It's been a long, long time and a lot has happened since the last email. I don't even know where to start. I guess I should try to find some kind of chronological order with all the events that have happened.... I'll eventually do something else to get my name in the history textbooks that America's youth one day won't read.
In more exciting (I don't know if exciting is the word I'm looking for…maybe honest? Factual?) news, I got a kitten. His name is Lupato which is the Bemba word for "hatred." It's the closest I could find to a literal translation for loathing, but they're pretty synonymous. It goes well with my dog whose name translates to fear. Fear and Loathing in Kapeshi Village…
Lupato is orange and I like to pull all his extra skin forward to make him look like a lion. He likes to too and shows it by pretending to actually be a lion taking down its prey- me who he frequently confuses for an impala. He's less of a cat, more of a cute fuzzy package for annoyance and hypodermic needles. He still hasn't learned his place in the hierarchy (maybe he's confused because of me making him look like a lion?). He's always on the table trying to eat the food that he thinks I've cooked for him or tries to eat Mwenso's food. I've given Mwenso full permission to bite off his head.
I started dating a health volunteer named Rachel. She lives in my province, about 150km away so I get to see her occasionally. She's cool.
Recently, the area's department of agriculture extension officer passed away unexpectedly. Not the one I don't like, but his boss. The one I don't like is still alive and drunk. Shortly after I left the village to begin my vacation, I received a text message that my best friend, George, and his wife had a baby girl. They'd asked me to name it, so I suggested Theresa after a really good, dear friend of mine- Theresa Heinz Kerry. (That's not entirely true. It's Theresa Donohue and since I couldn't be there for her wedding, this is my form of a gift to her. But the Theresa Heinz Kerry thing is a good segue because I've heard she's from Mozambique.)
I went to Mozambique on a pretty sweet 5 country vacation. It started with a trip to beautiful, exotic Serenje where we had a Christmas "gathering of close friends" and a gardening workshop. My travel buddy, Emily and I headed to Lusaka for my medical tests (liver's still ok…I think) and hitched out to Chipata in Eastern province for the night. It's a nice enough place. Very big though. They had a supermarket and more than 3 choices for dinner. Worse yet- more than 2 streets. I was way out of my league and it only got worse from there (There's a mall in South Africa. A HUGE one).
The next day we hitched to Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi and stayed at the Peace Corps house there and marveled at the selection in the grocery store. Mozzarella cheese that tastes like mozzarella?! I'd have been happy with anything that doesn't taste like feet. We headed out the next morning with the intention of hitching to Cape Maclear at the southern end of Lake Malawi. We got a lift to the bus station from someone dropping off his friend and on the way, she convinced us to take the bus with her. It was cheap and easy and was the only ride we paid for until our trip into South Africa. It wasn't a bad ride and the lady's 5 week old son made it more bearable. We also saw something that restored my faith in humanity, just a bit. A young boy needed to pee but was in the back of the bus sitting on the flood between my feet. The driver slowed but then decided he wasn't worth stopping for so someone passed back a bottle for him to pee in. A complete stranger held the bottle for him while he took care of the rest. I think you'd be hard pressed to find that kind of help on a bus in the states. Unfortunately, as the bottle was dropped from the window, it splashed through an open window spraying the guy 2 seats to my left. But on the brighter side- it wasn't me.
We got to the lake. Beautiful. Nice food, nice people, great weather. Emily and I got scuba certified. It was amazing. For a hint of what we saw, check out the cichlid tanks at any pet store or at the aquarium. Picture being completely surrounded by all those fish, toss in another twenty species of all sizes and colors and then multiply that by a thousand. That's about 1% of how awesome it was. We saw mating behaviors, moms protecting babies in their mouths (I've seen that a thousand times, but never while I was in the water. I hid behind a rock, she spit them out, I came around the rock, she collected them, then I left her alone). We saw 2 ½ ft long catfish in between rocks waiting for an unfortunate fish to wander by. We saw Cornish Jacks but I've always called them knifefish. They sense their prey with an electrical field. Pretty awesome. We also saw the coveted Obama chitenge. That wasn't while diving, but on a young girl. We each bought one It has his face between 2 maps of Africa and says a phrase in Swahili. I'm assuming it says vote for Obama and not death to Obama.
We had a nice Christmas dinner with a few other PCVs from Zambia and were serenaded by the orphan choir. The next day, a band of "children" came to sing at our campground. The "children" were all about 15, 16 years old. Their hits included "I love you Jesus" (I love you Jesus/I love you Jesus/I love you Jesus), We are the Children (We are the children/ We are the children of the children/ Let us play here) and my favorite, which is apparently a hit with every child in Zambia, "How are you?" (How are you? [I am fine!] X 4/ Muli Bwanji [Ndili bwino] X4) which showed their great diversity and song writing abilities. In a Shakira or Jose Feliciano-like fashion, they sang in 2 languages.
We hitched away from the lake and got a ride the last 3 hours in a Hummer H3. Normailly I would never ride in that. But, well traffic was slow, it was hot and the roads demanded something of that caliber. And he was going the same place we were. Before we saw it, we heard it coming around the bend and we both honestly thought it was a semi. We got another sweet ride in a Land Rover with a family who just finished a month long safari. They were returning to Jo'burg and dropped us at our destination on the beach. They were only going to take us 65km to a junction, because we were all squeezed in pretty tight, but they decided to take pity on us and rearranged and drove us another 300km or so. And we watched a movie on their DVD player. At the 65km turn, their GPS unit said "Turn right here…continue straight 1048km." There was a collective family groan.
