The Rule of Thirds Goes on Safari

Tags

African wildlife, Rule of Thirds, safari, Tanzania

A fantastic post on the blog Travels and Trifles inspired me to look back through my own photos from a safari in Tanzania. The Weekly Photo Challenge was to use the Rule of Thirds to compose a photo with its primary subject off-center, a technique I seemed to use frequently while snapping photos of African wildlife.

From towering to tiny among the acacias …

Serious to silly in the Serengeti …

Lumbering to lithe in the savannah …

Looking to landing near Ndutu …

Colorful to camouflaged on an afternoon game drive …

Prancing to perching atop long skinny legs…

 

Devouring to drinking in grasslands and watering holes …

 

and scavenging to reigning supreme in the circle of life throughout Tanzania.

 

 

Friday Photos: Faces of Tanzania

Tags

Maasai, Tanzania

I’ve been so busy with my Photo 101 class the last two weeks that I’ve neglected my Friday Photos posts.  Here are some of my favorite faces of Tanzania.

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s to Beer

Tags

Beer

My recent Friday Photo of some Guinness kegs in Dublin got me thinking about beer. The nectar of the gods is always a big part of my travel enjoyment. Before you think me a sot, let me say that I am simply an enthusiastic social drinker who particularly relishes a cold beer after a long day of trekking, sightseeing, or laboring.One of my fondest beer memories is from a trip we took to the Monteverde cloud forest area in Costa Rica. Our family joined a larger group to work for nine days in Santa Elena, CR, where we mixed concrete by hand, dug trenches, hauled concrete blocks, and built bookshelves, among other duties. At the end of each long, hot day, we were filthy and exhausted. When we arrived back at our humble hostel each night, the dilemma was what to do first: quench our thirst and relax our aching bodies with a drink, or clean ourselves up? As the days passed, the original binary choice of Beer or Shower morphed into a multivariable quandary expressed as Beer-Shower-Beer? or Shower-Beer-Beer? or Beer-Beer-Shower? or (screw the shower!) Beer-Beer-Beer! Imperial was definitely the ale of choice here, regardless of whether it was consumed before or after the bathing.

A good, local beer after a long day of trekking is also a marvelous reward. At dusk in the Great Rift Valley in Tanzania, we enjoyed many a Safari, Tusker, or Kilimanjaro outside our tents.

On the Inca Trail in Peru, we became quite partial to Cusqueña Dark, while in Glacier National Park in northern Montana and Canada, we consistently grabbed a Moose Drool out of the cooler. Asia is not a high point for beer, but once we had acclimatized in the Himalayas in Nepal, we enjoyed a Gorkha or Everest most evenings after a day on the Khumbu trails. And a cold and rainy Mount Fitz Roy climb in Argentina was blissfully followed by two delicious home-brewed dark and blonde beers at cozy La Cervecería in the tiny town of El Chaltén.

Even a casual sightseeing day is enhanced by a good beer during or after. The light and dark Sarajevska brews in Bosnia & Herzegovina were both excellent at the end of a travel day, and in Düsseldorf, Germany, we drank our way through a day-long layover at the Braueries Uerige and Zum Schlüssel, both famous for their altbiers.

In Iceland, we happily whiled away several afternoons in Reykjavik with some Brios, Gulls, and Egils, and we tamed our post-trek PTSD after a particularly daunting mountain hike with a good Borg Úlfur draft.

And then there’s Ireland, oh Ireland! A real Guinness Draught the minute we arrived in Dublin at 10:30 am and a weekend full of Murphy’s Irish Stout, Harp Lager, and so many more rich and creamy Irish ales. A “beer from the roof of the world,” a Lhasa, perked up a lunch at 11,000+ feet in Tibet, an Ožujsko welcomed us to Dubrovnik, Croatia, and we lingered over a luscious Laško in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

 

Another dark beauty, a Książęce, bid us farewell on our last night in Krakow, Poland … and on that note, I’m off to the fridge! Cheers!

