Firesticks - the movie

Here is a link to my vimeo account where I hope to post clips on a regular basis. This was shot at Kakesio, on the escarpment overlooking Lake Eyasi.

What to do when you have left the matches behind....

Click on the title of this post and it should take you there!

All Creatures Great and Small

Flap-necked Chameleon - Philip Shirk

As I often say, size isn’t everything.

Ok, ok, you can stop sniggering at the back…

My daily grind consists, on the whole, of going to lovely places and looking at awesome animals.  Usually big animals.  But that’s not always the case – sometimes you find some cool smaller stuff, and some of these are very cool indeed

A friend kindly volunteered (or was 'volunteered'?  Thanks again, Norma) to act as a ‘mule’, bringing me some exciting new toys from the States.  One of these, advertised on Amazon as a ‘Private Investigator Flashlight’ (apparently great for revealing bloodstains and other bodily fluids, as any ‘Bones’ fans out there will know) is an ultraviolet light.

Just before it arrived, I asked a fellow guide if he had used one at all?  Oh yes, lots.  How did he rate it?  ‘I stopped using it, it gave me nightmares…’  You see, UV isn’t only good for showing up bloodstains, it’s also REALLY good for finding scorpions.  (Hint: if you don’t like scorpions, don’t look at the picture below).

I have to admit to being just the teensiest bit underwhelmed when my CSI Flashlight arrived.  As soon as it was dark, I dashed outside to find… nothing.  I tried a couple more times in likely looking places… nothing.  So I wasn’t expecting much when Chris, the manager at Manyara Ranch, borrowed it to see what he could turn up.  But he was back in a few minutes, with a small scorpion in a glass.

It appears that a scorpion’s carapace absorbs UV light, so it glows a weird greenish white.  VERY weird against the purple backdrop of everything else around it!  Chris took a series of lovely photos, including this:

Photo by Chris Rodgers

As you can imagine I was reenergised by this discovery and managed to find 5 more on my way back to my tent.  Well, right by my tent actually.  Hmmm…

While at Manyara Ranch, Jules spotted a slim snake sunning itself on the path.  After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, we identified it tentatively as a Tanganyika Sand Snake, which, according to the distribution map, shouldn’t really be there.  We’re awaiting expert confirmation, but it looks like a good match. 

Meanwhile, back home once again, we were lucky enough to spend an evening prowling around our property with leading chameleon boffin Philip Shirk.  No UV this time: a standard torch (flashlight for those on the other side of the Atlantic) does just nicely.  In the cool of the night, chameleons save energy by diverting blood from the skin to the core; the colour-bearing chromatophore cells, deprived of blood supply, turn very pale.  So you look out for whitish, comma-shaped objects among the leaves and if you’re any good, you find them.

We found 9 (or was it 11?), including this baby Kilimanjaro 2-horned Chameleon and his friends:

Photo by Philip Shirk

Kilimanjaro 2-horned Chameleon - Philip Shirk

We also found these fun beasties:

Hawkmoth - Philip Shirk

Praying Mantis feeding on Hawkmoth - Philip Shirk

The moon in June and other safari moments

Photos by Tynan Daniels

Gaunt granite outcrops amongst the grey-tawny bush near the shores of Lake Eyasi.  Every bush and tree here, it seems, has thorns that reach out and cling at your skin and clothing.

We are visiting a small band of Hadzabe, the Bushmen of Tanzania.  Only a few hundred remain, living their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle.  In common with aboriginal peoples on other continents, they are increasingly marginalised. Once, they roamed freely over this whole vast landscape, but these days they are restricted to a relatively small area, as land-hungry immigrants from other tribes move into what appears to them to be unutilised land.

We catch up with the hunting group at their small encampment in the hills, a collection of small grass huts.  ‘Huts’ is putting it a bit strongly, as these are very basic shelters, easily assembled from local materials: grass, a few branches and twine made from bark.  This makes perfect sense for a nomadic people who need to be light on their feet, able to pack up and go quickly in response to changing ecological factors such as trees coming into fruit at a distant location.

