What I know

What do I know? This morning I read the entries from my journal from my first journey to Botswana in July 2007, the trip that turned my life upside down. As I prepare to fly away from Botswana today, I find that the words I wrote then hold true:

I know that stillness speaks. I know that the sky can sing. I know that unity with the other is possible beyond words and recognizable by only the slightest thread in ordinary space and time. I know that culture is learned, customized like a suit of clothes, but the day may come when the suit is threadbare and no longer of use. I know that fire and water hold magnificent power and that rocks have stories to tell. And I know that the trees stand as witness and healers to the world. I know that tracks in the sand point to the animal but are not the animal, just as spiritual paths point to the truth but are not the truth. I know that dominion over nature can be only a temporary exercise. The cycle will turn, round and inside out. What is nature if not ourselves?

A journey's end

From author Joan Halifax:

"Many of us, no matter the skin color, no matter the culture of epoch, have found that we have to leave society to retrieve our innocence. Our minds and bodies need to be refreshed; they need to be restored to each moment. Gurdjieff once said that the only way you can get out of jail is to know that you are in it."

Feeling antsy

Last night the rains fell in Maun. Stuart, Kim, Kyeren, Rian, James and I were sitting near the campfire and under the thatched lapa to savor roast chicken, potato bake and a green salad-- one of my last meals at the Boro. It felt perfect to be back with people who have been like family to me. They've checked on me, fed me, invited me along on outings and kept me entertained with endless stories. They were telling some good ones last night when the big storm came, and I was treated to another African phenomenon: The rain causes big white flying ants to zoom out of the ground! Guess where they fly? Yep. Into your hair, on your shirt, down your shirt, into your lap, onto the table. Even the dogs looked confused by the biblical swarm.

I think of it as another lesson about the animals of Botswana. I've never given the insects their due. I won't miss many of them. What I will miss on the Boro: the lesser bushbabies that leapt from tree to tree above my cottage, the genet that enjoyed the chicken bones, the scavenging francolins in the yard, the screeching barn owls, the little bard owl, the cacophony of bullfrogs, the music of the doves in the morning that we say sing: "You have to work harder," followed by their afternoon chorus, "You have to drink lager!" I'm glad I didn't see the two Mozambique spitting cobras discovered inside my cottage earlier in the year. I did see Stuart and Kirk don plastic welder's glasses and grab a snake stick to capture a cobra on the property the other night. That was a show worthy of the Discovery Channel. They gingerly placed it in a blue plastic container and the next day released the creature at the rice project.

I missed the python they caught near the campfire a couple of weeks ago, and, seriously, I would have enjoyed seeing it and the bush guys' expertise at snake handling. I was in the bush. Snakes, though, may well be on the run from now on at the Karibu property. Just spotted under my deck: a dwarf mongoose. I'll sleep better tonight knowing he's there, on snake patrol.

May the circle be unbroken

Dec. 5, 2008
Maun, Botswana
With photos of Richard Avilino and his girlfriend, Kay, and of Richard and me.

I like it when life runs full circle, when I find that closed parenthesis that helps order events. It happened to me the other day at Jacana Camp in the Okavango Delta.

I was spending the week at Jacana with Wilderness Safaris’ Children in the Wilderness program, and on this particular morning I was in the storeroom with Bonolo and Helena sorting crayons, t-shirts and craft supplies in advance of the children’s arrival. Someone rushed over to find me sweating among the Rubbermaid boxes: Richard’s here; he’s come over from Kwetsane Camp with two American travel agents.

Finally.

Richard Avilino is the guide who introduced me to the beauty of Botswana when I came on holiday with Wilderness Safaris in July 2007. He led six of us on a “Great Botswana Journey” arranged through Natural Habitat Adventures in Boulder. In the fall of 2007, I wrote about the vacation that had opened my heart to Africa and changed my life. I talked about Richard’s gifts as a guide who interprets nature, not just points out what he sees, and I seconded another U.S. newspaper columnist’s assessment that Richard is “an all-purpose human Swiss Army knife.” The man can track lions, talk on the 2-way radio, drive a Defender through water that covers the hood, shine a spotlight on a minuscule mammal in a thorn tree and mix a G&T sundowner without batting an eye. My story ran on the wire in newspapers throughout the U.S.

One of my first stops when I arrived in Maun in February was to march into Okavango Wilderness Safaris headquarters and leave my telephone number for some of the great staff I had met on my vacation, Richard included: I wanted them to know that Wilderness Safaris’ slogan was true: their journeys really do change lives. Look at me. I hardly touched my feet back on U.S. soil in July 2007 before I was trying to figure out a way to return to the bush of Botswana. Lucky for me, The Sacramento Bee granted my request for a sabbatical.

This year, Richard and I talked a few times on the phone and sent text messages, but we never saw each other. I was in the bush when he was out of the bush, and vice versa. He would sometimes hear about me at Maun Airport when he was talking to my guide friends from Desert & Delta. Everywhere I went I sang his praises, which the guides let him know, and they let me know when they ran into him. (I always held him up as a model for what makes a great guide – someone who can speak of the whole ecosystem and the culture and traditions of the country, i.e., “In the olden days, the leaves of that tree were used for medicine for….”)

