In brief!

I'm going to grad school in Costa Rica!

More photos!

You may notice a sparkly pastiche of photos to the left - that's the Flickr Zeitgeist! I'm gradually uploading more and more trip photos, with descriptions, and they'll all be up soon!

First of the photos!

I've had a rough time getting motivated to polish up the last posts, so for the few people still reading, I offer the first of many elephant pics!

I'M HOME!

More to follow...

Still en route...

And yet another promise of posting goes unfulfilled... I'm in London, at an airport web kiosk with an aggravating steel keyboard that requires titanic pressure to type anything, so progress is slow. Technical difficulties, and a vicious stomach bug, prevented me from posting my final two entries as promised (and made my 12-hour flight from Joburg MUCH longer). The posts will go up sometime shortly after I return to Canada.

That, by the way, will happen at 6:40 PM Saturday night... after a couple of hours to recuperate, assuming I'm still standing, I still might be up for hitting the town. See y'all soon!

PS It's 3 degrees right now in London, and I have only a Botswana suitable t-shirt and slacks. Sadly, I also have no way to fill a 10-hour stopover other than to venture into London, cold or otherwise. Let's hope that even after 6 months in Africa, I'm still Canadian enough to survive this.

I know, I know...

Inasmuch as Gaborone suffered something approximating a total internet failure, and I've been attending going-away parties and the like, I've done an unnacceptably poor job of feeding my blog. So without further ado, here are the myriad details of my most recent trip.

Pretoria
Potholes'n'Bribes
Fat and Happy!
Ow...
Sniff... sniff...
Sedition!
I'm inedible.

I'm wrapping up here, and will back in Vancouver on Saturday (6:40, I think), but I've got a few more posts half-done that I'll try to find a chance to put up between now and Friday, when I fly out. You'll hear some sort of pseudo-insightful closing comments from me, have no doubt.

Who would've thought?

“You can’t go past the fence now. The hippos are out. They have their calves”
- Imole, activity coordinator at Sondzela

“They will eat us?”
- Anne, French tourist

“No, of course not, they’re vegetarians… they will just kill you”
- Imole

This exchange wasn’t as comforting as Imole seemed to intend, but apparently hippos really are the deadliest animals on Earth, so we’re quarantined inside the Sondzela grounds until they retreat to the water at dawn.

Okay, now I’m bored. I’ve done pretty much everything there is to do in my part of Swaziland, now that nighttime game walks are forbidden. I’m none too keen on sitting around counting the minutes until dinner time, which was today’s main activity. Even the warthogs are losing their novelty, and since I have neither time nor funding to further explore Southern Africa, I’m going to go to Joburg, maybe visit the Apartheid Museum, and then head to Gabs, where a going-away party theoretically awaits me.