It’s All About the Smell

It was easy to get my steps done today since I spent almost all day trying to whittle down my over 5,000 photos from Africa to something more manageable. That task is hardly done. I have just looked at three days worth of pictures and flagged the first cut. How many Rhino pictures do I really need? I have a hard time telling one beast from another. But when you start talking about the baby elephant pictures or the leopard shots, then more is better.

My friend Lynn met me for lunch and we looked at some of the pictures while we enjoyed a Thai chicken salad. Lynn immediately picked up something x-rated in a photo that I had not noticed. See if you can see what she pointed out.

The more I look at the pictures of these beautiful animals the more amazing the whole trip seems. It feels like I just went to sleep and all these huge animals came to see me. But then I realize that I was actually right there with them, not touching them, but close enough to smell them.

Amazingly most of them do not smell bad. The hippo that lived outside our cottage in Zambia, whose name is actually Horace, not Olles, as I first wrote, did not smell at all. I would have thought that a hippo would stink. The smelliest animals were the baboons. You could catch their terribleness a mile away. It can’t serve them well since every potential predator could also smell them.

I have a new found appreciation for the sense of smell after leaning how the animals depend upon it. While I was cooking a corn, asparagus, shallot and tomato dish for dinner tonight I closed my eyes and smelled it. I felt like it was missing something so I added a chopped jalapeno. I took another big whiff, still missing something. I added a bunch of chopped basil. One more big sniff. Smelled good, smelled right. I added salt and pepper and tasted it. Yummy!

Now it might have tasted good before the jalapeño and basil, but the smell was not that complex. I was working on satisfying my olfactory sense, which in turn would satisfy my taste buds. I was just trying to connect to the animal side of me, just not the way the baby monkey was.