OnSafari: The Mara

OnSafari: The Mara

pinksunset.mara.08aug.447.jimWhy spend the time and money to travel north on a Tanzanian safari to the very border of Kenya, and then not cross?

I ended my extremely successful McGrath Family Safari game driving along the great Mara and Sand Rivers, seeing really giant crocs, looking longingly to Kenya. You aren’t allowed to cross over.

Ever since the 1979 dispute between the two countries closed the border, numerous attempts by good politicians on both sides have tried to reopen it to no avail.

Oprah stood where my family had lunch yesterday, peeved to smithereens that she wasn’t allowed to cross a few years ago.

Nobody can. Not even the politicians themselves.

The dispute is now so old that recounting its history is like critiquing a marble statue: Interesting, but it’s not going to change.

We had great game viewing these last two days, including a family of 12 lion in a weeded kopjes, elephant playing along the river, giraffe starting at us as we bumped and hurdled ourselves over really bad roads, and to everyone’s glee, 5 baby rock hyrax popping out of a rock design placed at the edge of our camp’s swimming pool.

But it’s a long … and expensive journey to get here. Obviously we aren’t unusual, because the camp we stayed in, Asilia’s Sayari, is expanding (now 15 tents) and is one of the most expensive and luxurious camps in Tanzania.

The southern (Tanzanian) side of the rivers that make up some of the border with Kenya are filled with camps. We encountered almost as many game viewing vehicles as we did in Tarangire. So clearly, we’re not alone.

The attraction is the allure of the migration. Read my last blog to see how crazy this is! Yet we are all driven by history, and in fact the chances today of seeing the great herds in Tanzania are definitely chances that on every day of the calendar are moving northwards.

But more correctly – and this is my own experience – they aren’t moving as much. It’s wetter, so more grass, and areas previously dust bowls at certain times of the year in Tanzania are no longer.

Personally, I love the Mara. In Kenya it’s called the Maasai Mara. Here it’s called the Mara District. But it’s the Mara, absolutely one of the most beautiful places on earth.

It’s cold at night like Seronera, but it never gets really hot during the day even with clear skies. It rains almost every day of the year except in October and November, which I love because it’s not the least disruptive (it never rains for long) and it’s dramatic and turns the veld into a bouquet.

(P.S. The animals like it, too.)

There are woodlands, but they aren’t as dense as further south, so you can reach a rise in a hill and have vistas that stretch for dozens if not hundreds of miles. It’s a lush carpet of greens: the shining reflective green of grasses and the deep dark fur greens of the trees and few woodlands.

And, of course, the rivers. We spent most of our time up here along the Mara River. It’s a raging, but not very deep river, bubbling over lots of big rocks producing white water and little cascading waterfalls everywhere you look.

Also everywhere you look are hippos, uncountable there are so many, and some of the world’s largest crocodiles. I think the biggest one we saw was probably 14 feet, but I have seen them twice that size!

The birdlife is exceptional. First of all, things are easier to see when the woodlands are thinned out. So, for example, we saw numerous klipspringer, steinbok and reedbuck, and even an oribi! These aren’t rare animals, just difficult to find because of their size, color and stealth.

The same is true for birds. So within a half hour we saw a hoopoe, a pygmy falcon and the pink-eyelidded Verreaux’s Eagle Owl!

But it’s not all good news. Tanzania – at least up here – pays a lot less attention to its wildernesses than Kenya. So there are many, many more tse-tse. There are many fewer tracks that we can use. And most of all …

… Tanzania does not allow off-road driving as the Kenyans do in the Mara. That’s critical. The official Tanzanian position is that it damages the ecosystem, and there is some truth to that.

But it’s a little truth, and the real truth has to do with Tanzanian corruption and lack of resources dedicated to tourist parks. So as Kenya calms down (the British removed their travel warnings on the Kenyan coast last week) I think that I and most of my colleagues will choose to travel to Kenya to see the Mara rather than here.

But the McGraths and all the others we met here this time made absolutely the right decision. The southern Serengeti remains my favorite place, but … the Mara is a close second!

OnSafari: The Migration

OnSafari: The Migration

From Naabi Hill looking west.The greatest wildlife spectacle on earth has become unpredictable because of climate change, as awesome as it remains.

Today my McGrath Family Safari left the Moru Kopjes at 7 a.m. and arrived our camp near the Mara River on the Tanzanian side around 5:30p. During that time we saw two enormous groups of wildebeest, despite reports that they were all in Kenya.

From just after the Grumeti River near Seronera to Lobo, a distance of about 25 miles, we drove continuously through wildebeest. I estimated a quarter to a third of a million.

After we arrived at the Kenyan border for lunch, we headed west then north again towards the Mara River. From about the Lemala Camp position on the river to about 10 miles southeast of Kogatende, we saw another 100-150,000.

If my very rough estimations are even slightly correct, it means that we saw – today in Tanzania – from around a quarter to a third of all the wildebeest and zebra known in East Africa.

Is this the migration?

For years and years, 30 of my own career to be exact, the more or less circular migration of the great herds was a given that you get nearly set your watch by. Safaris were appropriately planned several years in advance to intersect the best of the great herds.

The beginning of the year began with the rains that attracted all the herds together on the southern grassland plains. Here they calved – all of them, around the last week of February. There was a minor hiatus in precipitation in February in the south, more in the north, but the rains were continuous until often an abrupt stop in late May or early June.

A few weeks later the herds freaked and started running north. The calves were strong enough by then to do so.

They would sometimes break into three sections, often not, with some going into the western corridor and others sticking to the eastern Serengeti. Then by the end of June, virtually all the wildebeest moved across the great Sand and Mara Rivers into Kenya, where they stayed until October.

It just doesn’t happen that way, anymore. Calving is erratic and occurs almost everywhere on the migration route. This year hardly any calving occurred on the southern plains.

Read my “OnSafari” reports for the last several years. This year we found most of the migration in March where it traditionally would have been in June, and we later found it in April where it traditionally would have been in February.

