Mount Kenya, the Coast, and Zanzibar!

Hello again everyone,

After I last updated you while we were in Nairobi we traveled north of the city to Mount Kenya. We stayed for five days at Castle Forest Station, a former Kenyan Wildlife Service monitoring post which has been leased by them as a small campground and hotel. We were on the south slope of the mountain so the weather was cool and rainy. I dont' think it was ever below fifteen degrees but after the heat we had been in we were all sleeping in long underwear and wearing our touques all day.

I'm taking a biology class for this session so I spent most of my time working with a local guide in the forest on a project to design a vegetation monitoring program for the south slope forests. Other groups designed bird, mammal, and human influence monitoring programs. Our proffessor is responsible for a similar monitoring program being undertaken on the more arid north slope and is hoping to use some of our work to start a monitoring program in the area we were in.

One of our days was spent on a hike up the mountain with the entire group. It is a very strange experience when you are used to backpacking in Canada to go on a hike with four guards with rifles. Forest elephants are very common in the area, and although we didn't see any, one group came close enough to hear them trumpeting and even feel the ground shake as they were moving! Unfortunately they are usually very quiet in the bush and it is amazingly easy to surprise them, even though they knock down trees wherever they go! When they have been in an area in the past twenty four hours however you can tell by the smell, a fresh elephant trail smells like nothing else.

We hiked up the mountain for a few hours until we reached the end of the rainforest and entered the bamboo zone. We had lunch sitting on an elephant trail with bamboo fifteen feet tall over our heads. It feels like a completely different world. We only walked into the bamboo for about twenty minutes, but if you starting on a trip to climb the mountain you woudl walk through bamboo forest for another eight hours before you reached the moorland and sub-alpine vegetation.

Although we were camping again in Mount Kenya the lodge at the campground had a beautiful little restaurant and sitting area and we all spent out evenings sitting in front of the fire doing homework by lantern light, with real drip coffee. Surprisingly in a coffee exporting country it is very hard to come by.

From Mt. Kenya we drove back to Nairobi and then east towards the coast and Tsavo West National Park. We spent one day driving through the park. We visited a 'recent' lava flow, which was 500 years old. Its amazing how barren it is even after that much time. It looks like it could be ten years old. There is almost no vegetation, only sharp black volcanic rock. The park is more of a woodland savannah than areas like the Maasai Mara that we have been before. Although this means it is sometimes harder to see wildlife we still saw plenty of giraffe, zebra, impala, kudu, buffalo and other antelope species. We also visited Mazinga springs, a river where you can walk along the edge and watch crocodiles and hippos in the water. There is an underwater viewing area as well where you can see fish and if you're lucky a hippo underwater.

The final part of our visit was a trip to the rhino sanctuary. The sanctuary is a fenced 70 kilometer area of the park that has 50 rhinos. We saw one for a few seconds in the bushes - I have a picture but I'm not sure that any of you will believe me that its a rhino! The highlight of the day however was when I caught sight of a leopard right beside the truck as we drove out of the park. Its very rare to see them at all let along on the ground during daylight.

After our day in Tsavo we spent our last night camping on the other side of the park and drove on to Mombasa, and then up the coast to Watamu in the morning. Arriving at the coast after the long dusty drive was spectacular.

The place we stayed on the coast was a five minute walk from a small white sand beach, surrounded by palm trees with coral isalnds in the bay that you can walk out to at low tide. Needless to say going to class was a challenge. I'm very glad I chose a class that involved being on the beach!

While we were in Watamu we also visited Gege, the ruins of an ancient Swahili city. The coral stone ruins with huge fig and baobob trees growing up through it was fantastic.

After two days on the coast we flew on to Zanzibar. Even though Zanzibar is part of Tanzania, a country similar to Kenya in many ways, Zanzibar really is a very different world. The arab, african, portugese, and even british influences here are all obvious, and intertwined in the architecture, the food, the music, and even the smells on the street.

Zanzibar is actually an archipelago which includes Unguja Island (commonly called Zanzibar), and Pemba Island. We stayed in the old part of Zanzibar Town, known as Stone Town. The Stone Town itself is white as all of the older buildings were built out of coral limestone and cemented together with lime made from fossilized coral. The city has narrow winding streets which are lined with traditional Swahili and Omani homes. Both types of homes have beautiful carved doors which tell you things about the owners education, family background, and values. They range from very simple geometric carvings, to ornate depictions of plants and gold decorations.

