For Bob

 This past week our good friend Bob Taylor passed away. A brilliant photographer with a sharp eye and a long list of published books, he was a passionate voice for conservation and nature. Running tours through the Canadian arctic (particularly the bears of Churchill) as well as Eastern Africa he was always on the move and always charming, professional and patient.

 My father toured Kenya with Bob in 1986 and took me with him in 1996. The incredible experiences I had in that country were directly responsible for Kathryn and my tour with him in 2010. Bob strongly recommended the Galapagos and Quest tours to us at the time which obviously contributed to our end decision to visit the islands with that very company. Furthermore, Kathryn has been incredibly inspired by his efforts in photography and conservation and his influence certainly contributed to her working as a naturalist this past summer.

Through decades of tours in Eastern Africa, Bob built up a special rapport with many of the safari drivers and lodge staff. Henry Nzioka poses at Sweetwaters with him in the photo below on one of their many tours of Kenya over the years. Henry was a driver when I went with my father in 1996 and their friendship was already long established then.

 

I think Kathryn summarized it best:

A wonderful man of the world and naturalist died. Bob Taylor you opened up another world for me. No thanks will ever be adequate. I know that there are more worlds for you to explore.

Lake Manyara

Note: I have a busy weekend coming up so I'm posting sooner than later as last time I was a few hours late I came under intense fire for being lazy ;)

Lake Manyara was a very peaceful place in general. Our lodge was at the top of a ridge overlooking the park and we could see the jungle and a nearby town from the pool. The park itself was a nice assortment of grazers and the absence of large predators made it all the more serene.

Music: "Under the Stars" by Hans Zimmer

Our lodge had a very pleasing design with the rooms being arranged in little clusters of double deckers with two sets of rooms on each floor. Like many of the lodges they used concrete in a very pleasing way to avoid many hard angles and kept everything very smooth and organic looking.
The pool was a delight and after a long drive in the hot sun we were always keen to have a flop by it and a swim. It was quite cold so while it was incredibly refreshing it was also tricky to stay in too long without going numb; such are the hardships of roughing it in Tanzania ;)

Ndutu

Ndutu was our first major stop on the trip and made a huge impression on Kathryn in particular. The wildebeest migration was in full swing and the first few babies were just starting to be born. Top that off with huge herds of zebras and gazelles with hyenas and lions chasing everything and you have a pretty potent situation. Music: "Death is the Road to Awe" by Clint Mansell

This is our little cabin at the lodge which was quite different from other lodges in that there was no perimeter fence or ditch or anything keeping other animals out. Earlier in the year this cabin and several others before it were out of use while a pride of lions took a fancy to using our porch for shade for several days. Our tour operator Bob said that he's seen elephants sticking their heads into the dining area and there were zebras, cape buffalo and giraffes wandering around nearby.
At the end of every day we'd relax by the fire, watch the passing animals and feed popcorn to fiscals and weavers. There are several slow-motion shots of this in the video above but I thought this picture also nicely captures the feeling of the campfire area and also shows the longer row of cabins in the background helping give a better idea how the whole spot fits together.

Ngorongoro Conservation Area

We've touched on the Ngorongoro Crater in the past and although we only had a few hours in it, there was a huge range of wildlife to see in there along with some unforgettable encounters that we've highlighted in particular.

Music: "Crossing the Bridge" by James Newton Howard

The lodge we stayed at Ngorongoro was very nice, but being nestled in the forest and on the edge of a gorge, it was impossible to get good exterior pictures, so you'll all have to make do with a few interiors. The bar area below was host to a group of acrobats and dancers that evening which were quite impressive and the view from the deck out over the crater was a joy.
The rooms were quite nice and cozy. I had my birthday at this particular lodge and it was also the birthday of our friend Roger, so there was a fun evening of drinks and merriment.

Herons

The networks of lakes and rivers that criss-cross east Africa are a bountiful source of food for many animals, and herons are one family of great opportunists for wetlands hunting. This Black-Headed Heron was a common sight throughout our trips and very comparable in size to our Great-Blue Herons here in Canada.
Smaller in stature but every bit as charming, this Squacco Heron (perhaps the most enjoyable heron name ever) was about the size of a bittern and resting in the reeds in Amboseli.
Since Africa gets a giant version of everything, they also have the Goliath Heron, which the photo below doesn't really do justice to since there's very little else in frame for scale. This particular bird can get up to 5ft tall or more and this particular one was very striking as it strode through the Mara River in Kenya.