On the McGrath safari last Wednesday, we left the crater to enter the Serengeti. We visited Olduvai, where it was bone dry and few animals, but by the time we hit the Lemuta Kopjes the plains were covered with wildebeest.

From Lemuta west to the main Serengeti road, we easily saw 100,000 wildebeest. This is an area where traditionally they calve in February. Today is nearly July.

In all these unusual cases, the wildebeest were where the grass was growing, of course because it had rained. The rainy season is now all mixed up. Overall precipitation is greater than normal, but it comes in dangerous torrents followed by mini-droughts.

The wilde are adjusting.

The “migration” was never only wildebeest. It was a third zebra as well, but I’ve also noticed that the zebra are separating from the wilde in ways they didn’t before. For the last several days with the McGraths, for example, we encountered around 20,000 zebra starting at the Simba Kopjes through the top of Seronera and west into Moru.

Zebra, no wilde. (Well, maybe one or two or ten or twenty.) And today with the fractions of millions of wilde we saw, hardly any zebra.

Zebra have different eating habits and preferences than wilde. Perhaps climate change is differentiating these even more.

This is fascinating and perhaps troubling, but nowhere near as troubling as the commercial sites, like herdtracker.com, which claim to tell you where the wilde are.

Today, well, the wilde are everywhere. Large herds literally can be found in the furthest south and furthest north part of the Serengeti. Presumably, too, there are many in Kenya.

Irritated by sites like herdtracker.com motivated by commercial advertising, the Frankfurt Zoological Society is in the beta stage of a much more exact migration locator which will be launched soon as SerengetiTracker.com.

The FZS is radio collaring a number of different wilde which it believes come from different parts of the herd, and these will be tracked by satellite.

This is good, but not even this will be complete.

Meanwhile, my McGrath Family Safari couldn’t be happier. After all, they weren’t supposed to have seen the migration.

OnSafari: Crater

OnSafari: Crater

craterIt could be in an unexpected poem, a playground of happy children, the smells of the holidays … or the crater at sunrise. This is when your testy, challenged human spirit inflates with joy despite every reason on earth it shouldn’t, and you know everything is just fine.

This isn’t the best time for game viewing in the crater, although few tourists who come now realize this. There’s probably fewer than 5-6,000 animals from the peak in March and April of more than 20,000.

But all that transitory wildlife is only a part of the crater’s story. The inorganic magnitude of its landscape is unmatched anywhere on earth.

Right now as the rough winds signal that rains won’t return for six months, the thick cloud cover of the season will clear for a few hours in the late morning. This morning we had one of the most crystal clear crater mornings I can remember.

It’s only 12 miles across but it seems like hundreds. You’re constantly recalibrating your depth perception. The crater’s rough edges are still lush green, still sucking the last of the fresh-water rivers sinking down from the highlands. But brown is sweeping the floor as it becomes drier and drier, producing this most marvelous contrast of color.

At first everything is pastel and then the morning explodes and there’s this quilt of primary color.

It was hard today with the wind so strong to hear all the bird song, but whenever the wind died the red-naped lark seemed to be singing from one side to the other. We saw nearly 30 crested crane honking then leaving their long necks outstretched as if still tied to the sound long gone.

When it finally warmed to 50 then 60 and finally 70 degrees, the couple thousand wilde that remained started to blart and a few began prancing around. The zebra started barking and the hippo started grunting and you knew that the ossified night of the cold season was at least for a while banished.

But only for a short while. Day time on the equator is the same twelve hours more or less year round. But the overcast of the dry season reforms by early afternoon, the strong winds that seemed to sweep away the morning chill die, and cold settles down from the thick grey cloud quite early, probably by 3 p.m., and the animals and birds slow down, stop talking.

Everything in the world has to rest. The drama of the crater in March and April is sometimes overwhelming. You can’t separate the screams of the hoops of the hyaena from the screams of the elephants, and cackles of the dozens of vultures on a kill.

The movement and tension among the animals is overstimulating. No one has time to appreciate the enormous canvas painted when the world’s largest volcano self-destructed three million years ago.

Mt. Makarot never moves (you’ll have to wait to see the Shifting Sands for that!) The great forests of the acacia lehai seem undaunted even by this wind. The deep curving crevices sliding down the crater’s sides hold their form, but the grandeur of all this is missed in the mayhem of the wet season animal free-for-all.

This is the time the crater’s sleeping. That’s what it seems like, sleeping and recovering, and as our rover descended around the curves and switchbacks of the trail down it was as if we were navigating into a dream with the privileged skill of shaman. And when we climbed out during the peace of the midday and looked back, the landscape pressed into our memories like the tune you’ll never forget but will never be able to fully recreate.

The wilde have migrated out. The tens of thousands of Abdim stork and thousands of white stork and myriads of other migrants are gone. For some reason today even the eland had disappeared…

Leaving an earth so huge with the tiny little you there twisting about somewhere maybe inconsequential but you think it’s in the middle, trying to comprehend it all. Endless, right? Something forever is rare in our world, but that’s what the crater was expressing today, its implacable eternity.

OnSafari: Dr. Frank

OnSafari: Dr. Frank

DrFrankFrom time to time people get sick on their vacation, I’m sure it’s happened to all of us. It happened to one of my clients today on safari.

It doesn’t happen often and today’s case is a classic example of when it does. Years ago I worried endlessly about the food and water, the cleanliness of the beds and so forth, but those worries ended long, long ago.

The lodges and camps on the safari circuit are probably more hygienic and germ-free than most lodging a person would find in an American city today, so that’s fortunately no longer my concern.

My concern is when we get into remote areas, medical care is limited and when it’s needed – for whatever reason – it’s expensive and time consuming to arrange. The larger upmarket properties like Crater Lodge or the Mt. Kenya Safari Club will have medical staff on duty, often a fully credentialed physician.

But upmarket camps, for example, are just too small to offer this. So remoteness is the key worry.

