One of the hallmarks of the Overseas Adventure Travel (our safari tour provider) program is to spend time with local people in their everyday environment.  To that end, after another hearty breakfast (another hallmark-- lots of food three times a day), we head off to a Datoga (one of the 120+ tribes in Tanzania) boma and spend an hour or so walking through the enclosure and various huts.  This boma (an area enclosed by a fence) is owned by MamaMaria, whose husband was killed by a lion about six years ago while defending his cattle, leaving her to manage the boma, the good-sized collection of goats, sheep and cattle (Craig calculated about $40,000 worth at the going rate of $400 per cow), and three children.  She and her elder daughter, Maria, are beautifully dressed and very gracious in showing us around.  We marvel at how she can manage it all alone between fuel gathering, livestock grazing every day, feeding her family, and keeping the compound well maintained.  Oh, and fending off lions.

Next we headed to a Maasai village where both the men and women of our group participate in various village daily activities.  After introductions, first on the agenda was the opportunity to drink cow blood.  They led us to a group of cattle for what we thought was to be a demo of the technique.  In fact they picked out a likely beast, fitted a blunt arrow into a bow and proceeded to shot it in an artery in the neck.  The blood that spurted out was captured in a gourd of some kind and passed around.  After giving a reasonable amount of blood the cow was patched up with some mixture of earth and herb and sent on its way.  No one in our group actually partook of the proffered delicacy.

The village women arrive with a ceremonial song and march, then each of them takes one of us (females) by the hand, shares necklaces with us, and leads us each out to participate in a traditional dance.  Phyllis’ mentor, also named Maria, was the lead singer in the welcoming song and is the daughter of the village patriarch and sister to the current chief, Lobulu.  She is very tolerant of Phyllis’ clumsy dancing and seems pleased (but speaks no English so we had to use sign language).  The men then all participate in some sort of jumping dance with the Maasai men.  Later, we women are led off to learn the practice of plastering a hut with a mixture of mud and cow dung (!!!) and carrying loads of firewood on our heads (Phyllis did not drop her limb).  During that time, the men in our group do men things, which consists of drinking molasses-based moonshine with the Maasai men.  Apparently the women do all the hard work around here.  In fact, we later learn that the men can live to 90, while the average lifespan of a Maasai woman is 47 years.  Even taking into account the likely high rate of death in childbirth, this is a pretty startling statistic.

The Maasai are essentially a nomadic society, measuring wealth and stature by the number of their cattle, and they build villages that can be moved when the need arises.  They originally migrated down the Nilotic spine of Africa from the far north and stopped just about here in Tanzania.  Although Phyllis joked that the men around the village seemed a bit lazy, the work of protecting the cattle and families from wild animals is no small task.  Lobulu showed us the scars from his youthful encounter with a lion, and recall that MamaMaria’s husband was lost to a lion attack too.  This is not an easy life for anyone.  It is another one of those moments where we realize how lucky we were with the date and place of our birth.

The Maasai are a very interesting people.  They have a reputation as fierce warriors, which is apparently mostly deserved.  On the one hand at every lodge where we stayed, the guards were Maasai and as described above they do not hesitate to take on a lion when their cattle are attacked.  One of our fellow travelers recounted how in Nairobi when you had to travel in this somewhat dangerous city after dark you would call up a service that would send a Maasai (with spear) to escort you to your destination.  On the other hand, our chief guide Ronald recounted an incident some years ago when he was taking a client group on a “walking safari” escorted by several Maasai warriors armed with spears.  They unexpectedly came upon a group of elephants from which one large bull began to advance toward them at a rapid pace, trumpeting as he came.  Ronald looked back to get direction from the Maasai as to what to do only to see them, spears flung aside, heading over a rise.  Later it was explained to him that while the Maasai will fiercely face a lion, they have no stomach for defending against an assault by an elephant, which apparently usually involves an inevitable and particularly gruesome death.

Interestingly, in spite of their warrior reputation, they are herdsmen and do not hunt or eat wild game.  The Maasai’s other reputation is as world class cattle thieves, apparently resulting from a cultural misunderstanding by which the Maasai mistakenly believed that all cattle in the world belong to Maasai.  Thus, whenever they found some being herded by other tribes they were obligated to bring them home.  It reportedly took the national governments quite a while to correct this belief.

After leaving the Maasai village, we head to the Tloma Lodge in the small town of Karatu near the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, where we spend the night before a long drive to the Serengeti.  The Lodge is one of eight owned by the same man who owns Kibo Guides, the outfit that is contracted to OAT, our tour operator, to actually conduct the safari.  Tloma fits our Rudyard Kipling-ish image of colonial tropical outpost, composed of a large compound surrounded by a concrete wall to keep the “megafauna” out of the extensive flower, vegetable, fruit, and coffee terraces which provide the foods served at meals.  We drove through a downpour before arriving, and this entire area is at about 8,000 feet in elevation, so it was comfortably chilly after the earlier heat of the day.  We strolled the grounds and enjoyed yet another excellent and large meal.  Our rooms and decks looked out over the terraces with the Ngorongoro highlands in the misty distance.