Devanshi Mody laments conservation lip service and inconsistency in sustainability at some of the leading safari camps of the Serengeti.
Superb joke, isn’t it, that some of the ugliest and stupidest creatures on God’s Earth are more photographed than a supermodel and more followed than a superstar? Appositely, then, the Serengeti’s Great Migration, involving about two million migrating wildebeest, offers the perfect stage to spotlight something not so funny – climate change.
Placards in the Serengeti bugle, “The Serengeti Shall Live Forever!” That is, if we let it…
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The first thing guides from Serengeti Bushtops (below) announce as they fetch us at the Kogatende airstrip in Northern Serengeti is that the wildebeest have prematurely migrated into Central Serengeti. It is October. This is unprecedented. Provoked by climate change.
Timun, our savvy Masai guide, whose village fringes the Serengeti, grew up witnessing the migration annually. As the wildebeest have unseasonably mowed the grass in the north, Timun forecasts they’ll hit the Southern Serengeti, where they calve, ahead of schedule and raze the grass there before their babies are nourished. This year’s bewilderingly anomalous migration, he worries, will eventuate wildebeest starvation and dismantle the Serengeti’s ecosystem.
As we wait endless days for some straggling wildebeest to cross the Mara River, observing their typical yes-no-yes-no-yes-no at the water’s edge, we hear Californians in jeeps adjoining ours bemoan seas too hot to swim in and roads too hot to walk their poodles on in Beverley Hills. New Yorkers counter: forget the luxury of peddling dogs, they couldn’t breathe due to smog from forest fires in Canada that palled New York City!
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Naturally, problems created by the First World have their worst repercussions in the Third World. As if to impress this truth, the sun that has been glowering over us, dispatching us in quest of a fleshy riverine tree to picnic under, is suddenly quenched in smothering billows of dark clouds. Fat spears of rain come striking down. Our game vehicle is suddenly zipped down with canvas, and we are racing back to camp. Our special sundowner is washed out, as is the much-awaited private dinner.
El Nino rains are lashing Tanzania. Timun reveals that last time they destroyed crops and caused mass starvation. The Developed World didn’t care. But when you can’t swim in California, now that constitutes calamity!
Back in camp, my handsome all-wood ship-like jacuzzi-studded tent feels like a dinghy in a deluge on raucous sees. Solar power ensures hot water despite the unrelenting rains, demonstrating how ferociously hot it was before the dramatic switch. Whilst showering, I remark amenities from presumptively eco-conscious Healing Earth come in plastic. In a decade of travelling to Africa, this is my first encounter with plastic on safari.
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It’s also only my second encounter with cereal and juice out of cartons. The first time was 10 years ago, at Richard Branson’s Mahali Mzuri, to which I had transferred from Great Plains Conservation camps, the most conservation-driven safari on earth. Aghast at Mahali Mzuri’s industrial cereal, I threatened to check out until the chef conjured up all-natural homemade granola just for me. But why just for me?
In Zambia, whose young Tourism Minister is projecting the destination as the greenest safari, even during the pandemic, every camp we stayed at offered fresh-made food, right down to the tomato ketchup. A luxury safari has hitherto rigorously inculcated sustainability and wholesome living through its own example. The post-pandemic Tanzanian safari, however, doesn’t. It signals a paradigm shift: that commerce, convenience, and self-preservation override conservation.
When we emerge for supper at the dining area, after five hours of remorseless rain, we’re presented with hot fresh-baked bread, and I wonder if, by the time I return on safari next, the bread too will be from a plastic pack.
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Given the vagaries of the weather and my mother’s health, we shift to the Four Seasons Safari Lodge Serengeti (above). Mum is much relieved to have AC and TV. I remark that this colossus, with 77 rooms, is hardly low-impact. Mum doesn’t care! At Bushtops, despite our indefatigable butler Peter’s efforts to pamper mum, he couldn’t quite protect her from the infernal temperatures and remorseless rain. Mum now just wants a temperature-controlled room, yes, room, with concrete walls and a TV – she wants to watch the Cricket World Cup.
