Jess and Craig:

Hi Everyone.  Here is a little breakdown of our adventures in Tanzania:

After about a week of kicking around Dar, we finally too koff on our first adventure.  We traveled North through Tanzania to the Uzumbara Mountains, where Theron has done most of his living and working for the last five years.  The Uzumbaras are part of the Eastern Arc Mountains that pop up along the East African Coast, and, being temperate semi-rainforests with very different climates from the dry lowlands that surround them, end up having an abundance of wildlife that live nowhere else in the world. Theron took advantage of this fact and, while on a Fullbrightscholarship, started the Amani Butterfly Project.  The project now has about 300 farmers who farm the exotic butterflies of the region and send the pupae (chrysalis) all over the world to zoos and butterfly exhibits.  The idea is that the farmers need the forests to stay intact for them to keep catching butterflies, so there is now an economic incentive for the local people to preserve their forests, rather than cut them own for traditional agriculture.  And it seems to be working.  All over the place around Amani you see the little butterfly enclosures in people's yards, and the project is running now wthout much help from Theron and making about $100,000 a year for the village and the farmers.  

So Theron has a pretty cool thing going up there. He also has a house high on a hill with a dramatic view of a deep mountain valley that extends all the way to the coast near Tanga, and the sun glimmers off the Indian Ocean 25 miles away every morning at sunrise.  He knows pretty much everyone in the neighborhood, and people are really nice to him, so we were always getting gifts and good deals on tea and mandazi (African doughnuts).  We had a good time going on some hikes through the jungle, including traversing beautiful waterfalls and a night walk where we found some crazy tree frogs and chameleons.  But, the major part of my time up there was eaten up building a gigantic pizza oven in Theron's yard.  Apparently, he used to have one and threw some major village pizza parties until some cow who really liked the oven for a scratching post finally did it in.  Theron was psyched to build a cow-proof replacement, and I foolishly offered my services.  The process of building something in Amani, where the nearest Home Depot is 11,400 miles away, is alot more than I bargained for.  To build the foundation, we had to drive around until we found a guy near the tea plantation who had busted up a bunch of rocks and took 3 trips in a land rover to haul a cubic meter up the hill to the house.  To make mortar to hold them together, we had to get a guy to pull buckets of sand from the bottom of the river, shovel them into rice bags, and ferry them up the hill.  You have to dig the pink-red mud from a roadside escarpment and haul that up too.  You also need to haul water, bucket by bucket, to mix it alltogether.  For the oven, we had to find a guy who makes bricks, and carry  them from where he made them up to the road, then ferry them up the hill in the truck.  And on and on and on.  But eventually we got it done, and ate pizzas like kings for the last two days of our trip. 

We really liked it up in Amani, but after 10 days we had to return to Dar and get ready for our little safari, which Jess is going to recap.

