Visitors from Denver!

     David and Maeve Franklin visited us this past weekend. They are friends through Katherine's 3-days-a-week “Walking Group,” which has been tremendously supportive of our effort here in lots of thoughtful ways. Both Maeve and David were born and schooled in South Africa, receiving medical training in Cape Town, but they left for the U.S. nearly 30 years ago. Their South African perspective was of particular interest. They are here for 2 family weddings in the province of South Africa that is just south of Swaziland, and for a visit to their summer home in the Eastern Cape.

They went with us to the two primary schools where we teach.

They spoke about medical careers, and then they met a ½ dozen of our favorite students we had assembled in the High School Library to talk about medical training and careers.

David and Maeve visited our local shebeen and sampled some home-brew, which they left behind, generating much cross-border good feeling.

We had lunch at our hut.

Notice the picture of Walking Group's Farewell Party 15 months ago behind us, beside Katherine's right ear.

     The Franklins brought some treasures to make our life here easier, carefully selected by Walking Group and my sister. These thoughtful deliveries from home make our life here easier and are very much appreciated.

     The Franklins then drove us 2 hours to the nicest game reserve in Swaziland, Mkhaya, where strenuous efforts have preserved “white” and “black” rhino and lots of other game.

     Mkhaya is very high end, and we were well fed and treated beautifully. We slept in thatched-roof huts with stone walls up to about a hard high, open to the bush above that, lit by kerosene lamps and lanterns. They brought us coffee and tea and biscuits at 5:30 a.m. before the 6 a.m. game drive.

     We talked with the Franklins about Denver news, changes in South Africa, retirement, religion, our work, other travels in the area, politics, birds . . . . David has a very quick eye and a long lens.

Bird Of The Day

     BotD honors had to go to fine multiple sitings of the purple-crested turaco, which David calls loerie, its Afrikaans name. A nice green with a bluish-purple head, it flashes a bright red under-wing when it flies; David was emphatic that the Swaziland national bird deserved BotD honors, and how could we assimilated Swazis disagree - the king wears 5 of its bright red feathers in his official traditional garb. It won out over stiff competition from the black-headed oriole with its gleaming yellow body, black head and red beak, and black and white edged wings, and also over the bearded woodpecker's black and white tummy stripes and red-crested head.

     Sunday we drove 1 ½ hours to Mabuda Farm; David is distantly related to the current owner! They had planned an outdoor braii, but had it inside because the weather was cold, windy and damp. The Mabuda Farm owners are at the far end of this picture, with Maeve and David and Katherine. Closer are 2 interns who had been training at the local hospital with Dr. Pons, an ophthalmologist there, and her parents who were visiting. This is the dining room in the enormous main house, which was built in the 1930s and has been in Helen Pons family since then.

     This was a really nice visit, with many flavors of home to enjoy while we visited with the Franklins and also in coming days.

condom demonstrations at the shebeen

      We have arranged for Population Services International to deliver condoms to us and, better yet, directly to supply our major distribution points. In visiting at our site with PSI they were interested in an alternative to our biggest distribution point at the local bar. Near the bar is what is called here a shebeen, which is an Irish word I'm told meaning an informal, unlicensed place that sells “home-brew”, a sweet fermented sorghum drink. We were told in training to avoid shebeens, and our only association with this one had been to see its denizens stumble around back (right by the road we travel) to pee. The PSI rep was tall, self-assured, and Swazi, and he took us to the shebeen, where we met the owner/manager (a woman, which I think is typical). The customers were quiet and polite, if a little stupefied. I enjoyed some home-brew with them, and we agreed to return Saturday afternoon for a condom demonstration.

     We didn't arrive till around 4 because of an event at the Refugee Camp, and the clientele had not become more lively with the passing time, but they were older than the bar, the absence of the pounding music of the bar enabled us to talk with those there, and we saw one woman we knew, the secretary at one of our schools, whom we like and who has been helpful to us.

     We pulled out our models and condoms, a customer volunteered to do translations and Katherine demonstrated on the models the use of the male condom first, then the female, then we answered many good questions.

