Smurfs and sprinkles

Cartoons and doughnuts. That's what I want on a Saturday morning: Cartoons and doughnuts. Krispy Kreme, Kennedy's, or Duseks. Doughnut shop or bakery. Filled with jelly. Cream. Covered with icing and sprinkles. Glazed. Blueberry cake or cherry or pumpkin.

I want a shiny, wax-covered box from which I can pick anything I want and I want to eat my doughnut, my long john, my roll, in front of the TV while watching hours of cartoons, laughing hysterically, eyes just as glazed as the treats from the shiny waxed box.

I started taking swimming lessons when I was four. Every Saturday morning, for years, I got up and went to the Y to swim. Slumber parties be damned; Mom would pick me up by 8:45 to go to the pool. Then, she'd go home and forget to come back.

Polliwog, Guppy, Minnow, Fish, Flying Fish, Shark. By the time I reached the upper levels, by the time I was a fish, a few years had passed. By the time I reached the upper levels, I had to help with the classes, demonstrating strokes, encouraging students to float and turn and kick, and Saturday mornings at the Y stretched somewhat longer between my lessons and theirs.

I was still just a kid, younger than most of the others I "taught," but I didn't mind. I loved the water. I just didn't love getting up, going to lessons, on a Saturday morning. I wanted to watch cartoons.

Occasionally, I caught a break between sessions. Sometimes, I caught a break between lessons and I'd go to the room with the vending machines and a handful of arcade games – Tron, Centipede, Space Invaders – and I'd catch the Smurfs. Never the full 90 minutes, but 15 or 30 or 45 minutes of Papa Smurf and Brainy, Handy, Jokey and Smurfette. Gargamel. Asriel. Even then, I found it silly – how could something three apples high live in a mushroom? But I watched with rapt glee. Cartoons on a Saturday morning.

After lessons, when Mom finally showed, we'd go home for breakfast. Honey Nut Cheerios. Kix. Grape Nuts. Roman Meal toast with cinnamon sugar served as the sweetest treat we'd ever get. Definitely no doughnuts. By the time we got home, cartoons were over and I needed to finish my chores, dusting and dishwashing, cleaning the disaster I called my room.

In later years, when lessons were done, Saturday mornings stayed busy. Band. Explorer Scouts. Basketball and baseball games. Weekends at Dad's. I rolled over in bed, slapped the alarm and dreamt of the day I could sleep as late as I wanted. As late as I needed.

In college, I worked every weekend, every Saturday. Occasionally, I watched cartoons as I cleaned rooms at the local Best Western, following the X Men from room to room. More often than not, though, I just cleaned, and after a year of housekeeping, I found another job. I kept working weekends but moved from television to classic rock while I polished silver and fretted over engraving.

Brandy, wears a braided chain
Made of finest silver from the north of Spain
A locket, that bears the name
Of a man that Brandy loved

After college, I hiked on weekends. Worked at the Kennedy Center. Grew up. This morning, I got up and started working by seven, shivering in my cold little apartment and hunching over the laptop as I rewrote queries and updated charts for Monday's review. For Tuesday's meeting.

This morning, I watched TV, but I couldn't find cartoons and there was nothing even remotely resembling a doughnut in my kitchen. Or cinnamon toast. Or Grape Nuts.

I want Smurfs and sprinkles. Doughnuts with icing. Saturday morning cartoons. I want a room with vending machines, with Centipede, Tron and Space Invaders - and I want to have a score somewhere in the top 10. I want to swim. I want to be a kid again without the lessons and chores.


Tag: Saturdays

Kazungula

I don't have any pictures of Karen, not that I would have captured her friendly chatter in a lilting South African voice or her slight shiver in a summer frock on a cool, rainy day if I had pointed the camera at her.

I don't have any pictures of Teenie, her husband, come to our rescue, a knight in shining armor and muddy boots when the car battery died due to a faulty relay.

I don't have any pictures of Sharon with her froggy, cold-laden voice or the Imeldas working with the kids, the man hanging the alphabet banner or the uniformed women in the kitchen, all dressed in pink.

I snapped a few shots of the kids, but they don't capture anything at all – not the laughter or the timidity, the curious stares or shy little voices. Those will all just have to stay in my heart when I think of Botswana and our visit to the Kazungula Children’s Ark and Support Group.

I don't even know how it happened. The visit. The anything. A friend asked me to drop off a few gifts and a check if I found myself in the area. The travel company told me, in no uncertain terms, that it would not work; I would be staying in a remote bush camp. I talked to the guide and emailed Karen and Sharon a few scattered messages from a few scattered posts in South Africa and Namibia. I made a call from Zambia, and there I was. In Botswana. Singing "if you're happy and you know it, clap your hands" to a room full of preschoolers.

Two of my fellow travelers joined me; Tickey and crew dropped us off, driving the overlander down potholed and muddied lanes from ferry, from the Zambezi, to camp as the rain continued to pour. A few other campers set up our tent for us, in that pouring-down rain, while we visited and learned about the center with a couple of paid staff, a few volunteers and anywhere from 25 to 35 kids between the ages of two and a half and six.

The kids come to school every day, five days a week, year round. Picked up at 7:30 and returned by a half past four, they get breakfast in the morning, lunch and afternoon snack. They get lessons and playtime, naps and songs. They get attention. Clothes. Toothbrushes, They get a chance.

The kids at the center come through social services. Many have only one parent, if they have any parents at all. Some have been orphaned by AIDS and some of the kids are HIV positive. They are orphaned, needy and vulnerable children from the village of Kazungula. They don't have much at home, but they all seem happy, healthy, loved. I think the center has a lot to do with that.

The daycare is privately funded and run from an old school building donated for use by Kubu Lodge, with our hostess, our guide, drumming up support in terms of donations – both money and goods.

Before I left, I would want to empty my bank account, to give them all I had, in hopes that it would make a difference. I wired a donation when I got home, a bit less than emptying the coffers, a bit less than my astronomical electric bill for the month I was gone. It wouldn't go far, not nearly far enough, but it would do so much more than a few dinners out. A new pair of shoes. A trip I didn't need.

In addition to the daycare, the group has started a library. They'd only lost one book to date, as of our visit. My own books were ratty, covers affixed with generous helpings of duct tape. Cry, the Beloved Country. Mosquitoes by William Faulkner. War and Peace. Of the two I left in Africa, neither made it to the school, and I regret that a little. Even with the duct tape.

I was happy visiting. I knew it. I clapped my hands. And the laughter and timidity, the curious stares and the shy little voices still haunt my heart weeks after I've come home.


Tag: Travel Botswana

Drained

"Tired" seems so inadequate. Drained, exhausted, the walking dead – something more than tired would fit so much better, but my words have started to fail me. Because I am tired. Drained. Exhausted.

For the past week, I have been ready to crawl into bed by three in the afternoon, two on some days, four on others, but generally by about three, I want to strip out of my work clothes, climb into my pink pajamas – the ones with the butterflies – and slip between my worn flannel sheets. I want to cover myself in blankets, turn off the lights and sleep, just sleep, until I awaken naturally in a soft morning light.

The medicine that warps my dreams and torments my sleep is only part of the problem. I do it to myself. I stay out late and I get up early and I work full days, skipping lunch in favor of another hour on my project.

In the past few nights, I've met with friends of a friend to talk about a school in Botswana and eaten dinner with a visiting friend from New York. I have dragged her to the 9:30 Club for Thievery Corporation, Ben's for a chili dog and a church to answer prisoners' requests for literature, for magazines, for books on chess and molecular biology and Aztec art.

Dinners out fell in between. Drinks. A night in a speakeasy to celebrate a friend's birthday. I have lived life fully and enjoyed each and every evening, even the cold ones, snowy, icy, and after it all, I came home and worked late at night, putting in more time on my project, answering email and running queries.

Running ragged.

I am tired. Drained. Exhausted. The walking dead. But I am happy.


Tag: Exhaustion

Tuesday night special

"This is the best Tuesday night I've had..." I wracked my brain, struggling to quantify the time, to rank my Tuesday nights, "this week!"

I didn't intend to sound quite so flippant when I started the sentence; it was a great Tuesday night. It was a great night. Period.

