20 June 2012

I woke up several times in the night, but I finally woke up to see dawn light filtering into the tent, instead of the pitch black of night. Used to studying chimpanzees, who often leave their night nests before dawn, I felt I had overslept.  I unzipped the tent and went into the kitchen tent. Tyler was there heating water for tea and oatmeal. I thought everyone else must have already left for the monkeys. But no, as it turns out, geladas are lazy monkeys. As Taylor says, “they are solar powered.” They sleep on cliffs, and bask in the morning sun before climbing up to the grasslands above. Even then they may sit around socialize a while before starting the day’s main business: feeding.

The others came in one by one and fixed their breakfast and lunch. Unlike dinner, each person fixed their own breakfast and packed their own lunch, some more elaborate than others. Taylor eagerly prepared a sardine and salad sandwich from one of the five cans of sardines Tyler had bought for him in Addis. For our first day at Guassa, Tyler and I wouldn’t be going out all day, so we would come back for lunch.

It takes time for a body to adjust to 11,000 feet. There’s a lot less oxygen in the air. “I’m sucking wind just walking up the hill a bit,” Tyler commented ruefully.

The geladas had been spending a lot of time in the south of their range, but Tyler wanted me to see the north, with its spectacular views. So for our first day out, we went on a gentle hike, together with Peter.  But even this left me winded. I stopped frequently to look at plants, take pictures and catch my breath.

Up close, Guassa looks like a giant herb garden. Thyme covers much of the ground, along with Helichrysum, bushy little plants with silvery gray leaves and bright yellow flowers, and other low-growing plants: clover, daisies, dandelions, two kinds of carrots, an onion, and many others I didn’t recognize.

Occasional stands of giant lobelias made clear that we were in the African mountains. These odd herbs look a bit like Joshua trees. Peter says that the ones at Guassa grow until they flower and then die, to be replaced by clones of the original plants. I knew these plants from the books and magazine articles on mountain gorillas by George Schaller and Dian Fossey that first made me want to become a primatologist.

We walked along a path through flowers and herbs, through stands of giant lobelias and giant celery. I asked Peter what the strange bushy plant with scaly leaves, and he said it was heather – which just confirmed my impression that we had somehow ended up in Scotland by mistake.

I had imagined that above the cliffs where the geladas slept, the grassland would be a gently rolling plateau. There were some places like that, but for the most part, here the cliffs were topped with steep hills, including the one that we were walking along. It was a long way down. Peter and Tyler said it was too bad about all the haze; you could normally see much further. But it looked like we could see plenty far down as it was.

At one point where we stopped, Peter said it was about a full kilometer down to the valley bottom. I’ve been up to the observation decks of a few skyscrapers, but the tallest of these, the Sears Tower in Chicago, is just over 440 meters, less than half the height that we now stood above the valley. We looked down to fields and round farmhouses topped with conical thatched roofs, spread out like a map below us.

Tyler spotted gelada monkeys on the steep slope of a hill above the cliff across from us. It seemed impossible to get from here to there without falling off the hill into the abyss. But still we went – and for the most part, found that even though the hills looked impossibly steep, if you stepped the right way, you could get around.

We met the geladas at closer range as they came up the hill. They let us come close, so they were used to seeing people, but they weren’t named individuals from study groups.

Geladas are strange monkeys. The females look rather like small olive baboons, but with thick, fluffy hair, and strange bare patches of red skin on their chest. The males look like little lions. They have long manes and tufted lion tails. Like females, they have bare red patches on their chests. They also have orange shadow all around their eyes, and when making threats, they raise their eyebrows to show off the orange.

Baboons display lots of information about their reproductive status on their bottoms. Females have bright red swellings that indicate when they are ovulating, and a pregnancy sign that turns red when they have a baby on board. Geladas, though, spend much of the day scooting around on their bottoms, eating grass. A big swelling would get in their way while scooting, and you couldn’t see it anyway. So they display their reproductive condition on their chests instead. (They do get little swellings on their bottoms, just nothing as dramatic as baboons.)