So here he was, at Jacana. And it turns out the two travel agents were from Natural Habitat Adventures and knew about my newspaper story. Richard and I had only a few minutes to chat, but I was able to meet him and his girlfriend, Kay, at Bon Arrivee for lunch this week before he and I flew our separate ways into the bush again, he to the Kalahari and I to Savute. It gave me a sense of joyous completion to be able to thank him in person and say, ‘See, I really meant it when I said that Botswana moved me to tears and to a crossroads. I put everything I own in storage. I gave up my income. I hopped a plane. I’m here. I speak some Setswana. Want to hear me list the animals in your language? I eat papa and seswaa. I’ve lived in the bush. I’ve stepped over black mambas. I’ve stayed awake listening to lions and honey badgers. I can spot the Malachite kingfisher….”

Poor Richard. My words rushed at him like the river at Victoria Falls, but I could tell he liked hearing it. He got a good laugh over my Setswana language skills and my imitation of a lion’s roar. (It’s pretty good, if I say so myself. Even Richard said so. I’ll demonstrate when I come back to the U.S.) And what I learned from him reaffirmed the global power of the written word. Richard told me the article I wrote is posted at his company’s office, the only article singling out a guide. He’s being offered exclusive trips to lead in 2009. His bosses rated him on his last evaluation as exceptional, he says, and acknowledge the marketing value the article had for the company. Guests arrive at Maun Airport having read about him in my story on the Internet – they tell him they know all about him -- and others are requesting first thing that he be booked as their guide because of the story. It has been a good year for him, busier than ever. And what’s more, he had a rare sighting: a pangolin. (My landlord says if any of his guests photograph a pangolin in the wild on safari, the Karibu Safari mobile trip will be free. That’s how elusive this nocturnal, armored, anteater creature is.)

Richard was pleased to see how well I had done in Botswana. And he didn’t seem surprised by how I had felt at home. “You were open to everything you saw, and you had so many questions and you wanted to know everything,” he said about my week on vacation. And he said the people of Botswana know when someone is truly respectful of them and their culture. I had passed that test.

I took Richard shopping for a reference book on mammals as a thank-you gift, and I inscribed it “with deep gratitude”. We exchanged e-mail addresses, promised to be in touch, and cried out the Setswana farewell, “Tsmaya sentle!” Go well.

Somewhere in the Kalahari, Richard is looking up at the night sky and telling his guests about the constellations. Just the thought of Richard and his group huddled together, marveling under a blanket of stars, makes me happy.

Jacana sunrise

Here are photos of guide Richard Avilino in July 2007 and a November 2008 sunrise at Jacana Camp in the Okavango Delta, where I would finally meet once again the guide who introduced me to the beauty of Botswana

Happy Thanksgiving!

This is wild. I'm in the bush, but the director of Children in the Wilderness has an Internet connection, so I can say how thankful I am for all of my friends and family the world over. I'm volunteering this week with Wilderness Safaris' nonprofit that takes disadvantaged children into the wilderness. It's fantastic and I'll have lots to report when I return on Monday. We are playing capture the flag, learning about the Okavango Delta and dodging an elephant in camp. He bumped up against my tent last night. Lots of photos to come. Lots of fun to be had with these children of Tubu Village in the Okavango Delta. Cheers on this turkey day.

You can't always get what you want...

Maun, Botswana
Nov. 22, 2008

Often in my time in Botswana I have met tourists intent on checking off the animals on their lists. They have watched the National Geographic documentaries, so they arrive tuned and ready: “Lion…Order up!” They simply MUST see a lion or a leopard or a wild dog or a cheetah. They don’t want to hear how filmmakers spent a year in the bush to capture the images seen on TV. They look to the guide to deliver on demand.

Is it any surprise that the vibe of “power and control” is in the air when they take their first steps on the Maun tarmac wearing their starched khaki ensembles, with a host of techno-camper gadgets at the ready? I wonder if the animals sense it, because they sometimes prefer to hide away on their own holiday rather than meet the guests. I like to imagine the elephants down by the water hole stamping their feet and sharing a few chuckling snorts about the Air Botswana parade. They tell their jokes and before the guests return from an afternoon game drive, the ellies amble off silently in all directions, lickety-split into the bush, just for the fun of leaving lodge managers to say, “You just missed them! I promise. There must have been 10 bull elephants at the water hole, not 5 minutes ago.”

What I wish for anyone who visits Botswana is to arrive with senses wide open for all that can be perceived. An opening of the heart will surely follow, by virtue of approaching the land’s treasures with the reverence of a novitiate, from the Fireball lily ablaze in scarlet to the dung beetle rolling a ball of wet buffalo poo with Herculean purpose. Where is that armored fellow going with that boulder of dung and at such speed? Sit and watch. The landscape and its occupants are grand, the whole of it, not just The Big Five.

Across the planet we are all sojourners among landscapes in constant change. It’s easy to miss the unfolding of the miracles where most of us live, stuck in traffic jams, a Bluetooth in our ear, a Blackberry on our dash. Underneath it all and through it all is a tapestry of nature woven from morning to night and all night through, indeed woven right through us. We forget to look for the gossamer threads. We’re walking amnesiacs huddled on street corners waiting for the light to say proceed. Here, in Africa, the recognition slaps us in the face, wakes us up. This is the light you’ve been waiting for. This is where you came from, this is what you’re connected to, this is the new news, same as the old news. Forget Times Square, for a digital moment anyway.

