Saturday, August 20, 2011

August 20

Since this Southwest plane has wifi I might as well conclude this journal here, 30,000 feet above Arizona. I'll be back in Oakland in three hours. I spent the last week in the suburbs north of Philadelphia, visiting relatives and friends. Among other things I learned that my cousin, in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, lives amongst bears. Apparently bears have spread from the Appalachians to urban neighborhoods in Pa. I had no idea. So, possibly, after seven weeks in Africa I came closer to wild animals in Pennsylvania than in Botswana. Well, not really, since we nearly ran over that hyena in Chobe National Park, but at least there I had a guide to protect me.
Thanks for reading. Bye.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

August 11


Today I discovered the most satisfying urban place I've ever visited: The High Line, an above-ground park in Lower Manhattan situated on an old elevated railway line. It is beautiful. It made me think of what city spaces I've experienced in my life that stand out. So I did what I always do, I made a list:

Best Urban Spaces
1. High Line, Lower West Side of Manhattan
2. Las Ramblas, Barcelona
3. Sutro Baths, San Francisco
4. Hong Kong Harbor (especially the ferries)







After strolling down the (long) length of the High Line I took in a depressing documentary about the deaths of young Black men in Chicago, made by one of the guys who shot "Hoop Dreams".
Then I sat in a park in Greenwich Village and read for a couple hours before I went up town to listen to some Mozart (and other composers) at Lincoln Center.
Now, as Pepys would say, to bed.

August 9 to 10

Don't know whether I can write anything interesting now that I'm back in the USA but I intend to keep trying until I get back to Oakland on August 20.

The trip to the airport on the new, modern Gau Line rail system (it links Pretoria to Johannesburg with a shunt to the airport) was fun and instructive. The line (which was finished only two weeks ago) is already a political football as the Left decries it as serving only the rich, generally White, patrons. I can confirm that 90% of the passengers on my trip were White suburbanites. It was a little eerie to see all those Black employees catering to the White riders.

The plane to NYC was uneventful. I tried to beat the jet lag blues by taking a sleeping pill eight hours before we arrived in North America but it didn't entirely work--or maybe I was just fatigued from the long (15 hour) flight. I was able to get to my New York home-away-from-home, the Gershwin Hotel on East 27th Street, but couldn't check in so early in the morning. So I headed off to The Strand bookstore and got a copy of Janet Malcolm's tome about Gertrude Stein. Odd that one of my favorite writers was interested in a subject that has fascinated me for over ten years: how did Gertrude and her lesbian lover, Alice Toklas, survive in Nazi-occupied France for nearly five years? Remember that both ladies were Jewish. I can't wait to see what Janet has learned.

It was hot in New York so I looked for an air-conditioned movie theater to wait out the time till hotel check in. The nearest theater had a review in its window of a movie about Ken Kesey. The type was too small to read, and I had no reviews to warn me off, so I too that one on.
The movie was someone's attempt to patch together all the miscellaneous film that Kesey and the Pranksters had produced during their bus trip that Tom Wolfe made so famous. I loved Wolfe's book and I'm sure that colored my view of the movie, which I found mildly interesting. There were, however, a couple of interesting moments.
They used a clip from the radio program "Fresh Air" to capture Kesey's view of the movie made from One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest. Predictably he disliked the transformation to the screen.What I liked was his reasoning: to Kesey the demonization of the nurse was misguided, that she was merely the handmaiden of "The Combine". I really should reread The Koolaid Acid Test, a great work of journalism.
Later in the movie that showed some film of Kesey and the Pranksters in New York at a party celebrating their arrival. What I didn't know--or had forgotten--was that Kerouac attended that party. There he was, quaffing a Budweiser, while all the young crazies cavorted around him. It was clear that he disdained the whole lot of them including Kesey, I'm sure. Another question that I wish I knew the answer to: how did the man of On The Road become a misanthropic drunk in his middle years (he never lived to be a misanthropic old man)? I remember that Bill Buckley's National Review magazine had a cover story/obit of Kerouac. The magazine cover showed Jack sprawled in an easy chair with a brew in his hand and several empties on the floor if I remember it correctly.
I should also add that the film featured some poignant remarks from the woman on the bus about Neal Cassidy/Moriarity. I didn't know that he, too, died a mysteriously pathetic death beside the railroad tracks in Mexico.

Monday, August 8, 2011

August 8

{It looks as if I failed to publish my July 27 post from The Great Zimbabwe. I fixed that tonight.}

A very dull day today walking, walking, walking around Pretoria and its suburbs. It's a very ordinary city, which, I think, is to its credit. I saw no abject poverty as in Harare or Johannesburg. I saw a few White folks walking, more than in JoBurg but fewer than Capetown. I saw lots of wealthy White homes in the hills surrounding the city, all with their electric fences and barbed wire, just like Capetown's matching burbs. I saw a few homeless people sleeping on the streets, about the same number as I'd observe in a similar jaunt in Oakland. I saw thousands of hip young professional-looking residents living in neat high rises. In fact Pretoria very much looks like the city that Jerry Brown envisioned when he became mayor of Oakland: dense conglomerations of apartments and condo's that support restaurants and theaters and a vivid city life.
Today was my last full day in Southern Africa. I haven't had time to reflect on the past 48 days but perhaps I should begin that process.

My favorite places:
1. Bulawayo, Zimbabwe....a small city in a wrecked country yet somehow this place seemed more welcoming than any place I've visited in recent years. There's something about these small cities (Savankhet, Laos; Malatya, Turkey; Chichicastenengo, Guatemala; Cienfuegos, Cuba) that makes them inviting to me.
2. Capetown, South Africa....a wealthy tourist town with great weather, what's not to like.
3. Solitaire, Namibia.....population 12, with one bakery serving the best apple strudel in the world, camel rides, in the middle of nowhere.
4. The Okavango Delta, Botswana.....canoeing amongst elephants and crocodiles was fun.

Tomorrow it is on to New York.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

August 6

My posts have been dull of late largely because I've been doing so much moving about. I'm too tired to put down anything thoughtful. Today is no exception. I spent a good day, but a full day, moving from Gaborone to Pretoria in South Africa. I think I'm going to like this place but for now all I could manage was to get here and find a place to sleep. I started at 7:30 a.m. with a taxi trip to the Gaborone bus depot. I found the minivan to Pretoria but it took four hours for us to get 12 souls to fill the bus. Once that was taken care of things went smoothly. The border crossing into South Africa was easy and we managed the trip to Pretoria in six leisurely hours. There's a spirit of comradery on those little buses that you don't get anywhere else.
I walked for about a half hour in Pretoria seeking a hotel mentioned in Lonely Planet. I never found the exact place but did stumble upon a decent bed & breakfast for $42/night. I expect to stay here for the remaining two days of my African adventures. I have some things to say about Botswana but I'm too spent to do it now.

