Our first challenge was to find the Stone Age site along a road under construction. Folks said that you just look for the sign -- there were no signs along the road as everything for at least 50 feet either side of the road has been removed and no signs (except a large sign "No Road Signage") have been replaced. We tried a suspicious looking cow path and went in about a kilometer but the kids pointed us back to the main road. We turned around only to encounter a large truck. Dale maneuvered us out of the way and we found another couple of gentlemen who pointed us to the top of the next hill about 3 kilometer away. And there it was -- a sign. Literally the only sign we had seen in the past 10 miles but it said "Isimela Stone Age Site". There at the end of a short road was a parking lot and the museum.
The Stone Age site is a deeply eroded river bed where the deep gorge has exposed numerous ancient tools and artifacts. The area was once a lake and oasis where animals congregated for water. Ancient man over 300,000 years ago had made simple tools for clubbing and cutting and scraping on the animals they caught at the water hole. At some point the dam that held back the water in the lake gave way and the lake became a stream during the rainy season and deep chasms over the thousands of years. We were shown artifacts and a time-line of the development of tools and hunting in a small museum and then taken on a walk thru the river bottom.
There were about 100 school kids there too and they had great fun shaking hands with each of us as they passed by.
After the tour we returned to the car only to find that it had taken the day off and decided not to start. This car only has one battery and apparently they have had great difficulty with it starting. I wonder why -- it has 347,000 kilometers (215,000 miles) on the odometer. I am sure it has not had the best of maintenance and many hard miles. We got help from a bus who came to pick up some of the children, but they couldn't get the battery compartment opened so we waited for Tom from the apartment to rescue us. He did after about 30 minutes and we returned to the apartment -- parched and hungry. After a chilled grease -- oops sorry grilled cheese sandwich (Dale wanted the tomato soup and we offered a bucket and some tomatoes) we took a rest while some went off to the market for a little more shopping.
Ginny Johnson (and others) needed to start some serious trinket shopping and conveniently there is a fellow set up right in front of the apartment (location, location, location) with a blanket full of carvings and such. They returned with a basket full of stuff and now just have to figure out how to get it all home. Annica is still eying the 6 foot Twiga in our living room and trying to convince the airlines that it is her service giraffe!
Our group from Fish Lake should be on their way. It is 7 AM here and in Amsterdam and they should just be staggering off the plane with a couple hours' wait for their next flight to Dar Es Salaam here in Tanzania.
By the way, we had our first rain this afternoon. It went from a light rain to a heavy downpour. The dry season is over. I found the following rainfall data for this part of Tanzania.
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Month Days with 1/8" or more of rain
- June 0
- July 0
- August 0
- September 1
- October 3
- November 8
- December 16
I guess we had our September day and can look forward to some more as the months go by.
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