Africa - Tanzania - Daily Life

For my second practical work, I had the possibility to go to Tanzania, to do research about nutrien cycling in a national park together with Judith, my PhD-student and supervisor.

The park where I had to work, the Saadani National Park, is really beautiful, although I had not seen leopards, as the two girls of the other research group that came from Switzerland with us.

But Judith and I were experiencing the real Africa: we had to travel up and down the park twice a week for our researches. In the house in the North, called Mkwaja ranch, often we didn’t had any water and sometimes also electricity was missing... So bucked showers became more and more the norm! Melanie and Annette, the two other researchers, stayed the whole time in the South, in a guest house (where Jud and me had to sleep on the floor in alternation in the beginning), which is quite ugly, but at least they normally have water and electricity and near to it there is an amazing hotel where we all go to have a drink sometimes after field work. One of the managers invited us to go on a safari with a boat. We joined a fresh married couple and we saw a lot of hippos, crocodiles and king fishes. It was really nice!