Maisha ya kupendeza (Beautiful Life)

Mambo! (More of a casual hey dude rather than a hello)

Tarangire was so so awesome.  You know when you think of “the bush” in Africa??  Well that’s Tarangire.  It’s not packed with tourists nor does it have perfectly paved roads for them to safari on.  At one point, it was just our land cruiser and we were driving through what must have been an area, home to many carnivores.  I will let the pictures do the talking.   Giraffe carcass.  Zebra carcass.  I know it’s sort of far away but that’s an elephant carcass.  This segment of the drive that lasted about 10 minutes was so eerie.  It was completely silent and all of these herds  of zebras and  wildebeests were extremely alert…as were we.  Once we got to the waterhole   we saw cheetahs and a lion! I only saw the lion for seriously 5 seconds or else I would post a picture because as you all can imagine, I was freaking out ….but I swear I saw it!  We did population counts for the first 3 hours of our drive which was pretty meticulous.  Each transect was 2 km.  At any sight of an African mammal, we had to stop, estimate the distance from our land cruiser in meters, count the number of species, and then continue.  However, if the vegetation changed within the 2 km transect, we had to start another transect.  We only dealt with 4 vegetations: woodland, grassland, riverine, and bushland.  After the 2 km we would drive 500 meters just so the data was consistent.  This “500 free-bee” (as we called it) was the best. Anyway, enough of that boring detail.  After our drive we got to go to the tourist safari lodge.  Oh my gosh, I wanted to live there forever.  We went swimming in a beautiful (chlorinated= we counted it as a shower) pool.  And the best part was the deep end, because once you reached it,  you got this little view!!  We could casually see wild elephants …here I experienced the, “Okay okay so this is why I went to Africa!” feeling…that I have about every day…x 5.   A few other characters also made their way up to this lodge  I can’t blame them. 

                Today our environmental policy class took a 4 hour “fieldtrip” to the town of Mto-wa-mbu (directly translates to mosquito river) but luckily I only got one bug bite when we were there (I’ve only gotten 5 total—how crazy!).  Mto-wa-mbu is one of the more established towns near us that offers cultural tourism.  We saw the very vast rice fields  (I know I’ve told a few of you about my good friends– Rachel, Allyson, Jess, & Rachel), we were taken through the surprisingly lush forest of banana trees ,and then even more shockingly we were given taste testers of banana beer!  It is made of millet  banana, and water.  It is tradition that you must lightly blow on the “millet-foam” before indulging  it was better than we thought it’d be .  Banana beer is viewed as something that brings people together, no matter the tribe. Then came my favorite part, the kids!  It’s crazy how much they just love the sense of touch.  Whether they’re just hanging  or swinging  they really never ever let go   It’s funny because most of these little kids have never seen  a white person before.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “Ah mzungu!” (Ah a white person!).  When the kids come up to you, it is not uncommon for them to kind of feel your hand instead of just shaking it.  I honestly think that they may be skeptical that our skin feels different because the color is different, it’s kind of cute.  But more than anything, these kids loved my camera.  They were genuinely interested in how it worked, it was amazing.  Obviously I was showing everyone that would listen .  One was even learning how to zoom in on his own ! SUCCESS  

                Sorry for this insanely long wall post, I’m going to try and spread them out a little bit more…if the internet allows.  We’re actually hiking an escarpment of the Great Rift Valley tomorrow morning! Oh and PS we found 2 snakes in our “campus” this week! No one was hurt.  But three students did get “jiggers.”  They’re pretty nasty—you may research if you choose to, I will spare the details!  I’ll check up with ya later this weekend, be free.

☮Hannah

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 23rd, 2010 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Maisha ya kupendeza (Beautiful Life)”

1. Linda Canepa says:

   September 23, 2010 at 8:56 pm

   Hannah,

   Guess I never realized how much taking you to see Lion King affected you! Your blogs are fun for us all to follow and THANK YOU for getting pictures of yourself in the blogs so I can see you look healthy and happy!