Year 5 residential trip

One Zambian school kid successfully taking on five of ours! Actually they let us win all the games we played!

A scout showing the kids how to make bread on a camp fire.


Our walk to the local waterfalls (generously named). Rather a tense experience as kept imaging
children slipping in to the croc infested waters - health and safety field day!



Paul and I in the hide looking for sitatunga.

About three weeks ago now we took 32 10yr olds to Kasanka National Park for a week long camping trip - a rather daunting prospect! As the three other Zambian teachers that came with us were useless in varying degrees we were basically responsible for the lot of them, 24/7, exhausting work. We had to drive up there in mini-buses for 7hours, something I doubt British kids could do, and unfortunately as we left very late on the first day (due to the school cocking up over trailor hiring issues) we arrived once it had got dark. It was like an environmental education centre that we were staying in and so we did activities like making campfires, making up plays about anti-poaching, game drives and bush walking, where we got a little too close to a hippo for my liking! Unfortunately these kids do not shut up so we didn't see many animals - the area is famous for a water loving antelope called sitatunga but they're quite shy so we had no chance of seeing them! We got back Friday afternoon and we were in bed by 8pm! I could never be a teacher, it's official.

Unexpected pleasures

Living in unexpected places (I wouldn’t like to say quite how little I knew of Zambia before turning up here eight months ago) can have its unexpected pleasures.

Yesterday, someone at school happened to mention in passing that David Shepherd would be giving a talk at one of the other international schools in Lusaka the following evening. Zambia’s capital, I think I might have mentioned before, is somewhat culturally deprived, so to have an event that I would happily pay to attend in the UK was, as I said, an unexpected pleasure.

With the end of April supposedly comes the end of the rains. We could now expect temperatures to fall steadily until July, a winter of sorts (the African sort, with temperatures perhaps even dropping below twenty degrees), before rising until the rains begin again in late October. Except things are not going quite as expected; it has rained twice in the last week. And then, shortly after five this afternoon, our house was battered with hailstones the size of golf balls and the pools that surround our house whenever it rains rose to heights we have never previously seen. Into this we ventured out, determined not to miss such a rare opportunity to spend Friday night doing something other than playing cards. We waded to the car (literally - I had to take my shoes off) and forded the roads that had become silt-laden rivers.

David Shepherd was welcoming people at the door when we arrived. I remarked that he was somewhat responsible for my living in Africa, to which he replied: ‘I’m very pleased to hear it. How’s that?’ I explained that I had grown up in house with pictures of his of African wildlife on the walls and that these had rooted in me a desire to see such things for myself. He took it is a great compliment, which I suppose it was, though I had not realised that when I said it, and we talked briefly about what I was doing in Zambia and how he had first arrived in such an unexpected place. It seems that forty years ago, shortly after Zambia had gained independence from Britain, he was commissioned by the Zambian government to paint a dozen pictures that would be the founding pieces in a national art collection. These paintings are now on display in the National Museum in Lusaka, which we have thus far avoided visiting but will now make an effort to explore.

His talk was a mix of dark, unhappy truths - poisoned waterholes killing over 250 zebra - and humorous anecdotes - cheetah’s tails being used to clean Land Rover windscreens while they use the bonnet as a look-out. His stories revealed that fearlessness that seems to be possessed by many born between the wars, and generally lacking in those born since. It is not reckless valour but that courage that comes from strength of conviction and commonsense, neither of which are quite as abundant as it seems they once were.

All in all it was a thoroughly agreeable way to pass an evening, wherever in the world one might be.

Rachel turns 25

Yikes, I am now closer to 30 than my teens, oh dear. Well, on my birthday it rained (!?!) - it's supposed to be the dry season now. So it was birthday tea and cake sheltering in the back of the car after we'd been out for a little walk around our friend's plot. Paul then cooked me a very lovely dinner - we treated ourselves to some of those hideously expensive things we had seen in the supermarket but never dared buy before like sundried tomatoes! (Dad take note - nice new top!)