The men are busy making new arrows, checking the straightness with the utmost care and shaving off small sections where necessary.  They are sitting on skins of Lesser Kudu, a beautiful spiral-horned antelope found in these parts.  The women are nearby, cooking and playing with healthy looking children.

Later, we set out on a hunt with the men.  It is rare nowadays for Hadzabe hunters to find big game – the pressure on the land is too great with all the newcomers.  In any case, having a bunch of flat-footed wazungu (whiteys) trying to keep up, would cramp their style.  Not to worry - I am fairly certain that they would forget all about us, in the excitement, if a decent-sized animal were spotted and they would tear off, leaving us floundering.  Quite right too.

They move through the bush, quiet but intent.  When a hyrax is spotted there is a flurry of activity and the scrawny hunting dogs scramble under the boulders, trying to flush the prey.  One man cocks an arrow and takes careful aim.  The unfortunate hyrax is hauled unceremoniously from his hiding place.

***

It is a few days later and we are in Serengeti.  By the road, lions have killed a buffalo.  They are pretty full but every so often one wanders over to the carcass – maybe just a little bit more, maybe a tiny space still left to be filled.  In the melee, we can make out five small cubs, maybe 2-3 months old.

***

The Western corridor is alive with the honking of wildebeest, like a chorus of demented bullfrogs. Hidden in dense bush by the Grumeti River, we watch as they make their nervous way down to water.  There is tension in the air: as animals of the open plains, they are fully aware of the dangers inherent in the prosaic act of drinking: large predators lie in ambush and the placid water might erupt at any moment, as a crocodile attempts to catch breakfast.  The Grumeti crocs are particularly large and probably only get to have a decent meal when the migration comes through for these few short weeks once a year. The rest of the time, pickings may be skimpy.

Today, fear wins out over thirst: something spooks the herd and they whirl away, out of the forest and onto the plains once more.

***

A herd of ellies finds a lovely muddy pool. An ecstatic youngster churns up the mud for better wallowing.  The babies lie flat, kicking their legs up in the air, while the adults, more sedate, squirt mud behind ears and under bellies.  A good mud bath is a wonderful way of cooling off, as well as for removing pesky parasites.

***

Later on, we sip our wine as the sun sinks to the horizon in a blaze of red and gold (all that smoke from the Park Managements early burning program has got to be good for something!).  It’s time to head back to camp.  A lioness… she wasn’t there a moment ago.  There is probably a whole mob of them in the tangled thicket of sickle bush from which she has emerged.  After a few minutes, we leave her scanning the plain, looking for dinner while we head back for ours.

•••

After a long flight, we are on the shores of Lake Tanganyika.  We know it’s a lake, but it feels oceanic: the mountains of the Congo side, 25 miles away, are shrouded in dry season haze and the water merges with sky at the washed-out horizon.  We head out for a walk in the forest – there are Red-tailed Monkeys in the trees overhead, but they are difficult to spot.  Moving stealthily and peering up for a glimpse, we are probably behaving just like a party of hunting chimps and they whirl away with bird-like chirrups of alarm.

•••

June is often tough for chimp tracking.  Many of the fruiting trees they favour are way up high and it is hard work for Homo sapiens, particularly an unfit specimen such as myself, to get to.  Today the news is good: last night, they nested low down and the trackers have set off to locate them early to give us the best chance of catching up with them.  We head south by boat to the trailhead and start into the forest.  Here the guides stop us: the chimps are on the move and they want to be sure of their direction before deciding which trail to take.  The trackers radio down: they’re off toward the river.  The trail hasn’t been cleared yet, as it’s still early in the season, so the guides have to hack a way through with their pangas (machetes).  Soon, there is no trail at all: we branch off along the river, and have to cross several times, teetering mid-stream on precarious boulders.  If the chimps cross before we get there, they will disappear up the densely forested mountain slope, where we have little hope of following.  All of a sudden, there they are: 2 males, Darwin and Carter, grooming each other in the classic Mahale Handshake style, clasping each others hands overhead while they search for parasites and flakes of skin.

