deponti

Here's a pic of two fruit bats relaxing in the afternoon sunshine in a tree in Manyara, Tanzania...





I don't know whether these bats are identical to the fruit bats we have here in India... for example, these two birds are identical to their Indian cousins:


The DRONGO:





and this SHRIKE, feeding her baby:




Could someone enlighten me?

I felt I must post this!








Incredible that such a lazy, idle animal should LOOK so majestic!

Well, having posted all that, I decided that though I never got a chance to eat in a Tanzanian home, I must set down the little that I learnt about food in Tanzania.

I might be mistaken, so do correct me if you have more accurate knowledge.

Apparently the staple food is maize/corn, and from maize/corn flour they make a kind of sticky pasty preparation called Ugali. This is just the flour, cooked in water with salt.

They also have a stew to go with it which is called Achali.

Apart from this, I was told about two dishes by the chef at one of the hotels:

"Kuku was Kupaka", which is stewed chicken simmered in coconut, and served with Ugaii and Achali

and


"Nyama ya Kukaanga" whihc is marinated beef flakes, again served with Ugali and Achali.

I was rather surprised when Huruma told me that tamarind is not used in the local cuisine, or the vegetable "drumstick" (moringa), as both trees grow plentifully in the region.

That's the trouble with staying in hotels..you get the generic touristy food...

But I suppose, if the Masai's favourite drink is milk mixed with blood, one would be better off with mineral water!

thaths....you say you know the region well...can you let me know something more about the cuisine?

Well, since I can't possibly post ALL the pics from Flickr to LJ (like I could not post all the photos/videos from my laptop to Flickr or YouTube)...I am done with the wildlife of Tanzania...but I would like to close with a few images of the towns and the sights....here are images from Dar es Salaam, Arusha and Manyara.


DAR ES SALAAM

As we came in to land, I took this snap of the beauty of the sea along the coast:





And there was the city of Dar-es-Salaam,filling my window:




( For more pics of Dar,Arusha, and Manyara, click here )


And beyond the town were the traditional Masai houses, too:






Those are my impressions of the towns of this African country...to an amazing extent, it felt as if we were back home in India, and especially in Karnataka...Tanzania, to my mind, is not all that different from India....except that there doesn't seem to be much manufacturing or other industries (except mining) there. The unit of currency is the Tanzanian shilling, though the dollar is practically a second one.

Hope you enjoyed that whirlwind tour!

This post too will contain lots of pics...so those without--a) interest in wildlife, b) time, or c) patience, off you go to the next friend's entry!


I started another post with the sunrise,but this one I will start with the moonset, as that is what we saw as we left very early from the Kirawira tented camp for Lake Manyara. Who can resist photographing a lovely full moon?




(  some pictures chosen from the Flickr site; for the rest, click on one and it will take you to the Flickr page )


Having shot so many mammals, I couldn't resist shooting the wildest one of all, or at least, its shadow on the incredibly dusty ground:




And of course, here's the end-of-the-day:







Well...the last post will be about places and scenes in Tanzania...and that will conclude my Tanzania posts, ladies-n-genmun!

For three days, we had been going on both morning and evening safaris in Lake Manyara; we had seen lot of other interesting things, but of course, every tourist wishes to sight that unusual phenomenon, the tree-climbing lions of Lake Manyara.

Our guide, Huruma, told us that only 10% of visitors ever get to see these animals which have learnt to climb trees; so I thought that my usual Murphy's record (which stands unbroken in the spotting of tigers in the south Indian jungles) would hold good here, too. But since we had seen so many lions in the Serengeti, and actually been able to sight a leopard the very first evening, I did not entirely lose hope.

The second evening, we had sighted a leopard in the dusk, though not all of us were able to see it, but after three days, KM's brothers and their families had to leave.

The next morning safari for the two of us was extremely productive in terms of all sorts of fascinating birds and mammals, and we decided that in the evening, we would go to the Hot Springs, which is 25 km away from the only entrance to the park:




(note...every signpost in the park seemed to have a buffalo skull set upon it!)



( for the pics of the lions, click here )


I am posting just one video here as a sample...do go look at the others....







We decided to leave them, most reluctantly, to carry on to the Hot Springs...if anyone had told me that I would have to leave the lions and go off, rather than the other way around, I would never have believed them!

When we came back from the Hot Spring, more than an hour later, they were still there, and several vans were pulled up, enjoying the view. The people in them just could not understand why we didn't wait too long..they must have thought us the most blase wildlifers in the world, to go off after five minutes of looking at them! They didn't know about our earlier tryst with the King and the Queen...

