Weather Sandy or the Serengeti

October 30, 2012 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The capacity for denial in America’s current lemming-like culture makes Africa seem like the real Super Power and we Midwesterners hoakies from Padokie. Super Storm Sandy = Global Warming. When will Americans learn?

Four times weekly starting about 5 a.m. CDT I access the internet to write this blog. This morning, half my links are down. So is the stock exchange. So is LaGuardia airport. And clients we have returning from a safari, half-way around the world, are stuck because their flight is canceled! Because of Sandy!

Because of GLOBAL WARMING.

The storms over the Serengeti are legendary, and I’ve often wondered if my own and other Midwestern fascination with the Serengeti is because we at least share turbulent weather.

As a child in tornado alley in northeast Arkansas I stood with my two younger siblings in the frame of a door watching hopefully as tornadoes passed us bye. That frame was destroyed by a tornado several years after we moved on.

In the Serengeti I’ve had camps blown down, had vehicles ground to a halt on a granite boulder by blinding rain and will always remember a TWA pilot who as a client pointed up to the sky and exclaimed, “That is an altocumulus standing lenticular!”

He exclaimed that the magnitude of that storm would flip a 747 like a dead leaf by a leaf blower.

But times have changed. These tumultuous events are no longer memories of the extreme. Extreme weather is normal, now. Quickly and more forcefully it’s happened than even we staunch heralds of global warming predicted.

A terrible storm whether in Africa or here is no longer unusual. Kenya’s northern frontier is exhausted by drought following floods following drought. The Zambezi River is flooding villages one year then practically turning off the next. South Africa’s breadbasket is being torn apart by desert winds.

And at home we just suffered the hottest year on record along the upper middle Mississippi, and drought was formidable. And this followed a year of incredible flooding. In our little corner of northwest Illinois in my little village several people were killed by floods. No one remembers that happening before.

For the past few years I’ve tried desperately to understand why so many Americans refuse the science of global warming and so many Africans don’t.

Unlike terrorism, the world’s experts know how to impede the coming apocalypse: reduce CO2 and other gas emissions. But because the developing world is developing so fast (thankfully) they proportionately produce more of these gases. The developed world has agreed that the developing world needs to be compensated for reducing their emissions.

So sort of a free ride, eh?

And a sacrifice for those already developed. Yes, that’s probably it. That’s probably why Americans who are the most developed in the world refuse to believe the obvious, and Africans among the least developed in the world, embrace it wholeheartedly.

But you know, if even that cynical view is correct, it’s no different than an old man lending a couple bills to a young lad who fetches his mail each day.

Because if we stop looking at ourselves as competing counties for the river’s stream and stop gerrymandering ourselves for a slight advantage for our portfolios, and start to realize that air blows right across immigration fences, then we’ll realize that this is a challenge that the world together can solve.

But my god it has to begin by simply acknowledging science. Recently several scientists in Italy were jailed for failing to adequately warn a village of an impending earthquake.

Perhaps we should consider jailing the crazies in Alabama who think global warming is a hoax?

Hot Migration Topic

July 24, 2012July 24, 2012 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Is it really such a burning issue: why are the wildebeest so late?

I’ve often experienced them crossing from Tanzania to Kenya even later, sometimes not until August. Normally, though, the herds cross the two river border that separates Tanzania from Kenya by mid- to late June, so we’re a month behind.

This year it’s stinging Kenya more than before.

Kenya’s tourism is reeling from terrorism and a rapidly inflating currency. So the few tourists coming to the Mara who are expressing disappointment is just another blow the Kenyans don’t need.

Looking anywhere for a reason their vacation has been diminished, there are a number of American tourists now blogging incorrectly that the reason the migration is late is because the Tanzanians are setting fires in the Serengeti which is disrupting the wildebeest from moving north.

And of course the general collection of end-of-the-world nuts have picked up this version of what’s happening.

They’re all wrong, but first let me explain where the less apocalyptic are coming from.

The wildebeest eat grass and nothing but grass. Their traditional migration patterns are based on where the grass grows when. It’s that simple. Historically the rain pattern traces a parabolic circle the north of which is Kenya’s Maasai Mara and the south of which is Tanzania’s Serengeti.

For more detail, click here.

The rainiest place in East Africa is Kenya’s Maasai Mara. When it’s dry everywhere else, it rains in the Mara, so the wildebeest go there. The Mara is higher and more rocky and has more acidic soil than in the Serengeti, and so the grass isn’t as nutritious. But at least it grows when it doesn’t grow in the Serengeti.

Separate from this rain dynamic that guides the migration is the age-old agricultural and wildlife management question about whether or not to burn grasses on a prairie.

A proponent of burning that I trust explains the necessity as the only way from keeping the prairie from turning into a forest. Most scientists agree with this explanation, but they also disagree that’s good. Most science suggests burning isn’t overall a good strategy for either agriculture (slash-and-burn) or wildlife management. In other words, it might be better to have a few more forests and a few less prairies.

The argument has been going on since Caesar.

Here’s a blogger that’s got it right.

Whichever side you choose, the fact all agree on is that the increased prairies in East Africa over the last half century is part of the reason that the wildebeest population has tripled. Another argument is over whether the current huge size of the wildebeest population is good or not, but certainly from a tourist point of view it is.

Both Kenya and Tanzania park rangers burn their grasslands. Come September and October when the rains return to parts of the Serengeti and the herds begin to leave Kenya, Kenyan rangers start furiously burning to delay their departure from there.

So both sides do it, and both sides argue they do it for scientific reasons, albeit there is a short-term benefit that does for a very short while delay the herds. Burning, as you may startle yourself from remembering 3rd grade science, produces water (moisture) which drops on the burned prairie and immediately sprouts new short grass even without rain.

Alas, a very tempting reason to stay and have another bite.

It was very unfortunate that an excellent Kenyan newspaper, Nairobi’s biggest, propagated the inaccurate story. It’s beneath the standard of the Daily Nation but even worse, suggesting the fires are being uniquely set as a blockage rather than just the normal half-century old grass burning strategy is totally irresponsible.

The greatest reason the herds are late is because the rains – like everywhere in the world – have been very unusual. I’m sitting in a place of a horrible drought. East Africa – northern Tanzania in particular – has had unusually heavy rains, and this has resulted in much more new late grass.

