Orange you glad it’s photo challenge time?
Photo Challenge
Big Cats ~ in their element in the Maasai Mara
Related: …of Maasailand a travel piece that was long-listed in the Brandt Travel Guide writing contest 2000
Produce From My Allotment: Some Of Last Year’s Rewards
The Dhow Builders’ Yard, Zanzibar
Zanzibar’s days of building large ocean-going dhows were on their last gasp when this photo was taken in 1999. Hari, our guide, told us that the large dhow on the right had been commissioned by a Somali trader at a cost of around £7,000. The building yard is on Maruhubi Beach, not far from Stone Town, and on the edge of a mangrove forest which provides much of the construction timber. All the work is done by hand, following centuries old traditions. It is a slow and painstaking process, and dhow builders camp out on the beach while working on a big contract like this.
Thinking of Zanzibar
Zanzibar is of course famous as a spice island. The Omani Sultans once made fortunes from their clove plantations there. And while saffron, I am sure, is not one of the local commodities, Stone Town at sunset seems bathed in a saffron light. It is the kind of light that makes you wonder if you are awake or dreaming.
I have written more about the island HERE and Swahili Culture HERE
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Thursday’s Special: Seeing Red
I’m in love with the Japanese crab apple tree in my garden at Sheinton Street. There is hardly a moment in the year when it does not give pleasure. Even now in February there are still a few tiny apples on its bare branches – minimally disposed like a left over Christmas tree that someone forgot to undress. The black bird still visits, although by now the apples have been frosted and lost their bloom.
But then I also know that by the time the last one has fallen, there will be tight rosy-red buds bursting to make the next crop, bees permitting. And while I think of it, I’m grateful to fellow blogger, Mélanie at Mon Terrain de Jeux who tells me that crab apples sound much lovelier in French, and I agree – pommes sauvages.
On the other hand, my little tree is so finely wrought and well bred, and its fruit so exquisite, that I can imagine no situation when it might be tempted to wildness – unlike its large, unruly English cousins that grow in our farm hedgerows. Those I raid in October for their not so pretty fruit to make jars of crab apple jelly. (How could I possibly pick my own pommes sauvages?). The jelly is delicious on toast and croissants, and the jars glow like jewels as the hot jelly is poured into them. Mmmm.
More things to look forward to then: blossom, bees, pommes sauvages, toast…
For Paula’s Thursday’s Special challenge ‘Red’ at Lost in Translation
One Word Photo Challenge: Seafoam
Here are some more Lamu photos (see previous post). Some of you will have seen the top one before, but it is one of my favourites, and I thought the colour of awning fits with Jennifer Nichole Wells’ one word seafoam challenge. It is a colour that I anyway associate with the Indian Ocean. This shot was taken on a dhow taxi in the middle of a tropical downpour. It was December, the monsoon season, and we had just flown in to the little local airport on Manda Island. The strait between the two islands looked suddenly grey and forbidding. It seemed strangely cold too in the midst of the hot season, and not the best start to our four-day Christmas break from Nairobi.
But then the rain passed. This is the waterfront of Lamu stone town, one of the best surviving Swahili settlements on the Indian Ocean seaboard, and a world heritage site. You will have to look harder here for the gentle shade of seafoam.
Lamu is a captivating place. I was so impressed by our four days there that I wrote a teen novel, Sea Running, published by Macmillan Pacesetters for the African children’s literature market. It’s a good yarn about drug runners and first love. It also has a splash of seafoam on the cover.
For more posts on Lamu:
One Word Photo Challenge: Strawberry
I’m being utterly literal in my response to Jennifer Nichole Wells’ latest challenge. Well, what better example of the colour strawberry than an actual strawberry, and ones that were growing so happily last year on my allotment ? Also they look so juicy, and remind my cold toes that summer will happen, if not quite yet. I’m also thinking – looking again at Jennifer’s colour swatch – than I can also use a shot of my raspberries to illustrate ‘strawberry’, or is that being too perverse?
Anyway, it’s clear where my thought are heading. February is the month when things can be started off in my polytunnel – this in preparation for the spring planting. There are potatoes to chit, broad beans and peas to sow, and excitement is building like rising sap. So much to look forward to.
Guest Challenge: Knowing your place (colour photo challenge)
This week I’m also over at Paula’s blog, Lost in Translation. She kindly asked me to post a guest photo challenge ‘Knowing My Place’. It’s all about finding some cunning new angle that tells you something fresh about a place you think you know very well. To find out more read on, and to see Paula’s own amazing photo response go HERE:
Tish Farrell:
Music: Vaughan Williams On Wenlock Edge song cycle inspired by A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad
January can be a lowering month – at least in the North. We are expected to burst, sparkling new, into the New Year, when we might feel more jaded than go-ahead. Hopefully this photo prompt will have you seeing things in a new light.
I’ve called it ‘Knowing My Place’, and you can interpret it in any way that strikes you. ‘My Place’ will be somewhere that you think you know inside out: your home town or street, the journey to work, your office, kitchen, garden or desk; your state of mind, or work in progress. Now search it with the camera’s eye. Sleuth out an angle that starts to tell you something new about it.
When I first thought of the prompt I was thinking about my home town, Much…
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Mischief in the Mara
These photos were taken in the Maasai Mara during a game drive. For more scenes of mischief visit Ailsa’s travel challenge at Where’s My Backpack
And now for a treat, and even more mischievous behaviour: a short film about Daphne Sheldrick’s Elephant Orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya. The baby elephants you will see in the film have all been orphaned, mostly due to ivory poaching or drought. Sheldrick discovered that orphaned infants will only survive if given 24 hours a day emotional support. At the orphanage each infant has a keeper who becomes its surrogate mother. The ultimate objective of the Sheldrick project is to restore these elephants to wild herds in Tsavo East National Park. This approach has had many successes, and in fact just before Christmas it was reported in the British press that one of Sheldrick’s former orphans had just given birth, back in the wilds with her own herd.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvA52oAvcZ0