Shaking my head and listening to a friend's laughter, I shrugged off the silliness of my statement and focused on the task at hand: Dancing. Onstage, Thievery Corporation drummed and strummed, hummed and spun, and the 9:30 Club pulsed with life.

As I lost myself in the music, surrounded by friends and just not caring, I thought about my progression in dance and how music moved ever south in my body. By retirement, I might only feel it in my toes.

As a kid, I took jazz and tap, but they got me nowhere but an adequate shuffle off to Buffalo. In junior high, I bobbed my head too much, coming home from dances with staggering headaches and strobe-like images of the gym cum dance floor. In high school, the movement dropped a little lower as I swung my arms and shoulders in pitiable convulsions. In college, someone tried to help.

"Just... bend your knees," he said.

I tried, but I still seemed too stiff, too uncomfortable in my own skin, in my surroundings, in the 80s music that played at the bar by the gas station, the one that changed hands four times in as many years, or in the hip hop phase at Uptown. I would have given anything for the white man's overbite or the worm or the sprinkler. The running man. The cabbage patch. The Charleston. Anything I could actually execute with style, no matter how absurd, but I just couldn't relax. I couldn't let go.

"Why don't you go and grab us a beer?"

The beer didn’t help, though. Not as much as age did. Maturity. Self confidence. Sometime between college and 9:30, I learned to dance. Music slipped into my hips, my thighs, my belly. My shoulders moved of their own accord as did my hands. My feet. And I might have looked just as stupid as I did with a bobbing head at a junior high dance, but I no longer cared.

I felt free.

As much as I love live music, and I do love live music, there's generally some part of me that waits for a concert to end, knowing that it will, and I stand in bittersweet anticipation of the moment it comes crashing down. The music stops. We all go home and the recorded song, the CD, the file, will never sound quite as good as it did at that moment, face to the stage, eyes wide shut, music washing over me.

As much as I love live music, there's generally some part of me that feels old and crotchety, uncomfortable with the crowds, the jostling, the strange little vibration in my left ear that marks the slow and steady loss of my hearing. Some part of me wants to kick the next person who steps on my foot or pushes past, but last night I didn't. I didn't kick. I didn't feel uncomfortable or old or deaf. I didn't wait, with heavy heart, for the music to end. Last night, I danced.

And then I went to Ben's Chili Bowl.

It was a wonderful night, incomparable, really, with Thievery Corporation, the 9:30 Club, the eerily quiet night filled with empty streets, ice and determined fans, but as hard as I tried, it would have to remain the best Tuesday I'd had all week. No more.

A week ago Tuesday, I danced at the Southern Inaugural Ball and stood barely 20 feet from the stage bearing our president and his wife. I went to a hip hop party with aging artists and danced on a swollen ankle with friends old and new. Oh, baby, you, you got what I need but you say he's just a friend. But you say he's just a friend, oh baby. You.

Two weeks ago Tuesday, I spotted a leopard on a night drive at Kruger in South Africa. The Tuesday before that, I visited Victoria Falls – one of the wonders of the natural world. Before that? Namibia and Etosha National Park with zebras, giraffe and wildebeest posing for pictures in the late-day light. Before morning, I would see a beautiful white rhino.

I wanted to give last night, the concert, the friends, the dancing, the credit it was due. Far more credit than "the best one all week." It was perfect. I've just had too so many good Tuesdays lately.


Tag: 9:30 Club Thievery Corporation Life

Gone missing

Do you remember that dream? The one in which you walk the halls of your high school and friends stream past, laughing, talking, and suddenly, you're 17 again? Or 16. Or 15. And you remember, you feel, everything that comes with being a teenager. Friends. Fights. Acne. Homework. Spring fever. Crushing on the boy sitting next to you in home room. Volleyball and band and play practice. Prom dates. Angst.

In the dream, you walk into a classroom that you have walked into a hundred times before. English with the woman who drawls "Now, group" with her nasal twang. Geometry with the guy who stands, hands in his back pockets, rocking on his heels and puckering as he sucks on his tooth. History with the track coach who sits on his desk, instead of behind it, and leans into the group, elbows on his knees and hands clasped.

In the dream, you walk into a classroom, sit at a desk and find an exam in front of you. You haven't studied. A paper is due, and you haven't written it. You have a presentation and not only have you not prepared slides or notes, you're wearing pink flannel pajamas with blue and yellow ducks.

And the bottoms have gone missing.

Yesterday, I had a four-hour meeting. Today, I have an eight. In the middle of both (as well as the middle of the night and over the weekend), I need to pull together millions of records to make a pretty little presentation. Three to five pages. Tables. Graphs. Easy-to-grasp points. And I am. Working in the middle of my meetings and the middle of the night. It will be done. Meetings or no.

They started yesterday, the meetings, on a completely unrelated different topic.

"Can you go home?" my boss asked when faced with my lingering flu.

"No… I've got the meeting. On the model?"

"Right. Let me know how that goes. I'm apparently still on the hook for training."

And she left for Seattle.

I walked into the meeting, found a seat in the back and looked up at the screen. The agenda.

1) Introductions (Meeting facilitator)
2) Opening Remarks (Program sponsor)
3) Training Status (My company name)

I looked around the room and I was the only person from my company. I felt like I was wearing pink flannel pajamas with blue and yellow ducks, and the bottoms had gone missing. Not only did I not know anything about the training status, every single person in the room knew more than me.

Every. Single. Person.

The first break didn't fall until after my scheduled debacle. I ran through the possibilities of what I might say, what I might do with my half hour of air time, and I slipped to the front of the room during the opening remarks.

"I don't have anything," I whispered to the girl on the laptop. "The boss is on her way to Seattle and she didn't give me anything. I don't have... anything."

"Do you know anything about the current status? Can you just...?"

"No."

"Can't you...?"

"No."

"But..."

"No."

And I didn't. The meeting moved over the training status with nary a word in my direction. The dream was so much worse than reality.


Tag: Nightmares Work

Skinny jeans

"Am I too old for skinny jeans?"

She raised her eyes from the rack of denim, appraised me coolly and replied, "Yes."

"I know. If I did it before…"

I hung the jeans back on the rack with a longing sigh. It wasn't the jeans I wanted so much as the girl they made me remember, the one in high school, in college. A girl not yet a woman. Even though she was a walking fashion disaster, even though she was awkward and clumsy and completely unsure of herself, I kind of missed her.

The girl in the skinny jeans was young. Idealistic. Trusting. She was hopeful with a whole world, a whole life before her, and I saw all of this reflected in the dressing room mirror as I zipped into the skinny jeans that I didn't know were skinny until I tried them on. I frowned at my legs and lost myself in memory.

"I thought you were wearing leggings," a friend commented a lifetime ago of the skinny jeans I wore under a sweater in college.

My face flushed. I didn't know what was wrong with my jeans or with leggings, but her tone of disapproval buried the jeans in the back of my closet, never to be seen again. Not on me, anyway.

The girl in the skinny jeans, the one back in northwestern Ohio, was young, idealistic and trusting. She was hopeful with a whole world, a whole life before her, but she hadn't seen any of it. She was scared – of herself, of others, of things that went bump in the night – and she didn't have a clue what she wanted to do with herself.

She was a walking fashion disaster.

The woman in me put the jeans back on the rack and turned to her friend with a smile.

"Thanks. I like wearing my cowboy boots under my jeans anyway."

I'm still a walking fashion disaster.


Tag: Clothes

Camel thorn

Towel drying my hair and staring into the mirror with sleepy recognition, I discovered a new scar. One on my forehead.

A few weeks ago, at Spitzkoppe, I got all tangled up in camel thorn as I crawled under the branches to take a picture of a pair of butterflies in the grass. We'd gotten a little lost in searching for rock art, and it was one of the happiest losts I've ever been.

Nevertheless, as I tried to crawl back from the butterflies, my back, shirt and hat got caught in the thorns. My forehead. My hair. The harder I tried to disentangle myself, the more caught I got and friends had to rescue me.

"I screwed up," I realized as I stared at the reflected scar on my brow, and I didn't just mean the camel thorn.

By the end of the trip, things had gotten pretty tangled with one of my rescuers and we'd since fallen out. I jumped out, reacting quickly, pulling myself free and nursing my wounds.

