To the classic A-frame sunk into a muddy field near Devil’s Lake. You were a warm respite, a cozy nook, a place to gather with friends…as well as the site of my first completely unintentional hot-boxing. Dear tentmates: sixteen years later, I am still sorry. Please forgive.

To the cheap Coleman with the flimsy fabric and irritable zippers. You were the first tent I exchanged real, live money for; I owned you with pride. I look back fondly on our times spent tucked into the sands of Huntington Island and that other swampy place whose name I can’t recall. I only regret riding you hard and putting you away wet – who knew mold was so tenacious?

To my first backpacking rig, the spacious REI Half Dome. You accompanied me to the highest and lowest points in the Continental United States. You weathered two wide ExPed Synmats being jammed across your interior time and time again. You handled the repeated abuse on that single zipper like a real pro. Miles and miles and miles, you were my workhorse. My companion. My everything. I hope you aren’t jealous of my new, infinitely lighter and sexier backpacking tent.

Oops – did I say that out loud? Apologies.

To that snazzy glamping compound in the Serengeti. I’ll never forget the solace of your flushing toilet, the comfort of your asininely huge bed, or the bliss of your warm bucket shower. I’m also infinitely grateful for your protection against that one jackal that spent the entire night stalking me. Asante sana.

To the fancy expedition model on Kilimanjaro. What can I say? We laughed together, we cried together, and that one vulgarly cold night, you even let me pee in you (in a clearly marked Nalgene bottle, of course). I’m not sure if my special eau de backpacker ever left your weather-resistant walls, but I hope you’ll remember me always.

To the stupidly small rented Mountain Hardware disaster pitched in the snow at Rock Creek Lake. Your guylines were dumb. Your interior was miniscule. Your walls manufactured cascades of condensation despite proper ventilation. Still…I suppose you held up your end of the bargain. Barely.

To the absurdly large Kelty 4-person castle. You are my McMansion of car camping. The day I realized I could set up a folding chair inside of you was the best day ever. So what if I look like I’m fighting a greased pig every time I set you up while alone?

To my relatively brand new Big Agnes Fly Creek UL2. Your silnylon is soooooo sexy. The way it barely collects dew in the morning…the way it dries nearly instantly if damp…the utter and improbable lightness in my pack…I’m in love with you. What do you say we hike 942 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail together this year?

…and to sometimes leaving all of the tents behind in favor of cowboy camping under an infinite sky.

(Yes, that’s the best cowboy camping picture I have. The sky looked way better at night, I promise.)

This question came up amazingly often during my first week in Tanzania, and I always answered with momentary silence followed by a stupid, awkward laugh. I reflected on this as I spent a good chunk of one early morning evacuating the contents of my bowels into a fairly functional flush toilet in a two-room canvas tent smack in the middle of the Serengeti, a chorus of wildebeest grunts accentuating each uncomfortable heave. Despite my digestive discomfort, there was a hot water bottle nestled in my bed, a plush bathrobe draped on a hook, and I was about thirty minutes away from having a French press full of steaming coffee delivered straight to my front flap. Here, I was rich – or at least rich-adjacent.

It felt sort of weird, this idea of being viewed as wealthy. I felt a complex swirl of guilt and defensiveness, tempered by the reminder that when I asked why there were going to be so many porters on my upcoming Kilimanjaro expedition, the answer was, “Everybody in Tanzania needs a job!” Halfway across the world, I was an eternally unzipped wallet. The Bank of Shawnté. A walking, talking dollar sign.

Except for at the moment, I wasn’t doing any walking or any talking – I was hunched over a cold toilet, groaning to myself, realizing the limits of my intestinal flora. I suddenly remembered the seemingly overzealous suggestion that I avoid all produce for my first few days in the country and immediately made a mental tally of the massive amount of vegetables I ingested in the name of hunger and in the hope of avoiding unidentifiable meat products.

Gurgle.

