It’s the Other Side

We awoke in a remarkable coffee planation.  Tall ceilings, dark hard wood and locally grown coffee to plunge.  After extended periods hotel rooms we suddenly had the run of an entire house.  I’ve never been to South Africa but somehow I imagined that this is what plantation houses there were like.  The night before the proprietress who informed me that her family had been here since the days of Isak Dinesen kept calling me “darling” which I liked, had suggested the place was fenced off.  “All you might see were some Dik Diks.  They’re little dear, darling.”   My wife was very reluctant to leave and head out into the bush this morning.  “This place is really great.  Why don’t we stay here?”

The road into Arusha was jammed again, just like it was last night.  By the time we got to the market to get our supplies, the older one was carsick and had to utilize one of the spare bags we had lying around.  The market was odd.  Supermarket scale, this establishment seemed to be about only one third devoted to food.  Choices of food and beverages were limited.  There was wine.  There was gin.  There was no tonic.  There was little by way of fruit.  But there were samosas.  We bought a cart full of things and stocked the car.  One the way out of town we stopped at a Whole Foods like establishment with fresh blueberries, cheese and plenty of tonic water.  Should have come here first. 

The tension of starting this remarkable endeavor that I’d planned for so long now built and built as we made our way out of the urban environment towards the famous Ngorongoro Crater.  Our driver Ndashi pointed to a cliff face.  “There.  It’s the other side of that mountain.”  The scale of things here in Tanzania is dramatic, perhaps the way Texans and Kansans talk about bigness.  The mountain was too far away to seem big but clearly it was massive.  The ride to approach a cliff face can take two or three hours.  The climb up another thirty minutes.  And then, you’re there by a roadside bluff staring down into the vast crater itself. 

You make your way past a person or two to the railing and slowly turn your head from right to left.  Down into the floor of the openness one imagines seeing some of the animals one is supposed to encounter the next day.  What’s that moving by the lake?  Over there at eleven o’clock, is that something along that salty, dry area?”  “The sun’s reflecting on it.  It’s a car . . .”

Later we checked in at the Serena Lodge.  Walking along to the edge of the ridge it people began to groan about how far it was from the restaurant, but when we arrived it was clear that this end point afforded an uninterrupted view of the vista.  I searched and found a perfect mix on Youtube called:  1970's Tanzania Rumba Musiki Wa Dansi. It suddenly reminded me of the Congolese star, Franco.  I tried to explain to my wife and then to my girls after she suggested it wasn’t her present priority, that West African music had been predominant in Africa until around the mid 70’s when the Zaireoire, of Tabu Ley and Franco began to dominate the continent Rhumba and Latin Jazz was present earlier than this, of course, but this mix I found was so much like Franco it seemed an uncanny example of the popular music migration I’d understood to be true. 

Out the window, not fifty feet away, as if it were an auger, two five hundred pound buffalo careened by, paused long enough for my young one to get a snap before charging on ahead.  I recalled a few moments later when a guide passed by with an upbeat group of tourists, down in the same bluff, that the buffalo are supposedly one of the deadliest beasts one can encounter.  Later, we were walking down there as well, wondering now for the first time, what it might be like to proceed along down the hill and into the body of the crater, a mere mammal, positioned well below the apex of the food pyramid.

Saturday 07/01/17