TravelStream™ news feed for member stevecori on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/stevecori en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:57:43 -0400 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1188475920/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1188475920/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1188475920/tpod.html Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:57:43 -0400 There is travel after a RTW - absconding again from corporate America for 5 week spin around southern Africa.

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Lower Zambezi National Park, Zambia

Originating in the high plains of Angola, the Upper Zambezi River trickles south toward Zambia, gaining momentum until it steamrolls over the precipice of Victoria Falls - a massive faultline that cleaves in two the central southern African countryside. From there, it caroms down class five rapids, crashing through the Batoka Gorge before emptying out into the placid waters of Lake Kariba, southern Africa's largest man-made lake. Only after the Zambezi's pent up waters are released through the gates at Kariba Dam, slowly tracing the channel carved through the floodplain between Zambia and Zimbabwe, does the Lower Zambezi begin to work its magic.

We were seduced by the notion of visiting this portion of the Zambezi, which, unlike its cousin the Upper Zambezi, with its histrionics and flare for the dramatic, is amenable to being explored by canoe, slowly and quietly. Our launching point was the confluence of the Zambezi and the Kafue River - a watercourse used more by locals than by wildlife and therefore one that was used by our guide, Martin, as a training ground for techniques in canoeing. Martin showed us the basics involved in steering and powering a canoe - a delicate task for a married couple to undertake, no doubt - and then we pushed off the bank and glided into the muddy waters of the Kafue, exhilarated by the magic of beginning our African river journey.

Our efforts in canoe maneuvering must have satisfied Martin, since we drifted without additional instruction until, fourteen kilometers later, just before the confluence of the Kafue and the Lower Zambezi, Martin motioned us over to the river bank, where he briefed us on the five main dangers of the river adventure about which we were about to embark. The first three - sun, wind, and underwater obstacles - could prove daunting challenges, but we imagined we were up to the task, if armed with sunscreen and drinking water, and a fair portion of vigilance in avoiding the hazards lurking underneath. The last two, however, Martin warned, might be more tricky - we'd have to be on the lookout for crocodiles and hippos. While in the canoe, crocs wouldn't bother with us, but on land we'd have to stay away from the riverbank unless Martin accompanied us, and always away from the edge at night. As for the hippos, Martin cautioned, we should always treat them with great respect: hippos have been charged with the greatest number of human fatalities than any other animal in Africa. On land, we were not to approach them on foot, as hippos will charge anything they perceive as blocking their path back to the water. And in the water, we'd have to follow Martin's navigational instructions carefully; over the course of the next five days, he would knock on the bottom of his canoe at close intervals, which would wake submerged hippos sleeping on the riverbed and bring them to the surface, where we could give them wide berth.

And then we were off, effortlessly easing into the Zambezi, letting its quiet but strong current pull us along. Sparse, flat-topped acacia trees dotted the riverbanks, and reed-choked islands slipped into view and melted past as we dipped our oars in and out. After half a kilometer, Martin did as he said he would and tapped on his canoe bottom, a sound which he said could be sensed by hippos up to two kilometers away. Sure enough, we heard a short sigh in the distance, and we spotted two ears peeking just above the water's surface several hundred meters away. Soon the noise of spouting came to us in surround-sound as dozens of hippos showed their whiskered snouts, wary but curious about the underwater commotion.

That afternoon, Martin guided us to the sandy shore of a river island, where we were to spend the night. We began to set up tents on a flat, hard-packed area under the shade of some thorny trees, but Martin stopped us. "Not there," he said, "the elephants may pass right by those trees." Certain he was joking, we shrugged and relocated to his suggested spot about twenty-five yards away.

Martin prepared dinner as we sipped sundowners and, appropriately, watched as an ochre African sun began its hazy descent beyond the river. Giant fireflies shone neon green beacons amongst the marshes; like miniature airplanes, we could trace their course by following their luminescent signals. Frogs sang lusty paeans to the dusk, and crickets added their squeaks to create a noisy, cacophonous riot of sound. Later, after a simple but filling meal, a full moon swam on the horizon, casting a creamy glow on the river, which barely illuminated shapes of elephants on the far bank. These behemoths splashed and played in the water and, then, as we strained to hear their movements, they swam over to our island, where they emerged on land just fifty meters away from our camp. Silently lumbering toward us, two enormous males spotted us fifteen meters out, froze, and flapped their ears menacingly in our direction for two minutes - but what seemed like an eternity - before concluding we posed no threat and making their way toward the tree under which we had initially set up our tents. Their silhouettes, backlit by the moon, passed right over the rejected site and finally settled to eat contentedly, destroying much of the surrounding shrubbery in the process. Sleeping was difficult that night, given our excitement about our near encounter, but also because the elephants continued to make noise right outside our tent for the duration of the night.

The next several days served up an African safari by canoe. Floating along the Zambezi's banks, we were presented glimpses of waterbuck or impala grazing alongside troupes of noisy chacra baboons foraging. We watched as hippos hauled their hulking masses out of the river to consume their daily allotment of eighty kilograms of roughage. And occasionally we'd spot a crocodile sunning himself on a narrow riverine shelf, the sun warming his prehistoric spines and scales. But the most stunning tableaus belonged again to the monarch of the riverbank, the elephant. Often, elephants grazing on the bank would surprise us as we interrupted them in the midst of a leafy snack. At other times we would find large herds quenching their thirst in the heat of mid-day at river's edge. Once, rounding a bend in the river, we came upon an elephant splashing knee-deep in the water; when he spotted us, he backed up against the steep riverbank, but he was unable to pull himself from the water before we floated within ten meters of his tusks. After we had passed, and our hearts had stopped pounding, we glanced back only to find him almost entirely submerged, swimming in our wake to the opposite shore.

At night, Martin would prepare dinner and make a roaring fire, after which we'd all eat ravenously while listening to river sounds. Then, after the meal and the washing was completed, Martin would tell us about Zambia and her politics - earlier troubles with corruption, the renewed hope of the nation under new leadership, the triumphs and foibles of political personalities. He also spoke more personally about the difficulties facing him and others as Zambians - the burden of scraping together a dowry of eighteen cattle to present to his girlfriend's family before they would bless the marriage, his worry of reports that employees of the National Bank were making illicit withdrawals from account holders' reserves, the stories of witchdoctors and black magic practices in villages where children might be sacrificed in order to further a parent's success in business or love.

Our last night on the river, while Martin cooked, we sipped tea and munched on snacks while monitoring the goings and comings of a local pod of hippos that stationed itself nearby our campsite. The hippos occasionally surfaced, spouting water, after which they'd emit low bass grunts to communicate with one another before opening their giants maws wide to yawn, their enormous teeth prominently on display. Just then, a lone male elephant ambled up the shoreline, not five meters from our campsite, in search of new trees to eat. We remained still and he maundered past, ears flapping and tail laconically swishing. We can never look at camping in the same way again.

Having canoed about eighty kilometers, we reluctantly hung up our paddles the next day for one last day of activities: a morning bush walk, during which Martin accompanied us around a large open expanse (so that we cold easily spot elephants in the distance and steer clear of them) while telling us about the flora and fauna of the area, followed by a mid afternoon hike up a nearby dry creekbed in search of elusive leopards that might inhabit the ravine. Later that afternoon, we visited a local village and learned how its inhabitants built mud huts, farmed, and ground and pounded maize to make meallie pap, a local staple. The village visit concluded with a little play time with dozens of local kids, whom Steve entertained with his antics. And finally, that night, we headed out on a night game drive in an open air safari vehicle. Martin manned a big bright spotlight, moving its beam around erratically to catch the glint of an animal's eyes in the headlights. We spotted an aardvark, numerous hippos, hyenas, and impala before catching a leopard's eyes in our crosshairs. And, although we never caught up to the leopard, Steven's appetite was whetted, which set the stage for our future wildlife encounters in the heart of Southern Africa.

]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/long_honeymoon/1156821780/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/long_honeymoon/1156821780/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/long_honeymoon/1156821780/tpod.html Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:34:06 -0400 After our wedding in Crested Butte Colorado, we set off for a 1 year trip around the world that will take us to central + south america, northern africa, india, laos, china, mongolia, russia + turkey.

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Denver, Colorado, United States

Time sure flys when you are having fun, but since we have been back in the US we have noticed that time can also move at a pretty fast clip when things start to get a bit less exciting. We made arrangements to have one week of downtime after we got back home and before we both started working again, and perhaps not surprisingly this was one of our craziest weeks in the past year. In addition to finalizing our apartement plans in Denver, moving our junk from Colorado Springs to Denver, and trying desperately to get the stench of the road off our bodies before we had to become professionals again, we also found ourselves on the market for a car. The net result of these assorted perigrinations is that within the first few days of our return we had officially re-established our national identity: we had ingested fast food, shopped at Wal-Mart, bought a new car, registered to vote, and adopted the uniquely American pace of life.

In retrospect we both agree that this frenetic pace turned out to be a good thing, even if it was a major shock to the system. Yanking ourselves from the idealic life we had been living where well over 50% of the time we had no real clue where we would be the following week and where at least 95% of the time neither of us knew or cared what day it was was bound to feel like a slap in the face, but had our schedules allowed us time to quietly reflect on the extent of the change we were working though it would certainly have been more difficult.

