Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Circle of Life—An Amazing African Day

9/8
Today was quite the African bushland day.  My car betsy had broken down, so my field assistants and I took Kermit to go tow it back to the centre.  Along the way, we saw a heard of about 85 giraffes, which was amazing.

In the later afternoon we went out in search of the wild dogs.  We found them right as they finished killing a baby Eland (Eland is the largest antelope and looks a bit like a majestic cow with spiraled horns).  It was quite the sight to see and hear the pack eat the eland, but what made it so interesting was all the other action going on as well.  The dogs were of course yipping and squealing happily and crunching on the bones.  But the mama Eland kept coming back and driving the dogs off the carcass, obviously heartbroken that her little one had been taken.  It was actually hard to watch just how sad the mom was.  She stayed there with the dogs for over an hour, looking mournful and at times trying to drive the dogs off the carcass, even when only the head and some skin was left.  There was also a hyena lurking that the dogs had their eyes on.  There was a family of elephants quite close as well who were trumpeting angrily at all the commotion and the fact
that the hyena was close to their baby.

In the late afternoon, we headed back out to see the greet.  The full and giant moon was rising over the beautiful landscape, which is now lush and green from all the rain, and Mt. Kenya was peeking above the clouds with its glacier shimmering in the afternoon sun.  On the drive home, we crossed over the bridge and there was a dead zebra in the rapids that must have drowned in the high water.  There were 2 hyenas trying to figure out how to get to it without following the fate of the zebra. 

As we drove home, the rising moon was the backdrop to giant acacias, herds of graceful giraffes and regal grevy’s zebras.  I wish a camera could capture the moment or my words could do it justice, but it’s just impossible to do so.  But let me just say that it was stunning, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off of it and wished that the drive would never end.


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We found out the next day that on this same day in which we had a great African day, our friend George in Nairobi had a most terrible African day.  He was staying in Nairobi working on getting permits.  On his way back to his hotel at night, he was attacked in an attempted mugging.  A brick was thrown at him, but luckily he was only 100m from the hotel gates and was able to make it back to the hotel without further injury and without losing any of his possessions (he had had his new iphone stolen a few months ago in Nairobi already).  He ended up getting 12 stitches and having his nice new shirt destroyed by all his blood, but he is back at Mpala in good spirits.  He was actually staying in the same hotel that Elisha and I stayed at, a very nice, but budget hotel.  Elisha and I are very familiar at where he was attacked, Globe Cinema Roundabout.  The problem is he was walking across this giant roundabout (with bridges, underpasses, and a bit of forests) at 10pm when it was deserted.  Elisha and I only crossed the roundabout when it was light or there were still lots of pedestrians and cars around.  When we came back late at night, we took motocabs as a safety measure.  Nairobi is not a safe place at night, especially "across the train tracks" as Matt calls that part of Nairobbery, so it's best to always take cabs by night.







hyena sneaking in

the mom Eland




















Wednesday, September 24, 2014

A new home

September 3rd.  Happy Birthday Mom!

Considering how expensive Mpala is to stay and that I’m now paying my own rent since I’m not working on my master’s project now (so Todd isn’t paying), I moved off of the research centre.  It was a very tough decision to do it b/c I have really loved the social aspect of the Mpala, I’ve grown very close to the few people remaining, and it’s just easy to live up there, but in the end this will save me over $1000 per month.  I moved to a place called Milimatatu, which is about a 15 minute commute from the centre.  It’s where the wild dog team is based, so I am sharing a house with Stef and Helen as well as a guy named Andrew who is part of the team, but is only here for 2 weeks. 

The house and property is actually really cool.  It’s totally how you’d imagine colonial British Kenya to be like.  And it feels like it as well.  The main house has three bedrooms, a large dining area, a living room with couches and a fireplace, and a kitchen.  This is where Stef and Helen are living.  Andrew and I each have our own rooms in a guesthouse that is just a few meters walk through a garden from the main house.  It’s kind of nice to be living at a real house after being in a banda for 4 months.  The place has 24 hour hot showers (b/c they actually insulate their solar heated water) and has 24 electricity from solar panels as well.  The grounds are very nice with grass and a beautiful flower garden.  They have a garden where we get fresh vegetables and different types of greens for salads.  The land owner also brings fresh cow milk for us (which we boil to try and avoid brucellosis). The river runs through the lower part of the property, and you can hear it softly from my room at night.   Unlike at Mpala, we cook for ourselves, but Stef and Helen so far have been great cooks, so that’s nice.  I’d offer to do the dishes since my cooking skills aren’t great, but the house maid washes them.  So instead I help chop some vegetables and then start the fire.