More appear from the forest, making their way to the water’s edge to drink, before crossing, taking care not to get their feet wet.  This they achieve much more elegantly than our party of their closest cousins.

It is a perfect situation for photography, which is ironic, as my camera has chosen this moment to go on strike…

Six of them settle down to a group grooming session, crowded around the thuggish alpha male, Pimu.  One female, Omo, has a small infant cradled on her lap.  He is only 6 months old, and has a pink, wizened old man’s face.  We are totally rapt.  All of a sudden, a single chimp pant-hoots from above.  The group immediately leap to their feet, replying in wild crescendo, ending with a series of high screams.  Then they disappear into the wall of forest.  It is perfect – the curtain has come down on the scene and we, the privileged audience, walk slowly back down the hill.

Next day, we don’t find them at all.  The trackers only hear a single distant call – how incredibly lucky we have been.

***

It’s our last night.  Everyone has gone to bed, Steve, Kiri and I are sitting around the camp fire before heading off to bed.  I glance over my shoulder – why has the moon gone red?  Wow, IT’S AN ECLIPSE!  I race off to rouse my guests and we stand and watch in awe.  It is a relatively rare event as this time as the moon passes right through the centre of the earth’s shadow, so it is a total eclipse – the moon gets very dark.

The fates are clearly smiling on us…

A Hadza lady in her boma

Hard times ahead

My apologies in advance… this post might make gloomy reading.  If you feel like a good giggle, I suggest you stop reading this now and come back to it another time.

Apparently, more than 800 rhinos were poached across Africa last year, including 333 in South Africa alone.  (For more on this story, follow the link below)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110325/ap_on_bi_ge/rhino_poaching

With figures like that, can there be any hope for rhinos in the wild?  South Africa is light years ahead of the rest of Africa in the sophistication of its anti-poaching.  Terrifyingly, we even lost one from our tiny Serengeti population, soon after a trumpeted reintroduction of five animals from South Africa.

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/serengeti-poaching011.html#cr

There are persistent rumours that more of the Serengeti rhinos were poached around this time, but nothing concrete.

The simple fact of the matter is that rhino horn is an incredibly valuable commodity: ounce for ounce, it is dearer than gold. With many people living on less than a dollar a day, the temptation to cash in on the goldmine on the nose of this bumbling blind behemoth is just too great to resist.

Here’s a scary quote for you: ‘Tanzania’s elephant population declined by more than 30,000 elephants between 2006 and 2009, primarily from poaching to supply black-market ivory to Asia.’ http://appablog.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/elephant-poaching-and-illegal-ivory-trade-out-of-control-proposed-ivory-sales-increase-threat-to-conservation-efforts/

One of the main forces driving this new upswing in trophy poaching is rapid economic growth in the Far East; many Asians are finding they have cash to burn for the first time, and ivory and rhino horn are among the products they covet.  It is fair to assume that this will change: as time goes by, the younger generations will turn against this trade, much as has happened in the West.  Political correctness will come to the rhino’s rescue.  But how long will this take, and what will be left of our wild places by then?

The crucial thing is awareness.  International outrage is the only force that can hope to put a stop.  On this front the tide is beginning to turn, with people like the artist / photographer Nick Brandt using his powerful images to publicise the massacre:

http://www.biglifeafrica.org/

Several of you sent this link to me - many thanks to all of you.

No pictures from me this time:  if you don’t mind, I think I’ll just let Nick’s photos do the talking.

Spring is in the air...

It’s almost April and the rains are upon us.  Well, almost.  We’ve had great build-ups of cloud, huge stacks of cumulo-nimbus in ominous shades of grey and black; thunder growling all around.  But oddly patchy rain: some places have had huge downpours, while others (usually us) have had very little.  Jules is particularly miffed at the way each storm seems to slide past us, thumbing its meteorological nose as it goes.