Baby Things

Since the last post was a bit grim and red in tooth and claw, I thought I'd lighten the mood with some baby things...
AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!
This little white rhino was carefully following its mother in the forest not far from our lodge at Lake Nakuru.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!
This lion cub was part of a pride of lions in Ndutu and was thoroughly charming. There were a pair playing together but this particular photo wins for cuteness due to his 'awe shucks' grin.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
We saw this tiny baby elephant (which Kathryn and I dubbed 'The Smallephant') in the Maasai Mara. Our guides told us it was likely only a few months old and is so cute it boggles the mind.

Waste not, want not

With the volume of animal life in the parks of Africa, something is always hungry. This constant appetite creates a theatre for death and the macabre that takes some getting used to, but which is entirely natural once you think past the 'poor sweet animals' kind of thinking. One example of this was a carcass we found early one morning on a drive in Ndutu. A swarm of vultures on the ground lead us to a spot and by the same means drew the attention of a lone hyena.
A female wildebeest had died, our guide said of natural causes, and the vultures were on the carcass hoping to eat as much as they could before other bigger scavengers showed up. This opportunistic hyena slipped in through the crowd and extracted a fetus before scampering off a few dozen feet to try and eat his meal in peace.
Not being keen to share, he quickly chased off any vultures that got too close and was still eating his fill when we moved on. Our guide estimated that the wildebeest had probably only been dead for an hour or two at most and would be stripped to the bones by sunset. Africa is as beautiful as it is unforgiving and lets very little go to waste.

Driving Among Giants

Its not just lions which are generally unphased by passing vehicles. Elephants have very few things to fear in protected parks and generally seem to know that there is nothing to fear from us. The elephant below walked through our convoy in Ngorongoro Crater and didn't even bat at eye at us. We were quite pleased at this as it was the first time we were that close to an elephant and they make a real impression up close. Any moment you are close enough to hear an animal breathing is an incredible time.
This elephant in the Maasai Mara made sure that everyone could get photos of it with other vans in frame for comparison. The roads in the Mara are very simple dirt tracks for the most part but the elephants wander about as they please quite happily.
The "pygmy" elephants of Lake Manyara were equally unconcerned with this one wandering across the road for better foraging on the other side amid quite a pile of vehicles.

Close Encounters of the Furred Kind

Near the end of our morning drive through Ngorongoro Crater the sun was starting to get very high in the sky and very hot. Most game drives were between 6am-11am and 3:30pm-6pm because the mid-day African sun is sweltering. From out in the distance a pair of lions with no available source of shade were wandering towards our line of vans along the roadside.
We felt very lucky and awed that they chose the shade of our particular van to lie down in, allowing for a wonderful photo opp. To be sure you can all tell how close they were, the rail from the side of our van is in the bottom of the shot, and the bump in the right of the shadow is the top of my hat.
We were sure to keep all the windows rolled up and not lean too far out of the van, but I'm sure they were too hot and tired to want to give anyone trouble. We enjoyed their company for quite awhile and then rudely took our shade with us in search of other adventure in the crater... we would have loved to stay longer but visits to the crater are very limited in time and we were almost out of ours.

Walking Birds

While many of the birds we saw in Africa were magestic eagles and tiny sparrows, there were a handful of magnificent ground birds. Not all of them were flightless but they were all certainly striking in their own way, starting off with the obvious ostrich. There were 2 varieties to be seen, the Common Ostrich which we saw throughout Kenya and Tanzania and the Somali Ostrich which we hoped to see in Samburu but were unable to find.
The Kori Bustard was always an impressive sight. They are apparently the largest birds capable of flight, but we consistently saw them on the ground. They have a very striking courtship ritual in which the male tucks his head and seems to inflate his neck in a strange way but we only saw this from a distance or in a moving car and don't have any good pictures to back it up.
Rounding out the set, Secretary Birds were an infrequent treat that could be seen searching for lizards, snakes and insects in the grasses. There were several occassions where they were walking along parallel to the road and we could see them well, and a few occassions where we saw them in flight.

