Lion-spotting: Mikumi National Park March 2010

Good morning everyone,

I hope everyone enjoyed the first instalment of my African chronicles (click here if you have missed it). A week after my unplanned trip to Morogoro hospital with amoebic dissentry (and very much still feeling under the weather), we had the opportunity to hire a car and a driver for the weekend (I am not enough of a dare devil to drive myself around in Africa!). I was torn...on the one hand I knew that being more than 50 meters away from a bathroom at any time could prove to be a dramatic experience if another dissentry episode came along...on the other hand, a weekend in Mikumi National Park a few hours down the road from where we were was too good an opportunity to miss. I had always dreamed to go on a safari! Although I had some wonderful wildlife encounters in Ethiopia, I had never seen one of the Big 5s (the lion, buffalo, elephant, leopard and rhino).

So we set off one Saturday morning with massive grins on our faces and enough Imodium to constipate a whole infantry company (and provide me with peace of mind if not happy bowels). The Mikumi National Park covers an area of 3230 km², making it the fourth largest in the country. The park is crossed by the Tanzania A-7 highway. The uncontrollable excitement started while driving on this highway (and well before actually arriving in the National Park) when we started to spot herds of elephants and giraffes grazing on the side of the road!

What an unexpected first encounter!

The lanscape of Mikumi NP is quite similar to the one of the much bigger and popular Serengeti NP. Less visited by tourists (which has to be a good thing when it comes to its environmental protection), the park harbours many of the species characteristic of the African savannah such as...

... the wildebeest...



... the zebra...

Why no one has tried to domesticate these is beyond me? How cool a pet/horse they would make?!

... the elephant...

Mum and baby

... the buffalo...

... the giraffe...

I know it sounds silly, but until seeing them in the flesh, I'd never realised how tall giraffes were...

... and various species of antelopes such as impalas

The savannah is dotted with majestic baobab trees...

... and is also a haven for birds (>400 species inhabit the park)

We arrived on Saturday afternoon and spent a couple of hours driving around the park. We first went to see the hippo pool. I was a bit weary of hippos after an encounter with one in Ethiopia on a lake where it almost overturned a terrified fisherman's boat, but these seemed to be fully occupied taking their afternoon nap.

Yours truly playing it cool for the camera but secretely terrified of a hippo attack

Looking more closely in the water, I realised I was surrounded by crocs (little ones yes, but still with enough teeth to turn you into a kebab) so I quickly took a couple of pics and ran back to the car.

Traffic was occasionally slowed down by elephants crossing the road and taking their time (or charging us...good thing I had taken some Imodium as this was quite a terrifying moment!). No traffic jam though, we only saw one another car in the 2 days we were there! It was great not to have that safari feeling of being 12 cars surrounding one lion with everyone fighting to get the best view/picture.

Beware! Grumpy elephants crossing.

We eventually drove back to the park headquarters and enjoyed a drink on the terrace of the restaurant. What a way to enjoy an evening drink!

And what a view! There is water hole not very far from the restaurant and you can enjoy your evening meal while watching the buffalos and elephants drink at the water hole.

And this is when it happened: the curious incident of the elephant in the night time. The restaurant was 2 minutes walk from our hut. After dark though, the park insists on you taking an armed guard to walk you back to your sleeping quarter. My colleague and some people we were travelling with had decided to stay for another beer, so I went home with an armed guy and a hand torch. We were happily walking along, 20 meters maybe from my front door, when the guard suddenly stopped. He swept his torch in front of us and we found ourselves less than 5 meters away from a big bull elephant. How did we not hear him?? It is incredible that such enormous creatures are as quiet as mice. Thankfully, the bull just walked away trumpetting to voice his annoyance of being disturbed in the middle of the night. I was gob-smacked!

The following morning, we rose at 5am to set off on another drive before the sun rises. Early mornings and late afternoons are when the animals (and us Northern Europeans travelling in Africa) are most active.



I don't think there are many things more beautiful than the sun rising on an African savannah



Dawn is also a great time to take pictures because of the good light conditions and because you get to catch half-sleepy animals getting up to get on with their daily business like this herd of elephants.

