For those who don't know, I have a minor obsession with the rhinoceros and from our back porch I can see the Ngorongoro Crater, which is full of them. For weeks I've stared at it's rim over morning tea and evening beers. Naturally, I needed to look inside.
Tourism in Tanzania is very expensive. It costs fifty bucks a person to get into a park, two hundred bucks to get a vehicle into the park, and then you need to hire a guide at going rate, and when all is said and done you need to tip the guide. But a friend of a friend knows a ranger, just “tell the park guards that you are from the ecological society.” We also signed a document stating we were East African residents, the text of which we only discovered later.
This didn't save us much, but as a ranger's guest, it bought us the right to go off road. So when we saw a huge male lion wander off into the brush we were able to run our little Land Rover right in after him. My door, coincidentally didn't really shut and rattled delicately on its hinge. It also bought me the freedom, provided no one was looking, to get out and take pictures, but though he looked well fed, I stayed in the vehicle to see the lion.
If you can imagine Crater Lake, the Ngorongoro is bigger, warmer, and with a lot less water. It's sparsely forested in spots, but otherwise flat enough and big enough to host the 2010 World Cup, all games played simultaneously.
Along with three of the other big five, we saw eight rhinos scattered thru the park. The black rhinos are endangered so we gave them respectable space. “That's M7, male seven over there. His mother is F7, female seven, off in the distance.” My pleasure at seeing those magnificent and peacefully grazing tanks is beyond my ability to articulate. But as we stayed and watched I chose to think of them informally as Roslyn and Jeremy, though I kept that to myself.
I'd taken to riding in the Land Rover with the tanzanian staff. It started on the second day in order to beat the mobile clinic to the village and capture video of it's arrival, but from that moment on I kept my spot in the car. I preferred the intoxicating laughter as the staff amused themselves in rapid fire kiswahili. I didn't understand a lick of it, but Amiri translated bits and entertained me in english as well. I spent the mornings strolling the village before work began, occasionally raising my camera or greeting the locals.
I've been to some pretty remote spots, but this was exceptional. Roads forged simply by driving the terrain. Tracks led off in multiple directions as we tried to ascertain the paths of least resistance. It was afternoon and I'd been invited to do a home visit for a patient unable to walk the return trip. Turn right at the shrubs here, go thru the break in the fence there, there were six of us, including two men that weren't among the one hundred selected for treatment that day. Their knowledge was our map and on the return, they wanted to take me to maji moto, a small bubbling natural hot spring in the middle of a vast flat salt plain, surrounded by joshua tree-like mounds of granite in the distance.
The following day, one of the men returned to the clinic and was admitted. I greeted him in the morning and took his portrait. That afternoon I greeted him again, this time welcoming him to the lab, Darlenes signature flowing across his lab slip. I prepared a slide for malaria and test tube for brucella as she prescribed. In the corner of the lab, a makeshift studio forms and I snap portraits and the drama troup drums in the background, surrounded in dance. Educational slideshows, talks and skits entertain, as do their brief encounter with their own images on my camera. Well beyond electricity, this landscape is one where firewood is precious and living is hard, but the spirit is strong and I sincerely hope that every one of these strong faces can know the feeling of good health.
