rsc

I was reminded by a passing remark in ruralrob's journal of a curious characteristic of the various lodges we stayed at in Tanzania: they had a remarkable array of light switches, some of which controlled the various lights, and some of which controlled whether certain other switches did anything at all. These were mostly either unlabelled or labelled ambiguously. In general, we never did actually figure the system out (it was, of course, different at each lodge), and controlled our lights by trial and error.

It has perhaps not occurred to the people who design these systems that the guest is unlikely to have stayed there before, and isn't going to be there long enough to learn each room's particular obscure system.

For some reason, there's a group of animals designated as The Big Five, and apparently no African safari trip is considered complete unless one sees all of them. The five are:

buffalo
elephant
leopard
lion
rhinoceros

I don't know why any list of "Big N" African animals wouldn't include the hippopotamus, which is pretty damn big. And of course if I only saw the Big Five and nothing else, I wouldn't exactly consider my trip complete.

But anyway, we did see all five of them, although the one leopard (sacked out in a tree) was so far away you could hardly tell what it was.

But our guide told us about The Little Five:

buffalo weaver
elephant shrew
leopard tortoise
ant lion
rhinoceros beetle

the only one of these that we saw was the buffalo weaver, of which jwg probably has a photo or two.

Lots of elephants in Amboseli -- there''s a herd there that's been studied for the past 30 years or so -- and it's interesting to see large groups of them spread out across the marsh, in all sizes and ages, including an adult female followed at a short distance by an adolescent. with a baby between them. Baby elephants viewed in company with adults look really tiny; it takes strong intellectual effort to remember that they weigh 100 kg at birth.

Edit: See the first photo in this post.

Hippopotamus don't seem to vocalize a great deal (unlike, say, zebras, who it seems never shut up), but when they do, they emit deep, resonant bass grunts, rather like a badly-played bass clarinet or contrabassoon. Once in a while one will emit a series of such noises, a result that sounds remarkably like laughter. That's OK, guys, I can hardly look at you without laughing, too.

Monday night, our first at the Serena Lodge on the lip of the Ngorongoro crater, a bunch of us are on the balcony outside the bar looking at a brilliantly starry sky, trying to determine what compass direction we're facing. Ken, the tour organizer, says that since we're on the south rim of the crater, we must be facing north. I'm still getting my brain adjusted to both unfamiliar constellations and familiar ones in unfamiliar orientations, but, what with the Southern Cross to the far right and Scorpio more or less in front of us I'm pretty sure we're facing just about due east. Mary is inclined to agree with me, but is less certain. Ken is insistent, however, and entirely unmoved by my assertion that the stars don't lie. Mary suggests that we'll probably know in the morning.

Tuesday morning at 6:30, I get up and look out from our balcony (all the rooms, private and public, face in the same direction, namely out over the crater). The sky is brilliantly clear except for a few coppery wisps of cloud, and the glow illuminating them is straight in the direction I'm looking, where, indeed, the sun appears about 15 minutes later.

I go up to the dining room, where Ken is having breakfast. I go up to him and remark that I didn't know he was taking us to the South Pole. "The South Pole?" he says blankly. I reply that that's the only place I know of where the sun rises in the north. He advises me, with a slight growl, to go get my breakfast.

Arrived just before lunch, got to our room -- wow, what a spectacular view! Oh, there's one of those black-faced (otherwise vervet) monkeys in a tree right opposite; seems like a logical place for it. So my brain insists on singing:

I'd like to be
up in a tree,
in a black-faced monkey's garden in the shade...