Eaten by Elephants

In brief!

2005-04-30T03:13:00.000+02:00

More photos!

2005-04-28T17:51:00.000+02:00

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!

2005-04-25T09:51:00.000+02:00

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!

2005-04-17T11:26:00.000+02:00

More to follow...

Still en route...

2005-04-16T09:37:00.000+02:00

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...

2005-04-13T13:54:00.000+02:00

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?

2005-04-04T13:50:00.000+02:00

“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...

2005-04-03T13:49:00.000+02:00

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...

2005-04-01T22:47:00.000+02:00

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!

2005-04-01T11:33:00.000+02:00

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.

Surfing attracts jellyfish!

2005-03-30T22:45:00.000+02:00

Surfing was… unique. The local surf instructor slightly shredded his leg in an unnamed recent accident, and his girlfriend forbade him to actually teach us how to surf. So he sent Kristi and I on our way with two rented boards and a few confusing, self-contradictory tips on how to skim gracefully over the surface of the waves.

Of course, my surfing consisted less of grace and poise than getting my face flattened by a flying surfboard, but life is a learning experience. My surfboard was comically small, so when I lay on my stomach to paddle out past the breakers, it was a foot underwater rather than resting on the surface. The result was a curious hydrodynamic vortex that powered oceanic quantities of seawater directly up my nose each time I passed a wave. Kristi was rather more successful, acquiring a truly maniacal look in her eyes and declaring that she was abandoning her life of international development work to become a “surfer chick”. It’ll take me a few more tries before such an addiction takes hold. Occasionally I felt a momentary thrill of accomplishment at having skillfully stood up on my board, only to find that it had long since buried itself, motionless in the underwater sand. Eventually I gave up trying to actually surf, and just reverted to yesterday’s game of playing in the titanic waves, albeit with the challenging new handicap of having a 7-foot surfboard ties to my ankle. Good times.

We bartered for seafood with everyone we met on the way back to the lodge while the sun set. We returned with nearly 9 kilograms of scallops, prawns, crayfish and miniscule crabs, which we combined into a nearly inedible paella of burnt rice, unsuccessfully flavoured with salt and cider. This failure drove most of our crew to bed, but I returned religiously to the beach. Tonight the sand on the beach was so smooth that the retreating tide left behind a motionless film of water that mirrored the stars and half-moon above. Wandering the unrippling expanse, staring down at my feet, had the most enrapturing effect, like walking on the sky.

So very lazy...

2005-03-30T12:42:00.000+02:00

Tofo makes me forget my general distaste for beaches. About 500 km north of the capital Maputo, on Mozambique’s glorious Indian Ocean coast, Tofo is a miniscule town founded on fishing and sustained by tourism. The weather is impeccably sunny, the people friendly and entrepreneurial, and the water endless and inviting and so blue it’s nearly black.

We’re at the hospitable and highly comfortable Bamboozi Backpackers, and at the moment I’m perched on the balcony of their dune-top bar, relishing the mid-tide waves a few hundred meters across the yellow sand below me. It’s an agreeable existence for tourists like me, on the tranquil shores of one of the most stunning countries I’ve seen, and it’s a crime we only have 2 days here.

