Hot hot sun. Dusty too.

Day of recounting. October 16, 2011. What a weekend. Our safari group consisting of: Sarah, a nurse from the Midwest who is twenty eight and pudgy, Daniel, an eighteen year old from Concord NH who is on the straight track to becoming an alcoholic and drug addict, Jacob, a monotoned small Jewish boy who went to school in Utah and is from DC, Lea, the recent grad frm Georgia who is well off and pretty and dark harked but friendly smiled, Lauren, the sweetheart from Texas with strawberry blonde hair and a surprising taste for large quantities of wine, Caroline, a Duke graduate who now lives in New York and is looking for a job in the nonprofit world with a completely unabashed personality and germaphobia, Madison, from Miami who brought hipster clothes to Africa and an attitude to match, Madison from Vermont who plays tennis and tans easily and wears flannel and Toms, Monica from Canada who played soccer in high school and has an infection in her esophagus and a naturally raspy voice, Lydie and me. We drove two hours to Arusha from Moshi in a van, them switched into a safri car, our new home, as it would come to be. Our guide's name was Iso. Someone, I think Lydie, cracked the ipso facto joke. No one really understood it, even her, but we all laughed anyway because we were going on safari. I listened to my ipod for nearly the entire drive, and I came to the conclusion that there is fee music that can hold its own against the African landscape. Vast, vast vast. I kept repeating the word over and over as we passed miles of savannah under the IMAX sky. We stopped in Arusha briefly, to get gelato, mine mint chip dipped in melted chocolate, and to get food for the upcoming camping days. I got Jackers, the Tanzanian form of Pringles, snickers, in addition to the granola bars, nuts, and chocolate we brought from home base. We drove into the campsite, inside Terengheri National Park as it was approaching nightfall. Within minutes, we saw blue-balled monkeys, giraffes, zebras, gazelles, antelopes, impalas. We reached our campgrounds minutes later, or tents already set up, astonished. We had dinner and a campfire following, while we watched rangers trying to drive elephants away from the small open area. Supposedly, Mussa, the guide for the other car, snored so loudly he competed with the lions roaring during the night. We woke up the next morning at 7, had toast, eggs, fruit and coffee, as usual, and then embarked on our tour of the park. The top of the vehicle converts into an enormous sun roof with a cover, so we stood on our seats for days as we watched the animals, sans enclosure, living around or dusty and rugged rover. Lydie sat next to me, Jacob and Daniel behind, and Madison from Miami in front of me, next to Iso. We drove for hours on end, taking hundreds of pictures of eating elephants, braying zebras, our own smiling faces, the entire ride like a boating adventure, all the while proclaiming we had never been happier. We ate lunch by an enormous plain, where wildabeasts and dik-diks moved thorugh dirt from one patch of grass to another. We saw a leopard in a tree shortly folioing. Iso suddenly stopped the car. We asked him, what do you see? About two hundred yards away, an outline could be seen in a massive tree with crawling branches of little cat ears. I still have no idea how he spotted that animal. Even with binoculars, the weak muzungus could hardly see a thing. We saw a pair of lions, deep into their mating season,sitting as a couple on a ridge close to the trail. The male yawned, looking deceptively in our cameras like the middle of a roar. I held my hands out to scoop the wind and to savor the feeling of being free under s massive sky, with uncaring animals singing noises around me. We drove to our next campsite again as the sun set. Will write more tomorrow. Our lives are documented so that it seems useless to write a thing. But you never remember sometimes the real things that are more than images.