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| Stinks, actually. |
At the same time – that’d be spring 2013 – that my essential self knew
to drive around America, it also knew that the next thing to try would be a
trip to someplace brand new to do something useful. The organization called Earthwatch came highly recommended by friends
as a mentor for that. Earthwatch offers
paid-volunteer opportunities around the world working on archeological digs,
wildlife studies and other research projects.
So I made a spreadsheet and compared a few of their more interesting
opportunities: cost, duration,
distressing-ness of local government, probability of leeches, weather, etc. My final choice, from amongst things like
dolphins in Greece and water in Mongolia, was cheetah conservation in
Namibia. I had just a few days after
finishing the road trip to start my malaria medication, unpack the Honda and
re-pack one large and one small suitcase for two weeks of very new adventure.
Earthwatch and its partner the Cheetah
Conservation Fund were very careful in directing me what to pack, so that
part was pretty easy. Somehow I never
did get the bug spray they’d suggested, but mosquitoes aren’t supposed to be a
big problem in that part of the country in November. I did pack a few boxes sent over by the CCF
office in Virginia, including one containing golf-cart parts that are difficult
to find in southwestern Africa. Given
the cost, time consumption and difficulty of shipping goods in and out of that
country, they make use of couriers as much as they can. Then there were long sleeves for evening and
short sleeves for daytime, a spare picture card for me and a few dozen for
CCF’s camera traps, four kinds of strong sunblock, a rain jacket and my
notebook.
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| Golf-cart parts in black case, to be checked through. |
The flight was 17 hours, including a one-hour stop in Dakar where we
through-passengers remained on the plane.
Ann from Boston had the aisle seat, from which she described herself as
‘a DEET factory.’ She was going on
safari in some of the wetter areas of southwestern Africa. She is 60-some, maybe 70, with the thick, dropped-r’s accent of Boston’s outer
neighborhoods. This was not her first
major excursion; she has been to China, South America, Australia, Egypt, Spain
and Morocco, and 30 years ago visited, “I don’t know what to call it – Israel
or Palestine.” In between bouts of
learning about Ann and sleeping shallowly, I tried to get some exercise. The plane was configured so that I couldn’t
do laps around the coach section, so I walked up and down my aisle, trying not
to look suspicious.
One night to spend in Johannesburg, and no place to spend it. Some kind of Travelers’ Aid desk helped me
out (I got the impression their system was baksheesh-based), and after a bit
Octavia from the OR Tambor Country Lodge arrived and guided me to their
van. It was a bit less than an hour to
the Lodge, and Octavia offered a choice of music for the ride. I asked her to pick, and she went with gospel
– South African gospel instead of American at my urging. Our driver, Ken, was from Malawi; Octavia was
born in Durban, on South Africa’s southeast coast. She grew up speaking Zulu, learned English
young as a second language, and has picked up pieces of nine other
languages. She wants to learn Portuguese
next.
None of this, of course, precludes the possibility that Ken and Octavia
don’t work for a hotel at all, but are going to take me to a back alley
somewhere and hit me in the head with a rock, and sell my three quarts of
assorted sunblock on the black market.
Spoiler alert: they didn’t. They took me to the OR Tambor Country Lodge,
about ten rooms strung together in an L-shape, facing a garden courtyard with
the owner’s home on the third side and what looked to be pasture on the fourth.
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| No water in the fountain. That's foreshadowing... |
There were big, puffy, scentless white roses in the garden, and
fragrant lavender, and even more fragrant gardenias. There were birds calling in the early
evening, and all kinds of chirping frogs or insects or both. One bird said, “Wheet-wheet. Wheet-wheet-wheet,” in a hospitable
tenor. More, different “wheet-wheet”s
respond. I didn’t recognize the call, of
course; the only bird sounds I can confidently identify are roosters crowing
and woodpeckers rapping. I might get a
whippoorwill right, but I couldn’t guarantee it. Later, when I woke at midnight to think about
jet lag, breakfast times and alarm clocks, the wheet-wheet bird would still be
chatting away.
There was another that gave a drawn-out, whistling call that I liked
quite a bit also. Nobody seemed to
reply, but I expect the bird can hear things I can’t. It, too, would be awake in the wee smalls,
but then it would offer only a single sustained note before dropping out of the
night noises.
Before darkness fell, I was feeling pretty unremarkable. A 17-hour flight is almost like suspended
animation for me, with the weird dips into dozing and back out again, the food
descending from above at random moments, Ann complaining, gently, of this or
that airline policy, and my occasional too-brief ambles up the aisle and back
down again. It’s unreal time. In contrast, the Lodge felt like very real
life.
