Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [46]
“They all live in Khartoum. This is their shopping flight. There’s nothing to buy in Khartoum, so they take this middle portion of the flight back and forth to do their shopping in Cairo.”
Sure enough, when we arrived in Khartoum and parked on the tarmac, every one of the passengers who had boarded in Cairo promptly got off. As the last of them deplaned and the aircraft sat, I was able to steal a look out the door. No terminal was visible. In the warm desert night, the lights of the capitol of Sudan glistened in the distance. Driven by a steady breeze, swirls and whorls of sand danced across the runway while a pair of guards armed with AK-47s stood guard on either side of the rolling stairway. At any moment, I expected Sydney Greenstreet to arrive in a jeep and make a mad dash for the plane with an agitated Peter Lorre in tow.
Bathed in sunshine and carpeted with flowers, Morogoro sits at the foot of the imposing Uluguru Mountains. For days, we enjoyed Bill and Sally’s hospitality (Sally’s chicken-fried warthog is to die for . . . perhaps I should rephrase that: It’s wonderfully good), traveling to little-visited spots like Ruaha National Park. The finale of our visit was to consist of a long drive northward, in the course of which, we would visit several better-known national parks. At its conclusion, our hosts, unable to legally cross into Kenya with their little Subaru wagon, would drop us at the customs and immigration station at the border. There, we could walk across the dividing line and on the other side hire a taxi to take us to Nairobi.
Our first stop was Lake Manyara National Park, full of hippos, herds of antelope of several species, and the oldest elephant I have ever seen. Our next was Tarangire National Park.
Like every other business in Tanzania, the tourist industry had taken a huge hit thanks to the communist government’s inherent ineptness. Over the years, word of chronic shortages and mismanagement had driven away all but the most determined and dedicated visitors. In the course of our travels, we experienced firsthand just what a central bureaucracy can do to a previously thriving business.
For example, in the formerly excellent hotels where we stayed, lightbulbs were nowhere to be found. Staff had purloined every one of them for personal use or resale. This proved to be true of many hotel basics, from toilet paper to towels. At the spectacularly sited hotel on the rim of Ngorongoro Crater, we had to pass a small bribe to one of the staff to get an extra blanket. This was necessary so we wouldn’t freeze to death during the night because the hotel had no heat. Repeated attempts to order off elaborate dining room menus invariably met politely apologetic replies of, “I’m sorry, sir, but that selection is currently unavailable.” We learned quickly enough that instead of wasting time participating in this charade, it was much quicker and easier to simply ask which one of the sixty-three listed choices the kitchen actually did have on hand that day, and be satisfied with that. Compared to trying to identify an edible entrée, dessert was a simple matter. We ate more canned fruit salad than we ever had before or since.
At the Mount Meru Hotel in Arusha, the center of northern Tanzania’s tourist trade, we encountered something that to this day remains utterly unique in all my travels. Turning on the hot water tap in the bathtub brought forth an immediate gush of steaming hot water. Attempting to moderate it by turning on the cold water tap produced a furious stream of . . . steaming hot water. The same was true of the water that flowed from both sink faucets.
Talk about your surreal travel experience. A hotel bathroom that serves up only hot water.
The rolling hills and plentiful wildlife of Tarangire were rendered all the more stunning and memorable by the fact that the four of us were the only visitors. Having the park to ourselves made us feel as if we had taken a step back in time, to when visits to Africa were the sole province of the