Termite time

When the rains come they often bring different flying insects who are roused from the ground by the rain drops. Or something like that. 

This weekend, just in case mopping up puddles of rain water wasn't enough fun, I was given winged termites to deal with as well. 

My kitchen is technically outside, separated from my living area by a covered corridor. The corridor has a door at each end, one of which is usually open all the time to give some air and ventilation. Inside the corridor are fluorescent lights which, this weekend, provided a landing beacon for every winged termite in Abuja. 

I was happily cooking on Saturday night when I realised what was happening. The corridor outside was starting to emit a strange buzzing sound, and my kitchen was slowly filling up with winged termites. I stepped into the corridor to meet a little termite party, so I quickly went back in to the kitchen and wedged the door so that it was almost closed (I didn't want a repeat of the locked in my kitchen incident!). 

I finished cooking and just ignored the termites, occasionally running the gauntlet between my kitchen and my house, taking care to avoid adding extra protein to my chilli-con-carne and rice, gin and tonic or strawberry jelly. Although I have been told that fried termites are delicious, I didn't fancy adding live ones to my meal, and didn't thing they would be a good mix with jelly. It did, however, prompt me to re-read a blog post I remembered from my favourite Nigerian food blog, Dobby's Signature. In this post she describes the process of collecting and frying termites - and why you would want to do such a thing. Apparently they are highly nutritious (receiving the best attention from the colony to prepare them for their mating journey later in life). As interesting as this is, I'm not too sure how I would feel about actually eating them. 

Just a few of the termites - this was at the early stage

Anyway, the next morning I was met with termite chaos in the corridor - the termites had shed their wings (which were now blowing around like confetti) and I had piles of termites everywhere, with break away groups doing little mating dances at various points up and down the corridor.  

My first idea was to pin open the doors at each end of the corridor and let the wind blow the termites away... but this only worked to a limited extent and I resigned myself to sweeping the piles of wings and termites out with my broom. It felt like some sort of weird bush-tucker trial in 'I'm a celebrity get me out of here'. 

The lizards were pretty happy with me though! The lizard in the first pic is one of the 'mint choc chip' lizards... they have a brown body and a mint green head with brown dots which makes me think of ice-cream. The lizard below is striped black and white with an electric blue shiny tail. The pictures don't really do them justice, but both are very beautiful. 

Last night I learned my lesson and made sure both doors to the corridor were closed before turning the lights on! 

East Africa part 2

After two flights (Dar to Mwanza, Mwanza to Bukoba) and an hour and a half drive into the hills we finally reached our destination - Karagwe, a lovely village close to the border with Uganda and Rwanda. 

Our hotel was quite nice (although played a lot of Nigerian music with a heavy hand on the bass, which made me feel quite at home but it drove Ken mad!) The views from the hotel were amazing. 

Flying over Lake Victoria
as the sun rose

The guest house

The surrounding hills

There's too much to write about in terms of the site visits that we made (and I have to write about that for my reports so I will skip for the blog!) but it was great to meet loads of coffee farmers who are benefiting from my project. And I got to learn a lot about coffee, from the field, to the processing factory, to taking part in a coffee tasting session with local organically grown Arabica coffee roasted right in front of me. 

A farmer gave me a bag of physalis - the
sweetest I have ever tasted

I loved this little house made of earth and straw

I was really pleased with some of the photos I took, capturing the local coffee producers. 

The coffee tasting session was great fun - lots of schlurping and spitting, which I found very hard to do because I kept laughing!

Schlurp...

...and spit it back out!

The journey home was looooong, but the trip was great! Here are a few shots of the tiny airport I flew out of. 

The waiting area

 

Luggage being taken to the plane!

Tiny airport

Oh, and my journey back via Nairobi was another mini adventure, as the 'hotel' I had been booked in to turned out to be a shared apartment! The other person staying there was just as surprised as I was as he thought he had the place to himself for the week! I was only staying there a few hours (arrived at 6pm and had to leave at 3am for my flight) and the guy was quite friendly so I just made the best of it, but it could have been a very uncomfortable night if he had been a weirdo! I should point out I did have my own room and bathroom, but it was still quite an odd experience! I consoled myself with cake.

 

East African Adventures part 1

It has been a while since my last post - things have been crazy busy! We have reached the end of the first year with my project and, as I am responsible for putting all our year end reports together, I have had a lot of work to do. 

I am now back in Nigeria after a trip to Kenya and Tanzania. For the first week in Nairobi I was attending a workshop, sort of related to my project but focusing on our future approach to secure livelihoods for the whole organisation. The hotel was lovely, it was great to meet people I have been working with remotely, and it was nice to be a participant in something rather than one of the organisers / presenters. We didn't get much 'down time' or time outside of the hotel, but I did get to have a couple of nice meals out in the city, and I went to a Masai Market on the final day. A highlight of one of the evening meals was seeing President Kenyatta at the restaurant! And a highlight of the hotel was that they had a gym! A real life gym with modern exercise equipment! I was very excited and managed to go three times in 6 days - which helped balance the effects of the hotel buffet table.

CHEESE! (Thankful for the gym!)

Too busy to try the pool unfortunately

Finally got some Ethiopian food!

Sampling the local beer

Out for nyama choma (grilled meat)

On Saturday Ken and I were travelling to Tanzania, so we left the hotel towards the airport earlier than planned and called into a hotel that had been recommended. It was a new hotel which had a nice restaurant looking out over a part of the national park, and sometimes animals can be spotted (Zebras, giraffes etc). We didn't see anything but birds and a deer, but we had a glass of wine and a nice sandwich. 

Check out the arrowroot crisp (the speckled one) - I wasn't a fan of boiled
arrowroot but the deep-fried crisp version was quite nice!

On arrival at the airport at 4pm we found that we had been bumped from our 7pm flight on to the 11pm flight which was a real pain. Not only did it mean hours of airport time, it meant that we would land in Dar Es Salaam at 1am and then have to be back at the airport for 4am for our next flight - not really enough time to get to the hotel and have any decent rest. He offered us refreshment vouchers but I was in no mood for a cheese sandwich and bottle of water! I had the bright idea instead to ask if there was a lounge we could wait in, and he obliged by putting us in the business class lounge. We had wifi, comfy seats, and free access to food, coffee, and a lot of alcohol! I settled in to a bottle of Gordon's gin, and my colleague hit the red wine, and the time just flew by! 

 
 

As predicted, we were in for a pretty rough night once we landed in Dar. I had tried to contact the hotel to warn of our late arrival with no luck. So we went to the hotel anyway, which turned out to be in a terrible part of town, only to find that they had no record of our booking or pre-payment. So we headed to a little motel near the airport, had less than two hours sleep and then headed back to get our little flight up to north west Tanzania. It was a gruelling journey, but the time in Tanzania was well worth it....