Across Maasai Land

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AARON GOES TO AFRICA

Exploring Tanzania PLUS: SCHUBERT ON RIDING FAST TOURING WYETH COUNTRY CYCLING ACADIA

Ac

ross Maasai Land Story and photos by Aaron Teasdale

I wasn’t sure why the spear-wielding Maasai warrior had suddenly broken into a sprint and started chasing me down the remote Tanzanian road. Nor did I understand what his high-pitched cry meant, but somehow it didn’t sound like, “Wait, intrepid cyclist, you’ve dropped your minipump!” Young Maasai warriors have historically proven their bravery by spearing and killing wild lions, and I could only hope this whippersnapper wasn’t aiming to establish a new tradition by felling a cycling Caucasoid. It was only our first day of riding, but as the sandy track and intense equatorial heat slowed me to the pace of a drugged tree sloth, I was certainly easier than the average lion to skewer with a spear.

“So, Dave,” I asked my guide and riding companion a short while later, after managing to outdistance my pursuer, “Got a shield I can borrow?”

Dave — a longtime explorer of Maasai country, and owner and chief guide of

When cyclists and giraffes meet.

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Adventure Sports and Leisure, Tanzania’s only dedicated mountain bike company, — assured me that conflicts with Maasai were rare and we chalked the overzealous warrior’s actions up to youthful showboating. I acted nonchalant about the whole thing, as if getting chased by tribal warriors happened all the time on my rides. Which, of course, it didn’t, and which is exactly why I’d come to Tanzania: to experience the wilds of Africa, our world’s primeval otherworld. This is the ancient birthplace of humanity, where people still live in tribes, where enormous animals of every stripe roam free, and, as I was discovering, one hell of a place to ride a bicycle.

Unexpectedly invited by friends to join them on safari, I’d chiseled out two weeks from the responsibilities of home and came here determined to suck the marrow out of my fourteen days on the Dark Continent.

Wanting off trodden paths and into the bush, I skipped out when my friends went

to climb tourist-riddled Mount Kilimanjaro and joined up with Dave instead.

“Everyone comes to Tanzania for safari and Kilimanjaro, but there’s all this incredible cycling that nobody even knows about, ” Dave told me. “There’s so much here to explore.”

Home of the fabled Serengeti, northern Tanzania spills across a vast savannah and grassland plateau that is studded with volcanoes and deeply cleaved by the continent-shearing Great Rift Valley. We planned a six-day cycling circumnavigation (with a Land Rover assist) of the rarelytraveled tribal lands and wild country surrounding the Crater Highlands, a complex of mostly dormant volcanoes with the great Ngorongoro Crater, once a mountain higher than Kilimanjaro, at its center. This is Maasai Land, an area Europeans dared not explore until a century ago. Long feared for their skill and ferocity as warriors, Maasai permeate the landscape here, and for the

A herd of wary giants size up a new species on the floor of the Great Rift Valley.

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next week we too would call it home.

It didn’t take long for Maasai, dressed in their resplendent red togas called shukas, to gather near us as we ate a lunch of panfried bread and Coca-Cola on that first day of riding. This would happen whenever we paused from pedaling on the trip; no matter how remote our location, or how long it had been since we’d last seen them, Maasai would appear and gather — kids, mothers, spear-carrying warriors — standing near us but apart, intensely curious but with dignified restraint. The warriors in particular carried themselves with a languid nobility, but were always quick to respond to our greetings with waves and wide, luminous smiles. One even let me try a few throws of his spear, which instilled fear in the hearts of exactly no one and, unsurprisingly, won me no invitations to join in the next lion hunt.

The afternoon led us along rocky roads and braiding Maasai livestock trails, through a world of arid savanna, profusely thorned acacia trees, and distant green mountains floating on every horizon.

Though not in the same zoo-withoutcages density as in the national parks of the safari, strange animals and oversized birds were frequently in view. Zebras huddled in the shade of diminutive acacias.

Terrier-sized deer called dik diks darted away as we passed. Bustards, huge carnivorous ground-dwelling birds, stalked the landscape like small dinosaurs.

As afternoon faded and Africa tilted away from the sun, we pedaled on through golden light. Nowhere in the valleys, mountains, and huge sweeps of land around us were there any marks of humanity save an occasional thatch hut. In the distance, Maasai tended their cattle, and the dusky blue shapes of ostriches and zebra moved across low hills. In the sprawling valley bottom to our side, rosecolored Lake Engaruka reflected sunset hues while massive volcanoes, vaulting into perfect cones, spiked the horizon.