The other day I was in Camp Moremi, surprised to find I would be the only one on a game drive with guide Kagiso, a river bushman whose name means “peace.” I was overnighting at the camp to interview managers and guides. I hated to take Kagiso away from a rare opportunity to have an afternoon break. Just an hour’s drive would be fine, not the usual 2 ½ to 3. Anything we saw would be appreciated, I assured him. (This is usually the time I tease guides by amping up my demands, “You must find me a lion today!” We have a good laugh over it.) I was happy to see the Fireball lilies and dozens of baby impalas, tiny antelopes that belong under the lid of a music box, some of them not more than two days old, grazing and skipping throughout the reserve but sticking close to their moms.

I looked at my watch. We’d been out for an hour. It’s ok to go back now, I told Kagiso. Not far away an African fish eagle watched over the pond where golden-green crocodiles rested on the banks. The eagle took to the sky, throwing back its head to call its long whistling cry. (I am determined the sound of the fish eagle will be my cellphone ring tone back in the States. It will be the signal that elbows me in the ribs, “Wake up. Remember.”)

Kagiso started the truck rolling, but something caught his attention in the wet sand. Fresh leopard tracks. He wanted to check them out. Fine by me. Whatever we saw would be a gift. I really meant it.

You can see photos of the male leopard Kagiso tracked, a leopard with yellow eyes that were sparks. For some unknown reason, the leopard granted an audience, letting Kagiso and me join him on his afternoon walk, we in the truck of course, inching behind. To my astonishment, we spent 45 minutes with this leopard while he scratched his head against a log, sharpened his claws, marked his territory, rolled in the grass and sipped water from a puddle in the road. He was close enough that if I had leaned out of the truck I could have petted him. Radical notion, that one.

I was so close I watched the heaving of his chest as he breathed. How can nature paint a coat like that? I wondered. I found myself transfixed by him but not unaware of the whole. In the distance a giraffe stopped eating fresh leaves from an acacia treetop to crane his neck; his neck was the Tower of Pisa. (Did you know, despite that long neck, the giraffe has the same number of vertebrae as you and I?) The impalas froze as if on ice. The leopard carried on. Nothing else moved except the red-eyed francolins. They squawked and scattered about in a panic, sounding the alarm calls, running around like headless chickens. The leopard lazed. He was the picture of nonchalance. No question who was boss on this reserve.

To think the visitation happened without a whit of desperation on my part or that of Kagiso. The leopard granted us an audience, and we accepted with reverence. It was one of those moments of grace, fleeting yet eternal. I wish all the guests in Botswana could have shared it with me. Then they would understand and perhaps remember to keep their eyes open for the gossamer threads at home.

The leopard

'Tis the season

Maun, Botswana
Nov. 21, 2008

I cannot believe my eyes. When Sandy arrived from the United States on Nov. 2, the Botswana landscape was brown, parched, barren, absolutely crispy. In Moremi Game Reserve, the first blessed torrential rain fell on Nov. 4, and since then the cumulus clouds gather most days to announce we will have more rain, known as “pula.” The result? The landscape is awash in every shade of green. The trees are turning emerald, lime and sage. Sprouts of grass appear in the desert sand. Donkeys and goats on the roadside are having a field day, munching on what might be considered their version of fresh organic baby lettuce.

The mopane trees lining the sand track to my cottage pulled a Vermont on me last week: displaying leaves that glittered red and yellow for a couple of days as though heralding a Maun autumn. Someone must have flipped a switch, because the next thing you know those very leaves had clothed themselves in finery that was lime green. It’s stunning, the transformation that comes with the change of season. Even the air smells different.

The Thirstland loves its rain. And, as for me, someone who moped along badmouthing rain and clouds during the winter months in Sacramento, even I am a convert in a place like Botswana. In October the heat is unrelenting. The animals suffer. People feel edgy and crazy. October in Maun is bluntly referred to as divorce month and, worse, suicide month. With the rains, the land is coming alive, and the animals are on the move without frenetic desperation one observes in October. The temperatures are bearable again, and a breeze sometimes kisses your face. I can sleep without taking showers in the middle of the night to cool off. I live in gratitude for the relief.

From the bush planes this week I could see the magnificent greening of the Okavango Delta, how on Sunday that patch over there was green and on Thursday the color had spread for miles.

I want to introduce you to one of the flowers of the Okavango Delta that announces this spectacular rainy season: the Fireball lily. Its flowers are at least the size of my fist and sometimes the size of two fists. When I saw my first one on Tuesday on a walk at Palm Island, I stopped guide Lets Ngoma with the enthusiasm an Italian tourist would show for a lion. (And that’s saying something. “Leeeee-ooohhh-neeeee!” squeal the Italians.)

These explosions of scarlet dot the green landscape in the delta only for a short time and only at this time of year. I like to think of them as nature’s fireworks, alight to celebrate the advent of the rainy season. They are living exclamation points that say “Welcome, Pula!”

Take it from me, Mma Pula: Live through a Maun October, and you will know why a Fireball lily is a gift from the heavens, a sign of better times to come.

Fire in the hole!

Maun, Botswana
Nov. 21, 2008

Pardon me for the break in my storytelling from Maun, but I jumped at an invitation to go to the bush again. I’m back for a few days, then out again on Monday with Wilderness Safaris to volunteer with their nonprofit Children in the Wilderness program for the week.

