Fossil-hunting at Runswick Beach, Yorkshire UK on holiday with my uncle and his family – yes, we went fossil-hunting on holiday. (Twice, actually, since the afternoon was high tide and we had to come back in the morning – my 9yr old cousin woke me up. Have I mentioned how much I love my family?) Continue reading
I know, I said I didn’t take any pcitures. That is, I didn’t take any except for the Catacombes. I totally got pictures of the Catacombes. Continue reading
“Do you believe in God?” She was earnest. She wielded a clipboard.
A grin skipped up beside. “Ca va?” He sounded young. A green mask covered half his face but I remember him grinning. From my back, on a bed, in a hallway, I replied automatically. “Comme ci, comme ca.”
The doors opened. “It is time, Miss Tankard.”
Lights, white tile, stainless steel. I remember the windows. It hurt, so they found another vein. An older voice told me to picture a happy place – to imagine my family – and they counted, backwards.
The grin on the left waggled a vial. “Maziwa…”
I swam upwards to translate. “Milk?” Split second having managed it, before she came in from the right, put her face to my ear, and whispered through her mask.
“Believe, Miss Tankard, believe. He is real.”
And then I was out. Continue reading
I came to Arusha over a week ago to attend the East African Association of Palaeoanthropology and Palaeontology Conference.
It was incredible.
It was inspiring – and intimidating – incredibly, intimidatingly, inspiring.
Richard Leakey gave the opening address; the conference was, in honour of the 50th anniversary of Mary Leakey’s discovery of the Zinjanthropus fossil. Thursday we made a pilgrimage to the exact site it was found, in Oldupai Gorge. Monday to Wednesday we sat in a freezing room in the basement of a generic hotel listening to many of the most famous scientists in the discipline.
“This conference is going to be very well attended. You’re going to get to meet some amazing people,” the archaeologist (rock art researcher, with whom I’d come to volunteer) told me earlier in the week. It was… Continue reading
The dig at Songo Mnara already feels like another lifetime, or another world.
It was amazing. The site was incredible, the island was gorgeous, the people were great. The sun was unbelievably strong, straight down on us, and if the wind wasn’t blowing sand and dirt straight into your eyes, it was only because you were downwind of the sieve and getting mouthfuls of it. The minute tonal difference between the types of soils, trying to identify them, to distinguish between them, was infuriating – almost painful – and hours spent looking for traces of decoration or finished edges on pottery fragments had me hallucinating bases. Continue reading
I’ve always tried to keep my travelling mixed up – a party here, a home-stay cultural immersion there; volunteer placement and aimless wandering – but, as I’m faced with a trip a bit different than what I’ve done before, I’m beginning to wonder about how to mix – authoritatively, presumptively, intentionally – work and pleasure. It’s one thing to step out of the office and into your social circle; it’s one thing to take your spontaneous adventure and twist it back, folding and editing, into a story – or even a study – when you realize in retrospect that there are larger ramifications; its wonderful to have a private room or two that isn’t fodder for analysis and its shielding to be fortified within a uniform as you work; it’s… Continue reading