We also compiled a few lists that we thought might be interesting to share. These sorts of things change as quickly as our moods do, but it is at least an effort to document our answers to those most common questions folks tend to ask about our trip.

TOP SMALL TOWNS
1 - Bariloche (San Martin), Argentina
2 - Yangsho, China
3 - Luang Prabang, Laos
4 - Cesky Kremlov, Czech Republic
5 - Cusco, Peru
6 - Antingua, Guatemala
7 - San Malo, France
8 - Takayama, Japan
9 - Goreme, Turkey
10 - Crested Butte, USA

MOST MEMORABLE MEALS
1 - Mango Café in Hoi An
2 - Mango sticky rice under the stars
3 - Sausages and crackers on the trail in Torres
4 - Lebanese feast with Naji
5 - IndoChine Restaurant in KL
6 - Mexico City Los Girasoles
7 - gorgonzola gnocchi in Hoi An
8 - Brasilian churrascaria
9 - Sushi with Naji
10 - Traditional Palestinian dessert in Amman

RUNNERS UP
Goat roast in Mongolia
Tajine in Berber tent
Fsh at Flavio's shack in the Amazon
Free champagne will get you sick in Salta meal,
Chicken rice with Josh and Eric in Singapore
Our failed Thanksgiving feast in San Martin
Argentinian steak meal for Christmas in BA
Goa restaurant with cow looking on
Vending machine noodles in Kyoto
Olde Hansa in Tallinn
Sandy koshary from the Pyramids
Cheap chai and coffee on Indian Railways
Fried guinea pig in Arequipa

BEST LODGING DEALS VALUE FOR DOLLAR
1 - San Martin cabana
2 - KL Sheraton
3 - La Paz Blue Star Hotel
4 - Guangzhou Victory Hotel
5 - Chiang Khong Riverside
6 - Hoi An Hostel
7 - Krakow Gardenhouse Hostel
8 - Temujin Ger Camp
9 - Darjeeling Viceroy
10 - Trans-Siberian Express

BEST CITIES (OVER ONE MILLION) (not just this trip)
1 - Hong Kong
2 - Chicago
3 - Rio
4 - Rome
5 - London
6 - New York
7 - Paris
8 - Tokyo
9 - Sydney
10 - La Paz

FAVORITE COUNTRIES
1 - Argentina
2 - Vietnam
3 - Lebanon
4 - Bolovia
5 - Japan
6 - Turkey
7 - Thailand
8 - Jordan
9 - Peru
10 - Egypt

BEST PEOPLE (NATIONALITIES) TO TRAVELERS
1 - Turkey
2 - Uruguay
3 - Italy
4 - Thailand
5 - Japan
6 - Argentina
7 - Denmark
8 - Jordan
9 - Malaysia
10 - Estonia

BEST BEACHES
1 - Goa Palolem
2 - Belize Key Caulker
3 - Costa Rica Osa Penninsula
4 - Hoi An
5 - Zanzibar
6 - Ko Pi Pi
7 - Big Island Hawaii at Kona
8 - Copacabana Rio
9 - Red Sea Sharm el Shiek,
10 - Ft. Lauderdale

FAVORITE TRAVEL KIT
1 - Life Drive (for typing this entire blog)
2 - Keen Flip Flops with toe protector
3 - Osprey backpacks
4 - Bluetooth Think Outside Keyboard
5 - Montbell Down Coats
6 - silk sleep sheets
7 - Timbuktu small shoulderbag
8 - MSR water filter
9 - Pentax Optio WP
10 - Salomon tech amphibian sneakers

RUNNERS UP
Sharper Image space bags
Patagonia capilene quickdry travel shirt
Patagonia quick dry underwear
two airline pillows

PLEASANT SURPRISES
1 - seeing four tigers on safari
2 - Jordan and its people
3 - kindness of strangers in Costa Rica, Rio, and Mongolia
4 - Indian rail system
5 - not entirely astromically expensive in Japan as expected
6 - Brasilian embassy in Mexico
7 - Krakow
8 - Munnar
9 - safety in Moscow
10 - United Airlines in Mexico

BEST DECISIONS/TRAVEL TIPS
1 - Meeting up with friends and relatives
2 - Packing light
3 - Moving faster than traditional wisdom would dictate
4 - Sequencing of itinerary given seasons and weather
5 - Making reservations or plans upon arrival in a new country
6 - Visiting Naji in Lebanon
7 - Keeping a travelogue on travelpod
8 - Stopping over in US during trip
9 - Keeping a daily budget
10 - Buying Japan Rail Pass

RUNNERS UP
getting travel insurance
getting skype
googletalk
leveraging airline miles and hotel points
preserving flexibility in itinerary

BEST PANORAMAS/SCENERY
1 - Iguazu Falls
2 - Li River
3 - Torres del Paine
4 - Salyar di Uyuni
5 - El Chalten
6 - Laos karst - drive btwn LPB and Vientiene
7 - Belize Keys
8 - Montenegro coast
9 - Munnar tea estates
10 - Capadoccia

RUNNERS UP
Perito Morino Glacier
Siete Lagos and Circuito Chico Bariloche
Erg Chebbi
Halong Bay
Victoria Harbor
Great Rift Valley
Table Mountain
Sacred Valley of Urubamba
Mendoza
Matterhorn

MOST IMPRESSIVE BUILDINGS
1 - Taj Mahal
2 - Pyramids
3 - Abu Simbel
4 - Casablanca King Husssein II Mosque
5 - Petra
6 - Parthenon
7 - Pantheon
8 - Petronas Towers
9 - Ankor Wat
10 - Corcovado Statue

RUNNERS UP
Hermitage
Jin Mao Tower
Colloseum
Forbidden City
St. Basil's
Jaresh
Alhambra
St. Peter's
Westminster
Frank Gerhy Pavillion
Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia

THE SINGLE BEST THING ABOUT OUR TRIP
Spending an entire year together
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1190464800/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1190464800/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1190464800/tpod.html Fri, 23 Nov 2007 13:55:52 -0500 There is travel after a RTW - absconding again from corporate America for 5 week spin around southern Africa.

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St. Lucia, South Africa

Leaving Sousussvlei, we drove northeast, toward Namibia's capital, Windhoek - yet another German-era settlement that grew to be the country's largest city, at just over two hundred thousand people. Windhoek is so tiny that even a mile outside the city limits, we couldn't see any sign of settlement; instead, we still felt as though we were traveling through untouched countryside, particularly when we spotted both an enormous iguana and a troop of baboons sitting by the side of the road not ten minutes from the downtown. Still, it isn't as if modernity has passed Windhoek by entirely, both positive and negative incidents thereof - the downtown in awash in swanky shops, restaurants, cafes, theatres, golf courses, and schools, while the newspaper headlines every morning blare frightening updates about the grisly goings on of Namibia's very own serial killer.

From the Windhoek airport (where it should be noted Steven was welcomed into the exclusive airport lounge, while Cori was barred admittance), we flew to Johannesburg, South Africa, spending a weird and short night at the house of an Algerian immigrant who ran a local B&B. From there, we flew to Richard's Bay, South Africa, on the south-eastern coast of that country, rented a car, and headed north along the coast toward Mozambique, which was our ultimate destination. We had a day to spare, though, and so we toyed with a number of ideas as to how to spend it. We settled on staying over in St. Lucia, South Africa.

It needs to be said that South Africa is, unfortunately, one of our least favorite countries around the globe. While there are a few bright points, like Cape Town, South Africa is, in our minds, characterized by rampant crime, the attendant fear that generates, ridiculously wide disparities in wealth, and, at best, very strained interactions between races that is likely the legacy of decades of apartheid. The country has striven mightily to get beyond that period of its history, but old prejudices and animosities do linger, tainting on a private level the government's public rainbow policy of inclusion, tolerance, and a celebration of diversity. Despite these very significant hurdles, we should also note that South Africa is, by far, Africa's most prosperous and economically successful country: fully one quarter of the entire continent's GDP is generated within a hundred-square mile radius of Johannesburg/ Pretoria, South Africa's economic powerhouse.

For our part, though, we were most affected by reports of crime and its visible effects. Almost everyone in the country has been a victim of a violent crime or knows someone who has been, since armed carjackings occur with alarming regularity - often resulting in the death of the carjacked - house robberies are commonplace, and murders happen every day. As a result, private security systems and services are big business in South Africa. Every house looks like a little compound, surrounded by high walls topped with electric or barbed fencing, and most boast warnings of private security systems or ferocious dogs within. We get the sense that anyone fortunate enough to own a house in a South African city lives a life of scurrying from one safe haven to another, constantly afraid for loss of life or possession. With this in mind, we drove around Richard's Bay (which really is a fine small town, probably much more livable than most South African cities) assiduously aware of locking our car doors, leaving ample space at stoplights between our car and others in front of us, maintaining a vigilance as to what other cars were doing, whether they were behaving erratically, whether their occupants were inspecting us, and so on and so forth.

