78uuu lumière des étoiles

Dusty:Starlight:Culture



Out of the Kalahari
2004-11-21   4:49 p.m.

Delusions of grandeur, and revisionist history. I've had enough of them both, from politicians and world leaders at this summit in Chile to the unstable, spoiled side of people I've encountered lately who liken themselves to James Baldwin and fantasize about how much integrity they have. Bleh. The victim / martyr complex gets a trifle old, a trifle fast. I'm over it.

So here's something really superficial instead. I bought some new pants this weekend which I (gasp) spent $50 on. I know that doesn't sound like much, but then I typically buys clothes at the salvation army, an outlet store or at some market in a foreign country - and at all these places, I'm used to getting a pile of clothes for $50. So anyway, I'm picky when I spend money. Despite this, Carla the sales clerk practically threw a pile of pants at me as I walked into one store yesterday. She insisted that "we long-legged gals must stick together" (she was, um, about five inches shorter than me), I suppose by helping each other find pants that will go all the way down to our insteps.

In the dressing room, she'd tug at my waist and grab for fabric around the backs of my thighs as I tried pair after pair of pants on. She frowned when I came out to model the second round. "You keep picking the ones that are too big for you," she said. Before I could answer, she came back with arms full of teeny pants and suggested that I try them on. "Er, I haven't been this size since I was twelve," I said, not reaching out for the pants. "Jeans are supposed to be tight," she insisted, closing my fitting room door. "And besides," she called over, "there's nothing wrong with showing off that figure of yours! FLAUNT IT! YEAH!" This, I kid you not, she yelled. Glad the whole store heard that one. Nothing like strangers loudly scrutinizing your body in such a public forum.

"Perfect!" she said, as I came out. Steve stood behind her and made a face. "It's sexy," he said, "but um.... are you planning on wearing them to work or anything?" hmm. The jeans "fit", but in the sense that I was poured into them. But they weren't stretchy, so I may as well have had a corset on. I'm not in the habit of fainting like Victorian Ladies so often do in those novels (cause they couldn't breathe with those corsets on), so...I passed on the spandex.

So though I think it disappointed Carla greatly, I only bought a pair of non-super tight really beautiful white pants. Yeah, that's all.

More stuff from my Botswana journal:

xo.

**

Day: 23

Time: 9:37 am

Date: August 16, 2004

Place: Palapye & Serowe, Botswana

Journey: Kalahari Desert to Khama Rhino Sanctuary, Serowe, Botswana

Barely awake, I'm wiping the Kalahari dust out of my eyes. Down here, they have no harmattan, but they must have some similar winds that blow the heat around and make the dust swirl up in hazy clouds. I have to ask Gavin about that when we get back into Jo'burg.

I'm not ready to go, but our trip is coming closer to an end the more we near the South African border. I keep hoping, dreaming, thinking that something will "come up" and we'll be "stuck" here for an extra day, week, month, or year. Would that be so bad? Alfred, I love; Joe, Megan, and Helen I'm also really fond of. Wayne's drunken antics have gotten a bit tiresome. He's really funny, a great chef, good driver (props still for not flipping the van after we plowed through that heard of cattle) and fun to talk to, but does that mushy "I love you man" type of stuff when he drinks, which is every night, and also tends to repeat the same story, phrase, or idea, several times throughout the night.

I was bopping around one night at a really, um, ...organic club in Kasane just a week ago to some Mandoza song, for example, and Wayne was dancing with me. "AH GREW UP ON THIS MUUUSIC," he managed to say about a dozen times as I'd continue to dance, as loud as you please, right into my ear. "AH LIVE IT," he'd continue. And for the record, that's "love", but you know, he's got that Afrikaner accent thing going on.

Ultimately I'll still miss him though, the way I'll miss how accustomed I've grown once again to the rhythm of something so alien to me. What lies all around us is remote and right now barren, but there's something similar here at the edge of the dry Kalahari that connects in my mind to the lush and fertile Okavango delta, despite their vastly different aesthetics. It's something sensory - we're deprived of all the glitz and visual stimulus of the Western world here, but as a result, something more primal takes over and just makes more sense.

I wish I could explain it better - can't come up with the metaphor, though. It's a bit like getting out of city air; when you're out in the country, you can literally smell and feel a difference, though people around you can't because they're so used to their own. And once you're back in the bad air, you just get used to it again - you adapt, quickly forgetting how to articulate or describe what the difference is. You can feel which one is better for you. It's kind of like that, quite literally, actually, but psychologically something similar goes on as well. It's a sensory deprivation because we're so used to over-stimulation and an image/media blitz twenty four hours a day. In comparison, the desert, the delta, even the game parks and the mountains look still, solid, contemplative, silent. But once that channel you keep open to deal with the flashy, electric overload of the west fades away and dies down, you can start to appreciate a more natural version of that, and see how chaotic, quick, and impulsive a place like an African delta or the desert can be. But only if you let the other stuff go away can you see it.

