Friends-
Today I write from Gabarone, Botswana. We have been here with Phil Rotz for the last couple of days, and enjoying ourselves immensely. When last I wrote, we were in Cape Town. We rousted ourselves very early in the morning (as is our wont, and that of every space-available air traveller), and drove to the airport in Cape Town to divest ourselves of a rental car and hop on an airplane. Since both of these operations create stress in my life, I was very pleased to find that the airport offered omelettes and coffee.
We arrived back in Johannesburg at 8:00am, at which point we set about getting into town, to the bus terminal at Park Station. One would think that public transport of some kind would be available, but no dice. A short but fairly spendy taxi trip got us to Park Station, where we cooled our heels until 2:30pm in Buffalo Bill’s Pub and Grille. We then hopped on the Seabelo bus bound for Gabarone. After an enjoyable communal experience of watching Maid in Manhattan (go, J-Lo!) with our fellow travelers, we arrived at the border with Botswana around 7:30pm. Then the magic of border crossing by bus commenced. It took quite a long time, involving unloading of bags, wandering around, and aimless-looking official types milling about sending SMS messages and generally not paying attention.
Happily, we reboarded the bus and made it into Gabs by 9:30. Phil and companions picked us up and ushered us to a hot meal at very trendy digs.
We had a chance to have dinner last night with a number of friends of Phil — more later on this — and today, we visited a wildlife preserve at Mokolodi. Lots of good pictures, and we got to see Elephant, Rhino, and Cheetah close up. Angela had a chance to pet the Cheetah, but it seemed to react badly to Phil and I.
This afternoon, Phil drove us by an artist’s community. We had a wonderful discussion with the owners of a pottery shop and picked up some interesting pieces.
Tomorrow, to Maun and more wildlife.
I have posted a few more of our photos at:
http://andersoj.org/gallery/v/2006-africa/
For those of you who have missed the earlier emails, I’ve also posted these at my much-neglected blog:
http://andersoj.org/oddments
But I have had to cut down on the uploads due to the fact that this is a
satellite internet connection, with end-to-end latency with the US of
about 3.5 seconds. That makes for a 7 second roundtrip, and TCP/IP was
not designed for such insanity.
Cheers.
JA
–
Jonathan S. Anderson — andersoj@andersoj.org
tel: 540.961.0229 (H) 540.818.2896 (C)
www: http://andersoj.org/oddments
pgp key: http://andersoj.org/personal/0xF0BE7EF8-pub.asc