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I visited Dachau and Oktoberfest in the same day. I sort of recommend it.

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Dachau is the first concentration camp that I’ve seen, and even though I’ve learned about the depths of depravity we humans are capable of by reading about the horrors and visiting the Rwanda Genocide Museum, by visiting the old slave market in Stone Town, by walking through Berlin and learning about the Holocaust in school and in Germany in an unapologetic way, it felt important to see this place, to walk through the ghosts of things that should not have happened.

Ditto, Oktoberfest. I mean, it felt important to go. I’ve been in Munich a few times (even when the Wiesn was in full swing). I love Germany. Aachen feels like my 2nd home. Yet for some reason, Oktoberfest has never been on my list… But this time there was time in the itinerary, so why not.

That these two juxtaposed realities can exist in the same plane of existence is both appalling and yet somehow not entirely unexpected.

old-ized image of entry gate to Dachau
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The words arbeit macht frei (work makes you free) are wrought into the iron in the entry gate at Dachau. It was a work camp more than a death camp, though the calculated deliberateness of the atrocities and the hypocrisy of the arbeit makes it very clear why chiefs from this camp went on to do even more evils at Auschwitz and others.

Walking the grounds and exhibits, in their brutal honesty, makes you realise that as horrible as the recounting was, it was sanitized for the sake of the viewer. Sanitized, for fucks sake. What actually happened there was far worse.

It was a gray, semi-rainy late-September morning. By the time we left, I was cold. My feet hurt. I was hungry. I needed a shower. Absurd first-world problems by any measure. Unfathomable, by today’s.

A cold, almost metallic, shiver stayed with me throughout the gray morning, and I couldn’t get the word hypocrisy out of my mind as I tried to align the thoughts this should not have happened with how close are we now to the timeline then?

It was a quiet bus-then-train ride back to the hotel, where a shower felt a little more decadent than the day before and a snack of some day-old bread was a luxury in a real world that felt so surreal and undeserved after the morning.

Rhetorical question: How can we simultaneously release ourselves from the past while living with empathy and integrity and inclusiveness so that history doesn’t get the chance to repeat itself?

Genuss lässt dich vergessen (indulgence/enjoyment makes you forget) is written nowhere that I’m aware of, yet the visions of the morning dissipated as we meandered the streets of Munich and wended our way to the Theresienwiese, the Oktoberfest fairgrounds. Along the way we saw lederhosen-clad revellers on electric scooters, dirndl-dressed Fräulein, and oodles of others dressed in traditional garb and less-so.

We had been with German friends for the past week and a half, all of whom joked and rolled their eyes that we wanted to go to Oktoberfest; all of whom suggested visiting the more authentic Oide Wiesn.

So we entered the fairgrounds via the Oide Wiesn, the historic Oktoberfest, in hopes of avoiding some of the chaos outside these gates. It felt like a state fair, only 11,000 times bigger, replete with enormous beer tents and oompah bands and Bavarian folk dancing. As one does, we indulged a bit: drinking steins of local beer, eating Bavarian pretzels and Fischbrötchen, riding the Willenborg Ferris wheel, and maybe the best part, peoplewatching, because the outfits and the mayhem truly make the day.

Traditional Bavarian folk dance in a beer tent at Oktoberfest

The Oide Wiesn felt like the safe place, as venturing into the wilds of the main Oktoberfest madness felt like a frat party on steroids. We ducked in and out of beer halls and played “spot the American tourists” (inebriated 20-somethings in rented lederhosen with stuffed chickens on their heads…I am not kidding) and “dodge the detritus” (unfortunate results of said inebriation) enough to call it quits for the day and head to the exit with one final auf Wiedersehen to the experience.

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It doesn’t make a lot of sense to visit the polar extremes on the humanity spectrum in the same day…But maybe it does. Maybe they both teach us lessons on balance and compassion and bramacharya, restraint.

  • Be kind.
  • Don’t let apathy win.
  • Indulge…but not to excess.
  • Practice equity and empathy and compassion.
  • Laugh…at yourself before others.
  • Live modestly.
  • Love generously.
  • Learn rabidly.

