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.

"And the gold medal goes to...."

Aug. 18, 2008
Maun, Botswana

Alpha Kilo Kilo – radio-speak for the plane that brought me back to Maun yesterday afternoon – ferried a lone reluctant passenger. You know who….

Not so the rest of my Savute friends: guide Gwist, who kept checking his cell phone as if news from his mosadi (girlfriend) would pop up any minute, rooms ladies (that’s what they call housekeepers here) Maggie and Keba, groundsman and all-around fix-it guy Mocks and waiter Mbombo. They had worked their two months solid and were headed to Maun for their 11-day time-off. After tourists disembarked at Kwando, Matt the pilot reflected the staff’s mood by pumping a low-volume bit of rock and roll through the plane’s speakers.

From the co-pilot’s seat beside Matt with the bird’s eye view, I surveyed the dry scrub of Savuti, then the lush green of the Delta as we made our way west and south, and, yes, I wanted to turn around and go back. I love the bush. I exclaim it from the top of the morning until night swallows day: I absolutely love the bush. But this time I kept my mouth shut. I know those folks from Savute like me, but I would have sparked mutiny had we ventured anywhere short of Maun. Skydiving with no parachute would have been my fate. They were tired. They wanted to see their families, eat traditional food and go to the cattle post. No way, no how would a romantic makgowa (me) with stars in her eyes about Africa stop them.

Why do I love it? The bush reclaims my attention from distraction. I listen with new ears and see with new eyes, and I never cease to feel reverence for the wild.

Last week I was in one of the chalets getting ready for dinner. I had just had a shower. The bathroom sliding glass door was cracked open about a foot and a half. In the bedroom the sliding screen doors were all that separated my room #4 from the balcony overlooking the water hole where the elephants meet. It was 6:08 p.m. when I heard the quick rustle and the thud. I looked out from the bathroom and couldn’t believe it: On the railing of my chalet was an adolescent female leopard! She must have been chasing a guinea fowl, and it was this cat that had landed with the thump on my rounded timber railing just a few feet away.

Job one for me: Close the sliding glass doors in the bathroom quietly, hastily, with care.
Done.

I watched the leopard glide like a gymnast on a balance beam. Slow move. Quick step. Slow move forward again. The sun was setting, so she stood in contrast to the yellow and pink glow behind her. She walked the length of the railing, then jumped down onto the balcony to snoop around. No guinea fowl here. She leapt up on the big tree that leans into the balcony, crawled partway up and came down again. I was watching it all, eyes always on her, my body frozen except for my hands digging through my backpack to find my camera. I failed at retrieving it in time. No matter. I’ll never forget the scene: Her sleekness and elegance, the length of her tail. She jumped off my balcony, and I heard the crunch of leaves as she moved on. I exhaled. Time had been suspended. I wanted to dance with joy. I was shaking with the thrill of it all, though slightly annoyed that I didn’t have a photograph to commemorate those minutes. Of this I was certain: The leopard’s visit was etched in my memory in burnt-black detail. Rembrandt couldn’t have done better.

And then! There she was again! She was at the right-edge of my chalet, craning her neck around the corner to peek in at me through the sliding glass door. Her face was so like that of a house cat, it was uncanny. I glanced at my watch: 6:10 p.m. She sat there looking at me while I muttered something silly, “Hi there, kitty. I’m not going to hurt you. It’s ok. It’s ok.” We stared at each other in high alertness. We were in a sea of stillness. We studied each other intently. I held my breath through it all. Then she was gone.

When nature comes calling with such a creature carrying its calling card, no words can do such a visit justice, only gratitude. That I felt in all its fullness.

I finished dressing in a flash. It was 20 past 6:00 by then, probably safe for me to go from my chalet up to the lodge, but, well, maybe not. My sissy mode appropriately kicked into gear. I knew that the two lodge managers Kobus and Sanet liked to watch the sunset from the chairs near the fire pit when guests were on the afternoon game drive. I figured they were there, close by my chalet but out of sight because of the trees. “KOBUS! KOBUS! CAN YOU COME GET ME IN NUMBER 4?” I yelled. Without a bright flashlight, I figured this was my safest course at dusk, and indeed Kobus came running. He and Sanet had heard the thud and rustle. They had run toward #4 just after 6:00 but stopped short when they saw the “Do Not Disturb” sign stretched across the path. They thought guests had been cavorting. They forgot that was my room for the day, where I had been napping during my break.