Not finding anything particularly worthy of keeping us in Richard's Bay, we pressed northward along the coast, covered in commercial groves of verdant eucalyptus. We were struck by the constant contrast in levels of development and wealth; we plied wide, beautifully-paved roads in tandem with shiny BMWs and Volvos, while farm workers in dirty clothes and ratty shoes walked along the highway shoulder for miles to reach small cinder block buildings without running water or electricity.

We decided to explore St. Lucia, about an hour up the road, for the whale watching opportunities it afforded and its proximity to the Greater St. Lucia Wetlands, a UNESCO world heritage site notable for its five interconnected ecosystems: marine, shore, reed and sedge swamps, the St. Lucia Lake, reputed to be the largest estuary in Africa, and the western shores, filled with grasslands and bushveld. As it turns out, we arrived too late in the day for a whale-watching trip, regrettably, but we did have plenty of time to conduct our own self-drive safari within the St. Lucia wildlife preserve, an opportunity we seized enthusiastically.

Self-drive safaris, as it turns out, differ quite markedly from a tour-guide-led safari, most notably in that one has to both steer the car AND look for animals. It proved to be more challenging than we imagined. Nevertheless, we liked the flexibility of driving as slowly as we liked, gazing upon animals for as long as we chose, and never having to fear group censure for erroneously blurting out "I think that's a lion!" when, in fact, the spotted object was nothing more than a tree stump. During our several hours in the park, we saw kudu, rhinos, water buffalo, zebras, oryx, impala, warthogs, monkeys, and a squashed green snake coiled in the middle of the road. And we got out of the car to inspect the estuary and its tattered pier (carefully scanning the area for crocs nearby).

That night, we decided to splurge a little by spending the night at a very luxurious B&B, Umlillo Lodge, decorated in African bush meets Swiss Family Robinson themes and appointed with all manner of modern amenities and touches. For $70, we concluded it was quite a treat and a bit of a deal, as well. And we rounded off the night with a fish dinner at Ocean's Basket, a comfortable restaurant that dished up fresh, heaping servings of calamari, kingklip, and hake. It was a nice end to an unexpected day of good fortune, and it fueled us for the morning's drive to the Mozambiquecan border, where we'd begin our last scheduled portion of our 2007 southern African animal tour.


]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1190378280/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1190378280/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1190378280/tpod.html Fri, 23 Nov 2007 13:52:41 -0500 There is travel after a RTW - absconding again from corporate America for 5 week spin around southern Africa.

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Windhoek, Namibia

Transit through Windhoek
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1191328560/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1191328560/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1191328560/tpod.html Thu, 22 Nov 2007 13:10:57 -0500 There is travel after a RTW - absconding again from corporate America for 5 week spin around southern Africa.

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Sesreim, Namibia

Upon motoring out of Swakopmund in our shiny new VW rental car, we were immediately pulled over by Namibian police. Our hearts sank. For more than two weeks, we'd lived impervious (or so we felt) to private affronts to our safety and governmental onslaughts alike, and, just fifteen minutes after cutting the tour guide's apron strings, we'd been targeted as vulnerable tourists subject to easy exploit. We'd been heading down the coastal road, oohing and aahing at big breakers crashing on shore and around rusting shells of big cargo ships, when a policeman stationed on the side of the road motioned for us to pull over near his parked car and, as far as we could tell, nearer to his friend, a "private citizen," who was either there out of boredom or to get a piece of the bribing action. We were wary.

"Where are you going?" We were just heading to Walvis Bay, we said, just thirty minutes' south of Swakopmund. "Why are you going there?" rejoined the officer. We were going there to meet up with friends, one of whom was a tour guide. We eyed his own friend cautiously. "What is your profession?" asked our rather too-curious inquisitor. We're just students, we replied, here on a scholarship study abroad program. "Why aren't your lights on?" demanded the officer. We thought they were, said we, and we apologized up down and sideways for mistakenly only turning on our parking lights, promising to leave our real lights on forever (now that we knew where they were), if that's what it took. Finally, resignedly, the officer wrote a ticket, tore it from his pad, and instructed us to drive into Walvis Bay to pay it. Fifty U.S. dollars, all for failing to dicern between parking lights and driving lights. What a crock. We disregarded the parking ticket and went on our merry way.

In reality, we weren't headed to Walvis Bay (more famous, unbelievably, for the Jolie-Pitt birthing extravaganza staged there than the parking light injustice that befell us); we were bound for Sessriem and Sousussvlei, home to the oldest and tallest desert dunes in the world. We weren't meeting friends; in fact, we weren't planning on meeting anyone. And no, we weren't students on scholarship; we were professionals running away from desk jobs who were only too happy to flash the student ID card if that would keep us out of trouble.

Speeding out, with lights forevermore on, we headed southeast into the Namibian interior, over the Namib-Naukluft mountains, a rather odd-looking smattering of craggy peaks and valleys now part of one of the world's largest national parks. The park is home to leopards, zebra and kudus, so Steven's eyes were firmly trained to the landscape, even though he was stationed in the right-hand side driver's seat. The drive was uneventful but long, due in part to the stultifyingly slow speed limit of forty-five mph, so we stopped a few times, once just to gaze upon the rare quivering tree, which is not a Harry Potter oracle but rather an aloe that can grow up to eight meters high, can store massive quantities of water in their trunks, and boasts lightweight branches used as quivers by the native San hunters.

A few hours' journey more brought us to the small outpost of Solitaire, population about five hundred. A more authentic wild-west, roadhouse, Route 66 joint you will not find, even along Route 66 itself. Solitaire is home to one "country lodge," one campground, one gas station cum restaurant cum general store, a few small houses that lodge locals, and a dilapidated airfield that certainly hasn't seen an airplane land in more than twenty years. The town is surrounded on all sides by a ring of distant rising mountains, filled in by scrub brush, snakes and small rodents. We expected to see tumbleweed blow through accompanied by eerie shoot-out at high noon tunes, but nothing materialized.

We did find Moose, longtime resident and owner of the gas station (who must be making money hand over fist as the only purveyor of petrol within a two hundred mile radius but who nonetheless refuses to air-condition his sweltering general store). For a dollar or two, he dished out a heaping plate of genuine apple strudel, German-style. We ate the strudel in the store, which is plastered, as you might expect, with rusty, beat-up old license plates, cluttered with old-fashioned car parts, other sundry machines and coca-cola memorabilia, and illuminated only by the glow of the soda refrigerators, humming noisily along under the prodigious effort of keeping even just a few bottles slightly cooler than room temp. The strudel went down surprisingly easy and fast, given the searing heat in the general store, but we opted to take some home-baked bread (fantastic, even though it probably never saw the inside of an oven - the yeast likely rose there in the roadhouse) back to the comfort and relative cool of our hotel room.

We stayed over in Solitaire that night, primarily because there was nothing more proximate to Sessriem even remotely within our budget or remotely available to people, such as ourselves, who choose to make arrangements at the last minute. But it didn't matter. Sessriem was just an hour and a half drive down the road, and we were well versed in the art of driving before dawn, albeit usually with the objective of making first tracks on ski slopes. So the next morning we hit the road an hour prior to dawn, mostly because we understood that something akin to the Oklahoma land grab occurred every morning when the gates to Sessriem opened. As we drove the night gradually gave way to the indistinct shapes of dawn, the stars lost their gleam, and a cool blue morning crept up on us, backlighting the silhouette of mountains we didn't even knew existed just minutes before. We arrived at the gate to Sessriem just as the sun was about to crest the horizon, but we nevertheless claimed pole position at the gate, our competitors having snuck in a few more winks than we. But the gatekeeper kept us waiting for another ten minutes while cars impatiently lined up behind us before allowing the pent up flood of visitors through.

Sessriem is a small collection of hotels, park service buildings, and campgrounds, and it was brought into existence by the park service to administer and serve as a gateway to the national park lands. Beyond Sessriem, a paved road stretches fifty miles or so westward, into dune country, eventually petering out into a sandy road. And, from the end of the paved road, you can catch a four by four vehicle to transport you over the last four treacherous miles to the mouth of
Soussusvlei, which is the most famous of several enormous ephemeral pans surrounded by a sea of red dunes stretching hundreds of meters high.

At any rate, this whole process of queuing is a weird incident of some stupid Namibian national parks policy designed to enrich the national park service, of course, but also a few select concessionaires that probably paid a pretty penny to secure that status. It turns out that most people prefer to visit the dunes and vleis (dry lakes) either very early in the morning or very late in the afternoon when the sun is most angled, the shadows most interesting, and the light playing off the red dunes most brilliant. Because the afternoon is often so stinking hot, however, the morning is THE preferred time to go and, hence, the mad rush to get in the park when the gate opens at dawn. But the select few who plan years in advance to camp in the park service campground or who can afford to pay the exorbitant sums required to stay in the concessionaire's hotels, however, get a "head start" in racing off to the dunes well before the rest of us get a shot at it. The notion that nature's beauty is somehow related to a bonanza-type foot race or may somehow be incurably marred by the early arrival of someone else is an odd one, to say the least, but it is infectious, and we fell prey to the mentality to the same extent as the others lined up almost pushing to get in.

