today

Everybody travels with a digital camera these days.

Digital photographers face a couple of problems, however. One is that your memory cards get full half way through your holiday no matter how many gigabytes of storage you brought. Second, going digital has just aggravated the old problem of finding an audience for those 10,000 holiday picts that no longer lie around in shoe-boxes but take up space on your computer hard drives.

The Hyena Square documentary was to be aired on TVT yesterday night, but in the last moment TVT decided not to show the film.

We do not know why. We will meet with them on monday morning, and report further on our website.

Today Friday – World Aids Day – TVT will show the documentary "Hyena Square" at 10:45 PM.

The film is about Elisa, a former child prostitute who is open aobut living with hiv.

Today we had a hundred tea growers -- industry people, experts, farmers, government officers -- from he whole country for lunch in Maweni. They have gathered in Lushoto for a week-long campaign to revive the tea industry. Having seen smallholder tea growing decline for decades and entire villages sink into poverty, we can only applaud the effort.

The wildlife of Maweni is not like Serengeti's. The top predators here are not lions but moderately dangerous eagle owl, monitor lizard, honeybadger (but you should see their teeth!). And then we have the ugly monster: the neigbouring priests' cat. A lazy, chameleon-eating, fish-stealing, bird-terrorising, rat-ignoring, anti-social creature, who does not even like children.

Today a paradise flycatcher chick fell down to the ground from a nest in one of the avocado trees around the front yard. I am not saying the cat caused it, but it happened to be nearby, licking it's mouth. Fortunately, guests and staff rushed to the scene and rescued the little chick in front of the drewling monster's jaws.

Last year, the waterfall in Soni dried up almost completely for the first time in history. Now after many weeks of daily rainfall, it is full of water. This stream has a watershed that covers a large part of the West Usambaras