Africa Wrap-Up

When we last saw our intrepid hero he was in Gaborone, Botswana waiting for the rain to clear. Obviously that was some time ago. The storm did finally pass in time for one nice afternoon in Gaborone. We visited a village nearby which has an interesting museum covering the history of the village in incredible detail. We mostly went because it was essentially free, but the attendant stood next to the donation box and gave me dirty looks, so I had to leave my smallest bill, which was supposed to buy me breakfast the following day. We met up with Sean and his classmates that night for drinks and dancing, which actually started at 10 p.m. as advertised. At 9:59 the patio cleared out and by 10:01 the floor was packed. Unfortunately the idea of a night club opening when it says it will open was lost on our American colleagues who arrived at an appropriate 11:30. Frankly it never would have occurred to me, but we were already there for dinner.

The drive back to Joberg was mostly uneventful except for one thing. Why do guinea hens cross the road? Apparently in order to steal license plates. One stumbled out in front of my car at 120 km/h and not being terribly familiar with the local fauna, I could only hope it would fly off. It didn't and I ended up hitting it square. The noise woke Sharada up, thinking we had lost a muffler. As it turned out, we had lost the license plate from the front of the car, which we noticed just 200 km later just before a Traffic Control Officer waved us to the shoulder to ask about it. She let us off with a warning instead of an R600 fine. I promise not to do it again.

We mostly just hung around the hostel in Joberg, but we got some good intelligence about the financial situation in Zimbabwe, which resulted in our bringing just barely enough US Dollars instead of almost none. We were also given a pair of glasses and a letter to deliver to various people in Victoria Falls, which hopefully worked off some one my karmic debt for the return of my camera equipment.

Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe is a clean and welcoming tourist town that offers a wide range of accomodation, none of which is more than 5% full at the moment. Sharada and I slept in a 15-bed dorm all alone. Someone told us that there is some law in place to prevent any hotel booking more than 10% occupancy(in order to spread the small number of visitors evenly) but I'm not sure if that's true. We stopped at The Castle resort, hotel and casino because it seemed to have only restaurant on the side of town with power one night(there's a rotation system of scheduled black outs). It would have been more at home in Vegas except for the warthogs fighting on the lawn. The main floor of the casino was lit up with flashing lights beckoning to gamblers, but was completely silent and empty except for 4 black jack dealers all sitting at the same table chatting quietly to each other. We opted to eat in the dark at the hostel instead because it was less eerie.

The falls are mind-blowingly amazing, especially for a desert rat like me. According the info at the park during peak flow(which I think we were fairly close to) 550,000 cubic meters of water pass over the falls EVERY SECOND. This is 145 million gallons, or roughly the amount of water that Albuquerque uses in a day, which means it takes a whole 6 minutes for a year's worth. The falls are formed when the Zambezi river spills into a gorge. Above the falls it forms a large wetland area, so when it hits the gorge it is over a mile wide. More or less as though the Mississipi river suddenly fell into the Grand Canyon. The Zambezi Gorge is not as deep as the Grand Canyon, but it's almost impossible to tell as the cloud of mist generated not only prevent the bottom of the falls from being seen but also extends a further 500 ft above the rim of the gorge and can be seen from 20 miles away. This is a lot of numbers, but it's difficult to describe the falls without them. They are simply so huge and powerful that the human mind can't really grasp them. The spray completely envelopes you in a way that makes it impossible to see more than a tiny portion at any one time unless you charter an aircraft. The falls form part of the border with Zambia, and the Zimbabwe side(across from the falls) supports a small rain forest in a relatively arid region just from the costant spray which completely soaked us.

We also went to Zambia for the afternoon, where you can get closer and see the top. The two are joined by a bridge which was designed in 1902 by a Brit who had never been to Africa, assembled in England and shipped in chunks to Zimbabwe. It seems to be holding up pretty well. I paid $105 dollars for the privelege of jumping off while connected to a large elastic band. This is the world's second highest bungi jump at 111 m(under a dollar a meter). This was terrifying and so exciting that my adrenal glands didn't shut down for almost two hours, making me panic about nothing for the rest of the afternoon. Also, it's hard to beat the view of the falls with a 300 degree upside-down rainbow that can probably only be achieved this way.

On the way back to the hostel from dinner some locals stopped us in the street which was a bit arresting as it was quite dark. As it turned out, they were merely trying to prevent us from wandering into the path of a group of five wild elephants that were crossing the road about 50 feet ahead of us. "We are scared of them. They are quite dangerous," the woman said. The elephants were on their way in a minute or so, as were we. Apparently the elephants usually take an evening constitutional in the area. In fact the cross street they had come from is named "Elephant Walk."