For a relatively small island Zanzibar has a huge diversity of flora and fauna. While we were there I got a chance to snorkel on a coral reef on an offshore island, visit a mangrove forest, visit a seaweed farm, and a natural aquarium which houses the four different kinds of sea turtles that nest on the shores of the island. On our first day there we were also able to visit a spice farm and see vanilla, cardamon, cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper, lemongrass, and cloves growing. Zanzibar really is a spice island. As well as being a trading center for spices in the past due to its position in the monsoon wind system it exports eighty-percent of the world's cloves.

Now we are back in Nairobi and the program is finished. I have also finished my undergraduate career. What a way to end! Although I am excited to be going home it is hard to leave this place and these people. When I am home in a few days I will try and tell you more about coming home and post some more pictures from the rest of the trip.

Maasailand

Hello everyone,

It's hard to know where to start to tell you all about the things I've been doing for the past few weeks. Everyday here can be so overwhelming! Right now we're back in Nairobi for a week before we head off to Mount Kenya. It's funny how coming back to the same place feels like home now. The smells and sights of driving around town here seemes so unfamiliar before.

After we left Mbita we had a travel day that took us to Kisii. While there we visited a soapstone quarry and several loval soapstone shops. Almost all the soapstone from Africa we see in Canada is probably coming from these carvers that we met. They have some problems with middle-men, but one of their biggest customers is the mennonite organization ten thousand villages, who has stores across Canada. They are one of their best customers and buy direct from the carvers at good prices. They advertise all of their products as fairly traded so it was neat to see that it is working for these people.

From Kisii we travelled the next day to the Maasai Mara national reserve. The drive took us into Maasai land and we drove through several of the group ranches that have been alotted to Maasai communities as we drove down to the Mara reserve itself. The landscape of the area is beautiful. It really looks like the classic African savannah image with ridges and escarpments rising up on either side of the grassland with the single flat topped acacia tree in the distance. I'll post some pictures soon I hope.

We camped at a campsite beside a river in an area just outside of the reserve itself. I set up my tent right beside the river so I could see all of the birds and the vervet monkeys in the trees over the river. The river was very low. The further we've been driving back into Kenya from Uganda the more the effects of the extreme drought the region is experienceing have become clear.

This area of the world has two rainy seasons, the short rains run from October to December and the longer rains from March into May. The last two years at least the short rains never came, and the long rains were sparse. Many of the other smaller streams we passed driving into the area had been dried up for months. The people who live in the area are pastoralists. Many of them rely on their cattle and sometimes sheep and goats for their entire livelihood. Dead cattle on the side of the road, and people using ropes to lift cattle who can't stand on their own has become a very common sight as we're driving. Some pastoralists who have the resources are moving their cattle more than five-hundred kilometers across the country, even putting them on trains to move them, to find enough pasture. One Maasai friend who traveled with us for a while explained that every cow he can get through the drought could increase in value almost twenty times when it puts on weight again. Right now many cows would only fetch a thousand Kenyan shillings (about fifteen dollars american) at market.

The next morning we got up at six for our first game drive in the park. We saw far less wildlife than we expected, but luckily I was on the truck with the ornithology professor so learned what all of the birds were along the way, includign the four different kinds of vultures. The game drive that evening and the next morning we took a route outside of the park through the surrounding group ranches. There was much more wildlife in that area. We saw large numbers of buffalo, zebra, wildebeest, thompson's and grant's gazelles, topi and hippos by the river. On the third game drive we finally saw what most of us had been hoping for, lions! Over the next two game drives we saw three groups of lions including adult males and females and several small cubs! At one point we were able to watch a group of two adult females and six cubs nursing for about twenty minutes right beside our trucks. While we were in Maasai Mara we also visited a Maasai village, a clinic, and a conservation NGO working in the area.

From the Mara we drove north again, down into the Rift Valley to Naivasha, one of the fresh water rift valley lakes. We were only there for two days, one of which I spent sick in my tent, so I didn't get as much of a sense of that place. I did have the chance to visit a flower farm. The lake is ringed by huge expanses of greenhouses which take advantage of the fertile soil and the water in the lake for irrigation. There are many issues with the industry. The water level of the lake is decreasing and local Maasai groups are being restricted in their access to the lake to water their cattle. At the flower farm we visited the worker's were treated very well and had very good benefits. Everyone I talked to said they felt lucky to have the job. We learned later however that it was the third company we had asked for a tour at and the others has been very reluctant to talk to us at all. Apparently they had gotten some bad press in the week before in Europe to do with working conditions.

