Siringet

Jumbo!  We are back from expedition in the Serengeti! It was one crazy time.  Usually my posts about one day are long, so I have a feeling that a post about five days will be quite long. 

Gosh, I don’t even know where to begin.  We left on the 20^th around 7:00 am, made a stop at Olduvai Gorge before arriving at our campsite in the Serengeti around 4:00 pm.  The 21^st and 22^nd, we left our campsite around 6:15 am to go on morning game drives, we got back to our campsite around 10:00 am and had breakfast, then had until 2:00 pm as free time.  Those four hours were brutal.  The heat is awful at that time and we had very little shade in our campsite so if you were fairly heat tolerant, you could brave the roasting tents for a nap, otherwise we all squished under a few trees and tried to rest.  Around 2:00 pm we had guest lectures, one about an overview of Serengeti and the other about the reintroduction of wild dogs in the Serengeti.  After our guest lectures, we would head out for an evening game drive until 6:30 pm, returned to camp and had supper around 7:00 pm.  Then our night was free.  It gets dark in Africa around 6:30 pm so the first night I played Uno by the light of head lamps, but the other nights I went to bed around 8:00 pm because I was so tired.  The 23^rd was the same with game drives, but we went to a fancy lodge in Serengeti for an American style buffet complete with create-your-own pastas, salads, meat, cheese, and dessert (you would have thought we hadn’t eaten forever by the way we gorged ourselves at the buffet); after lunch we had a swim in the lodge pool. 

Schedules aren’t very exciting, I’m sure you want to hear about the actual trip and what we saw.  I still don’t know where to begin!  I guess I will begin with Olduvai Gorge. 

Olduvai/Oldupai Gorge

Olduvai Gorge (as it is commonly, but mistakenly called) is considered to be the “cradle of mankind” because archeological digs have found some of the oldest human ancestor remains.  I’m not really sure if what they have found are “human ancestors”, but that is how the man who gave us a lecture described the remains.  If you have heard of “Lucy”, the oldest remain found, it is commonly thought that Lucy was found in Olduvai Gorge, however those remains were found in Ethiopia.  What were found in Olduvai were preserved footprints that matched Lucy’s species as well as remains from different archeological periods and artifacts.  The lecturer threw out so many scientific names for the remains, but I can’t remember them at all, essentially the scientists believe the gorge was occupied 1.7 million years ago. 

In the museum, they had a plaster replica of the best-preserved set of footprints made by the same species that Lucy was.  After preserving the real footprints, the archeologists reburied the footprints to keep them from eroding.  They also had a large collection of prehistoric animal skulls and horns that have been found in the gorge.  Just from looking at the skulls and horns, I can tell you that those were some weird looking animals! 

The museum and lecture were definitely interesting, though I’m unsure how I feel about the “human ancestor” part as it evokes the idea that modern humans evolved from these chimp-like, almost humans but not quite.  Evolution is a tricky subject and one that most people, especially Christians, don’t like to get into.  I completely understand why.  Therefore, as this isn’t a blog dealing with evolution or young earth vs old earth theories, I’m going to not talk about it other to say, the visit has made me think and has brought up a lot of tricky thoughts.  Though, at the end of the day, I get the feeling that we will never know the full extent of creation and how God formed the earth and everything living on it until we reach Heaven.  I’m naturally a curious person and want to know how everything works now, but I guess I’ll have to settle for not knowing for the time being. 

Fun fact about the gorge; while its commonly called Olduvai, that is a misspelling of a Maasai word for the wild sisal plant that grows in the gorge, Oldupai.  I believe they officially changed the site’s spelling to Oldupai Gorge, but most people still know it as Olduvai. 

Fun Fact about Serengeti:

Serengeti is also a misspelling of a Maasai word.  The Maasai word for the area is “Siringet” which means “wide, endless plains”.  Wide, endless plains definitely describe parts of the park.  There were a few moments on game drives when I would look out and feel like I was transferred back to eastern and central South Dakota for a moment (minus the corn fields).  I even exclaimed to my car mates: “This is what my homeland looks like!” It was beautiful.  I love plains that go on forever.  It just shows I really am a South Dakota girl at heart!   

Exciting Things We Saw in Siringet:

First of all, guess who completed her Big Five sightings? This girl! That’s right, I’ve seen a lion, elephant, a cape buffalo, rhino and wait for it….leopard! Leopards are gorgeous.  I saw three leopards, one of them I saw four different times.  The one we saw four different times was in the same tree all four times, but changed positions each time we saw it and had a dik-dik for breakfast one morning and a Thompson’s Gazelle for breakfast the next morning.  Another car saw a leopard chase and kill a warthog.  I unfortunately did not see any kills this trip, as morbid as that sounds, kills are really exhilarating to watch!

