Elephant Suit

Elephant Suit

There is no question that it is becoming more dangerous for tourists interacting with elephants. But is the $850,000 award to an injured tourist in Kenya the right response?

Last November a Kenyan court awarded Wendy Martin, the wife of a British diplomat at the time serving in Kenya, 65 million Kenyan shillings in compensation for injuries she suffered in a 2000 elephant incident at the then new Il Ngwesi Lodge in northern Kenya. (This represented about half of Martin’s claim.)

It is a horrific incident, and you can read Martin’s own graphic and terrifying description from her own site: Wendy Martin’s own story It is remarkable that she survived.

Many don’t. According to Singapore’s Straits Times (April 8, 2009) more than 700 people are killed annually in India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. We don’t have a reliable count of elephant deaths in Africa, but last year the BBC claimed that about a dozen tourists annually are killed as tourists by elephants in Africa. And according to the Save the Elephant Fund, there are probably hundreds of villagers annually killed in Africa. I think it is more likely in the thousands.

And that’s the point. I’ve written before that a convergence of otherwise unusual circumstances requires that we be overly vigilant right now with regards to elephant encounters. These include the economic downturn, the reduction of habitat, and the increase in elephant poaching. Kenyan law compensates each villager for “death or destruction” by elephant with 30,000 Kenyan shillings (about $250).

Why should Martin get $850,000?

On April 8, a Dutch tourist was killed in India’s Kazaringa national park while on a guided bird walk. His small group was accompanied by two armed rangers, who did fire at the charging elephant. The other tourists escaped, but he was killed. Based on Martin’s award, his estate is now contemplating a massive suit.

The question as to why tourists ought be treated differently in such litigation to local citizens suffering the same or worse outcomes is not a flippant or rhetorical one. Tourists are not expected to be familiar with the areas they visit. Their “adventure visit” is often contracted by numerous disclaimers, but at the same time by assurances that their hosts know what they’re doing.

In Martin’s case (according to recently released testimony), there could also be the specific negligence that knowledge of an errant elephant family moving onto the estate was known the night before the incident. Martin also claimed that she was “pushed” into going on the bush run somewhat against her own better instincts, and apparently the judge accepted this claim.

There is also the reality that one British tourist is worth to the Kenyan economy a geometrically larger amount than one Kenyan farmer.

Nevertheless, I think this is wrong. The British are currently very reluctant to release aid for building Kenyan roads, because they doubt the Kenyans are capable enough of building a good road, and that corruption is likely to divert the allocated funds. Why does the wife of a British diplomat expect the management of a new and somewhat experimental tourist facility would do any better?

Il Ngwesi where Martin visited was a new local community based tourism project. These projects represent a wonderful new direction that much investment has taken in East Africa in the last decade. Part of this dynamic, however, is that relatively unskilled and untrained local villagers assume much of the management and guiding of these establishments. That’s wonderful, too, but it’s clearly not as professional as a long-established bush camp in South Africa, for instance.

And this dynamic is well understood. Consumers attracted by the “ecotourism” component of a tourist offering must understand that the “guide” who meets them at the front door is not an elephant Ph.D. researcher or Zimbabwe certified bush guide. In the vast majority of cases the project “guide” has had little schooling and even less training with regards to foreign tourism. Consumers must be sensitive to the fact that enthusiasm might trump safety.

Most elephant incidents of which I’m aware — including my own clients’ near escape of a March, 2007, incident near Amboseli — do not have the several incriminating factors of Martin’s epic. Clearly this is one for the books, a precedent that may be defining the thresholds of responsibility and the monetary levels assigned them.

But one factual number tells me something’s not right: Wendy Martin’s horrible incident is not equivalent to the death of 3400 villagers. And right now, that’s where Kenyan law stands.

Rumblings in Kenya

Rumblings in Kenya

Secretary of State Clinton expressed concern about the political situation in Kenya, as she should. But I don’t think violence is on the horizon.

Several weeks ago Clinton sent a letter to President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga expressing several concerns about the state of the coalition government trying to run Kenya. And last week Parliament opened but didn’t, as political wrangling over how Parliament in this new coalition era should be run.

The Kenyan coalition isn’t working the way the parties agreed more than a year ago; and not just the U.S., but much of the world including the master of the coalition design, Kofi Anan, has severely criticized Kenyan politicians.

