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.

Oww...

2005-02-11T12:54:00.000+02:00

In the Red Cross Ofice, when you need to run errands outside the building, you grab one of two company drivers and have him run you all over town. This isn't particularly noteworthy, except:

1. Yesterday's driver proudly proclaimed "This is my favourite music!" as he played a custom-made CD of the twangiest, whiniest, cruelest American country tunes imaginable.

2. Today's driver played a Milli Vanilli CD (god knows where he found it, but it hasn't aged well since 1990).

Now my brain hurts...

Success!

2005-02-03T09:23:00.000+02:00

As exciting as my three days of unemployment were (like a mini-vacation, really), I couldn't stay a gentleman of leisure indefinitely, lest the Canucks funding me turn off the tap.

So now I work for the Botswana Red Cross, trying to get their network and database up and running before I leave, and maybe developing a new PR strategy for them if time permits. They'll let me take my already-planned trip up to Zimbabwe, and they mighty friendly people to boot. Funny how accomodating people are when you show up offering free labour.

Plus, the Red Cross looks a whole lot better on my resume than an environmental organization that's as unknown and unproductive as it is unpronounceable.

Yay me!

Sluggish blogger... and big news!

2005-02-01T10:30:00.000+02:00

Took about ten minutes to load the "New Post" page, so time is short. Were Blogger faster, I'd have put this up much sooner...

As is widely known, my job has gradually deteriorated from merely boring and uchallenging to being a festering sore on my psyche. I have been without a computer to work on for a month, and have gotten increasingly frustrated.

So...

I quit! Yesterday! Gleefully! They're really mad about it, but if bothered them that much, they shouldn't have brought me 15,000 klicks without having a pc for me to sit at. With the rapid and much appreciated approval of my Canadian paymasters, I've begun a solo quest for new employment to fill out my remaining two months here (Holy Crazy Calendars, Batman! How is it just two months left?)

I'm going over to ACHAP (the Bill Gates-funded agency overseeing antiretroviral treatment in Botswana) after I finish typing, and I might have a line into a Red Cross job, working for the First Lady of Botswana. We'll see how it all goes, but at the moment I'm mainly rejoicing at having taken the plunge.

Me again!

2005-01-27T08:49:00.000+02:00

Wow, have I ever been lame in the posting and emailing. Of course, it’s been the peak of summer here, so nothing’s happened since I got back, since nobody’s been moving around much. The weather is starting to cool off, though, so I have no further excuse for not posting (aside from the increasingly bad internet access, now down to 500 bytes per second).

So here’s what little has happened:

My phone destroyed itself, by choosing to hide in the pockets I had carefully emptied of all other valuables, before I jumped into my swimming pool. It was hot outside.
I now have a better phone, which can use my Canadian account (useful when I go on my next two trips out of Botswana in February and April). It may even be more capable of receiving calls from Canada (011-267-7286-4435), whereas the old one let only a single crackly call through in the first three months of my trip.

My job has deteriorated. I now have the remarkable distinction of being the world’s only IT guy who doesn’t have a computer to work on. Thanks to office politics, Botswanan bureaucracy, and all-round miserable lack of organization, our group failed to get any new computers for the three new people it hired for the new year. Combine that shortfall with the break-in over Christmas that cost us an old but functional laptop, and I end up spending my days either sitting uselessly at the boardroom table, or (when possible) working at home on my own computer. Argh. I’ve been trying to make clear to management that I can’t build their desired database and website with coconuts and silly putty, but I’m not getting anywhere. So be it, I’m putting most of my energy into planning my upcoming trips.

Though poverty (all things are relative) has postponed my intended trip to a small game reserve this weekend, I’ll still be able to afford an ultra-low-budget jaunt into northern Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe in the two weeks straddling February and March. I’ll visit Victoria Falls, visit elephants at a safely inedible distance, and even wrestle crocodiles at a research camp in the swamps of Botswana’s famed Okavango Delta.
Then I’ll finish a few more weeks at Somarelang Tikologo in Gabs, and head to Mozambique at the end of March for some historical tourism, great food, and maybe a bit of lounging on the beach (still not my thing, but worth a shot). I’ll pass through tiny, beautiful, badly-governed Swaziland on my return to Gabs, pick up another stamp on the passport, and get to Gaborone in time to catch my flight if all goes well.

I’ve begun hosting movie nights. Being smallish, hot and pretty new, Gabs is not exactly a cultural hotspot. Actually, some Americans I met in South Africa described Gaborone without hyperbole as “the most soulless city in the entire world”. So we make our own fun. The Gaborone Film Society at nearby Maru-a-pula school is growing in popularity, and themes vary from month to month (from Finnish flicks to Pedro Almodovar to Cuban documentaries). To do my bit to combat the cultural atrophy Gabs inspires, I’ve started weekly showings of none-too-highbrow films that haven’t gotten any exposure in Botswana. Last week’s inaugural session included “Dawn of the Dead” (unrelenting horror in which flesh-eating zombies overrun the world) and “Shaun of the Dead” (joyous British comedy based on the same theme). More madness will follow, dependent on what DVD’s I can find/rent/borrow.

As you can see, things have been a bit slow and the blog has reflected that… but as compensation, you’ll get infuriatingly verbose posts about my upcoming trips, and anything else interesting enough to recount. May something exciting happen soon…

Still alive...

2005-01-19T08:40:00.000+02:00

I swear I'm not dead (I've gotten more than a few emails to that effect)! But I have been struggling with a horrific web connection... plus not all that much of interest has happened in the last two weeks. I should have some proper posts up by the end of the week.

Be careful what you wish for...

2005-01-07T08:31:00.000+02:00

You asked and begged and complained... now you've finally got them: endless, innumerable posts stretching all the way back to December 23rd. Mwahahahahaha!!!

Sympathies...

2005-01-03T16:00:00.000+02:00

I left the connected world shortly after the tsunami in SE Asia, and had no idea how severe the death toll was until I checked the new last night. It's terrifying to see the devastation this has wreaked, but I'm inspired by the way the entire world has stepped forward, with both official and private aid.

We can all spare something. Even $5 will give one refugee a week's worth of food and assistance. This list is a good place to look if you want to contribute something. As always, UNICEF and anything else UN-related is a good bet.

Still alive...

2005-01-03T15:46:00.000+02:00

I arrived back in Gabs a couple days ago, to find *everything* closed... this city is absolutely dead. It wasn't until today I was able to find an open net cafe.

I have several dozen pages of blog postings, just waiting for the day I can find a net cafe with working CD drives (probably wednesday), so you'll hear more then.

