- eliza deacon photography

I have moved...

2011-10-20T09:16:00.002+03:00

Dear All

I have moved. You can now find me over at www.elizadeaconphotography.com - hope to see you there :)

Cheers, Eliza

Sometimes everything just makes sense ...

2011-09-27T13:52:00.000+03:00

On Safari

2011-09-02T11:05:00.000+03:00

If I could be anywhere right now, it would be here...

Imperfect Balance

2011-08-27T11:02:00.009+03:00

I must be obsessed with feet...

The Sea

2011-08-21T16:49:00.007+03:00

Sitting on the veranda of the dhow house trying to write, lose myself in words, but their rhythm is not mine...rather the sound below of cloth being smacked again and again against chairs, chasing away the dust, always chasing the dust. Futile really as its ever present in the air, has nowhere else to go but down. Dust thrown up by winds on the mountain, and even down here beside the jewel-like sea where we spend our days.

Days, long and languorous where the sticky heat slows everything down, even the time, and gives way to absurd thoughts like is dust continent-bound, or could it be that the fine layer of dust and sand that covers us, has blown in from afar on the winds and was born instead on the beaches of Kerala. The only cure for the mid-day heat is to run wild and shrieking down to the waters edge, stir it up from its afternoon’s inertia and plunge into the cold spray, then temporarily renewed find solace inside the thick walls of the kitchen, leaning back against the cool cool stone; the Cook, shelling prawns for supper, shakes his head ‘mad dogs and Englishwomen’. His eyebrows raise slightly, he shells another prawn.

It had become a matter of life and death, the mountain with its almost 24-hour blackouts had to be left behind. There is no power, the lack of rains has meant the daily slowing down of the country’s power grid; we expect an almost-total blackout in under 60 days. Candlelit evenings have long since lost their romance, instead the annoyance at all the things you now cannot do crowd your mind. Fridges that don’t freeze, phones that won’t charge.

Leaving that all far behind, as it matters less to have lights when you’re living in a house made of old boats that sits encircled by palms and overlooks the Indian ocean. Long days spent walking with sandy toes along the crescent beach; one evening you see a white Arabian horse being ridden in the waves by a black-haired girl. Your mind, just coming out of its heat haze, sees only the movement and the slip of turquoise that streams around the girl. You never catch them, walk along the shore the next night and the next, but they never reappear.

Everything slows down and at times you feel all the layers falling away, stripped down and naked you stand in the wind, sucking in breathful’s like a newborn.

Sunday

2011-07-31T12:50:00.000+03:00

God bless the child...

2011-07-26T12:45:00.004+03:00

Them that's got shall get
Them that's not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child
that's got his own
That's got his own
- Billie Holiday

Storms over the Serengeti

2011-05-16T10:21:00.032+03:00

The rains came and we chased the black skies over the short grass plains from Ndutu up to the Moru Kopjes. Wildebeest and zebra in every direction, also following the scent of the sweet new grass coming up through the dusty ground. They never stop walking, these herds that make up the migration; driven by rain or just the promise of it, they spend their entire lives on a march encountering inumerable terrors along the way. We drove through the middle of huge herds, like Moses parting the waves, but they just kept on walking.

We passed a lion on his look-out rock, he was also watching the storm approach as the wind whipped through his wild mane. We were in an open car so couldn't stop but for just a moment, we had started already to feel the first few drops, smelled them long before as they sank into the dust.

Standing on the back of the pick-up, laughing and feeling like we were the luckiest people on this earth to be out here. Got into camp just as the sky split apart with the the loudest thunder I had ever heard. Drinking wine on the mess tent veranda, feet just inside and out of the rain, wrapped in Maasai blankets, starting every time the lightning hit, almost to the ground. More wine consumed around the lantern-lit table, putting the world to rights as the hours rolled by. Woke later, much later, with buffalo all around my tent, their regular munching of grass soon pushed me back into safari dreams.

At sunrise the migration were all around us, they had filed into our valley during the night and now stood docile in the fragile light. We sat with mugs of steaming coffee on the still wet grass. Sometimes I imagine no other life than this one.

Women

2011-04-25T11:29:00.017+03:00

It's a funny thing this, but I've noticed whilst on my travels that women, no matter where in the world they are, no matter the lack of common language or culture, no matter what the circumstances of their lives are, will always find something to talk about.

Life of late

2011-03-30T17:37:00.009+03:00

Seen through images and for once few words...except that I realized, on looking at this collage, that it looks very un-African...which is odd as I am surrounded by so much that is. For some reason the pictures this time just don't reflect that.

The rains have started and I'm just back from the Serengeti chasing the migration and a million and one sodden wildebeest, followed by some very muddy and damp lions. Another story!

Coming home

2011-02-28T09:24:00.023+03:00

I arrived back after three weeks away, set foot on African soil in the middle of a thunderstorm, although when we landed it was impossible to see anything in the darkness through rain splashed windows that didn’t allow you know where you were. The tarmac was flooded and there was no-one to wheel the steps out to the plane, so we sat feeling stale and uncomfortable for thirty minutes more before the doors were opened and sweet wet air poured in. The rain was torrential, the long rains have come early J said when he met me, and in the 100-yard dash to the terminal everyone and everything was soaked. Wet steps that made everyone wary and doubtful of what they were doing; first-time travellers here no doubt always feel this way.

One sheds one’s skin during flight and becomes the other person, feeling the weight of the wooden African beads that were hidden before by too many clothes, smiling as they twist smoothly between your fingers. This is how it is when you feel happy because of where you’ve been, but as happy about the place you’re going back to; you move easily, smoothly between the two selves, it took a long time to become like this. Arriving back here always assails you and it’s always what you expect, but totally unexpected at the same time. A sense of familiar newness, knowing what it is but seeing it through newly born eyes, smells and sounds that you don’t find any place else.