Friday, August 5, 2011

August 3 to 5

Lots of traveling done. I'm now in Gaborone, capital city of Botswana. Botswana is an anomaly in this part of the world, a British protectorate (by request of local chieftains) until the 1960's when it became independent. It therefore suffered fewer of the depredations of colonialism. According to what I was told the country languished economically until diamonds were discovered, which freed up money for infrastructure improvements and other public expenses.
Botswana is starkly different from Zimbabwe. It has a modern feel to it, much like Namibia. Shopping centers here resemble El Cerrito or Burbank. The hinterland, i.e. the Kalahari Desert, is still primitive,but the population centers are clearly members of the First World rather than the Third. There are many improvements that could be made--an expansion of the rail system, new agricultural crops, more industrialization, and a more democratic government (the President, from the dominant tribe, has been in office for 13 years, and dominates a flaccid Parliament).
I got here this afternoon after stopping for a day to visit some friends in the village of Mahalapye is 2.5 hours north of here. Mike and Geri, Peace Corps volunteers, live there. They come from Oakland, but serendipitously I met them in a hostel in Johannesburg in early July. They rent a small house and work for an NGO (non-governmental agency=western-funded charity) that is trying to reduce the soaring AIDS rate in Botswana. They were ultra generous to me, allowing me to stay a night in their home and feeding me throughout my one-day stay. The highlight of my time in Mahalapye was a visit that Geri arranged to a primary school. I sat in on three different classes, one on geography, one on AID's awareness, and one science class on parasites. I asked a bunch of questions and learned a good deal about how schools function in this land. I wish I'd been more assertive in trying to visit schools in other countries on this trip.
I got to Botswana via a convoluted series of bus rides from Bulawayo. I started at 6 a.m., before dawn, walking from my hotel to an omnibus station in midtown. I'd been told that I needed to get to the suburbs to a place called Nkunumura Shopping Center. I peered into one omnibus and asked about this route but he said it wasn't his. Luckily another van was on the same street going the opposite direction and he, indeed, was the one I wanted. I even got a front seat, unprecedented good fortune! After a ten or fifteen minute journey they dropped me at the 'shopping center', which turned out to be a few old ladies selling bananas and candy. There were several large buses filling up and I envisioned a soft-seated ride to the Botswana border, three hours south. But I quickly learned that the bus I wanted was a 15 passenger, beat up, hard-seated minivan. And I re-learned that finding the bus was half the battle. We sat for three hours waiting for a full passenger load. And full passenger load meant everyone squeezed in cheek to jowl. Now I envisioned a harrowing trip that would leave me incapacitated at the border from back pain. But ten minutes into the ride a family left the bus and we all shifted into a relative degree of comfort. But now my attention shifted to, "what do I do when I get to the border" since this van driver told me that was as far as he would go.
But not to worry. On the other side of the border waited an inexpensive, fairly large bus, ready to take us to Francistown, Botswana, the next big town down the road. That went well and, one hour later, I transferred at the Francistown bus depot, to another bus--this time a very large specimen--for the final ride to Mahalapye. Altogether a tiring day of rides but interesting nonetheless.
My last day in Zimbabwe was fun. I found a museum that had been recommended to me and discovered a pretty lively art culture in Bulawayo. I even talked with some artists who rented space in the museum to do their work. I really wanted to buy one piece by a local artist but I felt it was too fragile to make it home. He was bummed and so was I.

Tomorrow I hope to head back to South Africa. The lady at the bed & breakfast where I am presently located says I must book a ticket a day in advance. I hope that's not true. Today is Friday, I believe. On Tuesday I jet back to New York, assuming I make it to Oliver Tambo Airport in JoBurg on time.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

August 2

In Bulawayo again. It looks like it will be challenging to get to Botswana from here. Only a few mini-vans travel the route and they don't go unless they have a full load of passengers. We'll see what happens tomorrow a.m.
I feel like some kind of summary of Zimbabwe is warranted but my head is full of details now and I'm not sure what merits comment.
It is a very troubled country, for sure. A leading general announced this week that he would not tolerate the opposition (MDC. led by Tsangvarai) taking power even if there were fair elections. And fair elections are doubtful given that Mugabe's party controls the voter rolls. Right now there is a very tenuous truce between the two parties with Mugabe as President and Tsangvarai as Prime Minister. But Mugabe is growing impatient. He sent thugs into the Parliament building last week to beat up an MDC legislator and some reporters.
Harare is a typical big city with lots of glass and steel skyscrapers dating from colonial times. There is little prosperity evident anywhere in the country as evidenced by the gradual erosion of infrastructure. There are trains but they don't run much, much less 'on time'. The sidewalks are crumbling, air and water pollution is rampant, and people are discouraged. A movement to separate the southern part of the nation (including Bulawayo) has just been created.
More then anything you notice the lack of variety in daily life. The entire city of Harare consists of clothing stores, places selling cellphones, restaurants all serving the same food, banks (Mugabe's part wants them to sell 52% of their assets to locals--meaning Mugabe cronies), and, strangely, copy places. There is plenty of education--colleges abound--but no jobs for the graduates. There is no public transit (which I, as a libertarian, applaud).
Bulawayo is a more habitable place than the capital. It suffers from the same lack of variety but seems to have a spirit about it that the bigger city lacks. I spoke with an artist at the big gallery in town and he epitomized the nation; he can make art but no one will buy it since no one has disposable income. The national politics depresses him, as it does just about everyone I've spoken to. It will be interesting to see if Mugabe (who is 87) decides to go out in a blaze of glory by finally wrecking all the remaining democratic institutions before he dies. There are rumors in the Harare press that Tsvangarai and another MDC leader are about to be arrested for 'corruption'. If that happens, and the banks are taken over, Zimbabwe may overtake Haiti as the worlds' leading failed state.

Monday, August 1, 2011

August 1

I'm set to go south tomorrow morning. Nothing startling to report here in Harare. I went to the Botanic Garden, which was well maintained (to my surprise) but lacking in anything grand. Today I spent a couple hours in the National Archives brushing up on my Zimbabwe history.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

