A typical day at Olduvai

Wake up at 6 AM.
Breakfast at 6:30
Head out to site by 7:00.

Then I was dropped off and hiked into wherever my site happened to be that day. Work mostly consisted of this: Digging a trench (with lots of help), describing, measuring, and photographing a trench, collecting samples, and finally hauling them back up to camp. 




Work until 12:30 or 1:00 when someone would come back by in a truck to pick us up for lunch. We stopped at 12:30 for two reasons. A) It becomes too dang hot to do anything besides go eat lunch and rethink why you came to Africa in the first place and B) The light at the equator is weird! After about 11 am you start to think you are crazy. All these things you saw and described just start to disappear as the light begins to shine directly over head.



So we head back to camp to have lunch and take a siesta if you can until 4 when head back out until the sun begins to set at 6. Then it's back to camp for a "shower," dinner, and a well earned beer. I usually headed back to my tent at 9 to read and was asleep by 10 if not sooner.


Next up: Accommodations!

A little preview...

I promise that soon I will start up the blog again, but for now here's a little video preview that I made over Christmas break. 

Olduvai Gorge

Now that I have a nice map and before I go off on tangents describing all my adventures in Tanzania, perhaps I should explain why I was going there in first place...

Practically my whole life I wanted to be an archaeologist. One of my favorite books when I was younger just had pictures of King Tut. For my master's thesis, I wanted to do something that combined geology and archaeology, but seeing as I find sitting hunched over for hours in the hot sun digging quite tedious, I decided to find a geology project that would be important for understanding an archaeological site instead. There begins my interest in Olduvai Gorge.

The gorge is named after this plant called Oldupai that grows everywhere 

in the gorge, but somehow was anglicized to Olduvai.

Now why is Olduvai important you may ask? Mostly because back in the 1960s Mary and Louise Leakey began finding hominin fossils and tools there and archaeologists have been finding them ever since. If you would like to learn more about the Leakeys, I suggest this book Ancestral Passions that my advisor gave me last year for Christmas.

Here I am holding an enormous hand axe made out of quartzite. I wish I could say i found it, but sadly I only got to hold it. I did help out on one of the archaeological digs for one day, but I didn't find anything interesting.Fortunately for me, the archaeologists need geologists to tell them what the environment was like millions of years ago, and that's where my project comes in. I'm looking at soils that formed along a lake 1.8 million years ago and have been buried. These buried soils are now are exposed in this gorge cut into the Serengeti Plain and can tell you a lot about the environment.

Here I am describing them. More on that later! 

Now where exactly is Olduvai Gorge?

View Tanzania in a larger map


I've been working on this map that should help explain where things are. It shows things like the Kilimanjaro airport, places I stayed, and most importantly where Olduvai Gorge is! I plan on updating it to show where things are as I get to them.

Tanzania at last!

Tanzania at last! After a long flight from Amsterdam to Kilimanjaro Airport and a crazy drive in the dark to Arusha, I finally arrived in Tanzania. I was so excited and nervous! I had spent the last nine months almost continually thinking about Tanzania whether I was doing background research, applying for grants to go there, ordering supplies, etc, but I had to wait until morning until I could actually see anything. Arusha is a fairly large city and was our base to gather supplies before we headed out to Olduvai Gorge.

I must admit when I first arrived in Tanzania, I was a little overwhelmed. I had spent so much time preparing for the research aspect of my trip and very little time thinking about what it might be like there. The poverty was shocking at times, but everyone is very friendly. Sometimes a little too friendly... I was a magnet for anyone trying to sell something.  

I didn't take too many pictures at the beginning of my trip because the locals (understandably) don't like strange giant white girls taking pictures of them while they go about their daily business, so I respected their privacy. However, I did snap this shot in the late afternoon. This is a view from my hotel room looking towards Mt. Meru.

While I got to see a lot of amazing things in Tanzania, my main reason for going was to collect samples for my master's research project, and therefore I spent most of my days digging trenches and describing the sediment. Not very exciting to most people...so instead of recounting my adventures day to day like I did for Europe, I'm going to just tell stories about what it was like. I have more pictures than I could ever post on here, and they don't quite capture Tanzania anyways. I continue to get better with my camera, but some things I still cannot manage to convey with my pictures, so I'll do my best to describe it.