Tanzania

to finish off my bit about Kenya, I'll tell you about our guide, Dominique. he's been a safari guide for 25 years and I have to say he is very good at his job. In fact, we like him so much we decided to prank him. Now, Chloe has this stuffed animal, a rat, named Pinky. Dominique has told us a few grisly stories about animals in cars, so we decided to have Pinky attack someone while on safari. The perfect moment came when Kirsten was in the front seat. We were driving slowly to avoid speed bumps, there was a bush nearby that an animal could jump out of, and we no one was expecting it. Kirsten stuck her hand out the window.

"Hey, what's that thing? oh my god! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!! WAAAAAH!"

Dominique screamed as Kirsten shoved a flailing animal that was attached to her arm in his face. he tried to jump out of the car, but not before hitting the brakes with enough force to propel my face into the seat in front of me and shoot 8 year old Chloe onto the floor. Ouch.

Once we all started laughing, Dominique told Kirsten to get out of the car. She didn't, but it made us laugh even harder. I don't think he ever thought it was funny, but we're still laughing at it.

Now we have a new guide named Daniel, and he took a wild animal it the face a lot better than Dominique. If any of you know my stuffed monkey Pedro, you can imagine what happened. same thing, but with baboons surrounding us, Pedro on the attack, and Chris as the lead actor. it was also quite entertaining. Daniel's nick name is Mamba, which means Crocodile in Swahili. The first place we visited with him was the fabulous Ngorongoro crater, which has a self contained ecosystem. We went on an early morning safari to see the twilight hours through the eyes of a wildebeest. The view was fantastic, because the clouds were pouring over the rim of the crater and into the center like an overflowing vanilla latte. The clouds were tinged pink from the rising sun, and the zebras and wildebeest were enjoying the peace that comes when the lions get a fresh kill. We also saw the lions with that fresh kill, and watched as one cub stole a hunk of bloody meat from another.that was pretty fantastic.

After this whole ordeal, we went to the expansive Serengeti National Park, which was named after the Masai word (seringet) that means "Endless Place." For good reason too! The place is over 14,000 square miles of plains, forest and water, based roughly on the annual wildebeest migration, which was what we came here for. The migration is when almost 2 million wildebeest and almost as many zebras migrate around Tanzania and Kenya and face dangers such as crocodiles, hyenas, lions, raging rivers, and their own stupidity. Zebras are significantly smarter than wildebeests, they let the fools take most of their falls for them.

we also have seen several different species having a bit of fun, if you know what I mean. We've seen gazelles, lions, vultures and baboons, all fornicating. Actually, I saw two different sets of baboons going at it, and one couple with a bit of disgusting evidence. Must be mating season.

Now we're at a hotel in Arusha waiting for our various cars to take us to our various flights to various places. We have some slow Internet, which is allowing me to type this right now. I'll take some time to answer some questions here, because I just went through all the comments. Sorry, no one has asked to buy my dad yet. I guess I'm just more beautiful than him. Camel tastes musty,but you have to take about an hour to chew one bite of it. Sorry for the responsibility Leo, but I think you can handle it ;0. I'll try to get you all some souvenirs, but IT'S SO HARD TO GET EVERYBODY STUFF! I got Katy some sugar packets though. and I got Methi a hat from Egypt. and about a million post cards.

Well, I have to go. Meanwhile, the baboons and lions are smoking their cigarettes.

Maasai

Sorry for the delay in postings, but we've been lacking in the internet department as of late. We just finished our safari in Kenya, and now we're in a hotel for lunch in Tanzania. I'll just talk about Kenya here, because we've only been in Tanzania for a few hours. Kenya is surprisingly green for the dry season, but it's also ridiculously dusty. We all enjoyed the roads (by "we" I mean the eight of us, Kirsten Steketee, her husband Chris Morscheck, their kids Chloe and Sarah, and Kirsten's cousin Kim, plus her husband, Chris. Yeah. Two Chris's) with all the potholes and speedbumps, and dad and I got a taste of Montezuma's african cousin, coloblo. Dad came up with the name, he made it sound like a Swahili word. I've learned about thirty words in Swahili, and I'm trying to learn a song called Kenya Best in Swahili.

