In his element.

These photo's are of Rich messing around with a skim board about a week or so ago. Amazing how much enjoyment can be had with an oval shaped piece of ply wood!

A new car for Mr and Mrs O cont'd...

I blogged a couple of months ago about going through the experience of getting a car on our island. I had intended to put up some photo's then, but Rich told me to wait until he had taken some nice pictures of the car (preferably on a white, sandy beach with palm trees in the background). I have now given up waiting for these pictures and have decided to just go ahead and put the pictures up that we do have, so here they are.

This is our car! Considering how nice and shiny it is, we got a really good price on it. It took us over two weeks of going to at least one cash point a day (often it was more like four cash points as they often run out of money, the biggest denomination being equivalent to £5) and withdrawing the maximum amount our bank would allow. We also had to borrow from our team mates in order to get the money together in time.

Impressive eh?! This is in fact only about 2/3 of the money we actually needed to pay for our car. We even took it in a paper bag to make the payment - shady!

Politcally Correct?

Political correctness is a concept that has yet to land on these shores. Coming from a country where PC-ness is highly valued (or at least expected) we are times shocked or amused by instances of political incorrectness that we come across, or more usually are the recipients of.
It is very rarely that we are able to leave the house without local children and sometimes men (it seems the women are above this sort of behaviour) calling out ‘mzungu!’ Now the literal translation for this word is ‘one who walks around in circles’ and apparently the expression was coined when Westerners first arrived in East Africa. Ask someone now what it means and you will hear that it means a white person or westerner. The thing that I am surprised by is that the children and young men in our neighbourhood are quite accustomed to seeing us and other ‘wazungu’ (plural form) on a regular basis, so I find it odd that they still feel the need to call us this particularly as we do in fact have names that they could call us by.
This daily surprise (sometimes mild irritation – I do have a name!) I experience was eclipsed by a recent experience in a photo shop. Rich needed to get some passport photo’s to update his UK driver’s licence, so we headed to the photo shop in town. Now here there is no photo machine. A lady sticks a camera in your face and takes a photo which she then edits to change the background colour and re-orientate the picture so that you are not diagonally across the picture. The pictures are then printed out, cut up and put in a little envelope for you to take away upon payment. When I turned up to collect the photo’s I was immediately given an envelope although I hadn’t been asked to give a name. Why? Because someone had written ‘mzungu’ across the top of the envelope and that obviously must be me!
This insistence of referring to us and our team mates as ‘wazungu’ often leads to confusion. As many of you know, our internet is tediously slow when it works and sometimes it just gives up all together. There have been occasions when we or one of our team mates has had reason to call our ISP in order to get an engineer to come and see just how bad our connection is. Now, back home our name would be taken and written down in order to ensure that the engineer goes to the correct address. Not so here. Although we may give a name, they seem to choose not to take any notice of it and instead sent the engineer to the mzungu’s house in Chukwani (the, sort of, area we live in). This leads to engineers turning up at Jason and Roxanne’s house and refusing to understand that their internet is actually fine and they don’t need an engineer while ours is up the creek and we would actually quite like some help please! Oh for some order and organisation!! This all just goes to show that it IS important to use people’s names and that political correctness can be useful in its own way!!

Rich the Chippie

Rich has always faniced himself as a bit of a chippie. He loves wood and has always talked about working with it. Of all the trades, carpentry is the one he loves and most enjoys. However, back in the UK he had not really had the opportunity to indulge in much wood work. (Mostly because the majority of his spare time was spent in the garage fixing the cars, putting in kitchen's, bathrooms or re-building the mini.)

Here everything is different. Firstly there is no garage for him to disappear into for an evening's entertainment. Secondly, there is no Ikea or Argos for cheap furniture. Everything is made to order in town by carpenters.

We had decided that we should upgrade our coffee table from a cardboard box to an actual table. Rich decided that this was a project he could take on himself in order to prove his skills as a carpenter. After an evening drawing up plans and discussing designs, he and James (who was visiting at the time) headed off into town to try and locate some suitable material for the project. They returned with wood of various shapes and sizes and started work the next day.

After a day of listening to the noises of circular saws, planers, sanders and hammering they were finished and ready to present their creation to the world, and here it is!

Half the fun is working with the power tools!

Measuring it all up and fitting it together.

Getting a good finish on the wood.

The finished product!

A visit from Mr and Mrs Pinto!!

Today we were sorry to say goodbye to James and Anna Pinto who have been with us for the last two and a half weeks. We have absolutely LOVED every minute they have been with us and have some fab memories and photo's to share on our blog!

