Karatu

           February 7^th was our first non-program day. We had a group meeting two days before, and Mike, the student affairs manager, gave us suggestions for what we could possibly do. We decided on a morning hike to the Elephant Caves in the Ngorogoro conservation area and then an afternoon trip to the market in Karatu.

            Getting ready Sunday morning was pretty chill. We could’ve slept in until 8:00am, but it gets pretty loud here in the mornings around 6:00am, so most people got up between then and 7:00am. The morning sounds consist of roosters crowing (contrary to popular belief, they pretty much crow at all hours of the day, though thankfully not at night), cows mooing, dogs barking, birds singing, pots in the kitchen clanging, and the staff talking while starting out their day. We ate breakfast and packed up our lunches, which consisted of fried dough, fresh banana bread, hardboiled eggs, carrots and cucumbers, potatoes, apples, and a choice between peanut butter and jelly or Nutella sandwiches.

            The drive to Karatu from Rhotia is about 20 minutes, but the Elephant Caves hike was another fifteen or so minutes through a residential part of Karatu. That meant bumpy, dusty dirt roads, waving to all the children we passed, and waiting for people’s cows to walk past our cars.

            The start of our hike was near a coffee plantation owned by a German and a tourist lodge. Our group was broken into two groups, and each group got a guide. Our guide spoke pretty good English and was really knowledgeable about all of the plants we passed, giving us the scientific names, common names, and fun facts about their traditional use. It was just like a field natural history class! My favorite was Elephant or Maasai Perfume, which is this shrub-like plant that smells wonderful. I’d need to smell it again to attempt to describe it, but it is really nice. Apparently the Maasai use it to mask their scent so elephants can’t smell them.

            It was a gradual climb up a section of mountain, and we’d stop every once in a while to take pictures of the beautiful vistas. Near the top, there were two attractions: the waterfall and the elephant caves. We first saw the waterfall from far away; the water level was very low, but the drop was impressive.

            The elephant caves were amazing! They’re not really caves, but holes in the side of the mountainside dug by elephants with their tusks. According to our guide, elephants travel from very far away to this area where they’ll carve out part of the mountain with their tusks to get at the minerals in the rocks. The elephants need the minerals so they can effectively digest their food. Even so, they only digest about 45% of what they eat. Other animals come to the area too, after the elephants have dug out enough minerals. These minerals came from a volcanic eruption many millennia ago, the eruption that actually formed the Ngorogoro Crater (which is technically a caldera and not a crater), the place I’m most excited to see.

            After exploring this uneven mountainside, our guide took us to the very top of the waterfall we’d seen from afar. It turns out that the gigantic drop we saw was only the first of two large drops. We were able to stand on the side of the stream pretty close to the edge of the cliff and look down.

            After the hike, some of the girls changed into skirts and everyone ate their lunches. The general rule while walking around the villages and towns in Tanzania is to have everything from your knees to your shoulders covered, preferably with something baggy. Women can wear long pants, but mostly it is only the younger generation of Tanzanians that do so. If you want attempt to avoid looking like a complete tourist, which isn’t that effective when you and your peers are usually the only white people around, it’s best to wear a skirt.

            We drove back into Karatu and were let loose in the market. It was completely overwhelming—there were people and animals everywhere! I can’t even estimate how large an area this market covered, but it was very extensive. For people who are familiar with Cleveland’s Westside Market, maybe about that size and as crowded as a Saturday morning. Except it was all outdoors and most of the stalls were just blankets laid on the ground. In the livestock section, people were selling cows, chickens, sheep, donkeys, and goats. There was a butcher section with very, very, very fresh meat. The most common foods I saw were bananas, potatoes, carrots, watermelons, and very small, dried fish. There were also fabrics, recycled clothes, and shoes, and then there were people walking around with plastic bags on sticks selling the bags.

            I bought fabric from one of the vendors, though I didn’t really have to barter because I was with Becky, the intern for our program. She can speak Swahili and she had haggled with the same vendor already, so I got my fabric for the same price (10,000 Tanzanian shillings, which is roughly 5 or 6 US dollars). I’m getting pretty good with my Swahili numbers, though, so next time I hope to give haggling a try.

            I went back to the cars pretty soon after, and then sat and talked with Costa, one of the drivers. We talked in semi-English, semi-Swahili (mostly English) about things similar to this market in the United States. I told him a bit about malls and grocery stores, and then we tried to compare the price of food in the US vs. Tanzania. I didn’t know many prices of the things he wanted to compare, like a kilogram of rice, so it didn’t really work out. His impression was that food in America was more expensive, which, compared to the prices here, it is. Average income is extraordinarily more in American than here (I believe the average in the area is $150-$200 a month), so perhaps considering the differences in income makes the food more comparably priced? I haven’t bought any food here yet, but maybe I will find out more about this. The Coca-Cola is very cheap though. One of my friend’s bought one for 600 shillings, which is less than 50 cents; the bottle was 400 shillings though. Normally you’d drink the Coke there and then give the bottle back, but she decided to keep it.

            Once everyone started heading back from the market to the vehicles, vendors started swarming us, sticking necklaces and woven bowels into the open windows. That’s pretty common whenever we leave Rhotia, even if a few of us are walking down a main street people will appear out of no where with all sorts of things and try to put them in your hands. They are extremely persistent, even when you try to ignore them and say hapana (no) over and over.

            After our market excursion, we were all driven to the restaurant Happy Days, which was designated our meeting place any other time we go into Karatu. It is a very nice, secluded restaurant, pretty close to one of the tourist lodges where we have the chance to go swimming later in the semester. We all got something cold to drink and sat around the porch, exhausted after our hike and market experience.

            A few people and I went into the main part of Karatu after sitting around for a bit. It was about a 10 and 15-minute walk into town, and then we walked down the main street looking at a few shops. It was hard to tell, in some cases, exactly what these shops were since I know little Swahili, but it was interesting to see a more urban, bustling town in Tanzania. To be clear, Karatu isn’t a huge city in US terms, it’s “downtown” area is along a single road with brightly colored buildings, shacks, and carts on both sides. There are a few roads that turn off the main road and into more rural area, like the road to Happy Days.

                        Once we were done exploring, my group headed back to Happy Days. I had my first refrigerated bottle of water since getting here (most of the water we get in camp ranges from cool to tepid), and then got in one of the cars to head back. To be honest, I kind of forget what we did for the rest of the evening because I was so tired! Probably reading for class. We don’t have too much reading usually; sometimes the policy stuff gets pretty lengthy, but the academics so far have not been strenuous.

            Hopefully I will be able to upload pictures from this trip soon. I got some pretty epic pictures today during my first trip to the African savanna, so by the time I write an entry for that, I will try to have pictures too.

Until next time,

Savanna