Then, as I rode a short ways behind the group, whether from dust in the air or the beauty and wonder of it all, Africa brought a mist of tears to my eyes.

Just when darkness truly fell, we reached camp. Joseph, the driver of Dave’s

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“Hey dude, seen any lions lately?”

Julius greets a Sonjo tribesman and dodges burrros while riding into a Sonjo village.

retrofitted tank of a Land Rover, had our palatial canvas tents already set up, including, I was delighted to discover, a small tent just for showering. Exhausted, I blissfully rinsed the day’s dust away under the winking African stars.

Lions roared that night, somewhere in the savannah nearby. Or so I was told.

Unaccustomed to the heat, I was too busy sleeping off my first African coma to hear them. I didn’t hear the hyenas that came into our camp either, but fortunately I’d brought my shoes inside the tent after Dave warned me that hyenas like to chew them and coiled snakes like to adopt them as bungalows. It was the kind of warning you don’t need to hear twice.

Our morning routine was quickly established: I stumbled out of my tent after everyone else was up, usually to the sight of 14

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Julius, Dave’s colorful Rastafarian assistant bike guide, lubing the chains and cleaning the bikes of dust and sand. Then I plopped down in one of the wooden folding chairs at the small wooden dining table where Dave’s cook served tea and breakfast. It was a much more civilized style of camping than I was used to, and I imagined it very British.

Of course, I wasn’t used to eight-foot-tall ostriches casually strolling by while I ate breakfast either, but there they were, their periscope necks snaking high above their enormous, profusely feathered bodies. It didn’t take long to get comfortably used to both.

The last member of our tribe was Louise Hill, a fine-art painter and avid cyclist with the soft-spoken toughness of a woman raised in Africa. Both she and Dave were of British ancestry but were born in East Africa, and both had lived for a time in

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England only to return to make their lives in Tanzania.

Our collective goal for the second day was simple: cross the Great Rift Valley.

One of the planet’s greatest continental fractures, it’s formed by a separation of the earth’s tectonic plates and is literally splitting Africa apart. Home to the oldest hominid fossils yet found, it’s here that man-apes first began walking upright millions of years ago. The guiding landmark for our crossing was the western Rift Wall’s 1,500-foot escarpment, clearly visible twenty miles across an open valley of acacia scrub and wildlife of undetermined varieties. With no roads or trails, we would ride cross-country.

Fortunately, the desiccated soil was pleasantly firm as we set out, leaving us only to dodge acacia and the occasional bus-

Nuts & Bolts: Tanzania Why here: Twice the size of California, Tanzania is the largest country in East Africa. Poor but peaceful, fully one quarter of its land is under some form of protection. Head out from one of Tanzania’s few cities and you’ll

where Dave Armon is based.

The nearby Kilimanjaro Airport is convenient, though it’s often much cheaper to fly to Nairobi, Kenya, and take the five-hour bus trip south to Arusha.

Money: Tanzanian Shillings are the country’s currency. Don’t bother trying to use American dollars or traveler’s checks. Several ATMs in Arusha are your best bet for augmenting your cash stash.

SUDAN ETHIOPIA SOMALIA KENYA ZAIRE

TANZANIA

find a countryside of bucolic small farms and sprawling national parks, which are some of the most wildlife rich in Africa. The cycling may be rough, but there’s no finer veloadventure in world.

Health: You’ll need some needles poked in you before you go, plus malaria pills. Check www.cdc. gov/travel/vaccinat.htm to sort out your needs. The dry season is hot and lions can eat you, but riding in Tanzania is probably still

When to go: July through October is the dry season in northern Tanzania. It’s hot, but the best time for cycling.

How to get there: The city of Arusha is the nervecenter of northern Tanzania and

tard on the hunt. Then, minutes after setting out, we saw them: giraffes. A herd of twenty or more, moving across an open plain a few hundred yards ahead of us. We were heading straight for them.

Now, having never actually ridden a bicycle into a herd of giraffes, I was unsure of the proper protocol. Were these 3,500pound ungulates bicycle-friendly? As we emerged into a half-mile-wide, giraffe-filled clearing, two dozen of the world’s longest necks rotated their lofty heads toward us and stared. With a nonchalant grace, the Eiffel Towers of the animal kingdom drifted aside as we pedaled through. Two young

ANGOLA ZAMBIA

safer than your commute to work.

