Serengeti addendum

Forgot to post my list of animals spotted in the Serengeti:

Gray-breasted sand grouse

Serval cat

Yellow-billed stork

Nile crocodile

Impala

Cheetahs eating an impala

Lion

Crested Guinea fowl

Dik dik

Grant's gazelle

Maasai giraffe

Baboon

Hippo pond with a billion hippos

Plains zebra

Wildebeest

African Cape buffalo

Black mambo

Topi

White-headed vulture

Elephant

Thomson's gazelle

Spur-winged goose

Gray heron

Blacksmith plover

White-browed coucal

Agama lizard

Tawny eagle

Marshall eagle

Dark chanting goshawk

Hartebeest

Long-crested eagle

Gray-breastfed spurfowl

Dung beetle

Hyena

White-headed buffalo weaver

Baboon

Go away bird

Warthog

Marshall eagle

Tawny eagle

Scimiter hoopoe

Serval cat

Savannah monkey

Banded mongoose

Hadada ibis

Ox pecker

Eland

White-backed vulture

Variable sunbird

Augur buzzard

All these photos were taken by my incredibly talented safari-mate, Nick.

Channeling my inner Def Leppard

And not just because of the fortuitous pun on "leopard."  I'm thinking of the chorus to their 1987 hit: "And I want / And I need / And I love / Animal."  Because if it's animals you want, need, and love, the Serengeti has got you covered.

[Endless hippos, my absolute fave critter in Africa.]

"Serengeti" means "Endless plains" in Swahili, which pretty much sums it all up.  It's about 6000 square miles of grasslands, with very few roads in very small number intruding into its grassy expanse.  Given the large numbers of visitors to the park each year, I asked my driver about why the government did not improve the roads--single-lane dirt tracks bucked with potholes, seasonal washouts, and spontaneous irruptions.  He told me that the road conditions keep out poachers.  The roads are virtually impassable unless you have one of these purpose-built Land Rovers, with extra-high clearance and snorkels for flash flooding.

[That's me on the left, out the observational pop-top. Man, I'd love one of these rides, but like the poachers, I'm priced out.]

My Subaru definitely couldn't handle the Serengeti.  But one of those Land Rovers runs to over $150,000, far beyond the socioeconomic capacities of the standard poacher.  So potential evil-doers just can't really get in there to be dastardly. As with the N'gorogoro Crater, limited human entry means that the place belongs to the animals. And in the Serengeti, there is a more visible predator presence than in the crater.  Lions, cheetahs, and--yes--leopards are everywhere.  People are not permitted to leave their safari vehicles because the lions are just hanging out all over the place.  Staying at the bush camp, a cluster of heavy canvas tents deep in the heart of the park, I was not allowed to walk between my sleeping tent and the dining tent without an armed guard, and the sound of lions roaring haunted the camp all night long.  It was a bit surreal, but also sublime.  

[Thwarted picnic lunch: table already occupied]

[Lions just hanging out in the tree, like big kitties. Or killer fruit.]

I spent 2 days in the Serengeti, and saw, again, a mindblowing array of wildlife.  Would I do it again?  Well, after 2 full days (12 hours+) getting bounced around in the big jeep, unable to exit the vehicle, I think I'd had my fill.  But what a revelatory landscape.  I was so amazed to see in the Serengeti a realm where human interference has been kept to a minimum, allowing the proverbial circle of life to do its thing. 

Africa's Eden

 

During a four-day safari, I was able to visit three separate national parks in northern Tanzania, each one distinct in its landscape and containing different animals.

N’gorogoro Crater, declared a friend of mine before I left for Tanzania, is a miracle, an enduring Eden.  The crater used to be a huge volcano, approximately the same size as Kilimanjaro but a little to the west, alongside the imposing wall of the Great Rift Valley.  When this volcano blew its top 2 to 3 million years ago, it created a fully contained bowl—the crater wall is uninterrupted for the approximately 120 miles of its circumference.  The big bowl is about 20 miles across, and the floor of the bowl is about 2000 feet below the crater rim. 

Because of these natural geological protections, the ecosystem inside the crater flourishes unbothered by the world outside.  Which means it contains a staggering diversity of wildlife. 

Visiting the N’gorogoro Crater presents the intrepid safari-er with so, so many animals that it’s hard to keep track.  It’s not just that there are so many kinds of animals, but that each kind is there in such overwhelming numbers. 