Driving up the long hill to the house, the dirt road made slippery and treacherous by the storm and feet clad in smart new London shoes had to step out into the mud to turn the car wheel hubs to 4-wheel-drive. Mud splashed onto sockless feet, the socks had come off the minute the wheels left the tarmac of icy Europe heading for warmer skies. Much laughter, it’s hard not to find humour in a situation so ridiculous. Once precious possessions, like the sparkliest of gems, are actually not so it seems, deep sticky mud is a great leveler. Arriving back into darkness because there is no power here, there has not been power for weeks – at least not as a daily reliable source. So the house remains candlelit and the evenings become more insular and secretive; we take care stepping over dark dogs in dark corners and drink wine and tell stories, and go to bed early. And within a day or two it’s as if you had never left, Africa moulds itself back around you, it’s not like a cat who sulks at your absence and takes time with its approach.

Someone I know died last week, was shot by poachers in Maasailand. Sudden, violent, cruel and shocking. Today we stood out in a big open field and his family, and those who knew him well, talked of their love for him. Many tears slid down dusty cheeks and everyone remembered an amazing man; there was laughter at tales that had to be told, but overall an unbearable sadness. A pilot buzzed low over the field in his small plane in tribute, a friend sang Angel from Montgomery with a lone guitar, her voice faltering once or twice as she sang. I think we all feel a little unbalanced by this, as if everyone's respective worlds have slid just a little off their own axis. I hold J that little bit closer at night.

Conversations with myself as an old woman

2011-01-18T10:41:00.037+03:00

Gnarled hands that are surprisingly pale, folded in her lap. Capable hands, although she never liked them despite their ability to reach one note over an octave on the piano.

She’s always stayed out of the sun, not for vanity but because she doesn’t like the sun or the heat; funny for someone who has spent the last 60 years of her life in Africa. Leathery old strips of biltong you can look like otherwise, the intense heat of mid-day etched deep into crinkles and creases. Nice faces though, lived-in, they look like they belong here.

Here she became the person she never thought she was before; hidden away, in a too-tall lanky body, by insecurities and doubt, never entirely comfortable in the skin she was born with. It wasn’t so simple, but then this continent never is; it tests and challenges, weeds the strong of heart from those who shy from its extremes. It can drive you mad and it’s easy to stumble, the dusty earth is often rock-strewn and rarely flat.

She often used to wonder if this was a place to grow old, she never wanted to feel fear and it’s here sometimes, visits at night with the winds. With shiftas and waizi ... thieves who come in when the moon is low, skulking around the perimeters in whispers. The dogs bark and the old Maasai askaris keep them at bay, but they’re still out there. And fear is an unwelcome guest especially when you know your limitations.

She and the man she loves know of no-where else to go, this place they call home is just that and has claimed them wholly. They have both been spat off the continent before, thrown out of the land they were bound to; for him because the colour of his skin was deemed wrong, despite having the right passport, for her because she was told she had just been there too long. But where else to go, where else do you find the life that offers you the most extraordinary freedom, whilst always with cruel accuracy reminding you that this freedom comes at a price.

At times she wonders at how she can still find the thrill in that particularly African golden light that comes just before dark, that one hour grace period when everything else is forgotten and the Gods smile down on all. And the moment when walking on the farm, she startles a wild animal and it’s frozen, staring with wide eyes, preserved in that drawn-out moment until neither can bear it any longer and the spell is broken.

She remembers things like bare feet on wet grass, stepping carefully in the darkness, the smell of sweet wild jasmine and night sounds in her soul; feeling giddy with wildness in the shadow of the mountain. And she remembers a dress, covered in a thousand sparkling sequins and as they drove down the long farm road towards a moon-lit gathering, it filled the inside of the car with colour, like stars that no-one could see but them. She files away all these memories, carries them carefully in a treasure box, revisits them at sunset when, sitting on the veranda with a glass in hand, the world slows down and sinking back into the past is easy and without regret.

Old now, but there is so much that is good here and as much as you can ‘belong’, they know that they have been marked, carry the scars as well as the laughter. There is permanence and stability in its indelible stain and it ties them to that dusty African soil, a compass that always points them home.

Out of Dreams

2011-01-05T09:19:00.017+03:00

The moment at dawn when sleep still lies over your body and pushes you back into the night's dreams. As you wake, fragments of memory fade too quickly before you can piece together their story; just as you grasp an image, any meaning attached to it is gone. This happens a lot and you are left wondering at the night time world you inhabit, when you are at your most open to it. I don't often remember my dreams, although I know that I do dream and sometimes I wake suddenly in the middle of the night stiff-limbed and cold.

I know that the things I see during the days, the things that impact enough to remain, will appear eventually although changed; dreams only need a small element of reality, the rest is as if you are looking through a kaleidoscope, warped and surreal.

Last night, during a waking moment, I found a cobra in our garden, large and black and very angry. He had our littlest cat cornered, had his hood flared and was up in the air by at least a third of his body. I shouted at him in the dark, stamped the ground to distract him from my small cat who was naively trying to pat him with her gentle paw. Help came in the lanky form of William, our Maasai askari, who dispatched him with one blow from his knobkerrie stick. I've lived in Africa for 16 years but some things still scare me; this was a nightmare which I know I will revisit later.

As a child, I used to slip into a half-state between wakefulness and the stage they call REM sleep. Not yet asleep and still very much aware. I'd open my eyes and see things in my room, a figure sitting at the end of my bed would slowly turn and face me. I don't remember him as particularly malevolent, but my 13-year-old self was too terrified to do anything but scream and turn on the light. It's funny what you remember, the man at the end of the bed wore a white hat with a silk band. Other nights I was woken by small winged creatures crawling all over my bed and the more I stared at them, the more they took form and shape. Their wings took on detail and I could see the movements of their legs. I'd hold my nerve for as long as I could before I panicked and turned on the light.