July 30-31

Nothing remarkable has happened in Harare so far. I was very fortunate in finding that the 2011 Harare Book Festival was taking place while I'm here. I spent a couple enjoyable hours talking with folks at the fair about how teachers are trained in Zimbabwe; how black farmers are faring now that they've been given land seized from white farmers; the state of literature in Zimbabwe (I bought three books for my classroom library by Zimbabwean authors); and the state of libraries in Zimbabwe (I agreed to try to send some books to help the cause).
Most of my time has been spent wandering around Harare, learning the layout of the city. I've ridden some more omnibus commuter buses into the suburbs, always an interesting thing to do. I've been searching for the best way to get to Botswana from here. It turns out the cheap buses leave from a crowded suburb called Mbare and that I'd need to get there at around one a.m. to secure a seat on the 6am bus. It sounds dangerous. So I'm going to research whether I can take a luxury bus from the city center to Bulawayo (remember Bulawayo, my favorite city of this trip), then transfer to a bus going further south to Botswana. We shall see.
I've been pondering several questions about Harare and Zimbabwe:
1. Why are there no Chinese restaurants in this country? I can't remember the last nation I've been in where there were none. And I know, from reading the local press, that there are many Chinese in Zimbabwe either mining minerals or searching for new deposits. In fact that is a controversial topic hereabouts. The MDC people (the major party opposed to Mugabe) resent the Chinese, saying they are raping the country of its mineral wealth. (Most of the refining apparently happens in China). Yet somehow all those Chinese workers are keeping a low profile. I saw my first two Chinese folks on the streets this morning. So why no restaurants.
Zimbabwean cuisine is the worst in the world, I'll wager. Every restaurant serves the same fare: chicken and rice; beef and rice; some other meat and rice; chicken, beef, or other with chips (french fries). And I am not exaggerating. No one sells anything else. If you are very lucky someone will serve a salad with the aforementioned. There is one chain of 'restaurants'. They have four incarnations, Baker's Inn (baked goods); Chicken Inn; Steer Inn (hamburgers); and Creamy Inn (Ice cream).
1a. Related to this is the question of indigenisation. This is a new law requiring that all foreign mining operations sell 51% of their assets to Black Zimbabweans (most of whom would presumably belong to Zapu PF, Mugabe's party). One assumes that many of these firms belong to the Chinese, yet I've read nothing in the press indicating that the Chinese embassy or any representative of Chinese business firms is upset.
2. Why are there no motorcyles or motor scooters in Zimbabwe? I've seen two motorcyles (one a nice offroad bike near Masvingo) and not one motor scooter. There are automobiles. Thousands of them in Harare. The omnibuses amount to thousands of vehicles all by themselves. So why no scooters?
3. The trash pickup system is odd. There are no streetside trash receptacle. Everyone simply throws their trash on the ground wherever they happen to be. Then a city employee comes and sweeps the trash into piles at intersections for sometimes mid-block. Generally these piles are set alite, where they smolder for hours. Occasionally a city garbage truck will come along and scoop up piles of trash from these piles into the trucks.
4. Why is it that in this terribly poor country (according to the press annual per capita income is $640; unemployment is 80%) everyone is scrupulously honest and friendly towards me? From my limited experience this is the most honest, friendly country I have ever visited, I almost didn't come here because I was afraid of robbery (or worse). What a mistake it would have been to give in to those fears.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

July 29

Too tired to write much tonight. After studying my Lonely Planet I decided to head north to Harare. I found a nice hostel in an area with a lot of college students. No dorm available but I got a room for $25/night, a bit more than I anticipated but reasonable. I expect to stay here three or four days.
The bus ride from Masvingo was tight; we were crammed in like chickens one of those assembly lines that animals rights folks are always citing. I have the sore back to prove it. Luckily an old man decided to be my guide, without my asking, and he even helped me find the right neighborhood in Harare once we got here. What little I've seen of the city does not endear itself to me, but we shall see.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

July 27

Today I spent several very enjoyable hours traveling to--and exploring--The Great Zimbabwe, largest archeological ruins in Sub-Saharan Africa. The ruins themselves are very reminiscent of Pergamum, Greek ruins in Western Turkey. And within the entire 'city' is a fortress-like structure that could easily be mistaken for Troy. The story of the place is that a group of people from east of here, in present day Tanzania, migrated to this valley sometime in the 12th or 13th century (I can't remember which right now). They used granite blocks, which they shaped by first heating the rocks, then dousing them with water to fracture the granite structures. Like the Greeks they splayed the stones so that the lower wall was wider than the top. No mortar was used. Like Pergamum they perched a castle-like fortification on a nearby hill, and put the King's residence there. For six bucks I hired a guide who answered all my silly questions without complaint.
Getting to the ruins was half the fun. My hostel host told me if I hoofed it to a nearby college I could catch a minibus to the ruins. I followed her instructions but one part didn't work out as seemlessly as I expected. The van dropped me off near a dirt track. The driver pointed down the road and said, "Go that way." My first thought was about the warthog that had just crossed in front of our van a mile or two back. My second thought was, "is this guy taking the tourist for a (literal) ride, dumping him in some backwater from which I will never emerge?" But so far everyone in Zimbabwe had been straight with me so I set off through the underbrush to find The Great Zimbabwe. The 'road' was a dirt pathway that had been obviously created by many horsedrawn wagons traversing the ground. Two ruts were separated by some tufts of grass. I walked for a few minutes till I came to a fork in the path. Ahead was a farm house with a lady hanging wash. So I motioned to her. "Left?" I signified. She nodded. So I trod onward, avoiding the feces on the path (cow or baboon?). After a few minutes I came to another paved road. Which way, right or left? I guessed right and, shortly, I noticed bright colors in the distance. Those turned out to be a streetside crafts market. The market ladies shouted instructions to me ("Turn here. Go through the hotel, you'll find the park behind the hotel.")
The ride home to my hostel was even better as I got a ride in the back of a covered pickup truck with an old man and a young girl going my way. The ride to the ruins was $2, the ride back was $1. Can't beat that.
Masvingo, where I 'm staying now, is a small city with an air of commerce about it--unlike Bulawayo. It's not prosperous (the electricity is turned off each night at 4:30) but the stores are very clean, and dozens of young men are engaged in building a sewer system of sorts. Their jackhammers woke me at 5:30 this morning. Most of them are digging with picks and shovels. The sad part is that the sewer is intended to direct all the untreated waste into the city's river. The river is barely a quarter mile from town. And there is a nice crafts market just beyond the river. I can't imagine the stink that this will all bring to the neighborhood, not to mention the trash that will fill the river.
I'm really in a quandary about tomorrow. I could head north to Hararre, the Zimbabwean capital. There's a train from Hararre to my next destination, Gaborone in Botswana. But really there is nothing attracting me to the capital except that Zimbabwe has been such a pleasant surprise. I admit to getting a little tired of all the deprivations of this, very poor, nation. Botswana is likely to be more modern and comfortable. I will probably head south, instead, hoping to catch that same train in Bulawayo tomorrow afternoon. That would get me to Gaborone in two days. But that is really too early. I'd rather get there on about August 2nd. I could head east to Mozambique, but transportation is so bad in Mozambique that I might never make it to Gaborone. Time to study my Lonely Planet.