After Naivasha we drove south again, past Nairobi to Nguruman. On the way we drove through Magadi which the staff who have been there before affectionately referred to as "hell on earth". Needless to say we were skeptical. They weren't far off. Magadi is one of the soda 'lakes' in the rift valley. There is nothing lake like about Magadi during a drought. It consists of a huge salt pan which stinks like sulfur with the Magadi Soda Company factory on the edge. This factory produces the majoity of the world's soda which is used in glass production and other industrial processes. It was also 37 degrees in the shade when we were there.

After a two hour stop there we continued on to Nguruman. We kept waiting for the temperature to go down when the sun did, but the low overnight was about 30 degrees and it was 35 degrees at least until midnight! Not fun sleeping conditions in a canvas tent! While in Nguruman we had a wonderful school visit where the school had prepared an afternoon of entertainment for us. The acts we saw were presented by the health club. They were all in the Maasai language and were designed as a way for the students to inform their parents and adults in their homes about HIV/AIDS, the education of girls and other things they are discussing in their classes. The next day we went back for a soccer game with their team.

The other aspect of Nguruman that we explored, especially in my anthropology class was the use of low-tech irrigation methods to grow crops both for local consumption and export. Because Nguruman is located at the base of one of the rift valley escarpments it has a perennial water source from a river which collects water coming down off the escarpment. The land in the area has been kept under one title as a group ranch. All of the members of the ranch are given some land suitable for cultivation which has access to the irrigation canals. The water is switched between the canals manually and each farmer is given access to the water for his crops for twelve hours out of the week. Each member of the ranch also has access to the rest of the ranch for pasture. There is also a third area set aside for an ecotourism project and as reserve pasture for times of drought.

It was a relief to leave the heat of Nguruman after a few days. From there we drove back towards Nairobi and then back down to Elangeta wuas, another maasai village. The valley that the group ranch is located in is much more wooded than the other arid regions we have visited. It was interesting to walk through the scrub acacia forest. All the leaves have fallen off of the trees due to the drought, and there is no undergrowth the ground is entirely sand.

The highlight of our visit to E. wuas was our homestay. In groups of two or three we spent twenty-four hours with a traditional Maasai family, and a local youth guide who acted as our translator. It was an incredible experience, and its hard to know where to start to tell you about it. My journal entry about that day is twelve pages long! For now I'll tell you a bit about the family that I stayed with. The family was quite rich by local standards. There were three households in the compound (called the en'kang), and a fourth being built for the fourth wife. We stayed with the elder wife in her home. Throughout our visit we had a chance to have tea with the second and third wives in their homes as well. We never met their huband as he was about four days travel away with the cattle and goats due to the drought. In the morning we walked back into town with our family to meet everyone else at the weekly market. I hope before we leave Nairobi I'll get the chance to write another entry about that experience in particular.

After another two days in E. wuas we drove back to Nairobi. We had our final exams and presentations for this set of classes today, so tommorrow is out day off before we start the next round! I haven't even narrowed my class choice down to two. The three options are a biology course that will be taught by several different proffessors from Kenya on different topics, a history course taught by an expert on swahili cultural history and a development course called peace and conflict.

Tonight we're going bowling and to a movie which should be an interesting experience! The other night we went to one of the five star hotels for dinner to celebrate someone's birthday. I went to the Japanese restaurant and had some of the best sushi I've ever had! I wasn't sure what to expect from a Japanese restaurant in Kenya.

That's all for now, hopefully I'll get a chance to post some pictures soon!

Hello everyone,

So we're back in Kenya again after a few weeks in Uganda. We're staying for a few days at the ICIPE research station at Mbita Point on the shores of Lake Victoria. The point is beautiful, the lake is on both sides of us so there are beautiful sunsets and sunrises over the lake everyday. We've finished our first class session now and today is the first day of the second class session. I'm still not sure what I'm going to take, I'm having trouble deciding between anthropology and archaeology.

Wes pent most of our first session in Uganda. All of the areas of the country that we saw were incredibly beautiful. We flew from Nairobi to Entebbe and drove from there to Kibale National Park. The park area is mostly covered with rainforest. It has the highest primate density in the world, and is home to thirteen different species including chimps. We didn't see any chimps, but we did see seven other species including Red Colobus monkeys which are endangered and very rare elsewhere, but common in Kibale. The olive babboons were also hard to miss, especially when they were busy breaking int our rooms or the kitchen!

During the first session I took a conservation ecology course. We spent a lot of time doing small projects in the forest and surrounding wetlands. We did a butterfly biodiversity survey with a local expert, a study of the forest edge, and a water quality assessment in a papyrus swamp. It was really nice to be in one place for a few days and get to know some of the local field assistants who work in the park and know the forest very well.