Here is my short clip of the two adorable lion cubs and the two lioness walking past our safari van, in the Ngorongoro Crater area:




You can hear Huruma, our guide, telling us that one was "hitted by a porcupine"!


For the rest of the videos that I have uploaded (well, with a lot of help from anushsh) to YouTube,at


http://youtube.com/deponti


There's an olive baboon grooming her mate while the babies run around, there's a mother shrike feeding her little one, a hornbill struggling to swallow the large grasshopper it caught...they are all short clips, and since they are my first attempts at video, that shows, too!

I will be posting a few more soon.

This, this, is the dream that one has after watching a National Geographic documentary....that one can also make an image like this...it's imprinted much deeper in my memory than it will ever be on any other medium!


Here's the young adult male lion:





And here's the lioness:






And if that's not rest and relaxation, I don't know what is!

Do not miss the last instalment of this Tanzanian serial....

It's been really hectic, but I have finally found the time...it's going to be a long post,compressing two days at the Serengeti, with lots of photos (there will be one lot more with pics from Lake Manyara, with the TREE-CLIMBING LIONS)

Here's a sunrise over the Serengeti plains...




anushsh has made this his screensaver....so this is dedicated to him!


Our safari started on a high note, with this sighting of a CHEETAH, which had just killed a gazelle and was dragging it to a good place for the feast....




(Remember, I said that none of my cheetah shots are close-up or good!)


Another "typical" shot that I got was the Masai, walking for miles in the vast landscape, amongst the eternal grasses of the Serengeti...




( lots of pictures under the cut; you must have a lot of interest in wildlife, and lots of time..othwrwise, skip! )


I will wind up the Serengeti pictures with this delta image of the vulture in flight:

We watched the male and female Masai ostriches shivering their plumes in their ritual mating dance. They were pretty far away...but then, from the grass, two most unexpected heads popped up. Two cheetahs, taking their ease, languidly watched the ras-leela entertainment provided for them!




Once again, apologies for the graininess...its a camera video, the subjrcts were really far ooff (Nearly a mile away) and this was the first time I was shooting something like this...but it was riveting and I wanted to share it with everyone, too!

Yes, yes, I know this is grainy, non-professional..and I was jostled about by KM and his brothers, all trying to take their images too...but still..when you see the line of animals stretching from one horizon to the other...it's amazing.



By the way...that panning is only from left to right, it is NOT all around me. It is an entire length (kilometres of it) of wildebeest, as far I could see and capture...

Will be posting more videos...beware!

At the Ngoitokitoki Picnic Site in the Serengeti, I found this STREAKY WEAVER BIRD drinking by using the drip from the tap..and then some competition arrives,too!






Next loonng post will come up shortly...

Had a hectic day, and just don't have the time to make a long post of the next day at Ngorongoro Crater and the trip to the Serengeti...so I am going to post some photos of birds in no particular order...

The LILAC-BREASTED ROLLER





That same roller, taking off (I am thinking of sainath and dearchcichi and shivakumar_l)






The GLOSSY STARLING (as beautiful as the Superb Starling)





Some WHITE-BROWED ROBIN-CHATS on a bush







A STREAKY-THROATED BARBET eating breakfast







and a RED-BILLED HORNBILL on an acacia bush (imagine sitting comfortably on a plant with thorns like that...must have been an Indian fakir in its last birth! And I think it needs lessons in applying lipstick, too...)








OK, OK, tomorrow we will have the cheetahs eating the gazelle, and the lions walking on the road....I prooooomise!

The Ngorongoro Conservation Area works towards the conservation of the wildlife in and around the Ngorongoro Crater, both the caldera and the rim.

The name, "Ngorongoro", according to our guide, Huruma, has an interesting background...it is supposed to be the Masai version of the sound of the cow-bells as they graze! I must confess, in that case I would have thought of words like Tingting or Tinkletinkle...but if "go-rong-go-rong" was the way the Masai heard it...!


The rim of the crater is at a height of about 7000 ft, and so, at this time of the year, it was pretty cold out there!The vegetation at the rim is pretty much the kind of jungle that one would see here in the Malnad region of Karnataka...moist deciduous jungle.

Our hotel was perched on the rim of the crater, and as you could see in the photo I posted yesterday, one can see to the lake at the bottom of the caldera from there. Once, on safari, we descend into the plains of the bottom of the caldera, one can see the crater rim (well, it looks more like hills surrounding the plains!) all around the vast savannah grassland.

