Africa

My Time in Africa

At the moment of this writing I am somewhere in Turkey just outside of the city of Troy. I have been through Tanzania and Egypt in the time since my last posting. We arrived in Tanzania and took a bus to our lodgings in the city of Arusha. We stayed in a hostel run by a catholic organization that also maintained a high school. One had to sleep under a mosquito net to avoid malaria and although at first they are a challenge to get situated within, after a few nights I was a certified professional mosquito net operator. The trick is to get the bottom situated around the foot of the bed then go around, fix one corner around one side of the headboard and then slip into the opening and get the last part once underneath. So know you know. The whole compound was surrounded by a ten foot cement wall topped with barbed wire. At ten the gates were shut and at a quarter after the dogs were let loose while the guards went on patrol. Turned out, the dogs were about as friendly as could be although the one was fairly stupid and spent most of his time eating plastic bags. At about ten thirty as I learned one night, this mangy junk yard dog was let out. His face was mangled on one side and when he was around all the little dogs were as mean as he was.

We left the compound to go on safari for three days. Our safari home was a few hours by car away from Arusha, and rather than dogs it was patrolled by men with bows, arrows, and clubs. We stayed in anti-mosquito tents and were served meals under a large thatched roof wall-less structure. Our first day of safari took us to the lake Manara national park where we saw a multitude of large mammal wildlife. Elephants, hippos, giraffes, lions, and wildebeests were all present. My favorite sight for the day however was the Dik Dik. The Dik Dik is the smallest member of the antelope family and is about the size of an abnormally tall wiener dog. I am partial to it because its just this tiny thing trying to make sense of life in the African wilderness surrounded by lions, cheetahs, leopards, cervals, and all manner of large animals that could crush it with one accidental step. Yet there it is, doing its thing. On the second day of Safari we visited the Ngorogoro Crater Wildlife Preserve. Easily the most stunning place I have ever been to. You drive for miles up into the rim of a dormant volcano and then down through jungle into a grassland many square miles in size yet all within the volcanic crater. The transition from tropical forest to grassland is an especially interesting one because it is driven primarily by the activities of the elephants within the crater who will actively maintain an area of grassland in an environment in which the climax vegetation is a type of forest. There were lakes and wetlands within the crater supporting a stunning variety and number of animals ranging from the warthog to the sacred ibis. Even the wildebeest within the crater, traditionally a migratory animal, never leave the confines of the crater because they are so well provided for. There were easily thousands of Wildebeest there as well as innumerable Zebras, Grants and Thompsons gazelle, Dik Dik, countless fascinating birds like the Grey Crowned Crane and the Paradise Fly Catcher. There were also many Lions, Hippopotami, and a few Rhinoceros. The third day was a visit to the Serengeti where, due to a mysterious massive migration of life to the western side of the park, we didn’t see much large mammal activity. However we were treated to close up views of many extraordinarily beautiful birds like the Kingfisher and Lilac Breasted Roller. Here we witnessed also an elephant that had not moved out of the area bathing in mud from about ten feet away.

We returned to Arusha following the safaris for three nights to hold classes, get work done, and see the city. One day I ventured out with a friend and we met two Arushan men because one, who called himself Hombre, spoke Spanish and so did my friend. I walked with the other whose name was Maganga. Hombre owned a “curios” shop selling bows, arrows, bracelets, post cards, spears, machetes and the like. Maganga was his associate and described his employment as a manager/coordinator of street vendors and their activities, deciding who sold what in which area so as to maximize profit. Neither had attended a day of school in their lives. At any rate, after I bought my lucky bracelet from Hombres shop they gave us a tour of Arusha. We visited all the important sites, monuments, government buildings and such and for the grand finale were taken through a vast, sprawling system of back alleys and warehouses that had turned into a bustling shady market where one could procure meats, vegetables, dried smelt, and monstrous bags of grains in any imaginable quantity. I was particularly pleased with our tour of the marketplace because it was not the famous market in Arusha that all of the tourists visit. Quite the opposite, if I had been there without my guide I would definitely have been robbed, probably beaten, maybe killed. Maganga was kind enough to translate the comments of the shop keepers and patrons alike as we passed through their ranks. To put it lightly, no one had much nice to say. I got some good pictures though, difficult photos to obtain due to the aversion to being photographed prevalent in this area. Also I made friends with a human rights lawyer named James. He was kind enough to take me to his favorite haunt in Arusha one night. If you’re reading, hello James and good luck with everything.

