Common Sense and Whiskey

Grasshoppers and Spiders and Africa, Oh My

Working on a new e-book about the African safari experience has got me poking around into my photos from Africa. Here's one I reprocessed yesterday. It's a huge, finger-sized grasshopper from South Africa. Click it to make it bigger.

And while we're in safari mode, here's a random, short bit from the upcoming e-book. It's from a walking safari in Zambia:

Rains from November to April flood the Luangwa river system, and from then until November it's perfectly dry. The water will dry and recede and force the animals into greater and greater concentrations, with more and more conflict and danger from predators, but for now, there is peace, there are lagoons for crocs to eat catfish and places for hippos to eat and live apart from the river. The grass is still green and tall and thick, and Aubrey shows us how hippos change the landscape as they come and go from the river, creating an indentation on the water's edge that grows when it rains, collapsing the soil into gullies and washing it into the river.

Other animals use the trampled paths, that extend far up onto land, and sometimes hippo trails even evolve into rivers. We set out away from the river on a hippo path old and wide enough that there's a sandy bottom maybe half a meter wide with the grass on either side. Can't see ahead of us or to either side beyond the grass and Isaac pushes on toward a stand of mopane trees.

Great Quotes Collection

"The last time I saw Jack the Whipper it was ten a.m. and he was picking a fight with a one-armed clown. "
 

- Possibly apocryphal, but attributed to Mick the Whip. From a very funny story about purveyors of leather goods who clashed in titanic whip competitions (like Two-Handed Whip Pyrotechnics and Synchronized Whipping) in the 1990s in Darwin, Australia. Heard on safari in Zambia, as told by Denis and Georgina, whose further identity, since they're still running a safari camp at an undisclosed location in Malawi, will be protected.

 

Zambian Democracy

Nice to see the peaceful transfer of power to a new President in Zambia. Had a little email chat with the people at Kapani Lodge in the South Luangwa National Park this morning. They said President Banda was gracious in defeat, that it's all very exciting and they're proud. Best of luck to incoming President Sata.

Several years ago we spent a week at Kapani Lodge and other Norman Carr Safaris properties in South Luangwa. They're really great people. Couldn't have been nicer. Here's one of their bush camps. That's the "honeymoon suite" in the background.

Check out some wildlife photos in the Zambia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Vignettes from Africa V - Around Victoria Falls

We're not in Africa. We're actually en route to Panama City, Pamana today. We'll talk with you from there shortly. Meantime, here's part five of a series of short vignettes from some of our past trips to Africa.

The Zambesi is the fourth largest African river after the Nile, Niger and Congo, at 2700 kilometers. It's the longest to empty into the Indian Ocean. It's mouth in Mozambique comprises a 120 kilometer wide delta.

Its source is in northwest Zambia. Above the falls it’s navigable by bigger boats to only ten kilometers upstream, at Kandahar island. It's a calm river with sandbars and islands. 84 species of fish, 415 of birds, Ebony, Fig, Mahogany, Waterberry and what they call the "Raintree" and the "Sausage Tree" as well as Ilala and Wild Date Palms.

A woman named Precious arranged us a Zambesi cruise. We climbed aboard a two-deck blue and white cruiser and found a seat with some agreeable gin-swilling Germans.

Upstream, hippos yawned, a croc lurked here or there, boats like ours chugged by. The sun ground us into the sundeck.

Vignettes from Africa IV - Day Trip to Zambia

ZNBC, Zambian TV was just a scream. At sign on at 6:00 p.m., Chinyama Mukuma, in a brown plaid jacket, and Bridget Nkhoma, brown blazer and a necklace with a cross, read us the news. It ran until they’d told it all, I guess. It started at 6:00 and ended at 6:18. Then some happy people down by a pool smiled and sang about how much they enjoyed "Saladi De-odorized Vegetable Oil." The next commercial was for the Gorilla, the Zambian equivalent of The Club anti-theft device.

The TV played videos on channel 4. They even played the warning against showing them in places like hotels.

•••••

We gambled. Three games available down at the casino, roulette, blackjack and Zambesi Poker - five card draw with no drawing. You just bet your hand. Mirja and I bought 100 Z$2 chips each and pulled up at the roulette table. Every single croupier was a trainee, and the trainer glared at all of them, all the time. I lost all my money straightaway but Mirja won about all of it back, and still we were in bed by 11:00.

•••••

While the sun rose over Zambia, white people disdained me over their cereals and fruit as I stuffed down sausages, bacon and cheese rolls. We changed hotels. Graceful, gracious, the Victoria Falls Hotel has a fine view over the fine back lawn, up the chasm of the Zambesi to the Zambia bridge and the falls' spray. Water costs more than beer.

•••••

The air parched, still, searing, we set out to walk to Zambia.

Vignettes from Africa III - Up to Victoria Falls

There's a band of five boys under a tree, all five playing xylophone-marimba-type things, their hands full of musical hammers, and a lot of smiling going on. Now there's more cumulus than blue and maybe, just maybe, rain will come. They need it keenly.

I asked a young boy, "How are you doing?"

"I am just waiting for rain, sir."

•••••

If there were no Victoria Falls here there sure wouldn't be any tourists. Flat, scrubby, hot-as-absolute-hell. Air completely still.

The instant we got to town Mirja and I did the walk down to the falls, in heavy travel mode, long sleeves and pants and all. What the hell?

