Serengeti and other adventures

Due to my recent obsession with playing Cardi Moja (a version of Uno with a regular deck of cards) with the staff here in Tanzania and the amount of work we’ve had to do for our directed research projects, I haven’t posted in a while. In the past few weeks we had an amazing experience in the Serengeti, some adventures around Karatu, and a homestay in our local community.

The Serengeti is definitely my favorite park that we visited. It’s huge and is the quintessential image of Africa that I had in my mind before coming. The central area that we were in consisted mainly of grasslands that stretched for miles with a few hills or rock formations in the distance. There were some rivers running through the grasslands that formed pools where hippos and crocodiles gathered. We were lucky because our Student Affairs intern, Jenna, from Kenya was able to come on expedition with us! She is a lot of fun and everyone missed her a lot since we had moved to Tanzania so it was great to have her with us. On our way to the Serengeti we drove through the Ngorogoro conservation area and stopped at the Oldupai Gorge. As I mentioned in my last post, this was an area where the oldest human remains were found. The Leakey family did archaeological digs there for over 50 years and found bones and tools that were from over a million years ago. They also uncovered footprints that were 3.6 million years old! It was pretty cool to be standing in the area where humans began to evolve. We enjoyed the view and wandered through the museum looking at the old pictures and artifacts for a while before piling back into the cars to continue onward. At the gate to the Serengeti we were able to open the car hatches and game drive to our campsite in the park, about 2 hours away. We saw our first glimpse of a cheetah, a blurry shape in the distance, which was only a preview of what was to come. We arrived at our campsite and set up tents while being attacked by tsetse flies. They were the worst part of the Serengeti because their bites hurt as badly as being bit by a horsefly and then itched for a week afterward. They were everywhere and hard to deter, killing them was definitely a major goal for the next few days. Unlike in Lake Nakuru, our campsite was not fenced so we had one of our own askaris and a park guard with a rubber bullet gun to protect us. Bura was our askari and he enjoyed telling us how he would protect us by hitting hyenas on the head with his stick.  Our first night we could definitely hear the whooping calls of hyenas and guttural sounds of lions around the camp which was pretty crazyyyy.

Oldupai Gorge

One of the hippo pools

The next two days we had game drives all day where we identified birds and observed giraffe and elephant behavior. I actually started to develop an interest in bird watching which was something I never thought I’d enjoy. The birds here are so different and colorful! Watching the giraffe and elephants was definitely my favorite exercise though. Most of the giraffes were really close to us so we were able to really see their behaviors. It was a lot of eating, but it was interesting to actually see their long tongues wrap around the thorny branches to pull off the leaves. Unfortunately all the groups of elephants were pretty far away so we weren’t able to see the details of what they were doing. The first day we went to lunch at Maasai rock, a big rock outcropping where the Maasai would hit some of the boulders which made a sound like a steel drum. The acoustics of the area must have been just right to allow for the ringing rock. There was a beautiful view from the rock and we had a lot of fun making beats on the pitted boulder. We also went to a cave nearby where the Maasai who had rested there when they roamed in the park had painted on the walls. There were also a lot of old bones that were remnants of Maasai meals with the marrow sucked out of them. The next day we went to the visitor’s center in the park which was really cool. They had a lot of information about the Great Migration of wildebeest and other animals that occurs throughout the park. Here’s a fun factoid I learned: when the wildebeest are in the southern plains of the park 20,000 calves are born a day! Then only 40% make it back to the south after their migration north and back again. The wildebeest were in a different area while we there unfortunately. As we explored the visitor’s center we saw a bunch of hyraxes which are rodent-like creatures that are related to elephants. They are pretty funny looking. That day we also were one of the first cars to come across a cheetah about 30 feet from the road. It was exciting to finally see one so close! As we watched, more and more cars arrived and competed with each other to get the best view of the cheetah as it walked. We began to realize that the cheetah wanted to cross the road but each time it got close to the road, a car would pull up blocking its way. The amazing experience of seeing the cheetah so close became really upsetting because it was obviously being very harassed by the cars. We quickly left so we wouldn’t be participating in the harassment. This was the first time that it was obvious to me how this kind of tourism is a guilty pleasure. Our last day in the Serengeti we saw some adorable lion cubs lying on a downed tree, a ton of hippos, and a leopard really close to the car. We watched it use some of the cars on the road for shelter as it tried to hunt baboons. The baboons saw it and the big males chased it away and began patrolling the area. Their response was so quick and the baboons were pretty menacing looking. The next morning we woke up bright and early, broke down camp and loaded up the cars to head back to Moyo Hill.