All the animals that once descended into the bowl of the caldera now reside there with a few exceptions which move in and out. Hence, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area is like a kind of Noah's Ark of animals..as KM remarked, God's gift to the Tanzania Tourist Board! The species variety is remarkable...but since there are no tall acacia trees, there are no giraffes either.

Here we are, entering the NCA on the evening of the 23rd July;




It was so misty, that the sighting of the leopard within 15 minutes of this photograph was a great bonus. Of course, the light was very poor and photographs were not possible...but the leopard stayed, rather confused, by the side of the road for about ten minutes, going around, up and down, during which time we got quite a good look at it!

We checked into the hotel, and early the next morning, (of course, taking time to capture that wonderful sunrise!), went off into the crater bed for the safari.


Here's a snap of a cap in the hotel souvenir shop (probably made in Taiwan!), detailing the Big Five, as tourists like to call these mammals.




Of the five on that cap, we only got to see four...since we didn't want to take any special effort to see the rhinos unless we happened to spot them, we didn't bother (we can see them in our own country, in Assam or Arunachal Pradesh!). There are only 25 rhinos in all, so this is not surprising! If we had wanted to, we could have asked to be taken to them, as each rhino is now fitted with a radio device in its horn and watched...but somehow, we didn't feel like tracking them down like that!

And of the four that we did see, both our sightings of the LEOPARDS-- rather unrecongnizable on that cap!-- (once in the NCA, and the second time in a distant tree in Lake Manyara) were in such low-light conditions that we could not take photographs. Indeed, of the two safari vans, the other one which contained my nieces and sisters-in-law (we were ten, in two vans) never got to see the leopards at all, on either occasion!

Even our CHEETAH sightings were at long-distance, on the first occasion, nearly a mile away, when two of them lounged at ease in the grass, watching two ostriches in a mating dance...and the second time,not much closer, when two cheetahs were feasting on a gazelle in the Serengeti National Park. So you are certainly not going to see any spots-on-the-cheetah shots here!

But that's only the "Big Five"....to us, everything else...from the AUGUR BUZZARD to the ZEBRA...everything was fascinating!


( shall we start the NCA tour? )



Well satisfied with our day's sightings, we came wearily but happily back to our hotel to tuck into a lot of good food, have hot baths, and ...go to sleep in preparation for the 5.30 am start the next day? NO WAY! CF and SD cards had to be downloaded on to the laptop, and one plug-point had to be used in turn to charge all the camera batteries...we couldn't resist looking up the reference book to see the names of some of the birds once again....no one told us that wildlife was so much hard work!

Here's the aerial view of Mt Kilimanjaro (that I got,actually, on the way back home)....



We realized that we could either spend 5 days climbing the mountain, or spend it on wildlifing; and the decision was easily made!


And here is the opening picture of the time at the Ngorongoro (pronouced "go-wrong-go-row") Conservation Area:

What you see is NOT the sky. It is the outline of the lake at the bottom of the caldera. The land beyond the lake, the opposite rim, and the sky were all shrouded in mist.




The caldera is a volcano that has collapsed and made a fertile area of its bed. The amazing thing (at least,on the days that we were there) was this sunrise...because for some reason, the sun itself was not visible as it rose in the mist; but reflection of the dawn sky was there, in all its beauty, in the lake at the bottom of the caldera, which is what you see in this photograph!



Still looking at what I should post, what I should leave on my computer ( I am choosing about 198 photos to put up on my new Flickr account and on day 2 of the trip, have already got more than 70!)and what I should, in the name of good photography, delete forever(and forget that I can still take such foul shots..gawd that S3 can give some shake in low light!)...so it's going to be the next post that will have the zebras, warthogs, lions, cubs, lionesses, and assorted other birds,mammals, and insects...


The geyserman came, and will come again tomorrow...can someone tell me what I can do with a HUGE carton (family size, or in this instance, flood size) of wadded up rolls of toilet tissues? They are sitting there and grinning at me...perhaps I should set up a game of toilet-tissue roll bowling...

On the 23rd morning, we landed at Kilimanjaro (no, we couldn't see the peak from the flight because of heavy clouds) and realized that the flight on which the rest of the family (who had just finished visiting the Pyramids in Egypt) would not come in until 2 pm. So we spent our time clicking happily...some of the common birds in the area were known to us, and others proved delectably new, and our guide, Huruma, was much amused!

Let's start with one of the most common birds in Tanzania...




