Safari

Yesterday, we woke up at the Jambo Inn in Dar es Salaam at 7am which, as those who know me well will agree, is an uncommonly early hour for me to rise from bed. So it must have been for good reason, right? It was. We were leaving Dar es Salaam! Thank god, finally! Our sweet new red Suzuki Escudo was safely parked at the front of the hotel being guarded by the security man who works at the front door. He had been up all night standing by it making sure that nobody stole the car or the mirrors or windows or the distributor cap or even the spare tire. We thanked him by tipping 2,000 shillings and a coke. In fact our last evening and morning in town was more than usually costly since we were mobbed by all of our associates who congratulated us as we pulled up in the new car and hoped to be tipped for whatever slight connections they had to our good fortunes. Mohammed convinced us to pay him 10,000 shillings to scribe the license plate numbers onto all the windows and mirrors to deter their theft. Rubes we may have been, but if 7 dollars kept our car intact through the night we felt it was worth the skinning. We paid Samuel 10,000 shillings for being nice and 10,000 more for his brother Eddie who was in the hospital receiving medication for his infected swollen legs and feet (mosquito parasite - which we hope doesn’t happen to us). We gave Ali 2,000 shillings for finding us a car fire extinguisher. We loaded our car and sat for a short breakfast while a persistent old Iranian traveler pestered us with claims that he performed the first arm transplant in IRAN 32 years ago, and sketched my profile on a napkin. By the time we pulled away in the morning, our car loaded down with supplies, we were happy to be leaving the city headed for greener views, cleaner air and less crafty people!
It took us a couple of hours to clear the city traffic and surrounding towns. We drove slowly and cautiously, for not only were we on the left side of the road surrounded by maniacs driving huge trucks, but also there are two species of speed bumps all along the main highway lying in wait to disable tourists’ cars. There’s the lowly short ribbed speed bump, similar in height to the US beast, but stacked 4 deep like a brutal washboard and it can shake the HELL out of your car even at 5-10 mph. Then there’s the Giant whoop de do – don’t know what else to call it- which is a really BIG speed bump about 2-3 feet tall. You can roll over it at low speeds no problem, but if for some reason you didn’t see it at all (since it isn’t marked for example, and camouflages itself with African dust and shadows) then hope you watched a lot of Duke’s of Hazard because that’s what it would be like. We hit one at about 15mph because we didn’t see it in time to slow down enough and everything inside the car got air-born.
The drive from Dar es Salaam to the Kilombero valley where we are living took us through some spectacular scenery and we saw lot’s of animals along the way. If you look closely in the panorama image above you might see giraffe and an elephant. For 50 kilometers we were in the Mikumi National Park. Here we had a little bit of an emergency and I had to get out of the car (which is not recommended) and sneak into the bushes to heed the call. We had stopped anyway to take some pictures of giraffes on the other side of the road, but this is not how I planned to enjoy my first sight of the famous African creature.



We also saw water buffalo, warthogs, impala, elephants, and baboons!



As we neared our destination I was amazed to see how many of the villagers were traveling along the roads on bikes. Unlike Dar es Salaam, it’s the main mode of transportation out here in the sticks. We would drive through small villages and see every type of person on bikes- small kids, young couples, old couples, mothers, fathers, grandparents, government officials and laborers. Some people were pedaling or pushing massive loads.



Our new home is on the edge of the Udzungwa Mountains National Park. We drove 7 hours from Dar- the last hour on a dirt road. We are staying in the research station established by Francesco Rovero and Tom Struhsaker (Ruth’s adviser) with funding from research grants. It’s an amazing spot as you can see from the view out our front door!



I am hereby beginning a new feature section of my blog, titled BUG OF THE DAY. Each time I post I will put up a photo of one of the crazy insects that we see here in the Udzungwa Mountains. This forest is unique in that it contains a high number of unidentified species (and also a high number of species unique only to this forest). This is due to the remote location of the mountains and their geographic isolation from other forests which allowed species to evolve independently. There should be many more researchers here cataloging birds, insects and mammals, but there are just not enough. There are many insects which have yet to be named but I know next to nothing about bugs, so perhaps an aspiring entomologist will see one of these photos and recognize a new species.

April 5, 2009- found on a fig tree (?) leaf in front of our house.