It's a hobo's life for me...

2004-12-30T21:30:00.000+02:00

My home for the night is Linda’s 24-Hour Coffee House, in the Bloemfontein Bus Station, which is actually much more comfortable and pleasant than any Greyhound depot I’ve seen in Canada. Even if there were a room in town available for less than $100 (there isn’t, this being the holidays and my arrival here being quite unplanned) I’d have no way of ensuring I catch my 6:00 AM bus to Joburg. So I’m here for another 9 hours, my luggage checked and my scribbly blog journal in hand.

Bloemfontein (or just “Bloom”) is apparently a nice enough town of half a million, mostly populated by Afrikaans, and legendary among other South Africans for its dullness. Meh. I’m going to sit here and drink rejuvenating beverages until dawn and fill in the plentiful gaps in the notebook entries I’ve been keeping for future transcription online. So if you find this or the prior dozen entries to be bloody loquacious, please be forgiving – I’ve got a lot of time to kill.

Hitting the road...

2004-12-30T05:30:00.000+02:00

The sun is coming up, and by unanimous consent we’re getting moving early in an attempt to beat the heat, pausing long enough to pet the baby goat who was sleeping in our doorway when we emerged to greet the day. The night passed in stops and starts, the stone floor being less than luxurious, but it wasn’t too bad. The hot lunch and shower awaiting me at the lodge, six or so hours from now, sound very appealing.

Far away...

2004-12-29T18:26:00.000+02:00

A pot-bellied pig is plaintively asking me for food. Two immense chickens just mated at my feet. The sun is going down, and the cool, welcome wind is too intense to keep a candle lit. This is the most remote place I’ve ever been.

I’m sitting on the doorstep of the erstwhile tourist rondavel, in a clutch of similar huts 50 or 60 kilometres from Malealea, itself a world away from electricity, let alone the Web, so as usual I’m scribbling in my notebook. A circle of metre-high stone wall, about 8 metres across encloses the local cows for the night (though one just made a daring escape). The many chickens wandering about in the dust are starting to clamber up onto the head-high frame of sticks and twine that serves as their evening roost, lest the local dogs get any hungry ideas while the birds sleep. A few Basotho (local) women, spanning at least three generations, are brewing some variety of beer in a huge steaming pot over a semi-open fire.

The horse ride out here was a six- or seven-hour odyssey of amazing vistas and strained muscles that took me far, far away from the world I’m accustomed to. It’s very different here, and fascinating despite the emotion it evokes. Lesotho is poor, like no place I’ve ever seen before. I’m many, many kilometres away from the nearest power line, water main or paved road (or even a real dirt road, for that matter). Basotho are almost all subsistence farmers, and though there’s no famine here the country is dependent on food aid and economic opportunities are beyond scarce.

But at the moment, the scenery is intact and beautiful. The trek led us through innumerable villages and down, across, and up the deep gullies I saw yesterday. The landscapes are cast and varied – the plant life over our trek ranged from tenuous to almost lush (impressive given the dry climate) – all of it very different from what I’m used to. At the moment, the most obvious and striking are the aloe grey-green aloe plants. I’m told they’re like aloe back home, but these are huge - taller than my head and wider than my horse. Each of them is flowering, displaying orange blossoms on stalks that shoot as much as ten metres into the air for a few days before collapsing under their own weight.

The intensity of the ride was a new experience for me. My previous horse rides have been mostly of the 2-minute Washington State Fair variety, so hours of riding over really rough terrain was a bit of a change. Right from the beginning I decided to simply trust that my horse had no more desire to die than I, and I assumed that she would lead me wisely and surely down the steep, narrow trails of rural Lesotho. Unfortunately, my horse had, as Michael put it, “a bit of a suicidal bent”, manifested in her obsession with cliffsides. I named her Winnie (short for Winston) in honour of her sheer bloody-mindedness. No matter how broad and comfortable the path, no matter how stridently I tugged her towards the trail’s center, she was only happy tiptoeing right along the edge of dizzying plummets. Lesotho is an alpine country, with a palpable roof-of-the-world feeling. There are a lot of cliffsides for a deranged horse to flirt with.

But even my insane steed couldn’t dampen the fun. The six of us (two guides, myself, and the three friendly South Africans from yesterday, Michael, Lee and Donna) circled mountain after mountain, following village paths, dry clay streambeds and tiny, rocky paths. Our pace varied from deliberate to galloping (and butt-numbing), depending on the mood of the horses and the patience of our guide. We passed amused, candy-demanding children, and other villagers whose responses were by turns wary and quite friendly.

Our trek took us past dozen of tiny farms smaller than the average Canadian backyard, plowed by weathered human hands and occasionally oxen (never by machines). Corn and a handful of other dry-ground crops dominate the landscape, and the valleys reverberate with the constant ring of cowbells. Boys as young as three, wrapped in brightly patterned woven blankets and wearing conical Basotho straw hats, herd modest clusters of cattle and goats through the sparse grazing lands of the hills. Lesotho is one of the few developing countries where female literacy is much higher than male – apparently because boys are drafted into tending family herds in the absence of their fathers, many of whom work the mines in South Africa to supplement farm income. Tribal and family loyalties seem to dominate - one of our guides paused to hurl rocks and angry words at unwelcome herders urging their cattle across the wrong river to his tribe’s shore.

As far as I can tell, whatever indigenous ecosystem might once have existed here has long since been replaced by livestock. Paradoxically, people who have sought to lessen their poverty by expanding their herds are discovering that overgrazing and the attendant soil erosion threaten to completely destroy their livelihoods. It’s been estimated that by 2040 Lesotho will have no remaining land suitable for any kind of agriculture, precipitating a crisis for which the national government is, of course, completely unprepared. Anybody (I’m looking at some of you SFU folk) who pipes up about the romantic purity and simplicity of this sort of pre-industrial life can expect a thorough verbal beat-down – some of the human consequences of the subsistence lifestyle are too horrifying to comprehend.

But I do feel welcome here in this village. No doubt the revenue from renting out rondavel we lekowa (non-insulting local term for white folk) is a welcome boon, but there’s some genuine hospitality. A local woman asked with genuine interest (and excellent English) about what I was scribbling in this book, and was pleased to know that I was taking notes about the area. The locals laughed with us (rather than at us) for our clumsy attempts to visit with the village animals.

It’s growing very dark now, and in the absence of electricity the stars are growing remarkably bright. We’re setting out early tomorrow, so I’m calling it a night. I think this has been one of those days that will keep coming back to me for years, at unusual times and in unexpected ways. I’m glad I’m here.

