epiphany

Africa Photos

After plenty of time, I'm ready to take you on a brief tour of Africa.

We'll start out flying over the Sahara Desert, which is HUGE. We're talking ocean-huge. I looked out the plane window at the northern edge of the desert, shortly after we'd left the Mediterranean Sea behind. Several hours later, I looked out the window again, and we were still over the Sahara Desert.

Our first afternoon in Kenya, we took a safari at the game park just outside the city.

We saw a variety of animals, including lots of zebras, cape buffalo, wildebeasts, ostriches, and giraffes. We also saw several eland (the one with the buildings in the background) and a hippo, though none of my photos of him turned out.

Coming back from the ride, I had to figure out how to deal with this crazy, windfed creature.

From Nairobi, we flew to Kigali, Rwanda for a day. More than 1,100,000 people, over 10% of the population died in the four hundred days of genocide back in 1994 while the rest of the world did nothing. 260,000 people are buried in mass graves at the Genocide Museum (which is top notch and very disturbing). Eleven years after the horrors, they're still finding bodies.

We spent the majority of our time in Lusaka, Zambia. There are no flights between Rwanda and Zambia, so we had to transit through Nairobi again. The flight from Nairobi did offer views of Kilimanjaro, which I wouldn't have seen otherwise. I liked Lusaka a lot. One doctor described it as "Africa for beginners." Unlike Nairobi, the city was generally quite clean, had good roads, and appeared safe--at least in our neighborhood. We stayed at a really nice hotel with great views and wonderful landscaping. Most of the flower photos come from there. I do want to point out the slightly blurry picture with the tree trunks. The ground is red a purple, thanks to the dropping petals of the trees' flowers. Those trees are the size of elms or skinny oaks, and the entire tops were completely covered in blossoms. Also, careful with the second all green shot--the file is a little large because I wanted to show off the detail.

Probably the greatest treat for me came on the flight home. Ever since my first flight across the Atlantic Ocean back in 1998, I've been wanting to see Greenland. Unfortunately, the northern Atlantic has been clouded over every single flight. Until this one. The skies cleared over the east coast of Greenland, and I was able to watch the icy wonder for quite a while. The land is magnificent: all mountains and glaciers. It was fascinating to see visible differentiation between the snow sitting on top and the glaciers beneath. I could even see icebergs frozen in the fjords. Beautiful.

Posted by jonhanneman at November 21, 2005 8:13 PM | TrackBack