That's the Superb Starling, and though we didn't get tired of it by the end of our visit, as Huruma predicted, we certainly saw these birds in their thousands, all over the place! But that didn't detract one bit from their fantastically colourful, iridiscent plumage.... it shone like a satin neck-of-the-peacock...




( here are some more familiar and unfamiliar birds )

And here's a bird which I couldn't identify until our guide took a look at my photograph.

It's the BARE-FACED GO-AWAY BIRD that I talked about in my earlier post...




What a fantastic name! The bird makes a kind of "gweyyy" sound, that white travellers interpreted as "Go Away"....and why call it bare-faced when it has such a nice crest, I really don't know!


After he realized that we were both seriously interested in everything-- birds, mammals, insects, trees, the lot-- he lent us three excellent reference books on the three regions that we visited. One was the Audubon book on East Africa, and the others were books on the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, the Serengeti, and the Lake Manyara area, with special reference to the tree-climbing lions...

Oh yes, they will be posted too, soon, soon...but right now, the bare-faced go-away bird is telling me to go away from the computer and get on with the task of cooking dinner for our guests tonight (I had, indeed, forgotten that this is the season for all NRI's...Non Resident Indians, friends and relatives alike, to come visiting...a cousin from New York and a close friend from St Louis are here with their families right now.)

To whet your appetite....two Thomson's Gazelles fighting, a pride of lions (three lionesses, two adorably roly-poly cubs, and two lions) walking unconcernedly past our safari jeep, two tree-climbing lions of Manyara, ungulates by the hundreds, two ostriches doing a mating dance with an audience of two cheetahs (in the far distance, alas), a cheetah, also somewhat far away, feasting on a gazelle, a golden jackal with its cub....plus homely touches like a shrike feeding its hungry baby, Yes, I do love watching mothers and their children, no matter what the species they belong to!

Before I start on the birds post and bore everyone to death (I must confess, I have still downloaded only the first-day-of-the-trip's photos!) here's a very nice mission statement from this shop in Kilimanjaro Airport...once you have bought from them, they want to have nothing more to do with you!





Oh, well, by and by, they might become more shopper-friendly....;-))

Well, I am still in the process of downloading my pictures and sorting them out.. and I didn't bargain for a lot of guests or a geyser that had leaked all over the bathroom to greet us as we walked in...but here's a beginning!

Let me begin with this arresting profile of this woman at Dar es Salaam airport.....




( for pictures of Dar es Salaam airport and Kilimanjaro Airport, click here )

I do love differences in pronounciation...we say "Tan-ZAA-ni-a" but the Tanzanians themselves say it so muscially, with the stress on the third syllable, "tan-zay(not zaa)-NEE-ya"...sounds so much nicer! Thw Swahili language sounds well on the ear...


I will begin posting the pictures of birds starting with the ones we clicked right at the Kilimanjaro airport (which could most certainly call itself a bird haven!)..but right now I must call the geyser repair guy, and meet the carpenter, and check out how many people will be coming for dinner tonight....!

We are staying with some extremely affectionate friends here; but the last two days have been difficult because:

1.There always seems to be a very Indian trait of being fearful of walking around the immediate area (I found this when I lived in Muscat,Oman, too)..don't go walking on your own, some *incident* (unspecified horrifying fate worse than death) will befall the unwary tourist.

2.Neither KM nor I are very keen on visiting the tourist shopping areas and picking up those long lean human figurines that are being churned out in the thousands. My friends say that there is little else of interest to see in Dar, a statement which I strongly disagree with, but cannot do much about, short of taking a taxi over the warnings of our host and hostess!

3. Both KM and I are really short on sleep and rest, having spent every available daytime minute in being out, and much of the night hours in charging the camera batteries, downloading all the pictures, during the times that the electricity works at night...so we are both tending to utter slothfulness before we get back to the daily routine.

Today I have decided to go for a drive around the beaches of Dar; it is a day of unseasonal, heavy rain, so walking is not to be thought of...

Tanzania seems as poor a country as India, if not actually poorer; people here tell me that Julius Nyerere, with his communistic ideas, set the country back by five decades and made the people lazy...but I do like the low population after the extreme crowdediness of Bangalore, and the lovely art deco buildings and the general laid-back atmosphere....of course, 3 days is just not enough to form any but fleeting impressions...

Very keen to get back home..the concert went very well yesterday and I seem to have collected a whole new battalion of fans...I had no accompaniments, but I enjoyed singing, and when I enjoy myself, my audience, I know, will enjoy itself too. They did, and that's not just because they said so!

A dreadfully slow connection, with my hostess glued to it throughout the morning for her stock market dealings (Indian stock exchange) means that I don't get much access, or much enthusiasm for it, either.

