Serengeti, Tanzania

We may have found our favorite location on the trip. We were looking forward to seeing East Africa but had no concept of the vastness nor the quantity and variety of wildlife. This is a hard posting to write because there is so much I would like to share and describe but don't have the space (and you probably don't have the patience to read through my blather). The country is beautiful with wide green valleys dotted with acacia trees and the rocky, granite kopjes jutting up from the ground.


We flew a small, single engine plane from Kilimanjaro airport to the Serengeti Migration Camp. The one hour flight took us over the Great Rift Valley. Fantastic! We landed on a short dirt strip with zebra, wildebeest, and antelope on the end of the runway. We transferred to open top land cruisers for the 30 minute ride to the camp seeing herds of animals including elephants.


The tented camp is located on the Gambetti river. Many of you may have seen this river in documentaries of the migration where the crocodiles attack zebra, antelope and wildebeests as they cross the river. While tented, the camp was comfortable. We each had an individual large tent which made for some interesting walks to the main part of the camp.


Our front door.



Back porch



Bedroom



Lounge



Dining room.

During the first night we were up for hours listening to all the night sounds. Hyrax scrambled on the top of our tent while giraffes and elephants pulled at the trees. At one point, a lion made a kill in the camp. We heard a loud squeal followed by the huffing of the lion.

We spent the morning and afternoons on game drives through beautiful rugged country. We were continuously amazed about the large numbers of animals. In one day we saw 7 lions and uncounted numbers of herbivores. Our first close encounter with a lion was a large male sauntering through thick grass.



After seeing the lion we crested a hill and found hyenas feeding on a wildebeest: the lions kill. The hyenas stole the king's breakfast.



This big guy got tired of us and bared his teeth. It was mating season and the females would wake the male, they'd mate for a few minutes, roar and go back to napping. This process was repeated every 15 minutes or so until the female decided she was impregnated. This can last for weeks.



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I think one of my favorites, though, is the Masai giraffe.


Note the zebra at the base of the kopje. Wildebeest are the most numerous followed by zebra.

We saw many more herbivores, primates and carnivores but there isn't space sufficient to share all these photos.

One experience I want to share occurred the night before leaving. After dark you couldn't go anywhere in camp without a guide due to the animals. After supper, Paula and I were being escorted back to our tent. We reached the bottom of the hill and the guide put out his arm to stop us; a hippo feeding on grass about 15' in front of us in the dark. We skirted the hippo and continued down the trail with flashlights out and eyes peeled. We made it about 100' when the guide pulled up short and started back peddling - cape buffalo straddling the path. The guide moved us off to another tent and then made noises which got the buffalo to move a bit off the trail. We took a wide circuit through the brush and, just about the time we located the trail, two more cape buffalo. The guide, Charles, was obviously uneasy and shaken at this point. A cape buffalo and hippo behind us and two cape buffalo ahead. We abandon all hope of using the trail and started up a rocky hillside through the thorny acacia trees. Somehow, Charles located our tent in the dark, saw us to our door, bid us good night and quietly slipped away.



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Location:Serengeti Migration Camp

Taj Mahal

Stunned is probably the most apt description. We've all seen the Taj Mahal. It is as familiar to us in pictures as the Golden Gate Bridge or the Statue of Liberty. I thought I knew what to expect but the Taj is much more than can be displayed within the two dimensional space of a photograph. The building leaps at you as you enter the courtyard through the brown limestone gates.



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The detail in the building is delicate and beautiful. This craft is still practiced in Agra.



The detail at the top of the frame is semi-precious stone (garnet, onyx, and the like) inset into the marble.



The inset script framing the door is a chapter of the Koran.



Paula has enough hanging from her neck to supply an electronics store.

Our hotel, the Oberoi Amarvillas Hotel, is considered one of the finest in the world. Incredible. It is only 800 yards from the Taj and all the rooms have a view of the Taj. The patio off our suite was about 15' by 20' over looking the pool with a view of the Taj Mahal




Here's the patio....



and the views.



Everyone on the trip griped about the difficulty of attaining an Indian Visa to enter the country but none of us thought it would be difficult to leave. We flew in and out of Agra through a military airbase. When leaving, our pilot got clearance to board the plane and depart. Once we were all onboard, the story changed. The Indian military decided we didn't have sufficient visibility to takeoff. Our pilot required 500 meters but the military decided 3,000 meters and then, in the spirit of international cooperation, reduced it to 1,500 meters but they decided when that would occur. The problem is that it wasn't fog or bad weather reducing the visibility but the air pollution. The air had the same haze the as the previous smoggy days. Our pilot negotiated with the military and agreed on the appropriate amount of whiskey and money to be handed over and we were allowed out of their polluted airspace with only a two hour delay.

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Terra Cotta Warriors

Another posting with more pictures than words.



Pit #3. The original site.



The horses were originally pulling a wooden chariot. The chariot burned when the site was sacked. The weapons carried by the warriors were real and stolen at the same time.




The remains of a chariot wheel.