Great, I can hear all you English-dwellers say; rain - who needs the stuff?   Well, actually I do: I’ve got my tanks to fill before the dry season, and all those trees need a good soaking too.  So, just as my father used to at this time of year, I spend a lot of time anxiously peering at the sky trying to figure out what’s going to happen and when.

Anyway, what rain we’ve had has greened everything up, and life has changed gear: the dawn chorus each morning is incredibly loud as birds proclaim their territories; frogs, katydids and crickets are all joining in.  It’s LOUD out there.  Butterflies everywhere, with the big Emperor Swallowtails stealing the limelight; and bugs and beetles aplenty – blister beetles in particular, munching on all the freshly emerged flowers on display right now.

And the trees: we have a huge fig tree groaning under the weight of juicy orange and red fruits; each day you can see where the fruit bats have been gorging themselves, then voiding the seeds onto the ground below.  The whole place will be one huge fig-forest if even a tiny percentage of these take root.

What we have plenty of, though, is guavas: over the years, birds, bushbabies and elephant have dispersed seeds all over the place in their dung, and we have guava trees everywhere.  And they’re all fruiting.  Now I love a freshly picked guava, straight from the tree, biting into the pink flesh as I walk around. Jules has been busy turning a bucket load into jam this morning; everyone heads home with bulging bags of fruit at the end of work. But still the branches are laden with the things, and rotting fruit under every tree.

Luckily help was at hand.  The other day, right around full moon, we heard a loud cracking and breaking.  We sat quiet on the balcony, eyes trying to pierce the shadows, until all of a sudden there was a pair of tusks in the middle of my binocs.

 

We soon counted 5 elephant, but going by ‘noises off’ we reckon there were clearly several more.  Next day we went to see the damage, and found that they had been on Operation Guava: many branches picked clean, with barely a fruit dropped.

What a blissful evening it was.  We often hear elephant crashing around of course - they seem to treat our place as an extension to the Park - but we have never before seen them like this, relaxed and feeding no more than 40m from the house.  Utterly at home in fact.

Wildlife Corridors: the migrating herds need them more than ever

When Tarangire National Park was gazetted, back in 1970, few foresaw the looming population explosion, or the farms that would spring up in what were then, important wet-season dispersal areas for migrating herbivores.


That has now come to pass. Populations of migrants such as wildebeest and zebra have crashed, largely cut off from their ancestral calving grounds.

AWF (African Wildlife Foundation) recognised the need to protect important game corridors outside National Parks, in order to keep the old migration routes open. An important (if controversial) move was the purchase of Manyara Ranch, a 44,000-acre chunk of land occupying a central position in the vital Kwakuchinja Corridor, connecting Tarangire to the nearby Lake Manyara National Park.
http://www.awf.org/content/solution/detail/3505/

This is an attempt to achieve that holy grail of wildlife management – involving the local community in a sustainable conservation model, to the benefit of both people and wildlife. I wish them well. National Parks in Tanzania are, on the whole, in pretty good shape. Sure, there are inevitable issues, such as poaching. But I think most people are reasonably confident that, in 50 years or so, the parks will still be wildlife havens, providing enormous enjoyment to many visitors – and vital dollars to the national coffers. The future for wildlife outside the protected areas is much less certain.

