Okay, the following series of entries is being posted late, due to a lack of internet on safari. I kept journaling while we traveled, and now that I'm in Munich, Germany (and Emily is in class all day today) and I've access to almost unlimited internet, I can actually get these words typed and posted! This is long, so you may want to read only one entry at a time. So, without further ado.
7 November 2008
Within two hours of our first day of safari, Douglas, one of our guides, posed in all seriousness the question "What makes the world beautiful?" We all pondered it for awhile. The answer "love" seemed like a cop-out. Molly answered "people," Whitney said "mountains," and Anna said "trees." I thought of youth (in a broad sense), but then I realised old is beautiful too. So my answer ended up being two answers: "time" and "contrast." Similarly, Douglas's answer was "diversity." When the next day we asked the same question of Ole Maria, a visiting Maasai man hired by Dorobo Safari Company to familiarise us with the area, his answer was "God." He recently converted to Lutheran but follows traditional Maasai beliefs too, and tends his cattle instead of going to church when he can't get his family members to tend his cattle for him.
The land we bounced through is beautiful in a stark, thorny sort of way. We're in giant jeeps we've taken to calling moon rovers because they'd dominate even lunar craters and valleys. On our first day we saw giraffes, ostriches, gazelle, impala, about 30 species of birds, and yes -- zebras. We each have to do a report on an African animal (like middle school, speech and all) and I chose zebras. I've been reading a lot about them in my free time. Did you know the Romans used to call them "hippotigris," from the Latin for horse and tiger, and used to conscript them to pull chariots in circus acts?
As we drove along, we passed lots of "bomas," little huddles of round mud-and-thatch huts built by the Maasai and Warusha peoples. It's incredibly surreal -- in our killer landrovers, binoculars around our necks and cameras in hand, we're passing by rural, traditional villages still inhabited by people who look exactly like Discovery Channel programmes -- and they're more excited to see us than you'd expect, given the legacy the British left behind. They shout "wazungu!" and come running to stand and wave or stand and stare. They're dressed in traditional red and purple or blue blankets, they often have empty gauge piercings and ceremonial scars on their faces, and their shoes (when they have them) are made out of tyre segments strapped together with leather cording.
Maasai measure their wealth in cattle. It is children's duty to herd and graze the cattle. Now that schools are becoming more common, children are less available to mind the cattle. Families compensate in a few ways: 1. Sending only some of their children to school and keeping the rest home to assist with housework and herding (it's technically illegal to keep children out of school, but it's still practiced); 2. sending the children part-time (some schools conduct morning and afternoon sessions); and 3. allowing children too young for school to mind the livestock. I've seen five-year-olds out in the bush alone, leaning on their sticks and watching the herd.
As we neared sunset, clouds started rolling in, threatening a rainstorm. Although nightfall didn't wait for us to make it to camp and pitch our tents at Oldonyo Sambu and neither did the lightning and thunder, the rain held off until we'd gotten all our tents pitched and had started cooking dinner. It deluged all night and most of the next day. It was like being back in Oregon, camping in the mountains or at the coast, except with completely different terrain. And, y'know, zebras.
We finally got to go trekking around in the grasslands when the rain let up after lunch. It was super muddy, but we got to see a lot of bugs and tons of animal poop. I can identify more kinds of African animal poop than actual animals. We're supposed to go for a (hopefully) drier hike tomorrow.
(Footnote: Thad Peterson, brother to Mike Peterson and father of Zach Peterson, is our head guide and biology teacher, and he's got a bit of Hobbit about him, and a lot of awesome.)
11 November 2008
We climbed a mountain this week. The way the mountain was shaped, it looked like it'd be a half-hour climb to reach the summit, but every time we got to the top, there was another higher peak just a little way off. So it ended up taking us a couple of hours. We got misted on top, too, which made the bugs go crazy -- which made us go crazy. It was an incredible view. Thad gave us a lecture up there. The catalog of places I've had class expands: hotel balcony, tree, ocean, top of a mountain...
Yesterday we packed up and drove to Tarangire National Park. I want to live in a Baobab tree. They're all over the place at Tarangire, and Kennedy told us a story (to open his report) about how when the world was new and all the animals and plants were trying to decide where to live, the Baobab tree couldn't make up its mind, so God picked it up and chucked it across the globe -- it spun top-over-bottom-over-top until it landed upside-down in the earth with its roots in the air, and that's why today Baobab trees look like they've been planted upside-down.