       As in dining halls I've observed for US primary schools, high schools, colleges, and graduate schools, the men at the shebeen mostly sat together, and the women sat apart. After our demonstrations for the men, we went up to the women's end, and started our demonstration there, but several women, including our friend, told us quite nicely to stop. They said they are widows, and this information was not useful for them; they were passed this stage in their lives. Not easily deterred, Katherine said they could use this information to be sure their children and grandchildren were being safe. They were not interested. We backed off. My guess is we are older than all of these women, but many of them were lame, missing teeth, significantly over-weight in some instances, and all rapidly losing ground in the struggle with mortality.

      Our translator came up, led us back to the main group, and publicly thanked us, very eloquently. I think he was genuinely appreciative, but I was also coming to understand that they expected us to buy one of the small (probably 1 ½ quart) plastic buckets of home-brew they pass around. We get requests for money a lot more compelling than this all the time, and we mostly just brush them off as I did this one, saying we're volunteers, not paid, and we're giving our time. I went inside to see the fermentation process, bought a bucket of brew for the two of us and, after we'd had a swallow, one of our new friends took it off our hands, and it quickly started around the circle. Which was fine. Katherine said she was burped all the way home. I liked it.

      Sunday we planned to ride around 20 kilometers to the homestead of another volunteer, but shortly after we started K got a flat, I couldn't repair it, so she walked back alone. When I got home after a long, hot, dusty, dry ride into a fierce headwind we worked on some siSwati exercises we've set for ourselves and, upon finishing that, found the kitchen area was infested with ants; there's a crack in the wall, and if you leave unwashed plates out for a few hours, the ants invade. We washed and moved everything, then sprayed and exited into the late afternoon heat. Not what I'd planned for the end of the afternoon! In the increasing heat we've been drinking and generally using more filtered water, and I did a 2^nd processing overnight, and awoke to find I'd overfilled the reservoirs and flooded the kitchen table, seeping underneath the plastic cover, which is worse than it sounds because the kitchen table is made from composition material like cardboard, and I'm afraid it will fall apart if I do this much more. After teaching 2 classes at the “poorer” primary school, which did not go very well – they could recall few of the most elementary things we'd covered (the 4 fluids that can transmit HIV) and instead talked and joked among themselves - we went back to the High School to meet some Form IIIs selected by the teacher as needing special help for their exams. The Principal had sternly lectured the students at morning assembly on the importance of a big push for their final exams for Form III and V, which start this week and extend through October, but then he sent so many of them home for failing to pay their school fees (including the refugees, whose fees are supposed be paid by Caritas, a Roman Catholic charity funding the Refugee Camp) that classes were canceled for everyone. We rounded up 2 of the 5 Form IIIs we were to help, and had a pretty good session with those two.

     Sometimes this country is too much for us!

The Trip of a Lifetime: Part 4 – Maun, Old Bridge Bacpackers

     Arriving in the dusty tourist and agricultural town of Maun after the luxury of Gunn's Camp was a big change. A van met the plane, picked us up with our luggage, drove us to the terminal, and we walked away, with our backpacks, on our own again.

TIA Moment: No cash!

    We always had to be careful to get cash whenever we passed an ATM, especially in a new country. We'd been in Bots nearly a week, but only passed an ATM twice, each time hitting it for our withdrawal limit, so we really needed to re-supply in Maun. There was an ATM right outside the airport. I fed in my card and PIN, and the screen went blank. Hmmm. Katherine tried hers. Same. We started trying to figure how far we could get on the cash we had left, plus credit cards where they might be accepted. We walked a little further, spotted another ATM, and, ah, the sweet sound of those little wheels inside spinning out Motswani Pula. We knew it was the last Saturday of the month, and we'd seen a similar pattern in Swaziland, where some ATMs run out of cash the weekend after pay-day.