My mother, concerned about the state of my mind, took me to a doctor who dismissed it as an over-active imagination. The bad dreams, for that was what they were referred to - although I wasn't convinced - pursued me for the next 15 or so years. And then they took a hiatus for a very long time.

I went back to England last year, stayed in our family house in my old room which now, transformed into a smart guest room, bore little resemblance to what it used to be. On the third night, my sister - trying to catch some sleep with a new-born baby at her side - was startled by loud screaming downstairs whilst I, in some in-between place, had found myself facing an army of something, exactly what I don't remember, and literally thrown myself out of bed, cracking my head on the window seat on the way down.

I am capable of good and deep sleep though and here, in our mountain castle, I feel the karma that flows in and out of the many open windows and doors. This is a house where I have known most, if not all, of its inhabitants over the years and that gives it a familiar feeling, as if they are present in the very fibre of it. And our large free-standing bed, with softly draped netting all around, is a place I like to be in often. I like the view it affords, almost 360 degrees out of all its windows. You can see far, like a look-out place, see whatever is approaching from any direction. I go to sleep with that thought in my mind. I light a candle in my dreams.

In the company of elephants

2011-01-05T09:08:00.000+03:00

Kilimanjaro on my mind

2010-12-27T16:11:00.046+03:00

I drove back to the mountain, went to see if it was where I left it last; can report that Kilimanjaro is exactly where it's meant to be and all is well with the world.

Driving this familiar open road on a hazy golden-light African afternoon, Africa in my sleep, how I see myself tangled in dreams when I'm away. The times when I balance and feel the length and breadth of my feet squarely on the ground, dusty earth beneath and between dusty toes.

Windows wide open and music loud on my stereo.

Smell the promise of rain coming in over the Maasai Steppe, nothing but space and air and purple hills as the road draws you on.

Sun spots dancing all over the car, wind whistling through, hair in my eyes, feel like laughing out loud.

I once described myself as lost on this road through Maasailand, where I chase dust devils and forget where I am. Today I know exactly where I'm going, as slowly Kili looms large in my window.

Sometimes life is so simple. I want to package this up and put it where I'll remember where I left it. Everything finds its place, it's not so hard. This is how I feel when I am at my happiest, arms wide to possibility and chance of adventure, doubt held firmly at my back by confidence.

Contemplating grass

2010-12-16T14:45:00.031+03:00

Last night a storm rolled down off the mountain, right over the top of us in our stone castle. I lay in bed listening to the wind howling and roaring like a monster; I was 'at one' with the elements, to hell with being poetic, our house is open to the winds and the rain, the doors and windows are never closed. I hear everything, from the mullah's first call to prayer at 5am every morning from the mosque down in Usa River, to the colobus monkeys calling from lower-slope trees in the early evenings. I sleep lightly and wake easily from sleep confused by noise blowing in on the breeze.

I lay there worrying about the little things; were my ducks being blown every which way by the storm, was the littlest cat inside, had I put the handbrake on my car, had the askaris (night-time guards) taken cover somewhere warm and fallen into a deep sleep, immune to the fact that there could be a bunch of waizi (thieves) on their way up to our eerie this very minute. At times I wondered if our house could withstand such a force of nature, there isn't much to protect us up here on the foothills, nothing to hide behind.

The storm also woke up J, who - before turning around and going back to sleep - rather unhelpfully remarked 'I hope that big old Albida tree doesn't fall on us'. This morning, after I checked everyone four-legged and feathered were where they were supposed to be - no ducks in trees - I sat in the garden amidst the wreckage.

It's a good place to start the day, far-off views and space are always calming. It reminds you of where you are, puts your feet back on the ground, lets you sink further into your skin. I seem to be popping out of mine a bit too much lately; you know that feeling when you just can't keep up with what's inside of your head. The days become weeks become months and we moved mountains almost half a year ago, but so much here is unpacked (literally and relatively). We have yet to settle.

Ours is a bit of a transient life, I suppose I'd be the last to complain. Gypsies we are...bound only to the place we stay by coming home to it. Every stop we make, we take on more baggage: the bookshelf stacks up a little more, the antique glass-fronted cabinet and the old Danish upright piano demand more space and stability. I traveled light once, but that was a long time ago. And now I've met a man who is as much a wanderer as I, like attracts like I suppose. Besides Africa can be a hard place to 'belong' to, we're all visitors in so many ways, no matter the country of your birth.

It reminds me of the words of a dear friend, someone in a life so different from mine as to be totally surreal (to me); he talks of "melancholy" as being happiness tinged with longing. And that's how I feel.

Where the wild things are

2010-12-09T16:45:00.039+03:00

We were in Mkomazi, a sprawling 3200 sq kilometers of wild open savannah, dusky mountains and glimpses of Tsavo in the far-off distance. It's not far from us, up here in the north of Tanzania and bordering Kenya. It's rugged and wild and probably the most beautiful part of Africa that I have ever seen. Not many tourists come here, I guess it's rather too much 'off the beaten track', but poachers, various tribes and their cattle are here and they leave a heavy footprint. Much of the game has been decimated in the past, by men with guns, and many of the animals that were left soon disappeared over the border. This isn't uncommon in this part of the world, sadly not at all.

It's been a dry year and there is little water, we saw a few skinny buffalo out on the plains and a small herd of elephants. "They've been going into the villages", a local man told us, "it's a big problem, they get into the crops and people get scared, they chase them, they shoot them". I had heard a terrible story of a baby elephant being chased to its death; this from friends who are custodians of two young elephants, 4 and 14, rescued from a horrible death by starvation and/or poachers. They now live together in relative safety on Kilimanjaro.

