My Last Week!

Hi everyone!! I know I've been slacking on my blog! I'm very sorry! Everything is still going very well in Tanzania. I spent the past two weeks on my directed research project. I finally finished the paper on Saturday. It ended up being only 22 pages, which was surprising because I thought it would be more, but I think it turned out well. It's definitely a relief to have it finished!

So tomorrow we have our community presentations. We've been told we could have as many as 100 people come to watch us. I'm a little nervous, but I think it will be cool to get the chance to present all of our findings to the people who really live here, and who are influened by the things we studied.

My individual project went well. I took park in the Wildlife Ecology project on baboons. My study focused on the interactions of adult male and infant olive baboons living in both Lake Manyara National park and in the surrounding villages. After spending eight full days observing the baboons I've definitely learned a lottt about them. It was a very interesting topic for my first real research opportunity, and I had a lot of fun.

We spent most days in Lake Manyara National Park and I have a good story from one of the days there....

This is my 'scary' story...One day we went to the hot springs in the park. The springs area is one place in the park that pepole can get out of their cars to look around and strech out. To see the small streams we had to get out of our car and walk down a bunch of rock stairs. Everyone was at the top of the hill reading about the hot springs, but I couldn't see the sign so I decided to just start walking down the steps. As I walked down the stairs I was focusing on the springs down below because there were bushes around us so I couldn't see much of what was beyond the small streams. When I reached the bottom I was looking down at the water wondering how hot it was and if I should try to touch it (my friend had touched it the day before and said it was really hot, but it didn't burn her). Then after a few seconds I looked up for the first time, and there was a giant, lone buffalo standing less than 50 yards from me just staring at me. Buffalo are the second dangerous animals in Africa (after the hippo) beacuse they are very territorial and get aggressive if anything/one encroaches on their space. So when I saw him I froze, because I know they are not extremely safe to be around. I was only down by myself for a little while and then all my friends came down the steps behind me. I told them to be quiet and nodded toward the buffalo. One of my friends decided to take a couple steps closer....and the buffalo did nottt like that. It lowered its head towards the ground and then threw himself up and forward and started running at us while grunting loudly. Apparently he only took about three steps, and then stopped, but I didn't see that because I had done a complete 180 and SPRINTED up the stairs. I was very scared, but maybeee overreacted a little bit. Everyone else was still standing at the bottom laughing at me because he never came close to us but just made a bluff charge.

I, of course, hear multiple jokes about buffalo daily. Everyone makes fun of me for my reaction, but I was very scared!! I could laugh about it later on but I never went back down the stairs. Needless to say, I do not like buffalo haha. Since then my friends found a tshirt with a giant mean buffalo face on it that says HAVE A NICE DAY!! under it. They made me buy it. Its very funny, and I wear it all the time. So thats my scary story. It really wasn't a big deal at all...so don't worry. Just made for a good story.

So anyway, I can't beleive I'm leaving in 5 days. I'm sad to leave, but also excited to see everyone at home. My mom and I will be in London and Paris from the 8th-14th, and then after than I'm going to Barcelona until the 23rd to stay with my two best guy friends from school Tommy and Brian. Tommy has been studying in Barcelona all semester, and Brian has been in London. I'm very excited to see some of Europe. Magz has been planning out our schedule and I think we will get to see a lot. I will write another post before I leave, and then probably one last one about Europe.

Hope all is well at home. SEE EVERYONE SOON : )

DR Pictures

This is a picture of the forests of Lake Manyara National Park. Some parts of the park are very dense and feel like a rainforest. This is where we observed the majority of baboon troops we saw for DR data collection. We never saw any predators here but it was one of my favorite parks because it was so pretty. There were a lot of sections that were very open and dry and African like, but the extra foresty parts were really cool.

This is Lake Manyara National Park's Serena hotel. Every park we have been to has had a Serena hotel. We've been to the Amboseli, Tsavo, Serengeti, and Lake Manyara Serenas. These are the lodges we go to for lunch buffets, drinks and swimming. This hotel was definitely the prettiest. In the background you can see Lake Manyara National Park. The dark green is the park forest and then the blue and light green is Lake Manyara. The edge of the pool is just at the top of the Manyara escarpment, so its a beautiful view looking out over the park. Inside the lodge is also gorgeous. Living in Africa for three months has made us all really, reallly appreciate the good food and elegant atmosphere the lodges provide. They are always a really nice break from the regular African food and tents!

One day during our DR data collection we were in the village looking for baboons troops. We were driving through a small part of the village, that was basically like a small neighborhood, and one man told us he knew where baboons like to hang out. He led us to his house and then we got out of our Land Cruiser and walked through some trees and bushes to get to his yard. Behind his house was a huge banana plantation/forest/farm. Every direction we looked was just banana trees. They were so pretty, and really cool! The trees looked very tropical. Above is a picture of a bunch of bananas. Each bunch had a large purple flower that would grow out from the fruit. The bananas in the picture aren't ripe yet, they are supposed to be yellow, buttt we do have green and red bananas here in Tanzania that we eat a lot. We only had the green ones in Kenya. They are small and less firm and a little sweeter than normal, and the red ones are huge and taste kinda different, but they are hard to explain. SO anyway, after trecking through the gorgeous banana trees we got to more woods and saw some baboons playing high in the trees. They were much more skittish than park baboons so they stayed too far away for us to record any observations, but it was a lot of fun to see them in the village woods.

Rows of Banana trees.

Chelsea and me in the Banana Forest.