My Life is Actually "The Lion King"

Posting while the internet is working!

After climbing Kilimanjaro, everyone met up in Arusha for the next portion of our program. It started with a free day, that our director filled with a trip to visit a Maasai boma. This turned out to be a crazy experience. I expected to go see the boma, meet some people, and have it be a kind of uncomfortable tourist experience (we went with a tour guide), but it was a fantastic day! We did meet some people in the boma and walk around and see things, but we also got to do some very awesome things. In the afternoon, we all crammed into a mud/cow dung-walled hut with an old Maasai woman, and drank their tea. Then we got the incredible opportunity to take part in a ritual called Olpul. Usually, groups of Maasai warriors will go away to refuge-type places and take cows to eat and stay for a couple of months. It's a reflective time, and it's called Olpul. Naturally, we didn't do this, but we did get to participate in the part where they slaughter a goat. It was insane. I helped kill the goat and I skinned part of it, which was bizarre. Then when it was skinned, the men began butchering it. In the process, they were cooking certain parts of the animal. But some they eat raw. And of course, they offered them to us. For example, they eat the kidney straight out of the animal with no preparation whatsoever. As they came around offering it, I thought to myself, "No way, I am not going to eat a raw, bloody kidney" but then realized you only live once, and it won't kill me! It had a really strange, smooth texture, and it was pretty salty. Not as gross as I thought it would be, but certainly not something I would choose to eat again. Apparently it's a delicacy in Maasai culture. I also drank some of the blood with cooked intestines in it, which was also surprisingly tasty. The cooked goat itself was delicious, as well. It was a very intense afternoon, and I'm so glad I witnessed and got so active in participating. It was awesome

The next day we drove to Lake Manyara National Park, where we got our first glimpse of East African wildlife. It was like living in a nature documentary! That was only the very beginning, though. After that day, we drove to Serengeti National Park where we spent three days and four nights experiencing the ecology. Our campsite was smack dab in the middle of the park, no fences or anything. There was a sign that read something along the lines of "please do not leave campsite, animals will attack humans". We quickly found out that the sign was no joke. Every night after the sun went down, we'd start hearing the whooping laughter of hyenas around our campsite, and occasionally the growl of a lion in the distance. Every night we were camped there, the noises got louder and more frequent. By the last night, hyenas were walking through the campsite, and lions were laying next to our tents in the night. We woke up the last morning to find hyena pawprints inches from our tent! It was admittedly really scary at some times, because in reality a tent isn't much protection from a big cat, but it was a very cool thing to experience.

In the Serengeti we saw all sorts of incredible wildlife. A herd of up to 1000 cape buffalo on the first morning, and then a large herd of zebras. Elephants, giraffe, gazelle, hippos, babboons, topi, water buck, reed buck, hyena, lions. We even saw a cheetah sitting next to the road with a half-eaten gazelle. Not long after that, we came upon a leopard lounging in a tree, with its kill hanging in the branch above it. Leopards are a rare catch, so it was exciting to get to see one! On our last day in the Serengeti we got to see something incredibly cool. There was a pride of lions that had taken down a very large cape buffalo earlier in the afternoon. When we pulled up in our safari vehicles, the buffalo was lying dead probably two feet away from the road, and two lions had their heads completely inside the body cavity. It was so incredible to see these lions devouring their prey in person, although there were a lot of safari vehicles there to see it as well which kind of ruined the effect.

Safari week was great, and after it was over, we drove to a small village known as Kibaoni which is located about seven kilometers outside of Tarangire National Park. We spent the next four weeks there doing our field research. That will be in my next post!