When the rains come to this area, and if they're good, it means grazing and water is more readily available without crossing unmarked boundaries, leaving less room for conflict. The rains bring everything back to life, out of dust and bones, and nowhere is it more apparent. I wish I could 'bed in' here and never leave. Watch the days, weeks, months change, the animals come and go, and forget anything else in the world as nothing would be as important as this.

Being here takes my breath away. On the one side, you have the Usumbara's and the Pare Eastern Arc Mountains, deep purple and shadowy at sunset. From the top of a craggy escarpment we looked all the way out across Tsavo, could see the Taita Hills on the horizon. J was in a very good mood, it's a birders paradise and he saw species he'd never seen before. If he's really good, I'll let him 'bed in' and stay with me here too.

Storm Warning

2010-11-19T11:20:00.030+03:00

So, the rains have come. Finally. Not a gentle ushering in of the rainy season either, no chance...instead a full-on wild manic skies whipped up devil wind, that arrived seconds before the deluge started. And it poured and poured. The mountain, at my back, disappeared in the blackness, the sky came down to the ground and the only place to be was inside...with a large whisky!

Of course the power went off, that's a given during the rains and it can stay off a while. But, no matter, there are always candles to light before rushing to close windows now banging off their hinges. And then you just wait it out. I sat upstairs cross-legged on our wooden floor in front of the wide open veranda doors; I let the rain spray cover my face and breathed lungfuls of clean clean air. It made me feel exceptionally happy.

Rain on a tin roof will always, for me, be a particularly African sound; it's something I dream of - and miss - when I'm not here and it drives me to an insane and edgy lack-of-sleep existence when I am. It reminds me that the power and depth of nature is not here in half-measure...oh no; roads can be washed away, they just disappeared into ditches, huts too. The river we drive through at the bottom of our hill, usually just a stream, can become a raging torrent that can't be driven through. It could take your car and smash it sideways into the rocks, it's not worth the risk so we turn around and find another route.

I drove down Arusha's main road once, during some such storm and within minutes the water was up over the tyres...lapping over the curbs and refusing to disappear down rubbish-filled storm drains. We were exhilarated by it, my friend and I. It was a moment of hysterical madness, being caught up in its unpredictability. By the time we had got home of course the rains had stopped and the sun had reappeared and the sky was back where it should be. So it goes, on and on. But everyone, unsurprisingly, looked somewhat shell-shocked for a while.

In Flight

2010-11-01T11:59:00.018+03:00

It’s been a strange old month for sure; it’s the days before the rains come and I think everyone goes a little mad, restless, prickly in their skin. I know I am. Everything is hot and dry and dusty, the sky is about a foot off the ground, oppressive. I really feel the lack of air, I think that I am trying to breathe through a warm wet blanket.

The other evening I sat in the garden, trying to catch the odd bit of cool that came drifting past and I watched a dust storm building up out on the Maasai Steppe. The sky turned eerily yellow as it approached with winds howling; running around the garden trying to secure all the shutters whilst they banged and slammed on clumsy fingers. This happens a lot now until the rains hit, until then we’re all weather forecasters with eyes fixed firmly on the skies ‘yep, I’m sure I felt a drop over at Ngaramatoni the other day. Really? Nope not us, we’re still pouring sweat this side.

It's been a bad old month too. Someone very dear to me was attacked in her home last weekend by a shotgun-wielding gang of 9. They broke in whilst she was asleep, they dragged her out of bed, they hit her with sticks and pangas, they shouted at her 'give me money, give me money'. They shot at her through the window, but they missed. They didn't have to do any of that. She in her 70s and had a stroke a few years ago, she is not so mobile and would have just lain in her bed whilst they took what they wanted. She might well have shouted at them, she has the courage of a lion - the locals call her Mama Simba - but she couldn't have intervened. So why did they have to hurt her. They took the one thing she values most, her late husband's naval ceremonial sword. That upsets her more than anything else they did.

I stayed with her last night and we both assumed an air of normalcy; supper on the veranda, a glass or two of wine, talked about the weather, the dust, the view of Mt Meru that takes your breath away. We chatted about her book, she's writing her memoirs, she's had an extraordinary life. We laughed, remembering the exploits now written down on well-thumbed pages, but we were both on edge, the long sweep of the garden was too dark. Slept under her tall thatched roof, in a bed draped with mosquito netting and dreamed of nothing; a dead, still, sleep but I woke up tired and irritable. And gritty, dust in my eyes because sure enough it's everywhere today, 'lick my lips and taste it' everywhere.

But soon the rains will break and we can all breathe fresh clean air and shed our scratchy skin. Or maybe that's just very wishful thinking, as yet another day dawns hot dry and dusty and indeterminably long.

In Transit

2010-10-01T11:01:00.014+03:00

So we’ve left one mountain and moved to another. The details are long, and boring; I won’t go in to them. Suffice to say my heart broke, well half of it, the other half just wanted to escape. We haven’t gone far, instead of Kilimanjaro at my back I write with Meru rising up craggy and strong, with shadowy hills that go purple and bruised at sunset. Our funny little ‘gothic castle’ sits atop the foothills and we still look out over the Maasai Steppe and when its clear I see Kilimanjaro rising – these things are good to know, they make me happy.

This morning, from our upstairs veranda I see life in perfect clarity. The wood smoke spirals up from all the huts lost – like us – in Meru’s folds. Slow Sunday morning sounds roll down to us but they don’t jar. I slowly let go of that breath, stretch like the cats warming their paws in the sun. It takes time to settle in, and change – despite knowing it needs to happen – can be an unwelcome guest. That feeling that you don’t really know where you want to be sets you on edge; you wander from room to room trying to find a space to be, somewhere that feels right. It takes time.