We got to the beatch, met up with some other PCV friends, cooked a great dinner of squid and prawn pasta and rang in the New Year with a subpar band and lots of South Africans in their late 20s, early 30's who displayed above average amounts of buttcrack. You could see them adjusting their shorts to show just the proper amount. By the way, these were all guys. It would have been slightly, ever so slightly, better if they were girls. Oh well, we got a good laugh.
We headed south to Tofo where we met Astra and Lou. Tofo is a beautiful place. The highlight of the stop there was snorkeling with the whalesharks. Theses sharks are massive and can reach 45 ft long. The longest that we saw was maybe half that, 2/3 max. Still huge and beautiful. The choppy seas and outboard motor exhaust resulted in about 70% of the passengers leaning over the side, experiencing breakfast for the second time. Our next stop was in Maputo. We arrived on my birthday and wandered looking for a place that I deemed worthy of my presence. In our wanderings, we found a memorial to president Robert Mugabe. The plaza it was in (just like Zimbabwe!) had seen better days. (By the way, Zim just released the $100 trillion note.) We found a nice place to eat located beside a small amusement park that had also seen better days. The Merry-Go-Round wasn't very merry, they had 3 other rides that were petrified in a snapshot of better times, but the bumper cars worked! I picked out my target early and was relentless. That whiplash is something fierce. I don't know the kid's name, but let's jus say blue shirt kid will never walk right again.
Until this point, we'd paid a total of $12 for transportation. It's not safe to hitch in South Africa, so they say. So we took a bus. The bus broke down 30 km into the ride. The ticket cost twice what we'd paid for the previous 2 weeks of travel total. We got on a back up bus, crosses into SA, got our rental car and departed for Kruger National Park. When I picture Africa pre-invasion, I picture Kruger. Animals everywhere. We saw more impala than I care to remember, many kinds of antelope, zebra, giraffe, elephants, hippos, birds of every color, a cheetah resting in the shade and rhinos (both black and white, we think). My favorites were the lions. It wasn't just the lions that were special, but the entire scene, what they were doing and what was happening around them. The day before we arrived, some lions took down a giraffe as it crossed the paved road where it couldn't get any footing. From the car, we saw 9 lions feasting, digesting, or waiting their turn to gnaw on the carcass. Their activity was dependent on their hierarchy rank. The bigger ones having already eaten were resting, the smaller ones were waiting. There, lying in the shade with the fattest belly of them all was Lupato. Guess he really is high in the hierarchy…We went back in the morning and saw that the carcass had decreased in size but increased in vulture presence. There was one lioness there, more for protection than for feeding. Vultures and Maribou storks waited their turn. Some vultures tore at entrails right beside the car. One thing about Kruger- it's hot. It was 7am and already probably around 90F. We had no AC, only open windows and the stench of death. (We made Lou shower that night, so it was considerably better the next day). After a while, a couple of hyenas showed up. They are ridiculous, goofy animals, bounding around grinning stupidly. They're very timid and ran away if the lion so much as looked at them of if the vultures took flight. The hyenas reminded me of the hyperactive stinky kid at recess. You were in 5th grade, he was in maybe 3rd and always wanted to play 4 square or dodge ball with the big kids. "Hey! Hey guys! Can I play? No? Oh Ok That's fine. I'll play next round! Is that ok? Guys? Hey?" but he never got the hint. That was you, wasn't it?
Country number 5 was Swaziland. We went on a nice hike amongst the friendlier of Africa's beasts. We saw baby zebras, wildebeests, warthogs, and more antelope. We spent a couple hours at the hot springs at the lodge and drank liters upon liters of water to replenish what we'd lost that week.
St. Lucia came next. It's a beautiful beach town on the northern coast of SA. Lots of places to eat and pretty things to see. We drove to a park and explored the dunes. Seeing zebras atop a dune overlooking the ocean is pretty awesome.
We headed down the coast to Durban and checked out the beach there. Then to really put our systems (mine and Emily's) into a shock, we went to a mall. A HUGE mall. SA is very cheap compared to Zambia. Food prices were maybe 40% of what we pay. For dinner, we ate at a restaurant that had a half price Tuesday special. Emily and I split a bowl of seafood paella and a sushi platter. Delicious. After dinner she and I boarded the bus to Jo'burg leaving Lou and Astra to finish their travels. Early the next morning, we arrived in Jo'burg and hung out in a nice neighborhood then caught a movie before heading to the airport. Up til now, the trip was smooth. Too smooth. Something had to go wrong. It was inevitable. There was no desk for the Zambian Airways check in. We asked around. "Check at counter 72." At 72 they said "Check 1." At 1 they say "Check 36." "Check 72…already did? Check 7" "Did you go to 17?" Finally 17 tells us to go to a completely different area, an un-numbered window. "Not this window, the next one." The next window tells us "Zambian Airways is no more. They went out of business. Go to the sales office." Sales closet might have been more appropriate. No one was there, no one answered the phones. Not even at the travel agency we bought the tickets from. With 6 hours left on my tourist visa, we bought tickets on South African Airways. $200 later we board the plane home.
But I'm back now. So that's good. My dog was skinny and covered in ticks, kitten fat on lizards and grasshoppers, and my field choked with weeds. Back to normalcy…ahhhh….
Just a heads up, there's a 2 for 1 deal for tickets to Namibia in case you wanted to visit. They celebrate October in the traditional way of their german forefathers- Oktoberfest. Just a heads up.
Ok now I'm done. I'm not proofreading this. So deal with it. Hope you're good.