Well, the sun finally advanced high enough in the sky to satisfy Mr. Gatekeeper, who opened the gate and allowed us to go through. And the horses were off. The ribbon of tarmac (ironically, the first we'd seen in the country since Swakopmund, three hundred miles earlier) wound through a large valley surrounded on both sides by fields of dunes stretching onward for miles. These behemoths towered over us, some two to three hundred meters overhead; their fall lines snaked skyward, delineating darkened slipfaces in shadow from the leeward faces gleaming ochre, maroon, peach and rose in the sun. Occasionally, we'd pass by the lone oryx, foraging for tender shoots among the sand granules. Forty five kilometers down the road, we stopped at Dune 45 to go looking for the famous interplay of light, shadow and color, parking our car at the base of the dune and beginning the long, arduous two-steps-up-one-step-sliding-back hike up the sand. A hundred meters up, we began to notice the elevation and suddenly realized that a misstep off the side of the fall line wouldn't end prettily. Steve decided it was time to try his hand at sledding down the dunes, whipping out the plastic luggage bag he'd been hauling around since we'd left DIA four weeks before. He positioned himself on the forty degree pitch downward, scooted to the bottom of the bag and pulled it up around his chest, took a big breath, and shoved off, careening down the sand about...four inches. Another repositioning, another big breath, and this time he took off...another two inches. Four more failed attempts followed. It seems the sand sledding wasn't meant to be, at least not in a large plastic luggage sack marked "Baggage" across the top.

Returning to our chariot, we emptied about a pound of sand out of each of our shoes and then pressed down the road in the hopes of laying eyes on the legendary Sousussvlei. A few kilometers down the road, we came to the car park, where we waited for heavy-duty transport over thick sand roads the last couple of miles to Soussusvlei's jumping-off point. Transport wasn't cheap - we shelled out about ten dollars per person for an eight mile round trip ride (nothing like a captive audience and an entrenched state-sponsored monopoly to jack up prices). But we finally boarded the bus and were deposited in due course at a small clearing, where we were unceremoniously shunted out of the bus and pointed in an ambiguous direction to Sousussvlei.

The crowds trickled over a sandy rise to the east, so we wandered that way, noticing, as we did, the startling rise in temperature that had occurred in just the hour or two we'd been in the park. A few more minutes' walking brought us face to face with Sousussvlei - an enormous chalky expanse of a dry lakebed, punctuated with husks of dead trees. Ruddy dunes rose behind the pan, creating a stark, striking effect. But in the end it was a panorama that we found, after snapping the obligatory pictures, rather disappointing - a classic case of overhype. Perhaps we'd been jaded by our earlier experiences with dunes in our own state; perhaps we just aren't terribly sandy people; perhaps we've become a tad jaundiced in our world-wanderings. Whatever the case, though, we agreed the time, effort and money expended to get down to Sousussvlei was hardly worth it; the site certainly didn't qualify in our minds as Namibia's number one travelers' destination - Etosha holds that title in our opinion. So, after a bit more walking, some liters of water, a few more pictures, and a wild goose chase wherein Steve attempted to photograph a sand beetle who'd escape his paparazzi onslaught by burying himself in the sand, we called it a day. We turned tail and headed back to Solitaire to wait out the heat of the afternoon, certain that, at a minimum, we'd not be disappointed by another serving of Moose's strudel.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1189686660/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1189686660/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1189686660/tpod.html Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:29:51 -0500 There is travel after a RTW - absconding again from corporate America for 5 week spin around southern Africa.

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Etosha National Park, Namibia

This place is hot, windy and dusty. But above all, it is dry. So dry that my face feels as though the skin has contracted and my forehead has shrunk. My legs have taken on the appearance of scales. And my feet, which I've abused by constantly wearing sandals, have developed massive, open gashes where my heels have cracked open.

The climate is no kinder to the land. Most trees are now withered and barren, their dead, dry leaves heaped in brittle piles in the undergrowth, which is itself skeletal. The earth is parched and dusty, and the warmth radiating from the baked crust sends up wavy chimeras of heat. Water is scarce and therefore precious, as the dried up riverbeds and smaller water holes attest. And to the north is the great salt pan, a vast, white, shallow depression stretching hundreds and hundreds of miles, shimmering with mirages, which native people call "great place of dry water."

But despite these odds, Etosha National Park is a wonderland of animal life, chock a block full of millions of beasts comprising one hundred and forty-four mammal species - not including birds and reptiles. Elephants abound, as do lions, rothschild's giraffes, burchell's zebras, blue wildebeasts, and endangered black rhinos - of which there are more than three hundred - one of the few such populations that are growing. Other animals, such as the black faced impala, are endemic to the area. And, of course, antelope in every shape and size round out the parade, including the enormous eland (largest of all ungulates), the elegant gemsbok (or oryx), with its striking markings, the tiny Damara dik-dik, just 45 centimeters high, the flat-faced red hartebeast, and the majestic kudu, whose horns can grow up to a meter and encompass three full spirals.

Steven is excited about prospects at Etosha, particularly for spotting that most elusive of all animals - the leopard. During our prior safari in Kenya and Tanzania, we were blown away by the profusion of animal life - dozens of lions, cheetahs, elephants and giraffe. But no leopard. Etosha represents our best chance to catch a glimpse of this solitary animal, and we devote ourselves to this pleasurable task, Steven's eyes fixed firmly on the groundcover, scanning the small pools of shade for potential life. And so our days are spent searching for animals, with little time for other pursuits.

Game drives during the cool of morning and the shade of late afternoon offer opportunities to spot animals scavenging for food on the savannah or congregating at water holes. We become accustomed to identifying clusters of animals in the distance - the squat hairy figures of warthogs running with their spiked tails straight in the air, and the willowy silhouttes of giraffes, gracefully towering above the pan, rythmicly swaying in time, spaced like staunch towers on the horizon, one after another. Unfortunately, we also come across a zebra, standing not five feet from the road, who quite obviously had been the focal point of some very vicious predator's attentions. Miraculously the zebra managed to get away, but deep gouges in his flanks weeping blood and ooze warn that soon the zebra will succumb to either another attack or infection. He isn't long for this world.

At the nearby waterhole, we spot herds of elephants, thrirty strong, waiting out the heat of the day while they splash and charge and trumpet and drink (more than one hundred litres in just one sitting). Reluctant to interfere - and probably for good reason - the more reticent giraffes, antelopes and zebra watch from the periphery for the chance to slake their thirst. The next morning, we're rewarded with our first glimpse of cats; we spot three lions - two male and one female - stalking toward a calm pool. Surveying the scene, they each select different places to crouch and drink. Then they scan the horizon, and they slink off in the opposite diection, passing within ten feet of our hushed vehicle.

Another afternoon, we happen upon a larger water hole, close to which a pride of lions is lolling about underneath some thicker shrubbery, while a lone lioness, clearly suffering ennui, basks on the banks of the hole. Under normal circumstances, zebra and wildebeast would never dream of sneaking sips, even if the lioness is stationed on the opposite side of the hole, but these are not normal circumstances. In all probability, these herd animals have trekked several dozens of miles over scalding, dry earth, kicking up cyclones of dirt that herald their arrival, just to reach this hole. Thirst emboldens them, and they inch toward the hole while the lioness occasionally glances in their direction. But she doesn't move, and they creep ever closer. Soon, hundreds of animals advance on the hole, and they close around us, rushing around the van as though we were a rock in the midst of a rushing river current. Reaching the water, the animals drink in peace but, jittery, they bolt as soon as the lioness twiches. She eventually bores of the tableau and returns to her family, where another female is being savaged by the male of the pride, an activity we're told takes place for one week straight, every fifteen minutes, with few (if any) breaks for food or for sleep.

But still no leopard.

During midday, when the sun is most intense, our group retires to the campsite, prepares lunch, and waits out the heat for our next foray into the park. While we wait, we admire the wildlife that wanders into the camp: the glossy starling, a lovely pest of a bird with piercing mustard yellow eyes and irridescent teal feathers bearing hints of pearly indigo on its breast; the yellow-beaked hornbill, a toucan-like bird with a curved, prominent beak; the white backed honey badger, which has perfected the art of climbing onto trash cans, casting aside the rocks thereon designed to secure the lid, and crawling inside to loot for tasty vittles. But there is another opportunity to watch wildlife in this downtime, and we seize upon it. We soak our clothes in water to fend off heat and then trudge up the half mile to the campsite's own water hole, which is perched on a rocky outcropping overlooking a spring that fills a shallow basin with water. A stadium seating area offers a bird's eye view of any animal proceedings below, with a floodlight at night for better visibility, and a fence at least nominally protects those of us who silently wait for animal visitors who cannot resist the lure of water. During the day, we see the occasional black-backed jackal, waterhog, zebra, and elephant. But the place really comes alive at night, when the nocturnal animals emerge. In one night, we spot over sixty elephants belonging to two seperate herds, along with one hundred and fifty zebra. The highlight, however, is the arrival of not one, not four, not six...but eight rhinos, at the same time - an entirely fortuitous convergence, since rhinos are generally solitary animals who come together only to mate. Perhaps love is in the air. The elephants, however, are not impressed, and one particularly combative adolescent male charges at a rhino. Rhinos, while bulky and armed with a intimidating horn, are no match for elephants, who are perhaps up to twice their size. So the rhino backs away, and the elephant moves on to bully another. This occurs several times before one old, big rhino, tired of the treatment, stands his ground. The elephant lunges forward, and the rhino stays put. Puzzled, the elephant lunges again, and the rhino now responds offensively. He shuffles forward and lowers his head, jabbing his tusk just a few feet from the elephant's trunk. Cowed, the elephant backs away, but only to fight another battle - this time with a different, more passive rhino, who shuffles away from the elephant's attack.

