Jim spent over an hour cleaning the blood  out of the cab of the Beagle. He started with just a roll of towels but soon realized it would take more. Most of the blood is ours. It is smeared on the windows and the dashboard, on the console and the floor. We were attacked – by tsetse flies. Africa has many creatures that can easily kill you. Tsetse flies are on that long list. Their bite may or may not carry sleeping sickness – what will more likely kill you is when you are bitten, you’ll scream and swerve into oncoming traffic. The flies buzz around the windows just waiting for you to stop and roll it down for a photo. Then they come in as an army, deploy themselves in hiding places and wait for the right moment to strike. Whatever photo you took it better be NatGeo quality because you are going to pay for it in blood. We’ve developed a calculated method for killing these insects whose bites itch madly. My little note pad is excellent at smashing them – I like to wait for them to be in the center of the window, not the edge. The more smashed the better – tseses will get up fly off if you go easy on them. Jim is more of an edge smasher, window or dash he uses his hand. We pull off the track and wage war until we think they are gone only to have a few rear-guard troops come out hours later. We wonder if they are breeding fast somewhere in the car. Not to say they are spoiling anything for us – once we get near the rivers they disappear and we’ve yet to have them in camp. The cab needed a good cleaning anyway.

This is the biggest park in a country of huge parks. Not that we would see all of it, that would take years. It is indeed enormous, with great swaths of different ecosystems and rivers – all with fantastic scenery. The elephant population is the largest in the country and we found that elephants had different personalities in different parts of the park.

Over on the dry side we coasted up to a small group of seven medium size ellies, our windows rolled up and a big bush between us and them. No need to crowd them, we don’t get close. But they weren’t having any of it, one raised its foot, shook its head, and in a second it was charging the truck – a true charge, nothing mock about it. Punch it, Bishop… and the elephant running full on down the road after us. Interesting behavior as the group didn’t have babies that we noticed. They did seem small to be off on their own, we wondered if the matriarch was far away. It pays to be so cautious, not get too close, have an exit plan. Another encounter had an elephant slowly walking up to us, sniffing and cocking its head, reaching out with its trunk – it appeared to be very curious. Unthreatening behavior. We still kept the windows up, we have heard of ellies reaching into cars with their trunks – that is not to be taken lightly. Most of the time elephant just do what they do – shake trees to get seed pods, play in the water, take dust baths, and generally socialize. I’d call it cheap entertainment, and it is endlessly entertaining, but it is not cheap. Parks here are expensive and worth it.

Ruaha also has many lions. We heard them roaring in the night and we were up early to see if we could find them. One can drive around all over looking for lion and not see them while missing other interesting sights. This is not fun and leads to disappointment. We leave camp and go to the place where lion had been seen, no luck there, so we moved to a scenic lookout and had our coffee. Down the road are a dozen giraffe, we stop and play with them. They come closer and closer to the truck – then suddenly they are intent on something behind us. What do you know, the giraffe are staring at a pride of lions who’d popped up out of a gully. Nice! We turn the truck around and watch the them playing and butting heads until, exhausted by that, they lay down in the meager shade to rest. Four males and four females. This older female has an endearing look, with her lazy ear. The whole pride is still there when we go by in the afternoon. They had barely moved. It’s hot, why stress?

Where Katavi park had its palm trees, Ruaha has baobab trees by the thousands. Gigantic or enormous, or just plain huge, leafless or flowering, they are everywhere. Elephant tear and gouge at the trunks for the moisture and yet the trees survive with the scars to show. Some of the trees appear troll-like, others look like an alien spacecraft landed on a coke bottle. Holes in the trunks house birds, lion make use of the great shade the trunks cast. Baobabs – that’s “bow-bow”, as in bow to the queen, with a short o.

Vultures and storks flock to a lion-killed giraffe carcass and there is a vulture I have never seen. I must find an eastern Africa bird guide when we get to Dar Es Salaam, I am hopelessly out of range with my current book. There are fish eagles galore, screeching and crying all day – I have yet to see them actually fishing. This darling baby eagle owl had a swarm of lories harassing it, making so much racket we had to stop and investigate. Even as I have dozens of photos of bee eaters and kingfishers, I can’t stop shooting them. We follow the track along the river and wish we could stay for a year in Ruaha.

We’ve been in Tanzania a couple of weeks now and here on the western side one thing stands out – homes are drab. The exterior anyway. Dirt brown brick houses line the road from Zombe to Sumbawango and on to Mbeya. No colorful paint or decorative designs here, no five gallon buckets cut in half and filled with plants; few trees around the homes. Coming from Zambia, this is mind-boggling. Occasionally I see some “landscaping” but it is not the norm. Homes here all seem to be of the same vintage, the livable ones at least. We wondered if this whole area is a “housing development” for settling people; Tanzania has one of the world’s highest refugee populations. There are an astonishing number of unlivable homes mixed in with the newer ones. It seems as if when a home falls apart it is left there and a new one built next to it. This gives a village a haunting look, homes abandoned when their owners became zombies or something. I’ve got zombies on the brain.

The Great North Road runs through this country. Jim wants to start a campaign with the promise to make the Great North Road great again! We crawled along its length for close to 10 hours one day and yes, great is not the word I’d use to describe it. We pulled over to eat something and stretch – not a scenic spot, either – and I broke the coffee press. My precious! I could have sworn the press was plastic but when it flew out of its holder and broke into pieces, plainly it was glass.  Jim laughed and said the look on my face was priceless. What luck that our camping destination that night was a coffee plantation. After that long drive the plantation was a relief and right at the reception were coffee presses for sale. Now we have a new precious, and a bag of ground coffee to go with it. Life is good.