A holiday spent doing elephant science: Part II (some science, some other stuff)

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Okay, so every day wasn’t elephant counting and monitoring and dung sampling. Yes, I really went to South Africa for my vacation and spent at least a small amount of time looking at, taking photos of, measuring, and rooting around in, elephant dung.

Read Part I of this series here. And read about the Bring the Elephant Home program and our mission: What happens when you drop a fence.

The Bring the Elephant Home program was structured to give us several days in the field, a day or two in the “office” doing projects (I wrote a blog post, created a few new visuals for the team, and contributed a BUNCH of photos for the ID project… and I’m trying to put together a Hackathon project to use AI for elephant ID. More to come on that as it progresses!), and time to see the local area and learn even more about Xhosa culture.

We watched some presentations on other conservation being done in South Africa and abroad, one by Bring the Elephant Home’s Antoinette van de Water on her work on the value of elephants [read the white paper here, or take a look at her TedTalk here], and by the amazing work being done in rewilding by Brett Mitchell of the Elephant Reintegration Trust. Their motto, “helping elephants in captivity or distress to gain the freedom they deserve” says volumes about the work they’re doing. (Know any gajillionaires? A new project they’re working on to create a sanctuary and rewilding center near Kariega needs funding. Let me know and I’ll put you in touch with the right people!).

A small public service announcement: If you are fortunate enough to see elephants in their native land and have the opportunity to ride or touch captive elephants, please DON’T! Just please don’t patronize these businesses. These types of business exist at the expense of the health and welfare of the animals. [read more here]

Elephants are sentient, endangered beings, mistreated and quite often drugged in order to be submissive enough for human entertainment; in the process they suffer years of emotional and physical hardships. Having seen captive elephants first-hand in Thailand and India, and wild elephants in Africa, I can assure you that there is nothing more exquisite than watching a wild elephant in its natural habitat. There is absolutely nothing satisfying about watching a captive elephant. [rant off]

One of the events later in the week was an offsite visit to the home of one of the Kariega Foundation’s staff for an afternoon cooking demonstration! Xhosa cuisine is comprised of quite a lot of meat, but also their staple starch called samp, a corn meal derivative that seemed a lot like the East African fufu or ugali, made with cassava, that I tried in Botswana and Zimbabwe. Beans or sauces (meaty and non) are poured over the samp, as other cultures would use rice or potatoes.

Lunch!

Fears of cultural appropriation dancing in my head, our faces were dotted with Xhosa-style paints, and we donned handmade clothes and beaded neck wraps. Our smiling hosts guided us into the kitchen and outside to the fire upon which we heated stews and baked the bread we had just hand-rolled. Note: It was a bad time to have quit bread, as these hot-off-the-fire rolls were simply divine. The afternoon culminated with a demonstration of local song and dance by kids from the neighborhood, replete with drums and chanting. This dancing show gave me pangs, as in cultural experiences I’ve had elsewhere in Africa: I wondered if the kids participating in the show resented their elders for making them show off for the visitors, or if the joy on their faces during the dancing and singing was genuine, and whether they were grateful to share this expression and pride of culture. I hoped for the latter, as they did appear to be quite enjoying themselves. The smiles were genuine. Ours too.

Over the course of the 10 days, we learned, we did research drives, we walked along the white sand beaches of Kenton-on-Sea, and even did a night drive through the dirt roads we spent so many days travelling in our quest to find the herds. Jackals and kudu, white rhinos and rhinoceros beetles (one, landing on my neck, was an unwelcome visitor!)…and the Southern Cross in the Milky Way-spattered sky. But the highlight of the evening, as we were heading back to camp in the darkness, was a weird little creature we saw scampering down the dusty road, looking like a cross between a tiny bear and a marmot. He ducked down into a dry gully as we stopped, popping up only a metre away from the vehicle to stare down his smarmy nose at us. A honey badger! To quote even our naturalist, “I’ve never seen one of these in person before.”

