Lake Manyara, at long last

Let me think…  Where did I leave off?

Did I tell you about the stars?  Oh.  My.  God.  The stars.  On the night before the day we went down into the crater we saw stars like you don’t ever see stars.  If I mentioned them before they bear repeating.  The whole sky half-glowed with them.  I can’t forget those stars.

After the crater we went to Lake Manyara.  Lake Manyara is a small park whose area consists almost entirely of the lake itself.  At the lakeside we saw giraffes coming to drink. The way a giraffe drinks is very humorous.  He has to spread his legs out slowly, one by one, walking himself down into a splayed posture and then dip his long neck to reach the water.  They are clearly designed for tree-top browsing rather than drinking water.

I felt embarrassed on their behalf to watch them in such awkward moments, as if I’d come across them sitting on the toilet.  When they’re walking, running, and browsing they’re quite graceful animals.  Far more graceful and natural than you might have expected from seeing them only in zoos and pictures.

I started trying to compete with our driver, Selemani, in spotting animals- to the best of my ability, anyway, because he was amazingly keen sighted. I scanned the landscape around the lake intently, trying to see something- anything- before he saw it.  The crater was a vast wide plain, but Lake Manyara is more forested.  I kept looking as deep into the woods as possible, trying to catch sight of a lion, an elephant, or a monkey.

Monkeys we saw plenty of.  Big troops ofbaboons with large male monkeys and females with tiny babies clinging to their stomachs or slightly older ones perched on their backs.  We also saw pair after pair of tiny dik dik, which are antelope of about the size of a toy dog, just tiny delicate sweet little things.  They’re very vulnerable to predators and so they tend to hang out by the roadside which offers some protection.

Selemani had promised elephants, but by the time we’d stopped for lunch we’d begin to think we might not get to see them that day.  Then on one of the winding and heavily forested patches of road I spotted four half-hidden by the brush, which Salemeni had driven past unseeing.

I said, “Stop! Go back!” and there was some conversation as about what sort of stumps or tree branches I might have seen- until the others saw they really were elephants, and they were huge, and wonderful.  A mother with baby and two other medium sized children.  Se got to see them feeding and even caught the baby nursing from its mother.

“Good spotting,” Salemeni said.  I was all kinds of proud of myself for spotting it.  This incident may have begat the myth, often repeated by my mother, that I was particularly good at spotting animals.  It wasn’t true though, not really.  The elephants were huge and I just happened to be looking in the right direction as we passed them.  But you cannot tell this to my mother.  She loves me and believes that I have super-powers.

After that we saw even more elephants.  There was another group of five or six in an open area who took turns bathing in a mud hole, and after them we saw another two or three in a wooded area where I took a close up of a big one’s head as it grabbed a branch to feed itself.  

At one point my mother asked our driver, mock seriously, “Salemeni, there’s just one thing I can’t quite figure out.  Why did human beings ever leave Africa?”  I think he liked us.  He surprised us by bringing box lunches and staying in the part until mid afternoon, despite the plan which called for no lunches and being back in Arrusha by 2pm.

If you ever go to Africa, Bushbuck Tours is highly recommended.  We stayed in great hotels, planned our own itinerary, and this last thing was only one of several times we felt they went above and beyond to make the trip as close to perfect as it could be.

Gone again? But you just came home!

My family tradition is to spend the Fourth of July in Ellsworth Maine, and so that’s where I’m going.  When I return I’ll try to pick up where I left off if anyone’s still interested in my trip by that time.

The Crater

After Olduvai we spent the night at the Sopa Lodge on the rim of the collapsed volcanic caldera called Ngorongoro.  After our dinner we walked outside on the path back to our room and the whole sky was filled with stars, stars like you never see them back at home.  I wanted to cry, seeing the sky like that, because it’s so damn beautiful and because we have deprived ourselves of seeing it except in special, foreign places.

The next day was the crater.  I think that you could probably set out for the Ngorongoro Crater expecting phoenixes or dragons and still not manage to be disappointed when you got there.  The crater is magic.  If anyplace is magic, that place is.  You get down in the heart of it and you’ve been seeing wildlife the whole time in ones or twos and far off groups but all of a sudden you look around you and it’s like nothing you’ve ever imagined.