The cheetah we saw very close to our car



Elephants walking through the plains on our drive out of the park

The next day was a non-program day where a few of us went to a cultural boma that had been set up by an Iraqw family. They are one of the local tribes in this area but most of the people don’t live traditionally anymore. This family lived in one of the common concrete houses of the area but had two traditional Iraqw structures set up on their property. We learned how they made their local beer by fermenting sorghum, millet, and maize and I tried a little sip. It tasted like chunky, sour beer, not exactly what I would want to drink all the time. Apparently the Iraqw would brew a bunch of it when they wanted help building a house and many people would turn out to help and then party at night. We saw the traditional wedding skirts that the women wear and we were able to try them on. They are made of goat hide and then beaded with designs representing family, rivers, and the clay pots they make. The house was similar to a Maasai house but the walls were made of clay and it was much bigger in order to house all the livestock as well as people. The house was built into a hill and grass was grown on the roof to disguise the house as part of the hill. This was supposed to be a technique to defend themselves against the Maasai who would steal their cattle at night. The Maasai would walk on the grassy roof thinking it was part of the hill and the people inside the house would hear the footsteps. Then the Iraqw could grab their spears to stab the thieves through the windows when they jumped down from the roof. A pretty good way to protect your livestock if you ask me… We were getting ready to watch a traditional dance when a car full of old American tourists arrived, fully khakied and as enthusiastic as ever. It was fun to participate in the dancing with them. The rest of the day was spent in Karatu. My friend Becca and I paired up and were escorted around by a little boy named Michael whose main goal was to sell us necklaces, but also seemed to enjoy hanging out with us and helping us find whatever we wanted. We did our best haggling for fabric and then decided to try to find some Tanzanian pop music, specifically “Bongo Flava.” Michael led us to a stand on the road where a guy sold music and DVDs. We sat in the stand while he burned us a mixed CD of some fun Bongo Flava music. It’s pretty great and the experience was especially interesting. On the inside of this guy’s stand were two CDs that had been written on. One said “Thug Life” and the other said “I love you Jesus,” pretty much summing up this guy. After burning our CD he began showing us some videos he had about Jay-Z being a Free Mason and all the conspiracy theories about the Masons control of crucial world events. A lot of people here are really into the theories about secret societies, it’s pretty funny. Next we visited the Karatu market which occurs once a month in a big field that is away from the town center. It was HUGE! There were probably a thousand people there and apparently it wasn’t as big as normal since it was rainy. The tarps where people had fabric and clothes laid out formed a maze with the stands selling any sort of object you might need. There was a whole section of food stands where goat was being roasted and other foods prepared. Live shoats and cattle were also available for purchase in another section of the market. We only stayed for 45 minutes since it was pretty overwhelming and we tried to do a 3,000 shilling ($2) challenge to find the coolest thing for that amount of money. I passed up some Ms. TZ underwear and some funny spandex in the beginning to look for anything that might be better but it started raining and everyone started packing up all their goods. In the end I wasn’t able to find what I had seen before and didn’t get anything. The winner bought a shirt that said Obama and Adercromble and Fltch with a Native American in a headdress on the front. Definitely a winner!

