Wednesday, June 5 and Thursday, June 6

Ruaha National Park, Tanzania:  Msembe Bandas

    We left Iringa in the morning and made the two hour trip on rough road to Ruaha.  On the road out, we saw baboons and both lesser and greater kudus, large members of the antelope family, which jumped right across the road.

    When we arrived in Ruaha, we finally felt like we were really on safari, which we learned was the Swahili word for journey.  We stopped by the park entrance to fill out paper work and pay park fees, and took a lunch break (delicious pressed sandwiches and samosas) in a gazebo overlooking the Great Ruaha River where we spotted a couple of crocodiles lounging in the river and saw an African fish eagle flying overhead.

    After lunch, we head to our camp, which is located  on the opposite bank downriver a few miles.  The camp is very close to the area where park employees live, and we're amazed at the number of people who live in the park full-time.  There's an elementary school with fifty or sixty students; a social hall with a television, ping pong tables, and a small canteen; and a well-used soccer pitch, where animals frequently come to watch the matches.  While there are quite a few people living in the park, there are not many tourists at all.  The park is 13,000 square kilometers, and when we went for game drives, we did not see one other vehicle.

    We settled into our banda (hut), and then headed down to a small gazebo on the river bank to relax until we were ready to head out for our first game drive.  The afternoons are so hot that all of the animals seek shade or sleep, so we did the same and waited until late in the afternoon to go out.  While sitting at the river, we spotted a number of birds.  Some we could identify from our book -- the pied kingfisher, the glossy starling,  and the redbilled hornbill -- but most of them we couldn't, and we entertained ourselves by playing amateur ornithologist all afternoon and giving them names.  The most beautiful was the blue-backed-red-breasted-long-billed-fish-eater.

     While Randy had been on safari once before (in Malawi and Zambia), this was my first real game drive, and it did not disappoint.  (In fact, Randy saw more animals in two days here than he did in his previous safari.)  As we drove away from the campsite, we saw zebras, giraffes, elephants, cape buffalo, warthogs, and jackals.  We also saw a wide variety of antelope including impala, dik dik, waterbuck, and eland.  We saw some more birds, including vultures, guinea fowl, and woodpeckers. 

Click here to see more photos from Ruaha.

    But the highlight of the game drive was watching lions mate.  Yussuf had a sixth sense for spotting animals, and somehow knew that we needed to get off the road, drive through the bush and perch our vehicle close to the edge of a cliff, so we'd be able to see the lions on the riverbank below.  There's a male and a female directly below us, and three more females further down the bank.  As we sit there, the pair directly below us begin to mate.  The male climbs on top; less than 30 seconds later, he roars Xð, bites the female on the back of the neck, climbs off, and looks up at us; the female then roars and rolls over on her back with all four paws in the air; they then both curl up for a short nap.  Less than ten minutes later, they're at it again, with the exact same sequence.  We sat there for 30 or 40 minutes and watched them mate five or six times.  According to Yussuf, they will continue at that pace for ten to twelve days, not stopping for anything – even to eat.

    Back at the camp, we found that there was only one other group -- some Germans -- staying there.  Yussuf and Mr. Mosha prepared some beef stew and pasta for dinner, after which we went directly to bed.  We were starting to get into the African rhythm of rising with the sun and going to bed with the sun.  (Or at least we were starting to get used to going to bed with the sun; we were still having some trouble rising with the sun.) 

    Yussuf had told us that the hippos will come out of the river at night to graze.  They travel about 200 kilometers per night before returning to the river at sunrise.  He had also told us that hippos are the most dangerous of all the wild animals because they will charge and, weighing two tons, can flatten a human being.  Knowing of all this, when I woke up in the middle of the night to pee, and heard a lot of snuffling Xðoutside the banda, I realized I would have to hold it until the morning, and made an important note to myself: nothing to drink after dinner on safari.

 Swahili word of the day:  Simba (it really does mean lion)

    The next morning, we got up for an early morning game drive.  After about an hour and a half, we hadn't seen much more than what we'd seen the previous evening.  Just a few more members of the antelope family:  the oryx and the Thompson gazelle.  By this time we were already starting to get safari fatigue:  "Yeah, sure, zebras, giraffes, whatever.  Seen one impala, you've seen them all.  Where are the big cats?" 

    Just as we were about to give up and go back to camp, Yussuf spotted, really almost practically smelled, cheetahs.  He was hurriedly directing Mr. Mosha and pointing kind of frantically, but we couldn't see a thing.  All of a sudden, we came upon a large watering hole.  Two cheetahs were drinking at the hole with a herd of zebra and some antelopes near by. A group of jackals approached and parked themselves between the zebras and the cheetahs. One jackal started barking at the top of his lungs until a group of about 10 to 12 baboons arrived.  At that point, the cheetahs took off, chased by the jackals and the baboons. Apparently, the baboons will kill the cheetahs because the leopards eat the baboon babies and the baboons can’t tell a cheetah from a leopard, and, for whatever reason, the jackals are allied with the baboons.  The tension during this scene was palpable, and the animosity among the animals was obvious.  I was surprised to learn that animals will kill each other out of hatred, not just for food or in self-defense.  We felt like we were in an episode of  Wild Kingdom and half-expected Marlin Perkins to come wandering out of the bush, microphone in hand.

    We went back to camp, and while waiting for breakfast, Randy and I stood by the river watching the hippos.  All of a sudden, a very large hippo came running out of the water and up the bank.  I took off running, and screaming mostly likely, while Randy stood there watching it.  While I may have looked like an idiot, I still maintain that running was the right thing to do under the circumstances.

     After a nap and some more time relaxing in the gazebo, we went out for a walking safari.  In accordance with the park regulations, we took a rifle-carrying ranger with us.   We drove back to the park entrance where Mr. Mosha dropped us off and said he'd see us back at camp.  He wasn't kidding.  We walked along the riverbank and saw loads of hippos and crocs in the river, fish eagles in the air, and zebra and buffalo not too far off in the distance.  As we were walking, we saw one hippo come up out the river.  Since we could not see where it had gone, the ranger had us wait behind while he scouted around, rifle ready, to make sure that it was out of range.  While at first I had been very concerned that the ranger might have to kill, or at least wound, an animal, by now I was very glad that he and his gun were with us.

Copyright © Mimi Samuel 2002
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