For whatever reason I scheduled a full two day in Joberg after Vic falls, which sadly was not enough time to leave. We got a bit cheated on our outing the first day(although this was conveniently no one's fault). Which put me in a sour mood, and made me that much less excited about the city. I just went on a long walk the second day and watched movies in the hostel. I was in a fairly nice part of town, and it wasn't unpleasant, but the place has got to be one of the least pedestrian-friendly cities on earth. Even many well developed areas lined with shops and coffee houses don't have sidewalks. This creates the paradoxical situation of extremely posh neighborhoods where one still does not feel safe on the streets. I don't think I'll be moving there any time soon. Also we were gridlocked on the freeway on the way to the airport for 90 minutes until our driver pulled a u-turn across the grassy ditch that separated the traffic. The van could barely make it up the opposite side in the loose soil but we somehow managed to merge into the passing lane. Otherwise I would almost certainly have missed my flight. The flight was not too bad, as far as 28 hour flights go. And I ran into my 7th grade humanities teacher in the Atlanta airport who was on his way back from Macchu Picchu and the Amazon. Small world. Really really small, provided you travel in a straight line at high speeds.

Africa Pictures

View near Nelspruit
















Swazi cultural dancing.















Rhino--Cape Vidal.





















Beach--Cape Vidal ~30 minutes later.





















Coy Hippo--St. Lucia Estuary
















The beer and the boat and awesomeness.





















Victoria falls--Zimbabwe
















Victoria Falls--Zambia





















Boldly forging ahead.















The quick way down.

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.

Update

This will have to be a quick post, but long overdo. No pictures because I have been temporarily separated from my camera cable. From Nelspruit, where we were introduced to the world of rugby with a Super 14 final crash course(cross-listed under drinking) we moved on to Mozambique. There was some uncertainty about whether we would be able to get the car and both of us across the border, but with the help of a friendly volunteer(who then demanded to be payed) we did it in just under an hour. The roads were not as bad as we had been lead to believe except for certain very short stretches. The stretch of highway just north of Maputo that serves as the city's bus station is an incredible tangle of traffic and people and commerce and it took an impressive amount of time to negotiate it.
Being the winter, it is rather the off season at the beaches of Mozambique. In fact literally no one else was there. The Indian Ocean is really quite warm, but the air was too chill to be comfortable with a stiff breeze. The beaches themselves were also quite lovely, but as the only tourists there was quite a bit of pressure from vendors of souvenirs. We decided to head to the capital a day early and see the sites, which we did. The national art museum was fascinating. All of the art was local, and none of it was more than about 30 years old(post independence). Most of it was also quite distrubing, which given the decade-or-so long civil war is very understandable. Unfortunately we missed almost half the exhibits because the power went out. The guide book instructed us to keep our passports at all times, which we did, luckily because a pair of police officers(with uzis!) casually demanded to see them as we were wandering the street. Someone later told us that they sometimes also demand money, but not from us. Other than that the people were quite friendly and very understanding(maybe forgiving is a better word) of the fact that Spanish and Portuguese are not nearly as similar as I had hoped. English speakers were few and far between so there was a fair amount of hand waving and drawing diagrams in the dirt. Not that Mozambique wasn't lovely, but we left early. We've been missing the food and music ever since.
We moved on to Swaziland, which looks a bit like New Mexico, but not quite so dry and more densely settled, with a network of small, mostly subsistence farms. We visited a reconstructed village from 100 years ago. Apparently the going rate for a bride--17 cows--hasn't changed since then. I'm glad I'm not Swazi for that reason any way. The valley we visited was beautiful and we also caught some traditional dancing, along with 100 Swazi high schoolers who made it much more engaging with their whistles and shouts. We were definitely missing some nuances of the dancing because seemingly unexciting parts of the dance drove them into a frenzy. Several of them ran onto the stage to leave change in front of their favorite dancers.
We returned to South Africa less than a week after leaving and headed for lovely St. Lucia where we took in some more wild life, most notably many many hippos(they may also have been hungry hungry) and a truly lovely beach at Cape Vidal(which probably offers one of the shortest Rhino to beachfront drives on earth). We headed north to see the Drakensberg mountains, but it has been raining so hard(and snowing even--I thought this was Africa) that we haven't caught a glimpse. Hopefully we'll catch a glimpse tomorrow as we head back to Joberg to (hopefully) retrieve some of my pictures that I left in Maputo, and then on to Botswana.