Beginning the safari

One more sign from Nairobi that I forgot to include in the previous e-mail.  At the National Museum they had flyers for this tour:

I’m not sure how I feel about a slum being a place to tour, but the first question I asked the man at the desk sitting near the flyers was, what is the first slum in the world in size?  Does someone really measure the size of slums?  By area?  By number of people?  As a trivia player, I can never let a claim like second largest go by. But it is nice to know that the people there are the first in friendliness.

We had a long travel day yesterday with three flights in successively smaller planes.  Apparently you used to be able to fly from Nairobi directly to Tarangire in Tanzania, but now Tanzania requires you to go through an international airport and clear passport control.  How unreasonable of them.  So first we flew on a charter flight from Nairobi to Kilimanjaro Airport which, as near as I can tell, is in the middle of nowhere.  Another group from my tour company flew on the charter with us, but they were continuing to somewhere else after dropping us in Arusha.  So we all got on a twelve passenger plane.  As we flew over Arusha, the guide said, something is wrong.  He went and consulted with the pilots who somehow had missed the instruction to drop us in Arusha.  I thought we might have to parachute out.  The pilot continued and I could see a long round trip flight in front of us, but apparently they worked things out over the radio and after ten minutes, we did turn around and return to Arusha.

Great, I thought, we are finally there, wherever there is.  But they hustled my group of three across the apron to another twelve passenger plane where seven people were waiting not so patiently for us.  This is the group of ten that I will be with for the rest of the safari.  Our second small plane took us to Tarangire where we had another hour drive to the Tarangire National Park where we are staying tonight.

First of all, the riding in small planes was really interesting as we flew low enough to see the things on the ground.  Secondly, as soon as we started driving from the landing strip, which was unpaved, to the National Park, we started seeing animals.  The other seven had apparently had spectacular viewing for the last few days, so they were rather bored by groups of zebras, elephants, and giraffes, with herds of antelope and occasional warthogs as well.  But I wasn’t.  No, it was not spectacular viewing, but it is amazing to see groups of zebras and elephants on the sides of the road every mile or so.  This is what I came to see.

Trivia question of the day, what do you call a group of zebras?  A dazzle.  A group of giraffes is a tower or something else.  I’m going to learn all of these this week.

This morning we took a game drive in Tarangire National Park where we saw so many animals.  It is hard to imagine saying, oh, it is just more zebras so no point in stopping.  Mostly we saw zebras, elephants, giraffes, lots of different kinds of gazelles and antelope, warthogs, the occasional cape buffalo, and amazing birds.  We also saw a few lionesses and once we caught a rare sighting - a leopard sitting on a branch of a tree.  We are in a customized half-truck, half-jeep, with a top that is raised about a foot and a half.  Every time someone sees something interesting, we pull over and stand up to look through the roof.

Interesting facts about animals:  The warthogs brain is so small, that when it is running away from a lion, after five minutes it forgets why it was running, stops, and gets eaten. Warthogs also kneel on their front legs to eat because their necks are too short, and a group of warthogs is a sounder. Wildebeest are not much smarter than warthogs, and the herd keeps changing directions.  So a herd of wildebeest is called a confusion.  A group of giraffes is a journey and a group of elephants is a parade. Who knew?

A warthog on its front knees

After lunch we set off to drive to the Ngorongoro Crater.  I had pictured a fly-in safari meant that we did not have long drives on bad roads.  Turn out we still have some long drives, but at least on a decent road.  So while we are spending more time driving than I would like, the scenery continues to be interesting and the three best locations are yet to come:  the Ngorongoro Crater, the Serengeti, and the Masei Mara.

Late in the day we arrive at the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater and had a first view two thousand feet down into the crater.  It is a spectacular view.  The crater, which is really a caldera, is eleven miles across and thirteen miles long, rimmed by tall walls.  It reminds me a bit geographically of Salt Lake City, with the totally flat city rimmed by the Wasatch Mountains.  After our glimpse of the crater, we drove around the rim to our hotel where each room backs onto the crater.  You can just sit in your room, or at poolside, or outside the lobby and enjoy an incredible view.