Monday, July 25, 2011

July 25

I wanted to visit the esteemed natural history museum in Bulawayo today. On my way there I chanced upon 'Centenary Park', Bulawayo's central park. It epitomizes this country and this city. The park has been here for over one hundred years I think. Certainly the trees are magnificent specimens, some over 100 feet in the air. You can see that once upon a time this was a stunning tribute to the city. But time and neglect have rendered it a relic. An old abandoned miniature golf course is at the park's center. There is the shell of a once impressive zoo including an aviary. An old locomotive was once used to take kids around a narrow gauge track within the park. The track is still here and the locomotive sits nearby. There are slides and beautiful walking paths. I saw one elderly man in a uniform gamely watering plants from a lone spigot. Very sad. This park needs a benefactor, someone to spend a couple hundred thousand bucks to revive a once great piece of this community.
After the museum I went in search of something from my Lonely Planet guide. The book showed an Arts & Crafts building on the outskirts of town where locals made and sold art work. I figured that would be a great place to buy a gift. I began walking out Sixth Avenue as my guide book instructed. Within about fifteen minutes I was outside the city proper in a residential district that looked very much like public housing projects all over the world. Block upon block of identical single and double story brick buildings lined my way. The homes were small with about 200 square feet of front 'lawn'. Most had trees out front, citrus and other fruit crops in the majority. A few had paved the front area with decorative stones or cement. Most merely had sand or a few small flowers. Most residents did their gardening on the side or out back where I saw many local veggies being grown.
I got lost, as usual, but was able to quick people on the street often enough that I didn't go far astray. As I neared my objective I was greeted by a flood of school children from a local primary school who were going home for the day apparently. I suspect that the school day here is short owing to the extreme heat that covers most of the school year. I tried to ask for directions from the kids but no one understood my English. Language is an interesting issue in Zimbabwe. There are three languages, Shona, Ndebele, and English. The latter is the official tongue and all store fronts are in English. Yet most people seem to speak the native languages. Last week there was a hullabaloo because some of Mugabe's backers wanted new constitutional changes printed in Shona as well as English. My sense is that this is a side issue that crosses party lines. Anyway, I am most surprised that no store owner has opted to put up Shona or Ndebele signs. Seems like a smart marketing move to me.
I found the Arts & Crafts place. There were two buildings, one for pottery (no good for me; too fragile) and one for other crafts. But, like most things in Zimbabwe in 2011, the crafts people have fallen on hard times. I found a small store with some basic basketry and weaving from which I was able to procure one gift. But I suspect if I'd been there twenty years ago I would have found a more robust facility.
Bulawayo is so reminiscent of Malatya, Turkey, a place I found two years ago. Each has a terrific museum. The Bulawayo Natural History Museum must be one of the finest in Africa. It has hundreds of rare specimens including one stuffed elephant reputed to be the second largest ever taxidermed. Each city also has an interesting archaeological site nearby: Malatya had Arsenteppe, a 6,000 year old dig dating to the Hittites. Bulawayo has the Great Zimbabwe, which I hope to visit tomorrow.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

July 24

Sunday here in a very Christian nation so not much is open. I used the day to wander the streets and read the local press. Surprisingly Zimbabwe has one of the most vibrant presses in the world if my eyes don't deceive me. I'm especially impressed with the Zimbabwe Independent, a mouthpiece of the opposition but also one of the best newspapers I've ever encountered. Zimbabwean politics is fascinating. Mugabe has been president since 1980, another guy who stayed too long. (Insert praise for the redoubtable Nelson Mandela, who just passed his 93rd birthday). In 2000 Mugabe, for understandable reasons, decided to seize all the major farms from their white owners (who got the land under the apartheid-like regimes of the previous century). He abandoned a previous system of buying the land that was funded by Great Britain. The pace was, apparently, glacial. The result of the seizures, however, was chaotic, and self-aggrandizing for those close to Mugabe. They got rich, the country went down the tubes, now listed as the second poorest on the planet. Civil war ensued. It was mostly black against black with tribal loyalties involved. In 2008 a sort of truce was put in place that gave some power to the opposition. That compromise is still in place though this week's newspapers say that Mugabe has rigged up an alternate financing system using money from mining to skirt the regular government finance system.
Bulawayo is a hotbed of opposition and the local press is full of anti-Mugabe rhetoric. All you see on the streets is the end result, an impoverished population hanging on by a thread. Hyper inflation killed most people's savings in the 2000's. The country abandoned their devalued currency and replaced it with US dollars and South African rand. A big issue locally is the scarcity of US coins. This forces businesses to substitute barter for small amounts. Groceries routinely give candy as 'change', which gives opponents a ready source of outrage. About every third business in Bulawayo sells 'air time' for cell phones. Another big chunk sells cell phones and accessories. There are few restaurants in town and nothing that could be called an upscale hotel. Trash pickups are rare, I gather, and residents simply push it into alleys or available out of the way spots. The telltale smell of raw sewage hit me randomly as I walked the streets.
But what really stands out for me is the friendliness of everyone I've met. Waiters, minivan drivers, newspaper vendors, they all give me a big smile and go out of their way to help me. The guy who drove our bus from Vic Falls chased me down the street for two blocks to try to steer me to a good place to stay.
One of the places where European influence really shows itself here is in sports. The papers are full of news from the Premier League in England, and local athletes excel at rugby and cricket.

Yesterday, through the fog of fatigue, I forgot to relate the excitement of our drive from Vic Falls. The land from Vic Falls to Bulawayo is virtually uninhabited. All I ever saw were a few gatherings of thatched roof huts, mostly fewer than five in a cluster. And the roads were almost devoid of personal automobiles. Traffic was mostly buses and semi's hauling freight. It was not a stretch of highway to liven the heart of a hitchhiker.
So when, about 100k. out of Vic Falls, I heard the telltale noise of a muffler dragging under our minibus (a large one, holding about 30 passengers) my heart stopped. The van came to a slow stop in the middle of nowhere. When the driver turned off the engine I began calculating my chances of survival. Thirty people abandoned on the highway. Who would get the few rides available? Certainly not me. The next settlement was probably forty or fifty miles ahead, and even those places probably didn't have hotels or places for me to sleep. And what of the growling teams of baboons I'd seen crossing the road ten minutes ago? Sleeping beside the road was not an option.
There's no drama, here, of course, because I made it to Bulawayo. The driver snarled, then pulled out a rope. In a few minutes he was thrusting his coat on the ground under the chassis. Somehow he managed to tie up the muffler well enough to get us 300k. further down the road.

I plan to stay here a day or two more before heading out to the Great Zimbabwe.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

July 23, I think

I spent the day motoring from Livingstone, Zambia to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. I learned never to invest in a used copy of Lonely Planet. It cost me today. I got to the Zimbabwe border this morning confident that there was no visa cost, but that was old info. I needed $30. So I had to backtrack to Livingstone, Zambia to get the cash. Luckily a kindly cab driver went out of his way to help me, even to the extent of finding friendly money changers, so it all worked out just fine. Once across the border I found a minivan headed to Bulawayo. It was an eight hour journey on a hard seat but I enjoyed it. I feel better being back on the regular bus lines and off the tours for a while.
I'm dead tired and haven't the energy for a long post. I had some trouble when I got here finding a bank that would take my ATM card (strange fact: the national currency of Zimbabwe is the US dollar) but eventually settled that. I also struggled to locate a good, cheap place to stay but that, too, is now old news. So I'm optimistic. I plan to stay here at least one full day before heading for a historical site called 'The Great Zimbabwe".