There are similar projects afoot elsewhere in the region: north of the border, in Kenya, the Northern Rangelands Trust works closely with local communities, helping them to set up conservancies with fancy lodges so they can benefit from their wildlife resources. So far, NRT is involved in projects involving 15 communities, thereby helping to conserve hundreds of thousands of hectares of land in northern Kenya.
http://nrt-kenya.org/home.html

Here in Tanzania, high flying hedge fund manager and hunter / conservationist Paul Tudor Jones has been investing heavily in the Grumeti Game Reserve and Ikorongo Game Control Area, two degraded hunting blocks, lying just outside the western boundary of Serengeti National Park. The project has had its ups and downs but the proof of the pudding is in the eating: a few years ago, you would have been hard pushed to find much game in this area, so bad was the poaching. Now, it offers first-class viewing, with plenty of important species such as cats and elephant as well as hordes of plains game. Importantly, it now serves as an excellent buffer for the western Serengeti, which has historically suffered from massive poaching and wood cutting. And their conservation arm is leading the charge in the planned re-introduction of black rhino into the Serengeti ecosystem, to bolster the existing population.
http://www.lexdon.com/article/Grumeti_Reserves_and_Paul_Tudor/49004.html

What these projects have in common is the recognition that, outside the parks, successful conservation requires involving local communities and relies on the profit motive: I will protect that which benefits me. In other words, enlightened self-interest.

Contrast this with the situation elsewhere, in areas beyond park boundaries and lacking free spending conservation-minded billionaires: wildlife numbers are plummeting; the mechanisms and methods employed by wildlife authorities are, on the whole, outdated and simply not up to the task of conservation in the modern era. A lot of stick and not much carrot. And did I mention leaden bureaucracy?

Official policy has it that wildlife is a tremendous resource, a precious source of revenue, something to be cherished and nurtured – a blessing. The reality on the ground is somewhat messier: wild animals eat your crops and livestock; they are a threat to kids on their way to school, or women collecting firewood; and it is virtually impossible to make money from this ‘resource’, thanks to the convoluted and expensive bureaucratic procedures mentioned above. A neat example: a friend running a local NGO recently told me that the cost of creating a WMA (Wildlife Management Area) which is the legal process for Villages to regain control over their natural resources and develop commercial community toursim projects, could run up to a quarter of a million US dollars. Villages in rural Tanzania don’t HAVE that kind of money, which means that conservation can only happen in conjunction with large NGO’s with deep pockets.

Which means, once again, dependence on foreign aid…
What it really means is that wild animals are only really of any value dead, cut up into pieces and sold off to townies as bush meat.

So bring on the new private initiatives: if the game is to survive outside the parks, we will need this kind of approach.

Migration time again

And so to Serengeti once more, where the green flush brought on by heavy rain a few days earlier was already beginning to wilt under the onslaught of strong winds and the January sun. Wildebeest were still around in good numbers but already heading west in great, looping, school-crocodile lines.  

Wildebeest on the move

Vultures and Golden Jackal on a kill

We're having a La Nina year again, so it is pretty dry.  Isn't that ironic, with stories of catastrophic flooding in Australia, Brazil and elsewhere?

The first babies were already staggering around on wobbly legs - and we were lucky enough to witness a gazelle birth.  

Grant's Gazelle with lamb

Beginning of January is very early for wildebeest to be dropping their calves.  Were these Ngorongoro animals (they tend to calf earlier than their Serengeti cousins)?  Or just unlucky early arrivals?  Either way, their future looks bleak. The Serengeti wildebeest breeding strategy involves flooding the market: nearly half a million calves born in the course of a few weeks.  With the best will in the world, the predators can't hope to keep up with those numbers.  But the few early arrivals will be real targets. A case of the early worms being caught by the  bird...

The real stars, I think, were the cats: Ndutu was pumping, with cheetah highly visible.  We spent a lovely couple of hours watching a mother with her 3 cubs, all obviously hungry.  She ignored a long straggle of wildebeest and zebra filing past – they were all too big for her to handle on her own, she dare not risk damage from a flailing hoof or horn.

She watched a distant herd of gazelle for a while.  Then she started towards them, in classic stalk mode to begin with, but soon abandoning any pretence of stealth to run at just under full throttle to catch something that we had all missed: a suckling lamb.  