In The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris argued that over the course of human evolution, a similar relocation of reproductive signals occurred. Just as in baboons, in our closer cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos, females signal ovulation with big swellings on their bottoms, suggesting that our common ancestor also may have had sexual swellings on their bottoms. Chimp swellings don’t look terribly comfortable or convenient, but as they mainly get around by walking on all fours, using their feet and knuckles, the swelling doesn’t get in the way much. With the evolution of a bipedal gait, however, the area that swells in chimps ended up between the legs, where a big swelling would make it hard to walk – and a small swelling would be hard to see. So, Morris argued, the main female visual signals, and corresponding male interest, shifted up from the bottom to the chest.

If Playboy published editions for chimps and baboons, they would feature lots of rear views. Playboy Gelada, however, would be all about the frontal shots.

Later, back at camp, I met a group of four bachelor males who were foraging in the grass just beyond the kitchen tent. If these were Gombe baboons, they would be racing into the kitchen tent to steal all our food. But gelada monkeys don’t seem to care about our food. They were content to skirt the camp, just looking for grass and herbs to eat.

At one point, I heard strange high-pitched calls coming from up the hill. The gelada bachelors noticed too – they looked up and stared towards the calls. Walking into camp, I found others looking up the hill. “Did you hear the wolves calling?” they asked.

So, just like when camping up in northern Minnesota, there’s a chance of hearing wolves here. But Ethiopian wolves are much smaller, and have a high-pitched whistling call, much different from the haunting howl of the gray wolf. Still, it was tremendously exciting to hear the call of these rare creatures, which only live in the Ethiopian highlands.

 

Setting up Camp

19 June 2012

After we arrived, I took a little tour of Gelada camp: a scattering of tents at the head of a long, wide valley. There is a kitchen tent, a storage tent (tattered and torn from the relentless wind and sun; Tyler had bought a replacement for it in Addis), a little shower tent, a handful of tents for the researchers and staff, and a rough little latrine, screened off on the side towards camp, but open towards amazing views in other directions.

The bare heathland seemed more like Scotland than Africa, as if we had driven so high that we had somehow found a shortcut in the sky to Europe. But the dizzying view of the rift valley below made clear we were somewhere else entirely.

We piled our more vulnerable belongings inside the kitchen and storage tents to protect them from the rain.

Before long Peter returned from the field, where he had been collecting plants for nutritional analysis, and welcomed us to Guassa. We huddled in the kitchen tent and drank tea and ate peanut butter and honey sandwiches waiting for the rain to stop before setting up our own tent.

In the kitchen tent, I tried reading the labels in Amharic on the honey jars and tea bags. I could work out that honey was mar, water was wuha, and tea was shai, but couldn’t make out much else. Bedulu saw what I was doing and helped out, pronouncing the words for me. He asked in Amharic if I would be visiting the farms while here; unfortunately there wouldn’t be time for that.

Wanting to get the tent set up before nightfall, we eventually settled for a lull in the rain, rather than waiting for it to stop completely. We chose a spot that had been previously occupied, still marked by a bare patch on the ground. Fitting together poles and stakes with hands numb from cold and wet with rain brought back memories of camping trips in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters.

Once the tent was set up, I changed out of my rain-soaked town clothes and put on layers of field clothes. Even after the rain stopped, and even inside the kitchen tent, I kept my raincoat and hat on for warmth.

The other researchers gathered in by sundown, and we ate dinner: huge bowls of rice with a sauce of tomatoes and onions. Dinner started with placing big pots of rice and sauce in the center of the table, surrounded by bowls for the nine people in camp: Peter, the project co-director; Ethiopian staff Bedulu and Shoa; the outgoing volunteer, Taylor; the incoming volunteers, Carrie and Bryce; visiting researcher, Morgan; and Tyler and me.