July 3rd, 2009      A recap on Tanzania

Part 2: Safari

Last time we were in Tanzania we did the Northern safari circuit which includes Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, and the other parks in that area. This time we decided to head in a different direction to the Mkumi national park. After the typical errands/traffic of Dar, we made our way out to Mkumi and arrived just before dark. We had just enough time to take a quick tour of the park. We were rewarded with sunset views of giraffe, impala, hippos, elephants, and wort hogs. After our quick safari we set up tent in the yard of guest house and headed out for the a healthy meal of chips mayai (eggs and french fries fried together in a pan). We ended the night sitting at the guest house drinking Safari lager and playing pitch (anyone who was with us eleven years ago knows that this was a remarkably familiar scene). Next morning Craig rallied at 5:30am, cooked Theron and I oatmeal, and got us on the road back to safari by sunrise. We decided to get up this early with the hopes of catching a leopard before the heat of the day.  Despite the fact that Theron lives in Tanzania and has been on a zillion safaris, he has never seen a leopard. Craig also has had never seen one and I had only ever seen one at night time, so we really had our fingers crossed. We started the morning by following another safari vehicle called "Leopard Safaris," thinking they clearly would lead us right to one. But after about twenty minutes of following them we decided that they were just way too distracted by giraffe to ever have leopard success, so we broke free and headed down our own route. About ten minutes later as we are distractedly cruising at fairly high speed looking for a spot for Theron to stop and use the bathroom, Craig yells "leopard!"  Right on the side of the road was a crouching leopard. We got to watch each other for a few moments before the leopard reasoned that it was best to hit the road. It was a pretty awesome sight! From there the sightings were a bit down hill. We saw the typical animals listed above and we drove EVERY possible road in the park. Including ones that no one had clearly been down in ages. Which meant that we spent a lot of time cutting the eight foot overgrowth with our vehicle and crossing our fingers that we had not left the path. On one of these explorations we found ourselves at the bottom of a steep river bed unable to get up the other side. Nothing like having to get out of the car in lion land to make road repairs. Theron and Craig loved it. As for myself, I was a bit distracted by the fact that we were on a path the no vehicles passed down and a few days walk from a world not ruled by carnivores.  Happily after about 45 minutes and many failed attempts we flew out of the hole. We continued to drive around until the end of the day, and despite not having any further awesome sightings and having to initiate a battle of who in the car could kill the most of the most tsetse flies(theron was the BIG winner), we all had a great time.

That evening we headed out to the Udzungwa National Park. Udzungwa is a forested mountain area where there are tons of different types of monkeys and elephants living. While there we camped at Theron's roomate's campsite, which turned out to be really nice, complete with bonfire and high pressured showers. The next day we went on a guided hike through the park to an absolutely spectacular waterfall. Along the way we saw red colobus, black and white colobus, blue monkeys and the endemic species of mangabey monkeys (that remarkably were not discovered until 1979), as well as evidence of elephant. We also had a near miss with a forest cobra that scared the bejesus out of our guide.  We ended the day with another reminiscent night of pitch by the campfire. Around ten p.m. Theron's roommate (Woody) arrived along with the manager of the campsite. At this point I hit the hay and Craig and Theron ended up staying until about 3:30am swapping stories with woody by the campfire. Unfortunately for Craig, by seven am the African sun was fiercely beating down on our tent and the only option was to get up or be cooked alive. After a tasty breakfast of chai and chapati, Theron led us on a bushwhacking adventure looking for host plants for butterflies. I am happy to report that although we were covered by scratches and bizarre rashes caused by some unfriendly plant, no one managed to step on a hidden snake. We spent the rest of the day in a somewhat futile attempt to cool down by hosing off the car. We also got introduced to a new and quite juvenile game enjoyed by Theron as a child, where one throws a Frisbee at a person trying to hit them while the other person is not allowed to move. Somehow this painful game had us cracking up for hours. Dinner that night was cooked by the staff at camp and was scrumptious beef curry. Next morning we headed out on one more adventure before hitting the road back to Dar. This adventure was to a patch of woods located in the center of sugar cane fields that we had learned the day before was a great spot to see monkeys. We brought a local man with us to show us the way. We followed a road out through a village and into the sugar cane. From there the road ended. Once again we were forced to use our borrowed vehicle as a plow as we mowed down lines of sugar cane and worked hard at getting lost in the middle of nowhere. The drive stopped short as we came upon a huge ditch in the road, luckily spotted before we fell in. Happily from there we were a short walk to the forest. Of course, I was too scared of snakes to really enjoy the bush whacking but once we got to the forest we got to see more monkeys and of course more butterflies. After a short walk we headed back to the car to begin our trip back to Dar. Somehow we managed to follow the track of broken sugarcane and found our way out of the field and back to the world.

The rest of the time in Dar we spent hanging out and preparing for birthday parties.  Woody's wife Hannah got a surprise party that included a couple of dives (so we got to go along on that part).  And two days later, the day before we left, Jess and I were on dessert duty for Jaki's b-day.  Though making cake and tiramisu is alot trickier with African ingredients than it is at home, we pulled it off and enjoyed a couple of fun parties.  And then we flew back to the USA...for now.