Expectations...

Things I didn’t expect to do in Africa:

· Hit a CD release party (for an artist whose name I forgot instantly)
· Join the Gaborone Film Society (First flicks I saw – Peter Seller’s excellent Being There and miserable Australian film The Man Who Sued God)
· Attend the Exodus Live! Spoken Word and Poetry Festival
· Get more and better TV news than I had in Vancouver (at least when the satellite’s working)
· Be unnerved by the sight of large congregations of white people after only a few weeks here.
· Celebrate American Thanksgiving.

Things I should have expected to do in Africa
· Hear an atrocious cover band playing 80s torch songs on hand drums and a sitar.
· Discover that cheap beer and extreme heat are a very bad combination.
· Leave shoeprints in the asphalt roads at midday (it’s THAT hot here sometimes).

Excuses, excuses...

I've been neglecting my posts, I know. I've been sidelined by a nasty flu something-or-other (NOT malaria!), and foolishly left all my half-written entries on my computer at work. Check back around Monday... there will be more.


P.S. My phone is horribly broken, and I'm not sure why. Hopefully I'll have that fixed tomorrow.

Aminamals!!!

I didn’t get eaten… joy!

Mokolodi Game Reserve is a few hundred acres of fenced scrubland and floodplain just south of Gabs (as Gaborone is known, with the trademark local mix of affection and frustration). Arriving a few minutes late for a booked tour two Sundays ago, Jo, her son and mother, and I, clambered into an immense military style truck, open to the air and packed with tourists both local and foreign.

After rattling past a large monkey habitat filled with a half-dozen tiny howlers, the truck veered into dry but fairly well-vegetated terrain, and the brush and low hills hid any hint of the city I’d just left. Within seconds, spiral-horned antelopes named kudu speckled the brushland. They’re far bigger than I’d expected, nearly the size of horses, and they clustered in wary groups of 6 or so, watchful but fairly unconcerned with our presence. Our helpful guide offered us an elaborate explanation of the kudu’s intricate and meaningful coloration patterns, every single detail of which escaped me within instants. I’m told they cluster with zebra, each eating different veggies and sharing the responsibility of watching for predators, but alas, no zebra did we see that day.

The kudu were accompanied by impala, however, tiny dog-sized antelopes bounding about the bush with an odd leaping gait, and the first of innumerable warthogs. Both the warthogs and the kudu are immune to human efforts at fencing them in, for the kudu easily leap all but the tallest, most fortified fences, and the warthogs cheerfully burrow under them. The squat, neckless warthogs, for their part, are even funnier-looking in person and supposedly dumber than the roots they eat, but there’s something quite interesting in their total indifference to the outside world as they scratch the dustplain with their tusks in search of devourables.

Mokolodi is an educational reserve, tilted towards close-to-the-critters tours, so no predators are allowed. I’ll have to look elsewhere for the hyenas, wild dogs and big cats that fire my imagination, nut I did see four of the most magnificent beasties of all…

Heffalumps! Slightly herded by their trainer (more on that later), three female and one male African elephants ambled thunderously into view, and gradually approached the truck. About 5 meters away they stopped, and spent perhaps fifteen fascinating minutes giving themselves a dust bath, scooping up great trunkfuls of desert floor and tossing the silt over their backs. Supposedly it kills ticks and helps cool the immense critters, and they honestly appeared to be enjoying themselves. They clustered quite close to the truck, and occasionally glanced our way, but they surely see several such tours each day and were pretty indifferent to our presence, offering only the occasional curious (and not unfriendly) glance in our direction.

It’s impossible to pass along the immensity of these animals; perhaps the best I can do is describe their attitude as best I was able to perceive it. Indian elephants have an air of docility and meekness about them, but these Africans strode and murmured to each other and ate prodigiously with an easy confidence that can only come from knowing they dwarf anything else alive.