We saw pretty much the whole circle of life this week: first, a scattering of giraffe bones, some of which we hauled back to camp -- the pelvis would make a great toilet seat, and Sass is going to try and sneak the femur he spent two hours cleaning up through Customs; then a dead elephant reduced to bones and skin that we smelled before we saw; a ridiculous number of vultures and storks ravaging a fresh zebra carcass; lions mating; and finally baby animals in all flavours (elephants, baboons, giraffes, impalas...)
14 November 2008
We left behind Tarangire for the Nou Forest in the highlands. The drive was quite enjoyable, but also I'm weird in the way that I've got a peculiar fondness for long car rides despite my fear of automobile collisions and what I think is a mild allergy to benzine which inevitably affords me a nausea headache every time I spend longer than half an hour in a car. (My mom has carcolepsy -- I wonder if it's related.) We gained so much altitude that an hour or two before we parked we were all shivering and donning every piece of fabric we could reach. I started giving people massages just to keep blood circulating in my fingers.
The Nou Forest looks suspiciously like any forest in the Cascade Range. The prevailing theory amoungst group members is that one of our guides drugged us without our knowledge and transported us to Oregon or Northern California, because we're pretty sure we're not in Africa anymore, Toto. We're surrounded by ferns, moss, about a hundred species of mushrooms, trees that closely resemble oaks from a distance, even some evergreens. The only signs that we're still in Tanzania are the unfamiliar bird calls, the aardvark holes all over the place, the African dudes who occasionally maunder through camp, and the lines of siafu (Swahili for army ants) migrating progressively closer to our tents. (Siafu has become a verb in our group, as in, "I got siafued last night on my way back from the choo.")
Maybe it's just because we spent the last week and a half cruising around valley grasslands, but it's freakin' cold up here in the mountains! We've all been rocking the fleece and long underwear, and for the first time since we started safari I'm sleeping in my sleeping bag rather than just near it. A bunch of the students opted to sleep outside near the fire last night (it was a full moon), and at about one or two am they got deluged and dispersed shrieking into tents. (Their panicked retreat apparently woke D Camp, who was, understandably, far from pleased.) Several people crashed my tent, waking me just enough that I had the sense to shift my luggage to clear some space, and in the morning only Tosti was still there, and the extra sleeping gear had vanished alont with its owner or owners unknown.
Yesterday we hiked to an absolutely beautiful waterfall and it took me about ten seconds to strip off the majority of my clothing and stumble into the cold water. It took me hours to get properly dry again, but it was totally worth it. How often will I get the chance to get pummeled by a waterfall in Africa?
Today we hiked to a nearby village, where we got to tour a traditional Iraqw house built Hobbit-style into the side of a hill. Thad told us that the government forbids this type of house to be build nowadays -- its structure, which traps heat as well as years of smoke, is basically a festering tuberculosis pit. The architecture is a holdover from the era when Iraqw needed to protect their livestock from Maasai ilmorrani cattle raids, and the folks living here basically bribed a government official in order to keep living in their house. After five minutes of negotiations (Thad acting as Swahili translator), I got the elders who live in the house to agree to allowed me to take their photograph on the condition I send them a copy, which I will do my best to accomplish.
Following the mud hut tour, we were treated to a performance by village men (with women drumming) of a traditional dance normally reserved for weddings. Several of the boys in our group got in on it too, and wore themselves out jumping up and down and grunting. One of the drummer women had a baby tied to her chest, and I was amazed how he dozed through the drumming and shouting, and when he did finally wake up, she realigned him so he could nurse and continued drumming.
Then we met with several members of the village Council of Elders. Thad translated our questions and their answers. I took notes for the first half, but during the Swahili-heavy second half I gave up on the academics and instead sketched one of the elders in the corner of my notes. At the end, one of the lady elders, who'd apparently caught on to what I might've been doing, took my notebook from me, and, laughing, paraded my drawing around to half the village. I can't be sure, but I think they were pleased. (Thad later confirmed that indeed they were.)
17 November 2008
The Hadza are fabulous hunter-gatherers who speak in clicks and live one day at a time. We're staying in Yaida Valley, Hadza homeland, and my observation about the parabolic properties of the awesomeness of this trip as related to time holds frim. Despite battling the environment - sarms of buggs, African savannah heat, thorns on virtually every plant -- Yaida Valley is tons of fun so far.