There are a myriad of disputes. The most prominent is who gets to appoint top civil servants: the President (Kibaki) or the Prime Minister (Odinga)? The grand coalition document divided the ministries between the two men, but appointments of certain powerful positions immediately under the very top management was never addressed. And there are some appointees, like the civil servant responsible for distributing food aid, who span multiple ministries’ portfolios.

So far, President Kibaki has muscled his way on this issue, and for a while Odinga let it go. When a scandal broke out about the distribution (or lack of it) of grain, Odinga’s power base got hot. There was violence in the slums where the initial post-election violence of 2008 began and where Odinga’s heart of power truly resides. The Nairobi slums are not just the most numerous single demographic in the country, it has among the highest voting turnout of any group and it is squarely behind Odinga, the “champion of the poor.”

Then came the thorny issue of the method of determining who was responsible for the 2008 violence and what to do with them. I see an incredible analogy here with our own recent disclosure of the “torture memos.” And so there is a philosophical red flag thrown up by Obama when his administration insists that Kenya determine the raw facts and prosecute those responsible, but is reluctant to do so at home.

Neither Odinga or Kibaki really wants to pursue this “truth and reconciliation commission”, and admittedly there is more at stake than just this single issue. Obama and the EU are wrapping this issue to the general state of corruption in the country, which seems to be getting worse, not better. I’m not sure, though, that the way to tackle systemic corruption is through the extremely sensitive issue of who started the 2008 violence. Street wisdom believes that there were few sitting politicians at the time who didn’t contribute to the chaos.

Is the coalition unraveling? This weekend the Odinga camp called for new, immediate elections. I don’t think that’s serious; they’re just trying to find a way to calm what is certainly a growing uneasiness among their base. But will it come to outright violence.

I don’t think so.

This weekend Nairobi newspaper columnist Dominc Odipo summed it up well: “We’re better off than in 1989″ was the title of his column.

“What was it like …back in 1989? “ Odipo asks. “There was only one legal political party, and its leader, President Moi, was the undisputed, all-powerful political head of the country. There was no question whatsoever about where political or State power lay.”

Odipo referred to an important speech that was delivered at the time by Moi’s Minister of Agriculture, Elijah Mwangale.

Pointing at the President, Mwangale intoned: “You speak of the public will. There is enshrined, in human form, the popular will! Even the lobsters and the fishes of the sea, out to the 200-mile limit and beyond, pay obeisance to our great President!”

Odipo then went down a list of important men at the time, all of whom are either (a) happily obscured in deep retirement, (b) dead or (c) missing.

Odipo continues: “Twenty years on there can be no doubt the country has moved … in the right direction. Yes, we have not yet been able to reign in corruption, impunity, negative tribalism and other national ills but, on the political fundamentals, we have certainly trudged ahead.

“Today, any adult Kenyan, man or woman, can register a political party and have it operational within only three days. To the best of my knowledge, no citizen is being held in any torture chamber anywhere in the country.

“There has been another sea change. There is no undisputed, supreme political authority in the land. Political power is being shared, even if not yet equitably as required in the spirit of the National Accord and Reconciliation Agreement.

“Power has also largely been demystified. If President Kibaki today tells you to jump, you don’t have to. You can look him in the eye and tell him to get lost.

“We have come a long way since 1989. And don’t you ever forget that!”

Voodo Prices!

Voodo Prices!

Safari travelers are getting taken for a ride!

The price of a new car is way down, as is the price of butter. But safaris are getting more expensive! Consumers beware and Fair Trading be damned!

I remain astoundingly dumbfounded at how ridiculously high safari prices are being kept in this economic downturn. The problem is two-fold, one which effects companies like EWT, and one that only effects big companies like Abercrombie & Kent.

I’ve written before about the foolish strategies employed by local East African companies in response to an economic downturn:
they raise prices.

The altoKeysenian theory is that reduced demand shouldn’t lead to reducing prices, but rather increasing them! In an environment where there’s no unemployment insurance or hiring/firing codes, and where contracts are adjudicated in bars rather than on them (in courtrooms), this protects the owners and investors while killing the employees.

EWT’s survey of local price increases in East Africa shows about 15% for 2009 over 2008! Remarkable! This effects everyone who ends up buying an East African safari, whether they walk into a store in Nairobi, buy from EWT or buy from Abercrombie & Kent.

But that’s just half the story.

The weirdo economics has now infected even U.S. markets. America’s three largest tour companies selling East Africa have announced price increases for 2009 that were more than 20% higher than 2008!