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We went up to Addo, a national park an hour away that boasts an elephant population of ~300. It’s rumored that a couple of Addo bulls are planned to be transferred to Kariega to help balance out and give some adult supervision maybe to a young and randy bull population over there (stay tuned, maybe that will be a new research opportunity!). The day was drizzly and spitty, but it was still fun to see dozens and dozens of eles at the different watering holes throughout the park.

It’s not without irony to me that there are really no wild wild animals remaining in South Africa. Their wild stocks have been poached and hunted to near-extinction; the wild lands, animals and all, are all now locked behind fences to protect them from the most alpha predator of all.

It was fitting, then, on our last day, that we spent time in the pouring rain visiting the APU, the Anti-Poaching Unit, at Kariega. These rangers steadfastly protect their eles and rhinos (black and white) from said predators. In fact, while visiting the team, we were privileged to a sighting of Thandi and two of her calves. Thandi is famous in these parts for being the only rhino to have survived a brutal poaching attempt in which two others in her crash (an apt collective noun for rhinos!) where brutally murdered. Thandi’s face was mauled when they hacked off her horn, but hers is a survival story that speaks to the valiant efforts of surgeons and conservationists alike to restore her face and her family. Since the poaching in 2012, she has created a small battalion of rhinos and now has grand-babies roaming the thicket and savannah of Kariega in her honour. On our first game drive, we met Colin, Thandi’s 2nd calf. According to Kariega’s website, that calf was named Colin in memory of the reserve’s founder, a man loved and admired by many, who had died just days before Thandi gave birth. The name Colin means ‘victory of the people’. White rhinos in this case.

Colin
Black rhino
Black rhino (notice the radio collar on his leg?)
Not a rhino 😉
Thandi and 2 calves

The skies cleared just as we realised we were running late for lunch and our ride back to Port Elizabeth. We hadn’t managed to spot more than one or two elephants in the distance all day. But just like a cheesy movie, as we were losing hope, we managed to get a ping from Beauty’s collar – the one that had been malfunctioning all week. She was about a kilometer away from the fence at the edge of the Kariega Conservation Center. Of course she was. So as it turned out, in our last moments of our last game drive on our last day in Kariega, we were treated to a close encounter with the whole of Beauty’s herd, a brightening sky, and baked-in memories to last half a lifetime.

Late that night, in a hotel room in Cape Town, which felt like a million light years away from the reserve, I saw a WhatsApp message to our group from Brooke, the PhD researcher: “Beauty and Half Moon came up to the fence to say goodbye.” Later still: “Bukela’s herd crossed the river!” This was the exact thing we were there in South Africa to help observe: What happens when you remove a fence.

Next up: a few days in Cape Town and a long trip home.

THIS JUST IN: Want your very own elephant prints or cards? I just launched my new print store… take a look HERE. And use coupon code TGM-15 for a 15% site-wide discount!

I spent my holiday doing citizen science in South Africa: Part I

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What draws us to elephants is a mystery. Or is it? They represent wisdom and strength and empathy. They are revered in Thailand and in India and elsewhere in Asia. Ganesh is the Hindu elephant god of new beginnings, the remover of obstacles and bringer of wisdom and luck. His name in Thailand is Phra Phikanet.

Across Asia and Africa, these magical and mystical creatures are worshipped in temples and simultaneously loathed in the fields, where their land is being encroached upon by farms and development. A mere “drive by” by a herd can decimate a family’s crops in minutes.

I think I’ve always been charmed by the magic of elephants, intrigued by their human-like behaviours, disgusted by humans’ treatment of them and their habitat. My first visit to Africa gave me a up-close look into those long-eyelashed orbs and I was smitten. It’s not a secret that Ganesh is something of my patron saint, and it’s certainly no surprise that I’m something of a wildlife freak. So when an opportunity to participate in Bring the Elephant Home’s volunteer program, assisting scientists with crucial behavioral research to learn more about social structure, welfare and habitat usage, I couldn’t apply fast enough.

Fast-forward 8 or 9 months, and I’m beginning to pen this on my flight home, coming down from the elephant high that has been my status quo for the last couple of weeks.

