kruger national park as traversed by Jane, Ethan, Jennifer and Jim

Jennifer and I were honored to have Jane and Ethan visit us in South Africa.  So honored that we made them fly round trip to Joberg, drive up to Kruger National Park (5 hours) and camp without sleeping pads for two nights, before making the return drive and two massive return flights that must have amounted to at least 36 hours of travel.  I did hear that they are alive and well after the trip and we are very excited about that because we are really looking forward to their wedding in a few weeks!

We had two great mornings exchanging drivers and co-pilots and eventually meandering the minivan back towards camp without running it into the brush of too many acacia trees (we were able to cover up the minor damage by slicking some water and soap over them at a gas station, then letting extra dirt stick to the car while driving (that happens as a consequence of normal driving) :).

We would also go out for afternoon game drives and were lucky enough to spend the evening with our friend Taryn, who we met playing ultimate frizbee.  Taryn has spent at least 3 years studying in Kruger National Park and went there most years of her childhood.  There is actually a whole village in Kruger that helps support park staff and researchers--they just fence their houses.  At night the call of bushbaby's and impala can be heard on the local and majestic golf course.  Taryn brought us to two excellent places for the sunset--one overlooking a dam resevoir (for the town) that was full of grunting hippos and a variety of birds.  The next night we stood atop a kopjie (large granitic rock outcropping or big hill) to look out over the savanna and right below us down the steep slope of rock at a white rhino perusing through the underbrush.

Jane asked Taryn, "what if the rhino tries to come up here?" Taryn laughed and said, "I'd really like to see it try".  That pretty much encapsulated how common sense it was for us to feel safe on the kopjie.  Yet, Taryn followed up that warm feeling with a story about how they had to close the hill for a period of time because rangers saw a leopard stalking them on that spot one night as the leopard was figuring out that easy prey gathered at the same time and same place every night.  Pretty sure that leopard wasn't too close when we were there :).

Check out the pictures!

OK, Mom (Betsy) this is the start of your identification challenge.

agra fort (agra, uttar pradesh, india)

Just before we went to see the Taj, shortly after arriving in Agra, we visited the Agra Fort.

Driving in to Agra, things just gradually became denser until you realized that you couldn’t see fields any longer, only shops. The roads were narrow, much narrower than Delhi, and the shops much smaller and less modern.

We drove over the river which separates the Taj Mahal from Agra Fort, and got our first glimpse of the Taj along with the sight of a few men bathing in the river, and a group of cows cooling off in the water. My classmate Karthik explained how dirty the water was. I could see bits of trash near the shoreline and could see that the water was nowhere near clear.

We visited Agra Fort, and I enjoyed seeing the palaces. Our tour guide pointed out brass roofs on the tops of white marble structures, and explained that they had been gold roofs, but the British came and took the gold and replaced it with brass. It was a good example of the sorts of pillaging that Karthik had been describing to me earlier in the day when I asked how he thought of the British. 

seventh wonder - taj mahal (agra, uttar pradesh, india)

I am recently returned from another MBA trip, this time to India. Before classes started, I had the chance to tour (briefly) two prime sight-seeing spots in northern India: Agra and Jaipur.

Figured I would start with photos of the prime attraction: the Taj Mahal. I got to see it in the late afternoon, and we hung around through sunset. Another one of those surreal life experiences that I have been lucky to have so many of this year.

One thing that surprised me (in a good way!) was how many of the tourists were Indian. I asked one of my Indian classmates about it, and he said that there are different prices for Indian nationals. He explained that making a visit to the Taj Mahal is still a very expensive endeavor, and some of these families might be coming for the only time in their lives.

At popular tourist activities in South Africa and other African countries, to be honest, most of the people touring are white. I just heard something on the radio yesterday about a woman writing a letter of complaint to the City of Cape Town about prohibitive pricing on attractions like Robben Island and Table Mountain. Her argument was, simply stated, that she's never seen these amazing sights because they are too expensive, and now that she is getting older, she wishes she could go. I think she makes a fair point, especially for the Robben Island museum, which is something every South African should have the chance to see. A few parks in Rwanda had "national" and "foreign" pricing, as did the Genocide Museum, and it seemed to make a difference in the number of Rwandans we saw, especially at the museum in Kigali.

A brief history of the Taj: it was built between 1631 and 1648 by Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan. He founded Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi), amassed a huge fortune, and built a lot of monuments. He built the Taj as a burial monument to his favorite wife, Arjumand Banu Begum, who died in 1631 giving birth to their 13th child. For that reason, it's interpreted as a site recognizing true love.

After he built the Taj, Shah Jehan went a little off his rocker, and was pushed out of power by his son and essentially imprisoned in his rooms in the palace at Agra Fort, across the river from the monument (he had wanted to build a black version of the Taj as a burial site for himself. Instead his son buried him in the Taj after he died). He got to look out at it every day.

I'll also post more photos from the other major sights we saw, including Agra Fort (where the Mughal Emperor who built the Taj Mahal lived), as well as Jaipur.

Walking up to the gate at the Taj Mahal. From here, you can't see any of the actual building. The small arched doorways on the right that line this big courtyard were used as hotel rooms until not long ago, for people who wanted to come and see the Taj.

Facing the gate - excitement builds!

Our first glimpse of the Taj Mahal.

This is probably my favorite picture - from much later in the evening as the sun was getting low. But it was too good to bury at the end of the blog post! Click through for more. 

Our tour guide was very excited about taking this photo for each of us! Had to do it.

wildflowers, spring 2014 (clanwilliam, south africa)

We were busy this "spring" and never got around to posting these photos from our wildflower-viewing weekend in September.

