Serengeti...Wildlife...Finally!!

Mwanza is less than two hours from the western gate of the Serengeti. Since I had only seen African wildlife from the train and bus on the Ifakara trip and George hadn’t ever been to the Serengeti even though he’s lived in Tanzania for 5 years, Cathryn, George and I anted up $200 each (!!) for a day trip into the famous park. The best time for wildlife viewing is early morning and early evening so to make sure we got the most out of our $600, the driver picked us up at George’s at 5am. We saw a beautiful sunrise over the plain on our way and by 7am were through the park gate. The roof of the land cruiser pops up so we can stand up inside and look around in all directions. We saw wildlife almost immediately- a few wildebeest that didn’t bother migrating to Kenya with the bulk of the herd mingling with zebra and gazelle on the right and a pair of ostrich on the left. We were cruising along slowly taking it all in when a cheetah strolled across the road about 25 yards in front of the truck and into the tall grass on the other side. He sat watching us with just his head peaking out for awhile and then stood up looked back at us and continued on his way. Cheetahs are endangered and not all that easy to see so our day was off to a good start.

A little ways up we say a huge giraffe that was almost completely black- a sign that he was old and looking for a mate. The day went on with barely a dull moment- warthogs trotting off with their tails pointing straight in the air, baboons with babies on their backs, monkeys, mongoose families, a jackal, and more types of herbivorous than I could ever remember. Cathryn was an incredible spotter- there’s this, look at that…she was on fire! Shortly before lunch, we pulled up to the Grumeti River to find hippos floating in a pool on the upstream side of a bend and huge crocs on the other side. After lunch besides the river, we found tree eating twigas (Swahili for giraffe), a lone elephant drinking and spraying water from his trunk out on the plain, and more zebras, antelope, wildebeest, Cape buffalo, storkes, etc. The wildlife was plentiful and because we entered through the less used western gate and it was the middle of the rainy season, the people were not. We passed a few other cars on the road but all our we had all our wildlife viewing experiences to ourselves. From what I’ve heard, this is not the norm in the Serengeti and other popular parks on the Tanzania safari circuit. However, there was one safari gem that was eluding us. We hadn’t seen any lions. I had been on the As the day went on, the only thing that was eluding us was lion. I had been on the lookout for lions all day but all I was managing to spot was dead logs and rocks. The driver headed towards some circling vultures and we found a heard of zebra with a hyena in front with a zebra leg hanging out of his mouth. The vultures, who were just as tall as the hyena when sitting up, were inching their way for a piece of the action.

As we were watching, the driver says, I think there are lions in that tree and he points to this bushy tree a ways off. I looked with my camera lens, George did the same with his even bigger lens and we both saw nothing but a bushy tree. He said he was pretty sure there’s a lioness with 6 cubs in the tree. Cathryn took the binoculars and also saw nothing. We thought he’s out of his mind. To prove his point, he turned the truck and drove towards the bush. Sure enough, out popped a lioness and two subadults (teenagers) and four cubs. We couldn’t believe it. The subadults led the cubs to a nearby bush with the mother kept an eye on us, grunting her dissatisfaction with our arrival. It was awesome to see (even though we probably shouldn’t have been disturbing them). After her family was relocated to another bush, she just sat looking out over the Serengeti in an idyllic safari scene.

On our way out of the park, Cathryn and George assured me that game viewing really doesn’t get much better than the day we had. But it wasn’t over yet, we came across a pack of bull elephants (George could tell they weren’t females somehow). Usually packs are all female and males are solitary but occasionally they form batchelor herds…yet another unique sight. They were tramping along right besides the road. Although we had seen a couple of elephants throughout the day, they had all been loners and at a distance. This pack was basically in a line marching down the side of the road. They were so big and surprisingly graceful for their size. It was a beautiful sight. The perfect end to a great day! It makes it all worth it.

Swahili bootcamp

We're going to Swahili bootcamp in Iringa for a two weeks! I'm not sure if we'll have any internet access while we're there so there may not be new posts for awhile. We hope everyone is well and enjoying summer!

Good Times in Mwanza

I was joined by friends from Dar for a getaway weekend in Mwanza. Here's Cathryn and I at the Hotel Tilipia, Mwanza's poshiest (and I think only) lakeside hotel/restaurant/bar.


Here's George and I on top of the boulders on Mwanza's Capri Point. George used to live with Chris and Cathryn in Dar but he recently moved to Mwanza to work for Goodyear selling gigantic tires for earthmovers to the mining companies near Mwanza. He now lives in an amazing house overlooking the lake. The sunset picture in the last post was taken from his deck.


And here's the group of us having Habachi dinner at the Tiliapia.
I love Mwanza!!