Consider my day yesterday: I awoke early and devoured a free coconut (one of many) while I admired the bar, built entirely of grass, bamboo and planks of local wood. Then Natalie (our honorary Canadian) and I walked a couple of kilometers down the beach into Tofo proper, in search of amusement. We found it in the form of a snorkeling expedition further south along the coast. We joined two Americans and a handful of Canadians in an inflatable motor raft that careened over the impressive waves in search of whale sharks, and each bounce and leap nearly flung us carelessly into the water a few kilometers from shore.
Sadly, that was almost the trip’s sole excitement. We glimpsed a few dolphins leaping briefly from the water, but they were little interested in us and vanished quickly. We spent nearly two hours searching in futility for bigger game, but it was only after we’d returned in frustration to the bay we launched from that Mark, our Aussie guide and pilot, bellowed “Everybody into the water!” Slow to find my mask and flippers, I was the last off the boat. I was rewarded well for my sluggishness – as I dived in and shoved my snorkeled face under the surface, I discovered a seven-metre whale shark drifting just below me. I could easily have reached out and touched it, were such intrusions not forbidden by our guide. The largest fish in the world, a shark but interested only in plankton, slowed a little as it passed beneath, and its speed matched mine. The other divers vanished behind me somewhere, and with my face submerged the shark and I swam in total silence. I drifted for fifty or a hundred metres, arm’s length from the harmless titan in an unexpectedly tranquil and empathic experience, before it gradually descended into the opacity of the Indian ocean.
Our mission thus fulfilled, we all clambered back aboard and returned to shore. Afterwards, Nat and I perused the local crafts market and bargained for prawns with a local fisherman (2 kilos of prawns for 6 dollars – I do love to haggle!), and then wandered along the rising tide back to the backpackers. I joined Kelly and Kristi in the simple, enormous fun of battling the by-now immense waves of the climbing water. The two- or three-meter waves batted us from our feet, and we struggled endlessly to stand just so the water could work its hilarious violence on us again.
Exhausted, we cooked and devoured a vast, satisfying cauldron of a nameless prawn and tomato concoction. A few of us lingered by the bar for a while after sundown, and I enjoyed my new nightly ritual of wandering solo to the moonlit water’s edge and basking in the roar of the glittering, barely-seen waves.

Sadly, we have to leave Tofo tomorrow, for a few days in Maputo before I head to Swaziland. Through this entry I’ve been planning a rambling conclusion about how fortunate I am to be here, relaxing amidst blue water and good friends and plentiful food, but I think that’s quite enough introspection for one day. I have a few hours of daylight left, and the sun that scorched me to cinders yesterday is retreating low in the pale sky. I’m going to go learn how to surf.

The Road of Terror...

2005-03-27T13:39:00.001+02:00

The roads in Mozambique defy belief. A chaotic webwork of dust paths crisscrosses the country, reaching some destinations and entirely ignoring others. Paved roads are few, and 4 wheel drive is essential for traveling anywhere outside the capital city. Even the main arteries, though technically paved, have potholes that would befuddle an Abrams tank. Some are literally three metres wide, and an arm’s length deep, which necessitates a sort of ridiculous slalom across the highway’s two narrow lanes, dodging careening minibuses and enormous cross-country trucks. Driving properly, between the lines, would quickly shatter even the hardiest of vehicles – and it’s been effectively demonstrated that our truck is NOT in such esteemed company.

But it sure beats some of the other wheeled calamities we saw en route. In Africa, the drivers of public transport are paid according to the number of people they move, as I may have intimated while writing about traveling in Lesotho. In Botswana, this often means that drivers pack people into the beds of their trucks, as many as can sit down and then some. But today in Mozambique we passed a pickup which had clearly been loaded with as many people as could possibly stand up – at least twenty people were crammed into the open back, all on their feet. The passengers in front leaned forward over the cab, clinging to whatever they could, and the next layer of people clamped onto them in turn, and so on. This terrifying spectacle raced around the potholes and other traffic much as we did, clocking at least 100 km an hour. I’m really glad we’ve got our own transport – public transit is a damn scary thing here.

'Bout bloody time...

2005-03-27T06:36:00.000+02:00

The trucker had no idea what he was talking about. Through a prolonged odyssey of searching, Kelly and Andrea managed to find a competent mechanic who diagnosed a clogged fuel pump, repaired the problem for a moderately extortionate fee, and sent us on our way too late to disembark on Saturday. So another uneventful night passed at the Holiday Inn, and we set out for the tiny beach town of Tofo at 6AM today, two days behind schedule. At least we devoured some seafood (our main reason for the trip) while waiting in Pretoria.

Stuck...

2005-03-26T12:18:00.000+02:00

Vacation is off to a roaring start. About three hours into South Africa, en route to Mozambique, the truck in which we five travel began to sputter. After getting an appraisal (in a VERY dodgy country neighborhood) from a helpful trucker, we coaxed it the 30 km to Pretoria, where we ending up spending last night crammed five to a double hotel room at the Holiday Inn. The car's being looked at, having apparently dropped some key bearings, and I'm at the pleasant Hatfield Plaze shopping centre, in one of Pretoria's nicer district. It's very pretty here - more of that Southern California feeling - but it's not Mozambique. Hopefully we'll be on our way tonight, hitting Maputo by sundown. If the car will thake longer, this being the Easter weekend, we'll probably all bus to Swaziland and formulate a better plan from there. Wish me luck.

