Jul 8, 01:09 AM
Mt. Longido
Last weekend (yes I’m a bit behind) I went with two other interns and a husband of one of them on a hiking trip. We climbed the little mountain called Longido that is 80 km north of Arusha and close to the border with Kenya.
There are many Maasai tribesmen in the area. Our guide, Ellie, was one, but he said he was not “traditional.” That meant that he wore trousers, a shirt, and sneakers instead of the distinctive red cloths and sandals made from tires. There were also a few more traditional Maasai who met us at our camp site.
Along the way, Ellie showed us a tree whose thin branches turn brush-like when you chew them. He said it was informally called a Maasai toothbrush tree and said that they would really use it that way. He also showed us a tree that is used for malaria medication and another one whose sap soothes chapped lips.
Realizing that you could stock a medicine cabinet with the trees around there, someone joked that we would need to find the deodorant tree after we had been hiking all day. Not long after that, and I’m not even kidding, one of the guys came walking into camp with a bunch of leaves and started rubbing them in his armpit. They called it a perfume tree, but I say that’s close enough.
And it did seem to work.