Staring at the scar in the mirror, I realized that I had struggled too much. I could have disentangled myself with far less damage, a brilliant realization that came a little too late. I hoped I would remember.

Earlier in the evening, two older realizations came back to me, two from years past, two that stuck with me.

The first came from high school, from a mentor knocking me down a peg or five. He made me understand that I wasn't the smartest. I wasn't the best or the brightest or the quickest. There would always be someone smarter or funnier or prettier than me.

There would always be someone better at any one thing I tried, but he still liked me best. There would never be another like me. Nobody else in the world would have my unique combination of talents, lacking and quirky as some of them may be.

There will always be someone who runs faster and jumps higher. Someone more outgoing. More introspective. A better listener. A more articulate talker. Someone stronger, weaker, taller, shorter.

Someone will always be better at the one thing I want to do better than anyone else and it's humbling – humbling and frustrating and miserable - but I am not *one* thing. I've got my own special blend of herbs and spices.

We're all like that.

The second realization came in college. My belief in popularity started crumbling when my high school elected the girl with Norplant as homecoming queen. Later, during my sophomore year of college, working too much and completely exhausted, I started making friends, for the first time, based on similar interests rather than proximity or class schedule, and I realized that popularity was merely a façade.

There is no popular in life. It all boils down to the people I like, the people I don't and everyone else. Opinions matter some, in terms of the people I like, but even those should be taken with a grain of salt.

I won't get any points at the end of the game if more people like me; I won't have any points shaved away if more people don't. I just need to do what I feel is right, stand for my beliefs and let the chips fall where they may.

Unfortunately, though, sometimes I struggle a little too much for what I feel is right. I scratch myself, scarring my brow, when I can just as easily wait for a little help. When I should wait for help.


Tag: Realizations

Fading photographs

"What is that?" I muttered, sorting through my pictures as I talked to my sister on the phone. She couldn't see the pictures; she couldn't help.

"Send it to me; Laney will know what it is."

If my niece didn't know, she'd soon be able to figure it out and in a couple of weeks, when I visited, I might employ her nimble, 8-year-old, computer-hack skills to help.

"Oh, wildebeest. I know that one."

The zebras were easy as were the giraffes. The elephant and hippos looked nothing alike. I knew the difference between monkeys and baboons, the leopard, lions and cheetah, and nothing else looked like the Mozambique Spitting Cobra.

I failed to capture a photo of the black mamba in the middle of our camp or the 4-foot monitor lizard. I caught some smaller ones and they looked nothing like the crocodiles, much less like the croc drowning an impala. Though, I only really caught a flash of the antlers with that one. I was a little too stunned, a little too horrified to react quickly with the camera and I only had the small one with me on that rainy-day cruise along the Chobe River.

It was the impala that was the problem, though. Not the one that drowned so much as the ones that stood and stared, grazed and bounded. The impala and the kudu; the steenbok and bushbuck; waterbuck, reedbuck and springbok. I think I'll know the klipspringer when I see it, but maybe I won't. Most of the antelopes have run together, clashing their horns, and springing across fields. While I still know the oryx, little more than a week ago, I knew them all.

"Is that a hyena or a jackal?" I wondered of the blurry figure in the middle distance. "Where are the wild dogs?"

I knew the birds – the tawny and black-chested snake eagles, the Malachite and Pied kingfishers, the common bee-eater. The egrets. The herons. The storks. I can still figure out which is the lilac-breasted and which is the European roller and I know the kori bustard and secretary birds in my pictures. The guinea fowl. The yellow-billed hornbill. The red bishop. But I fear the knowledge is fading. The words. The names and the stories.

The steenbok stood alone or in pairs. They avoided the herds of the springbok and they were smaller. Will I remember that? Or the way the springbok kick? The way they bounce across fields?

Will I remember the wonder of seeing rhino at the watering hole at three in the morning on New Year's Eve day and my oh-so-eloquent observation, "Oh, my, god. It's a f*cking rhino."

The rhino I can identify in my pictures, but will I remember which one was white and which was black or how I can tell the difference?

I don't know how to tag my pictures. I don't know how to tag my memories. My journal is filled with dates, locations, file names and animals, but I doubt I will cross-reference the pics with the handwritten list.

"Oh, that's a hartebeest!" I exclaimed on the phone with my sister. "I know that one."

The rest are all blurring together and yet I continue to sort, to sift through my pictures and cling to the memories, trying to pick 100 best of more than 2,000 photos, trying to craft a story and trying to hold onto a trip that seems light years away.




Tag: Travel Photography Southern Africa

Routine

I awoke with cautious optimism.

"Not dizzy," I thought. "Not dizzy. Not queasy. Not too late for work."

Carefully, I pulled myself from bed and ran through the list again, noting with some satisfaction that I seemed to be feeling better. The food poisoning/flu/e coli scare of the day before had disappeared into the night, seeping into the sweatshirt I'd want to burn in the morning.

I showered and dressed and logged into work, ready to start the day, the week, the year. I hadn't worked more than four days in the past six weeks. I needed a routine, whether it was the one I kept before I left or another. I needed something stable in my life. Weeks of travel, guests, and inaugural activities had run my body and mind ragged.

On Wednesday morning, after the inauguration, a ball, a party stretching past five in the morning and injuries along the way, I moaned, "I'm not sure if this is change I can believe in. I'm not sure if this is change I can survive."

Then, I got sick. Horribly, terribly, "I can't roll over without retching or diarrhea" sick. I spent the day on my sofa with blankets and clear soda, lemonade and bananas. When I wasn't sleeping, which wasn't very often, I watched the shows I had been recording for the past six weeks – not only was I not working, I was not watching TV – and I recovered. Or so I thought until I ate cereal.

Apparently, I wasn't better so much as devoid of food. And Pepto. I had only eaten a handful of crackers and two bananas on the day of the couch. The Pepto kept them somewhat in place by the end of the day and by the next morning, they had settled.

Routine would come sometime later. I would work over the weekend, if I could stomach it. I would spend another day on the couch with fever reducers and Gatorade. The rest of the bananas. A handful of crackers. Bad TV. For the moment, I needed to take care of me.


Tag: Sick

Cry baby

One week. I've been home for exactly one week and oh, what a week it's been. My trip and southern Africa seem light years away as I sit on the couch and attempt to work.

In the past seven days, I have slept too little and worked too much. I ate too much and drank too much, talked too much and laughed, well, not nearly enough but quite a lot. I have walked miles. For five and a half of the last seven days, I played host to an old college friend with brief forays into hosting others for a night or two each, and now, my body has revolted.

I have either the flu or food poisoning. I am not sure which but whatever it is, I hope it's a varietal limited to 24 hours. I have things to do. Places to go. People to see.

My mail finally arrived, requiring some sorting, reading and response. I need to update a presentation and my boss called at eight this morning to see if I could check her email and update a presentation for a project on which I've never worked. I want to volunteer. To see friends I missed over the past month. To see movies. To catch up on the Oscar nominees. I need to call my sister and email my brother. I need to sort through my pictures. I need to sort through my memories.

Instead, I am stuck on the couch, whimpering and wondering what will happen when I run out of lemonade. My entire body aches, from swollen ankle and broken foot to the top of my head. The tips of my fingers – one of which seems to be stoved. My cracked and bleeding lips. My roiling stomach.

"That's what I get for committing," I moaned to my friend on the way to the car so I could take him to the airport. "Last night I said, 'If this dish were a boy, I'd marry it,' and now it's making me vomit."

"It can't be that delicious dish," he protested and I shook my head.

"It's either that or e coli from the salad or the flu shot didn't work."

My entire body ached.

Nevertheless, I drove to the airport. I took myself to the store and talked to a pharmacist, taking his advice for bananas, Pepto and Gatorade and managing to make it out of the store without retching. I rescheduled my root canal and I rescheduled my meetings. I acted like a grownup, responsible, mature.

And then I went home and cried.


Tag: Sick

Picture time

Note to self: Next time we have a monumental, course-of-history-changing, hope-inspiring event like the election of Barack Obama, forget about fashion and take the big camera.











