Hero and Keira

Hi All Thanks for all the lovely emails about the photos we posted yesterday! :-) I have now finished uploading the rest of our photos, and Keira is busy adding extra information to them as we speak. We have added the following sets to our 'Big Adventure Collection' : The Crater Lakes and Bigodi Wetlands Rwenzori Mountains Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, including Mountain Gorilla Tracking Lake Bunyonyi, including Canoe Trekking We hope you enjoy these ones too... the blog, to acc... read more

Hi Everyone This is just a short announcement to let you know we have uploaded new photos to our Flickr site. We have uploaded several new sets of photos from Kenya and Uganda and you can find them here in our 'Big Adventure' collection: Big Adventure Or alternatively, you can access each set individually through the links below: Kenya - Masai Mara Kenya - Lake Naivasha and Hell's Gate National Park Kenya - Nyahururu (Thomson's Falls) Uganda - Bujugali Falls url=... read more

I've just had the true African experience - for the last half an hour I have been performing a minor surgical procedure on myself to dig out and remove the eggs I discovered had been laid in the sole of my right foot. By what, I have no idea, but the thought of things (worms?! spiders?!) hatching inside me is pretty disgusting. And so was seeing the eggs - so many of them! - coming out of my foot as I removed them. And the weird globby thing that looked suspiciously like a worm itself... Hopefully I got them all; I guess I'll just have to wait and see.... read more

Scrawled while making the journey from Kabale to Buhoma (at Bwindi Impentrable Forest National Park) Hills quilted in a patchwork of greens and browns by terraced crops. If I could find the quilt's corner I would be tempted to pull at it, creating new folds of land and revealing what lay underneath this blanket. Nature harnessed, stitched and restitched communally by countless people across the land and through generations. Is the earth warmed by it, or suffocated? I think the latter - the quilt is pinned down firmly and trapped nature denied freedom. Kids on the side of the road, wearing dirty bodies and ragged clothes, filthy and torn. Hands outstretched, demanding money. Our socioeconomic differences evident in our absence of their accumulation of dirt, snot and malnourished pot bellies; in the completeness of our clothes; ... read more

Thought: Uganda is so lush and green, the rich red earth so fertile, that if your feet got stuck too deep or for too long in the post rain mud, I think that you, too, would start to grow, sprout leaves, or simply burst into bloom!... read more

We have been having an excellent time here in Bujagali Falls, just outside Jinja in South Eastern Uganda. We are not sure how long we will stay here, but are definitely in no hurry to leave at all!!! We got here a few days ago, after crossing the border from Kenya through Malaba, and traveling via Jinja where we did an overnighter to stock up on supplies before venturing out here. Yesterday we were painting a local school with an organisation called Softpower. Softpower are a non-religious NGO with an extremely wide portfolio of educational activities including rebuilding and maintaining local government schools, funding a couple of local nursery schools (the government does not provide free nursery schools here, but without them women find it extremely difficult to perform all the tasks demanded of them, such ... read more

After yesterday's chillaxed vibe, in which peaceful hours spent at camp were punctuated only by laundry, internet and dinner at a cafe in the nearby village, today felt like a series of intense experiences barging into each other and vying for thought space. We'd decided to stay another day at Fisherman's Camp, partly because we didn't feel ready to leave (especially in an early departure!) and partly because we wanted to attempt a sighting of flamingoes at a place we knew only as "Little Lake," the location of which had only been described sketchily to us by a since-departed couple of travellers who told us the path (on private land) could never be found unless you knew where it was already. After a bit more asking around, we discovered that its real name is Lake Oleiden ... read more

There are so many spiders living in and on it that our tent (bright blue though it is) has practically become a part of the wildlife. The camp is teeming with life - thankfully not too much of the human kind, as we are enjoying the peace of so few other tourists that we have been fortunate to experience so far. From the tiniest ants though to giant but reclusive and antisocial hippos, and all in between, there is animal life all around us - all existing both alongside and also separate from each other, the various species observing individual patterns and paces of life, intersecting at various moments in time and space. Supporting them is the rich abundance and variety of plants and trees whose slow growth makes the animal movement seem wildly frenetic, yet ... read more

Hero's turn at blogging: Talek is a small, dusty town that feels like it is in the middle of nowhere... yet it lies on the border of one of Kenya's (and perhaps Africa's) most amazing national parks - the Masai Mara. The town itself looks like something out of an old country and western movie, except that the cowboys are in fact Masai warriors (wearing their vivid red Masai blankets tied on one shoulder, rather than plaid shirts and chaps) and the weapons of choice are spears or bows and arrows, rather than pistols... oh, and all the horses here are stripey ;-) There are two rows of shops in the town which border a very dry, dusty expanse (the town square?) which is mostly inhabited by the local chickens, goats and dogs, who spend their ... read more