One of our earliest travel adventures took Sara and I to Tanzania, Africa in June of 2007. We began our safari with 3 days in Arusha, the second largest yet mostly agricultural city, followed by two weeks on safari in 3 of its national parks. It was an enlightening experience that forever changed my life, as I fell in love with the beauty of its people, wild animals, and diverse, rugged landscape—which, to this day, leaves me yearning to go back. I also came home knowing that the possibility of this amazing land remaining untouched was slim to none. When someone asks me where my favorite place to travel is or where I would go back my first answer is always Africa, before it's too late!
While poor in comparison to most anywhere in the US, the people we encountered in rural Arusha were generally humble, well-kept to the point of being stylish, and happy with so few of the things we think of as necessities. With few transportation options they either walk everywhere, or, for longer trips, cram into cars and vans never meant to hold that many people. Many of the homes we saw had dirt floors and openings in the walls for doors and windows, with no electricity or running water, which instead was carried long distances in large, ceramic pots or 5-gallon plastic buckets on the heads of women and children, some barely as tall as their containers. By early evening the thick smoke from fires used for cooking and keeping warm would slowly fill the valley, eventually obscuring nearby Mt. Kilimanjaro, the tallest mountain on the continent at over 19,000 feet. The aromatic smell and ethereal feeling is indelibly etched into my mind. Except for the massive trucks on the two-lane highway hauling more people than humanly possible back and forth from work, it could have been 1957.
Our time on safari proved to be more extraordinary than I imagined. To be within a few feet of these wild, bigger-than-life creatures was exhilarating as they were at once both intimidating and gentle. Spend 10 minutes with spotted hyena pups playing about their den or brace yourself against a charging elephant who turns away so close to your rig that you can reach out and touch him as he passes by and you'll understand what I mean. In our 2 plus weeks we saw thousands of birds, animals and reptiles of every kind including the Big 5 but just barely (the black rhino and her pup were so far away we needed binoculars, but hey, it still counts). The parks we visited were incredibly raw and rugged, with landscape as different from each other as black is to white.
Coming from a modern society, I was struck by how quickly survival becomes the main story. You see it in people lumbering under huge bushels of sticks and piles of fabric along the roadside, to zebra and wildebeests fleeing as hyenas seek out the weak for a quick meal before the lions claim it as their own. It was a humbling reality from what I'm accustomed to, and the feeling that this place was on the precipice of forever changing was hard to shake. For the animals it goes beyond the hunt for food. In spite of the efforts of numerous organizations and countries most rhinoceros species are on the edge of extinction if not already gone. Elephant herds face a similar dilemma for their ivory or because migration patterns are being disrupted and eliminated. These aren't the kind of creatures that you put a fence around and say 'stay!'. Their migrations extend for hundreds of miles across many borders leaving them continuously vulnerable to loss of habitat and poaching. The rate* of elephant deaths is over 17,000 a year. Think about that for a minute.
Many of the tribes we encountered were already showing signs their culture and lifestyle were changing, whether with the appearance of Nike and Disney apparel, or young men herding cattle while talking on their cell phones in the middle of nowhere. I went naively expecting something more untouched, and was quietly startled by how invasive the Western world had already slipped into their everyday life. In the case of the Masai tribe we visited, many of their children attend schools for higher education far away from home, exposed to so much more than they ever would living in their traditional villages. The young man who gave us a tour of his family's mud hut with beds made of sticks and blankets had just returned from college in the UK and spoke perfect english. Were it not for his traditional garb and the ease with which he moved about his environment, he could have been mistaken for any other college student back home. I don’t fault him or others for wanting to move out from under years of what must feel like long-outdated traditions, but it does beg the question at what cost does progress come? What has been around for hundreds if not thousands of years is suddenly in danger of disappearing before we have time to fully understand and appreciate it.
I began writing this with a point in mind but I now have two. First, for better or worse everything changes, so go and experience the less-touched places of the earth before they change beyond recognition or vanish completely! Second, as a modern, fast-paced society of corporate wealth and means, I think we have a responsibility to consider our influence and impact on the ever-shrinking and changing cultures found on this planet. A good friend of mine recently returned from a 2 month trip around the world and told stories of plastic bags and garbage piled high on pristine beaches and against fences separating wildlife parks from neighboring cities and towns. By now most of us have heard the stories of whales, fish and birds dying from so much plastic in their stomachs that they starved to death, or islands of trash floating in the ocean bigger than Texas. But this isn't about just the environment, this is about preserving the diversity of people and lands that make our world such an amazing, interesting place.
My short time in Africa does not qualify me as an expert in answering such difficult questions, and people far more educated in the challenges of the African Continent have been grappling with these kinds of issues for decades, but my experiences in traveling to far away places over the years has given me a much broader perspective of both my own insignificance and how small our planet really is. If we can allow ourselves to be governed by a sensitivity and awareness of a fragile world much bigger than our own sphere of existence, I think it would go a long way at making this world a much better place with a more hopeful future, before it really is too late.
*based on the results of the largest ever 3-year, continent-wide wildlife survey of elephant populations released in 2016. UPDATE: as of 2025 the rate as declined (yay!). Recent estimates suggest tens of thousands of African elephants are lost to human pressures each year: 15k - 20k annually to illegal killing for ivory (on average over the last decade), with additional losses driven by habitat fragmentation, blocked corridors, conflict killings, and drought-related die-offs.