I never quite figured out where it was, but I think it’s between
Johannesburg and Pretoria, and a bit closer to the former. One of the realities it offered was ‘self-catering
facilities,’ which means the owner, or the manager, or Ken from Malawi (he’s
the driver) will drive you to the Pick ‘n’ Pay to get some groceries. For the Welsh couple in #1 and me, it was the
owner, who crammed us into his not-tidy car and drove us by neighbors’ houses,
and stretches of bare ground, and a warehouse or two, until we arrived at the
grocery store, which rose suddenly from nothing. I bypassed the display of biltong – dried
meat in many curious shapes – and found a plastic tray of pasta salad with
bland cheese and some not-Italian herbs.
The lodge owner got Kit-Kat ice cream for his kids, and the Welsh couple
(taciturn, in the nature of their people) got something the owner microwaved
for them, as the self-catering doesn’t extend to any kind of cooking apparatus.
A lot of people romanticized Africa for me before I left the U.S., but
I had a hard time buying it. For one,
it’s an entire continent. I simply
cannot believe there’s something mystical that imbues this entire continent yet
is absent from South America, North America and Europe (I’ve never been to Asia
or Australia, and will probably never make it to Antarctica. Leave Antarctica alone, that’s my
motto.) Really? Gabon’s beaches, the Holiday Inn Harare, the
Sudanese desert, a convenience store in Alexandria, the gardens of Constantine
and the Pick ‘n’ Pay in Kempton Park, all magical in their other-ness? Magical I’ll accept, and celebrate, but not
more magical than the bison of Oklahoma, the mosses of Fairbanks, the autumn
foliage of the White Mountains, or the thunderous falls of the Potomac outside
Washington, DC. Nor yet the corn soup of
Cuzco, the Incan stones of Choquequirao, sunset over the Seine, the North Coast
Cliffs of Derry or the Škocjan cave outside Ljubljana.
I watched for extra magic, but so far things seemed very normal. Gardenia fragrance is magical, that whistling
bird, too. As expected, seen from the
ground, the human imprint in suburban Johannesburg seems much more spontaneous than
South Africa seen from the air – roads waver and bend, then twist back; a few
shacks appear; then nothing but road and a group of three people, and a group
of two, then a sudden grocery store, carefully landscaped behind a serious
fence. From the air, everything looks
much more symmetrical and planned. It is
entirely wonderful, and entirely usual.
Here in this tiny speck of Africa, there’s no Dark Continent mystique I
can find. It is, in fact, brighter than
moonglow. Maybe it was a Dark Continent
in days gone by; maybe it’s some other part that’s Dark. Goodness knows this section offers very
little shade.
Of course South Africa’s recent history is dramatic, and that was a
constant in my thoughts. But it is, so
sadly, not unique in any way. My own
country offers occasional reminders of its brutalities – a drunk Athabascan
staggering into the sled-dog museum to request a pen; a plaque memorializing
Black Hawk, a Sauk leader who fought displacement of his people (the fourth
time they were forcibly re-located, thanks); monuments to slave-owners and
civil rights leaders; the wreckage of lives implicit in Detroit’s mangled
neighborhoods. There’s nothing darker in
African history than the decimation of native populations by imperialists,
colonists and smallpox,
or 620,000
dead in a war over slavery, liberty and which rights trump which. And while there’s plenty in South Africa’s
history that’s just as bad, of course we can always look north about 4,000
miles and back sixty years, and European history looks darker than the black
mud of the Niger River.
These were not the exact ideas that I entertained while consuming my
salad in #4, the room with no key. I was
more thinking, “Recent history notwithstanding, it just doesn’t seem that different.” Dinner finished, I sat for a bit in my room,
with the windows open. It was a
beautiful night, and I hoped for the scent of gardenias to make it over from
the far edge of the garden. Most of what
I got, though, was the neighbors tuning a radio, almost at random. Or maybe the signal was bad and kept fading and
coming back. They were mostly bringing
in pop music, including a countdown of something. Number eight on the countdown was “Cups (When I’m Gone)”,
but I got pretty well sick of that six weeks before in Kalona, Iowa, at the
fall festival talent show. I really didn’t
need it 17 hours on an airplane away, especially when I started thinking about
the razor wire around almost every store and home I’d passed in this country.