I kept a list of the critters I encountered in the crater:

Baboon

Great white egret

Plains zebra

Wildebeest

Ostrich

Grant's gazelle

White rhino

Thomson's gazelle

African Cape buffalo

Warthog

Red-knobbed coot

Flamingo

Black-winged stilt

Hippo

Guinea fowl

Elephant

Crowned crane

African spoonbill

Pink-backed pelican

Gray heron

Lion

Jackal

Kori bustard

Eland

Cattle egret

Taveta weaver

Fan-tailed widowbird

Hyena 

Just to be clear:  I was in this crater for maybe 5 hours. Incredible.  It was kinda like I was in the biggest zoo in the world except all the animals are roaming around free and I’m encaged in a jeep and they’re gazing at me with mild disinterest.

Stay tuned for another Tanzanian national park, and another stupidly long list of animals sighted.

 

Onward and upward

Kilimanjaro is a big pile of rocks.  Or rather, a big pile of lava.  I was surprised--though I shouldn't have been--at how the high rock-quotient translated into a low critter- and plant-quotient:  not a whole lot grows on the upper slopes of that old volcano.  

My trek took 5 days to ascend to the summit and 2 days to descend.  I think it could have been managed relatively easily in 4 days up, but I will tell you that the company with which I booked my trek really, really discouraged me from doing a 4-day ascent.  After having now completed the adventure, I suspect that has to do with how deceptively accessible the summit is.  There are a generous buttload of people attempting that mountain every day--hundreds on the way up on any given day with one tour provider or another (one must hire a guiding company to climb the mountain).  My group had 14 climbers in it, and we were just one of 5 groups on our climbing schedule just from my touring company (and there were many other touring companies operating on the same schedule).  I would estimate that 300 trekkers per day attempt the summit, maybe up to 400.  What that means is that there are a lot of unprepared, inexperienced folks giving it their best shot, and so the guiding operators try to nudge folks into a schedule that is less likely to end in either failure or medical difficulty.  

Anyway, 5 days up was more than plenty, given that 4 of those 5 days involve walking around the mountain from the west side to the summit approach on the eastern slope.  I actually found these 4 days a little...boring, with the exception of the Barranco Wall, a 1300-foot not-quite-cliff that must be climbed in order to get to the next camp.  This stretch was, by far, my favorite part of the whole week on Kili.  It's basically an unroped 5.3 up which everything must be hauled.  

[Zoom in to see the line of tiny little people on the left side, making their slow zigzag up the face]

Look at these porters, carrying....you know, metal folding tables and 20-gallon jugs of water.  Incredible.

Summit night begins at 11pm.  Summiting consists of ascending 4000 vertical feet in 3 miles, with sand and loose shale underfoot.  It was not too difficult, but it was not fun.  The hardest thing for me was not having any sleep in me at the outset, which made the 3-4am stretch feel like profound physical regret.  I was in the "fast group," and we made the first summit, Stella Point, at about 630am and the second, true summit, Uhuru Peak, at about 730am.  

And yes:  glaciers!  Six glaciers on the top of that old volcano.  I can't at this point remember all their names, but I was very happy to meet them all.

After sand-surfing back down that 4000-foot sandpile, it was another 16 miles to the mountain's base, over two days.  Through a rainforest with monkeys and beautiful flowers and a proper dumping of rain.

I'm glad I did it,  I'm pleased that it was not especially physically taxing for me.  I was the only person in my climbing group that did not take Diamox, and my unaided oxygen levels were in the high 90s the entire trip, my resting heart rate 50-60.  Those are pretty much the numbers I post at home, so altitude seems still to be a friend to my body.  

Would I do it again?  Probably not--it's just not scenic in the way that, say, the Everest region is.  But I'm super happy to have had the chance to go up this big old volcano.  And to have stayed on to safari--about which more in the next post.

A big-ass adventure

Even though my year of constant travel has ended, I'm still allowed to move around the world from time to time.  This summer, the Year of Our Lord 2026, presented me with an unusual stretch of time without responsibilities:  one of my kids is a grown person with a grown person's life and work schedule, and the other spent half of this summer fulfilling a fieldwork requirement for his degree.  Given that I didn't have to haul myself to campus or cook anybody dinner on the regular, I decided to go climb a mountain.

Welcome to Tanzania

TanzaNEEyah?  TanZANyah?  However you pronounce it, this country on the east coast of Africa is a study in contrasts.  It's equatorial, which means it has no shortage of heat.  But it also boasts glacier-rich Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Roof of Africa, which (as one might say) rises like Olympus above the Serengeti. And you know I'll go anywhere for a glacier.

[True story:  today at the august age of 55, I learned that the familiar line from Toto says "Olympus" and not, as I have thought since the song's release in 1982, "a leopress" (which I suppose I understood as a kid to signify a female leopard and which I have cleaved unto until...literally just now when I looked up the song's lyrics to find out how to spell "leopress").]

