7/30/98

The challenge of seeing the Big Five: elephant, rhino, leopard, lion and cape buffalo, never arose when planning the African trip. I wanted an itinerary centered on the outdoors; I wasn't going to bring along a scorecard.

I also didn't want a big load of camera equipment. Just packing a 35mm single lens reflex and a $15 secondhand pocket size camera felt like moving a darkroom across town after I added a pair of military binoculars and eight rolls of film in X-ray-proof canisters to the pack. (By the time I made a few plane changes, had I found a set of 500mm lenses left behind in an airplane seat, I'd have had to have help to carry them to the lost and found department.)

So I wasn't trophy hunting, or thinking of entering a contest back home. I took plenty of long range shots with a normal lens on the first part of the trip, knowing the zebras galloping 300 yards away were going to look the same printed on film as pinpointing black tsetse flies swarming on the horizon.

Several times I regretted being without a telescopic lens. Like the late evening we sat for an hour watching a dozen bull elephants graze down the bank of a big draw, stripping bark from trees and pulling grass up with their trunks and shaking the clods from the roots before curling their trunks to their mouths.

It would have been exciting to have a video on the morning the tracker led us in such breathless stealth to see a white rhinoceros and her calf grazing in the bush. But if we'd had a movie camera along, we'd have had to leave it in the carseat, because to stalk rhinos, even a plastic rain coat makes too much noise to succeed.

We walked single file, avoiding so much as breaking a twig. I held my breath and prayed I wouldn't be the one to trip and scare her. We managed to come within 300 yards before they bolted and ran. The ranger rushed us back to the Rover for a wild ride to watch her and her calf race for the park boundary. Breathing heavy from excitement and running so far, we sat panting and grinning at each other, like we had landed a big fish.

Checking out to go back to Johannesburg was easy. The manager at Tanda Tula confirmed our plane reservations a day ahead of time. He also arranged for a van to transport us from camp to the airport. The airfield is a military base. Boarding passes are issued in advance, and airport taxes are collected at a hotel franchised to operate on government property. Ground transportation from the hotel to the airplane was handled by an independent contractor.

Over my jet lag by then, I was able to pay more attention riding from the airport in Johannesburg to the hotel than when I arrived before. I asked the driver if the cars burned grass. The whole freeway smelled like a prairie fire back home. He laughed and said, "No, the cars burn a derivative of coal. The smoke you see and smell is not pollution, but from the grass fires we always have during the dry season."

He offered to make a drive around the city, but I needed to wash my clothes at the hotel to be ready to leave on the American Museum of Natural History trip at five the next morning. I didn't see much of any Southern African city. In the course of the whole trip, three nights were in hotels. The rest of the time we slept in comfortable tents and ate outdoors. I shopped for several years to find an African trip focused entirely on nature. The museum also knew how to bait the hook. The name of the tour was

"The Last Of The Wild Places." Staying in the bush suited me fine. Before I caught on, I wasted a lot of dough and time sitting on a tour bus while a guide took the group through his buddy's craft store, or arranged for his brother-in-law to guide a tour of the city's night spots for 50 bucks a head.

After a meeting at the hotel, the museum's leader took the group to dinner at a Portuguese café. I ordered a fish kabob called espeto bufferia, or "a spiked buffet." An elaborate dish of huge scallops and big chunks of fish and red prawns threaded on an iron rod hanging from a rack curved to position the skewer above the plate of the chef's lime and butter sauce. Takes a nimble fork to keep from splashing sauce by dropping fish in the plate, but the thick homemade bread made just the shield I needed to stay dry ...