Our safari left the last vestige of civilization today, as we left the town of Karatu and headed into Ngorongoro Crater for the final week. The further we got from Karatu, the more difficult it would become to arrange adequate medical care.

No one comes on safari not knowing this. In fact it amuses me the numbers of people who presume this is the situation the moment they disembark their airplane in Nairobi or Kilimanjaro, areas with modern hospitals and medical care.

So I suspect most travelers have a very good handle on medical preparations and precautions. I think travel clinics within hospitals often over prescribe and are overly cautious, but from these I know that travelers are usually well prepared.

Proper insurance is also very helpful. It minimizes or completely eliminates the worries of expense that increase the more remote one gets. East Africa has a wonderful network of air medical services for very reliable and quick medivac.

So today as the group prepared to leave I get a knock on my door. The spouse conveys how ill her husband feels. We are at lovely Gibb’s Farm in Karatu. Spouses are usually – not always but usually – the best indication as to the seriousness of a situation.

In this case she seemed more concerned to me than she was letting on or was told to convey to me. So I persuaded the patient to go with me to the excellent FAME clinic at the outskirts of Karatu, and sent the rest of the group on its way as planned.

The clinic is run by a man famous in the area, Dr. Frank. His business card says no more than that, but he is an incredibly generous man, a former cardiac anesthesthesiologist in California. His wife, Susan, and he came on safari more than a decade ago and after a close to critical experience climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, fell so deeply in love with the area that they decided to radically change their lives.

And the lives of the people of Karatu.

Dr. Frank’s clinic is modern, exceptionally staffed and beautifully efficient. It serves all the people of Karatu with extraordinarily modern medicine. There is a prenatal clinic, an operating room, patient wards and well stocked pharmacy.

And tourists – and NGO expats – can … “break the queue” and this is because the exceptional treatment he has provided them is routinely returned exponentially. FAME clinic is privately funded mostly from the U.S. and mostly from small family foundations.

My client was seen, given a battery of tests and diagnosed by Dr. Frank with a very serious infection, probably in the lungs. He had brought the infection from home was part of the diagnosis and as often happens with those who get sick on vacation, the relaxation that accompanies a vacation is often the entree for the sickness to finally get the attention of the patient.

His infection had also led to dehydration, the illness I see most effecting travelers. So he was put on an IV for four hours and given massive doses of antibiotics and fluids, then released onto his safari with a box load of medications.

He looks better and feels better, but as Dr. Frank explained, it will take some time to fully recover, and Dr. Frank knows better than any physician at home that the safari lodging will be just fine for his rest and recuperation.

FAME clinic helps many, many more people locally than the occasional tourist like mine. But the relationship that’s built with the foreign tourist is what fuels the project.

So we caught up with our group which had climbed Olmoti Volcano today, and tomorrow we head into the crater for a game drive, thankful for the FAME Clinics and Dr. Franks of the world!

OnSafari: Wild is Unpredictable!

OnSafari: Wild is Unpredictable!

lionintree.manyara.ckordash.648.14aprLions don’t climb, hippos aren’t in Tarangire, vervets hate thorns, and guides know it all. Just a few of the things disproved so far on my safari!

Apologies for the big delays between blogs, but Tanzania is in something of a data congestion at the moment. Reports from businesses in Dar and Arusha are all complaining of the slow internet signal.

It’s not the weather, which is beautiful and quite normal, nor nearby conflicts, because except for distant Burundi there are none. So common wisdom is probably true: there are suddenly just too many people trying to use to few satellites.

Common wisdom, though, would not hold much rank on the McGrath family safari. Today in Lake Manyara National Park we saw two near-adult lions in an acacia tortilis tree sleeping their lives away until we arrived.

They were draped over the branches like wet laundry hung out to dry. We watched them for a while until another car came up at which time one of the lions got nervous and teetered down quite ungracefully.

The last one tolerated 2 or 3 more cars before she finally took to the ground, too. So what’s all this about lions not climbing well?

The truth is that lions will climb trees everywhere, if it’s the right kind of tree: fantastic Manyara is filled with so many different kinds of trees there are plenty with the requisite low horizontal branches that will tempt this largest of the cats.

But you can tell it’s a real balancing act, because they never seem completely comfortable up there. But unlike their many cousins on the savannah, their views on the ground are obscured by Manyara’s thick vegetation, so anything that gives them height gives them comfort.

Manyara was great in several wonderful ways, today! The lake is pretty full, so the hippos are plenty. The wind was down, the morning not too cold, and we first watched for a good long time at least a couple dozen silvery-cheeked hornbills flying around and cackling madly.

This is the largest of the hornbills in Tanzania and true dinosaur looking bird!

Grandma Cindy asked if there were any malachite kingfishers, and a few minutes later as we headed to the platform overlooking the hippo pool, we saw two! Also saw lanner falcon, long-toed plover and a bunch of other stuff.

Manyara is baboon heaven, but otherwise I never expect Manyara to be a memorable animal experience. Yet we added to the lions-in-the-tree, 15 minutes literally immersed in an elephant family of 13, and the truly beautiful lake shore landscapes covered with giraffe, wildebeest and zebra.

I even glanced a klipspringer as we were leaving. Manyara was a much better animal experience today than I would expect.

The last several days in Tarangire were classic. The park is absolutely the best elephant park in all of Africa, and it gave us opportunities to learn to distinguish between healthy elephants, lone elephants, sick elephants … elephants that were agitated, and so forth.

The northern half of the park has the more docile and approachable sedentary elephants, whereas the south half of the park usually has more temperamental and transitory ones. Only this time I felt they were pretty calm in the south.

It could be that just over time the homesteaders are arriving. Or it might be that the transitory folks were just coincidentally absent, giving entry to the over crowded north. Either way it was an astounding experience for us.

That is except for Hakon and Alden on the way to their Tent #1 at Little Oliver’s, unable to do so because the elephant wouldn’t leave the path.

I think the manager, Julie, did exactly the right thing. Took a truck down the path and let the guy know he wasn’t welcome. Far too often camps try to cultivate wild animals, and it never ends up well.

