Fun in the sun

28/03/08
A rest day today, people have largely done nothing today but worked on their tans. I have potted in the kitchen – a great culinary masterpiece was produced – Fish and chips from basic ingredients. How many fish and chip shops in the UK are likely to serve Nile Perch in bread crumbs and local herbs with chips made of red sweet potatoes? I’m pleased to report that the others thought it was quite a good meal as well – for later we have a dish, the complexity of its production can barely be put into words. Due to the complete inadequacy of the English language to verbalise the advanced and bizarre culinary skills used – skills which incidentally I had to beg for tutelage in from a local shamen – I will merely provide you with the dishes local name and let you marvel in your own time – Raspberry Jelly!

While it has broadly been a rest day today, that is not particularly my sort of thing, thus i decided to go for an explore – stupidly wearing my Crocs. I had walked maybe 30 paces from the house when a 4cm thorn pieced through the flimsy rubber sole and buried itself into my foot. Suffice to say I was pleased to be so close to our villa, and a bottle of antiseptic spray – my foot now an attractive iodine golden yellow I’m hoping it won’t drop off until i have completed my ascent of Mt. Meru next weekend, and Mt Kilimanjaro the following weekend.

There is a plan tomorrow to travel to the East, to a Lake Daluti which is situated a 3km south of my little hospital out in the sticks. We have been suggested to go there because of the distance it is from the usual tourist haunts and is thus still a fairly pristine lake. Certainly the reports from others who have undertaken the trek down to the lake have returned with stories of giant eels, and fish in the lake which can be seen from the canoes which you can pilot across the lakes depths. Certainly it will be an interesting experience to see Africa where the tourists are not prevalent, for to some degree it has felt that a lot of the things we have seen have been to a large degree “put on” for the benefit of the white man

I’ll comment about it later