Every spring in the dry veld of the Western Cape (north and west of Cape Town), a really magical bloom of wildflowers takes place. The absolute best ones are supposedly about 7 hours away in Namaqualand; we didn't make it that far, but we did get to Clanwilliam this year and really enjoyed the weekend driving through fields and exclaiming over the colors.

We're heading back up this way next week for our last trip in southern Africa before we head back Stateside. As you can see from our lack of posting on the blog, this year has been busier than last with fewer weekend trips - we're not exactly tourists here any more! But we are looking forward to getting out for a few more long weekends and taking advantage of school holidays before we leave Cape Town permanently in June. (Tears are forming just thinking about it!)

Til then, enjoy a few sunny flowers now that it's turning to spring in the northern hemisphere!

addo elephant park with mike, jon, and jim

Rule number one on game drives:  don't get out of the vehicle.  Most tempting rule to break when one needs to find something in the back of the car:  Rule number one.  We had a good time breaking this rule when I was looking for the talisman Mike brought along to give us good luck.  We were having a relatively crappy game drive (nothing but zebras, kudus, and warthogs) up until this point and really wanted to see some lions--so the effort was to recover our lucky talisman, then we would begin seeing big game.  After a fruitless search I climbed back in the car and began driving around the bend...about 200 meters until we saw a pride of lions relaxing next to the road.  Yikes!  That is why you don't get out of the car, ha ha.

We had a blast seeing the animals, cruising around the park, and saving two German fraulines from a gigantic spider.  Good thing our ladies have us disciplined--we recovered the spider and left immediately to recline to a chapter from World War Z--the zombie epic that we were reading to each other in the car.

One of Mike's best sitings was a hare, sitting next to the road just behind a hill so that oncoming traffic could not see us.  We had time to pause for a picture, then get out of the way!

Other fantastic sitings included rhinos, elephants, leopard tortoises, kudus, and of course--the lions.

This makes me wan to eat a salad.

Or be a tortoise

Not a dung beetle though.

Imagine the scene in Money Python... "Run away!  Run away! Clip clop, clip clop, clip clop" 

lions!! (serengeti national park, tanzania)

The final stage of our big trip took place in Tanzania. We went on safari in the Serengeti with a fantastic duo: Moses and Emily, our tour guide and driver, from Moses' company, Sange Safari. We were trying really hard to keep our budget small, and Mosses was amazing at finding us cheap, clean and safe places to stay. Safe being a relative term - we camped in our tent inside the Serengeti for two nights, and there are no fences at the campsites!! We had hyenas watching us brush our teeth, and heard lions calling nearby in the morning. 

Speaking of lions, here is a highlight reel of some of our best photos of the kings and queens of the savanna. We were astounded at the number of lions in the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater - we saw lions every day. 

Our first lion sighting, on our very first game drive! This pride was beautiful and sleepy, with tons of cute cubs, which made for great photo ops. Our driver Emily had tracked this group for about 45 minutes through the grass and brush, aided by the other car you see in the photo. We were the only two cars for miles. It was beautiful and quiet as we sat with the sleeping pride.

The male lion with this pride is sleeping under the tree on the right-hand side of the photo, a hundred yards away. We got to go see him too.

You could almost hug them. (Almost.)

hiking in the nyungwe national park (rwanda, near borders of congo and burundi)

Here is a highlight reel from one hike we took in Nyungwe Forest National Park in Rwanda. This park was tough to get to - we drove for six hours across the entire country, on winding hilly roads - and a bit hard to access once we got there: you can only hike in the park with a ranger, and the rangers only go on specific trails at specific times of day (when we asked to go on the 9am hike at 9:05, they told us we were too late). 

BUT when we finally got out in to the forest, it was beautiful. 

A young mahogany tree.

Forest ants eat all the dead leaves off the forest floor and recycle nutrients back into the ground. There were thousands of them in this line, going back and forth. And they bite! 

More ants.

We spotted a bush viper! Our guide was really excited - these are rare. It was a small snake, barely a foot long, but apparently quite poisonous.

chimpanzee tracking, nyungwe national forest (rwanda, near borders of congo and burundi)

We began our time in Nyungwe National Forest, Rwanda by tracking chimpanzees--a much easier venture than finding gorillas!  We spotted about three chimpanzees in total and the highlight was watching this big adult male eat his breakfast of figs, spit out his breakfast into one  big handful of fig-rinds, then re-eat the fig paste (it looked like eating poo, ha ha).

I remember making eye contact with the chimpanzee and having that weird moment when your mind interprets what you see as a human face--I remember making eye contact--then feeling a strange sensation as I came to the realization that this animal had just connected with me in some way.

One of my lasting thoughts after seeing the chimps was, could this really be our closest living ancestor?  I mean, we need to go way back (about 8 million years) before we get to a time when we share a common ancestor.  That is a long time and it is weird to think of all the species of bipedal hominids that must have been brought into this world, then died off again, during that period.  It is fascinating for me to think of the Planet of the Apes-like scenarios that could have played out as different species of bipedal hominids fought and killed each other.  Even chimpanzees kill and eat each other--something you can imagine our ancestors have been doing in the practice of war for a loooooong time.  Brutal, but certainly interesting.

It's tough to imagine, but sometimes watching one chimpanzee for 45 minutes can get boring.  This bee was a good target for camera focusing practice!

The older male chimpanzee sat and ate these figs for the entire time we were watching.  The guide said that he would only swallow the juice and kept the rinds in his mouth.  Eventually, he spit the rinds back out...see below.