    In Maun we stayed at a backpackers hostel PCVs recommend, but we got the upscale tent-on-a-platform overlooking the Thamalakane River, which drains the east side of the Delta, with ensuite open-to-the-stars HOT showers and potty. Although the ablutions at Chobe Waterfront had an impressive-looking solar apparatus, Katherine got 1 sort-of warmish shower while we were there, and the boys' never warmed up at all; we showered quickly, in the hottest part of the day. And Gunn's, despite the wine glasses, white table cloths and fluffy towels, didn't really have hot water for its showers. So after a week of cold showers, the hot showers at the backpackers in Maun, for which we paid 1/10^th of the daily cost of Chobe camping and 1/40^th of the Gunn's cost, were quite welcome.

     In Maun we did an all-day mokoro ride, a morning bird walk/mokoro ride, and a hot dusty trip into town looking for the fabric we'd seen on women at Vic, but the fabric in Maun was essentially what we see in Swaziland; the Central African women must have a source we haven't discovered yet.

BotD: African Barred Owlet

     Our bird guide in Maun had a really sharp eye but no binoculars, and few teeth on the left side of his mouth. As we walked through a grove he stopped and pointed, and then carefully described where to look. Neither of us saw, with “binos” as they're called, what he was seeing with his bare eyes, and the bird flew. He called it, spotted where it returned to, and painstakingly guided our searching, until we, with our binos, spotted a perfectly splendid little brown owl, with white-speckled circular patterns around its eyes and over its head, white-fringed feathers on its body, and then large white spots like epaulets on its shoulders.

Oh yeah! It's hard to spot many raptors, and owls are especially difficult.

TIA Moment: “May I borrow me your binos?”

     Our guides on the all-day mokoro trip were Whiz (named, he said, for an American singer; could have fooled me.) and Extra (we did not ask the derivation of the name; the names of many Swazi children reflect the circumstances of their birth – the name of the PC/SZ Manager of Safety and Security (a full time position and, for some of these small young women in remote sites, he's very important) translates as “another boy”). Neither had binos, and shortly into our walk Extra, who seemed to be sort of a guide-in-training, asked could he “borrow me your binos” (a turn of phrase also common among the Swazis, whose language has only one word thata means both lend and borrow.) Then he asked for the small bird book Katherine was carrying. He did not offer to return them, and seemed to expect to walk with them during our excursion. We got them back and borrowed them to him when he asked.

BotD: Pied Kingfisher

(with an honorable mention to 6 Little Bee-eaters)

     We saw Pied Kingfishers all through Bots, but they are still special, with vivid black-and-white markings and a ridiculously long bill; hyper-active, darting/hovering/returning to perch and then diving for small fish. But at the backpackers at Maun a family of 2 seemed to have nested in the bank 1' under our tent platform and spent all day fishing (successfully, then bringing their catch back to the vines in front of our chairs and gulping the little guys down like nachos at a Super Bowl party – alas, that would have been the best part of the last SB I got up at 1 PM to watch in February).

They're noisy: K - “I never thought I'd ever say 'oh, just another kingfisher!'”

     In the colorful world of Bee-eaters, Little Bee-eaters are the (relatively) drab poor relations, with only a yellow throat and green back to show for themselves, neither terribly bright. But one evening at our Maun backpackers 2 perched on a slender twig 10' from our porch, then 2 more, with the twig bobbing up and down as each landed, then another and another until there were 6 of them, huddled together in the fading light as if for warmth.

    We went on the all-day mokoro ride, and then had dinner with a young German couple who were traveling southern Africa by public transportation. They were in the tent next to ours. He'll start at PWC in audit in Cologne in October.

We bought them an excellent Namibian beer (Windhoek – Namibia was colonized by Germans) and asked them about how people from the old East Germany are regarded by those from West Germany; with tribalism at the root of so much discord on this continent, I'm curious about how some groups get along, others don't.

