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.”