The people here are very different from what I'm used to. There are 54 different tribes in Kenya, and more than a hundred in Tanzania. If you ask someone what tribe they are from, you do't get a short answer, you get the name of the tribe, an idea of the language, and what the tribe is famous for. Our guide, Dominique, is from a tribe famous for carving. fdon't remember the name though.

the most interesting of the people though, based solely on looks, is the Maasai. there are a lot of Maasai, and they do wierd things to their bodies. They get their ears pierced, then weigh down the earrings to turn the peaircing into a big hole. Sometimes the earlobes touch the shoulders! We went to a Maasai village and watched them dance and sing. We leaerned two Maasai words (Ashay is thank you and sopa is hello) and danced with them. Most of them had shaved heads, but some had long, braided hair. While they were dancing one of the ones with hair hit me with it. The Maasai live in little huts made out of cow crap. the wives build the houses and the termites eat it. The Maasai are poligamist and a man can buy a wife for 6 to 7 cows. I'm kinda curious as to how that works. Does the man haggle for a price with the father of the girl? It's all quite wierd.
On the topic of the actual safari, we saw a TON of animals. We saw lions, leopards, vervet monkeys, baboons, cheetahs, hyenas, girraffes, elephants, zebras, all sorts of songbirds, a bat eared fox, warthogs, jackals, hippos, thompsons gezzelle, impalas cape buffalo and ostriches. There was a big swamp where hippos and elephants stayed all day, and a road running through it. A bunch of elephants were on the road, and a little baby one got mad at us when we tried to pass it. It bellowed more loudly than I imagined possible, then ran into the water. It also ran into papa, who bellowed and threw the kid into the water, both of the protesting loudly. We were also chased by two different Cape buffalo and we were threatened by a baboon. We frightened warthogs on multiple occasions, and I have to tell you, they're hilarious. When they run their tails go up like radio antennae and they book it. I gotta go. more later.

Kenya

I am typing this from our room in my favorite hotel in all of Africa. We’re in Kenya now, and this hotel is home to the biggest swimming pool in the country of Kenya. It really is a cool pool, it looks like part of the landscape and it’s surrounded by plants of all kinds. I’m glad to see some green after being in Cairo! We’ve learned some politics (they just had a regime change here last year, it was messy for a while with riots, but things have calmed down a bit and now Kenya has a more democratic check and balance system between two political parties. We are learning some Swahili words (jambo is hello), and we’re starting to get used to the currency. One American dollar is worth about 75 Kenyan shillings. Leo! Thanks for the comment. Tell everyone else that if they don’t say anything then I won’t bring them any souvenirs.
At the airport today (at 4 am) we met two guys from America. One of them was actually from Oregon: he lived in Salem on Battle Creek, only around 10 miles away from us. The guy and his friend were studying in Cairo to learn Arabic, and they talked to us for an hour or so. There were a total of 3 major and bizarre coincidences with this guy: he was from Oregon, He was in the same flight as us, and he’d spent three months at my dad’s hometown Ketchikan, Alaska. They were really interesting ad we discussed all sorts of things with him.
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We started taking preventative malaria medication yesterday; hopefully it won’t have any bad side effects. Dad brought a different type of medication in case we react badly to this stuff. I haven’t seen any elephants yet, but I’ll tell you guys when I do. I have seen some cool art though. I think I’ll have to bring something of that sort home just because it’s so different. The plants here are very different too; I’ve taken about thirty pictures of flowers alone. The weather is perfect and this place is like a bird sanctuary with all the calls I’m hearing right now. The sky is a ridiculously dark and pure shade of blue, it’s like there’s no air pollution at all. Needless to say, I like it here. I guess that’s just my green hippie child side showing itself. More later.
~Kelly
P.S. We just finished dinner. I had beef, pork, chicken, turkey, lamb, goat, camel and crocodile. Crocodile is salty.

more pictures

I'll throw some more pictures up here while we still have internet. Top to bottom:

