you’re your own best guide
this past weekend i went to “operation massive coordination.” operation massive coordination required a dedicated team of highly trained professionals to completely disregard their professional work in order to send approximately 2000 emails per day to set up. it took massive amounts of bandwidth and almost overloaded email inboxes at one point. it took great strength of character not to delete emails with an impatient flick of the wrist, but to patiently write “hi. thanks for that suggestion, but i don’t know if, per email #274, that would work for me.”
some days i think organizing things were easier when all we had was a pointy spear and a couple of hard rocks (you mean no internet? gasp!)
but what were these logistics organizing? an awesome weekend for six in kruger, well worth at least 1500 of those emails per day. six coworkers who are in southern africa on short term contracts got the chance to go back to the days of pointy spears and hard rocks and trek into the bush of africa to see massive lions snarling out at us from behind bushes, their hot breathe steaming up our backsides as we ran for the safety of cover. to see herds of elephants stampeding across the plains, as we stood there, holding our ground, ready with our spear, looking to get our dinner.
Monday, December 11, 2006
no? not buying it?
ok, ok, we stayed at a lovely little bungalow where we could have a braai (look at that native lingo seemlessly inserted into the text! what grace! what style! a braai is a south african word for barbeque), could swim in a pool, buy kruger-branded trinkets and chatchkis to our heart’s content, and sleep in air-conditioned glory.
part of the logistics was just getting ourselves there. we all drove in from various points on saturday morning. as i was already in swaziland for work, nina and i drove out to kruger in a rental car from swazi. this was my first time with driving on the wrong side of the road. although i quite easily got the hang of the actual driving part - thanks dad for that tip of the driver always stays closest to the center line no matter what side of the road people are driving on - i never did quite get the hang of the fact that they had also reversed the windshield wiper stick and the turn signal stick. i am sure however that all oncoming traffic could clearly see i was indicating a right turn when my windshield wipers went on.
out the camera! where is my camera? where is it? where is it? - millipede. yes, the african zebra millipede is quite an impressive, er, millipede as it curls up in a ball quaking in fear while 8 gargantuan humans peer down at it. the other nature encounter was with a tick.
one cool thing we did see on the walk was a “rhino information center.” basically, all the rhinos use one spot as a toilet and then the other rhinos, when using the toilet, can find out who else has been visiting the neighborhood, what they’ve been eating, and if even of them are females in heat. it’s just this principle that leads me to hang around toilets too. to the left is a photo of us hanging out at the “rhino information center.”
oh, and another cool thing we saw. when we had lunch at the little kruger-branded marketing frenzy center, we sat out on the patio underneath a big wood/straw hut things that blocked the shade. i was wondering why all the tables were arranged around the edges of the shade cover and the center was empty, until i looked up. about 50 bats were just hanging out, upside down, in the center. pretty cool, eh?
but never fear, all was not lost. we saw tons of game, four out of the five “big game”....when we were driving ourselves in an out of the park on the wrong side of the road. we even got so close to a lion that, in a moment of panic i removed every body part of mine from the window and frantically rolled up the window as fast as possible. (as cheryl and magnus can attest to, when faced with a large animal moving towards me, i can get into a car quite quickly). the lion only snorted, “stupid human,” and kept walking.
once we all got settled in, we headed out for a game drive. the car almost topped over on its side from the sheer mass of tourists, loaded down with multiple photographing devices, ran to the one
you may want to make this picture of such a ferocious predator your screensaver.
the next morning, we also did a “game walk.” this is where we, accompanied by two guides with big guns, walked through nature to see game from a different perspective. we had two fabulous guides who took us on a lovely walk. one of our guides was super-hyper
alert and would spin around at the slightest irregular crack of a twig. it’s a good thing too, as we had two heart-stopping encounters with game on the walk: the first was with a zebra - quick pull
so, i realize that most MTODs are just doom and gloom, woe is me, look at all the bad things that have happened to mozambique. so this one is the good news MTOD. the average growth rate in mozambique from 1993 to 1999 was 6.7% (smokin’!). from 1997 to 1999 it averaged more than 10% per year (red hot hot hot!). in 2000 there were some devastating floods so the growth dropped down to 2.1%, but then rebounded to 14.8% in 2001. mozambique has pretty much hit 7-10% a year since then and is projected to do so for at least the next five years.
more than 75% of the population works in small-scale agriculture which still could use a lot of improvement to the infrastructure, commercial networks, and overall investment. a whopping 88% of mozambique’s arable land is still uncultivated. so, one might say there are lots of low-hanging fruits around for improving development.
side of the car when the driver said, “and on your left we have a leopard” - insert mass hysteria, scrambling, and rushing - ““turtle.” aaah, the elusive leopard turtle. i have photographed it here.
aaah, tourism. you never know when you will be your own best guide.
