All posts filed under: Travel

The Armchair Safari

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Since I was a lone girl child, my father and I have been talkers. We don’t talk to other people much, but we talk to each other. About other people. But also about big ideas. Philosophy. Politics. Plants. Every and anything. It has been a way of working through the commodious complexity of daily life. A method for understanding ourselves as much as the world outside of our small sphere. These days, when I return from assignments out in the bush, we sit across from each other on big leather couches in the family lounge, my mother beside us, completing our sphere. And we talk. We drink tea and we talk. About everything from poached eggs to poaching. About the warthogs I met. “Do you think I could keep one in my flat? They’re just like fat puppies.” About the lions. “You were right, Dad. I’m a wimp.” About the colours, the smells, the sounds of safari. The talking can go on for days, as new memories return. Like a sort of Armchair Safari. In a way, this blog at Relais & Châteaux …

Tanzania’s Best Kept Secret

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The Other Pemba Tamlin Wightman discovers there’s more to this tiny Indian Ocean island off Tanzania than diving. It started with a touch. The touch of a child’s soft, plump hand in mine. So timid that it didn’t linger long and was quickly retrieved by its owner. All around kids were screaming at me like banshees. ‘Mzungu! Mzungu!’ White person! The crowd of about 20 little mites had chased after me as I passed through their village, Kijijini, on Pemba Island, named Jazirat al- Khadhra, the Green Island, by an Arab geographer. Some kiddies were naked, some just pulling on their dresses or shorts after enjoying the beginning of the monsoon rains. Once one of them had felt the strange pale skin, all wanted a turn. If you let it, Pemba Island will touch you in many ways. It’s hillier and more lush than neighbouring Unguja (known incorrectly as Zanzibar), with which it makes up the Zanzibar Archipelago within the union of Tanzania. Some say it’s Tanzania’s best-kept secret. Tourists of the more usual sort …

An Island Safari

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Tamlin Wightman | Sunday Times – read it here In search of more than the usual catamaran and snorkelling adventures of Mauritius, Tamlin Wightman discovered a taste of Africa in the Casela Nature and Leisure Park, where she met some handsome beasts of the furry kind. He was a handsome figure: striking light brown eyes with a hint of kohl eyeliner (a metro-sexual), thick hair you could grab onto, a chiselled jaw, an assertive upward tilt of the head. He had all the reason in the world to be assertive – after all, he’s Africa’s largest carnivore. It didn’t sound like a very good idea: walking with lions (with nothing but sticks for defence). Lions develop their hunting instincts at around three years of age and here, before me, stood two three-year-olds with the sort of teeth I’d seen cause serious damage on Attenborough’s documentaries. But I was there to walk with the big cats and walk I was going to do. We were at the Casela Nature and Leisure Park in Mauritius. It’s not what …