I told them the leopard story, and, sharing my excitement, off they went to see if they could track her. My job was to meet the guests coming back from game drives to tell them what happened and how the hunt was on for the leopard. Kobus and Sanet came back to the front of the lodge a few minutes later. They hadn’t found her. Some guests had already gone to their rooms. Energy and Gwist were leading their guests to rooms near #4. It had been a hot afternoon, and the animals had “taken a holiday,” as we say in sympathy about game drives in which Italians in particular arrive back at the lodge disappointed by an absence of big cats. Well, the game activity wasn’t over. The leopard –my leopard visitor – was in a bush on the right side of my chalet. She hadn’t gone far after all. The guides shone their spotlights, and guests got close and shot their photos. Smiles all around. Alas, I still hadn’t dug my camera out from the pile in my backpack, but from disappointing experience I knew that it would have failed to capture the leopard during nighttime anyway.

So I am left with only this tale to tell you, and it is true and will stay with me always. What can be contained in three minutes of clock time? Reflected through nature, it is an alchemical blend of depth and stillness, exquisite, heretofore unknown to me, wherein clock time matters not at all.

6:45 a.m., Friday, Feb. 29

My first dispatch from Africa: I did it! I took the leap in leap year.

So this morning I am in Audi Camp on the Thamalakane River outside Maun, Botswana, sitting in my meru tent, listening to the sounds of doves and birds I don’t know yet that zip about in the shady mopane trees and sipping my instant Nescafe classic coffee. (Goodbye, lattes. Goodbye, Dean and DeLuca coffee in the publisher’s suite during my happy afternoon chats with Debbie Ventura.) I haven’t had any major crying bouts as I did last summer when I was deep in the Okavango Delta and every baby elephant that trotted by or the sight of the southern cross or the stillness at sunset tugged at my heart. I did tear up when I neared our landing in Maun. I was seeing the landscape again, finally, but this time instead of brown shades of camouflage color, it was green. The green of the bush this time of year is soft green, gauzy, not at all like you imagine the green of lush jungles and rain forests. It’s a smudged earthy, mossy green captured perfectly by my new friend in Gainesville, Florida, a landscape painter named Mary Jane Volkmann who lived in Africa for 28 years and is married to Walter, a Namibian who grew up on a vast cattle ranch. She gave me a book of her paintings of Namibian landscapes. Her portraits of Africans have appeared on Namibia’s postage stamps. She gets the colors of this region spot-on, and you can see them on Mary Jane’s Web site.

This has been a good year for rain (which in the Setswana language is “pula,” which also means money and cheers. Sounds about right to me.) The waters are teeming, and so the animals are spread throughout the bush. As winter nears – June, July and August here – and boreholes dry up, the animals will make their way to the remaining waters, in the rivers such as Okavango and Chobe, near where I am.

I’ve got much to tell but I won’t go into it all today. The highlights so far are that I was met at the airport by Cathy Wanzala, a Kenyan, who has lived here over a decade with her husband, Joe, an accountant from Uganda and new owner of the College of Business Management/internet café in Maun. They agreed to my request to stay with them; the Quakers founded SERVAS, a network of international travelers and hosts interested in cultural exchange and world peace. I joined, so I got a list of people in Africa and the U.S. who welcome guests for up to two nights. I’ll be staying with Cathy and Joe tonight and Saturday night. And in the list of many synchronicities about my journey, I found out in e-mailing Cathy and Joe two months ago that they have a daughter, Winnie Wanzala, who works in Sacramento for the state of California. She lives in Stockton. You can imagine how surprised I was by that bit of news, and I jumped on the phone to introduce myself to Winnie before I left California.

Cathy insisted on meeting me at the Maun airport on Tuesday. It’s not unlike Sacramento’s executive airport in size. It’s the hub of safari tourism in the famous Okavango; Maun is the gateway town to the delta. Think of it as a tiny, dusty Estes Park before you get to the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado but without the famous Herzog’s Gift Corral of my past with its unfortunate supply of pewter peewees that I sold as a clerk in 1982. I wandered into the lobby area with a clump of tourists, almost all of whom were heading off toward safari hosts holding sign boards with their names on it.

After a while, after most people had gone off to their bush planes for the trip into the delta camps, I was one of only a few people hanging around. I looked over at a black African woman, about 65 years old, dressed in a hot pink ensemble and sitting right by the door that we travelers had exited after picking up our luggage.
“Cathy?”
“Maria?”
She couldn’t believe it. “I saw you come in but I thought that couldn’t be you because you looked like you knew what you were doing!” she said.
We gave each other big hugs, and I took her words as a major compliment, because the last thing I know after all these months of preparation, bureaucracy, hassles with Larry’s Moving Helpers, a desperate search for a home for my “special needs kitty,” and packing for a year for city/summer/winter/safari wear is what I’m doing. But I do know a couple of things. All of you who sent me on my way with so many good wishes and encouragement are fueling my journey, and I carry you with me. And while I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t expect to. I am, as my friend Stephen in Colfax says, “living the question.” That’s the point of this journey – to be wide awake, to pay attention, to be eternally grateful and let the journey unfold as it will.