Encounters with elephants

We crossed into Botswana at Kazangula, taking a ferry, of sorts, across the Zambezi and trying not to think too much about what would happen if the ferry’s spluttering diesel engine decided it had had enough (a swift journey downstream before an even swifter plummet over the Victoria Falls). Proving that the colonial powers were not always acting in an entirely arbitrary manner when carving up Africa (a great many of the continent’s borders do seem to have been pencilled in by someone overly fond of rulers and right-angles), Botswana was immediately at odds with Zambia: dryer, dustier and wealthier.

At US$10,500, Botswana’s GDP per capita is higher than any other country in Africa, and the place certainly seemed more affluent than Zambia. Kasane, the first significant settlement we reached, looked like a neglected frontier-town in the American West, or perhaps a forlorn outpost in the Australian bush. Though such towns have faded away elsewhere, their echoes seemed to offer a future for Botswana: a small town serving a farming community (almost fifty per cent of Botswana’s land is permanent pasture) or serving the tourist industry seemed a fitting model for the country.

But I am getting ahead of myself; we have only been in the country a minute or two and already I am proposing how Botswana should organise itself to ensure its continued prosperity.

Jason, Laura, Rachel and I were to spend our first few nights in Botswana in Kasane, from where we would explore Chobe National Park. Our adventures in Chobe were to be dominated by encounters with elephants. On our first evening in Botswana, we watched - enchanted - from a boat as they drank and played along the banks of the Chobe River. The pictures say more than my descriptions ever could.

Being a happy band of carefree adventurers, we decided to drive ourselves through Chobe the following day. The guidebook suggested it might be an idea to keep a safe distance from elephants and we thought this seemed a very sound proposal and so decided to go along with it. The plan though, as it turned out, was somewhat flawed, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, no-one, not even the guidebook as far as we could make out, was quite sure what a safe distance actually was; and secondly, such a plan does not appropriately prepare you for what to do when you round a corner and find an elephant rather closer than anyone’s idea of a safe distance. My first thought, if I can correctly recall, was something like: ‘gosh, aren’t elephants big.’ You might think this obvious, they after all the largest land mammal roaming this planet. But, the thing is, they’re not big; they’re huge. My car/truck is big, but if an elephant had wanted to sit down to tea on its roof it could have done so quite easily and that would have been the end of Arthur (the car, if you recall) and everyone inside of him. Worse, an elephant could have decided it wanted something to sharpen its tusks on and used, well, whichever bit of Arthur, or again his contents, it thought would work best (probably, as I envisioned at the time, the engine to get them nice and pointy and then the upholstery to buff them up a bit afterwards).

We crept through the herd, making sure we did not get between any mothers and their offspring. Just as the road ahead of us cleared, a young male elephant, showing-off to his friends no doubt, thought he would trot after us. In case, I suppose, my attention had been diverted by a particularly interesting bush, Rachel kindly pointed out there was an elephant running after us and that it might be an idea if we were to see what other delights Chobe had to offer and I obligingly hurtled down the track as quickly as I could.

The next day we set off early, heading for one of the lodges where we were hoping to find someone else to drive us around the park (a plan we had formulated shortly after being chased around by the swaggering young pachyderm). Somewhat blurry eyed, I slalomed along Botswana’s pot-holed roads, focusing on the pitted tarmac just in front of the bonnet. What I was not focusing on, and perhaps should have been, was the herd of elephants in the road. In my defence, elephants are quite grey and just before dawn the world is quite grey too, so it might be argued that an animal the size of a bus is not that easy to see before the sun has illuminated their vast form. By steady, some might say heavy, application of the brakes, we managed to stop far enough away to watch them lumber across the road with only slightly elevated heart rates (our rates were slightly elevated that is, I cannot speak for the elephants).

(We did manage to find some animals other than elephants.)

We had opted to be driven around in the hope that someone with a little more expertise might be able to find us a lion or two. After a while chasing tracks that seemed to head in all directions at once, we gave up on the pursuit and instead spent a curiously long amount of time watching an eagle instead.

Visitors and holidays

So we have just come to the end of a month full of family visits and trips away and now it’s back to the mundaneness of day to day life.

My mum and sister were our first visitors at the end of March. Paul was unfortunately still at school during their stay so we could only go away at the weekends but we still managed to pack in as much as pos. We went away the first weekend to Kafue National Park which is about a 5 hour drive west of Lusaka. We stayed at a camp called Mayukuyuku right on the banks of the Kafue River which was a stunning spot.

