Just another week in Tanzania

Sunday funday

Sunday was another non-schedule program day for us. In the morning, about half of us opted to take a bike ride through the area immediately surrounding Lake Manyara National Park. The best way to describe the experience is it was like mountain biking without the mountain. My butt is still sore and I don't think I'll be volunteering for any offroad biking again anytime soon. I'm also pretty lucky that I have cat-like reflexes because the brakes on my bike were completely non-functional. And let me tell you, thorned Acacias are not a nice plant to run into when you forget your brakes don't work. Besides the minor mishaps, actually being able to get out of the car and explore the area was really awesome. We were able to get right up to Lake Manyara and we finally got to see the flamingos!!! (Ignore my overuse of the exclamation point here- I’m a little too obsessed with those dorky pink birds). 

Our bike ride also took us to the place were many of the local wooden carvings are made (ebony, rose wood, etc). The people working on these crafts came from Mozambique during the civil war, and to this day continue to create beautiful authentic artwork. I went a little crazy buying crafts in there and if given the chance to go back will probably go crazy again. Family, brace yourself, the gifts will be glorious. Our bike ride ended where many of the popular paintings of the Maasai and wildlife are created. We got to see how each painting was made, and it was extremely tempting to buy a wall sized painting, but I refrained. Later in the day we got to walk around Mto wa Mbo (and I garauntee you that I am not spelling that right) and explore the Maasai Market and other cool trinket shops. Highlight of the day: getting two Maasai blankets for 20,000 Tanzania shillings after multiple epic bargaining failures. Prepare yourselves for the epicness that will be a home-made flannel created from a Maasai blanket. And for those wondering, my africa pants are fabulous. We ended the trip eating pizza from a local pizza place and buying them out of beer (we may or may not be suffering from withdrawals). Later that night, we played a soccer game with some of the staff while all of Rhotia watched. I'm so bad I've officially demoted myself to cheerleading squad.

Tarangire National Park, Tanzania

Yesterday, we went to Tarangire National Park to work on a wildlife management sampling project and to explore. We (all of us SFS students) started off the day doing transects along the road, and recording species, species number, sex counts and behaviors of every animal group we came across. After a couple hours of sampling, we got to drive around in search of some animals we haven’t yet seen. Now, I’m going to make you totally jealous: WE SAW A CHEETAH AND A LION. SERIOUSLY GUYS, IT WAS UNBELIEVABLE. I almost peed my pants with excitement. My group’s driver, who is also our wildlife management professor, told us being able to see a cheetah in any park is rare (SFS groups usually on see one every third time coming to Tarangire). The lion is not so rare, but being my first lion sighting I got a little overexcited. I couldn't get a picture of the cheetah because my camera is dinky, however; I do have a copy that I will upload soon!

The beautiful mistress herself.

 Besides those two completely awesome sightings, I got to see hundreds and hundreds of elephants, zebra, wildebeest and impala. There was also a ton of giraffes (my new favorite animal), and I even got to see some rare mongooses and eagles. At the end of the day, we got to stop at the Tarangire Lion Research center where our SFS Center for Wildlife Management director (Dr. Kissui) has been working for the past ten years. He showed us the radio and GPS collars his research team uses to track lions, and also introduced us to some researches from Dartmouth working on giraffe demography. I'd promise to calm down the gloating, but come on.. I'M IN AFRICA!

Fighting impala

Bird straight out of Alice in Wonderland. Anyone?

Finally saw a wild ostrich!

Mr. Cool Giraffe man who walked inches in front of our car

It's amazing how huge these birds are. I don't think I'd want to start a fight with one.

Probably two out of over 200 zebra that we saw.

Vulture picking at some bones.

We saw this baby elephant and a very pissed off herd. Little did we know they were so agitated because a lioness (the one pictured above) was hiding nearby.