While at the water hole, we scour the area for animals and, in so doing, we happen to spot the carcas of a dead impala. The impala's body is splayed out but somewhat obscured underneath a tree, and its head is bent back from its body at a unnatural angle. We can't be sure why the impala died, but our guide speculates that it met its end either in a fall or via a fatal encounter with a posionous snake. Either way, we keep close watch on the impala, sure that at any minute a scavenger or predator will sniff out the carcas and make a meal of it. But several mangy brown hyenas slouch by the impala without taking note of it - it is clear they aren't aware a ready-made meal is just several yards away. After a while, a small African wild cat smells the impala and crawls over the carcas, but its teeth aren't sharp enough nor its jaws sufficiently strong, and it cannot pierce the impala's outer layer of skin to get to the flesh below. Frustrated, it eventually makes an exit. So we wait, and as we do so, we watch the comings and goings of two owls mating, along with a few rabbits, scared stiff the owls will suddenly swoop down on them. But the owls are too enamored with each other to bother about food, and the rabbits hop off to live another day. And eventually, exhausted, we hop off to sleep another night, disappointed that the impala hadn't been discovered. We resolve to return the next day to survey the scene, and we retire to bed. Several hours later, we awake to a screeches, howls, screams and whoops - signature noises of a pack of ravenous hyenas. We return the next morning and find...nothing. It is as if the impala carcas had never existed, a figment of our imagination. It had been completely devoured, bones, fur, and all.

Our last day in the park, we head out on an early morning game drive, tracing some of the more remote backroads of the area. After a considerable distance, we come across a few cars pulled to the side of the road. We inqure why, and the drivers explain that the first car out that day came upon a leopard basking in the sun, stretched out in the middle of the road. Frightened by the noise of the car, the leopard bolted and ran into a culvert, of all places, that stretches underneath the road. So the vehicles are stationed on either side of the road, monitoring the ends of the culvert for signs of movement. We join in and wait. And wait. And wait some more. And, thirty minutes later, our group is clamouring to leave, arguing that the leopard may not emerge for hours, if not days. We consider mutinying, but the numbers simply aren't on our side. And so our vehicle pulls away from the leopard in the culvert. We press our noses against the glass and wish for a private safari.

As luck has it, our return path traverses the same stretch of road, and therefore the same culvert, that we had so miserably left an hour prior. We hold our breath and hope against hope that the leopard is still on the premises and, as we near, we see vehicles parked along the side of the road. We gird ourselves for another intra-vehicle battle as our guide pulls alongside a car to inquire whether the leopard has emerged. And as we pull up and she asks, he merely points over his shoulder to his left and we see, sitting in the shade of a nearby tree.... a LEOPARD! Oh joy! Oh excitment! Oh amazement!

The leopard is a magnificent animal, with crisp, clear spots, luxurious fur, and a thick, healthy tail. When it gets up to move, its muscles ripple underneath its soft exterior, and its big cat pads allow it to softly plod along. A rumbling truck sends the leopard scurrying seventy yards off underneath another tree, and we strain to see the animal, just overjoyed to have caught a glimpse of it at all. We congratulate ourselves and each other, and, after all pictures have been snapped and all looks of amazement exchanged, we prepare to head out when yet another leopard emerges from the culvert. LIke rhinos, leopards are solitary animals that join together only to mate, so we leave it to your imagination as to what was going on in that culvert. This new leopard steathily creeps along to the tree under which her mate had just been stationed. She sniffs, scratches at the ground, and squats to mark her territory. And, as quickly as she arrived, she departs back into the culvert, but not before coming within five feet of our vehicle - allowing her to shoot a knowing, slightly menacing, slightly blood-chilling glance in our direction. And then she disappears.

We disappear, too, at least from Etosha, but this park definitely stays on in memory. And it stays high on the list, as well, which it may very well top for affording us a chance to see those leopards.

]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1190032440/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1190032440/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1190032440/tpod.html Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:24:27 -0500 There is travel after a RTW - absconding again from corporate America for 5 week spin around southern Africa.

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Swakopmund, Namibia

At last, our small group had traversed one half of the southern expanse of Africa - from Victoria Falls to Namibia's cold, barren Skeleton Coast. Named for the treacherous coastline that had ensnared vessels confused by prodigious fog created by the hot Namib desert air colliding with the cold, dense Benguela current, this stretch of sand had claimed the life of many a sailor. Either the fierce waves dashed the shipwrecked seamen against sharp rocks, or, if slightly more unlucky, sailors would be washed up on an enormous expanse of salty desert with no fresh water for hundreds of miles. The rusty hulks of dozens of ships bear witness to the lethal combination of climate and landscape that savaged hundreds upon hundreds of victims over the years.

With the advent of radar, four by four vehicles and radio, the frequency of shipwreck has declined, and most passengers aboard a wreck now make it out. So the misty coastline looked to us less ominous and more welcoming, if simply for the respite it provided from the oppressive heat at Brandberg. It also, apparently, looks welcoming to two hundred thousand cape fur seals (the largest fur seal) that live year round on the stormy coast, diving in the cold, salty waters for fish and generally making a huge stink whilst reposing on the pebbly shoreline in between feedings.

These seals are loud, they smell far worse than concentrated amounts of fish sauce, and, on shore, they clumsily throw their great heft around, rippling blubber everywhere, in order to move just two feet. In fact, the colony is so constitutionally incapable of quick movement on land that it is vulnerable to the depredation of roving packs of black-backed jackals, who sniff around the outer edges of the colony (or, when they are feeling bolder or more hungry, who plunge into the very midst of the seal congregation) for sweet young cubs just ripe for the eating. The adults are limited in the cover they can provide - a little barking, a little angry shuffling, but that's about it; if the forty pound jackal spots a cub, chances are it makes off with it, despite the "protection" afforded by the three hundred pound adult seal.

But on the day we visited, no cubs presented themselves as fantastic targets, and the adults were focusing their energies less on the extant cubs and more on the creation of potential ones. Truth be told, witnessing the spectacle was a bit horrifying - the male, who is far larger than the female, advances on the female, thrusts his weight upon her, and pins her, after which he proceeds to ravage her while seemingly boasting about it - loudly - as he heaves and undulates.

A few hundred yards away from the pornographic cacophony of the seal colony, a small monument has been constructed in the memory of Portuguese seafarers who came through the area more than four hundreds years ago. They erected small stone crosses - which are still there today - thanking God for bringing them across ferocious seas and asking him for furthr guidance as they plied the stormy seas of Africa's coasts.

Our last hour spent in the safari bus took us from Cape Cross to Swakopmund, our final stop on the tour, and the point at which we'd be shoved out of the safe tourist cocoon of Jenman safaris and back into fend-for-yourself backpacking travel. We simultaneously looked forward to and dreaded being on our own again. But, for the next day or so, we had some down time in Swakopmund, where we could leisurely bid adieu to our travel companions and wander around this strange German outpost.

Swakopmund was founded as a German colonial center right on the Swakop River where it pours out into the Atlantic. (As a side note, Swakopmund is much more pleasant than the name would apparently lead one to believe; "Swakop," we are told, actually means excrement in some strange Germanic dialect). The town itself has no more than twenty thousand inhabitants, but we suspect it is by far one of the more cosmopolitan corners of Namibia. Most buildings are constructed in either old teutonic style, with gables, eaves, and cross beams, or in Euro-trendy-mod style, all glass and minimalist stylings. Cafes, curios, and bookshops abound, as do bed and breakfasts and upscale restaurants which, we were pleased to note, were all a very good value for American dollar. We enjoyed more than our fair share of fresh fish dinners out, along with really way too many (at least for our own good) mid-afternoon coffee and strudel snack breaks. And two days spent browsing souvenir stores maxed us out in the shopping department. We did contemplate participating in some "extreme sports", for which Swakopmund has become the continent's capital, but we couldn't be bothered - somehow the thought of running roughshod over nearby dunes in an ATV didn't seem nearly as appealing as snuggling below down comforters and trying to decipher newspapers written in German over steaming mugs of hot chocolate.

Our time in Swakopmund did have a downside, which came with our realization that someone we'd encountered in the prior few weeks had absconded with our credit card information and had been racking up large charges with vendors far and wide - from those selling electronics equipment to purveyors of genealogical information. A simple but rather expensive phone call to our credit card company rectified the situation, however - all charges were erased and the card was cancelled - and so we were set to go for the next portion of our southern african swing, just minus one card. We wondered how much cash should get us through....

]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1189859520/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1189859520/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1189859520/tpod.html Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:20:53 -0500 There is travel after a RTW - absconding again from corporate America for 5 week spin around southern Africa.

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Twyfelfontein, Namibia

Much to our chagrin, all good things must come to and end, including our amazing animal safari in Etosha. Heading south and west, speeding on pavement (now an unfamiliar treat to us) past the last vestige of animal life of the park, we headed to Damaraland, a hot, dry, sparsely populated corner of Namibia better known for its ancient inhabitants than its current ones.