Nairobi

Yesterday I flew from Addis Ababa to Nairobi.  A few last thoughts about Ethiopia.  First, while many people clearly saw me as a source of funds, I think the people were genuinely nice and wanted to talk to me and meet me.  On my last night, I was far from downtown in a not very interesting area.  I walked a few blocks and found a local restaurant that had pizza.  On my way back, there were not that many people walking, but one young man asked me if I needed help.  When I said no, he just walked away.

The second thing I realized is that every morning, my guide, driver, and seventeen people at the hotel asked me if I had slept well last night.  Everyone from the desk clerk to the serving people in the breakfast room were all very concerned about my sleep.  I know they are service people, but everyone did seem nice in Ethiopia.

I arrived at the airport in Nairobi and had not even gotten to passport control when I was met by a representative from my safari company.  Everyone else went into the health (vaccinations) line, but she walked me right to passport control.  Don't I have to show my health record, I asked.  You have it? she said.  Yes.  Ok, so you don't have to go there.

She insisted on rolling my bags, and when I got out to the car, there were two men - a driver and Joseph.  Was he a guide? concierge?  Who knows?  Three people to pick me up at the airport.  She got into the driver's seat and I was surprised for a minute until I realized that they drive on the left side here.

Flying into Nairobi, I thought it was on a lake because there was a clear "shoreline."  Then I realized that it was all land, but the buildings were not randomly spread out and thinning on the outskirts as in most cities.  The city goes to that line and stops.  On the ride to my hotel, the guide explained that there is a national park that borders the city.  So I saw my first zebras on the road, as well as some gigantic, scary birds.

Joseph said the ride to the hotel was forty five minutes if the traffic was good.  The traffic was beyond horrible.  The three lanes in each direction main highway was a parking lot.  We literally stopped for half an hour without moving.  There are roundabouts with lights that you ignore because there is a traffic officer who directs traffic.  So why did he stop our side for half an hour?

During the (long) ride, I learned from Joseph that there are forty two tribes in Kenya so they speak forty two languages.  Nonetheless, Swahili is the national language and English is the official language.  Everyone speaks three languages: their native tongue, English, and Swahili.

My hotel is across the street from the University of Nairobi.  As we passed it, I saw a sign that said "Corruption-Free Zone."  How do they enforce that, I asked.  Joseph said that it is illegal to take or pay bribes at the school.  Aren't bribes usually illegal?  If you put up a sign, does it work?

It was still mid-afternoon, so I asked Joseph if I could go for a walk by myself.  He seemed dubious and said he would go with me.  When I came down twenty minutes later, he was waiting for me, but I had discovered the swimming pool, and had no need to go further.   I read in the sun all afternoon at a nice pool in a beautiful setting.  The view from my room:

I'm still not sure who Joseph was because today Peter was our guide and tomorrow we are flying to Tanzania where Kennedy will be our guide.  We also have a personal concierge, Marcy, here at the hotel even though everything has been completely arranged for us.  The owners of the company are in their 80's but they still personally greet each tour, so this morning we had a little introductory meeting with Peter, Marcy, and the owners.  The only other people in my group today are a couple from Denver, but we are meeting up with seven more tomorrow in Tanzania.

Our first stop this morning was the Giraffe Center.  There is only one species of giraffes but seven subspecies, three of which live in Kenya.  The Rothschild subspecies was almost extinct, so at this center, they breed them and reintroduce them into the wild.  The giraffes are so gentle and eat right out of your hand.  And you will never see them this close anywhere else.  They are so tall and funny looking.  Look how big just his head is compared to me.

I don't know if you can see it in the last picture, but they stick their tongues out about six inches and you can put the pellet of food right on their tongue.  Some little known facts about giraffes:  they sleep standing up but only for five minutes to half an hour a day.  They have to spread their legs wide and bend their necks to drink, a position that is uncomfortable for them.  So they drink over twenty gallons at a time and then don't drink again for a month.

Driving to our next destination, we talked about education in Kenya since we had seen a few school groups at the Giraffe Center.

