One of the people we met in Nairobi, Paige, does some work with the Maasai and invited us to visit an actual Maasai village with her for a night and to see what their culture is like. She was going there to discuss a school project with them. We’d met a couple of the leaders in Nairobi and were excited for the trip.
On Dec 5th we left early in the morning to head to Amboseli National Park where they were living. At a Kenya/Tanzania border town we met one of our Maasai friends, Jacob and bought a couple goats for our hosts to say thanks for letting us stay with you. We drove into the park via a side entrance because we didn’t want to have to pay a park fee since we weren’t there to go on Safari. That being said while were were in the park we did see lots of animals, zebras, water buffaloes, giraffes, gazelles, imapalas and elephants. Most of the time they were running away from the van, but at times they stopped a fair distance away so we could observe them in their beauty. It was really cool to see them in the wild. Though I wish we could have gotten closer to the elephants, I love elephants.
We got to the Maasai village in the late afternoon and were greeted with a welcome song and dance. It was really cool. I can’t really describe the sounds they were making abut they came ut in their colourful robes and the guys were jumping up and down. There’s a sense of pride in being able to jump really high.
One of the cool things about the location of the village was that it was about 8km from the Tanzania border and about 20-30km from Mt Kilimanjaro. So it dominated the horizon to the south. The sun would rise just east of it and set just to the west of it. It was very cool. We watched the sunset that night and don’t worry, I took some photos of the spectacular view. Hopefully I can stitch together some of the frames into a long panoramic that will do the view some justice.
If you’ve never seen a Maasai village on a some random show on TV, then look them up. It’s a serious of mud huts in a circle and inside that circle is where they keep all their cattle and goats at night. What makes the village really interesting is that any fence they need is made up of branches from a really thorny bush. Think about it, what protects the Maasai and their cattle from the lions and hyenas is a bush.
That night we were treated to something most westernized people have never seen, the slaughter and gutting of a goat. They killed the goat for us for dinner and showed us how they took it apart for all the meat. Nothing goes to waster, they’ll give the eyes to the dogs, they’ll burn the hair off the head and boil it to make a soup, heck, they’ll even drink the blood. No joke.
We spent that night hanging out with some of the Maasai men and elders talking and finding out about each other and the differences in our lives. It was a lot of fun and something that I’ll remember for a long time.
After waking up multiple times in the evening to the sound of hyenas outside our tent, a couple of us woke up at 6am to watch the sunrise over the east side of Mt Kili. Wow, it was one of the better sunrises I’ve seen. They we got a small tour of the land from the village’s chairman. From there we sat and drank some tea, which is about half milk (fresh from the cows) and half water with some tea leaves. I don’t normally drink tea, but this stuff was good!
Then things became interesting. The first load of tourists came by. As people enter the park to go on Safari, they also get to spend a few minutes at a Maasai village. They got an song and dance too (not as big as ours) and sat down as a Maasai told them about their culture. We found it funny because they were getting only a snap shot and some of us felt liek we were closer to them because we’d spend the night with them, getting to know them and making new friends. The tourists were only here for a bit and were very typical tourists. One group of brits had the typical brit outfit on, sleeveless shirts, shorts, sandals and a wide brim hat. While all of us that were there were wearing pants, had proper shirts and were wearing hiking shoes/boots.
But towards the end of our stay with the Maasai we were ushered towards the “marketplace” where they would sell stuff to tourists and we figured cool, maybe we can buy a little trinket from them to help support our new friends. Wrong, little did we know that this was a well choreographed selling of wears. We got introduced to a pressure sell. They would have someone visit all the little blankets of with us, trying to force us to see different souvenirs and wouldn’t let us move to the next blanket of stuff until they were satisfied that we were done at thank blanket. I’m used to being able to browse on my own, but they insisted in hand hold us as we looked around and held onto things that we liked so that we could negotiate a price at the end for everything.
Did I buy things? yes. Did I feel like I paid too much for them? yes. Do I feel cheated a bit? Yes. Our new friends would show us their family’s blanket of stuff and say buy from my family and you’d feel guilty. They also said that they made certain things themselves and you want to believe them. Heck, I did. These were my new friends I had to reason not to believe them. It wasn’t until after when we were all talking that people said that there was no way that they could have made all those things. They were too similar, and probably made else where and then sold here as their own.
Why does this piss me off?
- they were my friends and I had spent a night getting to know them and had no reason to believe they’d rip me off
- they lied to me, and that is not something I enjoy, I try to live by the golden rule and if they can’t treat me with respect, then why did they pretend to be my friend?
- I was there with my friend Paige who was there to help build/improve their school, why should I be treated that like the other tourists? We came to be friends with them, heck we even bought them goats!
- in the end, they just saw us as white people and to them all white people have a lot of money. This is one theme that I’ve seen a lot of in Eastern Africa and it has severly put a bad taste in my mouth about my experience here. I came here to work with NGOs and don’t have a lot of money. I understand that some people are here for safaris, which aren’t cheap, but I wasn’t. Why am I being treated like every other white person?
I talked about this is Jaret, Manny, Bill and Stella (the last two were other friends on the trip with us) and we all agreed that in the end we felt cheated and the whole marketplace experience left us cheated and ruined a perfectly good time. We also realised that they were pulling in a sweet amount of coin from this whole things. They were rolling in the money, even if they didn’t have the material possessions to show for it.
There are definitely some positives from my trip, like the view of Mt Kili and the experience of the culture, but they whole marketplace thing made me lose all respect for them and it’s a shame because I thought they were nice. Now I realize they were only nice because they were trying to scam more money out of us.
I’ll give you an example. When the typical tourists were visiting the camp, Manny thought it would be funny to give one of the Maasai men his camera and have him walk up to them and take photos. The Maasai taking photos of the tourists, priceless. At the end of the trip, the Maasai walked up to Manny and asks if there was anything Manny would like to buy to support his family and Manny politely declined because he’s already bought what he wanted. Then the Maasai guy then said that “but I was the guy that took photos with your camera”. So he tried to guilt trip Manny into buying more.
Maybe we should have taken the Lonely Planet’s advice more to heart. They said that people will try to befriend you but they’ll always have alterior motives. It couldn’t be more true in this case. We just wished that our friend Paige would have warned us about this because they did kind of ambush us. Lesson learned.