Resources: The Tree Where Man Was Born

by Peter Mathieson is a deeply informative look at the region, it’s ecology, and history.

The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior

by Tepilit Ole Saitoti is a fascination look at Maasai culture from the inside.

Contacts: Tanzanian Tourist Board: www.tanzaniatouristboard.com Dave Armon is an excellent

Maasai boys leading a herd of goats into the clearing took no notice of the giraffes, as we might ignore deer on suburban lawns, and silently returned my wave as we passed.

With no trail to follow, we crossed the rest of the valley by weaving between termite mounds and spear-tip acacia thorns under a blast-furnace sun. Ever-present dust tornados spiraled sand and soil skyward into the valley around us. As my lips cracked and gradually turned to sandstone, I found two remarkable feathers that made everything worth it: one from the tail of an ostrich and the other from the wing of a bustard. I lashed the two-and-a-half-foot-

MOZAMBIQUE

guide, with deep knowledge of the area’s fauna and flora, and has good rapport with the Maasai. His Selela Forest Camp comes highly recommended. He can also arrange safaris and climbs of Kilimanjaro. Adventure Sports and Leisure: www.ad sportleisure.com. Tanzania Biking: www.tanzaniabiking.com.

To see some of Louise Hill’s wonderful paintings of the Tanzanian people and countryside go to www.louisehill.net.

long bustard feather to the side of my backpack, which somehow made me feel more adventurous and explorer-like, and kept riding.

As we drew closer to the valley’s far side, foot and cattle paths began appearing, then a scattering of bomas. The homestead of a single polygamous Maasai family, a boma is a collection of huts constructed of acacia sticks and termite-mound mud surrounding a central acacia-branch corral.

The Maasai are a people of cattle — they live exclusively off their stock’s milk, blood, and, occasionally, meat — and the thorny acacia corrals serve to keep their precious animals, their lifeblood, protected from East

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Into a wild forest. The trick is knowing which trees are big enough to stop charging elephants.

Africa’s profusion of predators.

As Dave pointed out, “The Maasai don’t need much and don’t want much — just a good knife, a good pair of shoes, and a couple pieces of cloth.”

Nearing the base of the Rift wall there were more and more of them — women walking along the path-turned-sandy-road, children running to us from their huts, warriors patrolling in pairs. I always waved and, if they were close enough, called out a hearty “jambo!,” and they invariably returned my greeting and flashed lion-sized smiles. As we rode, Dave and Louise talked more about Maasai culture and casually mentioned that some of them rode bikes.

“Maasai ride bikes?” I blurted, eyes opening wide. It seemed too great a thing to be true.

I told Dave that I would love, love, a picture of a Maasia on a bike — “If I could get only one picture for the rest of my trip,” I said, “that would be it.”

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That afternoon we reached the Maasai village of Selela, where a decade earlier Dave and his wife had lived for a year as missionaries. Perhaps not coincidentally, modernity had established a beachhead there, with a few cinder-block buildings and several hundred residents, an unusually large population for a Maasai village. Dave had established an exclusive camp not far away, sharing its proceeds in an effort to convince the villagers to preserve the riverine forest surrounding it.

“Okay now,” Dave said, after riding from the village and stopping the four of us as at the edge of a wall of dark, towering trees, “there are elephants and buffalo in this forest, so we’ll have to be alert.” Then he reviewed the giant-angry-mammaldefense strategies with us: get charged by an elephant, keep a tree, preferably a big tree, between you and the elephant. Get charged by a buffalo, lie flat on the ground and hope it jumps over you.

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Surprisingly, and much to my joy, they let me lead. Clearly, I’d impressed them with my wilderness and bike-riding savvy.

Who better then Aaron, African adventurer extraordinaire, to take the lead through the elephant- and buffalo-infested forest?

Somehow it didn’t occur to me until afterwards that I was also serving as a convenient and eager surly-beast buffer for everyone else.

In the trees, the world changed from the lion-colored plains of the previous two days into a verdant forest-world, where baboons and blue monkeys cackled and leapt from branch to branch overhead as we rode. A patch of mud showed fresh, craterlike tracks. Weaving between giant tentacular fig trees and hopping across small streams, I replayed Dave’s advice — elephant: big trees; buffalo: lie and pray. The air was electric, every twist in the trail tingling with possibility, every deep-throated bark of a baboon urging me forward under the living canopy.