I’ve seen zoo elephants before, of course, and these animals weren’t exactly wild, but they have a interesting story of their own. Mokolodi has brought in a Sri Lankan elephant trainer to dispel the myth that African mumakil can’t be trained. Though it’s apparently arduous work, he’s having some success in domesticating them, a historic first. They respond to basic commands, and have a note of fealty to their trainer (though only to him).

The African elephant has apparently rebounded quite nicely since the ivory ban, multiplying at least tenfold from their threatened low of ten thousand animals. They’ve become so numerous that farmers despise their immense appetites and even some environmentalists decry the damage their foraging can do to the savannah. I don’t care, though. They’re extraordinary creatures, and I’m thrilled to have seen the first few of (hopefully) many on my trip. Africa survived them in far greater numbers decades ago, so I’m not especially concerned about their impact on the continent

Roaring on from the immense dust cloud crafted by elephant hygiene, we headed deeper into the immensity of Botswana. This is one of a handful of countries more sparsely populated from Canada, on my first glance from a desert hilltop drove that home. The vastness of this place confronted me in the small, inconceivably distant towns and low mountains that added flavor to an otherwise uniform plain of patchy desert grasses and small trees. No doubt those lands, not part of the reserve, hid thousands of new animals, but without the assistance of a guide I lacked the expertise to spot even a one of them. The view itself was enough. I have pictures, of course, but it may take months for me to share them.

Later in the three-hour tour we caught glimpses of Africa’s other fabled creatures. A barely-glimpsed patch of mottled giraffe’s hide may not sound like much, but it sparked great excitement in the few seconds I was able to see it. Likewise the moment’s sight of a rhino’s butt end disappearing quickly into the brush. As the tour descended towards a broad but shallow river and the surrounding wetlands, ostriches appeared at every turn, the guide and several tourists describing them the stupidest animals on earth. They’re still pretty dang cool. There was an unidentifiable (to me, anyways) grey lump in the water that I’m told was a hippo, and the Attorney-General’s glorious private lodge on a hillside overlooking the beauty of the whole marshland and much of the park. I said there was less corruption than in the rest of Africa, I didn’t say there was none.

Amid the omnipresent warthogs, I saw even a large cheetah pen. Two brothers live in there, sleek and spiffy, separate from the other animals. Their mother was killed by a rancher, I heard, who discovered the two young cubs and brought them to the park. Raised by humans and now gorgeous adults, they obliged us our few minutes of gawking and photography and then walked lazily away to nap in privacy.

Yet while all seeing these semi-wild animals in the protection of a reserve was amazing, and my later visits to the unfenced plains to the north will be even more fascinating, there was one thing that was more telling to me. As we drove out to the reserve in the late afternoon light, a baboon crossed the suburban street in front of us, as indifferently as might a Vancouver squirrel, and vanished into roadside brush. The casual interaction of the exotic (and unfriendly-looking) beast with the mundanity of a Sunday car ride was striking to me, a symbol of the vast difference between this place and the one I left behind. A baboon crossed the street in front of me!

Why am I even more amazed by this than by the heffalumps?

Phone goodness!

The way to call me from Canada, new sources say, is to dial 011 267 7286 4435.

Bood luck!

The internet still stinks here, but at least I have a phone...

Though still less connected than I'd like, it's now possible for me to get in touch with y'all via my cellphone. If anybody wants to call, makes the most sense to buy a phone card specifically for the purpose, which will be ridiculously cheap.

Mine number: 7286 4435

I'm no longer sure what the area code is, but I'm in Gaborone, Botswana. Could someone kindly find out what the procedure for calling here is (country code, area code, etc.) and post the details here? I'd like to know how this hwole thing works. Thanks, eh.

Technical difficulties or, how to see a foreign city without really trying.

A mosquito coil is burning slowly on a plate on my desk as I write. There are two delicious T-bone steaks marinating in the fridge, bought for a dollar apiece. Filter and Franz Ferdinand are playing in the background, and I’m chewing on a mouthful of biltong, the ridiculously durable South African variant on beef jerky. I’m slowly learning how to do things around here.

