Day 2 - The Serengeti
With much colorful singing and dancing, we were welcomed into a Masaai village in the Ngorongoro National Park. We were invited into their round houses made of a stick frame covered in mud and dung. The homes stood no taller than me. Although small, there was enough room for two short beds made of branches covered by cow hide and a cooking area with a smoke hole over it. There was also a separate area designated for nurturing baby calves during the colder season. This gives you a sense of how important cattle is in this culture. In fact, a man’s wealth is dependent upon the number of cows he owns in conjunction with the amount of offspring he produces.
The Masaai of Tanzania are a semi-nomadic people who migrated south from the lower Nile River Valley beginning in the 15th century. As they traveled south, they would take over territory by force and absorb other cultures into their way of life. They have a reputation of being fierce warriors.
The Masaai people live off of the animals they raise, mainly cattle and sometimes goats. Our host in this village told us that they really don’t drink too much water, as water is hard to come by in their dry land. To keep hydrated, they drink the milk and blood of cows and goats. The Masaai people do not kill wildlife for food. Masaai warriors today carry spears, clubs and bows and arrows mainly to protect their herd from hyenas and lions.
Since the 1970s, in order to create reservations to preserve wildlife, the Tanzanian government has been relocating Masaai villages into smaller and smaller areas, limiting their boundaries for cattle grazing. The move has affected the nomadic customs of many villages. Recently some Masaai villages have adopted a semi-agrarian life-style by raising maize along with cattle.
The Tanzanian government has also intervened in the customs of the Masaai people in other ways, such as forcing them to adopt a cash-economy instead of the trade and barter system. Education is another reform that the government has imposed on the Masaai that has faced much resistance.
This village had a schoolhouse with a chalkboard on one wall and a giant hole in the roof. I’m not sure how much education really does happen here. No matter what happens, I’m sure the kids (and even the adults) enjoyed the Tootsie pops we brought for them. Hopefully, the paper and color pencils will do some good also.
First of all, Olduvai is a misnomer. The proper name for this ravine is Oldupai Gorge, named after the olduvai plant that grows plentifully in this area. Excavations between the walls of this dried-up ravine have revealed some of the world’s most important research and revelation on human evolution including fossilized tracks of hominids walking upright on two feet.
Serengeti was derived from the Masaai word “siringitu” meaning “the place where the land moves on forever. And that was exactly how it felt as we drove down long stretches of dusty road flanked by endless grassland and open blue skies.
The Serengeti is one of the world’s largest savannas encompassing a mixture of plains, woodlands, rivers, marshes and forests. Here and there, the monotonous grassland is broken up by kopjes or rock outcroppings. As we traveled into the heart of the Serengeti, we saw the Simba Kopje, Simba’s home in The Lion King.
Because they are nocturnal animals, leopards spend most of their days hanging on tree limbs. Their spots help them blend in with their environment so well, it is hard to spot them. We were lucky to have seen four different ones. There was even a pair lounging on the same limb, a rare sight.
We saw a male lion sitting among the rushes along a stream. A lioness crouched within the tall golden grass of the plains some thirty feet away. Her eyes focused upon the horizon. On the opposite side of the narrow stream, an elephant, seemingly nonchalant, slowly made his way across the grassland heading for the same spot where the lion was resting. I wonder if the elephant knows that there were lions relatively close by. I imagined the worse. The elephant approached the stream. For a few minutes, the elephant and the lion were within feet of each other, but nothing happened. The lion continued to lounge, and the elephant pulled at the bushes with his trunk, stuffing his tiny mouth full of green delicacies and then moved on. Why didn’t the lion attack?
Impalas and gazelles are wanderers of the Serengeti. They bear the same colors and both have horns. To tell them apart, look at their horns. Impalas have curved horns whereas gazelles have straight ones. Gazelles also have a distinct, dark horizontal stripe on their sides.
