The wide waters of the Chobe River form the northern boundary of the national park of the same name. They divide Botswana from its neighbour Namibia to the north. But of course the wildlife that teems on its shores, in its waters and in the skies above knows no national borders. And nor does the sun, which sets and rises on all.
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I love to travel and see other lands; I love to spend time in the country, time by the sea, time among mountains or deserts. But I am a city girl. I was born in London and this is where I belong.
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The first computer my husband and I bought had a memory of around 500 MB. The second seemed a huge advancement at a whole gigabyte! Today I have 32 GB in my phone, i.e. 64 times as much, and 64 GB (128 times as much) in the memory cards I use in my cameras. And yet that first computer of ours was of course a massive advance on the earliest computers.
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Wow, so Lisa has entrusted me as guest host for this week’s Bird Weekly Challenge! It’s an honour, but also a somewhat daunting task. Unlike Lisa I’m no expert bird-watcher; I just like seeing them and trying to photograph them. And while I like to know the name of a species, the main interest for me is the challenge of trying to photograph something so elusive, so constantly mobile, as many birds are.
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How many of you have had to learn a poem by heart as a child? It’s strange that something that was perhaps a chore at the time can become a fond memory, especially if we grow to love the poem. One of the most often learned English poems might just be Edward Thomas’s Adlestrop, first published in 1917. The poem describes an uneventful journey Thomas took on 23 June 1914 on an Oxford to Worcester express.
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As we approached Santa Rosa on Interstate 40 the heavens opened and for about ten minutes we drove through a downpour so heavy that it was almost impossible to see the road or any other vehicle on it – scary stuff. Maybe the elements were finding a way to punish the road that almost destroyed one of the most iconic of all American cultural icons, Route 66.
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The fashion editor Diana Vreeland once said, ‘Pink is the navy blue of India’ and in Rajasthan I certainly saw why she would say that. Everywhere we went the women were dressed in the most gorgeous shades of that colour. Among all the wonderful colours that I remember from our time there, it is pink – a shocking pink – that stands out.
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Owls are hunters, birds of prey. And like all birds of prey they pursue other animals for food, something that not everyone is comfortable with. But they are also very beautiful, with delicate markings on their feathers – spots and stripes that frame their faces, adorn their wings and bodies. They are among my favourite birds.
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There is indeed something particularly awe-inspiring about coming across an oasis in a barren landscape. The contrast between lush greenery and bare rock or soil can be so striking. Wadi Bani Khalid is one of the best-known and most accessible of Oman’s wadis. But the small amount of development here has been done sensitively and it doesn’t detract from the visual impact of deep green waters, lush date plantations and stark mountains all around.
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As much as the sights we see, it is the people we meet who make travel so rewarding and so memorable. Whether close to home or on the other side of the world, an interesting encounter can really bring a place to life. A few years ago we had just such an encounter in Seaton Sluice, a coastal village north of Newcastle in north east England.
