masharti

We traded the Creels for a second helping of researchers from Montana who must have spent a considerable amount of time hoping for an African adventure lacking ease. Their own travels were delayed a day due to airplane mechanics and so the story goes from there. We took them to the Nairobi orphanage on the way out of town, no sooner had we bought our tickets and taken one step past the covered walkway into the coverless park that it started pouring down rain. My head didn’t even get wet, that is how instantaneous the rain had been with step one. Getting our money back wasn’t an option though and we could barely get the guy behind the desk to let us come back tomorrow. The orphanage is amazing by the way. It was worth the delay to enjoy a private tour the next morning. We held two week old baby cheetahs and stood a chain link fence width away from numerous roaring lions. Our guide also told us that the friendly, fluffy, spotted hyena that we were petting was 22 years old. Kenya likes to give you full control of your own safety. There is no moat around the predator cages keeping you, mindlessly, at a respectable distance. My age conforms me to my own fears so I didn’t need the four-inch minimum spacing requirements between bars to keep me from trying to stick my head inside the rhinoceros’s pen - although if you were caravanning with small children I wouldn’t expect their safety to already be managed for you.

Well Happy Birthday America – Sam’s birthday was the day before and we successfully baked a cake for her over the campfire. Then we colored the icing green and I wrote the word PLANT on it out of cookies and candles. Sam’s research includes vegetation monitoring and she jokingly, in comparison to Paul’s exciting carnivore project, says that she just studies plants. I meant to write PLANTS, but ran out of room and hence made her research seem even more specialized. After devouring the baked goods and a bottle of wine, we wished her a happy birthday and apologized in advance since we were going to have to beat her up the following day due to her British heritage.

The next day brought us lion number four which we named Esipata, meaning freedom or truth in Maasai – opinions tend to vary. She was one of the females in Ren’s pride, the male we collared at the end of May. He had been evading us for a few days when we went out to track him, but as we were sitting there waiting for one of the lionesses to get close to us, he meandered on over and butted his way into the carcass feast. We sat patiently while he took his turn, but when he fell asleep at the dinner table three hours into our stake out we unapologetically started up the car to wake him up. The offering was big this time - an entire Zebra that had died from drought. An attempt to partition the carcass led to the release of gases that were still building up in the bloated animal. Instead, Vicki and Chris helped Paul tie it up to the back of the truck and they dragged it across Shompole to an area we were expecting the lions to be. The trail of this process led to some curious phone calls from the rangers in the area.

A few days later we put Chris and Vicki on the bus so they could go to the Maasai Mara. Six in the morning and already jam packed with people, they said they were basically hanging out the door. An hour into their trip they stopped in Magadi and virtually everyone on the bus was kicked off except for the three wazungu, white people. A school choir group had chartered the bus from there to Nairobi, but the drivers must have realized that the white folks wouldn’t know what to do if they were kicked off in this random little town. Two days later we drove back to Nairobi ourselves to renew our overdue car insurance. On the way to the insurance agency we got pulled over by the cops. This has never happened before - ever. They don't have vehicles so they just stand in the middle of the road and flag you down. Paul tried several times to talk his way out of this situation. "They never sent us a reminder notice - can't I just go get it and bring it back to you - how about a warning?" - all to no avail. We had to take a cop with us to escort us to the police station where Paul tried several more times to get the lieutenant to just let us pay our fine and leave. Tickets can’t be mailed or paid on the side of the road so your time, the policeman’s time, the court’s time is taken up for every single traffic violation. We sat in the police parking lot while ACC went and got our renewed stickers and delivered them to us. They assured us that, though rather inefficient, this was standard procedure. Court was Monday morning – but first we were going to Mt Kenya.