It’s a bit weird to have basically house servants.  At first I wasn’t really sure how I felt about it.  It just sort of feels weird and not right.  But Stef (who grew up in Tanzania) told me that if the houses didn’t hire maids to do laundry, clean, wash dishes, etc, then these people just wouldn’t have jobs nor make money.  Plus they usually get a place to stay at these houses.  Which I guess is true.  She told me that the few people who refuse to have house help are actually viewed by the Kenyans as cheap and the people wonder why they won’t help the locals out by hiring people.
The area has lots of wildlife around and the commute back and forth is basically a game drive.  Just today I saw 3 herds of elephants, buffalo, giraffes, zebra, jackals, white-tailed mongoose, and more.  And b/c it’s not too far away, I’m still going to try to make sure I can be social and hang out as much as I can with the other long-term Mpala folk: Julia, Sally, Matt, and George.

The drought has finally ended and it’s been pouring for several days.  The day I moved out of my banda, it poured super hard and the thatched roof leaked, soaking my old bed (and causing the whole place to smell like mouse pee and poop b/c it all washed down onto my banda from the roof), so it was good I was moving.  Also the area is incredibly green now with all the rain and the roads are a crazy slick and muddy mess.  Makes for some really fun driving!  Sadly for the farmers in the surrounding areas, this rain came during the normal dry season and before the normal wet season, so they hadn’t had anything planted yet.

9/5
We went down to nanyuki to get supplies and such.  We had an interesting encounter b/c as we were leaving the nakumat shopping area someone yelled at us “we’re going to cut off your heads and ship it back to your country”  It was just some crazy guy on the street, but still a bit unnerving considering the recent beheadings we’ve been reading about in the news.
The director is gone on vacation for several weeks, so she is letting Sally use her house.  It’s a super nice house, so Sally had us all over for a mac ‘n cheese and wine party, which was a lot of fun

9/6 
 Today was the first day of sun we’d had in a while, and we had a great breakfast in the glorious sun on the porch as we overlooked the bushland.  We also had a sundowner by the river which is 100m from the house.  The property also has a track and path along the river and through the property that is about 1.25 miles long.  The entire property is closed in by an electric fence that keeps out elephants and buffaloes, though they do often get leopards in the area.  We have some cool photos of a leopard on a camera trap from the trail.
I met the landlady who owns the house that we are renting.  She actually lives right next door.  She’s a really nice lady, who is sharp as a tack even though she’s only 80.  She has a beautiful house with a beautiful garden and some little ponds.  She feeds the birds so there are lots of pretty birds around.  She invited us for tea.  It felt so colonial british, b/c her househelper brought us down the fancy tea with biscuits.  She’s of course had a very interesting life living in Kenya.  She remembers as a kid how the country was just so covered in wildlife, but now it really isn’t, except in a few areas.  She told us how she raised a cheetah cub as a girl b/c the cheetah mom was killed by a car.  She said the cheetah used to cuddle with her and the dogs and when it got bigger it would sleep in the bathtub.
Sally was having a sleep-over for a select view (Tyler, Julia, and myself), so I headed up to the centre for it.  Since the director’s house has special internet that is super fast, we were able to stream movies from the web.  The director’s bed is giant, so we were all able to fit onto it to do our movie marathon.  She also has a blender so we made banana milkshakes with baileys.  I slept in the guesthouse which has a bed that is so nice it definitely doesn’t belong in Kenya!  In the morning, we made crepes and sat on her porch which looks out towards Mt. Kenya.  Since her house is outside of the fence line, we also got to watch a family of elephants eat right in front of us.  They were only about 100 feet away.

9/7

There is a guy, named Andrew, who is also helping out right now with the wild dog project.  He’s from NC, but is working on his PhD in England at the same place Helen is doing hers.  He’s studying carnivores, but his research is more on regional movements and conservation using GIS, so he doesn’t actually need to go into the field.  He just uses data collected from researchers across Africa to do it.  But he’s for 3 weeks just to see the methods behind where he gets his data.  He’s a really cool guy and we are becoming good friends.  He’s into sports, my age, and level-headed.  I’m actually really lucky he’s here b/c it makes the move into a house with 2 girls a bit less awkward.  And since he goes and does things with me, it makes it seem less like I’m just ditching the girls or something.  Also, the 2 girls are really good cooks, and we really just get in the way of things when we’re trying to help with dinner.  So we end up just sitting on the couch talking and laughing about how useless we are in the kitchen.  And what is normally a guy’s go to thing to help out with—dishes—is not something we can help out with here since the house lady does the dishes.  We’d offer to make some things, but the girls are real foodies, so they aren’t really into having our specialties of mac ‘n cheese, pasta, etc.  They just like cooking, so would rather do that than eat our stuff and have the night off.  But the food has definitely been amazing.  We have fresh salads from the garden with Stef’s homemade dressing.  And Helen makes curries and chilis and other fancy sauces from scratch.  To me it’s all too much work to make it worth it, but since they enjoy it…  The other funny thing is, every night they drink a large beer while cooking, a large beer while eating and then fancy whiskey while watching a movie at night.  They poke fun of Andrew and I for not drinking, but for us it’s too expensive and too many calories, so it’s nice to have someone else to help keep away the peer pressure.  Of course, special occasions is a whole other thing!