Peter, the guide, said that school was mandatory through high school and that the parents could be put in jail if the children did not go.  Diane from Denver:  That's great, you can't make children do anything in America.  Children just do what they want.  Peter:  Here children always listen to their parents, and even to any adult.  Diane:  No one disciplines their children in America.  And you can never discipline someone else's child or you will get into trouble.  But the children pay later.  When they grow up, if they don't figure it out for themselves, they will all become criminals and end up in jail.  When they get out of jail, they just commit more crimes.  And Obama let all the criminals out of jail.

I was right to be worried about a trip with rich Americans.

Meanwhile back to Nairobi ... we next went to the Elephant Orphanage.  Elephant mothers are pregnant for fifteen months and nurse for two years.  If a baby loses its mother before it is two, it will die in the wild.  So the orphanage takes them in, feeds them formula until they are two, and then carefully reintroduces them to the wild.

This baby is the youngest and needs the blanket for warmth.  You can see that the baby elephants stand only three to four feet tall.  But a full grown elephant is five times bigger, weighing five to seven tons!

Next we had a lovely visit to Isak Dinesen's house.  Out of Africa is one of my favorite movies, so years ago I read the book which turns out to be completely different from the movie but really quite good.  I remember the overall story but not the details, so this week I started reading it again, and although I am only halfway through, I really liked seeing the house and her pictures.

The owners of the company hosted us for lunch in their house.  The wife kept telling us that we were eating a home cooked meal, but she had a cook, two people serving, and it came up in conversation that she has a chauffeur.  She does have a lovely house, and is a third generation Kenyan - of Portuguese and Indian ancestry - so she was interesting to talk to.

After lunch we stopped at the National Museum which combined natural history (stuffed animals and birds), anthropology (the Leakeys' and early man) and history (pre-colonial, colonial, and independence).  It was all quite interesting, and I did learn one trivia tidbit that I never knew:  monkeys are not apes.  I always thought the two were synonymous.  The most noticeable difference between monkeys and apes is that monkeys have tails and apes do not.  Who knew?

So my overall impression in my one day here ... Nairobi is a city of over four million so you can hardly compare it to the places I visited in Ethiopia, but it does seem more modern.  There are quite a few universities in Nairobi, and there seems to be an emphasis on education.  The traffic was at a standstill again when we drove back to the hotel this afternoon, so we got out and walked.  Everyone around us was walking fast and purposefully.  I also saw a few Western chain restaurants and stores, something I had not seen in Ethiopia, and some microbreweries.

At dinner they gave me the local newspaper to read.  The most interesting story was about a 17 year old boy whom the court had just ordered to be released from prison and the government was ordered to pay him $4,000 in damages.  It seems that when he was 16, he and his girlfriend slept together (gasp!) and she got pregnant.   Her parents had him arrested and charged with defilement.  The court found that since he was underage, he had been defiled as well, so it was discrimination to charge only him and not the girlfriend as well.

Finally, some signs of Nairobi:

Where do you go shopping after you have been to the Giraffe Center?

For people who squat over a hole in the ground and do not know how to use a modern toilet.

And when you enter the Elephant Orphanage.

Tomorrow we will fly to Tanzania and have our first game drive.

Bahir Dar

This morning my driver, Abboush, picked me up and quickly turned from the paved road onto an unpaved road.  It was rocky and uneven with sections of mud or several inches of water.  I thought the road was horrible and could not imagine driving on it.  Then, after more than half an hour, we got to a section that was rockier and muddier with huge lakes in the middle.  Abboush said, here the road is really bad (duh!), crossed himself twice, and carefully drove through the lakes.  You couldn’t see the bottoms but apparently he knew that they were only a few inches deep.  It was really hard not to be a white knuckle passenger.

Once again, the drive itself was fascinating.  We passed through a few villages on this unpaved road.  Again, the houses were shanties but the fields were beautiful and well maintained.  Whenever I ask about famine in Ethiopia, everyone blames the government, because there is fertile land everywhere.  The main crops are coffee and teff, but we also passed fields of corn, rice, and sugar beets, as well as banana, fig, mango, papaya, and avocado trees.  There seems to be electricity, even out in these villages, but not running water.  People wash and do laundry in the rivers.  They back their cars to the rivers and wash them, too.  And they collect water from anywhere, even large puddles on the ground.