I joined the group in Port Elizabeth (recently renamed to Gqeberha), on the Eastern Cape of South Africa: a couple from the UK, a handful of Californians, and a student studying ele behaviour at a University in Johannesburg. From PE, we went up to our post at the Kariega Conservation Center at the Kariega Game Reserve. I posted a blog at the beginning of our time there called What Happens When You Drop a Fence, outlining our initial observations and the main research objectives.

What was it like?

So the 8 of us volunteers, 2 PhD researchers, and a local ecologist ventured out into the thicket of Kariega Game Reserve each day looking for elephants. While like something out of a dream, it also felt much harder than it seemed like it should have been. One might think elephants are so big, and how could you miss them, right? Well, crazy ele fact #1: they move silently. I mean, so silently that you could be sitting in a spot for a while and see or hear nothing, but a moment later, you could glance over your shoulder and see an animal the size of a Land Cruiser standing just metres away, trunk curled, sniffing in your general direction. While you’d think they’d make themselves known by heavy footsteps, their massive feet are so cushioned that they walk as if clad in slippers. In fact, more often than not, we’d know they were nearby only from the branches snapping rather than anything else (the tracking collars, when working, didn’t hurt either 😉).

Day 1

That first afternoon we went out on a game drive to get our sea legs, as it were… we saw zebra and white rhinos and giraffes and warthogs (Pumba!) and of course a few elephants. Even though it was just a couple of hours on the reserve, and we got a flat tire just before dusk and had to wait a while for another vehicle to come and bring us a spare and a new jack, it didn’t feel like a harbinger of doom for the week. Instead, it felt like the beginning of a cool adventure. Especially when I looked up and realised that the giraffes we had been watching on the other side of a hill began to creep in closer to get a peek at what we were up to out there in the scrubby thicket.

The first full day was a series of lectures on why we were there, classes on how to do elephant identification, exercises in what to look for, behaviour-wise, and a slew of what to do when things around age and sex and different behaviours and dung sampling and using the Zoomonitor app to record said behaviours. It felt like a lot.

I mentioned to my manager that we had elephant school that first day. He replied that he had heard they are good learners. Us humans, though… the jury was still out.

One of the first lessons was ageing elephants. It’s done by relative size, facial features, and behavioral characteristics. Calves (<1) can walk underneath an adult cow. Juveniles (1-4) are still suckling but may or may not have tusk buds (squeee!!!). While Intermediates (5-8) may or may not look like sub-adults (9-15), they are weaned and the females take on more and more “big sister” duties. Sub-adult bulls spend less and less time in the center of the herd as they mature and become more independent (and, you know, more like naughty teenage boys!). Adults (15 and up) come in different shapes and sizes, depending on whether they are bull or cow. I learnt so much just this first day on these different stages, not least that bulls don’t even come into their first musth until they are about 25, while cows can start having their own calves by about 11.

Once we had a decent grasp on ageing, we moved on to sexing (size, head shape, body configuration, rear view). About half-way through this lesson I felt like I might fail elephant school altogether, so I was glad that the professionals would be with us in the vehicle to help out with our ID follies!

The team uses the SEEK (System for Elephant Ear Knowledge) system which incorporates a set of features and markings in addition to body condition on a scale from 1 (emaciated) to 5 (chubbo) to identify and code the targets of our observations. I’m grateful for the visual aids we were given, as well as the Elephant Voices ethogram website which we were encouraged to review prior to arriving. This was beginning to feel like work.

The last part of our training day was to review the different behaviours we were to observe and track: continuous behaviours like locomotion, grazing, browsing (and identifying the differences therein), and all-occurrence behaviours like head shake, sniff, play spar, trunk curl, trunk to face (and whose trunk to or from whose face)… again I was appreciative of the technology at hand – the app into which we were to record said behaviours and the myriad PowerPoint decks and references that had been prepared for us novices.

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As the long day wound down, we received our marching orders: review the materials and get ready for an early wake up call. We were going into the field in the morning, then breaking up into groups of 3, one to observe behaviour, one to do elephant ID, and one to be the photographer.

