Meeting Pumba, Rafiki and Simba up close and personal

MIKUMI, Tanzania — The movie “The Lion King” came out in June 1994 when I was just 10 years old.  I remember watching the film and dreaming about East Africa and taking a safari.

Xixteen years later, I realized that dream.

My summer internship as a graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University is in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.  When I first accepted the position, I was quickly overcome with the excitement of that 10-year-old girl inside me who started day-dreaming again about prancing gazelles, fields of elephants and dangerous encounters with lions.  

Forget the fact that my time in Tanzania is all about interning and gathering thesis research. I knew I had to fulfill my safari dream.  

I arrived in Tanzania without any safari plans because I’d seen the advertised prices of safaris. I knew I would have to find inside deals and opportunities after I arrived.

I spent my first few weeks cooped up in Dar es Salaam, the largest city and economic center of Tanzania, where few things hint at what lies beyond the city limits. There are Masai men, famous for their ability as warriors, looking very out of place dressed in full traditional garb working as guards at up-scale restaurants, banks and stores.

Other “Lion King” reminders, appreciated largely by me alone, included seeing boxes of the local tea called “Simba Chai” and hearing someone call a friend “Rafiki” (which means “friend” in Swahili).

While many tourists who come into Tanzania head straight for the famous Serengeti in the north, my safari ambitions had to be scaled back to smaller and lesser known options. I eventually settled on Mikumi National Park, the park closest to Dar es Salaam. It could be done in a weekend without missing any work and cost only a couple hundred dollars, which is cheap even for just a weekend.

So on a Saturday morning, I joined a group of four other interns and headed to the Ubungo bus station where we waded through the crowds to our bus to Mikumi.

After five hours on the road, we finally entered the park and things were immediately different. Baboons and zebras could be seen from the road. All five of us became giddy. We jumped off the bus, giddy like little children and waited for the owner of the nearby safari camp to pick us up.

That afternoon we took a game drive into the park. We immediately saw large groups of jumping gazelles and the movie’s “Circle of Life” opening scene leaped into my head.  One of the other interns must have been in the same frame of mind because she screamed “Pumba” when a warthog ran by.

A little further into the park, we spotted elephants in the distance and our driver hit the accelerator so we could catch up to them.  When we got there, the mother elephant stared us down and gave us some ear flapping as a warning to stay away from the baby in the bunch.

I quickly screamed, likely upsetting the elephant even more. But my heart rate slowed when nothing happened and we were able to sit there and watch the stunning scene of the family of elephants walking off together toward the distant hills.

By the end of the tour, we saw giraffes, wildebeest, buffalo, jackals and a hippo. It was amazing to see how rich Tanzania is with these animals that are so exotic to us. Giraffes are common, crossing the highway and staring back at us crazy humans as we stare at them.

While Mikumi is hardly the Serengeti, we got a glimpse of Tanzania beyond the big city and saw some of the Africa I have always dreamt about.

But now that I know Rafiki, Simba, and Pumba really are nearby, I may just have to arrange another visit.