We've been misplaced!

2005-03-25T21:25:00.000+02:00

Pretoria isn’t Maputo, which is another 600km down the road. Our cramped double-but-secretly-accommodating-five room at the Holiday Inn is not the sunny open-air hostel that awaited us tonight in Mozambique. The Big Mac Meal on which I gorged myself tonight, at first with novel vigour and then with mounting regret, was most certainly not the prawn and crab curry my slavering mind’s eye had foreseen. But at least Raiders of the Lost Ark is on TV! Bah. I’m sure that under the right circumstances Pretoria, South Africa’s capital, is a vibrant, fascinating city. But, since it’s Easter weekend, the place is a ghost town, as everyone of means has split for the coast. There’s nothing going on. Much more importantly, dag nab it, it just ain’t where we’d hoped to be right now.

Our precious truck more-or-less died 30 km out of town, about halfway between Gabs and Mozambique. We coaxed the wheezing beast off the freeway and into a rundown gas station/bar in a nameless little hamlet around noon. It being Easter Friday, no mechanic was available and, more strikingly, everyone there was already reeking drunk, including the genuinely helpful trucker who looked over the engine when he stopped to buy beers for the road (yikes!). He diagnosed horrific symptoms liked dropped bearings and engine corrosion and broken cylinders, but informed us that the car could limp to Pretoria, where we may have to wait until Tuesday to get it fixed. ARGH! Inasmuch as rural South Africa is not known to be safe haven for lost and confused tourists (and the trucker terrified us with, “You are NOT safe here”), we dragged the truck at 20 km/h all the way to Pretoria, where we grabbed a hotel room. Now we’re waiting, watching TV, eating McDonald’s food (which we haven’t had in many months in Gabs), and hoping against hope that the trucker had no idea what he was talking about.

Aaaaargh!

2005-03-24T13:52:00.000+02:00

I'm a git.

I write all my blog postings on my computer at home, and then drag them over the web cafes and post them. Only this time, having finished nearly all of my posts for the last two weeks, including the remnant details of my trip, I forgot my USB key before heading to the interweb place.

This is particularly frustrating because I'm leaving for Mozambique at 6AM tomorrow and will be vanished for two weeks. I'll try to find a net cafe in the capital Maputo where I can throw this stuff online. I think I'm writing mostly for my own records now anyways - who wants to read three-week-old vacation news?

In other news, I finished my job at the Red Cross yesterday! They brought cake, and bought me a copper clock shaped like Africa, and hugged me. A lot. They sang the Botswana Red Cross song, the lyrics to which are absolutely awful, but they made it sound amazing. I have yet to meet a single person in this country who can't sing like a professional vocalist. It's impressive and eerie.

So I'm done!!! I managed to get a whole lot more done at this job than at the last one. Working in Botswana entails savoring the small victories, because large ones are a myth. I had a few small victories - secured some important donations, built a database, trained the staff in how to use it - and I'm glad for them. Not too bad for just 6 weeks work. Now it's just vacation and relaxation and a wee bit of paperwork for three more weeks.

First Mozambique (possibly the poorest country in the world, but with good food and snazzy beaches), then Swaziland (landlocked kingdom ruled by borderline retarded tribalist jackass), then a few days in Gabs wrapping up the details. Then I'm coming back home to the most important thing in the world - Fooooood!!! Delicious Vancouver food!!! Oh yeah, and friends and family and dogs and all that...

The first volley!

2005-03-11T16:59:00.000+02:00

I've posted four entries from my first day of the last trip. Don't worry, not all future posts will be so infernally wordy. Rather than hope you'll all burrow through my archives looking for them, I'm just going to link to them here.

Baobabs
Heffalumps!
Food!
Bob!

Enjoy!

Alive!

2005-03-09T13:49:00.000+02:00

I'm back in Gabs! Waitaminute, Gabs is the dullest place on Earth. I want to be back in Zambia.

Since I can't have that, it seems (stupid work), I'll have to relive the trip through blog posts, the first batch of which approaches readiness. I went to Zimbabwe, Zambia, Northern Botswana, and technically into Namibia for a few minutes. All were amazing, and all offered different things.