After some time, I reluctantly left my perch, packed my things, and staggered over to the Land Rover for one last game drive back to the airstrip. Once we touched down in Arusha, I bid adieu to my safari mates Debbie and Dan, then made a mad dash for the bathroom, where I was confronted with The Most Terrifying Thing given my current physical state:

The Drop Toilet.

Also known as a pit or squat toilet, this is basically a hole in the ground over which one hovers to do their business. Once you’re finished, you shake and spray – there’s usually a hose stashed in the corner of the room – or if you were brilliant enough to think ahead, use toilet paper that you smuggled in, then trudge the used bits out to a nearby waste basket for deposit.

Here at the airport, the setup was only vaguely civilized – cracked, wet tile and the stench of a thousand soiled diapers. Every square inch was wet with water or urine or some unidentifiable liquid other. I practiced squatting in various positions with my purse slung across my chest and my duffle balanced on my thighs, but upon realizing that I had no toilet paper and that the morning’s business was as yet unfinished, decided to wait for the clean porcelain familiarity of my sparkling hotel commode.

Waiting for me at the airport was a kind, quiet guy named Nico, a driver employed by the company I’d be trekking with on Kilimanjaro in the coming week. I was glad for his comfortable silence, a rarity so far in my chatty Tanzanian travels, because it allowed me not only to focus on clenching tight every inch of my war-torn digestive system, but also to think about all of the questions I’d been peppered with over the past few days. My drivers were all men, from my first airport pickup to my safari guides to Nico here, and their inquisitions were nearly identical:

Why did you come to Tanzania?

Do you believe in God?

Are you married?

Do you have children?

Are you traveling alone?

Intrusive and awkward? Sure. Malicious and judgmental? Not at all.

I came to Tanzania, I usually explained, because I’ve heard that the people are wonderful, the scenery is marvelous, the animals are magnificent, and because I want to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.

I want to…well, I want to have an experience.

That last part sounds ridiculous, so in truth, I never said that out loud. Dear sir, I spent a Tanzanian lifetime’s worth of cold, hard, crisp, unwrinkled American dollars so I could drink hot coffee in a fancy tent, shit in a flush toilet on the Serengeti, marvel at a multitude of horned beasts, and traipse up a giant volcano. I want to experience your exotic culture and eat your exotic food and take pictures of your exotic scenery. I want to get away from my regular life for just a little bit and have an Adventure.

Instead, I piled on frothy platitudes about the Wonders of Tanzania and waited patiently for the next question.

“Do I believe in God?” [Noting the rosary draped around the rearview mirror.] “Wellllll, I’m a very spiritual person.” [Glancing at the dalla dalla ahead, where Tupac’s disembodied head floats above a neon pink splash of “GOD LOVES YOU!”] “Very, very spiritual, really.”

Once the driver replied with the usual praising of Jesus, I was then hit with the one-two punch of “Where is your husband? Where are your children?” In as many words, I replied that I was a childless singleton and patiently awaited the flood of gently pity-filled questioning that followed. “Ohhhhh, why are you not married? Why don’t you have children? How old are you? Do you want a husband? Why do you travel alone?”

After hearing this round of questioning often enough during my trip, I settled on the belief that there’s some sort of government-mandated pamphlet issued to all drivers titled “How To Make Small Talk With American Women.” It was like a mobile version of Groundhog Day.

One morning late into my trip, I was in a van driven by a talkative man named Abdullah, headed towards the grassy shores of Lake Duluti for a canoe trip. When he asked if I was married, I blurted out, “Why does everyone keep asking me that question?” I mean, outside of family reunions, I’d never had so many people interested in my relationship status as I did in Tanzania.

Abdullah chuckled. “Well, because when we see a woman traveling alone and we find out that she is not married, we know that she is honest and brave, and we think she is a warrior to come to Tanzania by herself.”

Ohhhhhhhhhhh. I let loose a huge, strangely proud smile. I could be into this.

Not a half hour later, my canoe guide Emmanuel unsurprisingly drilled through the requisite conversational blitz and after I responded that I was unmarried and traveling alone, he grinned and exclaimed, “Ah, you are like a female Maasai warrior!” I wanted to high-five him in the most serious way, but considering we were about two feet away from a toothy monitor lizard the size of a small child, I thought I’d better keep both hands on my paddle.