Friday Photos: Favorites from Morning to Night

Tags

acacia tree, Canada, Glacier National Park, Serengeti, Tanzania, Waterton Lake

From morning to night …

Morning on Waterton Lake, Canada

Sundown in the Serengeti, Tanzania

Into the Wild

Tags

Great Rift Valley, Maasai, Naiyobi, Tanzania

In Tanzania, we wanted to get deeper into the bush and a little more active than the typical safari allows. We did do the classic Land Rover game drives though the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater for the first week or so (and they were great), but we like walking too much to just sit in a vehicle for much longer than that. Our outfitter offered a walk through the Great Rift Valley that was the perfect way to stay on the move and feel really immersed for a few days in this mysterious continent.

(CLICK ON PHOTOS if you want to see them full-size)

We started our odyssey in northern Tanzania by walking deep into Empakai Crater, where we explored the flamingo-covered shores of the lake on the crater floor. The only way down to the bottom of this volcanic depression is on foot, and we saw no other humans all day other than the silent, armed ranger accompanying us. We had a relaxing descent, Tarzan-swinging on vines and avoiding the droppings of one of the few other living creatures around, the water buffalo. The two-hour ascent to get back out, however, was exhausting; the altitude here was only 8000 feet, but the crater sides were steep and the day extremely hot. We collapsed into our first camp, in the shadow of the active volcano, Ol Doinyo Lengai, too tired to worry about how exposed we were to the area’s wildlife. We looked warily but gratefully at the solemn guard with his huge rifle, knowing that our thin pup tent walls would certainly not impede any animals who might consider us dinner.

We spent the next full day trekking cross-country through the rising and dipping folds of remote Maasailand. We seemed to float in the heat through swaying, waist-high grasses, and again saw no one but an occasional cattle herder. (Good thing, since later photos revealed we were all sporting attractive dirt mustaches.) Late in the afternoon, we reached our guide’s home village, Naiyobi, and visited his mother’s hut.

 

We were stunned at the small, dark space shared by a whole family and all of its animals. The fire in the center, for both cooking and heat, had charred the interior walls a deep black and left an intense woodsmoke smell that would linger in our clothes for days.

Afterward, we shopped for homemade beaded gifts in a corral in the village and visited a local Friday market teeming with people from all the nearby villages selling animal hides, grains, and jewelry. The children touched our pale arms repeatedly, and we fell in love with the sweet, shy smiles hiding behind the runny noses, flies, and dust that coated their little faces.

Tonight’s camp was both fascinating and disturbing. We pitched our tents near an area where some junior Maasai warriors were preparing for a two-day ritual in which they sacrifice an animal and then eat its meat after spending months in a remote site. After killing the terrified animal, the young warriors cooked it (barely) over a fire while dancing around the flames. The still-bloody meat was wiped on some of their faces and then consumed to give them strength. The setting was eerie, with dancing shadows and flames in the dark woods, and the sounds and sights were unsettling to those of us whose meat comes shrink-wrapped in plastic in brightly-lit supermarkets. A few in our group joined in a bouncing celebratory dance after the ritual meal, but most of us went to bed disquieted and fell asleep to the sounds of a rare rain shower and the yips and yells of these young men who had become equals with the other men of their village that night.

On our last day of trekking, we descended 2600 feet with ridge-to-ridge views of the Great Rift Valley most of the day. As we zigzagged down through the foothills and glowing yellow-barked acacias, our shoes filled with sand and our clothes were again saturated with fine dust. We were filthy overall by this point, and it was a great luxury to stand under lukewarm dribbles of water in our campsite near Lake Natron, a shallow salt lake straddling the Tanzania-Kenya border. Our safari was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but this short Tanzanian trek was easily the highlight of our time in East Africa – a chance to feel in some small way connected with this enigmatic continent.

 

Friday Photos: Queens of their Domains

Tags

Nepal, Peru, Tanzania, Tibet, Travel Himalayas

I have so many photos to share, and I can’t imagine I will write a post about each and every one of them.  I thought I’d pick a few favorites each Friday and post them with simple captions only.

Ama Dablam, from Everest Base Camp trail, Nepal

Serengeti, Tanzania

Peruvian woman, Chinchero, Peru