Well, our private villa features not one but three TVs the size of elephants, which derogate from the live drama unfolding outside our window as a herd of elephants with their toddlers saunter up to the lodge’s marvellous waterhole to drink. As for human toddlers at the lodge, they seem to care little for the spectacle outdoors, their eyes firmly set on their mobiles. When nature has ceased to excite kids, what will incentivise future generations against its depredation? Or guard against history repeating itself, like during colonial times when elephants were exterminated ruthlessly to embellish Europe and America, where everything from furniture to billiard balls was made of ivory. A safari is an education. Had I children, I wouldn’t initiate them on safari at a Four Seasons.
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The lodge’s boma reincarnates in a contemporary avatar as a restaurant encircling an open central space where Masai perform. Not very authentic, but this bit of dinner theatre is an effort to preserve Masai culture. When the Masai’s vociferations cease, I overhear some Americans commending Germans about their vigorously verdant forests. The Germans scoff, “Verdure?” Their forests were parched and bleached over summer. And Alpine snow is melting like candle wax.
These conversations happen against a backdrop of plastic bottles piling up like wildebeest carcasses during river crossings as truckloads of tourists descend en masse upon the Serengeti. It’s the first bumper season post-pandemic. No one hears nature’s alarm calls as even premium lodges flout bush etiquette and speeding game vehicles strike impalas to whizz upon lion cubs. Asked about the bleeding impala bestrewn across the road, clearly knocked by a vehicle, my guide shrugs, “Happens.”
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By contrast, my guide George at the new Wilderness Usawa (above) conducts a sedate safari. He’s an ex-poacher excruciatingly pernickety about upholding the law, so much so that he won’t infringe the official speed limit of 25 km/ph. When a clog of cars dissipates to reveal four lion cubs, George doesn’t zoom in terrorising them, as many guides do. He maintains a respectful distance from which, eventually, nine lion cubs are demarcated, curled in tight embrace.
When we encounter an injured cheetah with three cubs, George remarks that she had previously lost the fourth. The starved survivors are so emaciated they seem to be swaying on stilts as they try to walk. I ask if the rangers will treat the mother and save her cubs. “We don’t interfere with nature,” George asserts. Even if cheetahs are endangered? If the cheetah population increases, what will happen to the hyenas is George’s logic. Why doesn’t the same logic apply to humans? We treat ailing humans, we don’t let nature take its course. As the human population increases, the wilderness is expropriated to feed its needs and greed. Forest land turns into farmland or factory land, generating industrial waste, which effects climate change, which impacts the natural order. George has no answer.
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Usawa, the latest offering from Wilderness which has, for 40 years, crusaded for conservation with a capital “C,” is a mobile camp peeling off barriers between man and nature as mere netting separates you in your luxury tent from the elements. Plastic water dispensers in-tent and plastic buckets in-camp, however, are oddities. Rigorously sustainable, you’d expect Wilderness camps to be plastic-free zones.
Asilia is another conservation-oriented safari operator. If Roho Ya Selous and Rubondo Island Lodge display emphatically eco-rustic chic, then Jabali Ridge (below) is a masterpiece of environment-sensitive bio-degradable design and architecture. Amongst the most astonishingly glamorous lodges on the planet, and certainly a “destination” lodge that created a destination out of the far-flung Ruaha National Park, this lodge, looming with a scatter of cutting-edge suites stacked up a ridge overlooking a ravishing landscape, eloquently demonstrates that the ultimate in luxury can be as responsible as it is racy.
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Remoteness is Asilia’s trademark, and in the deep Eastern Serengeti, the company’s terrific Namiri Plains retreat (above) is yet another testament to how style, sustainability, and indeed, sybaritism can make for a happy marriage or a merry ménage à trois, as the case might be. Warren Buffet’s son Howard Buffet, who sojourned at Namiri, gifted Tanzania a helicopter to patrol for poachers.