In fact it’s so directly next to the river that the actual campsite was flooded but this was fine cos Paul and I could pitch our tent right next to the safari tent Grace and Mum were staying in and then use their nice bathroom and veranda! We could hear hippos in the river from our camp and actually Paul and I had a rather close encounter with one of them – we were taking stuff back to the car at night and I noticed some eyes light up in my torch beam and then made out the rather large animal they were attached to (and these animals really are large – about the size of our car!). Remembering some advice we’d been given about hippos – don’t shine your torch directly at them, don’t come between them and the river – we quickly skirted as far round the back of it as possible, dumped the stuff in the car and ran back to the tent, all the time trying not to shine our lights at him but at the same time trying to keep an eye on where he was so we didn’t run into him! Much prefer hippos in rivers I’ve decided. While we were at Kafue we did a lovely sunset cruise on the river where we watched the sun go down from the middle of the river, and then a few drives around the park looking for animals. We watched some nice elephants just from the side of the road and saw lots of different types of antelope: puku, impala, hartebeest, red lechwe, waterbuck, kudu, zebra, but unfortunately no predators.

Our second trip was down to Livingstone to see the Victoria Falls, a slightly longer drive of about 7 hours south of Lusaka, over some interesting pot-holed roads at the end. We stayed at Maramba River Lodge just outside of Livingstone, close enough to the falls that we could hear them at night! It was a lovely camp, nice and quiet cos we’re out of season, with a lovely little pool and a great decking area by the bar looking out over the Maramba river where you could see crocs gliding past and hear hippos and a great chorus of tinkling frogs at night. The falls are in full flow this time of year, being just after the rains, so we got pretty wet going to see them! They give you raincoats at the start of the trail but really they don’t stand much chance against the spray – it’s like standing under a power shower in a waterproof and hoping to come out dry! It’s pretty magical though, there’s this great wall of white spray which just occasionally parts long enough for you to catch a glimpse of the immense wall of water tumbling over the edge behind it. After having had our shower we took a walk upstream in the sun to dry off. You can get right next to where the river plummets over the edge of the gorge – the health and safety regulations here are really rather lax!

We also went down into the gorge (armed with big sticks to scare off the baboons!) to what is called the boiling pot which is where the river makes a 90 degree turn before flowing on into Zimbabwe. It was lovely down there, it’s like a mini rainforest due to the amount of spray the area gets, we were wading through streams most of the way down! We also treated ourselves to ‘high tea’ at Livingstone’s poshest hotel the Royal Livingstone. It was quite the ridiculously gluttonous affair! You are presented with two tables piled with as many different types of scone, cake, muffin, tartlet you can imagine and then told to fill you plate with as many as it can take! Needless to say we were actually quite grateful to the cheeky vervet monkey that decided to come and relieve us of some of our treats by helping himself to a cake straight from our table! The hotel is beautifully situated, right on the banks of the river and you can see the spray from the falls from their lawns!

A weekend away

So yes, as Paul said we finally managed to get away for a weekend. We stayed at a little lodge on the shores of a lake in the middle of nowhere (though still with the sound of screaming children, it seems you can never get away from that no matter how far you travel) called Village Point. We were welcomed by the guy who owns it, an English guy called Jamie who was the most friendly easy going bloke I think I’ve ever met. Nothing was too much trouble to him and he went out of his way the whole weekend to make sure our time away was exactly how we wanted it ( I mean I know that’s his job as a host to paying guests but he just so genuinely wanted us to have a lovely time).

Our chalet was a two storey building with the open fronted bedroom on the first floor overlooking the lake and distant hills, twas lovely to lie in bed at night and look out at the night sky. Downstairs there was a lovely open air bathroom, walled on all sides but with no ceiling. The shower was all built of local stone, heated by a wood burning stove, and was a little pipe that poured the water onto a series of stones to make a waterfall to shower under! At the front outside we had a little veranda and an outdoor bath which unfortunately we didn’t get a chance to use apart from dangling our feet in.

We had the entire place to ourselves Saturday afternoon and so spent the whole time in the wonderful pool and relaxing on the deck with a beer. In the evening they set us up our own private romantic dining area (being valentine’s day and all) and after some entertainment in the form of music and dancing from a local band we had a lovely dinner, all freshly home made, before heading to bed accompanied by the sound of grazing hippos. Was lovely to get away and have the luxury of being waited upon in such a peaceful spot – and al for the price of an ordinary UK B&B!