I was back at the River Lodge last night for a dinner at which the worms-in-ceviche story remains the talker. But now there’s another singularly odd Botswana story in this week’s Ngami Times that has people talking. I met the hero of the tale early in my time in Maun and confirmed the newspaper’s account with one of his good friends last night. This one’s delicious.

According to the newspaper (and flourishes contributed by Gary’s friend): Gary le Roux, a builder, has been erecting a remote safari lodge in Nxai Pan, lately a very dry area of Botswana. A couple of weeks ago Gary awoke in his tent to a loud banging noise and looked out to see a bull elephant banging a metal cup on a metal table.

This was a very thirsty elephant.

The bull moved around to the shower tent and destroyed it to drink the water that was waiting in the bucket for Gary’s shower the next morning.

Gary was unnerved. He decided to unzip the tent (his girlfriend had told him never to run for it, but he was contemplating a dash). The bull caught wind of it and lumbered over to Gary’s tent, now with the flap unzipped. Gary moved to the back of the tent, to the metal container where he was keeping extra water. Guess what came along? The elephant’s trunk, winding its way through the tent toward him and the water container. Gary did the only thing he could think of besides running. He lit a cigarette “to restore my shattered nerves,” took a long draw and then blew smoke right into the elephant’s trunk.

“It snorted and retreated out of the tent and away from my camp, making its way to the staff camp where absolute chaos erupted as it smashed its way through their belongings,” he told The Ngami Times, which concluded the piece by noting that “Le Roux has decided not to give up smoking….”

So have many of the fellows I’ve met in Maun, where it is not a rare thing to see a sign on a door that says “Smoking encouraged.” Now, darn it, the okes will pull out Gary’s story anytime they need it to justify their habit. I can see them now taking a long draw on their Peter (Stuyvesant) Blues and saying, “But baby doll, smoking can SAVE lives.”

As the African worm turns

Maun, Botswana
Nov. 15, 2008
with a photo of the view of the Boro River, where I live, from Colin's boat and a photo of Tony the Tiler and Colin (he's holding on to the boat)

Whenever I return to Maun from the hinterlands, I wonder what crackerjack story I’m going to hear next. I’m never disappointed. Either my hair is left standing on end, or I’m doubled over laughing. This outback village is lousy with storytellers accustomed to chewing the fat around bush campfires. I could listen to them all day.
Colin is a safari company owner and jack of all trades who’s been here for years, and, though soft-spoken, is one of the jaw-boning champions. You’ll usually find him at the helm on his party-rental boat that cruises the Boro, a whiskey-drinking captain who named his boat Sir Osis of the River. He is beyond wry. Once he looked around at all the young married couples with babies at the River Lodge (Colin calls it the Liver Rot) and said they might look happy now, but just wait a few years and they’d end up divorced like his group of 40-somethings and older.

Divorce, sadly, in Maun is common, especially in the crazy month of October when temperatures soar past 120 degrees Fahrenheit and the hunters come home from safari season to find that some home-wrecker has hooked up with their sweeties. But from Colin’s standpoint everyone in Maun has always taken such bouts of misfortune in stride.
“You don’t lose your partner,” he said. “You just lose your turn.”
Hoo-boy, I told him. That is cynical.

I saw Colin yesterday at the pilots’ hangout, the Buck and Hunter (also known as the Duck and Ambush for a shooting outside the building a few years ago that amounted to guns going off with nobody hurt). I could tell by Colin’s smile this story was going to be good. He started off talking about a “cute Mexican” gal, an artist visiting Maun recently. He took a shine to her, tried to make some plans with her, which she accepted but then cancelled. He’d had enough of that, so he moved on. Somewhere along the way she phoned and invited him to a dinner party at which she would cook a traditional Mexican dinner at a local backpackers lodge where the young British royals like to hang out when they are in town. Colin said he was busy and declined.

Turns out that the people at the dinner, none of them British royals as far as I know, were treated to a Mexican dish that featured raw fish from the river. Colin didn’t know the name. The best I can figure was that the artist made ceviche using Okavango Delta bream. Now, I’m a sushi lover, but even I would run from a plate of raw river fish. I’ve heard the same story again today from another source: the number of people is somewhere between 6 and 8, including the artist, who, post-dinner, are battling horrific worms.

“You can see the worms move under the skin,” Colin said. They move up and all around and “can go to your brain!” To be rid of them, a doctor has to cut them out.

(Aieeeee! This was the kind of gross my boss in California would salivate over.)

Just like the movie “Alien!” I said to Colin.

And I added, “Great, one more thing to worry about in Africa.”

Nonplussed as usual, Colin looked on the bright side. “I feel like one of those guys,” he said, “who missed the plane that crashed.”

How to correct a fashion faux pas in the bush...

Maun, Botswana
November 15, 2008

Into the bush on safari, I imagined I had left all thoughts of couture behind. As usual, the enduring lesson about Africa – about life in general – is to expect the unexpected.

On the day Americans were celebrating Obama’s victory (or not), my friend Sandy and I pitched up as guests at Camp Moremi so I could introduce her to the African lodge experience with Desert and Delta Safaris, which repeatedly has afforded me a place I longed for from America: a home in the bush among the animals and a life attuned to nature’s rhythms, not the alarm clock’s. We were scruffy and bedraggled (maybe I should speak for myself) from our two nights of mobile safari camping with my landlords’ company, Karibu Safari, but completely satisfied with our authentic, rugged tent safari in Moremi Game Reserve, even during the crash-bang thunderstorm that shot lightning bolts to the ground nearby, and I mean on X- marks-the-spot nearby. Exciting! That’s how I viewed it. I like to think of it as Nov. 4 election fireworks and, as I mentioned in the previous blog, a blessing bringing rain.

