(Hi, it’s Claire..) Right now ,as I write, I look out the window and see many different kinds of birds. My favorite is the trumpeter hornbill. They has a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge bill and come swoopind down landing in the trees all the time. They also make a loud honking noise(it sounds like they’re laughing). ” Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” they say. Today we are leaving Nairobi and going to a place where we work with Colobus monkeys. I love it here, but now it is time to go on another adventure!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just a quick post, thanks for all of your comments which we are enjoying and make us feel connected. Today was a mellow “recover from jetlag” day with a morning at the Nairobi National Museum and an afternoon just chilling in the apartment, followed by a fabulous Lebanese dinner out with our hosts.

Wednesday we fly to Mombasa and drive the the Colobus Trust to begin our volunteer stint there; we’ll do our best to keep posting frequently.

Lyanda and Claire arrived safely last night and our adventures began this morning with giraffe licks, though even before that I had spent a wonderful Sunday breakfasting with a video producer colleague and then somewhat spontaneously joining her in preparing and distributing food to some folks in need at a small, poor church and school (long story, but a great experience on many levels).

Then catching up with my old colleague Emily at garden party, which was great. And finally, at 8:30, off with a sweet taxi driver named Boniface (who we kept today), to get Lyanda and Claire at the airport. Waiting there, the minutes slowly ticking by as the arrivals board showed the flight “arrived,” but no sign of its passengers in the baggage area (visible through glass if I elbowed my way through the hotel drivers holding name signs), and then finally, there they were! An unmistakable pair in there, headed for the baggage carousel. So, partly to pass the time while they were so close and yet still off behind glass and customs, waiting for their luggage, I suddenly remembered I could create an amazingly powerful demonstration of how wired the word is, and post to the blog from my cell phone, alerting all and sundry to their safe arrival.

After fitful sleep, today: In addition to the giraffe feeding (which was, indeed, a truly awesome experience), we spent the rest of this morning wandering the trails in the small forest sanctuary the giraffe center maintains across the street (which is seemingly almost never visited by the tourists, but teeming with bird life), and then visited the Karen Blixen House museum nearby, to have a taste of old Kenya complete with leopard skin rug (which promptly caused Claire to flee for the gardens in appalled horror). “I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong hills…”

Later in the afternoon we chilled at the Chungs’ apartment and sat on their fourth floor deck watching hornbills, ibis, pied crows, kites, and assorted other avifauna in the Jacaranda trees around the building. Yeah, hornbills. Seriously.

Tomorrow, the national museum, then we take our leave of the Chungs and head for 9 days at the Colobus Trust on the coast. We’ll try to post more photos from Nairobi onto our Flickr.com account before we go.

Originally uploaded by furtwangl

(From Claire): Getting licked by a giraffe is quite an experience! You have a piece of giraffe food in your lips and the giraffe grabs it with its tongue and eats it! Slobbery, but fun.

The flight here was SO long, it seemed as though it would never end. But here we are, having so much fun! We’ve already been to the giraffe center, and walked through some beautiful woods. We saw some very interesting birds! One was blue and shiny orange (Ly sez: Africa Paradise Flycatcher). I love it here!

I’m at Nairobi airport - Spotted them in at the baggage carousel! Yay!

Hello from Nairobi, where I traveled uneventfully from Addis this morning. Lyanda and Claire are enjoying an afternoon somewhere in the environs of Heathrow Airport, and we are about 31 hours from rendez vous.

The joys of travel serendipity have already begun - I was in the immigration line at Jomo Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi when I heard “Tom Furtwangler?” and turned to find my friend Dr Michael Chung and his wife and son, returning from a week long conference in Uganda. He’s a UW researcher who lives here, and one thing led to another and I here I am at their place, we’ll stay in their guest bedroom for the next few days, enjoy their company, and save a few bucks. Not only that, but another old friend from I-TECH, Emily B, happens to be in Nairobi this weekend, and we’ll have dinner tonight. (And just to complete the small world theme, Steve Gloyd and James Pfeiffer of HAI, who happened to be on my plane from Seattle to Amsterdam, happened to be on Emily’s plane today from Kampala to Nairobi… The reason for all this Kampala traffic was the big PEPFAR meeting last week, so these intersections aren’t all that strange, but it is still a little surprising to run into people you know so far from home).

Theoretically I just configured my phone to post by SMS, so the next post should be a text message with our local mobile phone number (I bought a SIM card at the airport). Feel free to text us, but remember we are 10 hours ahead of Seattle.

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.