3rd Quarterly Report

My introduction to the mountain hut system of Tanzania started on the slopes of Mt. Meru at the Mirikamba Huts. I write huts and not hut because Mirikamba was like a little village in the mountains. There were 7 or 8 buildings clustered around in a small area, all of them solidly built with quality materials that meant no wind would blow in through cracks in the wood. I shared a private room with my friend Alena. There was solar power to let us read in bed at night, flush sit-down toilets, and even soap dispensers by the sinks so we could wash our hands. Luxury, indeed, considering many hotels and homes in cities don't have all of those features. At Mirikamba there was a mess hut complete with cushioned wooden chairs, all brought up invidivually by porters since the construction used no animals in the transport of building materials. The other huts I visited were similar to my first night at Mirikamba. Not all the places I slept on Kilimanjaro were as well preserved, probably because the volume of visitors is much higher, but I still slept in comfort all my nights on the mountain. The guides and porters slept indoors too, in beds on Meru and in huts at least on Kili.

Tanzania proved to be the country with the biggest discrepancies between what the locals and the foreign tourists wanted out of the wilderness. There would be no one climbing the tall mountains, no one living in them, if it were not for the foreigners, it seemed to me. Tanzanians saw the mountain (by which I mean Kilimanjaro, the central focus of hiking in the country) as a place for a job, not a vacation. There were no locals climbing up when I was there, although I know that Tanzanian student groups do make the climb. The only instance of local involvement in the mountains (besides having a paying job there) was in a small village outside of Mtae in the Usambara mountains. A local volunteer ranger protected the little forest I walked from anyone who might try to cut down trees or take branches for firewood. This ranger was protecting his village's piece of the forest and their water supply-- tourists did not really have any place in this purely local affair.

Danger on the trail? Since that was a factor I used to evaluate wilderness in other countries, I will bring up the discussion here. Yes. Absolutely. The obvious danger was the animals. That is whe the Tanzanian park service sent an armed ranger up Mt. Meru with each group. I didn't feel threatened when we passed 10ft from giraffes and water buffalo, but I was a bit nervous. I could see Michael, our ranger, fingering his gun the entire walk--there was a danger there. The quick gains of altitude is dangerous as well as being downright stupid. But the guns and the frequent admonitions to go pole pole, slowly slowly, guard against both the danger of animals and fast altitude gains. At Mirikamba, the tourists were warned not to venture beyond the perimeter of the camp because the armed guards could not be responsible for us out there. I stayed put, not wanting to meet any curious elephants. In that way, the huts themselves made the wilderness a bit less wild, a bit more safe for all of us visitors. A danger of the wilderness that I had not expected was the poaching that my ranger Michael described. Besides protecting tourists from animals, the rangers must go off-trail in national parks and protect the animals from armed and dangerous poachers.

Parks seemed to be set up as money making machines--a wilderness set aside because foreign visits demanded that... the Tanzanians rightfully wanted to make money off of the visits to the mountain. The rules that govern human presence on the mountain are shaped around western influences, and not what the locals might want out of their mountain. My guide on Kili, Philip, told me about the strict laws against taking anything away from the park. The usual take only pictures leave only footprints saying. But once in the park, he picked up rocks and put them in his pocket to take down the mountain. And it was ok to use the plants for medicine, he told me. I reminded him out what he had told me, but Philip shrugged that off saying that there were enough rocks for every visitor to take one. If picking plants is for medicine, that is a reason to shrug off the rules, never mind the western-modeled rules that instruct otherwise. National parks might have had strict regulations, but with a huge country like Tanzania, there were certainly other less-regulated wild landscapes. Michael, my ranger from Meru, explained the rules pertaining to game reserves and game-controlled area, the land that surrounds national parks. Hunting by locals is allowed on a limited basis in these areas.

The idea that Tanzanian wilderness had something to give humans was consistent in my visit to the lower Usambara mountains. There the locals handed me piles of pears freshly picked from the trees, or tomatoes from the fields as they were picking. The idea behind these free hand-offs, as Yassin, my guide explained, was that there was enough for everybody there. I can accept that logic for the Usambara mountains, for now. The number of visitors is only a fraction of what Kili receives. But the idea of taking something that the mountain produces for human consumption is an important one, because the gifts of crunchy pears did not appear because I was a mzungu, a novelty in a small village. The unspoken rule that within the mountains products are free for all even if outside the mountains they are sold is long-standing. It was around before the mzungus were, and therefore is telling of a specifically Tanzanian concept of wilderness unaltered by Western mountaineers shaping national park policies.

One failure during my time in Tanzania was my inability to get a woman's perspective on wilderness. All of the locals I talked to about wilderness were men. They were the ones who had the jobs as armed rangers, as guides, as porters. I did meet and talked to women who were part of the park service, but most of them had desk jobs at the bottom, not up in the mountains. Michael ventured an opinion when I asked him about it: Women do not like coming up into the mountains. They want to stay down in the offices. This seemed like an excuse more than anything else, so I asked a female park ranger when I was back at the bottom of Meru. Did she want to go up and guide tourists on multi-day hikes? No, she told me, aligning herself exactly as Michael had predicted. She preferred to work just for the day and return home at night. I wondered if there was a macho culture surrounding working up in the huts that made it uncomfortable and impratical for women to work up there. Like the excuse the park ranger in Chile gave me for why no women were working at the ranger station in el Cajon del Maipu: men and women would have to share a bathroom, so therefore women really couldn't work there comfortably. This Tanzanian ranger might have had a different view on the danger in the park, from both animals and humans, than her male co-workers, but I don't know the real reasons behind her statement that she would rather not lead hikes like the one I had just finished. My inability to understand how women see the wilderness in Tanzania is not really a personal failure on my part--the tourist industry is set up so that tourists are interacting with men almost all of the time. Actually, this is true for most of where I've walked. There were more male than female hut guardians in Switzerland and Chile, only male guides and porters and cooks in India. I am not quite sure how to overcome this limitation.

A few successes I've had... in Tanzania I managed to plan more quickly with the limited time I had in the country. Because of government regulations, I had to walk with a guide at all times, but I was able to organize my entourage more easily than I could in India. The limitation on my independence, however, was frustrating. I am glad to be in Scotland, where I can control the routes I take, where I sleep, and the food that I eat without worrying as much about safety and getting sick. I was quite proud of the fact that I spoke more Kiswahili than the average tourist, thanks to my Peace Corps Volunteer friend Alena who taught me some key phrases at the beginning of my time in Tanzania. Being able to say how are you (Habari za leo) rather than just the touristy Jambo paved the way for better relationships with guides and porters on the trail. And of course, making it to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro lands in my successes list. My body's response to altitude was not completely in my control, so I can't claim that luck did not play a role in the climb... but I was there, standing among glaciers at almost 20,000ft!


Right now I am well into my 9th month of travel on this 12 month Watson journey. I am almost finished with the Speyside Way national long distance trail, which is the third of its kind I will have completed in the last 3 weeks. That means over 200 miles since Rebecca's visit ended. Yes, I am feeling a bit tired. I love being in Scotland (despite blustery sideways freezing rain days like today) because the discussion of wilderness is everywhere. It is not just about bothies (the Scottish huts I came to see). Scottish Access Code information is posted and readily discussed, and by wild camping on the national long distance trails like the West Highland Way and the Great Glen Way, I can see how the Scottish understanding of wilderness on paper plays out in practice.