My knee has been feeling a bit better and I got a more stable knee brace, so Andrew and I joined up as a team to play Julia and Sally in tennis at the ranch.  The teams were pretty even (Julia played college tennis), so it was fun.  We then sat on the porch of the ranch house and sipped gin and tonics.  That evening we also joined the rest of the crew for a cool sundowner on a rock I had never been before that had an awesome view of the sunset, rising full moon, and river.  On the way up I nearly stepped on a puff adder hidden in the rocks and on the way home we spotted a leopard.
The Wild Dog To Do List.  Note the Take Head out of Freezer

The new bedroom






The cows we get milk from with the house in the background

view form the walking trail


our garden






The guesthouse where I stay



The river right by the house

The nice porch

mohawk twins

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Rift Valley Music Fest

9/1
This past weekend we attended the Rift Valley Music Fesitval on Lake Naivasha in the rift valley.  The group of us from Mpala (Matt, Julia, Sally, Georgia, Tyler, and Sally's visiting friend Maggie) left MRC on friday afternoon and took the long matatu journey to Naivasha.  We arrived just at dusk, set up our tents and then headed straight to the music fest, which was adjacent to our camp.  Well actually first we were hungry.  We were ill prepared for good eating as no one had a stove.  I had brought Todd’s old cliff bars for breakfast (Todd is now GF so he gave me tons of bars), and chips and bread and peanut butter for lunches, but what to do for dinner when you are shopping in Kenya AND have no stove.  Well, we all ended up just buying Ramen with the thought that we’d just eat it cold.  But when we got to the campsite, we found out there was a restaurant.  Having the tricks of the dirt-bag backpacker up my sleeve, I told them that we should head up to the restaurant and sweet-talk them for some hot water for our ramen.  The nice people at the restaurant obliged, and in the end, as you will see, it turned out to be a good deal for them.  The restaurant was an open-air place.  There was one corner area that was big enough to fit about 12 people.  It was in a U-shape and instead of seats, it had these huge giant pillows and then a low table.  The pillows were insanely comfortable, and we could all sprawl out, which was very nice after our long and bumpy matatu ride and would be great after long nights of dancing..  The food, it turns out was pretty cheap, so we also shared a plate of nachos to go with our ramen.  We called that room the VIP lounge.

The music fest grounds were pretty cool with a main stage and 2 minor stages, lots of art things and other booths, all on the shores of the lake.  The first night we all had fun dancing the night away at the smaller stages where they were playing more reggae and reggae/hip hop style music.  We only stayed out until about 2am, but the festival kept going each night until 6am.  So being adjacent to the festival, made for a bit of fitful sleep, not to mention I didn't have a sleeping bag (just blankets) or a pad.

The next day we did a lot of chilling in the morning.  We went back to the restaurant, to our VIP lounge so that everyone could get their coffee.  I just had my cliff bar…and some more ramen.  Breakfast ramen is quite tasty.  We spent a long time just relaxing in the VIP lounge before heading back to the campsite where we explored a bit along the lake.  The music started at noon, and when it did we came back to our tents and tossed the frisbee around a bit.  Then everyone pulled out their blankets and we rested/slept on the grass in the shade of the giant yellow-fever acacia trees.  In the afternoon, we had a strange snack.  Matt had brought a British military rations box (similar to an MRE), so we concocted some weird snacks out of the unusual things in the MRE.  After our snack, we headed over to the festival to check out what it looked like in the light.  Around 8pm, we left the festival and headed back to our VIP lounge for dinner.  Instead of ramen this night, we ordered pizzas, which were really amazing.  We spent a couple more hours resting at the VIP lounge before heading out for more dancing at the festival.

The next morning, we of course headed to the VIP lounge so everyone could get their coffee.  But the breakfasts also looked amazing, so we all ended up getting breakfasts.  Sally and I split something called the “Monster Breakfast” which was truly delicious.  We then basically lounged in the VIP lounge and back on the grass at our campsite until it was time to take the matatu back to Nanyuki.

It was funny b/c when we arrived back to Mpala, there was a large group of about 20 sitting in the outside dining area.  We saw them as we approached in the van, and Matt said, “it must be the Spanish class already” (the country, not the language), and all the occupants of the van let out one large collective groan.  We had grown used to a small, tiny group of people at base, so it was tough to see new people.  But the class is only on Mpala for about a week, so it will soon be back to our little quiet research centre.






our camp



breakfast ramen for me at the VIP lounge

why we love the VIP lounge

Matt's face says all you need to know about the VIP lounge

Lake Naivasha

MRE snack time

our unique dip we made from MRE's, random canned goods I brought, and ramen of course




Julia, Tyler, and I got mohawks for the music festival


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