I’ve been running into some bad luck with the internet cafes and it keeps deleting my blog drafts, but third time’s a charm, right? So this post is about a week late…

We just got back to Arusha after an amazinggg adventure in Tarangire National Park and Lake Manyara National Park. We camped in Tarangire National Park for four nights. I spent the mornings observing elephant behavior by practicing various field methods such as scans, focals, and ethograms…while also oooing and ahhhing at clumsy baby elephants. Elephants are found in two types of herds: breeding herds and bull herds. The breeding herds are led by a matriarch (the oldest female) and consist of related mothers and their offspring (males get kicked out of breeding herds at approx. age 14 when they start getting boisterous). Here’s a fun fact: elephants have to eat for 16-17 hours a day.

In the afternoons after going back to camp, analyzing our observations/data and presenting it to the group, we got to be tourists and go on game drives! In addition to elephants we saw giraffes, lions (very far away), zebra, cape buffalo, vervet monkeys, olive baboons, impala, waterbuck, hippos, ostriches, warthogs, chameleons, monitor lizards, lots of beautiful birds, lots of my favorite tree (baobab)…and other things that I’m sure I’m forgetting right now.

But camping inside the national park made for some sleepless nights. The combination of roaring lions, trumpeting elephants, baboons screaming at a nearby predator, the fear of black mambas slithering under our tents, and the telling of ghost stories around the campfire before bed didn’t quite lull me to sleep. It really put some things into perspective. As one student put it: “single person tents are like doggy bags for lions”. But remembering that I was camping in a Tanzanian national park surrounded by so much amazing wildlife definitely made up for the lack of sleep.

After Tarangire we camped in the village of Mtu Wa Mbu (literally translated to “The River of Mosquitoes”…a very accurate name) for two nights. (But I accidentally got a letter wrong and called it Mtu Wa Mbo…literally the River of Penis. Oops…good thing Tanzanians have good senses of humor). We got to try the local brew, banana beer, which is a thick 1% alcohol concoction which is the consistency of melted smoothie, the appearance of cream of wheat, tastes of vinegar and BBQ sauce and is served in 2+ liter buckets. Yum. I probably won’t be bringing any of that home to the states. We also watched wood carvers creating intricate, traditional statues out of ebony wood. But the most interesting part of the stay was learning about ethnobotany in the area. We first met an herb seller that picks and mixes dried herbs and plants to create natural medicines to cure everything from malaria, to HIV, to erectile dysfunction, and even one that makes Maasai warriors brave enough to kill lions. Then we visited a Maasai boma that is home to the most powerful Maasai man in the region. He is a traditional healer with 25 wives and 200 children. He even built a school next to his boma just to educate his own children. He laid out a cow hide in the dirt, poured stones from a cow horn onto the hide and counted them –104 stones. Apparently the even number of stones indicated that we would have a problem-free time here in Tanzania.