There were three zebras munching on the grass outside our patio on the edge of the Ngorongoro Crater on our last morning in Tanzania.  Monkeys frolicked on the sidewalk as we walked to the lodge for breakfast.  And we realized after two weeks of civilized travel in dangerous places what an amazing adventure we had had.  And it is likely we would never return. But we took a lot of pictures that we will look at time and again because—–

Well, because we were someplace magic, I guess.  That might be the closest we can come to describing being in another world, one that wasn’t a human world.

Imagine being in a place so sublime that you can sit on your patio after dinner and watch what we were able to watch.

It doesn’t take long to realize why Serengeti National Park in Tanzania is called “The Last Eden.”  But dangers lurk in these places.  Not long after we got home, we saw a news article that a tourist at a park where we watched zebras and gazelles graze was killed by a hippo.  We were told that the hippos came around our sleeping places in that park late at night to graze.  They are very territorial and surprisingly quick.  We were in a boat on a Kenyan lake one day and we made sure we kept our distance.

So did the hippo.

Visit all the zoos that you want to visit, but until you have seen the broken line of hundreds of families of approaching elephants stretching to the horizon on your left to a similar line headed to the horizon on your right, these elephants crossing the road twenty yards in front of you, you have not seen elephants.

Until you see a black line in the distance and realize it is thousands of migrating Wildebeests, you cannot imagine the Great Plains in our country as our ancestors in covered wagons saw buffalo.  Nor can you imagine the grasses of that era until you have gazed at the grass of the Serengeti that extends as far as you can see.

 

See the giraffe in a zoo and you have not seen a giraffe until you see a half-dozen of them gliding in their awkward dignity across an open area, nor can you appreciate the magnificence of these creatures until you walk past one of them munching on the leaves of the tree over your head as you head to your room from the dining hall.

And seeing a lion in its zoo “habitat” is not really seeing a lion.  Peering into the tall, tan, grass trying to differentiate between what is grass and what is fur, listening to it eat and then watching something  of powerful grace emerge and walk away, perhaps with a dismissive glance toward you, that is seeing a lion. But it’s often hard to see them, and that’s the way they like it.

For most of us, zoos are where we can appreciate these animals. In some cases, zoos are places where these animals have their greatest hopes of survival as species and we should appreciate the people who want to make sure we see something more than skeletons of extinct animals in our natural history museums.

But friends, if you ever have the opportunity to see them where they really live, save your money for however long it takes to afford the trip, and take it. We signed up for a Central Bank Classic Club tour, knowing we would spend hours in an aluminum tube high in the air, sometimes so crowded we couldn’t stretch out our legs all the way, hoping our tray tables didn’t cut us in half because a dolt in front insisted on lowering his (or her) seat back all the way.  We knew we might get little sleep, would eat microwaved food (which isn’t all that bad) and snacks and might get to watch a movie to help pass the time. More than seventeen hours on three flights each way, and vehicle travel for two weeks that often made us dearly appreciate seat belts might be discouraging to some.  But every inconvenience was worth every penny—and then some.

We endured the worst roads we’ve ever traveled to get to some of the most magnificent areas we have ever seen. (Come along with us for several minutes on a stretch of road that led to one of our lodges. Understand that our guide, James, did an excellent job making our ride as smooth as possible by swerving all over the road to minimize the beating we were taking).  It is worth noting that the tires on our vehicles were TWELVE-ply radials.  The tires you and I drive on our tame Missouri roads are four-ply. Some of our party who wore the wrist-bands that measure how many steps are taken in a day (10,000 is considered healthy) were seeing numbers beyond twenty and thirty-thousand. One even got a reading of 42,000—because of the daily bouncing, twisting, turning and grabbing the OS handle in our Land Cruisers.  At the end of the day we could understand how tennis shoes feel after they’ve been through the clothes dryer. We were surprised when we got home to see that we had each lost about five pounds although we had eaten well.

But, oh, my goodness.  The things we saw—some of them things that are disappearing in the wild.

The rhinoceros is under dire threat from poachers who are killing them for their horns that are ground into a powder and sold for high prices in some countries because of the belief the powder cures cancer or hangovers or improves virility or produces a cocaine-like high.   This is the only time we saw rhinos and these were white rhinos.  We saw no black rhinos because they are considered critically endangered and only about 5,500 are known in all of Africa.

Marvel at the trees, the Acacias with their leaves that seem to grow as clouds over the top branches, but also with thorns similar to the thorns on our locust trees—a reminder that in the wild, beauty and danger often are the same.   And sometimes it’s not the thorns that are the most dangerous things in those trees.

No, we did not get out of our Range Rover to go stand under the tree to take this picture.  On trips such as these, we worship the telephoto lens and the high-megapixel camera.  In fact, we worshipped them more than 3,500 times, probably and we worshipped the big memory card when we got home.

But the eaters and the eaten are facing uncertainty.  The National Geographic we bought at Downtown Book and Toy after our trip had an article about Kenyan farmers who were crowding the habitat of the magnificent creatures we saw poisoning the animals who were there in the first place to protect their crops and livestock.

Did you know that you can tell if an elephant is right-handed or left-handed?  Yep.  And that leads us to the difference between the elephants we saw in Africa compared to those we would see if we ever go to India.  African elephants such as this fellow (and we were a safe distance from him, too), both male and female, have tusks. Asian elephants don’t all have tusks. Those that do are males.  About half of the Asian lady elephants have tusks but they don’t have any pulp in them and they’re called tushes, a word that has a different meaning in our country.  something else.

Yes, the tusks are weapons against predators. But they’re mostly used for foraging, or digging, or stripping bark off trees or just moving things out of the way. And you can tell if an elephant is right-or-left handed (tusked?) by checking which tusk is shorter.

We saw the “Big Five,” the animals the big game hunters most covet—Lion, Cape Buffalo, Rhinoceros, elephant, leopard—throughout our safaris although we saw the rhinos only that one day and leopards were elusive. We didn’t start seeing them until our last couple of days.  We saw them from a safe distance, too, and we wouldn’t have seen them at all if our guides and their trained eyes didn’t spot them for us.

Leopards like to take their food up a tree to eat it.  Otherwise a lion will take it away from them, we were told.  We knew we were in leopard territory when our guide pointed out the horns of a former gazelle dangling from a tree branch.

And if we needed any reminders that the furry friends at home are related to these beautiful, lethal, creatures, this one reminded us that a cat like this, awakened from a nap and ready for action, acts just like our lap-warmer at home.

Okay, that’s enough for this edition of the summer vacation slide show.

Find a way to do what we did.  Find a way to explore cultures and economies and habitats far different from ours and witness some animals who dismiss you as long as you are in your vehicle but who will gladly and quickly kill you if you step outside.

You won’t find anybody named “Puff” out there.