You can go to a hundred zoos. You can look at a thousand animal calendars or posters. You can be utterly familiar with all their shapes and colours from films and nature documentaries. And still there is uncontainable, childish excitement at seeing, for the first time, the real thing – the big African mammals in the wild, in their own environment.
For a start, the roles are reversed. The animals have the huge expanse of the Serengeti plain and the vast floor of the Ngorongoro Crater. They are not in the enclosed box of a zoo’s cage or a television showing a documentary. The humans are caged inside safari Land-Rovers. Did the lions wonder if were ever allowed out of those small metal boxes into which we were crammed?
The walls of Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania form the natural boundary of one of the world’s greatest wildlife sanctuaries – home to about 20,000 large animals. Flamingos on the lake’s edge; lions hiding in the long grass; buffalo, elephant, half a dozen species of antelope, rhino and so
Every morning they have two sorts of visitors. A limited number of Maasai people are allowed to take their cattle down to drink in the lake before bringing them back before nightfall. And seven or eight white Land-Rovers each with up to eight tourists come down to shoot the wildlife. Their weapons are cameras, though some have telephoto lens almost as long as rifles. Each vehicle had a pop-up roof through which the caged tourists looked at the animals.
In fact, you don’t need a huge telephoto lens because you get so close. Besides a bit of surrounds gives the wildlife context. If you fill the frame with a creature’s face, it could be taken in a zoo – though not quite. An animal in the wild has a freshness of expressing and liveliness of fur that not animal in captivity has.
And there was another reminder that this was indeed the wild. Every now and then we came across bleached bones – the remains of some herbivore that lost the incessant tussle between eaters and the eaten. Occasionally we saw hyenas and vultures sharing the remains of a lion’s kill or lions guarding a new kill. This was no zoo.
The Land-Rovers hunted, too. Like vultures, if one stopped, the others turned and went there to look over the pickings. With the advantage of two-radio they scoured the crater floor, moving first this way, then that and then coming together to home in on whatever animal showed its face. And having found it, the occupants of the Land-Rovers shot it with their cameras. Or looked with intense awe through binoculars or the naked eye. How could a flat grass plain accommodate such a diversity of large mammals?
And among these mammals are humans. Not just the tourists and the locals who look after them, but also the Maasai
They are not allowed to live in Ngorongoro Crater, so they bring their cattle in each morning and out each night and go to their traditional villages.
We went to one on the way to the Serengeti. There it was, just as in my Year 7 Social Studies book. I remember then going “”yuk” at descriptions of Maasai extracting blood for the neck veins of cattle and mixing it with milk, as a food supplement.
By late 18th century Maasai had occupied most of what is now Kenya and Tanzania with a population of half a million. Ninety percent of that population and more than two thirds of the land were lost to the British by World War I. The land was choice for agriculture and game hunting. Now the Maasai number about 250,000. They stick to their traditional semi-nomadic lifestyle by choice.
Our village – called Sento Maasai Mangata – had 87 people and 130 head of cattle. You wondered how they survived, until you add the $US10 charged to each tourist for a visit. You can hardly begrudge them the money. We had just come from the magnificent Ngorongoro Serena Lodge perched on the edge of Ngorongoro crater – stunning view, magnificent food, comfortable bed.
The Maasai were living in tiny huts made from sticks and cow dung. The flies, mosquitoes and stink of the dung were missing from my Social Studies book which had a romantic view of the Maasai. This was the real thing. A privilege to see and ponder the great Tattslotto of life that gives most Australians a first-division prize without having to buy a ticket.
The village was surrounded by a fence of sharpened spikes to keep the wild animals out. A similar fence within created a space for the cattle to stop them roaming about the huts. The whole thing was about quarter the size of a football oval.
It lasts about eight years and then they pick up and move elsewhere.
The animals migrate, too – annually. As the waterholes dry up the grazing animals move in a vast circle around northern Tanzania and southern Kenya, following the rain. Two million wildebeest on the move and hundreds of thousand zebras, antelope and other grazers. And the lions, hyenas, cheetahs and leopards have to follow them. And the Land-Rovers and the tourists go, too.
They leave the 14,000sq km Serengeti National Park in northern Tanzania in April and May and head north in an arc sweeping east to Maasai Mara reserve in southern Kenya. Many fall to predators. Then in October-November they head south again, this time on an arc bulging to the west.
Though hazardous for the animals its predictable route makes it easy for tour operators to guarantee you will see virtually every major species – and close up. I took the photos on these pages with an ordinary 80-200 zoom lens. Indeed, we were so close I was glad the lion had been well fed and did not have the look of Cassius about her.
You have to see a lion in the wild – at least once in your life.