At our first campsite, a giant baobab tree swelled up out of the centre of our boundaries. A couple of the Hadza dudes working for Dorobo chiseled hand- and foothold pegs and beat them into the trunk, which made climbing the tree much easier and marginally safer. I've never really been shy about heights or attempting to freestyle scale nature. But monkeying up the baobab was actually kind of terrifying -- partly because its bark is so smooth and it's just so huge, and partly because of the knowledge that should one of us slip and fall, we're kilometers away from medical facilities. Fortunately, I report no casualties.
On Sunday, the Hadza took us hunter-gathering. We spent the morning digging up roots we were told were called 'ekwa -- that apostrophe signifies a certain flat-sounding click. (There are at least four different kinds of clicks in Hadza language, probably more.) We roasted the roots on the fire and, after peeling off the skin, at them sugarcane style, spitting out the fibrous remnants. They tasted a lot like raw potatoes, maybe a bit of jicama flavour too. We started the fire with a hard stick, a soft piece of wood, and some dry grass. I helped -- it was very boyscouts. The smoking sawdust I helped to produce (pre-fire) was used by the Hadza to light their cigarettes. They seem to all be extremely addicted to tobacco. Thad told us that in exchange for their help, one of the demands of the Hadza is a certain amount of raw tobacco, which they roll into cigarettes using bits of old newspaper as wrappers.
We also ate baobab fruit and a couple of kinds of weird local berries. The Hadza are very into sharing -- everything they kill or gather is shared with everyone in the "village" (the quote marks because I use the term loosely -- there is a lot of mobility and flexibility in Hadza communities) along with any visitors or other people in the vicinity. Or us, since we're their pet wazungu for a week.
Back at camp, we made arrows -- with a lot of help, since none of us is all that skilled at straightening tree limbs using knives, fire, and our teeth -- and learned how to do Hadza-style beading. The beading string was made out of bark the Hadza women peeled apart with their teeth and twisted together. I got a pretty bracelet in blues and white made from some of the beads I'd brought to give gifts. By the last section of the bracelet I'd finally figured out how to do the tricky middle bits. After bracelet-making and arrow-straightening-and-fletching, we borrowed one of the Hadza's bow and practiced hunting an obligingly stationary cardboard box.
Today we hiked across the valley floor to get to our next campsite. We were all packed up and on the road by 8am, and stopped for lunch at the base of the ridge around noon. We could, at that point, choose to continue uphill in the sun on foot for another hour and a half, or we could wimp out and ride in the jeep. Everyone chose to continue walking except for Anna Courtney, Molly, and me. And about ten of the Hadza women who'd chosen to accompany us across the valley.
It was the most memorable non-safari-animal-focused jeep ride of the trip. The Hadza woman sitting next to me (ditto for the one sitting next to Anna) took it upon herself to protect me from all the potential acacia branches along the edges of the road. Every time we approached a tree that looked like it might be expansive enough to penetrate the open jeep sides, she would seize my head and force me face-first into her lap, shouting at me in a combination of Swahili and her indigenous click-laden language. Whenever she stopped paying close attention to the approaching acacia threats, the other nine women in the truck would shout at her and she'd suddenly grab me again and I'd find my head buried in her lap again. All in all, it was a pretty funny ride. I spent a good portion of the ride laughing into her skirt.
26 November 2008
On our last full day with the Hadza, we woke up eeeearly to go hunting in small groups. That really means two Hadza dudes with four or five students bumbling along behind them watching them do their thang and trying not to get in the way. In my group, we mostly just decimated some hives of wild bees and ate a lot of honey, honeycomb, nectar, pollen, and bee larvae. Our Hadza dudes would first find a hive, then build a fire, smoke the bees out, and just stick their hands in the hole and rip off huge chunks of honeycomb with no regard whatsoever for the wellfare of the hive. These guys are used to stings, so even though we were a little concerned that one of our Hadza men's right hand had swollen to three times its normal size, he didn't seem bothered at all. When we finished eating the entire hive, the Hadza dudes washed their hands by using a chunk of full honeycomb as soap and dirt as water. It was completely ridiculous. (Later we found a shallow puddle of rainwater collected on a rock that they used to finish the job.)
