Karibu Tanzania!!!

Hi everyone!!!

Time to move on to my Tanzanian adventure!!!!

When we first got to the border, everything was such a blur.  We were being told to fill out this form and that, go through Kenyan customs, move over to Tanzania, say goodbye to people along the way, grab all of our stuff, leave all of our stuff.  It was so hectic and we were all running different ways just trying to get out of one country and into the next.  When things finally calmed down and we were waiting to get our passports back, we finally got to meet the other SFS group that had been in Tanzania.  I literally felt like I was in an alternate universe seeing all these mizungu at the border, some that I had seen at Penn State before.  My entire group from Kenya was bawling our eyes out having just said goodbye to most of the staff, whereas the other group seemed to have barely any attachment to their staff!  It made me so worried that we would not have such an amazing staff to get close to when we finally got settled into Tanzania, including the SAM, who was hard to replace Tara and Jenna!  We talked to the other group for about 10 minutes before having to move on and exchange money so we would have it at our first stop.  We gathered our bags, and it was finally time to say goodbye to Tara and Jenna.  I have never seen just a giant group of people bawling their eyes out like I did when we had to say goodbye to them.  Jenna and Tara hugged all of us and told us what an amazing group we were and none of us could pull it together.  I am talking 28 people crying in the middle of no-man’s land at the border.  It was so hard, but it made me realize that we meant as much to them as they did to us.

We finally got to meet our SAM from Tanzania and after a few other logistics, we loaded up the cars.  I introduced myself to my driver, whose name was Pascal, but the problem was that he spoke almost no English.  Swahili is much more prevalent in Tanzania than in Kenya and I knew right then that I was going to have to start practicing.  Pascal told me to sit up front with him and keep him company and I did so, even though I wanted to be in the back being comforted by all of my friends.  Everyone in the car fell asleep very quickly as soon as we started rolling accept me.  I just couldn’t stop thinking about Kenya and the staff and what an adjustment this was going to be.  Kenya had literally become home, and it was like being ripped away from my family and comfort zone all over again.  Don’t get me wrong, I was unbelievably excited for all of the excitement in Tanzania, but lack of sleep and being sad is a terrible combination.  On the plus side, the drive was beautiful and I enjoyed looking around at a landscape filled with green rolling hills, so different than Kenya.  At our first police check, they collected our passports, and of course, mine was the one with problem.  The officer at the border had forgotten to write that I had paid my visa in my passport so the officer didn’t think I had paid.  Luckily, the site manager was close behind and got it handled quickly.  All that was in my head was “oh well, guess I have to go back to Kenya!” hahaha

Our first stop was the shop rite center in Arusha, which is one of the largest cities in Tanzania.  There was a lot of hustle and bustle going on and we had the opportunity to go to the grocery store, chocolate and coffee shops, and other art boutiques in the area.  It was so nice, but filled with so many white people, probably more than I had seen my entire time in Africa.  It was nice to get out and stretch and I got this amazing iced coffee with vanilla gelato in it.  It was just the comfort food that I needed to get through the rest of the day!

The rest of the drive took about 2 hours to get to camp, filled with lots of livestock, agriculture, and big hills to climb up and down.  I started to dose a little bit, but still remember almost all of the drive.  When we finally hit the dirt road pulling into camp, I was excited to see the camp I had looked at so many times in pictures. 

The camp is literally surrounded by huge agricultural fields, huge hills, and giant drop offs into the Great Rift Valley.  It is so beautiful in such a different way than Kenya, but at that moment, I was so tired that I couldn’t really take it all in.  Once again, we were all greeted by the staff, had a quick intro, and received our new banda mate assignments!  I now live in Simba Left with Maggie P and Rachel, which is great because I haven’t had a lot of one on one time with either of them.  The rest of the night, we just unpacked, talked around the campfire outback, and went to bed early.  We have bunk beds here, but I hate them because between the mosquito nets and the mattress right about your face, it gets a little claustrophobic. I didn’t sleep great, but it felt nice to lie down for a while!

Day two in Tanzania was filled with orientations to academics and the rules of the camp and the area that surrounds us.  The town that we live in now is called Rhotia and it is a small town with a couple of tailors, a few dukas, and lots of people sitting out front of stores.  Whitney, our SAM introduced us to the camp and all of the ground rules and when she was done, we had our camp managers walk us around camp and around town so that we got accustomed to the areas around us and where we can go for walks and runs.  It’s really great because in Tanzania, we are allowed to leave camp whenever there is time and go into town for a soda or just for a walk all around this area!  It’s so fun to go exploring and allows us to break out of the borders of camp a little bit since this camp is about half the size.  We had class in the afternoon to get to know the professors and the projects they have been working on in their time here.  We have Mwanhanga for EP, Kioko for WE, and Christian (a mizungu from Germany) for WM.  They are so different than Kenya, but I think in a very positive way!!!  It was a great day to get to know the area and hang out with friends in this new crazy camp where we are so much more divided.  In our bandas now, we have showers AND power, so sometimes people don’t have any reason to leave.  We have all decided to make the effort to stay as close as we were when we all basically lived in the chumba in Kenya.