The next day was Easter and my partner Sidra and I had our homestay with an Iraqw family. I felt kind of bad about intruding on their family holiday, but we were welcomed warmly into their home. This homestay was very different from our stay with the Maasai because we were in very modern homes. Sidra and I were greeted by Emma, the 18 year old daughter who was home with a few other kids while the rest of the family was at church. I was kind of sad that we didn’t get to see what the church service was like on Easter, but it was also really nice to talk to Emma. She spoke pretty good English and we asked each other about the differences in our lives while sitting on plush couches in the living room. The room was decorated with ribbons for Easter and pictures of Jesus covered the walls. The walls and floors of the house were made of concrete and there were many rooms separated by a courtyard in the middle. Outside on their property they had a garden with vegetables, mango and papaya trees. They also had a cow for milk and chickens. Their home was supposed to be able to sustain the family but because of shortage of rain it wasn’t currently. I was impressed by the rainwater collection system they had set up for their house too. As we talked to her we learned that her aunt and uncle actually owned the house but had taken in her mother, brother and herself when her father had died. She had four cousins, some of which were away at school, and the family had also taken in an orphaned girl. I was extremely impressed by the generosity of her aunt (Paulina) and uncle (Baba Bambare).  After talking for a while we cleaned the house (which already looked super clean to me) by using rags to mop the floor and wipe the surfaces. The rest of her family arrived home from church and we ate ugi, a millet and maize porridge with lots of sugar. It’s pretty delicious. We learned that Baba Bambare worked at Serena Lodge as a clerk and Paulina was a primary school teacher. Afterwards we began to prepare the big Easter meal for the entire family using the food that we brought as a gift. We made ugali, cabbage, beef with vegetables, and rice. Once the food was ready we gathered around the dining room table, a prayer was said, and everyone chowed down. It was delicious, especially because I was pretty hungry by the time everything was ready at around 3:00. After eating we helped clean all the dishes. Then we played Cardi Moja with Emma’s younger brother Joseph until it got close to the time we were being picked up. While waiting for our driver, we sat outside with the family and drank chai.  We said goodbye hoping we would visit again if we could figure out how to get to their house from camp. We said goodbye, hoping we would be able to visit again if we could figure out how to get to their house from camp. It was definitely a unique Easter that I’ll remember forever!

Sidra and I with our homestay family. From left: Baba Bambare, Paulina, Emma's mother, Emma, and Joseph

Tanzania

I’ve been in Tanzania for two weeks now so it’s starting to feel like home at Moyo Hill Camp. It is very different here from where I was in Kenya! Instead of red-brown dust covering the ground there are actually trees and grass around our camp. There’s no beautiful view of Kilimanjaro, but when you step outside the gates you see rolling hills of farmland. Moyo Hill Camp is in northern Tanzania on the Rift Valley. Our camp is actually in the town of Rhotia so it’s much smaller than KBC, but we can leave camp and go into town whenever we have free time. There is a very hilly running route around Moyo Hill (the big hill nearby that is our camp’s namesake) that is really hard but enjoyable. Whenever we walk or run outside of camp we are greeted by kids who want to hold your hand, even if you are running. They always ask “what is your name?” because that is pretty much the extent of their English. Tanzania’s national and official language is Swahili unlike Kenya which has English as an official language, so it is much less common here. My Swahili has definitely improved since most of the staff don’t speak much English, although most of the words I use revolve around volleyball and soccer. I suppose gonge (attack) and njee (out) will come in handy elsewhere too. We’ve already finished all of our classes for the semester and tomorrow we depart for our expedition to the Serengeti. When we return everyone will begin our directed research projects with the professors. In the past two weeks we visited two parks, had a few field exercises, and explored some towns.

                                         Moyo Hill Camp, including my new banda Simba

The parks we visited were Lake Manyara National Park and Ngorogoro Conservation Area. Lake Manyara is about a half hour drive from Rhotia down the rift valley escarpment. The park was very different from all the other parks we’ve been in because there was a lot of forested areas and rivers running through the park. It was a more jungle like atmosphere, very different from the barren landscape of Amboseli. After game driving through the park in the afternoon, we came back the next morning to do baboon behavioral observations. This was definitely one of my favorite exercises because they are so funny to watch! Some of their behaviors are so humanlike. The Ngorongoro crater (inside the conservation area) was definitely the coolest place we’ve driven around so far. We had to drive up the edge of the crater and descend into the crater where the majority of the animals were. It was so crazy to be driving inside the old volcanic caldera (a collapse of land following volcanic eruption). Near the crater is the earliest sign of mankind and the area is often referred to as the cradle of man. Tomorrow on the way to Serengeti we will actually go to the Olduvai Gorge, one of the areas where a lot of old human remains have been found by the crater. I’m so excited! I think I liked the area so much because of the contrast between the open grasslands inside the crater and the thick forests on the crater walls rising around us. We saw a lot of lions in the crater and got pretty close to one. Our vehicle and another SFS vehicle was parked on the road watching a lion walking and it walked right across the road next to the other car! It must have been looking for shade from the car but there wasn’t enough so it moved on towards the wildebeest. Then we enjoyed watching the wildebeest try to intimidate the lion and drive it away, although it didn’t look like it was in a good condition to hunt them. Another interesting thing about the Ngorongoro Conservation Area is that it’s the only area where wildlife conservation and use by indigenous people for pastoralism occurs together legally. The majority of the people occupying the area are Maasai and they receive many benefits from the conservation area including free education, medical services, and grain. These benefits promote wildlife conservation and allow for the continued livelihood of these people. It’s an interesting model that surprisingly hasn’t been repeated anywhere else in East Africa. The reason it works so well in Ngorongoro is that the area has a huge income from tourism so it can support those services.

