Imagine, if you will, a squirrel. Imagine that it is three times as large as a squirrel should be. Imagine that it is bored out of its mind and tired of its monotonous squirrel life. Imagine that it has opposable thumbs. You are now imagining the vervet monkey that shit in our sink.
I am an animal lover, I swear. I would never ever harm a creature. But sometimes, at 3 in the morning, when the stars are bright and the vervet monkeys are playing dodgeball on our rooftop with their tiny vervet monkey bodies, I do wish some hyena would come and just eat them. Nature taking its course...and so on.
Despite the surprise in our sink, yesterday was a lovely day. We drove two hours to the base of Mt. Kenya for a day hike that brought us to an altitude of 12,000 feet. On our way, we drove through a misty rainforest. Colobus monkeys hung in clumps from the trees, looking like giant dandelions with their combined black/white capes.Baboons darted from the road, watching us with no small degree of disdain as we drove by their groups of raucous young. We even saw a baby elephant, no older than a month, hidden between the tall stalks of his mother's legs. She trumpeted a warning at us as we drove by, and tucked her baby more neatly under her body. His tiny trunk blew out from beneath her, and he hustled to keep up as she walked off, nudging him every now and then back under her tall belly.
The flora of Mt. Kenya is astounding. I had to be reminded not to trail my hands across every plant we passed. Tall cactus like shrubs rose from the ground laden with daffodil like flowers, red and purple lichen trailed delicately across the rock, and bright yellow flowers dotted the landscape by our path. The way up the mountain was relatively straightforward, and so we were allowed to move at our own pace. Without the hindrance of a heavy pack, I quickly moved to the front, and stayed there, lost in my thoughts until we reached the nearest observatory. In the distance, we could see the jagged peak we were to climb, another 4,000 feet above sea level. Below, white fog had stretched across the mountain's slopes, making it seem as though we had arrived in some hidden forest, high above the clouds. Even with just a day hike, the height was startling. We will need four days to summit, not for the distance, but so that our bodies can adjust to the altitude. I can't wait.
Afterwards, we (sort of) convinced Raphael and Jackson to bring us into Nanyuki town for ice cream. We stopped at a coffee shop called I <3 NanYuki (in the model of the I <3 NY logos) and had the best milkshakes I have ever tasted in my life. It was a full day, one inspiring of a deep and fulfilling nap despite the light of the ever present sun.
A quick note on what we are currently working on...we have split into groups of three and four to work on our own projects. My specific group is working on determining the similarity of the Bongo microbiome between half siblings and full siblings in inbred herds. To do this, we have spent multiple days isolating the DNA from fecal samples. Today, we will begin to do the actual sequencing. All of this lab work is new to me, and the amazing part is how extraordinary it is that we are able to do it at all. Two years ago, this type of work would have been impossible out in the Kenyan bush. Now we are able to do it in a matter of hours. We are being given a brief introduction to Genomics with some of the most sophisticated equipment on the continent. It's amazing.