Briana's Travels

One of our favorite things to do is sit around in camp, while having a meal or tea, and tell what I call "war stories". Most of these stories involve close encounters of the animal or insect kind. For instance: the time someone only realized they were being stalked by lions when they walked back to their research camp in the Serengeti (Tanzania) one night when they woke up the next morning and found lion footprints all around their tent. The time a hippo charged a car in the Semliki Valley (Zaire), knocking it clear into the air and leaving tusk marks. The time an elephant crashed through the bush in Tsavo National Park (Kenya) to charge a car, whose driver immediately started going backwards to avoid being 'tusked', inconveniently went through a big puddle which splashed onto the engine, which made the engine die - so the two people in the now-stalled car were faced with an ear-flapping, trumpeting, pretty pissed off elephant. Thankfully, the car started again, and t...

So why am I in Kenya? To dig! So here are some photos and notes about digging. First, here are some tools of the trade. In this pile are brushes; hammers; chisels; dustpans; karais (the Swahili name for the metal basins we use to transport the sediment to piles to be screened, which I'll talk about in another post); plastic bags; toilet paper (no, not for *that*, for wrapping delicate specimens in!); gardening pads for kneeling or sitting on; and in the top left hand part of the photo, there is bone glue and bone hardener. The flip-flops are not excavation tools -- they're there because we have a no-shoes-in-the-excavation rule, so someone doesn't accidentally step on something and break it! Sometimes we dig with picks, especially at the start of an excavation to quickly get down to the layer where fossils or bones are coming from, and then we dig more carefully, with chisels, hammers, brushes, and even dental picks. What do we find? Fossils and stone tools! Here's one ...

Yesterday, something usual and something unusual happened. The usual thing, unfortunately, is that my car broke down. It's the one in the middle, with the mechanic, would-be mechanics, and general onlookers pondering it's open hood. :( After much collective examination, several attempts to push start it (Land Cruisers are HEAVY!) ending in a successful push start - which I could not photograph since I was usually in the driver's seat, and hypotheses of dead batteries and broken starter motors, the current hypothesis involves screwy wiring. I'm in Nairobi today, partly to get the car fixed - so we'll see. I'm pretty excited about having a nice long hot shower! The unusual thing that happened is that it rained. In the morning! We hardly get rain here during July and August, normally maybe once in a season, in the late afternoon - a softly falling rain that gets soaked into the dry, thirsty ground within minutes. The other morning we saw very dark grey clouds, and ...

I was going to write about our excavations, but I had to change topics after the spectacular moonrise we had this evening. It's a full moon tonight (or nearly so), and early this evening this soft glowing orange orb was visible just above the horizon after sunset, rising ever higher, and becoming ever brighter, into the starry night sky. There is nothing like watching a moonrise in the African bush. I would have taken a picture of it after it rose, but I don't have the photographic expertise - here's one I took of the full moonrise last year. Last night, the moon was so bright that when I got up in the middle of the night to pee (a sign I'm keeping well hydrated!), it was casting shadows everywhere, and I didn't even need my flashlight. It's perfectly gorgeous. The moon isn't the only gorgeous thing here - beauty can be found growing delicately among the rocks, or singing a song in the trees, in the form of a colorful red and yellow barbet.

Many of you know I'm a runner, in some shape or form. I never thought I would be, since I hated running when I had to do it in high school for tennis, ski team, or soccer practice, but I picked it up while I was living in South Africa. At that time, I was living in the Free State Province, which is full of open skies and flat roads by big farms.I was was there learning how to identify animal bones at a research station about 45 minutes from the nearest town, and there wasn't much else to do - so I started running with some people who lived in the research center compound, and surprised myself with how much I liked it. I'm not a very fast runner, but I enjoy it for many reasons besides that proverbial "runner's high" - it helps me sleep better and feel better, physically, emotionally, and mentally. I don't "train" for races, because that implies some sort of schedule and work, while I think of running as fun. (I'm running in the Army Ten Miler...

Another camp essential that gets set up in the first day is the "bathroom" (burlap-wrapped wood stakes around a long drop with a toilet seat of sorts) -- -- and the "shower stall": another burlap-wrapped stall with a solar shower, a big (usually black on one side, clear on the other) plastic bag full of water that gets heated by the sun all day as it lies black side up on the ground. And speaking of solar things, a key component of camp is our "solar system". We use solar panels to capture solar energy, which we feed into a special battery (like a car battery), which we attach a plug strip to, and voila! Power. Power for computer batteries, portable printers, and charging our Kenyan cell phones. Within the last 2 years, one of the two cell phone companies in Kenya put a tower up at the top of the rift fairly close to our camp (within a 45 min drive or so), and now we get cell phone coverage in camp. It's been really helpful for communication and logist...

It's great to be back in camp. I was immediately struck by how quiet it sounded when I opened my car door upon arrival - ah, leaving the city far behind! (Well, about an hour and a half behind, technically). But then I realized there are lots of sounds here - the constant chatter and chirping of birds; the tinkling of cow bells, as herds of Maasai animals wander by in the valley below our camp cliff; and the occasional vehicle driving on the paved road, which our camp is located a few hundred meters from, on a dirt road. As Kay (one of the researchers working with us) put it last night, at the dinner table on her first night in camp, it seems like the whole year is just working towards getting back here. Here's what the camp looks like from the air; I took this picture from a small plane, flying low overhead, in 2005. The first few days always consist of a lot of setting up, including all of the tents(here are two pictures of my tent from last year).

After a hectic last day doing all the last minute things I left until... the last minute, I made it to our field camp on Monday. A few days before that, we dropped off our Kenyan crew members, who would work hard to set up our fantastic camp on a cliff overlooking eroded hills. Here's a view of the lorry - uh, truck, in American - which drives all our gear down to the site. One of our oldest excavators, Vincent, loves to climb on top of the lorry and be at least partly in charge of unloading. He has amazing energy, even at the end of the day as the sun is starting to hide behind some clouds. Here are several of our crew members, carrying one of our gas-powered refrigerators from the lorry. Having a fridge on a dig is quite a luxury; it means cold water in the middle of the hot days, and the ability to keep food for days on end. One of our drivers normally goes back to Nairobi once a week to buy fresh food. We don't have any electricity in camp. All our food is cooked on gas sto...

My week or so in Nairobi was a blur of errands and seeing old friends and colleagues. This included hosting a dinner party of sorts, where I supplied the location and friends cooked up a yummy pork pilau, and going out to dinner at the usual places - Furasato (delicious sushi, yes, in Kenya!); Tamambo (where I got my usual, the ostrich fajitas); Open House (mmmm Indian food in Nairobi is fabulous); and Trattoria (Italian). Unfortunately, a few friends decided to walk home from Trattoria on a quiet Sunday night, and one got her purse snatched. Fortunately, she didn't have much money in it, but she did lose her US bank card and her Kenyan cell phone. It's not nicknamed Nairobbery for nothing. Part of my week was making sure our 4 existing field project vehicles were fixed, going to pick up our brand new project vehicle (forget a fancy sportscar, give me a bush-worthy Land Cruiser any day!), renting a vehicle, and getting my own vehicle. Which was not in the best of shape, frustra...