Hello all!
Well, I’ve really dropped the ball on the updates on this
side of the new year. And now, I’m faced with trying to fit the contents of two
busy months into a single update. So, I’ve decided not to. Instead, this update
will be sent in two installments; the first will cover stories from some of
amazing travel I have been fortunate enough to go on since my last update, and
the second will focus on the recent goings-on in Nyumbani Village life.
I’ve broken it into 3 sections, one for each trip, in the
attempt to make it more manageable! Get comfortable, this is a long one, but I
promise it has some good ones! As always, photos are included to make it more
fun.
December: Mt. Longonot and Hell’s Gate National Park
I was fortunate enough be able to do a nice bit of
travelling during the month of December. Just after my last post, I spent the
three-day Jamhuri Day weekend (celebrating the anniversary of Kenyan
independence from Britain in 1963) back up on the banks of Lake Naivasha,
exploring Mt. Longonot and Hell’s Gate National Parks. In my opinion, this
region seems to be the most underrated (amongst Western tourists) of the stops
along the typical safari circuit. Mt. Longonot is a volcano dormant since the
1860s, with a 2km-diameter crater that you can circumnavigate. The name
“Longonot” comes from a Maasai word meaning something along the lines of “many
peaks”, which makes a whole lot of sense as you hike around the crater rim.
While not a particularly long hike, it definitely had some of the steepest
sections of trail I’d seen in a while! We were rewarded at the peak with some
truly spectacular views of the surrounding mountains, Lake Naivasha, the
neighboring Hell’s Gate National Park, and some really cool steam vents spiraling
up in the distance, a result of the geothermal activity still happening under
the surface.
The next day we were back in Hell’s Gate National Park,
where I had travelled with a group of Nyumbani volunteers from Spain back in
August. If anyone reading this ever plans a trip to Kenya, I really do love
this park. You can cruise through the park on rented bikes due to the lack of
predators (although I definitely saw hyena tracks this last time I was there…),
and it’s a very cool and different way to experience the plains wildlife of
Kenya. Herds of zebra, buffalo, eland, gazelle, impala, and giraffe are always
around, and it can be a heck of a workout if you choose to go up and over the
mountains on the back side of the park. This is the route we opted for, and
when we combined 40+km of biking we did that day with the hike from the day
before, we all slept pretty darn well that night.
December/January: Bush Camp, Mafia Island, and
Zanzibar
The following weekend, I left the Village for a two-and-a-bit-week
long holiday vacation. The Kenyan holiday calendar worked in such a way that I
could accomplish this while only missing 2 official days of work, so I was
determined to take full advantage! After flying from Nairobi to Dar es Salaam,
I took a little 14-seat puddle-jumper from Dar to the town of Iringa, in the
south-central highlands of Tanzania. Here I met my friend Brennan, who I had
studied abroad with in Tanzania back in 2014! Brennan is currently working for
Wildlife Connection, an NGO doing really amazing community-based conservation
work, with the primary focus of mitigating conflict between elephants and the
communities that live just outside of Ruaha National Park (or, you could say,
my dream job). After a night in Iringa, Brennan and I headed out a few hours
down a spine-shaking washboard dirt road towards his bush camp on the edge of
Ruaha. We hung out around camp for a few days, running a couple errands for the
project, but mostly we stuck around and helped with some small projects that
the new site manager wanted to take care of while the staff was home for the
holidays. I got a bit of a crash-course in bush construction, putting together
a makeshift wall out of bamboo sticks and chicken wire, but it turned out
alright! The region around where the bush camp is located, like most of Tanzania
and Kenya, was hit by a pretty brutal drought this year. The short rains, which
usually come in November-December, almost completely bypassed much of Tanzania,
instead showing up nearly two months later than normal. Because of this, any
small areas with moisture were in high demand by wildlife. One such area was a
small watering/mud hole just nearby the bush camp, which attracts a fair amount
of wildlife through the camp at night. It was a little on the quieter side for
the days I was there, but we still had a hyena sniffing around my tent the first
night, and a herd of elephants wandering by camp on the last night. There had
also been reports of lions hanging around the area, leading to a heightened sense
of uncertainty any time Rafiki, the camp dog, froze up and stared off into the
bush in the evenings. As much as I am enjoying life in Nyumbani Village,
spending these few nights in the camp really reminded me of how much I love it
out in the bush, and certainly reaffirmed my desire to get back into conservation
work at some point in the future!
