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Founders |
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Founders
Peter Jones
I
started my safari company, Tanganyika Film & Safari Outfitters, in 1991
to offer visitors the chance to experience the best of East Africa in
the traditional style. I'd like to share with you the sort of hands on
experiences I had while conducting my own research --exploring the parks
and walking - which is very different from the typical formal lodge and
car-oriented trips commonly offered.
I have lived in Tanzania since early 1976, when I arrived
at the age of 19 to spend three years working on fossil excavations with
archaeologist Mary Leakey. I stayed for 8 years, working at the plio-pleistocene
sites of Laetoli and Olduvai Gorge in the Serengeti/Ngorongoro area. I
found myself surveying hundreds of square miles of country on foot every
year, looking for Paleolithic sites, conducting my own research, and eventually
running Mary's entire camp. My Swahili is fluent and I also speak some
Maasai.
At the end of 1983, I left the Leakey camp at Olduvai Gorge
to undertake my own research in Tanzania, studying living groups of hunter-gatherers
- again my life was to be constantly in the bush - walking, stalking game,
and camping with tribes-people. This extensive fieldwork allowed me the
opportunity to teach a course in Experimental Archaeology at Harvard in
1986.
I later decided to make Tanzania my home and returned
to make a living that allowed me to stay in touch with my friends in the
bush. The next few years I worked with a variety of safari companies as
a safari guide.
Eric Ng'maryo
At heart a writer, in fact a lawyer, the safari business lends wings to
my creativity and, for sheer beauty, it leaves the lawyer speechless.
Whenever I am in the "bush" with our clients, Peter, and our crew, or
when I'm doing my early morning jog along M'simbati's magical beach I
guiltily wonder whether there is no law against such unadulterated enjoyment
of nature's blessings. The writer in me just flies.
Margot Jones
I am also at heart and, in fact, a writer, in 1994, I sold a small newspaper
business I owned in Montana, packed my Labrador retriever, Zoë, and moved
to Tanzania to start a new life with Peter and his son, Erik. In 1995,
Peter and I were married (by a Maasai Laibon medicine man) and subsequently
took on the task of reclaiming and rehabilitating the wildlife and habitat
of Ndarakwai, a 10,000-acre ranch at the foot of Kilimanjaro. We spend
off-seasons at travel market conferences (Berlin and London) and, during
the summer, at our Montana refuge.
My writing interests now are non-fiction and include wildlife management
and law -enforcement, anti-poaching efforts, forensics, Colonial history,
the Maasai tribe's Laibon, hexes, hoaxes and frauds. For the last few
years I've been writing an investigative memoir that includes these interests.
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