It is an odd mix of traditional and modern in the countryside.  Most people walk or run everywhere, but there were a surprising number of motorcycles and bicycles.  Many people were dressed traditionally today for New Years and most women wear dresses and the traditional scarves daily.  But most men wear western dress, often with a serape like scarf, and the younger men and some of the young women wear jeans. The children's clothes may be shabby, but the young people are always neat and clean, although I have no idea how they manage to do that.  I saw children rolling hoops, an activity that I had only read about from a simpler time in America, but I also saw young men playing pool.

It is an odd mix of urban and rural in the cities, and it turns out that Bahir Dar is even bigger than Gondar.  The roads are paved and crowded with tuk-tuks and the city buses which are blue and white vans.  There are a few trucks and private cars and white vans for all of the tourists.  Maybe it was just for New Years, but there were lots of shepherds walking their sheep and goats on the roads.  The main streets are boulevards and it was not uncommon to see horses or the occasional cow grazing in the center strip.

Back to my long drive to Tiss Abaye which means Smoke of the Nile and is also the name of the village.  Westerners call it Blue Nile Falls.  We picked up our guide who walked with me up and down the mountain until we had a beautiful view of the falls.  I should have been prepared since Lake Tana yesterday was brown, but the Blue Nile Falls are brown.  I have never seen brown waterfalls before.  They now channel seventy five per cent of the river through a canal and over a dam, but even twenty five percent of the river is impressive.  And again, since we are at the end of the rainy season, the falls are full.  They pick up their brown color from all the runoff from the mountains.  Later the falls will look more like water, but they won’t be nearly as big.  Two of the sections will dry up completely and the main section will just be a thin ribbon.

This was our snack bar at the end - round and open sided. The proprietess could make tea or coffee from that (brown) water in the container, and there were bottles of water, Pepsi, and Fanta lying on the ground. I had a delicious, air temperature, real Pepsi.

Walking back from the falls, my guide explained to me the mystery of the Chinese road construction companies. Estifanos had been wrong that Ethiopia only paid thirty five percent of the cost of the roads. Ethiopia has to pay all of it - eventually. But the Chinese Export-Import Bank lends the Ethiopian government the funds and a Chinese construction company gets the work. Concept! Someone explain this to those Republicans in Congress who want to kill the funding of our Ex-Im Bank.

We drove back to Bahir Dar on that godawful road and took a drive to the top of the mountain overlooking the Blue Nile and the city.

We and were supposed to visit a palace , but it was closed for construction. The shops were all closed for New Year's. We still had a little time before I had to go to the airport, so we went to a cafe on the river and watched all of the people strolling in their holiday clothes. The traditional dress is white with hand embroidered crosses. Many of the children - both boys and girls - were dressed in cute white suits and dresses.

And that was my interesting week in Ethiopia. After a quick flight back to Addis Ababa, I have one night with wifi strong enough to send out the blogs I have been writing every day. Tomorrow morning I will fly to Nairobi and meet up with my safari group.

Gondar to Bahir Dar

This morning my excellent guide, Belete, took me to the 17th centruy Debre Berhan Selassie Church in Gondar.  Since today was Sunday, there was a mass going on, so he asked me if I had a scarf to wear.  Yes, I had the one that Solomon gave me and when I put it on, Belete said I looked like an Ethiopian.  Not exactly.  But that damn goat.  I feel guilty that I didn’t buy it and if I had bought it, I would be kicking myself for being taken.

Back to the church … we got there just after mass when they were doing a reading.  No one eats before mass, and after the reading, they pass around holy bread for everyone.

 

Then they all left and we went into the church.  It is painted on all the walls and the ceiling with scenes from the Bible and the martyrs.  When the Moslems destroyed hundreds of churches in the 19th century, a swarm of honey bees attacked them and drove them off, saving this one treasure.