     We cooked 2 nights in the communal kitchen with 2 South African couples about our age who were driving 4,000 miles around southern Africa. The wives were sisters, raised on a remote farm without electricity at the base of the Drakensberg Mountains in the eastern part of SA. The girls had gone away to boarding school at age seven – 3-month terms with a single visit home per term. The 2 couples came over to our porch for cocktails

and explained SA to us: those of English and Afrikaans descent barely notice the origins of each, this despite some English concentration-camp atrocities just over 100 years ago during the 2^nd Boer War and English opposition to the Afrikaans' imposition of apartheid more recently. One husband is of English descent, the other Afrikaans. In the deep south of the US I think some are still fighting the Civil War, 150 years later – how's that work? Relations among whites, blacks and, I suppose, coloreds, in SA are still developing, but are far better than they would have been without Nelson Mandela; what a precious gift that man was for this entire region.

     And then, alas, a flight back to Jozie, overnight at a hostel there, and early the next morning the Gautrain into town to the international khumbi rank

 

followed by a 5 hour ride to Manzini and 1 hour back to our town, some grocery shopping and a ½ hour walk home, heavily loaded, including with many wonderful memories.

The Trip of a Lifetime: Part 3 – Gunn's Camp in the Okavanga Delta

     After 3 nights camping on the Chobe Riverfront we returned to the main city in the area, Kasane, and flew in a small plane (4 passengers) to Gunn's Camp, in the middle of the Okavanga Delta. Gunn's had 6 tented platforms and a reception/dining area, on a series of small islands in the marshes formed by the Okavanga River spreading out and evaporating, leaving practically no water to flow south into the Kalihari Desert.  For the 6 tent/cabins, so 12 "clients" there were 24 staff on site; it was delicious to be pampered – clean sheets on real beds, good meals served on china, spectacular dawns and sunsets over the marsh.

(Did you notice in that top picture, fine South African white wine with lunch! Ohhh, I could get used to this!) The wildlife wasn't nearly as abundant as at Chobe, but the guides were more sophisticated, and made it very interesting for us, and you know, 3 or 4 elephants can be as interesting as 100.

     For instance, who knew that the male impala servicing a breeding herd always poop in a pile in the same place, time after time, while females poop around anywhere. When a rival male comes and poops on the other male's pile, the 2 have to fight and often the male with the herd loses, having lost weight and strength attending to 2 or 3 dozen does. Don't you hate it when that happens? But our guides held out hope – often the defeated male, driven out and disconsolate, rests, eats and gains weight, and wins back his place with the herd. I'm eating all I can. Really.

Bird of the Day: Wattled Crane

     The Wattled Crane is a big bird (seeing a pattern here?): 4' high, with a gray back, white belly and neck, yellow bill with a red base, and long white wattles hanging from its chin! (Urine samples have been demanded from the design committee submitting this one; wattles? Red base to the bill? Really?!) Our Bird Book describes it as “vulnerable . . . uncommon and localized,” with only 8,000 globally, 2,000 in Africa!

     At Gunn's our guides could identify birds by their call, and could call them in, and tell the different kinds of nests. They also babied us, insisting on coming to our cabin/tents to get us for dinner, after dark. But seeing 18” elephant footprints in the sand outside our tent one morning did make us appreciate the attendants' attentions. On a walk our guide pointed out lion prints in the sand, going the opposite direction from ours. A few steps on he pointed out that the lion had then gone back the other direction, so the lion was now apparently ahead of us. I noticed after that the guests all walked close together.

     One of the pleasures of our trip was the people we'd spend a few intense days with and then move on. Here are clever handsome Belgian newly-weds who had been self-driving 3,000 miles, camping through Namibia and then Bots, having adventures nearly getting stuck fording rivers, and who now stayed 2 nights at Gunn's. The first night at Gunn's they chose to camp on a nearby island – with 4 attendants! Segolene had never camped before she'd met Benjamin 8 years ago. He'll start with Boston Consulting Group in Brussels when they return.

    Giorgio, a courtly and witty old-world widower, 81,who was from northern Italy and had an old-world grace, carried a well-thumbed copy of Birds of Southern Africa, stained and wrinkled in some places, many of the pages kind of curled. That told us all we needed to know about him. He reminded me a little of Katherine's Dad, but from Parma.  His wife, an avid birder, had died, and he was there with Eleanor, a new acquaintance only a little younger than he, who had no English, the lingua franca of southern Africa, nor, as far as I could tell, any interest in birds. . He was, of course, charmed with Katherine. 

