Ngorongoro Conservation Area

Today we went on the BEST SAFARI EVER!!! Disclaimer on this blog post, I am slightly tired and as several people have observed, when I get in this state, I become a little “slap happy” or a little loopy.  If something doesn’t make sense, I’m going to blame it on my tiredness.  In my defense, we had breakfast at 6:30 am and left camp by 7:00 am.  We spent the day at Ngorongoro Conservation Area.  Now NCA is not a National Park, it is a different type of reserved land in Tanzania.  I’m not fully aware of the differences, however the biggest difference is that NCA allows Maasai people to live traditionally in the area.  There is actually a large population of Maasai living in and around Ngorongoro.  Therefore, NCA’s mission is to conserve both the wildlife and indigenous culture.  It was pretty fascinating, we would see Maasai herders with their cattle and shoats (sheep and goats) grazing among herds of zebra and wildebeest. 

We got to NCA and had a lecture given by the director guy, I’m not fully sure what he does at NCA, but I’m fairly positive he works there.  It was interesting.  He gave this very eloquent speech on how NCA is perfect and everyone lives in harmony with everything else.  Odd.  Especially since we’ve been learning for the past four weeks about the human-wildlife conflicts of the area.  When we got back to our land rover, I asked a local staff member, Yohana, who is Maasai if what the director guy was saying is true and he laughed.  He told me Maasai hunt for lions and that if you kill a lion, you are considered a hero in Maasai culture.  He also told me a bunch of stories about Maasai going after hyenas or leopards after they killed livestock.  It would be great if there were no human-wildlife conflicts, but so far that isn’t the case.

We had a great car for the safari!  There were five students, including myself then three staff members, Yohana, our driver Pascweezy (Im not sure why we call him this, but it started and has stuck), and our Environmental Policy professor, Mwamhanga.  I really enjoy getting to know the staff members; they all have interesting stories.  We learned today that Mwamhanga is fluent in five languages, but doesn’t think that’s very impressive.  He wants to learn Spanish and French as well.  He also doesn’t like lions at all, because when he was a boy he had a dog and a lion ate his dog so ever since then, he hasn’t liked lions.  We heard more about Yohana’s background as well.  He grew up in a traditional Maasai lifestyle, but has attended school and has worked at SFS for three years now.  Yohana has Maasai eagle eyes.  We would be driving around and Yohana would casually say, “Oh, jackal on your left” and we would all be frantically looking for it, and he would point to this speck in the distance which through binoculars we could see was a jackal, but he never used binoculars. 

I have a feeling this may be a long blog post.

Ok, so the area consists of three calderas, plains, highlands, and rainforest.  As we drove into the area, we were driving through the rainforest.  It was a surreal experience. On either side of the road was dense underbrush and a thick forest of trees.  There was so much fog and mist that we could only see into the forest for about 50 meters.  After those 50 meters, there was an ocean of fog. 

We finally got down into the biggest caldera (the name escapes me) after driving through narrow dirt roads carved into a mountainside.  It’s funny, this summer my boyfriend, Joel, and his roommate wanted to go off-roading in the Black Hills in South Dakota and I was really hesitant.  I really didn’t want to go and was a little afraid.  Those roads compared to Tanzanian roads are like a piece of cake.  Tanzanian roads, especially those in national parks are barely roads.  My mom would not like these roads.  We spent the entire day exploring the caldera, which from above seemed like not a lot of area, but we spent 5 hours exploring.  The caldera was immense grassland plain with a few splotches of trees every so often. 

During this safari my car saw the entire circle of life.  One of the first things we say was an ostrich courtship dance.  There was a male ostrich lying on the ground, flapping his feathers around in an insane fashion and whipping his neck every which way.  The female ostrich cautiously circled around the male then sat down a little ways away from the male.  The male quickly stood up and flapped his wings over his head and ran to the female, then sat down on her.  I decided to give them some privacy after that. 

After we left the ostriches to their dance, we went into a brush of trees and low and behold, there was a bushbuck who had just given birth!  The calf was still wet and the mother was cleaning the calf off, then began encouraging the calf to stand.  It was precious.  Within fifteen minutes, we witnessed conception and birth! All we needed was death. 

Before I get to the death part, I’ll keep you in suspense and tell you about the other animals we saw.  We saw hyena, which was my first time seeing hyena!  I always thought hyenas would be ugly, but I actually think they have a little something something.  We saw several jackals, so we were definitely getting our carnivore fix for the day.  We saw lots of zebra, wildebeest, impala, Cape Buffalo, Grants Gazelle, and Thompsons Gazelles.  We didn’t see any giraffes today, but the environment wasn’t really suited for giraffes.  We also only saw about two elephants.  BUT we did see a very special animal off in the distance.  In fact this blog is named after this animal.  We saw a RHINO!!! It was really far off in the distance and Maasai Eagle Eyes Yohana somehow saw it amidst a herd of wildebeest, whereas we could barely see it with our binoculars.  But sure enough, it turned and we saw its profile and it was a rhino!!! I wish I could have gotten a picture of it, but it was too far away.  I’m told we will see more in the Serengeti.  Seeing the rhino sparked a conversation between my professor and myself about if we were poachers if we would poach rhino or elephants.  He said he would poach rhino because their horns are worth more money.  That sounds like an awful conversation to have while watching a rhino now that I think about it, but he started it.  (Just to clarify, I detest poaching). 

We also saw some hippos.  While at the hippo pool, our professor started chatting with random people and made us wait for him for 15 minutes so we joked that we were going to throw him into the hippo pool and without hesitation he said “Ok, I’ll race against them.  I’ll probably win, I’m a pretty good swimmer, but you have to have a gold medal waiting for me when I get out.” Funny. 

Ok.  Should I finally tell the death story?  Actually, I may have stretched the truth a little bit.  There was no death involved, but there was almost death involved (mostly dead? Princess Bride, anyone?).  We were driving along in our land rover when all of the sudden we see….A LION!!!! A real life lioness, watching a large herd of wildebeest from a hill.  We were told that lions will watch their prey for several hours before actually going after the prey.  We watched this lion for almost 45 minutes.  She was beautiful.  So majestic and graceful and smart and powerful.  She would stand and creep through the grass for several meters than slink down into the grass again.  She did this several times until she was about 15 meters away from the wildebeest.  Finally, she stood up and started running full speed towards the wildebeest! She almost got a wildebeest but they all scattered too fast!  IT was AMAZING! Possibly the coolest thing I have ever seen in my entire life.  I have always wanted to see a kill in the wild, and though she didn’t kill a wildebeest, it was still incredible.  Ill try to see if I can post a picture sometime.  This was my favorite safari thus far.  I can’t even say how great it was.  It was just fabulous.  I’m blessed.