Crawlies...

2004-12-29T08:24:00.000+02:00

Something very heavy (as such things go) scrambled in through my window and thudded to the floor in the darkness of the lodge rondavel last night. It scurried around the floor, squeaking too high and loud to be a mouse. It vanished when I lit a match to see it.

I still have no idea what it was.

In constant motion...

2004-12-28T20:22:00.000+02:00

I’m writing by candlelight. Actually, the generator in my home for the night is still on for another hour, so I could turn on the light bulb over my head, but this place looks much cooler in the dim light. I’m in a Sotho rondavel, and circular hut built of red stone and plaster, roofed with a cone of tightly woven grass. The floor is perhaps 9 feet across and though it holds 2 beds I appear to have the entire place to myself (more privacy than I’ve had in weeks).

Tonight’s home is part of the Malealea lodge, a lovely complex deep in the wilds of southwestern Lesotho. Though we’re many miles from the nearest electrical lines (hence the evening generator), this place is calm, clean, spirited and ultimately very relaxing. The journey to get here, however…

Getting to Malealea is surely the most intense bit of traveling I’ve ever done.

After posting this morning from Maseru, Lesotho’s small but incredibly frenzied capital, I set out for the bus station. Some friendly ladies at the cavernous, almost totally unused Lesotho Tourist Centre pointed my in the right direction, after about 30 minutes of staggering like a mule under my new backpack and the weight of locals’ stares, I was there.

The Maseru bus station mirrors the city around it – bustling, intimidating as hell to any foreigner, and chaotic in a way that must be witnessed to be understood. There are no bus timetables in Lesotho – the buses arrive when they’re bloody well ready and leave when they’re full. Dozens of truly decrepit buses and passenger vans floated about without any visible order, some with no destination markings, while thousands of people milled about in the otherworldly heat with far more purpose and direction than I.

Steeling myself, I headed to the nearby supermarket to claim water to prepare my parched body for a ride sure to be sweltering. Sadly, a polite employee, wary of shoplifters, informed me at the door that I’d have to leave my bag, laden with passport and other indispensables, outside the front door in the throng. Though he insisted on deferentially calling me “Boss”, the shiny pump-action shotgun he was brandishing did not leave me feeling in charge. Since neither of the two options which led to water (losing my worldly belongings or dodging 12-gauge pellets) seemed appealing, I continued my journey, thirst unslaked.

Feeling very white, I wandered into the maelstrom seeking a bus or minibus labeled Malealea, a village 80 kilometres from Maseru, for which the lodge is named. Sensing my goal from my skin colour, a succession of people (speaking mostly South Sotho) pointed me in many different directions, none of which reveal buses labeled Malealea. After a short while, two gentlemen who spoke a bit of English argued with each other for a moment and then decisively suggested a bus with an unfamiliar name. Buoyed by their confidence, I boarded the crowded conveyance, which was as luxurious as a schoolbus from hell and already twice as packed. Feeling hideously out of place but seeing no alternative, I clambered towards and emptyish seat in the back, trying and failing to avoid bopping people with my immense backpack, which I refused to store up on the roof rack with all the other baggage. I squeezed tightly against the window, amid thundering Sotho tunes coming from two ancient but powerful speakers mounted on the ceiling. Then I watched with equal fascination and horror as a long procession of grandmothers, businessmen, farmers, and mothers with infants secured to their stomachs with only ingeniously tied blankets, filed onto the bus. Most of them wanted to share my seat. The eventual victor was a somewhat businesslike man, who spoke a handful of English words and said he was going to Malealea himself. Though he never shared his name, this boosted my confidence in the endeavour.

After perhaps an hour of merciless heat and zero ventilation the bus, finally full in a way I’d never imagined possible, departed along a dust road. Lesotho paved its first road for the King of England’s visit in 1947, and has done little to expand the network since then, at least outside Maseru. The road, one of the main arteries, was not so much potholed as simply broken, which ensured an exciting ride for the hundred or so passengers. Drawing through farming settlements too small and scattered to call villages, the bus careened at speeds for which neither it nor the road were designed. Thunder and lightning roiled in thick clouds that retreated with the horizon, and the vicious sunlight was only occasionally punctuated by welcome bursts of light rain through the open window. In the four hours it took me to travel 80 km, the bus stopped at every tiny community on the way. At each stop a small army of people emerged from nearby homes to sell fruit juice and water (neither of which I trusted to drink) through the bus windows to the passengers.

After hours of interminable stops and white-knuckle sprints, my (by now) suspiciously helpful travel companion pointed out the minute hamlet of Malealea (virtually every place name in Lesotho starts with “M” – very disorienting). We both disembarked with difficulty, and a hand-painted sign said “Malealea Lodge – 7 km” along a narrow but very scenic dirt road up a dry hill. By then, I’d been crammed into very public transit for nearly 24 hours, and I was not inclined to wait for the Lodge bus the Nameless One insisted was coming. I thanked him for his help and set off up the road, in spite of his entreaties to stay put (in very hot, unfamiliar, and for all I knew, dangerous territory). He waited at the crossroads. Instincts are funny things, and mine told me to get walking.

About 2 kilometres up the road, past clutches of tiny huts and gauntlets of children smilingly demanding “Sweets! Sweets!”, an engraved metal sign marked the entrance to a short mountain pass. It read “Wayfarer - pause and look upon a gateway of Paradise.” Just beyond was a valley so vast I couldn’t guess at its size or shape. Dozens of arid mountain peaks, ringed with rock strata visible from many tens of kilometers away, encircled the scattered rondavels, tiny cornfields, and dry grazing patches below. A handful of impressive rivers and modest streams cut jagged gullies hundreds of metres deep into the yellow-white sand of the valley floor, sectioning the land into tribal holdings.

I clambered up the nearest hill to get a worthy picture. While I perched on my rock, the Nameless One ran (nobody willingly runs in 40-degree heat) through the pass and down the road I had been following. Presumably in pursuit of me, he scanned the hillsides until he saw me and called me down to the road. Though I was grotesquely aware that I’d be truly hoped in the event of a mugging, I found consolation in my greater size and the abundance of good bashin’ rocks at the roadside. A kilometer further on, I drew little comfort from his continued anonymity, to say nothing of his unsettling habit of climbing small hills to yell things he wouldn’t translate to people I couldn’t see, all the while pointing insistently at me.