I ran their tour programs through EWT’s price database to figure out their real costs. Here’s the astounding outcome:

(Timeout: make sure you read the fine print. All these companies publish a certain safari cost, and then hit you with “internal air fare” costs, so make sure you do the addition… Second timeout: all these companies are offering some kinds of specials, and I haven’t incorporated them into the analysis. It’s usually less than a 10% discount on the cost… Third timeout: prices from all of them fluctuate throughout the year, so I’ve used June 1 as the first day on safari.)

The cost to selling price ranges from 108% to 185%! Yes, that’s right. At the very least the cost price is doubled, and in some cases, nearly tripled!

Abercrombie & Kent
Wings over the Migration
Retail Price (with internal air fare) : $15,595
True Cost : $6057
Markup from Cost: 157%

Micato Safaris
The Micato Grand Safari
Retail Price (with internal air fare) : $21,150
True Cost : $7,414
Markup from Cost: 185%

Big Five
Tanzania Explorer
Retail Price (with internal air fare) : $16,550
True Cost : $7,940
Markup from Cost: 108%

These are three very good companies: reliable, long in business, with pretty impeccable credentials. At least as far as pleasing customers, but do these customers realize how they’re being taken for a ride and not just a safari?

What bothers me most of all is how terrible all of this is to the employees and local businesses in East Africa. One of the few local companies that has an American selling presence, Thompson’s Safaris, just laid off almost half its work force. There’s no insurance for these good folks; no government paycheck, no retraining programs, nothing. They’re being laid off, so that the handful of owners and resellers — who do nothing ultimately to provide guests with a good safari on the road – maintain their situation in life at the expense of dozens of local employees who find themselves at the edge of collapse.

The three companies described above are not local companies, despite sharing names with local companies over in East Africa. These are American companies, and their despicable prices and markups from the cost they give the local companies is kept here, in America. That means for every $10 that a safari customer gives Micato Safaris in New York, $6.50 stays in America, and $3.50 goes to East Africa. That’s outlandish.

Fourth timeout: all these companies have foundations, do some good work locally in East Africa, support charities and basically because of their volume are essential to East African tourism. So let’s say that I’ve overestimated by HALF (which I haven’t). Even if I exaggerated that much, it would still mean that more than half of everything a consumer in America pays for a safari, stays in America.

That’s outlandish.

“Fair Trading” which I’ve also written about before and which is being broadly adopted by tourism companies worldwide, insists that at least $6 of every $10 goes to the source, and that’s a minimum. Many companies like EWT operate with a minimum of $8 of every $10 going to the source.

Fifth timeout: but small companies like EWT do not have the huge marketing costs of the big giants.

A-ha! And that’s the explanation, and least a big part of it.

Much of East African tourism in America is still sold in anachronistic ways: through what in the rest of the world is ancient distribution systems. The safari that a customer might buy from Big Five is likely to come through a travel agent, a wholesaler, and then a global wholesaler, and then through an inbound operator, before it finally reaches the hotels and transport owners that provide the safari services.

Smaller companies like EWT leapfrog all the middle men. All those necessary markups don’t exist. Does this explain everything?

Not quite, but it goes a big way. I think the final analysis also has to do with the infectious weirdo economics of local East African company owners as it seeps through an anachronistic distribution system to America. I think these American companies are also using voodoo economics.

Consumer to East Africa, beware!

Elephant Dilemma

Elephant Dilemma

Elephant encounters are one of the most exciting and memorable of all safari events. But they’re getting harder to manage, and maybe, dangerous.

I’m certain that elephant poaching has begun, again. Last week in the Serengeti my heart dropped when unexpectedly I watched two families of around 20 elephant run for high heaven away from us when we were noticed.

We were on the backside of the Moru Kopjes just before the Kusini road junction. It’s one of the most beautiful places in Africa because of the density of giant kopjes, massive granite outcroppings now radiantly green with the scrub bush and candelabra blooming with the rains. But for a giant tusker it must be somewhat confining, since the passageways between the kopjes are often narrow.

Years ago in the 1970s I remember that every time we encountered elephants in the Serengeti, they ran away from us, just like these did, their huge backsides swinging opposite their flopping tails like a fat circus lady can-can dancer. This time they stopped after 300 yards were placed between us. That’s different than in the old days, when they didn’t stop until they couldn’t be seen. So I guess we’re at a real decision point, right now.

