THE VOYAGER ZIWANI

Today i do an out of the norm post because we have been doing some serious posts lately , its birthday month for us so am allowed to deviate a bit. You know those pamphlets they hand you, tour operators and promoters, when at an exhibition or a fair, with descriptions and pictures of various places you could visit and the various attractions they have and you're unimpressed? Well a few weeks ago I was handed one for a little place at the edge of the Tsavo West National park, The Voyager Ziwani. Apart from the pictures of the “spacious tents that offer the classic ambiance of a traditional African camping safari” the rest looked ordinary until we actually arrived to this private sanctuary.

This was part of the BAKE (Bloggers Association of Kenya) award prizes that this and fellow winning blogs from the food category (pikachakula.com) Photography (MutuaMatheka.co.ke) and the travel category (kenyataalii.com) were awarded in collaboration with Uniglobe Northline Travel  and Heritage Hotels East-Africa who sponsored the trip.  

What i actually saw was what was in the pamphlet .....and then some!!! Ziwani was a marvelous place. The first thing I noticed on arrival was that being close to the Tanzania border there was little or no coverage at all but with some networks it was possible to roam. You could simply disappear into nature when here. The tents were fully furnished with an en suite bathroom and tiled floors all this without losing the camping tent touch.  But what impressed me the most were the sunsets. The sun sets right behind Mt. Kilimanjaro and with the dining area and fire place overlooking the Ziwa Dam the evening reflection of sundown rays was quite the view!

Sunset that disappears behind Mt Kilimanjaro

Next in the line of impressive was Lake Chala. This small caldera lake (or Crater Lake as some call it) is right at the boundary of Kenya and Tanzania and you could even see the Tanzanian side from the Kenyan side we stood. The view from the top was to behold but the journey to the bottom was a bit rough but our guide took us to the bottom safely.

L. Chala from the top

The lake, as I was informed by one of the locals had no inlet but had an outlet underground. I Wasn't sure but I will research and get some answers to where it gets its waters from. The blue waters were unpolluted and two of us decided to have a dip.

Found this kid fishing by the shore and just so you know i caught my first fish that day. proud moments!!

Swimming was not one of my favorite activities so I let it pass but I made it a challenge  to learn how to swim.

Before we went to Chala we passed through a farm, Gicheha farm.

an antique plough that was still in use

 Impressive were their irrigation techniques not only because of the scale of their operations but also in the simplicity in their methods. They grew maize and tangerines in large scale while also experimenting with Yellow Passions and Bananas.

We left with a bag-full of tangerines each - very sweet those! (now a funny fact about some of the goats they keep there. The males they use for mating do so in the ratio of one goat for every hundred females -no Viagra no nothing!)

Also included was a visit to the World War 2 battle fields and  the Sniper tree- sad story to it though…

the mkamba in him made one M. Matheka climb the tree looking for honey 

From the night game drives

to the game walks,to those Barbecue dinners and sunrise breakfasts

passing though the crystal clear waters at the Mzima springs.

on their way to Mombasa

water so clear you could see those little blue fishes

about the Mzima springs for those who don't know 

Forget the coast December holidays and TEMBEA KENYA!!! 

PEACE OUT!!

sorry for the bad quality pictures but see more crystal clear ones of both Gicheha farm and Ziwani from the links below
http://www.flickr.com/photos/38577759@N06/sets/72157627501124392/ (Gicheha farm)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/38577759@N06/sets/72157618475288970/ ( Voyager Ziwani)
Also see more pictures here (via @potentash) 

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OLDEST DINOSAUR FOSSIL WAS FOUND IN TANZANIA

From Science Mag

A team of paleontologists thinks it may have identified the earliest known dinosaur—a creature no bigger than a Labrador retriever that lived about 243 million years ago. That's at least 10 million years earlier than the oldest known dinos and could change researchers' views of how they evolved. But some scientists, including the study's authors, caution that the fossils could instead represent a close dino relative.