We had a chance this time to visit the far southwestern side of Silale swamp, and that was a real treat. Lemala has put a semi-permanent camp down there and the tracks are being better maintained.

It gave us an opportunity to see larger numbers of Grant’s gazelle and hartebeest. If there is any drawback to Tarangire it has been the uniformity of its wildlife experience: almost exclusively elephant and giraffe. The new tracks in the south now will broaden its appeal.

Finally, too, as we were leaving we stopped at a water hole in the Serengeti Plains. We’d already spent probably hours watching elephant frolicking in water, but here they were frolicking among very angry zebra definitely not pleased with their arrival.

It was a wonderful interaction that ended when the Mommy elephants finally got the youngsters to leave the swimming pool and the zebra came down to drink. A wonderful end for us in this marvelous park.

Stay tuned! We’re on our way to the crater!

OnSafari: Lost Bags

OnSafari: Lost Bags

baglostThe family I’ll be guiding for the next ten days arrived cheerful and ready to go!

The McGraths/Bumsteads/Farahs come from Washington and Providence, two families with 4 teenagers and grandma McGrath leading the pack! The kids are 13-18, so older than my typical family safaris and I’m looking forward to fewer video games and more conversations!

We’ll see. Stay tuned.

Practically every safari spends the first night in Arusha, and we’ll be at the Lake Duluti Lodge. There are a dozen decent places to stay in the Arusha area, and a second EWT safari led by Steve Taylor is currently down the road at the Serena Lake Duluti Lodge.

Yep, a names travesty, and the excellent company Serena is completely at fault. For years their lodge was named Mountain Village, and I continue to call it that. But some marketing whizz decided lakes are more important than mountains, and the enormous confusion began.

It hurts this very nice Lake Duluti Lodge much more, because this is a stand-alone property and Serena is a chain.

It seems like this year a lot of people have lost luggage, including me. My bag was lost for 3 days before it arrived with a bagtag that included a transfer in Moscow. I didn’t fly to Moscow. I hope it had a good time.

Poor Audrey from Dallas, the sweetest southern belle you can image, was finally reduced to tears in frustration this afternoon because of the extraordinary bureaucratic confusion that attends some baggage transfers, and as a result, she and her daughter are without their bags.

The devil of the internet led Audrey down a primrose path that ended in Hades. She got her frequent flyer ticket on Aadvantage all the way to Nairobi, and then as any of us, booked a connecting flight from Nairobi to Kilimanjaro on some service like Expedia.

Only BA didn’t arrive in time. Her safari company here signed off on a bad combination of airlines, since the connecting airline has no baggage agreement with BA. So she was forced into a late night after an around the world journey last minute decision: make her connecting flight and hope the bags would make it, or miss her connecting flight and try to retrieve the bags in Nairobi.

She made the right decision and lost her bags. It was the last connecting flight of the day.

From my point of view, the woes of travel are often self-inflicted, but because of the awful allure of the internet that you can do everything yourself. Audrey has learned her lesson the hard way, and perhaps the rest of you can learn from Audrey.

My family arrived fully in tact. KLM arrives at night, and it’s nearly an hour’s drive from the airport to the lodge, and that was followed by dinner. The first night on safari ended probably among its latest, but they all seem in excellent spirits!

Stay tuned! We head tomorrow into Tarangire!

OnSafari: Hit The Road Jack!

OnSafari: Hit The Road Jack!

horrible plane rideWhat’s the best way to start a vacation? Come early and “power down” or jump right in?

The main reason most travelers give for wanting to “power down” for a couple days before “heading out” is that they consider the travel of getting to the start of their vacation so difficult. The second most important reason is “to adjust to the time zone.” The third most important reason is to pad the trip in case the travel is delayed.

Absolutely ridiculous for the first two. Sensible for the third, but too conservative.

First of all, we’ve all had those horrible, disastrous flights and be real, they are not the norm. The norm is not good, but it’s a known quantity. If you choose the right flights and dedicate a bit more of your precious vacation budget to the flights and better seats, there’ll be no need to compensate for anticipated misery.

Consider a typical safari: In Tanzania the average daily rate today is $500 per day per person and my type of safaris are closer to $1000. So what’s the point in working so hard to save a few hundred dollars on your flights by making additional connections or taking inferior airlines or seats when it will cost you four times that to recover?

Wouldn’t it be better to have an easier journey and be able to start off right away with something unique and memorable, rather than paying for a hammock and wide-screen TV in a hotel that could just as easily be outside Newark?

I have numerous examples, but the best is Nairobi. I love Nairobi. Just as I love New York. I love the excitement, the snarling traffic, the putrefying smells, the stultifying noise, bumping into angry pedestrians, pissing off over-tired hotel clerks, biting into over-cooked fish! That’s the city! Because in between these negative memories is music, art, science and youth that is among the most engaging and inspiring in the world!

But … if you arrive Nairobi during the day on any day but Sunday it will likely take you 90 minutes through stop-and-go traffic to get to a downtown hotel. Now in about that same time you can board another airplane, fly over some of the most serene and dramatic scenery on earth, and be in your open-air villa on a plateau overlooking the endless Laikipia desert landscape, a horizon of warm breezes and immeasurable silence.

Soaking in your footed bathtub. Sipping a Tusker.

Here’s a less dramatic example. Where I am outside Arusha, Tanzania, is far less congested than Nairobi, and it’s about an hour from the airport in northern Tanzania where most travelers arrive.

Why not continue another hour or two (or take a flight of a half hour or less) to some idyllic spot like Gibb’s Farm or Chem Chem Lodge or Little Oliver’s Camp rather than dead-head it here?

To be sure where I am now, Rivertrees Country Inn, is one of the most pleasant of the Arusha area accommodations I know. That’s why I’m here. But it’s only with luck that the few monkeys in the trees will show themselves, the birdlife is modest by Tanzanian standards, and the lamb ragout while very good can’t compete with Fritz & Frites in Galena where I live.

