The Way of Wanderlust (27 page)

Part Five: Cheetah Time on the Mara Plains

Just as we were finishing breakfast this morning in Masai Mara National Reserve, Sammy our driver and Lewela arrived in our van. Perfect timing.

We set off on a game drive. During the course of the drive we saw big brooding Cape buffalo, mud-caked elephants, treetop-munching giraffes, and a young hyena emerging from the hole that led to its underground home. But the wildlife highlight of the day occurred about a half hour into the drive, when Sammy spotted a yellow flash in the grasses to our left. He crept closer, slowly and steadily, until a mother cheetah and her two children suddenly emerged into a wide area of lower grass. What a sight! There was something breathtakingly sleek and elegant in the way they walked, the lean rippling lines in their flanks, the sloping spotted back, the slim, quick, powerful legs. Speed personified—or rather, cheetahfied.

We followed them for a while. They were scouring the plains for their breakfast. They would walk slowly, majestically, for a few paces, then lift their heads to smell the wind and look at the plains. At one point they froze—a herd of Thomson's gazelles was grazing in the near distance, and a couple who weren't paying attention seemed to have strayed from the others. 

Suddenly the mother cheetah went into stealth stalking mode, sinking into the grass so that she virtually disappeared, slinking forward long taut leg-stretch by stretch. We could make her out now and again, low to the ground, her belly almost touching the soil, sliding ever closer to the gazelles. The gazelle closest to the cheetah looked up and around, ears twitching; the breeze was blowing toward the cheetah. Closer. The gazelle went back to its grazing, and was soon enrapt again in the grass. Closer. My throat was dry; my palms were wet. Closer.

Then the air went electric. In a bright yellow blur the cheetah leaped up and pounced toward the nearest gazelle, which shot off as soon as she noticed the spotted blur. The gazelle vaulted through the grass and the cheetah gave chase, bounding forward in time to the gazelle's leaps. The chase continued for twenty seconds that seemed like an eternity, then the gazelle suddenly veered to the left and leaped into a waterhole, high-stepped through the water and scampered out onto the other side. The cheetah bounded into the water but was slowed by it and stopped in the middle of the waterhole, abruptly giving up the chase. The gazelle bolted on to the safety of the herd.

We resumed breathing, and continued to follow the cheetah, who had returned to her two cubs. Would they find breakfast? Who was the good guy and the bad guy in this drama? Neither, of course. On some gut level I felt simultaneously relieved and disappointed. Life in the wild.

The cheetahs strode to the shade of a tree, and before long the two cubs had climbed up into its branches. Their mother continued to search the plains. Was there a kind of desperation in her manner or was it just my projection? Her children were hungry; there must be breakfast out there somewhere. She spotted another herd of gazelles and began to crawl toward them. We followed slowly behind. She neared them, heading toward one loner who was lingering over a patch of grass while his mates had nervously scattered away.  

Suddenly a couple of bush bird beauties—the regal crested crane, the national bird of Uganda, adorned with a flamboyant golden crown—flew into the air and settled near the gazelle, where they began to emit a distinctive cry.

“Look at that!” Lewela said. “See how the prey work together? The birds are trying to warn the gazelle that the cheetah is approaching. We see this often here—the prey work together to keep each other safe.”

Alerted by the birds' cries, the gazelle leaped away to re-join his herd.  

“I bet that cheetah would like to get her paws on those birds right now,” Jennifer said.

  

Now it is 10:00
p.m
. After dinner I was escorted by a gun-bearing guide along the pathway back to my tented camp. Happily, no buffalos or other inordinately scary things appeared in the arc of his light. For a moment on that dark path, though, I had been the gazelle—and now that I am back safe in my tented camp, I feel simultaneously relieved and, in an odd way, disappointed.

Life goes on, and so, I now understand, will this safari, long after we have left, in the savannah of my soul: Africa has gotten under my skin.  

The encounter described in this essay took place on the same trip during which I visited Machu Picchu. I especially love this experience because it was such a grounding counterpart to Machu Picchu. Making roof tiles—sinking my hands into wet clay, molding it, then leaving it to bake in the sun, knowing that in a few days it would be part of a villager's home, protecting it from the wind and rain—forged a deeply moving, visceral connection to the people and the land. I wrote this story for the blog of Geographic Expeditions, the same company that took me to Pakistan along the Karakoram Highway in the 1980s; I have been editing and writing for the GeoEx blog, which I re-named (of course) Wanderlust, since 2007.