Tag: Presidential Inauguration Inaugural Ball Barack Obama

War wounds

My finger hurts. I don't know why, but suddenly, it stopped bending. At some point, my feet stopped working, too, held as they were to something between a 45-degree and 90-degree angle in my favorite, "almost comfortable for about five hours" heels.

I wore them for eight.

My ankle is swollen, twisted and bruised. My head hurts; though, I still have one drink ticket left, and I am exhausted. I just went to bed. I swear. An hour ago. Maybe two. Three. Five. But I've been up for a while.

Last night, I joined a few hundred, a few thousand, of my closest friends, in celebrating our new president, and sometime around midnight, after my feet started hurting but before I slipped out of my shoes (like one out of every three women still at the ball), I got to see him. In person. From closer than I will ever see him again.

The ball was better than I expected, with mediocre finger foods – red, white and blue chips; red, white and blue cupcakes; cheese and crackers, brownies, blondies and cheesecake bars and cookies at every table.

"Hey, I found this great table," a friend joked. "At the intersection, they've got guacamole. Cheese. Crackers. It's great!"

By that point, though, I didn't mind. I was starving. We didn't exactly eat dinner. I made black beans and rice which I served to my friends as we tried to figure out how to tie a bow tie, but nobody ate all that much. We were too busy trying to look pretty.

The men owned their own tuxes. The other woman and I pulled dresses from our own closets and while I worried about length (midcalf) for a while and my cleavage even longer, I soon realized that anything went, from the girl in her pink, sparkling taffeta to the bubble dress in the corner. Long, short, sleeveless and sleeved. One woman seemed to be wearing a cross between a kimono, a Princess Leia costume and something from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick would have been proud.

By the end of the night, trains were dirty and feet were bare. People shrugged into overcoats with glee and we stumbled with mincing steps halfway home before we found a cab.

In the crowd, I saw only two people I recognized, two that I knew outside my circle of friends. I recognized the local author of children's books – we'd met several times in past year or two – and Evander Holyfield, whom I didn't actually know at all.

Earlier in the evening, though, standing and waiting and pressing toward the stage, I made new friends of my own: a couple of guys, a couple, who'd come from Laguna Beach for the event. The very drunk girl in the green dress. Everyone staring at the very drunk girl in the green dress. We stood together, talked, waited and cheered for Joe Biden and his wife. An hour or so later, we went crazy for the president. Barack. And Michelle.

Most of my pictures from the night, my pictures of the president, include other people's phones. Their cameras. Their hands. As soon as Biden appeared and again with Obama, arms shot into the air from the back of the room, one could only see the glow of digital LCDs, but we couldn't seem to stop. Barack and Michelle! Mr. President and his first lady!

I know I've heard the line before, the one about a wife doing everything her husband does but backward and in heels, but it had never seemed more true. He talked. They danced. They left and the crowd dispersed after hours of pressing toward the stage, of boxing out and trying to hold our space while sending emissaries in the direction of the bar.

Sometime before the president arrived, a woman passed out from the heat or the excitement or the pain of wearing heels and a strapless gown for hours on end. A friend went to her aid. We had come with our own doctor; though, that didn't help hours later when I sprained my ankle again.

I'd like to blame the alcohol but I think it had more to do with the heels. The hour. The fact that we'd gone to a club for a post-ball event (for which we had tickets) only to find the club closed and our cab gone. A trio of celebrants from the Bay Area who'd circled the block to take pictures of the club and us in our dismay ended up taking us to the new location as four of us – three in black tie apparel – crammed into the back of their rental car. I lost a button and made new friends.

For a few more hours, I stood in my very high heels on a swollen ankle and aching feet and I danced. Night approached day and the gin only did so much to ease the pain.

"I have to go," I explained to my friends. "I've hit a wall."

And I had. I wore the bruise, scrapes and swelling to prove it, but, oh, what a wall it was. I'd wear my wounds with pride. I saw the president.


Tag: Presidential Inauguration Washington DC

Our new president

We couldn't stop saying the words as we walked together and found a place to eat.

"President Barack Obama," a friend smiled as we sat down to brunch, to thaw and drink and rest our weary bones.

Without tickets, we found our way to the Mall. Without checking a map, we wandered from a friend's house to the wrong side of the Mall, back again and down I-395, racing down the interstate on foot.

We ended up at a spot farther from the Capitol than I actually lived, but I didn't have a JumboTron in my living room. I didn't have the strangers with smiles, the bone-chilling temperatures, the sun shining down and so we walked.

It was impossible to get to the Mall from the Hill. By the end of the day, we would walk almost 10 miles to the National World War II Memorial and back. We'd walked a similar, more direct route the night before when I couldn't help but smile, I couldn't help but laugh with the joy of seeing so many people in my hometown, so many smiles and cameras and absurdly tacky t-shirts, buttons and hats. Bad artwork. Balloons.

Early evening, I drove to the bus station in sluggish traffic to pick up a friend, here for the festivities and we returned to friends, friends of friends, one girl's brother-in-law's sister and two of her friends, for a homemade dinner of beef stew, steamed vegetables, rice pilaf and homemade bread. Good bottles of wine. Cheese with honey. I made an apple crisp to share in a kitchen I didn't know with a cookbook I did: a gift at my parents' wedding in 1969, taped together and filled with notes from my mother.

Today, we walked. We watched. Aretha Franklin brought tears to my eyes as I took part in something so much bigger than myself and I heard the words "our new president."

Tonight, I'm going to a ball. I have the dress and I have the date. He belongs to somebody else but we've been friends for a very long time and he in his tux and I in my gown will join a handful of friends and a whole bunch of strangers at one of the official events.

If I'm lucky, I might even see our new president. He will be there. If I don't, though, everything will be fine. Today, everything will be fine, and tomorrow, I will enter this new era in American history with as much dignity as I can muster. After the party, at least. I will work hard all day and I will volunteer.

"For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate."
- Barack Obama, January 20, 2009

For now, my feet ache. My eyes and my heart are full, and I have a dress to don. I will be dancing by midnight.




Tag: Washington DC Democracy

Anticipation

The feeling plagued me all weekend, the thought that I was missing something, forgetting, waiting, hoping, expecting something that just wasn't here yet. The entire weekend, something felt off.

Of course, something was actually off. I didn't have any money. At all. I had transferred funds from checking to savings, making it impossible to access for days. I spent all of my cash on inaugural ball tickets, and my credit card stopped working due to a mix up at the bank. Their system was down; they couldn't help.

I had barely returned home from a month-long trip when I found myself playing host to a friend from my university days, a man who'd hosted me on numerous occasions. I had yet to return the favor as New Orleans trumped DC most of the time.

"This is like mardi gras for you guys," he exclaimed, in as much as he exclaimed anything. (He wasn't an exclamatory sort of guy.) He said it a few times over the course of the weekend, noting the differences between his town and here.

In a different house, a few blocks from mine, another NOLA friend surfed a couch while the sister of his host's brother-in-law would join us late Sunday night, flying in from New Mexico.

On Monday night, a New York friend would join us, taking a bus and staying with me. On my couch, my floor, my bed. Somewhere in my apartment. She had planned to take a midnight coach and go straight to the Mall before I offered my space. All she knew was that she wanted to be here for this: Mardi gras for DC.

But it was so much more than the party atmosphere. Both of the friends staying with me had worked on the campaign – one going to Georgia to knock on doors and register voters, the other flying to Ohio to work a polling station on election day. The latter had also worked the caucuses in Texas. They didn't come to town for the crowds. They wanted to be a part of history, to participate in something so much bigger than ourselves. My dad wrote to tell me that I would be standing for him, too.

For three nights in a row, I found myself out with these friends, at parties, bars and restaurants, and missing others. Bars seemed less crowded than I had expected, and the streets, more so. At the airport, throngs of people milled about the baggage claim area. They didn't seem to be claiming anything, just milling. Standing. Talking. I had never seen a crowd quite like it at National, not even at Thanksgiving.

Out-of-state drivers filled the streets, weaving, stopping and starting at very inopportune times. Making illegal turns. Blocking the box. I didn't intend to drive at all, with rolling street closures, but the tickets we needed were halfway across town and nobody seemed inclined to take the Metro. I barely felt inclined to leave the Hill and my nerves frayed as I drove.

