Blogs from Arusha, North, Tanzania, Africa - page 60

Now that we have the dropping off done, we are under control and ready for the next step. Joshua is settling in his new home for the next 4 - 6 - 8 years …. (Yikes!). As you can see there isn't much space. Anthony, being the handy man that he is, has built some shelving that we are taking down this weekend for the guys to have at least some way of organizing their mess. I was stunned they wouldn't let me color coordinate their clothes or alphabetize their CD's, but maybe this will at least get it off the floor! IMAGINE that! I just hope the guys appreciate it. Our house however, is quiet … quiet and messy … not just messy .. I'd say it was a wreck! But that is fine with ... read more

After a bit of a break on a weekend safari it was time to get back to work! Next project: Manyara Ranch. The ranch is part of the African Wildlife Foundation and is set on a beautiful property between Lake Manyara and Tarangire National Parks. Other than the donkeys this was our first opportunity to work with livestock and we were excited to get into it all. There were about 5000 cattle and hundreds of sheep that live within the ranch and we got an opportunity to work with some of the animals on the ranch and also animals in a pastoral community nearby. We treated a foot abscess in a sheep and spent a day vaccinating, deworming and ear-tagging calves. The cows we were working on were Boran cattle (a tropical breed that's part of ... read more

Ok, so I'm cheating a little bit. We didn't have internet access so I haven't posted anything since the end of July but I wanted to update everyone on the rest of our trip. The summary would be WAY too long if I tried to do it in one update so I'm going to do a few in order of where we traveled. Yes I know I'm not in Africa anymore but I'm going to put the dates from when these events occurred so I don't mess up the timeline too much! --Since our plans didn't pan out with the Arusha SPCA we opted to take a final safari (we'd already seen what little there is of Arusha and couldn't handle even one more day of the crazy touts that are everywhere in town!). We headed ... read more

Well after our pleasant walk through the mountains surrounding Lushoto, we jumped on a small bus and headed further west to the town of Arusha. There's not many nice things to say about Arusha really, the town is totally unbearable, but in the following paragraphs I will attempt to explain. Kris, Jord, Ry and I checked into a cheap hotel up from the bus stop. However before that, we had to fight our way through the local street touts upon exiting our bus. To explain further: as soon as a bus arrives people swarm and cram the exit point making it almost impossible to even get off the deathtrap without throwing elbows. And before that even, the tout network activates itself, and actually touts in Dar Es Salaam (or wherever your bus leaves from) phone the ... read more

Well we've made it to our final leg of the trip. Two weeks today and I'll be arriving home! We have our last bit of vet work next week followed by a little bit of vacation time in Zanzibar and then back to Nairobi for our flight out on the 10th of August. The trip to Tanzania went pretty smoothly, or as well as an 18 hour bus ride could be! I am definitely starting to appreciate even the luxury of travelling by train at home. The roads were the worst in Kenya, and so there was definitely no sleeping. I was kind of glad it was dark out because I often wondered if we were even on anything remotely resembling a road. Tanzania is very pretty. It's much greener than Kenya and we even saw ... read more