drowning five-armed monkeys

One day during Free Travel Week we learned how to cook Swahili food at Langi Langi restaurant. We made the absolute best coconut curry I've ever had -- the whole meal was probably the food highlight of East Africa. When I say we learned how to cook, I really mean we stood awkwardly in the way in the kitchen while Sele, the cook and hotel manager, bounced around stirring things and speaking in an affected Cockney accent. We went back to Langi Langi restaurant a few nights later because it was so good, and Sele gave us a complimentary chocolate cake with ice cream.

At the almost end of the week we moved out of Baraka. We sent all our luggage over in a hired van-taxi, then walked/waded along the beach to reach Kendwa. At around 3pm, Sele came kayaking up from Nungwi. We hailed him and he pulled in and spent a four hours hanging out on the beach with us. We tried to convince him to come visit us in Portland sometime in future.

We spent the last night in Kendwa during a power outage in an okay room that smelled weakly though distinctly of latrine. Early the next morning the Dorobo Safari team picked us up. The Petersons turned out to be (at this juncture) one of the "Peterson brothers" and his nephew. They kinda resemble Han Solo and Luke Skywalker (or, if Luke Skywalker and Marty McFly fused into one 25-year-old with an unplaceable accent), which is a source of great amusement for me. We took a couple of dhows ("dao" in Swahili) across the ocean to get to the mainland. Dhows, or the one I was on, are really not designed for comfortable ferrying. We just put all our gear in the bottom and perched wherever we could around the edges. (Over the course of the week we got real familiar with these two boats, since we took them out everyday to get to the coral reef.)

A pod of dolphins joined us for a few shining minutes, and we saw tons of flying fish leaping all over the place. Other than that, it was a pretty uneventful four hours. I fell asleep curled up in a little ball (I'm good at falling asleep almost anywhere in almost any position -- it's a skill I'm nurturing a lot on this trip) to avoid the threat of potential seasickness and, I awoke as the sailors were cutting the engine in favour of hoisting the sail. I suffered only a minor sunburn on the part of my tummy my t-shirt wasn't covering and an indent in the back of my head due to unwisely using an anchor as a pillow. We waded to shore in bellybutton-high water, portering all our giant backpacks over our heads. I was stuck with boat-head for the rest of the day (boat-head being the maritime equivalent to airplane-head), but a solid night's sleep kicked it pretty thoroughly.

Pembe Abwe (which is sort of Swahili for bay shaped like horns) was incredible. This trip is structured so that it continually gets more and more awesome. Just when you think you're at the zenith of awesome saturation, you go somewhere that outranks it. We all stayed in "bandas," A-frame structures built of wood, palm fronds, and screens that looked right out onto the ocean. We had class and meals in a freakin' tree. I think it's one of those giant Rafiki trees (baobab), but it had a sort of treehouse/balcony/raincover thing built all around it. Shortly after eating lunch that first day, a gentle storm blew through, and Anna, Rachel, Whitney and I sat on our porch for a few hours enjoying the drizzle and the wind. It was kinda like being back in Portland, except about 20 degrees warmer, and, y'know, with palm trees and a bathwater-warm ocean.

The next day we had our first biology lecture, which the entire week seldom got more complicated than "animals and plants live in places called habitats." (Okay, I exaggerate. But not much.) The bio component of this programme is gonna be easier than ramen, I can feel it. After the lecture, we went tromping around on the exposed intertidal zone (it was neap tide because it was new moon). The coolest find was an octopus, but even the coral, sponges, hydras, and urchins were neat. I carried around a brittle star for awhile -- they're spiney-lookin' stars that wave their limbs around like drowning five-armed monkeys. We went snorkeling right before lunch, too. Some of the students are new to snorkeling, so it was an optional practice session, but I got in on it because we only got a week of coastal stuff, then it'd be off into the Serengeti, hours away from the ability to chase fish.