The migration isn’t so hard-wired that animals will leave a food source. Migrations worldwide are driven by food sources. We had an unusual warbler migration this year in the Midwest, because bugs – their food – appeared earlier than normal.

Burning is incidental to this, perhaps a short-term fix delay (a week, maybe two) but nothing more significant. Tourists who believe they can fine tune their “migration vacation” in periods of two-weeks are nuts.

Tanzanians blame Kenyans for everything wrong in Kenya, and Kenyans blame Tanzanians for everything wrong in Kenya. In this case there’s nothing wrong to begin with.

Except bad reporting and tourists who didn’t do their homework.

Way South of Scott Pelley

January 24, 2012January 23, 2012 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Sixty Minutes rebroadcast of “Into the Wild” Sunday night caused many of us experts serious angst. Basically three wonderfully short thumbnails of things wild in East Africa were riveted with inaccuracy.

I’m sure that when a professor of dentistry speeds past a billboard for toothpaste he winces. Nothing wrong really with telling people they need to brush. Nothing wrong really with fluoride in the goop. Nothing wrong with a beautiful woman smiling like a bleached Mayan temple.

But probably lots wrong with everything in between, like how often, how hard, when and with what kind and temperature of water, and who knows what else.

I hope the bristles on my back as I watched the 60 Minutes show weren’t as stiff as a Number 10 toothbrush. (Admission: I watched the tape. I had calculated that the Patriots/49ers game would be less stressful. Wrong.)

There were three segments, and the most egregious was the best and first, about the great migration, the Mau Forest controversy and how it effects the Mara River, and the transformation of some Maasai land into community based tourism projects.

Most egregious because it was very, very close to the situation as I see it, but agonizingly not spot on, providing opportunities for enormous misunderstandings.

Pelley and crew were in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, which represents approximately 5% of the land area of the Serengeti/Mara/Ngorongoro ecosystem through which the migration moves. He was correct in pointing out that the migration was there “for a very short time every year” but arrogant and irresponsible in claiming this is its most dramatic moment.

Some years, yes. Most years, no. The drama moves with the weather, and the simple historical odds will place the greatest drama of river crossings at the Grumeti or Balanganjwe rivers in Tanzania, not the Mara in Kenya as Pelley claims.

Pelley said that the “few days that it takes the herds to cross the river, crocs will bring down enough food for months” implying that the river crossing in the Mara is brief and singular moment for any given group of wildebeest.

Not true. Wildebeest cross rivers back and forth multiple times for no good reason. It’s an instinctive part of their overriding component “to follow.” They might have crossed the river ten minutes ago, and another group is crossing in the other direction, and off they go. A single wildebeest might cross back-and-forth a hundred times the same river in the same year.

The problem here is that Pelley is treating the migration like so many casual observers as the sum of its parts, individual wildes on some monarch butterfly calculus of pretty constant direction. That’s just not the case with the migration.

From year to year the actual movements of the migration change massively. There are even years when it never gets to Kenya, or hardly at all. Unlike butterfly migrations, the wilde aren’t hard-wired with a map. They go where there’s grass. And grass grows where it rains. And over time there are definite patterns to this, and which right now are being dramatically altered by global warming.

I have other serious concerns, but none as important as the above: Pelley’s claim that the migration is predictable and that its “most dramatic moment” is in “late summer” when the herds cross “in a few days” the Mara River in Kenya’s Maasai Mara. Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

Kudus though, and not of the animal kind, to Pelley for a thoughtful thumbnail of the Mau Forest controversy and of some local Maasai attempts to transform a dwindling agricultural lifestyle into tourism.

Finally, a recurrent criticism I have of American media is their lack of due diligence. The show used three experts for its three different segments. Two of the experts are honorable scientists to be sure, but none of the experts are current leaders in their fields.

Most of the current leaders of field research are no longer found in Kenya, or at their foundations in the United States. They are brilliant, younger and performing exceptional scientific work, many more in neighboring Tanzania than Kenya. It pains me constantly how a lack of effort by American media leads them not to the true sages but to the hack celebrities.

Nuff said. In sum it wasn’t bad. But to be good it needed care that perhaps no American TV is capable of. BBC where are you?

Maybe a Wolf, but no Railway

January 5, 2012January 5, 2012 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

There is no evidence that a Chinese railway will be built through the Serengeti, despite the alarms sounded by Serengeti Watch (SW) retweeted and reblogged by conservationists.

SW’s end-of-year alarm is not just premature, it’s dangerous. It makes it difficult to sustain a lasting fight against those in the Tanzanian government interested in subsuming conservation to more rapid commercial development.

Several days after SW’s issued an alert to its 40,000+ friends on Facebook that the Tanzanian, Ugandan and Chinese governments had plans to build a railway through the Serengeti, the Tanzanian government said unequivocally that any railway being planned “will not run through the park.”

I’m the last to enshrine African government announcements as trafficking in truth, but this one is pretty clear and simple, and while of course anything can be lied about, this time I seriously doubt it. Here’s why:

SW’s principal evidence was a December 23 announcement of an Uganda/Tanzania/Chinese agreement released by the Uganda Transport Minister reported by one of Uganda’s better news services, IPP media, on December 24.

The agreement for a $450 million feasibility study for several infrastructure projects all linked to China’s extraction of African natural resources included a railway from Tanzania’s northern and wholly undeveloped Indian Ocean seaside city of Tanga to its Lake Victoria port of Mwanza. A straight line from one to the other goes through the Serengeti.

There is nothing in the announcement to suggest the railway will be straight.

In the next few days following SW’s alert dozens of bloggers took up arms, and while not exactly going viral it was widespread. Several days later one of Uganda’s typically near-tabloid newspapers took the rumors and staged a full-on, evidence-lacking scandal claiming in its lead paragraph that the agreement would “build a railway line passing through the Serengeti National Park.”

That was promptly followed by the Tanzanian government denial noted above.

A whole basket of threats jeopardizes the Serengeti, not just from this yet fluid and unclear agreement, but from numerous other development projects including the moribund roads project which has not yet been removed from Tanzania’s transport docket of active projects, despite clear indications it has been shelved.

But ambiguity is supreme in African politics and policy, and it takes a bit of care in mastering your position. Threats must be fought differently than wars. The Serengeti road project is definitely on the shelf and being monitored by a whole range of pantry watchers including UN agencies and Hillary herself. It was a war that SW helped to win. That battle’s over; the threat continues.