My next post will detail my climbing of the leopress. But first a few photos to give a sense of Tanzania, which manages--despite its sitting right in the hot middle of the planet--to be temperately tropical.  My first night was spent in Machame Village, which sits at about 4500 feet in elevation (more or less the same as the Salt Lake Valley floor), and it was pleasantly cool, if humid.  The villages that cluster along the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro benefit from its altitude and from the weather the mountain makes, and that allows for comfortable temperatures even as the lush landscape is dense with banana trees, avocado trees, papaya trees, and various palms.  

[Tiny little baby bananas growing inside a big purple banana flower!]

On my first day in the country, I got myself up into the green slopes of the mountain, hiking up to about 7500 feet to Materuni Waterfall:

Apparently, lots of folks swim in the pool at the bottom of these falls, but I did not.  Why?  Because freshwater in this part of Africa is home to these big-ass snails:

[Bigger than my fist, by some decent margin]

I think the technical name is not big-ass snail but Giant African Snail, but these terms seem more or less equivalent to me.  

In any event, these big-ass snails are home to the Schistosoma parasite, which floats off the snail and absorbs itself through the skin of unsuspecting swimmers, causing all manner of internal ruckus.  Nope.  I am content to watch the water fall from dry land, thank you.

The slugs around the waterfall can also claim big-ass status.  

FAQ

Here are some answers to questions that I’ve had from several folks over the last year:

1.     Which place has been your favorite?

I've loved most of the places I stayed in.  But within that general sense of delight, there’s a short list of places where I could happily live out the rest of my days: 

 Karakol, Kyrgyzstan

 Ushuaia, Argentina

 Wanaka, New Zealand

 Christchurch, New Zealand

There are also a couple of places I really love and would happily stay for a good long while but couldn’t live permanently, for one reason or another:  North Clare/Galway, Ireland (no mountains). Almaty, Kazakhstan (air quality issues). Tyengboche, Nepal (pretty inaccessible). Bergen, Norway (OMG SO EXPENSIVE--or should I say, unaffjordable).

2.     Which place has been your least favorite?

I don’t regret going to any of the places I went.  I found every single place fascinating, and I enjoyed my time in each location.  Having said that, I don’t need to while away too many more hours of my life in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, or Dushanbe, Tajikistan—though when I someday get back to that Pamir Highway hiking trip (the one my illness prevented my doing back in September) I will certainly go back to both of those places.   

3.     Best hike?

In no particular order:  Ala-Kul (Kyrgyzstan), Fitz Roy (Argentina), Buarbreen Glacier (Norway) 

3.     Did you write anything?

Well, I finished a book of poems.  I wrote a lecture and a conference paper.  I edited an enormous essay collection. 

4.     Are you going to write a travel book?

Sounds like a lot of work.  Or more precisely, sounds like the perfect way to transform this adventurous life into a deliverable.

5.     Have you counted your steps?/ Have you used a pedometer?/ How many miles have you hiked?

I didn’t track my steps because I didn’t want to gamify my efforts to just be present in these places.  I do know that I put in about 2000 miles between Turkey and Nepal because I calculated after the fact, but I haven't kept track after leaving Nepal.

6.     Hardest place to be a vegetarian?

Tajikistan, because of the uncooked vegetables.

7. Best food?

  I had outstanding food pretty much everywhere. 

8.  Worst food? 

Burritos in New Zealand. Ketchup is not salsa, amigos.    

      9. Best travel tip?

      When you know that you will arrive at a foreign airport, jetlagged and in a place where maybe you don’t speak the language or even read the alphabet, splurge on a prebooked hired car to get you from the airport. (I usually use Booking.com for this.) In most places it’s not that much of a splurge—in nearly all of my destinations, the cost was between $5 and $15; only Istanbul came in high, at $37, and having a driver standing there with a sign with my name on it is totally worth it in that madhouse of an arrivals lounge.  By the time you're ready to go back to the airport, you know the city well enough to figure out the best way back to the airport, but on arrival?  I'll take the bougie driver option, thanks. 

     10.  Have you been lonely?

I don’t know how people managed this fellowship before the smartphone. I've kept in pretty constant, even daily, contact with my family--mostly by video.  I've had wifi in most of my lodging (excluding time on treks), and T-Mobile’s mobile/data coverage is worldwide (it’s not necessarily lightning fast but I did have free data in every single country I went to).

11. Have you ever felt unsafe?

No.  Most places, I felt warmly welcomed, and people were kind.  The one place I felt less than easy was Tajikistan.  The people there were not unkind, but neither were they welcoming.  They regarded me with a mixture of bald curiosity and suspicion, and I was conspicuous everywhere because of my tall fair aspect and my nontraditional clothes.  No one spoke English.  But I wouldn't say that I felt unsafe there--went on a run every evening as usual, explored the mountains on my own.  Just really, really felt like an obvious outsider, like the country wasn't especially happy I was there.