Our next day in Tanzania was already filled with excitement and I couldn’t believe how quickly we jumped in to everything here.  We had an environmental policy class early in the morning, and as soon as lunch was over, we packed up our stuff and got to head to our first National Park in Tanzania!!!  The park that we were going to was Lake Manyara National Park.  We packed in the cars and only had to do species association assignments, meaning that we got to enjoy and really know the park that we would later be doing our research in.  The park is very unique compared to where we have been in Kenya.  It was very densely forested when we first entered, and we hung out at the visitor’s center for a while so that we could get all checked in.  After getting back in the cars, we were so excited to get going.  The problem is that finding animals in the beginning of the park is like playing iSpy!  It’s so hard to see them among the dense vegetation and most of the animals we saw were baboons, which I am so over at this point after seeing them everywhere we go.  And to add to that, the baboons in this area have syphilis, so they are all gross and losing weight and nasty.  I was kind of bummed after we stopped at the hippo pond and had barely seen anything interesting.  There weren’t even hippos in the hippo pond!!!  The rest of the day pretty much went the same, only seeing giraffes from a distance and elephants as well.  It was nice to get to know the park though, and I can’t wait to see more of it and hopefully all the animals that live there somewhere.

We got back just in time for dinner, ate, played some campfire games, and went to sleep since we were actually going back to the park the next morning!  We left for the park again right after breakfast, and this time we had more of a purpose to our visit to the park.  We were completing a WE assignment looking at the behavior of baboons and what it means in context of the park.  When had different cars this day, and my car was the little safari car that only holds 4 students.  We got to the park and started driving, but we could literally not find any baboons anywhere!  The day before, less than 24 hours before that, we had seen hundreds of baboons.   We got so lucky and saw a huge herd of elephants right on the road near us.  Some of the elephants were less than 5 meters away from the side of the car and I probably could have touched them if I wanted to!  There were tiny little babies and huge males, all right by our car.  I was so excited, I could barely control it. The problem was that the assignment required a certain number of hours for the study, but we didn’t find any baboons until this study time was almost over.  We just extended it so that we could collect enough data to write a paper on.  The study involved doing 5 minute scans of baboons and noting their main activity, minor activities, food sources being utilized, and if any other species we present in the area.  After starring at the silly monkeys for around 45 minutes, I had hit my limit and we all decided that it was definitely time to head back for a well-deserved lunch.

That afternoon, we had time to go over what our professor was looking for on the assignment with the baboons, and had the rest of the afternoon to do whatever we pleased.  A couple of my friends and I decided to walk downtown and get a soda and visit the tailor for the first time.  I wanted to have something special made for family members, and I was so excited to drop it off with the really cool fabric that I got in Kenya.  The women tailors are so fast and they told me if would be done the next day.  I enjoyed my soda and hanging out with my friends the rest of the day until it was time to head to sleep.

The next day, we had the opportunity to leave camp again!  It seemed like we were never trapped in camp, which I really liked!  The first thing on the agenda for those days was a traveling lecture for all three classes combined!  Our first stop of three was at this hill called Kilimatembo (hill of elephants) that in the past had been a dispersal area for elephants and wildlife from one park to the other.  It is currently covered in agriculture, so we learned about the policies that forced that change and the effect that it had on wildlife.  The next stop was near huge rice field close to Lake Manyara and we had an agricultural extension officer give us a guest lecture.  We learned about the area that this land used to be and how it has been reclaimed.  He told us about the conflict that occurs in the area and what is being done to prevent it.  I had a little bit of an issue understanding what he was saying, but luckily we were right in the middle of everything he was trying to show us, we I was able to figure it out.  Finally only about 3 km down the road, the land change was completely different.  We went from green and agricultural to dirt and dust with no vegetation.  We stopped at this AMAZING baobab tree that stood out on the landscape like a sore thumb.  We learned about biosphere and the NGO’s that had come to this area to help conserve the wildlife and the land here!

In the afternoon after returning from the traveling lecture, we had an introduction to the exercise that we would have the next day with Christian and I returned for my tailored items and fell in love with what they created!  It was a long day in the heat during our lecture, so a good night’s sleep was definitely in order!

The exercise that we were doing the next day was for Wildlife Management and how animals use water and the vegetation that surrounds it!  To do so, we completed a transect walk from a water source outwards to a distance of 250 meters and counted dung piles and vegetation cover along the way.  The best part of the entire exercise was that there were elephants standing right on the other side of the water hole getting water!  I had never seen an elephant in Africa while standing at the same level with them, so I sort of freaked out when I saw them.  After they disappeared back into the vegetation, we kept counting our dung piles and recording what animal they came from!  It was a hilarious exercise because I was with a great group of friends and we all just found it funny that we were counting poop in the middle of Africa!

