Something the professors here like to do (and something I wish Amherst college professors would do more, though I don’t know how feasible it is) is give traveling lectures – we all get into the cruisers and drive from relevant spot to relevant spot, and in each one we get to hear a little bit about why exactly that spot is relevant. On Tuesday, we had a four-hour one of those, which started out on the top of a hill and about the ecology of the Tarangire-Manyara ecosystem, and ended up in a curio shop and about tanzanite mining. One great/not so great thing about traveling lectures is that the scenery provides plenty of distraction if you’re up for it. When we were on the hill, the meteorology was enough – the clouds our heads were in boiled around and changed colors and rained on us and then dissipated and left the sky a kind of Barbicide-blue and we all got sunburnt before we knew the sun had even shown up. And then I happened to turn around and see this Maasai boy herding his goats on a hilltop level with ours.
Needless to say, I’m hoping the Tanzanian ecosystem can be studied experientially. At our next stop, next to a road, we learned about beekeeping and I watched bicyclists go by with their handlebars completely hung with little fish they were taking to sell in nearby Karatu. Okello, our Center Director and former professor who still teaches when he gets the opportunity, made a guest appearance to talk about ecotourism. He was smart and kept us in the cruisers for his lecture, which he delivered from the hood of one (from the left: Okello, Clinton, Coral, Chelsea, Sam, and Kaila).
For our last stop, they loosed us on a curio shop complex, where shopkeepers tried to sell us tanzanite (way too expensive, even at “student prices”) and lion teeth (way too cheap, since that’s illegal). Christine and I contemplated buying black t-shirts with cheetahs screenprinted on them and the bottom and sleeve edges frayed and braided with Kenyan-colored beads, but by the time we’d worked out the mental justification necessary it was time for our last lecture, and then we headed back to camp.
After thinking hard about landscapes and people in the morning, in the afternoon we went to Lake Manyara National Park to look mindlessly at animals. Actually, come to think of it, we were there to do a field exercise that involved counting baboons. So we must have done that at some point (oh, I kid, I kid, of course I remember). We drove into the clearing near the lake and were greeted by all kinds of garden-variety large African mammals – giraffes, zebra, Cape buffalo, and the rest of the exotic-locale epitomizers, by now pretty familiar to us, if you can believe it. But we were looking for baboon troops to census! And that day, the baboons felt like hanging out and grazing near the edge of the clearing, among some impala, including this male (who, in a stunning display of actually being scary despite generally appearing cute, bleated loudly in a way you would not expect an impala to bleat and sent most of the females in his harem running. The baboons were not bothered).
The baboons also didn’t mind the presence of these overaggressive warthogs (I know it looks like dancing, but they were fighting! I hope they both made it).
Next we stopped briefly at the swamp to look at all the cool shorebirds and check off some more in our bird books (my first spoonbill! Tori, we’ve come a long way since putting spoons in our mouth and flapping our arms at home).
After that, we happened to drive by just as a couple of elephants got particularly itchy and couldn’t take it anymore. We have studied elephant vegetation damage before, so it was particularly eye-opening to see how it actually happens:
When that elephant’s sides and legs were satisfied, he joined a friend in piggybacking a fallen tree and getting in a nice belly scratch. This was a large tree, but under two elephants-worth of force it shook like a sapling. Seeing these individuals take on a small part of the forest, and multiplying the effect by the number of elephants that tend to roam around together in large herds, it was easy to see how elephants have single-hoofedly changed much of Amboseli’s habitat type from woodland to grassland.
Next, we ran into some babies, including a small elephant who was learning how to be destructive:
And some young zebras who were learning how to have mohawks:
And there were some dikdiks:
who were probably full grown but who always look like small aliens:
Lake Manyara is a very small park compared to the ones we’d visited before, and it was cool to feel as though we’d been able to see so much of it in one visit. The groundwater forest also houses animals that aren’t found very many other places, like the blue colobus monkey, who is much shyer than the baboon. I still have to go back, though – we missed the hot springs, and the lake itself, because baboons don’t tend to hang out there. But according to the brochure, “the lake forms the most spectacular sight”, and apparently when the water is sufficiently high, you can go canoeing among the flamingos. I also missed the infamous tree-climbing lions, although one group did get to see them. And I guess you don’t really need an excuse to revisit a Man and Biosphere Reserve.
