I don’t know what day it is. I don’t know what time it is. And to be completely honest, I’m not entirely sure where I am. It’s been a long, grueling 46 hours of travel, which I will detail below in hopes that my readership will commiserate:
+1 hour drive from Rice to IAH
+3 hours at IAH
+12 hours on a plane from Houston to Istanbul
+5 hours at Istanbul airport
+7.5 hours on a plane from Istanbul to Nairobi
+2 hours at Nairobi airport
+4 hours on a bus from Nairobi to the Tanzanian border
+1.5 hours at the border
+2 hours from the border to Arusha
+2 hours in Arusha
+3 hours on a Land Cruiser from Arusha to Ecoscience Lodge
+3 hours somewhere that I have no memory of
= 46 HOURS. TWO OVERNIGHT FLIGHTS. THREE CONTINENTS.
Anyways. It’s a surreal adjustment from Houston to Kenya and Tanzania–the second we started driving through Nairobi, I went through a mixture of culture shock and feeling at home. The crowded streets, tuk-tuks flying around, motorcycles veering to the side of the road to avoid traffic, seemingly ubiquitous construction–all of it reminds me of the chaos in Manhattan that I miss so dearly. The content reminds me of home, but the form is foreign.
Inhabiting Houston involves a certain amount of compromise: you adjust to hours of traffic, taking the freeway wherever you need to go, occasional flooding after every rainstorm, and the list goes on. However, I didn’t realize how much I had given up sharing life in the public sphere in Houston. In Nairobi and Arusha and all the towns in between, you see life wherever you look: people talking, toddlers playing, vendors selling, cattle meandering, older people sitting and chatting, businessmen walking, teenagers running, even giraffes browsing within half a mile of the airport (though no Alcelaphini, unfortunately). The bright colors and vibrant patterns that many regions of Africa are known for pop out even more against a backdrop of dusty roadsides and sun-faded signs. In contrast, Houston looks like a ghost town.
To quote my field journal, which I believe summarizes my feelings towards our journey better than I can: “Maybe when I see a wildebeest, am bitten by a mosquito, get licked by a giraffe, I will say it and believe it: we have arrived.”
– Rose
Plus a few token photos of the voyage, for those of you who scrolled far enough:
