Naabi Gate and Into the Dust Beyond

Friday, September 2, 2005

Exactly twenty-four hours after entering the Serengeti National Park, our overland truck rumbled into the dusty Naabi Gate entrance/exit area. Our allotted time here was up.

It seems that this is a more popular entrance to the Serengeti than the gate we entered by, and the parking-lot for visitor registration was filled with tourists, somewhat of a shock after seeing so few people besides ourselves on the savannah itself.

We had half an hour or so to relax and drink a cup of tea or climb up to the Naabi look-out. Jeff and I decided to do both.

The trail up to the look-out was steep but short with a view over the grasslands and acacia forests we had just left. Along the way we saw many more agama lizards skittering among the rocks and also another kind of lizard, possibly an anole, which seemed to levitate from vertical rock surface to surface. It was the most physics-defying little creature I'd ever seen!

Descending once more to the gate, we watched the iridescent-blue starlings gather to drink at the stone bird baths. There were a lot of birds up in the trees too. I decided that a beautiful book of East African birds (authors Chris and Stuart Tilde) offered at the little shop here would make a nice souvenir of the Serengeti, but alas it cost 30,000 shillings ($30) and we didn't have enough Tanzanian money changed at the moment.

I saw tiny animals moving underneath a tree and sat down on the grass with my camera ready. The animals disappeared like lightning. I held perfectly still and soon the mice came creeping out of the holes in the bottom of the tree to play in the grass again. But at the slightest movement from me to focus my camera, they disappeared again.

Before we left Naabi Gate, a memory that still makes me giggle: the horrified nose-wrinkling of a female tourist in designer khakis as she came out of the public bathroom here. She put up her hand to stop me as I entered the loo, saying in a hushed and distressed voice: "There is NO toilet paper in there!" I smiled and showed her the folded wad of tissues in my pants pocket.

"Don't worry, I don't think I've been in a toilet with its own paper this trip", I laughed. She looked at me as if she'd rather have faced a lion than carry her own loo paper around. Ah yes, a good tip on an African trip: always bring your own toilet-paper.

The rest of our afternoon was a long dusty, dusty ride toward the Ngorongoro Crater area. Choking dust in shades of orange and grey followed in our wake in an enormous cloud, silting in through the open sides of the truck and coating our skin in hair in a fine layer of grit.

Later, I would do my laundry and watch as the washing water turned the colours of Serengeti mud.

Yes, bandannas: they're not just for bandits and cowboys anymore. I slitted my eyes against the glare of the sun and held a hankerchief over my nose.

The roof of the truck vibrated so hard as we jolted over the road that once again the screws in the ceiling began to work loose. Somebody was always getting up to tighten them.

We also had to be careful that none of our possessions fell off the upper shelf to fly out the window. Jen lost a flip-flop shoe today somewhere along the long road through these Masai lands. The bread and other groceries also needed a good shove once in a while so we didn't lose them. As for carbonated beverages, they were opened tonight at the owner's own risk after the shaking they received today.

This was incredibly arid land---a flat, yellow-grey prairie, a wasteland of rocky soil and dessicated grass to the horizon. The termite mounds here were made from grey clay, unlike the red mounds in the reserve area we'd spent the last day on.

Once in a while we'd see a bright splotch of colour in the landscape--bright red in a sea of dull colours. It would be a Masai herdsman walking along with two or three cows. He was literally miles and miles away from...anything. It was incredible.

It got me wondering if the modern world touches these people at all. What does the whole rat race matter out here? I suddenly felt like I had way too much stuff.

Once or twice on the way to our campsite we passed a circular boma, a small Masai compound encircled with a wooden fence. You could easily pick out the Masai people from a distance--clad in bright red or purple they were the most colourful thing in the land for miles around.

Dassies Everywhere at the Serengeti Visitors' Centre

Friday, September 2, 2005

At noon we had a pleasant stop at the Serengeti Visitors' centre.


There was a picnic area with thatched-grass umbrellas over tables and a kiosk that sold pricey instant coffee.

Several of our group descended like vultures on the coffee opportunity. It wasn't that we had no coffee on our little camping-trip, explained someone, it was that this was coffee served in a proper cup and saucer .

Ah yes, civilization. :)

At this centre there were peaceful wooden walkways which led through leafy glades, past informational displays of maps, stone-age artifacts, animal bones, and buttons you could press to listen to recorded animal sounds. Eventually the walkway led to a look-out point with a view of kopjes, and the many-armed euphorbia candelabrum trees .

The way was dotted with whimsical metal animal sculptures, and such things as a life-sized model of a termite mound which you could step inside to see how the inner passage-ways were formed. We've driven past a number of these mounds, but I'd never gotten either a close look or a decent photograph.

But my favourite memory, and the single-most prolific wildlife presence at this stop were the hyrax. They were everywhere. We'd caught quick glimpses of them on the savannah, sunning themselves on rocks and then dashing away. Here they were much less elusive.

Also known as dassies , these little animals were as bright-eyed, button-nosed and about as cute and tame as a wild animal can get.

Emma disagreed vehemently and pronounced them vermin, but I privately added them to the list of favourite animals encountered on this trip.

The dassies reminded me quite a bit of the furry little marmots of Vancouver Island fame, but in a strange twist of DNA evidence, their nearest living genetic relative is actually....the elephant .

Believe me, the relation is not obvious to the casual eye. It's got something to do with their teeth I believe.

Tree hyrax climbed in the branches over our head at our picnic spot and along the forest-walkway, while rock hyrax scampered among the boulders and peered at us from the porch foundations of the visitor centre itself. One of them crawled ever closer and closer to my camera as I sat on the ground watching it. Closer, closer, closer. There was no need for a zoom-lens in this wildlife encounter.

They seemed so oblivious to our human prescence that we even saw several occasions of a little dassie-on-dassie action. One pair were right in the middle of the path and we had to either wait politely for them to finish their amour or step over the little enthusiastic lovers.

Back at our lunch-spot by the truck, a little cloud of birds of several varieties descended on a spiny acacia shrub and began to peck for seeds almost at my feet. They were pretty to watch, and also very used to humans.

I read about this visitor centre before coming on this trip. It stuck in my mind because the author of the journal I read encountered a lion here. She and her boyfriend passed by a shrub along the path somewhere here on the grounds and a lion was behind it. Somehow the tale ends happily with the lion running off in one direction and the people in the other. She emphasized that no way would she have thought an animal as big as that could hide behind a little bush like that.

But no lion for us. Just birds, dassies, and a mongoose. Oh, and a big metal crocodile.