Having done a lot of shushing each other and silently pointing, we were glad, on the next day, to be given an Environmental Policy field exercise that involved talking to people. Ji-Yeon, Chelsea, Alex Hughes, Kaila and I set out together into an Iraqu village (Iraqu = a Tanzanian tribe – now that we’re here, we are no longer working only with Maasai) near Karatu-Town (the largest town in the area). We had a translator, but I practiced my Swahili anyway. A few of that day’s commonly used phrases:
“Mbuzi mdogo sana sana sana sana [infinite sanas]” = “very very very very [etc.] small goat”. This was appropriate because the first house we went to had a fuzzy just-born white goat about as big as a small cat and I had to restrain myself from kidnapping it and putting it in my backpack. The second house had a speckled goat and I had to hold Chelsea back from doing the same thing – she decided right then and there to raise goats and become an artisan cheesemaker.
“Mbwa mkubwa sana sana sana sana [infinite sanas]” = “very very very very [etc.] large dog”. The dogs in Tanzania are much more protective of their human and livestock friends than the goats in Kenya were, perhaps because they’re treated better.
“Ninasema Kiswahili kidogo sana sana sana [you get it]” = “I speak very [etc.] little Swahili”. This usually elicited laughter, which is understandable. Oh well. At least I wasn’t in Olivia’s group . . . an older woman told them that she often eats giraffe meat that she’s given by the government (senility is present in every culture! It just displays itself differently, I guess. Although apparently giraffe is delicious).
We went through thorns and sunflowers and from farm to farm asking people about human-wildlife conflict in the area, and got some surprising answers (surprising to us, anyway, but I’ll spare you). As always, we also met very interesting people, including a couple who stopped hoeing their maize to talk to us, and got into an endearingly flirtatious shoving match when the man said he couldn’t stand wildlife and the woman disagreed. There was one woman who politely declined to be interviewed because she was on the way to the clinic in Karatu-town. She looked healthy but then we noticed that the baby on her back had a fully developed sixth finger which was hanging off of her pinky by a tiny thread of skin. We stopped by an evidentally wealthier part of the village, where the houses were much larger and more well-constructed, several houses had cars or rustless bicycles outside, and none of the dogs’ ribs were visible. It was probably not coincidental that the people we interviewed in this part of town cited no conflicts with wildlife at all. One family invited us inside, where they had enough stools for all nine of us, and the walls were decorated with torn-out magazine articles about Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and a gigantic poster of fruit, the size and faded bluish color of the kind you see on the sides of mobile Italian Ice stands.
On the way back, we passed a farmstead we’d been in before, and the man we had interviewed smiled broadly and called something out to our translator. It turned out that he was a witch doctor and that his wife was predicting the rains, and he was wondering if we wanted to come watch. This trip, especially our cultural manyatta experiences, has made me a little suspicious of things like that, but of course we weren’t about to miss out, and we gathered around as the witch doctor lady tossed river pebbles on the ground and gathered them up again. It was very fast and reminded me of nothing so much as bananagrams. We didn’t get to find out when it was going to rain next, because the man who had called us over spotted my walking stick, and of course it sparked something, because that’s what it’s good at. This time, the man decided that if I had one stick, of course I would want more (this is a common thought process around here, for some reason) and he brought out his witch doctor stick, a lighter version of mine with a freaky-looking oval head carved into it. I did not want it! but Alex Hughes decided that he did. So he is now 5000 Tanzanian shillings poorer (about $3.75) and is set to go all voodoo on us any day now. A little research reveals that Tanzanian witch doctors do exist, but all it really tells me is that they got in the news recently for killing albinos in order to use their body parts for amulets. There has been a government crackdown, and hopefully they don’t do that anymore.
So back through the sunflowers we went (that’s Ji-Yeon)
where I think we had a quiz, and then played some checkers (that’s our kitten, Kili Monster . . . Monster for short)
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