We drove to the more marshy parts of the park where we took part in a Bataille Royale with tse-tse flies in the car. We were driving with our window opens until we realised that we were being eaten alive by tse tse flies (painful bites). We closed the window but had to track and kill every single fly that had flewn in.

Quite an arty photo don't you think?

Despite the flies, the ponds and marshes were beautiful and proved to be a great  photo background.

Driving around that morning we spotted the usual suspects... 

 ... as well as a couple of species we hadn't seen the previous day such as baboons

... and jackals

However, we still hadn't seen a lion!!! More difficult to spot than some of the other species, we had looked very hard for them. Mikumi NP does not have a big lion population like the Serengeti NP for example, but we knew they were there. Although every single second of that safari so far had been fantastic, we felt deep down that we would be sorely disappointed if we got back home without seeing a lion. Finally, at 2pm we had to start the journey back to the university and started driving to the entrance of the park. And then we saw a lion tree!

The Mikumi lions exhibit a behaviour which is not widely seen in other lion species. They climb trees! And there, in front of us, we had 3 big lion cubs having a snooze in the midday sun while their mum was lying in the grass at the bottom of the tree keeping an eye on them.

These 3 lion cubs and their mum proved to be the perfect ending to a fabulous weekend. What a feeling to almost have a national park to yourself and to sip your evening drink while watching elephants play in the water!

We went back to the university for our second week of teaching after which we were going to move to Dar es Salaam for another 2 weeks of teaching. Upon reaching Dar es Salaam, I had to go to hospital again after experiencing very bad burns in my stomach. Upon examination, it turned out that taking my malaria medication on an empty stomach for 10 days (I still wasn't fully recovered from the dissentry by then and could not eat much) was a bad idea and I now had a big stomach ulcer. Anti-malarials are powerful drugs and they can do a lot of damage if not taken with food. It would be another 2 weeks until my ulcer started to heal and I could eat a proper meal.

Join me next on my Easter holiday weekend trip to Zanzibar!

An eventful first week in Tanzania: March 2010

Taming the local wildlife

Good morning everyone,

A few of you left comments on this blog a few weeks ago to say they wanted to hear more about my African adventures and travels. Because of the thousands of photos I have to sort from my three years in Ethiopia (2006-2009), I thought I would start this series of posts with my most recent travels.

Between March and June 2010, I spent just over 3 months on the road travelling to 4 countries in East and West Africa. Although the purpose of this trip was work-related (I was teaching a statistics course to African postgraduate students at 5 different universities), my colleague and I had lots of opportunities at the weekends to go off and discover some amazing places.



Teaching probabilities and distributions!

Thr first of the training courses took place at the Sokoine Agricultural College, in a town called Morogoro about 3 hours away from the capital Dar es Salaam. Lying at the feet of the Uluguru mountains, the campus is lush green and unlike any campuses I had ever seen!

View of the campus from the canteen

What I really loved about this campus was that it was reptile heaven! In particular, I looove geckos and it was so cool to have those guys living in my bedroom (other people would be freaked out, I loved it!).

The campus is like a mini-village in itself. Being an agricultural college, crops are grown on campus and livestock are reared too. Milk and yogurt are produced on the dairy farm too so you can nip across at lunch time and buy some delicious fresh yogurt to drink while eating stewed bananas: yummy!

Our everyday fare at the canteen

Some students/teachers live on campus of course, and you even have a school on campus for the students/teachers' children. It was so adorable to see them walk down the road to their school in the morning wearing their school uniform!

Not only was this my first proper experience of teaching (and I was really nervous about being rubbish), but the local conditions sometimes made it challenging to conduct an 8 hours teaching day: (in no particular order) power cuts, 38 degrees celsius in the teaching room, monkeys coming into the classroom and scratching their bits in front of everyone...

Hilarious I agree but how do you go back to teaching the Central Limit Theorem after that??

