Poaching?

I had a fascinating conversation the other day: I gave a lift to our next-door neighbour, a hard-working lady who earns a living buying produce in the villages near Arusha, transporting it to the market, and then selling it on at a small profit.

She told me about the night she found her teenage daughter trying to sneak out of the house while the family slept. It turns out that she had been offered 5,000 shillings (just under US$4) to carry buffalo meat.

To put this in context, this is a deal more than a man can earn in a day doing hard manual labour, working on a building site for instance.

You see, we live on the edge of Arusha National Park, a tiny gem nestled on the forested flanks of Mount Meru, Kilimanjaro’s spectacular twin. The land here is fertile and well-watered, good agricultural land, and the Meru people farm it. Small plots are intensively tilled right up to the park boundary. And there’s no fence. So, every year as the crops - maize, bananas, sugar cane etc – ripen, elephants and other species move in by night and help themselves. A farmer can lose most of his harvest in a single night in this way. It is scarcely surprising, then, that wild animals are deeply unpopular.

Add to this that it is very difficult for local communities to benefit from tourism – and there, in a nutshell, is the conundrum facing conservation across much of Africa. Game is of no benefit – on the contrary, it is very destructive; tourism revenues seem only to go to outsiders – safari companies, guides, foreign investors; and rangers prevent local people from exploiting their traditional natural resources: food, fuel and medicines from the bush.

Along comes a poacher offering you twice the going rate for your labour… and suddenly bushmeat is the only show in town.

Until we can show that wildlife and wilderness offers local people more benefits - real benefits - than the bushmeat trade (or logging, charcoal, ivory poaching etc), we will continue to haemorrhage our natural resources. And in all probability, we will never understand the value what we’ve lost until it’s all gone.

It's February in the Serengeti – what a fabulous time to be here...

We drive out onto the plain early one morning.

It rained a few days ago after a bit of dry spell, but the news is that the migration is nowhere to be seen, just some scattered groups. Right away, though, we get lucky: we find a small nursery herd with one calf clearly only minutes old. It is still wet and struggling to stay upright. A little miracle – this tiny creature will be able to run around in half an hour or so, and by day’s end will be able to keep up with the herd if they start heading out.

In the same group we spot a cow with a foetus already partially emerged, but pleasure quickly turns to anxiety: she is clearly having difficulty. A breach birth? After half an hour with not much progress, we decide that it’s just too traumatic, so we wish them well and move on, our rose-tinted specs slightly askew.

As we make our way across the plain, we spy a heavy dark line on the horizon. Bushes? Not out there… Cloud shadows? We can soon make out a tsunami of wildebeest, a densely packed mob moving steadily across the grassland, eating intently as they come.

This isn’t the peaceful event of last month, with half a million fat’n’happy animals dotted evenly across the plain. They have been forced by the dry spell back into the western woodland, where the grass is less nutritious. With the grasslands greening up, the pregnant mums are in a controlled feeding frenzy, an army of lawn mowers on the march, shoulder to shoulder, across the open land.

Soon we are in the midst of the herd, probably hundreds of thousands of snorting, honking, restlessly moving animals. This is one of nature’s grand spectacles, something that never fails to take my breath away.

And it’s not just the wildebeest that are giving birth. Periodically as you drive, a tiny gazelle bounces out of a tuft of grass, its tail held ludicrously upright, like a fluffy black exclamation mark. Not so ludicrous really – it helps mum keep an eye so she can find him again when he settles.

And then there are the ever-attendant predators, looking for these new tasty mortals. The circle of life keeps on turning...

Maasai lion hunters

Soit Ayai kopjes, Piyaya. ‘The Magic Hour’, when golden morning light slants across the plain, painting everything it touches in rich hues; long shadows at crazy angles.

There was good rain some days ago, and the plain is greengreengreen, and covered with peacefully grazing animals as far as the eye can see. It has been like this for the last few days: every time you think you have seen every single wildebeest on the planet, you come over a rise and there is another huge plain, with another 100,000 animals…

A party of Maasai moran (warriors) is striding across the grassland. They look fabulous, as usual: red tunic; a rough leather belt on which is a red scabbard and simi; and a spear. They are visibly agitated by our presence. ‘No photos’, I tell my guests.

I greet them: ‘Entasopa!’ ‘Hepa!’ comes the reply.

We talk a while, about the usual things, and then I ask what they’re doing today. It turns out that they are searching for lion. They will then chase it until, terrified and enraged, it whirls and turns on its tormentors. Then they will spear it.

It is 2010, and yet there are still young Maasai men whose cultural roots run so deep that they are prepared to risk life and limb in this way in order to demonstrate their courage. They sure as hell get my vote.