We also saw two cheetahs, ten feet away from our car! It was crazy!  We saw a large group of cars and pulled in and a cheetah was standing right there!  He walked around and called for another cheetah, also a male therefore it was his brother as cheetahs are only found in male pairs when they are siblings, who joined him!  We watched the cheetahs for thirty minutes!  They rested in the shade of a car for a while, then drank from the nearby stream and ran off into the grassland.  Incredible. 

HIPPOS!  There have been several conversations about how we have surprise favorite animals that we didn’t give much thought to before we came to Africa and once we saw them in Africa, we fell in love.  Well I fell in love with amphibious, fat, big-mouthed, yawning, mud-wallowing hippos.  One of the coolest things we saw was a crocodile eating a rotting hippo, we passed this particular scene the first day and watched the feast progress every day as there was less and less hippo every day.  The last full day there, we went to a special hippo pool where we could get out of the car and stand 50 feet away from the pool.  It smelled awful because the hippos use the pool as their bathroom and wallowing spot, but there were so many hippos lying on top of each other! Another morning, we watched hippos run towards a pool, one of the hippos couldn’t figure out how to get into the pool and tried four different spots before he actually got into the water by sliding down the bank into the water.  Hippos, they may be one of the most dangerous animals in Africa, but they are also now one of my favorites. 

Several lion prides.  I saw two male lions.  One had a fantastic mane, the other one was younger so didn’t have much of a mane at all.  We saw so many lion cubs though! They were precious.  We saw probably a total of 40 lions throughout the five days.  It was great!  

Sad Things We Saw in Siringet:

In Africa, baboons are considered vermin.  If they get into your personal space, you can kill them with no repercussion.  Even though the government “owns” all the animals, they don’t really care about baboons.  After watching these primates for a full day in Lake Manyara National Park and writing two scientific papers about them, I have a greater appreciation for them, even if they can be nuisances. 

One day we were driving and had to stop for a baboon troop crossing the road, as we watched the baboons, we noticed one was carrying a dead baboon baby in its mouth.  This baboon, a male baboon to be exact, crossed the road and sat down on the other side taking the dead baby out of its mouth and putting it on his lap.  He then began to stroke the dead baby.  The baby had been dead for several days at least, it looked almost mummified.  In baboon social structures, there are some males who act as godfathers and take care of young that are usually related to them and we figured since baboons don’t exactly know their fathers that this male was probably a godfather to the dead baby.  This scene really touched me.  For all the bad rap baboons get, they obviously have complex brains and have feelings.  Baboons aren’t the only animals to “mourn” their dead, elephants when passing remains of a clan member or relative will rumble and move their trunks over the remains. 

The other sad thing I saw in Serengeti was a juvenile elephant with half of her trunk missing.  We were watching an elephant herd and I realized one of the young elephants only had half her trunk!  She was trying to grab grasses to eat but her trunk wasn’t long enough to reach the grasses so she had to bend over to be able to reach grass.  We asked our driver, Charles, why an elephant would be missing half a trunk and he said that it probably got caught in a snare set by poachers.  Awful. 

Visitors to our Campsite:

Fun fact: we stayed in the Dik-dik campsite.  More fun facts: We brought our own security detail and hired a guard with a gun from TANAPA (the park authority) to patrol the campsite for visitors such as hyenas, lions, cheetah, and serval – all of who visited our campsite. 

Mind you, though we were at a campsite, we were still in the middle of the Serengeti and were not separated by fences or any barriers so animals were free to visit us at any time, though they all visited during the night.  I saw a few hyenas, but didn’t see any other animals.  I definitely heard them at night laughing and howling.  Apparently last night there were a few lions wandering through our campsite and the iscari (security people) got into cars to corral the lions out of the campsite.  Of course, I slept through all the fun parts like that!  Last night there was a lion near the border of the campsite around 10:00 pm, but I had already gone to bed.  We were sharing our campsite with students from another rival study abroad program, SIT (other unwelcome guests depending on who you asked), and I guess several of the SIT students decided they wanted to get closer to the lion, and got fairly close before they got yelled at by one of our professors and hauled back to their tents.  The SIT program is not wildlife based, obviously.  I never felt unsafe though, our iscari are great and kept us very safe. 

There you have it, Serengeti.  I don’t know how to wrap up a trip like the one I experienced. The magical, mystical land of purple flying monsters; or maybe more like the magical land of endless plains abundant of beautiful creatures and God’s creation.  Siringet.