Tanzania cultural reflection:

East Africa is home to the world’s largest population of primates. Since we have been in this area, I have developed an interest in primates and have started researching Dian Fossey’s gorilla research center in Rwanda and Jane Goodall’s chimpanzee research center in Tanzania. Gombe Stream National park in Tanzania is 52 square kilometers and is the smallest park in Tanzania and is the site of the longest study of wild animals in the world. In 1960 British researcher Jane Goodall arrived and started studying wild chimpanzees. Jane Goodall’s studies are now in the fifth decade. Gombe Stream was declared a national park in 1968. There are approximately 150 chimps in Gombe Stream. Some other animals at Gombe are: vervet monkeys, olive baboons, bush pigs, leopards, and a variety of bird life. One of the stories in “My Life with Chimpanzees,” by Jane Goodall is about the chimpanzee, Flint. When Flint was born, he stayed with his mother, Flo, a lot and when Flo had another child, he still had not acclimated to being on his own and remained with his mother. He still wanted Flo to carry him, groom him and sleep with him! It was hard for Flo because she couldn’t carry Flint and her new baby and groom both of them and sleep with both of them in one nest. Like when Flo was grooming her baby, Flint would grab her hand and put it on his head so she would groom him! When Flo died (she was old, 50 years old), Flint was so attached to her that he just stayed with her body and refused to eat and he died shortly after she died. This story shows how social and like humans chimpanzees are. For more information about Gombe Stream, visit http://www.janegoodall.org/. 

March 14-20, 2006: Kendwa Beach, northeast coast of Zanzibar

Our time at Kendwa Beach has been for relaxation and school work. M’s birthday was on the 18^th, Saturday, and she’s now 45 so we will celebrate M’s birthday! We went to a really nice resterant to celebrate M’s Birthday! We all got tropical drinks and then gave our gifts to M. Peter, D, and I gave her money to buy a wooden giraffe. Then we moved to a different table to eat our pizza. We each got a pizza and it was great. Then the cake came and the staff came out singing, “Jambo, Jambo Bwana. Habari gani, nazuri sana. Hakuna Matata.” The cake was really good!

March 13, 2006:

We spent the whole day in Stone Town. We went to the site of the old slave market in Zanzibar. They kept the slaves in a very enclosed place in the bottom like a cellar and many of them died from suffocation. When the slaves were shipped to different countries, they were in a ship for a long time and they were all on the bottom of the ship and many of them died there too. David Livingstone, an explorer and missionary, built a church on the property of the old slave market. The altar was where the whipping post used to be. In the middle of our visit, it started to downpour and the parking lot flooded. We went to look for tanzanite at one shop for our friend Bill Clark. It was really expensive. At another shop, the woman was really nice and told us all about the stone. Mom checked her email before we made any purchases and found an email from Bill telling us to stop looking, that he had already gotten a stone in the states! So we went across the street to an internet café and checked emails and did research. We went to souvenir shops on the way back to the hotel. M found a wooden giraffe that she wanted for our living room but it was over our budget.

March 12, 2006: Zanzibar

After breakfast, we went back to the bookstore. They didn’t have Gorillas in the Mist so I got a book by Jane Goodall. We then went to the ferry terminal. The ferry was supposed to take three hours but ended up taking 7 hours! When we got to Stone Town, we got a hotel, ate and went to bed.

March 11, 2006: Dar es Salaam

When we got to Dar es Salaam, we went to the ferry office. We had already missed all the ferries for that day so we got our tickets for the next day. We got our hotel and then went to dinner. When we were done with dinner, we went to a nearby bookstore to see if they had “Gorillas in the Mist,” by Dian Fossey, but it was closed so we went back to our hotel and went to bed.

March 8-10: Lushoto

Today we went on a hike to the viewpoint in Lushoto. On our way we talked about our trip budget and itinerary in Europe. We went to a farm and got some lunch—a loaf of bread and cheese—and then went on to the viewpoint. When we got to the top, it was a great view of the surrounding mountains. To the right was a cliff and straight ahead was the Maasai mountain. We ate lunch on the top of the cliff. After we ate, we headed back to the hotel and started working on school work and then walked into town to eat and then walked back and went to bed.

On our last day in Lushoto, I spent the whole day sketching. I finished five sketches and glued all of my memorabilia into my scrap book and got ready to leave for Zanzibar the next day.

