Party in the Usa

It’s only my second full day in Tanzania and I’ve already gone on a safari! This place is AWESOME!

After a short lecture on Tanzanian culture, we loaded three vans and set out on our first safari in Arusha National Park. As we got further away from the city center, the landscape slowly began to change. Arusha’s economy is almost entirely agriculturally based. The crops are grown in the outskirts of the city, and then sold along the sidewalks in the city that I walk by every day. Massive banana trees lined the bumpy (but paved) road. As we got closer to the National Park we passed several rice fields and coffee plants.

Our driver/safari guide’s name was Job… “like the Bible story,” he said. Tanzania has a school particularly for tourism since this sector generates so many jobs (not to be confused with Job) in the area. Job learned French at tourism school, so I was able to converse with him a little bit. During one part of the drive, Job pointed out that we were about to arrive in the U-S-A. To clarify, Usa is a province in Arusha. Despite the similar names, the two Usas don’t share many other resemblances. Even so, maybe this was the Usa that Miley Cyrus was singing about...?

Finally, safari time! I was in a safari van with Elise, Karla, Ben, E.J., and Pierce (…or is it pronounced Puce…? We aren’t sure so we usually just mumble his name…). Unfortunately, one of my roommates, Hannah, couldn’t join us for the safari because she got a bacterial infection (we think she got it from the water, even though she boiled it… hakuna matata, she’s all better now).

The entire time I was on the safari, I honestly felt like I was living in an episode of Planet Earth. Arusha National Park is the most topographically diverse reserve in Northern Tanzania. Mt. Meru towers over the region and creates a rain shadow that dumps rain on this side of the mountain. Because of this, Arusha National Park resembles a rainforest most of the time. Everything was a luscious green color. The leaves were the most massive ones I’ve EVER seen… and I’ve seen some sizeable leaves in my days. I think James Cameron should give a shout out to Arusha in his Academy Award acceptance speech because he plagiarized the landscape from Avatar directly from this park.

I had been on a safari in South Africa, but this one was completely different! Because the forest is so dense, many of the “Big 5” animals don’t wander into the Arusha National Park region. However, within the first minute, we saw 2 giraffes poking their heads out of the bush. The other wildlife we saw were zebras, warthogs (or ‘mice’ as Karla called the baby pumbaas), a lot of birds that I think all look alike (sorry brdlvr832), herds of water buffalo, at least 50 baboons, and several other types of monkeys, including collobus (sp?) monkeys, which look like skunks hanging out in the tops of trees. We stopped halfway through to eat lunch at a location that overlooked a giant, green crater (see pictures for details… too beautiful to describe in words!). Overall, a great success for our first safari of the semester! We were in the park for about 5 hours total, but the weather was so wonderful and we were having such a great time that it felt like only 30 minutes had passed.

On Sunday, the final day before classes, we had our last orientation session and then had free time to explore the city. I strongly dislike looking like a tourist, but it’s pretty much inevitable here (take into account skin color, attire, language, pretty much everything about us...). Being in Northern Tanzania, Arusha is considered the ‘gateway’ to all of the safari parks. Therefore, a LOT of tourists pass through on a daily basis. This makes it extremely difficult for our group to integrate with locals because they think we are only coming to buy their souvenirs and then return to our 'Western' lives. Walking around the city is particularly difficult because we are constantly followed by men who are trying to sell us paintings and jewelry. Instead of buying items, we ask them their names (Jina lako ni nani?) and strike up a conversation… it usually begins in Kiswahili, and then switches to English after the greeting. We figured that this is the best way to let them know that we are here to study East Africa, not just to visit. I think we’ve been fairly successful thus far, as we’re getting fewer souvenir offers on the street.

As classes begin and exhaustion kicks in, I'm struggling to find time to write... so I apologize if the entries aren't as gripping as usual. To sum it all up, I'm having an amazing time here and the people in my group are already such good friends... (As he was offering me a donut, Stanley, a student from Kenya, said "we are family now").

Kwa heri!

The view from where we ate our bagged lunch on the safari!