One day while we were three we took a break from the forest and drove to Lake Nakaruba ecotoursim site. There are about eighty small crater lakes in western Uganda. They are usually no more than 200 meters in diameter, but can be up to 200 metres deep! The one we visited is one of only two safe swimming sites we'll visit on the trip. We hiked up to a look out point where you could look down over several crater lakes and had a beautiful view of the Rwenzori mountains which form the border between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. The mountains are home to several groups of mountain gorillas. After the hike we took advantage of the swimming before heading home.

After finishing up our research projects in Kibale we spent a day driving to Queen Elizabeth National Park. As we drove down out of the foothills of the mountains the forest disappeared and the temperature climbed steadily until we reached the scrub forest savannah that make sup the park. The highlight of the visit was definetly a boat ride on the channel that joins two of the African great lakes, Lake Edward and Lake George. This area is in the midst of a drought, beyone the regular dry seasonand it was very clear that all of the wildlife was concentrated by the waters edge. During the two hour trip we saw too many hippos and buffalo to count, as well as several groups of five or six elephants in the water and browsing in the trees along the edge. We also saw huge flocks of cormorants and pelicans as well as fish eagles and other shore birds. From a distance we also saw a monitor lizard and a small crocodile.

We had an interesting time that evening. There were warthogs wandering around our building all the time, including one which had taken up residence and was raising her family in one of the washrooms! We ended up going to bed early as there were hippos and lions in the area as well. Unfortunately we haven't saeen any lions yet!

The next day we drove on to Lake Nabugabo, a small satellite lake of Lake Victoria and our second swimming spot. My class did some fishing there too have a look at the haplochromide cichlid population, and the primatology class got to observe vervet monky behavious, often up close and personal as they tried to steal our dinners out of our hands!

The last couple of days were spent in Jinja, the source of the river nile as it flows out of Lake Victoria northwards. We were given lectures by many of the scientists at the ugandan fisheries institute and had a chance to visit a fish freezing factory, an aquaculture facility, or go out in a boat to see some wetlands. No surprise I chose the boat trip.

After Jinja we had almost a twelve hour travel day and then spent the first day here studying for and writing our final exam. It's good to be in one spot again and get caught up on sleep and work. Yesterday was our day off but it ended up being quite an intesnse day. I visited the Christian Childern's Fund office on nearby Rusinga Island. In the past five years they have lowered the infant mortality rate from 60% to 15%, only by educating the community about malaria and distributing bednets. The work they've been dong is incredible, and so simple. After that we visited a women's co-op in the next town. The compound houses about 20 widows and their children. They use the income generated from crafts they seell, as well as grants they receive to provide homecare for local AIDS patients, as well as buying school uniforms for orpans and helping with their schooling costs. Most of these children are being cared for by grandparents. Two amazing places.

From here we are travelling to the Maasai Mara, Lake Baringo, Elangata Wuas and several other sites in southern Kenya before heading back to Nairobi. I'm excited for the camping portion of the trip as we've just had two nights in tents so far.

Well I'm off to start another class. Hope to hear from all of you soon.

Photos

Here are some photos from the first day, driving through the city, and Nairobi National Park.
1. A view from the trucks driving in downtown Nairobi
2. The trucks we seem to spend a majority of our time in!
3. Giraffe!
4. Zebra
5. Eland (the largest antelope species, moose size!)
6. Wildebeest
7. Secretary Bird
8. A stork, that I should know the name of!

The First Two Days

It's hard to believe I've only been here for two full days, there is so much to tell all of you about already. It's early in the morning as I'm writing. its actually feels a bit chilly right now, its probably about 15 degrees actually. The people here would consider this cold though as this is about as cold as it gets. During the day so far though it has been about thirty degrees and a bit humid.

On our first full day here on Tuesday, they decided to give us a 'slow' start as many of us didn't sleep well the night before. A slow start meant a game drive for most of the day at Nairobi National Park! The National Park comes right up against the city, and is connected to the rest of the national park system down into the serengeti plains in Tanzania by a narrow wildlife corridor. During this time of year the herds of ungulates aren't usually in this area, but there is a severe drought right now so more of them have stayed up in this high area where there is usually water year round. We saw several large herds of wildebeest which we apparently wouldn't have seen any of another year. We saw a lot of different species, giraffe, hundreds of zebra, eland, impala, grant's gazelle, ostrich, buffalo, wildebeest, duiker, warthog, and lots of different birds. It was quite the first day. It really is amazing how close the park is to the city, I have all sorts of pictures of giraffes with large skyscrapers in the background!