The air buzzed with the hum of electricity, and I wanted to do something more than wait for Tuesday morning. I searched for MLK Day volunteering opportunities. I made plans to visit a gallery. Find long johns. Pick up more tickets. Run errands in a city that suddenly seemed much less navigable but far more festive with mile upon mile of bunting stretched across storefronts, with balloons and streamers and flags everywhere we went, with Obama hats, pins and Ts, and smiling faces on everyone we met.

I wanted to do something, needed to do something, other than wait. The anticipation was driving me crazy.


Tag: Washington DC Inauguration

Fridge

Apropos of nothing...



My fridge makes me happy. It's cluttered and ugly and doesn't even work all that well, but it's filled with memory, if not food.


Tag: Inane

Story time

Have I used up your patience? Have I used up mine? People keep asking about my trip and I haven't figured out an answer yet, my story, my line. I haven't figured out what people want to hear. Or what I want to say.

It's easier to talk about being dirty, hungry and tired. I can explain that I haven't slept in more than five weeks, not well, at least, with intense, Lariam-induced dreams. With nightmares. I can talk about late nights and early mornings, rolling out of bed or sliding out of my sleeping bag and off my mat at five and packing up the tent by six.

I can talk about the truck. The road. The parks. I can talk about the group, the guides and my friends.

I just can't figure out how to tell people about my trip or what it meant to be in southern Africa for a month. I cannot remember a single defining incident or even the top three. Top five. Ten.

Tea time and tee time. The sugar packet in the pocket of my rain jacket. The impala and the croc. The bat-eating Mozambique spitting cobra. The leopard. The mokoro and my guide. Shards of memory litter my mind, requiring too much explanation, too much glue, to tell the story.

At some point, I hope to sit down and sort myself out but I haven't had time. Or energy. Or enough sleep to think straight. Or finish unpacking. Or think straight.

And so I keep doling out bits of the trip, pieces I remember – rhinos at the watering hole, the school, the friends of friends of friends – and leaving out the important parts as I go. Dropping tales like crumbs instead of serving cake. With time, I hope, with distance, I might be able to wrap my arms around the trip. For the moment, I'm overwhelmed by memories, guests and the nuttiness of DC on an inauguration weekend. With this inauguration weekend.

My credit card has stopped working and all of my cash has been spent on tickets to an inaugural ball. My apartment's still damp from the flooding. My dishwasher's broken as are the handles on my bathroom sink, and apparently, my apartment's not up to snuff. Not clean enough.

The story, the stories, my answer, my line will have to wait 'til tomorrow or the day after that. Next week. Next month. Sometime when I have my head on straight. For now, I need to clean. To find a dress. To put my laundry away and find a map for Tuesday.

I suppose that itself is the story of my trip to Africa: More time. I need more time. Both now and then, here and there.



Tag: Travel

People

"People," I thought as I walked into the office. "That's what I need. People."

In my first day and a half back in the country, I put in more than 20 hours of work, talking to my client, supervisor and coworkers. I needed to brief a senior vice president less than 29 hours after touching down. Of course, given that the files arrived the morning I left and nobody had touched the data in my month-long absence, I was a little… frantic.

I holed up in my apartment setting my laptop afire, and hacked at the data. And then I fell asleep, awoke with a disjointed conversation with a client and started working again. The next day, jetlagged, I rolled over on the couch where I slept and started working again. At 5 a.m.

With all of the work, with unpacking and sorting the mail, with grocery shopping and volunteering and trying to sort out my sleep, with running to the pharmacy for antimalarials, I didn't have time to realize what it was that I missed.

People.

For the past 30 days, I had shared room or tent with a friend. For three weeks, I had spent all day, every day, with nine other travelers, a driver/guide and a cook. At home, alone, I missed the company.

I missed the awkward tension and waiting for the bathroom.

I missed stilted conversations and inane conversations and awkward, "I'm so sorry I don't speak French" conversations. I missed those truly connecting, finding those things we shared.

I missed sharing food, wine and laughter. Talking late into the night. Heads drooping as we bounced down long, dusty roads.

I missed the petty annoyances and getting over them because we had to get over them. We were together. We would stay together.

I missed people.

The few hours I spent in the office recharged me, for a while at least, and I made plans to meet up with a friend later that night to go to a party, a house party, to open an inaugural weekend in Washington, DC.

We could hear the music from outside. In the dining room, a DJ spun and people danced. They filled the kitchen, the living room, the stairs and the hall leading to the bathroom. People smoked on the front porch and people smoked in the back. And it didn't matter how much the temperatures dropped, people kept coming, music kept pumping and the house expanded to take them all.

I only knew a few people at the party. I met a couple more, but we didn't talk much. It didn't matter. It was too loud anyway. Loud and crowded and filled with beautiful party people.

It was perfect.


Tag: Washington DC

Two trains

"The coldest night in five years," the anchorman announced, flipping from a live broadcast from a street corner in Dupont Circle back to the studio, the nice, warm studio.

"It is dangerously cold," the weatherman said. "Only 12 degrees now at National Airport, and we have just a 13 at Andrews. Only 10 at Dulles. Frederick's down to 12. Hagerstown, Martinsburg, Winchester now in the single digits, and we have winds that are gusting to around 20 to 25 miles per hour so the wind chills are below zero. Wind chill now three below zero at National Airport."

Groaning, I reached for a second blanket and pulled the computer to my lap, clinging to its warmth. I hadn't slept all that well – the cold, the jet lag, the disorientation of sleeping in my own apartment for the first time in 30 days. I kept awakening and wondering where I was, why I was alone, and I realized with bittersweet agony that I was home again, on my own again and ultimately awake and working at five in the morning.

Watching the news, sleepy and chilled, I tried to perform the mental calculations that escaped me. If it was 42 degrees Celsius in the Namib Desert on Christmas Day, how much had temperatures dropped in the past three weeks?

42 degrees Celsius = 107.6 degrees Fahrenheit
12 degrees Fahrenheit = -11.1 degrees Celsius

If two trains 150 miles apart were traveling toward each other along the same track, with a fly flying back and forth between them…

I desperately wanted to walk to work. The trip, Africa, included much less exercise than I wanted with 6,240 kilometers in the group truck and days in Kruger National Park, fenced into a camp or locked into a car. (Strangely enough, they didn't allow guests to wander among the lions, leopards and buffalo. Oh, my.) I swam when I could, walked as much as possible, and tried to keep legs from atrophying, but the swollen ankle and aching foot kept me grounded for a while.

Actually, only the rules and the fencing kept me from walking but the swollen ankle and aching foot should have contributed.

I desperately wanted to walk to work, but I couldn't remember how to keep warm, my blood had thinned, and I'd forgotten my winter wardrobe. I wondered if I owned a pair of long johns and if I didn't, where I could find them before Tuesday and what I could wear to an inaugural ball that would keep me frostbite free.

And then, I realized the absurdity of it all. I could layer and walk to work. I could take the metro. The ball was sheer decadence. It didn't matter. There were people outside without homes at all. The day I returned, in Anacostia, I read to kids in a shelter – kids without much of anything at all.

In Namibia, I met village children in ragged, torn t-shirts. In Zambia, men who wanted anything I could offer – my clothes, my hat, my carabiner – because they had so very little. People without clothes to layer. In Botswana, I met needy, orphan and HIV children in a day care center.

Somewhere in the depths of my closet, I had something to wear and I would keep warm. I would be fine.

I worked the morning I left for Africa – bouncing between the client site and home, transferring files and passing along my work to a client, my boss and one of my coworkers. I came home to discover that nothing had happened in the project and I needed to scrub, query and analyze the data within 31 hours of the flight touching down. I did. I worked late. I worked early, but something inside me had changed more than the temperatures outside. I cared about so much more than work.

If two trains 150 miles apart were traveling toward each other along the same track, with a fly flying back and forth between them, if a woman spends a month in Africa, who will she be when she returns?


Tag: Weather

Home sweet home again

19 hours on a plane. I just spent 19 hours on a plane with about 17 and a half of flying time and a couple of hours in Dakar with a refueling stop.