The next day was without a doubt the most miserable snorkeling of my entire life for one two-syllable reason: Jellies. Millions and zillions of jellies. I've never had so much animosity for one aquatic life form before. We had to swim through a wall of them to get from the boat to the reef, and at first we thought they were all comb jellies, which don't actually sting. But no, interspersed amoung comb jelly legions were a variety armed with a mild but incredibly obnoxious sting. After a few of those suckers kissed my arms, I hightailed it back to the boat so fast I mauled one of my knees on the ladder. I was determined to spend all of free snorkel (half an hour) enjoying the reef from the safety of the boat, but then some of the snorkelers discovered that the jellies were rare over the reef itself -- we just had to suck it up and fight through a ten meter thick barricade of jellies to get there. So I was back in the water. Once I'd made it to the reef, I saw all sorts of cool things: lionfish, something that may have been an octopus or a bizarre-shaped fish hunkered down under a ledge, huge anemones, angelfish, butterfly fish...

And then the obligatory guided snorkel, which took us to a part of the reef plentiful with jellies. Not a wall of them, but still way more than it was comfortable to swim through. While Kolombo pointed out snappers and wrasse, I was busy trying to avoid the stinging jellies, having no idea which ones stung of the three or four non-comb-jelly species abundant in the vicinity. We all got jelly stings, and later, back on the boat, we all swapped jelly rash locations, trying to outdo each other on the worst or most awkward places we'd been loved by those nasties. We did see a couple of sea turtles, which was neat, but that guided hour was not worth the uncomfortableness of sharing swimming space with thousands of jellies. Just about the only thing keeping most of us in the water (I felt particularly bad for the newbie snorkelers) was the knowledge that reef ecology is a quarter of our biology grade.

The snorkeling was quite improved by the disappearance of the jellies by the second day. There were always a few lingering every time we went out all week, but never in droves the way they were that first day. After our learning-how-to-identify-stuff period, we performed a Reef Check on a transect of the coral reef to collect scientific data on how many of certain species are living there. The data is submitted to a global Reef Check project to be analysed by unknown scientists interested in global trends of reef ecosystems. I was on Team Rock (ie, substrate), so my job was to drop a plumb bob every 50 centimeters and record what it landed on. Having a primarily tactile task worked well, given that without glasses (or contacts or a prescription mask) my vision is restricted to about five feet in front of my face. So instead of identifying fish zipping past or lobsters hiding in crevices, I got to dive and poke stuff, then make hand signals at Anna, who wrote it down. We had a whole nonverbal code for the seven or eight types of substrate we could identify.

The written final was easy, as anticipated (What's the importance of mangrove forests? How does the moon influence the tides?) and afterwards we had a nostalgic 90s pop dance party in the top of the tree with such classics as NSYNC and Savage Garden.

Starting on Hallowe'en, I slept on the porch every night. It was a bit damp (due to regular rainstorms at about 3am) but otherwise quite enjoyable. The sunrise every morning was stellar. I went to bed very early every night, since there wasn't much to do after the sun went down. Many of the students got really into daily football (soccer for all you Americans) games on the beach right before sunset, which I occasionally watched from the sidelines.

We took a longer-than-eight-hour bus ride to Arusha yesterday. At one point we had to take a ferry across a river that could've qualified as a large puddle, but there was no bridge so the ferry was the only option. We drove by Kilimanjaro and it's beauuuutiful. I wish I had enough time and money to climb it with the other seven or eight students who plan to at the end of the trip, but a week in Germany will be fabulous too.

We're currently staying at a sort of campground that belongs to Dorobo Safari (the Petersons basically own Africa. We're convinced.). It's two students per tent, though we could easily fit three or even four. And so ends my non-campfire-smoke smell. We leave for the Serengeti tomorrow morning. It's all tents and campfire smoke and holes dug in the ground from now until December.

This is my absolute last entry, at least for a month. We return to Arusha on 4 December and I'll be taking a bus from there to Nairobi early the next morning. There is a distant possibility that I may find a cyber cafe sometime between Nairobi and Portland, but don't count on it. That said, farewell! Or as we say in Swahili, kwaherini!