23
JULY 2005 ‚ 2239 HOURS ‚ KIRUMIRU TENTED LODGE TANZANIA
Before I get to the good stuff of today I need to recount what happened when
I finished last night's entry and crawled into bed. One would think that being
on an escarpment overlooking a national park in a remote section of a remote
country in a remote part of the world would allow me a level of peace and quiet.
Nope. Though I had most certainly
heard the heavy bass and drums of the dance music coming from somewhere
below the lodge, it wasn't until I had shut off the lights and lay
there that I REALLY heard it. Fucking dance music. Like there was some
sort of rave taking place down in the town called Mto-Wa-Mbo (colloquially
known as Mosquito Creek ó what is this, Arkansas?). Friday night at
Lake Manyara. Paaaarty!
And the beat went on. And on.
Crappy techno dance stuff that wafted up from the valley floor and
basically did its best to ruin this place for me. I ultimately had
to resort to my Bose noise-cancelling headphones and they were very
effective, but you can bet if the opportunity to come back and visit
Lake Manyara Nationa Park and the Kirumiru Luxury Tented Lodge ever
presents itself, I will have second thoughts. And thirds. There's nothing
like destroying the serenity and solitude and rugged rustic nature
of this place by making me think I'm back at my old apartment on Del
Mar Avenue in Silver Lake, dealing with inconsiderate tenants to make
me never want to come back here again.
When asked this morning at the
front desk as we were leaving for our game drive if I'd had a pleasant
evening I told them not quite and asked about the music. The only response
they could provide was a slight shrug of the shoulders and apologies.
Now onto the good stuff so that
I might get to sleep tonight before the Saturday night version of yesterday
kicks in. First off, I had my moment of Hemingway convergence this
morning. I brought "The Green Hills of Africa" with me on the trip.
It's his nonfiction accounting of a monthlong safari spent in east
Africa in the 1940s. And while the first couple chapters are unspecific
regarding his exact location, he finally clues the reader in in chapter
three when at the beginnings of a rhino hunt he gives away his location
by describing "the shine of Lake Manyara" nearby.
Nice. Speaking of Lake Manyara,
I had no idea what to expect going into the National Park this morning,
but I certainly didn't expect to see so much: giraffes, elephants,
mongoose, blue and vervet monkeys, wart hogs, baboons, wildebeest,
water buffalo, zebra, Thompson's gazelles, spoonbills, plovers, lesser
and greater egrets, African fish eagles, Bataleur eagles, vultures,
turtles, impalas, dik diks, pelicans, kingfishers, and any number of
other bird species to plentiful to mention. Oh, and did I forget the
100 hippos? That's right. Gathered around the water's edge along a
great plain that borders the lake were easily 100 hippopatumuses. Can
one even comprehend what it's like to see 100 hippos in one place.
Better yet, because of the cloud cover and cool whether, most of them
were opting to lounge on dry land rather in the water where they would
have been found had it been warmer and sunnier. So you could 
really
get a since of what the mass of 100 hippos really is. Incredible. The
only thing we didn't see were predators, of which the park boasts,
lions, leopards and cheetahs. But we did see lion tracks ‚ big ones,
too. I ended up taking 210 pictures in a span of basically 3.5 hours.
Most of them were of the elephants we encountered. There was a group
of three males feeding about 40 feet from the road we were on and I
could have spent the entire day in that one spot. When I wasn't going
crazy with the still camera, I was getting some awesome footage of
one of them reaching up into a tree to grab a tendril, wind it around
its trunk and yank.
Chalk it up to a combination
of being bushed and blown away, but I don't have words to describe
how awesome this day was. I told Susan at dinner that it wasn't 
better
or worse than our days trekking after mountain gorillas, it was just
another chapter in a really good book that we're writing on the fly.
Arriving back at the lodge for
lunch, we rested and then went on a nature walk escorted by a Maasai
named Malunga who pointed out a variety of trees and their medicinal
uses among his people, before leading us up to the rim of the escarpment
for a beautiful look out over the section of the Great Rift Valley
some 15 kilometers wide to the mountains on the arid eastern side.
On our way back, we were met by three young musicians, each playing
the same two-stringed type of 
guitar called a zeze (zay-zay). It was
delightful to get a little taste of their culture in the two songs
they played and sang for us and it provided a perfect cap to the hike.
Before dinner we went down to the bar and found an acrobatic troupe
setting up for a show on the outdoor deck so we decided to wait around
over glasses of red wine and see the show. They were a spirited and
energetic quartet backed up by drums and a small wooden version of
a xylophone. They even had homegrown CDs for sale so of course Susan
made a donation and we bought one. Perhaps it will be the soundtrack
for the inevitable photo/video diary I build once we return home. But
it will have to wait. Tomorrow we bid farewell to Kirumiru and Lake
Manyara and head into the Serengeti.
And until then, looks like I'll
be pulling out the headphones for tonight as well. It's not dance music
that's blaring (yet). For now the Mosquito Creek mosque is sending
up a whole bunch of that sing-song reading of the Koran. Joy to the
world.