When he paused to step into a roadside house, insisting without explanation that I stay put, I took my leave, walking briskly down the winding road. After maybe 2 kilometres of pleasant breezes and bemused locals unused to pedestrian white folks, I saw no sign of the shifty dude, and breathed easy. Moments later, a bright SUV pulled up alongside. The passengers, Donna, Lee and Michael, South Africans on vacation, graciously offered me a lift. No longer fearing ambush, but quite content with my 5 klick hike, I clambered in.

I arrived at Malealea Lodge intact, unmugged, and not at all dead, a full day after leaving Cape Town, a thousand flying-crow kilometers away. I ate a straightforward but delicious (and bloody expensive) meal and retired exhausted to my darkening room to write. I’m going quite blind scribbling by candlelight, so I’m calling it a night. Tomorrow: crazed horses and unforgiving Lesotho terrain – a winning combination!

One more thing: the helpful lady at the lodge’s South African booking office told me it would cost 400 rand – just short of a hundred dollars – to get from the Lesotho-South African border to the lodge.

I did it for three bucks.

Country-hopping

2004-12-28T10:39:00.000+02:00

After about 15 hours in transit, peppered with last-minute course corrections, I'm in Maseru, capital city of Lesotho. I arrived by walking over a road/rail bridge from South Africa, and climbed into a crowded VW van converted into a minibus. It roared with unintelligible but joyous South Sotho music. In order to fund my upcoming horseback trek into the deep mountains of this alpine country, I've just converted more money than most Basotho make in a year, which I suppose should make me feel guilty. Now I'm taking a few minutes at a Chinese-run broadband internet cafe (globalism rocks my world) and will have a tasty breakfast at Nando's in a few minutes.

This is one of the poorest countries in the world, but at this very instant I'm relatively comfortable, owing (I think) to my growing ease with the (on the surface) chaotic rhythyms of African life. I'm about to go in search of a bus to take me to Malealea, about 80km away, where I'll be staying in a thatched forest hut and befriending a real live pony. After that, I'll spend a night or two in a Basotho village in the far south of the country while touring the mountains.

This is, methinks, a very successful vacation.

P.S. I've not forgotten to write about my Cape Town adventures, but I don't have that much time at the moment. It'll have to wait until I get back to Gabs on the 31st or 1st. If I don't get on before then, Happy New Years!

In chronological order...

2004-12-27T10:42:00.000+02:00

It's been a while since I last offered an update, considering all that's transpired. Seriously, the days are just packed.

I honestly started to write about Robben Island, Table Mountain, the Christmas goings-on and my occasional brushes with the Reaper, but found that my words were rote and passionless and totally unfitting the niftiness of the last few days.

I'm think I'm mostly preoccupied with not knowing what my Lesotho plan is... the hostel I was planning on visiting is adamantly not answering the phone, though I had hoped to arrive sometime midday tomorrow after an odyssey of taxis and hiking. I have a buncha camping gear to pick up, and further details to arrange. I'll try to write snazzyish posts about the goodness of days past on the 12-hour bus ride to Bloemfontein, on the Lesotho border. But I can't promise I'll be able to find net access in that tiny country. We'll see...

Weirdness...

2004-12-26T08:03:00.000+02:00

Merry Christmas, all!!!

Very weird to be marking the day this far from home. I hope you're all having a fine, preferably snowy Christmas. I'll share the details of my own Christmas chaos shortly...

Santa even visited!

2004-12-25T20:20:00.000+02:00

Long Street Backpackers, mindful that Christmas can be tough for travelers, organizes a spiffy extravaganza of food’n’fun for all its guests on that most familial of holidays. After yesterday’s fun, frazzling, knee-knackering epic journey up, a little relaxation was supremely in order.

My old nemesis Irony sought me out again… dammit. I kicked off Christmas by climbing halfway up Table Mountain again… with a bathtub-sized bowl of salad in my arms this time.

‘Twas worth it. The hostel managers staked out an excellent spot for a Yule feast, less a proper cave than a low-ceilinged overhang embedded into the mountain, albeit one with floor space to rival most houses. Table Mountain was wearing its trademark tablecloth of cloud, a thick mist that shrouded the cave and offered wondrous relief from the heat and sun of the day before.

The next best thing to a white Christmas at home is hanging out with a slew of backpackers, each clinging affectionately to a champagne bottle and devouring plate after plate of turkey and tiramisu. Though a cool wind blew, I and my fellow Yule travelers found warmth in the beverages on offer and enjoyed the fine food, good company, and impressively loud music (considering that the speakers and batteries had to be lugged up the trail along with everything else). There was even a Secret Santa gift exchange – I gave a bottle of booze and received a nifty gourd rattle. The party wound down from its raucous heights by about 6 o’clock, lest the trail down become dangerously dark, and the crowd waddled back the hostel fat and happy and more than slightly impaired.

The hostel in the evenings is normally a deafening place that serves as the intermittent base for the guests’ nights out in the neighborhood. Last night it was tomb-quiet by 8PM, and I much doubt that any of the party guests headed out for further celebration. The next morning was likewise quiet, punctuated only by the pained moans of hostellers suffering the wrath of grapes.

I had a great time, and I hope that you good folks back in Vancouver also enjoyed the company of good friends and a bit of overindulgence… but I bet I’m the only person reading this who’s ever done Christmas in a cave.

The Reaper says Hi!

2004-12-24T20:18:00.000+02:00

What’s a vacation without a little flirting with death?

Table Mountain is a lovely, kilometre-high plateau that wraps around much of Central Cape Town. Its impressive beauty and walking-distance-from-downtown convenience make it extraordinarily popular with residents and visitors, which led me to greatly underestimate the damn thing.

Steph, Andrew, Nathan and I set out early for the half-hour walk to the mountain’s base. The cloudless sky and violent heat (a break from Cape Town’s normally temperate climate) made us awfully whiny by the time we reached the trailheads at the cable car station, 300 metres up., but we weren’t seriously dissuaded. After all, thousands of people climb Table Mountain on a busy day, enjoying a leisurely ninety minute stroll from the famed Kirstenbosch Gardens on the south side of the mountain. That we were on the north side of the mountain didn’t discourage in the least. Indeed, we reveled in our own smug superiority as we trudged past the station to the start of the trail. Hundreds of lazy (and, I now know, wise) tourists lingered in hours-long queues for an effortless ride to the summit.

Long inured to the hyperbole of Canadian warning signs, I shrugged off their South African counterparts that said such things as “Warning: the trail ahead is very difficult. This is not the recommended route.” It could have said something more specific, like “Jackass Canadians with nearly no rock climbing experience have a palpable chance of messy doom on this path.”