Tracing back the earliest dinosaurs has not been easy. Fossils that old tend to be fragmentary, and researchers don't always agree about their evolutionary pedigree. Paleontologists do agree, however, that pint-sized specimens found in Argentina and dated to 230 million years ago—with names like Eoraptor and Eodromaeus—are true dinosaurs. And in 2010, a team led by Sterling Nesbitt, a paleontologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, reported in Nature the discovery of a close dinosaur relative in Tanzania's Manda Beds, a geological formation dated to between about 242 million and 245 million years ago. That specimen, called Asilisaurus, is not a dinosaur, but belongs to a so-called "sister taxon"—that is, the closest it can be to a dinosaur without actually being one.

That made Nesbitt and his colleagues take a closer look at what else has been found in the Manda Beds. One set of fossils, including an arm bone and several vertebrae, had been discovered in the 1930s and studied for decades by Alan Charig, a famed paleontologist at London's Natural History Museum. Before he died in 1997, Charig named the specimens Nyasasaurus, but he never published his conclusions about whether it was a dinosaur.

For the new study, which also includes Nyasasaurus fossils housed in the South African Museum in Cape Town, Nesbitt's team carried out a systematic comparison of the bones with those of other dinosaurs and their relatives. The researchers, who report their findings today in Biology Letters, find a number of features characteristic of true dinos. For example, Nyasasaurus has a broad crest of bone along the edge of its upper arm, to which the animal's chest muscles would have attached; this crest appears to extend more than 30% of the bone's length, a telltale dino feature. Nyasasaurus also has three vertebrae in its sacrum, the part of the spine that is attached to the pelvis, whereas dino ancestors only had two. And a microscopic study of the arm bone, carried out by team member Sarah Werning of the University of California, Berkeley, shows that it had grown very rapidly during the animal's development, also typical of dinosaurs as well as later mammals and birds.

Nesbitt says that this combination of characteristics, rather than any one taken alone, makes a strong case thatNyasasaurus was "either a dinosaur or the closest relative." Moreover, by the time early dinosaurs such asEoraptor and Eodromaeus show up in Argentina at least 10 million years later, they already represent diverse groups that must have been evolving for millions of years. That means that dinosaur evolution must have begun a considerable time before that, Nesbitt says. And it makes Nyasasaurus a good candidate for an early dino, especially as a very close dinosaur relative, Asilisaurus, was also living in the Manda Beds some 243 million years ago.

Nyasausaurus

The team stresses that its findings don't suggest that the earliest dinosaurs evolved in Africa, despite the Tanzanian location of the fossils: At that time, Africa was part of a supercontinent called Pangaea, which also included present-day South America, Antarctica, and Australia. But the results may contradict the views of some researchers that the first dinosaurs diversified in an "early burst" of rapid evolution soon after they appeared.

The authors are "properly careful" in saying that Nyasasaurus is probably, but not definitely, a dinosaur, because the arm bone is not complete, says Michael Benton, a paleobiologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. But even if the team is not "100% certain" that it's a true dinosaur, Benton adds, the existence of a close dinosaur relative that early "guarantees [dinosaurs] must have originated then also."

Max Langer, a paleontologist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, agrees that the fragmentary nature of the arm bone makes estimates of the length of its crest "highly speculative" and argues against making any "bold claims" about finding the earliest dinosaur.

As for the discovery's implications for the "early burst" hypothesis, Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, insists that it "doesn't nix the early burst idea at all." IfNyasasaurus is only a sister taxon to dinosaurs, Brusatte says, then the early burst hypothesis "would only be falsified if true dinosaurs lived between the time of Nyasasaurus and the time that we see several species of unequivocal true dinosaurs in Argentina" 230 million years ago.

Nevertheless, Brusatte says, "within the next decade I expect the Manda finds to greatly change our understanding" of the rise of the mighty dinosaurs.