Briana's Travels

I'm happy to report that the intercontinental travel went well! We said a hug-filled goodbye to Daddy who dropped us off at Dulles airport at about 3:30pm on July 4th. Toby kept entertained at the gate with a new pirate-themed activity book - you can see our plane in the background. He paid close attention to the safety announcement... ... and found the games on the screen amazingly quickly! He slept for about 3 hours on the flight from Dulles to Heathrow (7 hours). When we got off the flight, we asked if the captain could sign Toby's flight log (he got a kids flight log on his first flight on American Airlines when he was 4 months old), which the captain was very happy to do - he even invited Toby to sit in the cockpit! We had about 3 hours to kill in Heathrow until our flight to Kenya; we rested, we ate breakfast, and we played in the "family lounge". Toby settled in well for the flight from Heathrow to Nairobi (8 ...

The travel blog is baaaaaack! But with a big change from the last time I was keeping it updated... now it's for me and Toby! Cue the cute photo. We're leaving for nearly two months in Kenya tomorrow. Bags are packed. Electronic devices are charged. Checklists are completed. Malarone (anti-malarial medication) is started. I guess that means we're ready...? (gulp) Here's our basic itinerary, with a map: We'll be in Nairobi (purple dot) for about 2.5 weeks, while I do research on fossils from an archaeological site called Olorgesailie - I've been working on this project for quite a while! Then we'll spend a few days in Baringo District in a town called Mogotio (red dot) where I'll be helping to facilitate a 1.5 day workshop on evolution for Kenyan high school biology teachers. We'll drive back to Nairobi, then leave the next day for Ol Pejeta Conservancy (blue dot) for about a month of fieldwork studying the bones of modern animals. I...

The 6:30am wake-up call was Samweli coming to our tents with hot water and a choice of coffee or tea. Turns out Jen is a coffee drinker – one of those people who needs coffee to get started in the morning. I opted for tea, but after the first morning found that the black tea was too strong for my stomach without any food so I just had a cup of hot water. After we got dressed, he came with a basin of hot water for a morning face and hand wash. It was very hot water – it must have been just boiled. We often had to wait for the morning washing water to cool down before we could even use it. Not that I'm complaining! Kilimanjaro coffee! Kilimanjaro tea! We were called to the mess tent for breakfast, and had the pleasure of seeing a blue monkey in a tree above us! It's hard to see, but there's a monkey in that tree. We had a big, delicious, hot breakfast. I love eating big breakfasts, so this was right up my alley. Jen is more of a smaller-meal-eat-more...

(I'm writing these posts after the climb is done, hence the date discrepancy between the post title and the published date.) I climbed Kilimanjaro with my friend and colleague Jen. Jen recently finished her dissertation (I was on her PhD committee) and is one of a handful of people out there that basically does the same kind of research I do. She also just got a tenure track job in San Diego, so she was heading back home to pack her things and move after the climb. Jen and I get along very well, and we both know a decent amount of Kiswahili (sometimes just called Swahili), the main language of Tanzania and Kenya from spending several years doing research there. I thought we would make great climb companions, and we did. We had invited several other friends and colleagues we knew to join us, but in the end it was just us. Jen and I started the day with a delicious breakfast at our hotel at 7:00am – thankfully, it came faster than dinner had the night before, which was more...