Tanzania Journal - Day 9:Lions as Role Models

Lion couple near Lake Nduto

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Running Log, 1/1/11 -- 25 minutes in and around Lake Nduto Tented Camp

In late December 2010 I traveled to Tanzania with my wife and son to visit my daughter, Joni, who had lived in and outside of Arusha in 2004 and 2007 and who, at the time we visited, was working in neighboring Zambia.

I started writing about the trip several months ago, and those earlier posts can be found under the "Tanzania" label. In my last post, I described my final run of 2010 -- a 25-minute jog around the campground where Joni had met lions three years earlier. Although that was the end of my "year of running dangerously," we were only halfway through our trip...

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After my final run of the year, I joined my family for dinner in an enclosed pavilion at the campground where we sat at metal tables and toasted the coming New Year with two bottles of wine. Rob had squirreled them away for the occasion, another one of his many thoughtful gestures. In spite of festive atmosphere, we had no real desire to stay up late, and instead retired early, falling asleep to the boisterous sounds of revelry from a group of German campers who continued to laugh and sing long into the night.

Waking up to the new year, we were, for once, not in a hurry to leave our camp site. We had another day of driving and game-watching ahead of us, as the plan called for us to work our way South to Lake Nduto, where we would have the luxury of staying at another tented camp.

My online sources tell me that the name "Serengeti" is taken from the Maasai word serengit, meaning endless plain. Entering the Serengeti Park from the North, we had not been aware of the breadth of the Serengeti. The terrain had instead seemed full of variation with rolling hills dotted with acacia and fever trees, and areas of low vegetation that provided habitats for a wide variety of wildlife. It was only when we left the Seronera and headed South that the real expanse of the plains opened up to us. The trees and low bush fell away, and the grassy plains stretched in every direction like an ocean.


Four of the roughly four million zebras we saw everywhere on the vast plains...

Here and there, the uniformity was broken by a large outcropping of granite called a kopje ("small head" in Afrikaans). In the Serengeti, kopjes rise out of the surrounding grasslands like islands, providing a distinctly different habitat that supports numerous birds and animals. For this reason, kopjes are a popular destination for the Safari vehicles. At one particularly magnificent kopje we were one of about a dozen Land Rovers parked to watch a leopard with her two cubs sunning themselves on a high shelf of rock.





Aside from the kopjes, the plains are home to hundreds of thousands of herbivores, huge herds of wildebeest and zebra, as well as smaller bands of Thomson gazelles and other migrants who feed on the short nutritious grass covering the land. These animals are part of the great East African migration, a seasonal movement of game over a 1200-mile route in search of water and nutrition.

At this point in our trip, we had begun to view the animals through the filter of our human values and to see them as representing human qualities. We had started identifying our favorites, and we all started taking sides in their endless everyday struggle for existence.

It was, for example, easy to root against the hyenas -- they seemed like gangs of thugs always slouching around plotting some new atrocity. Rob tried to put their behavior in context for us, but our prejudice got the better of us. So, too, it was easy to root for the elephants, those calm and imposing matriarchs and patriarchs surrounded by happy extended families, seemingly untroubled by our presence or the presence of predators.

I admit that at the beginning of the trip, I didn't have much respect for the wildebeest (or bearded gnu). Silly looking, I thought, and probably not too bright. But then I saw them running, single file in long dusty lines and I changed my mind. The wildebeest impressed me as the true endurance athletes of the Serengeti, running for days at a time with a steady distance-runner's gait, guided by the mysterious and crucial ability to find water in this dry land.



As for the lions, well, we all had different opinions about the lords of the Serengeti. Thanks to the skill of our guide, we had many opportunities to see lions "in action." Most of the time, this meant seeing them sleep. They sure did a lot of sleeping, at least while the sun was up. At Ngorongoro Crater a few days later, we would have our most impressive and bracing encounter with lions when three of them ambled slowly out of the grass and came straight toward our truck. It turned out that they only wanted to lie down in the shade of the row of Land Cruiser that had stopped by the side of the road.

And then there was the lion couple that we saw at Lake Nduto. When we first drove up, they were lying lazily on the ground, ignoring the gawkers and apparently doing nothing.



After a few minutes, the male rolled over, hauled himself to his feet, circled the female once and then mounted her. This sequence took about 30 seconds total, and did not appear to impress the female very much. In any case, both lions were soon snoozing again. Rob explained that this was typical and that it would go on all day, with the male waking up every 15 minutes, initiating copulation, and then going back to sleep.

My son -- who, by the way, had been growing a reddish, lion-like beard on the trip -- remarked that his search was over; he had found his role model.

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After a full day of wildlife viewing, we were ready to rest. We drove through a dry wilderness around Lake Nduto, a maze of scrub forest with dried-up watering holes and dust everywhere. We arrived at the Lake Nduto tented camp around 5 p.m. and were grateful to get out of the Land Rover and smell the familiar charcoal smell of cooking fires. We dumped our bags in the tents, and the others went to get drinks.

I had decided to run -- to start the year off with a run before breaking my streak, so I changed into shorts and running shoes and began my usual routine of circling the perimeter of the camp. It was very dusty, and the charcoal smoke burned my throat, but I was pretty happy to be running anyway. I felt good, and felt that after 372 days, I would appreciate a day off.


Running at Lake Nduto -- the final day of the streak

When I was done running, I prepared to shower. The large, apartment-like tents at Lake Nduto were constructed with an ingenious contraption for hoisting a bucket of hot water up on a pole and then connecting it via a PVC pipe to a shower head that sprayed water down into a small shower stall within the tent. "Preparing to shower" meant telling the camp personnel in charge of heating up water, to bring a bucket to the tent and raise it up into position. Not for the first time, I felt a little uncomfortable to be the recipient of such lavish personal service, but I did enjoy my hot shower very much.

NEXT: Olduvai Gorge, Ngorongoro Crater