In my glorious Wonder Woman haze, I was reminded of a conversation I had earlier with Victor, after I asked him if women ever became safari guides. He said that he only knew one female guide, and explained that women weren’t usually as tough physically as you needed to be in order to deal with the very real dangers on safari, especially considering the violent poachers that roamed the area. “African women just aren’t raised to want to be that way,” he shrugged. “In the Western world, especially in the United States, women are raised to be human beings, but here, they’re raised to be women.”

I realize how that might read, but Victor wasn’t judging me, or American women, or Tanzanian women, for that matter – he was just making an observation based on his life experience in contrast to that of the constant influx of tourists he meets, same as any of the other men I conversed with during my trip.

When they found out that I was traveling alone and planned to climb Kilimanjaro, I suddenly commanded a strange sense of respect from the local men. “Oh, you must be tough! You must be strong!” But was I stronger than the countless mothers and sisters and daughters I saw lining the dusty roads, packages piled on their heads and across their broad shoulders, the weight of the world hung from their eyes? Did these men look at them and think they were tough, they were strong?

I don’t know. I didn’t expect to be hit with a wave of feminism in the shadow of Kilimanjaro, but I would think about these things during my coming week on the mountain – my place as a female traveler, as a female “climber,” as a female no different, yet so very different than those who surrounded me at the moment.

Well, I would think about those things until I was preoccupied with other things, I should say – like gasping for air at 18,000 feet whilst clung to a volcanic outcropping, pants around my ankles, freely blessing the frigid flanks of Kilimanjaro with arcs of champagne-colored urine under a starlit sky.

Yes, sometimes there were other things on my mind.

(To be continued…)

<< Previous: AFRICA, PT. 3 – Just Call Me Serengeti Jones

It was 5:45am and I was shockingly refreshed. I tumbled out of my soft nest and eventually made my way to the open-air restaurant where Anthony waited with a cup of coffee. It was now 6:30am and my flight left in exactly one hour. Where he’d been lackadaisical the night before (“Oh, it will only take fifteen, twenty minutes to get to the airport in the morning. Get some sleep and we will leave at 6:30!”), he now seemed in an awful hurry (“There is no time – we must go!”).

Before we departed, I checked my extra luggage with the hotel and in exchange was handed a very, very, very heavy box: breakfast. Inside were two pre-cracked boiled eggs, a bag of sliced carrots and zucchini, a yogurt, an orange, two tiny bananas, mango juice, and a bottle of water. My stomach felt fine from the previous night’s veggie assault, so I inhaled the box’s contents, suddenly starved.

As we left the hotel property, I took in the surroundings that were invisible the night before and it was immediately clear that if there are two things Westerners have sold to Tanzanians, its Jesus Christ and Coca-Cola. The soda giant must pour loads of money into the area, because the familiar swoopy red logo is festooned on nearly every stationary surface, including mileage signs. Christianity is also very present, primarily on the brightly colored minibuses (dalla-dallas) adorned with phrases like “Magic of God!,” “Hand Of God!,” “Power Of God!,” and “May God Be With You!,” accompanied by renderings of very godly men like Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg.

Turns out you might need to have the word of God painted on your vehicle as some sort of spiritual auto insurance, judging from the general absence of road rules and overall atmosphere of four-wheeled mania. In the light of day, Anthony blossomed into a certifiable lunatic behind the wheel. On a road with two lanes, he casually carved a third, eliciting a chorus of honks and hollers. He wove back and forth with abandon, slipping in between semis painted with Coca-Cola logos, dalla-dallas overflowing with people and chickens, and pickups boasting unsteady hay bale towers and ferrying enough men that they conceivably could, if they chose, lift up and carry the truck itself.

“I’m sorry for the crazy driving, but you drive crazy in Los Angeles, right?”

“Um, not quite like this.”