The size of things

We managed to get away for the weekend a little while ago, just for one night, to Lake Kariba, a country-sized (Switzerland-sized to be precise) reservoir in the Zambezi valley. To get there we drove for four hours, two and a half on pencil straight roads obviously conceived and constructed when natural barriers posed little problem for mans’ technological might, and the final hour and a half on rougher stuff, dirt tracks that weaved through villages of mud and thatch.

Our journey, monotonous and perilous in more or less equal measure, took almost as long as it would take to drive to the Lake District from Cambridge. And yet it was not until we returned that we even considered that we had spent rather a long time staring through a windscreen for just one night away. Perhaps having gone the equivalent of London to Istanbul and back by public transport at Christmas we are accustomed to the idea that there is just a little more space over here, that you have to go a little bit farther if you want to get anywhere.

It’s not just the distances that are baffling (to someone from a rather crowded little island at least). Lake Kariba, on whose shores we sought refuge for twenty-four hours from the din and dirt of Lusaka (I’ll leave Rachel to fill you in on the details of where we stayed and the like), was created by the construction of what was at the time the largest dam in the world (the time being the late 1950s). I could share with you lots of numbers that do something to convey the size of the dam - how high, how wide, how thick, how much it cost, how many kilowatts of power the hydro-electric generators produce - but I think the following is the most indicative statistic of the scale of the thing: eighty-six workers died during its construction, eighteen of whom are entombed within the dam’s million cubic metres of cement. Or maybe that says more about health and safety in Africa.

People puzzling

It was perhaps inevitable that sooner or later something would appear here about that thing that occupies most of my time. While it is technically still a Letter from Africa, Africa does not feature particularly prominently, or at all, in fact. I just thought I would warn you in case you wanted to give this one a miss…

As far as maths is concerned, people seem to fall into one of two categories: those who get it and those who don’t. There are quite a few people in the world who, through no fault of their own, think that they belong in the latter of those two categories when actually they belong in the former, but more of that later. I don’t mean to suggest that those who will always be somewhat confounded by numbers are a lost cause; they simply need to be taught in a very different manner to those who, for some reason another, come equipped with an innate understanding of algebra and trigonometry and similar mathematical marvels.

The difference between the two groups appears, superficially at least, to concern retention. This is perhaps best illustrated with an example. Last week, my class were learning about angles. On being told that an acute angle is any angle between zero and ninety degrees, half the class immediately found a small shelf in their brain on which to store that information and could without hesitation identify which of a page of angles were acute (actually they weren’t looking at a page of angles, we were wandering around the school looking for and identifying angles in buildings and notice boards and staircases, I just thought it would be easier to say they were looking at a page of angles, but then I didn’t want people thinking that my lessons were boring so I thought I better let you in on what we were actually doing). The other half of the class were beginning to get it by the end of the lesson but many were still confusing acute angles for obtuse angles and couldn’t really remember what the word for an angle greater than one hundred and eighty degrees was (reflex…).

That half the children should struggle to grasp the difference between an acute and an obtuse angle is not indicative of their general ability to retain information, though for some this certainly is a problem, but rather concerns their conceptual understanding of angles. In order to quickly assimilate what an acute angle is, a child must first understand that an angle is the measure of the rotation involved in moving from one initial axis to coincide with another final axis (though obviously I would not necessarily expect them to express their understanding in such terms). They must also have understood and accepted that in a complete rotation there are three hundred and sixty degrees (and what follows from this: that there are one hundred and eighty degrees in half a rotation and ninety degrees in quarter of a rotation). What this really means is that those children who immediately grasped what an acute angle is were able to do so because the shelf on which they neatly filed ‘Acute angles’ was in a room with ‘Geometry’ written on the door and part of a stack which had ‘Angles’ written above it in bold lettering.

