Mikumi National Park: favorite photos ~ Lundeens Lens

Dec. 7. 2017

At last, a chance to post some more photos! Taking pictures in Tanzania has been challenging for me. I had aspirations to take National Geographic style portraits, but I haven't for a couple reasons (besides the obvious, I'm not a NG-caliber photographer). First, it's culturally inappropriate to take unsolicited pictures of Tanzanians, and second, I'm too shy to ask (and probably pay) to do so, which also ruins the candidness of it. However, here we are in Mikumi National Park, where animals don't care!

Two of the stranger animals in the park

Mikumi is a large preserve near Morogoro, where our Pioneer Bible Translators branch is based. We had an opportunity to join some friends on a safari after our branch meeting a couple months ago, and we were blessed with a perfect overcast day, so the animals weren't all hiding from the sun. So we had some amazing views. I've posted my favorite photos below, but here is a link to the full set. A few of the full set are atrociously out of focus (I have some more learning to do on my new camera), so they aren't here in my favorites, but I still included them because of the cool subjects they captured.

There were eight of us riding up in the back of a rugged safari-truck in the open air, but for a tarp-like covering to protect us from sun. The open format gave us great panoramic views without being confined to windows. By the way, safari is simply the Swahili word for 'trip' or 'journey', but as you know, English has adopted it to mean a specific kind of trip.

Without further ado, the photos, and as a bonus, learn some swahili animal terms!

Aw, cute little warthog (ngiri) babies!

Impala is swala

pundamilia literally means something like 'striped donkey'

Tembo na mtoto wao (Elephants and their baby)

See the full set (link above) for closer pics of this simba, as well as a cub hiding in a bush. The focus was wrong on those. You don't see lions (especially cubs) every visit to the park, so we were pretty grateful.