We began our adventures together by driving north from Dar es Salaam to stay near Arusha and use that as a base for then going on safari. We spent a day at lake Manyara about an hour and a half's drive from Arusha and then headed on to the Ngorongoro crater. Both of these places were just incredible and we saw some beautiful wildlife. Although the crater was very impressive, we loved lake Manyara as we were so close to the animals. At one point our car was almost charged by an elephant which seemed to make our guide a little bit nervous, but we were just so overwhelmed and excited to be so close to a real life, wild elephant!

On returning to the island, we dragged James and Anna around while we did all our jobs and tried to get back into our usual routine. They did brilliantly and even attempted an outing on a dala dala (local mini bus) all by themselves!

Rich loved having someone to play with and gad about with. It gave me the opportunity to get on with some reading, rather than being called upon for entertainment!!

Anyway, enough of all this talking, here are some photo's from our time together for you all to enjoy!

Anna and James eating an early breakfast while waiting to enter the crater.

We saw loads of hippo's at both of the parks we went to. They are such weird looking animals!

This is the elephant that started to get a little bit too close to our car (there's no zoom used in the picture, he really was that close!)

This is the car that we spent the better part of 48 hours in driving round lake Manyara and the Ngorongoro crater trying to find exciting wildlife.

We had hoped, but hadn't really expected that we would see any cats on our safari, so we were very happy when we saw thes lions lazing in the sun!

We came across another car with a group of tourists all intently looking at a big stretch of grass. When we asked them what they were looking at they informed us that a Cheetah was lying down in the tall grass. So we waited and our patience was rewarded by this glimpse of a Cheetah.

One of many giraffes at lake Manyara.

Our day in the crater was really cold! We were in our element wearing thick jumpers and even wrapping up in warm blankets!

The best cake in Tanzania! We found this amazing little patisserie/coffee shop which served incredible food including these yummy cakes. At the top is chocolate cheesecake, carrot cake on either side and an eclair at the bottom.

Once we were back home we went to the south east corner of the island and went out on a boat to go swimming with dolphins which was AMAZING!! This is a picture of Rich with a group of dolphins. They were incredible beautiful, graceful and somehow peaceful to watch.

After we saw the dolphins, the boys all went off snorkelling and as they were coming out of the water, James fell on a sea urchin. The whitey/purple areas on his thumb and first two fingures are where the sea urchin spikes broke off in his hand. We estimate that he had approximately 30 or so spikes in his hand.

Only in Africa - Driving Range.

The boys on our team were recently very excited to find that there was in fact a driving range in the town we live in. They all went along for an afternoon's manly activity and came back full of stories about the African-ness of the driving range.
Rich went again yesterday, with a friend who is staying for a while, for a Sunday afternoon of hitting golf balls. Rich took these pictures of the driving range on his phone for you all to laugh at and enjoy.


As you can see the range itself is no bigger than a large-ish garden and close behind the back fence are some houses. Of course this then provides endless fun of seeing how many balls one can hit into the village. Note also the car parked in a precarious position. Apparently there are no smashed windows as yet, but the body work is a bit dented.

This picture of James preparing to take a shot gives an idea of the width of the range. Lining the right hand side of the grass is a row of duka's (shops) and warehouses and on the left hand side is a restaurant with air conditioning units on the outside making convenient targets for cheeky boys!!

Only in Africa!!!

Funny Hats

At night, in every city we visited, the streets were overwhelmed with women walking around with trays strapped to them (a bit like the trays used in cinema’s and theatres during the interval to sell ice cream) full of nik naks, such as bracelets, hats and wooden frogs that make a sort of croaking sound when you rub a stick of wood over their back. We never did actually count how many would approach us during our evening meals, but on some evening’s it was easily 20 or so different women all offering exactly the same thing.
After a while Rich decided to mess around with them a bit, so he would point at Hans (our team leader) and mime putting a hat on him. One lady obviously thought that there was scope in this for making a bit of money, so she put hats on everyone at the table while we took photo’s and had a bit of a giggle. Jason then commented to Rich something along the lines of ‘I wonder how much this is going to cost us?’ No sooner had the words been uttered, the lady was asking for money and insisting that we buy something in return for the photo’s. Suddenly everyone else around the table was very deep in conversation and I, who was sat right next to the lady, was left to try and explain that we didn’t want anything. Eventually she did go away, but I was convinced that she would be waiting for us around the corner when we eventually made our way back to the hotel at the end of the evening!