Back in Laikipia

I have made it to Laikipia. Not quite to Ol Pejeta yet, but to Mpala Research Center, which is about an hour away and is Princeton's home base in Kenya. I will spend the night here, pick up and pack my car in the morning and drive to Ol Pej to get settled. I had hoped to go to Ol Pej directly without spending the night here, but my travels were hectic and once I unloaded at MRC I just couldn't make myself get back in the car again.

The trip started well enough. I got to the airport early and made my (only somewhat tearful) farewells to Mike. My flight ended up being delayed 45 minutes or so because the plane was late for whatever reason. Once the aircraft door closed I shut off my cell phone for three months and prepared to take full advantage of the on-demand in-flight entertainment Delta offered. That didn't work out so well. I slogged through The Social Network at half speed, rewinding every 20 seconds because the picture blurred and the sound cut out. By the time I tried to start my next movie, the pictures was nothing but garbled pixels and there was no sound at all. So I slept, curled up in my seat and the empty adjacent one. I woke up about an hour before landing and fiddled in vain with the video controls.

Once the sleep wore off, I checked my boarding pass for the next flight to find which gate I would have to go to. Not listed. What was listed was the boarding time: 9:30am. A glance at the flight tracker on my screen (the only part of the entertainment that worked) told me that we would be landing at approximately....9:15 am. Somehow a 45 minute delay had turned into a 3-hour late arrival and my 4-hour layover in Amsterdam seemed woefully inadequate. I kept an eye on the flight tracker, hoping that perhaps it had overestimated our remaining flight time. "Just kidding!" it would say, "We will actually land with plenty of time for you to stretch your legs, grab some food, and stroll leisurely to your next gate!" Instead, I watched, increasingly distressed, as our pilot did two large, leisurely loops around Amsterdam, the projected landing time climbing to 9:26 before he announced that we'd been cleared to land.

We landed in a fog so thick that the thump of the wheels on the runway took my by surprise: it fully appeared that the plane was still engulfed in cloud. We then proceeded to taxi forever. Apparently Amsterdam's landing strip is located several miles from the airport, or possibly in Paris. What little time I had left to make my plane was dwindling and my hopes of my baggage making the flight were long gone.

When I finally made it into the terminal, I looked frantically for a board telling which gates flights were departing from. There were none. There was one Delta representative with such information, but she was swamped with people asking if it was too late to make flights that left an hour ago. I picked a direction and booked it until I finally found a board that told me my gate was two terminals away. More booking it to the gate where the last of the passengers were going through the at-gate security check for boarding.

I went through the security check, thoroughly unamused when my bag was pulled aside for extra searching. The security guy made a joke when he pulled my extra pair of socks from my bag. I looked at him with daggers in my eyes, annoyed at everyone plane-related. I made it onto the packed flight only to find that the aisle seat I had requested three weeks ago had apparently been given to someone else, leaving me with a dreaded middle seat. An hour delay at the gate gave me a sliver of hope that perhaps my bags would make it on the plane. The rest of the flight was uneventful: sporadic sleep and on-demand entertainment that worked.

We arrived an hour late to Nairobi. The visa process was mercifully quick, although there were a handful of those annoying people who think their time is somehow more valuable than everyone else's and who therefore skipped to the front of the line for some reason justified only in their own minds.

Fifteen minutes at the baggage claim all but confirmed my suspicion that my bags would not be arriving. Unfortunately, it was impossible to get anyone to tell me if more bags were on their way, and there were a lot of people still waiting. Hope kept me waiting for twenty minutes more after which I got in the long line of people reporting delayed luggage. By the time I was done with that, it was almost three hours after I was supposed to have landed and I was afraid my ride would have given up and left. But my name was there on a piece of paper when I walked out and at that point I was so relieved that nothing else mattered. We went to my hotel where I had a late dinner, wrote some emails, took a cold (ugh) shower with my few toiletries, and went to bed around one.

Compared to yesterday, today went very smoothly. My driver and I stopped first at Nyayo house so I could go to the Immigration office and get my pupil's pass stamped into my passport. Then we went to the airport to claim my luggage, which had obediently arrived on a 7 am flight. From there it was straight to Mpala, after pinballing between several gnarly Nairobi traffic jams and finally finding an unobstructed route out of the city. I stayed awake the whole trip, although I did not hold up my end of the conversation with the driver very well.

Now: Mpala, a hot dinner in five minutes, a (hopefully) hot shower thereafter, and an early early bedtime so I can finally get settled tomorrow.

9 Days

I have nine days until I return to Kenya for another 3-month stint. Preparations are going well, but I still have the requisite nerves about my departure. It helps a lot that this is more or less old hat by now and that I am familiar with my field site and many of my methods. That consolation only goes so far when faced with a three-month absence from home though!

I have a couple new project components that I will describe in more detail once I get to the field and start blogging in earnest. For now my main difficulty is that I have acquired 10 camera traps, each requiring a heavy steel case, multiple batteries, battery chargers & assorted other accessories. Total weight of this new equipment is a whopping 40 lbs. I have a 2x70 lb-bag luggage allotment on Delta (thank you Silver Medallion) in which to pack that equipment and just about everything else I'll need for three months. We'll see how this goes!

To celebrate my return to the blog and imminent return to the field, I present you with the following diagram of a Thomson's gazelle as seen after a long field trip. Image is courtesy of the immensely clever and charming Mike Costelloe. See more of his work at www.mikecostelloe.com.