andersoj.org oddments

After some long delay, I’m writing the final message (we hope) from our trip to Africa. We find ourselves at Johannesburg International Airport (again) due to a slight hiccup in our space-available travel plans. This is the first time I’ve gone through immigration twice in two hours before. Sadly, our luggage seems to have hitched a ride on our reputations and preceeded us to Frankfurt. South African airways assures my wife that this evening’s flight is “wide open”, so we hope to be enroute soon.

Since my last report, we have traveled from Gabarone, Botswana by airplane, car, taxi, bus, powerboat, mokoro (a sort of pole-driven canoe) and foot through Botswana and South Africa. After spending a few days with the staunchly hospitable Phil Rotz at his home in Gabs, we made our way north to the Okavango Delta. This is accomplished by way of a short flight to the small city of Maun on Botswana Air, then transferring over to a Cessna 207 (six seats) for a 20-25 minute flight up to Gunn’s Camp, a fairly rustic facility near Chief’s Island. If you browse through the pictures we’ve posted, you’ll enjoy photos of the Gunn’s Camp Airport Terminal, complete with a fire suppression system that made me smile: Five or six galvanized buckets, painted red, and suspended from a rail.

Our reservation had us meeting Dave Kao, AJ Nadelson, and Dr. Kao at Gunn’s Bush Camp (the leaping-off point for camping excursions) for lunch. Happily, the Kao contingent had just returned from several days in the bush and delayed their much-anticipated shower plans to have lunch with us. We were excited to hear about their excursion, and they had the good fortune of seeing Rhinoceros. We hoped their good luck with the wildlife might rub off on us a bit. We also had a chance to pose for a somewhat-belated remote campaign photo-op for Ben Cannon, who recently won a primary race to represent urban Oregonians in the state legislature. Theresa Kao provided campaign buttons, and Dave and I posed for a few “West Linn High School Alumni Friends of Ben Cannon — Okavango Contingent” photos.

After a nice lunch, we parted ways and boarded a mokoro with our guide, loaded for a few days of camping in the bush. It’s a bit odd heading off into the wilderness — and we’re talking about some serious *wild* here — with a guy you’ve just met and a box of camping supplies packed by a bunch of people you haven’t met. Nevertheless, we hopped blithely into the boat, and “Radi” our guide commenced the hour-long trek through the wetlands to our camp site.

While we were in the bush, we spent each morning and afternoon on nature walks, totaling 6-7 hours a day. My feet, most recently adapted to the sedentary programmer’s lifestyle, protested. In spite of sore feet, we wandered around for the bulk of each day, seeing (and it seems crass simply to enumerate, but…)

* Lion (1 male, three females)
* Hyena (1, and very briefly)
* Kudu
* Honey Badger
* Python
* Giraffe (lots)
* Elephant (lots and lots and lots. they are filthy with them!)
* Warthog
* Mongoose
* Baboon

A few experiences from the camping trip stand out. First was the cooking — Jonathan was challenged a bit by constructing meals out of the farrago of ingredients presented in our cook kit. Of singular interest was the canned-corned-beef bolognese with spaghetti and squash. Never has canned meat tasted so good to me.

Another event was our coming upon the pride of lion not 1/2 km from our campsite. They were as surprised as we were, but all evidence suggested that their feet didn’t hurt as much as mine. It was a thrill to watch them lounge about (well, after they reorganized themselves a bit to accommodate our presence) and watch us. Eventually we got tired of watching and taking pictures, and made our way around them to our dinner. Later that evening, after dinner and sundown, as we sat around the fire we heard them kill some kind of creature. Quite a stir, as hyena descended on the site. We estimate that it was less than 1km away, as the distinct sounds of individual hyena and guttural growl and (a few) roars of the lion were easy to make out. It sounded as though some baboon had also been freaked out a bit by the events, as we heard some screaming which sounded like baboon. It’s also possible that one of them just accidentally fell out of a tree and injured his pride, which seems to happen with startling regularity.

The last and perhaps most amusing event, predictably, revolves around our attempts to bathe in the wild. Angela had brought along some kind of contraption called a “sun shower”, a plastic bag one is instructed to fill with water and leave in the sun to warm. Later, it is suspended from a tree while prospective bathers attempt to clean and rinse themselves in 3.5 gallons of water descending from a rubber hose. Armed with a fully-primed sun shower, we headed off into the trees to find a suitable place. As we got set up, we noticed that our activity was the focus of attention for a troupe of 30 or so baboon. Angela ran back to the camp to fetch cameras, and we spent some time taking photos in the low light. Nervous baboon twittered away, and a few fell off of trees, stumps, and each other, creating a ruckus. I am reliably informed by an old wildlife book from the camp that this is known as “gamboling about.” And so, they gamboled and we shutterbugged. After we got bored of documenting them, we turned back to the task of bathing in the bush, watched in earnest curiosity by the baboon. The whole thing takes on a kind of voyeuristic/exhibitionist tone in the retelling, but it was rather amusing when it happened. Sorry folks, before you ask, there is no photographic evidence of this last bit of the story. That I’m aware of.

Eventually, we emerged from the bush, cleaned up and relaxed at Gunn’s Bush Camp, and headed back for civilization. I recall being told as we were selecting a platform tent for ourselves in camp that, “sometimes the warthog sleep under your platform at night.” In order to stay any concern, we were reassured that, “don’t worry, you won’t bother them [the warthog] at all. They’re used to campers.”

Another short hop by Cessna returned us to the airfield at Maun. Here we encountered what must be a distinctly African approach to coping with travel scheduling uncertainty. As the departure time for our Gabarone flight approached, folks in the terminal started to exhibit some anxiety about the seeming lack of aircraft. A solitary, nervous airline employee in uniform entered the terminal and made a 270-degree transit of the room. Her shy smile, downward-cast eyes, and nervous hands suggested that some news of great portent was in the offing. She then selected a customer from the terminal and pulled him aside to speak with him. The man regarded the room with a bit of a shrug and said something about having done something wrong and being scolded.

When he returned, he was giggling a bit. With the employee flanking him, keeping him between her and the bulk of the crowd, he announced that the airplane would be a bit delayed (an hour or so) and that he had been nominated spokesperson. There were immediate calls by the assembly for our newly-minted middleman to negotiate on our behalf for tea and crackers for our trouble. To no avail. To the amusement of all, our spokesperson continued to provide updates until our airplane left, roughly an hour late.

Upon our return from the Delta, Phil Rotz collected us in his ’silver pellet’, a serviceable if not beautiful vehicle “imported” (I hesitate to apply a word so laden with implications of legality) from Japan and set loose on the byways of southern Africa. We headed out the next morning by road for Johannesburg with traveling companions Noxi and Vin, Phil’s girlfriend and roommate, respectively. Vin was on a southbound mission to reunite with his girlfriend, who lives in Johannesburg. The remaining four of us set up camp at a bed and breakfast, Melville Manor, and set about visiting various bits of Jozi by car. By and large, I’d say that African city driving offers a close parallel to the same sport in Boston, and I recommend it for those of you whose palette has not been suitably tantalized by the thrill of American automotive sociopathy.

We had the pleasure of visiting both the Hector Pieterson museum [wikipedia] in Soweto township and the Apartheid Museum [wikipedia]. Uplifting and daunting experiences, both of them.

We are ready to return home — particularly after an unexpected extra day or so here in Jozi — and look forward to talking with all of you about the trip on our return.

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.

Blessings.

JA