Whereas nothing can compete with the absolute relaxation of a Gibb’s Farm massage, of sundowners at Chem Chem overlooking Lake Manyara or the symphony of early morning bird song floating in from Tarangire at Little Oliver’s.

Power down? Hardly. You’re Power Pausing.

Second Reason: Adjust to the time zone.

“Factor in one day of recovery for every time zone shifted,” according to Travel Tips of USA Today.

Sounds reasonable. So the American’s average 11.1 days on safari will be spent thusly: the first nine days in a Ramada near the airport and the next two point one days on safari.

There are too many suggestions on the internet for dealing with time zone change. Mine? Sleep when you want to. When you wake, read. You won’t want to sleep when on safari, and it won’t kill you to be a little tired.

Third. Pad out the beautifully organized trip in case you’re late.

We’ve got stats for this: A quarter of all flights are late or canceled and this is as true for domestic as international flights. Using such free internet tools as flightstats.com you can survey your potential airlines for their level of reliability.

One in 8 flights results in a serious delay that will disrupt your journey.

So as I see it you can look at this in one of two ways:

First, obsessive American you are with wanting the most out of everything, come a day early: protect yourself.

I prefer the second: play the odds. If only one of your eight vacations is disrupted that means seven go without delay, and that means playing the odds got you a week more vacation for the same investment.

As a professional tour planner, I can assure we better designers save the best for last, anyway. A trip with sequential experiences begins with the least rewarding and ends with the most rewarding. It fits nicely – although is definitely not founded on – the possibility of a disrupted beginning.

I’m not doing a very good job selling this lovely estate where I’m staying, anxious myself to get into the bush. But them’s the facts, Jack:

If you arrive in the day in time to get going, get going!

OnSafari: Tanzanian Election

OnSafari: Tanzanian Election

BackRoomPoliticsAll the talk in Arusha is over next month’s choice of a new president of Tanzania. That may confuse you non-communists who think the election is October 25.

The election is October 25. But the president isn’t chosen in the election.

Most African countries have become pretty democratic and that includes Tanzania. On October 25 Tanzania will vote freely for candidates in all levels of government from local to the presidency.

But like South Africa today where the ANC dominates the electorate, the real choice for president isn’t determined in the national election. It’s determined in nominating committees, some open and some closed, assemblies of party faithful (not unlike the American caucuses for primaries) but ultimately by just a handful of party officials.

In Tanzania’s case this will all culminate in mid-July when the ruling CCM party announces its candidate.

The story is then essentially over. There will be opposition candidates, but no coalition among the opposition candidates who are as eager to eat up each other as the main CCM candidate. Since many of these opposition parties are very regional if tribal, CCM is certain to get the largest vote.

There will be plenty of local governments run by opposition parties, and the important town of Arusha is one of those where the opposition party Chadma holds sway. But the power-and-purse held by the national government is exponentially greater than even in the American system, so local government is often tightly beholden to the national paymasters.

So the CCM candidate announced in July will become the winner in the national election. This isn’t a sham as in China or rigged as in Russia. It will be the “free will of the electorate.” It is as truly democratic as the winnowing process of primaries is in America, or the fractured parliamentary campaigns are in Israel.

And it’s simply another example of why democracy is broken … worldwide.

The technological revolution has already given us the tools for a truly democratic construct for choosing leaders. Were unfair influences like biased media and pork barrel legislation and unlimited campaign money prohibited, I expect America would have much different leaders than it does now.

Frankly, I really don’t think there would be many Americans voting for either Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton in that fairy tale world. In Tanzania and South Africa current politicians would also be shown the door.

But who would be shown in?

That’s the scary part. Would it be a current Pop Star? Somebody with a memorable name?

We are doomed in the truly democratic parts of our planet to vote not for whom we think will be good, but for whom we think will be less bad.

Progress is possible. In South Africa an opposition coalition that could defeat the ANC is a possibility. In Tanzania committee sessions and party leader convocations should be changed to primaries. In America big money should be prohibited and campaigns shortened.

Everywhere in the democratic world, widely publicized debates should be organized and probably overseen by officials from a foreign society altogether in an attempt to achieve fairness!

Because if democracy can’t be made to work in this technologically rich world, then the default is Chinese authoritarianism or the Russian mafia.

So three cheers for Tanzania’s election on October 25! …or July 12 or whatever!

OnSafari: You Need an Agent

OnSafari: You Need an Agent

AirportFor years I’ve derided travel agents as unnecessary middle persons. I’m rethinking some of this.

So is Lufthansa, and probably soon Delta. Once completely dependent upon travel agents, these two mega airlines are soon going to charge you if you use an agent or consumer website like Expedia.

I’m in Vienna, half way through my journey back to Africa. Vienna has no flights to Africa, but Austrian Airlines is part of the Star Alliance. I connect here to Istanbul and then to Kilimanjaro.

This is not a routing that United’s MileagePlus originally offered me. I had to tell them. (It’s a regular schedule offering, now, but when I first booked nearly a year ago, it wasn’t shown.)

My own travel agent skills, and the SABRE GDS booking system that we have in the office is what led me to this option.

A normal consumer without access to a GDS couldn’t do this.

GDS’s are children of the original private airline computer systems. In the late 1970s airlines were among the first companies to use computers. The larger airlines leased their computer systems to scores of other airlines and travel agents and they were called GDS (Global Distribution Systems).

For example, SABRE was the American Airlines’ system. AMADEUS was the system founded by the main European airlines.

GDS are much less user friendly but much more powerful than say, Expedia. They can be quite costly to.

GDS can duplicate Expedia methodology: give me the options for flights and costs for where are you going to from where, but their power is greatly reduced by doing so.

Rather, the savvy user must know before beginning a session what the likely “routing” will be. The GDS is most powerful when asked step-by-step to display every possible option.

The professional using a GDS day-in and day-out discovers the tricks and shortcuts and learns the complex fare building that were Expedia to attempt would result in too many options for its users. So consumer sites like Expedia hewn these options down by algorithms based mostly on expected consumer price points.