For the children who get maths, having divulged the names given to angles of different sizes it is possible to immediately move on to calculations involving angles. For those who don’t, one must look for as many different pathways as possible to the Geometry room. When it is eventually found it will almost certainly never be the most organised of places: for some, that there are three hundred and sixty degrees in a complete rotation may always be baffling. And why shouldn’t it be? Why are there three hundred and sixty degrees in a circle? (We have the Babylonians to thank I believe, something about the number of days in a year, but I doubt that is of much comfort to anybody).

If children are not set by ability, and they often are not in primary schools, teachers are confronted by three unenviable options: a) teach two lessons simultaneously; b) teach to the highest ability in the class; c) teach to the middle ground. (The actual answer is secret option d) teach through open ended investigations, which is not always possible and is far from the easy option but it allows children to work at their own pace and potentially stretches them as far as they are able without going beyond into the land of disillusionment. I have seen few teachers go for this option, maybe because it’s secret, so I’m going to stick with the three alternatives previously identified). Planning for one Maths lesson a day is time consuming enough, to plan for two and then deliver them on top of each other is unappealing (I have seen few teachers go for this option either actually, I think I might be the only one, and I only go for it when I’m not busy with option d), obviously). Teaching to the highest ability in the class works well in other subjects but will leave those children whose conceptual understanding of Maths is weak baffled and disheartened for reasons that are hopefully explained by what I have said before. The middle ground satisfies the needs of neither group of children but it does at least come with a government seal of approval.

The demand that every child reach level four by the end of Key Stage 2 has meant that the arbitrary single mark that distinguishes a level three from a level four has become an obsession in many schools (the prevailing middle ground), a line to be crossed at any cost. That cost is quite often fewer children achieving level five; they, after all, are already on the right side of the line that matters. The government may have expected a minimum standard to improve all results equally (a rather foolish expectation if that were the case): that the normal distribution would slide further along the x-axis while maintaining its perfectly formed bell shape. But, of course, that isn’t what happened. Instead, the peak remained exactly where it was, hovering over what has become the Holy Grail of level 4, but extended up the y-axis as the curve narrowed around it (the mean remained the same, the standard deviation from that mean decreased). This meant more children getting level four (good), fewer children getting level three (also good), but also fewer children getting above level four (not so good). The not so good consequence is most ably demonstrated by the fact that it is no longer possible to get level six in Maths at the end of Key Stage 2: so few children were getting it they scrapped the paper. (If you fall into the group of people for whom Maths poses something of a problem then please accept my sincerest apologies for all the preceding talk of x- and y-axes and normal distributions and standard deviations – I hope it didn’t put you off too much and that the point, which didn’t really need those things to be made but I am a maths teacher after all, still came through).

I have no objection to National Curriculum levels; so long as they are applied appropriately. The levelling of work completed in class provides a very useful means of assessing pupils’ progress and, what is more, of ensuring that pupils are making the progress of which they are capable. But insisting that a population of individuals whose circumstances vary so considerably all achieve above a certain level is nonsensical. These are unique human beings with diverse backgrounds. Some will progress slowly, some will progress rapidly and, yes, there will be many in between who progress at a middling rate. But what advantage comes from identifying the average rate of progress? It hinders both those who progress slowly - by labelling them as underachievers - and those who would progress much faster – by considering them needless of attention. As for the middling children, what good does it do for them to hear that they are average, that they are much the same as everyone else? Surely it makes more sense to acknowledge the individual progress each child makes. And so I suggest the following: that every child is encouraged to make the best possible progress of which they are capable. And that their progress is monitored by assessing them according to the National Curriculum levels and that teachers and parents collaboratively establish whether a child is fulfilling their potential. Which leads rather nicely onto my second suggestion: that education is openly acknowledged as a partnership between teachers and parents, even if an unequal partnership.

Children spend around thirty-five hours a week in school. That leaves one hundred and thirty-three hours to fill with other things. Many of those hours are obviously spent sleeping and eating and engaged in other such necessaries, but still, for a few short hours every a child may do as they, or their parents, please. Imagine two boys, both in Year 6 and both wobbling along that divine line that separates a level three from a level four, in English say. These two boys attend the same school and keep the same teacher, overly concerned by SATs results, awake at night thinking of ways to help them fall forwards onto a level four rather than backwards onto a level three. The parents of one of the boys listen to him read every night, they talk to him about what he has been learning in school and they make sure he is in bed by seven every evening. The parents of the other boy largely ignore him; he comes home from school and sits in front of the television or plays on his Nintendo DS until someone realises he should probably go to sleep, at perhaps nine o’clock. Results day comes (this is all fantasy remember) and the boy whose parents listen to him read every night gets a level four while the other boy gets a level three. Should the teacher feel guilty because one of her pupils got a level three? (ignoring for the moment the irrationality of anyone caring so much for anything so arbitrary). I would argue that they should not, that responsibility is elsewhere found.

