4/1/10: NATURE PLAYS TRICKS

Long time no see again! "A couple of hours" Tanzania time is pretty much infinite, it seems like. But here it is: the blog you've been waiting for, maybe!

The next day was special for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it was Sarah’s birthday. Sarah is our Student Affairs Manager, or S.A.M. She has lived in East Africa for four years now – she did the SFS program and got hooked, and after she finished school she went back to Kenya and worked in an orphanage before she got this job. Next year she is going back to the US for graduate school, so this was potentially her last game drive for a long time. Thus, she requested that we dress up as either our favorite animals, or as fanimals (fans of particular animals). She complied with her own request:

as did a few other people who wore zebra-patterned spandex pants. But Christine made two pairs of paper cheetah ears, and we drew on each others’ faces with eyeliners, and I think we may have won:

(Oh, hey Christine. Picture that, but with hair, and it’s pretty much what I looked like, probably). So we went into the crater like that. It had the unexpected result of keeping the hawkers away, because when they cried out “hey, mzungu! necklace, 5000!” it was possible to say “hapana mzungu. duma” (not mzungu, cheetah) and they had no reply. Also, a lot of tourists meowed at us.

The road down to the crater was one part roller coaster and two parts postcard and necessitated (as so many things here do) an a capella rendition of the Jurassic Park theme song:

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and the first thing we saw upon arriving safely at the bottom was this goofy-looking secretary bird, balancing himself somehow on a tree.

Soon after we came upon this scene, which I like to call “The Wildebeest Snubs The Weaver”

but it turned out that all of this was a prelude to one of the happiest fifteen-minute sections of my life. Our driver, Dr. Kissui, is our Wildlife Management professor and a lion expert, so he keeps his eyes out for small tawny ears above the grassline. He saw some, and we pulled over and were greeted by these two cheetah brothers:

And then Christine and I summoned them with our minds and they came closer:

And closer, until they were right here!

And we left them sleeping in the grass and dreaming of juicy wildebeests.

Before we even stopped for lunch, we also encountered this extremely stately hartebeest

SMILE

he wouldn’t smile.
Luckily, these flamingos were being more social (at least with each other):

Quite a different sort of social interaction was going on between some lions when we accidentally walked (drove?) in on them at an inopportune, PG-13 rated moment. I’m not sure whether it was our fault, but the whole situation dissolved soap opera-quickly – by the time we left, if feline facial expressions and body language are to be trusted, we’d run the gamut of lion emotions, from come-hither gestures:

to slightly angry pillow talk:

We left the lions to their mild domestic dispute and headed to our classroom for the day, a picnic spot near a pond full of noisy hippos and a very climbable tree. Visitors like to eat near the hippos, and black kites like to eat near the visitors, and sometimes, for example in the case of our intern Erica, black kites like to try to eat the visitors themselves (one slashed a carrot directly out of her hand and left her bleeding). I can neither confirm nor deny certain rumors that after witnessing that incident, Christine and I attempted some hawkbaiting. But if it happened, it was not too successful, and we had to settle for this kind of bottom-of-a-snowglobe kind of picture:

After teasing the hawks, we gathered on the hill for a lecture about what makes Ngorongoro special (it’s the only national park that really counts people as a protected species – Maasai graze their livestock in the crater). In the meantime, we found some critters who were hard at (their own, unusual kind of) work:

After the lecture, we strapped ourselves in and went back up the roller coaster and to camp. And what more can I say after all that?

So those were all of nature’s April Fool’s day tricks, which we fell for completely and never want to be disabused of. We humans aren’t quite as good at that kind of thing, but we did our level best. Dr. Wallis, our Wildlife Ecology professor, started the morning off right by trying to convince us that her motion-detector camera trap had snapped pictures of something weird and lionlike overnight. Amanda, Christine, Becca and Ryan turned Sarah’s office literally upside-down. Chelsea and I had been planning to sandwich-face (sandwich-facing: smushing a slice of peanut-buttered bread on either side of someone’s face) Mambo since he threatened to do it to us in Serengeti, and we managed it that night while everyone was doing homework, and he finally let his guard and his hood down for long enough for us to get him. Then he and Ryan retaliated by doing the same thing to me, but they upped the condiment to a peanut butter and mud mixture, so it was basically just like getting a free exfoliate treatment inside a Reese’s cup. Then they threw bread into our tent but Chelsea guarded it valiantly. As a recipient of half of Mike Giaimo’s genes, I am required to consider April Fool’s Day halfway endless, and half of endlessness is still endless, so no one should be surprised to hear that there is something epic in the works. But I can’t say any more until it is actually implemented.

So far, though, the winning prank is The Epic Salt Switch (prankster: Christine; prankee: Ian). Let’s just say that salt and powdered laundry detergent look very similar, but taste a lot different on hard-boiled eggs.

(BONUS TRACK! This is what the inside of a cruiser (specifically KBB) looks like during lunch (back row left -> right: Aubrey, Christine, and Amanda; front row left->right: Sam, Ian):)

I hope you enjoyed your virtual journey! I had a pretty great time reliving it. Soon I will be writing for Glimpse.org, so I have a feeling that blog will get slightly more attention than this one. But if you have time, you can . . . read . . . both!

kwaheri sana, kaka duma.

kwaheri sana everyohne else too!