And the railway is not yet clear enough to send in the troops.

The way to oppose these threats successfully is to be grateful to the various glorious ministers for their stated positions and to constantly remind them and the public of these. The stated position by the Tanzanian government is that there will be no big road through the Serengeti and no railway through the Serengeti. Thank you, Mr. Minister.

If the day arrives when this stated policy changes, the reversal – unlike Newt’s, Mitt’s and our farcical righties – will carry significant political leverage in Tanzania where a growing movement similar to Kenya’s is requiring more and more accountability and constancy from local politicians.

This is a tough one, and it is so because of China’s intractable need for natural resources, one that with each day is clearly insensitive to anything but its own consumption. Huge battles loom all over resource-rich Africa.

In Tanzania alone we need battle strategies right now to stop ongoing projects around Zanzibar and Tanga’s coral reefs, uranium in The Selous, hydroelectric plants on the Rufiji and the ongoing travesties with gold mining near Mwanza. Any one of these, all ongoing at this very instant, has negative environmental impacts as great as the imagined threat of severing the wildebeest migration.

The way to master the railway threat on the Serengeti is not SW’s. We need effective diplomacy not not-for-profit hysteria. The best way to lose a battle is for the little guy to shoot first.

In Africa dreams often become reality. But the last thing we need right now is to provoke these threats in the Serengeti. China has a lot of money and doesn’t exactly like clean air.

SW’s call to arms is premature and incendiary.

Storms Move The Serengeti

December 2, 2011December 2, 2011 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Early wilde birth — Photo by Sarah Vieth, Ndutu, November 2011

Climate change is slowly, steadily changing the ecology of the world’s most spectacular big game wilderness, the Serengeti. For a visitor, it’s nothing short of fantastic. For animals it’s terrifying. For the planet it’s just too complicated yet to say.

The roughly 7000 sq. miles of the Serengeti/Mara/Ngorongoro wilderness is the greatest wildlife area on earth. Said with bias. And the necessary qualifiers are many, of course. But this is classic Africa that seems to get better to the casual visitor year after year.

Historically northern Tanzania’s rains begin towards the end of the year and last (with a noticeable but incomplete interruption in February) for 5-6 months. This year, and last year, they began much much earlier and ended a little earlier.

And, predictably, this sent the wildebeest circling faster. And all of us “experts” are thrilled and surprised. The wilde now seem to spend less time in the Mara in the northern reaches of the migratory route, and more time in the Serengeti. They don’t follow the rains, but they follow the grass the rain grows.

Rain patterns are critical to the great migration, as well as practically everything else in this ecosystem from fields of yellow bidens flowers to the nesting habits of pink-eyelided eagle owls. For all my life until now all of this explosion of life was pretty predictable. Getting harder, now.

I was astounded this morning, for example, to read a blog posted by Bill and Sarah Vieth from Evansville, Indiana, celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary in the Serengeti. They probably had no idea how remarkable was the photo Sarah took when they were in the Ndutu area, which I’ve taken the great liberty of reposting atop this blog.

So what’s so unusual about a lioness bringing back a wildebeest baby to its pride for a slightly late Thanksgiving?

There shouldn’t be baby wildebeest, now. Wildebeest are the predictors of the veld’s health and sustainability because their migration and foaling is … well, at least until now, predictable. Wildebeest babies in Ndutu are born in February. That’s what the books say. That’s what I saw for 35-36 of the last 40 years. This birth, following 8 months of gestation, is maybe two months early.

But alas, it all starts to match if you’re willing to believe that the rain clock in Equatorial Africa is changing. It syncs beautifully with last year’s early end to the rains.

Wildebeest rutting historically occurs as the rains end, and last year they ended early. In fact the news blog posted by the owner of Ndutu last May read: “Lake Ndutu was completely dry by the end of May! It’s the first time in all her years of being here that Aadje has seen the lake dry so soon after the end of the ‘wet season.”

Early December minus eight months equals early April. Remarkable, a shift of 6 weeks to 2 months.

Now, was this just a fluke?

I called Bill. Bill was kind enough to give me permission to post his wife’s photo, and went on at great lengths about what a great trip they just had. And he proved that photo wasn’t a fluke.

When Sarah and he were descending into Ngorongoro crater first thing one morning, they watched one, then two wildebeest births. He excitedly described to me the lurking hyaena and how one of the younguns didn’t make it. But proof positive how early the births are occurring!

Now it isn’t so hunky dory and simply just a shift in the clock. I saw a young wildebeest being born in April this year around Ndutu. In September in the far north of the Serengeti I saw baby wildebeest that couldn’t have been more than three months old. So clearly mother nature’s change of habit is causing some confusion with the wildebeest.

Like men, wilde may be resisting the idea of climate change. I excuse them. Their brains are smaller.

Rains began in the northern Serengeti with a vengeance this August, and while they’ve abated a bit right now, the center and southern part of the ecosystem is near flooded. What I think we’re experiencing is not just a shift to earlier rains, but an extension of the entire rainy season. I think we’ll soon all agree that it rains more and more than half the year on the Serengeti.

Or as one blog puts it, “Short Rains Aren’t so Short!”

That jives with rain patterns all around the planet near the equator. With global warming there is more moisture in the atmosphere. We’ve all heard about the 90-mile wide icebergs calving from the Antarctic. It floats towards Cape Town and melts. Seas rise, yes, but so does the atmosphere which in a warmer state can hold more and more water.

And it dumps conveniently on the equator. The Serengeti.

Wish it were just all that simple, but equatorial meteorology is far more complex than my Chicago television weatherman suggests. We have discernible seasons in the north and south of the world, but the equator doesn’t. Rains in equatorial northern Peru were devastating in the last few years, but hard to predict.

One week is a series of torrential storms; the next week seems like a drought. That’s the basic pattern as you move away from the equator, away from the Serengeti. That’s why the Somali refugee camp at Dadaab had thousands of refugees fleeing a drought 4 months ago, and thousands now fleeing floods.

But closer to the equator the complexity is less stark. Basically, it just rains more; it’s wetter.

So what does this mean to the animals?

Having lived there and visited constantly throughout my adult life, I can say with care that the animal populations are bigger, the viewing more dramatic as tension among predators and competition for food sources increases, but my worry is that it will all come crushing down some day.

You might call it the Animal Bubble.