We walked probably eight or nine minutes past salesmen (carved rhinos, hippos) and across the rail line that continues into Zambia. U.S. $2.50 admission was good for the day. Signs admonished you to keep strictly to the paths. In just a couple minutes, you were there.

It's hard to choose the right superlatives.

Some figures: It's seasonal, but at its peak, 12,000,000 gallons take the plunge every minute. 1,600 meters is a mile. Victoria Falls is 1691 meters wide.

It's carved from a shelf of volcanic basalt, chiseling zig zag down a fault line. It's been only 140 years - 1855 - since the first white man, David Livingstone, arrived. Grass-clad tribesmen told him of Mosi-oa-Tunya, but he named it for his queen back home. In 1905, exactly 50 years later, a rail line arrived from Cape Town on its way to Cairo. The bridge to Zambia began. By this time Cecil Rhodes was in charge, and Zambia was North Rhodesia.

We didn't care about any of that. We just lurched straight down to stand in the spray. Someone outside warned, "Oh, definitely rent a rain coat - you'll get drenched," and we did get drenched, without raincoats, and it was fabulous.

•••••

Victoria Falls has no parking lots, no dancing waters, no wax museums. Just stone pathways. We wandered the paths around the falls, through the fig and rhododendron trees. Two does teased us for awhile, and on the path back we squatted down to visit with a pack of about 20 curious suricates, sitting up on their hind legs, watching for danger, or maybe a dinner tidbit from the tourists.

At the end of the day  the spray tossed far up over the trees and the bridge to Zambia. The sky deepened pink into blue and black, and the southern cross pierced the black high and to the south. On the menu at the rooftop restaurant, crocodile thermidor for Z$45: "Enjoy a crock-tail with us."

Next: Day trip to Zambia

Just a Wee Bit of a Safari Story

Elephant at sunset, South Luangwa park.

I've just come across this entirely by accident, and I don't know if I've seen it since I wrote it. I pass it on as it is, with a photo or two, and I'll see if I can find any more notes from this trip.

26 May, 2002, Kapani Lodge, Zambia: Sure the getting here was miserable. Thirteen thousand one hundred four kilometers was the first plane ride - leave shore over Charleston, South Carolina and don't see it again until Cape Town. On the map it was as if the continents were mountain peaks and we slid down the valley called the Atlantic.

That got us to Cape Town where it never dawned but rather the distinct gray of winter merely brightened up. Nine more hours of airports, and these were the difficult hours, hours 18 - 26 straight in public places, but finally, Lusaka.

Familiar traits of the developing world that once made us uneasy - only because of their familiarity - flooded back and this time were welcoming: The scent of wood fires, a banner marking independence (37 years ago) over the airport road, dust, pedestrians, desultory construction, and then the Holiday Inn and our room, where the air conditioning worked.

It would shortly be dark and after thirty-plus hours now we threw off our travel clothes and immediately went to find dinner. We never planned to see more of Lusaka than the view of a few concrete high rise blocks from the third floor elevator landing.

There was an Irish pub in the hotel - I think they called it McGinty's - and we downed a number of the local brew, called Mosi after the indigenous name for Victoria Falls, Mosi O Tunya, or the smoke that thunders. By now we'd drunk beer and napped and flown and done all that over again a few times. A buffet opened at 6:30 and we gorged and then slept twelve hours straight.

Then it was Saturday and a man named Webby delivered us back to the same airport and after hunting we found a woman named Beatrice from the copper belt (up by Lubumbashi, Congo where everybody's an expat in the mine trade and therefore a place that needs a travel agent, which Beatrice was). Beatrice was going where we were going. Nobody else seemed to be until finally we hunted down Ryan, a boy pilot from Durban, and finally we rounded up Kitty and Meva who were also thoroughly lost, and we loaded up the Cessna and left.

Don't Go to Prison in China. Or Zambia.

Mind your manners on that foreign holiday. Best not to run afoul of the law.

There must be tons of places not to end up in prison when visiting on vacation. Anywhere that participated in the U.S. "extraordinary rendition" program, for example. And I'm aghast to learn that we've visited 12 of the 16 countries in which the use of torture was documented in 2004 & 2005, according to Human Rights Watch.

*****

Two not so cheerful recent newspaper stories document prison conditions in China and Zambia:

- Zambian authorities were disarming in welcoming a damning report from Human Rights Watch titled Unjust and Unhealthy, which "documents the failure of the Zambian prison authority to provide basic nutrition, sanitation, and housing for prisoners." Prison officials even attended the release of the report. Still, figures are grim. The New York Times reports, "Mukobeko Maximum Security Prison, built in 1950 for a capacity of 400, held 1,731 inmates, the report said. Lusaka Central prison, built in 1923 for 200, contained 1,145 people. Prisoners told investigators that their bodies were “packed like pigs,” “squeezed like logs in a pile,” or “like fish in a refrigerator.”"

- In China, in contrast, The Australian newspaper The Age's article Stern Justice speaks of "sitting up straight all day on a communal wooden board, enduring ritual 'confession' sessions and learning the unwritten rules on how to qualify for life's small privileges...." It describes a foreign citizen jailed arrested on drug charges as sharing "his cell with up to 14 other people, half of them Chinese and half of them foreign. It was too crowded for all of them to fit on the communal wooden board, so a few would sleep on the floor. Fluorescent lights burned 24 hours a day."

*****

(Photo from EarthPhotos.com. See photos from both China and Zambia - from outside the prison walls - in the EarthPhotos.com China Gallery and the Zambia Gallery. And enjoy more fun signs in the Signs Gallery.)