Steep but straightforward for its first third, the path known as the India Window abruptly changed character when the trail metamorphosed into a series of 20-foot rock faces. Reasonably simple for an experienced climber, this was a new hurdle for me. Fortunately, Nate and Andrew are veteran rock climbers, and they talked me through the process of scrambling madly up terrain no human was meant to traverse. Though I made it through intact, I had the honour of clinging precariously to thin handholds over truly precarious drops, terrified out of all proportion to the situation (maybe). Easily the most hair-raising experience of my trip so far.

But I was rewarded with some of the most impressive views I’ve seen. Table Mountain is far larger than its modest height suggests, and some incredibly sheer rock faces cap amazing panoramas of Cape Town, stretching away from the foot of the mountain and over the horizon. Clambering among the rocks and peering down at the city, I heard the shrill cries of rock hyraxes, tiny rodent beasties related to elephants, but they hid from view. The mountain was beset with lizards of remarkable colour and variety (and no small number of birds waiting to eat them).

About three hours into what should have been a ninety minute hike, we began referring to the climb as our Epic Journey. The further we climbed, the scarcer the shade and more merciless the sun, but our sense of accomplishment grew. Until around hour five, that is, when our water ran out and we (mostly me) started to whine. Eventually, impossibly, the summit of the mountain appeared, up a gentle slope adorned with handrails and chains that had been painfully absent earlier in the ascent. It was well trafficked by tourists complaining about the five minute walk from the cable car station, while the four of us limped and moaned over the last few steps.

After talking cheerfully about our upcoming tour of the kilometers-wide summit while climbing, we arrived at the top to find incredible views that we had no energy to enjoy. Instead we snapped a few photos and staggered to the (insanely priced) restaurant for refreshment, then staggered onto a cable car downhill.

By the time we finished the walk back to the hostel, we’d regained the energy to boast of our day’s accomplishments. The four of us took some time to partake in the culinary delights of Cape Town (a long way from the boiled corn mush of Botswana), and enjoyed some world-class burgers and history’s finest milkshakes before retiring to our rooms and collapsing around sunset.

The Japanese have a saying about Mount Fuji that applies well to Table Mountain, methinks: “You’re wise to climb it, and a fool to do it twice”. Brushes with death, blistering heat and all, I’m glad to have climbed Table Mountain, and I can’t think of any reason to ever do it again.

Fences...

2004-12-23T20:15:00.000+02:00

One of the most striking things about Robben Island is its mundanity. South Africa’s most notorious political prison, a rallying point for the anti-apartheid movement, could have been indistinguishable from any jail. The first post-apartheid generation of leaders thankfully decided more was in order.

10 kilometres and a 20 minute ferry ride from the ridiculously gaudy tourist complex known as the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, Robben Island is a fascinating experience. I visited this afternoon with three friends from the hostel, Nathan (Kiwi), Andrew (American, self-described honorary Canuck) and Stephanie (Brit).

In addition to a leper colony and a small village for prison staff and their families, Robben Island held opponents of various South African regimes for nearly 400 years. Signs of long habitation are omnipresent in the ruins of old docks, crumbling stone houses and surprisingly large cemeteries given the size of the settlement. Now the island is dedicated to teaching South Africans and visitors of the injustices of apartheid and the way this place incubated the movement to end racially segregated rule.

The maximum security wing of Robben Island was reserved for black male political prisoners (whites and women were held elsewhere in South African), and the regime unleashed its greatest brutality on them. Our guide, Sparks, shared the island’s secrets with an authority well earned during his seven years as a prisoner here. Arrested, if I recall correctly, in 1983 for being a member of the anti-apartheid Pan-Africanist Congress, he explained the horrific living conditions and the punishment leveled at intransigent passengers. To hear a man describe his days of solitary confinement and starvation has rather more impact than reading any textbook on apartheid.

Nelson Mandela’s prison cell was like all the others in the solitary wing of the prison. It was perhaps six feet by five, with three paper-thin coarse blankets, a metal plate and cup for food and drink, and a single bucket for predictable purposes. He spent twenty years in that space, twenty-three or more hours a day, enduring sporadic torture and constant humiliation as did all the other opponents of apartheid held there.

The most remarkable thing that every visitor to Robben Island sees (aside from the penguins, of whom I saw only two) is the attitude of the former prisoners. Sparks explained to us that he, along with the other prisoners, made a decision to view their time in Robben Island not as an injustice, nor even as a sacrifice per se, but as a critical precondition for toppling apartheid. Robben Island strengthened and bound together the anti-apartheid movement by bringing together its most forceful leaders and their disparate groups. It was on Robben Island that the most courageous men in South Africa first set out common goals and methods for freeing their country. It was there that Nelson Mandela wrote The Long Walk to Freedom and smuggled his manuscript to the waiting world. It was there that the world first truly saw the face of apartheid and began to undo the system from abroad. It’s hard to overstate the significance of the place, or the power of Sparks’ (and others) conviction that apartheid could not have been overthrown without their suffering.

Lest the talk of forgiveness and reconciliation sounds like mere words, consider that Sparks, like many of the other former inmates now guiding visitors around the prison, chose to live in the island’s village after he was released. Some of the men who imprisoned him are now his neighbours, coworkers and even his friends.

Wandering!

2004-12-23T09:40:00.000+02:00

I've discovered that my favorite pastime in a foreign city is to simply pick a direction and walk until I return to where I started or my feet cease to function. Yesterday morning I set out from a delicious breakfast at a local artsy-fartsy cafe (think Subeez) and turned right. Inasmuch as Cape Town has its share of desperate poverty, I resolved to correct my course should I wander into any injurious neighborhoods... yet no such thing happened. Instead I found yet another thing I hadn't expected to see in Africa...

California. Each block further up a grinding hill took me deeper into ridiculous luxury, glorious and ostentatious homes ensconced happily in palm trees and sculpted terraces. The weather was merely warm rather than infernal, perhaps 25 degrees, and a merciful wind reminded me that Cape Town is not the blast furnace I've grown accustomed to in Gabs. In climate, landscape, and conspicuous consumption, it's outright eerie... standing in the posh suburb of Tamberskloef, it was easy to believe I'd wandered into upscale San Francisco.

My camera, however, had not forgotten that I'd attempted to nourish it with no-name batteries bought Botswanan suburbs, and quit in protest after fewer than five minutes of function. The glorious Table Mountain that was drawing closer was abruptly off limits, as the gentle breeze accelerated to the 60km/hr brutality of the beloved "Cape Doctor". So I wandered back down the hill, replenished my camera at an upscale little shopping mall called The Garden, and found myself at the hostel without delay.

