Talking Animals

African Safari, part 3:

For a pre-negotiated price (we “tipped” about 12 bucks per person, and Helfer said he separately paid an additional fee) we were treated to demonstrations of the village’s men and women--clad in the vibrant red garb particular to Maasai-- singing and dancing, as well as starting a fire with sticks and cow dung, a general lecture and Q&A session, a peek inside one of the huts. This all culminated in being deposited in their market area, where we had ample, aggressively-presented opportunities to buy jewelry, carvings and curios.

Then it was time for more international travel. We drove to the Kenya- Tanzania border and crossed over, where our first order of business seemed to be lunch at Mezze Luna, an Italian restaurant in Arusha Helfer had been gushing about for months.

Improbably, it lived up to every last morsel of hype. Terrific. Nearby, we also spent some shopping time at a high-end emporium, The Cultural Heritage Center, where we bought carvings, batiks, clothing, jewelry (some of us bought Tanzanite) and other souvenir or gifts.

Afterwards, we made our way to an airstrip, boarded a tiny 20-seat airplane and took off into an increasingly ugly storm that made it increasingly hard not to think about the final flight of the Big Bopper.

Not to worry. We landed safely and almost immediately we were traversing the famous Serengeti National Park. Truth be told, our time exploring the Serengeti was a tad disappointing in the animal-viewing department. Just prior to our arrival, there had been some atypical, late-in-the- season rainfall and the upshot of this unexpected sprinkling was that it made the grass taller--further concealing some of the cats and others animals we were specifically seeking--and washing out some of the roads that would’ve otherwise provided access to prime wildlife-watching spots.

But what a difference a day (or so) makes. Our next stop would be the Ngorongoro crater. We’d barely started our lengthy drive--you do a lot of driving on a trip like this--from the Serengeti when we spotted a snoozing lion couple, taking a siesta between rounds of mating. Not long after that, we found ourselves beholding the sensational sight of a leopard stretched out on a big, horizontal limb of a big, tall tree.

The rest of the long drive was similarly dotted with cool or unusual sights, ranging from a lone hippo standing briefly in the middle of the road to the surreal spectacle of roughly zillions of wildebeest, often with zebra escorts, traveling in absurdly orderly fashion--at times, damn near single file-- as part of the fabled annual migration familiar to many through assorted Africa guides and books, TV documentaries and, of course, “The Lion King.”

There were also one significant stop--and experience--en route that must be addressed before we get into the various delights of the Ngorongoro Crater. We arrived at the Olduvai (also sometimes spelled Oldavi, though the original word is actually, Oldupai)

Gorge, piled into four-wheel drive vehicles, and headed down into the Gorge for an outing to Shifting Sands, a formation of electromagnetic ash that-- as the name suggests--ever-so-slighly changes location while maintaining its identical shape. It’s also a spiritual and ceremonial ground for the Maasai, and, as such, it would be quite rare for a fistful of tourists to be allowed to visit Shifting Sands without some sort of government-issued permit.

But Helfer is a longtime panjandrum in East Africa, and this type of unusual access is but one example of the perks one enjoys when traveling with him. In this case, after describing the Sands’ healing properties that he’s personally witnessed (including a woman with fairly advanced cancer who’s not only still alive but cancer- free), he led the group through the meditation exercise that achieved that kind of result. I gotta confess that neither my sister nor I felt noticeably different afterwards, but one member of our group, with injured and chronically sore shoulders, reported that he could reach up and extend his arms, pain-free, for the first time in years.