Last October 7.2 tons of ivory were sold to two Chinese and two Japanese businessmen on the first allowed sale of ivory since 1999. (The 1999 sale was a single auction to a Japanese businessman and the first since the ban on ivory sales adopted worldwide ten years earlier.) Opponents of the sale warned at the time that it would spark new elephant poaching.

The sale was the culmination of years of wrangling between the southern and East African countries within the CITES convention. CITES (the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) is the world’s most subscribed treaty: more than 200 countries bound together in the 1980s to end the decimation of elephants by banning the sale and transport of ivory.

The southern African countries are much more developed than East Africa. Their national parks and reserves have been well managed for nearly 100 years. Poaching was never the problem with them that it was in East Africa. In Kenya, 95% of its elephants had been wiped out by poaching; Tanzania had a nearly 80% loss.

So East Africa’s elephant fate was saved when the convention was adopted. By ending the trade in ivory, there was no value to poaching elephants.

And for the 15 years thereafter, southern African countries continued to stockpile ivory. Elephants die and throughout Africa, especially in East Africa, elephant hunting is allowed. In southern Africa especially, elephants are regularly culled to maintain what local scientists believe is a better natural balance in the protected reserves. Ivory built up in warehouses that cost a lot just to manage. But the ivory couldn’t be sold.

A large portion of the conservation efforts in southern Africa was lost when the ivory sale revenue was ended. In Zimbabwe, 95% of the ministries revenue for administering the national parks came from the sale of ivory.

The businessmen paid $1.3 million for the 7.2 tons, or about $75/pound. Today, most elephants carry tusks weighing about 70-100 pounds, valuing each animal at around $10,000-15,000. A senior park ranger in the Amboseli Game Reserve makes approximately $3,000 annually. A starting ranger can earn as little as $100/month.

The Amboseli Trust for Elephants now reports that poaching is definitely restarting in Kenya. As many as a dozen elephants have been killed recently in their area, their tusks removed.

China has been actively rebuilding Kenya’s roads. Most suspect this is because they soon will announce having found oil in Kenya. But recently the roadbuilding was suspended after the Kenyan government expelled several Chinese road building managers for having been discovered with new, raw ivory.

A happy elephant is relatively easy to approach. An angry elephant, or one that feels it is cornered, is incredibly dangerous. Must we now “back off” our elephant encounters on safari?

Ndutu Migration

Ndutu Migration

Our three days ended with a bulls-eye migration find at Ndutu. But a whole lot more, too!

There are several reasons that most safaris don’t overnight in Ndutu, even though that’s the best place to be to see the great wildebeest migration from late November through May. We did spend our last three nights here, and we had an incredible experience, finding the migration and much more.

I’ve always been irritated by so many companies talking about the “Great Wildebeest Migration” and then not truly featuring it, since they bypass Ndutu. Ndutu Lodge is the only permanent lodge in the southern Serengeti grassland plains. There are also many private camping sites. But all the other lodges in the Serengeti are between 3 and 8 hours further north.

Ndutu Lodge is a historic lodge, built by Margaret Gibbs years ago, I think in the 1960s. It has 27 rooms and doesn’t normally take groups. The rooms are very comfortable, but very simple. The public areas are all covered but opened to Lake Ndutu. The staff is old and loyal; the food is OK. It is not “Maasai Versailles” or anything close to it.

Nor does it belong to any chain of hotels like Sopa or Serena or Kempenski, and it doesn’t offer butlers like Grumeti or Klein’s, and charges are incurred for laundry and drinks. But it is almost a wonderful secret, used by those of us in the know who grow nostalgic the moment we leave. It has a fantastic setting, and there is absolutely no better place to stay during the migration.

I used to prefer a private camp, and there are many good sites in the area. But in the last few years the rains have grown heavy when they fall – I mean, really heavy. We like it that way, as do the wildebeest and other animals, and not least the spirits in the sky that produce unbelievable sunrises and sunsets. No matter how good your camp is, it isn’t fun when it rains hard.

So that leaves Ndutu Lodge. We arrived Monday evening after a fabulous journey through the eastern Serengeti north of Olduvai. Twelve days ago this was brown and dusty; now it was green and fresh, little dust. There were literally tens of thousands of Thomson’s Gazelle, some eland and a handful of zebra and wildebeest. The big herds weren’t here as they have been for me in most of the years past. But we enjoyed outstanding views of the Serengeti during our lunch perched on a kopjes opposite Lemuta, and we had the entire day from the moment we left Olduvai completely to ourselves.