The air of relaxation overwhelmed me. I sat on the hostel balcony, overlooking snazzy Long St, and enjoyed the fruits of my early wanderings through the neighborhood's dozen used bookstores, in this case Richard Morgan's Broken Angels. After napping/reading for an hour or so, I noted that another, less windswept hill was but a short walk from the hostel. Heading towards it in the slowly setting sun, I failed to realize that there were marked paths and roads, and simply climbed up the immediately available steep side, through african thorn brush and swarms of leaping lizards. Arriving at the top after a sweaty, grimy, half-hour, I discovered full-fledged tourist infrastructure, including snack stands, paved roads, and people who were far better rested and less covered in burrs.

No matter... the view was extraordinary. My photos will have to wait until I return to Gabs, but though Signal hill is but a third the height of nearby Table mountain, it afforded an extraordinary panorama of the endless Atlantic, dotted with landmarks like Robben Island and Cape Town's sparkling waterfront. Table Mountain itself has an endless waterfall of cloud flowing over its summit and vanishing before striking ground, an extraordinary effect. A ludicrously tempting path led from Signal Hill up to impressive Lion's Head mountain, but darkness was encroaching and I retreated after an hour lounging and exploring the hill...

Whoops, gotta run. I'm heading to Nelson Mandela's prison cell in twenty minutes, followed by a tour of the Waterfront. After that, I'll take another shot at Lion's Head... you'll hear more soon.

Noise...

2004-12-22T08:45:00.000+02:00

Cape Town is resonating with the thuds and whirrs of construction as I type this, from a cheap and convenient Net cafe (broadband!) down the street from my hostel. It's a busy, fascinating, confusing city, a bit larger than Vancouver and with South Africa's trademark extremes of affluence and poverty.

I'm staying at Long St. Backpackers, a hostel on the buzzing and coincidentally named Long Street, one of the main avenues for nightlife and restaurants, within walking distance of the crowded malls and shiny towers of downtown Cape Town. The hostel is crowded and friendly, with no shortage of varied activities - yesterday I helped wrestle a 10-metre ill-gotten Christmas Tree into place on their patio and on Christmas Day they apparently host a party in a nearby cave.

My plans for the day centre on exploring Cape Town on foot, camera surreptitiously in hand (though safer than Joburg, it's still South Africa). I'll climb the beautiful Table Mountain that someone dropped right in the middle of downtown (somebody google it, I'm running out of net time), and maybe visit Nelson Mandela's prison cell. There are, sadly, no elephants here, but there is a bewildering array of shops and craft stalls (all at extortionate prices), and the best variety of restaurants I've seen in two months. I had Lebanese food for yesterday's dinner, and the sudden rush of actual spices, so long absent from my life, was a moment of epiphany.

The web place will evict me in a few seconds, so I'm signing off. You'll hear more of the furthest corner of Africa as soon as I have more to post...

Call meee!

2004-12-21T22:48:00.000+02:00

My cell phone number for the duration of my rampage around South Africa, from Canada, is either:

011-27-076-103-0072

OR

011-27-76-103-0072

Your contact is muchly welcome. And yes, muchly is a word.

More to come...

2004-12-21T15:06:00.000+02:00

I smell truly awful right now... I've traveled over 1500 kilometres in the last 30 hours, over two legs of an interminable bus trip. I haven't slept in well over two days, nor eaten anything worth eating in that time.

But life is still pretty damn good... I'm at an internet cafe in Cape Town, and access is vastly faster than in Gabs. Though I haven't checked a map, I suspect Cape Town may be the furthest bit of land from Vanvouver, anywhere in the world, without going to Antarctica... pretty cool. There are even penguins here, whom I plan to visit/eat within the next few days. I'll scribe about all this in great detail, but for the moment I'm simply absorbing the joyous fact that even my casual vacation from my vacation is among the most exotic trips I've ever taken. Life is treating me well... the fact that I just ate a Big Mac notwithstanding...

Plans

2004-12-18T14:15:00.000+02:00

The bitterness of my last post notwithstanding, I'm muchly looking forward to my Christmas plans. Work finished for the holidays as of yesterday, and now I have two and a half weeks to wander around Southern Africa. Joy! Alas, I have but four minutes of web time left, so I'll have to be brief and will hopefully post more details at the beginning of next week.

Mozambique just wasn't panning out in any non-suicidal way. Being a relatively inexperienced traveller, I decided against wandering solo (my schedule being incompatible with the other Maputo-bound groups of expats). On Monday morning at sunrise, I catch a bus from Gabs to Johannesburg, about six hours away. Then I mill about in Joburg for about 5 hours (hopefully finding a broadband web cafe from which to tell more) and then catch the 18-hour overnight Greyhound to Cape Town. Cape Town is supposedly almost Vancouverian in its beauty and cosmopolitan nature, so I'll spend a week or so seeing the highlights (including Nelson Mandela's prison cell!!!) and eating SEAFOOD! Then I'll catch a bus to Bloemfontein, South Africa, where I'll detour into the tiny alpine kingdom of Lesotho (pronounced Less-oo-too, apparently) and spend a few days in some truly remote and rugged terrain, hiking, mountain horseback-riding, and seeing some dinosaur digs.

Crud, outta time. Merry Christmas, all, but I'm sure I'll be online with more information and a message of cheer before the 25th! Hotmail's been out, but I think that'll be fixed soon too.

Anger

2004-12-16T11:19:00.000+02:00

It’s hard to know where to begin. If you’re hoping to hear only about the wonders of Africa and the joys of traveling, skip this post. I mean it.

I’ve moved into a new home, and was planning to blog about the place when my new roommates Natalie and Aziz suggested dinner at our nearby kebab joint. Happily and hungrily I agreed, and within minutes we were relaxing on an unassuming patio in the concrete parking lot of a tiny and mostly defunct shopping plaza.

While we sipped our beers and awaited our food a woman quietly crept into a chair in the corner two metres from us and sat, rocking the toddler in her arms as if to comfort herself as much as the child. We didn’t notice her until she half-shrieked at a man who tried to offer her a cup of water, and we turned and saw one of the true faces of Botswana. The woman had been beaten so brutally that her swollen eyes completely blinded her, and blood dripped from a dozen rends in her face. The young boy was physically unhurt, but his mother was the most viciously abused person I’ve ever seen. Her head was bowed, and I could see little of her expression, but the fear she radiated was palpable.

