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.

Couldn't post this one while I was actually *in* Swaziland...

The dinner drum is drowning out Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. So be it. I’m bloody hungry, and this movie has aged very poorly since the time I was ten.

Last night we arrived at Sondzela’s, a hostel deep in tiny Swaziland, a beautiful, astonishingly ill-governed monarchy sandwiched between wealthy South Africa and slightly war-torn Mozambique. King Mswati III is a useless tumour of a ruler, even by the miserable standards of Sub-Saharan Africa. His spasms of idiot largesse are the only things that occasionally drag his little-noticed country of 1 million into international view.

You might think that a minute, impoverished country, dependent on international food aid to stave off famine, would have more pressing priorities than a private royal jet (price tag: $47 million US) or a fleet of dozens of luxury cars ($100,000 apiece). You’d be right, but Mswati III seems to disagree. You’d also be right to think that a culture competing with Botswana for the title of most AIDS-ravaged nation, with an infection rate of about 40%, could use a better national role model than this polygamous lout. But Mswati, in keeping with his favourite annual tradition, will choose his thirteenth wife September. There have been questions in the past about whether all his brides actually want this particular honour, but in Swaziland, that’s a secondary consideration.

Fortunately, (for me, at least) Mswati has as yet been unable to destroy Swaziland’s wide variety of stunning landscapes and lush greenery. When we four entered the country yesterday, beginning the final leg of my African wandering, we met forests, the first reals ones I’ve seen since I arrived. They were thick with pine aromas and shrieking birds. That quickly gave to alpine meadow and then Botswana-style scrubland, and at last the patchy rainforest of Mlilwane Nature Sanctuary, where I now write.

The Vancouver-style drizzle tht has cooled the whole area markedly has thus afforded me a few opportunities that would otherwise have been prohibitively sweaty. This afternoon I rented a mountain bike to wheel around the reserve and fill in a few of the gaps in my wildlife checklist. No big cats live in the park, so sadly I’ve seen not one lion since I arrived in November. I did, however, see hordes of Burchell’s zebra, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them that their stripes are terrible camouflage against the dark green grass here. Their symbiotes, the not-actually-blue blue wildebeest, congregated nearby in small herds of a dozen or so. It’s calving season, so most of the animals are guarding midget versions of themselves. Taking a bike, rather than a guided game drive, brought me much closer to these creatures, and to countless other varieties of antelope and the omnipresent warthogs. I kept a safe distance from a three-metre crocodile, though he seemed well (and recently) fed, and not the least bit interested in moving at all, let alone eating me. I similarly avoided the half-metre wide dark tunnel that marked the entrance to a wild dog den, though I would give a kidney for a few photos of those rare animals. Being nocturnal though, and probably with new pups, they apparently don’t take kindly to daytime disturbances outside their dens. I saw a documentary a few weeks ago showing a pack of them devouring an antelope (about my size, instructively enough) in less than a minute, and gave them a wide berth.

Kelly, Natalie and Andrea, my remaining travel companions (Kristi having split in Maputo a few days ago) departed early this morning for their jobs in Gabs. The fools. I’m going to linger in Swazi (everything gets abbreviated around here) for a few more days, trying to find rhinos, giraffes, and maybe even a lion before I head back to Botswana to wrap up the final details of my trip.

Hopefully Mswati III will abide.

Stinkiest... place... ever...

Maputo smells like a textbook 3rd world metropolis. Mozambique’s capital, although sophisticated and a damn fine place to eat, marinates in the humid body odour of its three million people, the aggressive reek of the seafood and livestock that feed them, the fuel and exhaust of ancient automobiles in a land that never knew Aircare, and a generous hint of good old-fashioned sewage.

Yet it’s still a lot of fun, since it offers both the cosmopolitan feel and the snazzy food I’ve been so desperately missing in Gabs. Following our early-evening arrival we began last night with a feast at the classy and delicious Indian joint across the street from the backpackers, gorging ourselves over three delightful hours for about $7 Canadian apiece. After a breather, we followed up with a trip to a late-night pastry shop for Portuguese desserts, principally a curious but effective egg tart called a (I’m guessing at the spelling here) pastis do nata, which has since become the mainstay of my diet.

