Botswana

I'm glad to report that I did manage to recover all of my camera gear, including the memory card with most of my pictures on it. I left it all(except the camera) in the hostel in Maputo, but fortunately one of the other guests was able to meet us in Johannesburg with it. Sadly I left it in the hotel room today and you won't be able to see any of the pictures until my next post.
The foul weather has continued. We are assured by virtually everyone we meet that wet, dreary weather like this is unheard of in the month of June, but that doesn't do much in the way of assuaging our dampness and boredom. Turns out Africa isn't much an indoor tourist destination and rainy day options are limited. The one upshot is that I'll be able to catch up on my blog. The other bright spot is that we were able to meet up with my friend Sean(check out his blog here) whom I know from China. I was hoping he would be able to get us oriented, show us the capitol and so forth, but as it turns out we saw most of Gaborone while driving around looking for a pay phone to call him. The city is built, like many American cities, around a series of malls, some of which would look quite at home in Chandler or Rio Rancho. The rest of it is a confusing jumble of slightly curved streets and houses. Gaborone is crazy for cell phones, you can buy airtime in the post office, grocery store, petrol station and even half way through the border post. Despite this fact mine doesn't work for some reason. Perhaps they want me to buy airtime at the border.
This morning we visited the Naitonal Museum, which I thought was quite good. Not too fancy, no real awe-inspiring exhibits but the text was well written and displayed an admirable even-handedness notable lacking from say, the Smithsonian History. They also cover most aspects of Botswana's history geology and wildlife quite comprehensively with the one notable gap being that the history section ends abruptly at around 1910. Interesting fact : the Kalahari gets slightly more rain than Albuquerque.
Otherwise, a fair amount of time has been spent watching South African soap operas, which--when the chief's mutiple wives are taken into account--reach blistering levels of intrigue that our simple monogamonormative American minds are ill-equipped to understand. They are still quite entertaining though.