Upon our arrival in Cairo we went to the Cairo museum which was spectacular. I got to see all of King Tut’s remaining effects as well as a wealth of other amazing ancient Egyptian artifacts. After two days in Cairo we departed for an oasis. The ride to the oasis took us around seven hours away from any major cities and I watched, transfixed as the civilization turned to vast expanse of nothingness. Eventually the nothingness began to have a few sparsely vegetated hummocks here and there and then all of a sudden there were houses and palm trees and lush vegetation as we passed into the town that has grown around the oasis. The state of the oasis town is a precarious one. The population of Egypt is ever expanding. Because the majority of land within the country is desert, every populated area is virtually exploding including the oasis towns. The problem is that as the population expands the natural flow of water to the wells is insufficient to support all the people. Each year they pump faster and faster. When this isn’t enough, and as our guide told us it never is, the government sends more and more advanced machinery to dig deeper and extract faster. One day the springs will cease to flow and the wells will run dry. When this happens there will be an entire city seven hours by car away from any available water source, many of them too poor to afford motorized transport. I have encountered several societal systems in which the limiting factor is forecasted to be depleted in the foreseeable future, yet nothing is done. This is happening on a much larger scale in India as well. Having spent the night in a comfortable motel we arose early in the morning and departed for the black desert. We toured the black desert all day seeing the stunning mountains of basalt and blackened desert crust as far as the eye could see. We also scaled an enormous sand dune that has been working its way across the black desert for some time now. Standing on top of a sand dune in the middle of the desert is utterly serene, even if just for the few moments when my group was miraculously silent. Driving around the desert listening to utterly foreign Arabic music was quite a memorable experience. I got along well with our driver Yaser too, he dubbed me habib which I was told means we’re friends in Arabic. We moved from the Black Desert through to the White desert the next day. The transition was mind blowing. The charred mountains gave way to a vast expanse once again and out of it began to rise stark white limestone structures some over twenty or thirty feet tall, eroded by the wind into fantastic shapes. We saw a small mountain made entirely of crystals that oozed oil part of which was looked uncannily like a dogs head. Following this we ventured into the national park portion of the desert where the highest concentration of the white structures was. The White Desert was almost too much to absorb. In the absolute silence amidst the mineral towers I felt as if I was on another planet. I was a bit uneasy about our time in the sticks when I learned that we had hired an armed guard with a sub-machine gun due to the number of people who like killing tourists to stop western influence from entering Egypt, but he was very friendly and all was fine. We stayed the night in the desert in a camp set up by our Bedouin guides. We ate delicious food cooked over the fire and in kettles and danced around a fire all night to a drum beat and a man singing traditional Bedouin songs. The group then slept under the incredible stars on mats. I didn’t bring a sleeping bag so I was lent three blankets by our guides. Each weighing about ten pounds and smelling strongly of some part of a camel, but I’ve never slept better in my life. It does get quite cold in the desert at night though. Apparently a fox came and pooped quite close to where I was sleeping in the night. We drove all around the White Desert the next day and witnessed a stunning view of a huge portion of the desert from on top of a mountain of the limestone making up the structures around us. We then made the eight or nine hour trek from the desert back through to Cairo.

Ill be writing about Turkey soon. Im excited to be here and get to check out the environment in an area that has been inhabited for around four thousand years.Hi mom and dad and thanks everyone for reading. I really appreciate it.

The Taj Mahal at sunrise.

Here it is mom. I know you wanted to see this pic.

Goat Mahal.

I somehow found an area inside the Taj Mahal complex where not many people were. It took me 10 minutes to find a second where no people were here.

Behind the Taj Mahal is a river and across that river you can go and view it from a distance though there is an immense barbed wire fence closing the river area off. It was nice here though, Ill take barbed wire to 8 million tourists any day.

India Pictures

The Red Fort in Agra.

Snake boys. Lots of kids do stuff to try and get you to pay them. These cats took it a step further, so I hooked them up and took a few pictures.

Dog, Cow, Tuk-Tuk.

The view from inside a tuk-tuk or rickshaw whichever you prefer. I prefer tuk-tuk. By a lot.

View from a rooftop restaurant where I ate my first meal in India.

Myself and a few friends got sidelined into this basement rug shop where they gave us tea and spent an hour and a half telling us why we should buy these super expensive rugs.

Sleeping rickshaw man.

Oxes pull things through main roads and cars just honk and zoom around them. Its madness on the roads here.

Alleyway in Delhi and the view on the flight in.