Things are good for the animals, now. Probably will be for a few years, but just as wildebeest sex lives are getting screwed up (pun intended), massive ecological systems don’t like quick change. The response to quick change is usually to crash.

But right now, a month or more early, the wildebeest have massed at Ndutu and it’s pouring. And for now, they couldn’t do it better at DreamWorks.

Climate Changes Road

December 1, 2011December 1, 2011 by Arusha ♥ 6 Comments

When something goes wrong, those with greater resources cope better. So it’s no surprise that Africans are the furious ones and the developed world’s citizens are the most complacent about climate change. Too bad rich tourists heading on safari: you’re about to experience it square on.

I think practically everyone in the world will agree on one climate change outcome: weather is more extreme. Summers are hotter, winters are colder, winds are stronger, rains are heavier, and periods of beautiful calm are often longer. Extremes.

Idiots argue that man has little to do with this, and non-idiot poorly informed believe even if man has little to do with this, there’s little he can do to abate it. Wrong. Wrong, of course. And this dog-headed refusal to accept simple science is found mostly in the developed world, where hotter summers and heavier snows are annoying, but not catastrophic. Yet.

In Tanzania last weekend heavy rains fell once again in the north over the important safari circuit. Three bridges were destroyed, the beautiful Manyara escarpment lost much in a landslide, Serena Manyara Lodge was partially destroyed, a half dozen people were killed and hundreds hurt, and right now you can’t drive normally into the Serengeti from any airport in northern Tanzania.

The rains have laid waste a beautiful paved road – the only one – that links Tanzania’s Manyara, Ngorongoro and Serengeti national parks with the main metropolis of Arusha and Tanzania’s main northern airport. The road was built with Japanese aid money in 2007, completing an already improved gravel road built in 2003.

Before then overland safaris into the Serengeti were much different than they were post last weekend. Either you flew, missing so many beautiful sights along the way, or added a day or two to your itinerary to make sure you could get over the Manyara escarpment.

It’s unclear if Tanzania has the wherewithal today to repair the current mess, which is massive. The very important December holiday season is extremely heavily booked, and I doubt seriously that the roads can be repaired by then. And the greater question looms: you repair it at phenomenal cost, now, and then what about the next heavy rains?

This is happening as the Durban Conference on Climate Change goes on, and on, and on, and on. This is the conference that created the Kyoto Protocol, the nearest and now decaying world treaty to deal with climate change. For the first time in the conference’s 20-year history, no U.S. lawmakers are present.

And the all but dead Kyoto Protocol, which the world’s top polluters the U.S. and China never signed, may get its nail-in-the-coffin as reports circulate that Canada will celebrate the current conference by withdrawing from the treaty.

This particular road is important to tourists, but it’s more important to local commerce, students going to school, farmers preparing fields. It’s not just tourism, of course, that suffers from climate change. Droughts are more frequent and so famine is more frequent. Floods are more frequent, so development is drowned, diseases spread.

Africa can’t cope. And when Africa doesn’t cope big time, the developed world is pulled into the mess as rescuer of last resort at great expense. This is getting boring, it’s happening so often, and nobody seems to have a long enough vision to realize ultimately that the world as a whole – that means us – is hurt by climate change as much if not more than Wall Street banks and housing bubbles.

Try to spin this one, Mr. T. Party.

The Rains Have Come

November 1, 2011November 1, 2011 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

storm.serengeti.melville — "Storm over the Serengeti" by William Melville.
Inset: yesterday in Nairobi.

The dry season is definitely over in all of East Africa, the rains have been heavier than usual almost everywhere, the plains are spectacularly green and even here half a world away I can hear the veld sighing relief.

From Nairobi to Dar, the Serengeti to the Mara, Samburu to Tsavo, rain is falling and sometimes although not surprisingly now with the vengeance of global warming.

An incredible 2″ of rain fell in only 3 hours recently on what may be my favorite lodge in all of Africa, Ndutu in the Serengeti! The torrent was just reported by the owner, Aadje Geertsema, and bodes extremely well for upcoming Serengeti safaris.

The start of the rains, the certainty that they will continue and aren’t just a flash in the pan, is one of the most important moments of the entire year in East Africa. Yes, relief, but a certain kind of relief, the kind that unstops all the energies and ideas that you were holding back for fear of a drought.

“After about the third downpour a few weeks ago, the trees, bushes, and grasses shed their thick layers of brown dust and showed their true lush green beauty,” writes a missionary working on Mt. Kilimanjaro.

“The rains have come to the desert!” a volunteer nurse in Kenya’s north writes recently. “Rain brings life. Camels can drink, produce milk, and move again.”

I remember my first year in Africa, 1972. We arrived at the start of Kenya’s mini dry season, the end of its “short rains.”

Note most of East Africa has only a single, long rainy season the first half of the year, but in areas north and east of Nairobi where it rains less, the “February lull” in the long rainy season becomes distinctly a dry season that splits the first half of the year into two seasons: The Short Rains (Nov-Jan) and the Long Rains (Mar-Jun).

So, naturally, I thought this was how Africa was supposed to be: hot, dry and dusty! We hadn’t been working too long before the “Long Rains” came, so the contrast hadn’t much time to rivet my soul one way or the other.

But then the Long Rains stopped, as they do throughout all of East Africa, in June sometime, and at first you don’t think much about it. In fact, it’s so welcomed that you don’t have to continually wipe mud off your shoes before stepping inside and that the trek into the market isn’t a slipslide affair.

Moreover, the end of the Short Rains prompts the sea of grasses and gargantuan bushes to flower and seed, so it’s a strikingly beautiful time. In many places in the Serengeti the bright yellow bidens bidens – a smaller, thinner version of the American dandelion that is more like an aster – covers the plains for miles and miles.

But the welcome end to the mud season and the fields of beautiful flowers doesn’t last very long, and by the end of June the veld is brown, dry and dusty … everywhere. It’s cool in June, cold in July but then by August Mother Nature starts to fidget and grumble. The heat grows quickly. Anything in the road ditches that had found bits of water to grow beautiful wilts and dies.

In the great plains game parks predation reaches its peak and the predators grow fat and sassy. But the rest of the game begins what seems like an interminable struggle to live. Wildebeest like chickadees here at home in late fall foraging the last of the thistle before the frost, race useless from place to place, a glint of green grass in their peripheral version prompting some hope.