Thursday, July 21, 2011

July 16 to July 22

I've been camping and out of touch for a week but it looks like I can post today:


July 17

Call this three degrees of separation from home. The first degree is any foreign land. The second degree is the small towns and villages of the world away from some or all of the comforts of home. The third degree is to travel away from the villages into the hinterland, on a 4x4 truck, for instance, deep into the jungle or the desert. In this case it is something of both. Call this a dry swamp. Officially it is named the Okavango Delta, a confluence of rivers in northwest Botswana.

We got here by trucking for two days from Windhoek, east into Botswana. Most of this nation encompasses the Kalahari Desert, a vast land of acacia trees and thorn trees and low shrubs. Unfortunately, like many areas of Southern Africa, the ‘wildlife’ is more likely to be beef cattle than leopards or wildebeest. The habitations are traditional round huts of the Bush People. Every once in a while if you peer into the bush beside the highway you see a small collection of these huts. Their means of survival are few as far as I can see: goats, donkeys, and cattle. There isn’t enough water to sustain farming I don’t think. At least I saw no evidence of agriculture.

If you hang a left somewhere inside Botswana and head north you come to the only non-arid territory hereabouts. But even here the vivid blue water is surrounded by white, white sand. It’s as if someone quickly superimposed a swamp onto a desert. To get to our campground we had to off load from our truck and board a ponderous 4x4 ‘bus’. We plowed through swampland for 40 minutes till we came to a beautiful resort on a wide expanse of the river.

My group this time consists of five tourists and two guides. Manni is the black Namibian leader of our expedition. Solidly built with a deep, authoritative voice, he is a perfect choice to guide us. His sidekick is Joseph, a younger, smaller version of Manni. They sit up front.

In back are the six of us. Marcus and Laura are Germans from Munich. He is a biologist working on vaccines. Irene is a middle-aged manager for Ska Travel headquartered in Melbourne, Australia. She is on a kind of busman’s holiday, checking out our tour company at the same time as getting some vacation time away from her family. Omer and Tom are from Jerusalem, at least now that is where they live. Tom grew up in Farmingdale, Long Island about ten miles from my hometown. They are in their early 50’s I’d guess with adult children back home.

Just as we were leaving Namibia I grabbed a newspaper. Inside was a revealing story about a group of lions formerly resident in northwest Namibia near the Angola border. In fact these lions were observed trekking across the border a few years ago and quickly fitted with collars for environmental study and in a vain attempt to keep the lions—and their human neighbors—safe.

It started with one male, one female, and a cub. Before long there were two males and several cubs, a total of ten lions in the group. Then someone got a license to hunt one of the males. It turns out that wildlife hunting is so lucrative that the Namibian government is willing to risk losing some of their tourist attractions to reap this bounty. For tens of thousands of dollars you can go on a sanctioned hunt, which someone did---though apparently there was some dispute about who provided the sanction and whether they had the right to do so. But the lion was killed. The theory is that if only males are killed you still retain females to bear the litters.

You can guess the rest of the story. In the wet season the four-legged delicacies that form the lion’s diet migrated elsewhere. So the lions began eating cattle and donkeys of the local folk. So some of the lions were shot. Then, last week, the last three lions were found poisoned. The need to protect livestock trumped the more abstract need to protect the tourist industry. How this will end I don’t know. Tourism is a very big business in Namibia. There is a high school in Windhoek that is set up to train young people for the various tourist vocations. But one hunt for an elephant reportedly yielded over $100,000 for a farmer last year.

My eleven-day tour so far has been dull. Out of five days so far elapsed I’ve spent four days being driven around in a large van. But it looks like the next six days will be more active. We shall see.

July 18

The sense that is most useful in the Okavango is hearing. People talk about how you can see so many stars when you are away from the glare of modern life but no one mentions that out here you can hear things that generally are obscured by the noise of crowded life. Last night the woman in the tent next to me coughed in the middle of the night and I started, certain she had mysteriously invaded my tent.

So when we took off on little two-person canoes to explore the delta the things I noticed were sounds: the buzzing of insects; the mournful honks of geese; the soft splash of the pole rhythmically pushing us through fields of papyrus and reeds; the one, lone propeller-driven airplane overhead; the guttural bleats of the hippo we could hear but not see. And, later, the grunts of an elephant that was so far away he was only visible through the lens of the ubiquitous telescopic photo lens of my tour mates.

The day was vivid without being interesting. We were told over and over again that we might not see any wildlife; they migrate so fast that no one can predict where the rare elephant or hippo might be observed. But, nonetheless, we were all disappointed at one distant pachyderm and a guileless young croc who didn’t have enough sense to run away. The baobab trees were polite enough to awe. I didn’t know they were deciduous. So here were these odd looking things that seemed from another planet, leafless with branches like robot arms in a sci-fi thriller. I half expected them to lift up one foot and shuffle across the island.

Despite being in such an isolated location I can’t escape the calculations of freighted life; can I rationalize this expense? Most of my time has been moving from place to place in a van or a boat or hoofing it overland. The experience is ephemeral, in passing, summative. Every place is strange, and yet familiar. Is the Okavango fundamentally different from a trip south of New Orleans or on some Australian river? Is the Kalahari so startlingly unique that my senses are sharpened? No. So how can I justify such an expense? And yet, without the tourist infrastructure I would never have seen any of this and my trip would have been hopscotching from one hostel to the next, never really seeing African life. All this might not be worth the money; yet the alternative would have been to simply mark time in an existence I might have had as readily in Taos as Botswana.

My travelling companions are all veterans of this sort of thing and, so, sensitive to the obeisance’s and courtesies that allow six adults to share confined spaces without making anyone feel put upon. And yet, as often happens to me, my odd status as a single person of advanced age makes it hard for me to fit in. Spouses talk to spouses, young people talk to young people, and travelers talk with people they can relate to. I don’t fit any category. And I lack the vivacity to attract people to me.

Nights around the campfire are fun. We call the fire Namibian television. But the conversation is light, no confidences are exchanged, and I feel cheated of the chance to tell my life story, or to thrash out the world’s politics as I’ve done in Tbilisi and Suvanaket and…Now that I think of it I realize that those kinds of exchanges are the exceptions that stand out in my memory. Most of my stops around the world are of a kind with this place, solitary or with superficial chit chat.

We have five days left on this jaunt. If my theory is correct we’ll have one day or night that will be memorable that might make the whole expense of time and treasure worthwhile.

