Long description of a long distance travelled

ed. note: this is post-dated. I started writing after getting into Mpala, but I was tired and fell asleep before finishing it.

We drove from Nairobi to Mpala today. Most of the length of the drive was through fairly populated areas, and in many ways that landscape seemed familiar. Along the highway were the sorts of buildings you might find on a back road in San Martin, a very small town near Morgan Hill: lots of fruit stands (here, selling fresh mangoes and bananas. I had a delicious mango for breakfast this morning, although I didn't get it from a stand) and old wooden buildings (although in CA they would usually be abandoned farm/orchard buildings, and here they are stores and churches and restaurants and homes, which are clearly not abandoned). The plants and the soil near Nairobi reminded me of Hawaii, in a vague way. The landscape was tropical, but clearly home to lots of people, and vehicles. The hand-painted signs on stores and the markets made from improvised materials was a lot like Mexico, as were the large number of people travelling around by foot. After about an hour of driving, we were out of the urban/suburban area. While there was a lot of agriculture in Nairobi and the surrounding area- plots of corn and banana trees were tucked into most of the available space, and there were large fields of coffee along the roadside- this land was more used for grazing. At one point it seemed that the terrain was pretty much indistinguishable from some parts of California: lots of rolling hills and some flat fields covered in brown grass, sometimes crossed by fences or railroads.

While there were definitely aspects of scenery in these areas that were distinctly African, like the signs in Swahili or the ubiquitous ads for Safaricom, the number one Kenyan phone service, these parts of the drive did not seem that foreign to me, or if it was foreign, a sort of usual type of foreign. Once we entered Nanyuki, however, and left the highway for dirt roads, things did start to change.

For one thing, we started seeing weird animals. Well, first the landscape was different. You could see more shrubs in the far-away grasslands, and more of the sort of plants you would associate with the Lion King rather than a nearby abandoned field. Then we saw zebras. It was like noticing cows on a nearby hill from your car, but they were striped. And they were zebras.
As we kept driving, the shrub cover moved in closer to the road, and you could imagine travel photos looking like the view from the comvee up the dirt road. For the most part, the only animals we could see were cattle and goats, but it seemed much more conceivable that there might be a giraffe. And then Josephine saw a giraffe. I squealed like a 15-year-old being introduced to [insert male pop-star here. Or the twilight guy]. I didn't get any pictures, since we were in a moving vehicle, but there was definitely a giraffe.

Pretty soon we entered into wholesale savannah. There were acacias and big rock formations, and an electric fence to keep the rhinos in (or out, depending on whether you're an optimist or pessimist). We saw a herd of impala, a few antelope, two cape buffalo, and one dik dik, which is a ridiculously cute, amusingly small deer (deer-chibi, if you will) that I will probably mention frequently. The drive from Nanyuki to Mpala was long, since we were on very bumpy dirt roads, but it was in no way boring. We all had our faces up against the windows, taking in the scenery and searching the landscape for other animals. Well, I did, but as a consequence I can't really speak for Sam or Jo. Our driver was very friendly and accomodating, stopping for us to gawk at the pretty commonplace impala and antelope, and telling us about the landmarks we passed.

Mpala research center was everything I hoped for, and more. As soon as we got there they fed us. The area is open, and the buildings blend in well with the surrounding vegetation. While Nairobi was permeated with the unpleasant hydrocarbon smell of exhaust and burning charcoal, Mpala just smells like the outdoors. Our housing accommodations are lovely. Josephine and I share a 7-person suite, and Sam has one all to himself. There are indoor toilets and mosquito nets and the keys are the old-fashioned rod-and-flaps-of-metal type that they use in cartoon prisons. I finally feel legitimately excited to start my semester here, not just an excited mix of anxiety, uncertainty, confusion, doubt and disbelief.