I'm back from Africa! Specifically Nairobi in Kenya, and then Zanzibar (island), Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Crater Conservation area in Tanzania. It was definitely a once in a lifetime experience (altho pretty sure I'll be back again very soon). I got to see the Big 5 (yay!), and tons and tons of wildlife that roams the vast African safari. I did a few game drives in a safari vehicle where the top can be taken off and you can stick your head up to get a panorama view of the plains at any given time. Few nights of camping with a group of people, they were young and fun and great to be with. We had campfires, stargazing, great African local foods, tons and tons of booths selling local crafts in tiny houses made with mud. We had even visited a local Masai Village where the local people danced for us and gave us detailed introduction to their village, showed us their kids and kindergarden, how they build their houses...etc. It was just awesome.

For the 2nd part of the trip, I stopped by Amsterdam/Rotterdam (Netherlands), Cologne (Germany), Brussels (Belgium), and a couple other smaller towns for a 5 day European trip. God it was COLDDDD, and one night there was a snowstorm which made it really scary to drive. Still it was a great introduction to Europe and I got to see quite a few awesome churches and castles.

And yes I got my new camera (Olympus E-5) the day before I left at 8pm! Thank God. I quickly went through the user manual and packed it up, and I thought that it was the best day of the year.

That was the happy part. The sad part was that I broke my most used lens (12-60mm) the FIRST DAY I was there! I accidentally dropped the camera and the lens to the ground when I was lugging them around at the Kenya airport (it was in a camera bag but it didn't help :/ ), and the metal bracket at the bottom of the lens was bent due to the force. At first the autofocus completely failed. While feeling devastated, I took a tiny pair of scissors and slowly unscrewed the tiny screws on the brackets, took the metal ring out, and attemped to use the pair of piers in my multipurpose toolset to bend the ring back to its original form. After 2 hours of hard work (in front of a small lamp in a dark hostel room) I managed to fix 80% of it. The lens started to focus again from 18mm to 60mm, however it still wouldnt focus in the 12mm to 18mm range, which really sucked as that's range I used the most for wide angle/landscape shots. It was devastating, really, and I was holding my tears. For the entire duration of the trip I had to use F22 (smallest aperture) to do all the wide angle shots, despite the softness of the image at such an extreme aperture, and of course it worked only when there was plenty of light. Under F22 the images turned out to be okay, still a little blurry, but at least it sort of worked.

Anyway, here's a shot of an orphan baby elephant. It was taken at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Nairobi/Kenya, where orphaned elephants that lost their parents or injured are rescued and being taken care of. There were about 20 baby elephants at the show, they were really playful and cute, cuddling each other, having fun in the mud pool, and visitors can pet them as they get closer. More images to come, of course.

turn down your volume :)

* to see these videos better (better = bigger in this case ;) .. will your computer let you go to "view", then click "zoom in" a few times ??

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dear heartfriends,
early this morning was all set to come to your streams for the whole day! (so happy! :)) .. after sorting out these videos & images to do a post of several ~ because we have been in a 3-day thunder-lightning rainstorm.. so i haven't been able to be online
then...
something astonishing .. and heart-stopping .. happened with baby spirit... *
(everything is okay, i hope, now ;)

so all these hours later ~ am going to do 6 posts plus some images within because... if i don't do it now they will likely never get posted ;)
these 6 posts are, flickr-wise, in reverse chronological order

will be off to see You on your streams as soon as i feed bruno (am babysitting :) and catch my breath.. even though most of you are probably about to head for bed or are already there... :*



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may 31st 11:43 a.m.


be sure to see, at the end of the video, the 3 fairy terns on the left side soaring through the sky ~*~
... and the heartclouds :)

? a gathering of family and friends for baby spirit ?

this is how its been all day every day since babyheart was injured! .. when fairy terns from all over suddenly just appeared..... out of the blue ~*~
(have written about this heart-inspiring phenomenon in prior images :*)

yesterday when a dear friend met here on flickr called to see how babita is doing - since i have not been able to post/be on flickr for the last 3 days due to the near-constant lightning - she said she was surprised at the ?sound! of the gentle fairy terns .. as, while we talked, they were coming & going like this

yes :) ... when they're excited, its much like a parrot's

when just 1 spirit bird is calling to another .. like a parent bringing food ... (how do they do that with fish in their beaks?! :*) ... its a wonderful, comforting, welcoming sound .. different than this, it sounds like the soft, shuffling of a piglet snorkeling in a wonderland of food & dirt ;)

when a dozen are excitedly flying around, it is loud squawking ...all day this way, its a bit much! especially for our lightbulb, who sooo needs rest..
(so i've asked them nicely to chill out a bit ;)

yet!

have found that if i just breathe ... the sound seems to be a wonderfully astringent karma-cleanser :))
and when they leave for a few minutes between gatherings like this, i feel like i've just been swimming beneath a waterfall ~~~ *



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