Cheetah with kill


We waited as the cubs went to join her, but oddly, they didn’t feed.   Why would a family of hungry cheetah NOT eat?  It's agonising, because cheetah are such vulnerable animals, often losing their hard-earned prey to competitors, especially spotted hyena.  Every hunt (often unsuccessful) involves enormous expenditure of energy and  failure to eat can slow her down on the next hunt, if she's just not getting enough calories.  And with young to feed, she needs to hunt that much more often.


We couldn't help wondering whether they were just too stressed.   She was quite easy to find and several vehicles approached far too close, despite the cubs showing considerable agitation. In one instance, cars even blocked her way as she set out to hunt.


To my relief I heard from a friend that she killed again the next day, an impala – and this time they all fed happily.  Phew!

Not far away was a pride of fat-bellied lions, lounging in the shade. 2 cubs were squabbling over access to a nipple; the mother too full and lazy to swat them into good behaviour.

Nursing lion cubs

One of our most intriguing sightings was of a Fiscal Shrike feasting on a frog it had just caught.  It started off by impaling the unfortunate amphibian on a large thorn, and then tore off bite-sized pieces, which it swallowed with obvious gusto.  This is what earns them the nickname of ‘butcher birds’, but I’ve never seen them in action before. There’s always something new going on out there…


En route to Kakesio, a flash of crimson and green: a Narina Trogon!  He sat and posed for us beautifully, before flitting away like a gorgeous butterfly.  Now, some of you already know what I'm on about but for the non-twtichers among you, trogons are birds found throughout the tropics and they are always spectacular.  Perhaps the most famous is the Quetzal, the national bird of Guatemala.  They have a wide gape, reputedly enabling them to swallow small wild avocados - whole.

A couple of days later, over in the western Serengeti, we watched in awe as a herd of 300 elephant came out of the bush and ambled over to splash and play in a waterhole not far from where we sat.  Baby elephant, in particular, are a joy to watch at water. They have so much fun, playing with complete abandon while their mothers stand sedately nearby, squirting occasional trunkfuls of cooling mud over their bodies.

Elephants enjoying a bath


We also caught a rare glimpse of a black rhino, part of an ongoing project to re-introduce these prehistoric behemoths and bolster Serengeti numbers.  Rhinos were poached in their thousands in the 70's and 80's.  Rhino horn is prized for its supposed medicinal value in the Far East (presumably marketed under the catchy phrase 'Nothing makes you horny like horn') and also in the making of dagger handles, the must-have coming-of-age accessory for young Yemeni men.

The endangered Black Rhino

In a tree, later in the day, we found this lion cub, looking as if he had just enjoyed his Christmas dinner.  Not elegant, perhaps, but whatever works.

Overindulgent lion cub

We finished off the safari in style - an evening following a pair of mating leopards.  The male was relaxed but his young consort was very wary of safari vehicles.  She would hide in a bush, then sneak over to join the male for a brief copulation, before fleeing to safety 100 yards away. The whole performance was repeated every 10 minutes or so until the failing light forced us back to the lodge and our waiting G&T’s. 

When the going gets tough…

- - - - - 

Bat-eared Fox, Ndutu

Colobus Monkey, Grumeti Reserve

Greater Flamingo, Lake Ndutu

New Year Post! (Finally...)

Happy New Year to one and all! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season, with family and friends.  Our holidays involved a trip to Singapore, where Jules' eldest brother kindly hosted a houseful of siblings and assorted hangers on  (That would be me).  It was a festive time, so festive in fact that all my clothes appear to have shrunk...

Singapore. Ah, where to begin?

First impressions: it felt odd to be in a tropical city that works.  As you drive through the streets, everything – the heat & damp, humidity, the luxuriant vegetation, the sudden big-drop rainstorms – tell you that, yes, you’re still in the tropics.  At the same time, the meticulous signage, the gleaming new tar of the roads, the driving decorum and the very kempt verges tell of a more middle-aged, western capital. Oh, and the stern warnings on the subway against the carrying of durian, a popular local fruit with a foul smell but (apparently) delicious to eat. We committed this particular offence, by mistake, one day and couldn’t figure out why the whole city appeared to be shrouded in sulphurous fumes… until we got home and opened Jules’ back pack.  We had been carrying around our own private cloud of noxious durian-stench for most of the day.  So I’m lucky not to be writing this from a gleaming cell in Singapore Central Police Station.

