The Best of Wanderlust (A GeoEx eBook)

The Best of Wanderlust

Where the World Began: Ngorongoro, Tanzania

cattle. If the tribe is sometimes accused of cattle rustling, in their minds they are simply retrieving what is rightfully theirs. ~~ In the late afternoon, I walked down to the village beneath Entamanu with my guide. From pastures all along the crater rim, the Maasai were bringing the cows home along ancient droving trails. Centuries of cattle have worn these paths into deep ravines, sunk into the landscape. We fell in behind a large herd in the charge of a 10-year-old boy, armed with a herding stick and a proprietorial swagger. A group of women appeared, driving donkeys laden with firewood. It was that golden hour when a low sun rakes through the grass. In the still air, voices called back and forth, the banter of day’s end. Our arrival at the village was a moment of confusion. Dogs barked, donkeys brayed, and men shouted as the women untied firewood with a clatter and boys herded milling cattle into their corrals. People spat on me by way of welcome while older women carrying decorated gourds emerged from houses to milk the cows. With their red togas and glinting spears, the Maasai are one of Africa’s more iconic tribes. They keep their hair carefully braided and oiled, and wear more jewelry than a dowager on Coronation Day. And that is just the men. Women shave their heads and favor wide beaded neck bands, which quiver seductively when they dance. They also do everything, from lambing to house construction. The modern age has eroded most of the traditional male pursuits—stealing cattle, fighting neighboring tribes, killing lions—so the men tend to spend their days drinking honey beer while their wives nag them to take another wife to lessen their workload. One of the women invited me home for the Maasai equivalent of afternoon tea. A visit to a Maasai house can be a bit like that nightmare in which you have to run back into

Thousands of wildebeest trailed back and forth across the space like lost souls with their hopeless, bewildered expressions. Among them, handsome Thomson’s gazelle, poised on dancer’s legs, suddenly lifted their heads and darted away, zigzagging through the grassland. Warthogs trotted past, their tails aloft like flags. A quartet of hyenas appeared, tongues lolling greedily in their ghastly death heads. I picnicked by a lake where hippos surfaced while sacred ibis waded in the shallows. Beyond the lake a pair of ostriches were mating. The day’s best sighting came at the end as we made our way homeward. In a woodland of yellow-bark acacias, I spotted a herd of elephant, browsing with a kind of delicate slow motion. A toddler elephant peeped between his mother’s legs. A huge bull uprooted a tree as if he were picking a flower. Then suddenly he paused, raised his trunk, and trumpeted. The great rolling bellow seemed to shake the woodland and reverberate against the escarpments. It was a memory of another age, long before three of our distant ancestors walked across Olduvai Gorge. Forming the eastern flanks of the great rift valley, the Crater Highlands roll away beneath tall skies. Westward lie vast, lion- colored plains that tip towards the Serengeti. This is Maasai land, a world of grass, a landscape for nomads. The Maasai know it as Siringet, “the place where the land runs on forever.” Their round bomas , or homesteads, and their spiky cattle stockades are the only marks of man here—huddled together beneath columns of wood smoke, like the world’s first human inhabitants. In a place where herds of animals are so common, the Maasai are proud of their cows. Cattle are part of their identity, not just a sign of wealth and status, but also a kind of romance. They sing to their cows and have dozens of words to describe them. They believe that when Ngai, the Maasai god, gave them these lands, he was kind enough to throw in all the world’s

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