I’ve actually got a good excuse for failing to respond to emails and neglecting to install a better comment system here. Internet access is so atrocious here that it’s impossible for me to write emails and blog posts while sitting at the web café. It literally takes me fifteen minutes simply to check my hotmail. So I’ve been writing emails and posts on my laptop, burning them onto CD, and hoping that the one computer at the café with a functioning CD drive is unoccupied. The slowness that makes writing so difficult pretty much prohibits me uploading any photos… even the elephants. Incidentally, I looked into the cost of getting a 128K direct internet line – a bit short of Canadian standards, but tolerable. The cost was $4,000 a month. Anybody feeling charitable?

I’d resigned myself to the current unwieldy process several days ago, and had nearly finished several posts and emails when fate destroyed my power cable. As my laptop is approximately as portable as a refrigerator and as electrically frugal as a Spinal Tap concert, it took only a few minutes for the battery to drain and the system to die, entombing my words within.

Normally this is but a minor difficulty, rectified by the purchase of a five dollar cable. But that would be too easy. The otherwise very helpful people at the nearest electronics shop were mystified and intrigued by the astonishingly foreign connector I showed them in my quest for its doppelganger. Likewise the hardware shop and the Japanese TV/computer repair place across the street. They recommended the oddly named Game City Mall as the best place to look. It’s far out of walking distance, though, for Gaborone is spread over a vast space far out of proportion to its population of 200,000.

In a country with fifty percent unemployment, there are quite a few people with more time than money. Many of the men in this situation make extra cash by hanging around with their cars at every conceivable place people cluster, and bellowing “Taxi!” at anyone who looks rich or white (a hue assumed to be synonymous with wealth).

Today some of them were quite helpful, though not as they’d expected. I hailed one cab, haggled down the price, and headed to Game City past Jaguar dealerships (?) and many surprisingly modern (but small) offices and shops. Game City is a surprisingly large mall, half indoor and half out, anchored by the Game Superstore, the local answer to Wal-Mart. Game was quite massive and well-stocked, with electronics and food and furniture and remarkably few customers, a problem that I’m told plagues the many other malls in the city. Well, duh. What feat of self-delusion convinced some unwise entrepreneurs that a city of 200,000, half of whom are below the poverty line, could support a half dozen Western-style malls?

I digress. At Game, the electronics gurus looked at the cable with a mixture of confusion and terror, and suggested desperately that I try Ultimate Solutions, a tech supply store nearby, before they herded me and the feared devil-cable from the department. I grew increasingly chagrined, and fearful that I’d spend the remainder of my stay not knowing the joyous bath of LCD light that brightens my existence. (There’s not much to do here after dark but play video game and write – hence my wordiness).

Three cabbies/panhandlers were lingering near the mall entrance, and as the hollered “TAXI!” I asked if they could take me to Ultimate Solutions. At first confused, they squawked somewhat angrily at each other in Setswana, and then one stepped forward and offered to take me there, growing more decisive with each word.
His confidence was a cruel joke. Within minutes he’d driven halfway across town and gotten terribly lost. He became increasingly convinced that his friend/rival among the other cabbies had given him bad directions in the hopes that we’d both be lost forever. Moreover, he completely forgot where I wanted to go in the first place. Several times.

Cabbie: “You wanted to go to Sahara Computers, right?”
Me: “No, Ultimate Solutions.”
Cabbie “Oh, OK, I didn’t know that”.

Cabbie: “You wanted to go to Riverwalk, right?
Me: “Sigh. Ultimate Solutions, please. Out of curiousity, how did you manage to hear ‘Riverwalk’ out of that?”
Cabbie: “I thought that’s where you wanted to go.”
Me: “Oy.”