On our first game drive in Camp Moremi, we crawled to the top seats on the game viewer behind a diminutive man wearing a tight tangerine-colored shirt, his hair moussed upward in a style reminiscent of the crested crane I had seen at Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. His partner was bespectacled John, friendly, older, an accountant. The man in the tangerine shirt turned out to be a high priest of fashion: Louis Mariette. His business card from London is black with silver lettering. It features a festive crown one might see at a Mardi Gras ball, if I’d been to one. “Bespoke hat couture/ Bejewelled headpieces and accessories/ (by appointment only),” said his card. See www.louismariette.com for his photo gallery of dragonfly tiaras, his masterpieces that have appeared at Ascot races, Dorchester balls, his 15-million-pound timepiece hat, his list of supermodels who wear his work and the mention of Jerry Hall as one of his clients. Ascot, he told me, is a milliner’s “red-carpet moment.”

Sandy and I immediately liked Louis (pronounced Loo-ee) and John, and they liked us. We did the unthinkable and chatted too much on the game drive, but how could you not chat with a world famous hatmaker who would be right at home on the first version of the fashion make-over show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” although by necessity it would most certainly have to be a highbrow, gilded edition for the uppercrust.

Louis grew up in Africa, in Botswana for a time, Swaziland and Mauritius. His father was a vet, so Louis finds himself at home in the bush or on Rodeo Drive. Not only does Louis have an eye for hats, he can spot game with uncanny laser sight – from an owl hidden away to a monitor lizard tucked into the grass. I was impressed. Africa, particularly its insects, provides inspiration for his hat creations. I wish I could say I shared his enthusiasm for creepy-crawlies that fly, but don't get me started.

I let him in on my family lore, because, I decided, we were connected by artistry. In the 1700s an ancestor of mine from Coventry, England, stowed away on a ship bound for Philadelphia. The man paid off his passage as an apprentice to a milliner and later became a Minuteman in the Revolutionary War, a fact that prompted my mother to join the Daughters of the American Revolution and to occasionally note that I, too, am eligible to become a DAR member. Not ready. Not old enough. So you see, I, too, have the blood of hatmakers coursing through my veins!

Louis hesitated. Do you know whether he designed fashionable women’s hats, military hats or perhaps utilitarian hats for such people as firemen? he asked. Why, I never considered it could be anything other than women’s hats ablaze in colonial fabulousness. Dash it all! I might have had a perfectly pedestrian milliner for an ancestor. My feather in my cap wilted at the notion.

Which inspired an idea. Louis, since you are a world famous milliner, please give me your assessment of the hat I’m wearing. I bought it in Napa Valley a few years back and have worn it religiously in Botswana.

Louis pulled out the cannons.
Your hat is dowdy, he told me. It ages you 5-6 years. It’s clear that you had a relationship that ended and you wear the hat to hide your face. Correct?
Yes, I told him, at least about the relationship part and how I had missed the fellow for several years.
And, he hastened to add, the hat says you bake cakes.

We fell over laughing.

And Sandy’s bendable cowboy hat?

It says young, hip and loving life, he decreed.

Fine, I said. My hat is finished! It is over. Tonight we burn it in a fire ceremony!!!!

And so you have before you an array of photos - if Blogger works -- recording the burning hat ceremony with m.c. Louis Mariette. We decided to let guests around the campfire shout out words they would like written on the hat, signifying things they would prefer to vanish with the smoke. We heard: Palin, Maverick McCain, gun nuts, segregation, Mugabe. Those are the ones I remember. After all, there had been quite a cocktail hour in celebration of Obama preceding the ritual.

The ceremony ended with the ashes of my Napa Valley hat destined for the soil of Africa.
With customary generosity Sandy presented me with her Texas cowboy hat as a gift. She'll buy a replacement when she returns to Austin.
What a lucky evening I had correcting the sartorial faux pas. The fashion gods smiled upon me in the firelight. I could feel it.

A tip of a bespoke cowboy hat to Louis! (P.S. Can someone tell me what bespoke means, other than in the verbal sense?)

The mad hatter

photos from camp moremi's hat ceremony
The first is of a Louis and me in the process
Then there's lodge manager Kirsty Roberts, making sure the deed is done
The glow of the fire

Africa cheered for Obama

with photos of Sandy, chef Class and guide Borobi on the Karibu mobile safari during the time of not knowing who won the presidential election, plus a photo of me celebrating Obama at Dune 17 in the Namib Desert at Sossusvlei.

MAUN, BOTSWANA – We were in the bush searching for lions when the polls opened on the East Coast for the U.S. presidential election.

As we bounced along the sandy roads of the Moremi Game Reserve in the Okavango Delta, I turned to my friend visiting from Austin, Texas, and said, “They’ve started voting.”

What would the day bring?

In Botswana, nicknamed The Thirstland for its vast expanse of semi-arid desert, Nov. 4 brought this country’s greatest blessing from above: pula. The word means rain, money and “Cheers!” – especially cheers for the president. From my perspective, such a blessing was perfection on America’s election day.