The woman was rightfully inconsolable, and spoke no English that I could tell. None at our table approached her, as she was too terrified, and the restaurant staff’s initial response was simply to offer us a new table inside where her suffering would be out of sight and mind. They seemed not to hear Natalie’s requests for ice and a damp cloth to ease the woman’s swelling. The man with the cup of water spent many minutes attempting to pad her wounds with a towel, which she angrily flung to the concrete. Eventually the restaurant staff called the police and a few people crowded at a distance sharing our helplessness, while others tried talking to the women a little in Setswana, and to the too-helpful man we were beginning to realize was her brutal husband, who was six inches shorter than me and scrawny beyond words.

In ten minutes the police arrived. They casually patted down the man, cuffed him and led him gently into the back of the truck while they coaxed the blinded woman into the front seat. I couldn’t see what happened to the little boy. Procedural issues aside (sending male officers to transport an abused woman!?), the entire official response had such a practiced, nonchalant quality that I am certain of Aziz’s and Natalie’s assertions that the man will be free by morning and the woman, socially and economically dependent, will be back in that home after leaving the hospital.

I know that violence against women happens everywhere in the world, but here it’s so pervasive that even this most vicious of beatings was a non-event to most. In so many ways the modernity of this country seems increasingly a cruel façade. The HIV epidemic that is literally killing this country, about which I’ll write again separately, is another face of the brutality which is simply accepted as a fact of life here, a cultural practice ordained by God and tradition. The foreign-educated and fairly affluent Batswana women with whom I’ve spent some time have nearly boundless contempt for most of the men of their nation, and it’s hard to doubt their reasoning after tonight. From the nearly omnipresent culture of male infidelity that callously accelerates the HIV epidemic, to the (somewhat controversial) laws that automatically transfer a woman’s possessions to her husband at the moment of marriage, there is a tumour of outright barbarism beneath Botswana’s skin of modern industry and democracy. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.

Apologies...

2004-12-15T10:12:00.000+02:00

I've been moving to yet another new place, and have been reformatting all the computers at work, between which tasks I've had no opportunity to gtransfer posts from my own computer to the web-equipped ones. You'll hear more soon, but it probably won't be until Friday. A thousand apologies...

Everyone hopes...

2004-12-08T22:13:00.000+02:00

The most intense thunderstorm I’ve ever seen has been raging outside my window for the last half hour, and everyone I’ve talked to is ecstatic. The lightning isn’t the once- or twice-a-minute punctuation that I’m accustomed to in Vancouver, but an endless strobe frenzy, a half-dozen explosive glares and searing forks every second, often coming thick and fast enough to starkly light the neighborhood like early morning daylight. The thunder is a constant tremor rather than a sharp assault, except for the occasional bursts so close they thy knock my windows about. The rain would be a respectable downpour even in Vancouver.

We’re all hoping that this means the rains have finally come. A storm of this intensity will have little lasting effect on the brutal drought Gabs is suffering, since the parched ground here can’t absorb the water so quickly and the rivers will swell briefly and then recede. But this is powerful enough that it just might signal the rainy season has finally arrived. If it’s so, the heat will be more merciful and the patch of unbroken dirt we call our garden might even sprout some form of life.

Here’s hoping… Gabs has seven months of drinkable water left in its reservoirs, and if this doesn’t herald the rainy season, the city will dessicate itself before next summer arrives.

For a bit of perspective on recent weather and a free(!) bonus lesson in the dangers of blog laziness, enjoy this now completely-irrelevant post below, written a week ago about the numbing drought that was gripping us at the time, which I feebly failed to post after I wrote it:

“It’s hot in Africa.”

The above wisdom was shared by my coworker Stone. It’s a lot more insightful if you hear it as I did, spoken with a deep African accent and a tone of utter exhaustion. Stone was born and raised here, his family has lived here since time immemorial, and he, like other locals, can handle the heat scarcely better than I can.

We’re all wondering when the rains will come. Since the brief shower I wrote about a few weeks ago, we’ve had a single mediocre rainstorm and a half-dozen mini-showers lasting perhaps a minute or two apiece. This is Botswana’s rainy season, but according to the papers we’re suffering through the worst drought in the country’s forty-year history. The genuine deluge that should have begun two months ago never came at all, and the southern half of Bots is running bone dry.

Everyone keeps saying “When it rains late, it rains hard”, but the consistent unease behind the reassuring words suggests that the unimaginable is on everyone’s mind and no one’s lips: there may be no rain this year at all.

Minutiae, Part 1 : Eats

2004-12-07T16:36:00.000+02:00

I’ve been told that, in the temporary absence of excitement (like, for example, spending Christmas scuba diving with dolphins in Mozambique), folks would like to know about the tinyish details of African life. While I’m as yet severely ignorant of the real Africa, I can share what I know of life in Gabs which, at times and in more than a few ways, seems an enclave of Europe in the heart of the poorest part of the world.

First up: Food

Natalie, my American roommate, observed last week “You know, years from now, I’m never going to tell anyone ‘Back in Botswana, I ate the best X’”.

I was hard pressed to disagree with her. The supermarkets here are well-stocked, nearly what we’re used to back home, and when bought with care the food is wholesome and healthy. But, I swear to Vishnu, it’s dull.

No doubt I’ve been spoiled by the multi-hued culinary paradise of Vancouver, but by any standards things are pretty bland in Botswana, as even the guidebooks warned me to expect. The best thing about eating here is that since Botswana is a substantial cattle producer, very good beef and other meats are dirt cheap. I eat steaks pretty regularly because they’re actually about the most inexpensive meal I can get, and tasty too – a nicely marinated T-bone costs a dollar or less. But, as I’m reluctantly discovering, man cannot live on steak alone.

The staple food is pap, a truly flavourless boiled corn meal that serves simply to add starch and substance to diets dependent on gigantic portions of beef. Spicing is nearly absent from any of the food except the chicken (more on that later), and buying snazzier stuff like curry sauce is prohibitively pricey. Here I can buy almost anything I’m used to back in the world, but since I’m on a tight budget and would rather spend my money on traveling (dang semi-paid internships), I’m restricted to straightforward meats and fresh veggies. Of course, this is pretty healthy stuff, so my taste buds and my Vancouver gut are vanishing in tandem.

