CAN'T WALK FOR HELP - MIGHT GET EATEN
By Bob Van Leer

  (NGORONGORO WILDLIFE LODGE, TANZANIA, EAST AFRICA, Nov. 3, 1993) - Stranded in the Serengeti Sun may be the title of a book about this trip. The two-day trip to the Seringeti brought our caravan of three vehicles four flat tires and three mechanical breakdowns. Sylvester, our head guide, claimed this was unusual. But the drivers were quite adept at changing tires. During a game drive this morning two of our three vans broke down. Ours towed another back to the Seronera Lodge and the rest of the party doubled up in our van. We were scheduled anyway to return to the lodge for lunch.

  Sylvester called to Ngorongoro Lodge which is scheduled to be our stop for tonight and the lodge is to send two more vehicles. But i t will take three hours for them to arrive at Seronera Lodge. In the meantime, our drivers are working on the broken rigs. They are quite new vehicles, but the roads here are brutal to vehicles. Our drivers got the vehicles going and we started for Ngorongoro two hours late. This precluded a stop at the Olduvai Gorge. Olduvai is a world-renowned site for research into human origin. Its crumbling walls have revealed a continuous record of human occupation that goes back almost two million years. It was made famous by Mary and Louis Leakey. Breakdowns in this country have a different dimension than in most places. Walking for help is not a good idea. All over this area are animals that will eat people, particularly lions and leopards. Everyone helps one another, but traffic is light.

  Sylvester said government officials are not equipped with radios and there are no organized search parties. The Serengeti Park gates close at 6 p.m. If you have had a breakdown and haven't received assistance by then the only thing to do is wait out the night in your vehicle and hope it is built strong enough to hold up under a lion attack. At the lodge there was no water this morning and there was still no water when we returned. You don't realize how much you need something until it isn't there anymore. Just being able to wash the dust off our hands would be considerable improvement. When we woke to a waterless morning, there was a Vervet monkey peering in our window, an unusual Peeping Tom.

  We had nearly completed our game drive when vehicles broke down. The drive consists of driving special park roads looking for game. This is the driest time of the year, yet game is everywhere. This morning we saw a couple of more leopards, probably the same two we saw last night. We also saw a pair of young lions resting in the shade of a tree and another cheetah doing likewise. We have now seen more zebras than we are interested in. They are here by the thousands. Zebras join hippos and Tomson's gazelle as animal we have "done". The little gazelles, a slender, graceful animal, are everywhere. Other antelope-type creatures we have seen are: redbuck, topi, dikdik and Cooke's hartebeest. Baboons are always present and we saw a lot of monkeys. Wart hogs are common, a particlarly homely animal. Giraffe are common, as are buffalo. There are a lot of big birds here including secretary birds (about three feet high), Kori bustard and vultures.

  The restaurant and bar at this lodge is a classic example of an architect putting form over function. Adjacent to the lodge is a "kopje", little head, a pile of granite boulders, some as large as a small house. The restaurant and bar are built into the kopje. The appearance is spectacular. But to use it requires a labyrinth of narrow passageways between rocks and steps going up and down all through the structure. OSHA would never approve, much less ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). We arrived at Ngorongoro Lodge just at dark in our State Travel Service vans. Accommodations here are far better than at Seronera. The water is on and warm. We, and everything along with us, were covered with a layer of red volcanic dust. The lodge is 608 meters above the crater floor and we will be driven down to the floor tomorrow in four-wheel-drive vehicles. Considering the roads our drivers take us on in two-wheel-drive vehicles, the road must be pretty hairy.