Best and longest day yet

Still catching up from my camping trip! Bear with me- there is only so much internet, so uploading is quite a hassle! Hopefully will get pictures up soon too...

March 13: 

My first day of being 21 was probably the best day I have had in Kenya. It was our last day on expedition, and started with a game drive for a Wildlife Ecology assignment. We drove for about an hour and saw lots of little Dik-Diks, these cute little deer creatures that hide in the underbrush in pairs. (look up a picture if you haven't seen one- they really are adorable!) Suddenly we came around a bend in the road and a large group of dark animals came into view. As we got closer, we saw that it was a pack of about 30 Wild African Dogs. It is extremely rare to see these dogs: The population used to be about 500,000 in the world, and it has been reduced to somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000. This means that we might have been seeing 1% of all the existing animals of this species in the world. Our driver started driving toward them, and we all tried to tell him to stop thinking that they might be scared away, but to our surprise, they came up to meet our land rover and surrounded it, looking up at us as they split and passed around the sides of the vehicle. They were some of the coolest animals I have ever seen. Their ears are huge and there is something cute about them, while at the same time you know that they are one of the most dangerous animals in all of East Africa. We watched them for a while, and followed them until they disappeared into the bushes. I realized later that most of my pictures of them were blurry or not in focus because I had been so intent on watching them, so I guess I’ll just have to keep the memory of them in my head. Some of them turned out pretty well though:

After a few hours of game driving on a transect and documenting animals and habitat types, all the groups reconvened at the local Serena Lodge. What a paradise. We all sat around and played in the pool and watched the animals that passed by the main room for hours. It was the first time I have had a drink with ice in it here, and it was heavenly. There was a man-made watering hole near the main room, so waterbuck, giraffes, cranes, and baboons all came by to drink as we watched. I can’t believe we get to enjoy the lodges around here without spending the thousands of dollars it would cost to stay there. After roughing it so much, it is really nice to have a little ice water and a dip in the pool once in a while!

Serena Lodge

As we left the lodge, a car stopped us to tell us that there were lions ahead. We drove up slowly and sure enough, there were three lions lying in wait for a huge herd of buffalo grazing nearby. The lions were awesome, but my favorite sight was a glimpse of a tiny baby buffalo that looked so teetery on its legs that it must have just been born. As I saw it I felt a pang of sadness, since these are the animals that lions will go after first. I found myself really hoping that it wouldn’t be eaten, but then realizing that from all that I had been learning, the lions were the animals that needed more help here and I should be rooting for them. I know I am studying African wildlife management and conservation and ecology and I should be used to all of this, but sometimes it’s still hard for me to come to terms with the fact that animals need to kill others to live.

Soon after stopping to see the lions, we saw a huge cloud pouring rain in the distance. It’s strange; it is so expansive and flat here that you can literally see the edges of a rainstorm and exactly when it is going to hit you. We ended up driving straight into it, and getting pummeled with sharp pinpoints of raindrops as we sped through the downpour. Although the rain was a bit painful, it was such a freeing feeling to be speeding through the storm that we all stood high in the hatches and shouted into the air. The fact that all the red dirt we had collected on our skin and clothes and faces from the dust on the road was now dripping down us in streams of mud just added to the experience.

The rain coming!

After a delicious dinner (the cooks came with us for expedition, and somehow managed to make great food for us at each meal) we all sat around the fire and talked. A group of us got our sleeping bags and laid them out by the fire, preparing for a nighttime adventure. We had decided to stay up all night to see if we could hear the lions that we had been told came close to the camp some nights.

Sitting guard with the Kenya Wildlife Service armed park rangers and two askaris proved to be a lot of fun. We all sat for hours listening and chatting in a broken mix of Swahili, English, and Maasai. Most of the students took shifts sleeping by the fire for a little while. The hour and a half I slept was some of the best sleep I’ve had… the crackle of the fire and the warmth it gave in the cool night was so comforting, and the stars were so bright that I almost didn’t want to go to sleep as I lay in my sleeping bag. It was the kind of night that I wished I could save in a bottle and remember forever because it was so peaceful and good.

The last hold outs at 4am!

My view from my sleeping bag :)

At around 4am, I was talking to one of the KWS rangers, and asked him whether he thought we would hear lions after all. He told me that he thought so, but that we would have to ask God, and said a prayer  that we would hear the lions. A few minutes later, we heard them roaring close by. Whoah. The sounds came only twice, from different sides of camp, but it was enough. The perfect end to a fantastic day. (And what better way to end a great day than to extend it for 8 hours?)

A promising start to being 21!