By doing so, they often miss the boat. There are easily several hundred different connecting possibilities when traveling from Chicago to Kilimanjaro. Neither Expedia nor MileagePlus would have presented me with the journey I’m currently taking, which I constructed myself using a GDS.

Here’s another excellent example:

At last look, there were 281 different “through fares” between Chicago and Kilimanjaro. That means a single ticket, a single fare on some airline or another starting in Chicago roundtrip Kilimanjaro.

But if you build an air fare say with two fares: one to Europe then a second one to Kilimanjaro, the options are enormously greater. Just to London, for example, there are 650 fares published today, and then 362 fares from London to Kilimanjaro.

Delta in correct conjunction with three other airlines produces what I think is the best fare and best schedule to fly from the U.S. to Kilimanjaro … where I’m going.

But to arrive at this “correct conjunction” you must start with a Delta non-code-share to Paris, then pickup Kenya Airways to Nairobi, then PrecisionAir to Kilimanjaro. On the return you can use either KLM to Amsterdam or reverse the PrecisionAir/Kenya Airways/Delta outbound.

There is no existing consumer booking system that will create this itinerary. You can call an Expedia agent, for example, and tell them what you want, but they won’t be able to find this possibility.

Not even the Delta site will generate this Delta fared itinerary. I have no idea why. It could be that the GDS is capable of finding the loopholes in the complicated airline “fare ladders” constructed by complex agreements between different airline companies. It might also be that Delta just doesn’t want you to pay that cheap a fare.

Keep in mind, though, that this isn’t just to get a cheaper ticket, the obsession of the American consumer. It’s also to discover the best schedules.

I’m a safari guide, a poor travel agent by default. But a good travel agent who understands flights to more of the world than just Africa can be very valuable today. Their problem is that airlines no longer give commissions, and their professional service isn’t free.

One of the awful hazards of the internet is that it empowers the consumer to think she’s as good as the professional.

Not if you want the cheapest and the best schedule from Chicago to Kilimanjaro!

Forming The World Order

Forming The World Order

bashiratsummitOne of the most difficult things for anyone or any thing to do is cede control … to give away your authority to someone or something else. South Africa did that, today, and the United States in an identical situation in March refused to.

In my estimation, this makes South Africa more modern, more moral and presents a future more promising than the U.S. The world is becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent upon every part of itself.

A global society with ultimate authorities will some day be an absolute certainty. The societies which embrace this future and now work towards it will be the movers and shakers in it.

Those who refuse may decay.

Omar al-Bashir, the dictatorial leader of The Sudan, was in South Africa earlier today attending the African Union summit in South Africa. A court ordered his arrest on an indictment from The World Court for crimes against humanity, because South Africa is a signatory to the World Court Treaty.

But minutes before the order was issued, Bashir jetted out of the country.

Bashir was in New York in March for the opening session of the United Nations. Although numerous organizations and individuals petitioned various U.S. courts to have him arrested, no court issued a warrant because the United States is not a signatory to the World Court treaty.

So he stepped onto a world stage and addressed the opening as all World leaders are allowed to do. He legitimized his ruthless rule. Obama could have cooperated with the World Court, even without a formal treaty, but he elected not to.

The situation in South Africa was not without controversy. Before The Court ordered his arrest, it ordered that he not leave the country while it deliberated the case.

The current government of South Africa headed by President Jacob Zuma was caught off guard, as it has continually been throughout Zuma’s troubled reign.

Having little choice but to play with the court that, in fact, has kept Zuma somewhat immune to the ramifications of his scandals, the South African government aruged that Bashir was technically not in South Africa, but in the nether world of the Africa Unity Summit, and therefore South African laws didn’t apply.

The Court adjourned for an hour at noon South African time after a morning of deliberation. In that hour Bashir was sped away from the summit in a black limo to a nearby South African airbase, where his plane’s engines were running.

He leaves behind him another Zuma scandal: Zuma heeded the call by the Court to deliberate the question, but essentially just ignored the earlier order to keep Bashir in the country until a decision was reached.

Bashir is under indictment by The World Court for crimes against humanity mostly in Dafar.

On Friday, the South African government urgently appealed to the court in The Hague to rescind their arrest warrant while Bashir attended the African summit.

Saturday, The World Court refused and a local South African court then ordered Bashir to remain in the country while it deliberated on numerous motions from South African citizens.

It’s not uncommon for Heads of State, including George Bush, to avoid international travel because of fear of being arrested in a foreign country.

Bush and Cheney avoided travel to Canada and Switzerland shortly after the end of the Bush presidency because of numerous lawsuits filed against them for the fraudulent war in Iraq.

Bashir has avoided almost all travel since being indicted, this because the majority of the world subscribes to the World Court. In March, however, he traveled to New York to address the opening session of the United Nations, having received assurances from the Obama administration that he would not be arrested.

The U.S. is not a signatory to the World Court convention, as virtually every African country is. Moreover, the Obama administration believes that peace in South Sudan is critical and dependent upon Bashir’s cooperation.

At the time, The World Court, which is a child of the United Nations but technically no longer linked to it, requested the UN to arrest Bashir. Ban ki-moon declined, answering that he lacked such authority.

It was a terrible travesty of human rights that Obama and Ban ki-Moon allowed the ruthless dictator to address the world assembly.

It’s arguably a greater travesty that President Zuma picks and chooses which court orders he will obey at home, but the overall situation and outcome in my estimation puts South Africa as a whole in a much more moral situation than the U.S.

Accepting authority is never easy. But without a world authority in the near future there will be no authority for anyone.

Don’t Mix!

Don’t Mix!

pantherchameleonFascinating field research in Madagascar has finally explained a long-held mystery about panther chameleons: there’s more than you think!

Panther chameleons are very likely among the most popular reptile pets in the world, particularly in America. They’re native to northern Madagascar where their habitat is seriously threatened, but there are so many pet panthers in the world and so many breeders the species was not considered threatened.

But this crafty little creature might have fooled scientists, after all!

