15:48, Sunday, 8 July, 2012

Happy birthday Caitlin Elizabeth Mary Marie Perpetua Pingel!  Thanks for being the best friend a girl could ever ask for.  SO THRILLED I get to see your face over skype today!

14:08, Saturday, 14 July, 2012

I cannot describe the happiness upon returning to camp after Nairobi.  The first few days there were lovely, and it’s good to have Charlie here now, but after a week cooped up in the cold cottage I could have kissed the vervets greeting me with jumps on top of my tent.  How I ran to hug Benson and Wilson and Joseph, Tyler and Ian and Julie!  How happy I was to see the hyenas!!!  How ecstatic when Karma and one of the genets showed up at dinner!

However, Nairobi still speaks of Africa, and there were good times in this city entirely different from any in the states.  It was certainly an adventure attempting to drive there – I have never witnessed such organized chaos.  No lanes, narrow streets with people and goats and dogs on the sides, big impatient buses and matatus.  My timid self was not very good at the necessary norm of sticking out a hand in demand that the traffic stop before pushing my way in, and I kept forgetting that right turns are the ones I need to check two lanes for (not left! I put Michelle and Charlie through many unnecessary waits).  Then driving stick shift on top of it all.  I was always in need of the biggest massage in the world when we returned to the cottage; as it was a few more knots were tied in my trapezius.  The actual driving to and from Nairobi was even more terrifying: driving up and down hills in fifth gear, having to pass loris, riding the escarpment with a sheer drop to the Great Rift Valley where people pass around curves and you wonder how on earth it is you haven’t witnessed any deaths, knuckles white as snow.  I’ll take our bumpy Mara any day of the year, thank you!  Take me home, country roads!

The cottage has a bit of an Anne of Green Gables feel, and the courtyard is lovely, filled with brightly colored flowers – oranges, purples, yellows and reds -  that reminded me of something Mom would love.  It seems to me it would take a lot of energy to be such a flower; it must be a laborious task to constantly scream such a vivid brilliance.  Nairobi was not devoid of animal life; we saw the biggest hornbill I’ve yet seen in the yard’s Jungle Book tree.  Skinks crawled in through the holes in the walls, brightly colored little sunbills adorned the bushes, I released a little cockroach out the door, ibises croaked throughout the day, a light blue heron did the craziest neck-wiggle-wobble dance right beneath my window before lurching forward to gobble a hidden lizard, and tree hyraxes threw us into a horror movie every night with their vocalizations that sound like three creaks on a floorboard followed by the scream of someone being murdered (cracked up nearly every time – silly how real it sounds).  Fruit bats chimed, sykes (sp) monkeys jumped in the branches and pooped on our car, and dogs barked – I about died of happiness playing with Ian (our mechanic’s) six dogs, returning covered in hair and dirt after every visit.  Horses are kept within hedgerow-lined yards, as well as cows, and goats started when I ran toward them during my couple jogs.  The Homo sapiens were ever-smiling, releasing their vocalizations of “Jambo” and “Morning to you.”

Frozen yogurt, ice cream, french fries, pizza, sandwiches, fish, KFC (there went my attempt at vegetarianism) followed by an order of meat for the first time in almost a year at a Chinese restaurant.  Apparently protein depravation kills all willpower, also evidenced by the fall of Michelle’s 7-year vegetarianism upon coming here; you would never guess the way she attacks meat now!  Our taste buds danced.

Our taste buds weren’t the only things that danced.  The night we arrived and the day before we picked up Charlie, Michelle and I went dancing.  It was another dancing experience to remember.  Some Iranian guys pulled nearly everyone into a circle like the one at the end of My Big Fat Greek Wedding.  None of us knew who the others were as we spun ‘round, hands on each others’ shoulders, all different ethnicities, taking turns in the middle, clapping and shouting for each person’s unique moves (some more unique than others).  It produced a glow in my chest.

It was exciting to see Charlie when I rode with Taxi Joseph to pick him up!  Michelle stayed back and attended to a fire that was out by the time we returned, along with the rest of our electricity.  Welcome to our dark and humble home Charlie, where the pizza is so good we eat it by candlelight! Oh, and here is your freezing room!  (July is the coldest month here.)  It felt delightfully like the 1800s cupping our hands around candle flames as we carried them upstairs to read by.  Fell asleep to the sound of Charlie’s wind-up flashlight.

Sunday morning Charlie and I went for a walk while Michelle skyped with Eli.  The streets were lined with pouring, deep-purple lilac-like flowers draped over trees and telephone poles.  We discovered a hidden valley between rolling red dirt mountains, including a miniature corn field.  A creek bubbled along through a strip of woods where people washed their clothes.  A few houses perched precariously on the far mountain, hanging clothes strung like Christmas garland.  We hiked down to the creek, a piece of heaven in the middle of a dangerous city, and jumped across red rocks to the other side.  We both very nearly fell in the water on the way over, before witnessing our stupidity on the way back as we followed some locals across a perfect rock bridge we’d missed.  Climbing up and down the mountains, lungs opening, we passed many people dressed up in lovely wraps and suits on their way to and from church  (I really hope to attend a church next time I have to go to Nairobi). 