Our group didn't end up using bows and arrows (although our Hadza dudes carried them dutifully all morning), but two of the other groups shot rock hyrax, which they brought back to camp. Hyrax are a small mammal that look for all the world like a furry brown rodent -- somewhere between gopher and nutria -- but are actually most closely related to elephants and hippos. The dead Hyrax were thrown on the fire (quite literally), and once all the hair had burned off, the Hadza women pulled it out of the flames, sliced it open, and parceled out bits of hyrax meat to the whole Hadza group. I think a couple of the students might've gotten to try a piece too. One of the hyrax was pregnant, and the fetus was roasted and eaten as well.
After a day drive through Ngorongoro Crater (which is, like most things named Crater, actually a caldera, and was full of animals very used to multi-headed safari vans), we drove across the reserve and stopped briefly at a place called Shifting Sands. It was completely barren, a dry, cracked desert with absolutely nothing growing, but rising up inexplicably out of the middle of it was a dune of black sand. It was eerie. This pile of sand, as indicated by the markers stuck into the ground 25 meters away, slinks around over time so that it's in a different location every year. We climbed up on it and found dead frogs, dung beetles, and other similar small creatures that looked like they'd been visited by a vampire -- they were perfectly preserved, but sucked dry and crisped. Did I mention the place was eerie?
Our camp was surrounded by huge rounded rock formations called kopjes (pronounced "ko-pees" from the German word Kopf, meaning head). We climbed all over them, chasing rock agama lizards (males are bright blue with a red head -- we called them Barack Obama lizards because of the rhyming names) and watching the lightning tearing up the sky.
The best part of the Serengeti adventuring was when we went on a night ride. We took a giant spotlight and terrified the local nightlife -- impalas, zebras, gazelles. We chased an agitated porcupine until it got so tired it started smacking into trees and rocks with its spiny skirt all flared out. We also chased some spring hares, which are not rabbit-like at all, but are more like a cross between a kangaroo and a chihuahua. They're in the running for cutest African animal. The other truck saw bush babies, but I still haven't seen any. I've seen pictures only.
We're in Maasai country preparing for our homestays. I'm actually getting really excited about it -- baby cows and baby people! The flies are unbearable here -- I think I hate them even more than the no-sting jellies. They don't bite, they just swarm persistently.
And so ends my journal entries. But, since I never wrote (pen-and-paper style) about my Maasai homestay, it ought to be done too.
Molly accidentally invented the term "bomestay" in reference to our homestays at the Maasai bomas. On Thanksgiving, we were handed walking sticks and we trekked from our campsite to the nearby school football field, where a whole line of host mothers were waiting for us. After a bit of ceremonial shouting and weaving about, the mothers were allowed to rush us. The woman who grabbed my stick and led me off to her boma was one of the oldest mothers there -- many of them were around our age, some even younger. I got really lucky: my mother (or "yeyo," which is the Maa word for mother) spoke Swahili fairly well, and so did my older siblings. It was a really good opportunity for me to get my Swahili back up to par just in time for our Swahili oral exam in a week.
Maasai houses are small, dark, and smokey. The only light comes from the fire, which is kept going more or less constantly, and one or two tiny windows punched through the mud-and-dung walls. I had to repeatedly choose between sitting inside in the dark crying and coughing from all the smoke or sitting outside being driven absolutely mad by the torrents of flies. It's especially obnoxious when the flies got caught between my glasses and my eyes, or would crawl up the insides of my trousers and I'd suddenly feel them buzzing around at mid-thigh level.
I found out from my host sister Tikako (who was 14 and was great about speaking in slow, basic Swahili) that yeyo (whose name is Loorkinyai -- try to pronounce that!) was 38 and baba (father, who resembled Watto from Star Wars Episode 1) was 80. No kidding. Eighty. Oh, and yeyo had a three-month-old. Draw what conclusions you will. In addition to a mother and a father and Tikako and Daniel (the baby), I also had an ilmorrani brother who was rarely around, a 12-year-old brother who was usually out herding, a seven-year-old sister named Stella, and a three-year-old sister named Ndini. I loved playing with the little girls and their baby brother.