It may not be a crafty little creature. It might be 11 different crafty little creatures! And one of them, say that blue one with turquoise stripes and beady orange eyes — yes, it, indeed, may be seriously threatened!

Field scientists from the University of Geneva, working on a hunch motivated by a curious practice of the commercial reptile breeding trade, are suggesting that there’s not a single panther chameleon with lots of different colors.

Rather, contends Prof Michel Milinkovitch, there are 11 separate species whose very rare hybridization always produces an infertile offspring.

For years chameleon breeders and commercial traders have known that chameleons of different colors ought not be mixed up:

“Due to the extreme color differences of the species, we use locale info to identify the wide variety of panthers. This helps in keeping locales pure when breeding and avoids unwanted crosses,” is one breeder’s subtle way of saying don’t mix and match. You won’t get any little creatures tapping around your breederie if you mix red with blue. “Unwanted crosses” probably have never happened in the pet store.

For years and years no one’s questioned this mystery even though it’s been well understood that color differentiation is geographical.

It seems to me that this could have been a high school science project, but it’s taken all this time before adult scientists finally decided to test the hypothesis that color differentiated species.

It does. Two drops of blood from each of 324 panther chameleons across the upper part of Madagascar revealed in DNA analysis 11 separate species of creatures.

“Each of the new chameleon species requires individual management, given that they each constitute a different part of the biodiversity of the whole,” Prof Milinkovitch chides scaly pet owners around the world, and he’s right of course.

His report goes on to suggest that the harvesting of panther chameleons from Madagascar, which the government currently caps at 2,000 annually, needs to be more minutely regulated, as certain of the species might be in more trouble than others.

On the one hand this is a marvelously wonderful story that expands even more our understanding of Madagascar’s incredible biodiversity.

On the other hand the government of Madagascar seems incapable of stopping the entire deforestation of its island nation and it just emerged from a long period of violent civil strife. Who’s going to care about these little guys, anyway?

Remember, every new paint that you add to the mix makes the color duller. Remember that curious grade school fact: mix all the colors together and what do you get? White, how boring!

Poof! Thar She Goes!

Poof! Thar She Goes!

PoofEleNo, do not believe that the elephant population in Tanzania has declined 60% in 5 years. Read the science not the headlines.

A couple weeks ago the Paul Allen Foundation and the Frankfurt Zoological Society turned over their elephant census numbers to the Tanzanian government.

The Tanzanian Minister for Natural Resources and Tourism then held a press conference to announced the results:

A total head count of just over 40,000 elephant. Actually I had to add up his numbers which he released piecemeal, but not even clever Tanzanian politicians can alter arithmetic.

The last census, also conducted in part by the Frankfurt Zoological Society, put the country’s 2009 elephant population at around 110,000.

A 60% decline.

Some of the more sexy conservation organizations like NatGeo reacted like a London Daily Mail:

100,000 elephants killed” NatGeo reported in 72-pica type (or its relative equivalent in my 13″ CRS).

Still believing that some NatGeo products are better than the “Alaskan State Troopers,” a few reputable news media like Britain’s Guardian echoed the “catastrophe.”

The Washington Post cited the press conference as proof of a “catastrophic decline.” (This one really bothers me.)

Moving a tad closer to the truth, some better organizations were more measured:

The Wildlife Conservation Society in its ‘Response to … Elephant Census’ first noted the hefty increase in elephant numbers in the north of the country before three paragraphs down reporting the numbers in Ruaha, which is the component that brought the overall census numbers so low.

The Frankfurt Zoological Society, the lead organization for almost all wildlife conservation in Tanzania, was equally measured in reporting the results.

Like WCS it noted the success with elephant populations in the north before reporting the dire figures but further qualified them by suggesting there was hard evidence from the “carcass ratio” in The Selous that indicated “unnaturally high mortality“ not necessarily related to poaching.

Oooooo….

“Government, Wildlife Experts and Conservationist [are] baffled by the sudden disappearance of more than 12,000 large elephants from Southern Tanzania even though they were neither poached nor died,” reported the Arusha Times.

Oh, my goodness, it’s Babu at work. This is getting spooky isn’t it?

Here’s what’s happening, folks.

These elephant statistic are at long last some of the most reliable numbers ever obtained in elephant counting. I have often written about how confused and contradictory elephant censuses have been.

Many other more credential organizations have, too.

Maybe now, thanks to the Paul Allen Foundation, we’ll start getting it right.

It was Allen’s $900,000 which paid for this census, and it was the most exact, most scientific census of African elephants north of the Zambezi ever done.

But there are 2 major problems with concluding “a catastrophic decline” from the first set of reliable numbers we’ve ever had, beyond the simple common sense that reliable numbers can’t be compared with unreliable ones to make any conclusion:

First, this well done census was confined to protected or near-protected wildernesses. There are vast areas of Tanzania, particularly not far from those characterized as having the most “catastrophic” decline, that are not densely populated and perfect habitat for roaming elephants.

Second, the areas of Tanzania that have been very carefully studied pretty well for almost a century, the northern wildernesses, showed an increase in populations in the same study period.

Those northern areas are much more densely populated by people, with all their problems and daily activities and everything else that contributes to human/elephant conflicts. If there is any place where poaching can be documented, it will be in these areas.

I disagree vehemently with those who claim the human unpopulated vast wildernesses of Ruaha and Rukwa are prime poaching areas because nobody can see you do it. Balderdash. They can’t see you do it in the middle of the Serengeti National Park, either! At least not when you do it with the skill of a real poacher.

These guys aren’t going to waste their resources on the long-distance, sparsely populated, thorntree forests of the vast interior. They may, in fact, be less watched there, but it will be exponentially harder to poach then transport the goods to market from Ruaha than from Tarangire.

So thank you FZS and Paul Allen for at long last starting us on the right track, but those flashy so-called scientific organizations with their hands out … time’s up.

I just can’t wait for the 2019 census!