July 19

“Danger Crocodiles”. The sign next to our campground for the night says it all. We motored most of the day northward, back across the border to Namibia. We are actually only a few miles from Angola to the north and Botswana to the east. We came here mostly to drive through a game park along the Okavango. For my tour mates this is what they’d come for; a chance to view hippos and elephants and zebras up close from our van/truck. I wasn’t blasé about the whole thing but I also wasn’t captivated. My broken down little used camera is out of place in this group as much as I feel I am, myself, most of the time.

But last night, sitting before the campfire, I must say that I felt much better. We began solving the world’s problems, as I hope we would. The chitchat of previous evenings gave way to more substantive discussions; and I felt much more a member of the cadre than I had the past few evenings.

We stopped for the night here at “Rainbow Campground” a secluded little spot on the river—hence the warning sign. Tomorrow we head off northeastward through a little Namibian panhandle (consult your Google maps of Namibia) that will take us close to Zambia, our ultimate destination three days hence.

Our group has settled into a daily routine. We wake at either 6am or 7am and begin to pack up our meager belongings. Then we disassemble each of our four tents. Meanwhile our two guides begin breakfast (cereal and/or bread and butter or jam). We place our backpacks, sleeping pads, sleeping bags, blankets (it gets down to around five degrees Celsius most nights), and other necessities on a tarp for loading onto the van. Only then do we get to sit down before the campfire and eat. When we arrive at the next day’s camp we reverse the process, unloading, then tent construction, Joseph cooks us supper.

July 20, 2011

A trip through Chobe National Park begins an hour before dawn. About a dozen of us boarded an open-topped van for the short ride from our campsite to the park. Our guide was Michael: “You can call me Mike.”

Mike’s English was British enough to sound distinguished but African enough to sound quaint. Multisyllabic words he rendered staccato. CAM EH RAH. AN EE MAHL. But, like many people who come to English late, Mike hasn’t felt the need for all those linking words. “The road, i’tis rocky. You have camera, it might fall, break. Better keep in pocket for now.”

The park was stark—he said rhymingly. I expected grass but all we saw was white, endless sand. There were trees, most of them deciduous so few leaves to look at this time of the year. There were shrubs. Where else would the lions hide? We never saw any lions, a great disappointment to all concerned. We did get a fleeting look at a leopard. You should understand that Botswana tourism is based upon wholesaling lots of visitors in lodges, then trucking them retail in vans to drive through the park. I don’t know how many vans were in the park today but enough so that when the word went out via shortwave radio that someone had seen a leopard we found ourselves blocked from the animal by six or eight other, almost identical, vehicles. All we actually saw was the rear end of her body dashing between a couple vans ahead of us.

We saw lots of animals: dozens of giraffes, a few elephants, buffalo, jackals, vultures, endless varieties of antelope, birds by the score, a squirrel, hippos on the river below us, and, most importantly, a hyena. I can now testify that a hyena is a uniquely ugly, intimidating, unsociable, malevolent, unsanitary beast. I know this because the animals of Chobe are so inured to human presence (at least if you stay in your van—people on feet are another story) that they go about their business without paying much attention to the gawkers. (One giraffe kept munching away at the leaves of a roadside tree even after we motored up within ten yards of him.) Our hyena crossed the road in front of us carrying the carcass of some kind of antelope. His massive jaw tugged his prize to a convenient spot beside the road. Then he slowly backed up from the thing till he found a good vantage point to check out the competition. There were two jackals—little guys compared to the behemoth hyena—circling, hoping for just a taste. And a flock of vultures landed on the sand across the road, obviously waiting to see how things played out.

Mike says the hyena was nervous that the original owner of the carcass, perhaps a lion, would return to reclaim his or her breakfast. This fearsome looking thing with massive front legs and a sloping body that ended with shorter hind legs looked like the devil himself to me. But he apparently lacked confidence about his ability to retain this meat if someone bigger and badder came along. So we sat in our van staring at this guy while he surveyed the odds that he could eat without being disturbed. Finally, after about ten minutes, and, especially, after the jackals began sniffing too close for comfort, Mr. Hyena returned to his prize and began dragging it into the underbrush. That was the last we saw of him.

Even after five days of this chasing after big game I don’t have any great insights into how this all fits into the lives of the people of Southern Africa. What I see is a kind of monoculture of tourism. Every country has its legions of tour companies selling visits to the various national parks, everyone doing the same thing, showing the same animals, using the same tents and vans and propane tanks. It seems akin to that other bulwark of the African economy, mining. Admittedly elephants are a renewable resource but my impression is that, in fact, these living things are not going to be renewed, that gradually they will be killed off leaving the continent impoverished in the same way that the diamond mines are doing. The lions of Northern Namibia are gone through a combination of hunting and poisoning. Rhino poaching is one of the most lucrative occupations in South Africa. Desertification and urbanization is swallowing up habitat.

There needs to be a Steve Jobs of African tourism, someone to dream up the next big thing; something that preserves the animals and plants for posterity but that requires more human intellectual input, making for a more diversified industry. Africans need to create their own high value products rather than selling this basic tourism thing.

We’re due for part deux of our park project in about two hours. This time we will sail down the Chobe River, which borders the park to the north. We’ll be looking for crocodiles and elephants and hippos.

In the 18th century in France the courtiers at Versailles used to go to the King’s bedchamber to watch him eat and perform his ablutions. That was the image I had today on the river. In a semicircle were about a dozen flat-bottomed watercraft of various descriptions. There was one two-story aluminum catamaran-style boat; several boats that looked like a London double-decker bus without the wheels; a few small aluminum boats that held no more than a dozen tourists. All had Mercury outboard motors. And all were arrayed so that the passengers could watch one or more elephants stuff eelgrass into their gaping mouths—or in one case simply watch a regal bull make his way across the river back to the Botswana side. The Chobe forms the border between Namibia and Botswana. The Namibia side is flat and fecund with grasses because it is submerged during the recently-departed rainy season. The Botswana side in a gradually sloping hillside of red soil spotted with tall trees.

We didn’t spend all our time watching elephants. The hippos were present and accounted for. They had the easiest role. They sat sleeping in the mud along the river bank, except when one member of the ‘raft’ (which the guide informed us was the name for a group of hippos) yawned.

And we saw crocodiles, again sleeping. They ran our boat up within ten yards of this dozing monster and he (or she) never moved a muscle. What predates a crocodile, afterall?

July 22, 2011

You know, immediately, when you enter Zambia that you are in a different world. The climate north of the Zambezi is clearly more tropical, warmer, more ‘Central’ Africa. But you also know, when you cross the border, that you ain’t in Botswana (or Namibia or South Africa) anymore.

