My Experiences Studying and Researching Abroad: We found Nala!

It's been a great weekend. Lots going on, but all good stuff.

Yesterday morning, I gave the camera trap photos some more time before heading into Nanyuki with the conservation/education group here. We were still here for tea time (which I almost always miss), and there was mandazi! Mandazi is a Kenyan dessert, basically like sweet fried dough (so the Kenyan version of a beignet/fritter type thing). It is not actually super exciting by itself, but when I was here in January I only had mandazi from the airport (which was packaged and cold), and yesterday's was warm and fresh. So I was super excited to be able to try it, and it was pretty good.

Our first stop in Nanyuki was the bank for cash, and then Josphat and Jackson (our drivers--they usually drive the conservation/education group to the schools where they work during the week) took us to a spinners and weavers co-op. All the workers there are single others. A woman named Mary showed us the process of going from wool to a rug, which includes carding the wool, spinning it, making skeins, washing the skeins, dyeing the skeins, and then weaving it. We went through to their showroom at the end, and they had some beautiful rugs and shawls.

Next we went to the equator. It's just marked by a sign on the side of the road, but it's super cool. You can stand there, with half of your body in the Northern Hemisphere and half in the Southern Hemisphere. There were a bunch of shops right by the sign. They all had nice stuff and super aggressive shop owners. From there we went to lunch. Everyone wanted to eat Kenyan food for lunch, so we went to a place that had food set out buffet style, and you just went up and said what you wanted on your plate. I tried pretty much everything that was vegetarian, and it was all delicious. I got to try taro root for the first time, which was interesting. There were also cooked bananas. A full plate of food was only 490 Kenyan shillings, which is less than $6.

The restaurant was a few doors down from Dorman's an Mpala researcher favorite for milkshakes (where I went last weekend). Dorman's is connected to a souvenir shop that had beautiful items. They had kangas and kikoys, which are traditional African garments (check out the kanga wikipedia page here), in absolutely gorgeous color combinations. The patterns were amazing. We did some more shopping after that in a shop right near Nakumatt (the super market), where there was jewelry and some other small trinkets. We also stopped at Nakumatt itself, and a few other places on our way out of town to pick up things that people had requested from the center (like latex gloves, for one of the projects going on here).

I did laundry for the first time while here when we got back. We only have to wash our undergarments (the rest of our clothing is washed for us), and we do so with a tub, water and soap. This was the first time I'd ever hand washed so much of my clothing, and it was a bit of an adventure. After dinner, Tyler was going on a game drive with a few other people, and I got the last spot in the truck. We went for about an hour, and saw nothing super exciting for the first bit. And then Taylor saw a pair of eyes (which is pretty much the only way to spot stuff at night, by seeing a light reflect off their eyes) and Tyler backed up. We went closer, and saw a head. And realized it was a lion. A lioness, specifically. It was so cool. We followed her around for a few minutes in the truck until we lost her. She was the first big cat I've seen while here.

We (kind of a mix of conservation/education people and others) went on a game drive this (Sunday) morning. We were out for about 4 hours, which was great. We didn't see too many new mammals; I think the only ones were a steinbuck and what we're pretty sure was a klipspringer. The theme with many of the animals today seemed to be "Mommy (or Daddy) and me." There were a of of young animals out there. I've included pictures of a young baboon, camel and zebra. The camel and the zebra both seemed to have legs that were way too long for their bodies, and they moved kind of awkwardly. In terms of birds, we saw some cool ones: secretary birds and a fish eagle (which I've seen before), a Goliath bird and a kingfisher (which I hadn't seen before). The secretary birds are so called because they have these black almost tube-like things that stick out of their heads, which makes it look like they have pens stuck in their hair. They're pretty large and they have super strong legs, with which they stomp on snakes to kill them so they can eat them. Jackson (who was driving us) also took us to the place where two rivers meet, which was a really nice place to just be and listen to the rushing water. Some of us also got kind of wet there, which felt great. We were back in time for lunch, which was really yummy today. So yea, a very nice weekend so far :)