kearneyjourney

We left the crater rim on a beautiful, clear day and wound our way down to Karatu and back toward Arusha and the Arumeru Lodge. We stopped at the look-out point near Lake Manyara and were immediately ambushed by a trio of trinket-sellers waving chintzy necklaces in our faces. The price elasticity during our brief three minutes there was impressive: the first offer was $10 per necklace, which quickly became two for $10. By the time we were leaving for the car, we heard the bargain-basement price of three for $5. Out of curiosity, I should have waited for 10 for $1, to see the initial offer fully inversed. But I did not have the nerve nor the patience to endure this harrying.

This, however, was just foreplay; for we stopped at a Maasai market somewhere between Mto Wa Mbu and Arusha; and the moment we exited the car, a stream of souvenir-hawkers enveloped us. One of them offered me a T-shirt for a pen. He pointed at the silver pen in my shirt pocket and hoped I would trade it for him, but I quickly disabused him of that notion. I did have some pens in the car that I had brought for just such an occasion, but the car was locked; and I didn’t know where Ray was. I went back to the car with a half-dozen Maasai in tow and waited for Ray to return with the keys. I said to the guy with the T-shirts that I would give him a pen for one of the shirts; however, when Ray opened up the car, I quickly learned that the price had gone up to one pen and $10. This was the reverse of the process with the salesmen at the look-out point: as soon as he saw I might be interested, he upped the price. Naturally, I withdrew my offer and left him with a pile of T-shirts and no revenue. They all walked away empty-handed; and I was left with the question: do they ever succeed? I was happy to get out of there.

Ray knew a place that offered safari vehicles passing through a quiet spot for lunch. It was a souvenir shop; but there was nobody hassling us as we sat at the typical round picnic tables with grass roofs. But again, this passive sales approach bore fruit: we ended up buying some musical instruments from the shop and somehow compensated them for providing quiet and clean tables for us to eat our box lunches at. They also had reasonable lavatory facilities, so again the non-confrontational sales approach had prevailed.

While traveling back, we spotted a turtle on the road; and Ray slowed down and veered to the right to avoid hitting it. Gertrude suggested we back up and remove it from the road so that it wouldn’t get killed. But we discovered, upon stopping, that the turtle had been placed there by some Maasai children trying to get tourists to stop and give them a hand-out. Ray reprimanded them for their behavior and told them not to endanger themselves and the turtle with such foolish acts. Of course, we will never know whether they heeded Ray’s admonition. It was clearly an effective way of getting a safari vehicle to slow down and even stop; and along that stretch of road, it might have been their only hope of getting somebody to notice them and maybe even give them something.

Once at the Arumeru Lodge, we spent the afternoon relaxing around the pool. In the early evening, we caught a glimpse of a nearly cloudless Kilimanjaro poking above the trees at the northwest corner of the grounds. I was hoping for a better view the following day, but it did not materialize.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 16th, 2011 at 12:10 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.