There’s the group of twenty zebras right in front of you, the ones you’ve stopped to look at.  But then behind you there’s more zebras, mixed in with two different types of antelope.  You keep looking further out in every direction and you’re not looking at any individual animal at all because you’re counting groups- there’s fiftywildebeest, fifteen Thompson’s gazelles, then a mixture to their left of Grant’s gazelle and wildebeest ad buffalo, more zebras over here, even more zebras behind the other zebras, a group ofimpala, an eland, flamingos wading in the water, little clusters of dots which you need your binoculars to tell are wildebeest or zebras or gazelles and every where you look you see more and more clusters.  Then as you’re taking in the sheer wonder and spectacle of this your guide points out a lone hyena, making its way across the open patch between two sets of wildebeest.

The lions were practically an anticlimax.  The first thing we saw was the remote far-off grouping of four-wheel vehicles, all stopped to let our fellow tourists peer out at them through their binoculars and camera lenses.  We added our rover to the cluster and onlyafter joining did we see the lions.  There were five or six in total, two males with huge manes and three or four large females.  They were on both sides of the road, two males and a female or two on our right and two more lionesses on the left.  After a short time one of the lionesses finished drinking and came to lay down in the shade of one of the vehicles.  The female tourist in the chosen vehicle was unfortunately obnoxious.  As in, she tried to feed the lioness banana bread.  The lioness seemed about as unimpressed by this as I was.

Then we also saw hippos.  Just so you know, hippos are one of my favorite animal alonside polar bears.  I like both of them for the same reason, namely that they are fat and goofy/cute/harmless looking while also being two of the most deadly animals on the planet.  I mentioned to my mom that I feel a sort of kinship with them for that reason, but she didn’t like to hear that.  My weight is still a touchy subject.

At first our hippos looked like inert grey oblongs laying in a shallow puddle.  We stopped to watch them for a while even though they weren’t doing anything and for this we were rewarded by a sight of one of the hippos rolling over, showing us his belly.  His four feet waved in the air, and on those feet we saw his chubby toes waggling as he rolled on his back  from one side to the other side and back again.  He did it many times, but whether he was scratching an itch or coating himself with mud or just luxuriating in his lovely mud hole I couldn’t tell you.

We saw more animals than I can even tell you.  We saw two crested cranes with a tiny young one we barely glimpsed between the cattails.  We saw flamingos, ostriches, vultures, and secretary birds.  We saw warthogs and jackals and giraffes, and from a distance we saw what our guide called “retired” elephants, big stately older males crossing the open grassland.  There were more hippos when we stopped for lunch, submerged entirely with just their ears and noses surfacing once in a while.  Then on the way out we even found one the rare, endangered, black rhinos.  The one we saw was quite a ways away and standing still so all we really saw was a dark oval patch against the pale green vegetative background… but I have it on good authority (namely, our guide’s) that it was in fact an actual black rhino.

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We Came from Here

At 6:30 in the morning we left Arusha with our driver and headed for Olduvai Gorge, site of the Leakey excavations which uncovered some of the most famous early hominid ancestor skeletons.

We all came from here, I kept thinking as I looked out the windows into Tanzania.  It was warm and green.  Pastoralists in traditional costume drove cows and sheep and goats across dark red dirt roads and along dark red dirt pathways to pasture.  Women walked in ones and twos with plastic pails for water on their heads.  Nobody hurried but most everyone was working, even the small children who we saw drive goats with sticks as tall as they were.  In my mind’s-eye I’d see the car stop, I’d feel myself slide off the high Range Rover seats onto the earth, take up a water pail, and disappear into this ancient incarnation of humanity.

Go back a little ways- barely a thread’s length across the timeline of life on this planet- and all of us were herders or subsistence farmers.  Go back further and we’re uniformly tribal hunters and gatherers- but don’t go too far or you’ll find yourself in Olduvai along with Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, or Australopithecus.  The gorge isn’t much to look at and the museum is even less.  The whole place can’t even really be called special, except by happenstance.  The right conditions, geologically speaking, to bring our ancestors to us- forward through time, in pieces.

