Our First Safari

We started our day with bird watching. At first it was boring and looking through the binoculars made me feel really sick but then we actually started finding birds and it was a lot of fun. Our guide, Yohanna, was cracking me up. In his words, he "likes birds." It was great because he was really good and finding and identifying birds. And, every time that he saw one he would crouch down say "haaahhlooowww" quietly to get our attention and point to the bird. There are so many interesting birds here. I'm so glad I have good binoculars so I can see them. The morning finished with a summary lecture on top of a rocky hill overlooking the valley.

I learned three new swahili words today: kaa (sit), simama (stand/stop), mweeba (thorns). After I learned them I spent the whole walk back to camp repeating them to myself so that I wouldn't forget before I got the chance to write them down. I still had to ask about 5 times because I got distracted by something on the side of the road and forgot to keep repeating my words :]

This afternoon went into Manyara National Park for the first time. The camp staff popped the tops on the jeeps and we all stood up and started craning our necks to try and see wildlife. We saw elephants (tambo), zebras (punda milia), baboons, a couple kinds of monkeys, wildebeast, hippos, lots of birds, warthogs (pumba), a dik dik, and a giraffe (twiga). My favorite was the dik dik. It's a little deer-like animal with a funny pointy head. You should look up a picture of it. Did you realize that elephants live in forests here? We didn't see any out in the open areas, they were all in the forests. I thought that was weird...