The project that we did with dung was due that same day.  Chelsea and I volunteered to enter all of the data that the groups had collected that day, and after lunch was over, we all got to get together to do data calculations and figure out what the data meant.  After finishing that up, we had to go and write a paper based on the results and what suggestions we would make if we were in charge of that protected area.  It was so stressful to start research in the morning and already have the assignment due that night.  I understand why our professor did that because of the time crunch, but it was quite packed in between data collected, analysis, and the writing of the paper.  It was definitely a sense of accomplishment that I could complete an entire project that quickly!  I even had taken a break to play volleyball with the staff for a bit right outside the kitchen building at camp.  Speaking of sports, we also love playing soccer and volleyball with the staff here and I think it is the best way to get to know them!  Our soccer field is actually outside of camp at the local primary school so sometimes we have some little guests.  The field actually has some grass unlike Kenya, but eh corn bordering both sides causes a little bit of a hazard!  One of our askarais named Marta always plays with us, as well as Kioko and Christian who are both really good!  It is such a great time every time we get to play!!!

After a week of nonstop lectures, exercises, and papers in a whole new place, it was finally time for our off day and I could not wait any longer!!!  We had so many options of things that we could do that day, and I made sure to take advantage of all of them since it was really the first time to go exploring in Tanzania.  The first thing that we did bright and early was a hike called the Elephant cave and waterfall.  It was in the Ngorongoro conservation area and we had two awesome guides to show us the way.  It was a long hike that took most of the morning, but the stops along the way were so awesome.  The first stop was obviously the Elephant caves, which were huge stones made of tons of minerals that elephants scrape their tusks against to eat the minerals for their health!  The rock is huge and really steep and I would have given anything to see the elephants standing there.  The rocks are bright orange and have dark orange marks where the tusks have scraped against!  The place where these marks are is so smooth and almost feels unreal compared to the rest of the rock!  I was obsessed with walking through the rocks and caves and feeling all of the amazing tusk marks throughout the cave!  We all got to explore and I was talking about camping out to see the elephants at dawn when they come there for those minerals!  Finally after resting for a few minutes more, we continued on our hike, seeing tons of ants that formed tunnels along the paths so that the ants carrying important things would not get squished.  It was fascinating to see the teamwork of the ants along the entire trail.  Finally we made it to the waterfall!  But not at the bottom of it, but at the top!  It was so high up and our tour guide jumped right to the edge and started taking awesome pictures for us.  We all stood near the edge and took pictures like we were on the edge of the world!  Eventually, I got the courage to sit where the tour guide had been and me and Erin got our picture taken sitting right on the edge of the waterfall!!!  It was amazing to look down and see the free fall of the water to the next ledge down below!  I was in love with this spot sitting in the sun with a slight mist from the water.  I never wanted to leave, but it was getting close to lunch time and we needed to meet the rest of the group in one of the nearby towns!

We finished the hike, much faster than it took to get to the falls, and ate our lunches on the way to Karatu, which is one of the nearest towns to where our camp is!  The town is pretty big and has a lot of back alleys and cool places to explore and get new things!  We got dropped off and dove right into town, looking for the next big thing that we wanted to buy!  The people were very friendly in this town, but trying to bargain prices was so much harder here than it was in Kenya!  The people would get so mad when you would suggest a price and I think most of our group paid a lot more than they should have for some of the fabrics and shukas they got in town.  It was so fun to wander all over though , because the stores had unlimited supplies of fabric and you never knew what you would find around the next corner!  I got lots of neat fabrics, a shuka, and a few bracelets!  It was so fun and I hung out with Sarah for a lot of the day!  We had to be back at the car at around 3:30 to head to a local tourist restaurant and bar to try some of the food! 

The restaurant is called Happy Days and they have things like Hamburgers and Macaroni and Cheese, which was nothing like any of the food in Kenya!  Me and my friend Emily decided to split a cheeseburger and mac and cheese and it was a great choice!  We ate so much and I loved the mac and cheese since it was some of the first cheese we have had in Africa!  We were so full by the time we were finished!

After getting back to camp, full as can be, we walked back into time to a local tshirt shop nearby and back to the tailor to pick up things that people had made!  It was a nice walk after eating all that food and dinner came too soon because I was barely hungry yet!  We all picked at some dinner, sat around the campfire, and went to sleep.  I curled up in bed, watched a Disney movie, and fell asleep feeling pretty great about life!!! haha

Thanks so much again for reading!!!
I leave tomorrow for another expedition in Serengeti National Park!  I hope everyone has a great week!!!