I saw the astonishing Victoria Falls from above and below, across two countries. The animals were everywhere, including elephants, crocs, hippos, and monkeys who raided my tent and scattered my possessions far and wide. The weather was exceptionally pleasant and the mosquitoes were cruel beyond words. Four hundred or so photos did I take, few of which bandwidth will allow me to post, but I'll try.

Soon all will be revealed...

On hiatus...

2005-03-01T17:30:00.000+02:00

My silence of late is well justified, I promise.

At the moment, for example, I'm in Zambia, using my few minutes on a decent internet connection to tell y'all that I won't be posting for another week. Yesterday I was in Zimbabwe (for tourists, not nearly as terrifying as you'd think... cheap and exceptionally friendly). I wandered the unspeakably immense and moving Victoria Falls, about which I'll blog in greater detail in the not-too-distant future. Today I puttered about Livingstone, the border town, and tomorrow I'll be heading up to two nights on Bovu Island, a small and cheap beastie-watching camp in the middle of the mighty Zambezi, deeper into the heart of beknighted Zambia.

Then it's two nights in Chobe Game reserve in northern Botswana, riding sunset cruises in the hopes of getting devoured by hippos, and taking a just-before-dawn game drive to see if I can't catch the lions at feeding time. It's all quite exciting, but it has me abdicating my bloggy duties for the time being. You'll get it all in nauseating detail as soon as I'm back at my trusty computer (from which I may be able to send pictures of the hundreds of baboons that followed me today.)

More to come... those of you who still check in here from time to time will be rewarded for your persistence.

Good ol' Uncle Bob...

2005-02-27T21:57:00.000+02:00

In most offices around Gabs, at least one room has a poster from the Southern Africa Development Community, a forum for the leaders of a dozen regional countries to promote economic growth. This poster has a picture of the heads of state of all the member countries. What makes this tidbit relevant is that on every poster I’ve seen in Botswana, the portrait of Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe has been defaced – thumbtacks through the eyes, devil horns, outright shredding… you get the idea. The depredations of “Uncle Bob” have been very well documented elsewhere, so I won’t go into them in great detail here, except to say that seeing this poster made me feel better – hating Robert Mugabe isn’t just a pastime for pedantic, culturally biased Western outsiders like me. It’s something all the people of Africa can enjoy! And so they should – Zimbabwe under his recent rule has become a terrifying object lesson in how the cruel ambitions of a single person can squeeze the vitality from a country of amazing people and nearly boundless potential.

Zimbabweans don’t get much respect in Botswana. The recent troubles have sent a steady stream of Zimbabwean immigrants, legal and otherwise, into Botswana in search of work and political and economic stability. Zimbabweans are consistently blamed for Botswana’s quickly rising violent crime rates, for the paucity of good jobs, for urban overcrowding, for pollution, and (I presume) for bad weather and the lack of anything good on TV. They’re pretty much the all-purpose targets for any variety of generic frustration from most Batswana.

I suspect I see why. Though I’m only in-country for a day, my experience with Zimbabweans in Victoria Falls have corroborated my encounters with their countrymen in Botswana: they all shared the good nature, fine sense of humor, admirable work ethic and sophisticated manners that are so conspicuously absent in Botswana proper. Where the Tswana border staff this afternoon offered only surly indifference and a rank indignation that we had interrupted their sitting-around-and-doing-nothing time, their Zimbabwean counterparts on the other side of the crossing were cheerful and helpful beyond words. They joked with sincere cheer about our (failed) attempts to weasel our way out of the $30US visa fee; on request, they found the largest passport stamps possible to give us an adequate souvenir of our entry into one of Africa’s more maligned countries; they gave directions, thanked us for our time, apologized for the unavoidable delay, and actually *smiled* as they sent us on our way.

This may not seem so remarkable to those of you reading from home, but I assure you, anyone who has spent much time here will drool at the thought of encountering so much plain old *friendliness* of the sort that’s somehow been scoured from Botswana by an as-yet unexplained combination of government and local culture. One more example – in Vic Falls we pulled into a gas station, which a small sign dolefully informed us had no gasoline or diesel of any kind. We just wanted to get our oil and water checked – only the latter was deficient, and the attendant happily replenished it while apologizing for the absence of fuel. He subsequently washed our windshield, without being asked, while chatting with us about our travels – and then refused payment! After we had badgered him into accepting a few bucks for his troubles and driven off, we all, more or less simultaneously, offered some amazed remark such as “Guys, we’re not in Botswana anymore.”

