This essay was a “Birdman” first, posted in 2006 and entitled: “Mes Amis Amur” A thunderous tropical rain storm was arriving, most unusually out of the north. A tsunami of cloud breaking against the great black massifs of Mount Meru and Kilimanjaro in the early hours of November 23, 2006. Shortly after daybreak Dismus […]
Category: africa
Africa, we are told, is our original home. It appears that fully modern humans evolved on the land mass we now call the continent of Africa. We were so successful there that we had to walk out, invent the wheel, build boats and make money; feats which would encourage us to try to subjugate the […]
The person with the greatest exposure to the needs of foreign birders and those of other serious ecotourists in the mountains of Northern Tanzania is Martin Joho. A resident of Muheza Martin is a well known face in and around Amani as well as at the lodges and forest reserves above Lushoto. Everyone there seems […]
For the tour operator Tanzania remains a unique and challenging destination. The more so because world travellers hope to find here a savanna Africa of their dreams. Yet with a little luck a well-planned safari here really should become that “holiday of a lifetime”. A safari here is always going to be expensive, on account […]
Our tour commences of an evening at the relaxed and peaceful Kilimanjaro International Airport. That is when the daily KLM direct flight from Amsterdam Schiphol (and hence other capitals) arrives in Tanzania. Here you will be met by both James, your global-standard bird guide, and your Tanzanian driver-guide and taken, in a customised Toyota safari vehicle with […]
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The Nightingale Gardener
For over a month I’ve been getting the garden ready. Our wilding wedge beneath the steel grey pyramid of Meru. A rented hectare outside Arusha in East Africa, at a kilometre and a half above the sea. It’s an ever-changing tangled patchwork of exotic, alien hard-browsed Lantana camara in glade-thicket-and-brake. An experiment in non-racist eco-gardening, style […]
Falteringly I have become a gardener. Although not in any sense a typical gardener. I’ve become a Gardener for Nature. It started, at what was then our family home in Cumbria in northern England, in January 1983. But I now see it as every sensible person’s duty, in this Age of Extinctions, to welcome Nature back into our garden, […]
Vagrant Mind 