Science in the Bush: Lake Victoria

With my research permit finally in hand, I booked a flight to Mwanza on the southern shore of Lake Victoria to join up with a graduate student I met at the University of Dar es Salaam that’s doing research complimentary to what I’m hoping to do. All the delays meant that I was able to make it out to the lake just in time for her last two days of data collection. Not what she and I had planned but at least enough for me to scope out the site and make a plan for next time. Mwanza is Tanzania’s 2nd largest city and the setting of a documentary film called Darwin’s Nightmare about the social impacts of the overseas exportation of Lake Victoria’s massive and nonnative Nile Perch and how it provides a cover for the illegal smuggling of weapons into Africa. My expectations for Mwanza were based on this film (which I highly recommend to all you Netflixers out there) and to put it plainly, I was a bit scarred to be venturing there on my own. In Darwin’s Nightmare, Mwanza was a helacious place filled with poverty, prostitutes and homeless street children. My fears weren’t assuaged when I asked Baraka, the student I was meeting, if she could book me a room where she was staying. Her response was “I don’t think it would be good for you to stay where I’m staying. It would be safer for you to stay in town.” Ummm…ok. So I booked myself a room at the Christmas Tree Hotel and hoped for the best. I headed to the airport the next day for my first AirTanzania flight. I’m told they usually run about 5 hours late which would have put me into Mwanza at midnight. Not good. Luckily we boarded on time and the only weird thing was that you had to stop and pickout your bags from the pile of checked bags strewn on the runway and put them on a cart to be loaded on the plane yourself. Apparently the baggage tags that clearly say MWZ for Mwanza are just decorations. Baggage retrieval on the other end was even more sketchy. The plane was a full (and surprisingly nice) 737 which must seat about 200 people. Baggage claim in Mwanza was a tiny room with 3 one meter square openings in the concrete wall which dudes shoved everyone’s bags through. It was pretty much mass chaos. After a few minutes in the baggage mosh pit, I decided a better strategy was to wait by the door and make sure no one was taking off with my bag. When the dust settled (literally), I got my bag and braced myself for Mwanza. Before we reached the city I got my first glimpse of Lake Victoria. I could immediately see why the British named it for their queen. Sparkling blue water as far as the eye can see with a lakeshore of rolling green hills covered by huge, round granite boulders stacked awkwardly on top of each other (kind of like Joshua Tree for those that have been). Then we crossed the bridge and entered the town. My first thought was am I still in Tanzania? Mwanza was perfect. Nicely paved roads with curbs and sidewalks! Brightly painted buildings, traffic circles and everyone calm driving following basic traffic laws, and no litter! This place is a well kept secret.

The next morning I headed down to the research station to go out on the lake. We loaded up gear into a long wooden boat with an outboard engine and cruised down Mwanza Gulf to Baraka’s field site near the mouth of the Isanga River. It was breathtaking- miles of virtually untouched hilly shoreline covered in these awesome rock formations. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera because I couldn’t risk getting it wet (which I would have for sure). Baraka is studying how nearshore plants filter and alter the quality of the water entering the lake from the river and the watershed. One of these plants is water hyacinth, which is native to South America and invasive in Lake Victoria. In the late 1990s, this plant, which grows in these huge floating mats, was choking almost all the bays and nearshore areas of the lake causing major problems with on-lake transportation, fishing, water in-takes, etc. It declined through the early 2000s and is now rebounding. My interest is in the affect of these plants on water flow into the lake. We got to the bay into which the river flows to find that a huge, island-sized mat of water hyacinth, papyrus and reeds growing 2 meters tall had floated across and completely blocked the entrance sometime in the last 2 days since Baraka was last there. We cruised to a tiny lakeside village where people probably subsist mostly by fishing and only access to the rest of the world via the lake and hired 3 dudes with machetes. We took them back to the site and they climbed up onto the mat and started hacking away at the plants to make a passage for our boat. Imagine cutting down shrubs with a machete while standing on air mattress that you float on in a swimming pool that’s covered with broken tree branches. When they got a chunk loose, they tied it up and we dragged it away with the boat. It took hours just to cut it down enough so that we could push and pull the boat across the top of the vegetation for 20 feet to the channel of open water on the other side of the mat. It was arduous work and these guys all cut up and soaking wet. We collected the samples, saw a baby crocodile and headed back out through the path to find another island of vegetation was closing up the bay further out. There was only a boat width left for us to pass through and just after we crossed out to the open water we watched this “island” move across and seal off the bay. If we had taken 2 minutes longer, they would have had to hack a path through this island too. Insane. We dropped the guys off at their village and stopped along the way back to research station to buy fresh Nile tilapia from local fisherman who were in some cases out fishing on nothing more than a few tree branches tied together with vines just big enough to sit on and only partially floating in this lake where there are massive Nile crocs. We arrived back at the research station just as the sun was starting to set. It was a great great day!!