Then, after careening onto the dirt shoulder, past a line of rumbling trucks:  “Oh, this is illegal, I hope the police don’t see me!”

By the time we arrived at the airport, I had a slight case of lockjaw from forty-five minutes of clenching and I was about ready to throw up the twenty pounds of food I’d eaten. I made my flight with two minutes to spare.

Joining me onboard the tiny Cessna was an extremely pleasant Irish couple, David and Louise. We made small talk and marveled at the scenery below – first, volcanoes, then Maasai farmland, then the Serengeti, where we watched masses of wildebeest hoof across plains dotted with zebra and giraffe. The duo deplaned at the Lamai Airstrip to start their adventure, while I sat with our surly South African pilot waiting for another couple to board. After twenty long minutes passed, I wandered over and introduced myself. In return, I received a nod and a slow exhale of cigarette smoke. I took a more direct line of questioning:

“Soooo, how long have you been flying?”

Puff. “Six months.” Puff.

“Oh.”

As twenty minutes stretched into thirty stretched into forty, I watched a troop of baboons scamper around the airfield, wrote several pages in my journal, flipped through the in-flight magazine, and downed two bottles of water. Suddenly, I had to pee with a ferocity usually reserved for bladder infections. I scanned the area: there was the surly South African leaning against the plane, the baboons frolicking in the grass, and David and Louise enjoying an afternoon snack on a portable picnic table complete with checkered tablecloth, surrounded by at least six very attentive safari employees.

“Are there any bathrooms at the airstrip?” I asked Señor Chattypants.

Puff. “No.” Puff.

I tried not to think about peeing, but as you know, once you have to pee, it dominates your thoughts. I started to think about the people we were waiting for, who were now nearing fifty minutes late for their – my – plane. I considered joining the baboons for a wee, but thought better of it. I considered going behind the Cessna, but thought better of it. I considered hijacking the plane, but thought better of it.

My increasingly agitated thoughts were interrupted when the latecomers finally arrived, nearly sixty minutes tardy to the proceedings. They were middle-aged and spoke with a thick New Jersey accent.

“Oh my gawwwd, look at how small this plane is!” said the woman, who smelled of Aquanet and was clothed in a thick layer of cheetah-print fabrics.

“I’m sorry we were late, but we just haaaad to see one more crossing at the Mara River. I’m suuuuure you understand,” said the man, who was wearing one of those vests with all of the pockets that looked to contain nothing save for a few pieces of lint.

I shrugged my shoulders and pretended not to speak English.

When we landed at the Kogatende Airstrip a mere five minutes later, I bolted off the plane in search of a toilet, but was intercepted by a pack of gentlemen who quickly located my bags and directed me to a safari jeep containing four middle-aged Malaysian-Canadians (including the group’s ringleader Annie, who started most stories with, “When I was a young girl in the jungles of Borneo…”), one Maasai spotter, and one extremely happy guide named Good Luck who cheerfully exclaimed, “We are going to see some animals!”

I pushed aside the stabbing pain in my bladder as I struggled to process the parade of animals we encountered in our sixty minute drive to camp: gnarly wildebeest, elegant giraffe, lazy hippos, elegant antelope, adorable oribis, playful klipspringers, dirty warthogs, stunning zebras, beautiful impala, and one very secretive leopard.

I am in Africa. I am in Africa. I am in Africa.

The surreality continued at our remote installation, a collection of large canvas tents arranged in a semi-circle on acacia-studded plains populated with zebras and wildebeest. As soon as we jumped out of the jeep, we were showered with hospitality – hellos and hot towels and drinks and snacks – and then I ran for the toilet. Peace at last.

After dinner, we ventured out into the golden light in search of the big cat we saw earlier; when we arrived at our destination, a large pile of boulders, we had the extreme fortune of seeing real, live leopard sex. Do you know what it’s like to watch two leopards doin’ it in the wild, within spitting distance of your fairly unprotected person? I’ll tell you what it’s like – it’s insanely awesome. The dominant man-leopard flexed, grunted, and circled the submissive lady-leopard with a sort of hip-hop swagger, then positioned himself and went to town with a powerful staccato rhythm, staring out at his audience as if to say, “Who’s your daddy?”

