Numero Uno

Hello from Africa!! As most of you know, we were heading for Nairobi to visit a friend of Nick's and take care of some logistical issues, but were sidetracked when the Kenyan presidential elections resulted in riots, ethnic violence in the city's slums and some western cities (the challenger's home region). Today, largely non-violent protests resume as Kofi Annan has arrived to mediate discussions between the two men and their parties. Sad stuff in a country many believed was beyond reverting to ethnic violence after yet another corrupted election. We had to do some last minute rearranging and ended up buying plane tickets fron Nairobi to Dar es Salaam - so we were able to bypass Kenya completely. Hopefully things settle down soon, for the sake of Kenya and the rest of E. Africa, already feeling the effects of stagnant trade (food prices are up in Tanzania, and fuel is short in Uganda and Rwanda). It would be great to finish out our time here by heading north to spend some time in Kenya. On the flight to Dar we passed right over Kilimanjaro. It was incredible! It's so flat and wide at the top and was covered with snow.
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(Jess)
Jennie was right, I am in for a wild ride. This place is just insane. The cities are overcrowded, dirty, hot, humid, and full of trash (which local editioralists make note of often...so it's not just tourists that find it incredible). It's shocking at first and then you just feel guilty for coming from such a priviledged, developed-country life. I really don't like Dar. It's grimy and you can't walk around with out getting hassled by taxi drivers (there are so many of them!) or sweating up a storm and getting a layer of dirt everywhere.

We went to the fish market one day and ended up at one of the mama lisha (feeding lady) tables. We sat on skinny wooden benches and were given fish soup. I'm all about fish soup but when it shows up as a chunk of white fish with the skin still on in a watery grey broth, I'm a bit skeptical. I felt so stuck. On one hand, if I didn't eat it I'd offend the really nice lady cooks but if I did eat it, I might contract food poisoning and then that's the end (I don't know what my stomach is prepared for and not). But I gave it a shot...the fish was juicy and tender and the grey water broth was actually limey and salty and tasted amazing. I ate it all. We only spent 4 days in Dar until taking a ferry to Zanzibar to wait out research clearance. The ride was supposed to take 1.5 hours but one of the engines broke so it took 3 hours. And we were stuck inside the boat where it was hot and smelled bad. I never though 3 hours could last so long. One lady passed out on the ferry ride back because it was so hot and the ride was so choppy the boat was being flung all over the place.

We were met in Stonetown by a bunch of taxi drivers and in the rush to get away from them we took off into town sure that we could find our hotel. Stonetown is a maze. Ryszard Kapuscinski writes in his book, The Shadow of the Sun:

"Immediately upon leaving the hotel one enters the narrow streets typical of old Arab towns. I cannot say why these people built in such a cramped and crowded fashion, why they pressed together this way, practically one atop another. Was it so that they would never have far to walk? Or to be better able to defend the town? I don't know. But one thing is certain: this mass of piled stone, this accretion of walls, this layering of balconies, recesses, eaves, and rooftops, somehow secured, as though in an icy treasury, a corner of shade, a tiny breeze, and a bit of coolness during the most terrifying noontime heat."

