Sketches from East Africa

Posted on | April 2, 2010 | No Comments

As usual while on my travels I made a few sketches, though not as many as I would have liked. Here’s a few from our recent trip.

This sketch is of the Ngorongoro crater, the largest complete caldera in the world. It is surely the real Eden. We stayed in a lodge on the crater’s rim with views sublime enough to make stones weep.

The wildebeest at Ngorongoro were permanent crater residents and have become habituated to vehicles. So you can park very close to them and they don’t run away. This gave me a chance to make a few scribbles.

The grounds of the lodge we stayed at near Lake Naivasha were one of the few corridors left for wildlife to access to the lake from the surrounding hills. There was a resident population of waterbuck (Kobus ellipsiprymnus) here, which if you sat very still indeed, would graze around you. They really are extremely handsome antelopes.

I was impressed with the yellow-barked acacias (Acacia xanthophloea). They’re also known as fever trees, due to their habit of growing in damp, and therefore malarial, places.

The Twiga gift shop on the beach at Mtoni Marine Hotel in Zanzibar was just a flimsy shack, but looked so colourful with all the paintings hanging outside.