Our surroundings...

Flowers gallore. There are many beautiful flowers here, similar in type/variety/color to Hawaii. Although, during dry season (as it was when I was last here in December), they're not nearly so abundant.


Now THAT'S a grasshopper. Consider this, those are 12 inch tiles he's sittin' on. Lizards and geckos also are abundant...we particularly like the geckos...cool looking reptiles that can move up walls & across ceilings effortlessly...and they eat the bugs! There have actually been very few bugs, compared to what we were expecting...of course, it's not rainy or hot season right now, so we'll see.

Do you like sunflowers? How about 12-15 foot sunflowers! They're enormous, and they're everywhere. Locals grow them and make sunflower oil from them, but mostly just for their own personal use. The sunflowers line the corn fields. There is tons of corn here, but unlike America they don't harvest it until it is 100% brown & dead-looking (yes, the corn has become rock hard by this point, worthless for eating off the cob). They use the corn to make corn flour, with which they make Ugali...a staple diet for most locals. The closest thing we could compare it to is a 'tacky/sticky' version of cream of wheat...they roll it into balls & dip it into the 'sauce of the day.' The other staple diets include rice and beans...not that different from Cindy & I's diet back home, but I think Wes (Herbert) is going to go nuts if he eats it one more time.

'Climb me...climb me...climb me' it beckons incessantly. Mt. Kilimanjaro, the rooftop of Africa. The highest point in Africa, nearly 20,000 ft. Mile high city ain't got nothin' on this. Dave plans to climb Kili while we're hear, but is waiting for better weather ('winter' here actually means very few clear, sunny days...it is cloudy often, of course, the sun usually pops through at some point everyday). Thanks to the tourist industry, climbing Kili runs a cool $1,000 U.S...sooooo, Dave will probably only be climbing it once while hear. (Of course, if you were born in Tanzania, then it costs a whoppin' 35,000 tsh - tanzanian shillings - to climb...the equivalent of $30 U.S...amazingly, very few locals have climbed or have any desire to climb Kili...such is life, we take for granted what is out our backdoor.)