Africa Safari Blog

Last night a hyena visited, arr-yooping around and under my tent (it’s on stilts). It’s call echoed across the valley in descending decibles, waking up the Piet-my-vrou cuckoos. For an hour or so sleep was cancelled but it was worth it.  After breakfast we picked our way through coffee plantations down to Lake Eyasi. After checking in at Tindiga Tented Camp we wandered through a large, open-air market, threading past tall Maasai warriors in their startlingly red capes, fancy earrings and fierce weaponry. Prominent items for sale were onions and slops made from car tyres. Also on sale were calendars with a photo of Brother (ex) Leader Gadaffi. Did anyone here know he was dead and disgraced?

After that we had a cultural immersion that reinforced my sense of time warp. Sambargwa Domdu is a blacksmith who would not be out of place in the early Iron Age. His bellows were cowhide bags with which he blasted air through a clay cone into glowing coals, heating metal into red-hot compliancy.  His anvil was a rock and his only tools were a battered hammer and a beat-up chisel. With these, as we watched, he turned out lethal arrowheads for local Hadza hunters and delicate bangles for adornment-hungry Maasai. Afterwards he played on a single-stringed instrument and sang hauntingly about nothing I could understand.He was a true alchemist musician – the sort of guy every wild tribe needs. I bought some arrow tips with no intention to kill. They were such exquisite works of art.

Related links:
1. Best of East Africa Safari
2. East Africa Migration Discoverer Safari
3. Tanzania Wildlife and Cultural Safari

Share:

Pale chanting goshawks( Melirax canorus) are one of the most commonly seen raptors in Southern Africa. They are striking birds with orange beaks and legs with grey white and black bodies. I often see them on telephone wires or other perches, scanning the ground and the air for prey. They eat mostly small mammals and birds like Queleas and finches but like a good lizard or large insect too. This one in the picture is eating what looks like a Praying Mantis. What is great about them if you like taking pictures is that they like to “pose” for the camera. This characteristic enabled me to get these shots. This is generally a rather quiet bird, but during the breeding season the male makes a series of tuneful whistling calls kleeuu, kleeuu-ku-ku-ku from a tree-top perch.
Females will usually mate with one male, but sometimes they will be polyandrous. This means the female will mate with more than one male and he will usually do most of the work raising the chicks. Great system hey ladies!

The relatively small stick nest is built in an acacia tree at a height of 3 to 10 m. The female lays and incubates one or two pale bluish or greenish white, unmarked eggs. Only one chick is normally reared from a nest of two. The breeding cycle begins in midwinter and takes over 115 days. The young after leaving the nest may be found near it for some months and in the following year may even display in the same area. Some pairs and especially trios raise a second brood, starting about 24 days after the first brood fledges.

- Written by Chantel (one of our guides)

Related links:
1. Jenman Safaris
2. Meet the Chantel

Share:

The Great Rift Valley – correctly called the Albertine Rift – is a tear through the fabric of Africa from Mozambique to the Red Sea which is moving apart at about the rate your fingernails grow. In tectonic terms that’s pretty speedy.

It’s a messy rip made up of the Tanzanian Craton and the Somalian and Nubian Plates. There’s a western and eastern rift with Lake Victoria and the Serengeti between them. The lakes Manyara, Eyasi and Natron, together with the Ngorongoro Crater, are the result of volcanic turbulence along the eastern edge of the Tanzanian Craton.

Here molten magma is close to the surface and the Rift is littered with active and sleeping volcanos, boiling hot springs, craters and black rocks spat out from the planet’s interior like congealed blood of the underworld.

We drove through the tatty town of Karatu and up the Rift wall. From the top the mountains of the Rift fell away, north and south, in ridges of deepening purple. Far below Lake Manyara shimmered under a sky punctuated by towering thunderheads.

It was cool up there and we drove through fields of maize, beans and coffee to Crater Forest Lodge, where I’m now scribbling these notes.

Related links:
1. Best of East Africa Safari
2. East Africa Migration Discoverer Safari
3. Tanzania Wildlife and Cultural Safari

Share:

We have officially finished our “Save the Rhino Semi-Nude Calendar” and the response has been overwhelming… we have been featured in local newspapers, magazine and on loads of online blogs! As we have mentioned ALL proceeds go towards the African Conservation Trust – Project Rhino KZN which is an organization fighting hard to protect and save the endangered rhinos!

Cost: ZAR 120 per calendar!

To place your order please email savetherhino@jenmansafaris.com or to find out more and see who our amazing sponsors are (without them we wouldn’t be able to donate 100% of all sales to Project Rhino) click here!

Share:

With the horrific death of a surfer not too long ago… This is what Zapiro had to “say”….!

What are your thoughts about this? Did chumming bring the sharks closer to the shore? Did the surfer know his risks? Who is the blame? Let us know your thoughts as this story has become quite a controversial topic within the Jenman office!

Written by: Don Pinnock. Lake Manyara is a Jurassic time machine.

The high groundwater forest shook loose ancient cellular memories of a time when we called the great tropical African forests home.

A velociraptor seemed a distinct possibility, but instead we encountered a family of olive baboons preening each other in beguiling sociability.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry for disappointing you but this article will not be focusing on Nude Safaris promoted by a freakish Safari Company.

We all know that northern Europe’s population doesn’t have any trouble with nakedness and inhibition, given the number of German people taking over French and Spanish Nudist beaches during summer. So, when our German marketing manager told us about shedding our clothes to save the rhinos, we weren’t sure if it’s was either to militate against rhino’s poaching or to satiate her human (but German) nature…

Read the rest of this entry »

As you know – each month in our general meeting we award our staff members for their hard work and commitment with either an Achiever or a WOW award! Well done to Frans, Rebecca, Lisa and Asheeqah – read on to find out why!

Read the rest of this entry »