Many of the ungulates grow so thin you can see their ribs. Forest creatures do better, because the forest never totally browns out. It’s on the great plains, like the Serengeti, where the bitter reality of no rain cuts so harsh.

And over time, as the game increased and man increased next to it, new struggles developed.

“Eventually the grazing pressures increases,” Aadje explains. Maasai herders and their cows and cattle “clash with lions.” Lions kill their stock; they kill lions. “I suppose these incidents have taken place over many years in the past.” Aadje reflects, “and I am always much relieved for all parties when the first rains arrive.”

As Aadje waits anxiously at the end of the dry season for the rain clouds to form and the Maasai and their herds to leave, I would rest on a termite mound behind our house staring at the sky as if that would create clouds out of a blazeningly pale blue wash bereft of a single speck of anything but the underside of a relentless sun.

Even the birds it seemed had stopped flying. No wind, no breeze, just hot. And then, just when you were about to give up any hope and were certain a drought had begun, I would wake in the mornings to the surprisingly melodious cursing of farmers as they whipped their oxen to pull old plows through rock-hardened soil. They knew.

And then, “The rains have come, anyone got a spare ark?” writes British volunteer Dan Jones of the torrents that fell as if on cue onto Nairobi last week. And Nairobi’s “horrendous traffic gets worse,” power outages increase, football stadiums become swimming pools.

Oh, those poor city folk!

But on the veld, the Maasai return to their traditional grazing grounds, the great herds come into Ndutu and the lions feed on them. Baby impala and wildebeest and gazelle and zebra appear and frolic in the puddles.

The rains have come. Nature is reset.

Ho-Hum Just a Routine Day on Safari!

September 19, 2011September 21, 2011 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Bumpy road, alkaline dust, wind in your face. And a honey badger, some impala, hartebeest, elephant, a serval in a tree killed by a leopard and a family of 11 lion taking down a bull buffalo.

Anyone who only reads first paragraphs might be misled.

It was hardly an ordinary start. We lucked out big time. Sue MacDonald kept saying “I don’t believe; can you believe it?” And as is often the case with great game drives, it was basically luck and not strategy that took us to this extraordinary beginning.

Following the first couple days in Nairobi for our normal political and cultural touring and to shake as much jetlag as possible into the congested throngs of people we walked through on the street, we flew into the southwest Serengeti, to Ndutu Lodge. Yesterday there were two others besides our group, and today we’re alone. This is because of the common knowledge that the migration which is centered here in March and April is long gone.

But what so many television special driven tourists don’t reflect on is that animals and wilderness does not follow a TV schedule. It goes on year-round. Sure there will be times that will basically provide more animals than others, but there are very special things that happen at all the different times of the year.

I’ve written before about the discovery of the buffalo virus that was leading to more lion kills and lion deaths, but even so lion killing a buffalo is no easy task. I don’t think a lion even considers taking down a buf unless more customary food like zebra and wildebeest aren’t available. It would be like going to Whole Foods for a last-minute Friday snack and buying a complete Angus.

And that’s the case at Ndutu in the middle of the dry season. (By the way, we arrived in a rain storm, and it’s rainy today as well, but that’s really unusual. And the area essentially remains very dry.) So for the lion of Ndutu, dinner is always a challenge.

We’d heard in the middle of the night the anxious lion roars and hyanea yelps. We’d hardly been out for a few minutes past daylight when Dixon spotted a lone female walking fast on the top of a ridge about 500 yards away.

We drove up to her and I immediately noticed that she was limping, and that her belly was terribly contracted, a sign she hadn’t eaten for days. Clearly last night she was involved in a failed hunt of something that injured her right shoulder.

She took no notice of us and kept on her mission driven limped walk. She hesitated only momentarily to call and then listened as another lion called back from the far distance. She started to walk again.

Then all of a sudden out of some low bushes runs a subadult male covered in blood. The female we had been following laid her ears close to her head, turned tale and began running with the bloody faced male in close pursuit.

She was obviously not a part of the pride that currently owned this territory, but rather than following her we wanted to figure out the bloody face of the pursuer.

Soon we found other lion, three mature females and five cubs of various ages, all bloodied but clustered together as if something was attacking them.

Then we saw literally ten feet from our car in the bush a giant male buffalo.

He was obviously dying. The giant, awesome beast lifted his head back towards me and I saw that distinctive glaze in the eyes of a dying animal. Animals have expressions just like us, just not in the face.

Every time a lion got near him he’d stand up and begin to swing his deadly horns.

The older lion knew to stay well away, but the younger kids couldn’t suppress their hunger. They would move towards him, even jump on him, and he’d growl and swing his head. The youngest cub, about 4½ months old, got a seething cash on his little neck.

So we watched this for some time as the buffalo seemed to be on his last breath, and then when he seemed to stop breathing, a lion would close in, and he would stumble to his feet swinging his head, braying.

Finally, still alive, he lost all strength and the family knew it. They were on him at once: the kids on the back, the larger lion digging into the soft flesh areas. We left before he was dead.

A few hours later, on our way back to the lodge, we stopped to review the situation, and the buf was dead. In just that short several hours the lion had carved an enormous amount from the available meat and most were too full to eat another bite. But the male was close on the kill, as they always are, reluctant to give way so long as a single morsel of meat is left.

Even though he was too full to eat it.

Then came our second wonder. Two elephant were strolling down the lake shore which was about 50 yards away. But the wind was directly on them, off the kill, and immediately the mother ele started scenting the air.

Before long she was charging the lion, chasing them away and trumpeting loudly. The lion dutifully stood clear, the male the last to do so, and she kept up the harassment until for some reason she felt appropriately vindicated, and went off.

No. It was not an ordinary start to a safari. But on the other hand it wasn’t totally unusual. This is the most stressful time for Ndutu. Except for the aberrant rains that came with us, the veld is parched, a powdery salt blown almost like smog into the mostly still veld by the dawn and dusk breezes. Unlike March when I’m here, there is only a fraction of the normal bird song, a thin sliver of the number of animals always here then.

But predators don’t migrate. If they’re to survive, this is when they have to show their stuff. And for the lucky visitor, like us, a once-in-a-lifetime scene unfolds into our own alien world.