Well, yes and no. Because the other reality about 2010 is that, throughout Maasailand and beyond, lions are in trouble. Outside the national parks, lions only cling on in small numbers, and as human population rises, so these small pockets will be wiped out too. As lion numbers go down, moran are forced to seek them out in areas where they still exist - like Piyaya. One of the reasons that they are still here is that the camp pays tens of thousands of dollars each year for the right to operate here, money which the community uses for education, health and other projects.

Which is why I radio back to camp to get a vehicle to come and watch them from a distance. We know, and they know, that lion hunting is illegal, so they will be unable to make a kill while we are there.

Not long after, we find a lion, so we sit with him, as an added degree of protection. After a while, he wanders off and disappears in a thicket.

Lengai!

LENGAI CLIMB

I have just got back from an amazing weekend, climbing Ol Donyo Lengai, the active volcano in the Rift Valley. Wow – really and truly wow.

It’s about a 6-hour drive to Ngare Sero, the village near the south end of Lake Natron, which is the centre of the universe as far as Lengai climbs go. Inevitably, then, it took us about 9 hours…

We hook up with Petro, a local lad who regularly guides Lengai (he claims to have climbed 200+times!), and having reviewed our gear, we set off at about 11pm for the jumping off point for the climb, about an hours’ drive away. The drive is , err, interesting at the moment: There has been lots of rain recently, so the track has been washed away in places, and some parts are impassable. Last week, a vehicle was left in a dry riverbed and was washed away in a flash flood while the climbers were up the mountain. Bit of a bummer, no? So we have plenty of fun finding a way around the toughest parts and getting as close to the mountain as possible.

Which is not as close as I might have hoped. We have to hike for an hour or so just to get onto the foothills of the mountain. Once there, the land slopes rapidly up, and my lungs begin to heave. Oops – not a good sign! After a bit, I find my rhythm and settle down. Petro does an excellent job of pacing us, stopping us from tiring ourselves out early on in the climb.

All the while, the bulk of the mountain looms above us in the dark. The moon has not yet risen and it is fairly cloudy, but there is enough starlight for this. The summit seems impossibly far away and, so far as I can see, vertically above us. Somehow we persuade ourselves we can do it and carry on, plodding through the night.

The going is tough: as we get past the half-way mark, it gets steeper. The ash layer from the recent eruptions is damp from yesterday’s rain, which stabilizes it, but it is still slick and difficult to negotiate. Sometimes we can drop into a narrow rain-eroded ditch, and use our hands for extra purchase. This can be a good thing, or not...

Higher still, and now the moon rises. We are looking down on a layer of cloud far below, ethereal white against the black mass of the land. We stop frequently to rest and catch our breath. I am pleased and surprisingly to find that I am not blowing too hard. How far now? About another hour, says Petro, but steep.

Steep?? And what is this exactly, if not **&%?@@* steep?

Sure enough, it gets steeper, as we climb through a narrow gap between towering ramparts of lava thrown up in the 2007 / 8 eruptions. It gets slippery too, the top layer of ash reduced to slime. One by one, we all end up on our backsides, flailing for grip. Then all of a sudden, as the eastern sky goes grey, we are there, on the crater rim – a slender bridge with steep sides falling away into the crater on one side and down, down to the distant plain on the other.

It is an awe-inspiring sight: a short distance away, a vertical drop into the crater. This is a pit maybe 300 meters wide and 200 deep. Steam hisses angrily from the sides, while far below pools of magma roil and spit tongues of molten lava into the air. A patch of rock breaks off and slips gracefully into the boiling pot, like an iceberg calving.

There is not a blade of grass up here. On my last climb 16 years ago, it was a much softer scene, rounded slopes with a layer of thin grass. You could walk down into the crater, and watch flowing magma up close. Now it is a monochrome world of black and grey and patches of scummy salt. In the background, a continuous low growling and rumbling, as if a great beast were asleep. Don’t for God’s sake wake it…

The sun comes up, brushing the mountain with gold, softening the scene a touch. We walk around the rim, aware of the yawning voids on each side. The slopes aren’t extreme, but they suck at you and catch at your stumbling feet.

We stay at the top for a while (is it half an hour? 45 minutes? I don’t really know) and then we head back down. God, my knees! They bend (sort of) but don’t really appreciate the heavy demands I am making. Now they are whingeing at every step. And it’s SUCH a long way down – how am I going to do this?

then, the going eases. The slope decreases, the ash is loose enough in places to move in short skating steps. It’s still a loooong way to the car down there on the plain, but to our collective surprise we’re there in a couple of hours.

Looking back from here, in the full light of day, the idea of climbing Lengai seems lunatic. It thrusts straight up from the plain, a great steep cone, like a kid’s drawing of a volcano, a forbidding sentinel in the austere landscape of the Rift Valley.

I did it – I was there. And you know what? Now that the memory has faded a bit, I would do it again. Not just yet maybe, but some day.