July

Greetings from Nkoamansa, Tanzania.

It has been a tough couple of months, the wet season was truncated but was pretty miserable, wet and cold. The ground is already dry and it looks like a lean year for water.

June/July turned very cold in the night and morning exacerbated by the high altitude and cloud preventing the sun from appearing, quite often all day. If you wanted to get warm down to the plains we would go. Difficult to comprehend we are just over three degrees south of the equator.

Life became a bit more manageable and exciting a couple of weeks ago with a friend renting their car to me for 3 months. The other Friday was a national government holiday so after lunch we thought, let's go for a drive, some hours later we arrived in Karatu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karatu_District), not as tourists but the brother of a friend lives there.

Most of this blog will be told through images, I will endeavour to fill in as much detail as I can.

There are stones, so enjoy bargaining with the Maasai in Arusha, baboons, blossoms, mountains, washing, examples of learning traditional beading and anything else I may have missed like moving house in a public bus and how mechanics organise to repair ones car, There is some new work from the studio and Lake Manyara. I have a rather large collection of kitenge, kanga, java and shuka fabric, one of the images is a stall where I purchased more, the colours are intoxicating.