It turns out that the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible - old and new testaments - has eighty one books, and there are several apocryphal books as well.  This is far more than the Protestants with sixty six books and the Catholics with seventy three.  The Ethiopian Bible includes the Miracles of Saint Mary, the Deeds of Saint Mary, and the Miracles of Jesus.  They have some stories I have never heard before including  a completely different version of the birth of Jesus (but not his death).  I was fascinated as Belete explained this to me as well as the symbolism of Ethiopian art.  For example, the good guys are always looking straight ahead so you can see both eyes, making them somewhat distorted and nonrealistic.  The bad guys are always in profile so you can only see one eye.  In each picture, you immediately know who is good and who is bad.

The angels on the ceiling look in every direction

Balete left us after the church and my driver, Abboush, took me to Bahir Dar - a three hour drive.  The road was new and paved so we could go fast, but be still had to slow down constantly to avoid people and animals.  And again, the countryside is beautiful with well-tended fields and rolling hills.  After a while it struck me that one of the reasons I found the countryside so beautiful was that there was no garbage on the sides of the road.  The houses are shacks, but the land around them is well tended.  In most poor countries that I go to, there is litter all over the place as no one picks it up.  Clearly there is no garbage service out in the sticks.  I wondered if Ethiopia is so poor that there is no garbage.  Everything is retained and used or sold?  Finally I asked Abboush.  Duh!  I am such a city girl.  They burn garbage in the countryside.  In the villages there were a few plastic bags by the roadside, but he said that the people here have the mentality of not littering.  Unlike, he said, in the eastern part of the country and those Somalis.

In Bahir Dar is Lake Tana - the largest lake in Ethiopia and the ninth largest in Africa.  There are islands in the lake with monasteries on them, and I was going to visit the most famous one.   Abboush dropped me at the dock where a boatman told me we had an hour ride to the monastery.  Three hours in the car and an hour each way in a boat to see a monastery?  This better be good. It was.  The monastery was built in the 14th Century and the walls were painted in the 16th Century.  Like the church this morning, the walls were completely painted in Ethiopian style with scenes from the Bible and the martyrs.

My guide, Gaitun,  was as good as Belete and spoke even better English.  So I asked him about some of the differences in the Jesus birth story.  He tried to answer me but said he didn’t want to say anything wrong, so we would ask the monk outside.  After we went through the monastery, he called to the monk who was lying on the grass looking at his smart phone.  Gaitun then proceeded to translate my questions, converse with the monk for five minutes, and then explain his answer to me.  It still didn’t quite make sense, so we discussed the Bible for a good half hour.  Then I let slip that I didn’t believe in Jesus and Saint Mary and Saint Joseph, and the monk seemed to lose interest.  Gaitun assured me that the monk has read a lot of books and understood different theologies, but he said some pretty odd things.

Monks in Ethiopia wear round hats.  I had no idea who the old guy with a rifle was or the young guy looking at his phone and smiling at everything.  My guide, Gaitun, is on the left.  Later I asked him about the old guy when I saw another like him at the second monastery.  He said they are there to guard the church treasures.  Really?

After a stop at the other monastery on the island, we got back in the boat. Fishermen in Lake Tana fish from small kayak-like boats made of papyrus.

 Lake Tana is the source of the Blue Nile, so we went a short distance into the Nile.  There I saw my first hippos in Africa - sorta.  They stay underwater and just pop their heads briefly out every minute or two to breath.  It was underwhelming.

Finally, after a long day, I went to check into my hotel.  The bellboy taking me to my room began the familiar conversation.  Where are you from?  What work do you do in your country?  I told him and asked what he did.  He told me he was a student studying electrical engineering but it was very hard (I thought he meant the studies but he meant life) and he was going to have to stop studying and just work.  He said:  Maybe you would like to sponsor me or you know someone who would.  You know tomorrow is New Year’s and I’m not going home because I have nothing to bring to my mother.  Everything is so expensive and I can’t afford to live.  I know I can’t succeed without education but I need to eat.  Do you have any sons?  I have three sons, I said.  He said, consider me your fourth son, and maybe you can sponsor me or know someone who will.

That was all in the few minutes that he walked me to my room and opened the door for me.  By the time he finished, he was brushing away tears from his eyes.  What can you say?  What can you do?  I should have bought that damned goat.