Kenya/Tanzania 2010 - Best Of

We shot a lot of great footage between the two of us, and trimming it down to something we felt we could make other people sit through was no small feat. The clip below includes many of the highlights from our trip.

Music: "Theme from Jurassic Park" by John Williams.

99% of the footage we shot was done handheld in a crowded little mini-bus with a pop-up roof. With 5-6 people moving around at all times trying to get the best shots and working around the metal posts that propped the roof up it was a bit of a challenge, but one that we thoroughly enjoyed.
With each new video upload I will also try and highlight the lodges we stayed in to help dispel any notions that they were tiny tents or Maasai huts. The lodge below was the first one we stayed in just outside of Arusha in Tanzania and while we were too jet-lagged and eager to get moving to fully enjoy it, it was very pleasant all the same

Fellow Travellers

I've posted lots of pictures of mammals and birds and scenery but until now not actually done a proper post on our tour group (though you can already learn all about our guides). So here's a group photo taken in our last few days in Kenya. We had lots of meals and chats with everyone in the and plan to stay in touch as best we can, although we're more likely to visit with people in BC than Utah (but we'll do our best).
The tour was lead and organized by Bob Taylor (no relation) who lead the tour my dad went on in '86 as well as the one dad and I went on in '96 so he has a ton of experience and clearly runs a great expedition. He's shown below with his girlfriend Jennifer who was also on the trip and a total sweetheart.
And finally out of tradition of showing 3 pictures per posting, here's one of the pair of us at Ngorongoro Crater. Sorry for the recent lull in postings, we had a busy week and then a long weekend on Vancouver Island out visiting friends from this trip, so the next week or two may shift to have a more BC-centric viewpoint, but we have lots left in Africa yet and some video coming together too.

Maasai People

Although I touched on the life of the Maasai people briefly, it has taken me far too long to post an entry on the look of the people themselves. In the Ngorongoro Conservation Area we made a stop at a Maasai village where we were given a proper tour of their way of life and given carte blanche to take pictures of them. As I mentioned earlier, it is illegal to take pictures of the Maasai without their knowledge and negotiating a payment, so being in the village and around that problem altogether I made sure to get some portraits.
This woman was selling beads and hand made jewelry. With herself and the man above (and many of the older villagers) I was struck by the fascinating differences in their fashion and personal decoration, as well as how differently people over there age compared to what we are used to in North America. Many people had irregular teeth from a more basic dental regimine and many of them had eye problems, likely as a mixture of the harsh sunlight and constant dust.
This fellow, named Mola, was our guide in the tour of the village and also arranged for us to buy a spear for Kathryn's brother from one of his friends. Being amateurs at haggling and with Kathryn so clearly wanting a spear I am sure he got a price he was more than happy with from us, but we got to buy a story out of the deal and walked away smiling, so it was money well spent.

Oldupai Gorge

On a drive between parks in Tanzania we were fortunate enough to pass through Oldupai Gorge. For those of you not married to archaeologists, this might have been less of a treat, but it was very interesting for us as its a site of numerous early human discoveries and is considered by many to be "the cradle of humankind."
Often called Olduvai gorge, we were told its actually a mispronunciation of Oldupai which is a kind of seisel plant common to the area which was recorded improperly by early explorers. Given that its African and not European we're trying to be proper and use the correct spelling, and now that you know better, you can too ;)
There was a very nice little museum at the same spot and a covered area we could escape from the heat, eat our packed lunch and listen to a talk about the area at. We passed through the area on my birthday as well and it was a fun contrast to start my 32nd year in the same place that mankind was getting his first steps 2.5 million years earlier.