Tonight, we’re camped at the small but very pleasant Tokkie’s Lodge, a backpackers’ hostel ten minutes’ drive from the Falls. The British owner, Ron, in the great tradition of hostel operators’ everywhere, has been a huge help in arranging for our lodgings in Livingstone tomorrow night and suggested the fine restaurant I described with excruciating verbosity earlier. The two dogs, Softy and Nuts, are quiet and friendly black lab crosses who wander happily around the small fenced grounds and visit everyone in sight.

Zimbabwe, for what little time I’ve spent here, is fascinating, and I wish I had more time to explore it. Tomorrow we’ll be hitting Vic Falls and seeing what we can of this tiny corner, but it’s no substitute for seeing the rest of the country, particularly Harare, the heart of the Great Zimbabwean empire of five centuries ago. I’m coming back someday… and I hope that Zimbabwe’s still here when I do.

Life in Africa is hard...

2005-02-27T18:54:00.000+02:00

Tonight’s dinner, our one designated splurge in the entire trip, cost just over half a million dollars for the four of us. To be sure, it was tasty. We whetted our appetites with pickled slices of baby crocodile tail, exquisitely presented with cleansing, tissue-thin apple shavings. For mains, we all feasted on exotic delights: Kathryn and Nathalie each had a lean and succulent cutlet of kudu, a large antelope, served with fresh cranberry and mashed sweet potatoes. Serena enjoyed the warthog fillet, which was far tastier than any pork I’ve had. I had “Nyami Nyami”, a Zambezi bream fish nicknamed for the serpent god of the great river who offers his flesh to the people of Zambia and Zimbabwe. It was perfectly sautéed in coconut cream curry, and served with delicious roasted veggies (which I normally disdain as empty vitamins), some of which were quite new to me. It was easily the finest food I’ve had in my entire time in Southern Africa – even by Vancouver standards, this was a world-class meal.

The restaurant was at the Victoria Falls Safari Lodge, a beautiful and distressingly up-market, multi-story wooden edifice that caters mainly to wealthy (and mostly ancient) tourists. We all feasted on equally exotic delights: Kathryn and Nathalie each had a lean and succulent cutlet of kudu, a large antelope, served with fresh cranberry and mashed sweet potatoes. Serena enjoyed the warthog fillet, which was far tastier than any pork I’ve had.. We enjoyed a sundowner (the Southern African term for a beer or ten enjoyed in the fading light) on the beautiful terraced balcony that serves as the Lodge’s bar. It overlooked a well-wooded flat expanse of the Zambezi river valley, which stretched almost infinitely under another incomparable orange African sunset. The balcony isn’t far from a collection of smallish watering holes, each a few metres in diameter, which are floodlit to give the patrons a chance to view any animals that wander in for a drink after dark. Though hopeful for giraffes and lions, we saw only a smattering of unique birds and the hyperactive vervet monkeys that clambered playfully over the hotel roof behind us while we waited for the dinner bell.

Sadly, we had to reject our helpful server’s first dinner recommendation, the Boma, or “Eating Place” (in what language I remember not, probably Zulu or Matabele). Though the four-hour buffet of authentic Southern African cuisine sounded nearly irresistible, and Lonely Planet told us it was possibly the best meal available in all of Africa, we paled at the prospect of paying well over a million dollars each for dinner. So we headed up to the lesser-yet-still-wonderful restaurant that rested above the bar. It is a multi tiered, low-lit place constructed entirely of polished wood, with decor and service the equal of the ritziest places I’ve seen in Canada, though of course with an African flavour. Enormous woven carpets and tapestries with startlingly detailed depictions of local wildlife hung from the 15-m vaulted thatch ceiling. The wall were all open to the air and hung over the Zambezi plain below.

The restaurant had its own excellent view of the watering hole, and the lights were kept just barely bright enough to read the menus, to facilitate viewing of the unfortunately absent wildlife. Somehow, with no noticeable chemicals or other means, the whole place was entirely free of mosquitoes and other bugs, something entirely alien to my experience in the region. I don’t know how they did it, but at this point I’d give my arm for the secret.