For the first time, over Senegal, I saw the Southern Cross. I have been to the Southern Hemisphere at least six times, maybe seven, for a combined total of more than four or five months over the past nine years, and each time, I missed the constellation.

I almost missed it again: In the summer, the stars rest too close to the horizon and appear too late at night, too early in the morning, to be seen. I didn't even know what it looked like and nobody seemed inclined to tell me or to stay up 'til four to show me.

"Just follow the Milky Way," Kumoyo told me.

"You can't miss it," Tickey said.

"But I don't know what it looks like," I protested, to no avail under the clear black sky of the Namib Desert.

Eventually, I found a book and figured out how to find it but the rains had already started. Clouds covered the sky and I missed my chance.

Until Senegal.

The Southern Cross was the highlight of the 19 hours of plane time – the airline missed my order for vegetarian food and I found myself trapped in a seat by a very sweet young woman on her way to university. She'd been traveling for some time and smelled more than a little. 19 hours of plane time didn't help.

I slept a little and read a little. I watched five movies and two episodes of House, both of which I had already seen and greatly enjoyed. I wrote a little. Stewed a little. Tried to imagine that I would soon be home and then I was. Back in DC.

By 11:47, I had driven for the first time in a month – back to the right side of the road, back to rush hour and traffic jams. I had talked to my boss twice, my client and my sister and put in almost three hours of work, picking up the work that I had left on the way to the airport, work that had me at the client site, home and back within hours of my flight and work that kept my phone on me for a month.

By 11:47, a client called to schedule a meeting for Friday.

By 11:47, I had watched my first three hours of television in a month. I discovered flooding in my bedroom. Without food in my fridge and without food on the flight(s), I ate ice cream for breakfast. I needed to run to the grocery, the pharmacy, and the gas station for the first time in a month, and I desperately needed a shower.

By 11:47, I was happy to be home.

I was happy.


Tag: Travel

Home again

Early departure. Every day with the "early departure." I look forward to catching up on sleep with a four-day weekend so soon on the heels of my return.

Today, we're heading out early to visit a school on our way to the airport, to visit with a friend of a friend of a friend in the world of blogging and then we head to Jo'burg, to South African Air, to an 18-hour flight home. I'll be back by 5 on Thursday.

I worry that I'm going to offend people on the plane. I fear I smell, and I am dirty. Very, very dirty.

Tag: Travel South Africa

Big five

I knew the term, coming into this trip: Big Five. The animals one had to see in Africa.

* Lion
* Elephant
* Rhinoceros
* Leopards
* Buffalo

I didn't know what it meant, though. The big five.

Apparently, they are the deadliest animals on the continent. An encounter between any of these and a human being will likely lead to death.

According to our guide through the camping safari, according to Tickey, the list has been somewhat expanded to include hippos and crocodiles and we were warned to skip the mokoro (a warning only one of the group heeded) because of a recent, near-fatal accident.

Over the course of the trip, over three weeks of camping, we saw five of the big seven, excluding only the leopard and buffalo. (At least, we hadn't seen them by my last time on the computer - January 6.) With early-morning game drives and late-afternoon game drives, we hope to sweep the list.

Though, I don't know if my brain can take any more.

Tag:

Word of the Day

I just got online for the third or fourth time in the trip and the first time in more than a week. I just caught up with email, reading, filing, deleting, and I came across a word of the day from late last week.

wanderlust \WON-der-luhst\, noun:
a strong desire to wander or travel

I missed it because I was traveling down long dusty in another part of the world, on my sixth continent.

Did I mention that I'm already making plans for Antarctica? I started before I left...


Tag: Travel

Kruger National Park

By the time this posts, we will have left the group, our travel companions of the past three weeks. We will have left Namibia, Botswana and Zambia. Tickey and Kuyomo, our guide and cook. The Kiboko bus that served as home.

We will have left the fridge with the exploding beers. The overloaded powerstrip. The couple that came together. The couple that formed.

The people who fought.

The people who learned English.

The people who taught me a little bit of French.

Today, we enter our final stage of the trip and head to Kruger for a few days. It's bittersweet, staying, leaving. I'm going to miss our group. Though, I do look forward to sleeping in a bed.

Written on January 5 and autoposted to correlate with the trip.

Tag: South Africa Vacation Travel

Clean

I could no longer sleep. My eyes roamed. My nerves jangled, and I longed to crawl from the bed. I reached for the phone I hadn't intended to bring and checked the time: 5:40.

Sighing, I pushed myself from the bed, rummaged through my bag for something marginally less dirty than the rest and slipped into the bathroom.

As beads of hot water, the hottest in weeks, beat down on me, I cried. Tired, hungry, broken and bruised, I felt like I had lost my best friend. Two of them. Eleven of them. And I had, to some degree.

I didn't want to go to Kruger. I didn't want to go anywhere but home to Washington and winter, my bed, my shower. My life. I considered changing my flight as sobs wracked my body.

And then, camping instincts kicked in as I shut off the water to scrub and shave, to try to remove three weeks' accumulation of dirt, sweat and wear. Turning the water back on, I shampooed my hair for a third time, glanced forlornly at my feet - penknife pedicure not withstanding, they looked horrible - and washed my face, soap mixing with salt, rinsing it free of both.

Quietly, I dressed, towel-dried my hair and slipped from the room, limping a little as I walked on swollen ankle and aching foot.

The wrinkles in my shirt resembled the map we had followed with all 6,240 kilometers folded into the cotton. My trousers carried sand from Namibia and mud from Botswana. The shoes walked on their own, and I was grateful for that: I needed the help.

"Today to Kruger," I thought.

We had already seen so much, my head was full of things I could not yet articulate, but somehow, I'd find room for more.

I hadn't lost all of my friends. Two of us would travel together finding our way home. We'd meet with a friend of a friend of a friend on our last day. There was still more to see, to do, to feel, and I was as ready as I could be. Almost clean, even.



Tag: Travel

Bittersweet

Last night, an ant bit my tongue. Don't ask - I don't understand either. Later in the night, a mouse jumped on me. Things went downhill from there.

I've been criticized for my Jeep, my vegetarianism and my nationality.

The night before last I sprained my ankle and I'm fairly certain I broke my foot chasing after a very drunken traveling companion. Fortunately, it wasn't the one from home. Unfortunately, the sop staggered around camp, fell into a tent and walked around naked. I've also heard a rumor about poo in the shower, but I'm not thinking about that.

I have been wrapping my ankle but that pulls on the foot. I relieve pressure on the foot, and the ankle weakens.

The Lariam gives me the runs, as well as horrible nightmares, disturbing my nightly five or six hours in a tent.

It's raining again, and I had the axle seat this morning, sitting behind two friends who hooked up last night and tried to hide the fact, which only served to make me uncomfortable.

I am a mess.

Yet, it's still bittersweet leaving the people with whom I've spent the past three weeks and two major holidays. It's hard to leave the truck and the driver and the cook. It's darn near impossible to say goodbye, so I haven't yet. A few of us are going to dinner. Tomorrow we leave for Kruger.

I still need more time.



Tag: Travel

End of the line

All roads lead to Johannesburg. Through the long nights, the trains pass to Johannesburg. The lights of the swaying coach fall of the cutting sides, on the grass and the stones of a country that sleeps. Happy the eyes that can close...

...All roads lead to Johannesburg. If you are white or if you are black they lead to Johannesburg. If the crops fail, there is work in Johannesburg. If there are taxes to be paid, there is work in Johannesburg. If the farm is too small to be divided further, some must go to Johannesburg. If there is a child to be born that must be delivered in secret, it can be delivered in Johannesburg.

- Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country


And so we go. To Johannesburg.


Written on December 19 and autoposted to correlate with the trip.

Tag: South Africa Vacation Travel

Limpopo Area

Tonight, our last night of camping, we'll sleep near the "mighty Limpopo River," which forms the border of Botswana and South Africa.

The province shares borders with the neighbouring SADC (Southern Africa Development Community) countries of Botswana in the western side, Mozambique on the east and Zimbabwe in the north.

Its proximity to all these SADC countries makes Limpopo the perfect springboard for exploring the riches of this exciting part of the African continent.

