Traveling with the Stanfords 2025

Thursday September 29th John visited the Dassanech tribe, about an hour and a half drive from our base in Turmi, Ethiopia. They are nomads and are agropastoral. They grow sorghum, corn, pumpkins, and beans. They also raise cattle and goats. The morning we got there they were celebrating the marriage of six families daughters. Each morning for one month the mothers and fathers come out of their huts and put on special clothing made from animal furs and skins. All of the families and other tribe members gather to sing, dance and celebrate . We started Friday September 30th with an explore of the local market in Turmi. It was fairly quiet in the morning, and we enjoyed walking around taking photos. While Sara was standing in the shade of a building a young boy of about 15 starting talking to her. Eventually some older men joined and asked if she would buy him a book. Turned out the young guy was in school and really wanted an Amharic-English dictionary. After some back ...

  After spending the morning with the Suri face painting by the river we packed up camp and left for our next location - an arduous hot long 2-day drive south east of the Omo river. It had rained in the night and the forecast was for more rain so Fitsum wanted to get out of the mountain area since the trails become impassable in the mud. He mentioned having a vehicle stuck in the mud for three days with clients once.  The drive started out on bumpy mountain dirt roads that included a fairly precarious river crossing. Our driver, Israel, was an absolute expert at navigating any difficult backcountry road or river and the scenery was beautiful. We stopped for a late lunch in the tiny town of Tum - which consisted of one paved road for about a mile and dirt roads either side continuing on through the mountains. Fitsum said we would stay the night as there wasn't anywhere safe to camp between Tum and the next stop. We had a very basic hotel room with a bucket of water ou...

Thursday September 22nd was a long day of travel. We left Arusha for the drive to Kilimanjaro airport for the flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. For many of the airports in Africa your luggage has to be put through the x-ray scanner before you can enter the terminal and check-in. This leads to a somewhat chaotic scene, with people throwing bags on the conveyer and then picking them off the floor on the other side as the bags get pushed through. Our flight and arrival in Addis was fairly uneventful until we tried to leave the airport. All luggage had to once again be scanned and Sara's carry-on caused some consternation with customs. Barry's binoculars were given a lot of scrutiny and we were informed they were not allowed in Ethiopia due to national security rules - likely related to the civil war that has been simmering off and on since November 2020. After passing over my passport to a number of people and getting a bunch of paperwork filled out we were all...

Sunday September 18th started very early when Sara heard a strange munching noise outside at 4:30am. She very quietly unzipped the bottom of the tent flap and stuck her head outside to see a hippo peacefully grazing 30 feet away! Startled John a bit since it was dark and he didn't know if someone or something was unzipping the tent to come inside!  We headed out after breakfast with a stop at a local creek to video the sounds of the frogs. Sara particularly enjoyed the sounds of Africa whether it was the very loud frogs, the very loud morning birds or the lions we heard roaring every night. If you see a video with no real movement make sure the audio is turned up as it will be a sound recording.  After the frog stop we found a pride of lions on the remains of a zebra meal, and right after that a herd of understandably very agitated zebras. Listen to their barking sounds which we often mistook for hyenas. We really enjoyed watching the zebra and managed to g...

Thursday 15th September we left at 8:30am for a long day of driving. We stopped for gas and had both tanks filled up. The Toyota land cruisers used for safari are amazing. They are a standard land cruiser that has been heavily modified by cutting and extending the chassis to add an extra row, a pop up top for the entire length and larger windows. The vehicle is very rugged and reliable which is good because as we learned the roads are very bumpy and dusty - we saw a lot of broken down vehicles and Ben stopped to help a few folks get up and running again. To get to Serengeti National Park you first pass through the Ngorongoro conservation area that surrounds the actual crater. This area has less restrictions than a national park and the Maasai tribe are allowed to live and graze their cattle in the area, this was a compromise when the Serengeti park was created and the Maasai had to leave the area. There is a drought in the area and we drove through a lot of...

Sunday September 11th we left Arusha and drove for about 3 hours to Tarangire National Park. We ate lunch at the park gate picnic area since once inside the park there are limited options for getting out of the vehicle - wild animals and picnicking tourists don't work well together.   We immediately started seeing a lot of animals. Zebras, impalas and wart hogs grazing. Elephants digging for water in the dried river bed which was fascinating. There were some very large bulls and also tiny baby elephants. We saw a lot of brightly colored birds which were delightful. Around 5pm we started to head for the camp, which was a bit hard to find since the mobile tented camps move around. The tented camp was considered fairly basic, but was far above our normal camping experiences, with a king sized bed, a flush toilet and hot/cold shower! Since it had been a hot and dusty day we enjoyed a cold shower and then joined everyone in the main dining tent. We had...

In 2020 we planned a trip to Africa to celebrate our 25 th wedding anniversary. Covid caused a 2-year delay, so we were very excited to finally started our African adventure on Tuesday 6 th of September. The journey includes 2 weeks in Tanzania on safari, 10 days in Ethiopia with local tribes, a week in Zanzibar relaxing and 4 days in England with family, will be quite a trip! We didn’t arrive in Nairobi, Kenya until midnight on Thursday 8 th . What should have been 2 days of travel took 3 due to a ticketing snafu with American Airlines that wasn’t identified until we tried to board the Qatar flight in Washington DC. Not an experience I want to repeat, but it worked out with only losing a rest day in Nairobi so could have been worse. Qatar airlines is incredible, and the lounge in Doha is magnificent – a good thing since we had 12 hours there. Well worth using the miles for the business class. Friday, we visited the Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage to join the midday feeding of the 3...

After we said our goodbyes to Lennart and the Sampi Nature Camp we headed west to Abisko a small mountain town close to the Norwegian border. It was a beautiful location, on the edge of a lake surrounded by  mountains. We woke to a cloudy snowy day, with a forecast for more of the same all day. Hard to take landscape photos in a white out, so we spent the day relaxing and working on photos. Sara went for a short walk on the lake - it was beautifully quiet in the snow. Saturday 12th of March we started the 400km drive to our next location - Lofoten Islands, Norway. It was a beautiful day, and the drive was full of stunning views. We stopped for a picnic lunch to eat the sandwiches we'd picked up at the grocery store in Sweden, right before driving into Norway. We had been advised to get groceries there because it was cheaper than Norway.  This was a common theme, apparently Norwegians who are close to the border drove to stores in both Sweden and Finland to take advantage of lo...

Saturday 5th of March was our travel day to Sweden. Europcar luckily had the car ready for us by 3pm. Originally we were told 7pm, and we really didn't want to drive 270km in the dark and snowy conditions. We picked up our little VW Polo and managed to stuff all our bags into the back and set off. The roads were covered in hard packed snow most of the way, but it was surprisingly easy driving. We arrived at the Reindeer Lodge in Jukkasjärvi, near Karuna  just after dark.  We were staying in one of five idyllic cottage with a wood stove to keep warm, and access to a log cabin for food preparation and separate buildings for showers and bathrooms. The facilities are run by Nutti Sámi Siida, a family run Sami company who organize experiences based on Sámi culture. They offer this special lodging close to reindeer so there are opportunities to interact with these lovely animals. We fell asleep to the crackling of the wood fire, just delightful.  The ne...