Cross one off the bucket list, folks!  Today I went on my first safari!

Although I just left for Ifakara last week, I found myself making the trip back to Morogoro two days ago.  When I arrived at the language school campus (where they were kind enough to let me stay for a week so I could see friends before heading to my field site) after my stay in the States, I learned that the language school was planning on taking students and teachers on safari the Saturday after I was scheduled to leave.  I was majorly disappointed to miss this, not only because I still hadn’t been on safari, but also because going with friends seemed like fun and since the language school was providing transportation, it would be much more affordable than going on my own.  Fortunately, the head teacher said that I would be welcome to join them if I wanted to.

And so, exactly one after arriving in Ifakara, I left again.  I took the bus six hours back to Morogoro and had another mini reunion with my friends there Friday night.  I had no idea what to expect with the safari.  There were only about five students and I knew that many of the teachers had opportunities to go with each class, and so I only expected maybe two or three of them to be interested.  I assumed we’d take one of the school’s SVUs that has extra folding seats in the back and would just cram in.  Well we did cram in.  But I drastically underestimated our numbers.  When I walked out early Saturday morning after breakfast, a bus stood in the drive.  A full-on bus.  “Well this is nice in a way,” I thought.  “We’ll have room to spread out and everyone will have a window.”  I should have known better.  After all, this is Tanzania.

Only a few teachers were on the bus, so I and the two students with me entered and took window seats on the left side of the bus.  As we waited, more and more people filed in, filling up the single seats on the left and the double seats on the right.  Some were teachers.  Some were former students like me.  Some were family members of teachers.  Soon we had a full bus.  But we weren’t done yet.

We pulled out from the language school around 7am, an hour later than hoped, but rather than take the highway out of Morogoro as I thought we would, we drove into some of its neighborhoods, picking up even more people that I didn’t recognize from the side of the road.  I assume they were more friends and family members of teachers.  Soon, all of the fold-down seats in the aisle were full, some with two people squished in, plus a couple more standing up at the front of the bus.  It was fairly uncomfortable and I was curious how the safari would work.

The trip to Mikumi National Park was quiet- most of us were catching up on sleep given the early morning.  We pulled into the main entrance an hour and half later, and it took some time for us all to pay our entrance fees, use the bathrooms, etc.  But eventually we all made it back onto the bus, settled in, and sat waiting patiently for our guide to start.

Let me give you some advice.  A packed bus full of people can make for a great experience when you’re talking about a party bus headed to a concert.  Or a school field trip.  Or a city tour.  Even a dilapidated old machine carrying you and several squawking chickens down the mountain on the Most Dangerous Road in the World in Bolivia can be a great time if you have friends who are wise enough to bring Tampico and Singani along.  One thing a packed bus is not meant for?  Safari.  Aside from the obvious pitfalls of trying to take a bus on dirt roads meant for SUVs, you have the noise factor with that many people which distracts the animals.  It is likewise awkward to look out the window and try to take pictures or enjoy the scenery when animal spotting brings everyone in the middle of the bus lunging over you.  In addition, our guide, who spoke very good English, was excited to have Tanzanian tourists and so kept giving long complicated monologues in Swahili with vocabulary I didn’t know to the teachers and their friends and then, when we would ask him for the English version, would give us one word or one sentence answers.  It was clear he knew a fair amount of information on the different animals, so it would have been nice to understand more.  Also, someone had taught him that the best word to use to describe animal waste was not scat, feces, excrement, or even poop, but rather “shit.”   Which was not only amusing, but somewhat scandalizing to certain missionary members of our party.  There is a lot of discussion about animal waste on safari, let me tell you, so the word peppered the conversation frequently.

Enough complaining though.  Although it was not ideal circumstances, it was still a great experience and a fun introduction to the world of Tanzanian safaris.  It was low season, so we did not see the huge numbers of animals that you see during high season, but in terms of species I felt fortunate in the variety.  As soon as we left the front gates, we were treated to a small herd of elephants (Tembo), complete with two elephant calves.  I’ve been a bit of a fan of elephants since I was a child (first just because I liked my issue of Zoobooks on them, but later because I found out about their matriarchal family structure which appeals to the feminist in me).   Three warthogs (Pumba) grazed nearby.  As we traveled on, we encountered numerous giraffes (Twiga), zebras (Punda milia), a large heard of gazelles (Swala), hippos (Kiboko), wildebeests (Nyumbu), and water buffalo (Nyati).  Unfortunately I was working with a pretty cheap camera, a moving vehicle, and foggy windows, so my pictures leave something to be desired.

But the real highlight of the day came midway through the drive.  We had stopped to look at a lone water buffalo grazing in a field.  He wasn’t doing much and really you can only watch what is essentially a large cow eat grass for so long, so we started to creep forward in the bus to continue our journey.  Suddenly, someone spotted something in the grass nearby.  We weren’t sure what it was at first, but suspected the slightly darker spot in the grass might be a lion (Simba).  We sat as quietly as thirty people on a bus can sit (in other words, not that quietly) while we debated what it was and tried to zoom in with our cameras to get a better view.  For a while it was crouched too low in the grass to see, but eventually it raised its head enough for us to verify that it was indeed a large cat.  Our guide told us it was a lioness, others in the group thought it might be a leopard (Chui).  Our guide shook his head.  “You almost never see leopards,” he told us.  “It never happens.  It is definitely a lion.”  But eventually the cat sat up enough and we were able to use binoculars to determine that indeed, we were looking at Chui!  It was incredible how well it blended in with the surroundings, and that we even caught a glimpse of it in the first place.  We sat for a long time watching, hoping that the cat would make its move on the buffalo but it was obviously bothered by us.  It kept looking back and forth between our bus and the buffalo.  Not wanting to interfere longer, we moved on.

All in all, I felt pretty incredibly lucky to see what we did, and also just to get to enjoy the stunning landscape.  I would still like to do a safari the more traditional way, with just a handful of people in an open air vehicle, but I feel like I at least got to experience it once.  A safari involves a lot of just driving, so there isn’t much else to share about the day, but I wanted to share a few pictures and highlights!