      We carried everything we needed for 2 weeks in our backpacks, and had to pack with care. I'd pulled up weather forecasts for Vic and Bots before we left and noted a hot spell while we were in Chobe, followed by a cooler patch, but had not focused as much on the implications of a day/night temperature swing of around 48ºF. At the last minute Katherine chose to jettison an insulated jacket, and it became clear that presented a challenge. We borrowed a fleece jacket from our organizer before we left for the Chobe Waterfront, but at Gunn's she was really cold. She is very hardy. Not that she doesn't notice the cold (and other afflictions from living in southern Africa), but she doesn't let it get her down. Here she is one morning, on our porch at Gunn's, catching the dawn over the marsh

BotD: Meyers Parrot and Bennett's Woodpecker

     This has to be a tie between 2 fine “life birds” for us. Our plane out was a late one – 3 PM, so after lunch, with no activity planned (yes, it's a little like summer camp), we set chairs in the middle of our small island behind our cabin/tent and studied the jackelberry tree above us, which was full of life. Guides had pointed out both the Meyer's Parrott and Bennett's Woodpecker on our walks, but we've got our standards, and had seen neither with sufficient clarity to claim a sighting. But here we nailed 'em both. Meyer's Parrot with green belly, blue vent and yellow shoulders and an improbable yellow crown. Bennett's Woodpecker with a red crown and mustachial stripe, brown and white barred wings, and speckled belly. Ahhh.

No pix of either – these guys are tough to catch.

The Trip of a Lifetime: Part 2 – Chobe Waterfront

     After 2 lovely, memorable days at Vic, we took a taxi to the border crossing of the Zambezi River into Botswana, rode the ferry across, and waited for the guide I'd hired by email, the recommendation of the friend of a Botswana PC volunteer whom we knew from Denver, who had served in Botswana and been a great help to us in getting ready and in understanding the PC.

“This Is Africa” Moment: abandoned?

     I'd made all of the arrangements myself for our 2-week trip, using our limited internet and email, so there was no one local and knowledgeable to help us with the transitions, leaving me always wondering as each new stage approached whether it would work, or had I failed to notice something?

     No one sought us out at the ferry landing where we crossed the Zambezi into Botswana, so we walked up to the border gate, got stamped to enter Bots, but stayed there. Then each of us, one at a time, went back to the ferry. We are pretty recognizable – the only other white people all were in tours, arriving together, being met by those open-back safari vehicles with rows of benches, each vehicle with guides and a driver. No one responded to the name of the guide I'd hired, to whom I'd sent half our payment for 3 nights because, he'd insisted, he had to pay the fee for the campsites right away back in May. An hour passed, now an hour later than we'd said we'd meet. We had no phone service. We spoke to one of the safari guides, who called the number I had for our guide and he answered! He was down by the river, at a separate boat landing where the safaris bring their clients across in a motorboat, maybe 50 yards from the car/truck ferry landing, where we'd come over free with all the Africans.

OK, relax.

TIA Moment: buying food by memory

     Once we'd gone by an ATM to pay much of the other half of what we owed our guide we went to the grocery store where our cook bought all the 4 of us needed for our 3 nights of camping. I saw no list. All from memory. And, you know, if he forgot anything, I never noticed it; do you think sometimes some of the things that assist us, such as lists (and notes for speeches – Swazis never have notes when they speak, but don't seem to need them) cause memory and perhaps other skill,s to atrophy? Though I do wish Swazis made more use of calendars.

Bird of the Day: Saddle-billed Stork

     On our drive into Chobe National Park we saw a Saddle-billed Stork. An enormous bird, maybe 5' tall, with a white belly, black neck and head, and black and white wings. But then, in a touch Disney's animators would not have dared, the bill has broad red and black stripes and, can you believe it, a bright yellow saddle at the base of the bill. Wow! When you take your eyes off it, you can't believe it, and have to look again.

