TANZANIA I

Maasai Tribe and Mwabulugu Fishing Village 

From Marrakech I flew back through Casablanca, changed planes in Doha, and arrived at Kilimanjaro. Nearly 24 hours in transit, I arrived at 7:45 am to a lush, green, fragrant landscape, heat, and humidity. Marrakech is a city built on a desert, and Kilimanjaro is, most prominently, a mountain whose base is surrounded by grasslands, occasional marshes, and majestic Acacia trees. The fields at its feet yield dark, fertile soil to the hand-hoeing of women silhouetted, sometimes in the shimmer of a mirage, against a cobalt sky. This is not machine-based farming. This is hand-tilled, hand-planted, hand-harvested agriculture. Some villages have a plow and cows. If there's a tractor it's a shared investment and the owners rotate using it during planting and harvest seasons. Melons, sweet and starchy potatoes, peppers, eggplant, corn, beans. All precious for the time and human care invested in their cultivation. 

The Maasai migrate over the Maasai Mara, or bushland (mara = "spotted" in Maasi), which spans about 580 square miles across the countries of Kenya and Northern Tanzania. While the Maasai life is one of significant migration, villages exist where groups will stay for weeks or months at a time raising goats, tending fields, selling bracelets, earrings, necklaces, and miniature animals crafted from seed beads and wire. Each African tribe has foods that are especially treasured and eaten often. For the Maasai it's cow's blood mixed with milk. They pierce a neck vein of the cow with a sharp stick and collect the blood, but they're careful not to take too much, and to apply herbal poultices to heal the wound when they're done. The mixture is full of iron and protein, and is often given to women who have just given birth to replenish the loss of blood and expenditure of energy.  

We go inside a small, partitioned mud hut with a flat roof made of thin marsh bamboo and over-planted with grass and medicinal plants. It's a place for sleeping, with shade from the sun, a couple of small windows with wire screens, and a place to build a fire. The beds are elevated platforms, each of which takes up the entire partitioned space. A cow skin covers a pile of wild lavender for the matress. We are dressed by the village women in lengths of cloth and adorned with beaded jewelry. We meet the children of the village, hold the goats, stand in a circle and sing and dance, as best we can, with the men and women who show us their traditional dances and assure us karibu asana (you are most welcome). I ask about the Laibon, who is the namesake villager of the vegetarian restaurant I ate at in Cesky Krumlov. The restaurant owner named it Laibon after traveling with the Maasai for a few months several years ago. A man with a stick appears at my side. He looks to be about 35, and wears the traditional red checked fabric draping, an olalem (spatula-shaped double-edged blade) in a leather sheath, and the most amazing shoes I've ever seen. "You're the messenger?" I ask, "And you heal the village with plants?" "Yes," he replies "I travel very far and we have medicine here to heal many things." "I feel well today, but I'm glad to know this. It's good to meet you. I love your shoes." He smiles at me. The shoes are a cover--not just literally for the feet, but are meant to disguise the wearer's direction of travel. The Maasai believe that all the cows in the world belong to them; from the Wagyu breeds of Japan to the lumbering Scottish Wooly Coo, to the dairy cows of the American Great Plains, they're property of the Maasai. And so they must be re-claimed. Which means Maasai men sometimes need a way to travel on foot that disguises where they've been and where they're going. The shoes are made of old motorcycle tires cut into sections and fitted with straps or a thong that goes between the toes. One of the most amazing pairs I saw had a 6" rubber spike decorated with a few beads at the base sticking up from between the first two toes. I'm not sure about the function of this feature, but the form was outstanding. I hope they make it to the States. 

From the Maasai village we traveled to the shore of Lake Victoria, one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world (second only to USA's Lake Superior) to visit Mwabulugu fishing village. Mwabulugu becomes a marketplace between 6-10am, where men pour the night's net-caught haul out of wooden boats and sell them to women, who, in turn, sell them to local and regional buyers at stalls and on tarps covering the ground. The two most valuable fish are The Lake Victoria VIF (Very Important Fish) which is Tilapia, and the King of the Lake, the Nile Perch. Locally the Nile Perch sells for about $4 USD per kilo. We have some for dinner later that night, and it's delicious!