Then one person served rice and sauce until each bowl was piled high with what seemed like enough food for three people in each bowl. Then the salt, chili sauce and berberi (the local spice, a dark orange in color) were passed around for flavor, and everyone ate and ate, not saying a word, just shoveling in the food. Everyone emptied their bowl, hungry from a long day’s work. Then we talked, telling stories about the monkeys and people of Guassa and other places we’d been, and drank tea. I drank several cups, trying to warm up, holding the mug close between sips to warm my body.

Conversation included the researchers’ names for local places and things. Where did the geladas sleep? Darjeeling, down by the Cliffs of Insanity.  Some others might be sleeping in Norway. During some parts of the year, the monkeys eat Injury Berries, which despite their name are supposed to be not only harmless but very tasty.

By 8:00 I was nodding off, and soon we all went off to our separate tents. I snaked into my sleeping bag wearing heavy winter socks, field pants, t-shirt, and long-sleeved field shirt, with the collar turned up to warm my ears. Even with a wool blanket on top of my sleeping bag, I shivered with cold.

I slept in fits and starts. The tent shook in the wind, then beat like a drum when the rain fell. Having drunk all that tea before bedtime meant I had to get up repeatedly in the night, slip on my rain-soaked shoes, unzip the tent, and step outside for a bit in the howling wind and rain.

20 June 2012

Yesterday we drove up from Addis Ababa to Guassa – up and up and up. Up out of the crowded streets and diesel fumes of the city into the open country, up winding roads. The main road has been paved now and traffic moved quickly.

We started at 7:00, packing our luggage and all the supplies Tyler had bought in town: a storage tent with long metal poles (tied to the roof of the car), two mattresses, bags of food for us and the other people in camp. Tyler let me ride shotgun so I could enjoy the views that he knew well from previous visits; he sat in the rear passenger seat snugly surrounded by mattresses and supplies.

Then we drove to the transport operator’s house to pay him for this trip, my return on Saturday, and Tyler’s return in six weeks. We were supposed to bring up cylinders of propane gas as well, but the driver was worried that would make the load too heavy for the car to make it up the steep road into camp, especially now that the rains have started.

Some things that make Ethiopia seem really different from other parts of Africa:

Horses. I don’t remember seeing anyone riding horses in East Africa. I’ve heard of horseback safaris in Kenya, but local people don’t have horses. But here we saw lots of horses: people riding thin little horses, the horses decorated with bright red tassels. Thin little horses pulling little carts with three or more people sitting across. I don’t know why more people don’t use horses in Africa – they seem much more economical than cars for subsistence farmers. Maybe disease is more of a problem for horses at lower elevations? Or they just never caught on?

Donkeys. Lots of donkeys, with huge loads strapped to their backs, wandering aimlessly about or being driven here or there. Many of them carried huge stacks of flattened, dried cow patties: fuel for the home fires. Loads that in East Africa would be piled up on a bicycle are carried by donkey here. Again, seems much more efficient to use pack animals. Some of the donkeys were very shaggy, which is very sensible given the cold here.

Cows. Most of the cows look similar to East African cows: long horns, big shoulder humps, usually reddish brown in color. But we passed a herd that looked like Wisconsin dairy cattle: white and black cows grazing in an open field.

On the road we sometimes passed the whole family herd on the move: horses, sheep, goats, and cattle all traveling together with the men, women and children herding them along, hitting them with sticks to get them to move away from oncoming cars.

The higher we climbed, the more fabric people wore wrapped around themselves: white cotton drapes with colorful trim at one end, worn wrapped around the shoulders, and sometimes wound around the head as a turban. Higher up people wore wool blankets over their shoulders. Starting to think I should have packed more winter gear…

The paved road, like many others in Africa, was built by the Chinese. I suppose much (if not most) of international aid is rather selfishly motivated. Much of American and European international aid seems directed to projects that make donors feel better about themselves, or to promote things they happen to care about, such as conserving wildlife. I suppose Chinese aid is just as selfishly motivated as Western aid, but roads at least seem a particularly useful, practical sort of aid. Road improvements make life easier in all sorts of ways for people. Though of course faster roads lead to more deaths, not just of people, but of gelada monkeys, Ethiopian wolves, and other wildlife.