We drove to Mt. Kenya with Chris and Vicki for their last night. We stayed at a place called Mountain Lodge where every room has a balcony and view of the watering hole. At dinner they bring around a list of animals and you can check off which ones you would like to be woken up for if they come during the night. We were feeling pretty lucky already because we had just gotten back from our all day hike up the slopes of the mountain when they met us at the door with champagne and as we walked up to the window a herd of elephants came down into view. There was a pond of clean water closer to the lodge that the elephants prefer and a few of them walked over to take a drink and scratch their butts on a cement cylinder. Champagne glasses in hand, we walked downstairs to the underground viewing deck that took you about 20 yards away from where they were. Dessert came with a song and a certificate congratulating each of us on our hiking accomplishment. The lodge is full of little surprises like this and before we left on our hike that morning they had asked Paul to write down each of our names. There was some question over the handwriting and they deciphered correctly all but one name. Paul Schnette – congratulations on climbing to 10499 feet.

Monday morning rolled around and after waiting around for a couple of hours for the judge to even show up in a room dedicated to traffic violations, each case came personalized with the choice of a monetary sum or a jail term. Paul's choice was 6000 shillings or 2 months in jail. The menu of options must have been rather enticing, or Paul was just lacking his morning coffee, because he combined the two and said, "I'll take 6 months." The judge luckily asked for clarification and he answered, “Yeah, I’ll just pay.”

mwalimu

Before Paul had any animals collared last year he had to take a visiting friend to the Nairobi zoo to see a lion. Many wageni, tourists, come on African safaris hoping to get a glimpse of a lion living in the wild. They replace the bars of the cage with the steel of the vehicle - I’ve yet to see anyone willing to replace all barriers with fate. Lazy carnivores make this search difficult and national park regulations about driving after dark, you can’t, curb those chances even more. Keeping that in mind, a week ago we arrived back at camp with Paul's advisor, Scott and the whole Creel family. His daughters, 12 and 13 years of age, were on their first African safari. Their first night in camp, second day in the country, we took them on a game drive and tracked one of the lions. We found Mwanzo, the lioness, saw a hunt, and saw her and another lioness kill a zebra. Not only was it their first lion hunt and kill – it was my first lion hunt and kill; it was the Kenyan’s we had with us in the car first lion hunt and kill. What’s next? We had a lot to live up to with the remaining portion of this trip. Somehow we found a way to put icing on that cake by collaring another male lion a few days later. He hasn’t been officially named, but there has been some talk about his name being something like, 7 People and a Dog, because those were the contents of the truck when we found him. With a little man handling the little Jack Russell, Diesel, managed to keep relatively quiet throughout the whole procedure. I envisioned placing him on the lion to get a good picture, but
I decided that that might be pushing the limits of various ethical and security arguments.

Hyena hunting went a little bit slower. They managed to steal the bait once and evade the whole situation altogether most of the rest of the time. In fact, instead of us catching a hyena with our professional gear, one of our camp dogs, Monster, managed to get herself snared by a homemade version lingering somewhere along the river. She came up to me in the morning dragging a long piece of old metal. It extended into a loop around her neck pulled pretty tightly though she seemed to have forgotten about it already. The fact that she was dragging it meant that she was able to snap it loose from whatever tree it was tied to so it must have been an old trap. What its intended target was is a mystery.

Before closing the Creel chapter of this year, we took them to visit a couple of the schools. The children greeted us with practiced song and dance routines and the story was the same at both schools; they had qualified for the countrywide competition, but couldn’t afford to go. We introduced ourselves and left them with some school supplies collected from visitors of the research center. Then Scott’s daughters showed a video that they had made of students from their school. One of the teachers said that she was pretty sure that that was the first time 90 percent of the children had ever seen a computer screen. The video showed little clips of various school subjects and then a bunch of the students were asked what they liked to do for fun. Being a school in Montana, I think about 95 percent of them said that they liked to ski. The girls thought this through and realized that children in a remote, arid part of Kenya probably didn’t know what skiing was, let alone snow. So they included some snapshots of snowy mountaintops and people skiing. The children pushed and shoved for a better view of the screen and another one of the teachers turned to me and asked, “So what subject in school is skiing?”