We didn’t find the lions, because the season’s first crashing thunderstorm rolled over the delta, offering relief from temperatures of 47 degrees Celsius and water to parched animals. With no Internet, telephone, television or commercial radio, I and Dr. Sandy Garcia, an emergency room pediatrician and an Obama fan, were unplugged from the election’s moment-by-moment, red-blue-state updates.

Unplugged has been my mode of living for most of the months I have been in Africa, on sabbatical from my job as deputy editorial page editor at The Bee after falling head over heels for the African wilderness. Never before have I been so unaware of the world’s events, not from lack of interest but from lack of media in the bush. I found out two weeks after the fact that Russia had invaded Georgia. I peppered tourists as politely as possible for scraps of details about the U.S. presidential election, and each time I flew to Maun, I rushed to the Internet to try to catch up. It seemed an impossible task.

Time and again I have relied on local Botswana friends to relay the news, mostly by word of mouth. They’ve done so, even using the old-fashioned walkie-talkie-style radio at Desert and Delta Safari headquarters in Maun to provide me updates during the primaries. And, of course, I voted absentee in October from Cape Town – by fax.

The interest here in the election has astonished me. “A Black man in the White House?” was the front-page headline of Maun’s 12-page, weekly The Ngami Times (CQ) on Oct. 31. “That’s the question on everyone’s lips,” according to the story.

Wherever I’ve traveled on the continent, Africans -- white, black, brown, mixed -- have been pulling for Obama. (There was one exception: a white Zimbabwean who told me if “Hussein” were elected, it would be bad for the hunting business; wealth would be redistributed, discouraging rich Americans from booking hunting safaris.) In Zanzibar I met Masoud (CQ), who started a bona fide Tanzania for Obama movement by scrawling his support for Obama in ink on a Sebego shoe.

Masoud said Africans like the fact that Obama’s father was Kenyan. “But that’s not the main thing.” Hope is, he said. “My father insisted on honesty, sincerity and respect. I see that Obama embodies all those things my parents taught me.”

In September a flight attendant on Air Botswana pointed to the in-flight magazine and whispered proudly, “I’m a supporter of Obama. And that’s OUR Obama.” The magazine cover featured Botswana’s new president, Seretse Khama Ian Khama (CQ), the son of what is referred to in historical terms as “a marriage of inconvenience” between a white British woman and an Oxford-educated black tribal chief who became Botswana’s first president after independence in 1966. Many attribute Botswana’s racial harmony in part to the nation’s having had an interracial couple as founders, its version of George and Martha Washington.

Sandy and I rolled into Camp Moremi just before 11 a.m. on Nov. 5. Desert and Delta’s Munihango Limbo (CQ) walked toward me with a big smile. He had been watching election returns off and on all night in Maun before his flight to the lodge that morning.
“Obama won!” he said.
“Is it official?” I asked.
He said it was unofficial. Rats. After the 2000 and 2004 elections, I hesitated to jump to conclusions. I rushed to the radio to talk to Mos Bashe, in charge of lodge logistics for Desert and Delta in Maun and someone who had followed the campaign’s every twist and turn. It’s official, he told me. (Upon my return the next day to Maun, Mos, beaming and without a word, would throw his arms around me in a bear hug in celebration of the win.)

That Wednesday night at the lodge in the bush, Sandy and I were the only Americans, but the other guests – Europeans and Australians – were quick to sing out, “Brilliant show! Good job! Congratulations!” It was a fine celebration, even prompting me to make a speech and offer a toast.

In the days that followed while I traveled in Botswana and along the coastline and desert of Namibia, government officials at border posts, customs officials, receptionists, gas station attendants, waitresses, police officers, bar tenders – you name it – they all talked about the election. “Congratulations to you!” they cried, as if I had just birthed a baby. Thumbs-up was their universal greeting in honor of Obama.

“Obama is the 44th president of the Republic of the United States of America,” said Galerone Galeitsiwe (CQ), a truck driver in Maun. “Congratulations to you. It means the end of apartheid. Black, white, we’re all the same. Asia, Africa, America, we’re all the same.”

The view from Africa is an enlightened one. There is audacity in Galeitsiwe’s statement, echoing a sentiment of real optimism in the places I have traveled on this continent that America remains a beacon that stands for dreams, possibility, opportunity.

“If Obama can, we all can,” one East African told me.
To which I say, “Pula! Cheers to the president.”

Scenes from Stanford

I spent one retreat morning on horseback at a vineyard in Stanford, about 10 miles from Bodhi Khaya. I wish I could have bottled the green and brought it back to Maun with me.
Letting my curiosity guide me, I left the horse and wandered down little Stanford's main street, where I happened upon a dream come true: an art gallery/espresso cafe/restaurant/community cultural hub. The Stanford Galleries had it all, including newspapers!

I also got lucky. The owner hardly ever comes in, I'm told, but that morning he did. He's Peter Younghusband, who turned out to be a retired journalist and author, including of one successful children's book that chronicled the real-life wanderings of a hippo across Africa. (Some of you know that I was late to the party with my children's book about a baby hippo befriending a 120-year-old tortoise in Kenya after the tsunami. My book arrived at the publishers two weeks after a book on the same topic had been accepted. That OTHER book went on to become number one on the Amazon children's bestseller list. All I can say for myself is I was two weeks late and many dollars short!)