This might be why a Canadian girl I ran into at the hostel in Jo'burg before we left told me she was "bored the whole time" that she was traveling. She'd just returned from trek similar to the one we were about to take, so I had asked her how things were going. "There was nothing to do," she said.

Oh no, I thought to myself, you just don't get it at all. But do I? Do I have some sense, some understanding and appreciation of things that she won't, or can't? Who do I think I am that I “get it”? Am I fooling myself, believing in my own myth? Don't want to sound egotistical, elitist; don't want to sound so above her. But bored? I couldn't even fathom such a word in a place like this; it just didn't fit in here. I'd wondered if there was even a Bantu word that corresponded to boredom. Bored is what you are when you're at the car dealership, waiting for the mechanics to change your oil. Bored is what you are at a bad bar or bad movie. Bored is what you are when you're waiting at the doctor's office. Bored is what you are when you have to go to a really long lecture about something that’s way over your head. Bored is what you are when you’re over-stimulated or used to getting your way all the time. Bored is what you are when you lack patience, when you lack the ability to be appreciative of life and the beat of the world. What a Western word, what a Western concept, what a luxury. To be bored. How ostentatiously spoiled we are. Bored.

12:37 pm

Hot, tired, cranky, a little sick of the decaf sanka-esque coffee that we've been drinking out of cans for breakfast. I'm half contemplating kidnapping one of the chickens we see running around here just to get some eggs. I'd be nice to her and let her go as soon as I got enough eggs to scramble for breakfast. Then again, maybe I won't. I hear there are stiff penalties here for animal-napping. And when I said earlier I wish we'd be detained somehow, I certainly think my approach toward Botswana would change dramatically if I were viewing it from the inside of a prison cell.

All over some eggs. Damn. Think the sun is cooking my brain.

We've stopped to pee, I'm having some water and fighting off the urge to nick one of Alfred's cigarettes. Had a long conversation with him on the way out of the desert about why the roads curve so much (when the path is perfectly straight - are they curved for aesthetic reasons? Some kind of African feng-shui? Ask Gavin. Heh. The human search engine for Southern Africa. heh heh heh) and how hard it is for any South African to get a credit card. They only go to the extremely wealthy, apparently. They won't even send you an application unless you're paying a certain amount of taxes (here, the more you earn, the more you pay. Makes more sense than our system under this current administration, huh?). I thought about the five-ten applications that I get per week from random credit card companies that I wind up shredding and throwing away.

I wish so badly that Alfred could visit New York and stay with us. But I know how expensive it is, especially when you get paid in Rand.

The road twists and turns in front of us, and there's some semblance of a breeze now. Bob Marley, and thankfully not Michael Jackson or Abba, is on the radio. Steve's sleeping on my shoulder, and the sun is bright. I feel the sand in my hair, the dirt on my shins. The woman I bought an orange from on the side of the road gave me the biggest smile I've ever seen. I never want to leave here.

7:22 pm

So we finally arrived at the Rhino sanctuary, and set up camp inside the grounds. Soft, deep and sandy, I'm looking forward to the sleep the ground will provide tonight.

Speaking of deep, soft sand, the chivalrous, good Samaritan gentlemen I happen to be traveling with now felt the need to help out not one, not two, but three German/French/Japanese tourists who were stupid enough to take their non-4WD, teeny rented Peugeots out along the veldt to see if they could spot any rhino. And no one had sand ladders! How did they get through the Kalahari? Even on the outskirts, we ran into some patches of road that were just blown over with sand - we didn't get stuck, luckily, but I can imagine these geniuses did.

While the guys pushed and pushed (and the tourists steered and steered), a frighteningly armed-to-the-teeth military vehicle pulled up along side us. I hid my camera from them, and hoped I could find Alfred's pack of cigarettes or Joe's six pack of beer in case they wanted us to pay some made up toll. I was the only one left inside the van, not pushing since I was tending to the slash wounds I got from some bush with enormous thorns. I was by myself when they pulled past the van, and I didn't feel like fighting or playing to their machismo stereotyping.

They pulled past, luckily, but didn't stop to help us. They laughed when they saw the Peugeot/VW Rabbit/whatever crappy car the Japanese tourists were driving, but then so did I. Like I said, you don't take a little RWD stick car through this kind of sand without at least a couple of ladders.

We got them free, 'cause that's just what you do around here (help each other, how nice) and an hour later, good and sweaty (and with bloodied and bandaged forearms for me), we tracked rhinos, watched a mama and baby White Rhino throw some sand around, and sat talking on the roof of the car while starlings swarmed around in the sunset. More Bob Marley, a little Marabantu from Mozambique, and a braai on the way. What could be better than this? Oh, maybe some scrambled eggs.

**

Kalahari Desert, roadside

Rhino, Ostrich at the Khama Rhino Sanctuary in Botswana

Not going anywhere anytime soon...

Rhino Sanctuary Sunset