Back to Africa

Valerie had a work trip recently, which took her to Kenya and Uganda for three weeks.  Most of it involved long hours of meetings, workshops, and fascinating site visits to potato and sweetpotato projects near Kampala and Entebbe, Uganda, western Kenya, and the Taita Hills of southern Kenya.
Though there was little time off, she did get a chance to visit a few national parks to admire the amazing wildlife of that part of the world.

 Mosquito netting in all the bedrooms, not to be taken lightly.

 Rift Valley in Kenya

 Grooming baboons in Lake Nakuru Nat'l Park

 Dancing zebra with pink pelicans, Lake Nakuru

 Spotted hyena, Lake Nakuru

 Water buffalo couple, Lake Nakuru

 Stork, Lake Nakuru

 Leopard, Lake Nakuru

 Mama and baby white rhinos

 Lion

 Zebra and various storks

 Rock hyrax

 Looking down on Lake Nakuru from baboon overlook

 lizard

 wart hog

 Secretary bird

 Wart hog covered in white mud (the white is from the high levels of salt in the soil)

 White rhino

 Mother and baby zebra

 Water buck

 Impala

 Sykes monkey

 Colobus monkey

 Taita Hills in southern Kenya

 Potato farmer and extension workers, Taita Hills

 Shop built from potato cultivation profits

 Meeting with members of a farmers group in their beautiful potato field in the Taita Hills

Salt Lick Lodge  where we stayed after a long field day. It's located in a nature conservancy and up on stilts so you can watch the animals come to the water and salt lick.

 Visiting Tsavo West Nat'l Park on Sunday with colleagues

 These are the colors of Kenya

 Lizard, Tsavo Park

 Note the baby giraffe on the bottom left

 Typical round rural houses in western Kenya

Program recipient in front of here newly planted orange-fleshed sweetpotato field

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is a major hub for flights from Lima, whether heading for Europe, Asia, or Africa. It's a 12 hour flight and 8 hour time difference, generally with long layovers for connections. Valerie, especially, has spent many hours in transit at the Amsterdam airport on various work trips. On a recent trip to Africa, she spent a night in Amsterdam and had a chance to walk around the old city, benefiting from the long days of late May.

The cobbled streets and canals make for wonderful walks and discoveries. And it's fun to see the brick row houses, which very so inspired the architecture of Eastern and Mid-Atlantic cities in the US. But the most striking thing was all the bicycles. Like Beijing, they are the favored mode of transportation, and the bicycle parking area by the central train station is impressive.

 Bike parking by the train station

 Look at those waffles.

 Classic canal view

 Biking in style with the animal print seat and Van Gogh inspired saddle bag.

 Aaaaah tulips

 Homo-memorial on a canal

 Outside of Schipol Airport is this running wheel, where the founder and volunteers keep it going non-stop with people power - to raise cancer awareness and support research.

Puno and Lake Titicaca

Britt and Valerie both traveled to Lake Titicaca recently - though not together, unfortunately. Britt went via train from Cusco - an amazing ride - along with visiting family. Valerie went for work, since Lake Titicaca is the home of origin of the potato.
Lake Titicaca is 3,800 meters above sea level - the highest navigable lake in the world.
The cold, thin air, along with reflections from the incredibly blue water of the lake, make for amazing light and color effects.
The countryside is beautiful, with patchworks of various crops - including potato. But it is a harsh place, with high rates of poverty and a climate that never warms enough to go out without a jacket.

 The name Titicaca is a combination of two main indigenous languages of Peru, Quechua and Aymara, and means rock puma, because seen from the air it is said to look like a puma hunting a rabbit.

One of the favorite touristy things to do is to visit the floating islands on Lake Titicaca. These are made of reeds layered on top of each other, freshly replaced on a regular basis. The inhabitants are descended from people who fled the invading Incas and set up homes and livelihoods in this very rough environment. They have small farms with livestock and create small souvenirs to sell to tourists. Some now have power thanks to solar panels installed by the government, but it is a tough lifestyle, particularly in winter when temperatures drop below freezing.
The houses and boats are also made of reeds. For a small fee, you can ride on a reed boat, decorated and outfitted for tourists.

Puno is a bustling city on the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca. This is a photo of the Cathedral facade in Puno.

May is the month for the native potato harvest. Valerie went to Puno to take part in the harvest of improved native potato varieties developed to provide greater yields and greater resistance to frost, floods, and disease. There was also a field day with farmers to conduct a "participatory varietal selection". Farmers identified their preferred characteristics (e.g., size, shape, color, resistance to conditions and diseases, and more), and then rated those. They then assessed improved varieties harvested from a crop planted last year for various qualities, including taste, texture, look, quality, and more. Their votes and preferences were collected through a simple method, with brown paper bags in front of each variety or labelled with preferred characteristics. Each farmer had 6 votes, 3 for their top choice, 2 for the next, and 1 for the third choice. Men were given corn kernels as their voting chips with lima beans for the women, in order to capture gender preferences. Information on taste testing was collected by hand according to a survey. It was a fascinating process.  Their reactions to the taste test were similar to those you see among wine tasters - catching subtle differences in perfume, texture, smoothness, and such that most of the rest of us would miss.

Sun in Lima

If you can see Lima on a sunny day, particularly a Sunday when traffic is quiet and people are mostly out and about enjoying their families, well that's when it is at its best.

The sun on the malecone really brings out the blue of the ocean...

...and the bright colors of the city.

We discovered an art exhibit inside an old mansion