Along the way, we passed cars and trucks in various stages of break-down and disaster. One truck with two trailers hung from a bridge, having plunged off the side of the road.

About halfway to Guassa, in terms of distance, we left the main road and took an unpaved little branch road that climbed steeply up into the hills. The car soon broke down. While the driver tinkered with the engine, Tyler showed me the plants growing alongside the road: lots of thyme, mint, dandelions, and various yellow, purple and red flowers, including red-hot pokers. Thyme grows all over Guassa.

“That’s the scariest plant I’ve ever seen,” Tyler said, pointing to a plant that had inch-long thorns growing right from its leaves.

We shared a Snickers bar (our first food of the day, since the hotel doesn’t serve breakfast until 8:00) and some water. The road had already climbed so far above the paved road winding below that trucks looked like toys.

The driver got the engine going again, and we climbed into the car, driving higher and higher. We passed through forests of Eucalyptus trees, plantations clinging to steep hillsides.

We climbed up high enough to see down into the Rift Valley, and what had seemed like amazing views before now seemed barely worthy of notice. Even with the dust and late dry season haze in the air, the valley floor seemed impossibly far away. Valley doesn’t even seem the right word for it — a valley is gentle and pleasant. This is more like a canyon, a chasm, a rent in the crust of the earth. This is what the view from Gombe would look like if someone pulled the plug on Lake Tanganyika.

Despite the views, lulled by a gentle rain and the long drive and jet lag, I dozed off.

Sometime later, I woke up, hearing Tyler calling out that there were geladas ahead. We stopped and looked out the window to see a small herd of monkeys foraging in the grass near a cell phone tower. I took pictures, excited to see geladas for the first time. Tyler kept his amusement to himself, knowing that these views of distant, shy monkeys were nothing compared to what we would see of the research monkeys.

Finally, after hours of driving through landscape dominated by human activities — farms, fields, houses, tree plantations — we reached the Guassa: a vast, open country of hills covered by grass, flowers, herbs, and strange Afro-montane plants like giant lobelias.

Guassa is the local word for the kind of grass used for thatching roofs. For the past 400 years, the local people have protected this land in order to ensure a supply of thatching. In doing so, they also conserved a rare patch of natural habitat, and some of the creatures that only live here, in the Abyssinian Highlands: gelada monkeys, Ethiopian wolves, and many other endemic species.

We passed the Wolf Lodge, where the few tourists that make it up this way stay, and where the Frankfurt Zoological Society supports the study and conservation of the Ethiopian wolves. A herd of gelada monkeys scrambled up the cliff near the lodge. Tyler thought the researchers must be nearby but we didn’t see them. We continued on towards camp.

The road wound on and on, up into the hills. Tyler called for the driver to stop, then got out and scouted around until he found the faint track that led away from the main road towards camp. We drove up this steep, rocky track, until we could see camp emerging, a scattering of tents nestled at the head of a broad valley. This was where Peter Fashing and Nga Nguyen have been studying gelada monkeys since 2005. Tyler spent 13 months working as a volunteer on their study before starting graduate school at Minnesota, and now he was back to start his PhD research.

The two men in camp, Shoa and Bedulu, welcomed us. They greeted Tyler especially warmly, clearly very happy to see him again. Speaking Amharic, they told Tyler that the others were still out in the field. They helped unload the car. We thanked the driver, confirmed that someone would be back to pick me up on Saturday, then watched him drive away. An augur buzzard hovered over the edge of the cliff above camp, perfectly still, like a kite, holding steady in the strong wind blowing up from the valley far below. The air smelled of thyme, and rain.