They call it the Great North. On the surface, it is a broad, boundless area, a landscape tanning itself in the heat of the African sun. However, let this not deter you because a look beyond reveals a land of immense beauty that brings interest and entertainment in generous amounts.

These are ancient lands, attested by the recently encrypted Mapungubwe World heritage site in the Limpopo Valley and Makapans Caves near Mokopane (Potgietersrus).

Limpopo is a land of beautiful and contrasting landscape, which is typical of Africa hence it has become a favourite destination for leisure and adventure travellers worldwide. Come to a region of infinite scenic beauty with a great diversity of natural and manmade attractions, rich cultural heritage and an abundance of wildlife and nature-based tourism opportunities.

Our network of protected areas and nature reserves are amongst the best in the African continent. Through these nature reserves, we seek to preserve our natural heritage for future generations and for sharing with the international community.

- Limpopo Tourism & Parks

Written on December 15 and autoposted to correlate with the trip.

Tag: Botswana Vacation Travel

Makgadikgadi Pans

Sunset over what remains of an ancient 6500km² lake.

The Makgadikgadi Pan is a large salt pan in northern Botswana, the largest salt flat complex in the world. I don't even know what a salt complex is but it sounds impressive. I have been told that I don't want to miss this. Of course, I've been told that I don't want to miss any of it.

In the words of the Safari Lodges in Makgadikgadi, Botswana (where we're not staying because, once again, we will be camping):

The large pans of Makgadikgadi are the most visible remnants of a lake that has been formed more than five million years ago. Makgadikgadi was once a superlake some 30 metres (100 feet) deep, covering a massive area of 80,000² km (30,888² miles). But as recent as 10,000 years ago, climatic shifts had already started to dry up Lake Makgadikgadi. Further evaporation turned the lake into large pans with a surface glistening with salt.

Written on December 15 and autoposted to correlate with the trip.

Tag: Botswana Vacation Travel

Mating and Botswana

Today I hoped to meet up with a friend of a friend, someone running a school and/or a daycare in Botswana, but the tour operator told me, in no uncertain terms, that it wasn't a possibility. I think the words "remote bushcamp" might have reappeared. With any luck, though, I might have moved my schedule a little to make things work. I hope.

But Botswana... Another selling point for the trip. A couple of years ago, I received a book set here. The Christmas gift made me proud as the book required a companion dictionary (and not a pocket-sized one or anything abridge but rather something akin to the OED). My friend must have thought I was smart enough for the book.

Of course, she might have been wrong.

I found myself looking up word after word and stumbling to reach a rhythm in its pages. The descriptions of Botswana and Victoria Falls both made me want to drop anything and fly halfway around the world. Now I have.

"Set in Botswana in the days before the end of apartheid, Norman Rush's novel is, essentially, a comedy of manners played out in Austen's approved milieu: a country village. Granted, the village in question, Tsau, is a utopian society created by the great American anthropologist Nelson Denoon, and run largely by and for disenfranchised and abused African women. Still, the issue that interests Rush (and the one that fueled Austen's novels) is the age-old question of who mates with whom, and why? The unnamed narrator is a 32-year-old postgraduate student in anthropology whose dissertation has just gone south on her. Drifting around the edges of the expatriate community in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, she first meets Denoon:

"He was smiling at Kgosetlemang--the event was to be considered over with, clearly--and I could tell that his gingivae were as good as mine; which is saying a lot. I attend to my gums. People in the bush don't always attend to their oral hygiene, not to mention other niceties. There was no sign of that here. I of course am fanatical about my gums because my idea of what the movie I Wake Up Screaming is about is a woman who has to keep dating to find her soulmate and she's had to get dentures. I have very long-range anxieties.

"Entranced by this potential soulmate, our heroine strikes out into the Kalahari Desert with a couple of donkeys and follows him to his utopia where sexual attraction, regional politics, and social experimentation make for very strange bedfellows, indeed."

It might have been the book that swayed me toward this trip versus Kenya and Tanzania, away from the cradle of civilization, to this nation that remained 88 percent undeveloped.

It might have swayed me toward a better dictionary, as well.


Written on December 15 and autoposted to correlate with the trip.

Tag: South Africa Namibia Vacation Travel

In the rain

The sound of rain woke me and with a groan, I rolled over in my sleeping bag.

"Too early," I thought as I listened to the pitter patter of the drops. Suddenly, I sat upright and hit my head on the silken liner, dangling from a loop in the corner. "Fudge."

I pulled shoes onto my dirty, grimy feet, grabbed toilet paper and a flashlight and lurched from the tent. Outside, the laundry seemed no more or wet than it had when I hung it, dripping, outside the tent after hanging it, dripping, inside the tent during a downpour.

"It won't rain anymore tonight," I observed after dinner. Maybe that was the gin talking. Or the wine. Or the beer. We enjoyed a pair of Mosi lagers, the local Zambian beer with our traditional Zambian dinner after a mad dash back to close up the camp, to pull in laundry and zip our flaps.

"It won't rain tonight," said the man at the campsite, the one who washed our laundry.

"It won't rain much," said Patel, the singing cabdriver who made up songs out our trek, about our friends and an elephant and a Range Rover.

"It's going to rain," said our guide, and the rains came. They stayed. Pelting the tents and muddying our newly cleaned truck and our trousers, our soles and our souls. The tents were packed wet and slimy into our bags and the laundry, damp and cold into my bags. Later, I'll have to deal with it all in the rain because it's raining again, here in Botswana.

We left Zambia in rain and crossed the river in rain. We drove to the lodge in rain and walked to the daycare in rain and then, well, we forgot all about it, finding sunshine in the faces of children who sang, who laughed and clapped and stomped, who stared as we, the strange visitors, mimed "Head, shoulders, knees and toes."

My laundry's still wet. My tent's still packed and outside it's raining, but it's a beautiful day.

Tag: Travel Zambia Botswana

Victoria Falls

From what I understand, even after the trip, I won't have the words to describe Victoria Falls. Words, pictures, everything in my limited scope of creativity fail to capture the falls.

These are not the highest falls in the world. They are not the widest. But they are considered the largest based on a width of 1 mile and height of 360 ft, forming the largest sheet of falling water in the world. (Victoria Falls is roughly twice the height of Niagara Falls.)

The Victoria Falls Bridge was commissioned by Cecil John Rhodes in 1900, although he never visited the falls and died before construction began, he expressed his wish that the "railway should cross the Zambezi just below the Victoria Falls. I should like to have the spray of the falls over the carriages."

The bridge affords a magnificent view both down the gorge on the one side and through to the falls on the other. The immense depth of the gorge can be fully appreciated from this perspective and combined with the sea green river below, the shiny black rock face and lush green foliage, the 360 degree view from the bridge is breathtaking.

We'll be there during rainy season (from November to April), meaning more water. More noise. More everything. And I cannot even begin to imagine it during the lesser.

During the flood season, it is impossible to see the foot of the falls and most of its face. Walks along the cliff opposite it are in a constant shower and shrouded in mist. Close to the edge of the cliff, spray shoots upward like inverted rain, especially at Zambia's Knife-Edge Bridge. Fortunately, I packed my rain jacket. Unfortunately, I don't think it will make a difference.



Written on December 15 and autoposted to correlate with the trip.

Tag: Zambia Vacation Travel

More time

I keep forgetting the year, which makes sense so close to January 1 but also the day, the date, the month. I haven't seen a TV - I don't know what's happening in the world. I've only been on a computer two or three times for a total of about three hours. It's all slipping. I guess that makes sense, too, with a month in southern Africa.

It's not nearly enough.

Things I never considered coming into this: Showering with a millipede the length of my forearm. The way their legs ripple when they walk. A four-foot monitor lizard in our campsite. One that licked Kumoyo (our cook) on the cheek while he napped. Using a flashlight to avoid getting trampled by a hippo or an elephant on the way back from the bathroom. Awakening to the grunts of hippos and the roar of lions. Barking zebras. Tying a bandanna around my head after picking a third insect from my hair when I stood too close to the light. Learning French and teaching English. How much I'd enjoy War and Peace. The ill effects of sunscreen and bug spray on my poor, tan face. Giving myself a pedicure with a pen knife on a jostling bus...

