Briana's Travels

A few friends, after hearing I got engaged, emailed with something like "Congrats! But who is Peter? How did you meet him?" So here's the story... I was a freshman in college, thinking I was going to major in English Literature (I wanted to be a poet, perhaps) or Comparative Literature (maybe translate for the UN?). During my first semester, I quickly realize three important things during my first semester: 1) I didn't actually *like* literary criticism. 2) I wasn't nearly fluent in Italian - which I realized every week when I went to my Italian literature class, taught in Italian, and had very little idea what was going on 3) I like anthropology. What the heck is anthropology, I thought, I'd never heard of it! Anyway, I realized that I wasn't allergic to science, and I decided to take a geology class on the history of the earth my second semester. This was waaaay back in prehistoric 1994. Peter was my TA for that class, and I had a crush on him (Aw, cute!...

I'll start the Peter visit story with his arrival. His flight was scheduled to arrive at 6:30 am, which is about the worst possible time because allowing for the hour or so post-arrival time to get through passport control and baggage claim, driving back from the airport to Nairobi would be right during rush hour. And rush hour traffic in Nairobi is awful. But thankfully, he was arriving on a Sunday, when there is relatively little traffic. However, even in my sleepy state at 6am when I woke up that morning I thought to call the airport to see if his flight was on time - and it wasn't, it was delayed by about 3 hours. I tried to go back to sleep, but I was too excited about his arrival to do more than doze a little. (As an aside - Peter's flight home from Nairobi was delayed, too, due to a herd of zebra on the runway. Yes, at the international airport, I kid you not. Gotta love it!) Anyway, I ended up getting to the airport about 15 minutes after Peter had gotten out with h...

Well I was going to start at the beginning of Peter's visit to Kenya, and build up the anticipation and waiting, but several of my friends have clamored for me to tell them about the proposal. So here it is...! After this, I'll go back to the beginning of Peter's visit, and go forward from there. It was a dark and stormy night. Just kidding! But actually, it was a dark and stormy afternoon. Earlier that day, we had taken a dhow trip; a dhow is a traditional Swahili fishing boat, and taking day-long dhow trips is one of the more common ways to spend a day in Lamu. Here's a picture of a smaller dhow, named Hakuna Matata (yes that really does mean no problems in Kiswahili and people really do say it), which I venture to think had a bit of a matata since it was grounded in the sand and looked relatively unused. But let me back up just briefly... Peter had been visiting me in Kenya for about a week at that point. We'd spent several days in the excavation camp, which I wi...

I have so much to say about Peter's visit to Kenya, which was wonderful... but I am far too tired to say anything now except WE'RE ENGAGED!! I am incredibly happy, but sad that I dropped him off at the airport a few hours ago and we won't see each other for about a month now. I will post lots more about his visit and the proposal over the next two weeks, so stay tuned.

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 ...