I have digressed somewhat from my original ramble about the nature of learning and teaching maths. But I must return to address that group of people who think they don’t get maths when really they do; or, at least, the capacity to get it is there. The blame, though perhaps blame is too strong a word - those responsible for this incongruity are maths teachers. Specifically, for not all maths teachers are at fault, maths teachers who equip those in their charge with a method that enables them to solve exam questions, rather than furnishing their pupils with an understanding of how the pieces of the mathematical puzzle neatly fit together. If taught well, a child will end up with a whole mathematical wing to their brain: with a geometry room, full of parallel lines and polygons, regular and irregular, and the stack all about angles; and an algebra room, where numbers are banned and x and y are meaningful abstractions; and the first room to begin to form in the mathematical wing, the calculation room, in which there are four oversized toolboxes, one each for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, all overflowing, added to with every passing year to provide an ever expanding tool kit of mental and written methods to confront the innumerable and unpredictable mathematical challenges that life has waiting. And displayed prominently on the walls of every single one of these rooms, and in the many other rooms in the mathematical wing that have not been mentioned, are examples of how that particular realm of maths has relevance and applicability to the world beyond the classroom and exam papers. If taught badly, however, rather than having a mathematical wing to their brain, a child will end up with a shed instead. The walls of this shed (as well as probably the ceiling and the floor) will be covered with post-it notes, on which might be scrawled ‘a² + b² = c²’ or ‘Area of a triangle = ½ x base x height ’ or ‘SOHCAHTOA’. As the years pass, the post-it notes will fade, their meaning will become ever harder to recall; if, that is, their meaning was ever really clear. The problem is teachers who tell their pupils that pi is ‘just a number you have to learn’, or worse, ‘just a button on a calculator you have to push’, so that when those pupils, who some time sooner or later must escape the confines of the classroom, are presented with a problem that requires the beginnings of a conceptual understanding they soon begin to flounder.

The above is full of crude generalisations. But they are crude generalisations rooted in general truths. People can perhaps not be ever-so-neatly split into those who get maths and those who don’t. But on the spectrum of mathematical understanding, most people I know, including those I teach, tend to lean strongly towards one end or the other. And this, I believe, can and should inform teaching practices. As far as mathematical wings and sheds are concerned, most people, I would assume, have something in between, but I hope the analogy illustrates the flaws of teaching a method rather than teaching for understanding and excites in some the idea that their perceived inability to put the pieces of the mathematical jigsaw together is not the end of the story.

Our Kenyan Christmas

So we finally arrived at my old friend Hollie’s house for Christmas. Was so lovely to see all her family again, they were all so welcoming as ever, though her dad’s lasting impression of me seems to have been my constant eating! Christmas out here in Africa is definitely less of a big deal than it is elsewhere. When we arrived on Christmas Eve we helped to finish off putting up their decorations which Hollie says sometimes they don’t even bother putting up. I made a rather lovely floral display for the table. They had some neighbours over for tea and mince pies on the veranda and we had a lovely roasted ham for supper. Christmas Day itself was pretty quiet too. We had pressies in the morning, Hollie’s parents and bought us some choccie and Hollie had bought me and Paul a kikoi towel each which was very nice of them. There certainly weren’t the piles of expensively wrapped gifts that we get too used to, most of their presents were things specifically asked for (or money) wrapped in paper that has been recycled for years! We also slept for quite a significant part of the day, best thing to do when it’s hot, and I think Paul and I were still recovering from the journey! We were joined in the evening by some friends of theirs for Christmas dinner. We had sailfish for starters which is a bit like smoked salmon but it was rather odd and chewy. Then there was chicken and goose and all the trimmings. We had 6 crackers between the 9 of us, so some people had home made paper hats that we’d made the day before! We played a good funny game after dinner which consisted of balancing as many cardboard bananas as you could on various parts of one’s body whilst trying to carry out forfeits! Lots of ‘silly picture’ opportunities!

