Pictures from Kenya

I've been in Africa for over 2 months now, and I FINALLY got to see some exotic animals. Today consisted of going to the elephant orphanage, where people are allowed to go for one hour a day to see the baby elephants (along with a couple rhino) that have been orphaned. This facility raises the elephants, and then when they are old enough, they take them to Tsavo National Park and release them back into the wild. You can also 'adopt' an elephant, which means that by making a small donation, you get email updates on how your elephant is doing, pictures...etc. AND, the best part is, if you adopt one, you get to come back when no one else is allowed in and 'put your elephant to bed.' Which means you get to go and watch them come in from ranging out in the park and watch them getting their bedtime snack, and pet them and all that good stuff. That is what the above video is from-the elephants coming back to sleep for the night. All of those are under the age of 2, and they are all orphans. I adopted Lesanju, who was born Sept. 5th, 2006 and was 4 weeks old when she was orphaned. She fell down a sandy well dug for cattle in the seasonal river bed of the Milgis Lugga and was recued by the Samburu people. You will see some more pictures of her if you follow the link below to all my pictures.....

After the elephant orphanage, I went to the Giraffe Center, which is also in Nairobi. I can't even begin to describe how cool that was. You could feed the giraffes, and they would take it from wherever you offered it. Yes, I had to be cool like everyone else and put the feed pellet in between my lips and have the giraffe kiss me. I don't have a good picture of it, but I can say that I have 'kissed' a giraffe. And I found out the answer to a burning question asked by a 1 year old....giraffes hardly make any noise at all. They will grunt every once in a while, but they do not make noises like other animals do. None of them made a sound the whole time I was there. They didn't have any giraffes for me to adopt there, but I would have if they would have let me. I wanted to bring one home for Grandma Pralle, but sorry grandma...they wouldn't let me do that either.

At both places there were also warthogs just running around like they owned the place. And if any of you would like a short Swahili lesson, here you go: pumbaa means warthog (even I knew that...thanks to the Lion King!), twiga is a giraffe, and ndovu or temba means elephant. I kept waiting for the warthogs to break out in a rousing rendition of 'Hakuna Matata', but they didn't. But, in case you were wondering, yes that is an actual phrase that people use here. They are very much like Hawaiians...very laid back...'no worries'.

Below is the link to the pictures from Kenya...I may end up taking just a few more, because we don't leave until Wednesday, but these are the majority of them. Enjoy!

http://picasaweb.google.com/acstrat55/Kenya

Who Knew?

I still haven't been able to download all my pictures yet, but I couldn't wait to put this one up.

I hope the picture is big enough for everyone to read, but in case you can't, it says, "Alpine Inn...get your duff up the bluff...LaCrosse, Wisconsin". Yes, that's right. Someone in Kashmir, Kenya has a shirt from LaCrosse. (Now would be the appropriate time for everyone to start humming, "It's a Small World." You don't have to thank me for putting that very annoying song in your head for the rest of the day..... :-)

Kenya

They have storks all over the place here in Kenya. The stork and the cat were both waiting to get some food from the kitchen, and you can just imagine what that cat must be thinking. Apparently storks will eat kittens, but this adult cat doesn't have to worry about being dinner-just has to fight the stork over who is going to get the scraps for dinner.

As you can probably guess, I'm in Kenya right now. I went to Nairobi first, and now I am close to Lamu and Manda Bay (yes, I know, appropriate name :-). For this trip, most of our sites are on different islands, so every morning, we load everything up into speedboats and go cruising to our work sites. Sometimes we have to travel out in the Indian Ocean, and going over some of those waves in those little boats is quite the experience. All our travel is based on when the tides go in and out...there is a difference of about 9 feet. So usually in the morning, the water goes right up to the town edge and we can get right out. But when we leave in the afternoon, the tide is usually out, so the last couple of days we have had to walk about a mile through ankle to thigh deep water to get out to the boats. I made the mistake of asking if there were any crocodiles in the water and the response I received was, "You don't want to ask questions you don't really want to know the answer to." I don't know if there really were any crocodiles, but at least I didn't see any.

