Ngorongoro

After almost two weeks and about 25 to 30 hours of riding in safari vehicles between various stops, we got to our final destination of this vacation, Tanzania's Ngorongoro Crater. Earlier in the trip, at Lake Nakuru National Park in Kenya, we'd come across what the members of our party referred to as our first "Jurassic Park moment". On the way to our lodge the one night we stayed in that Park, we saw an open grassy plain with multiple species of animals moving in herds toward some unseen destination and it reminded us of the scene in the movie where Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler see the recreated dinosaurs for the first time. Ngorongoro blew away Lake Nakuru in Jurassic Park-ness. For me, Ngorongoro was Jurassic Park. Without the dinosaurs, of course.

The Crater, a 100 square mile circle which sits within the larger Ngorongoro Conservation Area, was formed between two and three million years ago when an active volcano exploded and then collapsed in on itself. It is the largest intact extinct volcanic caldera in the world, a site made most impressive to me because of its near perfectly level floor and rim elevations. It looks like a lush green bowl 2,000 feet deep stocked with wildlife that are for the most part captured within.

There is a road which leads roughly around the perimeter of the Crater offering glimpses to the floor below every so often. We first saw the entire Crater on a pitstop en route to the Serengeti National Park. I took the photograph above to memorialize the occasion. It is the most gorgeous national site I have ever seen (albeit with perhaps limited experience). I cannot think of a single place that filled me with more wonder, and that includes the Grand Canyon. Maybe it was the picture perfect day we had on our restroom and scenic view stop but I think this place is simply spectacular. It got more amazing when we descended into the place a couple of days later.

Wildebeest and zebra dotting the floor of Ngorongoro Crater.

To get down to the floor of the Crater, you have to take a twisty, turny, one-way road that seems not wide enough or stable enough at some points. Sit on the left side of the vehicle you are traveling in if you want the best, but sometimes breathtaking in a good and not-so-good way, view as you descend. The dark dots which are the wildebeest, lions, zebra, ostriches, gazelle and other animals get more defined as you get closer to the bottom. Maybe it was the day we visited but in my view the wildlife was more spread out than in the other places we had visited rather than gathered together in small or large groups. When you hit the bottom, you are faced with an almost flat landscape to explore before you take the similarly but different twisty, turny, one-way road out at the end of the day. The way out is the same road used by the elephants to get in and out. It might be a long drive if you have to wait behind a herd of elephants.

Over the two weeks in East Africa before Ngorongoro, we got the best look at cats in Masai Mara; the best look at rhinos at Lake Nakuru; the best elephant sightings at Amboseli; the most intimate extended experience with any animal (giraffe) at Lake Manyara; and a sense of what the great wildebeest migration might be like at the Serengeti National Park. Ngorongoro didn't top any of those individual experiences, but for me, Ngorongoro completed the entire safari. It filled in the little gaps that the other five parks together, for all the amazing sightings, missed. And where it duplicated an experience from another park, I was able to focus on the periphery of the event rather than the main attraction.

On the simplest of levels, Ngorongoro did two things: (1) it got us our best look at one of the animals that was on my top 10 never seen in the wild list (ostrich was number six on that list) and (2) it checked the last box for sure on my personal Big Five list. The picture above showing two male and two female ostriches is one of my favorite of the trip. I love the different poses, the spacing between the birds and the way some are looking right at the camera and others are not. We were close to the edge of the Crater at the time we saw these four so the wall of the collapsed caldera behind forms a back canvas to fill in the background of the shot. My only regret with ostriches on this trip is that we didn't get closer than maybe 100 feet or so but I'm glad Ngorongoro got me this picture.

The Big Five is a name traditionally given by big game hunters to describe the five species of African animals that are the most difficult to hunt on foot. They are not the largest five animals on the continent (sorry, hippo and giraffe). In our first trip to sub-Saharan Africa in 2015, we managed to lay eyes on the African elephant, lion and African buffalo but came home missing the last two spots. Earlier on this trip, we checked the leopard off that list in Masai Mara and Serengeti. That left only the black rhinoceros unseen. Our Kenyan guide, Joe, insisted that one of the rhinos we saw at Lake Nakuru was a black rhinoceros but it was so far away and disappeared so soon after we saw it that we didn't get any chance for a good look.

