The Visit - Tanzania

     The family are visiting Uncle Fred who works for Concern in Tanzania. After three flights over two days, we arrived in Dar Es Salaam, the capital city of Tanzania. I am not a great traveller.  I regard airports as the armpit of the world: too warm, uncomfortable and nothing decent to eat.

     We arrive in good spirits and the next day we set off on a day and half drive to Ruaha Safari park in central Tanzania. Driving through the bush, the roads are so battered it is like travelling on corrugated iron. The kids, all five of them, are thrown around the back of the jeep and love it.

    Several hours into the journey, my husband asks the driver, Rogerino for a pit stop. Rogerino, named by the Italian nuns who raised him, weighs up the best place to stop.  He pulls across the empty road and back over again until he is satisfied he has found the best spot with maximum shade.  Men and boys are lucky: they can go anywhere. I would have to walk a mile before I had decent cover and then you wouldn’t know what or who you might meet: this being Masai tribe and lion territory.

     Two hours later, we arrive at the safari park gates.  Up ahead,  on a hill I see a single hut marked ‘Ladies’. While Rogerino plays Eenie, Meenie Minie Mo with his parking options, I open the door while the car is still moving and hit the ground running to that gleaming hut on the hill.

     Sanity restored, I stroll back down to find the children standing on a bridge gawping at several crocodiles and hippos in the river. We were to see lots of animals over the next three days but my favourite is the hippo. It is hard not to attribute human characteristics to animals; if it is fat then you assume that it must be cuddly however, Fred told us they actually kill more people than crocodiles. Hippos are defensive, cranky and paranoid. They are herbivores but if the mood takes them, they'll overturn a boat, take a chomp out of you and then the crocodiles move in. That's why they hang out together.

      A house on stilts overlooking the river was to be our home for the next three nights. As we sat out on the veranda, we could see two hippos partly submerged in the water with only their nostrils and enormous rumps showing.     Hippos act like badly behaved old ladies who have had too much to drink. Every now then they emit loud honking noises and burps and occasionally they come to the riverbank to bask in the sun like great big brown slugs. The boys renamed them Hippo-butt-am-I.

     The safari dining room is in a separate building about 500 yards from the houses. After dark, it is not advised to walk outside alone and so every night after dinner, a Masai warrior escorted us home. The warrior was real: his spear was sharper than a Gillette blade. The first night, my six year old son and I were walking to our house when the warrior spotted a fully grown hippo under the stilts. It has been known for hippos to head butt the stilts and send the whole house crashing into the river. Thanks to the warrior, we made it inside the house safely.  My son was afraid that the hippo might come into the house during the night.

     I reassured him, “He’s so fat he won’t be able to get up the stairs and even if he did, the stairs would collapse under his weight.”

     My son agreed, “And anyway, he doesn’t know the code.”