Our next stop was the incredible Mafia Island, a small
island off the coast of Tanzania, a little ways south of Zanzibar. For years,
Mafia has been an under-the-radar destination, with just a few small towns and
a healthy fishing economy. However, in recent years Mafia Island has been put
on the map for one very big reason: whale sharks. From mid-November until late
February, the robust resident population of whale sharks that lives off the
coast of Mafia comes close to shore, where the sharks spend a bulk of their
time near the surface, feeding on massive schools of plankton. The high density
of whale sharks and the still relatively small tourist market sets up the
opportunity for prime chances to snorkel alongside these prehistoric-looking
creatures. We arrived in Mafia Island on Christmas Eve, and at 6:30am on
Christmas morning, we were out on a small boat looking for the telltale dorsal
and caudal fins cutting through the waters’ surface. Our guide, Captain Libber
(featured in a cool video in this
recent Nat Geo article about the Mafia Island whale shark conservation
project), had told us that the previous day he had spent 5 hours out on the
water and had only encountered a single whale shark that was swimming too deep
to properly see. We considered ourselves warned. However, it quickly became
evident that we had a whole heap of whale-shark sized presents under our
metaphorical Christmas tree (yeah, sorry, that was a stretch). Within 45
minutes of leaving shore, we saw the otherworldly sight of the massive,
box-shaped head of a whale shark breaking the surface as it filter-fed in a
school of plankton. We all (Brennan, myself, and two other women on holiday with
whom we were sharing our boat), scrambled to make sure we had our flippers,
masks, and snorkels in place, then on Capt. Libber’s command of “OK, go now!”,
we jumped in the water.
When I leapt in, the first thing I remember is the
disorientation of hitting the water after jumping out of a moving boat, surrounded
by a cloud of bubbles from my impact. The second thing I remember is the
bubbles clearing and not being able to breathe. I suspect this was a
combination of suddenly being a body length away from a 10-meter whale shark and
the fact that, in the excitement of getting my gear and camera ready, I had
forgotten to put the important end of the snorkel in my mouth. Once I straightened
myself out, I swam alongside the incredible creature, struggling to keep up
even though it seemed to barely expend any effort as it moved along at a
remarkably fast pace. I have to say, the feeling of breathlessness stayed with
me the entire morning we were out there; there’s just no way to get used to sharing
the water with these beautifully massive creatures.
If you imagine that it’s easy to keep track of 30 feet of
whale shark: think again. I don’t know how they do it, but these things can
disappear into the depths or into the thick yellow clouds of plankton in the
blink of an eye, and then can reappear in the form of meter-wide gaping mouths bearing
down towards you as they emerge seemingly from nowhere. The problem compounds
itself when there are multiple sharks at once, as was the case at one point
when we were swimming between three different individuals, all of whom were swimming
in unpredictable circles, feeding on schools of plankton. Because of the size
of their huge heads heads and the wide-set position of their tiny eyes, whale
sharks can only see about 3 feet in front of them, and even then, they don’t
seem to care. Brennan found this out the hard way when he was watching one
shark and another blindly swam up behind him and rammed into his back. From
where I was, the whole thing was hysterical to watch, but I think his heart
nearly stopped when he whipped around and experienced a sight that most
plankton consider to be Very Bad News.
All told, we had the incredible luck of seeing about 6-8
whale sharks that day (they can cover some distance pretty easy, so it’s hard
to know exactly how many we saw multiple times). One of the things that sets
Mafia aside from some of the Caribbean or Southeast Asian whale shark
destinations is the lack of crowds. Capt. Libber had wisely organized our trip
to leave at 6:30am, so we had a good 2 hours completely by ourselves before the
“crowds” set in. By crowds, I mean that by the end of our morning we were
sharing the sight of 3 whale sharks amongst maybe a dozen other people. This,
compared to the 20-30 people who sometimes are jostling for space next to a
single whale shark off the coast of Mexico, made it an even more special
experience. The tour companies also all do a great job of educating their
clients and respecting the sharks, making sure to keep a good distance, not adding
their boat to the chaos if there’s a choice of finding a shark with fewer boats
following it. So far, Mafia is allowing their tourism industry to grow at a
rate that is still respecting the whale sharks and the incredible coral reefs
that make Mafia a scuba diving hotspot.
