3/23/11
I am currently sitting on my bottom bunk in Simba A banda surrounded by suitcases, spending my last night in Tanzania with my roommates. We have spent the past two hours packing up everything and cleaning our banda. It feels so surreal that I’m moving to Kenya. Strangely this place has become my home and I don’t want to leave Tanzania. I’m nervous for Kenya, but really excited. Apparently the wildlife is much more abundant and close to the camp and it is much more isolated from everything. Our technology is even more limited than here in Tanzania. We will have only cold showers, communal bathrooms outside and all our electricity is from generators which only operate at certain hours and our internet is only in the classroom. We will be “unplugged” as Okello our center director puts it. We have all new staff and a new Student Affairs Manager, Molly. I really don’t want to leave all the amazing people I’ve bonded with here. Paulo, Charles, Yohanna, Aschum, Boora, Moses, Kioko, Erica, Safari, Yuri, Gerald, Arthur and many more staff members have made Tanzania unbelievably awesome! We had dinner and then had reflections and said goodbye to the majority of the staff, it was sad and no one wants to leave. We may get to meet the other group that we are switching with tomorrow as we cross the border. Maybe I should explain what is happening with my program. As part of SFS Kenya and Tanzania it means that we spend half the semester in Tanzania and then switch to Kenya for the second half. But while my group of 29 students has been in Tanzania, there have been 30 students in Kenya. So we are switching places with the other group. They don’t want to leave Kenya either. It will be a 6 ½ hour drive to the Kenya camp. About 4 hours to get to the border and then we have a lot of chill time at the border depending on how busy it is. That is when we may get to meet the other group. I don’t know how I feel about them. They are taking our places at Moyo Hill which is not alright. The Kenya camp is a lot more isolated and very different from Tanzania. Apparently elephants break through the fence sometimes, and there are lots of snakes and scorpions so we always have to have closed toed shoes; which is very different. The only wild animals at Moyo are dik diks and feral cats and dogs. I’ve never seen a snake or scorpion here either, but we do have a pet leopard tortoise that some staff rescued a year ago and now it wanders around the camp. Tomorrow should be a very interesting and long day. Our new camp will be located between Mombasa and Nairobi.
I guess I should tell you all about Serengeti… Honestly it was the most amazing trip of my life. I camped for an entire week in the middle of Serengeti National Park in the Seronera area. We were camping during the wildebeest migration into the park for the wet season and there were so many! There is a total of 1.4 million wildebeest that migrate into the park and our campsite was right alongside their migration route. Every night I fell asleep listening to them grunting and hoping they weren’t going to stampede our campsite like how they did in Lion King. We were so centrally located that wild animals were everywhere. Hyenas wandered through our campsite and monkeys tried to steal our food, one vervet monkey succeeded in stealing Joshie’s chips off of his bag. The monkey stole the bag of chips, ripped it open and then proceeded to eat the chips directly out of the bag as if it were human. It was hilarious and horrible.
Although we had wild animals wandering freely through our campsite, we had excellent security measures. Boora, our security guard (in Swahili askari), patrolled the camp every night, and one night he actually hit some hyenas with his long stick. He is a former military man from the Tanzanian army and he is hilarious. He does these animal impressions that are priceless. His impression of hyenas is hysterical. He will look at you and his eyes will get really big, then he will scoot towards you slowly and tilt his head and get a crazed look with his tongue out. Then he will start making cackling noises and reaching towards you as I can only assume a hyena would. Then right as he grabs your arm he makes a chomping noise and then says “Boora come” and the hyena cowers away and stops eating the delicious students. It is so funny and he does it all the time. In order to go to the bathroom at night we had to have Boora accompany us to the toilets. So there would be these huge groups of girls headed to the bathrooms and he would walk ahead with his huge flashlight and shine the light into the woods looking for eyes. As we walked we could hear lions roaring in the distance (their roar can travel as far as 15km so they were most likely nowhere near us), and there were buffalo or impala eating grass behind the bathrooms. We also had to be on the alert for elephants because apparently they like to knock the water towers down behind the stalls. (Even though there was water and no elephants knocking things over none of us showered) It wasn’t until the fourth day that some of us went swimming and showered at the lodge we had lunch at. The lodge was unreal. I’ve never seen such a beautiful hotel in my life. It’s the Seronera lodge and it costs $500 - $700 a night to stay there, which may not be as expensive as some hotels in the states that are considered top quality but in Africa that is very expensive. Everything about this place was beautiful and the pool was sublime, although cold. The showers felt so good after 4 days of grime and sweat. Sorry to gross you out! The all you can eat buffet, cost $20 and included showers and swimming, was delicious!! Totally worth all that money! I bought a beautiful handmade leather journal with recycled paper there that I fully intend on using the rest of the trip.
