One Toad, Many Giraffes and the Adventure of a Lifetime
I was awake, and then asleep, awake again and then forcing myself back to sleep. “Today was the day,” I thought to myself. “Today I’m gonna see a bunch of cool things and I know it.” I threw myself out of bed and started my morning routine minutes before my alarm. Little did I know that my adventure was going to start a little earlier than I expected and the “cool things” would just find their way into my boot. That’s right when I went to put on my boot, something soft was in the way, my groggy intuition thought, “oh it’s just a sock,” until I put my hand in and felt something extremely un-sock like. I threw my boot across the room as I remembered a story I had heard a few years ago and Woody’s coined phrase from Toy Story “There’s a snake in my boot!” Thankfully a little startled toad hopped out of the boot and my fears diminished. It was 4:30 in the morning and my day had already been exciting. I knew it was going to be a good day.
We waited as we watched Silous pull up in the old beat up white land cruiser (which is now one of my new favorite cars). Out he came with a huge Kenyan smile and a stinging high five. Off we were to Rumma National Park! After the long jostling ride in our safari car, we exited and watched the sunrise over the misty mountains to the east.
As the dew dried we began to see a bird here, a bird there, and even a bird that ran in front of our car for about 10 minutes as our mini tour guide. Suddenly from the back with the large camera Andre (Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell) shouted “Stop!” as small heard of water buffalo began to cross in front of our vehicle. We watched as the massive beasts crossed the road and made sure to take plenty of pictures!
We moved along twards the old air strip in the middle of the Park and began to see towering giraffes off to the right just chilling and eating some breakfast. I got lucky enough to see one male Rothschild’s giraffe witch can only be found in Western Kenya and Eastern Uganda. “What makes this giraffe so special?” you might ask. Well this giraffe has three horns and there’s only about 1500 left in the whole world.
We wrapped up our Safari with a visit from a whole family of baboons blocking our path out. After our baboon friends had vacated the premises, we bounced along the bumpy dirt road towards home. As soon as we arrived we took a quick nap and the Cornell students invited us to have a homemade lunch together of rice and bean stew made by Andre’s wife Katja (Professor of Entomology at Cornell) made from a concoction of ingredients found in the local market.
We ended the day together by watching the Germany/Mexico FIFA game and listing to Andre shout for the Germans like they or the refs could hear him from Kenya! It was my first time ever watching a whole professional soccer game and was actually pretty interesting.
After the game I made my way to bed where I found the same toad from the morning hiding in my shower. I humanely captured said toad and set him free into the wilderness hoping that he wouldn’t be eaten by the diverse wildlife here in Mbita. Good luck out there Sir Croaks.