Freedoms Crumbling

Freedoms Crumbling

VaderPilatoNo wonder that stability may trump Africa’s expanding democracies. Just look at Mosul or the Boko Haram held areas of Nigeria.

Today a popular rap singer was arraigned by a Lusaka magistrate for “defaming the president” of Zambia even though such a specific law doesn’t exist.

Pilato’s rap depicts the president as an oaf who spends much of his time drinking.

Pilato is very popular, very political and shows a definite sophistication of complex issues. This rap, for example, berates a political merger between two previously antagonistic political parties.

But the hook which gave his rap such a wide audience was the accusation of drunkenness. Drunken old men in rural Africa are the bane of their families, a condition closely associated with dementia.

It’s understood that age and dementia are not willful situations but nonetheless divine the good old men from the bad old men: prosecutor, judge and jury be damned.

So prosecutor, judge and jury respond, waging their own powers in equally questionable ways. A judge arraigned Pilato, today, but who knows for what. A prosecutor will now have to trump up charges, and a jury may assert its legitimacy by adjudicating violations of nonexistent laws.

From my untrained ears, Pilato doesn’t seem to be a specially powerful artist. Acting as if he’s a threat to society, makes him one and only because of that.

Last week at the inauguration of the new president in Nigeria, local journalists so accosted President Mugabe of Zimbabwe that his office later called them Boko Haram.

The video of the SaharaReporters’ encounter is particularly illustrative.

In my view, the so-called journalists were offensive. I’m hardly a supporter of Mugabe, who I consider one of the most devilish leaders Africa has ever seen.

I believe there are times when journalism should work with politics. I remain a devotee of Angela Davis and Herbert Marcuse. But this incident in Nigeria is not one of them.

These reporters had little interest beyond making headlines of themselves. “There is no democracy in Zimbabwe!” the woman journalist yells after persistently being unable to get Mugabe to answer her question, “Is there democracy in Zimbabwe?”

So with Pilato, no there’s not “too much” freedom of speech. But with the Nigerian journalists, yes they exercised “too much” freedom of speech.

There are ignorant rich, and there are ignorant poor, and technology is thrusting them backwards into the age old irresolvable battles between religions and tribes.

Neither side understands the facts, yet the IT technologies of iPads and iPhones present them constantly with situations requiring immediate reactions.

There is a reason that ISIS bans most technology. It wants to control the culture and the first step in controlling anything is to neutralize or pacify it. Many in Mosul as in the Boko Haram areas of Nigeria actually prefer such pacification to confrontation. My father did.

Democracy doesn’t exist without confrontation. Open societies need it. But when it reaches the level that technology brings it to, today, it’s like fusion. It expands under its own power and becomes uncontrollable and unpredictable.

When confrontation is such that it provokes a yearning for less freedom than more, when stability becomes society’s first priority, Darth Vader arises again.

Excessive Force

Excessive Force

RangersGunManyaraNot just in Dallas or Cleveland, “Excessive Force” is a top news story in Tanzania where four Lake Manyara park rangers were arrested last week.

The rangers got into a confrontation with herders bringing cattle into the park, which is illegal.

The rangers tried to impound the cattle for trespassing on national park lands, then claimed that up to 30 villagers attacked them with traditional weapons provoking them to fire modern weapons in self-defense.

Several villagers were wounded, and one 34-year old man was killed.

Only the Arusha police commissioner issued any statement and that simply that four of the rangers were arrested for using excessive force. Tanzania national park authorities issued no comments.

East African media, though, unlike here at home was reluctant to publish the story. One of Tanzania’s smaller, independent newspapers published it only on its on-line edition, which when I checked this morning had received less than 400 views.

The reporter discovering the story, Hazla Quire, resorted to filing his news through friends on Facebook: John Mrosso: June 6 posting.

By the end of last week only the Chinese news agency, Xinhua, had picked up the story and distributed it in East Africa but notably not in China.

Incursions by local herders into national park lands are increasing throughout Tanzania as the competition for good grazing increases. It’s particularly stressful during times of drought.

I was in this remote part of Lake Manyara National Park in April, and we saw several small herds of cattle in the deep forests just after the park gate about 10k west of &Beyond’s Tree Lodge.

The private lands leading up to the gate are relatively prosperous by village standards in East Africa. Densely populated the farms here produce several types of grain and a lot of rice irrigated by waters related to Lake Manyara.

But there had been an intense although short drought in February. I think the rice was doing OK but the grains were stunted. Heavy rains had just begun and several farmers were trying to plant all over again, their normally planted first-of-the-year crops lost.

Herders were suffering more, because it takes only a few weeks of drought before all available private grassland is grazed out. As this happens more and more with climate change, grassland rejuvenation is trumped by the erosion that occurs with the first rain.

Whereas inside the national park wild animals have achieved a balance with the grassland that is more resilient to a drought. It takes only a few days of rain and the grasslands inside a national park begin to rejuvenate.

East African park rangers are among the better educated, better paid security forces in the country. Consider that regular police often miss paycheck after paycheck. This isn’t the case with park rangers who are heavily subsidized by foreign NGOs.

They are also well armed and otherwise well equipped and well trained. Like police here at home, their actions are being captured on mobile devices and provoke the debate over “excessive force.”

This is not a debate about the issues of the confrontations. I, for one, believe that much of Africa’s wondrous wilderness is protected for us rich foreigners with very little benefit to the local population, and that’s a massively important debate.

As is why Baltimore’s waterfront has received so much money for development but little more than one CVS store has been built in west Baltimore.

But those are not the issues at hand: the police have been given a job however morally compromised: it’s their sworn vocation.

I think they used far too much force in many of the incidents surfacing recently in America. But what about in Tanzania last week in Manyara?

In a less developed society where arrest is often tantamount to conviction, one would naturally surmise that the four rangers were guilty of the use of excessive force, but not necessarily.

Arresting the rangers was likely the only way to defuse the volatile situation. I think it highly unlikely that anything further will come of this.

What is now more unclear than ever is whether more cattle will intrude the remote western forests of Lake Manyara.