I Heart Elephants

The chances of me doing justice to my last ten days in Tanzania grow increasingly slim as the days zoom along. This is especially true given that I'm heading out to Peru tomorrow morning, accompanying a group of fellow medical students as we visit urban hospitals and rural clinics in the Peruvian health system. After Tanzania, I have to admit that Peru seems like a much easier hill to climb: I can speak the language (decently, anyway), I'll be in the same time zone, I'll be traveling with friends the whole time - and I've even been there before. Not nearly as nervewracking as my departure for Dar in mid-June.

But a quick sum up of the Denny Family Adventures, before I fill my brain with aventuras nuevas. Successfully navigating the airline ticket craziness (see two posts down), Dad and Lexi arrived early in the morning on Friday, looking both sharp and exhausted in the way that only well-dressed international travelers can. The three of us spent a few days in Dar, alternating between city strolling and jet lag reeling; we didn't manage to get to the Annual Dar es Salaam Charity Goat Races, but we did manage to hit the city fish market on a pretty good day. (Enormous manta ray, anyone? I always wonder if their "horns" are delicacies.)

Then off on safari! We flew to Kilimanjaro airport and headed to Arusha, where we met our guide Juma. Over the next few days we visited four parks: Tarangire (rolling plains spotted with baobab trees, sprinting warthogs, 30+ flocks of giant ostriches and scores of elephants), Manyara (my personal favorite, a soda lake surrounded by forest, where a sudden turn in the road can put you face-to-face with 80 baboons or a family of elephants. Plus an delightful hippo pool and an excellent array of giraffes), the Serengeti (camping in the confines of the park was exciting to the edge of terrifying - hyenas stole our trash, baboons our breakfast), and Ngorongoro crater (a 20 km wide volcano crater with a condensed population of wildlife: hundreds-strong herds of herbivores with an accompanying smattering of cheetahs and lions). Each park area felt very different. The Serengeti, especially, is a truly amazing-looking place, even aside from the animals; vast, flat, grassy plains run out for miles in all directions, right up to the horizon. The name comes from Serenget, the Maasai word for "endless space". True story, Maasai, true story.

The Maasai, it should be noted, have been kicked out of the confines of the Serengeti National Park (or rather, were strongly pressured to "voluntarily leave" in the 1960s), but they still have free reign in Ngorongoro crater. This leads to amazing scenes where you have hippos, zebras, hyenas, and wildebeest all in your view - and then you notice a Maasai man and his cattle strolling by about a half kilometer behind them all. Neat.

After 5 nights of tent camping (although it's hard to say we were "roughing it" by any standard - I think it's safe to say I ate better food on safari than I did for the rest of my Tazanian stay), we headed to Zanzibar. We arrived, in fact, on the first full day of Ramadan, which I think added some extra interest to our stay on the island. Zanzibaris are about 95% muslim, which means that finding food or water during the daytime became quite a bit of a challenge for us; we were reduced to sneakily taking sips from our bottles in dark alleyways. It's like contraband. But at night fall, the whole island jazzes up noticeably. A huge siren announces the official sunset, and then locals and tourists alike go seeking food. One of my favorite aspects of Stonetown, the capital, was Forodhani Gardens, where a couple dozen local chefs nightly serve up tables heaping with seafood or fresh-pressed sugarcane juice or "Zanzibar pizza" (an egg/veggie combo fried in a very thin crepe). The seafood itself is often labeled in particularly egregious (and delightful) English; I myself opted for a skewer of "tuner fish", but there was also "black sneeper" and "paracuder" for sale. Other highlights included a spice farm tour, where we knowledgably sniffed our way through several dozen different varieties of spicy barks and leaves. The scent of cloves, especially, seems so very exotic.

After a particularly rough ferry ride back to the mainland (ie, sick bags were distributed), we spent a final dinner at the Badminton Institute with the housemates before our very early morning departure. That in itself was a bit of an adventure - the taxi didn't show at 4 am, thanks to the insanity that is Swahili Time, so I spent my last few hours in Dar jogging through the darkness in search of a ride to the airport. Sort of put a nice cap on my whole experience, really. Cairo was the typical craziness, London was pleasant (and cool!), and Chicago has been very welcoming. It's a little sad to me how quickly I fall back into my old lifestyle patterns; I'm trying to be more conscious about the way I live, particularly about how I spend my free time and how I interact with other people.

There will be photos posted soon (some already made it to Facebook, the destroyer of worlds), but in the meantime, an interesting article about women, birth control, and East Africa.