The Shifting Sands

Mashoka risking his life
  On Aug.16th we left Mwanza and spent 3 days travelling through the Serengeti. Maybe the biggest national park in the world, it is just... huge, which is what "serengeti" means in Masai, (the local tribe and language.) That 3 day adventure is a book in itself and a photographers dream come true. 

   After 2 days we took a side trip in our land cruiser to an area south of the Serengeti, near Olduvi Gorge called "the shifting sands". First written about by Mary Leakey in 1959 it is a sacred place to the Masai that I suspect they don't care to commercialize.  Barbara, the geologist, knew about this place and it had been on our list of "must see" places from the beginning.  And since she has the biggest  collection of sands from all around the world in new england,(stored in our house!), there was no avoiding this trip. We "off roaded" it through flat desert  with   wind blowing sand and reducing visibility till came to the site. Our Serengeti guide Mashoka had picked up a local Tanzanian geologist for the ride. On the way, in a mixture of English and Swahili, we got the story.  For some mysterious reason this  BLACK sand dune has been travelling across tan, red sand desert for as long as anyone can remember.  It is pushed along by the continuous east to west wind that blows there....mysteriously.  What's odd is that the black sand stays together and hasn't been mixed up with all the other tan colored sand over all these years. It travels about 15 meters /year in a straight east to west line. Mashoka  says the Masai think the shifting sands are spirits of the dead that hold themselves together  and the dune needs to be treated with respect. " Don't walk on the dune and don't take any sand". Disturbing the dead is bad ju-ju.

   We get to the site and it does have a  sort of  has a Indiana Jones feel to it. It's desolate, windy, sand blown and you just want to look down wind.  Its like the sun never really shines there.  There in front of us in a cloud of  red, tan blowing sand is a  parked black stealth fighter that looks like it just came in from Iraq. But its really the mysterious" shifting sands". It's flat black, shaped like a crescent, maybe 10 meters high and 30 meters long. I want to take pictures but I'm worried about my camera. We all sorta spread out and walk around , it is a spookey place. I remember that  last night I did see Barbara stuffing a few plastic bags in her back pack. Now she's disappearing into the sand cloud and walking around to the other side of the dune. 

   Its true, there is no mixing going on. The black sand is moving. the tan sand is moving but they are not mixing. I definitely have the spooks for this place.  The local geologist says the shifting sands are magnitite and have magnetic properties thus the particles stay together. Yeah, but THAT TOGETHER is  really odd and why is it so windy here? I have read too many Harry Potter books.

    I look around, Mashoka is walking on the dune!  Now, that is just asking for bad ju, ju!! The local geologist is shaking his head. Barbara is walking back to our side of the dune, she's all excited, its like she just saw GOD.  She and the geologist babble on about rocks.  I take a few pictures, yell at Mishoka  to get off the dune. He comes over and says "...Don't worry, is safe. I am not Masai". Exactly.

   Its time to get out of the sand storm, we pile back into the truck. On the way back  to Oldavai Barbara and the geologist  continue to "rock on" in the back seat. Mashoka throws in a few phrases in Swahili and I'm in the front seat bouncing around thinking about those plastic bags.

Did she steal some of the mysterious shifting sands? I decide it doesn't matter what I know, its what the spirits know that counts.

.