Mzungu

Tanzania

My first ever safari in 2011. Dar Es Salaam to Arusha, Manyara, over and into the Ngoro Ngoro crater, across the Serengeti plains and a final jaunt across the channel to Zanzibar. The experience was an explosion of joy. The hunt for animals, not to destroy them, but to glory in their shapes and forms, revel in their natural majesty, study the mysteries of their behaviour, and realise the smallness of the human form. >>>>Elephants sashaying across Acacia-punctuated plains. Hyenas gnawing on horn-crested skulls. Lions yawning their canines from thorny shaded bushes. Moving to Kenya in 2016, I was a stone’s throw away and went back again and again, fascinated by the hidden layers to the place.

Tanzania

The Usambara Mountains with their alpine climes and Germanic houses, the sugarcane-fuelled torpor of woodland villages, the Swahili paradise beaches along the coast, the peace of a gentle Islam on the mangrove islands.

Stopping under the morning shade of Serengeti trees we scanned across the Mara river and into Kenya. Wildebeest arrived in their tens, then twenties, then hundreds, thronging the bank and sending up great clouds of dust and noise. By lunch (a picnic spread on Maasai blankets over the bonnet) the scale was imponderable. The front rows tottered on the ten-foot muddy cliffs as the river roared below.

Suddenly and without warning, the alpha animal, his election invisible, hurled himself into the current and paddled furiously for our shore. In their thousands they followed suit, all along the bank as far as we could see. The river churned and young and old animals died; drowned, taken by crocodiles, pounced on by lions hiding in the trees beside us. It felt biblical. The sheer number triumphed and animals in their hundreds charged past our vehicle and into Tanzania, the last big obstacle crossed on their epic migration south.

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Cyprus

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