For us, after seeing the same shop a dozen times, we finally got 5 young kids to show us the way. Commissions are the name of the game in Zanzibar, and you have to beat back hordes of young men that want to whisk you to the best deal in town so that you'll bear an inflated room rate to pay their commission. Reservations are key. We didn't last too long in Stonetown. It's a cool place but I think over the last 5 years or so (Nick uses 2001 as a reference), tourism has ballooned and Zanzibar is having growing pains. People are nice but it's the kind of nice where you're unsure if they really just want to talk to you or are trying to get something out of you. In the evenings there's a waterfront park where dozens of food stalls set up. They all cook the seafood caught that day (or maybe not...be sure to smell) - you can get calamari, lobster, barracuda, shark, octopus, prawns, and more. Take two environmental students you get two cautious, dubious...hungry...hypocritical students eating fish from the Indian Ocean, hopefully not raised hypoxic from reefs by dynamite. We washed our food down with a glass of sugar cane juice. They strip the sugar cane stalks, run them through a press to squeeze out all the juice and then mix it with ginger and lime. One evening we found a tucked away local bar and had beers overlooking the water. We met some local artists and talked with them for a while then they took us to the best place for local food (after Nick was threatened to die by gunfire by a drunk and stoned guy who thought he was making fun of him for being drunk and stoned--they're friends now). Through several alleys and then a really skinny walkway it opened up into this huge garden-like backyard (seemingly impossible in Stonetown) where everyone was sitting at benches eating ugali (for those who don't know, it's boiled, thick cornmeal that you pull off, roll into a ball, and sop up beans or sauce) and beans. It was perfect. The food was amazing and the atmosphere even better. We shared the table with three Maasai. I am in total awe of them. Every time we see them they are usually alone. They seem so independant, confident, and ancient. And if Melissa really thinks she's as tall as a tree, she should meet a Maasai. They, men and women, are just massive. And rail thin. I like how they still wear their tradition dress- robes tied around their shoulders, beads around their neck, wrists, and ankles, and always carry a walking stick. There's definitely a lot of history there, and I learn more about what really sets them apart as so distinct in a country that lost much of it's tribal identity in the socialization programs beginning in the late 70's. They seem like people to be respected, and if by chance you end up on their bad side, all the luck to you.

We went on a spice tour and got to see how tons of different spices and fruits are grown- breadfruit, jack fruit, the lipstick tree, cinnamon, vanilla, cardamon, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg (the seed is absolutely beautiful!). One time when we were getting back on our little bus, there was a young man standing next to it holding a leg-bound chicken in one arm and a machete in the other. He made a motion that suggested he was going to lop the chicken's head off right there. I was kind of freaking out and my brain was screaming 'This is a spice tour!! No chicken killing!'. It ended up he was just passing by so I didn't see the death of the chicken but I'm sure it happened soon after.Then we spent 4 days on the east side of the island in Jambiani. It's a really small fishing village on a gorgeous white sand beach. The tide goes out about a kilometer so there's lots of beach to walk at low tide. The village kids all played on the beach in front of our hotel and constantly called us to come play frisbee with them. All the girls had crushes on Nick and would come up to our room and call out "Nicholas!" and then giggle and run away when he waved to them. The best part of that hotel was that we were able to watch the fishermen come in every evening with their catch of the day. There were so many kinds of fish! Some of them little and some really huge ones. Sometimes they even brought in octopus or really colorful lobster (although one of the lobsters was a female with eggs and I didn't feel so great about her being killed but I don't know too much about the lobster population there). The whole village would come to meet them and they would divy out the fish to every household. At the end they would make the kids line up and they would each recieve a few of the little fish. One evening I watched 3 young boys, each with an octopus, beat the crap out of it with a stick, then raise it over their head and smash in on the beach rock, and then knead it like it was bread dough. They did this for 20 minutes. Then they gave it to our cook and we had octopus for dinner that night. I asked why they had done this and the cook said that if they hadn't, there was no way we would be able to eat it as it would be really chewy and impossible to bite into. We also went snorkelling one day and were brought out onto the reef in a traditional dhow boat. It's such a cool boat- really thin and deep with two balances on either side, made out of mango tree and the sail was made out of sewn together with rice bags. We saw some really cool fish and strange looking starfish. Lots of black spiny sea urchins and even some kind of snake. We had to leave early, though, because of a coming storm and the ride back to shore was a blast. I really thought the boat was going to tip over a few times. Our "navigator" was a retired navigator (uh...) and roped us in to his somewhat less-than-official snorkeling tour on a hunt for water the day before. He picked us up at our hotel at 9am, hammered. Luckily, he had a one-man crew, and that guy (we think) wasn't drunk and was yelping at the storm the whole way back to shore, seemingly in control of the dhow.