With the exception of the young children of the Italian family seated behind us, we four, all in our mid-20s, were the youngest people there, by a couple of decades. Wealthy European, South African and American tourists abounded, having an extraordinarily insulated, but no doubt very entertaining, African experience. After finishing our dinner, we examined the place around us with awe and observed that the Victoria Falls Safari Lodge serves its patrons precisely the Africa they want to see, an Africa of abundant wildlife, comfort, and neatly captured bits of allegedly genuine local culture. As if to drive home the point, an impeccably talented men’s a cappella, clad in bright t-shirts featuring enormous savannah animals, exploded into a fine rendition of Neil Diamond’s “I am the Lion”.

Enjoying the surprisingly good music, basking in the glow of extraordinary food, and debating with my companions the appropriateness of enjoying such luxury in a country in precipitous decline, I asked myself two questions, and found two simple answers. Is the sheltered experience of some tourists, enjoying game drives and luxury lodges, the Real Africa ™? Of course not. Is it worth doing at least once while I’m here? Hell, yes.

They're everywhere!

2005-02-27T14:50:00.000+02:00

We headed north from Nata, and began the long drive to Kasane, the border post with Zimbabwe. The ride was incredibly flat, with straight roads and two-storey high acacia trees covering the plains that flanked us on both sides. It would have been lethally dull, except…

Elephants!!!!

About an hour north of tiny Nata, we non-driving passengers were staring at a huge eagle on a roadside tree, when our esteemed chauffeur Kathryn blurted “Other side! Other side!” Like puppets we jerked around to catch an enormous bull elephant emerging from the thick brush twenty meters to the left of the road. He was massive and, I think, very old. His skin was wrinkled with age, and his left tusk was broken halfway. He glanced passively at us as we sped by.

Shrieking with glee at our first sighting of a wild elephant, we launched into a group hug and then set about looking for more. We saw a dozen or so in the next two hours, before the brush became too thick to see anything. They were grouped by twos and threes, some idly chewing foliage, others crossing the road, and several who ambled away into the trees with studied indifference as we approached.

No giraffes did I see, though Nathalie and Kathryn claim to have glimpsed one. Eventually the ride became as dull as we’d initially feared, though only for the final two hours. We still never stopped intensely starting at the trees, though, ready to shout hectically about another pachyderm sighting.

On the road again...

2005-02-27T10:47:00.000+02:00

Botswana has twice as many donkeys as people. Since there are only 1.5 million people in a country of half a million square km, that may not add up to a huge donkey density. Yet since most of the three million spent yesterday blocking the highway, and last night clustered near our tent making suspiciously exuberant noises while we tried to sleep, they seem as numerous as the mosquitoes.

We’re heading out now from Planet Baobab, a spartan but comfortable scattering of huts and gravel campsites that sits on the immense salt pans of east-central Botswana. The highway north from Gaborone (itself at Bots’ southern border with South Africa) runs through this fossil of what was once a vast inland sea, which dried only a few thousand years ago. Too salty to grow more than hardy grasses and the weird, disproportioned baobab tree, the pans flood briefly with each rainy season, and become an incomparable breeding ground for hundreds of different bird species. Even now, in the dry season, I see a new (and noisy) bird every few minutes. The variety is impressive, and the landscape foreboding. Tempting posters advertise half-day quad-bike rides out into the pans, and for a moment I mull it over.

But we’ve stopped here only for the night. Yesterday, Nathalie (Quebecoise roommate) and Kathryn (Nat’s Brit buddy) set out from Gabs, and drove 600 (flat, straight, dull) kilometres north to the tiny village of Gweta. Planet Baobab waits in Gweta, its entrance marked inexplicably by a house-sized grey concrete aardvark and a metre-wide replica of Earth, carved of scrap metal and resting atop a five-metre-high termite mound. We’re now about 400 kilometres south of our immediate goal, the confusing quadruple border between Botswana, up-and-coming Namibia, inscrutable Zambia, and troubled Zimbabwe.

We met with Kristy, Elaine and Serena at the lodge last night. Kristy’s another volunteer in Gabs (from Coquitlam, amazingly enough), Elaine’s an Irishwoman who has wandered through some of the harshest parts of Central Africa and now teaches refugees and Johannesburg, and Serena’s a newly-arrive Italian volunteer under Elaine’s tutelage. After a few hours of constant prodding from everyone else present, Serena realized that her work in Joburg could wait a week, and our three became four.

