lumière des étoiles

FUN WITH AFRICAN LIVING
2004-08-09 10:00 a.m.

Hi from Zam.

We're in Livingstone now - we visited Vic Falls for the day on Saturday and it's still all settling in with me. Yesterday we decided to be adventerous, imagine that, and went repelling down Batoka gorge into the Zambezi river valley below. We also did this thing that was kind of like Bungee jumping, but they swing you around instead, and the free fall is a little bit longer.

Well I don't know what we were thinking either. It WAS a lot of fun, though.

So far, I think it's safe to say we've been having a truly African experience - of the best, most glorious and Disney-esque kind, since we've been seeing Lion, Giraffe, Elephant, Zebra, Cheetah, you name it, and interacting with and experiencing so much of the Zulu, Bantu, Xhosha, Shaangan, and mixed cultures here, and also of the oddest, most challening, your-consulate-warned-you-about-this kind. We got into a bit of a car accident the other day, for example, and as it was happening that awful stat about how many fatal car accidents there are in this area each year flashed through my mind while I was putting my arms over my head.

We were flying down the only paved road in Botswana in the dark, headed toward Nata, and we hit a cow, decapitating the poor thing. If our driver swerved, we definitely would have flipped, but thanks to his skills we're only a little banged up. Wish I could say the same for the van, now the "an" since the V went missing after impact, though I guess since it's still running it's fine. We did get a nice blood streak down the side of the van afterword, which we decided was our racing stripe.

Stopped later at the ubiquitous and pointless gov't checkpoint, we had to lie and say we hit a Kudu (like an antelope) for fear of kick-back payment or reparations or something. Things are so backward here, you see, it wouldn't be "since you let your cows wander around at night, you almost killed a couple people!", it's more like "you kill my prize cow, now you must pay". Well perhaps we're the ones who are backward, who knows.

So from here we're going back into Botswana, to hang out, camp, and Braai in the Okavango delta for a couple of days. Let's hope today the Zambizi border ferry is working, since a couple days ago it was shut down and we had to pay handsomely for an illegal boat to take us across the river and to the border. The driver stopped in the middle and demanded payment, which I had to pay him in US cash, before he continued on through.

We're having the time of our lives, and actually don't want to come home, no matter how scruffy we are right now.

Oh, and I was right about the mean monkeys - yesterday a vervet monkey chased this guy brandon we met all around our campground.

Heee!

I'll write again when I can.

xo,