News
24/02/2010 SOCOTRA - The Recconnaissence
Chris Gardner has now returned from his reconnaissence trip to the extraordinary island of Socotra, lying off the Horn of Africa. Below are extracts from his trip report. (Difficult to select extracts, it all sounded great!)
We will be running a tour to Socotra in 2011.
21/01/2010 Southern Tanzanian Highlands featured on new BBC series
Greentours’ Inaugural Tour of the Southern Tanzanian Highlands starts on February 4th. Whilst the tour is in progress (15th February) the BBC will start showing a new series on the Great Rift Valley.
20/01/2010 Andalucia: From Winter Floods to Spring Flushes!
After several very dry years in Andalucia there have been heavy rains in January in 2010 so we can look forward to spring full of flowers in the hills around Benaocan.
12/11/2009 Endemic Primates of Southern Tanzania by Rosalind Salter
The Southern Highlands of Tanzania is now regarded as one of the most important areas in Africa for primate diversity and conservation. Udzungwa National Park boasts 13 species including two endemic monkeys, the Udzungwa Red Colobus and Sanje Mangabey, as well as the near-endemic Highland Mangabey ‘Kipunji’. This is a new genus and species, closely related to baboons, only discovered by researchers in 2004. Kipunji are also found on Mt Rungwe (where it was first discovered) and within the Livingstone forests of Kitulo National Park. It is here that first detailed research of this species is currently being undertaken by the Wildlife Conservation Society. It is listed as Critically Endangered by IUCN.
10/11/2009 Big cats – two for the price of one! Phil Benstead in Central India
In the New Year, Greentours ran its first trip to Central India, Phil Benstead reports:
04/11/2009 The Yunnan Autumn Reconnaissance by Chris Gardner
Chris and Başak report back from Yunnan’s beautiful autumn-tinted mountains.
03/11/2009 Papua New Guinea - the Reconnaissance
The Paradise that is Papua New Guinea
During early October 2009 Ian Green visited Papua New Guinea on a reconnaissance trip. It hardly needs stating that PNG is one of the most amazing places in the world for wildlife not least because it contains so many bizarre and simply beautiful species. Though roads are few PNG has several of world’s finest wildlife lodges and Ian sampled several of these during his visit. The itinerary for 2011 will be up on the website soon but in the meantime you can read a little about Ian’s visit in the following extracts from visits to four of the main lodges which will feature on the tour, Karawari, Ambua, Loloata and Rondon Ridge.
16/09/2009 Chris and Basak Tie the Knot!
(Extra pictures added 4th November)
Very many of our regular customers will be familiar with our excellent leaders Chris Gardner and Basak Gardner, (Guner, as was) and will join us in congartulating them on their marriage on the the 12th September, in Istanbul.
21/04/2009 IRISES OF JORDAN - THE RECONNAISSANCE by Ian Green
We’ve been meaning to bring Jordan and Syria into our programme for some time, a natural expansion to the many tours we already run to Turkey, Iran and Georgia. So, at the end of March, I made a reconnaissance visit. Jordan is well known for its fabulous cultural sites, for its desert scenery, and for its great birdwatching, but its flowers have perhaps drawn less attention. Which is a shame because they are very very good. My main target was Irises. There’s around a dozen species in Jordan including four or five (depending on a recent discovery being verified) Oncocyclus species. These spectacular irises inhabit a zone stretching from the Red Sea up through Jordan, Israel and Syria, into Turkey and through into Iran and the Transcaucasia. They are robust plants, often quite short in stature, and have spectacular blooms. Jordan’s fit the bill nicely. One of them, the ‘Black Iris’ is Jordan’s national flower and whilst not exactly pure ‘soot’ it is very very dark. In fact all of the species in Jordan are largely dark with variations on purple-black, darkest cerise and that oddest of colours, a blackish-pink! During my visit I found all the known species, with some spectacular shows of the variable Iris atrofusca, and a great hillside with hundreds and hundreds of architectural Iris bostrensis, a little known species from the Syrian border. Of course one thinks of Jordan as being very arid which indeed much of it is, but the northern highlands in particular have a much more Mediterranean climate, indeed my first night there in the last few days of March would have made a good wild and windy night in Cornwall only a bit colder!