Fifteen years ago I knew an Irishman who’d trained for his finance job
in Belgium and moved to Texas after a couple of years in Johannesburg. He had some seriously alarming stories of
colleagues being robbed and beaten in their homes, despite the guarded gates
and ground-glass-topped walls. He said
it was routine for someone to be out of the office due to violent crime, like
cold season year ‘round. Everyone at the
lodge assured me it was perfectly safe to leave my things in my key-less room,
and certainly everything was still in place when I got back from the Pick ‘n’
Pay. Still, part of me questioned my
decision to go to sleep with both door bolts set, the chain on, and the windows
open. But I did enjoy hearing the
nocturnal birds. They made the dripping
toilet less irksome.
The jet lag woke me around midnight, and I checked and re-checked my
alarm and pretended to be tired for several hours. Absolutely not sleeping, and getting achier
and achier around the browbone, I decided trying to sleep was senseless. Just thinking the word ‘senseless’ made me
yearn to be...
I laced up my hiking boots and stepped outside. The horizon was showing a faint light, but I
didn’t know if that was a rising sun or a distant city. Passing through the lighted part of the lodge
driveway, where the ruckus of birds was excessive, I could hear a choir of
roosters forming from points west, north and east, so odds on rising sun
improved. That reminded me to look up,
at the stars. A moderately dark sky
offered a moderate display, including Orion’s backwards Belt and a scrambled
Great Bear or Big Dipper.
My walk was thwarted by a sturdy gate, closed for the night with iron
bars and topped with electric wire that I bet wasn’t charged. Since it was a) fifteen feet up a gate and b)
electric, I chose not to test that theory.
The rest of the fence was topped with coiled razor wire. The courtyard, with its floral display and a
couple of statues, was beautiful but pretty small, so laps around it felt
ridiculous. Instead, I decided to climb
the interior fence into the pasture area, where I thought a swimming pool might
lurk. I don’t know about the pool, but
two handsome dogs I had met earlier through this fence were lurking – or maybe
just sleeping. I believe we all know
what to do with sleeping dogs. But my
meandering woke them before I realized they were there, and they came charging
at me, fast and barking furiously. I
felt like a cartoon character, frozen with one foot off the ground, arms ready
to pump, and eyes grown gigantic.
I am not physically nimble enough for sprint and scramble – remember
there’s a fence to climb – and I don’t like the idea of turning my back on an
alarmed animal. So I murmured softly,
backed up slowly, and held out a friendly fist.
I wrote this journal entry (longhand, by the light of the rising sun, accompanied
by a smell of cinnamon and ruckus of roosters and every other bird on the ark)
with an unpunctured, though slightly befurred and spitty, hand. The greyhound was delighted to greet me,
tail wagging and body writhing; the boxer-like pup was too leery to come over
for pats. I still thought it the better
part of valor to move slowly toward the fence, and exit discreetly. The dogs barked disappointment as I made my
way back to guests’ quarters.
My headache had cleared up as soon as I stepped out of my room. I suspect the people in #3 of smoking as they
tuned their radio, and smoking some nasty, extra-strength foreigner
substance. Not one of the fun
substances; just extra-powerful smokiness.
I essayed a sun salute on the wet courtyard grass, and that worked out a
few kinks. The dawn light was sufficient
for writing in a journal, on the step outside my room, but gradually I grew
chilly, started yawning, and decided to try for a nap.
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| Not enough water in the tower to waste on a fountain. |
The nap was a very long time coming, but finally I fell asleep, around
6:00 or 7:00. When my alarm went off at
8:29, I needed two minutes of confused dreaming before I clawed myself out of
the exhaustion-swamp, and into the reality of jet-lag, a chirping clock, and 30
minutes until breakfast. I spent ten
minutes fumbling into some sort of clothes.
The main gates were now open, so I could stagger ten minutes along the
road, and ten minutes back. The
neighborhood would have qualified as decidedly upscale back home, with fancy
landscaping and huge yards. Each house
was protected by walls, wires and dogs; each had a small water tower in the
yard.
Despite very serious brain-fuzz, I could appreciate a marvelous
breakfast of custom-scrambled eggs and fresh papaya, prepared by a quiet, black
woman in bright clothes. Teeth cleaned,
I joined the former owner of the lodge, now its manager, for a ride to the
airport. He was the default driver, he
explained, as Ken from Malawi had called in sick this morning – after receiving
his pay in cash last night. Oh, Ken.
The airport was very like every other airport, but with biltong where
the Anchorage airport would have ‘moose poop’ candy and Heathrow would have Big
Ben tea towels and Lima would have Pan flute CDs. The plane to Windhoek didn’t even have
biltong – I could have been on the Dallas to Denver route, or Glasgow to
Dublin. Except when I looked out the
window, of course.
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| Suburban Dark Continent |
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