By 10am the market is wrapping up and just a few women remain with small, dried fish and vegetables to sell. We go to the boat yard, where 3 young men are using hand tools to saw and shape Acacia wood into a fishing vessel. Constructing a new boat takes a week, and costs about $6,000 USD. Several families in a village will share the cost of a boat to make it affordable. The same is true for the 5 or 6 grain mills in town. If the ownership itself isn't shared then a single owner charges a small per-use fee. We saw a woman bring a 5-gallon bucket of corn and dried cassava to mill into flour, which cost her 500 Tanzanian shillings (about 20 US cents). The owner of the mill changed the energy source from diesel generator to electricity when the town was strung with power lines in 2019. Collective use, collective ownership, and sharing resources are common themes in this village. The women cook lunch together over a fire, and there's no real sense of portions or measurement. There's just food enough for everyone you can see when you're cooking, plus a little more in case someone else stops by. Today we have cornmeal cooked with water to make a stiff polenta, okra cooked with cucumber greens, and tilapia (the VIF!) boiled in broth. The food is served in big pots placed in the center of the circle and we eat with our hands. Our guide, Mbasha, shows us how to roll the polenta into a ball and press a thumb into the center, making a well for the greens and the fish. After lunch we play a double-wide version of what I learned to be Mancala, though I can't quite grasp the rules of this game. One of the cooks and I play agains Mbasha, and the game goes back and forth in big swings for several rounds while the others have gotten to know the local kids and kittens and we eventually decide to call it a draw. 

For the rest of the time in the village we're part of a troupe. The 6 of us hold hands with the village kids who've adopted us since lunch and we wander through town with a few kids joining or leaving as we pass their houses or things that might be more interesting, like a house with a satellite dish where there are movies playing. Back at the shore where the market had been, several of the village women meet us for a farewell song and dance. They tie sisal skirts around our waists and sing as we step and swing our hips in the rhythm of the song. One woman has a train whistle and I can't help thinking of railroads and Mardi Gras as we dance in a circle on the shore of Lake Victoria, a million miles away from New Orleans. When the celebration is done we pile in to a wooden boat with motor and skirt along the edge of the lake to the Little Okavango Camp where we stay in thatch-roof huts on stilts in the marsh by the water. After a dinner of river perch, we fall asleep (or try) to the endless buzz of insects, late-night birdsong, and the grunting of nearby hippos.

TANZANIA II

The Serengeti 

The Serengeti. It means "endless plains" in Swahili. I'd imagined treeless fields of grass from edge to edge of the horizon, but, in fact, the Western Corridor, where we spent most of our time, is fairly diverse with rivers, hills, and scattered vegetation. Before I visited the Arizona desert in college I'd had a similarly homogenous imagination of the landscape as one big stretch of sand, but when I arrived, discovered a place vibrant with water and life. Serengeti National Park was no different. No less than 30 minutes after beginning our first drive we happened upon 50 or so zebra wandering together with some impala and a few egrets. It'd hard to tell if zebra are white with black stripes or black with white stripes, as each animal has it's own black : white ratio. They often stand head to tail to confuse their predators, usually lions, regarding which animal is facing (and potentially running) which way. They were 50+ meters from the road, but they were undeniably wild, and in numbers greater than I'd ever seen. Zebras are good mothers, and don't leave their babies unsupervised for several months after they're born. It's rainy season and there are lots of little ones who've just joined the heard with an abundance of food to grow on. 

Not long after the Zebras we encountered a huge herd of elephants, mirgrating from east to west, stretched out in a chain mile long. There were maybe 200 of them, eating grass and chewing the bark of young acacia trees along the way. The heard is composed of females of all ages and males young enough to still require the care of the group. Bull elephants wander solo or in small groups and only rejoin the females during mating season. We saw several males on the periphery. Both male and female African elephants have tusks, so telling them apart is a matter of size. While once a serious problem, elephant poaching has declined dramatically in the last decade in Tanzania due largely to action taken by the late President John Magufuli. He met personally with Chinese and other foreign animal export facilitators to forbid their business and enforce strict policies on elephant protection. At present there are only about 42 rhinos in Tanzania, about half of which are in the Serengeti. Poaching still threatens the sparse population. Elephants the tusks are far less vascular and are more hollow than a rhino horn, so they can be removed without endangering the animal and this was used as a conservation strategy during times of intense elephant poaching. Removing the horn but keeping the rhino alive often exposes the animals to lethal blood loss and infection, though, so any attempt to remove the horn often costs the rhino its life. The herd of elephants keep the calves close, and as we drive near they tighten the group, with the calves at the center, encircling the young ones with their bodies. 