I'm definitely into the food here. It all tastes so good. Kind of Indian inspired with lots of coconut, curry and cardamon, but not too spicy. Lots of rice or ugali, and even french fries which I can't really handle. Their 'fast food' here is fries and eggs. Nick says it's really good but I haven't given it a shot yet. I'm sticking to the beans, greens, rice, ugali, fish, and the occasional chicken. It's crazy when you order chicken because you realize just how pumped up the chickens are that you get at home. Here they are smaller and not as meaty- a bit more natural. It's hard to eat just veg so my diet has kind of changed to allow for what's available. And I'm okay with it! I've had tons of mango and pineapple too. I do crave cheese though, pretty much all the time. Kind of a funny thing to miss but when it makes up a large part of your diet at home, it's hard to go cold turkey:)

We saw camels in Zanzibar, a group of Kirk's red colobus monkeys which are endemic to Zanzibar, a whole herd of cattle ambling down the middle of the road with no herder to be seen, three cows in the back of a pick up truck, a lady brought a live chicken in a blender box in a plastic bag onto the bus to Morogoro, and the funniest- a goat in a basket strapped to the back of a scooter. I think I saw a baboon on the side of the road but we were going so fast I couldn't tell for sure, and I know that they'll become second nature when we head south for research.

We just got back from the Sokoine Agriculture University in Morogoro. Nick's been meeting folks, trying to make contacts for the upcoming research. Things are working out well, albeit slow. I think we're going to the 'research village', Mtanza, next week. It's really in the middle of nowhere. We don't even know if there's any place for us to live. Ash would be happy to know that wherever I live, it will be in a mud hut. Tin roof if we're lucky, palm thatch if we're not (depends on how you look at it I guess!). And the bathroom will be a hole in the ground - I'm still trying to get used to the squat toilets. Or we might be living in a tent. At this point, anything is possible. BUT, it's right next to the Selous Game Reserve so there are tons of animals roaming around all the time. Elephants, hippos, crocodiles, lions, baboons - I'm so excited!! I don't think we're going to move there until March though, but then stay for 4 months. We're going down next week to check it out and then go to Iringa for a month to take Swahili lessons and chill out before moving out to the boonies:)

And I can't help but wonder, how is Battlestar?!!

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(Nick)
I wanted to return to Tanzania for a number of reasons that I didn't quite articulate to myself, or Jess, except maybe the one that the people are really nice. I remembered that one ok (people have been great), but I have failed to fully acknowledge that 7 years is a long time, and my contacts, as my memory, are largely inaccessible now. We are officially winging it at this point, as I make new contacts with those who have done research in the Rufiji River floodplain including people at IUCN, Sokoine University of Agriculture, and the University of Dar es Salaam. I know nothing about the region apart from what I've read. I do know that the 150,000 or so residents of the floodplain are the poorest in Tanzania and nearly exclusively dependent on annual flooding of the Rufiji River to maintain their subsistence livelihoods. Also, the floods aren't always coming these days, for a number of reasons, from climate change to upstream development (dams) and erosion. While the details aren't yet drawn in ink, we will be most likely living in a village on the eastern border of Selous Game Researve to ask people about the effects of an IUCN resource governance intervention that began in 1998 and kicked the bucket last year. We're off on Sunday to barge into the village, introduce ourselves, and figure out a living arrangement that will keep us dry and out of reach of maurading male lions.

Of course, we brought too much stuff, and are making our camp in Safari Inn when we head back to Dar every few days. I'm looking forward to Iringa after this pilot trip down to Rufiji. It's cooler there - you don't sweat into your pillow all night, at least (we arrived at the hottest time of the year) - and hopefully my homestay family is still there (if Greg would ever write me back to tell me) and we can eat freshly made pasta and speak Italian to my Tanzanian surregate Mama. Jess has yet to see her first savannah animals other than that brief look at a baboon, but we'll get that out of the way in Mtanza this week, and if not there, then surely on the highway to Iringa that cuts through Mikumi National Park.

Long-term plans include four months in Rufiji, some safariing, a trip to Kigoma and Gombe, to Mwanza to see our friend Menan, and over to Rwanda and Bwindi in western Uganda to visit my friends in Ruhija and at least hear the gossip of the gorillas.