Ngorongoro fixed that. Black rhinos are scarcer than their white cousins that we saw at Nakuru. While there about 20,000 white rhinos in the wild, there are just 5,000 black rhinos. There can't be many of these animals in Ngorongoro but we were able to spot two and get a photograph or two of one of them. In marked contrast to the ostrich picture above, the photograph we managed to get of the fifth of the Big Five is not a spectacular picture because it was taken at a distance that stretched our camera's range. But we got him (or her). This was a big thing for us.

A solitary black rhinoceros. The last of the Big Five we saw on this trip.

Ngorongoro also gave us glimpses at the entire cycle of life. We saw what was probably the youngest animal we'd seen on our trip even before we'd finished the descent down into the Crater. On the right side of the road we were traveling down was a Grant's gazelle with its mother and it can't have been much more than an hour old and maybe that's on the high side of its age. It was so wobbly on its legs that the location where it was walking on a bit of a hill far away really from any other animals made sense from a keeping safe from predators standpoint.

That baby Grant's was not the only calf we saw. We also found a lot of baby wildebeest (February is birthing season for wildebeest) that we'd been hoping to see in all the parks we'd visited but which until Ngorongoro had largely avoided us. The wildebeest occupies a not so celebrated spot on the unofficial Ugly Five list (along with the lappet-faced vulture, warthog, marabou stork and striped hyena) for its less than pleasing appearance and is sometimes referred to as the "spare parts animal" because it seems to be made up of different not so attractive parts from other animals.

But the wildebeest babies? Well, not so ugly. In fact, they might be called cute. The beige coat looks way better than the grey-brown color the adults sport; the hunched back has not yet set in nor has the hair on the neck grown out; the awkward looking horns haven't shown up (I guess childbirth could be painful if the babies came with horns); and the tail works way better with the short hair. These things were plentiful at Ngorongoro, always sticking close to mom. Hopefully most of them survive until adulthood.

Mom and what was probably the youngest animal we saw on our trip trailing gingerly behind.

Baby and mom. Cute, right? 

Speaking of survival, we saw some death at Ngorongoro just like we did at Serengeti. And just like Serengeti, we didn't see the deed done but instead came upon the aftermath which involved a hyena and a whole lot of vultures. Our guide's opinion was that the African buffalo that was the object of all the attention here died from more natural causes rather than having been taken down by a single enterprising hyena. The idea of one hyena killing an animal as large as a buffalo didn't make sense, even if it could enlist the assistance of the two black-backed jackals hanging around the site to feed when they got the chance.

Since we'd seen a sight like this one just a couple of days earlier, I tried to focus on the behavior and flight of the vultures which kept descending and taking off again and again as the hyena chased them away. I think I'm fairly satisfied with the resulting photographs that get me a decent capture of these ugly birds in flight.

Vultures being chased from the kill site by the hyena...

and pouncing on the carcass after the hyena left the scene.

In between birth and death? A whole lot of conflict, right? Whether you are a human or any other sort of creature on this planet, conflict and fighting is inevitable. We'd seen a couple of zebra sparring at Lake Manyara earlier in the week before we got to Ngorongoro but that was at a good distance. Ngorongoro managed to get us some better looks at a spat or two.

I'm not sure if the Grant's gazelles (shown below) we saw locking horns right after we entered the Crater were fighting for real or just practicing, but the proximity to our car and the careful way they engaged one another was a sight to see. They almost seemed civilized in their fighting. I mean here's this animal with these sharp horns going at another member of his same species and instead of going right for the jugular, they keep the fight confined to their headgear only. Seems like a very gentlemanly way to go about establishing dominance over a fellow gazelle.

The hippos we saw tussling in the water later on that day? Not so gentlemanly. Ignoring the fact that these two animals appear to our human eyes to have huge smiles on their faces, the scratches on the skin and particularly the gash on the hippo on the right makes me think these big beasts are fighting in a little less friendly way than the Grant's gazelles. There were three or four pairs of hippos engaged in this same kind of display in the pool as we watched so I'm really not sure if this was a serious contest or just the start of something more serious to come. I believe either animal had the capability to do great harm to the other with those huge tusks in their mouths. Hippos continue for me to be the scariest African animal out there.

The almost civilized contest between two Grant's gazelle.

The less civilized hippo battle.

But after the best sightings of some species ever, the completion of my own personal Big Five list, birth, death and some fighting in between, I'll remember Ngorongoro as the closest I've ever come to an adult male lion and the way it made me feel.

