One dawn I rode a dizzy-pitched, rut-ulcerated switchback road into the crater. Maasai boys were leading a hundred cattle down to a salt lick. The young herdsmen were dressed in pairs of plaid blankets, with one worn as kilt and the other as toga. Beadwork swung at their necks and dangled from the piercings at the tops and bottoms of their ears. Each carried a long stick with the war-lance aplomb young boys give to long sticks. The air was clean and sharp. The clear sky was just beginning to light up. The cowbells plinked like a half-audible cheery tune. There are probably worse things to be than a Maasai boy taking cattle into the Ngorongoro Crater at dawn. Although the usual Maasai diet of curdled milk and cow’s blood wouldn’t provide enough roughage for an American my age. There is an all-day, all-night rush hour of animals in Tanzania: Cape buffalo jam, zebra lock, and wildebeest backup. Thomson’s gazelles bound about with a suspicious black swipe on their sides—enough like the Nike trademark to raise questions about sponsorship. Warthogs scuttle with their tails up straight in the air, endlessly acknowledging some foul in the game of hogball. Hyenas are all over the place, nonchalant but shifty, in little groups meandering not quite aimlessly—greasers at the mall. Hippos lie in the water holes in piles, snoring, stinking, sleeping all day. The correct translation for the Greek word “hippopotamus” is not “river horse” but “river first husband.” And lions doze where they like, waking up every day or two to do that famous ecological favor of culling the weak, old, and sick. (Do lions ever debate the merits of weak versus old versus sick? “Call me oversophisticated, but I think the sick wildebeest have a certain piquancy, like a ripe cheese.”) The nation of Tanzania might seem to be a Beulah Land—if you stick to the parks and the game preserves, and get back in your hotel by sunset. It can be done. I have a fatuous article from the March 2, 1997, Sunday New York Times travel section in which some publishing-industry pooh-bah tells how he and his wife flew in chartered planes to the Ngorongoro and the Serengeti, “and returned dazed by the wealth of wildlife and the vastness of the terrain.” But, putting the tourist daze aside, Tanzania is a truly poor country. I arrived at Kilimanjaro Airport, near that mountain but not much else. It was evening, time for the overseas flights to land, and mine had, and that was it. The airport is one of those grand, 1970s reinforced-concrete foreign-aid projects now going
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