On the road again

  At the tail end of our trip awaiting a plane back to Amsterdam from Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, we had a thought provoking experience: Investours. A tourism concept developed in Harvard by some students, that allows visitors to Dar es Salaam (translated House of Peace) to experience the business world in the local small business sector of the country. A group of tourists about our size (between 4 and 8 people) pay Investours the tour cost, in our case  US $200. That money is then given as a loan to a qualifying business applicant interest free to be repaid within 3 months. When repaid the lending bank gets 30% and Investours gets 70% for their efforts. So here you have it in a nutshell. We spent a day being driven around the poorer outskirts of Dar, as they call it in the local vernacular. Dar is not the prettiest town on earth, a sprawling shanty-town of 3.5 million youngsters. Tanzania has a population of 43 million people with a median age of 18 and an average life

   Here is the Safari blog many of you have waited for.    T here is no real good way to give you the essence of what we experienced during our safari. We saw so many things crammed into a mere 12 days that defy description: smells, flavors, sights and sounds of a nation dipped in poverty while also filled with beauty beyond belief.    A country in which I personally spent quite some time writing my thesis more than fourty years ago. However in those days I never experienced the beauty of nature that one is bombarded with when touring, incapsulated in a National park, seemingly far away from a country filled with people who are struggling to provide a living for those they love.    We were driving around amidst a beauty of pure Eden with almost no people, but filled with a spectecular array of wildlife roaming free, giving us the spectators a feeling of being lost in a vastness that I really can not put into words.    Thus I have decided to limit my wordiness and le

  Horny or Mating Season in the Wild.     T'was the season and as I sit here reflecting upon our safari trip in June counting the months it has been, I realize that many an expectant  mother out there is now showing or starting to show.     With so many species demonstrating to us the art of copulation in the wild and with my knowledge of their times to bear so limited, I feel woefully undereducated on that subject matter.   But horny they were those boys as they were playing the field, especially when considering the masses of wildebeests stretching out in front of us, dotting the far horizon with thousands of male and females in heat wandering seemingly aimless. this better works I don't want to walk too far     The ones nearby as they were plying their skills, showed clearly the difference between male and female. Even the more demure female travelers among our group eventually lost their sense of shyness and modesty, or as one would like to believe decorum