Most of the animals in the parks we visited in our two weeks on continent are pretty immune to being concerned about the cars us tourists drive around in. Every so often, you'll hear about an elephant or rhino charging a car that got too close or a cheetah getting inside one of the open-topped cars that are everywhere (including both of the vehicles we used on this trip) but for the most part, the animals don't care about the humans. Unless you are an elephant, the cars are generally bigger than you and they never hurt you so the park residents just ignore them. Which sometimes allows us to get really really close to the wildlife.

After having seen most of what I've written about above, we came across a few vehicles stopped dead in the road. This sort of scene generally means something more exciting than a zebra or mongoose. In this case, there was a male and female adult lion slowly walking down the road in between lying down sessions. Since off roading in the Crater is prohibited, the only way to get this close to a lion is to find one right by the side of the road. This was an opportunity that we couldn't pass up.

We'd seen lots of cats on this trip and even found lions on the roads in other parks and followed them at a distance while they hunted (without results) but none of those lions was an adult male. This was going to be a different sort of lion encounter. Neither the male nor the lioness in this encounter seemed to show the slightest bit of interest in moving off the road although they did seem eager to walk around all the cars, including ours. And very very close.

In the two weeks we'd been on safari, we'd only twice been asked to close the windows in our car. Once due to the dust that was kicked up by our vehicle and other vehicles passing in the opposite direction and once when we were following a lion on a hunt and she (or he) decided to slow down a little. In Ngorongoro, the request came strongly and swiftly from our guide. The fact that our driver had already closed his window quickly made this request pretty real.

The male lion stopped on our right side near the back of our vehicle, closest to the seat I was sitting in. There were maybe three feet between my eyes and his and he was looking straight at me. I've never felt any real danger in a wheeled vehicle in a park in Africa (boats are a different story) including in the open-sided vehicles that we used in Botswana a couple of years ago, but I have to tell you I was wondering how high these animals could jump. Remember we are in a car with an open top. Yes the roof is popped up so it's not like there's a huge hole in the top of the car but there is about 18" or two feet of space that something can crawl through. Is that big enough for a lion to fit? I thought it might be for a lioness.

I will not soon forget those orange eyes looking into mine as if wondering what kind of a meal I would make. It honestly paralyzed me a bit despite the admittedly flimsy single pane of glass in between him and me to such a degree that I didn't take a picture of how close we were to each other. This is remarkable because all I'd been doing the entire trip was taking as many pictures I could of the animals. Now I get closer to the most feared cat on Earth and all I can do is stare back? What can I say, sometimes the moment takes over. I'll have to settle for the picture above taken by placing the camera part way out of the top of our safari vehicle. I didn't want to tempt the lion, after all.

Lions in Ngorongoro Crater. These ones stayed away from the car.

Shortly after our closeup lion encounter, we ate a late lunch out of the boxes of food we'd brought from the hotel that morning. We stayed in the car to eat because we'd been warned by our guide, Filbert, about eating outside with black-tailed kites hanging around. We'd actually seen what might happen to someone who was not sufficiently warned or ignored the warning (we weren't sure which) earlier in the week when one of these birds of prey had snatched some food along with a bit of finger from an unsuspecting tourist. 

That lunch was the last meal we'd eat in a park together on this trip. It wrapped a week in Tanzania with four fellow tourists and our Tanzanian guide, Filbert, and driver, Samson, after a week in Kenya with three of the four tourists and our Kenyan guide, Joe, and driver, Peter. We'd made it to the end and it was too soon at the same time. I couldn't have been happier with the company on this trip. There were no disagreements, everyone showed up on time each morning and we shared with each other. I think we were lucky and I was glad to have such compatible companions. Getting the wrong group could have been a disaster.

We came back to Africa this year to see elephants. We ended up getting something a lot different than we did the last time we visited the Dark Continent including not really getting the same quality sighting of elephants we got back in 2015. If we had done the exact same things we did last time it honestly wouldn't have been as good an experience. These two weeks in Kenya and Tanzania was the trip of a lifetime (so far) and certainly the signature trip of this five year long (for now) blog.

But as we ate our last lunch in Ngorongoro, we were treated to a family of elephants making their way slowly towards our stopped vehicle. It was a true family, complete with matriarch, dominant bull and mothers, juveniles and babies, including a couple of younger males involved in some fighting that was eventually stopped by the matriarch. Everyone in the car got out to watch despite the proximity to the herd and the very real possibility of being charged if the mood of one of the elephants turned (we left the doors open just in case we needed to flee). In the end, we got what we came back to Africa to see because of that last lunch. That show over a meal and indeed the whole two week adventure should tide us over for a while or at least for a couple of years. Then I'm sure we'll find our way back to Africa again. To resist would seem to be futile.

