Saw Disney’s movie EARTH last night.  The videography is stunning, vivid, lush.  And thank goodness that Disney can afford to follow and film the trek of elephants across the Kalahari during the dry season and the migration of a mother humpback and her calf from the Artic to the Antartic.

The film didn’t, however, live up to its promise to follow its third family, the polar bears, through any kind of comprehensible cycle or conflict.  Before the movie abruptly wrapped up the bears’ story, the cubs and their mother had been wandering around searching desperately for food.  At the sudden conclusion of their story, the cubs were thriving.  What happened in between? What happened to their mother?

Some fascinating animal characters — the lynx in the boreal forest, for example, — are shown very briefly, then, frustratingly, never seen again.

The movie covered too much territory and gave the moviegoer an unsastisfactory story arc for virtually all the animals and left one wondering sadly, as all nature films do now, I guess, how long are these animals going to continue to exist?

Note:  Ty taught me the html code to change the font size and color, and I used it in this post!  Thanks, Ty!

When Cara and I returned to our resort, we joined the rest of the family at the pool.  Later, we all took a stroll along the beach.

At the beach, Dwight made a new friend, who tried to talk him into buying some African trinkets or paintings.   The rest of the family generally gives imploring hawkers short shrift, but not Dwight, who is willing to engage in a buy-sell discussion with anyone, anywhere, at any time about almost anything.

Tyler and Troy kicked around a soccer ball

and attracted the attention of a very jazzed-up Maasai.

The girls made an unwise decision to have their hands hennaed.  Sarah, the local henna artist, used a clumsy brush to apply some kind of thick ink that looked like gloppy chocolate pudding.  The girls did not end up with the delicate, intricate patterns they expected, but gooey figures that took days to get rid of and made us all laugh every time we looked at them!

When we returned to our rooms to get ready for dinner, we ran into a miserable Moses traipsing along in front of several of the hotel staff carrying baskets.  The new and inexperienced resort crew had jumbled up the guests’ clothes in the laundry.  Moses and his entourage were trying to straighten out the confusion and return various articles of clothing to their proper owners.

We opened our laundry packages and found a couple of shirts that didn’t belong to us.

I know where that goes,” Moses said, when we held up a little girl’s tee shirt, as if he had already handled a complaint about its disappearance.  Morosely, he pointed to a pair of women’s striped panties in one of the baskets to find out if they belonged to any of the females in our family.

In the few days we’d been at the resort, the luster of Moses’s job had been stripped away for him, it was plain to see.  His smiles were gone and his long kaftan didn’t seem as white or crisp as when we first arrived.  We couldn’t help but feel that he wouldn’t be sorry to see us go on the morrow.

The next morning, we were up and out — we flew from Zanzibar to Dar Es Salaam (the capital of Tanzania) back to Dubai and then on to JFK and home. Here’s the tired and rumpled gang waiting at JFK baggage claim.  The entire trip home took us almost exactly 30 hours door-to-door.

Wrapping up our family trip to Africa, which included our safari adventures in Kenya and Tanzania and the last few days at the beach resort in Zanzibar — the entire trip was SENSATIONAL,FANTASTIC, UNFORGETTABLE.

I had such wanderlust at the end of our spectacular journey that I was ready to throw over my domestic responsibilities back in the United Sates. I suggested several times (to no avail, obviously!) that the big kids should head home to finish the school year, while Dwight, Lynne and I continued on around the world . . .

I was ready to keep going and keep shooting!

Photo by Clare Sipprelle

I stitched together three photos that I shot at a Masai village into a panorama and had it developed at Cone Editions Press in Vermont.  The founder and owner, Jon Cone, asked if he could use my photo in the company’s booth at the Society for Photographic Educator trade show that was held in Texas at the end of March!

Here’s a couple of photos showing my Masai Dancers photo in Cone’s booth: