Mahali Mzuri opens in August in the Masai Mara

The past four days have been nothing short of an adventure.

This weekend I went on a 2-day safari at Lake Manyara National Park with my coworker and her family. Famous for its tree dwelling lions (the only animal I managed not to see) and earning Ernest Hemingway’s approval as “the loveliest place I had seen in Africa”, the Lake itself is a vast grey-blue reflection at the base of the sharp 600m wall of the Great Rift Valley. The Lake and many streams that flow into the valley make Manyara the national park with the highest biodiversity in Tanzania- with jungle, woodland, and plains animals cohabitating in 330 sq km. On the first day alone I got extremely close to elephants, giraffe, hippos, baboons, vervet monkeys, warthogs, and yes, dik-diks (Google them! So cute!) We had a couple different traffic jams during the game drive, first with a stampede of one hundred baboons migrating to a stream alongside the red dirt road, and later in the afternoon, a run in with a three-elephant caravan eager to get to the plains before dark. One of the elephants actually started chasing our car when it got separated from its comrades. Don’t worry– it didn’t have tusks.

The second day of our journey was a walking safari, not a game drive. In the morning we started with a cultural tour of the village, Mto wa Mbu (River of Bugs)- watching women making banana and millet beer, artists making ebony Makonde statutes, and listening to the sounds of jubilant drums and voices coming from the local churches. After walking some distance through rice paddies and banana fields, the houses and crops began to thin out and the prickly acacia trees started to take over. Just as it was clear that we were in the wild, our guide Sunday said, “This is the border
                                                    
“The border to what?” we asked.



“You are now in the park.”

Yes, my friends, we were walking through the wild animal park. But no need to fear, apparently predators don’t come near that area of the park during daylight, so Sunday said. Some years ago the villagers lobbied the national park service to have free access to the park in order to continue to fish from the lake– a primary source of food and income for many men in the village. As we walked through the forest towards the lake, men on bicycles carrying three or four buckets of tilapia would pass every couple of minutes. We began to see the still silver water of the lake through the trees, and it wasn’t until we reached the grassy plan that we realized we were going to have a picnic by the lake…with the giraffes, wildebeest, and zebras!! At least a dozen giraffes, twenty feet high, dotted the surrounding plain. A small herd of zebra stared us down as we walked to a spot half way between the woods and the shore. We sat and had lunch right among them, and I'll admit my food missed my mouth a few times because I was staring amazed at the animals.

Being with these animals on my own two feet, instead of in a Land Rover, was by far one of the most invigorating experiences of my life. Not to get too tree-huggy on you all, but during that picnic, I remembered, viscerally, that humans don’t own this planet­– we share it with so many other creatures that are beyond our control and should remain so. At the same time as I had this epiphany, I also felt pee-your-pants scared for about the first fifteen minutes of the picnic. I had heard zebras were really mean, and I thought the giraffes could kill me with one fell swoop of their necks. That was until I found out firsthand, that if you get closer than 30 feet to him, the gigantic giraffe will run away from you, the 5’4” human. As our guide Sunday said, “They are truly peace loving animals. All peace and love.”

Man I’m tired. I’ll have to tell you all about today's adventure in my next entry. Here’s a sneak peek– we visited one of my non-profit’s first scholarship students, Theresia, and her family at home in her traditional Maasai boma(house) in a village near the Kenyan border. In addition to lots of cute children and some spear throwing, I got incredible insight into traditional Maasai life and how the recent droughts have changed their livelihoods and culture.