You cross into Zambia on a boat, a ferry to be exact. Before you get to the ferry landing you pass a quarter mile of parked semi-trailers hauling beer and lumber and all manner of goods. The ferry is a remnant of a former time. High up top is a lone captain surveying the narrow crossing. The distance is about twice what Ichiro could manage on a throw from the outfield. And the ferry is equally modest in size. It can hold, at best, five automobiles—or one semi-trailer and a couple compact cars. Foot passengers fit themselves along the sides as best they can. Local passengers are likely to be carrying something, something for sale on the Zambia side. Cases of hard cider seemed to be the most popular item. Young men spent most of the time that the ferry docked on the Botswana side toting cases and cases of the stuff. Riding beside the ferry were about a dozen two-person canoes being poled across the river. These were, we were told, the smugglers. There seemed to be no need to be surreptitious about this ‘crime’. The ferry was not an orderly place.

And immigration is similarly chaotic. Once you get to the Zambia side you join the queue of people bearing blankets and TV’s and the aforementioned cider. If you are lucky (we were) there are only a few folks ahead of you. But our driver wasn’t so lucky. He languished in an office signing paperwork and paying fees for over an hour while we waited in the van. But, eventually, we were on our way to Livingstone, Zambia, named for the bible-toting paterfamilias of this place—at least as far as the white inhabitants are concerned. The principal reason for coming here is to view Victoria Falls, an impressive deluge of water.

We saw the Falls. We took pictures. We did the usual tourist things. I was suitably awed but hungered for some contact with local folks or something that didn’t involve elephants or canoes. We got our contact with Zambian folk, but it wasn’t the kind I was looking for.

We decided to eat out for a change instead of the campfire fare. We chose an upscale place on the main drag in Livingstone. We arrived at 7:45 and ordered. Eight o’clock came; then 8:30; 9:00, 9:30. No food. Waiters disappeared into the kitchen. They returned bearing beverages, but little food was evident.

Then a meal was delivered, spare ribs. The menu mentioned 500 grams of meat. Three small pieces of beef testified to about 50 grams on my tourmate’s plate. He sent it back. More waiting. Then a few meals were brought. But the spare ribs people (there were three such orders) were mealless. Finally one brave woman in our party marched into the kitchen herself. Much shouting was heard. She returned with some rice for the spare ribs folks. More waiting. Another trip to the kitchen. More shouting. This time her visit was prolonged, but, voila, finally she returned with the spare rib meals for herself and her fellow sufferers.

But our suffering was not over. We waited for the spare ribs folks to finish their meals. Then we tried to get a bill. Much adding was done by the waitress on a nearby calculator. Totals were added and re-added. Mistakes were made. Finally, at 10:45 the last of us escaped the Zambian version of service. The lesson is, don't be in a hurry in Zambia.

I have one more night in the tent here in Livingstone. I then hope to travel into Zimbabwe tomorrow.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Thursday, July 14





The Namibian Desert is not a desert. When I saw it I thought of descriptions I’d read of the San Joaquin Valley before modern agriculture brought water. The valley bottoms are dry most of the year but there is enough rain in the winter to support low growing shrubs and one species of Acacia tree.












But there is something here in Southern Namibia that looks desertlike:

Sand. Red sand. Huge piles of red sand. The world’s largest sand dunes. But the sand got here in a strange way. To the east is the Kalahari Desert, in Botswana. The winds blow west. The sand moved with the wind to Namibia. Then the prevailing winds from the Antarctic carried it northward to its present location.

What you see to the right are tourists climbing Dune #45 (they're numbered). There are hundreds of these dunes in the Nambian 'desert'.

The Namibians have cast their lot with tourism. Instead of trying to convert the valleys to agriculture with their own version of the Central Valley Water Project they have sealed off thousand of hectares of land for wildlife and nature. There isn’t a town of any size within 200 kilometers of here. But tourists are trucked in by the hundreds to climb the dunes (see picture above), trek through the dry valleys and wonder at rocks and oryx and springboks. The strange part of this is the herdlike way that the humans behave. This morning at 6am there was a traffic jam worthy of the Long Island Expressway at the gate of our campground. The gates open each morning at 6. The sun rises at about 6:45. And every tour group has its charges safely tucked into the African travel vans that they all use. Once the gate opens the idea is the race down the two-lane road to Dune #45 (yes, they are numbered). Once at #45 the tourists are released to race up the dune to photograph the sunrise.

I did get a photo of the sunrise:


This is the first three days of my eleven-day tour. We started out in the middle of the country at Windhoek, and drove about 225 miles south to the campground. Tomorrow we return to Windhoek just in time for me to embark on the eight-day, northern trip to Botswana and Zambia.

The sad part of all this is that I haven’t been able to find a friend among the twelve fellow travellers on this trip. Most of them are agriculture teachers at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Two young women are middle school teachers from Manhattan. Thrown in a woman from Germany and a woman from Holland and you have my group. But only two of these folks are in my age range and my natural shyness undermines my ability to feel comfortable with strangers. So I definitely feel like an outsider.

On the positive side I quickly realized that this is a part of the world that I never would have seen except for one of these tours. There just isn’t anything or anyone near here. You just can’t hop a minivan or stick out your hitchhiking finger and get here. It is a beautiful region. This photography thing is not my usual schtick but since I took pictures I might as well use them:

Of all the countries I've visited in the past six or seven years Namibia seems to one to earn "Most Likely To Succeed". It has problems (40% official unemployment although many of these are working illicitly); the residue of apartheid (though race relations here seem light years ahead of South Africa); lack of industry (but they just discovered oil of the coast). You just don't feel the tension here that you feel in South Africa. Downtown Windhoek gives the appearance of a multi-racial democracy.

Tomorrow I leave on a five day trip northward, ending at Victoria Falls in Zambia. After that I don't know where I'm going, maybe to

Zimbabwe, maybe Mozambique, maybe Angola or Tanzania. I've spent too much money already but still have enough to wander if I choose. Or I may simply find a hotel in Zambia or Botswana and relax for a few days to conserve funds. I was lonely on the southern Namibia trip and I'm mostly hoping I can make some friends on the northern tour.




Monday, July 11, 2011

Tuesday, July 12

After my 22 hour bus ride (the bus, believe it or not, ran out of gas about 50k. outside Windhoek) I'm not certain what day it is. I'm in a state of the art hostel in Windhoek wondering if I've made an error. $7/hr for WiFi access...an outrageous price. Everything in this place is overpriced but I decided to buy one of their expensive tours nonetheless. $2,000 for eleven days. Too much money for a cheapskate like me but the tour seems irresistable: wildlife, desert dunes, Victoria Falls in Namibia, four countries all together with several days camping and a couple days at a fancy lodge. You only live once (and I haven't that much living left to do), that's my rationalization for spending too much money. We leave tomorrow. My one hour voucher for internet access is ready to expire so I can't write much. I hope I can find access somewhere on my tour.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Sunday, July 10

I did almost nothing yesterday. I took a catamaran (sp?) sail on the bay for about ninety minutes and bought some gifts but little else. I did get a new roommate, a fellow from Shanghai on a round the world trip. He's a grad student in math at the University of Chicago so his brain is probably about twice the size of mine. I'm off to a 19 hour bus ride to Namibia in two hours. When I get there I hope to sign on for a seven day tour which might involve camping out and might remove me from the internet. Can't say for sure yet.