Last night friends came – the very best kind who helped us empty our packing trunks and make some semblance of order amongst the moving chaos. Dervishes whirled through the kitchen and soon everything had a place. Later we sat out under the tree at the bottom of the garden and ate and drank our way through the lantern and star-lit night. At some point, not exactly sure when, it started to feel a lot more like home.

What I miss when I'm away

2010-09-25T10:48:00.009+03:00

Sometimes I just have to get off the continent. You know how it is. It can all just get a bit much: the big skies, the open space, these things that I love but can loathe in equal measure. Here life is chaotic and colourful, it can be wild and intense. Maybe it’s the intensity that does it, makes you yearn for things that are just, well, normal. Not that we don’t have that too, life here is not so different from anywhere else…it just seems bigger.

It can make you feel so blissful; the little things like driving through a ‘migration’ of butterflies, literally thousands of them crossing the road for about an hour. Sitting in the garden with J the other night watching a “Wolf’s Moon” that rises up by the mountain, over-bright and full, chilly by now and shivery but the wine tastes so damned good and you just can’t go back inside. Chucking our bedrolls into the car and going to camp out in the bush on the western side of the mountain. We drive for hours, looking for a good tree and a good view, set up camp when we hear the sound of elephants rumbling not so far away. J sees birds that he’s never seen before, that makes him happy. I smile, yup this is what it’s meant to be.

It can also sometimes knock the stuffing out of you.

So I fly away. I go back to England and the minute the plane lifts off, wheels up from the tarmac at Kilimanjaro International Airport I take a deep breath. The possibilities over the next weeks are endless: café lunches and bookstore browsing, and the joys of supermarkets where you can buy anything; gas that comes out of the wall into the back of your cooker, and lights that come on all the time. Walking outside barefoot in the grass without worrying about treading on something nasty, seeing friends, family, people I love.

But at some point, usually after about 10 days, I start to get a bit edgy. I’m on a London street and I look up at the sky, only I can’t see it…too many skyscrapers in every direction. I miss not hearing the rain on our tin roof (remind me of that when I’m here, and it’s so loud I can’t sleep), I miss the smell of the new rain on dry earth…anyone who has smelled that will know exactly what I mean. I miss the person that I am when I’m here.

I land back at Kilimanjaro early evening and disembark, sometimes the heat and the humidity can be like walking into a wet blanket. But as we start climbing up into the foothills, windows down and fresh cool air pouring in, I smell what I miss most…wood smoke and damp vegetation, the coffee bushes are all around and the mountain rises way up over me…it feels good to be back.

Itchy feet

2010-09-20T10:08:00.013+03:00

I think I have my mother to blame, in the nicest way possible of course, for these itchy feet of mine. She was born in Ootacamund in the Nilgiri Hills of southern India. She grew up riding elephants and tracking tigers. She ran barefoot with wild tangled hair and a dirty face; her mother – an elegant English woman, although of Bostonian descent – tried to tame her unruly daughter, but soon gave up. A stint at boarding school in Scotland, after all the Brits were ejected from India, was a miserable failure. The cold, damp and dour weather was abhorrent to this stubborn and dusty “Indian” child. Her pioneering spirit was strong nevertheless and didn’t let her down, it took her to Colorado to round-up horses as a cowboy on a ranch in the mountains. From there she became a top fashion model in the London swinging 60s scene before appearing as a Bond Girl in the original Casino Royale (the one without Daniel Craig).

My mother, known in those days as Honey, told me about all of this in my early days. She whispered stories to my twin sister and I that flickered like fireflies in our baby sleep. She sang campfire cowboy songs to us when, I know now, she dearly missed the wild open plains of the west. She met a man, who wanted to take her to a desert where he raised Arabian horses and she would have lived in a tent. But then she met my father, a tall, handsome city boy with a twinkle in his eye, and she fell in love. She died when my sister and I were 16.

As soon as I was able, I started to travel. I went to the badlands of Kenya’s northern frontier district and Lake Turkana, where I tried to get lost…and failed. I journeyed to Russia, and walked for hours in Moscow’s Gorky Park; I went ‘underground’ with artists and writers who talked about things that went way over the top of my very young head, but I fell in love with all of them. Disguised as a Russian peasant I travelled across the Ukraine to Kiev, meeting amazing people on the way; old women with a lifetime of work and worry etched on their faces. They worked, stooped and stiff, on the railways lines in the snow, but we shared stories and laughter – remember what I said once about women always finding something to talk about, no matter the language or culture.

In Sarajevo I spent time with an amazing woman, an English professor at the city’s main University before the war. She was in her early 60s and lived with her elderly mother in a large, formal, house with one of those entrance halls (and I really mean ‘entrance hall’, the kind that Grace Kelly might just come gliding down to meet her dashing suitor at the door). Our reality check was an unexploded mortar sticking out of the once immaculate lawn like an unwelcome statue. We used to sit on the first floor veranda, only after dark so the Serbian snipers in their high-rise towers, wouldn’t see us, and drink rose petal tea out of gilt-edged tea cups and talk of life before the war.

And then finally for me, a return to Africa and finding my twinkly-eyed man. Days and nights spent in the shadow of our mountain and space, more than I could ever have thought possible, and love, laughter, chaos and colour that exhausts and delights in equal measure.

New Ways of Seeing...a Secret Life

2010-09-01T11:17:00.007+03:00

For a while now I’ve been feeling totally uncreative, not spectacularly uncreative, but noticeably so. A tad dull, somewhat weighed down, no soaring bursts of inspirational thoughts leaping out of my skin…sadly not one.