21/04/2009 OPHRYS CLIMACIS
on the Southwest Turkey Tour
Many great plants on show during this year’s tour, recently completed. Orchids were exceptional in some areas and included lots of Ophrys heterochila in all sorts of forms, as well as the lovely and rare Ophrys climacis, pictured here.
05/03/2009 HIGHLANDS OF MEXICO
- NEWS FROM THE 2009 TOUR by Ian Green
One of nature’s greatest spectacles surely has to be the wintering agglomerations of Monarch Butterflies in the Highlands of Mexico, whole trees glowing orange as the sun warms the millions of wings. There had been disturbing news of poor breeding success and low numbers on migration in Northern America this summer and autumn but the scene which greeted us at Sierra Chincua was great news indeed. A little stream crossed the path and here we had our first real 'wow' experience with these butterflies as many were packed tightly on the ground around the water. We lay on the ground taking close-up and wide-angle photos of this spectacle. Just around the corner though was the really big 'wow!' Here was the wintering colony in its majesty, the Oyamel trees covered in a bustling orange. Even before we arrived we hear the wings in the air. The sun shone warm and bright and as a consequence the outer layers of the many bundles were opening their wings and basking, then flying. The air above was swarming with huge numbers of butterflies. Lichen and moss covered tree trunks looked a picture with the Monarchs landing wings spread orange on them. There followed a rapid filling of memory cards. It is a hard spectacle to photograph but we tried! A favourite was to point one's lens skywards, pre-focussed, and catch a low flying Monarch with the swarm behind it. Hard that one. Back-lit groups nectaring on the Senecios were a favourite, and many of us revisited the stream for more pictures. Above we could see many trees covered in the orange masses, apparently no less than a thousand trees hosting the colony.
05/03/2009 THE COPPER CANYON - A NEW TOUR FOR 2010
Chihuahua’s prairies of the sky rise into the magnificent mountain country of the unspoilt Sierra Madre before plummeting ten thousand feet to the coastal lowlands of Sonora and Sinaloa and Mexico’s Sea of Cortez shore. Still hardly known outside of Mexico, the “Barrancas del Cobre” or Copper Canyon seems to make that descent in one great step, producing one of the world’s most spectacular landscapes, and certainly one of its deepest canyon systems, dwarfing the Grand Canyon! Not surprisingly there is no road that can cope with such a landscape however amazingly there is a railway. The Chihuahua-Pacific Railway is an engineering marvel. It took 100 years to complete and takes one from cacti and thorn forests along the Pacific shore up through five climatic zones to the alpine fir, oak and pine forests that clothe the higher parts of the Sierra Madre.
03/03/2009 SEA OF CORTEZ,
- NEWS FROM THE 2009 TOUR
We sub-title this tour ‘the Serengeti of the Sea’ to give an idea of just how abundant marine life, and in particular cetaceans, are in the waters either side of Baja California. Our 2009 trip aboard the Spirit of Adventure was as spectacular a success as any of our previous trips there. It is hard to give a picture of just how amazing this tour is, though taking a look at the gallery for this tour which should be up on our website shortly might give you some insight. The bare facts from the 2009 trip were about 430 whale sightings, thousand upon thousand of Dolphins, 9 turtles of 3 species, Mako Sharks, Manta Rays, all sorts of wonderful colourful fish, moray eels, octopuses, sea slugs, sea hares, sand dollars…
03/03/2009 COME AND MEET US AT ...
The Rutland Bird Fair, for one (Friday 2oth - Sunday 22nd August 2010). We'll be in Marquee 5 stall 12 again, and there will be the chance to meet Ian Bennalick and other leaders.