Singapore is full of contradictions. Beautiful trees lining the avenues but not much life flitting about in them (thanks, presumably, to the mosquito-control spraying programme). Busy ethnic quarters, complete with colourful temples, mosques and bustling street markets but all curiously ungrungy.  The red light district was like a genteel suburb… Then gleaming tower blocks looming over them all.  

Shop houses: A Singapore feature

 

In other words, it’s nothing like Dar or Nairobi or even funny little Arusha.

A few highlights: if you have small kids with you, definitely take them on a Night Safari.  The kids are merely a smokescreen, of course – it’s actually a great night out for your inner child!  Most animals live free in large open spaces; you get the impression that they all range freely throughout the park but obviously most of them are discreetly fenced off. Most of the cages are large and spacious, with plenty of room to move about.  You can hop off the guided tour and wander off to take in some of the 'off piste' highlights.  The whole is given a nice touch of mystery by the use of soft lighting, giving the silvery effect of a moonlit night.

Mirth as a flying fox, arching its back to avoid soiling its pristine belly fur. Ollie (nephew) narrowly avoided being dumped on. Not long after, a Flying Squirrel launched itself off a branch and swept magnificently over Jules’ head… well, it actually would have smacked the side of her face if she hadn’t ducked.  It clearly didn’t like the way she was eyeing up the succulent bunch of leaves it was feeding on.

It then sat and chattered at me in a possessive rage.  It's a curious creature: exactly like an oversized standard-issue squirrel, complete with bushy tail curved over its back - but with the addition of ankle-to-wrist membranes that it can deploy to glide from tree to tree.

The whole outing was a neat reminder of the important role that a good zoo can play in educating and inspiring lots of ordinary folk, many of whom will never get to experience wildlife in its natural setting nor appreciate the imperitive of conservation.

My new official fave emporium, anywhere: Mustapha’s, in Little India.  Billed as a spice shop but much, much more - the size of a decent department store, but inside, all the hustle and bustle of  Istanbul's Grand Bazaar; electronics, jewellery, a cavernous drugstore, spices (there were entire aisles devoted entirely to different kinds of coriander!) and a greengrocery laden with exotica, fresh produce from every corner.  (Warning: DON’T go to Singapore if you’re worried about food miles; virtually everything comes from elsewhere).

Dragon Fruit

The Botanical Garden:  we only scratched the surface here, as we ran out of time with the Orchid Garden, a bewitching array of weird forms and luxuriant colour.  I can testify to the fact that you can see too many orchids – the brain goes on strike, rebels against having to process the riot of new information. You get a sort of orchid hangover after an hour or so… but this didn't prevent Jules from falling for their decadent charm: we are now the proud parents of four tiny orchids (orchidettes?), potted up and reverently sprayed with a fine mist of water twice a day.

 

Orchard Road, Singapore’s answer to Oxford Street, was a bit of an eye-popper for us African hicks.  The Singaporeans have taken the concept of the Mall to a whole new level.  Not only is the street lined with these opulent secular temples but once you venture into the twilight zone, you can easily access the next one without surfacing again for air.   They are all inter-connected: a shopping-maze-warren, making it as easy as possible to part with your cash with minimal heartache.  It was all very dizzy-making.  Again, about as unlike the typical Arusha shopping experience as you could wish! 

Thai Silks

And the food.   There was a bewildering array of foods on offer, particularly specialities from SE Asia, India and Sri Lanka.  And it was all delicious, whether from a street vendor or a posh restaurant or the food courts that dot every mall.

It was lovely to get back home again, just in time for the New Year.  We almost made it to midnight… the spirit was willing, but the flesh was still in the wrong time zone.

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