Today, we're lucky. Two nights in the same place. One day without anything. I slept until 7:25, sheer indulgence, with a standing alarm at 5:15, packing, ablutions, tearing down the tent before breakfast at 6 and leaving at 7. Days of travel, of long dusty roads and bumping over the axle. Picnic lunches. Dinners at camp.

Yesterday, we saw Victoria Falls and I couldn't help but laugh with pure pleasure at seeing such a magnificent sight. It'll take days, weeks, the rest of my life to come up with words for that, for rain falling up from the bottom of the Falls, for rainbows and monkeys and friends. For bartering and buying and trading a pen and an empty film canister for a necklace with the river god of the Falls.

I need more time. More words. My head is full of all these images - a heron watching me as I brushed my teeth. Baby crocodile in the river. Learning to identify a kingfisher and a bee eater, to differentiate a heron from a crane from a stork.

I walked six kilometers in staggering heat and humidity to use a computer for the third or fourth time. I don't know what's happening in the world. In work. In the life that awaits me. I'll figure it out soon enough.

I need more time.


Tag: Travel Zambia

Z countries

Today, we head to Victoria Falls, Mosi-oa-Tunya, the Smoke that Thunders. The waterfall is situated in southern Africa on the Zambezi River between the countries of Zambia and Zimbabwe. The falls are, by some measures, the most enormous waterfall in the world, as well as being among the most unusual in form, and having arguably the most diverse and easily seen wildlife of any major waterfall site.

Back when we started planning the trip, there was a chance of accessing the waterfall by way of Zimbabwe. Given the "deteriorating situation" in Zimbabwe, our plans have changed. We're going through Zambia.

As of Monday, December 15, the day before I left for Africa, the New York Times reported the following:

"The United Nations Security Council held a high-level meeting on Monday, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Minister David Miliband of Britain, on the deteriorating situation in Zimbabwe, but it failed to break an impasse that has lasted since July. Although there was a consensus that the humanitarian situation was appalling, Russia and South Africa opposed any outside intervention, saying the crisis should be solved by regional negotiations. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that there had been more than 18,400 cases of cholera reported so far, that school attendance was down to 20 percent and that 80 percent of the country lacked safe drinking water. The World Health Organization in Geneva released new figures saying that 978 people had died of cholera."

A few weeks ago, a month or so, I read "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun," a wonderful memoir from a man who called Zimbabwe home. Between that and "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight," I have learned a little more about the nation and its heart-wrenching history in the late 20th century and the past few years. I almost want to visit. But not now, and I feel a little guilty about that because so many people don't have a choice. This is their home.


Written on December 15 and autoposted to correlate with the trip.

Tag: Zambia Vacation Travel

Kwando River - Caprivi

From my tour literature...

Driving through the BwaBwata National Park (formally Caprivi Game Reserve) we stop for a guided tour at a traditional Caprivi village and have a chance to buy their famous weavings before setting up camp on the banks of the Kwando River. Elephant and Hippo can be viewed from the deck overlooking the river. An afternoon boat excursion and game drive are undertaken in search of the many wild animals that inhabit the BwaBwata National Park.

The southern border of eastern Caprivi is defined rather indistinctly along the line of the Kwando, the Linyanti and the Chobe Rivers. These are actually the same river in different stages. The Kwando comes south from Angola, meets the Kalahari's sands, and forms a swampy region of reedbeds and waterways called the Linyanti swamps. (To confuse names further, locals refer to sections of the Kwando above Lianshulu as ‘the Mashi’.)

These swamps form the core of Mamili National Park. In good years a river emerges from here, called the Linyanti, and flows northeast into Lake Liambezi. It starts again from the eastern side of Lake Liambezi, renamed the Chobe. This beautiful river has a short course before it is swallowed into the mighty Zambezi, which continues over the Victoria Falls, through Lake Kariba, and eventually discharges into the Indian Ocean.

I'm not sure about buying local weavings. Granted, I should be using my toiletries and reducing the weight of my bag through the trip, but there's just not that much room. Or any room. At all. But I have room for all the pictures I want.


Written on December 15 and autoposted to correlate with the trip.

Tag: Botswana Vacation Travel

Mokoro

I'd seen the pictures of mokoro but I didn't know what it was, the word to use, the history, before planning my trip. A couple of friends live in Lesotho and they took a third friend on a similar tour to mine, to ours, through the same areas.

Their pictures and their stories reinforced my decision, my trip, my plan. The mokoro picture, especially. It just looked so peaceful.

According to a safari website I found (though not my own), the mokoro are associated with the BaYei people.

"The BaYei people came to the Okavango Delta hundreds of years ago, bringing with them, their traditional mode of transport, the mokoro, a dug-out canoe made from a large straight tree such as a sausage tree or an ebony tree. The mokoro is ideally suited as transport in the delta as in can move quietly through shallow water, being pushed by the boatman using a long pole, moving along the narrow channels or cutting through the long grasses or papyrus."

I'll post my own pictures when I can.


Written on December 15 and autoposted to correlate with the trip.

Tag: Botswana Vacation Travel

Okavango River

Today, we will enter the Caprivi Strip and camp amongst lush vegetation overlooking the Okavango River. Big plans for the day, include enjoying the sunset on the deck or swimming in the famous "river pool." I'm glad I brought my swimsuit.

Though, I am a little concerned about the 30 pounds I lost before leaving the US and the almost certain weight loss in Africa - will the suit fit? Fortunately, I shouldn't be spilling out of it, but will it slip off me? Something to consider at least... Thank goodness for sarongs - they always fits.

The Okavango alone almost sold the trip to me. I wanted to see "the river which never finds the sea." It disappears into a 6,000-square-mile maze of lagoons, channels, and islands.

The river system annually brings more than 2 million tons of sand and silt into the Delta, yet less than three percent of the water emerges at the other end to either flood Lake Ngami or cross another 300 miles of the Kalahari, then to enter Lake Xau and the Makgadikgadi Pans.

The Okavango Delta, in the midst of the Kalhan sands, is Africa's largest and most beautiful oasis. The River Okavango, which rises in the highlands of Angola, never reaches the sea; instead its mighty waters empty over the sands of the Kalahari. Here the great Kalahari desert thirst is locally quenched in a blue-green wilderness of fresh water, with emerald reed beds and towering trees.

It is a natural refuge and giant water hole for the larger animals of the Kalahari. The water gives rise to many forms of life unexpected in a "desert": There are fish, crocodiles basking on the sands, and hippopotamuses and swamp antelopes feeding on the vegetation.

The Okavango is the last surviving remnant of the great Lake Makgadikgadi whose waters and associated swamps once covered much of the Middle Kalahari. It also is closely associated with the Kwando, Linyanti, and Chobe swamps and river systems to the northeast. It is thought that long ago the Okavango, Chobe, Kwando, and upper Zambezi waterways flowed as one massive river across the Middle Kalahari, to join the Limpopo River and then to the Indian Ocean.

Crocodiles basking. Hippopotamuses and swamp antelopes feeding...


Written on December 15 and autoposted to correlate with the trip.

Tag: Namibia Vacation Travel

Happy New Year!

I struggle to think of what to say for the New Year, what to say in advance from my couch in DC or an internet cafe in the hot South African summer. It doesn't feel like the New Year. Nothing is ending. Nothing begins.

Today is just a day like any other.

But I'm in Africa.

This New Year's day is so different from one a year ago in DC, with a slowly dying relationship barely in its spring. Or the one the year before that in New York with friends, cold, gray and hungover. A friend told me I should resolve to be more firm in refusing things I did not want when another ordered lunch for me.

"I should resolve to stop letting people tell me what to resolve," I thought but in the end, resolved nothing.

This year, I set my resolution early: to do (at least) one (truly) kind thing a day. Just one. And it's been harder than I thought, especially in Africa where I don't know the people and I don't know the culture. I have had to go out of my way to perform an act of kindness here, unlike my network of volunteering and activities at home. Nevertheless, my traveling companion isn't the only recipient; though, she should be more.

This year for New Year's, I resolve to keep my promise, the one to myself, to be kind to others. The rest I'll figure out as I go.

Happy New Year to all!

Written on December 19 and autoposted to correlate with the trip.

Tag: Namibia Vacation Travel