Cool Running

10/3/09: Ngorongoro Reserve and Arusha, Tanzania

There’s an old African proverb that says, “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.”

This morning I woke up and I had to start running.

It was so cold at camp on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater, that after breakfast I decided to go for a short jog around the campsite. Almost as soon as I got started, I heard a rustling in the bushes nearby. To my surprise, just 50 feet away there stood a gigantic elephant.

We had seen many elephants from the comfort of our jeep on the safari, but it’s a totally different feeling when you’re standing there alone, staring down a who-knows-how-many ton beast. I motioned back to the campsite for others to come see, and pretty soon a crowd of about seven had gathered. We were all enjoying the moment, taking pictures and laughing about what would happen if the elephant charged at us, when all of a sudden… the elephant charged at us! We scattered in every direction, and as fast as the chase began, it ended. But I can now check “anger an African elephant to the point of attack” off my life’s to-do list.

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Back at the Meserani Snake Park in Arusha before dinner, a couple of us decided to go for a run of our own choosing. (It’s amazing how little exercise we’ve gotten since coming to Africa. We jogged around camp for a little while, but when that wasn’t enough, we asked the Masai warrior guarding the camel stables if we could run around those as well. Not only did he agree, but he offered to run with us and show us his village. Before I knew it, I found myself with two other out-of-shape safari-goers, running stride for stride with Taiko, a Masai warrior, and saying hello to everyone in his tiny village in Arusha.

me, Taiko and Siuha the morning after our run

And to think, just over three months ago I was sitting at a tiny cubicle in an empty office in Charlotte pondering the meaning of life.

[Side note: We did two laps around the village, and on the first I give one little kid a high five. He was very excited to see us coming the second time around, so I held out my hand for a high five again. We missed, and he took two steps to turn and run with us anyway, and then, out of nowhere, he looked at me and shrieked as if he had seen a ghost. I have no idea how I frightened him, but little kid, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry!]

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Puzzles for Postcards

Rhyme Time! (Solve three of these four greedy rhymes)

The machine that organizes some of your larger coins
A relative of a hundred dollar bill
When Kenyans put their money where their BBQ is
A large display of people’s earnings

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Picture of the Day: Our tour group is really just a bunch of kids who like to climb trees.

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Snakes on a Plain!!!

9/30/09: Meserani Snake Park in Arusha, Tanzania

We spent most of today driving from Nairobi to Arusha, Tanzania. We’re camping tonight at the Meserani Snake Park before we get up early tomorrow morning and head to the Serengeti. Now just stop and think for a minute. We are camping outdoors at a campsite that calls itself the Meserani SNAKE PARK. I don’t know about you, but I think these guys need to hire a new public relations person. Because really, I think a swimming pool and satellite TV would be a bigger draw.

Anyway, it turns out that the snakes at the campsite are actually in glass displays, not wandering around the tents looking for people to bite. I was quite relieved when I found that out. The campsite is owned and run by two Aussies who also opened a free clinic for the local Masai people. So guess what kinds of ailments the Masai coming to the clinic have? Colds? Pneumonia? Malaria? Nope. Snake bites. (And also burns from falling into fires.) The purpose of the long display of snakes is actually so the Masai who come to the clinic can point out which snake they were bitten by. I thought that was pretty clever, and apparently so do the area hospitals, because they often refer their snake bite patients to the Meserani Snake Park clinic. The only thing is – if you go to the hospital with a deadly snake bite and they refer you to a clinic that’s an hour away, is that really helping things or is it hurting things?

They also have crocodiles at the snake park. I guess the Aussies have a penchant for deadly animals.

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Picture of the Day: Mr. Turtle and I are millionaires in Tanzania

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Quick, Everyone out of Kenya!

9/30/09: Nairobi Kenya to Arusha, Tanzania

[Editor's note: We have finally found some decent (and I use that word loosely) wi-fi, so pictures have been added to all blogs posts. Thanks for reading!]

I can think of the names of four people that we knew in Kenya but weren’t making the trip with us to Tanzania: Pamela, Tracy, David and Two Tooth (the last two being our drivers in the Masai Mara National Reserve). Pamela flew out of Nairobi back home to Italy, and David probably didn’t know enough about anything to leave the country (no offense to him, because he was a really nice guy, but we were just hoping that he’d teach us more about the animals on our game drives, but it was clear that he did not know a lot).

Today we left Kenya for the greener pastures of Tanzania, and we weren’t the only ones. We ran into both Two Tooth and Tracy at the border – that’s 50% of the people we knew in Kenya that were trying to escape.

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Is it too late to go back to Kenya?

Tanzania is the dustiest, dirtiest, hottest place we have been to yet (and I would venture a guess that it is the dustiest, dirtiest, hottest place in the entire world). I have yet to see anything resembling the color green. This is probably not necessary to add here, but even my boogers are brown, as I’ve sucked in more dust that a vacuum on the beach. Every tree visible from the road has a dust coating thicker than a fine New England clam chowder. After twenty minutes in this country, Zhou rubbed her fingers through her hair and came out with nice brown French-tipped fingernails.

I don’t want you to get the wrong impression of Tanzania, as we’ve only just begun our visit here and we still have to look forward to Serengeti game drives and seeing Mount Kilimanjaro. But if there’s no post tomorrow, you’ll know Zhou and I are passed out from inhaling too much dust.

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Picture of the Day: Dust storms here are more common than Starbucks in America

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