We saw a lion that evening, too, but it was just lounging around, so it wasn’t nearly as exciting.

After a stunning sunset, we returned to camp and were escorted to our respective tents as insurance against any predators dragging us off dingo-ate-my-baby-style into the night. Outside my tent, which was the last structure before the neverending wilderness, stood two men with spears. Spears. They nodded soberly as I thanked them. Not too long after, I snuggled against the chill and fell asleep to a chorus of howling hyenas.

Lala salama.

Good night, Tanzania.

It’s hard to think that anything in the world could possibly top leopard sex (it really was that fantastic), but I woke with an open mind. Wrapped in warm layers, I slowly drained a cup of powerful coffee and watched the bleating wildebeest eat their way around the grass outside my tent as the sun rose. I felt like both observer and participant, no barriers between myself and the wild African morning unfolding in my midst. It was one of the most magical feelings I’ve experienced in my entire life.

It wasn’t the only magic the day had in store. I joined Toronto newlyweds Debbie and Dan, and led by our fantastic guide Victor, we began the day’s safari drive with a bit of exciting bloodshed as we came across two lion cubs feasting on a fresh wildebeest carcass. Here I realized just why I was so enthralled with the previous day’s leopard sex – it was a display of sheer power, unlike anything I’d seen in any zoo or on any hike. It was fierce, feral, and undeniably beautiful. I reveled at the concentration in the cubs’ eyes, the blood on their chins. One moment they were buried deep inside the beestie’s abdomen, the next, gnashing at its hide.

Afterwards, we rolled past a veritable encyclopedia of the African animal kingdom en route to scouting a wildebeest crossing of the Mara River, part of their famous annual migration. Along the way, I had to pee – and as you may have guessed, there are no Porta-Potties in the Serengeti.

Victor was reassuring: “If you are separate from the jeep, a lion or buffalo will see you as prey and will kill you, so just keep your back to the jeep.” I looked out at the vast ocean of hoofed animals and didn’t see any lions or buffalo. “Um…okay.”

I nervously slid along the vehicle, made my way to the back, and positioned myself underneath the spare tire. I’ve never felt as exposed as I did with my bare buns hovering mere yards away from an assortment of large creatures with horns. In retrospect, I feel you haven’t really lived until you’ve squatted behind a Land Rover in the Serengeti.

Back in the relative safety of our metal cocoon, we arranged the departure of Debbie and Dan, who were heading off to have a romantic lunch at some fancy locale, and Victor and I settled in to wait for the wildebeest crossing. When it finally began, we raced to the river’s edge and I watched with fascination as hordes of beesties transformed into a lemming stampede, rushing down the embankment and splashing through the crocodile-infested waters of the Mara River in an unparalleled frenzy.

As the excitement wound down, Victor suggested we venture closer to the Kenyan border, so we drove Indiana Jones-style across a flooded bridge and through rolling hillsides filled with beasts of all sizes. There were ostriches and zebras and lions and waterbucks, and miles and miles of open landscape stretching out to a vast horizon. I stood at the border and felt insignificant, understanding my miniscule place in this enormous world.

That evening’s communal dinner was filled with excited chatter – What did you see? You won’t believe what I saw! – which slipped into serious discussions of what led to each one of us occupying our chairs that evening. A Vancouverite named Cliff offered up a Steve Jobs quote (from his speech at Stanford University’s 2005 spring commencement ceremony):

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path; and that will make all the difference.

I went back to my tent and mulled over the day, the week, my life. I followed my heart and my gut when I planned this trip, not knowing what I would experience or feel, and so far I’d spent my time in Africa appreciating every moment, not concerned about the next. I felt content and full of gratitude as I once more fell asleep to the symphony of the Serengeti.

Then I woke up the next morning with the worst diarrhea of my life.

(…to be continued…)

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all pictures are by Shawnté Salabert