However, when he contacted authorities to enquire about the chopper’s implementation, he was allegedly told it had “crashed”. Despite proclamations that the Serengeti’s ludicrously high park fees are deployed towards grand conservation efforts, the government is better known for its corruption and bureaucracy than its zeal for conservation.
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Indeed, Rubondo Island National Park is wreathed thickly in plastic bottles and fishing nets, which park authorities clear but once annually. As a cormorant dangles askew from a branch, its eyes gawping glazed, I realise a fishing net has entangled it, seared through the wing and hooked the amputated bird to the tree on which the net got stuck.
Asilia is acclaimed for its work on sustaining communities, but nowhere is this more pronounced and poignant than at Shanga at Elewana’s Arusha Coffee Lodge. Shanga is an initiative that empowers disabled people who create handicrafts, from recycled cloth and glass, into everything from ethnic paraphernalia to elegant vases and ornaments or jewellery. It shot to fame when Amal Clooney was captured sporting a handcrafted Shanga necklace on safari.
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Conservation of Culture is a more ambiguous project. Timun at Bushtops had questioned the wisdom of western NGOs “educating” tribes, impressing on them Western ideas and ways which are presumed superior but which many feel are corrupting the local mindset and enslaving if not the African body then the African mind.
This point will be debated at andBeyond Ngorongoro Crater Lodge (below), perhaps the most astonishing lodge in all Tanzania, teetering on an escarpment with vertiginous views of the crater. AndBeyond is a vehement champion of conservation, and this lodge actually upholds the principles the company officially stand for. My guide Henry, a Masai like Timun, has that stupefyingly keen eye not blunted by city-dwelling, which enables the Masai to spot a mustard seed on a mountaintop. If Timun decried a rhino snoozing under a bush from merely noticing the mildest obtrusion, Henry’s eyes lasso down on four forms that each time manifest rhinos.
But unlike Timun, Henry has ambivalent feelings about both proselytisation and preaching western ways to the Masai. As we behold the blaze of pink over shimmering blue, a bright flame of flamingos streaking across the water’s edge, Henry avers it’s good that female circumcision is being controlled for until now, girls longed for it, culturally conditioned to believe their womanhood depended on it. Consequently, many girls bled to death during a botched process.
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As for religion, Henry is a Christian and has resisted paternal pressure to acquire another wife, several more, for wives equal cows and cows equal prestige in Masai culture. Henry, however, guffaws about Masai guides who’ve been hijacked to America by guests beguiled by Masai charisma, who have married Americans and tried to integrate into American society. Yet, when they returned home, they couldn’t resist “acquiring” more wives.
When Melia Zanzibar sends us to the Slave Museum in Stone Town for the first time, it occurs to me that Zanzibar isn’t an exotic beach getaway but enshrined as the most notorious slave market of Africa. As we spend three hours scrutinising every ordeal the barbarities slaves endured, we stagger with horror. If a belted and bleeding slave doesn’t move man, what will the bleeding earth and weeping heavens do? They are, after all, inanimate nature.
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But is nature inanimate? The ancient Vedas portray natural forces as governed by divinities, Conscious energies, as it were, whose retributive ire at savaged nature wreaks havoc- like the pandemic, which was a time to reflect. Instead, we return to travel post-pandemic, wrecking nature with invigorated zest to compensate for losses and are spiralling into a vicious cycle.
The Nasadiya Suktam of the Rk Veda attributes the origins of the universe to intense heat anticipating the Big Bang Theory. The same recondite and apocalyptic Vedas presage universal destruction by intense heat. A situation not unimaginable if we extrapolate global warming to its logical conclusion.
But a few million years will elapse before the earth vanishes, and with it the universe.
More immediately disquieting is that the wildebeest we’d been tracking at the river suddenly vanished one day. We relocated them upstream. But a time might come when they will vanish forever. And with them, the Serengeti.
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