The base we are staying at also has a hippo pond, so I literally got to walk up to the water's edge and look at a group (herd? I don't know my proper terminology here, sorry) of hippos just hanging out in the water. There was also a herd of deer grazing nearby (sorry Dom and Pete, we aren't able to shoot them) and there were a bunch of baboons nearby as well. I have heard there are also lions and cape buffalo in the area, but I haven't encountered them yet. (I think I'm ok not seeing a lion as I'm walking around. I don't think I could stand that much excitement.) Hopefully when we go back through Nairobi, I'll get to go to a giraffe and an elephant orphanage, so I should have a lot of good pictures then as well.

Anniversaries

Since I don't have easy access to a Hallmark store or a mailbox, I wanted to use this as a way to send out anniversary wishes. Happy Anniversary Kaye and Wally (on the 11th) and Jess and Dom (on the 12th).

And one year ago today (as I type this, it is the 13th for me, but for all you normal people in the States it's still the 12th), after many close calls at the airport, Jay came home from overseas, so we count this as our first anniversary. Hopefully next year at this time we will be on the same continent, maybe even the same state....for good...I can't wait. Happy Anniversary my baby.....I love you.

Video

I took this video of cows going through the dip tank because I thought most people haven't seen it before, and I think it's pretty funny. Some had to be forced in but some of them got pretty good air...I think they should make this an Olympic event. :-) The nasty water does have a little bit of a chemical in it to repel tsetse flies and ticks, two major sources of disease for the cattle. When they were all done with the cattle, if they could catch the dogs they would throw them in as well.

I finally got all the captions put up for the pictures from Tanzania, so hopefully they help to clear up any questions.

My short-lived stay in Djibouti is done...I'm off to Kenya now. Hopefully by the end of this trip I will have pictures of the exotic African animals that everyone wants to see.

Pictures from Tanzania

http://picasaweb.google.com/acstrat55/Tanzania

There are a lot of them, but I finally got them all up there. I tried to get them all in the right order, but if they get mixed around, I apologize... Also, check back for updates..it took me forever to download all of them and I still have some more to add and I have to add captions-it's still a work in progress.

********Disclaimer*******

There are some pictures in here that are not for the faint of heart. We saw a cow that had a complete fracture of her right hind leg, and of course I had to take pictures. If you don't like seeing legs that are not at the correct angle, be prepared to skip over those pictures pretty quickly. Veterinarians are generally most interested in the gross and disgusting, so of course I have pictures of it. :-) Also, you may have read that on one of the days they slaughtered a goat for us. Well, a couple days later at another site, they slaughtered a steer for us. Again, of course I took pictures of the process as they were doing it, so there are some pictures of the meat being cut up. I didn't take any pictures as the actual slaughter process was happening, but there are some after it had died. Again, that's completely normal for me to see, but I realize not all of you are used to that, so I wanted to make sure everyone was prepared.

******End disclaimer******

So as I mentioned above, I got to do meat inspection on a goat and a steer while I was here. I don't know if I will get used to inspecting the meat I am going to eat while it is alive and then 2 minutes later after it has died. Definitely a new experience for me. But it was very interesting to watch. They went from having 1 live steer to having a full-fledged fire, grill and barbeque in the matter of half an hour. No, I did not eat any of the organs (sorry grandma, no liver for me!), but the meat was pretty good (not as good as the steaks that Jay makes, but it was up there).

Also, in case you were wondering, the cow with the broken leg didn't make it-they had to slaughter her, but that was not at the same place where we had our barbeque.

The last day in Tanga we got to tour Tanga Fresh, which is their dairy processing plant. That is still a growing business here in Tanzania, because most people prefer to drink the milk straight from the cows, they don't want it pasteurized. They believe that they are taking all the 'good stuff' out of the milk, so they are working hard to educate people on the benefits of pasteurizing. Tanga Fresh is very much like a milk co-op that you would see back in Wisconsin-most of the same principles. They got a lot of their ideas and funding from dairies in the Netherlands. They mainly process fluid milk, yogurt and some mozzerella cheese. Someone needs to introduce to them the concept of cheese curds and they would be all set! :-)

That's about it from Tanzania....next up: Kenya. One final note: my good memories of Tanzania will always interrupted by one bad one....I was here when I found out that Favre was traded from the Packers. (you all didn't really think I wouldn't mention that at all, did you?) And that's all I'm going to say about that, because I'm still a little bitter. It could be a while before I'm over this.