Six crazy kids and their guides. Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania.

Lunchtime entertainment. The baboon eventually moved. Everything moves for elephants.

The Masai

Before I visited Kenya, I had never thought of setting foot in a house made out of cow dung. I did it anyway, and then felt bad afterwards for deliberately not touching the walls while I was inside. I spent maybe 15 minutes sitting on a very low seat that stretched the limit of my knees learning about the people who had invited me into their house. I also learned in a land where building materials are scarce and a three or four or six foot high termite mound is a common sight, cattle poop is apparently useful as a readily available termite-resistant building material. If that's all there is to build with, I guess you have to use it.

This, to me, is why we travel.

Visit Kenya and you'll find yourself in a land made up of 47 different tribes. There is absolutely no sense behind why these 47 tribes are amalgamated into one 21st century country other than that's where white men who had little real understanding of the history or importance of this land drew some lines to show other white men where their land started and someone else's stopped. Think 47 different tribes sounds like a chaotic mess to draw a country's borders around? Head south into Tanzania and you'll be in a nation composed of over 120 different tribes. Crazy, right?

Based on our one week each in Kenya and Tanzania this past February, I would struggle to name the largest, second largest or smallest or middle sized tribe in either country. We spent one week with two Kenyans (our guide, Joseph, and driver, Peter) and the same amount of time with two Tanzanians (our guide, Filbert, and driver, Samson) and I couldn't tell you what tribe each of those four men hailed from. Joe even explained the whole thing to us and I still couldn't tell you and I swear I was paying attention.

For the limited amount of time we spent in East Africa this year most of these 160ish tribes were invisible to us. They were all around us and registered very little in my memory. They all pretty much looked the same. They were store clerks or lawyers or tourist guides or drivers or customs agents or chefs or janitors or park rangers or motorcycle or car repairers or doctors or millions of other different things. They all looked similar to one another in the way they dressed and walked and interacted with us. All of them except one tribe: the Masai.

A line of Masai women trying to out-do their male counterparts. 

We went to Africa earlier this year thinking we knew a thing or two about the Masai. Legendary lion killers who confronted the kings of the jungle armed only with spears. Warriors with famous constitutions who can run for miles at a time without tiring. Nomadic tribesmen who exist on a diet of blood and milk and little else. Resisters of change determined to not conform to other people's vision of progress. All of those things turned out to be myths and truths at the same time. And then we found out so much more.

The Masai are both one of the 47 tribes incorporated into Kenya's population and one of the 120 within Tanzania's border. The funny thing about drawing lines arbitrarily on a map in a place you just got to is that some of the folks you are trying to define as Kenyans or Tanzanians aren't going to see themselves the way someone else sees them. The Masai's traditional land is in Kenya. It's also in Tanzania. They move freely between the two countries pretty much as they used to, although I'm sure in reality it's not really the same as it was centuries ago.

We had the opportunity to spend time with the Masai in both Kenya and Tanzania. We took the opportunity to do so in both lands, once near the Masai Mara National Reserve and once near Lake Manyara National Park. Both villages were similar and both were different but in our time in Africa this year, it seemed like the Masai were everywhere. I'm sure it seemed that way because the places we went were pretty much all in and around the Masai's lands. But we found some further apart too.

Masai children welcoming us into their village.

The Masai are about impossible to miss. Tall, slender men standing stock still in the middle of fields wrapped in red, blue, purple, orange or any other brightly colored checkered patterned blankets or shuka cloth. The cloths are likely 20th century substitutes for traditional leather goods used by the Masai for protection from the wind and other elements. How the Masai gave up their leather for these synthetic blankets is uncertain. Maybe they fell in love with tartan blankets traded with Scottish missionaries. Maybe they got them earlier than the 1900s by trading with people from the coast. Maybe it was something else. Wherever they came from, they make the Masai watching over livestock stick out visibly against the savannah. Visible to their flocks and herds and also to the predators that might do them harm.

These tartan warriors were impossible to miss on our first drive outside Nairobi on our way to Masai Mara National Reserve. Whether they were in fields or by the sides of the roads pushing their goat or cattle or sheep or all three along to find more food, they were obvious as they steered their animals using little more than what looks like a twig from an olive tree. We saw no spear carrying warriors. I have no idea really how they fend off large cats with those little sticks.

