I just ran across this great article about a ranger in Kenya’s Masai Mara park who is disseminating the park’s conservation message (and the economic impact of the tourism collapse) using web 2.0 tools including the Flickr.com photo sharing site (which we are also using to feed the images in the left sidebar), Twitter.com (which we will be using for text message posts to this blog), etc.

It’s a fascinating read about how “wildlife ranger Joseph Kimojino … a ranger in Kenya’s acclaimed Mara Triangle wildlife park … first learned how to click a computer mouse in November. Now he blogs about the Mara Triangle and posts wild animal photos on Flickr nearly every day.” And even more compelling is his blog itself, with first person stories of shootouts with poachers, crocodiles gorging themselves on zebras, and boy shepherds chasing off leopards that prey on their goats.

The penetration of web and mobile phone tools into Africa has happened incredibly rapidly and led to some great innovations. Of course there are a few bumps in the road, like that fact that here in Ethiopia the telecom industry is a government monopoly, voice over IP (Skype) is illegal, and there is no text messaging.

Still, it’s interesting to think about how radically things will be transformed in just a few short years when the fibre arrives and there’s bandwidth galore.  Live webcam on the Mara river during migration?

Greetings from the I-TECH Addis Ababa guest house - I arrived in Addis late last night after a long but uneventful journey - actually it’s a really nice direct connection from Seattle on NWA/KLM, with just 2.5 hours between flights in Amsterdam, and then a brief refueling stop in Khartoum, Sudan (I wonder if jet fuel is significantly cheaper in Sudan than in Ethiopia? I bet it is!). So less than 24 hours total travel, which is not bad for west coast to Africa.

Slept remarkably well and woke up to the good news about Obama, which is thrilling even half a world away, and to a flurry of last-minute e-mails about various aspects of trip preparation. I’m imagining Lyanda is home in a frenzy of final cleaning, packing, organizing, and logistics, though I doubt she’ll actually post to the blog till she hits African soil. It sure is going to be bizarre to be standing at the Nairobi airport on Sunday and see my wife and daughter come walking off the plane into the warm East African night. Can’t wait!

Departure is getting VERY close - in about 36 hours I get on a plane to Ethiopia to work this week. Then at the end of the week Lyanda and Claire fly via London, and we meet up in Nairobi next weekend. After a couple of days in Nairobi feeding giraffes and having a lunch seminar on post-colonial theory, we’re flying to Mombasa on the coast, and spending ten days as volunteers at the Colobus Trust, then a week in the coastal village of Takaungu, and then a weekend in Watamu at A Rocha checking out the Assets ecotourism project, centered on the Arabuko-Sokoke forest.

Then we fly back to Nairobi and bus to Arusha, Tanzania. After many late night e-mail exchanges with various outfitters, we have just about finalized our safari plans at last, choosing Active Tanzania as the outfitter we’ll be using for a five day camping trip from Arusha to Lake Manyara, Ngorongoro Crater, and Arusha National Park.

Then we head east, spending three or more nights at Muller’s Mountain Lodge in the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania, then on from Tanga to Zanzibar for four nights at Maruhubi Beach Villas during the Zanzibar International Film Festival, and then three nights on the other side of the island at Casa Del Mar.

The last week of the trip (July 20-27) is completely unprogrammed. Maybe we’ll be into island life on Zanzibar and extend by a week, maybe we’ll squeeze in a last safari to the southern parks in Tanzania… who knows!?

We have a public Google calendar up with the rough itinerary for our trip, and lodging plans. This is subject to change on the road of course, but it helps to visualize the trip.

I’ve been up past midnight every night these last few weeks planning, e-mailing, researching, and I’ve thought a lot about how a trip like this comes together. This is our second or third time booking an international adventure.  It seems like every time, at first the dates and itinerary look impossible, you’re overwhelmed by the options, the distance, the blizzard of information on the net.  You have no idea how you’ll fit together the puzzle pieces of the days, weeks, and destinations you want to see, and match it to budget, safety, and flexibility.  But then, gradually, with enough work and discussion and consideration, a plan emerges and starts to lock into place.

It’s still hard to figure out how much to book in advance, and how much to leave to the last minute.  On the one hand, we want some flexibility in the itinerary, and the ability to extend a stay we’re enjoying, or shorten a dud.  But on the other hand, it might be better to do the research and make the bookings up front. I will not have these research tools at hand once I’m on the road. The Lonely Planet guide, good as it is, just does not compare to the power of Google and the Trip Advisor forums.

So we’re erring in favor of a lot of pre-booking.  Fortunately in Kenya and Tanzania most places are willing to take an e-mail booking with no exchange of funds, so last-minute changes or cancellations are still possible (though unfortunately, a flip side of this is the oddity that most places charge a per-person, not a per-room rate).

Links to a lot of the places we’re staying are in the details of the entries on our Google calendar.

So that last post was from our Twitter stream - this is how I hope to do a lot of posting from Kenya and Tanzania - post to Twitter from a mobile phone and then have those posts appear here either individually or as a daily digest thanks to Alex King’s Twitter Tools Wordpress plugin. We will probably not have a computer with us (still a bit of a debate, actually, but the anti-computer forces are ahead by several lengths), so we’ll be reliant on net cafes and the kindness of strangers to blog and post photos, though hopefully Twitter will help  by allowing us to post “we’re still alive” by text message.

All you Twitter power users can actually set your mobile phones to receive our updates in real time, though they are likely to be posted in the middle of the night US time.

Casa Furtwangler is in departure mode… I leave June 2, and the ladies follow on June 6 - three weeks from today. So the house has piles of stuff laid out, and we’re having hot and heavy discussions about how many pairs of shorts a person needs for 8 weeks on the road. I’ve bought about six pairs of shoes in the last three weeks, gradually returning each pair after a few days of wearing them around the house. It’s coming down to the wire and I need some shoes I can wear and wear, but cheapskate that I am I just can’t bear to spend REI prices.

So I’ve got these two pairs home right now - left foot is $20 from Big Five and right foot is $75 from REI. They feel about the same, maybe if I keep the $20 shoes and add a pair of $35 insoles I liked at REI I’ll come out ahead of the game. Or maybe I’ll just have unhappy feet. We’ll see.

Meanwhile I’m posting a few safari pictures from my March 07 Tanzania trip just to make sure the Flickr feed works, and get this blog in the mood.