Splitting a couple of tents, we slept fitfully. The salt ground was as cushiony as cement, and blowing up the air mattress for just one night seemed foolish, so tossing and turning was more constant than real rest. I was designated Killer of Critters and Investigator of Strange Noises, since Nathalie’s midnight attempt lead us stoically along the darkened paths of Planet Baobab ended seconds in, when a hidden bird shrieked like all the hounds of hell, sending all of us (but especially her) leaping backwards in terror. As a result, what little sleep could be had was interrupted by those joyful, just-out-of-sight donkeys and the occasional entreaty of, “Paul! Wake up! Something just moved outside the tent!” But, having shown the great foresight to avoid getting my drivers’ license for the last ten years, I can sleep happily in the car. All’s well.

Our ultimate objective is the legendary Victoria Falls, a wall of water that dwarfs Niagara and divides Zambia and Zimbabwe. After a few days exploring the falls from both sides, then we’ll step a bit deeper into Zambia for a couple of nights at Jungle Junction, a small and secluded island hideaway where the bar and library are both well-stocked. The final leg will take us back into northern Botswana for two nights at Chobe National Park, home to 30,000 elephants and more than a few carnivorous beasties. Being the underpaid volunteers that we are (except for accountant Kathryn, who we consistently lambaste for having a real job), we’re doing it all on the cheap: camping everywhere, cooking for ourselves when possible, and haggling over every price that isn’t enforced with an AK-47. May our way be clear, and our mosquitoes non-malarial. Eventually, you’ll find all the details here.

Puppy!

2005-02-18T09:30:00.000+02:00

Natalie, Steve and I, roommates, have adopted a wiggly and timid street dog we’ve named Spock for his enormous pointy ears. He’s about three years old, and is a mutt about half the size of my beloved labs back home. I’m nearly certain that he’s part African wild dog (a never-domesticated savannah species), but he’s a surprisingly cheerful, friendly critter considering the tough life he’s surely had. He doesn’t even bark or growl.

Spock doesn’t actually live at our house, since he’s not the cleanest critter around, but he seems much happier and more relaxed now that he clearly feels welcome somewhere. Of course, none of us are here to stay, so we’re trying to start a house tradition of feeding little Spock, so that our successors keep him happy and healthy (comparatively speaking).

Animals are not well treated here. Most people don’t feed their pets, leaving them to scrounge from garbage bins and chase smaller animals for food. As a result, emaciated stray dogs wander most neighbourhoods alone or in mini-packs of two or three.

Violence against animals is sadly common. A lot of people think nothing of arbitrarily kicking any creature, pet or stray, who’s in the way or merely begging for food. This harshness is pervasive enough that I agonized over how to praise my insane horse in Lesotho, since she had known far more cruelty than affection in her life. I know that this callousness is born of the difficult lives of poverty and struggle led by most people in the region, but it’s very, very hard to tolerate nonetheless.

But Spock’s adjusting well. Though he has the meekness and fearful eyes of an abused dog, he calmed quickly when he saw we meant no harm. Within minutes of wandering into our yard he was rolling over for tummy rubs and playing puppyish games of nipping lightly at our fingers. Several times a week he comes to visit, he gets a bowlful of actual dog food (which it took him some time to recognize as edible) which he eats with remarkably polite and subservient table manners, rather than the reckless wolfing you’d expect. He gets tummy rubs and ear scratches once we’ve checked him for ticks, and spends as much time as we allow simply lounging in the safety and calm of our walled yard. He sleeps most nights under a patch of trees just outside the property (hence the ticks) and waits eagerly, more for attention than food, incredibly enough, most evenings when we come home from work. He's no substitute for my own puppies back home, but he's a sweet little guy and he'll do fine in the interim.

PS Speaking of animals, my friend Kelly, who lives on the outskirts of Gabs, has just had half a troop of baboons take up residence in her garden. This may sound excitingly exotic, and it was for about five minutes, but baboons are horrid creatures with huge teeth and notoriously foul tempers. She's still trying to figure out what to do about them. Updates to follow.