If there's any animal that proves is relevance in numbers (there are 1.5-2 million of them in Serengeti National Park), the Wildebeest is it, yet despite their proliferation they're considered some of the dumbest animals around. "Zero Brain" is the nickname quoted by Mbasha. It's rumored that they can wait a few days from when they're meant to give birth in order to deliver the calf just after a rainstorm, but other than this biologic superpower, their intelligence is questionable. They wander away from their young, and the babies are expected to migrate with the herd within 15 minutes of being born, they have terrible eyesight. They also rank among the Ugly Five. There's the Big Five-- Elephant, Rhino, Lion, Cheeta, Leopard--the stars of the African Safari Big Game bingo card, and then there's the Ugly Five: Bald Marabou Stork, Warthog, Hyena, Vulture, Wildebeest. You'll no doubt spot all of them without having to try too hard, but the prize for winning at Ugly Five Bingo is really just permission to casually look away having seen them that first time. 

We spot giraffes and baby giraffes, warthogs (aka Lion King's Pumba) who run so earnestly with their antena tails in the air, baby warthogs, troops of baboons, crocodiles on the river bank, hippos in the river, hippos trudging through camp at 5am, Thompson Gazelle, dik diks, jackals, hyena, impala, eagles, vultures, storks, hawks, Hamerkops, who build massive, multi-room nests with stucco mud walls, and lilac-breasted rollers, whose electric turquoise wings belie the soft colors of their underbelly when they fly. The first time I get out of the Land Rover and touch the ground with my own feet in the wild of the reserve, I feel how ungoverned this place is. There are very few human rules here. There's a road, a few signs, a couple of camps. Nature takes care of itself and has little concern for my protection or defense; yet, at the same time I frighten some jackals from the brush when I go for a run near our camp in the afternoon, and the impala scatter when the see me a hundred yards away. I wonder how long I'd last out here. Maybe my fortitude is stupid. The next day we see lions just down the road from where I ran. 

We see lions! Some near our camp, stretching their tawny, lazy bodies in the sun, and some farther out, where we can barely make out lion ears vs. termite mound in the distance and the tall grass. As we approach across the grassland though, we count 4: Three males and 1 female, in a slow-motion courtship (these guys are also just out laying in the sun) that will eventually end with the males fighting and the one who wins mating with the female throughout the week or so that they spend away from the rest of the pride. In the Land Rover the lions can't distinguish and of us as individuals, so we appear as one mammoth-sized, diesel engine beast puttering around as they yawn and stretch and tend to their own business. They're wholly unafraid of us and unbothered by us, and we drive within just a few meters of where they lay in the grass. It's the closest I've ever been to an animal this powerful, but looking into the face of the biggest male, there's nothing that's the least bit threatening. There's a pair of golden brown eyes that possess such an easy calm that I feel a million times more wonder than fear. This lion is wise and kind and knows the poetry of ten thousand sunsets and as many nights slept in peace under a star-studded sky. I'm not going to pet him or anything...those teeth are no joke! But I'm also pretty sure he's not eyeing me up as a snack. 

I watch the sun rise three days in a row, and the sun set, and the crescent moon rise, and Orion arc across the sky with Sirius at his feet. Three times I watch Venus rise in the East before the sun, and make wishes on the shooting stars of the Geminids before first light.

We miss the wildebeest migration due to flooding in the south Serengeti. It was one of the aspects of this trip I was most excited about. I love seeing the murmuration of a flock of starlings, or the Snow Geese in Washington's Skagit Valley; how the number and movements of the flock reveal the fluid dynamics of the air in which they fly. During our 3+ days in the park, though, I can't say that I mind. We see so many animals, often a mix of buffalo, wildebeest, impala, cranes, and baboons traveling together. As we prepare to fly out of the Serengeti from the Seronera Airstrip I spot an aerial photograph of the wildebeest migration taken from a plane and see another pattern of a natural phenomenon revealed by the wildebeest as with the birds: The wildebeest wash over the plains of the serengeti like a wave washing over a shallow shore. There's a curved leading edge, dense with animals, and then the scattered body of the heard that stretches over thousands on thousands of hooves, rolling out over the grassland. I might have to come back for that someday. I might need to learn to fly first. 

TANZANIA III

Zanzibar (Unguja) 

Growing up in the heart of the United States, Zanzibar has always been one of those mythic, half-real places of bedtime stories and nursery rhymes. It's out there with Timbuktu. To get there just follow the second star to the right straight on 'till morning... 

Zanzibar is very real, though, and so is Timbuktu. While in Morocco we visited the village of Ait Ben Haddou, which was the northern end of a north-south caravan route between there and Timbuktu. It's 52 days' journey through the desert, spanning about 3,500km. After a journey of that scale the destination is bound to feel like a fantasy, if not for the duration of travel then likely for the delerium.

Zanzibar refers to the entire small archipelago of islands that are a semi-autonomous region off the east coast of Tanzania. Tanzania (or Tanganyika) became independent from the British in 1961, and in 1964 Zanzibar and Tanganyika united to form the Republic of Tanzania. Zanzibar's flag is three broad bars of blue, black, and green, (top to bottom) and in the top left corner there's a small Tanzanian flag. 

