Tourism in Tanzania is very expensive. It costs fifty bucks a person to get into a park, two hundred bucks to get a vehicle into the park, and then you need to hire a guide at going rate, and when all is said and done you need to tip the guide. But a friend of a friend knows a ranger, just “tell the park guards that you are from the ecological society.” We also signed a document stating we were East African residents, the text of which we only discovered later.

This didn’t save us much, but as a ranger’s guest, it bought us the right to go off road. So when we saw a huge male lion wander off into the brush we were able to run our little Land Rover right in after him. My door, coincidentally didn’t really shut and rattled delicately on its hinge. It also bought me the freedom, provided no one was looking, to get out and take pictures, but though he looked well fed, I stayed in the vehicle to see the lion.

If you can imagine Crater Lake, the Ngorongoro is bigger, warmer, and with a lot less water. It’s sparsely forested in spots, but otherwise flat enough and big enough to host the 2010 World Cup, all games played simultaneously.

Along with three of the other big five, we saw eight rhinos scattered thru the park. The black rhinos are endangered so we gave them respectable space. “That’s M7, male seven over there. His mother is F7, female seven, off in the distance.” My pleasure at seeing those magnificent and peacefully grazing tanks is beyond my ability to articulate. But as we stayed and watched I chose to think of them informally as Roslyn and Jeremy, though I kept that to myself.

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In the grasses, which are higher than me at this time of year, the guide said we’d notice movement of large animals by the rustling. Yet it was the still grass of animals lying in wait that concerned me.

In the forest, we found the tell-tale tracks of the three toed Indian Rhinoceros and followed them as they trod along a small path. When they wandered off the path into the thick of the forest, we went in the opposite direction.

If I were a tracker, I’d follow the tracks. But I’m not, and our guide is, and he’s still alive. So what do I know?

An hour later we climbed atop a raised, wooden viewing tower and spotted yesterday’s wild male elephant. Arguably more dangerous today due to his unrealized goals from the night before, he looked peaceful and graceful to me.

From the raised station we watched him disappear into the jungle, right in the vicinity of our path. This unnerved the guides so we waited and the clouds grew darker.

Eventually we could wait no longer and with dramatic thunder in the background, we amassed in number, joining forces with two other groups and proceeded into the jungle toward the frustrated beast. Our guides were visibly anxious.

After half an hour of jumping at each snapped twig, we finally saw his tracks cross ours, leading away. Guides scrambled into trees, verified the stillness of the grasses, and we proceeded to track monkeys and deer.

It was then, deeper in the forest and on foot and at the furthest point from our lodging that the canopy thickened, the clouds blackened, and the rains came down hard.

The students were pissed. Three months ago the government promised them books, pens, and paper. Three months later, they still had none and it was the week before exams. So they dragged trees and rocks across the road and stopped traffic.

Our bus company simply re-routed their trip, dropped us off on the side of the road, and shrugged as they pulled away. We crawled atop a local bus and endured five more hours of crossing picket lines on foot, in taxis, on buses, each one dead ending and sending us forward to figure out how best to go forward, toward Chitwan National Park.

At one point our cab was waved into the mob by a few authoritative students, but was stopped twenty feet later, by student intervention physically blocking and pounding on the vehicle. Were forced to pay up, get out, and start walking again, concerned for our taxi’s ability to extricate himself from the melee.

Finally, at sunset, we sank into riverside chairs in the national park and drank a well earned beer while a wild male elephant sauntered across the river in what would be a late night attempt to break into the elephant breeding center down the road from our lodging.

He was categorically denied access and the locals said that makes him dangerous.

That makes sense to me.