Here is a short video I put together of our morning with the whale sharks!
Here is a short video I put together of our morning with the whale sharks!
The fact that the tourism industry is still growing was evidenced by the fact that we were literally the only ones staying in our newly-opened hostel in the southwest port town of Kilindoni. We had grand plans of eating cheap fish and chips that night for Christmas dinner, but we were lucky enough to get invited to a Christmas beach BBQ by the women we shared our boat with, who were staying with their husbands at a resort just across the island (the island is about 10km wide). We enjoyed a delicious meal of barracuda, shrimp, roasted veggies, and chocolate cake, the best food we’d eaten our whole trip! It was at this barbeque where we also met our travel companions for the rest of our trip, Tessa and Nicole, who, like Brennan and myself, had also met on a study abroad program and now were travelling together. They were staying on Mafia before heading to Zanzibar for New Years with their friends from Namibia. Brennan and I were meeting Emma, my friend from Bowdoin, in Zanzibar for New Years as well, so we ended up joining forces for most of the rest of our vacation. After a couple more days of snorkeling and relaxing on the beach on Mafia Island, Brennan and I made our way to Zanzibar to meet up with Emma before rejoining the girls.
Sunset from our hotel on Mafia Island
Two years ago, I went to Zanzibar after my study abroad
program, but spent all 3 nights in Stone Town, the ancient Arab-influenced
spice and slave port on the west coast of the island. This time around, we
spent all week on the east coast, which looks like something out of a postcard.
Pure white beaches and perfect blue water, with palm trees to boot. The
Zanzibar portion of the trip was much less adventure-filled than Mafia Island,
but it’s exactly what the doctor ordered. Days were spent eating, relaxing,
reading, wading out to sand bars, swimming in the warm water, and watching the dozens
of kite boarders who come to that side of the island to take advantage of the water
that, at high tide, stays about 4 feet deep for a kilometer off shore.
Our only hiccup was with accommodation, which became an
issue when we discovered that our hotel owner had not double but triple-booked
just about his entire property through a combination of Booking.com, Airbnb,
and, in Brennan’s and my case, via text message (yeah, that one’s kind of on
us). The final outcome ended up throwing our entire group on mattresses on the
floor of a raised platform with a thatched roof. But hey, it was beachfront,
and the breeze at night was great. And we more than made up for it with all the
simple luxuries of island life, wonderful new friends, and an unforgettable New
Year’s Eve party complete with fireworks and dancing on the beach.
January/February: Tanzania safari with the ‘rents!
Sadly, a couple of days after New Years it was time to
return to work, and I headed back to Nyumbani. But, less than a month later
came another highlight of the year: my parents arrived! I met them at the
airport in Nairobi, having shrewdly (if I may say so myself) scheduled a work
trip in Nairobi on the same day, allowing me to check into the hotel several
hours before their flight arrived. The following morning we headed out to the
Village, where they got to see where I’ve been living this year! They came at a
good time, overlapping with a small group of adult volunteers who come every
year to work on long-term projects in the Village. My parents only had 2 nights
in the Village, but I think they still had enough time to get a good taste of
what it’s like here, and to meet my friends and colleagues. I even gave dad the
full experience of heading into town via motorcycle for the local special:
roast meat, chips, and beer.
After the Village, we headed to Nairobi for a couple of
nights, and visited the elephant orphanage at the David Sheldrick Wildlife
Trust. We even enrolled in the “adopt an elephant” program, making us the proud
sponsors of Ambo, the 9-month old elephant. For any friends who might find
themselves passing through Nairobi: open invitation to come with me to the
orphanage after-hours to hang out with Ambo when he is put to sleep for night
in his stable by his personal keeper!
Our next stop was to head down to Arusha to start our
safari. Since my parents had been able to come to the Village to see where I’m
living now, I wanted to take them to the places I had lived, visited and done
research and field work in Tanzania when I first fell in love with this part of
the world in 2014. Our first stop was the southern Serengeti, the highly remote
seasonal home to the herds of millions of wildebeest during January, February,
and March. Wildebeest have an immense effect on the ecosystem of the Serengeti.