TIA Moment: our car as an elephant scratching tree

     As we drove to our camp we startled a medium-sized female elephant scratching herself against a tree 20 yards away. She appeared annoyed at the interruption and came up to the car and rubbed her ample butt against the right headlight, then her side against the driver's (and my) side of the car. Then she turned towards us and glared, flapping her ears and feeling the car with her truck. Having made her point, she moved on.

I have no pix once the female started scratching herself against the car; photographs seemed unimportant at the time. Here she is when we first encountered her, on the left, scratching her butt against the tree.

      That night we camped on the shores of the Chobe River. Our guide cautioned us that there were lions around, and that hippos, hyenas, or perhaps even leopards could come through the campsite, and all were “Potentially Dangerous Animals” (PDAs, in the guide lingo). Our guide said if we really needed to visit the ablutions during the night, which was a large cinder-block building 75 yards away, we were to call to him to wake him and he would drive us. Well that didn't work for me, but I could hear on and off through the night the distinctive grunting/bellowing/roaring lions make, so I did wait for a time when I had heard no roaring or footsteps for a little while, and I did not go far, nor did I linger, although the stars were magnificent.

TIA Moment: A Lion!

     The next morning, as I was explaining to Katherine that sounds travel further at night, the pitch of a lion's rumble carries particularly well, and the lions we heard were actually probably quite far off, we looked up and watched a large male lion walk by our camp, maybe 20 yards away, between our fire and the river. He's just disappeared off to the left of this picture, in which I had thought I was capturing the coming dawn.

We followed the lion (in the car), and shot lots of pix.

He joined another large male, 3 females and 3 cubs, and then disappeared into the bushes about 300 yards from our camp, following a herd of water buffalo.

TIA Moment: An Attack!

     When we got back to camp we found we'd been raided! No, not by man-eating predators, but by baboons, who had seized the bag containing all our bread – alas, no sandwhiches. Keeping food safe was a struggle.

     Each morning waking up on the Chobe Waterfront was like waking up in the Garden of Eden. “The world was all before them, where to take their rest . . . .” (Martha's Baccalaureate, with an assist from John Milton.) The number of animals and birds was simply astonishing. I tried to count the elephants; there were small families of 30; herds of 80; a herd of around 130. Sometimes 2 such herds would be in sight at the same time. I did not try to count the Cape Buffalo, and could not possibly count the zebra.

During the heat of the day the guides would snooze and I would sit in the shade with a 5-week-old Economist magazine and my siSwati vocabulary flash cards, but I rarely read or studied. Even at the quiet time of day, there was almost always something going on: an Open-billed Stork would catch and swallow a fish, Glossy Ibis and Pied Kingfishers dove for fish, White-breasted Cormorants opened their wings to catch the sun's warmth. When the fishermen from the Namibian side of the river (not a park, as it is in Botswana – Botswana has done a whole lot of things right) moved out of sight in their mokoro (a canoe hollowed from a log),

a Marabou Stork or African Fish Eagle (similar to but slightly bigger than a bald eagle, but with the bright white extending much further down the front) would settle in.

      On our afternoon game drive we found the lions about where we left them, and then followed the males as they walked by our camp as the first male had done that morning; our guide said the females always lead (!), so they must have gone through earlier, unnoticed by us.

      That night around the campfire we discussed with our guide and the cook the importance of tribal relations - whenever they encountered someone they would always mention to us what tribe their visitor was from.

That's our guide in the middle, the cook on the left. And that night and then throughout the rest of the trip we asked about relations between men and women – our guide was adamant that a man should have sex with as many women as possible, and having several wives is a mark of success. Botswana is a relatively prosperous nation with good health care and educational systems, and yet a very high HIV+ incidence, although not as high as Swaziland's, which is the highest in the world. If Bots can't solve that problem, with all it has achieved, the prospects for success in our efforts are not encouraging. Changing behavior is really hard. Especially behavior driven by hormones.

     As our cook was fixing dinner the lions did their parade past the camp; our guide built up the campfire and urged us all to gather closely around it. We complied.

