A Picnic With Kites and Bones

Saturday, September, 3, 2005

We held on tightly to our sandwiches when we stopped to eat in the afternoon. The kites of Ngorongoro circled over our heads as we picniced by a tree on the shores of a lake.

They were bold brown hawk-like birds who feinted and dived at us as we ate.

"If you hold your food up in the air, your fingers are bound to get lacerated", warned Wayne. I kept my fingers down, although I left part of a banana on a nearby rock so I could get a better look at them.

We were in a beautiful spot. We sat on warm outcroppings of rocks and relaxed in the sunshine or the shade of the tree.

The brilliance of the afternoon light made the colours seems so bright here: the blue of the water, the green of the lake reeds, the dusky oranges and yellows of the plain. There was also the brilliant white of bleached bones here.

I wandered over to the bones which lay on the grass or by the water's edge here and there. I think bones are fascinating and marvellous to photograph. Several times on the plains on this trip I've seen the scattered white remains of animal skeletons. Once, from a distance, we spied a large group of bones with what was almost certainly the skull of an elephant among them. They were scattered over a wide area though and a group of antelope cropped the grass growing amongst them.