We fly from the Seronera airstrip in the Serengeti to Arusha, stay an hour to collect more passengers, and then continue on to Zanzibar. Kilimanjaro is visible from the plane, flat-topped and expansive. We also pass over the suburbs of Arusha and some other small villages. The vast majority of roofs in Tanzania and Zanzibar are made of corrugated aluminum, which reflects patches of white-hot sunlight from the ground. 

The shallow, endless stretches of aquamarine water are the aquatic counterpart to the Serengeti, with sand bars and small islands encoding the landscape with a language akin to the bushes and trees dotting the Maasai Mara.  We arrive to the Zanzibari Hotel at the northern tip of the island during high tide, but when it goes out in the afternoon no less than a kilometer of tidepools and shallow water from the shore out to a sand bar where waves break. I walked out about halfway, where the water reached the tops of my legs, and thought better of continuing alone and without a life jacket. I also spotted a black and white striped snake-like creature about 4 meters away and didn't know what kind of trouble that might be, so made like a Pumba--they close their eyes and take off running when they see a lion, then after a distance look back to see if they've escaped. No signs of the snake. It could have been a snake eel (not so bad) or a sea krait (deadly venomous but also hard to provoke). Cool as it would have been to stand on a sandbar way out in the Indian Ocean, I'll have to save that for a return trip, along with and aerial view of the Wildebeest migration. 

We only stayed two days in Zanzibar, one at the beach in Nungwi and one in Stone Town. Nungwi was great for a snorkeling tour in a small fiberglass boat that motored out to the shallows near Mnemba Island. Despite heavy skies, and even some rain at one point, the storm cleared quickly and we got to snorkel the reefs for angelfish and a couple dozen other species in bright yellows and blues. We even saw dolphins! They swim in pods of 4-6, and the snorkel guides dive off the bow to spot them as they surface. I saw a few pods from the boat, and then dove in myself to see a trio about 10 meters away. They were beautiful and seeing them wild in the water was amazing, but I wonder how they feel about being followed by 30 or so motorboats of tourists clamoring to get near them. They didn't seem bothered, but I'm happy to have had that experience just once. 

Back on the boat and headed for shore we stop in a shallow eastern bay where the water is to our knees and ridiculously warm. It's like stepping into a giant natural bathtub. The sand is made from wave-crushed coral and seashells and feels soft under my feet. The snorkel guides slice up a pineapple and some mangoes and call us back to the boat for a snack. Maybe this is a mythic place after all. 

That evening our group goes out on a Dhow, a traditional type of wooden trading boat with a center mast and a single top-rigged sail that falls at an angle. We have a crew of 3 and a group of drummers with us. Once we're away from shore we cut the motor and raise the sail and the drummers start to play. There's a Swahili song called Jambo Bwana (Welcome, Sir) that's popular in Kenya, Tanzania, and Zanzibar. It's super catchy, and the drummers let me sit in and practice with them on a djembe, so I might be able to keep the rhythm if anyone wants to sing. This video translates the lyrics in detail, but the essences is: "Welcome, Sir, how are you? Very well. Visitors are welcome here in Kenya. No worries." You can change "Kenya" to anyplace from which you'd like to welcome people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WogvJEfCKpM  

I also got a chance to steer the boat. The captain corrected my course a few times, but since nobody pointed out exactly where we were going I figured that keeping the boat clear of the other sunset cruisers and not running aground in the shallow water qualified me as a decent first mate. The crew joked that I could stay on for a month in exchange for room and board on the boat. Watching the sunset glow through the sails I can't say I wasn't tempted. I turned the tiller back over to the captain and climbed the ladder to the upper deck to watch the sun slip below the horizon as we headed for shore. Many young Maasai men come to the beach to sell beaded bracelets and necklaces and to offer guided tours of town or to go snorkeling. I didn't see any cows around, but most of them wore the motorcycle tire getaway shoes all the same. Maybe soliciting tourists on the beach is more the way of the modern Massai. 

