January, Part 2

I have pride. That is the main reason I try to hide my crazy cat-lady-ness. However, anyone who knows me probably picks up on the fact that I am really, really into animals. In my past life in DC, I lived three blocks from the National Zoo. It’s big, and cool, and free, and I went there at least once a week while I lived in the neighborhood. While it can be packed with families and kids and strollers, it can also be an almost-deserted wooded park in the middle of the city, where it’s just you and the tigers, and you can pretend that you and the hippos have a special connection, even though they would stomp you to death in a heartbeat if you were on the other side of the fence.

Living here is different, of course. I’ve seen few of the wild animals rumored to live around my site (caracals, servals, Mutwari the elephant), just mongooses and some gigantic rabbits, and maybe some monkeys at a distance. I see enough beautiful and/or weird birds that I got a birding guide to East Africa for Christmas, and I use it all the time. I say all this to underline how strange it is that I have not been to Rwanda’s game park, Akagera, until one full year in country. We’ve been talking about having “Safari Saturday” with other volunteers since we knew we would be posted in Eastern Province, but it required a little more coordination than I felt like putting in. But, January 29^th marked one year in Rwanda, so we made it happen.

On Saturday afternoon, Tom and I met up with friends from different parts of the country, and headed to the camp site. The landscape changed quickly, from green, densely populated hills to more open spaces, and scrubby, dusty landscape with fewer and fewer people. We paid our entry fees, collected our tent, and blessedly found a place to buy a crate of beer. After a brief stop to see the Akagera Game lodge (where we had the privilege of a gorgeous view of Lake ?, and of a guy at the pool having to chase a baboon away from his food), we went to our campsite and set up our tents and got a fire going. Luckily for us, we had perfect weather and a full moon so bright that Tom and I took a walk without flashlights, startling an antelope along the way.

The next morning, after watching the sunrise, our ride arrived (a sweet, open-top safari car), and we set out. We spent the next 6 hours driving through the park. Sightings included:

Mammals

· Baboons (including a baboon fight)

· Buffalo

· Plains zebras

· Impala

· Topi (a big antelope)

· Warthogs

· Hippos

Reptile

· Crocodiles

Birds

· Fish eagle

· Ibis and other shore birds

· Kingfishers

· Marabou storks

· Guinea fowl

· Yellow billed ox peckers (which eat bugs and parasites off the buffalo)

· Lilac-breasted roller

Oh, and tsetse flies, which bit us a lot, and which will hopefully not give us sleeping sickness.

I know that Rwanda is not the absolute best place to go on safari. We didn’t see elephants or lions, but seriously, I don’t actually care. I didn’t care that I looked like a gigantic dork with a broad brim hat, video camera, and bird book, and it was impossible not be goofy and giddy and thrilled when standing there looking at animals I’ve only seen in zoos and picture books.

Towards the end, we realized that we were headed back to the park entrance a little earlier than expected, and everyone had the same thought- - we have not seen giraffes yet. With a little cajoling, our guide (who honestly, seemed kind of bored and unhelpful throughout) reluctantly radioed in to see if anyone knew where the giraffes were, and we were off. We retraced our path from the morning, and stopped at the top of a tall hill. After a few minutes, our guide pointed, we squinted, and we saw giraffes, like tiny stick figures in the distance. When we finally got there, there were seven, some babies, and some gloriously tall, slender, and alien-looking. We watched them, they watched us with faint curiosity, then went back to eating leaves. Eventually the driver turned the engine back on, and we drove away.

That was it. We went home, looked at our pictures, and thought about how we were going to tell our friends and families about it. I found myself missing my cat.

The postscript to safari was that I left my phone in the car, and it ended up with another volunteer an hour away from my site. So, the next day, I had to go meet her. After I picked up my phone, I visited to other friends I hadn’t seen since Thanksgiving. We sat in Chrissy’s living room drinking coffee, eating chapati, and listening to Bob Dylan, while neighborhood kids colored at her table and climbed trees in her front yard. We compared safari stories, Christmas travel stories (they had opted for Ethiopia instead of Zanzibar), and laughed at the ridiculous parts of our lives. It was hot outside when I left, and I climbed into a hot, crowded minibus (the name for them in Kinyarwanda literally means “scoot over”) that took a long time, and somehow, it made me really happy. The baby on my left slept against my shoulder, the one on my right pressing buttons on my phone. I chatted with their mothers, and let what a good month (and year) I’d had sink in.