     That night shortly after we'd gone to bed I heard a lot of thrashing around in the river by our campsite, and some trumpeting sounds I thought were elephants, but could have been . . . hippos? When it grew quiet I felt it was probably OK to get up; as I re-entered the tent Katherine awoke and said she wanted to step outside. As she proceeded I heard more thrashing and bellowing from the direction of the water, but Katherine was very cool, giving no indication she'd even noticed. She took longer than I wished, but I said nothing, and we quickly returned to the tent. Her hearing at certain pitches is even worse than mine, and the next morning, when our guide traced the footprints and elephant dung on the road by our camp, Katherine asked if I'd heard them.

That day we finally saw a leopard, only briefly.

Our guide had heard from another guide, one of his “home boys” (his word = same tribe), where a leopard had been seen, and our guide figured just where to park to watch him slowly stalk by, 15 yards away, following a herd of impala. Just magnificent!

Bird of the Day - a Hung Jury: Goliath Heron or Green Wood Hoopoe

      We'd seen the aptly-named Goliath Heron in February at Kruger, but this was such a close and long viewing of a splendid bird that he wins BotD honors.

         (This is Katherine.)  I  disagree with this designation. For me the BotD was the Green Wood Hoopoe, a big green/blue bird with bright red decurved bill and red feet and a high pitched cackling call. Though not a rare bird, this was one I had been hoping to see!

Another TIA Moment: Kidnappers!

     The guide and the cook had different pressure points concerning the dangers around us, although each wanted us in our tent, for different reasons, when they weren't around. I was up a little before dawn the day we were to leave and made my way quickly to the ablutions, for a lot of good reasons. The cook came in shortly after and was genuinely startled and upset to find me there. He had earlier told me that the guide, who had warned us about the lions, had only lead ½ day tours from the lodges, going back each night to the lodge, in contrast to the cook, who was used to living among lions in his 2 week trips; I'd been puzzled about the inconsistency of our jumping in the car to follow the lion, but leaving the cook to fix breakfast while the lions walked by camp; how did we know they weren't hungry? Anyway, the cook's concern was different; he said I was vulnerable to Namibian poachers who, seeing a target of opportunity, might seize a westerner for ransom. But later, when I mentioned that concern to our guide, he brushed it off, saying that hadn't happened for years. Its hard to assess the dangers. Especially in the dark, with lions roaring in the bushes.

      The guide and I had begun to get on each other's nerves. I couldn't consistently distinguish all the different birds we were seeing (K could), and was starting to hear a little too often “As I told you before . . . .” The relationship of a guide with his male client can be fraught: see Hemingway's splendid safari story The Short, Happy Life of Frances Macomber; fortunately, it didn't get that far with us. To my knowledge.

TIA Moment: Elephants on Parade!

Katherine had taken her chair to the shade of some acacia bushes, but came back to where I was sitting to tell me a big herd of elephants was approaching. As we sat under the bushes they passed by 15 yards away from us, some starting as they spotted us, facing us and waving their ears, stamping a little before they turned and moved on to the river. I stopped counting at 80.

Here are some other shots from Chobe. It was just unbelievably fabulous.

The Trip of a Lifetime: Part 1 – Victoria Falls

     Our 2 weeks visiting Victoria Falls and then Botswana was one of the great events of our lives: wonderful sights; fascinating people; some hardships we were able to handle; splendid birds and animals. The following description goes on a little long, I know; sorry, we saw and experienced a lot in 2 weeks. I broke this into 4 separate postings for the 4 stops of our trip. I think breaking it up makes it easier to deal with, but I don't really know – this is the only blog I've ever done. There will not be a quiz.

    We crashed our first night in Swaziland's commercial town, staying with a 3^rd year volunteer who had been working nights with commercial sex workers, going around with a driver and a nurse; he finished his service the next week. Buying pizza we joined a volunteer who is extending for a 3^rd year and her well-spoken low-key Swazi fiancé who is construction project manager for an NGO building a health clinic. Very interesting conversations.

     Staying in town enabled us to take the 1^st khumbi out of Manzini to JoBurg, which left at 7 a.m. It was fun to see dawn come to the city and the bus rank wake up, and to start our adventure. We got to JoBurg in time to take a bus tour of the downtown area, which is now probably the least important part of the city, but all we had time for – the action in Jozie seems to emanate from the townships and the wealthy surrounding suburbs, where businesses moved.