The sheep and goats are food. The cattle are not. Well, not in the sense that you and I might think of killing a cow for steaks or hamburgers or whatever else would tide us over with sustenance until they were gone. It's the cattle that are the thing with the Masai. They serve as a source of milk and blood and they are tangible symbols of wealth in their society. The milk makes sense; they get it just the way we do from the udders of the cows. The blood they will drink in a sustainable way, draining just enough from each cow to add more nutrition to their diets while keeping the cattle alive to generate more by feeding and continuing to grow.

The cattle that are the lifeblood of the Masai.

The cattle pen, for safekeeping at night.

The Masai used to be nomadic or semi-nomadic, moving around the savannah with their animals. Now they are really semi-nomadic or permanently rooted in settlements that stay put, more or less, in the same spot for a long time.

Their villages are roughly circular in form and are composed based on our experience from circular or rectilinear houses made of whatever the Masai have available to them to build with: sticks, grass and cattle dung with wooden or latticed together doors. These are not dwellings that families hang out in. They are used for sleeping, cooking and protection from the elements. That last part not just for the Masai but sometimes for their baby cows.

There are maybe two or three or four or five rooms in any one house, which are built by the Masai women. Not necessarily because the men are lazy but because they are generally off away from the village by day watching over their animals. That's probably less stressful and demanding work than building a house (or cooking in that completed house for that matter) but if there's ever a need to defend the livestock, I guess you need the strongest possible guardians out there with them.

Outside the houses there has to be a space to keep the herds safe at night. In the Kenyan village we visited, the entire village was enclosed and gated with the perimeter walls made from acacia tree branches with plenty of long, sharp thorns. The village in Tanzania was not fenced completely but there was gated enclosure (also made from the thorny acacia trees) to pen the cattle, goats and sheep at night. The difference? The first village was right outside Masai Mara National Reserve, home to lions and leopards; the second was not which presumably allowed a little less security to be employed.

If the story we were told about the village near Masai Mara was correct, namely that the Masai do such an effective job of warding off lions that zebra from the park often huddle near the perimeter walls of the enclosure, then the Masai must be on to something.

Masai women building a new chimney.

Masai houses are dark. There's no electricity and therefore no lights and their building materials of choice (twigs and dung) do not allow large open expanses of windows. And if they did, they probably wouldn't take advantage of that fact because windows for people without access to glass doesn't really protect against the weather that well, which is part of the point of these houses in the first place. After we ducked to enter the dwelling, we found our way to where we were told to sit all the while conspicuously (to me) not trying to use our hands on the walls for support.

The house we sat in was a rectilinear structure built by one of the wives of an important Masai. One house, one wife. One Masai man might have multiple houses, meaning multiple wives. I get that this concept may be contrary to the way our society views relations between men and women. Let's not get caught up in that in this post. This was clearly not our country. Let's not try to evaluate other people according to our own standards. At least for the remainder of this post, anyway. Thank you.

In addition to being dark, the place was tiny. I couldn't stand upright in the place due to the roof height and I couldn't imagine sleeping in one of the bedrooms, which seemed to me in the almost darkness to be little bigger than a ship's bunk. The beds were inches off the dirt floor and the rooms were far smaller than the baby cattle's room we passed on our way in. Later we'd spend time in taller circular houses but which were smaller in footprint, presumably due to the sloped reeds used to form the roof; reeds can only span so far I guess.

While we sat and learned, the stove in the house was on, cooking something in a pan or pot. And by stove, I mean an open fire stoked with wood. In a house with very small openings in the walls to admit light. Or to let smoke exit. And it was smoky. So smoky in fact that I guess it was understandable on some level that the women who spend all day watching over a pot of boiling beans refueling the stove have significant respiratory issues and a problem with cancer from inhaling fumes kicked up by burning logs.

While I'm all for not imposing our own standards of living on people living in places other than the United States, I was honestly shocked to hear about cancer and respiratory issues in places as remote and relatively unspoiled like Kenya and Tanzania. Fortunately, in this instance, G Adventures, our hosts for the two week trip we were on, were not ones to stand by and let this continue to happen unchecked.