Every day in Serengeti was a game drive through the park. We had numerous field exercises where we observed elephants for 2 ½ hours or bird watched for 2 hours or had a guest lecture from the Chief Ecologist of the Serengeti or even had a lion lecture from an American grad student. We ate lunch one day on Pride rock, the actual rock that inspired the rock in the movie Lion King where baby Simba is displayed to the animal kingdom. I’ve never seen so many amazing and unique animals in my life. I saw a leopard every day for the first three days. I saw one cheetah and mating lions on the 4th day and on the last day as we did a game drive out of the park we saw 6 cheetahs total. Three at once, then ten minutes later a different two cheetahs and an hour later one cheetah hunting along the border of the park.
We went to a hippo pool, which was foul smelling and full of hippo feces. Pretty much all hippos do during the day is sleep in the pools, socialize and poo/pee. The worst part is that their pooing/peeing is not just for necessary waste disposal but for social interactions. There were baby hippos which were adorable. Oh and hippos are the loudest animals ever! They make so many grunting and farting noises when in water, but when on land they are completely silent as they graze at night. I saw crocodiles in the hippo pool too, but they were sunning themselves. I learned how to identify at least 20 different birds, out of 540 bird species in Serengeti. I saw a serval cat, many hyenas, buffalo, tons of zebras, wildebeest and three huge herds of elephants.
When we were doing our field exercise to observe elephants and focus on one individual elephant’s behavior for 2 ½ hours, we saw something really interesting. My jeep of all girls (the boys decided to have a man car that day on St. Patrick’s day), had been observing a family herd of 10-15 elephants with lots of adorable little babies less than a year old when the adult females started freaking out. They were in the middle of crossing a very steep dried up river bed when the adults started trumpeting and their ears were lifted as if listening to something and they started rushing the babies out of this steep ditch. The matriarch elephant pushed an adult female out of the way by putting her tusks on her back and pushing her. Then once they were out of the ditch the elephants rushed to circle the babies and the matriarch stood off in the distance with her ears listening and trumpeting into the distance. It was an amazing sight! The babies were so surrounded that I couldn’t even see them! I would love to know what scared these elephants, they have excellent sense of smell and hearing but they can’t see very well. I didn’t see anything extraordinary except for five minutes before their freak out two male Topi (large antelope with ugly coloring) came bolting across the road in terror, but when that happened the elephants didn’t even freak out. I guess I will never know but it was an experience I’ll never forget. I took a video of the tail end of the freak out but I don’t believe that will post with my internet! Remind me someone when I get home to show you!
That’s more than enough for now. I have many more stories to share but seeing as I have a long day tomorrow with a very early start I need to go to bed! I posted a few photos on facebook that most of you have already seen I’m sure but if not check them out! There are three of lions, elephants and a hippo.
I hope I have strong enough internet to blog in Kenya! UPDATE: I am safely arrived in Kenya and the internet is strong enough at certain times to blog and email and facebook. But we only have electricity (generator) form 6:30 pm till 11pm and during the day we use solar power which is quickly drained. I love it here but it is completely different!
Hakuna Matata,
Julie
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