One can only guess which role I was more than glad to take on.

Stay tuned for more adventures from a citizen-scientist perspective. And be sure to take a look at Bring the Elephant Home’s updates page for more stories from our time at Kariega.

THIS JUST IN: I just launched my new print store… take a look HERE. And use coupon code TGM-15 for a 15% site-wide discount!

L’Afrique: Réflexions après coup.

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I didn’t know how to write about this trip. It’s been 5 years since I’ve been on a proper tour and half of those were spent while my life was sideways, treading water in an upside-down world changed forever by a plague and other mishaps. So in trying to compare and contrast my experiences, it dawned on me yet again that places have spirits or souls or essences that invite you in or spit you out, like Rajasthan or Istanbul or Botswana or Sardinia or Belize or Aachen or Marrakech or Amsterdam or wherever you call home…each has left its mark on me in a different way.

In Rwanda, I felt held. I felt fed – with local foods, recent history, a collective passion; with knowledge about conservation and community, with a shared compassion and humanitarian heart, eyes towards the future.

In Kenya, I felt sold-to, as if consumerism and capitalism and commercialism had woven its way into the fibers of existence there. It felt like a place that wanted to be so much of what my country stands for that they have shed their own identity. And while the pockets of the natural world there are being protected and nurtured, the delicate balance between selling eco-tourism as a commodity and believing that conservation is the right thing to do felt like a grand fuzzy line.

That said, I still had two days on my own at the end of the trip. So I spent my last couple of days in Nairobi learning more about how the country came to be, and seeing some of Nairobi’s conservation efforts for the Rothschild’s giraffe.

Stop #1 was the National Museums of Kenya (and snake house). The museum itself was a pictorial and diorama-ish narration of the country’s history from essentially prehistoric man to the present. If nothing else, the snake house was an opportunity to see their deadly (“a bite from this snake is considered a major medical emergency”) reptiles in a controlled environment.

The most disturbingly fascinating part of the museum, though, was the Birds of East Africa gallery. I wandered in, completely unaware, and was presented with what was functionally a life-sized Field Guide to the Birds, but instead of photos, each Kenyan bird was represented as a taxidermied example, meticulously arranged in plexiglass cases, labelled and numbered as in a bird book.

Stop #2 was the Giraffe Centre. What I thought would be a serene giraffe sanctuary turned out to be a breeding center and chatty tourist attraction. You are given a coconut shell full of snack pellets when you enter. Then you walk up to the viewing platform, where you can hand-feed and interact with the giraffes. It is a legitimate reintroduction program, as there are only approx. 1600 Rothschild’s giraffes remaining. They are at the centre to be bred, then released into the wild in protected parks throughout the country.

Looming large (and lovely) in the background was the renowned Giraffe Manor, where for $1000 USD a night (or more) you can stay in an enchanting stone manor that sits within the sanctuary’s grounds, as you commune with the resident long-necks. It was a weird but oddly satisfying visit, giving me hope that perhaps the commercialism of this place would help its natural beauty thrive.

Flying back home, I had a couple of distinct thoughts: I left Kenya with more things bought. I left Rwanda with more experiences sought. Yet it’s the little memories that pop into my mind as I digest my experiences:

The night I stood along the fencing separating the Lake Nakuru lodge from the reserve proper, watching a mass of dark hulking beasts make their way to the watering hole, grumbling and chatting amongst themselves in a low snuffling murmur. It was only once I shined my flashlight on the herd and saw 50 eyes staring back at me in the black night that I realised they were buffalo.

The night I went out to look for rhino in the weird Lake Naivasha camp, instead finding bushbabies skittering about (baby tree, said the night watchman). And maribou storks, dozens of the immense and bizarre creatures, using the half-dead and waterlogged trees as their base camp.

A lunchtime impromptu tour of the bush camp in the Maasai Mara, spotting hippos and monkeys and crocodiles, guided by a kind and eager Maasai warrior.