Enter the Clean Cookstove Project, an initiative by G Adventures' charity arm Planeterra, with a solution for those Masai women that want to improve their quality of life in a relatively simple way. The Project involves a self installed chimney and improved concrete stove to direct the smoke and ash that burns off the fuel for the daily cooking. In addition to being three times as efficient (which means 2/3 fewer trips for firewood), the stove and chimney assemblies exhaust up to 90% of the dangerous fumes the women will breathe in while presiding over their meals which cook for hours.

The solution is deceptively simple and super low cost. The average installation runs about the equivalent of $60 U.S. dollars and it's subsidized. The only issue, of course, is that most Masai don't have much money, so the women's half has to come from some savings and hard work. The silver lining to that struggle is that the Project will pay the women who build the chimneys for their work to improve their own lives. It's a circle that can be self-sustaining if worked correctly. I'm not saying it's easy necessarily, but it's something that can provide great value for a little investment. We were able to watch a team of women constructing a chimney for fifteen minutes at our stop in Tanzania. It's crude but effective construction. And effective counts here.

How many Masai does it take to start a fire?

Ultimately, the answer turned out to be one. Too many cooks in the kitchen in the first photo.

The Clean Cookstove Project is an example of the Masai embracing the 21st (or 20th, if you prefer) century on their own terms. While they have largely resisted western notions of progress in a number of areas, they are clearly willing to bend their lifestyles a little when it suits them. While they cling to traditional ways of life, most Masai carry cellphones and in the first village we visited there were a number of portable solar light fixtures charging on the dung and reed roofs. There may be no plumbing in their houses, but they recognize the need for a light source so their children can do their homework at night. I'm not sure if most Masai use elephant dung, a stick and a knife to start a fire like we were shown in one of our visits, but if they do, that seemed to work when we were there.

I wrote earlier in this post that we knew a little something about the Masai before we set foot in East Africa. Warriors. Runners. Shepherds. Traditionalists. We didn't know about the chimneys and we didn't know about the portable lights. But we did know they jumped. And we got an up close look.

I get that this demonstration was put on solely for our benefit, but the line of young Masai men who took turns showing us how high they can jump was truly one of the more impressive displays I have seen on my travels. This ages old tradition is intended to demonstrate strength for potential wives and some of these guys can get some air, especially given their jumping form which involves being wrapped in a blanket and jumping straight vertical using (at least it seemed this way to me) just the strength in their lower legs and ankles.

This is truly difficult. I think the picture at the top of this post is me at my maximum vertical leap of about six inches. Our Kenyan guide, Joe, claimed I wasn't even jumping but check it out because the evidence is clear: there's definitely some separation between my boots and my shadow. Yes, I'm not winning many wives with this sort of junior varsity level effort but I'm wearing way more than the Masai out jumping me and I'm way older than these much younger men. Fortunately, I don't have to be the highest jumper in order to find the love of my life. I'd be in trouble if I did.

After our time with the Masai and the animals in six parks, our last day in Africa this year was spent in Arusha, Tanzania. The last person we spent any appreciable amount of time with in Kenya or Tanzania was a Masai named Isaac. If we had seen the Masai as fierce stalwarts of traditionalism refusing to adapt their lifestyle to what other people from elsewhere in the world see as a correct way to live, Isaac provided a counterpoint to that argument.

He was our guide around the chaos that is Arusha, taking us from curio shop to curio shop looking for cheap souvenirs and maybe a piece or two of Tanzanite, a local purple-blue precious stone that is more rare than diamonds. Isaac didn't look like the Masai we visited in the two villages earlier in our trip. He wore no shuka cloth, carried no stick and was not herding livestock. He is one of 15 children of his Masai father. His mom is his dad's second wife. He and all his brothers and sisters from his dad's three wives have moved away from home and chosen to live their lives in a non-traditional way. With the unemployment rate in parts of Kenya and Tanzania at 40%, this is perhaps a brave thing to do. But it's also potentially a sign of what is to come more and more for the Masai.

In meeting Isaac and having him guide us around the city for a half a day or so, we got to see a different side to these people and I think it was valuable for us. It made us see beyond the stereotype that visiting the two villages might have reinforced for us. The day we spent walking around Arusha was the hottest day we spent in Africa. We sweated. We needed water. We needed shade. We needed rest. We ultimately had to beg off the walk back to where we were dropped off in favor of our driver coming to get us. Isaac didn't break a sweat the whole time. We thought of the Masai as warriors with famous constitutions. Yep, Isaac was for sure a Masai.