Zanzibar!

What did I do last week?  Oh, you know, mapped some villages, wrote some proposals, became very familiar with the Somali Integrated Management of Acute Malnutrition guidelines.

Oh.  And went to ZANZIBAR.  With KEVIN.

Did I mention I went to Zanzibar? 

Kevin had his R&R from Darfur but I wasn't due any yet.  So he flew to Nairobi and I took a two days off to go to Zanzibar for a long weekend with him.

I was in Zanzibar in 2006 with my friend Michelle as part of our great East African Backpacking Adventure, where we went overland from Kampala, Uganda back to Gaborone, Botswana where we were living at the time. We were on the $5 a day or so budget at the time, so I was looking forward to going back and eating and staying somewhere with a roof.  Just kidding. Kind of.

Kevin and I started in Stonetown, the old part of Zanzibar Town.  It was a hub of the spice trade and has amazing Swahili architecture with Indian, Moorish, Persian and European influences.  It's a warren of alleys, and you never know what you might find.  Or where you are, lots of the time.  Mostly we just wandered, ducking into a small shop sometimes or stopping for a cup of chai.

We capped off the day at Africa House...

....home of this awesome staircase....

...and the best sunsets in Stonetown.

The next day we headed up north to Kendwa, on the beach, for some relaxing and snorkeling.

Snorkeling was awesome, though I don't have any pictures to prove it.  It was pouring rain, which was interesting because underwater you didn't notice, but it was beating on my back.  We saw a sea snake, tons of giant sea slugs, butterfly fish, angel fish, and flute fish, among other things.

I don't have a lot to say about Kendwa, because other than snorkeling, this is mostly what I did.  I read two books.  Proposal writing is hard work.

This is where I did it.

I mean, really, it's so beautiful it looks made up.   I'm *fairly* certain it was real, but it might just have been a really excellent dream.  Thanks Kevin :)

Lost in Transl(iter)ation

So, I thought I would share a little lesson in Somali, should you too find yourself attempting to map dozens (62 to be precise) of minuscule Somali settlements to ensure that your organization is providing adequate nutrition coverage of remote regions of Somaliland and expanding to the appropriate areas.

Ceerigabo=Erigavo

Ceelafweyn=El Afwayn but does NOT=Lafaweyn

Dhaban Dhige=Ghabandhige

Rag Cadeye=Gag Caddeye

Hingalool=Xiin Galool

Transliteration and I have a fairly tortured relationship, dating from my Baghdad days.  I was using a lot of the statistical software SPSS, which demands that things be entered in the EXACT same way in order for the program to recognize them as the same.  So much as a capital letter or not will mess things up, let alone the various and sometimes creative spellings that places acquired on their way from Arabic (and the Arabic alphabet) to English.  Despite many, many hours of training, begging, and pleading with the data entry people, complicated efforts to standardize the spellings of common place names and so on, the issue remained.  

I was not very excited to encounter it again here.

The upside?  I get to spend a lot of time on Google Earth, mapping the villages (once I figure out how to spell them to search for them, of course).  Sometimes I just have coordinates to go on.  So I spend a lot of time zooming in really close and trying to see if there is actually a settlement there.  I like to put the Top Gun soundtrack on with my fierce Skype headset and pretend I'm a spy looking for missiles while I work on this task.

By the time the weekend rolled around, I was pretty ready to get as far away from the office as possible.  Unfortunately, at quitting time on Friday the whole street was blocked by a crane offloading a generator to the house next door to the office, and the crowd that had assembled to watch.

Clearly a camping trip was called for.  Luckily, Nairobi being the hub it is, I didn't have to look far:  my friend Maureen from headquarters, my friend Lorea from when I worked in Jordan and my friend Carrie from Baghdad are all here and were up for it.  So first thing Saturday morning we headed out for Lake Naivasha, about 2 hours west of Nairobi.  First stop?  Hell's Gate National Park, on the southeast side of the lake.

Hell's Gate has been on my bucket list for a long time since you can ride bikes through the park--there's lots of game, but no dangerous big game or predators.  So we rented bikes at the gate and started pedaling.  

 We didn't make it far before we found something interesting to do--rockclimbing at Fisher's Tower, one of the rock columns that scatter the park. 

Maureen and I decided to climb up, but Carrie and Lorea wimped out voted themselves official documenters of the experience.  I think they were jealous, which is why they took these incredibly flattering pre-climb photos of us.

Up we went. 

Even though she started later, Maureen got to the top first.  But her side was CLEARLY easier.  Also, she's about a foot taller than me, so she can totally reach way more holds than I can.  I'm really not bitter about it.  (P.S. Maureen--thanks for waiting at the top for me)

After we admired the view and the dassies sunning themselves on the rocks at the top, we headed down, pausing only for some glamour shots.

We hopped back on our bikes and rode another 8 kilometers into the park, to the top of the gorge that is the centerpiece of the park, and stopped for a baboon-plagued lunch.  These baboons had no shame and it was only our guide and his fierce stick banging that stopped them from stealing our lunches out of our hands. 

Then, into the gorge!

It was beautiful.

It also involved some fairly serious rockclimbing, which earned Maureen the nickname "Mountain Goat".

For our bravery in the gorge, we earned Masai face paint from our guide, Jackson.

We had almost made it out of the gorge without incident when Lorea didn't follow instructions and got sucked in by some vicious viscous mud.  Good thing there was one of the many hot springs in the park right there to wash her formerly pink shoes back to a more muted shade of brown.

When we finally made it to the top, we took a minute to enjoy the view.

Also, there was this cute little boy tending his sheep.

Then we went to the campsite, right on Lake Naivasha.  The usual camping shenanigans ensued, with the added fun of being able to hear hippos clomping around the campsite all night as they grazed on the shores of the lake.

In the morning there was a cool caterpillar on my bag.

But this was NOTHING compared to being out on a boat on the lake with hippos and pelicans and fishermen.

Getting stuck in some shallow water right next to some napping hippos really added that element of fear I crave in a casual Sunday morning boat outing. 

From the boat, we walked through a nature reserve with lots of zebra, antelope and giraffes.  We got so close to the giraffes that when Carrie sneezed it startled a baby giraffe, who jumped and ran to its mother.

Potentially wish I had seen this sign BEFORE I walked through the park, not as I was leaving.

We wrapped up the adventure with a view of a crater lake, flamingos, lunch by Lake Naivasha, another caterpillar and an extremely aggressive bird who tried to steal my dessert and pooped on Lorea when I refused.

And then we went back to Nairobi and I stayed up until 3 am mapping all of the villages I didn't get to earlier in the weekend because I was camping with hippos.