Twende is Swahili for "let's go" and "go" we did! Today's blog is just 8 photos chosen from the 1800+ that we took on our two cameras. We are intending to share the good ones with others in our group but some of the group's cameras took some amazing shots. Our contribution will be some of my patented action shots. This is what we wore on the 26 hour trip there and on the way home. (we had some laundry done in Iringa)
This was our first afternoon of safari in Ndutu Preserve. This might have been my favorite session of safari because it was all so new and exciting. Every corner we rounded and every hill we climbed revealed more exotic wildlife from this pride of lazy lions sunning themselves to cape buffalo to mongoose to zebra, to Grant's and Thomson's gazelle. Our guide Kasani said he heard that these big cats took down a buffalo the day before explaining why they looked so incredibly lazy.
Look how excited and energetic we look on our first leg of the flight from Minneapolis to Amsterdam. Dan from church, who works for Delta, was able to send some niceties our way back in coach class. These niceties were in the form of more gin and tonics than we could reasonably drink.
This was our first wildlife siting on the 9 hour bus trip from Dar es Salaam to Iringa. We were zipping through Mikumi National Park at about 60 miles per hour. We also saw our first warthog as it dashed across the road in front of us. Later on the game drives we would see countless zebra and many, many warthog families.
This was our surprise greeting on the side of the highway just before getting to Iringa where we would spend the first week of our trip. The trumpet playing white girl is a German volunteer. This was quite the welcome for our 11 road weary travellers.
We didn't see elephant on the first two days of the safari but Daudi, our second guide, guaranteed we'd see them in Tarangire National Park. We saw one half way down the road into the Ngorongoro Crater crater and then in Tarangire we saw more elephants than you could ever reasonably expect to see in one afternoon.
This was a typical greeting by the kids of Ipogoro Lutheran Church, our companion congregation. You'd have a kid hanging on to each of your ten fingers as you tried to walk through the crowds.
In that first surprise greeting on our first full day in Tanzania, we were presented with katanga, these colorful traditional wrapping cloths that you could use for curtains or table runners or as clothing. This is Ipogoro's pastor named Nixon and Mark our fearless leader. There will be some good Nixon-related photos to follow. . .
We visited four of the five preaching points of Ipogoro in our first two days. The preaching points are outlying extension congregations of Ipogoro led by a non-pastor evangelist. Nixon goes to each of the preaching points once a month to perform baptisms, etc. Mobility is difficult for the average subsistence farming Tanzanian so these preaching points are vital. We walked down a dirt path through farmer's fields for about 30 minutes to get to this preaching point. We sang some songs and danced after giving introductions of ourselves. Mark introduced us as "Augustana's Church Leaders". Nixon did the translating and I especially enjoyed how he'd make the trombone sound just as I did when describing my number one hobby. Sue did a fantastic job playing her flute by ear accompanying us.
Right outside of Iringa we visited the Isimila Stone Age Sight where stone artifacts dating back 200,000 years have been unearthed. We walked through the canyon among these towers of earth that were not eroded like the surrounding ground. Pretty amazing.
No comments:
Post a Comment