Pleasure

A breakfast meeting with some colleagues working on another transboundary landscape, about a future official exchange we’re planning. At the hotel where most delegates are staying, we had to negotiate access to the breakfast area, and the staff thought we were trying to scam a freebie.

These early winter mornings on the highland plateau of Southern Africa are clear and bright with dust rising and they make it easier to leap up for the day than the wall of humidity that I get when I open my bedroom door in Dar es Salaam.

In the evening the ‘pleasure of my company’ was requested, along with half of conference delegates, at a reception at the home of the German ambassador. Germany is a major financing country for biodiversity conservation in the region, so networking is always valuable. We all had some wine and fun conversations, although I didn’t manage to actually speak to anyone from the German embassy. German precision made sure the event wrapped up in a timely fashion, whereas some of us were just getting going.