ON MY FIRST VISIT TO PERU,
I spent an expanding and enlightening week wandering through the Sacred Valley. The highlights were almost too numerous to mention—the resonant ruins of Machu Picchu, of course, plus other soul-stirring sites such as Ollantaytambo, Moray, Pisaq, Tipon, and Pikillacta; the amazingly varied and delicious cuisine; the uniformly hospitable people; the intricate textiles, transporting music, and other cultural and artistic riches; ancient and cosmopolitan Cusco.

But one completely unexpected highlight was a chance to experience firsthand—literally—the fine art of making roof tiles.

On the next to last day of my journey, after exploring as far as Racchi, halfway to Lake Titicaca, we were returning along the road to Cusco. On the way we approached a site I had expressed interest in earlier in the day—a roadside area where a team of workers was making roof tiles; that morning we had seen the tiles arranged in semi-circular columns by the side of the road.

Throughout the Sacred Valley I had been expressing admiration for the mud-brick and roof-tile houses that we saw everywhere, and as we passed the site, my guide Manuel turned to me, “Do you want to see how roof tiles are made?”

Of course, I said.

OK, he said with a grin, then instructed our driver to make a U-turn. Suddenly we veered off the main road onto a dusty driveway. We bumped past a one-story mud-brick house and a startled grandmother sitting on its porch, then rolled to a dusty stop at the edge of the tile-maker's lot.

Manuel and I descended from our van and walked over to the work crew, under their bemused stares.

“Hello!” Manuel said. “My friend here would like to learn how roof tiles are built. Would you mind showing us?”

“With pleasure,” said a strong, compact man in a white baseball cap, orange shirt, and mud-spattered apron. He approached us with a big smile, and when I extended my hand to shake his, shyly indicated his own mud-lined hands. He didn't want to dirty my pristine palms.

He explained to Manuel, who translated to me, how roof tiles are made. First you get clay from the local quarry and heap it in a big pile to dry in the sun. Once it is completely dry, you wet it thoroughly with water and then mix sand with the clay, so that the mixture is about 20 percent sand. You have to check this mixture very carefully, the foreman said, to make sure that there are no bubbles because bubbles will cause cracks later.

Then you leave the clay mixture to dry in the sun and the shade for two days. After that, you cover it with a plastic tarp and dry it for one more day.

“That's the clay you see here,” the foreman said, pointing to a muddy mound under a sky-blue tarp. “This is the material we use to make the roof tiles.” Then he looked at me and grinned, “Do you want to try?”

I looked at Manuel, who smiled at me. “Why not?” I said.

The three workers broke into broad grins and one lifted off his own mud-layered apron and handed it to the foreman, who gingerly draped it over my neck and tied it behind me.

Then we went to work.

First, under his careful direction, I scooped a big handful of clay from the slick mound under the tarp. Placing that handful on the dirt ground just in front of the mound, I kneaded it into a sausage shape. Then I transferred this mud-sausage to a rectangular metal mold roughly six inches by ten inches, with sides about a half-inch high.

I placed the sausage at the end of the mold closest to me and then began to spread the clay the length of the mold. The foreman showed me how to work my hands along the clay, almost as if I were massaging it, making sure that it filled every crack, crevice and corner entirely.

By this time, five kids ages four to fourteen had come to watch the show. We all inspected my work to make sure that I had filled the mold evenly and uniformly, with no air bubbles anywhere. Finally the foreman gave a smiling thumbs-up. Then he told me to take a thin, smooth piece of wood, about three inches by eight inches, from a pail of water. I slowly slid this piece the length of the clay, skimming off any excess, to make sure the surface was absolutely smooth.

Next I carefully lifted the molded clay out of the mold and placed it onto another mold curved in the shape of a semi-circle. I left it there for a few minutes, just enough time for it to assume the curved shape of a finished roof tile. Then I slid it off the curved mold and carefully carried it—trailed by the ever-growing gaggle of kids—to an area where hundreds of roof tiles were laid in neat rows, drying in the sun. With a little flourish, I placed mine at the end of the closest row, then posed with it, surrounded by the giggling kids and smiling workers.

As Manuel and I went to leave, we thanked them all profusely, especially the foreman, who had so graciously and generously interrupted his day to teach a stranger his everyday art.

I extended my now mud-caked palm. He looked at it and then at me, and clasped my hand into his own.