A South African, Peter worked for Newsweek and for the London Daily Mail, with a 3-year-stint as its Washington correspondent during the LBJ years. He had to begin working 2 weeks early because Bobby Kennedy was shot. He covered the Vietnam War. He counted as one of his great friends in Vietnam David Halberstam. He told me how he was ready to go on break and told his paper he couldn't possibly do an assignment on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was the truth. But he told his buddy Halberstam about it, and Halberstam said no problem, I've got contacts that can help you get the story. Peter really needed the break, but Halberstam provided no excuses for him to go on vacation. He stayed and got the story. I got to share with Peter how Halberstam was one of our most generous guests during our Nieman Fellowship year at Harvard. He went so far as to pass around his notebook to our class of Nieman Fellows so that we could see how he conducted his interviews and took notes. On this occasion, he was working on a baseball book.

The connections continued. Peter turned out to be the previous owner of the farm where I was staying. He had a rough bout of health and couldn't keep up with the labor on the place. He sold it to journalist/filmmaker Georgina Hamilton, who made it Bodhi Khaya because, as she told me, there needs to be more meditation in the world. The farm is very old and has been home to authors besides Peter. Georgina's late father made the purchase possible. He was Gavin Relly, active in the anti-apartheid movement, among the first white South Africans to meet with the ANC in exile. (I haven't double-checked my facts on this, but this is what I was told by one of the managers at the farm.)

The Overberg region -- my getaway into the middle of nowhere -- turned out to be rich in characters and in story.

More photos from the Cape

Here's the farm where I stayed in Groosbot, in the Overberg. I don't have a photo of him, but I met Marc Weiner working in the Bodhi Khaya office, and he and I had a conversation about our love for Botswana. He said he used to work there in the mid-90s in the Okavango Delta, his favorite region of all. You can imagine my surprise in finding a true bush guy, complete with Crocodile Dundee hat, at a meditation retreat in the coastal farmlands. He didn't think I would know the place he once lived.

Camp Okavango, he said.

My assignment in May was Camp Okavango, I told him.

Marc couldn't believe it.

"Do you know Obie?" he asked.

He's one of my best friends in Botswana! I was helping him out at Xugana three weeks ago.

Marc and I wrote a note, and he enclosed a photograph of himself in an envelope I placed into the Xugana mail bag, headed out by bush plane today. How can a continent this vast bring people together in such coincidences? With that little card Marc was able to catch up Obie on his life's meanderings for the past decade and to ask about Obie.
Thus two friends, one a white South African, the other a black Motswana, were reconnected.

Maybe, as though emitting an untold signal, we kindred spirits are drawn to each other by our love of the delta. We recognize each other before we know it.

Botswana makes the news

Grootbos, South Africa
October 28, 2008

I meant to mention this last week, but I guess I was in such a shopping frenzy it slipped my mind. The Cape Times had an article with a London dateline describing how Festus Mogae, Botswana's president from 1998 until the end of March, won the 2008 Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. He'll receive $5 million over 10 years and $200,000 a year for life after that. The foundation created by Mo Ibrahim, who founded Celtel International in Africa and got rich beyond words, selected Mogae for his leadership on health and economic issues. In its second year, the prize recognizes and promotes good governance in Africa.

"Botswana is the world's largest producer of diamonds, and Mogae drove a campaign to ensure Botswana benefited more from its mineral wealth -- venturing into cutting and polishing diamonds instead of just exporting uncut stones and leaving most of the profit-taking to foreigners," according to the article. "Mogae also received widespread praise for tackling Botswana's high HIV/AIDS infection rates. He has taken an AIDS test publicly and addressed the issue in almost every one of his speeches. Life-saving anti-retroviral drugs are known locally as 'Mogae's tablets.'"

When I first arrived in Botswana, Mogae was on his village-to-village tour to say goodbye and accept the thanks of the people. I found it an other-worldly notion, this presidential goodbye and goodwill tour, but it works in Botswana, where people showed up with gifts of goats and the all-important cows. The citizens of Botswana truly like their presidents.

The new one, Seretse Khama Ian Khama, son of Botswana's first president, Sir Seretse Khama, certainly impressed me a few months ago. Even though in my bush life I have been radically unplugged from most of the news of the world, my Botswana friends in the bush kept my apprised of some of what they heard on Radio Botswana. Khama made a courageous stand for freedom and democracy after the June vote in Zimbabwe. He alone on the continent refused to recognize Mugabe as Zimbabwe's president. That seemed to make the people of Botswana all the prouder of their leader.



I can imagine this latest news about Mogae has had similar effect.

Where the world keeps turning

October 27, 2008
Hermanus, South Africa
photos of Leroo La Tau in daytime and at dusk

I'm the only guest in the Bodhi Khaya farmhouse, the meditation retreat center where wildflowers bloom in abundance, green mountains overlook the garden and a gurgling stream issues forth its welcome sounds. Come from a desert, and you appreciate the lushness of green and the soft pastels that emerge when fog kisses the mountaintops lining the sea. Yes, I'm enjoying my retreat from the heat. (I admit that I had intended to go into total seclusion for several days, but the draw of sushi was too much for me. Here I am in Hermanus, about 30k from the farm, waiting for the sushi doors to open at 6. I'll gobble down the sea's bounty and high-tail it back to my fleece jacket and down comforter. Can you believe it? I've hardly sweated for days, and you should see my still freshly pedicured toes. They're normally sandy and dirty five minutes after I walk out the door in Maun. Here, they are positively glossy. Why, I could eat sushi with them. There's an idea.)