We also visited the elephant orphanage one morning, and I saw Kilabasi, the orphan I adopted last summer!  Has she ever grown!  She is now 27 months old, and will be returned to the wild soon.  I would give almost anything for the job of those keepers, right in with the orphans, feeding them bottles and being fondly tickled by their trunks, returning the soccer balls they kick (yes, elephants apparently play soccer), sleeping on a raised cot in a stall with an elephant all night!!!  What I wouldn’t do!  Smartly, however, the orphanage only hires Kenyans. I learned that the oldest orphan is immediately recognized as matriarch of the group.  Even if the oldest isn’t the biggest, all of the elephants recognize it as the oldest, and make it their leader.  So neat!  They rumbled to one another, the littlest wearing blankets, draining milk bottles faster than Nicholis Ingle drains a beer at Crunchies (believe me, that’s impressive), poking about at one another and their keepers.  When I’m around elephants, I can feel the presence of beings that know more than our understanding will ever give them credit for.  And all their mothers killed by poachers.

Overall, got a lot of work done, survived riding downtown, put Charlie through some Bridget Jones movies, dueted Disney songs with Michelle, read The Life of Pi, paced around like an anxious mother while waiting to hear news of the hyenas (jumped up and down when I heard that Obama had been seen eating on a hippo carcass, snare wound looking well!!!), threw all my weight down aisles against carts full of camp supplies, slept and slept and slept, started to go crazy and cried relief when Ian said our car was finished. 

Savored every moment of the return.  Giraffes clumped under the shade of a tree, feeding elephants, lazy lions, the whole genre of antelope, jerky-walking secretary birds, five ostriches sitting all faced one direction and perfectly spaced (weird!) at dusk, ZEBRA AND WILDEBEEST (the migration has begun!!!  Good to see those crazy gnu dashing about and hear the zebra he-ha-he-ha-he-haing again), and...hyenas.  Seeing the cubs at the den was better than almost anything in the world.  Gypsum has definitely grown!  I thought maybe Foxtrot and Echo would be alright now that the migration is trickling in, but Foxtrot has been seen several times without Echo, and they were never apart.  My heart is broken.  It reminds me of when I got the call last summer that my cat Albus was now without his sister Minerva.  They were always together, and thinking of one without the other aches in the part of the heart that knows one of life’s cruelest emotions...loneliness. 

Certainly wasn’t eased back into transcribing!  Just caught up on all my work, only to have it backlogged again.  This morning I transcribed the aftermath of a clan war PLUS an intense lion/hyena interaction.  The clan war was between East and West again, and we found a latrine on the border so intense that we could smell the paste from the car.  Collected some paste and poop for some hormone analysis (Charlie just loved packing feces in a tube right prior to breakfast).  The lion interaction involved three adult female lions, three subadult males, and one subadult female.  The odd thing is that there wasn’t any food.  The lions just walked right on into a big group of hyenas, probably 30 and more arriving, chasing them about for no apparent reason, growls and roars to rival the hyenas’ whoops.  But the hyenas coalitioned together and held their ground.  It was almost like the lions stirred things up for fun, and the hyenas didn’t seem to mind the match either – a game of lion/hyena rugby, that’s what it felt like, yet maybe it was more intense than I perceived.  In the end no harm was done past perhaps terrifying a crowd of very vigilant zebra standing sixty meters away, all facing the spectacle and doubtless horrified at the sudden materialization of at least 50 carnivores right before their eyes.

Shadowfax and Pantanal are around again!  Navaho, too.  Maybe some of my worry is unfounded, but Centaur hitherto missing, and she used to be seen every day.  Gobi and Idi yet missing as well.

Still War and Peace, Dad, but too bad!

12:14, Sunday, 15 July, 2012

Safari ants on the way to the toilet.  Here we go again.

I have to write that the colors in the sky from a recent sunset made me want to die, die so that I could somehow be a part of it.  These pieces of something so magnificent make my mortal body ache in such a way I hope my soul will burst forth and fly past the confines of biology.  Another afternoon grew a new kind of stormy; the sky took on a deep blue that mirrored the ocean in an imitation I never imagined possible.  We were swimming beneath the world’s sixth ocean. And the moon rising as big as the sun above the mountains has burnt a new sulcus into my visual cortex, and this sulcus is deep as the Great Rift Valley.  A “witch ring”, as Tyler called it, around our very same moon had a similar effect; it appeared as a rainbow bed around the lamp that made our flashlights unnecessary.  This morning the moon was but God’s thumbnail again, him having recently clipped it.  Every phase of the moon is a lovely hurt.

Slept through elephants AGAIN last night.  No one could believe I didn’t hear them, as apparently they were right by our tents and very loud.  I am so upset!  If July didn’t get down to 50 at night I might leave my window open.  But it’s hard enough to get out from underneath the blankets in the freezing morning chill, only to put on layers that have gone cold during the night and steal all the warmth from your body.

The hyenas had a wildebeest head this morning.  The good times of great feast for them have begun!