I helped out with regular household chores like washing dishes, cutting down trees to build fences or to be used as firewood, fetching water and firewood on my head, sweeping, and putting the little animals in their bedrooms at night. The goats and sheep lived in a closet next to my bed, and the calves had their own room in the house too. Only the adult cows sleep in a corral at night. Every evening before putting the animals away, I got to try to milk a cow. I was, predictably, very bad at it, but trying was fun. Even when I actually succeeded in getting milk out of the cow's udder, I'd more often than not completely miss the mouth of the calabash I was supposed to be milking into, since I was aiming for a surface area about the size of a penny. My favourite chore was cleaning out the calabashes: I would choose a burning stick from the fire and drop it, flaming and smoking, into the calabash, then shake the heck out of it until the inside of the calabash was totally coated in charcoal. Remove stick, place in fire. Repeat process 25 times. Voila, clean calabash! It's no wonder Maasai milk tastes so smokey.
I drank a lot of chai in the three days we stayed with the Maasai. I don't think I even drank water, they gave me so much chai. Also, I was trying to take in as little liquids as possible, since the bathroom situation was basically "find a spot out in the trees or in the cow corral and shoo the curious children away if you'd like privacy." I got it down to an exact three times a day: morning, afternoon, and right before bed. It's no wonder my kidneys hate me.
One morning, Yeyo led me down to the edge of the forest where a whole herd of cows were being forced, one at a time, through a passageway that dropped into a deep trough of muddy water. Each cow would fall in, be submerged completely for a second, then come up blowing snot everywhere and walk up and out of the water via ramp leading into a corral. I didn't really understand what was going on at the time, and only later did I find out that the muddy water was a treatment bath -- it was laced with some kind of medication or pesticides or something intended to keep the herd healthy.
I slept on a cowhide lashed to a stick frame, which I shared with Tikako and I think Stella too. As a consequence, all of the possessions that I took to the bomestay smelled like cowhide, smoke, and petting zoo until I got laundry done in Germany. It was actually less comfortable than anything else I've slept on in East Africa -- punctured thermarest, rocks, rope beds, boats, luggage in the back of the jeep, airplanes -- okay, maybe not airplanes. But hey, it was only for three nights. Three nights that were so hot that by the second night I didn't even bother to get out my sleeping bag, just pb&jed myself between two kangas.
The children loved to have their photos taken, especially wearing my bandana and glasses (which they had to hold on to their faces with one hand because their faces were so little), and loved seeing the preview image on the screen on the back of the camera. They took to following me around all the time saying, "Piga picha!" ("Take a picture!") and I kept having to say, "Basi picha sasa. Nitapiga picha baadaye." ("Enough pictures right now. I'll take pictures later.") I also gave each of them a pen as a gift and a piece of lined paper ripped out of my notebook, and they were delighted. Tikako proceeded to write out a whole series of vowel-based syllables and started teaching Stella how to read them. Later, I folded each of them an origami crane, and tried to explain in my limite Swahili that it was a bird, not a plane -- the Swahili word ndege means both bird and plane.
Translators came round several times a day to check on us and eat whatever food our host parents would hand them. The translators were all secondary-school kids who were learning English in class. Fortunately, they were all proficient in Swahili, so I could revert to rudimentary Swahili when they didn't understand my English (which was most of the time).
Before I left, Yeyo (and her sister-wife who lived in the closest house, and whose children I spent a lot of time entertaining too) decked me out in Maasai necklaces and bracelets and earrings that they'd made. I promised to send them via post in January some of the photos I'd taken, and they were very excited about that. Tikako said she would put them in an album, and she's really excited about the idea.
At the end of the Maasai bomestay, we packed up our camp and loaded back up into the jeeps to drive to Arusha and civilisation. It took us two days to get from our location on the Serengeti (close to the border of Kenya and Tanzania) to Arusha -- we spent one night at Lake Naitron. The crescent moon was aligned with a couple of planets that evening so that it looked like the sky had a creepy smiley face. Also, I saw fireflies for the first time in my life! In the morning before our last drive, we woke up extra early, packed quickly, and hiked up the river to a waterfall. Leanora, Rachel, Collins and I climbed up the waterfall and jumped off it -- it was little and the pool it poured into was deep enough. After we hiked out, we got to stop and watch the flamingoes for awhile before loading up in the jeeps for our six hour drive to Arusha. (As usual, I slept in the boot on top of all the luggage, bouncing around uncomfortably because of all the potholes and rocks in the unfinished roads.)
And that should have gotten you sufficiently caught up to the point where we re-entered civilisation and stayed in that super-schmancy hotel where they turned down our beds and brought us roomservice cappuccinos.
14 years ago