Zebras tend to associate with wildebeest because they can take advantage of extra
eyes to look for predators, and there’s enough grass that there’s no
competition for food. Gazelles follow the wildebeest, because they eat the small
tender shoots of grass left behind after the larger grazers have had their
fill. in February, in an amazingly synchronized event, all of the year’s wildebeest
calves (hundreds of thousands in total) are born within 2-3 weeks. This also
attracts a large number of predators looking for easy pickin’s. We stayed in a
beautiful tented camp called Ubuntu, which looked right out onto an endless
stream of wildebeest as they meandered along, grazing.
The common theme throughout the whole trip became my
disbelief of how unbelievably lucky my parents were to see as much as we saw during
our week-long safari, something that started within hours of our arrival in the
Serengeti. Our first evening of game driving included a cool 8 lions (3 adult
males, 2 females, and 3 cubs), as well as a leopard asleep in a tree. In the 48
hours we were in the Serengeti, our sightings included 11 cheetahs (including 4
cubs), 12 lions (including 6 cubs), 2 leopards, bat-eared foxes, and endless wildebeest,
zebra, gazelle, giraffe, and hyena. The icing on the cake came the final
morning before our 10am flight out of the nearby dirt airstrip, when we had
already seen 5 cheetahs, and our guide Elia got a call over the radio that two wild
dogs, or African painted dogs, had been sighted not far from us. To give some
idea of the rarity of this, there are fewer than 100 wild dogs in the entire
5,700-mi2 national park, and they don’t even live in the southern area
where we were. The packs are found in the Western Corridor, 100km or more away
from where they had been sighted. Rarely, a pair might split away from the pack
and wander a considerable distance, which is what had happened with this pair. We
raced off to where they had been sighted, and sure enough: there they were,
resting out in the open. One of the two actually had a radio telemetry collar,
and looked to have been injured quite badly on the leg. As the dogs are so rare,
any sighting or injury gets reported to TANAPA, the Tanzania National Park
Authority. As if the wild dogs weren’t enough, on our race back to the airstrip
to catch our flight, we saw a gazelle with her minutes-old foal, and a cheetah
taking down a baby wildebeest. For those of you thinking “aw, oh no! Poor
wildebeest”, I can assure you it was pretty darn awesome. That’s why they make
millions of them.
Female cheetah - Serengeti
Our next stop was the highland area of the Ngorongoro
Conservation Area, about 40km north of the famed Ngorongoro Crater. This day
was a fun break from the time spent sitting or standing in a Land Cruiser on
safari, as it allowed for an afternoon hiking up to the rim of one of the
smaller nearby craters, called Olmoti. This area is truly a different world
from the typical plains and savannah of the famous national parks. It is unbelievably
lush, with dramatic terrain covered in wildflowers and beautiful birds, with
waterfalls and trees covered with Spanish moss, and is really unlike any other
place I’ve ever experienced. Our overnight stop that night was a new hotel
called the Highlands, and is one of, if not the
highest-elevation hotels in Tanzania, meaning at night it was COLD. However,
the place was truly epic, situated on the edge of Olmoti Crater with endless
views over the Ngorongoro Highlands. Instead of normal rooms or tents, we slept
in geodesic domes with a clear panel in the front that offered a spectacular
view, making the near-freezing nighttime temperatures well worth it.
Geodesic dome room, too cool not to share - sorry, should've made the bed
On our way back to lower altitudes, we stopped for a drive
through Ngorongoro Crater. While Ngorongoro is certainly considered a must-see,
it’s not my favorite of the areas in the northern safari circuit. It’s relatively
small with only a few roads to drive on, but every day it is filled with cars
all hoping to see the Crater’s main attraction: the black rhinoceros. So rare
that the authorities won’t release the number that live in Ngorongoro, the
Crater is still the best place in Tanzania to see the black rhino. We were able
to see a couple from a great distance, which is about normal in the Crater, as
they rarely come within a short distance from the roads. The main issue with
the Crater is that, due to the lack of tree cover, you never have a private
encounter with wildlife. The moment any lions, rhinos, or elephants wander
close to the road, people see them coming from a mile away, causing feeding-frenzy
style gatherings of cars. Nevertheless, the Crater is a geological and
ecological marvel, able to support a staggering amount of biodiversity in such
a confined area, and it’s always more than a little awe-inspiring.
