Beautiful Bokeh: Tanzania: The Arrival

It was dark when we landed at Kilimanjaro airport. I was hoping to get a glimpse of the famous mountain on the way down so I was a little disappointed but Brenda and I were both so very relieved to be finally done with the traveling (at least the boring part) that nothing mattered very much and we felt great.

No jetway! We got off the huge Airbus by walking down a vintage mobile staircase like the Beatles and Elvis used to do. Sweet! The warm air felt amazing. It was below zero when we left home in Minneapolis. The electricity in the whole airport went off twice while we stood in a daze waiting for our luggage to show up, and each time that happened all the other passengers yelled “WHOOOOOO!” really loudly for some reason. No idea what was up with that. Maybe they were all punch drunk from travel too but it added yet another layer of surreality to the already strange fact that the power in an international airport kept failing. And that we were in fucking Africa.

To be embarrassingly honest, I actually had a bit of anxiety about the fact that our one and only ‘plan’ was to ‘meet my dad’s friend Pete at the airport’ with no backup plan. No Plan B. My parents live 3 days north of the airport (by Landrover, through the entire length of the Serengeti....you can’t exactly take a cab). Add to that the fact that I’ve never had good luck calling them by cell phone and that there’s very little English spoken there, and you get a situation where Plan A better fucking work.

Turns out that Pete (we knew what he looked like from the pics we found on the web) wasn’t there in person but thankfully we finally noticed a serene beautiful smooth-skinned man with a sign that read “Chris Brenda Pete O’Neal” in very neat lettering. So we approached him and he smiled a big “everything’s fine, come with me” smile and loaded our luggage into a van of some unknown brand with the logo of Pete’s place on the doors. As far as we could tell, the driver spoke absolutely no English, and we were tired anyway so we didn’t talk much even to each other on the bumpy drive over unpaved “roads” from the airport. It was unbelievably dark. There is almost no light pollution even from the nearby town of Arusha and no streetlights whatsoever, so everything we saw was illuminated either by the moon or by the creepy flickery fluorescent lights of decayed gas stations or unidentifiable structures as they passed by the window. A couple of times, our driver would leave the road and roll up to an unbelievably scary building that we feared might be “Pete’s Place” but each time, he just said a few words to someone and then got back on the road. Whew.

Finally, we were waaaaay off the main “road” and bumping our way along what has to be the worst road I’ve ever been on in my life at about 5mph (it was that bad). It was completely black outside. Nothing but trees and we could barely even see those. But after a while, from out of nowhere, a huge colorfully painted wall appeared. The van stopped and the driver honked; we perked right up. The wall opened somehow, evidently it housed a gate that was invisible until it opened, and when we slowly entered, we saw a half dozen people bearing torches and they started signing loudly and dancing and leading the slow-moving van as we entered what was clearly some kind of huge compound. They were dancing and singing for us. Wild! The surreality had reached a new level. Finally the van stopped and we were ushered out and it was clear we were not to fuss with our baggage, but were instead intended to join the parade of torch dancers as they continued deeper into the compound. We followed them grinning like kids until finally the man who we instantly recognized as Pete O’Neal emerged from the shadows, walked up with a huge gold-thoothed smile, shook our hands and welcomed us.

Before the trip, we’d learned a lot about Pete. We knew all about his exotic past, that he had been a Black Panther in the 70s, that rather than face the inflated charges of what should have been a minor offense, he chose to flee the US to Africa where he’s lived in “exile” ever since.

Pete in his former life in the 70s

We knew what he looked like now from pictures online and the video clips we’d seen of the documentary that was made about him. We still weren’t prepared for the larger-than-life character who greeted us with the torch dancers. He was simultaneously refined, intimidating, charming, soothing, and with no more than a handshake and a few welcoming words he made us feel like we belonged there. We instantly wanted to be his friends.

The torch-dancing welcome walk turned out to be merely the prelude to a full-on high-octane African dance production that had been arranged just for us (I suspect my dad had a hand in it). We sat in a bar with no walls and a thatched roof, drinking whisky and watching the dancers and drummers go berserk just a few feet in front of us. We watched them and petted Pete’s dog Blacky (who has a dredlocked tail) until we could barely stay awake.

Then we were shown to our room which was a lot more comfortable than we expected. Pete sometimes plays host to celebrities (Jude Law & Sean Penn...hope he’s ok with me naming names) and perhaps that’s why he’s gone to some effort to make sure his cabanas are extremely comfortable by westerner standards.

The next morning we walked around the grounds, gawked & took some photos of the compound and Pete himself since we hadn’t really had a chance the night before. Everything was pretty interesting, from the dinner bell to Pete’s tiny hut that he had built for his giant boa constrictor. By the way, if this sounds like an interesting place to visit, he's in the business of playing HQ to people going on safari, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, etc. Here's his website.

The whole place was shockingly colorful since pretty much every surface was covered in vibrant murals. The compound was larger than we realized. There’s even a recording studio.

Pete’s staff prepared an incredible breakfast, which we ate with all the other guests who were staying at Pete’s place at the time. Among them was a group of young students who were about to attempt to climb Mt. Meru that day, an African American family, and a couple of older white Americans who turned out to be friends of my dad: they handed me my mom’s phone so I could make cheap calls to my dad if anything happened. Awesome. We explained to them that Dad had arranged for a driver to pick us up from Pete’s and basically drive us completely through the Serengeti and drop us off at my Dad’s. Door-to-door service. When they discovered our driver was Mashuka, (who evidently had given them a Safari once) they grew very excited and told us we had the best driver there is but that the only problem was that he knows almost no English so a lot of hand signals and gesturing would be required.

It didn’t take long after Mashuka drove up for us to realize that his English was excellent. The problem most likely was that Mashuka couldn’t understand them and their thick southern accents. In fact, despite his thick accent, Mashuka was incredibly easy to commuicate with and was obviously an incredibly cool guy with an incredibly cool job. We loaded our shit into his bad-ass rover and off we went, heading north towards the Ngorongoro crater.