By this point we were deep in an industrial district at the end of the work day, and people were flooding out of warehouses and small factories in droves. The roads alternated between blacktop and dust. The driver pulled up in front of a self-storage outlet and said “Here it is”. When asked if this was Ultimate Solutions, he replied, perplexed “Ultimate Solutions? Where is that?”. By this point I had resigned myself to this insanity and simply enjoyed the chance to see parts of Gaborone that I might not otherwise have experienced. The driver stopped to get directions at a payphone (in that particular neighborhood, a woman sitting by the side of the road with her own phone, renting it out), while I enjoyed the varied views of factories both small and immense, hovels built of tin, and homes of surprising modernity and luxury.

Eventually he figured out where we were going… a place called Commerce Park, three minutes walk from the Game City Mall I’d just left. I noted to myself that I could have avoided the entire odyssey, but probably wouldn’t want to. The staff at Ultimate Solutions, a dark warehouse packed to the gills with all manner of computer gear, regarded the cable at issue with the now-familiar lack of comprehension. They did, however, direct me to the highly helpful Frensch Corporation, the only store in town (and presumably the entire country) that had the piece I needed, albeit for an extortionate price. Content in the knowledge that my life would be alight in unhealthy phosphor tones once again, I hopped back in the cab, headed back to the guest house downtown, and paid the cabbie considerably more than the ride was worth. I’m discovering that I see far more if I have absolutely no idea where I’m going.

Many disconnected thinkings, and open comments too!

I’m adjusting, and observing, and many of the thoughts that I record herein will no doubt seem remarkably ignorant to me by the time I leave, which is of course why I record them.

As in everywhere else, contradictions abound here. Luxury cars are everywhere, and I see dozens on the walk to work each day. Yesterday I passed by Lexus and BMW dealerships brimming with shiny 2005 models. Botswana is one of the wealthiest countries in Africa, among the best educated, and almost certainly the best-governed. But, I’m learning, it’s still in Africa. For all the progress this country has made over its variously more downtrodden, corrupt or just plain unlucky neighbours, there is still poverty here on a scale that hobbles the Western mind. Gaborone is very spread out, and the area I live in is mostly populated with modest but quite livable single-story homes. It’s only by chance that I passed a far poorer area en route to the Mokolodi reserve, and glimpsed endless rows of tightly packed tin shacks, each containing a single room, about 12 feet square, that might house a whole family.
On the same drive I spotted the empty shell of a small car, upside down in the brush a hundred feet from the highway. I confirmed my suspicions with Jo, who explained that the car had likely flipped in an accident and had since been stripped bare of salable parts. What stunned me was her explanation that drivers who have car accidents are required by their insurers to notify them within 12 hours of an accident, because that’s about the longest one can expect a hobbled car to sit without being ransacked by the desperate (or just the opportunistic).
The crazy thing is that there’s far less income disparity here than in most other places in Africa. This is literally the only country in Africa to enjoy civilian democratic government since independence, not punctuated by military coups or other unpleasantries. Botswana’s enormous diamond wealth has been reasonably well-spent: on education – school is free through grade 11, and almost everyone speaks both English and Setswana; on infrastructure – the tap water is safe to drink(!!!); and bureaucratic law and order – Botswana is rated internationally as being less corrupt than either France or California (the first milestone’s amazing, the second less so).
This place has maintained the world’s highest average growth rate over the last 40 years, no mean feat given the miseries both outward and inward that have afflicted nearby countries like Zimbabwe. And for all that, the poverty seems to dwarf anything I’ve seen in person before. I’m still just beginning to perceive it; depressing though it may be, I’ll have to write more when I start understanding it better.

On a more me note, I’m still staying at the comfortable guest house, but permanent tenancy there is verboten so I’m expecting to have another place within 2 weeks. There are apparently several houses half full of Canadians and other expats scattered around the city, and I’ve several avenues for renting a room, so I’m not particularly worried about my prospects.