Nile from botanical gardens

camel purse being sold on streets

Nubian sailor on our sailboat

Temple ruins

Pyramid and smog in Cairo

Antelope, Vultures, Locusts and Nubians

(Pictures: Top: unfinish oblisk. Middle: bird at botanical gardens. Bottom: pheonix hyroglyphic)Well, sorry for the delay in the posts, but our cruise was lacking in the intenet area. I haven't posted in five days, so I think I'll just start where I left off to avoid confusion. Well, we left Luxor at about two (a bit late due to winds) and headed off towards the locks. We had to go under this bridge on the way, and since we were one of about 400 cruise boats on the Nile, it was quite a race. It was quite terrifying, really, because there was a boat on each side of us trying to go throught eh same space as us, where there was only room for two boats. I feared shipwreck, but the crew perservered (screaming at the other boats the whole time to stop) and we went through ahead of the rest. After all this excitement plus dinner, we went back to our little room for the night. Then we heard it.
"Hallo?! Hallo! Open de weendow!" So we opened the window(it was more like a glass door) and looked down to see this man standing up in a little row boat yelling up at us.
"English?" He said.
"Yes! American!" Dad called back.
"Welcome to Alaska!" (that's the catch phrase they use for Americans) "look at this!" He held up some scarf or something. Then he chucked it at us. It flew up while we cowered in fear of it's fate and went right into the room. This kicked off a storm of crap flying up four stories throught the window while we protested and tried to throw it back. The guy tried to buy me for a few camels (I'm really getting sick of these sexist egyptians.) while continuing to attack us with flying linens, shirts and scarves. We finally bought a tablecloth and napkins to stop the continuos flow of junk through the window. it took dad about 15 minutes to get the price down from 600 egptian pounds(L.E.) to 100 (about 18 U.S. dollars), and even that, we realised later, was to much.
From that point on there was a continuous stream of merchant type people who we started to call vultures because of how ruthless they are and the insanely large number of them. Our third night (in Edfu) showed us little kids, some only 4 or 5 years old, selling things on the streets. We bought a few bracelets from one of them, and were then mobbed by 5 0r 6 others, who all shouted at us in multiple languages to buy all they're wares. There were so many of them and they were so close to us that we couldn't even move. We eventually mananged to get to a staircase and made our escape to the boat, followed by shouts of "Habla espanol?" and "Only 10 pounds! All this! Only ten! Good quality!" I gave those ones the name locusts.
My rockstar legacy continued on the boat due to this egyptian family who became somewhat obsessed with me. The family was made up of a woman in her mid twenties (my main fan), her husband (picture taker), and their large mob of 4-6 children. The wife looked very young and spoke a bit of english, and on our first night in the boat they came up to me and asked for my picture. they also dragged a somewhat confused italian girl into the photo. Throughout the whole trip I had a total of 4 photo ops with the young family, and they said hello and introduced themselves everytime they saw me. I honestly have no idea why they're so obsessed with me, but I think it's a combination of my age, eye color, hair color and skin color. I also think that they're more willing to ask me for a picture because I'm a girl. I'd like to add that there were about a thousand kidsbetween the ages of 2 and 10 on our boat, and I think they're the worst behaved kids in all of Egypt. They ran up and down the halls continuously through the day and night and there wasn't a moment during meals without a screaming child somewhere. Dad put it well by saying that it was like being trapped in an airplane. We gave them the nickname "antelope" because of their habit of pounding through the halls at 1:00am.
I've seen so many temples throughout this trip that I don't think I could survive another. My favorite temple was one that had to be moved because of the Aswan Dam. It sits on this secluded island and it's very beautiful, sort of like a garden. It was very well preserved and it also had the added bonus of three crocodile mummies. That temple was created in honor of the god of evil with a crocodile head, and the god of good with the falcon head, Horus.
My favorite bit of the cruise was at Aswan, in the botanical gardens. I hadn't seen green in ages and in was nice to suck it all in before heading back to nasty old Cairo the next day (today). We also saw the unfinished oblisk, which was situated in the granite quarry from ancient times. Basically the ancient egyptians started carving this huge mass of conctrete to make an enormous oblisk (about 42 meters high and more than 20 tons) and it cracked. That must have sucked, because they were almost done with it when a huge crack went through it and ruined the whole thing. Anyways, we're kinda happy it happened at this point because now we know how the made that sort of thing.
Last night in the boat some Nubian people came onto the boat to do some traditional dancing and singing. Nubians are native egyptian people with black skin. They were very entertaining and had some amazing drum playing skills. Their music and dancing told stories and they had some vibrant costumes. I really enjoyed this part because they had the audience interact in some funny ways. Dad got really into it because near the end the pulled a bunch of people up onto the stage (including myself and father) and had us do some odd things. They had dad mimick one of the actors in everything he did and it looked like they were fighting. They were spouting giberish and pushing eachother around. It was hilarious.
Now we're in some fancy hotel by the Cairo airport, and we're ready to embark on the next bit of our journey tomorrow. Next stop: Nairobi!
Also: If any of my friends from school are following my blog, please leave some comments. That goes for everyone else too, I love reading the comments and seeing what you guys think. Chao!
~Kelly

Luxor

Well, we've just sarted our second day in Luxor, and I have to say that I like it a lot better than Cairo. Yesterday is when we saw most everything there is to see in the area, and we learned some new things. For one, Luxor has a population of half a million, and 90% of the locals make money through tourism. What with our current economic downturn, there are a lot fewer customers for all these people, so the few tourist they do see (Us) they attack with offers and follow for blocks. We've even trieed faking our language, but they speak french and german too. we're trying spanish next, they're not used to spanish tourist.

