TRAVELOGUERESS

Thursday 25 December 2008 Today is our first Bangladeshi wedding anniversary with F. who was the first one to congratulate. He beat me to it :-) [...] At 7 AM, we went for our walking safari. It lasted for about 2 hours. In addition to our guide David, another guide with a weapon also accompanied us. Whilst walking, we saw gazelles, topes, buffalos and jackals. We also saw an impala skeleton hanging down from the branch of a tree. Clearly, it has been hunted by a leopard,

Wednesday, 24 December 2008 Tomorrow will be our first Bangladeshi wedding anniversary with F.! Nights and early morning hours are very cold in Masai Mara! One needs to dress in layers. Camp managers put hot water bags in our beds to keep us warm. Last night, the leopard came by our tent again. She got on the chair in our veranda, then pulled her hunt to the bush next to our tent and ate it including the bones. From time to time, she roared. In the morning, we saw two i

Tuesday, 23 December 2008 Another eventful day! We started our safari (in Swahili it means "journey") at 6:30 in the morning. A leopard pulled a deer it had hunted right next to our tent and ate it. It was right next to us. We could hear the sounds it was making while eating. We were told that our camp was visited by elephants at dawn. During safari, we do not need play hide and seek with the animals here like in Shampole. Wherever you turn your head in Masai Mara, you ca

Sunday 21 December 2008 This morning, after watching the sunrise at 6 AM and sipping tea at 6:30, we started our safari. In the morning chill, mountains by the clear valley, trees, bushes and sky were even more beautiful. The first animal we saw today was a herd of buffalos. Their horns are really big and scary. They are the second most dangerous animals in Africa after lions. Then we saw fox with bat ears, colourful and gorgeous Kingfisher bird and other various types of

Saturday 20 December 2008 I could say that our safari this afternoon was unsuccessful. When the American gay couple who is staying at the same lodge as us told us that they saw chitas in their morning safari, we got quite excited. So today, we looked for chitas and leopards but found no sign. Of course, we saw incredibly beautiful and ugly birds whose names I can't even remember. But the most interesting things we saw today were the wild boar and her incredibly cute and tiny

Friday, 19 December 2008 It was an incredible night's sleep. I slept better than I ever slept in years and this was among the lions roaring, monkeys screaming, bats flapping their wings, owl sounds etc. At first, I was a bit taken by lions' roaring but later I got used to it and had a very comfortable and good sleep. As the sun was rising, F. woke me up so that I could watch the colours of the sky turning from red to pink to yellow. We could watch the dawn right in front of

Thursday 18 December 2008 F. and I are right now in the seating area next to the runway in Nairobi's Wilson Airport, waiting for our Yellow Wings Airlines propeller plane to fly to Shampole at the border with Tanzania. The weather is fantastic. Even though it is partly cloudy, it is very comfortable. Sun comes out from time to time and it is comfortable with just a t-shirt in December! Nairobi is very green. Even though not as green as Bangladesh, the buildings, the order o

Now I start the third phase of my blog. I will share with you snippets from the diaries I have written during my travels (I will not share their entirety and my inner world). Here we go... Cairo 10 March 2007 I am here again after 12 years. I never thought that I could come back. Though it is strange. Because for years, precisely for 7 years, the dream of being able to come back here kept me going. Then it all ended. [...]My willingness to come back here also ended. But