We traveled for 6 hours from Shifting Sands, which remarkably was wet and not windy, likely covering about 50 miles. We encountered not a single other vehicle and certainly well over a hundred thousand animals.

We arrived the lodge just before a downpour. It’s exhilarating to be in the Serengeti’s rainy season storms, because there’s plenty of lightning and thunder.

The economy has really dampened tourism, but we talked with the other guests, other drivers and the wonderful Ndutu manager, Colin McConnell, and decided that our best bet for finding the migration was to more or less duplicate what I had done two weeks ago: go south towards Makau.

The heavy rains can shift the herds in a night. For one thing, they hate gushy grounds. And they are driven by a need for food, not water (especially now when it’s everywhere). Dried clumps of grass turn enticingly edible virtually overnight when it rains.

Reviewing my notes of many years I knew that if the locus of the migration weren’t south, that there would still be a lot of wildebeest there. The Ndutu-Makau-Kusini-Ndutu triangle that touches the Kerio Valley to the south, the Moru Kopjes to the north and Hidden Valley to the east, seems never without wildebeest during this season. This is probably because it is one of the flattest sections of plains just north of Ngorongoro, so it captures a lot of moisture. Anyway, this is where we went first. We had a second day if we needed it, to go elsewhere.

I venture there are probably few tourists who buy a “migration safari” who don’t come home and claim they’ve seen the migration. The following day we would travel through great numbers of wildebeest around Naabi Hill, the center of the park and where the main road passes. We’d see several vehicles stopped there on the main road as visitors popped through their opened tops to photograph large herds. But they had no idea!

How many did we find Wednesday morning? It’s really hard to estimate, but presuming that at any given time we would have 30-40,000 wildebeest in view 360 degrees around us, and that we spent several hours moving around this triangle, I’d say a quarter million.

When we stopped and set up breakfast in the middle of the plains, the wilde gave us a wide berth. It was as if we opened a hole on the prairie.

Everyone was famished. Even though all you do is look, it’s incredibly exciting. There was great conversation and much laughing throughout breakfast as Tim, Rob, Judd and Brad tried to sound like gnu!

Thursday we went to the Moru Kopjes, the prettiest part of the Serengeti. Yes, we saw more wildebeest, the same groups that most tourists see, but to us it was a drop in the bucket of what we had ourselves experienced the day before.

What impressed me most this time at Moru was how frightened the elephants were that we encountered. They acted like elephants of old, during the years of poaching. As soon as they saw us, the ears flapped, there was trumpeting, and they high tailed it away running madly. I don’t understand this. I haven’t seen this behavior in years and I hope it doesn’t mean there is poaching, again.

We were unable to visit the Maasai cave paintings, because other visitors were there first: lion! During our three days in the Serengeti we saw over 40 lion, including about a dozen very little cubs and a lioness about to give birth. We watched a leopard on his kill in a tree, and followed a family of 3 cheetah hunt.

And one of the great bonuses was an amazing series of sunrises and sunsets, among the best I can ever remember seeing. Someone remarked that “It’s Photoshop in Real.” Steve Coates said all we have to say at the debriefing is “Oh, my god!” The skies were ludicrously beautiful.

Ndutu and the Serengeti performed for us magnificently.

Crater Experience

Crater Experience

Good Morning America named the crater one of the natural wonders of the world, which it is without doubt. But the fulsome experience includes much more than just this indescribable beauty.

I’ve heard several experts refer to the ancient Ngorongoro volcano as the world’s tallest structure, greater than Everest. I don’t know if this is science or valid extrapolation from the awesome mountain that remains for everyone to see, today.

Now seven smaller, six dormant volcanoes, Ngorongoro’s largest imploded caldera is the national park. The 7k drive from the gate to the viewpoint is often in deep fog, but we were fortunate as it was completely clear, the afternoon light deepening the forest colors.

The crater sits like a nearly perfectly round cup in a highland rain forest salad of towering trees draped with lianas, thick flowering bushes and radiantly green vines. Some of the most precious plants on earth, including the beautiful acacia lehai (which I call the bonsai acacia) decorate the rim. Even before we stopped at the viewpoint to peer 1800′ into the crater national park, we knew we had a glimpse of the Garden of Eden.

The next morning we descended before dawn. African dawns and sunsets are equatorially unique, and I wasn’t about to have my family miss them. The crater was still lush, with pockets of water across its veld, although drying slightly right to schedule from my last visit a few weeks before.