Hippos - Ngorongoro Crater
Our next two nights were particularly special to me, because
they were spent at a small tented lodge in the same town as where I lived while
studying in Tanzania, called Rhotia, just across the main road from my campus. We
took a day to do a game drive through Lake Manyara National Park, a small but
very cool park that has a special place in my heart as the first park I ever
visited in Tanzania, and from the many days spent there doing field exercises
on baboons, wildebeest, and zebra. The highlight of this part of the trip,
however, was unquestionably visiting my old campus, the School for Field
Studies Center for Wildlife Management. After more than two years since
leaving, I never would’ve expected so many staff members to recognize me, much
less remember my name when I showed up! The campus was almost exactly as I’d
remembered it, and it was so special to show my parents where I had spent 3 of
the happiest months of my life. It of course made me homesick for the
incredible people I was lucky enough to share the experience with, and I was
frantically Snapchatting my friends from abroad to the point that I’m sure they
were sick of me!
The final stop (for those still reading, I’m almost done, I
promise!) was Tarangire National Park, where we stayed at the wonderful Oliver’s
Camp, one of the oldest and probably most isolated lodge in the park. It took
us about 6 hours to get from the main gate in the north all the way down to the
southern end where Oliver’s is located, which allowed us to appreciate how
vastly different the different sections of the park are. The park is famous for
its elephants, boasting the highest density of any park in East Africa, home to
around 3,000 individuals, as well as its huge and beautiful baobab trees, fit
for The Lion King’s Rafiki himself. The
north of the park has a bulk of the elephants and baobab trees, clustered
around the riverbed that snakes through the entire park. As you move south, the
riverbed opens up, with herds of elephants keeping cool in the vast swamps, and
big cats prowling through the large bordering grasslands. On our first evening
en-route to the camp, we were able to see two cheetah brothers relaxing after
making a kill (based on their bulging stomachs), and the following morning we
even saw a leopard! Seeing big cats besides lions in Tarangire is never a
given, and it was my first time seeing both species in that park. Yet another
reason my parents had some amazing luck!
Our time in Tarangire was especially nice because, at three
nights, it was our longest stop of the trip, allowing us some final time to
unwind, relax, and enjoy being together before our trip came to a close. In
addition to the fantastic game drives, we had time to have drinks while watching
the sunset, sit by the fire, and read while watching elephant and buffalo
wander through the swamp below the lodge. One of the highlights of the whole
trip for me (second maybe only to the wild dogs) was the nighttime game drive.
Night drives are only permitted in 2 parks in Tanzania (the other being Lake
Manyara – *pretty sure that’s true), and it opens the opportunity to see a
totally different collection of wildlife. Our luck continued on this drive, as
we got to see genets (a small mammal in the cat family, living in burrows
during the day and hunting birds in trees during the night), servals
(medium-sized cat with spots similar to a cheetah), and even an African wild cat
(picture a house cat but……wild) – all new species for me! We also got to see
several hippos grazing out of the water, which they do at night to avoid getting
sunburned during the day.
Genet - Tarangire
Serval - Tarangire
After three wonderful nights at Oliver’s, it was time to head
back to the Kilimanjaro airport and fly back to Nairobi. I ended up prolonging my
vacation by a night by staying in Nairobi with my parents before heading back
to the Village, which was a nice way to drag my feet a bit in terms of heading
back to work! It also gave us a nice final night to reflect on what an
incredible trip it had been. It meant so much to me to see my parents enjoying
all of the places that have come to mean so much to me, both in Kenya and in
Tanzania. Spending so much time around wildlife also helped reaffirm my own belief
in wanting to get involved in conservation. In Lake Manyara, the park where I
had spent the most time while abroad, I felt a slight but clear difference in
the abundance of wildlife that lived in the park. Lake Manyara is quite small,
and is becoming impacted more and more by the rice fields and development that
is constantly expanding from the neighboring town. It served as a quiet but
firm reminder that I would love to continue to work on mitigating these issues
of competition for resources between humans and wildlife.
Bull elephants - Tarangire
"Sundowner deck" at Oliver's Camp - Tarangire
Thanks everyone for reading! This was almost twice as long
as my next-longest post, and I haven’t even written about everything going on
here in the Village in the last couple of months. I’ll put that one together
soon (there’s no way it will be this hefty, it’s been a slow start to the
year), and send it out!
Happy belated New Year to all, and as always, I miss
everyone tons! This week marks 7 months here at Nyumbani, and I know that the
next 5 months are going to fly by whether I like it or not!