But then one morning I woke up thinking of a friend of mine; an extraordinary photographer over at Shutterchance, Nostalgia, and the amazing, not quite of this world way (and I mean that in the nicest way possible) he has of seeing his surroundings. I think his eyes see in macro, forget the camera lens he looks through; he spots the things that most of us, including me, would just pass by. You know how it is, I’m so often out there being awed by skies, big, blue, in your face 180 degree all the way around skies, and of course that rather large mountain at the bottom of my garden.

And so with him in mind, I went out into the garden. Closed my eyes to the mountain’s charms, no not interested in you today thanks very much, and I thought only of the smaller things. Those that I pass by every single day without a glance. The dogs and I strolled out into the vegetable garden behind the house and I looked.

And I looked and I looked again. I thought of his “Tales from my Garden”. I can do this, I said. I walked through the maize growing way up over my head, back-lit against a blue blue sky. I lost myself in there, could only hear the dogs as they chased each other and their tails. I kept going, further in, feeling enveloped but in a good, safe way. I wanted to sit down in the dirt and study ants, seek out colourful beetles. I looked for butterflies, I looked for intricate and exquisite leaves. But i found this. In the midst of the maize stood a sunflower, one single solitary sunflower. A sentinel of gold and green. And in its midst a plethora of bees, doing what bees do. And so I stopped and I got close, and I peered into the heart of the sunflower. This one is dedicated to Nostalgia – from my garden to yours.

Lost

2010-08-25T16:38:00.013+03:00

Sometimes I get lost on this road, I don't mean literally. There is just the one road that links our mountain to Arusha. Sometimes I'm on this road every day and the landscape, before the rains come, is wild and barren and flat before it heads up into the foothills. It's the start of the Maasai Steppe, the Great Rift Valley; behind me is Kilimanjaro, in front Meru (depending on the direction I'm driving of course).

J and I call this area the 'Badlands'. It reminds us of Springsteen's album cover 'Nebraska'. One long road, going nowhere, going everywhere ... whichever way you want to look at it. It's not empty though, the Maasai are here with their cattle, you can see them from miles away. The dust they kick up goes into plumes that are sky-high and towering. It's hypnotic, hallucinogenic and the big sky always takes my breath away.

I chase dust devils here, well what else is there to do on such a long empty road. Sometimes these dust devils spring out of nowhere, nasty little whirling dervishes that dissipate almost as soon as they start. Other times they find strength in the deep dust holes where the cattle have been, then they are something to be reckoned with: big and dark and somewhat threatening.

I drive as fast as I can to catch them, to try and meet them head on as they cross the road. I watch them pass the watoto (children) herding the cattle, they laugh and shriek and try to catch them too. Timing is everything. As I said, not a lot to do on this road.

The Dhow Captain, off the coast of Zanzibar

2010-08-10T10:31:00.002+03:00

“A gentle breeze fills the huge sail of our dhow, and draws us through the water that ripples musically against her sides. Most of the men are sleeping forward, for it is near midnight, but a stout swarthy Arab, Mahomed by name, stands at the tiller, lazily steering by the stars. Three miles or more to our starboard is a low dim line. It is the Eastern shore of Central Africa.

We are running to the southward, before the North-East Monsoon, between the mainland and the reef that for hundreds of miles fringes this perilous coast. The night is so quiet, so quiet that a whisper can be heard fore and aft the dhow; so quiet that a faint booming sound rolls across the water to us from the distant land. The Arab at the tiller holds up his hand and says one word, “Simba” (lion). We all sit up and listen. Then it comes again, a slow majestic sound that thrills us to the marrow”.

H.Rider Haggard

I thought I was on the moon, but then I woke up...

2010-08-09T14:28:00.016+03:00

…..and I was in the middle of Lake Eyasi – on the floor of the Great Rift Valley – and the air was dry and heavy. The horizon beckoned invitingly, rather too invitingly; mesmerizing, hallucinogenic, edgy. I don’t know about you, I said to J, but the world just seems different today.

Lets not go back, he said. Lets just keep walking and see where we go. For a moment I thought of sensible things like water, a good pair of shoes (flip-flops are not advisable for far-off explorations), and a hat. But then J ran off ahead of me, laughing loudly, with my loyal Red Dog at his heels, trusty co-pilot of many an adventure. And I just had to follow.

Essaouira, 2009

2010-08-08T11:07:00.003+03:00

Cairo, 2009

2010-08-08T11:05:00.000+03:00

Karnak, 2009

2010-08-08T11:04:00.000+03:00

Cairo, 2009

2010-08-08T11:02:00.000+03:00

Morocco

2010-08-07T10:52:00.005+03:00

I went to Morocco not so long ago. And I fell in love. With all things. I loved the call to prayer, morning, noon and night. It came in stereo surround-sound in the medina at Marrakech whilst I lay in bed in a rather strange riad, trying to throw off a cold and feeling sorry for myself. I listened to it pouring through the windows, different voices that were not quite in time. At one point I did wonder if I had malaria and the discordant notes were in my head; I felt like I was going a little mad. After several ’rounds’, I decided that I preferred the early evening call, it was far more soothing or maybe just quieter. It was an unusual introduction to a country, four walls and room service, but luckily it passed and I ventured out.

I loved hearing it on the mountain at Toubkal, where I stood right at the top of the Kasbah in the early evening, feeling the cold at 7500 feet – and the thin air – and it echoed around the mountain, one lone voice.

I loved the cacophony of noise in the souks in Marrakech and the market at Imlil…the people, the crowds, the baskets of spices, the open-air stalls filled with every conceivable thing and the scrawny cats lurking at every corner. And tourists, yes there were plenty of people, especially there, but I wandered about fairly oblivious, stopping to haggle every so often over some beautiful jewel (Africa has taught me to haggle well). I ate everything in sight…delicious flatbreads to mop up the harira soup, amazing tagines, pastries dripping with honey, fish at Essaouira so fresh they literally jumped off the plate.

