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In the beginning

by Craig H. (in Washington on Mar 16, 10)

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In the beginning, more than a decade ago, I hadn't had a real vacation since I entered law school. At this time, I was living and working in the Washington, DC, area. I had a co-worker who had just returned from a vacation in South Africa, and I went over to congratulate her. I told her I’d like to visit Africa, and she said: “Why don’t you.” I said that my wife didn’t want to go, and she replied that her parents took separate vacations – why didn’t I?

So I went home and told my wife: “I am going to Africa, do you want to go?” She said “yes,” so I bought two tickets to Tanzania, to go on the northern circuit, which includes the Ngorongoro crater and the Serengeti. A few weeks later, I was eating lunch with another co-worker, who asked how the trip was progressing. I told him that my wife would back out, I just wasn’t sure when, and I didn’t want her going into retrograde on the airplane’s gangplank. Shortly thereafter, she did back out.

That left me with a spare ticket, and no possible refund. I checked with all my friends and relatives to see who wanted an “all-expense-paid” trip to Africa. Even my brothers turned me down. Eventually my sister-in-law’s husband signed up for the trip, and we had a wonderful time.

At one point we were camping out, and a lion came through the camp at night roaring. He woke me up, and I can now recall all the night sounds I heard then. We camped near a hippo pool, and the hippos were active. Anyway, when a lion is roaring like this one was, he is on patrol, warning other lions away from his territory – and his girls. The next morning the talk of the camp was about the lion, and why he was wandering among the tents. The speculation was that he was looking for me. You see, I snore. More than that, I come from a family of world-class snorers. (My mother used to tell me that when she was a little girl she remembered awaking up at night and hearing her parents snoring -- she said the sounded like wild animals snaring at each other.) The rumor was that he heard my snoring and was looking for the person that was challenging him as king.

Snoring is one of those odd subjects you run into now and again. While in Borneo I discovered that (although normally Orangutans sleep peacefully) sometimes they do snore. And when I was in the Amazon, we were going to try to see some Tapir at a water hole they frequented. We went to a blind set-up near the water and waited for night, when the Tapir may come. The blind was complete with mosquito nets, which because it was the dry season and there were no mosquitoes, I didn’t use it. You cannot sleep in the blind, or at least if you do, my guide told me, not to snore. Apparently, snoring scares the Tapir, which thinks the noise is a Jaguar. I couldn’t help myself. I was tired and jet-lagged, and the Tapir must have thought the forest was full of Jaguar, and they didn’t dare come down for a drink.

Anyway, I have been thinking about snoring. You’d think that snoring would be naturally dangerous, because it tells the predators where you are and that you are sleeping. But maybe not. I remember when I was a child sleeping over at my Grandparents’ house. I slept upstairs and they slept down. Nevertheless, I remember thinking that the snoring sounded like two giant animals snarling at each other. (Thus confirming my mother's account.) My conclusion is that since snoring doesn’t seem to have been life-threatening in distant times, maybe it improved your chances by scaring away predators.

In any event, after the night in the blind waiting for the Tapir in the Peruvian Amazon was over, the guide told me why we had mosquito netting. It was to keep the vampire bats off you. Sometime in the past, a lady was doing the same thing that I was and also didn’t use the mosquito netting. The next morning, her foot was bleeding from a vampire bite. It would have been nice if the guide had explained the netting’s use in advance.

But back to my first trip to Africa -- We drove up to the lip of the Ngorongoro volcano crater. The crater is about 10 miles across and has some 30,000 large mammals in it. This has got to be a main highlight of any Safari on the northern circuit in Tanzania. After a short map orientation at the park visitors’ center, we drove on up to a scenic overlook. Although usually foggy, from here you can see all the way across the crater. Three million years ago, this was the largest mountain in Africa – then it blew its top.

Normally the guides keep you in you vehicle any time you are outside of camp. While you are in the vehicle, the predators leave you alone. They see the vehicle as one really big, strange animal, but if you leave the vehicle, you are just another part of the food chain. So, it was unusual when the guide let us out at the overlook. You do really have to get out to see the crater, and this is the point where everyone exits the vehicle to get a gander of the park.

I was videotaping the crater – panning from one side to the other – when the guide said: “Everyone back in the Land Rover.” I turned around, and there was a leopard walking down the crater lip road towards us, its tail up and swishing back and forth. My instant reaction as a photographer was not to get back in the vehicle, but to tape a little of the leopard slipping up from behind. I have enclosed the photo.

In any event, when I got back home from Tanzania, I told my wife not to tell me she is going on a trip to me again, if she isn’t – that was too expensive. Ever since, when I have said that I am going somewhere, she has always said she will not be going with me. There was an exception; when we went to Malta.

Back in 2005, we flew into Malta with a National Geographic archeologist and toured the island. After that, we jumped on a four-masted ship, made in the 1930’s for the Post family (as in Post cereals). This ship had marble fireplaces and such. The name was the Sea Cloud, and it is now operated by a German firm. On this trip the crew out-numbered the passengers. We sailed around the Med, stopping at Greek, Roman, and Carthaginian sites. My wife’s educational background is in archeology and mine was in classical history, so we had a great time. I did break away from the group a couple of times to visit sites of interest to me. For example, there is a Roman city in Tunisia that was built largely underground, which we visited alone.

I had thought that my wife would start traveling more with me, and in 2008 I took my wife’s sister, her husband and two girls to Australia with me. In Australia, they speak English (of a sort), it’s civilized, and relatively disease free. But I had no luck – she would not even travel to such a place with her relatives. I have never entirely figured out why.

But at the end of 2008, one of my brothers asked if he could travel to Africa with me, next time I went. I had asked him to go in 2000 with me, but he had turned me down – and, his friends had been ribbing him for turning down a free safari ever since. So, in 2009, I did something I almost never do, I traveled back to somewhere I had been before. I went back to Tanzania, and did the northern circuit again, but with my brother this time.

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