One Heck Of A Ride

123 gerenuk, southern Grant gazelle, fringe-eared oryx, white-bearded wildebeest, lesser kudu, East African bushbuck, Lichtenstein hartebeest, and East African defassa waterbuck. These eight species would complete my quest. Anything else I might take would be a bonus. With that business behind us, we talked about hunting and some of the people we both knew or had hunted with. I found myself liking and trusting the man after spending only a couple of hours with him that evening. The next few days only solidified my confidence in the professional hunter I’d drawn. I slept well that night, then showered and ate breakfast, and was waiting with all my gear packed when Charlie arrived at 9:30 AM to take me shopping at the Cultural Heritage Centre before driving on to the hunting camp. The Centre was quite a place. There were well-constructed buildings with gardens, a fountain with a statue of a near-life-size elephant, and a bridge that was one of its focal points. It carried an assortment of African items, including exclusive carvings made of wood, bone, ebony, verdite and malachite, as well as tanzanite jewelry, fabrics, antiques, beadwork, paintings, batiks, books, maps, tribal art, and rare collectibles. Tanzania is the country of origin for Tanzanite, and my main interest was Tanzanite jewelry, of course. I bought a Tanzanite ring with matching earrings for Marty, and a couple of beautiful ebony carvings of Maasai people that would have places of honor in my trophy room. The city and its suburbs were a bustling multicultural and international center for 750,000 people of every color and ethnicity including indigenous Africans, and men and women of Arab, East Indian, Asian, and white European descent. Although I was surprised to hear many of them speak with American or Canadian accents, I shouldn’t have been. Arusha is on the eastern edge of the Great Rift Valley, and is known across the world as the jumping-off point for photographic safaris in Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti national parks, as well as Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Meru and the Olduvai Gorge. My biggest surprise came when I tried to pay for my purchases with traveler’s checks and learned that Arusha’s merchants added a twenty percent fee for using them. (Some even refused to cash them at all.) I was required to have three notarized letters before entering the country: one from my bank stating I had enough money to travel there and return, plus another from a doctor stating I was in good health, and one from my local police department saying I was a citizen of good standing and not a criminal. I had always carried a letter from our police chief whenever I traveled out of the country with firearms, but this was the first I had heard that traveler’s checks might not be accepted. Charlie said the camp was only about ninety minutes from the city and that the road was hard- surfaced or tarmac nearly all the way. (It actually took three-and-a-half hours to travel the sixty miles on the rough and unpaved road through northern Masaailand. Much of it was in a major cloud of dust stirred up by speeding hordes of buses, vans and trucks carrying tourists.) Fabled Land Of The Maasai Boma (African enclosure) designed to keep lions out of Maasai kraals ( villages) Unlike where I’d hunted in southern and central Africa’s bushveld and the rainforests of West Africa, this landscape was straight out of the film “Out of Africa,” with scattered acacia and thorn tree thickets stretching across low