The best parts of Christmas were really the non-christmas bits though. On Boxing Day afternoon we went down to rim of the Menegai Crater (an extinct volcano crater, apparently one of the largest on earth) with some friends of Hol’s for sundowners. It was a lovely spot to watch the sun go down over.

We also went and stayed on the Delamere’s private ranch for a night where another friend of Hollie’s has a house (which we won’t go in to cos it really was the biggest dive of a house I have ever seen, an extreme bachelor pad!). It was beautiful. It’s on the banks of lake Elementita, one of the rift valley lakes, so it’s like having your own private national park with none of the car loads of tourists. We walked round the lake (watching out for buffalo!) which was full of flamingos and pelicans and other water birds, went for a night drive where we came upon a small group of hyena in the headlights among other things. We got up before dawn the next morning and had our breakfast down by the lake watching the sun come up. We saw giraffe and buffalo and dozens of antelope. Gorgeous.

We also made a visit to Nakuru National Park so that Paul could see his first rhino! It was a lovely full day, arriving at dawn and leaving at dusk. We saw lots of baboons, who are fascinating to watch, as well as giraffe, hyena, eland and the regular buffalo, impala, zebra, waterbuck warthog etc. We drove the whole way round the lake so we got several lovely views out across the park. It did strike me though just how close this park is to civilisation, the houses are literally built right up to the park fences. It is, like Hollie said, almost like a big open air zoo. It’s funny cos when I was there last I thought it was the ultimate wild place, alive with animals. Maybe as you get older you see things for what they actually are a bit more.

Rachel goes swallow catching

At the beginning of December I got the chance to go ringing swallows with a Dutch guy called Bennie. He comes out to Africa every year to catch and ring European Barn Swallows who are on their winter migration – nice work if you can get it! He is particularly interested in birds that have European rings on already – we caught one from Poland – which tells him where the birds have come from. Apparently most of the swallows that over winter in Zambia are Eastern European birds, swallows from the UK and Holland tend to go down the west coast of Africa and end up in South Africa. We also caught a few with rings on from last year which shows that the same birds come back to the same winter quarters each year.

We would head out on the evenings and set up our mist nets close to reed beds where the swallows roost. We then put on a little tape of swallows talking and sat back and waited for them to come in. And just about on dusk they would. They would flock above our heads in groups numbering over 1000 at times which was really quite a sight. Then as they swooped down for the reeds in to the nets they’d go. We would catch on average 150-200 birds each evening! Luckily Bennie is quite the experienced ringer so he could whip them out, put a ring on them and off they’d go, me I took a little longer so I’d maybe only ring about 30 a night. But we’d have them all out in about 2hrs and then take 10 adult birds and 10 juvenile birds home with us to do more detailed measurements on in the morning.

First thing in the morning we’d process the swallows from the previous evening, measuring their wing and tail lengths, scoring them on fat, muscle and speed of moult, weighing them, to get an overall idea of body condition. Bennie’s past work has been investigating whether body condition (and thus survival) of individuals is affected by roost size so he will use this years’ data to compare it with results of previous years.

We also went out early one morning with our nets to see what other birds we could catch. Nearly every bird was a new one for me! We had waxbills, bulbuls, weavers, shrikes, warblers (one of which, the river warbler, Bennie was very excited to ring as he’d never seen that species in Zambia before…I then promptly let it escape from the bag before he had a chance to…thankfully he was very good about it….I think….). We even caught a Lizzard Buzzard that had seen the little birds caught in the net and gone after one as a meal. But the strangest thing we caught was a cattle egret which had followed a herd of cows right into the nets! Luckily we arrived just in time to chase all the cows off before they made a real mess.

North (by Northwest) to Nairobi

We hurtled out of Dar es Salaam heading towards Nairobi in the coach equivalent of a Fiesta XR2i with a three thousand pounds sound system in the boot. I was tired of Africa: tired of things not working, tired of waiting, tired because trains with so much slack in the couplings that the carriages knock around like they’re on a Newton’s Cradle do not foster deep and peaceful sleep (and neither do cheap hotel rooms without air conditioning when temperatures reach satanic levels at two in the morning). I didn’t want to be in Africa. So I wasn’t.