Smaller Hunters

The enormity of the biomass in eastern Africa creates niches of all sizes. While many of our earlier posts on carnivores have focused on the big cats and dogs, there are of course smaller predators for smaller prey throughout the landscape. The only trick being that since they are smaller they are much harder to spot in comparison. This Serval was the only one we saw but we were lucky enough to watch it hunting for small reptiles or rodents on our way out of Ngorongoro Crater.
At the other end of the rarity spectrum, jackals were quite common throughout our trip and always busy looking for smaller prey or the remains of a kill. This silver-backed jackal was out in Sweetwaters on a hunt. They typically seemed to work in pairs and we had a handful of charmingly close encounters but for the most part they kept their distance.
There are a surprising number of breeds of mongoose on the ground out there if you are lucky enough to spot them. We managed to get a sighting of each of the five main species but were only able to photograph two of them. This Dwarf Mongoose was part of a troop in the Maasai Mara in one of our lodges that were quite photogenic, running alongside the path and digging for beetles.

Spare a Few Bucks?

Rounding out or collection of every conceivable variant of east african antelope, here's a selection of animals that all end in 'buck.' First off, this bushbuck was seen at the salt lick outside The Ark where a few of them were very cautiously feeding around a herd of buffalo. This particular salt lick was also very thick with Ox Peckers which were eating parasites off the passing animals and some of the female bushbucks were covered in them and quite frightened by the number of birds swarming on them.
The most elusive buck of all for our trip, this reedbuck was seen by a stream in the Serengeti and when I say elusive, I mean that we only saw maybe 3 in a full month of being out and about and came home with just five pictures of them. They are lovely animals with distinctive forward-curling horns and beyond that I can't say much about them.
The most common buck we saw were waterbuck, this one in particular was posing quite nicely at a roadside in Sweetwaters. We saw two types, Defassa and Common, though I have a hard time telling them apart. They are the biggest of the bucks we saw and apparently their thick fur makes them hard for lions to eat comfortably as it bothers their mouths and their meat doesn't taste very good. I'm sure this defense mechanism doesn't work all the time but it seems to give them a degree of safety from predation. We had several other nice encounters with these animals including seeing some of them sparring for females during a walk we took in the evening at Lake Naivasha.

Cold Blood in the Hot Sun

Besides the crocodiles mentioned earlier we actually saw quite a few other reptiles and lizards in our adventures. Geckos were very common in most of the lodges either in the dining room or bedrooms, catching flies and whatnot. This little fellow lost his grip on the ceiling above and landed on my pant leg at breakfast one morning, very nearly landing in my coffee. We were both a bit stunned but he was no worse for wear and quickly took off. They are quite resilient little creatures, we had one with only three legs in our bathroom in one lodge and it was still able to run up the walls and skitter about after mosquitoes quite well.
Agamas are quite common on rocks in the hot sun, either out in the field or beside the pool. The males are quite brilliantly coloured with orange heads and purple tails while the females are smaller and brown. They are quite often very tame as well and we were able to get nice and close pictures of them several times. Often reaching up to more than a foot in length (with tail) they are quite harmless and lovely in their own way.
This monitor lizard is a little less safe though. We only saw them at breakfast one morning but this one was a good 3-4 feet long and had pretty fierce claws. They are slow moving and docile though and are typically fed at breakfast time at that particular lodge. At the same lodge we also saw a cobra early one morning but failed to get a picture of it and were as spooked by it as it was by us.

Country Life

Of course not all of east Africa is game parks and wildlife. There are millions of people living regular lives throughout both nations and the parks actually only comprise a small part of the total landmass. We passed through numerous towns and villages on the way and these pictures help give an idea of what non-city life is like. The market below shows much of the hustle and bustle that goes on, trading fruits, vegetables, clothing and meat.
While car ownership is growing, even in the cities donkeys are very common for labor and transportation. And where regular drinking water is hard to come by (and even in the lodges we only had bottled water to drink and brush our teeth) many people had carts to haul drinking water, either for themselves or for sale. Nearly all the roads everywhere are broken down asphault or gravel and we all inhaled more than our share of dust.
Towns would also include hotels, cafes and shops as seen below. Coke advertising was incredibly prominent in both countries, but in Tanzania it was endemic and there was only one poster of a woman drinking it for every shop, cafe or gas station. The strangest thing to me was the number of combination Hotel/Butcher shops that we passed... I would have thought they would not mix well but apparently they are quite common.