Lee, Lennox, Danielle and Deborah
Always great to wake up here to the sounds of life in Tanzania – people walking to market, a few car horns, the askari raking the yards and all the wonderful birds in the trees. It’s cool and overcast this morning, but the clouds will burn off shortly and the warm equatorial sun will dominate the day. This is the dry season though it’s been raining a bit in the last weeks here in Arusha as well as the Serengeti. This will be good for game viewing with the grasses somewhat taller than usual for the vast herds of wildebeest, zebra, Cape buffalo and all the various antelope that inhabit the massive Serengeti and Masai Mara. We’ll be starting tomorrow along the Mara River famous for the images of wildebeest herds crossing en mass. They follow the grasses and it is always tough to predict their movement that varies from year to year. This is the largest migration on earth and has been occurring annually for millions of years.
Spent the morning with the kids playing outside and doing what I love best in the front yard – catching old world chameleons! This is a sport that was perfected last March with Megan and will continue on. They are the most wonderful of lizards that try to intimidate with hissing and opening their jaws but don’t know how to bite as that isn’t how they catch their prey so they are only bluffing. Their fully independent eyes see a near full circle front and back and somehow their brains interpret this information. They are truly unique.
Danielle and I went to the Masai Market by noon to shop which is another experience altogether. Rows and rows of shops each with almost identical stock and each owner hawking for you to buy from them to help them out. It is an overwhelming experience for certain. Danielle had things to buy and so we spent a couple of hours going up and down the aisles looking for things that caught our eye with everything looking so similar. Of course, I was looking for something totally different – ebony chunks to use as pedestals for my baskets, standing straight with lots of character. Ebony is a wonderful wood with the black dense interior of the tree and the outer brown bark that is so thick. We survived our shopping trip thankfully and met with an expat patient of mine here for coffee at a very old hotel in Arusha and caught a ride home with them to the Tembas house.
Lee, Lennox, Michael and Deborah
Leonard and Pendo had family over to meet us for a late dinner and now it’s off to bed. We’re leaving very early in the morning to head to the airport and off to the Serengeti where our real adventures will soon begin.