Just as I was starting to blend in, to seriously think I could go awol and not bother showing up for my flight home, I thought better of it…remembered that I wasn’t really that far away. Then I heard about direct flights from Nairobi to Casablanca and I thought, yep that’s ok – I think I’ll just come back another time.

The Leap

2010-08-01T15:15:00.004+03:00

Winter

2010-07-31T09:05:00.006+03:00

Winter has arrived on the mountain; it came in last Wednesday. Most mornings now I sip steaming hot tea on the veranda and shiver. The dogs choose not to join me, their baskets are too warm and the cats only watch through the window. The sunlight is very pale, long fingers through the trees which fade before they reach the ground.

But it's peaceful, these hours before the farm erupts with noise. It's coffee picking time and that means the workforce swells by about two thousand people, casual workers who come in daily from the local villages and take up residence on the shamba (farm).

But the farm is mine in these early hours. Sometimes I have to share it with the 'crazy man', a strange chap who lives nearby and likes to walk around the fields banging a piece of tin very loudly. No idea why he does it. Not sure he knows.

He didn't wake me this morning though, it was the hooting of a Giant Eagle Owl that startled me from sleep. He's taken up residence in the large tree in our garden and watches us with curious eyes. But now it's utterly quiet and still, the only sound being the breeze coming through the shell mobile hanging from the wooden beam. The mountain looms large and somewhat forbidding with its icy cap. And once again I forget where I am for just the perfect moment.

The piano and a moment of clarity

2010-07-22T08:33:00.007+03:00

Several months ago, I decided that my life would no longer be complete if I didn’t have a piano. It was a rare moment of clarity, an instant and sudden decision that came to me one evening listening to an American friend playing some blues one lazy Sunday afternoon at a house on the other side of the mountain.

That I went out immediately thereafter and sourced what was undoubtedly the only good piano to be found in Tanzania, an elegant upright of Danish origin, is less surprising once you know that up until 25 years ago, I played the piano as if it were all that was important. I played for at least an hour every night – not the result of pushy overbearing parents who wanted me to become a child prodigy – but because I loved it and wanted nothing other than to be a virtuoso pianist when I grew up.

At 16 I stopped. Completely. Put down the piano lid and never lifted it again. I then went traveling and my beautiful piano stood silent in my family home from that day on. And that is how it’s been for all these years. Until that lazy Sunday afternoon when I heard my friend play and suddenly the only thing that was important to me was to have a piano. To bring it to our mountain was not easy, requiring ten strong men, one dusty old truck, many lengths of rope and tie-downs and a painfully slow 3-hour drive over bumpy tracks and dirt roads. A week after its arrival, a strange visitor to our farm turned out to be a Bavarian pastor who not only preached the word of God to his flock down in the highlands of southern Tanzania, but also happened to be a highly skilled pianist and piano tuner. Some things are just meant to be.

I remembered how to play, even after 25 years, and somewhat rusty and slow fingers started to find their way over still familiar keys; they picked up speed and fragments of melody soon filled the house...Debussy, Satie, Chopin. I imagined the notes carrying over the foothills of Kilimanjaro in the early evenings; we are far enough away from other people that it’s probably only the wildlife that inhabits our coffee that hears and in the beginning stages I thought this was probably a very good thing. But confidence always returns, albeit slowly, and I knew this the other day when, walking into a friend’s house on a completely different continent, I spied a piano and without much thought just sat down and started to play. It’s funny how you can surprise people when you suddenly are able to do something that they never associated with you before, it gives you another label as in Eliza the pianist, not just Eliza the photographer or Eliza who does this or that. It’s not really important is it, but somehow it also is. It's not about what others might think, it's what it has meant to me.

One evening not so long ago, we had a music night on the farm, a jamming session with an amazing group of musician friends; the American who is also a professional saxophone player, a classical Flamenco guitarist, a Dylan-style folk guitarist who also plays Irish drums (and lives with elephants), and then my friend C who used to sing in a rock band and has a powerhouse voice. It amazes me how so many different styles can come together and find a common ground. We played on throughout the night and out the other side; it ended with the sax player flat on his back on the floor, but still playing and making sweet music with the flamenco guitarist. The rest of us were just too tired to do much but raise our glasses.

Marrakesh medina

2010-07-20T15:20:00.002+03:00

Sudan 1991, the lost boys

2010-07-08T16:29:00.006+03:00

Sudan 1991 - Refugees, near Pochala, southern Sudan

2010-07-08T16:20:00.000+03:00

Sudan 1991, the lost boys

2010-07-08T16:14:00.000+03:00

Sudan 1991

2010-07-08T16:10:00.000+03:00

Sudan 1991, SPLA soldier

2010-07-08T16:05:00.001+03:00

White horses, coffee and leopards at night

2010-07-01T09:48:00.006+03:00

The coffee on our farm is being picked right now, full fat red berries all over the coffee bushes and lots of coffee pickers (can’t help but wander off on a tangent for a moment thinking of Karen Blixen's words: “If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?).

Back to reality... So I’m reminded of helping a friend last year with a marketing campaign for her coffee farm tours. She and her husband have one of the oldest coffee farms in Tanzania, on the foothills of Mt Meru and originally planted in the 1920s by his grandfather. Generations have since worked the land; coffee pickers, whose grandparents planted the first crop, still reside and work there.

The farm is small, but very beautiful with large acacia albida trees and a stunning view of Meru when out of the clouds. There is even a resident leopard the locals say, they hear him at night from the worker ‘lines’ where they stay. A leopard sounds like a rusty old saw on a piece of wood; it’s low and resonant and scares the living daylights out of me. Another friend has one in her garden many a night. It comes through in the early hours when the local dogs have stopped barking and the nearby village has gone quiet. She knows it’s there as her dogs pile into the house through any opening they can find. Kali guard dogs yes, but no match for a leopard.