I know I haven’t written about the heffalumps yet, but that news is upcoming. I promise! I’ve just been trying to find a way to add some pictures, but my limited bandwidth may not allow it. Plus, by the time you read this, I should have a better comment system up and running. OK, well it looks like it'll just have to be open commenting through Blogger for now, but as bandwidth allows I'll make it better. Speak to me!

Pula!

In Botswana, the currency is called the Pula. The national greeting is “Pula”. The national motto is “Pula”. I’ve heard many people shout it gleefully over the last few days, but they mean its simpler definition.
Pula is the Setswana word for rain, which ought to impress upon anyone the scarcity of water and the vital importance of rain. I’m now seeing pula for the first time since my arrival. The clouds have been teasing us with explosive thunder and brilliant forked lightning for days, and only now have they opened up, with a moderate rainfall that still feels like manna..
The locals, both African and expat, have been brimming with anticipation at the hint of upcoming downpours, and their enthusiasm is very infectious. It’s hard to explain, given that it’s only been five days since I was in Vancouver, but even though I’m sitting by myself in my room at the moment, it inspires a powerful urge to charge out into the wet and enjoy it while it lasts, an impulse I’ve indulged several times.
And last it does not. Even as I’ve sat here, the light shower has largely tapered off. Damn… but still… Pula!

On the ground, and surrounded by living things...

Smallish planes do something to me. As soon as I took my space in the 50-seater flying me to Gaborone, I passed out without grace or warning. Oblivious to takeoff, I woke up only as the captain’s voice sounded over the radio informing us that the temperature in upcoming Gaborone, my new and temporary home, was 54 degrees. The entire planeload gasped in collective shock and fear.

Fortunately, ol’ Cap had gotten his numbers mixed up, but the 34 degrees that assaulted me on my exit from the plane was a shock, since I’d spent only seconds outdoors in Johannesburg and my last real exposure to the elements was in chilly Vancouver. What stroke of genius commanded me to wear a polyester shirt en route, I’ll never know, but life is a sweaty learning experience.

Jo Walls, my liaison with Somarelang Tikologo, met me at the airport. After checking that my journey hadn’t fully destroyed my energy, she and her adorable (and grabby) 1-year-old Zak, took me on a rapid-fire tour of some of the most vital locations I’ll need to know here. Several wild goats and semi-domestic cattle lazily crossed the road in front of us at various intervals, confident that their ability to dent the car with their inertia would deter any collisions. They were right.

I met the staff at my new employer’s office, all the while peppering Jo with incessant questions that revealed my fundamental ignorance about the vast country I’m in. Jo patiently showed me the banks I’ll need, gave me some maps I was unable to find in Canada or online, and ran me through the shopping district nearest the (powered, air-conditioned!) guest house I’ll be in for the next few days. There’s a wonderfully inexpensive internet café and two remarkably well-stocked supermarkets within five minutes’ walk.

More remarkably, Jo has arranged a meet’n’greet barbecue at her house for tomorrow afternoon, to acquaint me further with my new coworkers and possibly even meet some folks to share a house with. By this point I was bordering on ridiculously thankful, but the best was yet to come…

Jo and family are going on a wildlife drive at the Mokolodi Game Reserve, and invited me along! Elephants! ELEPHANTS! ELEEEEEEEEEEEEPHAAAAAAAAAAANTS! I never expected to get a chance to see real wildlife so soon… JOY!

Actually, I’m already glimpsing the surprising variety of creatures that inhabit this remarkably parched land. The trees nearest the guest house are thick with weaver bird nests, gourd-like enclosures that are woven from grasses and sticks and hang upside down from branches with the entrance at the very bottom. According to Jo, these nests are painstakingly built by the male weaver while the female looks on, and voices her disapproval of an inadequate nest by snipping the supporting branch, and then waiting for the hapless male to construct another home while the prior one lies in ruins on the ground below.

Lizards are everywhere, and it’s amazing to see geckos scurrying in spirals up desert trees while I do something as mundane as carry my groceries home. They lurk inside my kitchen, which is apparently a good thing, since they devour the omnipresent but thankfully non-malarial mosquitoes.