I only had a few hours in Stone Town before my flight, so I did a quick tour of the markets before buying a kaftan for myself and a few Christmas gifts. I was low on cash but collected the things I wanted to buy from a shop before asking the total and heading for an ATM. The young man in the shop, who told me his name is Simba (which means lion in Swahili), walked with me and I asked small-talk questions about where he's from and his family and how he likes being in Zanzibar. Then I ask him what music he likes, and showed him a playlist-in-progress of songs I'd heard in Africa. It's a lot of pop, R&B, and stuff you could dance to at a club. He lights up. I hand him my phone and ask him to add his favorites. I get my cash and we wander in slow motion back through the stalls of the produce market and the white walls of this version of the medina (blue in Chefchaouen, brown in Fes, dusky pink in Marrakech, white in Zanzibar) as he searches  Spotify. He finds the ones he likes to dance to. I ask for the ones he listens to when things are quiet, and one for when he has a broken heart. I laugh and say that sometimes music is serious. He nods. He searches is favorite broken heart song and adds it to the list. "Thanks for being my DJ," I say as we arrive back at the shop. He offers a fist bump. Two women take over the shop desk, I pay for my things, and Simba is gone into the bustle of the market before I can offer him my change. 

Zanzibar is a beautiful, bright island, but it also has a dark history as one of the predominant and longest-running slave markets along the East African coast. Slaves were captured, collected in Stone Town, and shipped in packed dhows by Arab traders until the British closed the market in 1873. Just like with the West African slave trade to the Americas, people were packed so tightly into boats that conditions were unsanitary and utterly inhumane. Many of them died of disease while at sea. There's a memorial now at the Anglican Cathedral where concrete forms of slaves stand in a sunket pit, shackled, their bodies eroding as the concrete ages. There's a ring of red stones at he altar representing the blood of the slaves. The people of Zanzibar are beautiful and elegant, and many of the women wear a gown and hijab, if not a full burka. One of the most simple but striking combinations is a black gown with a white, veil like head covering that's unadorned except for delicate lace trim at the bottom. It's a version of the dress related to Swahili (Sunni) Islam. I don't understand how one person could ever capture another and treat them as less than human. The world as full of horrible mysteries as it is beautiful ones, and sometimes, as it was with my friend Simba and the slave memorial, they're only a few moments or a few blocks apart.  

I stopped at the hotel to grab my backpack and head for the airport. I found my friend with the room key having lunch by a window in the restaurant. The woodwork around the casing was amazing, and the breeze of the beach was cool. There was a gingerbread house. How it wasn't melting in the heat we didn't know. They must have left the butter out of the frosting. I saw my first Christmas tree of the season, decorated with bows and pinecones, and baskets of nuts and seeds at the base. I could hardly imagine Christmas, or winter for that matter. But I'd be back for Christmas in Ohio soon enough. I found my bag, bid farewell to my travel companions, and hopped into a taxi. The next 24 hours would be a journey of three flights spanning 8,260 miles as the crow flies: Stone Town to Nairobi, Nairobi to JFK, JFK to Cincinnati. Two short flights and one long one; 15 hours long. I slept and watched movies and got lost in the ether at 42,000 feet, but then, finally, we landed. I asked them to stamp my passport at JFK, which they don't usually do for citizens; there's no point, but I wanted to hear the final chunk of the stamper and have a mark in my passport to show the date: December 19, 2023. I spent much of the day at JFK because we arrived late from Nairobi and I missed my connecting flight. I called family. I set up appointments to see apartments and made plans with friends for dinner. I ate a $12 vending machine salad. Which is just to say that this story doesn't end with an explosion of joy as the prodigal child returns. There is joy, no doubt, as the sun rises over the hills of Alexandria, Kentucky where I write this last post from the spare bedroom of my sister's house. She and her husband and the kids are watching Saturday morning cartoons in their pajamas downstairs, but much is unknown here and the end of traveling means arriving to the start of building this new life in Cincinnati. I filled out a rental application for a loft apartment downtown with a view of the river. My Ohio nursing license got processed in record time so I can start work again on Feb 1. I'll need Tuesdays off so I can complete a certificate program in Experience Design. Lunken Airport has a great flight school if I decided to go for that aerial view of the Wildebeest migration under my own pilot's license. My parents fly in for the holidays soon. This trip resolves into the long-awaited, glorious return of the sweet, simple every-day. But not without the journey's end: 

We taxied in to the jet bridge at CVG at 8:10pm, nine hours later than scheduled. I was tired and simultaneously nauseated and hungry, I needed a shower. It was tight zipping my boots back on over my swollen feet. I'd made it around the world compressed into one small backpack and a tote bag, and it was time to get off the plane. The ground attendant waved us into to place with his high-visibility orange lighted cones. The plane began to turn as he held one above his head and one out at a right angle, then came to a stop at the gate. He switched them off. The plane decompressed to the metallic clink of belt buckles and unlatching overhead compartments. I unclicked my belt, gathered my bag from the bin, and moved into the isle. "Thank you, take care," as I crossed from plane to jet bridge: I am home.