Arusha to Kogatende, Tanzania
Arusha airport is located about fifteen minutes from the Arusha’s city center if you don’t encounter any traffic, which is never the case.
Children on their way to school in Arusha
I could count on one hand the number of stop lights I saw while there which meant driver took matters into their own hands. Honking, waving and the occasional evil stare were common place. Cars, vans sardine packed with daily commuters, and buzzing motorcycles jockeyed for position only to be denied by a lumbering cargo truck attempting to back down a narrow street. One of the advantages of slow moving traffic was it afforded one the opportunity to take in the surroundings. On the way to the airport, we saw students decked out in smartly designed uniforms. Some groups sported navy blue v-neck sweaters and crisp white shirts. To compliment these smart tops, the boys were dressed in khakis pants while the girls proudly wore mid-calf dresses and white stockings. The color combinations changed depending on which school they attended. Adults started the day by catching a city bus to work, sweeping rubbish from in front of a store or walking down the street with bundles or buckets perched solidly on the tops of their heads. Faint smells of smoldering fires hung in the air. We made our way to a highway of sorts and traffic abated.
Arusha airport (ARK for those who like airport codes) should not to be confused with Kilimanjaro (JRO) airport which is the main international hub for the area. The airport sits practically in shadow on Mount Meru, second only to Mt. Kilimanjaro as the highest peak in Tanzania. Some have suggested that Mount Meru was the place where Noah’s Ark came to rest as the flood receded. According to this view, the old Arabic text of Genesis 8:4 identifies the resting place as “har-meni”, which “refers to the mountain of Meni or Menes, another name for Mount Meru”. Hmmm. The airport code is ARK. Coincidence? I think not.
The airport is the primary jumping off point for bush planes heading to the Serengeti. There mere fact that we were catching a bush plane only added to the adventure of heading into the wilds of Africa. If I had a fancy pith helmet and a thick British accent with awkward inflections, I could have launched into a more exciting description of our arrival. “This reminds of the time I was on expedition in Burrrrrrma. Patsy, our guide then, was a luv-lee chap who spoke with a peee-culiar lisp as a result of being head butted by a charging boar whilst preparing my tea. Harrumph.” Regardless, we arrived at the airport “terminal” with little fan fair.
Aircraft unloading at Kogatende airstrip in northern Tanzania
After weighing our baggage we were given small plastic reusable boarding passes and spent the next few minutes mingling about in the small, open air terminal. Security was a breeze. We presented our passports and plastic boarding passes and then had our small belongings scanned by placing them in wooden boxes that looked a lot like drawers from and office desk. Coastal Aviation nine-seater bush plane sat quietly on the tarmac while other planes hummed, whined and blew dust – and one fedora – in our general direction.
Climbing into the bush plane conjured up childhood memories of climbing through the rear hatch our 1967 Pontiac station wagon for family vacations. It was cramped, stuffy and I bumped my head on the ceiling repeatedly. The only thing missing was my sister yelling at my mom to “make Greg stop breathing on me.”
I managed to wedge through and take a seat right behind pilots. All in all, I believe there were seven passengers on the plane. We buckled up and I watched the pilot fumble with a series of knobs and dials on the colorful instrument panel. It’s rare you get the opportunity to sit directly behind a pilot. During takeoff, I had to resist the temptation of giving him a flick or two on earlobe like a third grader.
And like that we were airborne. We banked left missing the opportunity to locate Noah’s Ark on Mount Meru. Our destination was Kogatende airstrip roughly one-hour north by northwest. Because we were in Tanzania during the dry season, the view out the window was of a landscape of varying shades of tan and grey. Occasionally, there were scruffs of green doing their best suck the remaining drops of life from dry river beds.
It wasn’t long before saw Maasai villages below. They were easy to spot. Their villages are enclosed in a circular fence called an “enkang,” and are usually made from the thorny acacia tree. At night, all cows, goats, and sheep are placed in an enclosure so they safe from wild animals. From the air, the villages look like a bad case of ring worm. The Maasai are indigenous to northern Tanzania and southern Kenya and have been under pressure from the government to abandon their traditional semi-nomadic lifestyle, but continue age old customs like polygamy, drinking milk mixed with cow’s blood, and encouraging young men that spearing a lion and holding its tail until it passes is the path to warrior status.
Yours truly attempting to keep up, literally with Massai warriors
The Serengeti is widely known for the great migration; a yearly event where some two million wildebeest, a quarter of a million zebras and a half a million or so gazelles seek greener pastures, literally. And all that traffic leaves quiet a mark.
Wide highways of hoof prints crisscrossed the landscape. Often, these highways thinned out and exited to river beds or patches of trees then merged back together. I’m sure if you flew over this same patch of land in during the rush hour months of January through March, you witness a traffic jam of epic proportions.
I surmised that that the use of the word “airstrip” in Kogatende airstrip meant not paved and that turned out to be the case. It looked like we were preparing to land on a par three golf hole that was in desperate need of care. On descent, we flew over the Mara River where blobs of hippos floated and sank. As we prepared for landing, I was on the outlook for creatures big, small and in between lazily grazing on the airstrip but we were clear to land.