Friday, July 8


I began the day determined to get to the botanical gardens without paying the $20 bus ride that the tour companies charge. If you have ever been to the gardens above UC Berkeley you know exactly what the Capetown gardens look like. Just as in N.California when you sit among the plants looking out towards the bay you see that this place was selected. You feel as if you are there to welcome visitors through the entrance to the bay.

I devised a strategy for cheap transportation. I took the minivan along the base of the mountain northward toward where I would be directly beneath the gardens. That was ninety cents. After exiting the van I turned right and headed up the hill towards the gardens. It took me about ninety minutes with a few minor false turns but eventually I came upon the place.
My walk took me through a wealthy white suburb. I thought I'd show you the way that South Africa whites protect themselves from blacks. They even have devised a way to dispense with black police officers. At the entrance to the suburb is a small white shack housing the office of the private security cops who roam the neighborhood on bikes and cars. A complete society segregated from South African society at large. Hop in your Mercedes (by far the most common vehicle), drive to work, then return home in the same sealed vehicle. No need to interact with blacks except as servants and employees of your company.
Admission was 37 Rand, about five bucks. I spent a few hours touring the place with one nap on a park bench way up at the top. It is not the most exciting botanical place I've ever been--too neat and tidy for that. An army of black gardeners tends the place for the (90%) white visitors.














I've only found two botanic gardens in my travels that really knocked me out, one outside Havana, the other on the Black Sea in Batumi, Georgia. The most 'interesting' of all was probably the Soviet Era gardens in Yerevan, Armenia, which have apparently been neglected for twenty years. I want some wealthy member of the Armenian diaspora to take on the task of renovating that place, which has a wonderful location in the middle of Yerevan. Someone will surely buy up the land and build apartment buildings if someone doesn't act soon.

After the gardens I headed back to my hostel to get dressed for the play, Purgatorio, that I was to attend at the University of Capetown. Again the minivans got me there (and home) cheaply. The play is by Chilean dramatist Ariel Dorfmann. {Advisory: long, dull play review follows}
This claustrophobic work features just two actors, a man and a woman. Each is resident in hell, which in this case is a psychiatric ward. In life they had been man and wife, but now, in the prison-like conditions of the ward, they don't recognize each other. This allows both to alternate playing psychiatrist to each other. We gradually learn the the husband dumped the wife for a younger woman; which inspired the wife to murder their two sons and at least one other member of the family. The husband committed suicide. A cheery pair. The conceit of the story is that each partner knows they can return to life if they can get their former spouse to confess his or her sins in front of a camera operated by whoever is in charge of this place.
Neither succeeds because neither partner is truly remorseful. They both, ultimately, confess that they would do it all over again if they had the chance.
Eugene O'Neill did a much better job with this whole idea in The Iceman Cometh. In O'Neill's scenario hell is a bar and the characters are genuinely remorseful--at least when they are sufficiently tanked--but it all leads to nothing. O'Neill's characters break your heart. You can see that their redemption would be simply; all they'd need to do is get sober. In Dorfmann's play the audience (or at least this audience member) has no identification with the characters. I guess Dorfmann wanted to drive home the futility of the church's remedies for human sin. Confess and your sins will be removed is the church mantra, right? But in modern times we all know enough about psychiatry and the unconscious mind to realize that our confessions are superficial and basically insincere, meant only to last long enough to shield us from hell fire. But Dorfmann's characters are so unlikeable that you end up contented that they will spend their days in endless dialogue, in hell, trying to get the other spouse to repent.
It was worth seeing but not a great play

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Thursday, July 7

Not in the mood to do much writing today. I'm alone in my hostel, all the other tenants having moved on. My WiFi theft didn't work last night so I've been out of touch. Spent much of yesterday on the mountain that looms 1,300m. above the city. I have a few pictures but won't be able to use them till I can get WiFi. Undecided what to do tomorrow. My rent for the hostel runs out so I might just use that as an excuse to move on to Namibia. Disspirited overall.

Since I was in such a gloomy mood today it seemed like the time to do one of my long walks. I decided to try to walk to the big botanical garden. My map showed it as quite distant and up a hill but I figured I'd just keep walking till I got there. I trekked up a sloping road for about two hours. Then I came to a place where the road turned into a highway, first two lanes, then three, finally five. Cars were speeding by me at 60mph+. But I was determined to keep going. When the pathway beside the road petered out I found a drainage ditch which paralleled the road. I trod through this ditch for about a quarter mile hoping the highway would return to being a road forthwith. But, instead, the drainage ditch became more and more impassable. Shrubs grew over the top of the ditch making my way more difficult. Then I came upon evidence of a homeless encampment in the ditch. That scared me. The thought of meeting guys up here above the highway was not something I could face. I sat down to contemplate what I should do.
So back down the hill I went. But this time I headed straight down. I had an idea to continue my walk, but this time in search of the University of Cape Town. I knew it was somewhere in the city below me. It took me another 90 minutes of walking but finally I came upon the campus. I'd read in the Cape Times that the university theater was performing a play by the Chilean dramatist Ariel Dorfman. And there before me was the theater. So I bought a ticket for Friday night.
Then I decided to wander around the campus.
You can see that the campus is very much like UC Berkeley: on a hill overlooking the community is serves. And like most US schools this place loves to coat its buildings in Boston Ivy (Parthenocissus quinquefolia). Thus UCT is an ivy league school. \School is out of session so any conclusions I might draw are dubious, but from what I witnessed UCT is about half white and half everyone else. I saw absolutely no mingling of students of different colors--which is in contrast to Cape Town as a whole where there is significant blending of the races. I couldn't get into the library as it was reserved for students. Overall it seemed very much like any comparable school in the US. The one that came most to mind was St. Mary's U in the East Bay. To get back to my hotel I grabbed a minibus. It's interesting to see the different minibus cultures around the world. The Cape Town version is very similar to those in Georgia and Armenia. The bus is operated by a driver and a tout who takes the money and arbitrates or arranges seating. His job is to stuff as many paying customers in the van as the patrons will tolerate. What is unique here is that the tout works much harder than any place I've ever been before. When the van comes near an intersection--of which there are many--he whistles to anyone on the street hoping to attract their attention. If that doesn't avail he jumps out of the van and gets face to face with anyone who looks like a prospect. For the longest time I couldn't figure out what the tout kept shouting till I saw a sign in one van: "Wineburg" (shouted with a South African accent it sounds like some African language). Winebury, I gather, is the nether end of the line.
So today wasn't very touristically productive but I did get in several hours of walking which should add up to some weight loss before this trip is over, at least I hope so.