“We’re here,” Dave called out entirely too soon, as we emerged into a small clearing where a freshly hewn footpath climbed to a spread of canvas tents at the foot of the Rift escarpment itself. Each tent had its own bed and a gravity-fed, canvaswalled shower area. A wooden dining table at the base of a gigantic baobob tree and a neighboring fire ring overlooking the clearing and elephant forest below. It was like our own boma, without the cowpie smell.

The morning of our departure from the Selela Forest Camp, after a deliciously relaxed rest day of long woods walks and bird watching, I was awakened by the magnificent orchestration of a million bird songs. Chirps, whistles, trills, coos, hoots, and warbles symphanized into an avian wall of sound and the finest waking alarm I could imagine.

Piling into the Land Rover, Joseph piloted us up the Rift Valley wall itself, along the rim of the famed Ngorongoro Crater, and down the other side of the Crater Highlands to Serengeti National Park. Just before entering the Park itself, we turned onto a faint doubletrack that closely paralleled its boundary and cut a straight path along the Serengeti’s perfectly flat grassland.

“Now we’re going into some real wild country,” Dave said with relish. “We might have lions visiting us tonight.”

As predicted, a great pride of lions came in the dark of night and encircled our camp, moving slowly, silently, the cots in our tents offering us up like platters. I watched them skulk and sniff and then …

I was awakened by Dave telling me it was

time to go. The dream had felt so intensely, almost supernaturally real that I wanted to search the camp perimeter for tracks, but there was no time — today we rode the Serengeti.

Aiming to avoid the day’s inevitable scalding heat, we set out on the bikes shortly after sunrise (and our requisite morning tea) to ride along the northeast edge of the 35,000-square-mile Serengeti Plain. I scanned the tan soil that passed under our tires for paw and hoof prints as

our narrow doubletrack road merged with a more-defined, well-traveled dirt track. It led us upwards as the sere shortgrass plains gave way to rolling hills dotted with acacia and we climbed and descended for hours in an undulating cruise along the Serengeti’s perimeter. The highpoints delivered panoramic views of the expanse below and the long, acacia-speckled hills that reached out across the plain like sleeping cheetahs.

“It’s like a sea,” Louise said quietly, as

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smiled and said, “Getting out in the African bush is my favorite thing to do. I love to just sit and look out over it, to listen to it, to smell it.�

Then it hit me for the first time like an unwelcome revelation — this was my last night sleeping out in Tanzania. After seeing only each other, tribesman in togas, and otherworldly wildlife for the last week, tomorrow we would return to the city, and I would board a plane filled with clean people in clean clothes and go back to western civilization, where no one carries spears and my dreams are free of lions. Here in the Rift Valley and on the plains above, the Maasai will herd their cattle, lions will move in for the kill, and vultures will sit in waiting. Life in Africa — the savagery, the grace, the wandering bloodthirsty beautiful life — will go on.

Dave told me I’d have to come back to see the great wildebeest migration on the Serengeti. Louise said my family was welcome to stay at her farm anytime. I told my new friends I hoped I could return someday, and then my mind flashed back over the last week and all the things we’d experienced and learned, the things you can only learn in Africa — like how to keep hyenas from eating your shoes, how to escape charging elephants, and that giraffes really are bicycle-friendly. Then I thought about the Maasai who’d chased me on the first day and it occurred to me that maybe he’d just wanted to go for a ride. After all, they may be living simply as herders and spear-wielding nomads in this untamed land, but the other thing we’d learned, and maybe the best thing, was that even Maasai warriors love a good downhill.

Aaron Teasdale keeps his bustard and ostrich feathers on display in his living room in Missoula, Montana, where they will soon be joined by a framed picture of a Maasai warrior on a bicycle. He is deputy editor of this magazine.

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05:2007contents May 2007 · Volume 34 Number 5 · www.adventurecycling.org ADVENTURE

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Cycling along the base of Ol Doinyo Lengai, an active volcano in a remote corner of Tanzania. Photo by Aaron Teasdale. (left) Sharing a rare patch of shade with Maasai warriors.

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ACROSS MAASAI LAND by Aaron Teasdale Tanzania is renowned for its oversized wildlife, epic national parks, towering volcanoes, and colorful tribal culture. But what’s it like to ride through? Aaron went to find out.

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