Christmas

Christmas 2019 has come and gone.  You have to look hard to notice it is happening at all here.  The larger supermarkets make an effort - staff wear santa hats with flashing lights, reggae or disco versions of carols play over the loudspeaker systems, plastic trees and decorations are briefly for sale for outrageous prices ($A190 for a bog standard tree).  Otherwise life goes on much as it always does.

Both our workplaces have shut for a couple of weeks.  I went to work in the week before Christmas and was often the only one there.  I had a couple of small grant applications to prepare and submit so had useful things to do.

We have been otherwise fairly quiet of late.  We had lunch at an Indian restaurant with the rest of the Australian volunteers a couple of weeks ago for International Volunteers Day (a couple of days late).  Great to catch up.

On Christmas day we woke early and Skyped family who were in the middle of various celebratory activities.  Jenny and I exchanged gifts.  One of my presents to her was a Giraffe made of metal from her favourite shop Shanga.  One of her presents to me was a Giraffe made of metal from her favourite shop Shanga!

They seem to be getting along well.

We had arranged to have lunch with friend Per Holman and his fiancee Selvine.  Our table for 4 had to be changed to a table for 6 and then 9 as more people wanted to join us.  So we ended up with two Norwegians, a Dutch, four Kenyans and two Australians.  We went to Rivertrees Lodge in Usa River where they put on a delicious buffet lunch.  All good fun.

Our Hamilton friends Rob and Lou took off a couple of hours ago to fly to Arusha.  We will collect them from the airport tomorrow afternoon and then head off for a two-week safari on Sunday.  My next post will be reporting on that.

Our safari taking in Lake Manyara NP, Lake Natron, Serengeti NP, Lake Victoria and the Ngorongoro Crater.

A month of all sorts of stuff

Since my last post on 3 November we have been busy with diverse work and non-work activities.  So briefly:

We welcomed new Australian Volunteer Program (AVP) arrivals Woody and Alex from Warrnambool and put them up in our compound's guesthouse for a few days.  A nice young couple.  Woody is an ambulance paramedic and Alex is a high school English teacher.  They will both be very useful here.  It turns out Woody knows our son David from when they were both working in Port Fairy a decade ago.  We took them to Arusha NP for their first safari and it was fun seeing their reactions to Giraffe, Warthogs, Baboons and an Elephant.

I submitted another project funding application to begin working on the degraded rangelands to our south and west.  Fingers crossed everyone please although we won't know if we are successful until early 2020.

I went birding to Lark Plains to the north of Arusha with the Attraction Birding Club.  

Lark Plains is a short grassland north of Arusha and is the only place in the world where Beesley's Lark can be found.  The Maasai maintain the area and protect it for the bird, other larks species and the birders who come from all over the world.

We saw several Beesley's Larks including a pair attending this fledgling.

Singing Bush Lark

Fischer's Starlings are common in the woodland adjacent to Lark Plains.

We went to a baptism of the sister of our birder friend James Nasary.  We were the only white folk among the 200 or so guests.  An interesting experience with lots of colour and music.

We were in the cheap seats.  No room inside.

This little chap was amused by me so I couldn't resist...

We had the AVP annual conference in a very swish lodge up on the Ngorongoro Crater rim.  Lots of sunbirds in the garden for me to photograph before and after the sessions each day.  Interesting to see three closely related species that have increasingly curved bills all sharing the flower beds.  The Golden-winged Sunbird males seemed to dominate all others though.

Tacazze Sunbird with the straightest bill.

Next is Bronzy Sunbird.

The bill of the Golden-winged Sunbird is the most curved.

I went with colleagues to the 3rd ECHO East Africa Highlands Symposium in Kigali, Rwanda.  This involved two 10-12 hours days of driving to get there and three slightly shorter days to get home. An addition to the normal challenges driving here is the requirement to switch to the right side of the road in Rwanda and our car being right-hand drive.  My colleague did this in the dark when we headed in to Kigali (3 hours from the border).  I did it in daylight on the way out.

Checking emails by the pool after breakfast on setting-up day for the conference.

The ECHO team getting ready for delegate registration.

Morning tea on the first day of the conference.  Going well so far.

I got to meet people working in conservation farming from Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Ethiopia as well as many from Rwanda and Tanzania. The talks were all well presented and we had great questions after each.  Hats off to the ECHO team for the effort they put on to make this happen so successfully.  A special shout-out to the excellent translator who dealt with French, English, Swahili and probably other languages.  When I got up to get ready for my talk she asked "Am I going to have trouble with you?".  I explained 'endophyte' and 'symbiosis' to her and the rest was fine.

Before lunch all presentations were in the main hall.

After lunch there were three concurrent sessions in the main hall and smaller rooms nearby
- hard to choose which to attend.

This wise old bloke gave his presentation in the main hall.

During breaks the ECHO publications were on sale.

I also got to see large areas of Tanzania I'd never been to before including southern parts of Kagera Region.  Bukoba, where we lived in 2010-11 is the main city in Kagera Region so it felt like a homecoming.

On the way we mainly drove on high quality sealed roads and traffic was mostly calm and light.  As we approached the Rwanda border however the road was severely potholed and had an increasing number of trucks.  Along this section a large truck had rolled and lost its shipping container.  The road was blocked to trucks in both directions and there was just room for cars to pass.  The last 30-40 km to the border took about two hours as we crept though the snarl of trucks.  Many trucks elsewhere along the way there and back were upside down in ditches or just broken down in inconvenient places.  Unroadworthy trucks are major contributors to the road toll of East Africa (see my theory on this in Uganda.  Nothing I have seen in Tanzania has changed my mind).

Birding highlights were few as we really couldn't stop along the way except for fuel for the car and ourselves.  In Rwanda I managed just 35 species but there was a Bat Hawk over the hotel on a couple of evenings so I can't complain.  The hotel gardens were sparse but did pull in a nice Scarlet-chested Sunbird on the last morning.

Scarlet-chested Sunbird.

A field visit to a site where local farmers get to try new ideas.
Here were potatoes and maize with various fertiliser and mulch combinations.

Some heavy rain preceded us in the Babati district on the last day of travelling home.

Next up is the run to Christmas and the arrival of friends from Hamilton for a two week safari to Serengeti NP etc.