The caldera was packed with animals. We are at the edge of the prime season, and there were probably still 17 or 18 thousand of the peak 20,000 animals found here in February and March when the wildebeest normally calve. Most of these are wildebeest and zebra, but there are eland, hartebeest, hippo, and virtually all the predators, although at last count only one leopard. That’s because the single great yellow-barked acacia forest is dwindling fast. Each time I come, the forest is thinner.

We saw four (of the estimated 18-20) black rhino, 3 (of the estimated 9) lion families, and my favorite several (of the who knows how many) big tuskers unique to the crater. During the horrible years of poaching, some of the largest tusked elephant on earth descended for its natural protection, and they’ve remained despite the containment of poaching that now exists. The crater isn’t good elephant habitat, but it was secure, and even now they won’t leave. We saw at close range one of the great masters, his turned in tusks nearly touching the ground.

Scenery and animals are the primary component of an East African vacation, I concede. But despite my clients’ protestations, so is the lodging. I do everything possible to avoid revealing component costs, because it’s a turnoff to be sure when my potential client learns that a night at Crater Lodge can cost $1000 per person.

Is it worth it? I’m not one to err on the side of a feather bed, but I’ve learned through numerous safaris that if I just bury the costs in the overall safari, that a stay at Crater Lodge becomes one of the main highlights. It was truly for my family, young and old alike. Erin Barnard, my son’s significant other, has an expressive face that beams joy with the slightest smile. I asked her why she was smiling as she walked with Brad from her “cabin.” “This is over the top,” she exclaimed.

We guides often refer to Crater Lodge as “Maasai Versailles.” It is over the top. It is over priced. The architecture is wild and uncontained. But the staff is the finest in Africa, the food and chefs probably the finest, and there’s no question as you laze in your oversize Victorian bath above which hangs a gargantuan chandelier as you look out your floor to (18′) ceiling window over the crater, that it is the perfect complement to this “over the top” natural wonder.

Manyara Journey

Manyara Journey

Lake Manyara National Park is small, often congested, yet still one of my favorite game drives. But she’s a fickle place; either very good or pretty forgettable.

We drove from Tarangire Treetops to Lake Manyara in about two hours, and it would have been shorter except for the requisite stop at the Mto-wa-Mbu market. If I’ve been criticized for anything throughout my career as a guide, it’s been that I don’t give people enough time for shopping.

But this stop was particularly productive. Ken Winge, the owner with his wife, Sandy, of one of Galena’s finest little stores (Galena Wine & Cheese) has adopted woodworking as his life’s avocation. Any visitor to his beautiful new workshop/barn can’t help but think he’s preparing his living space as a future museum.

Ken wanted not just some of the beautiful curios you can buy, but some of the raw wood so that he, too, could fashion something. That’s not the easiest assignment I’ve ever been given! A lot of the wood carvings found throughout the circuit come from woodworkers far away. And those that do have “workshops” nearby have difficulty themselves getting the wood.

I learned from Ken that the common names we’ve all been using aren’t really correct. I’m a particular fan of rosewood, or at least what everyone here calls rosewood. They make especially beautiful bowls and I admit that this safari I acquired a curio myself, a rosewood elephant!

Final analysis has to await something more scientific, but Ken’s first impression is that rosewood is actually bubinga, much lighter than true rosewood. He also believes that most of what we call ebony is African blackwood. The new nomenclature doesn’t diminish the beauty or rarity of the wood, by the way.

Well, Ken found his hunks of African blackwood since my lead driver, Tumaini Meisha, happened to bump into a cousin near the market who took Ken’s artistic motivations to heart, and guided him through both the miasma of curio stalls then the ultimate bargaining.

We entered Manyara shortly afterwards and how different it was from 12 days ago! The low lake level remained a final indication that the season has been very dry, but it had to have been raining hard for the last several days. The veld was beautifully green running from the lake shore to the woods, and the streams were all nearly full. Where we had seen only a handful of hippos at the famous entry of the largest stream to the lake 12 days ago, this day we counted more than 60!

On the plains were dozens and dozens of giraffe, zebra and wildebeest. In the forests were fabulous elephants, and the red and yellow bishops were back. Frankly, I don’t know where they want last time, and it makes me realize that game viewing might have a strong psychological component to it. The bishop birds never leave Manyara. They had to have been there my last visit, but perhaps we were just all so discouraged that we didn’t look carefully enough.