Our first stop was a petrified forest, said to be the ossified remnants of a prehistoric conifer outcropping. It did little to capture our attention - perhaps due to the presence of another petrified forest in our neck of the woods, so to speak, or perhaps due to the fact that fossilized remains of wood are just inherently boring. But we were interested in the national plant of Namibia, the Welwitschia, which behaves very much like a cactus, flowering low to the ground, storing water in its deep and extensive root system, and growing at a rather glacial pace of one to two centimeters per century. We were also interested by the large chameleons roaming the ground, disguising their whereabouts with rust-paletted coloring.

A mid morning break presented itself in Outjo, a bougainvillea-strewn village in the midst of the desolate Namibian high desert, teeming with Namibian-born Germans and, providentially, German pastries. Half an hour later, we were back on the trail with full bellies, this time on graveled backroads rollercoastering down and up dry riverbeds. That afternoon, we arrived near Kamanjab, site of a small tribe of displaced Himbas, a stone-age culture (so we were told), which had moved away from Kraokoland, their native land, in order to be closer to the tourist trade. Our visit to the Himbas, quite frankly, is one of the strangest experiences in travel we've had, not just because the Himba are a people entirely unlike any other we've interacted with, but also because of their rather unorthodox living situation at present.

We arrived at a dusty, dry expanse of cracked earth and weedy shrubbery interrupted by a rather incongruous green lawn, a one-story farmhouse, and a few other outbuildings arranged around an open-air bar and restaurant. Lynn, a Namibian woman of German descent, gathered us around her and explained that the Himba tribe we were about to visit was living on her land, an arrangement that had come about because she used to supplement her farming proceeds with income made by shuttling tourists back and forth to Himba villages in further flung locales. However, rising fuel prices, she reported, had called into question the whole economics of the enterprise, and she discontinued the visits until the day that the Himbas ostensibly appeared on her doorstep, wondering where their tourist dollars had gone when her trips to see them had ceased. Reassuring them that they had done nothing to offend her, she explained her situation, and the Himbas brainstormed to devise a way in which both parties could continue to enjoy tourism revenue - a session which eventually led to her invitation to them to live on her family's land. So there they are today. In a somewhat separate but somewhat related tangent, Lynn also explained that modern-day Himbas have not fared well, particularly as it relates to the bottle. Easy tourism dollars and an unfamiliarity with both western vices and the free market led to ruin, with rampant spending on alcohol and all the attendant difficulties entailed in such discovery. So Lynn's invite to camp on her land came with some strings - or rules (which seem really sketchy to us): Lynn collects the fee paid by tourists such as ourselves to visit the Himba, which she then uses to purchase basic staples for them, such as maize, flour, and meat. With one caveat, tourists are not to pay Himbas in cash for anything involved in their hour-long visits, including photos. The caveat is that the Himbas are allowed (encouraged? permitted?) to make jewelry from seeds, beads, and other various materials and sell those items to tourists for Namibian dollars. We aren't sure why the evils associated with cash-based tourism wouldn't apply to cash-based jewelry-making, but it is a distinction apparently embraced, or at least accepted, by both parties. The Himbas are free, she said, to live their lives in the way in which they wish, and she won't purport to interfere or tell them what to do - save, of course, for the no cash rule. She acts as their mediator with the western world, their midwife, their calculator, their interpreter, and their provider, in short, their de facto, if not de jure, chief. So, with that introduction, she led us to the Himba's village, which she warned us was just a few hundred meters but several thousands of years away.

The Himba are a people only found in Namibia, one of the last tribal remnants of a nomadic hunter and gatherer society. They live in semi-permanent huts constructed of sticks, mud, and cow dung, and they occasionally dabble in animal husbandry for milk and meat. The tribe seems to be somewhat patriarchal, insofar as the chief is generally a male, but the women seem to form the backbone of the grouping and are almost exclusively charged with raising and teaching children. Himbas do not enter into marriages in a traditional sense - each woman has many lovers and is free to accept or reject male advances as she chooses; if she wishes to have a child, she will, and if not she won't. She is apparently not reliant on male partners for material comforts but may lean on members of her family, male or female, for assistance. Perhaps because of their sexually-open approach to male-female interactions, Himba women place an inordinate emphasis on beauty and on looking good - efforts that seem odd to us westerners but are ostensibly very attractive to male Himbas. Every morning, a Himba woman will smear a paste on her skin, a concoction made with butter fat, water and ochre, which softens her skin and lends it a decidedly red hue. She will also rub the mixture into her hair, which is usually plaited in dreds or braids and topped with an interesting-looking headdress made of goat hair that signals she is sexually active and is willing, if in fact the right guy comes along. Women go topless but, in a sign of modesty, will cover up their ankles, their wrists, and their hair, which they braid and then wrap in cloth.

Lynn walked us over to the village, which we entered without fanfare or greeting, after which we all kind of stupidly stood around, looking at the Himba but hoping not to be too intrusive or voyeuristic, while they largely ignored us or, Lynn said, cattily gossiped about us, most specifically the women, who the Himba believe are most unfeminine and unattractive. And so we gaped and took pictures and asked Lynn for explanations while the Himba largely sat in the shade and, later, brought out their jewelry for sale. Lynn asked us to look at each woman's crafts, even if we weren't planning to buy and even if we saw something that we were interested in from one of the other women. So we dutifully looked, some of us bought, and all of us felt weird. Lynn's "cultural mediation" didn't much help. She characterized the Himba as overwhelming lazy, extremely jealous (particularly when it comes to food or cow dung, which they apparently fight over to repair their houses in anticipation of the rainy season), and generally "primitive." She also opined that Himba women were frivolous, had no common sense or practical smarts, and were far less valuable as employees than their male counterparts. Namibians, or at least Lynn, certainly don't suffer from an overabundance of political correctness.

While we think we may be glad to have visited the Himba, we are thankful more for the window of insight into the difficulty of maintaining an insular culture removed from the mainstream than we are for a glimpse at a traditional "stone age" way of life. Indeed, we have no illusions that what we were presented was anything remotely typical or traditional. Because really, it is a Catch 22 to strive to maintain the purity of a culture utterly divorced from market forces by surviving on tourism dollars, isn't it?

That night we spent in a tented camp in the hot Namibian hinterland, where we showered outside, fell asleep listening to the calls of animals roaming nearby, and slept under a blanket of stars. And the next morning, we were up early and speeding off toward Twyfelfontein, which we imagined to be at least a small hamlet but turned out to be nothing more than a small signed pull off on the side of a road.

Twylfelfontein, or "doubtful spring" in Afrikaans, was so named by an early European settler in the valley, who deemed the few liters of water a day produced by the nearby spring not nearly sufficient to sustain life. Steven preferred to call it Triflefontein, which, I suppose, might express the same sentiment. But apparently little did the settler know that several thousand years earlier, predecessors of modern Namibians lived in the valley, drinking the spring's waters and sheltering in its rocky outcroppings while lying in wait for animals to travel through. Following the farmer's exit, archeologists did discover this, however, mostly due to the amazing rock art left by these early people, and even UNESCO has now jumped on the bandwagon, having deemed this place a world heritage site (Namibia's first) not two months' before our visit. Given our quest to visit as many "U" sites as our itineraries might allow, we were quite pleased by the serendipity of it all.

Painted between two and six thousand years ago, the rock art of Twyfelfontien covers several kilometers and numbers in the tens of thousands of individual representations, mostly of animals and people. Included among the pictures we saw were impala, long necked giraffe, and kudu, with their spiral-shaped horns. Interestingly, the hunters also painted symbols for harder to depict objects, like watering holes and celestial bodies - symbols that apparently were used to depict similar items by early people in Australia and South America.

The sun blazing hot in the sky, warming the air around us to a stifling 110 degrees, we piled back in the truck for another drive to the Brandberg mountains, the highest mountain range in Namibia. Brandberg is also where desert elephants are said to roam (and though we saw evidence of said elephants, we failed to spot any of the actual beasts) and situs of the White Lady of Brandberg, the most famous painting of yet another outcropping of petroglyphs created around five thousand years ago. A ridiculously warm 45 minute hike put us in front of the White Lady, which was once thought to depict a ... white lady but is now, with more careful scholarship, thought to be a shaman or witch doctor. Many of the other nearby paintings also featured humans with legs of an animal or an animal with human appendages, perhaps to encourage those people portrayed to possess certain admirable qualities or characteristics found in the animal.

Returning hot and sweaty to our night's accommodation, Steven was afforded a lucky opportunity to get his hands on an living and breathing animal, which he is always itching to do. A resident meerkat presented itself as a target, and Steven soon solicited the advice and counseling of our guide, Laurina, who had grown up with a meerkat as a pet, as to how to pick up said beast. It turns out the secret is merely flipping a meerkat on its back and then picking it up by its forepaws, a secret that Steven will gladly share with anyone curious about the art of lifting these creatures. So Steven held the meerkat while it barked and clawed and made a great show of wanting to bite those that tried to pet it, while Steven grinned a toothy smile (see photo). It was, for him, a glorious end to a rather odd segment of our trip.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1189427340/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1189427340/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1189427340/tpod.html Tue, 02 Oct 2007 13:25:28 -0400 There is travel after a RTW - absconding again from corporate America for 5 week spin around southern Africa.

