Sweetwaters and Amboseli, part III

Good grief, this is getting long. I'm getting carried away. Oh, well. Birthday party went well. Fooled around with solar panels today, wiring together giant deep-cycle batteries and beautiful, beautiful BP solar panels. Seriously, they're amazing. It's this flashy-looking, surprisingly light, deep purple panel, and you put it in the sun and INSTANTLY you've got power flowing out of it. I love it. I kept expecting them to burst into flames or something, but no, they just sat there, miraculously producing energy in smug silence. Outrageous. Solar power is so cool. (Just turned twenty...? Or not. OH MY GOD SOLAR PANELS ARE LIKE SOOOOO TOTALLY COOL!)

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Moving on... Time to leave Sweetwaters and head for Amboseli National Park. Sometime back in 2005, Dan had ordered a safari van for our transport around Kenya. (Safari van = van with a roof you can push up). We'd been using Nick Georgiadis's Landrover the entire time, but Dan was getting antsier and antsier waiting for Joe The Mechanic to FINALLY deliver the safari van. Finally, we received word while at Sweetwaters that the van had come in, and Nick was going to drive it down and collect his Landrover. So, the day before we left for Amboseli, the van arrived. The van, quite simply, sucked. Actually, let's put that in present tense: it sucks. Each day, in fact, we discover a new way in which the van sucks. It has city tyres and very poor suspension, and does not have 4-wheel drive. This isn't a problem if you're in New Jersey. This IS a problem if you're trying to drive over rough terrain with 9+ people piled in, in a country which hasn't quite hopped on the paved-road bandwagon yet.

The first time we took it for a spin, there was an alarming scraping and clanking beneath the van, as the spare tire - bolted to the bottom - scraped against the highly-crowned road. Cursing Joe the Mechanic, Dan drove us back and we managed to unscrew the spare tire and put it in the trunk instead. Further problems arose when we loaded up the van - henceforth to be referred to as The Vengabus, which is what we named it - it looked dangerously low, just with our bags. We stood outside nervously while Dan darted around the van, crouching down to look underneath, examining the wheel wells, grumbling and swearing to himself about how low it was. We all piled in and he reexamined the van, swearing more loudly as he noted how much further it had sunk. But there was nothing for it - we set out down the bumpy Sweetwaters road. It still scraped every once in awhile, but generally held up well.

The drive to Nairobi took approximately four hours. We arrived at ICIPE in the evening, had dinner, ordered a bunch of Tuskers (a South African beer - by the way, Dad, I would buy you a t-shirt but your South African grad student already beat me to it, right?) and sat around talking. The instructor from our first course, Philip Muruthi, was supposed to stop by to chat and return our exams, but he never did, so Dan, Greg, Mark and I stayed up waiting for him till Dan gave up and broke into the beers he'd been saving for himself and Philip. We all stayed out there on the patio talking for some time, about all things Princeton and several other things as well. Dan got Greg fired up enough to write an email to TI, telling people to treat the club with more respect. I can see how you could think of Prof. Dan as arrogant and up in everyone's business, but my view is that he cares a lot about things, and takes upon himself a lion's share of responsibility. It's uncool to care, and we have an apathetic population. Is it arrogance to believe that you can fix things? I don't think so. Each day we spend here, I realize the value of the resources and abilities that any college graduate - no, any high school graduate - has to offer.

Slept, under tall white mosquito nets (I don't like the horrible diseases they're protecting me from, but I must admit, I love their gauzy, romantic draping), and woke for another of ICIPE's giant breakfasts: eggs, HUGE messes of thick bacon, sausages, cereal, fruit, toast, tea and coffee and juice... Of course, you don't have to eat all of it. I have a special affection for the huge bacon explosions.

We then drove to Prof. Jeanne Altmann's camp in Amboseli National Park. The drive was beautiful, through heavily-terraced red farmland, the farmers squeezing every square centimeter of arable land out of their properties. Banana trees and crops of every variety sprouted from the slopes, people and animals walking along the road or between the rows. There was a feeling of fertility, the land gradually growing greener and mountains starting to emerge as we got closer to Amboseli, till at last we reached Namanga, a settlement nestled at the base of a fuzzy-looking green mountains, our last major town before starting on the adventurous road to Amboseli. (We had no way of knowing just how adventurous it would be...) Stopping at a gas station in Namanga, we experienced the most intense tourist-mobbing we'd yet encountered. Amboseli is true Masai land, and even before the Vengabus pulled to a stop, dozens of Masai women had flocked to the windows, pushing their jewelery and crafts into the Vengabus and into our bewildered faces. By the time we stopped, it seemed like there were millions of them. They would do anything; literally pry open your hands and thrust bracelets into them, yelling out prices in dollars and shillings at an auctioneer's rate.

Overwhelmed, we refuelled and set out for Amboseli. The road was possibly the worst we'd yet encountered, which was rather characteristic of the whole Amboseli trip; here is a truly amazing, world-class national park, with one of the most famous and beautiful mountains in the world, wildlife that can be found nowhere else, and an unusual swamp system that makes an entire ecosystem possible. Yet the road leading to it is atrocious. Rocky, very highly crowned, and simply so bumpy you feel that your vehicle must surely shake apart at any moment. It doesn't look so bad - it's regular, raised from the rest of the ground, deliberately built of pale gravel, but to drive on it... Ay caramba. It's so bad, that hundreds of travellers have worn a secondary track to the side of the road, like a second lane that happens to be a meter or so lower than the other lane, and made of dirt. It was like riding a crazy rollercoaster; every so often a tree or hump in the topography would cut off the secondary track, and the Vengabus would go rolling up the side of the slope of the real road, like someone running up the side of the wall, and then curve back down to the secondary track. We were rattling like mad, going amazingly slowly nonetheless, when a terrible smell hit us.

It smelled rather like burning rubber, and after a few minutes of vain hope that it was external, we realized it was coming from the Vengabus. So we stopped, looked under the hood, checked the oil, discovered a mysterious and worrying drip coming from the engine, and ate our sandwiches while Dan scooted under the van to try and see what was going on. After a long, hot wait in the sun, Dan decided that we'd make it to Amboseli, and we kept going. The bad smell returned but then faded, and we made it without further incident to the gates of Amboseli. If you ever look at Amboseli National Park on a map, you'll notice what appears to be a grand, giant lake: Lake Amboseli. However, don't be fooled - Lake Amboseli dried up in the Pleistocene and now is a seasonal, shallow swamp. You can drive straight across it in the dry season. Jeanne told us that people show up occasionally with boats, asking where the lake is, and what this giant dustbowl is doing here when the map said Lake Amboseli...

After a quick detour to the main tourist lodging area to check out what manner of lifeblood was flowing from the van, we drove into the public campsite to our very own tents. We were met by the staff of our new camp, and Prof. Jeanne Altmann.