I had read a few pages of ‘The Lovely Bones’ the day before and had immediately liked the author’s style. So I hid in the book. In this way I didn’t hear the street sellers that crowded around the coach every time it slowed enough for them to run alongside; I didn’t see the crumbling buildings that lined the roadside or the empty faces of those who sat outside them and stared at the vehicles that rushed by; and I didn’t smell the horrific stench of the toilets when we stopped. But a novel cannot last forever, especially when it is being used to escape from the world. And so by early afternoon I was back in Africa, my senses awakened once more to everything I had escaped from for a few short hours that morning.

In a state of dehydration induced delirium a couple of things occurred to me: firstly, I would need water, a lot of water, sometime soon; secondly, we were not going to be in Nairobi before midnight. While the coach driver attacked the roads with a certain suicidal glee (it is a peculiar thing about Africans that they rarely seem in a rush to do anything until you put them behind the wheel of a vehicle, then suddenly they seem overwhelmed by a desire to move as swiftly as humanly possible, and, well, if humanly possible isn’t quite quick enough then angelically possible will do just fine too), he also liked to stop a lot, to pick up more people (for whom there weren’t any seats) or just for some idle banter with the locals.

I considered asking the driver what time he thought we might arrive in Nairobi. But, as others have noted, time in Africa is not the same as time in the Western world; questions concerning when something might or might not happen are generally meaningless, at least if you want or expect a precise - meaningful - answer. As far as would concern most Africans, we would arrive in Nairobi when we got there, that was as much as they would ever need to know. The most accurate and honest answer I could expect was ‘later’ and this wouldn’t quite meet my exacting Western standards of a given hour, or even a given day. I did try to ask the driver about being dropped off outside a hotel in Nairobi (the prospect of wandering the streets of Nairobbery in the early hours didn’t particularly appeal) but I was rudely rebuffed. I began devising a Plan B.

I had hoped we would make it to Arusha, northern Tanzania’s tourist hub, by nightfall; there we could find a hotel for the night and then catch another bus to Nairobi in the morning. But the sun was already setting when we pulled into Moshi, still two hours from Arusha. We sat in Moshi bus station for ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Half an hour. The sun had now set. The coach was bad enough in daylight; the idea of it tearing around in the dark made me distinctly uncomfortable. Time for Plan C, time to get off the coach. We took our lives out of the hands of the kamikaze coach driver. And put them in the hands of a taxi driver. In hindsight this was definitely the right decision, though I might have been less inclined to think so if the taxi driver had wrapped us around a palm tree.

The unlit African roads that separate Arusha from Moshi passed in a 120km/h blur. A blur that was made all the more hazy by the thick black smoke that billowed from the exhaust of a minibus we got stuck behind. We arrived in Arusha somewhat surprised that our limbs were still where they were supposed to be and decided to splash out on a half-decent hotel to celebrate.

For the price of a common-or-garden bed and breakfast in the UK we stayed in the most wonderful hotel. There were leather sofas in our room (I had never stayed anywhere where there was room for anything other than a bed in the room), the bed was the most comfortable I had slept in since coming to Africa and the breakfast the next morning was never ending: fruit then cereal then croissants than toast then sausages and bacon and eggs and baked beans, all washed down with tea and fruit juice and more tea and more fruit juice.

At dinner that evening, in one of the hotel’s many restaurants (well, there were three I think, but more than one seems a lot to me), we talked about how it would be possible to have incredibly different experiences of Africa. The bus we were to get the next day generally shuttles tourists from Nairobi airport, where are they are met by a friendly looking fellow who meets them in arrivals, to the doors of the hotel in Arusha. There they would be greeted by polite, professional, attentive staff who would accommodate them with a minimum of fuss or delay. From their hotel they would be taken on safari, to the Ngorogoro Crater and the Serengeti, staying in lodges or luxury tented camps, enjoying game drives and cultural excursions; the most they would have to do is brush their own teeth. Then back to the hotel in Arusha, the shuttle bus to the airport, then home again. Or you could do these things the way we were. Africa is a lot easier to enjoy if one has money it would seem. But that’s not really Africa.