The guest house was very quiet that late at night but our room was cozy and the beds comfortable. I took a cold shower before I figured out how to turn on the hot water, and Brenda and I went to bed. Our rest didn't last for long, however, since after 30 hours of travel we were both pretty jet lagged, and both of us work up around 0400. I managed to go back to sleep pretty quickly -- the glory of being my mother's child -- and Brenda spent the next day talking about how amazing my ability to sleep was. After 0730 we went to the breakfast served by the Mennonite -- some hard boiled eggs, breakfast sausages, lentils, toast, butter, jam, tea -- and chatted with some of the other guests. We were exposed to some very interesting philosophy and drank plenty of black tea before heading back to our room to pack up before our ride to Nairobi.
At 1000 our express matatu driver picked Brenda and I up from the Mennonite, and we enjoyed some lively conversation and a four and a half hour drive up to Nanyuki. In Nanyuki we met up with Kim, my lab mate, who has been doing research on giraffe at Ol Pejeta since January. Kim picked us up from the Nakumatt, one of Nanyuki's first department-ish stores, and we ran some errands around town before heading to Ol Pejeta.
Ol Pejeta itself is located on the outskirts of Nanyuki, although the town comes almost all the way up to the gates of the conservancy. The road leading up to the main gate is incredibly rutted and filled with pot holes so you drive on whatever side of the road is better paved -- unless of course there is someone coming towards you. All the cars in Kenya are right hand drives (they drive on the left). After getting into the conservancy we took a tiny game drive on the way to the research centre, and after arriving at the research centre and settling in a bit took another mini game drive with Blair, another researcher at Ol Pej.
The next day we got up early to try to meet with some of the research managers of the sanctuary and had some very, very brief meetings. We arranged a meeting for the next day (or the day after? I lost track of days pretty quickly here) to see the chimpanzee sanctuary and pleased ourselves with a day of game driving with Kim as she looked for giraffe social groups. If I recall correctly this was a pretty pathetic day for us -- in about five hours of driving we saw a total of nine giraffe, two or three of which were animals we had already seen that morning. Brenda and I oogled and oggled at the incredible wildlife and stopped Kim constantly to take photos and tried our hand at identifying some of the giraffe she works with. She has a very logical system for identification, involving a hierarchy of important characteristics that exclude one another so any animal can belong in only one category. A pretty incredible way to identify upwards of 150 animals that all look pretty similar (to the uneducated observer, that is!).
Our lunch was packed for us so we got to have a great picnic on a grassy plain watching antelope and zebra graze around us.
The next day we had more meetings and may even have been able to hang out with the chimps at the sanctuary a bit. The sanctuary is pretty incredible, 250 acres of woodland forest for the chimps to live in during the day and fresh fruit and vegetables for every meal. Most of the plants in the chimp enclosure aren't fruiting or edible for the chimps so they can't survive on what they are able to forage from their environment. The two groups are separated by a river, and they only come into contact when they meet at the rivers' edge. They can't cross the river to get to one another, fortunately, as most of them don't know one another and they are pretty aggressive when they meet across the river.
I woke up quite early each morning, around sunrise. In the beginning I am sure this was just the jet lag, but by the end of the trip I think I had adjusted to the time and I was just in the swing of Kenya -- it's hard to stay up late when you're going to bed early. The sun sets there around 1830 and it's tough to stay up late when it's been dark for hours and hours. At least, that's how I felt. I don't think I stayed up much later than 2330 any night I was there.
Our fourth day we spent out doing game drives with Kim. I got better and better at identifying giraffe, and was getting pretty pleased with myself. I made a few misidentifications, but fortunately Kim could correct any mistakes I made pretty easily. I also got to see the giraffe that was named after me, which I thought was pretty awesome.
The weather started to turn around this time, and we had a late afternoon thunderstorm. Some of the storms were very brief, just rain and a bit of thunder. One storm lasted at least 30 minutes with pouring rain and thunder lighting right above us, huge puddles formed and the ground turned to muck. Kim's 4WD was the only thing that got us back to the research center that night, and the only thing that got us out again in the morning. It was curious how quickly the weather changed, we'd go from beautiful and sunny in the mornings (although there was quite a bit of golden mist in the mornings as ground-fog took effect from the previous days' rain) to stormy and windy in the evenings. Then beautiful and sunny again.
Alright, I think that concludes my first few days of travel. Next will come March Kenya Trip: The middle-ish, and March Kenya Trip: The ending.
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