My son, Brad, was the first to spot the great silvery-cheeked hornbills, too. The park was in its full glory this day, and the one thing that never changes and was just as beautiful even during my last game poor visit, was the indescribable forests of towering podacoprus, mahogany, and tangles of intricate ironwood.

The feast for the eyes was more than sufficient. So it was sensory overload when less than a few hours later we stared down on Ngorongoro Crater from its first viewpoint!

Tarangire Elephants

Tarangire Elephants

Tarangire’s elephant game viewing is excellent year-round. It simply can no longer be considered a seasonal destination.

It was drier than when I visited the park only 12 days ago. Then there were many pools of standing water and a lush green veneer covered everything. For our visit this time it was still green, but much less water and dust followed every vehicle.

We left Tarangire Treetops before dawn with our picnic lunch. The drive to the gate is about an hour and was pretty uneventful, although the morning sunrise was spectacular. After we entered the park, Blair Devermont spotted a leopard.

She was gesturing to us wildly as we approached from behind, but the leopard slid away into the tall grass before we got a chance to see it. Leopard are skittish everywhere, but especially in Tarangire. This was a hunting reserve less than 20 years ago, and it takes multiple generations of leopard to become accustomed to game viewing vehicles.

We continued around the Silale Swamp road and enjoyed our picnic lunch at one of the finest picnic sites in all of Tanzania’s parks. New bathrooms, a beautiful area on a hillside overlooking the great swamp, and all shaded by magnificent trees. It’s the perfect spot for my lecture on Stanley and Livingstone, since all the great explorers coming from Zanzibar had to cross swamps like this.

We then proceeded up the track on the east side of the Tarangire sand river. It wasn’t long before we saw elephants. Similar to most game viewing, successful elephant viewing requires absolute quiet. I’m convinced of all these magnificent animals’ special senses, hearing is the most acute. They tolerate the whole gamut of car noises, but the variety of human voices is infinitely greater and disturbs them.

This doesn’t always mean angers them, although it can. But more often, it means that the game viewing experience will just not be as good. The matriarch will simply lead her family away from you.

Our group behaved magnificently! The first group of two families of 17 included a number of very young babies that performed as if in a school play! And we then saw a group of 50 coming from a mud bath towards the river. We positioned the vehicles carefully, maintained absolutely silence, and had one of the finest encounters I’ve ever experienced!

We returned to Treetops via the Boundary Hill track, one of the most beautiful little cuts through park woodlands in Tanzania. On the way back outside the park we stopped for pictures of everyone’s head through a hole in a baobab. The baobabs are magnificent in Tarangire, like the sunsets and sunrises, natural dynamic sculptures incapable of being plated on a photograph or painting.

My nephew, Tim Heck, smiles a lot, but I began to worry that he had some physical disease. He is a Blue Man in Chicago, capable at the end of each performance of standing in front of throngs of taunting people expressionless as directed. But he simply can’t do that here. Every time I see him, he’s smiling!

That evening we had sundowners overlooking Tarangire from a bluff near the lodge. To our north was the great Rift Valley escarpment with shimmering Lake Manyara at its base. To the east were the formidable hills of Monduli, and to our south, the beginning of the extensive Maasai steppe. The sun settled through the clouds like a curtain being drawn over the evening mist. This is a raucous and boisterous crowd, but I think I remember a moment or two of complete silence as the three-quarters moon appeared.

2-country Safari

2-country Safari

Both Kenya and Tanzania provide attractions not available by the other, but it takes at least one extra day of simple travel to put them together.

We traveled from Kenya to Tanzania, Thursday, from Amboseli to Arusha and finally into Tarangire. It was a long day. Ever since the dispute between Kenya and Tanzania in 1977 which closed their common borders for several years thereafter, there have been only certain places that tourists can cross between the two countries.

Often the easiest way is to fly between Nairobi or Mombasa, and Dar-es-Salaam, Zanzibar, Mwanza or Kilimanjaro. Most safaris fly between Nairobi’s domestic Wilson airport and Kilimanjaro airport in northern Tanzania.

The connection through Wilson is easy, because Wilson is small. But no matter how close your starting and ending cities are from Wilson and Kili, whether or not there are additional flights into or out of those cities, the day is basically shot getting from one country to the other.

In our case we were ending the Kenyan portion at Amboseli with the next game destination being Tarangire. We did this all in one day, picking up Ake Lindstrom and his girlfriend, Nangini, in Arusha to join us for the Tarangire experience.

