A day of adventure turns into....

Pictures from Tuesday's BIG sampling

...nothing accomplished... But it was pretty fun.

We were out again on Thursday to do some recruiting for next week's set of locations. We ran into some problems...

First, when I flipped the GPS on the four GPS points that we had to locate were actually the ones we used last week... When James and I started to scan through the next set of points(thinking perhaps they were mislabeled), we quickly discovered that the points were in a different sub-location (basically a Kenyan county) than we thought we were in... Bad news- mostly cause we had picked up the sub-location Chief. And then when we checked the back-up points, we discovered that they had all somehow gone into the GPS unit as the same point... Add in the fact that the indicated point was 600 kilometers away and we knew we were working with some bad data (I looked it up today and it would be in the middle of a forest in the Congo...)!! So we called the grad student who I am here working with to try to adapt a solution.

Luckily, she was on the way to an area near where James and I were working and happened to have her computer with her. She could use it to generate new GPS points and get us back on out way. So we met up with her on the side of the main road between Kisumu and Busia, and she decided just to hop in with us in case we came across any other problems. She replotted the points and while it still looked like we were headed to a different sub-location, she chalked it up to a redistricting that had happened since the map we were using was made. So the three of us headed off with the Chief of the wrong area in search of adventure. The Chief still knew the way around the other area and since it is REALLY swampy country, we were glad to have him.

After a couple turns and ever narrowing roads to trails to tracks, the Land Cruiser finally reached its point of exhaustion. As 'bridge' construction halted the vehicle and the countryside began to look swampier and swampier, we abandoned the Land Cruiser for a pair of rented motorbikes. The drivers of the motorbikes seemed quite happy to drive all 4 of us, two on each bike with the driver, towards the southwest on whatever trails were available. I have probably never held onto anything so tightly in my life. On the back of a motorbike with two other people, riding down single track footpaths was pretty exhilarating... Then came the bridge... If anyone has ever been to the Baltimore Zoo, they have a rickety-sort of bridge towards the end of the Children's Zoo section that sways a little bit, enough to make it fun for the kids but not enough to make it dangerous. Imagine that sway, but 20 times as much... Exposed to the environment, God only knows when the thing was built there... Lets just say that there was quite a bit of give in each of the boards...

When we got to the end of the bridge, there were about 4 kilometers more before we hit total swampland... Realizing that we still had another ~14 kilometers to go before reaching the point, the boat trip that we were facing was unfortunately turned down as we opted to circumnavigate the 'small' Lake Kanyaboli at the head of the swamp. In order to get southwest of the swamp, where we needed to be, we drove two hours around the lake and a bit of the swamp. Of course at the other edge of the swamp is Lake Victoria... Our points appeared to be about 1800 meters out in the water... They were supposed to be nestled nicely on land... Opps... We tried our hardest to get to one spot that looked like it might be on a peninsula... No luck there either, which I am kind of glad cause in the 200 meters I walked to get to the shore, I encountered more mosquitoes than I have EVER seen in all of my years combined. The sound was not unlike the sound that you would get if you swatted a huge hornet's nest...

So.... Lian (the grad student) had to bust out the computer and re-plot the point again. While she was working, we were attracting quite a crowd of children from the little village we had passed through... Soon enough there were 25-30 kids climbing all over (and some into) the Land Cruiser. Lian was stressing out a little, so I figured I could distract some of the kids since one of them happened to have a little football made of plastic bags and fishing net. It was like a 20-minute long revisit to last summer (I ran a summer camp)... As the computer battery died, a set of points was uploaded to the GPS unit...

Again they were 8oo meters into Lake Victoria. We only discovered this after hiking up a rocky cliff and bouldering for a couple hundred meters to reach the end of what was another peninsula...

So with no battery remaining and a faulty set of GPS points (turns out to be a faulty layer in the mapping softwear) we decided to call it a day...

But as the saying goes, the adventure is not found in the destination but in the journey (or something like that). So if that holds true we had a GREAT adventure, in spite of getting little accomplished for the project.