     Quick impression – JoBurg is a lot like Denver. A sprawling, high, dry city established about 35 years after Denver (Jozie – 1886) because of mineral discoveries, where treatment of the indigenous population was (and still is for JoBurg) an issue, and vast income disparities are manifest. JoBurg's downtown looks like Denver's in the late '80s after the oil crash, but without even the 16^th Street Mall. But JoBurg has a terrific fast, clean, safe, frequent comfortable train system. In the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, JoBurg is a “rainbow” city.

TIA (“This Is Africa”) Moment: WHO Yellow Fever proof

Checking in at the JoBurg airport to fly to Zambia the airline agent stared fixedly at my yellow World Health Organization card, shook her head and said she had to review it with her supervisor. She came back smiling – the all-important date of yellow fever vaccination was not included in the stamp she had been scrutinizing, but on the line of the card containing the stamp and also lots of additional (superfluous – but you never know who might want more) information.

OK, exhale.

     Upon arrival at our hotel in Zambia we walked 15 minutes to the Zambia side of Victoria Falls, the east side. Impressions:

• The paths were full of Africans, far outnumbering the whites, exactly the opposite of our experience in Swazi game parks.
• The Africans were generally dressy, as for a special outing. Many ladies from church groups were in their full church dress, identical for all from the same church, each uniform sparkling clean and ironed; many others were in Sunday best outfits. Only the white people wore what I would call “sensible shoes.”
• We were silent upon first viewing the falls. In discussions later we agree each of us was a little underwhelmed. More on this below.
• We walked down to the river below the falls, then back up. Many school groups. A boy passed me and urged on his girlfriend: “If this old man can do it . . . .” Missed what he said next. To whom could he have been referring? He had to say that in English?
• Up at the top of the east side of the falls again, we walked along the shore of the Zambezi in the golden fading life of dusk, seeing therRiver flow peacefully through the many islands, and then disappear over the lip like a giant's infinity pool, sending up the “smoke that thunders” that gives the falls their local name.

• People come to Vic Falls from all over the world. At the table beside us at dinner that night were some loud heavy-set men with younger hard-looking women all, ordering repeated refills of their wine glasses and other drinks; I'm convinced from the sound of their speech and appearance the men were Russian oligarchs.
• The next day we took a 15 minute helicopter ride, then walked across the bridge to Zimbabwe and walked the west side of the river, and from these two we came to appreciate the scope and magnificence of the falls. They are more than a mile wide, and about 110 yards high. But the falls were created, not by erosion, but by a rift in the earth opening from the shift of tectonic plates, and the area in front of the falls to the other side of the chasm, where we walked, is astonishingly small – sometimes I think about 125 yards away. This makes it easy to see the details, but you have to step back, and see each separate vista, to appreciate the scale. Or swing around in a helicopter, which we did. Also, the Zambia side, where we stayed and from which we first saw the falls, is slightly higher, and so in the drier season when we visited the flow is decidedly less than on the Zimbabwe side. My beloved art history professor referred to buildings and art works you can “see” in an instant (the Parthenon, Washington Monument; US Capital) and ones that you have to walk around, take some time and study a while to figure out (the Hamilton building at the Denver Art Museum; one's not better than the other - they are just different). Vic Falls is like that; it cannot be comprehended from any one view, even the helicopter.

• Each day we watched bungee-jumpers from the bridge. Both nights I woke up, shaking off what could have been a Meflaquin dream (and I haven't take that devil's brew for 8 months!), envisioning myself poised on the lip of the step in the middle of the bridge, then stepping out and down, down . . . , and of course waking up! We visited on the bridge with a pleasant Brit who was cheerfully watching his wife “take the plunge.” I thought of asking her as she strapped in if she knew whether he had bought a lot of insurance on her life recently, but refrained.
• This was our 40^th wedding anniversary. Many times we thought of those days 40 years ago, and of where we are now. Memories evoking “such sweet sadness.”