An exploration of the little paths along the park fence in Akagera National Park, wondering what might be stirring in the long grasses or what critters lurked just beyond the wires. I had a staring contest with a baboon in a nearby tree and spotted a family with the tiniest baboon baby (babette?) I’ve ever seen.

That night the Land Cruiser broke down on a long stretch of road between the Northern Province and Kigali and we were rescued (luggage and all) by a park ranger (and a veritable stranger) on his way back to Kigali.

The bicycles piled high with sugar cane. The lush hillsides. The milky way and the Southern Cross. The shoebills and hornbills and storks and kingfishers…brightly-coloured birds of all shapes and sizes.

A flash of history: We drove back from Giraffe-land past the new president’s house at about the same time the Kenyan supreme court awarded Ruto the win. The street outside his gates was lined with cars and photographers.

And the food…Dinner in the gardens at Hôtel des Mille Collines, staring out over the pool and pondering what Kigali’s people went through during the 90s. A homemade Rwandan lunch in the cook’s own kitchen, probably the best meal I had in the 2 weeks there. Dinner on my last night at an Eritrean restaurant in Nairobi, complete with injera.

I’ll come back to Africa. There’s so much more of this amazingly diverse land to experience. I want to see the Serengeti and Amboselli and Madagascar and Uganda…and return to Rwanda to hike more in the Virungas and return to Botswana and camp for longer, deeper in the Okavango. I want to eat injera in Ethiopia, and I want to see Deadvlei and Sossusvlei in Namibia. There’s probably more, not to mention the East African coast, that I don’t even know I want to see yet!

Travel is a privilege and an education. And for me, it is a prescription for the part of my soul that feels lost and wild and homeless and restless much of the time.

Jusqu’à la prochaine fois, l’Afrique !

Read about the whole trip: [Part I: Rwanda] [Part II: Jambo Kenya] [Part III: Maasai Mara]

Ode to a mackerel (sandwich)

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It’s no secret that I have a (not-so-secret) long-distance crush on the city of Istanbul. Recently, I ran across the passenger list for my grandmother’s passage to the US on the SS Themistokles on 27 Jan 1915.

My World History is splotchy at best, so my best assumption is that they fled the wrong part of the world at the right time… Gallipoli was mere months away, WWI was still raging in Europe. The US was opening its arms to immigrants who brought innovators and craftsmen and laborers to its shores. They travelled from Jaffa, through Piraeus (and through Cleveland apparently), to eventually settle in Brooklyn. Country of origin at the time (though technically Palestine): Turkey.

So maybe it’s in my blood.

Fast-forward 100+ years and I’m making a hodge-podge breakfast sandwich with what I’ve found in my fridge and pantry shelves: Persian cucumbers, pita bread, some red pepper spread from a jar I picked up in a market somewhere, avocado, smoked herring… I have a momentary and wistful flashback to a fish sandwich under a pop-up tent by the banks of the Golden Horn, in the Eminönü neighbourhood, across from the spice market, this side of the Galata Bridge.

More than New York City, more than Boston, this place calls me.

Balık Ekmek is common street food here, it’s fresh grilled fish served on a hunk of fresh bread with lettuce and onions and lemon juice if you want it as a sauce. It’s not fancy, but it is a simple kind of wonderful. The vendors walk around touting cups of pickles with fermented cabbage and pickle juice that’s meant for drinking. Even for one who likes pickles, it’s an acquired taste.

Eminönü, by the Galata Bridge, across from the Spice Bazaar

As much as the taste and freshness of the mackerel is the destination, what completes the experience and makes one’s senses come alive are the contrasts and interminglings here: the sounds and the bustle of the waterfront, the smells of the roasting corn and chestnuts mixed with the salty-ish city air, the colours and textures of the fabrics, the redness of the Turkish flag.

I’m daydreaming this morning: an ode to a mackerel sandwich, perhaps. The spring is trying to bust through here. And as a fairly dull and dreary winter comes to a close, I feel that familiar tug to the east, a restlessness in my legs to go adventuring, a void in my spirit where spice markets and lutes and zithers and magic carpets seep into my dreams.

Read more about my most recent adventures in Turkey here.