Holy Bureaucracy Batman! (Part 3: The Bittersweet End)

Like all epic stories, this one is a trilogy...With my stamped carbon copy bank deposit receipt in hand, I headed directly back to the accounting department at COSTECH. The accounting guy accepted by deposit receipt, pulled out his ledger and gave me a COSTECH receipt. I take that up to the clearance guy, he says ok, come back tomorrow and pick your research clearance. Victoriously, I leave COSTECH and head to Ardhi University where I’ve been trying to workout an alternative research collaboration since my original plans fell through to check on my immigration letter from them. Although I’d been making research plans with them for close to two months, they decide that they need for me to apply to be a student at the university, which amongst various forms and documents requires copies of my diplomas, before they can write me an immigration letter. Since my diplomas are in boxes in a storage space in California and therefore impossible to get to, I try to appease their bureaucracy, with copies of my transcripts from my B.S. and M.S. from my application file at UCSB. For three days, I went back and forth with variations on the fax number to Ardhi University with the administrative assistant at UCSB over email because the fax won’t go through and the 11 hour times change means we can have only one email exchange in a day (Brandt had exactly the same problem when he tried to have his transcripts faxed to IHRDC. Apparently the fax machines in the offices here are purely decorations). Finally she scanned and emailed them and I forwarded them on to the professor at Ardhi gently reminding him how urgently I needed that letter. When I arrive to pick up my letter, it’s this weird and very vague statement about my conditional acceptance to Ardhi University, pending the receipt of copies of my diplomas. Trying to hide my frustration, I explain that it is impossible for me to get copies of my diplomas and that my transcripts clearly state that I have received my degrees and say that the letter wasn’t really what I was expecting as it said nothing about the research project I had agreed to help with. He said well just try this one and if it doesn’t work, come back and I’ll write you another one. Great. So I take my letter, at least it had all sorts of official stamps on it which really seems to be the most important thing.
Meanwhile, I go back to COSTECH the next morning. A woman who works in the clearance guy’s office tells me he’ll be in a meeting all day today. Here’s your research clearance. It looks like it’s all ready but for some reason he didn’t sign in. You should come back tomorrow. I get the guys cell phone number so I can call him in the morning to make sure he’s there and on the second try I get my research clearance. With my letters, clearance, 5 passport photos, transcripts, financial guarantee, and $US 120 exchanged from shillings at an exchange bureau rather than the bank, I embark on the two dala journey to Dennis’s office. There I fill out the application form, in triplicate with carbon paper. I love that use of carbon paper is still alive and well in Tanzania. I think it faded out of existence in the U.S. when I was in elementary school. Meanwhile, Dennis drafts a letter on behalf of his boss who’s currently in the U.K. stating something about my affiliation with the local Rotary Club. Chaos breaks out when they can’t find the boss’s official stamp. I also love the stamping of everything. The only way it could be better is if they busted out wax seals for closing envelopes. Dennis asks me for my passport photos- I hope the background is blue he says. Fortunately it was, I think I may have lost it if I had to go get two more sets of photos made (they come in 4s and of course the application requires 5) because the background was the wrong color. In the end we assemble a file that is a half an inch thick which Dennis hands off to his sidekick Robert to take to the immigration office. At this point, I have 5 days left on my current visa. Don’t worry. No problem they tell me.
Done with Dar, I say bye to Cathryn and hop on the dala to beautiful Bagamoyo. I get up here to find that IHRDC has done almost nothing about Brandt’s residency permit. Four days tick by and I hear nothing. A bit panicked, I call Dennis. He tells me to bring my passport down and they’ll get me a month extension. I ask if he can get one from Brandt as well since all anyone at IHRDC does is tell him not to worry about it. In the end my residency permit came through about 4 days before the extension expired. Brandt is still waiting for his. It was probably a bit unnecessary for me to bore everyone with a trilogy but it consumed my life for 2 weeks and the ridiculous details of this story really illustrate what it takes to get anything and everything done in this country. There is no such thing as a simple task here. It’s all a journey.

Holy Bureaucracy Batman! (Part 2: The Bank)

