Tanzania: On Safari

Who doesn’t dream of seeing lionesses and their cubs slumbering under a shady tree? Of a leopard climbing the tree where its earlier kill – a bloody gazelle – awaits its razor-sharp teeth? Of packs of hyenas scuttling shiftily past in the evening light? Of watching the huge bubbles of hippo farts rising up from shit-coloured waterholes? Okay, maybe that last one is the stuff of nightmares not dreams, but you get the picture.

After days of volunteering our photography skills with a local NGO, then spending time in a remote Maasai village, our Giving Lens photography workshop ended with three days on safari, two in the Serengeti and one in Ngorongoro crater. It was magical!

Our team of photographers (Photo: Kate Siobhan Mulligan)

I think a list of the animals we saw (and this doesn’t include birds or reptiles) and lots of photos will be enough to convince even the most cynical that a safari is a must-do, a bucket-list item, an at-least-once-in-a-lifetime holiday essential. And if you are considering Tanzania as a destination, I cannot recommend highly enough the safari packages offered by local NGO Art in Tanzania. These are not your typical rich-folks safaris – you stay in budget accommodation – but the skills of their local guides will ensure you see the full range of amazing African animals and your dollars will help fund the incredible work AIT does to assist and support the impoverished people of Tanzania. Everyone wins!

Our sightings included: zebra and wildebeests in the thousands, impala, giraffe, topi, warthog, Thompson’s gazelle, Grant’s gazelle, spotted hyena, hippo, crocodile, lion, cheetah, leopard, dik dik, rhino, waterbuck, red buck and bush buck, Cape eland, Cooke’s hartbeest, baboon, velvet monkey, rock hyrax, buffalo, forest and savannah elephants, black-backed and side-striped jackal. Oh, and camel – domesticated, but still a surprise.

Tempted? Just do it!

Elephas maximus: lord of the jungle

Elephants can be seen everywhere here: large stone ones guard the entrances to pagodas, armour-wearing ones carry men to battle in the temple carvings and there is even an Elephant Terrace amongst the ruins of Angkor Thom. Elephants feature in Cambodian myths, they frequently appear in the designs woven in textiles, their statues adorn many public buildings, and live ones give rides to tourists.

However, I’m not sure that riding elephants is an ethically or morally correct activity for tourists here, as the poor beasts are often not well treated, according to Jack Highwood who runs the Elephant Valley Project. The project, in the northeastern province of Mondulkiri, is home to 12 elephants that Jack has rescued from locals, though, in this case, the mahouts often accompany their elephants to the sanctuary – being paid to care for their elephants at the sanctuary provides an alternative income for these local people.

The Elephant Terrace at Angkor Thom

The indigenous people of northeastern Cambodia still actively work with elephants, using them to haul logs from the jungle, periodically harvesting their ivory for sale to the Vietnamese, and, latterly, using these majestic beasts to carry tourists on treks to local tourist attractions.

Sadly, these elephants are frequently mistreated. The methods used to render them safe around tourists are nothing short of torture, designed to crush their spirits, and they are often overworked and undernourished – elephants need to eat for 15 to 20 hours each day just to maintain their body weight, impossible if they’re out trekking with tourists all day.

According to 2006 statistics, there are just over 200 elephants living in captivity in Cambodia and between 200 and 300 wild elephants. The Cambodian jungle does, in fact, provide an ideal habitat for the elephants and large areas of dense and seemingly remote forest still remain here. However, even in these remote areas, the elephant population has been decimated by ivory hunters and by the prevalence of landmines.

Elephants as temple decorations

My organisaton, Globalteer, provides volunteers and financial support to the Elephant Valley Project, which I hope to visit in the coming months. If you care about elephants, don’t be tempted to ride them. Instead, spend a week or two helping to care for them – bathing them, feeding them and helping to conserve their forest environment. I’m sure that would be a much more satisfying experience.

A temple guard at the ruins at Koh Ker

Making a mountain out of a molehill

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We were studying the perfect tenses in class yesterday and as part of that I gave my students an activity based on a small sampling of the thousands of proverbs we have in the English language. 

As we checked the answers, I questioned whether they had similar sayings in their languages. They do, of course, and it was interesting to learn how the sayings change as they cross cultures.

For example, the mountain in our proverb ‘Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill’ morphs from a mountain to a bull to an elephant to a stallion, a donkey, a camel and a hen. And the molehill becomes variously a mouse, a fly, a flea, a mosquito and a feather.

Here are some of the variations I discovered:

§         to make a mountain out of a molehill – apparently English people were using this expression as early as the mid-1500s

§         to make a mountain out of a mouse – Hebrew

§         to make a bull out of a fly – Finnish (because, in Finnish, bull rhymes with fly)

§         to make an elephant out of a fly – in Portuguese, French, German, Russian and Estonian

§         to make an elephant out of a flea – Hungarian

§         to make an elephant out of a mosquito – Dutch and Afrikaans

§         to make a stallion out of a mosquito – Romanian

§         to make a donkey out of a mosquito – Serbian

§         to make a camel out of a mosquito – Icelandic

§         to make a camel out of a flea – Turkish

§         to make a hen out of a feather – Swedish

§         to make five hens out of a feather – Danish

§         to make a garden fork out of a needle – Polish (no animals)

There were other interesting proverb alternatives too. The English ‘storm in a teacup’ becomes ‘a storm in a glass of water’ in Italian, Swedish, Romanian, Dutch, Danish, Spanish, Turkish, French, and Catalan, but in Arabic, it’s ‘a storm in a coffee cup’.

And then there’s the Turkish equivalent of our ‘Don't count your chickens before they hatch’: ‘Don’t roll your pants up before you see the river’.

Language, and how we use it, is truly fascinating!