They have unearthed 6,000 warriors and every one has a unique face.



On average, the warriors are broken into 300 fragments.



Pit #1



Pit #2. Many warriors are missing heads. They do not attempt to restore a figure unless they can confirm the look. If the head is missing or cannot be identified, the warrior is left headless.
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Location:Over Mogadishu, Somalia

Delay

I'm behind on the blogs. I have another from China and one ready to post about India. The Internet has been too slow in the last two stops to send all these photos. I'll try to finish the posts for the Serengeti and Petra on our way to Istanbul and, hopefully, post all four from there.

Sorry for the slow reporting but there is some good stuff (and adventures) yet to come.

Paula's birthday tomorrow. We plan to celebrate with a dinner cruise on the Bosporus.




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Location:Petra, Jordan

Tiananmen and The Forbidden City

The morning we departed Beijing for Xi'an, we visited Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Even with a police escort, the one block drive took 20 minutes. Everyone in China wants a car. No one can own land, everyone lives in condos or apartments, so the Chinese dream is to own a car. There are 2,000 additional cars on the streets of Beijing everyday.

Tiananmen Square was packed with people queued up to see Mao's body. Mao's glass coffin is raised everyday so people can walk past and pay their respect. After circling the square, we fought, honked and made our way to the Forbidden City. This will be one of the postings where I use more pictures and fewer words.



One of the gates in the walled Forbidden City



A bronze lion guarding the entrance. There are always two, a male and female. This is the female, she has her left paw on a cub. The male has his right paw on a ball that represents the world.



A dragon turtle incense burner. There were many incense burners. Large, ornate barrel size burners in between the staircases to create a cloud like effect and animal shaped; cranes, hares, turtles, on terraces.



One of my favorite details are the mythical animal carvings on the eaves of the roofs. You can tell the status of the individual by the number of animals. It is always an odd number; 1, 3, 5...up to 13. This is 13 and represents the emperors residence. The Forbidden City is divided between the political buildings, scholars and generals, and the emperor's residence. The residence contains 9,999 rooms. Many of the emperors had as many as 3,000 concubines and 5,000 eunuchs living in the residence. The emperor was the only un-castrated male in the residence.



Here's another with 7 characters. The lead image in both of these is a man riding a Phoenix.



These are the rooms reserved for concubines. You can see this one rated three protectors on her eaves.

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Location:En-route Tanzania

Impressions: Beijing and Xi'an

Beijing surprised me. Huge, modern city and very green. Wide, tree lined boulevards with many public parks and squares. Massive skyscrapers stretching beyond the horizon. The overriding impression, though, is the mass of humanity everywhere. Beijing's population is over 19 million. Traffic beyond description; all new cars, American, Japanese, and European cars with little room to maneuver and no room to park. Near our hotel were
dealerships for Maserati, Ferrari, Bentley, Mercedes, etc... A beautiful city.



Out of Cambodia en-route to Beijing we had to land in Xi'an to transfer from our plane to a chartered Shanghai Air 737 to continue the trip to Beijing. China recently imposed a rule that restricts private foreign aircraft to one landing and take off. Descending into Xi'an was surrealistic as we sunk into a soupy smog. I never dreamed air pollution could be so thick. Even inside the terminal building the air was hazy and smokey. I sent a blog posting about this from Beijing but the posting was censored. I later learned from our hosts in Beijing that monitoring and censoring Internet traffic was common (and necessary).

We stayed in another wonderful hotel, Beijing Raffles, just a block from Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City (more about them in another posting). It was a beautiful suite with a wonderful view of construction. There is construction everywhere across China. The growth rate in the major cities is such that there are hundreds of high rise (30 plus story) condominium projects under construction. On the out skirts of Beijing and Xi'an the high rise construction stretches as far as the eye can see. It doesn't look real. Of course, in Xi'an, you can only see several hundred yards due to the thick air pollution. It was eerie to drive through the smog and see the stacks and cooling towers of coal fired power plants belching acrid smoke into the air. In Xi'an, after seeing the Terra Cotta Warriors, we had another fabulous suite in a Sofitel inside the old city wall. While Beijing is a beautiful, fascinating city, Xi'an is more representative of China and was depressing due to the pollution and constant and continuous construction. Xi'an reminded us of a Mad Max movie, like the end of times. It felt good to board our plane and escape the pall.


Tiananmen Square

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Location:Agra, India

The Great Wall of China

What can I say: it is great!! Not much I can add so we'll let the pictures speak for themselves.



It is amazing that a wall was needed. The land is very steep and rugged; the Mongols and their ponies must have been tough.





We were fortunate to have clear weather. We were told that most days the smog and haze blocked the views of the mountains. As you can see, we had a beautiful day on the wall.




It was a good workout climbing up and down odd spaced steps and steep ramps but worth every step.