                                            The lion in Ngorongoro walking towards the other car

One of the more interesting field exercise we did involved assessing vegetation density and animal use around a water source in an area open for wildlife use and use by pastoralists. This involved identifying poop found along transects and estimating vegetation cover to determine whether particular species’ use of the source had any effect on vegetation cover. When we were first arrived at the water, we were standing around looking at a bunch of different poop samples we had collected when elephants started walking out of the forest to the water about 75 yards from where we were standing. It was amazing to be that close to elephants while we were on the ground. We were also surrounded by elephant footprints in the muddy pond surroundings and of course elephant poop.

Exploring the towns in this area has been really fun! I’ve gone into Rhotia a few times mostly to get some of the beautiful fabric I bought made into various clothing items (this is a warning to everyone that I will be wearing lots of wild African prints when I return because I’m obsessed with them J) I bought some of this fabric on our first non-program day in Karatu, a larger town close to us. We had a lot of fun exploring Karatu and trying to haggle all of our purchases down to acceptable prices. The town is on the main road to Serengeti so the people are used to tourists who can easily be ripped off. We employed “sina pesa, mimi ni mwanafunzi (I have no money, I’m a student) many times. It was interesting to notice the differences between our previous experience in Kimana and Karatu. In Kimana the Maasai Mamas would be constantly trying to sell us jewelry and in Karatu there were many little boys trying to sell us things. One boy told me his name was Mr. Cheaper. It was an interesting switch in the market dynamic and was a lot less aggressive than the swarming mamas. Also when we would go into a store looking for something that that store didn’t have, many times the shopkeeper would lead us to another store down the street to check there. The people were very helpful and friendly! Along with exploring the many fabric stores, I also walked through the food market. It was a maze of wooden stands in a building where tons of vegetables and fruits were being sold. The most interesting items being sold were the dried fish. There were huge baskets of dried sardines and many larger fish that looked quite crispy. I started to wonder why all the fish was dried and then remembered that I hadn’t seen ice since I got here. Also, I don’t think many people own a refrigerator although this area is a lot wealthier than the Kimana area due to the tourism in the many nearby parks.

The morning before we went into Karatu we had a chance to hike around a conservation area to see elephant caves. We had a hilarious old guide who looked like he could be in his 60s yet sprinted up the trail every so often. He knew everything about all of the plants off of the trail and their traditional uses. The area we were hiking in was forested with vines hanging off of trees, reminding me slightly of a rainforest. We hiked to an overlook where we could see a beautiful waterfall and the view of the gorge. Then we continued on to the caves themselves which have been carved by elephants out of a hillside. The elephants rub their tusks against the hard packed dirt wall which contains many minerals that support their diet. Other animals also come to these caves to eat the minerals that have been dislodged by elephants. We were able to walk into the small alcoves and see the elephant tusk marks that covered the walls closely. I liked touching the grooves formed by elephant tusks and consequently was covered in the reddish brown mineral dust.

Most of the group in an elephant cave

On our other non-program day we explored Mtu wa Mbu. It’s a more touristy town which had a lot of Maasai art on display. There are so many shops everywhere with very similar paintings but they are all original pieces. It was slightly overwhelming the first time, so I’ll have to go back to choose a piece of art. Everyone there was also very helpful and a lot of guys who wanted to be tour guides helped us find what we were looking for at good prices. They wanted to practice their English with us and I had fun practicing my Swahili with them. I also ate some very cheesy pizza for lunch in town which was delicious and satisfied my cheese craving.  The food we are served at camp actually has a lot more cheese available than what we got in Kenya (this means that every once in a while there is grated cheese for pasta) so I’m not quite as cheese starved as I was, but it’s still nice to eat something really cheesy.

Well I'm off to Serengeti and hopefully I'll have some good stories to tell when I return!