So, I embark upon my first blogging experience. The word “blog”,
and the verb derived from it “to blog” (I blog, I blogged, I will blog, I will
have blogged, I need to blog, dammit!), remind me of Star Treck “Captain’s Log,
star date 3631”, so I will start this:
Doctor’s Blog, Mpala date 1-3-14.
We began our journey to the Mpala Research Station on the
first day of 2014, in the midst of winter snow. As expected, there were delays.
However, it turned out that the delays had to do with difficulty in loading a
cargo bin, not with the snow, which had tapered off, and was expected to resume
the next day. The airline gave up on the cargo, de-iced the plane, and we were
off. Not yet to Mpala, mind you, but to the transit port of Amsterdam. Despite
our delay, we arrived in time for our Kenya-bound aircraft, which, luckily for
us, but not for other passengers, was also delayed an hour or so. We even had
to wait at the terminal for a while. Worried because of our previous delay,
Tanya asked a young gentleman who worked for the airlines (KLM) if he could
check whether our luggage had made it to the Nairobi-bound flight. This young gentleman
came back, and, with a totally straight face, informed Tanya that our luggage
never left Chicago. He managed to keep that straight face for about three
minutes. He totally got us. After about an hour in the terminal, we boarded our
flight, and we were off. 71/2 hours later, we landed in Nairobi, and emerged to
a nice warm evening. After going through passport control, and waiting an hour
for our luggage, we were taken to our hotel for the evening. The hotel was, as Tanya,
using her newly-acquired set of Britishisms, “Very Posh”.
We arose the next morning, and after a nice breakfast, we
were picked up by a van , and taken off to Mpala, five hours away. The ride was
very interesting. I started in the outskirts of Nairobi, a city reminiscent of
Middle Eastern cities, out onto a modern highway. The farther we got from
Nairobi, the more things became unfamiliar. To begin with, rather than bridges
over the highway, you had some major speed bumps that forced cars to slow down
so that they would stop for people walking across this major highway. The crossing were general next to small
groups of multi-family buildings surrounding open-air markets. Then the highway
tapered off, and we eventually were on a two-lane road. The settlements all
looked like larger versions of those markets and buildings. When we got into
Nanyuki, it seemed like a much larger version of this. We stopped to take out
some cash, and we accosted by sellers. It was a distinctly interesting feeling
of being in a place where I was instantly recognizable as a foreigner.
At Nanyuki we turn off the road to Mpala, and signs of
human habitat started disappearing. We only saw some entrances to personal
ranches. Then, suddenly, I had my first truly African experience, as an animal
ran across the dirt road. With a certain sense of unreality I realized that
this wasn’t some familiar canid or something familiar at all, but a baboon. Not
something you’d see driving in the hinterlands of New Mexico, Illinois, or even
Israel. However, things just got more, shall we say, African, as we turned a
corner, and not 30 m away, we saw a full grown Giraffe. It sort of looked at
us, decided that we were not interesting, and continued walking. We saw a few
more animals, and then we were at the gates of Mpala.
The first thing you notice in Mpala is the road
conditions. Evidently, to keep people from driving too fast, they limit repairs
to the roads. When you consider the fact that Mpala is full of 20something
rangers, and researchers with little sense of personal safety, you get the
logic of this. Driving across these roads in a van was, ummmm, bumpy.
We got to the offices, where Tanya was greeted like a prodigal
daughter, we were introduced to the various people there, ate lunch, and walked
around a bit. Nobody had arrived from the different researchers, so we had some
time to ourselves. We were taken to our accommodations, which is the ranch
House in Mpala.It turns out that these were, as Tanya put it, “very posh”. Eva
has her own room, and our room is like something out of the colonial times. A
huge bed facing glass doors that open to a view of Mt Kenya, a canopied bed
(mosquito netting), etc. We walked around the grounds and met an agamid lizard
in full mating colors (blue body, red head), a hornbill, a tree hyrax who
decided to join us on the veranda, and then the amazing chef/gardener Githai
showed us around his wonderful kitchen garden (the source of most of our food)
and his fruit trees, which he never got to eat from since the monkeys always get
to the fruit first. We also saw one of these thieves. At 5 PM, we were taken by
the amazing Jackson and Chanana out to an evening game ride in Mpala.
Eva has described the ride, so suffice to say that it was
amazing. It is not a tourist area, so the animals behave a lot more like wild
animals, and there were no other rides around. We also were not limited to
regular tracks, so we got to see all sorts of stuff that tourists don not get
to see. Because I love lists, here are what we saw (in no particular order:
- Herd of giraffes (nothing
really can compare to a heard of giraffes on the run)
- Zebras (Grevys and plains)
- Elephant
- Hippos,
- Dik-diks
- Impalas
- Grant’s gazelles
- Wildebeast
- Dik-diks
- A troop of baboons
- Jackal
- Secretary bird
- Did I mention Dik-diks?
- Bustard
- Egyptian geese
- Ibis
- Herons
- Cranes
- Some more dik-diks
- Guineafowl
- Hornbills
- Vervet monkey
- And, of course, dik-diks…
Excuse me for the fact that I wasn’t more specific (as in
writing what species these were), a cardinal sin for an ecologist, but, hey, I’m
new here. Anyways, we probably saw more, so I’ll need to go through the photos
to see what I have forgotten
As you can tell, it was a nice drive.
Around the ranch there is also no lack of wildlife, I’ve
mentioned the hyrax and the monkeys. There are also baboons and Impalas, at
least three species of sunbird, a squirrel, bulbuls (the only species I know
from elsewhere), and more which I’ll mention later.
Enough for now, I’ll write more later.