All of these things would have been a lot easier to deal with had I not fallen seriously ill 3 days after arriving in Tanzania. I am always sick when in Africa as I have a sensitive gut but still, 3 days was a new personal best record even for me. And this time, it wasn't just an unconfortable tummy bug...no no no, this was grandiose! On day 3 of my trip, I found myself being rushed to hospital with amoebic dissentry!

Still smiling for the photo but secretly wanting to die!

Of all the things I wanted to visit while in Tanzania, the local hospital wasn't on the list! To this day, I am still unsure whether it was the pizza or fanta from the night before that led me to hospital...I woke up at 3am not feeling so good and very quickly lost a lot of fluid, not being able to hold down any of the water I was drinking to rehydrate. When my colleague found me 6 hours later, I was half passed out on the bed and could not stand up any more. Anyhow, despite the basic facilities at the hospital (that's the understatement of the century), I received very good care from the doctor/nurses. I was put on a drip for several hours and was also diagnosed with early stages of malaria...my luck kept getting better and better!

So I was off work for 2 days and I then had to resume teaching despite not being able to eat or stand up for very long. I didn't eat for almost 2 weeks and lost over a stone in the process. While this wasn't an unpleasant side effect ( we were going to scuba dive in Zanzibar soon and I finally had a poorly but bikini-worthy body!) it made the first few weeks of our working trip quite difficult (and worrying for Mr T back home).

That's why I had to pull out at the last minute of a hiking trip that was taking place the first weekend after we arrived. The University's hiking club was training for the ascent of Kilimanjaro later that year and were going on a day hike to Mount Bondwa in the Uluguru mountains. My zombified self stayed home but my colleagues went along for what turned out to be one very long and difficult hike (she was gone for 8 hours!)

The University's hiking club

The Uluguru Mountains are named after the Luguru tribe that inhabits them and rise to 2,630 m in altitude at its highest point.

The Uluguru mountains are home to more than 100 plants, 2 birds, 2 mammals, 4 reptiles and 6 amphibians which are known from nowhere else in the world (thank you Wipikedia!). This chameleon below is one of those species that is only found on the Uluguru mountains. It is very rare and my colleague was lucky enough to come across it!

The mountain fauna also included ants (lots of them!)

... giant millipedes

... and other odd looking bugs!

And all of this happened within 7 days of landing in Tanzania! Join me soon for my next Tanzania post in which I have a dangerously close encounter with an elephant at night, go on a safari and visit yet another Tanzanian hospital (travelling with me is never boring!)

Hope you have enjoyed those glimpses of my pre-Suisse history, it is certainly fun to go through my old photos and remember those memories to share them with you. And don't forget if you haven't done so already, become a "follower" of this blog to be kept updated on the next installment of these African posts.

From Russia with love

I would like to introduce you today to five little Russian beauties who have been created in casa Made in Suisse over the last couple of weeks.

Please meet Natasha

Anastasia

Ekaterina

Irina

and last, but not least, Olga

These 5 Russian dolls made with felt and fabric were inspired by the July issue of the British magasine "Sew Hip" (http://www.sewhip.co.uk/). I bought the felt from an awesome felt artist/supplier in the UK (check out her blog and shop at http://bugsandfishes.blogspot.com/) and used scraps of fabric I had in the house. Like Sew Hip suggested in their tutorial, I have made these dolls as a garland and added little felt hearts in between every doll. I think this will look lovely in a little girl's room and may be added to my "Crafty Christmas presents" box which will grow exponentially in the coming weeks. Apologies for mentioning the C word in August, but as I am not a fast crafter, I need to start early!

I would like to take the opportunity to thank my followers for leaving me comments everyday and for encouraging me with writing more posts. At their request, I am about to start a series of posts about my life and travels in Africa between 2007 and 2010 so get your suitcase ready and be prepared to travel! I have noticed recently that I was getting a lot of traffic on the blog from outside Switzerland which I am very excited about. If you regularly come and check what Alf and I have been up to in La Suisse and if enjoy reading about our adventures, please become a "follower" of this blog (easy, peasy: there is a button you need to click on the left-hand side of the blog) and make my day! The more followers I get, the more excited I am writing new posts and sharing bits of our Swiss life with you! A massive Thank You to you all.