None of it has fully sunk in yet, like the strange fact that I just bought a very ordinary load of groceries... in Africa! As happened in Japan, there’ll surely be something that drives the unfamiliarity of my surroundings right into my brain, but it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe getting devoured by elephants will do the trick. Only one way to find out!

Nearly there...

I’m in Johannesburg Airport at the moment, waiting for the short final leg of my trip. I’ve been traveling for about thirty hours, and in a few more I’ll be in the Botswanan capital of Gaborone, hopefully settling in. Though clearly summer outside, it’s not too hot here at the moment, less sweltering than I’ve felt in Vancouver in July, which bodes well for the climate in Botswana a few hundred kilometers northwest. I’m stinking and sweaty nonetheless, a byproduct of a full day sitting on planes and lugging forty pounds of necessities on my back. But I’m almost there!

The flight from Vancouver to London was blessedly uneventful and surprisingly comfortable, as the seat next to me was unoccupied and British Airways remains one of the world’s few pleasant airlines. After an edible dinner, I got 30 minutes into Alien Vs. Predator before sleep took me away from the cheesiness. I woke an hour before landing, cursing my failure to spend the flight writing about my upcoming trip, but thankful for the rest. The longer flight, to Johannesburg, was still to come. I passed the six-hour stopover with video games and necessary shopping, and boarded impatiently when the opportunity arose.

In the midnight shade Europe was just a patchwork of indistinguishable city lights. The Libyan shoreline was more interesting, an astonishingly bright outline of the waterfront as far as I could see, the sort of luminosity afforded only to oil-producing countries. Libya soon faded into the Sahara, which is surely a fascinating flyover in the daytime but offered very little spectacle at night.

I crossed the Equator for the first time, at 5:13 AM Johannesburg time, November 5th. As I passed this personal milestone, a lightning storm illuminated the clouds we passed around and through. The storm stretched for several hundred kilometers, intense silver flashes firing several times a second in every direction, a fascinating show. Occasionally I could peek at the Congolese (I think) landscape below through the front, and even in the predawn darkness the thickness of the jungle was undeniable. Alternating shades of deep grey and deeper black hinted at the topography of the land, but sharper details escaped me. Once in a while minute, constellations of light sparkled from the ground, clusters of perhaps a dozen street lamps, a thousandth the brightness of even the small European towns I flew over hours earlier. These were, I surmise, tiny villages or mines buried deep in the jungle. Their miniscule size and apparent isolation were the first real hints I’ve had at what I may see in the months ahead.

Eventually the storm clouds dissolved and the sun surfaced on the horizon. For me, and probably for most people, any adventure as intimidating as moving to another continent brings doubts and apprehensions. It’s hard not to transpose yourself to somewhere so dramatically foreign for such an unreal length of time without frequently wondering, “What the dammity dammity hell am I doing?” But as I watched the perfect orange sunrise over the jewel lakes at the heart of Africa, it was very hard to remember my fears.

The pale green of the southern jungle gave way to carefully delineated farmers’ fields shortly after dawn, and I began to see the glint of reflected sunlight from the tin roofs of the presumably poor villages below. Eventually, Johannesburg itself came into view, and startled me with its size. The city is absolutely immense – I’ve seen far more populous cities, but none with sprawl to equal Joburg. I was surprised by the obvious opulence of huge portions of the city, less so by the shantytowns stretching alongside the clearly middle class neighborhoods. Golf courses were omnipresent, and at least fifty kilometers distant from the airport I could see a gleaming downtown of skyscrapers and superhighways. The city spilled over every horizon I could see from my tiny window, past hills and lakes and vast yellow-green fields. It’s huge.

I can see effectively nothing of the wider South Africa from the airport, unfortunately, but I’ll be back here in a few months, maybe less. In the meantime, I’ll be seeing whatever I can of rest of southern Africa. As soon as I have more to write, you’ll hear it all.