White Men Can't Jump: The Maasai, the Market, and the Volcano We Descended Into

Tanzania  •  Maasai Villages + Ngorongoro Crater  •  September 2016

On departure day from Camp Kikoti we drove through the park one last time to exit, which nobody was sad about. Warthogs running with their little tails straight up in the air will never stop making me smile. Never. We also stopped at the Day 1 watering hole to find the zebra carcass reduced to bare bones in three days. The circle of life, right there in front of you.

Before the Maasai village we stopped at a workshop specializing in ebony and rosewood carvings. Matt was "hired" as a helper for the demonstration portion of the visit, which he took very seriously. Ebony is remarkable: so heavy, so dark, so different from anything you expect wood to be.

Now. The Maasai.

I want to give you the real version because it's not all picturesque. Babenga had been telling us about the Maasai on our drives and some of the traditions are genuinely difficult for western ears. Women are responsible for everything in the home, including building it. Women build the houses, cook all the meals, collect firewood every day. We saw several women walking with enormous bundles of branches strapped to their backs on the road. Female circumcision still happens. When men are circumcised (every seven years, establishing their "generation" within the tribe), the number of cattle you own determines your wealth and how many wives you can have…up to seven. And here's where it gets truly mind-bending: the first wife is essentially shared within a man's generation. If a man from your same generation wanders into your village, the chief sends him to your home, and he can sleep with wife number one. Wives two through seven are off-limits for this particular tradition, which somehow doesn't make it better. I had to hear Babenga explain it twice.

The village itself is real but set up for tourism: the Maasai rotate families in and out to share the income fairly. We were greeted with a welcome song and then Tom and Matt were invited to join the men in their jumping dance. The highest jumper gets the most girlfriends, they said. I will just say "White Men Can't Jump" and leave it there. They're both lovely and neither is getting any Maasai girlfriends. They showed us how to make fire the old-fashioned way, which was genuinely impressive. We were invited into the chief's son's tiny round home, about the size of an American bathroom, with two sleeping areas and a small fire pit for cooking.

Next was Mto wa Mbu, which translates to "Mosquito River" and is a village where people from over 120 tribes live together. They grow more than 30 varieties of bananas, avocados, and papaya. A young man gave us a tour and then the women of the town had prepared a buffet of traditional Tanzanian dishes while other community members played music and performed. It was unanimously the best food of the entire trip. So many wonderful flavors. Matt went back for thirds. At least.

Tom's exit from Mto wa Mbu deserves documentation. On the way back to the car, a couple of "hawkers" as Babenga called them were showing him bracelets and necklaces. Tom was emphatically saying "No, no, no" all the way back. We were loading up. We looked around. Tom wasn't there. Matt went back and found him buying three bracelets and ten necklaces. Swindled?

We drove to our lodge for the next two nights, watching the landscape transform completely from dry and brown to lush and green, like crossing into a different country. Plantation Lodge was a gated oasis with internet and good food, and we slept.

Ngorongoro Crater day. Early in the trip I'd asked Babenga what to expect. He said he had no words for it. That we'd have to experience it for ourselves. He was right.

Ngorongoro was formed when a large volcano exploded and collapsed two to three million years ago. It is the largest intact volcanic caldera in the world, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, 2,000 feet deep, with a floor covering 100 square miles home to approximately 30,000 animals. Because of the enclosed geography it has formed its own complete ecosystem.

We ate breakfast at 6am and left at 6:30. Babenga renewed his baboon warning: these are not friendly, curious baboons. These baboons know every safari car carries a picnic lunch and they have a plan. Stories of baboons racing inside vehicles the moment a door opens, with passengers still sitting in them. We stayed alert.

We climbed to the rim at 9,000 feet, which has this surprising rainforest quality…green and misty and completely unexpected. When we were close to the top, Babenga told us to close our eyes. "I'll tell you when to open." When he said open, there it was: the crater. Clear morning. The full bowl of it below us, the lakes, the different landscapes compressed into this perfect ancient circle. Then we descended to the floor at 2,600 feet.

The floor is flat and open and full of zebra, wildebeest, buffalo, and gazelle…the tall grasses sustain them here, but no trees means no giraffes. We'd been driving maybe 15 minutes when we found our first male lion sleeping on a stream bank. He eventually got up and revealed his brother sleeping invisible in the grass beside him.

The Hippo Pool. I was not prepared for how objectively funny hippos are. They crowd together in a tight circle in the water and they grunt, grunt, grunt, then roll over, then grunt some more. It is ridiculous and I loved every second of it.

And then Babenga got a radio call: the black rhino had been spotted.

The Big 5 is the traditional list: lion, elephant, cape buffalo, leopard, rhino. We'd seen four. The only chance for the rhino was here in Ngorongoro, one of the very few places they still exist in Tanzania. Very endangered, heavily poached. Babenga picked up speed and we could see the line of other safari cars arriving from every direction, the whole convergence creating enormous walls of red dust rising out of the crater like signals. The rhino was far in the distance but through Matt's camera and Tom's binoculars we could see it. Big 5 complete.

Two female lions were our next sighting, lying in the shade. We were the second car there. Then they decided they needed more shade and walked toward the cars and then right underneath them. One just plopped herself down under ours, paws visible beneath the chassis. Babenga revved the engine. She didn't move. Matt calmly directed Babenga to inch forward and back until we could ease away. I think she just moved on to the next parked car.

The mating lions on the way out were our final sighting. When female lions are in heat the male stays for 24 hours and they mate every twenty minutes. We didn't need to wait long. Over in about two seconds. Babenga explained this in the same tone he explains everything, which is informative and completely matter-of-fact.

Coming out of the crater I took off my sunglasses and found two perfect white ovals where my face had been protected and every other inch covered in red-orange dirt. We were all some version of this. The showers that evening were, as I wrote in my notes, "a million bucks."