It’s well that the food is so good here, for our lodgings at The Base are less so. The rooms are clean and safe but hot as kilns and perpetually vulnerable to the din of the screaming fools who wander the halls at hours when anyone without fangs or a prehensile tail should bloody well be asleep. The pope’s death watch is playing endlessly on CNN in the shared room – it’s a bit of a downer. The staff are preternaturally unfriendly and more handicap than help with things like street directions and next week’s bookings. Sigh – you can’t win ‘em all, and this is the first disappointment I’ve had in five months in Africa, so I’m done whining.

Today we went a-wandering, after stocking up on enough delicious pastries to last us until we reached the next bakery. During a long banking odyssey (the details of which bore even me, so I’ll refrain from recounting them) we wandered a decent chunk of downtown Maputo, whose streets are universally named after either famous African leaders or celebrated Marxists, a remnant of the now-discarded founding philosophy of Frelimo, Mozambique’s ruling party. Frelimo’s official logo is a farmer’s scythe and a Kalashnikov assault rifle, set against an outsize industrial sprocket of some variety… it’s a bit unnerving.. I saw up front the contradictions of growth and the chaos of the developing world. Maputo’s port and industries are the engine for Mozambiue’s postwar recovery, so there’s a lot of visible money in the town – luxury cars are fairly numerous and banks are as plentiful as newspaper kiosks. Yet this remains one of the world’s poorest countries, and the symptoms of poverty far outweigh the trappings of wealth.

Every journey out of the walled hostel yard entails running a gauntlet of beggars of maddening persistence and occasionally frightening hostility, a distressing number of whom are struggling youth, their age disguised by malnourishment. Street vendors, hawking everything from beautiful cloth paintings called batiks to bootleg Chinese DVDs, cluster around restaurant windows and patios, and can follow a protesting potential customer for literal blocks. Though their aggressive tactics frustrate, I can’t imagine that I’d do any differently if my survival depended on it as theirs does. Kelly, Andrea and I learned to bracket our token American and consummate shopper, Natalie, as we walked down the avenidas. This tactic evolved of necessity, since many were the times one of us would glance back to find that Nat had seen a curious trinket and made the fatal mistake of displaying interest, soon finding herself immobilized, surrounded by a half-dozen or more jostling peddlers.

Eventually, we escaped the gravity of the main drive and the hawkers, who successfully burdened Natalie with at least a dozen pieces and then skedaddled in search of more fertile ground, leaving us free to explore the outskirts of the city centre. We wandered a few kilometres and marveled at the inconsistency of the architecture. The Portuguese slave traders who annexed Mozambique four centuries ago were brutal rulers even compared to other colonial overlords, but they apparently built to last. The large, terraced homes of white stucco they left behind now elegantly house many embassies and government departments. Interspersed are towering, cruel apartment blocks that illustrate the harshness of even middle-class life here. A cage of burglar bars encases each tiny balcony up to about the tenth floor of each tower. Many of the buildings are arbitrarily missing refrigerator-sized chunks of plaster and concrete from their edges, torn away by neglect or violence.

Other scars of the 17-year civil war, now a decade past, are evident even though Maputo itself escaped much of the carnage. At a gas station outside the city, a middle-aged man, begging wordlessly amid the fruit sellers around our car, brandished the remnants of his right arm, crudely severed at mid-forearm, now without prosthesis or even any evidence of medical treatment.

The most frustrating thing I’ve found about the poverty I’ve seen here and in other countries in the region, is that I haven’t had the time to understand it, let alone do anything about it. I just haven’t had a chance to get my head around anywhere other than Botswana, and even there I only glimpse the barest outline of the situation. Every poor country here has different reasons for its poverty, varying combinations of illiteracy, disease, corruption, war, inadequate status for women, environmental degradation, and a hundred other factors I haven’t yet grasped. I could (and probably will) spend the rest of my life trying to get my head around it.

Survival!

I'm still intact, and back in Maputo after a few days unwilling in Pretoria and three much better days further north along Mozambique's central coast. Now I'm lingering in the capital until tomorrow, when I set off for Swaziland and visit beasties for a week.

You'll hear more from me after that.