Deeper than a Jeep safari
LAKE EYASI, Tanzania - Elephants are fine. But more interesting is the man who can track elephants.
Lions are great. But even more amazing is the resourceful Hadzabe tribe.
As fascinating as animals are, the people and communities of safari country are what stick in your memory. Yet many travelers rushing from park to park in East Africa never get a chance to encounter any of them.
It is not just an itinerary issue, but an ethical one.
Are your dollars filtering down to the average person, who makes about $350 per year in Tanzania? How can you support the community when you visit? What else interesting is going on? How can you get out of the safari bubble?
I did it in three amazing ways:
Hunt with Hadzabe
It is one of the rarest tourist opportunities in the world - to meet and hunt with a hunter-gatherer tribe of Tanzania that lives almost exactly as it did 50,000 years ago.
And it’s not easy to find them.
Three bone-wrenching hours on a dirt road near Lake Eyasi, then another 45 minute-drive at dawn down a rough track and you finally come to a rocky, scrubby place in the middle of nowhere.
“There,” guide Momoya Muhindoy says, pointing to a clump of bushes. “The Hadzabe.”
“Where?” I say. Then I see them. Dressed in animal skins in a small clearing, they roast a tiny antelope called a dik-dik over a tiny fire. Four men, four women and one small child make up this family, but Hadzabe are scattered over miles around Lake Eyasi.
The dik-dik’s hair is singed off, then they scoop out its innards by hand and put them to cook on the fire along with the head. They throw the leg bones to the six dogs nearby.
The Hadzabe sleep on tiny mats in the bush. They move around every couple of weeks. They make fire with sticks. They make beautiful arrows with twine of impala tendon, spotted feathers of guinea fowl and wood of a nearby willow. The men hunt; the women dig roots and berries. They have few other possessions except some porcupine quill necklaces, a knife and a leopard pelt.
But when my translator introduces me in their ancient, click-sounding language, they have a question for me.
“Where is your husband?” one man asks.
“America,” I say.
“Where is America?”
“Many days away, that way,” I point west.
He frowns.
“Who is taking care of your husband?”
He is feeling sorry for my family. A man who sleeps under a bush.
Later, I trail the hunters for two hours over a cool, breezy scrubland. The air is clear. The green Ngorongoro highlands rise in the distance. Locusts 3 inches long sit in the trees. The hunters track wild pig footprints and shoot arrows at guinea fowl.
I feel as though every mile we walk is 5,000 years back in time.
After we get back, I give the Hadzabe 10,000 Tanzanian shillings - about $9 - at Muhindoy’s suggestion. The only thing they use money for? Metal arrow points, beads and knife blades.
Despite government attempts to make the Hadzabe live in houses and send their children to school, they just run away. An estimated 1,000 are left.
Six years ago, Muhindoy started this cultural tour to the Hadzabe and nearby Datoga tribes as a way to raise awareness of their fragile state (he is Datoga himself).
He had eight customers the first year. Last year, he had 100. Some people even pitch tents and stay a few days. The Hadzabe tour is now among Tanzania’s cultural offerings. You don’t have to be someone special to do it - any tourist can arrange it.
Is this good or bad tourism? He’s not sure. I’m not sure. The Abu Dhabi royal family has just leased a “safari playground” from the government on Hadzabe land. A dispute is brewing between anthropologists eager to protect the tribe and those who think it’s time they modernized.
Will royal hunters and tourists with cameras and cellphones change the Hadzabe the way the last 50,000 years of history could not? I don’t know. But I do know I am glad to have met them.
Information: Momoya Muhindoy can be contacted at momoyaeyasi@yahoo.com. Do not attempt this tour on your own, as the drive is on appallingly bad roads and the tribe is hard to find.
Attend a war-crimes tribunal
The witness, Fidele Uwiezye, sits in a small courtroom in Arusha, Tanzania, in a bright red jacket. His memory is hazy about his part in encouraging a mob to take up arms as Rwanda’s genocide began in April 1994.
A defense counsel in a black robe cross-examines him. Three judges sit in front, impassively watching. Behind them, the light blue- and-white emblem of the United Nations hangs on the wall. The entire room is enclosed in thick glass. And just outside the glass, five spectators listen and watch as the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda inches along, having convicted only 29 people in 9 years.
Watching a genocide trial may not be on the agenda of most American tourists to the city of Arusha, better known as a happy safari starting point and gateway to Mount Kilimanjaro.
But if court is in session, it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It is a riveting window into the bloody episode 13 years ago in neighboring Rwanda, when that nation’s Hutus killed 1 million Tutsis in just a few weeks.
The U.N. set up the court in this northern Tanzanian town in 1998 as a neutral site, providing employment to hundreds of Arushans.
Proceedings are supposed to end in December 2008, although 18 genocide conspirators are still on the lam. The court has come under criticism for being expensive ($1 billion spent) and slow (the trial I watch has been dragging on for two years), but the fact that it has convicted some high-profile people, including the former prime minister of Rwanda, has given it status.
The case I watch is a big one - the former minister of the interior, Edouard Karemera, and two political colleagues are charged with genocide, planning genocide, rape and crimes against humanity. Proceedings are conducted in multiple languages, so that simultaneous translation enables anyone to understand.
Even Arusha tour guides may not know about the free public admission to the United Nations tribunal, so ask. You enter on the south side of the Arusha International Conference Center, off Simeon Road (if you get lost, just keep asking to observe court, and they will tell you if it is in session that day).
If it is, turn over your passport and pass through security, take the elevator up to the fourth floor and silently slip into the room to watch the sorrowful trials.
Information: International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda: www.ictr.org.
Walk with the Masai
Godwin Longino Lukumay stops at various spots in the bush near Tanzania’s Tarangire National Park. This sharp green plant cures chicken pox, he says. That conifer tree sap fixes wounds. The little red apple cures stomachache. Zebra dung helps start fires. Elephant dung fire smoke cures headaches.
Lukumay is a Masai, making him part of the famous warrior tribe plentiful in northern Tanzania and southern Kenya. The pastoral, cattle-keeping people have lived here for thousands of years in their famous round mud huts with thatched roofs. The most famous safari lands - the Serengeti, Masai Mara, Ngorongoro Crater - are also traditional Masai homelands.
We walk, with him holding his spear, his red blankets around his shoulders, alert. He points to something on the ground.
“Elephant,” he says, pointing to a faint round track with small marks inside the print.
I look around, worried, but don’t see any sign of tusk or trunk.
Despite the slight risk of running into an elephant, this short walking safari is a welcome chance to stretch my legs. One major drawback to safaris? You are always in the car. That’s for safety, because of course you don’t want to run into a lion or elephant on foot. But six hours of riding can also make you stiff.
Now, it feels good to walk. It feels good to smell the slight wood-smoky scent in the air. It feels good to rub my hand over the rough bark of the baobab tree. And Lukumay knows this region like it’s home - because it is.
We come to his village. There, the children are herding the goats home. Children herd goats alone by age 7, he says, and herd the cattle far and wide by age 12, with not an anxious parent hovering.
The sun starts to set in a big round ball behind a baobab tree. We walk. The plants all look like scrub to me, but Lukumay knows the use for every single one. I think we are lost, but soon we come back exactly to where we began.
Information: Many resorts in East Africa will help set up a “walking with the Masai” tour. My one-hour walk was arranged through Tarangire River Camp and cost about $12 plus tip. Ask your tour operator about walking tours or safaris.