Ake is a 3rd generation white East African who has decided to buck the trend of leaving his home once educated abroad, and send his roots ever deeper into the place he loves. He founded and runs Summit-Africa, Tanzania’s finest adventure and climbing company.

My group spent a short time in Arusha, changing money, walking around town, and having lunch at the Arusha Hotel. Afterwards, we traveled to the nearby center of Meserani, about a 20-minute drive from Arusha. Sandy Winge was determined to visit the Snake Park, here, to the surprise of her husband, Ken. But like many people who are afraid of snakes, a guided tour is often the best antidote.

The guides at the Meserani Snake facility are excellent, and the group who took the tour didn’t mind missing the shopping time available at the curio store across the street, or the Tinga Tinga Gallery next to the curio store. Bobby Bjork found her dream Tanzanite, here.

It was a short distance from there on a wonderful paved road to the turnoff to Tarangire Treetops, one of the two upmarket lodges that serve Tarangire. Treetops is located just outside the park on its own reserve.

The road into Treetops is pretty bad, and it was the one time on the trip I didn’t wish for rain! About half way through the 80-minute journey we stopped for a “bush pit stop”. I was leading the foray when I flushed out two hyaena about 20 feet away, shouting to Beverly and Carley Flores to get back into the car.

We arrived lovely Treetops at 6:15p, having left Amboseli at 7:15a. It was an interesting day, and folks had time for shopping and non game viewing sightseeing. But it was a long day, unavoidable when connecting the two countries.

Reliable Amboseli

Reliable Amboseli

Amboseli’s situation under Mt. Kilimanjaro insures good game viewing no matter what the weather. But avoid the heavy rains.

We traveled from Tsavo to Amboseli in the requisite armed convoy at 8 a.m. from the Chyulu Gate. This is a pretty anachronistic practice that was instituted in the 1980s when there were many shifta [bandits]. In fact, about a half dozen tourists were killed that decade in this corridor, but there’s been no incident for years.

The drive takes about 1½ hours and includes a few minutes over the interesting Shetani Lava flow, one of the last major volcanic events in Kenya in the last several hundred years.

The route skirts the major border town of Loitokitok which is the nearest any major road comes to Mt. Kilimanjaro. We had been fortunate that the mountain had been out the previous evening, because it was now cloaked in storm clouds.

The area was quite dry. Normally, there would be many fairly mature sun flowers and knee-high corn, but some fields were bone dry, the sticks of the once young corn all that remained. Yet it had down poured the night before, and the typical erosion that is such a problem in Africa, had all but washed out several of our bridges.

I need to mention how bad the roads were. And this main route had been redone only two years ago. At one point when the tourist route linking the parks converged for several kilometers with a main road to Loitokitok, the road became almost unusable despite the fact that the traffic increased tenfold. Kenya’s greatest threat to improving tourism is the state of its roads.

I had told my crew that there as an interesting curio shop on the final stretch into Amboseli, but it had closed because there are so few tourists. No matter, we were besieged by sellers at the Amboseli gate, and quite a lot was bought.

It didn’t take long once inside the park to note that the dry spell had much less effect in the “wild” than in the populated areas we had just driven through. There was just as much dust, but there were also the numerous beautiful swamps that are fed by underground rivers flowing off Kili.

At our first one we positioned the vehicles carefully on the road to get a fantastic experience as more than 30 elephant walked across between our vehicles. They were headed into the swamp to water, and watching the young ones being tucked into the fairly rapidly marching line of massive jumbos was fantastic!

Later that afternoon, Blair Devermont told her driver/guide to “wait a minute, isn’t that something?” In one of the swamps there appeared to be a simple log, but Blair had noticed something else. Sure enough, it was a python that had apparently just swallowed an impala.

Of course everyone else got the word (nowadays by cellphone), so that no one missed it. In my 37 years on safari, I’ve only seen a python a handful of times.

The hippo and buffalo looked a bit distressed, and nowhere near as bad as their cousins we had seen in Tsavo. But everything else, including the lions and elephant, looked fairly good.

No matter what the weather, Amboseli usually provides an uniform game viewing experience. This is because it is essentially a huge soda lake with emerging marshes that are fed by underground rivers coming off Mt. Kilimanjaro. So even when as was the case for us there is a serious dry spell on the veld, Kili never stops pumping down the water.

But at the same time be cautious, because after heavy rains the huge soda pan floods very easily. This usually happens in later April and May. When this happens travel is restricted to only those park roads which the KWS has elevated, and this greatly restricts game viewing.