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Okavango Delta, Botswana

The Okavango Delta, a glittering, green, watery wonderland, is a gem of Africa, not only for its teeming population of animal and bird life, but also because of its unusual and incredibly improbable location bordering on one of the driest places in the continent, the Kalahari desert. The Delta is formed by the Okavango River, which begins in Angola, pours southward until it forms the border between Angola and Namibia, and then drains into the enormous sand deposits of Botswana's delta, where it peters out, having spent itself in greening up thousands of acres of marshland.

For eons, people have lived on the channels and backwaters of the delta on leafy islands, navigating through its shallow, reed-choked waters on traditional wooden dug-out canoes, called makoros. Occasionally, a local might paddle a makoro like we'd paddle a canoe, but more often, when the boat is laden with goods or passengers, the makoro boatman stands in the rear of the boat in a real feat of balance and poles the makoro with a long stick, propelling the makoro through the delta's water and vegetation almost silently.

Makoros are made of the wood of the sausage tree, so called for its sausage-shaped fruit, and used because of its strength and buoyancy. The mokoros are shallow-bottomed and liable to tip in heavy winds, but in the protected waterways of the delta, they are the perfect mode of transit. Accordingly, that's how our group explored the delta, with local guides poling us through the labyrinthine canals, revealing to us the delta's secrets.

To get to the makoros, we all piled on to a flat bottomed speed boat that propelled us, with the wind in our nostrils, down what seemed like a river but which continued to narrow into ever thinner waterways, the papyrus plants threatening to encroach on the watery byways until, at last, when the channel was no wider than our own boat, we arrived at a heavily vegetated island fringed by mangrove trees, and we disembarked. Our makoro polers were waiting for us there, and we all quickly clambered, two by two, into the boats - which gave us our first taste of the incredible balancing act performed by these men every minute - as the boats rocked violently, threatening to overturn at the smallest movement. Indeed, even mere minute readjustments registered in the boat - a small shift one way, a gentle lean the other, and all three occupants of the makoro could feel the pitch of the boat and the delicate balance that had been upset.

But finally we were all settled. The polers pushed the makoros out into a channel with a swift current, and we were off, drifting with that current for several minutes until we finally emerged in a large, deep lagoon. We congregated at the mouth of the pool and the polers knocked on the sides of the boats, bringing - just as it did in the Zambezi - the hippos in the pool to the surface, spouting and snorting and whinnying, as is their wont.

We pressed on, away from larger expanses of water and toward shallower haunts, where wispy reeds towered overhead and into corridors of papyrus plants, forming claustrophobic walls with their thick stems and ethereal tassels, exploding at the end of each plant like willowy fireworks. From there, we skirted huge fields of water lilies, topped with delicate white and purple buds but anchored, through their green aprons, with tough spiraling sinews to the thick mud underneath. We traversed through thicker vegetation, heavy with greenery skimming the surface of the water, creating such friction underneath the boat and requiring such effort to power us through that we could hardly discern whether the makoro was traveling through liquid or solid. Later, we meandered through smaller plant life, the bow of the makoro cutting through the stems, pushing some to one side, some to the other, showering us with fine, silvery strands of webbing thrown up by resident spiders. And all the while, however, we gazed, trancelike, upward, rewarded with glimpses of fantastic numbers and varieties of birds - ibis, fish eagles, cormorants, herons, yellow beaked hornbills, pelicans, African jacanas (aka Jesus birds), kingfishers, and so many others.

For lunch, we stopped at a palm-dotted island and took a short walk, where we spotted elephants grazing in the distance, along with warthog and oryx. Sandwiches in the shade and some lazy chatting was interrupted by the approach of two new elephants, who could not be dissuaded from coming closer. And so we all (carefully) hopped back in the makoros, shoved off from shore, and watched as the elephants reclaimed the land, snapping branches and gobbling leaves where we just sat.

A hot afternoon sun rose high in the sky, and the rhythmic watery murmurings of the poles caused some to nod off. A dip in some deep, clear, clean waters was the just antidote - we all peeled down to our suits and dove in to the polers' own swimming hole, relishing the cool, clean respite from the blazing heat. A strong current swept downstream, carrying us, floating on our backs, meters from the group before we raced back to do it all over again.

Returning to our camp after our day on the delta, we showered and grabbed cool drinks, which we sipped while contemplating the day's activities. From the lodge decking, shaded by the canopy of wild mango trees, we could see the fingers of the delta stretch into grove of papyrus and fields of reeds, and the setting sun cast a scarlet glow on the water.


]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1189167840/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1189167840/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stevecori/africa2007/1189167840/tpod.html Tue, 02 Oct 2007 13:24:43 -0400 There is travel after a RTW - absconding again from corporate America for 5 week spin around southern Africa.

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The Caprivi Strip, Namibia

We are not quite sure why it took us so long to figure this out, but are very schizophrenic travelers. Looking back over not only where we have gone in the past few years but most notably the manner in which we have traveled it might be hard to slot us into a particular category. On some trips we have gone in high style eating at the best restaurants and adjourning to some of the choicest hotels in the area, while on other trips we have made even the cheapest and most cash strapped backpackers look profligate. This trip around Southern Africa will hold to our general pattern of radical swings, but this time it is time to enjoy the good life for a while.

One of the hardest things about travel in the third world (as noted extensively in the previous entry) is overland transport. Buses never take you to a clean or safe part of the city you are heading to, trains seats are always oversold, tires pop and puncture at the slightest bump; generally speaking, anything that can get delayed will. For this reason, we decided to off-load some of the dirty work of the next leg of our trip to an expert, in this case an entire company of them. We decided to shell out significantly more than we are used to paying per day for an all-inclusive type trip that would take us from Livingstone Zambia to Swakopmund Namibia. We planned to spend time in the Northern reaches of Botswana and Namibia and we also wanted a guide to help us see some of the fantastic game parks the next two countries have to offer.

Like anything else you can pay for, there are many prices and many different options for this sort of overland tour. At one end of the spectrum are the truly luxury safaris offered by companies like Abercrombie & Kent. These are high-class affairs that spare no expense and manage to bring the African bush to the Ritz Carlton crowd. This would be a great way to go, of course, but if we traveled like this we would go on very few trips; the costs are just too high.

At the other end of the financial extreme are the big overlanding trucks that offer participation camping to the young and young at heart. These massive land ships hold as many as 30 people and can take a person from Cairo to Capetown for less money than the average Abercrombie & Kent traveler spends going from Capetown to Johannesburg. These trips were quite appealing to the penny-pinchers in us, but our strong disinterest in getting closer to the younger party-goers that these larger outfits attract and our strong desire to get as close to the animals in the game parks as we could steered us a bit further up market.

After much searching we decided to go with a company that promised to split the difference. The prices were relatively low, the pre-set agenda covered most of what we were interested in, and the accommodations would be a blend of both tents and lodges. We paid the required fee, checked out of our budget accommodations in Livingstone and crossed our fingers. We knew that the success or failure of the next two weeks would now largely depend on two things that were now out of our control: who else booked the same tour, and who our guide would be all the way to Namibia.

As it turned out, we were very lucky on one front and somewhat lucky on the other. Our guide, Laurina, was a native South African whose mother tongue was Afrikaans and whose previous work experience was with one of the larger overland companies as a cook. Her skills in the kitchen were indeed impressive, she was a decent driver, but despite her degree in zoology and her interest in pursuing a graduate degree in marine biology, her knowledge of animals was completely unimpressive. After she was unable to answer our simple queries about the gestation periods for Rhinos, the subspecies of giraffe we might expect to encounter, etc, we resorted to borrowing her field manuals to extract the information ourselves. So much for book smarts eh?

As for our fellow travelers, we were lucky beyond all expectations. All together we were 9 tourists and one guide, which translated into four couples and one single Canadian. In our age bracket were the ever witty and constantly polite Kate and Phil who hailed from Jolly Old England. Kate did something akin to account management in the pharmaceutical industry and Phil worked with computers but had previously been trained as a Chemist in Scotland. She was 30 and he was 34 and on the fourth day of our trip, as Steven predicted, Phil proposed to Kate. This was fun for everyone in the group and we were delighted to be a part of their special occasion.

The other two couples were quite a bit older than the average traveler and had a story behind their adventure to Africa. As it turns out, this was something of a reunion tour for the four of them. Chris and Otto, the two men, were both Swiss, but had met and worked in Africa in the mining business 40 years ago. Margaret, who was working for an oil company at the time, and Geraldine, who was a nurse in Zambia eventually connected with the two Swiss men and the rest is history. They had not spent too much time together after their few years together in Zambia, and this was meant to be a reunion tour that would give the two couples a chance to re-connect and swap stories about the good old days. As you can imagine, stories about living, working, and traveling in Africa in the late 1960s were fascinating, so we felt very fortunate to have linked up with this crew of characters.