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Location:Mu Tian Yu, Juyongguan Pass

Out of China

Blogging was technically difficult from China. A blog about Cambodia I sent from Beijing went through but the the blog about China was blocked; I mentioned the severe air pollution in Xi'an and I guess they didn't like that, anyway, that blog was eaten by the "People's" Internet security police. I wasn't able to log into the web site to see what did and didn't make it. Hopefully, I will be able to send from India.

I've avoided talking about floating village and the lake people of Tonle Sap, "The Great Lake" in Siem Reep, Cambodia. A little history before I talk about the lake people. As many of you recall, Cambodia attempted to stay neutral during the war with Viet Nam. Cambodia is a small country, down hill from Viet Nam, Thailand, and Laos. Neutrality was an impossible balancing act and ended with Johnson's carpet bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail across Cambodia. This resulted in the collapse of the Cambodian government and allowed the rise of Pol Pot in 1974/75. Pol Pot wanted to erase all traces of the west with the belief that that would allow the Khmer people to return to the greatness of their past. This policy resulted in slaughtering 1/3rd of the population of the country. Educated people, teachers, professionals, anyone that wore glasses or anyone with soft hands (considered intellectuals or non-working people). There is almost no one over 50 years of age in the country. Two generations of people were wiped out in Pol Pot's Killing Fields. People's property was confiscated and their parents and grand parents murdered. One of the results of this barbaric pogrom is the floating village in Tonle Sap. Over 6,000 people living in small floating huts living on the lake. To make matters worse, the lake is extremely polluted. During the dry season, the lake flows into the Mekong River. During the wet season, the Mekong flows back into the lake. The Mekong is one of the most polluted rivers on earth. Our visit coincided with the end of the monsoons with the lake at its peak. What appears in the pictures as brush and small trees are actually the tops of trees in a flooded forest. The water depth where we were was 30' to 35' deep. The open water that looks like a river is actually a roadway during the dry season. As the lake dries, the village moves out further into the lake.



This little boy jumped, naked with a live python, onto our boat begging for "dolla".





Small children that appeared to range in age from 3 to 6 years old were everywhere, paddling themselves out to us in wash tubs. Note the live snakes around their necks.




A picture I couldn't take was a mother holding her baby out to us and wailing something we couldn't understand. She had two other small, toddler aged children clinging to her in their rotting canoe holding up pythons longer than they were tall.



This is a floating pig pen. The women to the right is drying rice.



Their life expectancy is less than 40.

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Location:Enroute Agra, India

Followers

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As I'm sure everyone knows, we are taking thousands of pictures and only post a few.

We hope you are enjoying the posts.


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Location:Somewhere over China

Angkor Wat

I have been remiss in blogging while in Cambodia. Another powerful experience. The Raffles Grande Angkor is, hands down, the finest hotel we have stayed in. The temples are more awe inspiring then I can describe and the conditions of the Lake People in the floating villages more heart wrenching and disturbing than I care to describe.

First, the temples. We visited five sites; Taprohm, Angkor Wat, Bantay Srei, the Elephant Terrace and Bayon Temple.

Rather than labor to describe what we've seen, I've stolen a quote from Henry Mouhot's "Travels in Siam, Cambodia and Laos 1858 - 1860".


"What strikes the observer with not less admiration than the grandeur, regularity, beauty of these majestic buildings, is the immense size and prodigious number of of the blocks of stone of which they are constructed. In this temple alone are as many as 1532 columns. What means of transport,what a multitude of workmen, must this have required, seeing that the mountain of which the stone was hewn is thirty miles distant! In each block are to be seen holes 2-1/2 centimeters in diameter and 3 in depth, number varying with the size of the block; but the columns and the sculptured portions of the building bear no traces of them. According to a Cambodian legend, these are the prints of the fingers of a giant, who, after kneading an enormous quantity of clay, had cut it into blocks and carved it, turning it into a hard, and at the same time, light stone by pouring over it some marvelous liquid.


All mouldings, sculptures, and bas-reliefs appear to have been executed after erection of the building. The stones are everywhere fitted together in so perfect a manner that you can scarcely see where are the joining; there is neither sign of mortar nor mark of the chisel, the surface being as polished as marble.


Was this incomparable edifice the work of a single genius, who conceived the idea, and watched over the execution of it? One is tempted to think so; for no part of it is deficient, faulty, or consistent. To what epoch does it owe it's origin? As before remarked, neither tradition nor written inscriptions furnish any certain information upon this point; or rather, I should say, these latter are as a sealed book for want of an interpreter; and they may, perchance, throw light on the subject when some European savant shall succeed in deciphering them.


Sad fragility of human things! How many centuries and thousands of generations have passed away, of which history, probably, will never tell us anything; what riches and treasures of art will remain for ever buried beneath these ruins; how many distinguished men - artists, sovereign, and warriors - whose names were worthy of immortality, are now forgotten, laid to rest under the thick dust which covers these tombs!"



Guess who we met at the Bayon Temple?



Need a hint? Check out the black Suburban.




We used more a traditional Cambodian transport:




This blog is already too long. I'll share our experience in the floating village in the next post.

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Location:Siem Reap, Cambodia