South Africa

Game Drive
Spotting animals in the bush can be tricky, but if you look carefully, you'll be able to find a steenbok, a boar, a kudu and an elephant in the following photographs.









More Freakin' Dogs
On the fifth day of our tour of South Africa (we’re with a group of five, plus a guide, onboard a mini bus for 17 days) we were left to occupy ourselves in a tiny coastal town called Coffee Bay. The town is disparaged by some as a “hippy hangout,” but this term could only conceivably be applied to the smattering of White inhabitants who live along the beaches behind razor-wire fences. The people on the wrong side of these fences haven’t got the time to hangout. The vast majority of the area is formerly a “homeland reserve” for “natives:” it is occupied by displaced Blacks, the poorest of the poor in South Africa, who were shunted into these remote areas by White colonists, and who now eke out a subsistence raising sheep and goats on the nearly barren slopes of the Transkei.

Our group decided to leave the safe bubble of our tour van for the day, and walk the ten kilometer coastal path between Coffee Bay and the nearby settlement of Hole-in-the-Wall, another tiny White enclave. The path takes walkers to outrageously beautiful ocean views and through numerous “native” villages-loosely scattered collections of thatched adobe huts populated by shepherds. Joining us in our walk, uninvited but persistent, was KD, the hotel dog.

KD is a playful hound/pit bull cross, and was initially a welcome addition to our party, except that he soon attracted his own companion, a village stray with an aggressive streak. The two dogs together were uncontrollable, oblivious to our attempts to shoo them home or to command them; using us as their ‘backup,’ the dogs would dart in and out of the bush, harassing any animal we encountered, returning to our feet at the first sign of returned aggression. At first, the dogs were mostly interested in donkeys and cattle, animals too large to be particularly threatened, but an hour or two into our walk, we blundered into a small flock of sheep.

The dogs tore into the midst of the flock, scattering them over the hill. The aging Xhosa villager who was tending them, and who would now have to gather them again, was enraged. As we passed his hut, he stood by the side of the road, shouting and shaking his staff at us.

We tried to explain, with a desperately inadequate series of hand gestures, that the dogs didn’t belong to us, and that we’d make them go away if we could. To emphasize the point, I leveled a weak kick at KD, which I hoped would send him packing for home. Instead, he sat rapt with attention at my feet, the very picture of a doting pet, ready to obey the merest whim of his “owner.” I shrugged at the unimpressed shepherd, then walked away, KD at my heels.

Another kilometer or so along the way, the situation became much worse. KD and his companion flushed a goat and her kid from the bush, and fell upon the kid. We threw rocks and shouted, and the kid managed to struggle to its feet and flee into the bush, followed closely by the dogs. A few minutes later, the dogs emerged from the bush, licking their chops. The villagers have next to nothing, and now ‘our’ dogs had killed one of their goats. I have no idea what would have happened had the villagers witnessed this wasteful attack.

The dogs seemed sated by their adventure, and I was able to grab KD by the collar and fashion a leash from my camera strap. With KD on a leash, the village stray also fell into line, and although we had no means of securing him, he kept close to us. For the remaining five kilometers to Hole-in-the-Wall, KD, the village stray and I walked arm in leash like old companions. KD probably felt chastened. I felt like I was chained to a smoking gun.

Arriving at the Hole-in-the-Wall hotel, we tied KD to a fence and walked away, leaving instructions with the proprietor that if our hosts in Coffee Bay wanted KD back, they’d have to come and get him. KD bayed pitifully, but nothing could soften our hearts. Several hours later, after finishing our dinner at our hotel back in Coffee Bay, we found KD at his dog dish. He looked at us suspiciously, tucked his tail between his legs, and loped sullenly out of sight.

Rome to Egypt

I have genetic predisposition to choking, something I share with my mother. I’ll choke on anything, pepper especially, but I’ve been known to choke half to death on my own saliva. So I always figured I’d die by choking on something stupid like a lentil. But the universe reminds me every so often that there are many stupid ways to die, and that I have no idea which of them is going to do the job for me.

We ended our month in Italy with a few nights in Rome. Great hotel, but because in Rome it’s still 25 degrees during the day, the management hadn’t turned on the central heating, so a little too cold at night. There was a little wall-mounted electric heater above the sink in the bathroom, useless except to heat the bathroom itself, but I figured that I could improve things in the bedroom by removing the heater from the wall and propping it up outside the bathroom. After unscrewing the heater (using my Leatherman Tool, of course) and unraveling a length of wire from the wall, I found that I could at least get the heater onto the floor of the bathroom, facing the bedroom, thus warming things up nicely.

It wasn’t very intelligent of me to decide to have a bath in the circumstances, but it isn’t often that we’ve been lucky enough to have a tub in our rooms on this trip. I say ‘tub’, but what I really mean is a fixture about twice the size of the bidet (I’d like to note at this point, that in the entire month we’ve spent in Italy, I haven’t made a single joke about bidets. They worry me a little, so I ignore them.) The idea is that one sits in it, while using a hand-held nozzle to spray oneself down. While I was preoccupied with trying acquire the skill of washing one’s bottom at the same time as one is sitting upon it, I lost track of the precarious bit of folding glass that I think was intended to be a shower curtain, and didn’t notice that I was spewing gallons of water out onto the floor of the bathroom. By the time I’d got the soap from my eyes, as it were, I’d managed to flood the bathroom with a good half inch of water, enough to submerge the feet of my code-violating heating system.

I gallantly asked Cara to place a wooden chair in the bathroom and then stand on it to yank the cord from the wall, while I stood as still as possible so as not to create waves that could reach the element. No-one was hurt, but I have sent the Darwin Awards my stats to save them time when I am eventually included in their literature.

We’re now in Egypt, sort of. We’re staying in a four-star resort at the Hilton in Sharm el Sheikh. The purpose of this resort is to persuade Russian and British tourists that they haven’t actually left home, but that it’s miraculously become really hot outside. The illusion is pretty good, so long as you can accept that bacon is made from chickens rather than pigs.

Cara and I find ourselves in the unfamiliar position of being the least understood English speakers here. The Egyptian resort employees are so used to the Pidgin English spoken by the Russians (and the British, come to think of it) that they understand them with ease. American and Canadian tourists are so rare that our accents cause complete bafflement every time we open our mouths, even to ask for drinks. I asked the bar tender for a guava juice for Cara and an apple brandy for me, both of which items are on the list of six ‘all-inclusive’ drinks. The bar tender looked so confused that I pointed out the two items on the menu (written in English, of course), and he understood completely: that I wanted an apple brandy made with guava juice instead of apples. He had no problem at all understanding the Russian tourist who wanted a sextuple pina colada, hold the coconut and pineapple juice, at 11:00 am this morning.

I realize that this blog so far is rife with stereotypes, and that this will make it somewhat less certain that I will win anything at all from the Nobel committee next year.