Rod from Canada rounded out the group and was another reason it was possible to spend 14 straight days together with 10 people (in an 11 passenger van) without any violence or serious squabbles. At 50 Rod was able to cross the divide between our multi generational group with ease and was just as good at talking about his experiences in the farm foreclosure business with Otto as he was (as a former horse broker) pondering the merits of various quarter horses with Kate, who grew up riding.

By our first major stop on the tour, Chobe national park in Botswana, everyone had established good rapport with the others and we were relieved that we had been placed into such a great group.

Like our group, Chobe also had a ton of potential and we were quite excited to be starting the proper safari portion of our trip. Our expectations for Chobe were high, however, because others we had spoken to about this massive animal sanctuary east of the Okavango delta simply raved about the place. If elephants are your thing, they suggested, then Chobe is your place.

Unfortunately, our time in this animal wonderland was limited. Together with Moremi and the delta itself, Chobe makes up a sizable portion of Botswana and stands as a testament to the commitment that country's leaders have made to conservation and wildlife.

And what an abundance of wildlife it has. Our tour vehicle for this massive park was a boat, not a truck or bus, so our expectations were naturally oriented more toward water loving creatures like Hippos, Elephants, Crocodiles, and of course, birds, but our guide for this portion of the trip assured us that even by boat it was possible to spot a big cat who has come to the water for a thirst quenching sip of the Okavango's cool clean waters.

Surprisingly, after trolling around the peaceful waters of the park in search of animals for about 4 hours, we had only managed to cover about 15 kilometers. This meager distance was attributable to the fact that Chobe was so chock a block with wildlife that the boat was constantly pulling over to the side to take a closer look.

We were well positioned at the front of the boat, which gave us a great opportunity to spot elephants on the horizon and to direct the driver to nearby crocs. After not long at all we found ourselves watching a herd of maybe 30 elephants decide if it was a good time to cross from one side of the river to the other. Much hemming and hawing went into their decision making process and after about 15 minutes it became clear that there were two camps within the elephant community about the decision. One contingent, the ones who had already left the peaceful shore and were submerged up to their knees, felt that the entire herd should go as a group, but a few other more stubborn beasts were convinced that there were still a few tender morsels to much on shore. It turns out that 30 elephants are far more patient than half as many tourists because after not too long we were off to get a closer look at a croc someone had spotted in the distance.

As our boat got closer and closer to the shore we could spy the large scale-laden tail of an adult croc. The closer the boat got to the croc the more we began to question the wisdom of our decision to sit so close to the front, for soon we found ourselves not more than 10 feet from the tail of the croc. Just then, as our boat crossed some unspoken line that the croc had defined about how close was too close the massive beast spun around to give us a better look at his teeth. The guide assured us that we were still within a safe distance from this uber-efficient predator, but when we caught a whiff of the animal's dank and rotten breath we were quite sure we had come close enough for comfort. Honestly, how do crocs expect to meet-up during mating seasons with such terrible halitosis? With all those teeth, the folks at Crest would make a killing.

Interestingly, for a country so interested in conservation, Botswana's animal protection policies have been so successful that the profusion of animals in this and other parks has become a bit of a problem with certain species. Elephants are the primary example of this overpopulation problem and every year there is a bit of debate about the ethics and efficacy of culling members of the enormous herds to make room for other animals. What, if anything should be done with the tusks of elephants who are killed in the name of conservation, and what, if anything, should the park service do about the fact that left unchecked the elephants would devour all the trees inside the park and thereby threaten the livelihood of so many other species.

All told we saw something like 100 elephants in that one 4 hour trip. One man we spoke to who had spent time on land within the park said that he saw a single group of elephants in Moremi that consisted of as many as 200 members. After even a short time in this amazing place we believed that such a thing was possible. Chobe is definitely a place we would go back to.

The next day we headed for the Caprivi strip in Namibia. This long narrow sliver of land in the north east corner of Namibia extends like a finger to give Namibia a boarder with Zambia as well as Botswana and Angola. This odd quirk of geographic fate was the result of a 1890 exchange between German Chancellor Leo von Caprivi and the United Kingdom. Von Caprivi arranged for Caprivi to be annexed to German South-West Africa (the precursor to Namibia) in order to give Germany access to the Zambezi River and a route to Africa's East Coast, where the German colony Tanganyika was situated. The annexation was a part of a larger treaty between the two nations, in which Germany gave up its interest in Zanzibar in return for the Caprivi strip and the island of Heligoland in the North Sea.

In any case, we were happy to be heading there because had heard great things about the animal life in this small and easily accessible place. Unfortunately, the Caprivi did not live up to our expectations. We took a game drive in the afternoon but saw almost nothing. Our guide indicated that the last few times she had been through this area she was unable to spot many wild beasts. This was a disappointment, but we were confident that Etosha, an enormous and well renowned park in northern Namibia would sate our appetite for wildlife.

Later that evening we took yet another boat tour of the Okavango river, although in Namibia it is just called the Kavango river. Oddly, enough, at the river's source in Angola, it is called the Vango river, so apparently it gains both distance and syllables as it wends its way toward its marshy end in central Botswana. In any event, it made for a lovely end to our day and provided a great backdrop for yet another amazing African sunset.

Midway through the boat tour, however, another country was unexpectedly added to our travel list. Where we were at that time the river forms the border between Namibia and Angola, and the entrepreneurial tour boat operator has turned this into an opportunity. Somewhere in the bowels of his vessel, which is literally just two old canoes that he had fastened broad wooden planks to, he keeps a small cardboard sign that reads: illegal in Angola. Each night, with a new crop of tourists, he swings his ship toward the Angolan side, finds a place to 'moor his craft' and welcomes yet another set of travelers to Angola.

But the locals have also grown accustomed to his habits, because waiting for us in Angola, were a small group of young girls singing a harmonious welcome song to note our arrival. This jubilant gaggle of youngsters held quite a lovely tune and were not at all surprised when the thankful tourists offered them the few small tokens they happened to have with them at the time. Rod, the well prepared Canadian doled out granola bars, Margaret, the older Brit who was living in Switzerland gave up a few pens and pencils, and a few others probably gave small change. We were not so well prepared or so generous, so we gave them our best thankful glances and grateful smiles. After our boat pulled away and the driver suggested that he may have spotted a croc the troupe of singers entered the water and began to swim back to Namibia. Apparently the Angolan children, who would not have to swim with the crocs to entertain tourists, have not yet caught onto the nightly ritual. It will be interesting to see what happens when and if they do.

Ironically, although we encountered very little game on our safari that day and even less on the sunset cruise to Angola, we were excited to find Kudu on the menu for dinner that night. We were quite eager to try this impressive antelope because we had heard that it is a favorite of the lions in the area. Chances are the lions consume the un-breaded and un-salted Kudu, but we enjoyed our meals nonetheless. The meat was prepared in such a way that it would have been very hard to distinguish it from pork, or beef, or almost any other meat for that matter, but by that time, we were hungry enough not to care much. Following dinner, we enjoyed a raucous presentation of "local dance," drumming and African harmonies - tunes that rattled our bones and summoned forth goose bumps.

The next day we rose early and began our journey across the rest of the Caprivi strip. On the way we spotted a few antelope and a decent number of giraffe, but all and all it was mostly just a driving day. On the way, however, we read a bit about the Aids epidemic and got a chance to discuss the problem a bit with our guide.

As everyone knows, Aids is a serious problem in Africa, but a few facts we picked up in the region drove that point home with depressing clarity. On the whole, Africa is expected to lose 30 million people to Aids by 2020. Such figures are shocking and hard to comprehend, but on a village by village basis the stats are even worse. In one village we drove through it is rumored that over 70 percent of the adult population has been infected. This particular village is in Namibia which hold its head high relative to its neighbors because it has an overall infection rate of just 29 percent. Botswana, with its 1.8 million people estimates that 38 percent of its people are infected. When we pulled into Rundu, we noticed that funeral homes and coffin makers we located in some of the best real estate and were about as plentiful as Starbucks are in the US. What a tragic situation.

Even more tragic are the failed attempts to address this growing crisis. Condoms are just not accepted practice in Africa despite countless billboards and other advertisements throughout the region. Someone, somewhere has convinced a large number of Africans that condoms actually spread Aids and that the disease itself was created by the white man to further oppress and diminish African peoples. For this reason, even the best efforts on the parts of peace corps volunteers and other humanitarian workers fall flat because in the minds of the target population the fact that white people are trying to convince Africans to use condoms plays right into the accepted myth. To further compound the problem, women have so few rights in the area that they cannot insist that their mate uses a condom and are often beaten for the mere suggestion. Appalling but true.

This crisis, like so many problems in Africa, gets wiped away by an attitude of helplessness and resignation that we have encountered from north to south. When the bus shows up 5 hours late people look at each other and shrug: this is Africa. When a bridge stops working and the entire trucking system shuts down for a week while it is being repaired, no one raises a voice in protest or takes action to remedy the situation: this is Africa. In our limited experience, Africa suffers from many crisis, but one of the most insidious of all is a continental crisis of expectations. People have been trained by their experiences to enter every transaction with the expectation that they will not get a fair deal and that somehow, things will not work out in their favor. Until the countries of the region find a way to expect more of their people, their systems, and their governments, Africa is destined to continue to suffer this crisis of confidence, after all, this is Africa.

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