March 7, 2006: Ngorongoro Crater

We came from our campsite at 6 a.m. and we were the first ones to arrive at the gate. We paid our fees and headed towards the crater. It took about an hour and half to get to the crater entrance. We paid our crater fees there and went down the steep side of the crater. After the bumpy ride into the crater, we were in the crater! There were impalas and gazelles beside the road and a big herd of gazelles in the distance. All of a sudden, I saw something that seemed really big and running but not running very fast. So I asked the guide what it was and he said it was a hyena. We saw that it was chasing after the gazelle and the gazelle was ahead of the hyena and we thought it would never catch up so we all looked away to look at other wildlife. But, when I looked back to see how the chase was going, the hyena was right on the gazelle’s tail! They swerved a few times and then the hyena got him and started eating away! We asked the guide if we could go closer. We drove a little ways and then turned off and got really close to the hyena. We could see that it was a spotted hyena and he was enjoying his meal! Dad got some good pictures of the hyena eating his breakfast and I got some good footage. The hyena finally went into a little ditch and we couldn’t see him anymore. We kept moving along the road. Then, M said, “Hey, Paul what’s that?” And I said, “I think it’s a bird on top of a stump.” And M said, “A stump on top of a bird??!!” And then all of a sudden the whole thing moved. And M said, “Holy s**t, it’s moving!” And so I said, “Oh, it’s a kori bustard.” And then M said, “What?! A kori b*stard??!” And we all laughed!

We kept moving and ahead we saw a van that was stopped. Peter and I both saw a cat a distance away but it was hard to see. At first Peter thought it was a lion but when we both looked with our binoculars, we saw that it was a cheetah. It wasn’t a very good spot so we kept moving on.

We stopped at a hippopotamus hole and there was a baby and his mom lounging in the sun. The dad was in the water. When the dad came out, he walked over to the baby and the mom and M was very scared because she thought the dad would smash the baby when he lay down on the ground. We moved on because we saw that there were thousands of animals ahead. There were five cars ahead and there was a cat in the middle of a herd of wildebeests. There were five lions hunting in a herd of wildebeests. They did it very systematically two were lying in the grass, one was chasing the wildebeest and the male was watching. The one that was chasing the wildebeests was trying to scare the wildebeests toward the lions that were lying in the grass. When you see a hunt with the wildebeests, you see how really stupid they are. What they do is: They’ll run away when the lion chases them but as soon as the lion stops and starts walking away, they turn around and start chasing the lion and then stop right near the lion! So you really wonder how there are so many wildebeests in the world. You would think they’d be endangered because of their stupidity. No wonder everyone calls them “bewilderbeests!”

We went on and saw more herds of antelopes and saw a couple of crested cranes. But, then we saw five vans again ahead of us. Our guide pointed out three black rhinos but they were hard to see. Right near the road, there was a pool with three hyenas in it. We saw one hyena that was farther away and 2 lying in the grass. Six hyenas altogether! We were really close to the hyenas and I don’t think they liked that because they all got up and walked away from us.

We then ran into a family of wart hogs. They are even more forgetful than wildebeests. They forget in 4 minutes! We kept moving toward the forest because that’s where we were going to eat lunch. We ran into herds of zebras and impalas until we ran into the lake that had flamingos, blacksmith plovers and egrets in it. The flamingos were farther away than the ones we saw in Nakuru so we didn’t get many good pictures. When we got to the lake, Peter was attacking us in the back of the Land rover and we called this wildlife sighting, “The Wild Peter.”

When we got to the entrance of the forest, the yellow acacias were everywhere. We saw a group of water bucks and elephants in the distance. One time, we saw a couple of elephants in the distance that had very large tusks. We could even see them from a good distance away! When we got to the picnic area, we sat down under a tree and started eating. When we were almost done, it started to sprinkle and we saw a group of blue monkeys in the distance. We got into the truck and our guide told us it was time to leave the crater. We drove up the steep hill, got to the top and started heading back to our campsite.

Ngorongoro Crater Animal list:

Buffalo

Red buck

Black kite

Fish eagle

Thompson’s gazelle

Buffalo

Wildebeests

Hyena, spotted

Guinea fowl

Egyptian geese

Kori bustard

Ostrich

Secretary bird

Cheetah

Hippo

Ostrich

Zebra

Plovers

Crested crane

Elephant

Lions (5)

Wildebeest

Hyenas, spotted

Rhino, black (3)

Hyenas, spotted

Elands

Baby zebra

Zebras

Hippos

Plovers

Buffalo

Flamingos

Blacksmith plover

Kori bustard

Wart hog

Water buck

Vervet monkey

Elephant

Griffin vulture

Blue monkey

March 6, 2006: Arusha