My respite in the farmhouse has given me time to recall and consider wondrous memories of Botswana. And I find myself thinking back to two weeks ago, at Leroo La Tau, when the lions were roaring night after night. I would jump up to try to capture the sound with my tape recorder. Alas, the recorder never does the haunting sound justice. And yet, I remember the calls, to the bone.

It was a full-moon week, and I was fortunate to spend time with Gerald Hinde, a BBC wildlife photographer of the year, and his friend John Henning. They would wait in the hide beside the water hole and have the tripod at the ready for the rise of the full moon. I found myself enchanted by elephants sticking their trunks right at the spot where the water was pumping into the water hole. Their trunks served as gargantuan straws, and they slurped like a crowd at the counter of a malt shop.
Were we ever lucky!
A blood-red moon rose in grandeur over the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park, across the channel where thousands of zebra gathered to muscle their way in for water. Gerald was pleased with the show, as was I. My camera can never record the full-on night shots, but my memory can. And one of those memories will be how on the night of the full moon I woke up around 2 in the morning and rushed out on my balcony to see a primitive shape moving gracefully in the distance in the moonlight. The scene reminded me of the rock paintings at Tsodilo. I couldn't see details, simply a blackened shape. Finally, it registered. The shape was a giraffe, too shy to go all the way to the water hole. It went forward, then backed up. Soon I understood why. Another shape moved off from the water hole and toward the rise of the hill. That shape was an elephant.
The coast was clear. The giraffe loped to the water hole.
All was quiet, but the animals of the night were on the move, graceful as ever, oblivious to the woes of humans, many of us biting our nails and focused on distressing spirals of world markets. Botswana reminds me of what's real-- our connection to the animals, all of nature, and to one another. Nothing artificial about it.

I came across this quote from Annie Dillard that suits my endless fascination with Botswana's wildlife. Even here in this luxurious, lush Western Cape I long for my treasured glimpses of the animals:

"The great hurrah about wild animals is that they exist at all, and the greater hurrah is the actual moment of seeing them. Because they have a nice dignity, and prefer to have nothing to do with me, not even as the simple objects of my vision. They show me by their very wariness what a prize it is simply to open my eyes and behold."

Scenes from South Africa

You'll see the cable car we took up to Table Mountain, lucky for us, on a crystal blue day with little wind.

More yachts. Good life.

And while the economic downturn has everyone across the pond in a panic, the dollar is growing stronger by the day here. Whatever the state of the world's economy, mama duck has a job to do at Kirstenbosch Gardens and is handling the turn of events just fine, thank you very much.

Wish I had a photo from WIZARDZ Internet cafe in the all-too-familiar Waterfront mall where I might as well have plopped down my sleeping bag, considering the time I spent there. It was here that I embarked on the the grand process of trying to fax portions of my 48-page ballot to the Sacramento County elections office. It was an ordeal. Thanks to Dan and Stuart for helping me out last month, and to elections official Diane for answering my many questions about completing my civic duty from abroad. If the fax made it, my vote for U.S. president is in! Let the confetti drop. From this salubrious spot on the globe, the world is ready for change.

More Cape Town scenes

The food is from Masala Dosa. Every city needs one of these!

Kelly joked that someone went wild with a "bedazzler," something I think that is sold in infomercials, on this black Jeep we saw on Long Street. I'm excited that art cars are on the move in Africa, just as they are in Houston and Austin.

I'm here with the yachts, hoping that Microsoft's Paul Allen will happen by and invite us for a sail. It didn't happen. Oh, well. But the gossip in Maun is that Paul Allen has just purchased one of the fanciest safari camps in the Okavango Delta. It's the talk of the frontier post....

Oops, wrong button and now there are two yacht photos of me. aiesh. sorry.

Ode to my mother

Cape Town
October 25, 2008

I have a mother I wish everyone could have: kind, talented, compassionate, artistic, protective of her family in every way. She's not, however, someone who could stomach buying the ticket to Africa. Although her Sunday School friends tried to persuade her and my father to come visit me during my sabbatical year, they failed. I'm sure my stories about the black mambas and the lions roaring outside my tent -- oh, and the biggest spiders I've ever seen in my life -- didn't help move Glenda's high heels from their position locked in cement. No way. No how. Africa did not flip her trigger. I think her fondest international travel memories remain those from the Swiss Alps.

So today I have a blog entry in honor of my mother, lover of flowers, interior design and her garden club friends. Kelly and I didn't shop every minute of our time in Cape Town, South Africa. We went to the Kirstenbosch Gardens, a world famous spot tucked into the Table Mountain landscape and a draw for every British matriarch in this hemisphere. "Dah-link, would you go and fetch the car?" said one regal 75-ish-year-old to her very proper British husband. (All of England of a certain age must turn up at the gardens. Kelly and I looked positively schoolgirlish on the paths through the flowers) We also drove to the end of the continent, to Cape Point, and along the way we saw African penguins and landscapes that would entice my mother. So, Mom, this is for you, to assure you that Africa has treasures for everyone and to let you know I was thinking of you in the floral splendor of Cape Town. Miss you.