The saga continues....Yes, making a $300 deposit in a bank account is worthy of a blog post all by itself. It should be a simple and straightforward task. But not in Tanzania. For starters, I only have US$ 250 in cash and a $50 traverlers check. I go to the National Commerce Bank (NBC) branch in a nearby mall to make the deposit. I stand in a massive line for some ridiculous amount of time. No sorry we don’t take travelers checks and the ATMs have been down for 2 days so I can’t pull out any more Tanzanian shillings to convert into dollars. So I tell him just to deposit the $250 and I hope that COSTECH will accept the travelers check. One of my hundred dollar bills has a tiny tear in it (like someone stuck a tack through it at some point. The teller looks at the bill, looks at me and shakes his head. He runs all the bills through some machine that confirms that they are in fact U.S. currency and then tells me that he can’t accept the bill. I don’t even bother to argue. I take my money and leave. The next morning, I take a tiny piece of tape and tape the tiny tear back together, Cathryn lends me enough shillings to buy $50 and we go to different branch of NBC. I go to the teller line while Cathryn goes to customer service to deal with some issue she’s having with her account there. I get to the teller and I can’t hear a word she’s saying through the inch thick glass because they are blaring ABBA out of the speakers in the bank lobby. I tell her I can’t hear her because of the music and she just keeps talking in the same voice. So I proceed to tell her that I need to first buy fifty dollars and then deposit $300 into this account. She responds but I can’t hear her. I continue to tell her I can’t hear her until the teller next to her gets up and walks over turns done the music just enough so that if I strain I can hear the woman tell me that what I want to do is impossible. That’s right. Exchanging currency and making a deposit. Two very basic bank functions that are for some reason impossible. I go to customer service where I find Cathryn saying to the women there, “Do you know what NBC stands for? It stands for No Body Cares.” The response was a very literal, “No madame that’s not what it stands for. It stands for National Bank of Commerce.” I can see I’m in for it already. My attempts at attaining customer service were no better than Cathryn’s. However, I did learn that the music is blaring in celebration of customer appreciation week. Oh the irony. Moving on to the manager’s office, the first thing out of his mouth is they can’t help me because I don’t have an account there. Cathryn responds, “Well I do, at least for now but I’m going to close it because the service here is so bad.” At this, the manager says he’s got to go figure out what the exchange rate is (at the branch I was at yesterday they had it posted on the wall so I know I’m not making a completely off the wall request here). While the manager is doing that, one of the customer service women comes in and asks me why I didn’t just go to an exchange bureau somewhere and exchange the money before I came to the bank. Ummmmm…maybe because this is the bank and banks exchange currency! She leaves. The manager comes back with a print out with a horrible exchange rate. I think about arguing but really what’s the point. He tells me how much in shillings it will be for US$50 and sends me back to the teller line. I rejoin the disco party in the bank lobby and wait my turn. I’m lucky enough to get the same teller as last time. The manager brings her the exchange rate print out. I give her my shillings. While she does her thing, I fill out the deposit form which is three sheets with carbon paper slide in between and requires a ridiculous amount of my personal information. Then comes time to hand over the dollars. I slipped the torn and taped hundred in the middle of the other bills and crossed my fingers. She scanned them through her little machine. Tore off the bottom carbon copy, stamped, signed and dated it and hand it back to me. Mission accomplished. Sweet Success!

Holy Bureaucracy Batman! (Part 1: The Bribe)

Today is a proud day for me. I am officially a Class C Resident of the United Republic Tanzania. I’d sing the Tanzanian national anthem if it knew it. Attaining this revered status was one of the most ridiculous and convoluted experiences of my life. Since I bailed on the jerk professor I had intended to work with, I couldn’t get my residency through the University of Dar es Salaam as planned. My scholarship is through Rotary International and one of the local Rotarians is conveniently the president of Toyota Tanzania. He told one of his HR people, Dennis, to help me get my residency permit. I would never ever have managed it on my own. So Brandt left for Bagamoyo and for two weeks, I ran around Dar like a chicken with my head cut off, taking dalas all over the city (as many as 5 in day) to round up all the paperwork. On the top of the list was my research clearance from the Tanzanian Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH). I had sent my research clearance application last October, 3 months before I left for Tanzania and heard nothing. My emails inquiring about the status of my clearance have all gone unanswered so I decided to just show up at the office to figure out what the deal was. The guy whose job it is to process research clearances for all foreign scientists claims he hasn’t received my application (or any of my emails and assured me I hadn’t sent any emails because he always responds to every email always). He sends me down to accounting to see if there is a record of my application fee. The accounting guy takes me to a woman who pulls out a ledger book and casually flips through the pages looking for my name. No computer. No electronic records. No way of knowing whether my application was received or not. I go back upstairs and ask if I bring all the application materials (including another $50 travelers check for application which is probably the reason the original application has magically disappeared), how long to get my clearance approved? It will take 3 months. I ask if there’s anyway to get it any sooner and he just smirks. I go home and forward the guy the emails that we had previously exchanged to jog his memory. I get no response. I go back to Dennis. He says he knows this guy. He paid him a $300 bribe less than a year ago to get research clearances for a group of students that came over to work in one of the regfugee camps. So Dennis gets on the phone with the guy and sets up a meeting for the next day. We have a little chat which is mostly this guy making up excuses for not doing his job. Then they send me out of the room to go (re)pay my $50 application fee. When I come back, Dennis is ready to go. All I have to do is go deposit $300 into the COSTECH bank account and bring back the receipt and my clearance will be ready to go. It was like magic!