Tourists Stranded, Tanzania Tainted

August 11, 2011August 11, 2011 by Arusha ♥ 5 Comments

Hundreds of travelers headed to Tanzania remain in limbo this morning as a result of a high profile controversy involving one of Europe’s most prestigious hotel chains, a controversy ensnared in the Serengeti Highway debacle.

Late last month ASB Tanzania Investments, the owners of The Kilimanjaro Hotel in Dar and Bilila Lodge in the Serengeti, announced Hyatt would be taking over from Kempinski. In May they had announced Kempinski had withdrawn from managing the Zamani Resort on Zanzibar, and that hotel continued to operate with local management until this week.

But Hyatt has announced it is taking over only the Kilimanjaro hotel in Dar.

Email addresses, phones, websites have disappeared for Bilila Lodge and Zamani Resort.

What are tourists doing when they arrive these places, now? I can’t imagine Bilila abandoned; I was there only a few months ago. It’s a palace in the wasteland, a luxury convention resort. But no one answers phones or emails.

No notification was given those who were confirmed into the properties, nor to their agents or tour operators. Reserved travelers are in limbo.

Kempinski has referred questions about deposits and nonrefundable payments to Hyatt, but Hyatt insists it is managing only The Kilimanjaro.

For the moment, I’d advise travelers to quickly book something else in this High Season if they can, and then to read the story of High Intrigue that follows.

And shame on Kempinski for leaving Tanzania in such shambles.

But I think I know why.

Kempinski has only been in Tanzania for 4 years. Bilila Lodge opened on July 9, 2009. It is widely assumed that the president of Tanzania, Jakaya Kikwete, has (or had) a sizable investment in the three properties.

He was often seen at Bilila on retreat, where one of the suites was always held in ready for him. His over-the-hill inaugural speech for the lodge far exceeded the parameters a normal politician would dane to use.

Why?

It was no coincidence that this was just about the time that the Serengeti Highway project came together.

And it wasn’t just a highway project. It was a plan for an entirely new center of the park probably financed by two billionaires, Paul Tudor-Jones of the U.S. and Roman Abramovich of Russia.

Tudor-Jones already owns the Grumeti Reserves, now managed by Singita, and Abramovich is a long-time fan of Tanzania and frequent visitor to Grumeti.

Grumeti, Bilila, and the planned new center for the Serengeti, are all remarkably close to one another, and would have been a stone’s throw from various points along the Serengeti Highway.

The Serengeti Highway has been shelved. Opposition grew and grew and UNESCO dealt a final blow, just as it had done with Zamani several years ago.

With swaggering disregard for law, Kikwete had maneuvered Kempinski into paying $10,000 for a historic site within Stone Town that Zamani was to be relocated to … at hundreds of millions of dollars. UNESCO was appalled, and warned (like it did later with the Serengeti Highway) that World Heritage status would be removed.

In the economic hay days when Kikwete wrapped Kempinski into his devilish plans, he essentially ignored UNESCO. But as tourism contracted, as his own country was shaken by controversial elections, UNESCO’s warning was not so much powerful itself, as a final conclusion to what all good folk believed world wide, including in Tanzania.

The threats to the fragile history of Zanzibar and the ecosystem of the Serengeti were paramount, but it became clear in the leaned down years following the global recession that general tourism was threatened by his schemes.

Kikwete has backed away, entirely. Some of his ministers now become the fall persons for his folly.

Kempinski finally had enough. It left. Rather quickly, actually, and not at all like a European gentleman leaving a cocktail party.

I suppose what’s most important, is that this miserable attempt to profit from Tanzania’s special environments and history, is over.

What is left, though, is for Kempinski to come clean. And to apologize not just for its misguided interests in the beginning, but for the appalling way it’s left.

SERENGETI WATCH OUT OF SYNC

June 27, 2011June 27, 2011 by Arusha ♥ 4 Comments

Contrary to Serengeti Watch’s weekend retraction that the Serengeti Highway had been scrapped, it has been scrapped. SW now needs to be as clear as it’s demanding the Tanzanian government be.

Friday I joined the world, including SW in announcing the Serengeti highway had been scrapped. It has been, but a retraction by SW with an unusually scrupulous reading of the official Tanzanian government announcement does confuse the issue, and this is intentional by the government. Let’s try to work through this.

First, what happened Friday was a Tanzanian government letter sent to UNESCO dated Wednesday got into the media. After the first reading SW sent out an alert to their thousands of members that the highway had been scrapped.

I’m not sure of the actual sequence of reporting, if SW was the first to report this or how exactly SW got a copy of the letter, but within seconds of the SW announcement the world press was reporting it, including the BBC. Before Friday ended in Africa, in fact, foreign correspondents as reputable as the London Telegraph’s Mike Planz were reporting “Wildebeest migration safe after Serengeti road plans scrapped.”

Agence France Presse reported Friday from Paris, where UNESCO is located and to whom the letter was addressed, that UNESCO had confirmed the “Tanzania has stated it will reconsider its North Road project.”

And Sunday, media throughout Africa and the world picked up an Agence France report that as a result of the “reconsideration” UNESCO’s World Heritage Site board of trustees had decided not to list the Serengeti as an endangered World Heritage Site.

Click below for the best resolution I can give you of the Tanzanian government letter to UNESCO.
NoSerHiway_letter_6-22

SW considers the second paragraph of the letter dissimulating. The third paragraph, however, is pretty definitive:

Ezekiel Maige, Tanzanian’s Minister for Natural Resources & Tourism wrote, “…the proposed road will not dissect the Serengeti National Park…”

So, then, what is the “proposed road.”

Maige explains this in the second paragraph as a two-part road divided by the Serengeti itself. The eastern portion will be a new paved road to Loliondo, plus a 58k stretch from Loliondo to the Serengeti’s Klein’s Camp Gate, although that long 58k that will not be paved.

He then continues to remark that a 53k section traversing the Serengeti “will remain gravel road” and continue to be managed by park authorities and presumably, funds “as it currently is.” Where that road ends, at the western Tabora Gate of the park, there would then be a new (or renewed) 12k gravel road to the town of Mugumo, where a new paved road would continue to Lake Victoria.

SerNeckMap.Mugumo2Waso — Excerpted from Harvey Maps, London.

Now the confusion comes because SW doesn’t seem to think that this 53k gravel road through the park exists. After a day’s elation, SW sent out an alert to its supporters claiming “No gravel road exists across this 53 km stretch.”