Not very far from there, in a place they don’t let tourists go, are footprints.  The footprints of a place called Laetoli.  You’ve heard of them.  They show where a man, a woman, and another man (perhaps a juvenile), crossed upright over a field of soft volcanic ash more than 100,000 years ago.  If you think geologically what strikes you is not what a long time span this is, but what a tiny one.  If you start thinking cosmologically it makes it even worse.  An eyeblink’s eyeblink, that’s as much as separates we homo sapience from these australopithecines.

Small wonder that some people balk at this reality and through an act of will (their own, or God’s) seek to put humans safely outside the reach of natural selection.  The mind refuses to contain the truth about its own significance.  We try to hold it for a moment and then it slips and distorts and becomes gossip about Louis and Mary Leakey’s marriage.  Did Louis Leakey have a thing with Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey?  Because it matters, right?  Please, tell me that these human dramas matter.

We are this:

(not our picture)

We are this:

We are this:

Looked at from far enough away in space or history it gets harder to make out all the smaller details.

Arrival in Arusha

Some part of me has always doubted places like Africa or India or China actually exist.  I even made up stories in my head about it.  For instance, all of us could be inside a spaceship travelling through interstellar space for generations, and the only way to keep us sane was to create a fiction that we lived on a planet with billions of other people. I figured there were only about two or three hundred of us, really.

If you had asked me honestly if I believed that places in the world I’d never seen were real I would have said I did- I knew the stories I’d made up were only stories, obviously. But, still.  Now I’ve gone and come back I think I took them more seriously than I realized.  While I was there it didn’t hit me quite so hard, it’s only now I’m back I’ve got almost a time-delayed culture shock. I’m having trouble accepting that my home town and Africa really are both part of one real, objective, physical universe.  It’s just so different there and in a way Africa almost seems realer and more solid than my home town does.  Our lives consist so much of things like internet, television, and cell phones- it’s as if they’re really embodied over there in Africa, and we’re something like ghosts or spirits in comparison.

Trying to hold that place in my head surrounded by so much familiarity takes effort.

“I Voted!” Special Edition

Today I became one of the very few voters who came out for the primary to decide the one D and one R who will go up against each other in the special election for the Massachusetts senate seat left vacant by the late Ted Kennedy.  Turnout was slim but against my better judgement I braved the hidden cameras and other monitoring equipment put in place by the Authorities and cast a vote for Alan Khazei.  This despite the fact that I know as well as anyone that elections are a sham and candidates are grown in vats and upgraded with identical decision-making software once elected.

Why did I do it?  Well, there’s no way to keep tabs on the Authorities unless you’re willing to go where they are, see what they see, and do what they dearly hope you won’t do which is voting.  Yes, that’s right, I voted so you my loyal conspiratorial readers, never have to.

As a Theoretical Conspiratorialist the first question I had to ask myself in deciding who to cast my vote for was what would be the most inconspicuous choice in the eyes of the Authorities watching my every movement in the voting booth?  The most obvious choice was Coakley, front runner and the choice of the Enviro/feminist cabal which has control over most of my home state of Massachusetts.  For a left of center lesbian Coakley was the obvious candidate.  Or was she?

I went with Khazei because I also have a history, no doubt well known by the Authorities, of voting for third party candidates.  I have been hoping to establish a clear record of harmlessly insane yet well meaning leftism in it’s most passive and non-threatening of aspects.  Not for me your sign waving or chaining myself to things!  No fear!  Even tree-hugging I find uncomfortable and prickly!

But voting for leftist candidates without a donkey’s chance in Paraguay, that’s more my style.  Also, I like the feeling of voting for somebody who doesn’t have a chance.  You have to think that when a candidate like that looks at his votes every single one he gets feels that much more dear, more personal.  To a winner you’re just one of the adoring crowd.  To a second-placer it’s even worse- the only one’s he cares about are the ones that got away.  But to the candidate without a chance in hell who only gets a couple thousand votes or so, every little vote is precious.  It’s like a little hug which says “Don’t worry, guy.  At least a couple people loved you.”

So that was my reasoning. Crazy?  Yes.  Unhinged and disconnected from political reality?  Certainly.  But what else would you expect from the mind that brings you 3 News Stories and a Conspiracy Theory?

MIT Loves Balloons, MA Senate Race the Rise of Evo Morales

In returning to my hunt for conspiracies I started in my home city of Boston in Story One, with MIT’s successful completion of a DARPA sponsored mission to locate 10 red balloons.