Yesterday we visited the valley of the kings (a valley under a natural pyramid in the middle of the desert where the Ancient Egyptians buried they're kings) and saw some fantastically preserved tombs. It's amazing that these people spent their entire lives preparing for their deaths. we also saw the temple of Luxor (fantastic, I'll show more pictures when we get home)and the Temple Karnac. There are a lot more ruins here that I could have imagined, and most of it is quite well preserved. There's an overwhelming amount of history here, and much of it can be found within a space of 100 yards. For example, the luxor temple has an area where Alexander the great is depicted in the egyptian fashion making offerings to the god of fertility: yikes (see photo). On the opposite wall there's carvings from a thounsand years before then. It's fasinating.

On dad's blog he wrote about my being a rockstar. I think I'll explain that a bit here. When we went into the Luxor temple, this girl came up to me speaking arabic. our guide, "George", translated and said they wanted a photo with me. They were Egyptians from a rural area, and they'd never seen a tourist like me before (I'm amazing). *sigh* Well, Enough about me, I've got to go. Dad says my posts are to long. feel free to comment otherwise. Oh, and to answer the qusetion from the comments page (I think it was from Ann or Alison), we would've run out to the main street. There was a guard with a gun there.

2nd Day In Cairo

Well we just finished our second day in Cairo and it was fantastic. We visited the pyramids (they're massive, I actually got virtigo) and saw the sphinx. You know how it always looks like the pyramids and the sphinx are in the middle of the desert in all the pictures? Well, they're not. The pyramids are right by the edge of town and you can walk from the sphinx to the suburbs in about five minutes. We went into a temple where the tourists were throwing money into a pit for good luck, not realising it was just a pit. Our guide, Manal, told us that the compulsory soldiers would apreciate it and the pit would be empty by morning. The temple we were in was beautiful and really open to the sky. It felt quite sacred, you could really tell that a lot of people used to worship there.
Around noon we went to this huge museum of egyptian archeology and whatnot, and we were overwhelmed with the sheer amount of stone it held. We saw all the original carvings and things in King Tut's tomb, which was a massive amount of stuff to fit into one area, and about a million other little things from all parts of egyptian history.
I'd like to add that the people here are ruthless when it comes to selling things and such. At the pyramids we were continuously bombarded by offeres to take pictures(for money) offers for camel rides, offers "free" gifts, and offers for everything from camel purses to postcards. One guy even tried to rap a turban around my dad's head.
right now we're in the Cairo airport, waiting for our plane that will take us to Luxor for the nile cruise. Tommorow we visit the Valley of the Kings!

The Biggest City In Africa

Well, we just finished our first day in Cairo and man, is it smelly here. Nearly all the people smoke and there's garbage lining the streets. It's quite interesting though, the food is very different. I've been spending the day trying to figure out exactly what spices I've been tasting...Paprika? or is it Cumin? Eh, I'll figure that out later. Anyways, I just have to warn you that the traffic here is insane and we actually get armed escorts when crossing the streets. I've seen donkeys and camels in the streets, along with people walking through traffic and nearly getting pasted by oncoming trucks. I think dad and I look really touristy, because every taxi that goes by us stops and honks. I blame dad, he wears this floppy fishing hat on the streets when it's really sunny. We took a long walk in the morning and went up near the pyramids, and this guy crossed the street and tried to get us to go into this area off the beaten path. He said it was a stable, and he finally convinced us to go in. Dad said to be prepared to run whenever he said so. We went into the place and passed this guy who was rolling cigars. The man who led us in put his scarf around my neck and put me on a camel and made dad lead me around on it. Man, it was huge! I felt like a giant! I must have been ten feet tall. Anyways, the man, Muhammad, demanded that dad give him five dollars for the ride/picture, which he had said was free, so we gave him two dollars and called it good.

Excitement

Hullo, I'm typing this from a table in the portland airport with pleasant piano music in the background (Don't you love this airport?) and we are leaving this place in about an hour. we've packed all our liquids into plastic bags and put our laptops and videocameras in seperate trays, and we're leaving quite soon here. Dad is not even clolse to as excited as me, mostly because I'm thinking about Cairo and he's thinking about 10 hour long flights. Here's hoping we don't make a crash landing in the Columbia river!
I'd also like to put in a quick note here thanking Ann from down the hill for that fantastic little eco-friendly notebook she gave me! By the time I get back it will be chock full of writing and sketches. I'l type some more once our travel day is over: tommorow when we're half way around the world.