Yesterday was a completely different day. We went to visit the UN compound in the morning and had presentations by the head of UN-HABITAT and the head of their slum improvement program. It was interesting to see the whole compound, and the presentations gave us a lot of background information for our afternoon. In the afternoon we went to visit the UN-HABITAT office in Suweto East. Suweto East is one of the twelve villages which make up Kibera, one of the alrgest slums in the world. In Suweto 60,000 people live in a two hectare area. The population of Kibera as a whole fluctuates betweeon 500,000 and 750,000. At the office we met the local committee that has been elected by the community in stakeholders meetings to represent them in the UN-HABITAT program. Suweto East is a pilot project for the Nairobi area. The committee and other residents have done all of the enumeration work and mapping that has to be done before upgrading can begin, partly to protect the rights of these people to the land they are squatting on. Projects that have promised to improve the housing in the past have turned out to be high rise apartment buildings that have been unaffordable and have driven people further into the slum area.

After our introduction we were taken on a tour of the village in small groups by the committee members. Its really hard to describe what the place is like. There is garbage and open sewers everywhere, the pathways between the currugated metal or mud huts are usually about eight feet wide at the most. The people are incredibly friendly, and welcoming and happy to show us their homes and businesses. There are 34 churches and almost as many school just in Suweto East. We went into a couple of the schools that we passed. Here it would cost 1000 kenyan shillings (60 kenyan shillings= 1 canadiaqn dollar), to send your child to primary school for the year, 6000 Ksh for high school. Rent in this area of Kibera is between 400-500 Ksh a month. Most people probably make about 60Ksh a day at the casual labour that thy find in the city.

The children we met at the primary school were wonderful. We met most of the standard two class who are five and six years old. They wer all eager to intoduce themselves and have their pictures taken. As we left to go back to the trucks most of them followed us holding our hands as we walked back to the office. I have so many stories form the short hour we were walking about, I will try to send all of you some photos soon. The most amazing part was the incredible sense of community, and resourcefulness I saw. The frustrating part was hearing at the UN who incredibly easy and relatively cheap it would be to drastically improve the living conditions of all of these people, and the rest of the billion people who live in slums around the world. All that is missing is the international political will.

Today is a day visiting the scientists who work here at ICIPE and developing our own research projects for the trip.

Orientation Week

Hi everyone!

So now that I'm two days into my orientation week here in Montreal I thought I would let you all know a little bit more of the information I have about my trip now. I don’t have a detailed itinerary but I can tell you about some of the places we will be travelling too.

We arrive in Nairobi on Monday evening. We are spending the rest of the week there, at the Nairobi campus of ICIPE (http://www.icipe.org/). At the end of the week we fly to Entebbe n Uganda, where we travel overland to Kibale National Park (I’ve posted that website on the right of this page). After a week there we travel overland to the shores of Lake Victoria, stopping in a few places along the way, including Jinja which is the source of the Nile River. From there we continue down into the Maasai Mara reserve in Kenya, the northern extension of the Serengeti Plains in Tanzania. We continue traveling overland over the next few weeks visiting Lake Bringo in the rift valley, Mount Kenya, and several other sites. Finally we travel back to the coast and fly from Mombasa to Zanzibar for the last part of the program. When you sketch all of that out on the map it makes a bit of a zigzag pattern across southern Uganda and Kenya. We are covering a lot of ground in those weeks.

We found out today (finally!) the final schedule of courses that is being offered as well. There are two “context” courses that everyone takes throughout the trip. The first is Natural History of East Africa, and many of the game drives, and other trips to natural sites that we are doing as a group will be part of this course. The other course is Peoples and Cultures of East Africa. As part of this course we’re going to be doing some research projects which span the length of the trip. We will be spending some of the first week in Nairobi developing these projects. Our other three credits are done in three intensive sessions, with three courses to choose from in each session. In the first session the choices are Primatology, Conservation Biology and a Development course with a health focus. I’m not sure how I’m going to choose! Some of the other courses being offered include Ornithology, Swahili History, Archaeology, Biological Diversity in East Africa, and two other Development courses. This week we are mostly participating in introductory lectures by many of the professors who will be traveling with us, as well as by other McGill faculty with expertise in the area. Today’s included dangerous creatures, tropical diseases and our second Swahili lesson! Tommorrow our schedule includes a lecture by Romeo Daillaire’s second in command in Rwanda, Major Brent Beardsley.

That’s all for now I think. I need to get up early tommorrow to continue wrestling with the McGill administration a bit to sort just a few more things out!