Not wanting to leave the safe womb of my home state I chose Story Two about the Massachusetts senate race where Attorney General Martha Coakley is leading in the polls.

Then having regained my confidence I moved from Massachusetts directly to Bolivia in Story Three where leftist president Evo Morales is imposing the dreaded S-word on a grateful and poverty stricken population.  That’s right folks, he’s a socialist.  Not the fake kind of socialist spit out between the spittle choked teeth of a right wing nut-job, either.  An actual socialist.

*if all that sounded like a relatively straightforward summary of three news unrelated news stories just wait.  Below the jump it goes all wacky*

Evo Morales is inhabited and operated entirely by insects.

Come on.  Don’t you think there’s something a little fishy about that guy?  The way he began as a poor indigenous farmer in Bolivia and rose to power on a platform of communitarianism?  The fact that he comes from Bolivia which has as it’s primary distinguishing characteristic a proximity to Paraguay?  I think we can confirm right now that the Insect Queen of Paraguay has successfully managed a takeover of Bolivia.  That’s right, the Insect Queens now control Bolivia, Paraguay, and Madagascar.

Where this menace will expand next is obvious.  The Insect Queens have their sights set on the continent of North America.  Socialism, long thought a human political philosophy, is clearly an invention of those most communistic of insects, ants.  Think of socialist philosophy as the thin end of the wedge for global domination by the Insect Queens.

Martha Coakley is almost certainly a puppet of the Insect Queens as well.  How do I know?  Well, she’s a woman.  And she’s from Massachusetts.  SOCIALIST!  Next?

Who will stop this tide of reddening redness from Bolivia?  Well, probably, DARPA aided and abetted by MIT if I’m any judge of the forces and counter forces secretly controlling all our lives (and I think I am).  In what is possibly a case of the cure being worse than the disease the Authorities are experimenting with “social networking” as a way of defending themselves against the social insects of the Insect Queendoms.  Will we be turned into a hive mind in order to save ourselves from being turned into a hive mind?  Gosh, I hope so.

Kidnapped by Dwarves

I am writing this quickly, as I do not have much time.  I have been kidnapped by a dwarf suicide bomber who is demanding that I spend all my spare writing time finishing her short story.  She is likely not to let me return to you until this Saturday, when for better or for worse I need to have finished that piece.

Hope not to make a habit of this, but the blog is a side project and really should come second when I have actual work to do.  Just try and hold on til Saturday, all you conspiracy mongerers.

89 year old Nazi on Trial, Blogs Under Attack, and Super Earths

Is it ever too late to seek justice for one of the perpetrators of the greatest crime in recent history?  Story One, about the trial of a sickly 89 year old former Nazi says no and scolds you for even asking the question.

Story Two is about blogs.  Apparently, some far more successful blogs than this one can wheedle free crap out of marketing departments and now the feds are trying to force them to disclose that before rhapsodizing about whatever diaper brand keeps their smelly brats in Huggies.  Er, I mean Luvs.  Natural Choice?

Saving the best for last, there’s Story Three which posits the existence of gigantic “Super Earths,” planets where life has a way easier time of it than in our decidedly non-super variety.

*The views expressed below are for humorous purposes only and not intended to be taken seriously by paranoid schizophrenics or other conspiracy-minded individuals.  Although I do get all my diapers provided free of charge by Pampers*

Scary Skunky Weed, Ludicrous Nuclear Waste Disposal, Gays Invade America

Today starts out with a story about a dangerous drug which may lead users to psychosis.  No, I’m not kidding, and no, this isn’t the 1950s but  Story One comes from the bbc and warns of the dangers of, you guessed it, particularly strong Marijuana which someone told the beeb is known as “skunk”.  Sure it is, fellas.  Skunk.  Highly dangerous “skunk” Marijuana, far more dangerous than the kind you remember smoking way back in the day.  Yeah, that’s the ticket!

Story Two shows that at least the Brits have their priorities straight.  They can’t figure out a safe place to put their nuclear waste but they’re right on top of this nasty “skunk” marijuana problem.

Then at last I returned to a decent, godfearing sort of country with Story Three about how large numbers of gay asylum seekers are coming to this country to stop us from being so decent and godfearing already.

*be advised that the factual content of items below this line is functionally zero*