Woodstock and Beoynd

Im in Mussouri India right now at the Woodstock boarding school in the foothills of the Himalayas. It was established as a lodge for government officials to stay at while hunting in the mountains. Getting here was quite the journey. We departed from the Sariska National Tiger Preserve after a somewhat brief safari at around one in the afternoon. We jammed all twenty of us and our luggage into a small city bus and drove for over an hour to the city of Alwar where we took a two hour train ride to Nizamuddin. Once in Nizamuddin we rushed to find taxis to a different train station in absolutely pouring rain. My cab had no wipers so the driver threw a package of beetle nut, chewing tobacco and some kind of nut mixed with lyme, onto the windshield as a replacement. It actually worked, sort of. Upon our arrival at the train station we got onto a sleeper train and rode nine hours to Dehradun where we got into cabs and drove for about and hour up into the Himalayas. In India in the 40s or so there used to be only two classes of cars, upper and lower. The upper, called Ambassadors were what my cab was. Extremely svelte. We wound up and up and up the mountains into fog so thick you could chew it. Eventually the roads were covered in ice. All of a sudden my cab starts to slide and goes into the side of the mountain, thankfully not off the cliff face. We pushed it to the other side of the road to let the cars behind us go but a giant truck was trying to come down. He skidded to a halt beside us because a car had turned sideways and blocked the road in an attempt to go around my cab. We left the whole mess when a van capable of handling the ice came from the school and whisked us away to fried eggs, chapati bread, toast, cornflakes, tea, and coffee. Definitely a pleasant surprise.
This place was important to our studies because the Himalayan plateau is the source of a vast amount of the worlds weather. The sun beats down on the plateau, heating the air quickly and generating lots of wind as well as moving moisture out of surrounding areas and up into the mountains. This moisture falls around the mountains and this action is responsible for the existence of some deserts. As a result of this concentration of moisture places like Darjeeling near Bhutan can get up to sixty feet of rain in a year. The problem is that the glaciers in the Himalayas, like the majority of the worlds glaciers, are receding and are also responsible for the year round flow of the major rivers in Northern India. Once they are gone there will be no water and thusly very quickly no food for about a billion people. Can anything be done? I dont know. The state of water here is depressing. India's rain cycle is that of dry season and monsoon and there hasn't been a normal monsoon in five years. All of the water the people here are using is coming from underground wells of trapped mineral water which is non-renewable aside from being filthy. There are no sewage treatment plants here and attempts at westernizing the treatment of water have failed due to spotty electricity availability. This actually led to worse problems as the plants erected concentrated the waste to treat it and promptly failed. The mountains are beautiful though and the micro-towns scattered around the area are a wonderful break from the style of life in the big cities in India. I much prefer the people here to those in any other area of India we have been thus far as well. Today our group gave presentations on different biomes to a fifth grade class and spent several hours talking with AP students about climate change, their futures, and our experiences with higher education. I thoroughly enjoyed all of it. I like best that they stop for tea twice a day no matter what here.
Tomorrow morning Ill rise at 2:30, get in a taxi and drive to a train station. The train will take me to Delhi where Ill see some interesting things, get on a plane and fly to Sri Lanka. Once Im there Ill get on another plane and fly to Male in the Maldives. The next morning, good luck waking me up, Ill get on a boat and go to an Atoll a ways off the coast where Ill be scuba diving. Long story short Ill have another post and more pictures after I get back to Mumbai in a slightly less than a week. Goodnight all.

Cave.

The smaller of the two caves I visited in Thailand.



Cave spider.

Jungle Walk, Thailand.

The view across the river from our lodgings during our jungle walk portion of the trip.

Elephant feces.

Just over this is a several hundred foot drop. Idve climbed the rest of the way down, but my group was leaving.

The best way to appreciate a tropical forest is to really get your toes down into the juices.

So many of the plants in the forest were covered in ridiculous spikes.

Waterfall that the above water fall picture was taken atop.

Our guide. He spoke not a word of english but pantomimed that he would find it funny if I fell off of this one cliff near the picture with the sign in it. Everyone agreed.

View of the area surrounding the park.

Bangkok

Mmmmmmm....fried pig face.

Squid was just one of the multiplicity of stick meats available.

Part of downtown Bangkok. Yarawat street specifically.

Buddha maxin relaxin at the temple of the reclining Buddha.

Wat Arun temple in Bangkok. Constructed around the same time as Hiram College was being built. I climbed to the middle part of this.

All manner of street vendors have many different types of stands or mini shops set up everywhere.

Gold leaf is used extensively in many of the temples in Thailand.

Spicy fishball soup. Horrible to look at, worse to smell, and absolutely wonderful to eat.