12. What did you pack?

3 pairs of pants (climbing tech pants, water resistant/weather pants, zip-off hiking pants); 7 T-shirts; UV-blocking shirt; baselayer; fleece jacket; running shorts; wind-resistant shell; anorak; heavy gloves; light gloves; turtle fur; 3 buffs; sun hat; swimsuit; bandana; 4 pairs of shoes (hiking, running, daily sneakers, flipflops); crampons; hiking poles; drybag; toiletries; first aid kit; pharmacy kit; sewing kit; multitool; mylar blanket; Steripen; Lifestraw; headlamp; computer; spare phone; power converters; 3 nalgene 1L bottles (and a small bottle of baking soda to keep them clean).

12. Most essential gear?

Aside from sun-protective clothes (that ubiquitous bucket hat and plaid shirt!), I'd say it was my Steripen, which kept the water drinkable worldwide. 

Also, these poles, which are lightweight and tough and also fold down to fit in a backpack.  

13.  How does it feel to be ending this year of travel?

There are photos of Utah landscapes and samples of Utah rocks in museums from London to Kazakhstan to Singapore.  Utah is so crazy beautiful, so varied in its terrain, so sublime in mountains and deserts, that people come from everywhere to hang out in my backyard!  I'm thrilled to get back into my own, intimately known, spaces again.

And yet, I'm also sad to stop drifting.  I've had to keep reminding myself that although I'm headed home, it's not as if I'm no longer allowed to travel.  There is much world left to see, many mountains left to climb.  I've got a list.  Let me just get my laundry done and weed my yard and I'll be ready to go again.

[A little nap on my backpacks in transit from Argentina to Chile]

At home in the world

For decades I have referred to Ireland as my "spiritual home," and indeed I feel a level of natural familiarity and peace there, an immediate orientation that resembles what I feel in my actual Utah home.  Ireland has always seemed to me like a place that I just "get."  

But one of the pleasures of this last year has been the luxury of lingering in a wide variety of places, sinking into a new place until it becomes a familiar place, whose rhythms and values and quirks start to be a part of my own psychic day.  I've been able to realize that I feel a kind of kinship with a goodly number of places.  Or, to say it differently, I have happily vibed into alignment with many formerly unfamiliar places--which has made these places, too, start to feel more like home.

Is the widening catalogue of places I feel at home a function of my having been to more places than I had been when I first went to Ireland as a young person and found myself settling into the place?  That is, is my expanded sphere of spatial comfort a result of my world having expanded?  I might be tempted to think so, except that even before this year of wandering (and indeed, even before my time in Ireland in the 1990s) I'd done a fair bit of traveling, so the variety of the world's places wasn't exactly unknown to me.  

Perhaps it is rather, as I suspect, that I myself have expanded--not as a result having traveled across continents during this past year but as a result of having traveled through a lot of more life's terrain, the dislocations and disorientations of joy, grief, loss, gain, learning, forgetting.  I think that, as we move through years, we have more opportunities to learn to find a place in our displacement.  And so the familiarity of the external landscape matters less than the recognizable contours of the inner landscape.  

My pal John Milton knew something about this phenomenon, I think.  The guy certainly understood displacement, having lived through national and personal crises and changes, triumphs and catastrophes, that would have made anyone feel dislocated.  So at the end of Paradise Lost (SPOILERS!), the archangel Michael explains to Adam and Eve--just at the point that they must leave their domestic paradise of Eden--that there's another way to think about home:

                       ...though all the Starrs

Thou knewst by name, and all th' ethereal Powers,

All secrets of the deep, all Natures works,

Or works of God in Heav'n, Aire, Earth, or Sea,

And all the riches of this World enjoydst,

And all the rule, one Empire; onely add

Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith,

Add vertue, Patience, Temperance, add Love,

By name to come call'd Charitie, the soul

Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath

To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess

A paradise within thee, happier farr.

Milton's point--echoed elsewhere in Paradise Lost, is that the place doesn't really matter.  You can't lose paradise (or Hell!--sorry, Satan!), because it's a state of mind rather than a location.  I wonder if my goal (unknown even to myself) over this last year has been to follow a life-season of dispossession with the kind of movement that would make dispossession the default setting, with the resulting understanding that I can feel grounded through any displacement, the loss of any paradise, because it's not about the external conditions at all.  I may not have planned it that way, but I think that's how it feels from this end-stage vantage point.  

(Mullaghmore, Ireland)

As Jay always used to say, quoting his yoga guru, when things got tough:  Why fearing?  Not a bad mantra for all the journeys, brief and long, that we all must take.