I’ve driven it many times. See the map above. It’s a horrible road in places, disappears in others, but it has been a designated Serengeti track road for at least the last 50 years.

“WASO” is the actual town to which the new paved road will be built from Mto-wa-Mbu. Maige and others commonly refer to the “Loliondo Road” but Loliondo is the entire district. There is a small political and government headquarters named Loliondo 6.2k east of Waso, but Waso in the main urban center.

The 57.6k gravel road that will be newly built or newly reconstructed but which will remain gravel will be from Waso to the Serengeti’s eastern park gate at Klein’s Camp. 58k on gravel is at the best of times a two-hour trip. This is no thoroughfare.

Maige’s reference to the “existing road” from the eastern to the western side of the park, and which had been generally (not specifically) the blueprint for the originally announced “highway” is the arched track shown above as a broken line that begins a few kilometers south of the Klein’s Camp gate on the main road to Lobo, then moves northwest, then southwest through the neck of the Serengeti to the western gate at Tabora.

Maige then said the existing track from the park gate to the town of Mugumo will be improved, and at Mugumo the paved road will continue to Lake Victoria.

The arched track through the Serengeti is what SW claimed does not exist. Of course it does, and it appears on a number of the last issues of the Frankfurt Zoological Society’s maps of the park. The oldest one I have was published in June, 1970. A 2008 one is republished by Harvey Maps of London and is available for sale to the public.

To improve this existing track will require significant effort. There is nothing in Maige’s announcement to suggest there will be any further upgrading or building of bridges, or anything of the sort, on the 53k track that links Klein’s Camp Gate (east) with Tabora Gate (west). Frankly, I doubt they’ll do a thing.

The existing track just gives up the ghost in huge sections, and a number of new bridges (over the Balanganjwe and Mbalimbali to name two) would have to be built. No small or inexpensive task. It does not seem to jive with Maige’s claim of an “existing road” nor one that would be managed “as it is currently.”

As it is currently, a better Landcruiser than mine would be needed to make the entire journey. I suppose that park rangers on poaching patrol might manage along it, but that’s about it.

So this is the crux of the dissimulation, and I suppose it’s understandable that SW might suspect the government of trying to fool its way into retaining UNESCO World Heritage status while still planning to dissect the Serengeti. But frankly, I don’t even think Tanzanian politicians are that foolish.

Maige said definitively “the proposed road will not dissect the Serengeti” and that’s what the world community and UNESCO is taking at face value.

In fact, were Tanzania to do so, I can imagine nothing but incredible ramifications to the country as a whole, and not just from UNESCO, but the World Bank and the U.S. which has just orchestrated new aid for the country.

Yes, you can argue Maige’s letter is clever dissimulation but in fact it would be considered outright lying to the NGOs and foreign donors on which the country depends for its very existence. There are just too many sentences in that letter that stand as evidence that “the proposed road will not dissect the Serengeti.”

I think the letter is intended as much for local consumption as UNESCO. Like any good Tanzanian politician, Maige will never admit the government has changed its mind. And Tanzanian politicians’ track record of fooling Tanzanians more than outsiders is legend. It’s totally realistic to suppose what the government is doing, here, is leading unsuspecting local supporters of a faster link from Arusha to Lake Victoria down a nonexistent track.

If Tanzania really intended to build a new road, why write this letter in the first place? Do you really think Maige believed he could fool UNESCO, the World Bank and the United States with something like this?

That’s just too unbelievable.

Nothing is ever final in government or politics, whether it be Tanzania or here, and we have every reason to demand a greater clarification from Tanzania. But my money’s still on no new road through the park for the foreseeable future.

Victory in the Serengeti!

June 24, 2011June 24, 2011 by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

2roads for heaven — On November 9, 2010, I posted this graphic above my blog suggesting the Tanzanians would eventually back down from building a road through the Serengeti.

As I’ve been suggesting for a year, the “Serengeti Highway” will not be built through the park, but will be built right up to the eastern edge, and the goal of reaching the Lake Victoria port of Mwanza will be pursued as a new southern road from Arusha.

Wednesday, the Tanzanian government released a letter to UNESCO’s World Heritage Site office, which had threatened to remove World Heritage Status from the Serengeti if it were bisected by the highway, confirming that a paved west/east road through the neck of the park had been scrapped.

This is not a total victory, but a significant one. Let me explain why it’s not total.

Right now commercial traffic does move through the Serengeti, but it’s laborious. A paved road leads to the entry to the Ngorongoro Conservation Authority (NCA), and it’s then gravel for a long way, 5-6 hours to the Serengeti’s western gate.

What is planned, now, is for a new paved road to the eastern edge of the Serengeti, which will then continue as a new (short) gravel road to the existing gravel thoroughfare that runs roughly from Lobo to the western gate. When completed this “new route” will cut down the existing travel time through the Serengeti from 5-6 hours to about 3-4 hours.

The “new route” will also be significantly easier, as it will be straighter and less hilly than the winding cloud forest road through the NCA. So there will definitely be a new incentive for commercial traffic to increase once the route is completed.

But it is still likely a toss-up for commercial traffic to take this [faster] route rather than start from Arusha in a northwesterly direction on paved roads the whole way. This and the fact all roads within the park will remain unpaved are significant disincentives to commercial travel.

So in this sense it ends at least for the time being nearly two years of the most aggressive efforts by conservationists and scientists worldwide to alter a local country’s management of its sovereign wilderness.

Don’t pop the champagne.

First, this could not have been easy for the Tanzanians to have done. They have backed down. Can anyone imagine Eric Cantor backing down? Some creative spinning and long-term vengeance is in the political forecast.

Second, the real reasons for abandoning the project may not be known for some time, and I believe the main one is economic and strictly so. If I’m right, when the economic situation improves, the issue could reemerge.

Third, there is enough ambiguity in the letter that a flipflop would be easy … at any time.

Certainly there are recent indications that foreign donors – including the United States – engaged in some hard bargaining which may result in greater foreign aid to Tanzania, and likely for the construction of that southern road.

Hillary Clinton was in a specially good bargaining position last week. She was in Dar when the al-Qaeda leader, Mohammed Fazul, was killed in Somalia, and when his passport revealed that the only country which had given him safe haven was Tanzania.

What she told Tanzanian officials about Fazul’s capture is not known, and what was released instead included her reprimand about building a highway through the Serengeti.