 

18 June 2012

I’m sitting outside the Taitu Hotel in Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia. According to the paper I read over coffee this morning, Ethiopia is the second most populous country in Africa (with some 82 million people), and has the fifth fastest growing economy in the world.  Addis is on a high plateau some 7700 feet up, and it’s chilly here.

The hotel is the oldest in Ethiopia, and is named after the Empress Taitu, who led a force of cannoneers against Italian invaders in the Battle of Adwa in 1896.

Ethiopia is unlike anywhere else I’ve been in Africa. In the 19^th Century, when the European scramble for Africa subjected most of this vast continent to colonial rule, Ethiopia dealt the Italian invaders a humiliating defeat and maintained its independence. The Italians invaded again under Mussolini, and occupied Ethiopia for five years (1936-1941) before getting kicked out by the British, who restored Emperor Halie Selassie to the throne. Though Selassie was considered the second coming of the Messiah by Rastafarians, he was deposed by the Derg, who took over in 1974 and ruled Ethiopia as a People’s Republic until the end of the Cold War.

At the airport yesterday, we didn’t find the car the hotel had sent for us, so Tyler haggled with taxi drivers in Amharic. Our luggage didn’t all fit in the small car, so the driver tied my suitcases to the luggage rack on top of his car. Driving through the city felt much like driving through other African capitals in some ways, though very different in other ways. With about 3 million people, Addis is similar in size to Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Like those cities, the winding roads are crowded with taxis, minivans, and people. The streets are lined with small shops with brightly colored signs. But here most signs are written in Amharic, which uses its own alphabet, based on the writing system for Ge’ez, the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Ge’ez has a longer history as a written language than English, with some early inscriptions dating back to the 5^th century BC.

The Ge’ez script has roots in common with Hebrew and Arabic, but doesn’t look very much like either, and all the signs in these odd, lovely letters make clear that we’re in a different world now. I’ve been trying to learn the script, and spent time on the plane copying out whatever phrases I could find. Each letter represents a syllable rather than a consonant or vowel. With 33 consonants and 7 vowels, there are 231 different letters to learn, but they vary in a sort of systematic way. Syllables that start with “m,” for example, all have a pair of circles connected by a horizontal line, like a set of spectacles. If the spectacles are unadorned, the syllable is “mä.” If the spectacles have a handle on the right, like a lorgnette, then it’s the syllable “ma.”

At the airport, on the city streets, many different sorts of people mill about. Some people have jet-black skin, and look like they could be from southern Sudan or Uganda, while most others have lighter brown skin and narrow noses. Ethiopia is a diverse country, with many different languages and peoples, and stands at a crossroads between Africa and Arabia. At the hotel, some of the visitors are dressed in long white gowns and Arab headdresses.

After checking in, Tyler and I walked through the city for a while to get our bearings. Our hotel is in the Palazzo neighborhood, with many old buildings dating to the Italian occupation. Before we had gone fifty feet from the hotel, a young man called to me – “Hey, are you looking for something? I can sell you my sister.” At a street intersection not much further along, small children reached up to touch my hand, begging for money. A pair of vultures circled high overhead, and a pile of garbage smoldered on the street. The city air was hazy and acrid, smelling of diesel fumes and burning garbage. Further down, shiny new office buildings stood on wide, smoothly paved streets. Buildings under construction arose in a framework of scaffolding made of roughly lashed together saplings. At the intersection of two major streets stood a huge bore cannon that was fired once, cracking the barrel.

There are a few tourists here, and I saw one white United Nations car, but the place generally feels off the beaten track. We drank excellent coffee in a small café, and ate delicious local food for lunch and dinner at the hotel: spongy injera flatbread with different sauces, vegan for lunch and meaty for dinner.  After dinner went to the hotel’s jazz club to see a local band playing straight-ahead American jazz-funk – songs including Stolen Moments, Footprints, and Freedom Jazz Dance. What a country!