THE BLACK MOUNTAIN
My wife and I, and a group of friends and their families from Dar es Salaam, stayed for Christmas at Baobab Camp, which lies in the valley of the Great Ruaha River at the foot of the Udzungwa Mountains , and it was during this time that I, in the company of John Kuria, Peter and...
If anyone had bothered to ask me on the day my son Zak and I climbed Ol Doinyo Lengai (the Maasai's "Mountain of God"), the question “Why do people climb mountains?” the famous and fatuous answer “Because they are there” could never have been more aptly applied. There seemed no other...
So geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage-pictures fill their gaps;
And o’er uninhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.
Jonathan Swift
So wrote the poet in 1733. These words...
"Another time or place, Another civilization, Would really make this life feel so complete."
- Neil Young, (Dreamin' Man)
In the fall of 2005, I lived for ten weeks as a teacher volunteer in a Maasai village in Eluwai, Tanzania. When I arrived in Maasailand in October, I can remember well how...