Clinton was only the last of a long list of prominent diplomats who opposed the highway. Consortiums of scientists and wildlife organizations presented an impressive array of opposition, too. I remain seriously disappointed that our own American consortium of zoos was unable to get it together to join the impressive team.

An effort to get AZA, the American Association of Zoos and Aquariums, to join the world conservation opposition failed last year.

The first suggestions about the road came in early September, 2009, when East Africa was not yet suffering the world economic depression. What is hard for westerners to understand is that much of the developing world, and East Africa in particular, actually experienced increased growth until virtually this year.

But this year has hit East Africa very hard. Most prominently, the master road-builder China is reassessing its aid to East Africa and the world economic recession means that year after year, now, there is less to give to Africa.

Tanzanian president Kikwete is bound by a net of politics to help the Maasai in Loliondo, just to the east of the Serengeti. He linked this good, ostensible need with a bevy of corrupt components to give it a PR smile.

He can forego the corrupt goals, but the Maasai goal can’t be abandoned. This is the reason the government said, and I knew they would always have to deliver, a paved road up to the eastern edge of the park.

With less aid that will be difficult, now. But I feel that actually takes precedence over the grand scheme of linking Arusha with Mwanza, linking Tanzania’s northern heart to Lake Victoria. The priority must be the road to Loliondo.

So what happens when that is completed, but money runs out for the much more expensive southern road?

It depends. It depends upon how well tourism fairs in this down economic times. It depends upon how well Bilila Lodge (which was in the route of the old proposed highway), in which the president holds personal and substantial stock, does.

It depends upon whether the Grumeti Reserves continue to draw too much water from Lake Victoria. It depends upon whether American hedge fund traders do well enough to build the new Serengeti headquarters as they’ve promised.

It depends upon how prominent the opposition MP from Arusha, Godbless Lema, fairs in the next couple years.

All of these depends reduce to this:

If foreign donors put up the funds and build the southern road before all of the above depends play themselves out, the Serengeti is safe for another decade or two. If they don’t, it all depends.

Serengeti Highway Muddle

February 7, 2011 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

The great Serengeti Watch organization announced over the weekend that they had an advance copy of the Tanzanian government’s environmental impact study necessary for proceeding with the highway, but they didn’t analyze it for us. This is a serious mistake.

The 600-page report has not yet been officially released, but you can get to it through Serengeti Watch by clicking here.

I haven’t read it, and like many supporters of Serengeti Watch I’m upset that they led me to the document without some coaching as to what should be looked at in the 600 pages. The point of Serengeti Watch is to guide those of us who have placed our trust in them to take the lead. They’ve dropped an enormous opportunity, here.

Please, Serengeti Watch, give us a few more details and fast, before others not quite so sympathetic will do so.

Poorly Guided Tourists Hide Wilde

January 14, 2011January 14, 2011 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

This week the Huffington Post said the “migration was delayed.” True. It was delayed. About as long as getting stuck in Chicago traffic delays a dinner engagement.

“I can assure you the raingods are smiling,” the owner/manager of Ndutu lodge emailed me this morning. “The animals have streamed back onto the plains!… Everything right now is sprouting, growing and sparkling with life!”

The Huffington piece was written by a very respected conservationist, Carl Pope, Chairman of the Sierra Club.

Pope’s problem is the same as any other tourist who believes they are Robert Burton searching for the source of the Nile. TripAdvisor is full of this nonsense.

“…gazelles are waiting on the southern grasslands, but the short rains failed this December. The million wildebeest that drive the world’s greatest wildlife spectacle have not yet scented enough rain to trust their destinies to the grasslands. The migration, which follows the rain, must also wait for it,” Pope writes.

Poetic but untrue.

I am fan of the Huffington Post and consider myself allied to anyone who calls themself a conservationist. I’m not saying Pope was lying. His mistake – a very serious one – is suggesting that his one brief perspective from one small area puts him in a position to make such gross generalizations.

It was not immediately clear where Pope had been, but I dare say he probably wasn’t there very long and didn’t have a very good guide.

The Serengeti ecosystem is nearly the size of New Jersey, but unlike New Jersey it lies nearly astride the equator. Weather systems are fabulously complex, there, and especially now with global warming.

There can be small pockets of drought surrounded by areas that are flooded. Right now the northern districts of Kenya are suffering another drought. Perhaps he found himself in one such small area in the Serengeti, but the overall Serengeti is just fine, and actually, quite normally fine.

Pope’s assumption in his article that the herds are drawn by the “scent of grass” or sensitivity to rain is uncertain; we don’t know exactly what prompts the migration. Moreover, grass disappears for other reasons than drought. It can be eaten. By cattle as well as wildebeest, a serious ecological battle raging these last few years at the edge of the Serengeti with Maasai range lands.

He also suggested as typical of a casual tourist that the migration is a single thing — entity — that either moves or not. A million animals does not a marching band make! They are often split up all over terra firma.

He said the “gazelles were delayed.” Thomson’s gazelle often don’t migrate. Some do, some don’t. I see literally tens of thousands of Thomson’s gazelle on the totally desiccated plains north of Olduvai at the driest time of the year, July and the first of August. These marvelous creatures don’t need to drink, and they survive quite nicely by eating the roots of grass.

Pope marked his visit in “December.” But the information I have for December was that light rains began over the grassland plains of the Serengeti December 18 and 19, and the following week saw normal rain patterns. This is about 2-3 weeks late, no more. There was then a let up at the end of the year, as is also normal, and now as the Ndutu owner explains, everything is beautifully green.

Blogs posted by other travelers and tour companies suggest that the bulk of the wildebeest moved through the northern part of the Serengeti out of Kenya as early as the end of November/beginning of December. Right on schedule.

Several weeks later, perfectly positioned to profit from the first rains of the season, the herds were mostly divided widely between the Kusini plains to the west and the Gol Kopjes to the east.

This is the real magic of the migration. Until these first rains fall germinating new grass, there is simply no understandable motivation to draw the large herds into the area. Yet they come, year after year after year. Many believe as I do that it is a homing instinct triggered not by “scent of grass” or of rain, but of a lack of grass whence the herds came.

Whatever it is, this wondrous magic is diminished when respectable media like the Huffington Post publish reputable writers like Pope who offer tiny personal experiences as adequate accounts of complex situations, acting like experts when all they are, are poorly guided tourists.