Hello my dears! It's been so so so long since I've been able to touch a keyboard but now I have some limited daily access so that's lovely! As my dear mother intimated, life has been full of adventures over the last few weeks. So much like my journaling I have fallen behind and it is so difficult to catch up and keep current at the same time. SO I will attempt to bring everything up to date in the next few days with key anecdotes and then finally maybe I can be on top of things again! Ah well, that is the way life is in Tanzania. :)
So my first and perhaps favorite story from my last few weeks at Lazy involves critters, as usual. It was one particularly hectic day and at last I'd retired to my banda. I should preface by saying that there are TONS of mosquitos on the island and where there are "mozzies" there are bats. I should also say that I rather like bats. I scream, naturally, when startled but I find them to be interesting and "so-ugly-they're-kind-of cute". Anyway, again as is so often the case in my stories, (and why is that?) I was in the bathroom having just stepped out of the shower and into my pajamas. I had my hair wrapped up in a blue tower of a bath towel and was fiddling around at the sink when I saw in the mirror a blurry shap fly at me. A soft flapping and fluttering down my back produced a gentle screaming squeal and I dropped flat to the bathroom floor expecting to see a large moth or something of the sort. Tentatively I looked up. There clinging contentedly to my wicker lamp shade was a large eared little bat. Apparently I had been his first choice for a land spot and having behaved so abominably and uncooperatively he had resorted to hanging from the light shade. So, seeing as though I wasn't really confidant in said bat's navigation abilities I crawled/scuttled out of the bathroom and into the bedroom. I spent the rest of the night making hurried and low to the ground trip to the bathroom to brush teeth etc. and there the bat remained until the wee hours of the morning. When I finally got up in the morning the bat was gone at last and my real disappointment was that I hadn't been able to document the situation with a photo. I needn't have worried. The bat was back again the next night, preceded by a tailess gecko dropping onto the canopy of my bed with an alarming plop. So another night of nervous bathroom behavior ensued. Finally as I settled into sleep around 5:30 AM Mino (the puppy) decided it was time for someone to play with him and ran up and down the beach barking his loudest. This was too much. After 15 minutes and waiting for him to shut up, I wrapped myself in various pieces of cloth and flew wild haired down to the beach to scream at him. There I met Lara also in relative undress attempting to engage him in other pursuits besides adding to the early morning cacophany of noise. The solution reached was that the night watchman were kept on an extra hour in the morning solely to play with the puppy... Another morning I awoke to find three of the more feral cats running circles around the roof of my room--racing as if their lives depended on it. This accompanied with the patter patter thwump slide or scratching noise of the other cats attempting to climb into the banda completed the chaos. It seems to me lucky that I was ever able to sleep through the night. Between cats, dogs, bats, lizards, mozzies, bush babies, rats squealing, guinea fowl, and whatever else might turn up sleeping or trying to do so was always a great adventure!
So more soon, and more entertaining I hope. I am loving it up here in Mufindi with the matri/patriarch of the Fox family (the family that owns the lodges where I've been working). Mufindi is up in the highlands of Tanzania and is a working farm, tea/coffee plantation, and guest lodge. It's absolutely lovely and actually COLD at night, like a Minnesota fall, which is just exactly what I needed to clear my head. They are hysterical and wonderful people, two English expats in their late 60's, and absolutely brimming with vim and vigor. There are no guests right now and as the only real human entertainment I am being run rather ragged actually, especially after life on the sweltering beach. More that later! Suffice it to say that I am really happy up here and can't wait to catch up on my blogging and emails, which means I can't wait to hear more from all of you! Sending you all my love!
Sara
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