Once we get into the swing of things, I probably won’t do daily entries, or if I do, they’ll just sort of be short digests of funny things that happened. Until then, enjoy this far-too-detailed description of my day:
Arusha was loud, but not nearly as loud as Nairobi. The main noise was music from the market and praying. There are rolling power outages in Tanzania (government rations), so all our time in Arusha today was in the dark.
When Annie and I got up, we wandered down to the hotel’s restaurant and discovered that breakfast is complementary (well, discovered is a misnomer. Doug showed up and told us). Evidently this is the case in all of Tanzania, where someone decided that breakfast is bread, jam/peanut butter/honey, fried pancake/crepe-like things, watermelon (fun fact, watermelon in kiswahili is “tikitimaji” if our taxi driver is to be believed), omelets (every hotel or hostel has identical Spanish omelets and they are all very fried), and fried hotdog-like sausages.
After breakfast (and after we navigated six flights of stairs with our luggage in the dark), we met Rama and Halidi, field technicians from Morogoro with twenty and ten years of experience, respectively, working with rodents. Doug told Annie and me that one of us would probably have to stay in the lab each day and not go into the field because there were two of them (Doug had only intended to hire one field technician). We’ll see if I can’t convince him otherwise as I think things would be way more fun if Annie was also there.
Doug hired a surly noah driver to take me, Annie, Rama, and a bunch of our stuff to Karatu, while he and Halidi followed in the rental car with the rest of our field gear. Doug instructed me and Annie to make sure that our driver didn’t lose Doug, although we couldn’t see out the back due to how much luggage we had.
Me: Oh yeah Doug, we’re going to shake you and party it up in Karatu without you.
Doug: But if you lose me, you won’t know where the good mice spots are!
:)
Anyway, the drive to Karatu was beautiful. We saw lots of Maasai people with their cattle. It’s a really striking sight to see a sparsely vegetated landscape, dotted with tall, slender Maasai in their colorful, flowing cloth robes. As we were driving, Doug evidently saw a giraffe on Annie’s side of the road (her window had a self-applied tinted cover that rendered it useless). Wtf, we need to work on Doug telling us when he sees cool things. Although we didn’t see wildlife, an hour or so into the drive, I started spotting baobob trees. We drove past Lake Manyara National Park where there were tons of baobobs and a great view of the lake. Otherwise the drive was uneventful, except for some unhappy-looking woman pelting our car and Doug’s car with something.
We moved into the Karatu Lutheran hostel, which is no small task given the epic amount of stuff we have. Doug booked a suite (a hostel suite, which is a strange concept) for me and Annie, and it’s HUGE. We set up our lab in the big living room and it was nice to finally unpack. The electricity had been out in Karatu all day, so you can imagine our delight when Doug found mystery meat and cheese in the room’s minifridge.
Also! I nearly killed Doug! He and I were strapping a carry case to the top of the car and we wanted to string something through the windows, which were up. Since he was partially standing on the back of the car, he tossed me the keys. Evidently Doug hadn’t put the car in park (it’s a manual) or put on the parking break, because the second I turned the keys in the ignition, the car leapt backwards and I nearly ended Doug. Whoops. I felt pretty bad about that.
Walking back to my room, I met Kristen and Pidge, who were chilling in chairs in front of their rooms (there is only one floor and you walk on an outside path to all of them. Damn, I should’ve taken a photo of the hostel). I am pretty sure they will be regulars along the walkway. I learned that they are here with a non-profit group and they are interviewing students for scholarships.
We re-joined Halidi and Rama to talk logistics for our fieldwork, which starts tomorrow. Evidently in the forest sites we catch a lot of gerbils in our rodent traps (I forgot that gerbils are actually wild somewhere) and we have to be careful of the buffalo and elephants in the forest! We are going to be retroorbitally bleeding mice, ahhhh, although not killing them (until we take a few samples the last day) because we’re doing a mark-release-recapture experiment. We also trap on farms (man, at some point I should explain why I’m in Africa and what I’m doing, shouldn’t I?) and the farmers like it when we trap rodents since they’re a problem for the maize, but they’re not psyched when we release them. Halidi said we should tell the farmers that we’ve injected the rodents with a “medicine” that will kill them.
We got back to the hostel and Annie crashed. While she napped, Doug and I mixed rodent bait (peanut butter and oats) and I charged lots of batteries after the power returned around 7pm. This was more exciting as you’d expect as several of the bags I was mixing bait in had holes in the bottom of them and exploded the bait into my lap.
A little later, Doug delivered bananas (“ndizi”) to our room (a safe fruit because you peel it yourself and grown locally). I showered to get the peanut butter off of me and crashed before 9pm.
I woke up at about 1am and after lying in bed for an hour and a half wide awake, I got up to change the batteries charging. Annie was awake too, so we turned on the lights and snacked on bananas and weetabix. Now it’s 3:30am and Annie’s reading and I’m writing this.
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