4 Walk up to Amameru Village

John and I walked out of Twiga Lodge up the dirt road through the forest to the Amameru village.  Twiga Lodge sits across the dirt road from the border of Arusha National Park.  The park service has hung string with black t-shirts soaked in something along with pepper spray designed to keep the elephants from crossing put of the park into the villagers maize and bananas and everthing else fields.  We saw at least two places where the elephants crossed through the string & t-shirts and we heard the villagers dogs both nights alerting to the elephants.  As we followed the dirt road it gradually swung away from the national park boundry which resulted in fields along both sides of the road.  Tanzanian farmers farm open ground as well as ground under a large stand of trees.  On our walk we saw farmers from very young to very old and they all had pangas.  They were cutting, spraying, bundling, weeding and hauling grass to their cows.  Girls and women, boys and men were all working equally hard and carrying heavy loads.  We practiced our Swahili by greeting everyone we passed.  Habariza ...hee is morning and it was morning.  We saw a troop of Colobus monkeys high up in the tree tops and one Sykes monkeys quickly cross the trail ahead of us.  We saw two 6-8 year old boys each carrying a large guinea pig sized rodent hung on a string which we suspect were heading for the cooking pot.  We reached the village at the top of the hill and turned around to go back.  We saw the church.  It was the hardest working village I'd ever seen.  On the walk home we took a short cut and went off the road through the forest.  Theyre were oodles of paths to choose from, I followed John, and he guided us right to Twiga Lodge, just in time for a great pizza lunch.

 

Three boys hauling leaves & branches home for the livestock

Moo

A line of African ants