Part two of our collection of video postcards from Jangano... southwards from the Sahara....
12 May 2009: Slippin' and Slidin' down the West of Tanzania
06 May 2009: The Hope Centre Burundi It is a measure of how astonishing these guys are that after a mere five minute conversation they invited us to come and camp out on the lawn of their house in Bujumbura! We went up to the orphanage building site with them, and saw the really impressive work they are doing there. Thanks, Val and Charles, and Samuel, Matthew and John, for tremendous hospitality and great inspiration. 02 May 2009: Gorillas in Rwanda! Amazing! Mands, Max and Robert were able to track a family of mountain gorillas on the slopes of a volcano in Rwanda this week - one of the most extraordinary wildlife encounters we have ever had. We walked a long hour and a half up the side of a volcano in the Parc National des Volcans, north of Ruhengeri, with an excellent guide from the Rwanda national parks service, and found the Amahoro group, with their mighty 200 kg silverback and his extended family. We watched them for an hour - an extraordinary privilege. 20 April 2009: Another day, another border... A video postcard of a fairly typical day on the road for the Jangano team - a long loop around mount Elgon, crossing the border from Kenya to Uganda at the sparsely used Suam River crossing, and then winding over the north side of Elgon down to Sipi Falls. Bad roads, long borders, loads of fun! 25 April 2009: Colobus camp We are staying at the delightful Nkuruba camp in the forest above a small crater lake south of Fort Portal in western Uganda. Yesterday, as we tidied and serviced the cars, read, and lounged about, a troop of Colobus monkeys leapt and careered through the camp site, delighting us with their antics. 21 April 2009: Rafting the Nile Max and Jake decided that the best way to say goodbye to the Nile after our travels along, across and beside it over the past four months would be to raft the rapids at the source of the river. So we parked up with Nile River Explorers at Jinja, in Uganda, on the edge of Lake Victoria, and the boys took off down the river on a red bathtub. As you can see, they had a blast! 2 April 2009: Luggaring About
31 March 2009: Mandy's Desert Salon There are many strange and extraordinary phenomena in the desert. Mirages, lost oases... and the almost mythical "Mandy's Desert Salon", the Holy Grail of desert adventurers in need of a reasonably priced wash and trim. We were lucky enough to come across this staple of desert mythology in Kalacha Oasis, on the edge of the Chalbi Desert, in Northern Kenya. Mandy appeared out of the sand, clad in shocking pink, cut, trimmed, joked and passed comment on our hair -or lack of - and then vanished into the dunes. 02 April 2009: The Volcano - our trusty Kelly Kettle One of our favourite bits of kit on the Jangano2009 expedition is our Kelly Kettle, a wonderful aluminium water heater that uses a fire in a cone inside a water jacket to heat water. It is incredibly efficient - a handful of sticks will bring almost two litres of water to the boil in a few minutes. We burn "donkey nuts" - little dried donkey dung - camel and cow pooh, and pretty much anything combustible. Alexander explains how it works for Jangano Broadcasting. Late Feb-Early March 2009: Rendevous with the Long Range Desert Group We followed a GPS transect out into the Western Desert, looking for a Long Range Desert Group truck abandoned in the dunes in 1942. The LRDG were a unit of the British Army in the Desert war that operated behind enemy lines on reconnaisance and sabotage missions. We spent three days deep in the desert, out towards the Libyan border, in the trackless wastes of the Great Sand Sea. 24th Feb 2009: Riding the Great Sand Sea An impression of our days of desert driving in the western desert. A very special time for us all. |