Heaven was the Serengeti and the wildlife experience...but now, Heaven is increasingly the prospect of getting home!

Starting with crows that seem to be wearing white vests (Pied Crow) and the colourful local mynahs (the Superb Starling) in Kilimanjaro, the days in the Ngorongoro Conservation area, where the extinct volcanic crater is like a Noah's ark of animals, the days in the vast plains of the acacia-studded Serengeti, where the abundance of game just takes the breath away, and finally, the four extremely expensive days that we decided on in Lake Manyara were also astounding....only 10% of people who go to Lake Manyara are able to see the famous tree-climbing lions that the Lake Manyara National Park is famous for...and of course the leopard is a nocturnal, secretive animal...but guess what...my non-sighting jinx (which applies still, to the south Indian tiger) is now well and truly broken....on our way to the Hot Springs, we were the only people on the scene when a lioness and a very young male lion (his mane was just about beginning to grow)climbed up into an acacia tree and settled themselves down, JUST above our Toyota Land Cruiser, and let us take pictures for quite 40 minutes before we had to tear ourselves away....

Have you heard of the bare-faced Go-Away bird? The red-cheeked Cordon Bleu? The blue-naped mousebird? The tree hyrax? The rock hyrax? The Dik-dik (No you dirty-minded lot, that's dik not dick.) The Purple Grenadier?

We sighted a Crested Eagle (which feeds on snakes, so that would make it the African equivalent of the Crested Serpent Eagle)....saw flamingoes feeding in synchrony...watched hippos in large groups....saw a landscape studded here and there with giraffes....baboons....shrews...four varieties of vultures...not just saw them, but stayed quietly and watched their behaviour.

It was so very difficult tearing ourselves away and coming back to "civilization"....

The sad part about it is that this abundance of game in Tanzania is because conservation efforts were started from the early 1900's.....what fate awaits OUR wildlife, with our pathetic efforts starting now, and with the kind of heavy poaching we face?

There are exactly 25 (yes) rhinos in the Ngorongoro Crater area, and each is constantly guarded (no, we did not see one, but I am sure that if we had asked the right authorities we would have been shown one as each of them has a radio tracking device set in its horn).

The Tanzanians are a peacable people, and are so clean...the villages are very clean, and there is NONE of the horrendous plague of plastic in evidence except perhaps in Dar es Salaam, which, too, appears to be a clean city... Tanzania, however, is a poor country, with no manufacturing industry to speak of, and primarily agro-based industry. The wildlife fees are kept extremely high and that seems to have paid off in terms of limiting the number of visitors and ensuring that only serious wildlifers visit....

I am most impressed by the simplicity of the lifestyle of the Maasai people, who seem to be able to walk for miles across the barren landscape of the African arid lands....now, some of them seem to have cycles. They still reckon their wealth in terms of cattle.

I thoroughly enjoyed the company of our guide/driver, Huruma (which means, sympathy and compassion in Swahili), who took up this job after working as a Ranger for several years. He was extremely knowledgeable about the mammals, the birds, the reptiles (we saw a black mamba!), the insects, the plants, the rocks.....I really got an education from him, and he let us borrow three excellent reference books (Audubon, and Veronica Roodt's books on the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and on the Serengeti) as well. A remarkable education for me...and I was able to show him the trees and animals/birds that are common (eg the Painted Stork is called the Red-Billed Stork in Africa, and the Drongo is the African Drongo...and the African Tulip, the Tamarind, the Mango,the Euphorbia and the Magnolia trees are the same!) The age of the Baobab trees is just staggering....he also told me a lot of mythology and fables surrounding the wildlife, such as the Hyena being a stupid animal, and when he got the Baobab tree, he was angry and threw it into the ground upside down, which is why the tree looks like that...

The Rhino is Faru, the Giraffe is Twiga, the Lion is Simba, the Cheetah is Pandu...

We are in Dar es Salaam staying with some friends, and I am giving a one-hour concert tomorrow. Will try and visit Zanzibar, too...

The internet connection in my friends' home (dialup) is very slow, and she uses it for stocks and shares in the mornings, so I got my hands on it only now...we are off to see the seashore soon, so I will next be on the net only after I return home.

Tanzania, the Ngorongoro Crater, the Serengeti, the famous wildebeest migration (we did manage to get the major part of the tail end), the tree-climbing lions and incredible fauna and flora of Lake Manyara....We have spent a fortune in the past two weeks and it has been worth every penny of it all!