Postcards from Tanzania (2006)
Serengeti – 12 April 2006
Two vultures circled high overhead. Half a dozen hooded vultures waited motionless on a dead tree. Below, by the side of the track, there was a trampled pile of partly digested grass, like week old lawn clippings. It was the contents of the buffalo’s stomach, before the lions had ripped it open. Among the trees, behind a wall of flies, we could see the buffalo carcass, with a full grown male lion standing over it, tearing red meat from a huge knee bone, and then crunching the shoulder blade, just as we munch potato crisps.
After the lion had had its full, it slunk away. Within seconds, the first vulture descended and hopped warily towards the carcass. More joined it, until some twenty vultures were climbing over the carcass and each other, jabbing their heads down into the remaining flesh. A marabou stork, unable to tear flesh from the carcass, wandered around until it found a large lump of carrion which the vultures had missed. It swallowed it whole, like a snake swallowing a large rodent, its long neck bulging as it descended. Then a hyena appeared. Still wary of the lions, it approached cautiously, circuitously, and soon disappeared with an already severed rear leg. It returned a few minutes later to remove the buffalo’s tongue, which it carried away hanging from its jowls.
(We watched, less than 15 metres away.)
Crater Highlands – 13 to 15 April 2006
The volcano, Ol Doinyo Lengai, “the Mountain of God ”, had erupted a week before we arrived in the Crater Highlands. Villagers had been moved away from the ash it was spewing into the sky. So, we had to stop at Empakaai, an extinct volcano, a day’s walk to the south. We pitched camp on the rim of the crater, with its lake and pink tide mark of flamingos a thousand feet below us. During the night, we heard the cackle of hyenas and John Mekukopi, our Maasai guide, who never went anywhere without his spear, told us that he had seen a leopard stalking between the tents.
In the morning we re-traced our steps. To the left over a hundred kilometres away, the silhouette of Mount Kilimanjaro rose above the mist. By mid-morning we were back in Maasai pastureland. We walked through villages of round mud huts, with low conical thatched roofs, and wooden stockades in which the herds were kept safe from predators at night.
On the path, we passed Maasai men wearing red checked blankets, their bare legs adorned with white anklets. Most had white plastic jewellery dangling from their hollowed out ear lobes. Many carried spears or clubs and wore daggers, but little else, under their blankets. Two men were walking to distant villages “to see about a cow”. One man was taking a ram to the next settlement. Some were herding donkeys down to Nanokanoka to collect sacks of maize, which were being handed out because of the late arrival of the “long rains”. Women, similarly dressed, but without spears, were carrying large loads of firewood on their backs. Boys, some as young as five or six, mostly barefoot, were watching the thousands of cattle, sheep and goats that grazed the wide valley.
The sound of cow bells, shepherd boys calling, the “pee-wit” of sky larks and the occasional cock crow or bray of a donkey travelled far across the valley. Between the herds, a few wild animals grazed – zebra, wildebeest, Thomson’s Gazelles, jackals and a couple of ostriches – the remnants of the vast herds which once roamed these rich grasslands.