Or ‘Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Badger’
What’s the most fearless creature in Africa? I’ll give you a clue: it’s not the lion or the leopard or the crocodile or any of the big-name beasts. And it’s not ‘man’ either – that would be silly. No. According to the Guinness Book of Records at least, it’s the cape ratel, also known as the honey badger. Now needless to say, ‘fearlessness’ is not easily quantified, so the record lacks the legitimacy of some of Guinness’ more serious entries (say, ‘world’s loudest burp’ or ‘highest jump by a guinea pig’). But in the wake of a recent internet meme, the honey badger has gained a sizeable cult following, cementing its rep as the planet’s pluckiest quadruped and the comic creature du jour.
Now being the trend-setting type, I knew about honey badgers long before they were famous - I once wrote a school report on them – but I was still eager to see one in the wild. After all, this was an animal that eats snakes for breakfast (quite literally) and fights off lions 10 times its size; who wouldn’t want to see that? So it was that on a recent trip to Tanzania, badger spotting was my number one priority.
The setting for my search was the Ngorogoro Crater, a huge volcanic caldera chock fill of charismatic creatures (well, 25,000 of them). For most folk visiting the crater, the main draw is the Big 5 (elephant, buffalo, lion, leopard and rhinoceros), so called because they are big and there are five of them. Personally, I wasn’t too fussed about the Big 5, the very notion of which seemed to reduce the complex majesty of savanna ecosystems to the status of a preschool wallchart. The others in my party were suitably enamoured however, so my hunt for the honey badger would have to be carried out as an adjunct to their surveillance.
We entered the crater at dawn. The air was cool and damp, and mist hung on the breeze like steam from some smouldering crucible. Somewhere in there, I thought to myself, is my truculent totem. Moving away from the forested flanks, we soon encountered our first big game: a mixed herd of zebra and wildebeest, punctuated by the odd warthog. Our jeep pulled up alongside them, and I quickly grabbed my binoculars and started scanning the surroundings; zebras, wildebeest, some buffalo, an ostrich or two, but alas no honey badgers… We moved on. The floor of the crater is scored by myriad twisting tracks, and it was along one of these quite arbitrary routes that we proceeded, our eyes fixed on the sunburnt scrub. After a short while we began to accelerate towards a confluence of cars on the horizon – a sure sign of action. Could it be? No. False alarm. Nothing but a pack of lugubrious lions. The day continued much in this vein, with lions and hippos and jackals and servals but still no honey badgers. And then, just as it seemed we’d go home badger-less…
…a black and white blob in the distance!
There he was, shuffling around about a mile away, a full quarter inch tall at 90x magnification. I had found my childhood hero, and it felt, well, completely underwhelming!
And here’s the moral of the story: in the hunt for a honey badger, as for travel in general, one’s enjoyment is predicated on preformed ideals. For the most part, it’s the rupture between archetype and actuality that underpins disappointment, whether in tourism or any other aspect of life; one pictures the savanna, or ‘Asia’ say, and reality fails to match up. Conversely, we find that many of the best experiences come about by purging one’s expectations - embracing the ‘is’ and not the ‘ought’. So while it’s tempting to feel that Africa ought to look like it does in our heads (a.k.a. on TV), replete with leopards and rhinos and snake-munching honey badgers, holding fast to such ideals is a recipe for disappointment. Besides, safari is about more than ticking off animals, just as travel is about more than ticking off countries. Thus, to labour the metaphor, on safari (as in life itself) one would be wise not to fixate on the black and white blobs, but to stand back and take in the whole polychrome spectacle.