The restaurant scene is a bit better, but still takes some adjusting. The most common fast food joints are KFC and innumerable South African burger chains (no McD’s, not that you’d miss it). The prices, converted to dollars, are about precisely what you’d pay back home. The taste is likewise about what you’d expect in North America, so I find it better to skip these places and head to the omnipresent Nando’s and its tastier cousin, Barcelo’s. These places lay on the peri-peri, the omnipresent East African chili, in lavish doses, an unsubtle but very welcome relief from the timidity of the rest of the food.

The sit-down joints are a step up in quality and price, of course. Most of the usual pillars of my diet, from Thai food to Chinese, are nearly mythical around here, though a small handful of very upmarket hotel restaurants specializes in these cuisines. Sushi is entirely absent, this being a landlocked country, and simple fish is in very short and costly supply at even the best supermarkets. There are several decent Indian and Italian joints, and a number of pubs making excellent pizza and bar food. These places are expensive even by Western standards, though, so my visits there are few and highly cherished.

So food-wise, it’ll be another four months of relative good health and staggering boredom. I’m looking forward to my hoped-for visit to Mozambique, where if rumour holds true the seafood is fresh, the menu varied and the spicing bold. It won’t come a minute too soon. It’ll surprise no one, I’m sure, to know that I think daily about a dozen different restaurants I’ll visit within days of my return to Vancouver. There are countless things I’ll miss when I’m no longer here – the novelty, the music, the animals… great mounds of boiled corn are not among them.

I'm still alive!

2004-12-01T15:54:00.000+02:00

My recovery is nearly complete, and not a moment too soon. For a few days I was sick enough that my coworkers and I were genuinely concerned that it just might be malaria, the localized extinction of the Anopheles notwithstanding. Pleasantly, ‘twas not so… merely one of the more mundane yet still super-charged local bugs. Thanks to all who sent get-well-soon emails – you’ll get the best presents on my return. Everyone else will have to content themselves with a baby elephant. In the meantime, I’ll bring you up to date on my surprisingly ordinary life over here.

First of all, Christmas is in the air. The carols are booming through the shops, and the nearby Riverwalk Mall is adorned by the creepiest electronic Santa I’ve ever seen outside Japan. “X Shopping Days Til…” signs are everywhere, and the proud consumerist frenzy is fully underway.

Only it’s thirty-five degrees outside. That ain’t right.

The expat’s life in Gaborone is one of near-constant migration, it seems. I’ve been fortunate enough to arrange places to live throughout my stay, an uncommon occurrence for which I’m supremely thankful.
At the moment, I’m sharing a 3-bedroom apartment near the University of Botswana in central Gaborone with two other expats, Natasha and Natalie. Natasha is a Torontonian interning with the local YWCA, and Natalie is a Fulbright Scholar from Irvine, California researching HIV/AIDS. Both are fine people who know the neighborhood well and have helped show me around.
Two weeks from now I’ll move to my (hopefully) permanent digs, a house with 2 Americans (Steve and Aziz) and a Canuck (another Natalie). That place has a swimming pool. And a DVD player. And a satellite dish. All of which are welcome, since I’m rapidly running out of things to do in the terminal quietude of Gaborone. Most importantly, they have air conditioning!!! Joy! Joy of joys!!!

I’m gradually adjusting to the peculiarities of Botswanan business culture, by which I mean I’m tearing my hair out with slowly decreasing frequency. The Botswanan attitude towards time and work is by turns more relaxed and yet more bureaucratic, a maddening exercise in contradiction. I’ll go into this in more detail in a separate post, but the upshot is that on alternating days I feel tolerably productive and helpful at Somarelang Tikologo, and on others I’m certain that sanity is being torn from my grasp by the infuriating formalities of innumerable committees. This organization literally has fewer staff members than it has committees telling the staffers what to do. AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGGGGHHH!!!

Rather more exhilaratingly, I’m attempting to plan my Christmas vacation. My friend Rafael from South Africa will be in Peru over Christmas, so I may instead bus over to Mozambique with the Canadian Natalie and Taylor (another American). Mozambique, I’m told, is a captivatingly beautiful place dotted with glorious beaches (meh), sites of startling historical interest (a step in the right direction), and animals galore (now we’re talking!). If Mozambique doesn’t pan out, I may hitch a ride with some friends down to lovely Cape Town, bypassing the crime-saturated abscess that is Johannesburg and instead enjoying what is supposedly the most beautiful city in Africa. If even that doesn’t happen, I get the supreme consolation prize of catching a bus deep into the Kalahari desert and enjoying Botswana’s own natural glories solo, camera in hand. While I’d prefer to do that in April, when the weather is apparently more conducive to huge clusterings of animals, I’m sure that somehow I’ll make do.

So many choices, so little time to blog about it all…

With a thousand thanks to Briana...

2004-12-01T09:06:00.000+02:00

Bree has helped me find bandwidth for the first of what will hopefully be many pics: Up first... Elephants!!! It's a thumbnail, so click for the biggie...

Expectations...

2004-11-30T13:06:00.000+02:00

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...

2004-11-26T18:19:00.000+02:00

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!!!

2004-11-17T08:22:00.000+02:00

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!

2004-11-15T16:36:00.000+02:00

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...

2004-11-12T23:57:00.001+02:00

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.

2004-11-12T23:57:00.000+02:00

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!

2004-11-09T01:57:00.000+02:00

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!

2004-11-08T20:40:00.000+02:00

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...

2004-11-06T11:35:00.000+02:00

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...

2004-11-05T22:01:00.000+02:00

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.

Eaten by Elephants

In brief!

More photos!

First of the photos!

I'M HOME!

Still en route...

I know, I know...

Who would've thought?

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

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

Survival!

Surfing attracts jellyfish!

So very lazy...

The Road of Terror...

'Bout bloody time...

Stuck...

We've been misplaced!

Aaaaargh!

The first volley!

Alive!

On hiatus...

Good ol' Uncle Bob...

Life in Africa is hard...

They're everywhere!

On the road again...

Puppy!

Oww...

Success!

Sluggish blogger... and big news!

Me again!

Still alive...

Be careful what you wish for...

Sympathies...

Still alive...

It's a hobo's life for me...

Hitting the road...

Far away...

Crawlies...

In constant motion...

Country-hopping

In chronological order...

Weirdness...

Santa even visited!

The Reaper says Hi!

Fences...

Wandering!

Noise...

Call meee!

More to come...

Plans

Anger

Apologies...

Everyone hopes...

Minutiae, Part 1 : Eats

I'm still alive!

With a thousand thanks to Briana...

Expectations...

Excuses, excuses...

Aminamals!!!

Phone goodness!

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

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

Many disconnected thinkings, and open comments too!

Pula!

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

Nearly there...

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