On this afternoon we’d walked up and down the lines of coffee, followed intently by growing numbers of giggling watoto (small children) who were utterly fascinated by two women and a large white horse. We got lots of shots of the coffee bushes in bloom before abandoning efforts and heading back to the house where we knew a delicious lunch had been set up on the lawn and the first bottle of bubbly had just been opened.

Mozambique

2010-06-30T15:29:00.002+03:00

Mozambique

2010-06-30T10:03:00.000+03:00

Mozambique

2010-06-30T10:00:00.000+03:00

Mozambique

2010-06-30T09:55:00.000+03:00

Mozambique

2010-06-30T09:50:00.000+03:00

Mozambique

2010-06-30T09:45:00.000+03:00

Safari state of mind

2010-05-02T12:36:00.012+03:00

I've been on safari, up in the far north of the Serengeti where the wild things are. Up there it's big wide rugged country, filled - at this time of year - with astonishingly large amounts of Gnu's. Wildebeests - wild bewildered beasts that follow each other in long lines just like lemmings. At this time of year, all the wageni, the visitors, come to see the spectacle called “The Crossing of the Mara River”. It comes accompanied by blood guts and gore, honestly it does...these poor wildees line up on the opposite banks of the river in greater and greater numbers; they bleat, the snort, they panic, they mill about in tighter and tighter packs, they wait, they watch, they spook and then they often turn back and run in the opposite direction. But sometimes one lone brave wildebeest will find a small piece of courage and take the plunge, literally. He'll leap into the croc-infested water, strewn with leg-breaking boulders, and the whole damned lot ups and follows.

I can’t watch it, this tourism spectacle. I did once, and I felt sick and sad for days afterwards. Hey I realise that Africa is what it is, and it’s raw out here, intense, things happen that aren’t necessarily pretty or kind, or even fair. But I would rather not watch as they make their very perilous and chaotic journey. So I don’t.

And so whilst it was going on I was lying on my back on the warm earth, some ways back from the crossing point, and I was looking up through the branches of the most beautiful tree with filigree branches and just the right amount of shade. And in my mind I wished all those poor bewildered beasts ‘God speed and travel safe’ and I breathed out happy thoughts and chuckled at last week’s adventure when a baby elephant trapped me in our camp’s library tent for two long, very long, hours. Charlie Sierra, as he’s known when there are guests in camp, and Cheeky S**t, when they’re not, has decided that our Chada Katavi camp is where he wants to be, and if you're in the tent well too bad, you're going to have to share it with him or wait it out. Which would be fine, if he didn't decide to get a little playful; big ears flapping and some trumpeting that sounds less like little elephant squeaks and more, well, serious these days.

Being on safari makes me feel good. It's that "Safari State of Mind" (there surely must be a song there). It's far from relaxing though, 5am wake up calls with steaming hot coffee, out watching the golden savanna grass start to light up thirty minutes later, slowly slowly; long days where you could go anywhere and see anything, returning dusty and tired with an immense thirst, sitting around the campfire with an ice-cold Tusker, supper and then falling into your cot bed too tired to even shower. Dreams accompanied by lion roars and the chomp chomp of fat buffalo who come to graze around your tent.

All this I never take for granted, even after many such trips. You can't, they are too special and remind you of what's really important in your life, at least it's the way it is for me. It's like you lose your peripheral vision, you have your eye on just the one focus and everything else beyond that is just incidental.

An adventure with lions

2010-05-01T10:17:00.005+03:00

So a while ago, I had to accompany a documentary film maker into the Selous, south-western Tanzania, famous for being Africa’s largest game reserve. This chap had never been to Africa before I was told, I was asked to help him to ‘acclimatize’ to all things wild and bush-like, and assist him with getting the shots he wanted. There is one thing I love more than anything, and that is to see Africa again afresh through the eyes of someone for whom it is all new. The excitement and adrenalin they feel is always catching.

We’d been watching this pride of lion for a while; they lay in the cool of the shade, one male and his seven lionesses. They didn’t look comfortable and their breathing was heavy but then so was ours. It was hot and humid, typical of the Selous. They’d killed something recently, there was a fetid, sickly-sweet scent of death hanging over the scene.

But they were oh so beautiful. Intense eyes, ‘tiger tiger burning bright’. They were relaxed but they missed nothing; and they felt very very close.

It all changed very suddenly, very quickly. On our right, closing in fast, came a large herd of elephants, mothers and babies. They were cautious, watching everything, protective of their young. At first we blocked their vision – man always gets in the way of nature – but then the elephants spotted this languorous herd of felines. They were not taking any chances as in their midst was a week-old baby, small and pink and very vulnerable. One of the young bulls charged right into the midst of the lion pride, trumpeting loudly, kicking up dust, noise, commotion; the lions scattered, in every direction possible, no match for this angry herd. We were in an open game drive vehicle, felt very small, felt very ‘out there’. Turned to each other afterwards…my god have you seen that before…(slightly hysterical laughter), me no…I’ve never been that close when something like that happens, not in all my years here, I thought they were going to jump right into the car with us. Driving back to the lodge seemed somewhat sedentary after that. The film maker certainly got his footage.

2010-01-01T16:51:00.005+03:00

I've been living in Africa for over 17 years (originally from the UK). I was travelling the world, and somehow was never able to leave this continent. It's a photographer's dream, on a daily basis...more beauty than you've ever seen and yet with that comes as much harshness; both take your breath away in equal measure.

After spending 9 years in the company of elephants in Botswana, I moved up to Tanzania, and now live on a coffee farm in the foothills of Kilimanjaro.

Life before Africa? - best summed up HERE and in many ways, HERE