Summary of the past four posts: It’s September, 1964. I’m traveling with Henry Fosbrooke, the conservator of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, to Ngorongoro a hundred miles west of Arusha, Tanganyika to take up my duties as a forester. A newly arrived Peace Corps volunteer, I soak up impressions like a dry sponge: the Great North Road (Cape Town to Cairo); the Maasai Steppe with its spear-wielding cattle herders and air smokey from grass fires; buying bananas at a village named after mosquitoes; sweeping views from the Great Rift Escarpment; and, finally, crossing a once empty plateau now being settled by Mbulu farmers.

Several miles past the village of Karatu we came to Lodoare Gate, the entrance to Henry’s domain, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Beyond the gate’s wooden barrier, the road disappeared into the dense forest of the Northern Highlands Forest Reserve. In Arusha, Henry had complained about how the forest needed protection from illegal grazing by Maasai cattle but wasn’t getting it because the guards supervised by an African forester weren’t doing their job properly. As we waited for the gate guards to raise the pole and let us through, he abruptly switched from tour guide to boss mode and returned to the subject. Fixing me with a tight smile, he nodded toward the forest and declared, ” As the new assistant conservator (forests) this is your responsibility now. You must shape these chaps up!”

I needed no reminder. Cloaking the southern and western slopes of the Crater Highlands, the forest had been a brooding presence, a few miles to the north, for the last twenty miles, its dark green foliage sharply contrasting with the dried-up savanna of the plateau. Yes, I certainly intended to do something about those forest guards.

The road began to climb, passing through thickets of broad-leaved shrubs, vines, and creepers that reduced visibility away from the road to a few feet. Only where it crossed high on the slope were we able to look out and see trees with smooth silvery bark rising from a dense cover of shrubs.

“Any wildlife here?” I asked. “Yes indeed,” Henry enthusiastically replied, back in tour guide mode again, “elephants, buffaloes, rhinos . . . We might encounter some at any time.” Then with a grimace, “I’m driving a government Land Rover today because I don’t want my private ghari damaged should we meet a stroppy rhino.” Well, that gave pause for thought; the shrubs lining the road sometimes were so dense that rhinos, or possibly even elephants, would be nearly invisible until they stepped onto the road. If we arrived just as this happened, we could easily hit one, or find ourselves dangerously close. I decided to keep alert, especially when we rounded blind curves.

Jack Meyers would have understood. A livestock marketing advisor traveling from Arusha to Mwanza, he passed along this same stretch of road in 1976. However, he did so in different circumstances. Rain was bucketing down, the road was muddy and slippery, and his driver, the manager of the project he was advising, was proving worryingly erratic. At one point where the road cut across a steep slope, the vehicle wavered so near the edge that Jack almost grabbed the steering wheel. But then something happened that made his partner slam on the brakes. Crack! Pop! Crash! Shrubs violently shook and swayed, and where an instant before had been only muddy road, there was now an elephant. Flat on its butt.

What had happened was that the big animal, finding the wet soil on the steep slope too slippery to safely navigate on foot, had simply sat down and tobogganed, crashing through bushes and ricocheting off trees, downhill to the road.* Peering through a rain and mud-streaked windshield, the two men watched, wide-eyed, as the tembo, leaves adhering to its wet skin and a broken branch balanced precariously on its head, heaved itself to its feet and shook off the accumulated vegetation. Then it ambled across the road, carefully sat down again, and disappeared, sliding farther down the hill. Jack and his partner did not linger. Seeing another elephant materialize from the bushes close behind them, they quickly moved on.

(*Elephants have more than one way to negotiate steep slopes. For instance, some friends of mine, Andrew and Barbara Clark, rode an elephant in Thailand a few years ago which drug its hind legs like a sea anchor while walking and steering with its forefeet. In another example, a pachyderm in a recent televised nature program [name forgotten] tucked in all its feet and slid down a hill on its belly. And, of course, many of the big animals just carefully walk, especially when the ground is dry or rocky. )

In our case, no large animals impeded our progress up the mountain. However, we did occasionally see their spoor on the road, and, funnily enough, it conjured up memories. Cape buffalo droppings resembled cattle pats I had stepped around in fenced pastures in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Piles of elephant dung looked to my untrained eye like those of horses, except that the fibrous brown boluses were the size of grapefruit. At one point I caught the scent of horses wafting in through an open Land Rover window. “Elephants,” Henry corrected me. “Somewhere close by.”

Eventually, we arrived at the top where the road branched both ways along a narrow ridge. Henry stopped and suggested I look over the other side.

It took several minutes to absorb the details of that startling view. Expecting a forested valley, I was unprepared to see, far below, tawny grassland stretching away across the floor of an immense crater, Ngorongoro Crater! All through the forest, we had been driving up the Crater’s southern flank.

Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika

Wow!

We were near our destination now. Late afternoon shadows darkened the western walls of the crater and accentuated small hills on the crater floor. The road kept to the crater rim, passing through grassy glades, and dipping into forested gullies. Occasionally, wonderful views presented themselves northward over the darkening crater to the highlands beyond. Then we began to see animals–my first ever free-ranging African wildlife; two gray elephants daydreaming in an open glade, a reddish bushbuck standing startled at the forest edge, the massive rear end of a buffalo disappearing into dense green bush. And finally, the best: two lions walking down the middle of the road, so certain of their right of way that, as far as they were concerned, we weren’t even there. I started mentally composing my first letter home.

Buffaloes by My Bedroom: Tales of Tanganyika.

Then we were there. Passing a tourist lodge, we turned onto a smaller road leading past office buildings with red corrugated metal roofs to a large cul-de-sac serving four residences. Parking beside the smallest, Henry turned to me and said, “This one is yours”

Double wow!

Did I mention the view?