Simba at Mikumi
One eagerly anticipated highlight of the Peace Corps Training schedule
is designated in our syllabus as “Trainee Directed Activity”, covering 2 days
of our 5th weekend in country.
This is about ½ way through the course.
Since arrival, we have been going to school at least 6 days a week, from
8:00 am to 5:00 pm or thereabouts.
Sundays are for Time with Host Families, but in reality we do our
laundry, call home, go downtown to bars to drink beer.
The “Trainee Directed Activity” is traditional; every year the Trainee
group does the same thing. We go out of
town, overnight, as a group, on a completely unchaparoned safari to Mikumi
National Game Park about 2 hours south west of Morogoro. This year the group leader was a quiet and
intelligent young woman who handled all the details; dala dala’s to take us there, reservations at
a small hotel just outside the park, tickets to the park itself. She did a great job, and it looked at first
like a lot of work for her, but she was aided by our Training Co-coordinator,
who told her what other groups have done in the past, and supplied her with
names, references and telephone numbers.
We would bus over, have lunch and go out into the park on the same
buses, then come back for dinner and to spend the night. We were promised simple accommodations with
mosquito nets, fans and hot water. The whole thing cost about 90,000
T-shillings, or less than $60.00.
Out of town! Two days off in a
row!! Wild animals!!! Whoo hoo! I was
unprepared, although then not too surprised, to learn that a majority in the
group under 40 looked forward to getting drunk as early in the outing as
possible and staying that way for the duration.
I saw 1 young man’s backpack before we loaded up on Saturday
morning: a pair of clean under wear, a
clean T-shirt, and 2 liters of booze. As
a mom, I hope he had his toothbrush packed in there out of sight. I also hope he was preparing to share. I was
as ready for a break as anybody, and looked forward to seeing actual wild
animals in Africa, as opposed to chickens, goats, cows and the ugliest dogs
imaginable. I just didn’t automatically
assume that it would involve inebriation.
I am such an old fogey.
It was a ton of fun though. We
went in dala dala’s, small busses of about 25 passengers each. After the town rides, which involve maybe
twice that many people on the dala’s, these relatively large, newer, and clean
busses, all to ourselves, seemed luxurious.
We traveled away from the mountain and out onto a flat, tree-strewn
plain. After only 30 or so miles away
from Uluguru, it was drier and dustier, and the red dirt of Morogoro gave way
to brown. Occasionally we would see a
baobab tree, like the plane trees, typical of Africa: huge, fat –looking trunk and spindly, leafless
branches. It is a nightmare tree out of
a Tim Burton movie, a child’s drawing of a misshapen creature-tree, it always
grows alone, and makes the eye uneasy.
We had to cross over Mikumi to
get to the hotel and check in before going out to see our animals. There is a major road thru the park that
leads to Iringa, a capital of the mountainous region of the south. The park officials protect their
stock-in-trade from being slaughtered on the road by having it be 50 kilometers
of gravel punctuated by speed bumps at about every 50 meters. So you make a slow, dusty progress, with the
drivers still trying to make the best time possible while sparing their
suspensions, jockeying for the best cross-over of the bumps, which sometimes
puts you on a collision course with a semi coming the other way. There is lots of traffic. I was surprised by the number of safi busses, Land Rovers, and modern
looking semi’s hauling materials.
And yes, we saw wild animals.
That first morning we saw zebra, hartebeest, baboons and twiga: giraffes.
It caused a tremendous amount of excitement, people in my bus were
careening from one side of the aisle to the other to get a view, and take
pictures.
The hotel, which was called the Genesis, had a lovely courtyard covered
by a bower of bougainvillea, and the rooms were airy, clean and had in-suite
baths with toilets and separate showers! The Hilton couldn’t have been more welcoming
or appreciated. We ate lunch with really
cold beer and then set out for the interior of the park.
I wouldn’t say that Mikumi is a pretty place. Especially after the red clay hillsides,
coconut groves and banana trees of Morogoro, it seemed bare, and flat. Very Texas-like. A lot
of the grass had recently been burned-over.
Since there are no houses or other structures in the park, it was hard to
tell if it had been done on purpose. The
trees were dry land types, shrubby acacia and plane trees. It looked droughty to me. We were first driven out to a tank in which
resided 5 or 6 shy hippopotamuses. They
stayed in the middle of the pond, huffing and diving and trying not to make
eye-contact. We then sort of drove
around aimlessly, although we did see a small family of elephants grazing away
by the side of the road. We saw more
twiga and zebra, more hartebeest and baboons.
A lot of people were drinking. My
seatmate, a charming young woman from Long Beach, had a bottle of Konyagi, the
local flavored grain beverage. It tasted
like Triple Sec, only less sweet and viscous.
She shared quite a bit of it with me.
Some people were already obviously drunk. It was fun, not hot at all, a nice way to
spend the afternoon.
As the sun set we crossed the highway to try to bag our last major
unsighted wild animal: Simba. We had been told that lions are not regularly
seen in the park, although they do reside there and eat the zebra and
hartebeest. Our two busses drove quite a
ways in to the bush and stopped at a clearing.
We were not allowed to get off, and it was dusk. No Simba, not even a little roar.
Africa is black at night. Some
people took off for town to try to eat somewhere else than the hotel. I elected to stay put and had dinner in the
dark, lovely, cool courtyard, but after my second glass of wine I had to turn
myself in and go to bed. It is a sign of my advanced years that I can pretty quickly
be struck drunk; that’s why I don’t usually drink as much as I did that day. It
couldn’t have been more than 8:30 pm. I
was filthy dirty but didn’t take a shower, just put on my night gown and threw
myself under the mosquito net. I slept
for a couple of hours and then gradually became aware that people were enjoying
themselves quite a bit outside my room.
I think the party was pretty much indoors by 3:00 am. Some stories just don’t need to be told,
especially if they are related to me the next morning over chai. I don’t deserve
to tell them. But I think it’s safe to
say that everybody blew off a head of steam.
Perhaps some special friendships were kindled. That will be part of the continuing journey
that is Peace Corps.
When I got home I almost cried.
Mama had changed my sheets and done some laundry for me. I did some more, my clothes from Mikumi were
truly filthy; they probably should be washed twice. The first thing Flora asked me was did we see
Simba. When I told her no, she seemed
disappointed. Later, at dinner, I told
her I thought that the park seemed dry, maybe it was a drought, or the
fire. She nodded wisely. “I think it is because no Simba,” she said.
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