The quantity of zebras we saw was amazing. At one point our driver looked around the area that we were in and estimated that we were looking at 10,000 of them. They typically come at the end of the wildebeest migration and it's not unusual to see thousands at a time as one looks out over the Serengeti plain. Western Serengeti, Tanzania. 29 May 2011.

This lovely shot in the Serengeti was actually taken by our driver, Damas. He would occasionally pick up my Canon G11 point-and-shoot and do just that: point, and shoot. This was early one morning while we were waiting for a hippo to do something interesting. Central Serengeti, Tanzania. 21 May 2011.

So here I am, back from the not-quite-land-of-the-dead. It was one year ago today that I broke my back (fractured and compressed my L1 vertebra) and I'm celebrating by posting something for the first time in over a year. It's not that my recovery has taken this long (tho it certainly continues, but at a much less dramatic pace), it's that I've had lots of big changes in my life in the last year, in addition to the whole broken back thing. The good news about my back is that there was no spinal cord damage, so I was able to walk within a few days. The hard news was how long it would take to get the pain to a "manageable" (what's that?!) level. But all things being equal I'm the luckiest person in the world, I have a fabulous new job, and I can still wield a camera. And travel. Which is why you are going to see a lot of pix from the Serengeti, where I spent a bunch of time in May.
I've only had two broken bones in my adult life, and both of them occurred outside of the U.S. So there's a bit of irony in this post. My other broken bone (femur) occurred while being chased by a lion in South Africa in 1998. Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania. 23 May 2011.