Africa Travel Journal

Table of Contents

Introduction

4 October 1997

First day. I'm currently sitting in the Miami airport. I have a 7-hour layover between flights. There appears to be only one bench in this entire airport that you can lay down on, and someone's already on it. So I'm sitting here waiting my turn.

In the Miami airport still. About half an hour to boarding. Judging by the passengers, South Africa is 95% 80-year-old white Europeans, and 5% young Africans. Somehow I doubt those are the real demographics.

6 October 1997

South Africa was cool. It really felt like a young country. Regulation seemed light (although my only hard data is no requirement for driving insurance and minimal speed limits). It just seemed like a country ready to take off.

In Zimbabwe, however, suddenly light regulation seemed more of an incentive for chaos than growth. We were taken for $60 before realizing that our helpful border guards were in fact just locals who filled out our entrance cards for us.

7 October 1997

Still in Bulowayo. We had planned to leave early tomorrow, but one of my bags is still en route. Apparently it got lost in Miami, so it's been a day or two behind us. It was supposed to be here today, but customs held it in Harare.

Went to some ruins today (the old Khami ruins), away from town. Then walked around town for a while. I like Bulowayo, actually.

8 October 1997

Went to the Matopos game reserve today. Saw some wild white rhinos, which I thought were pretty neat. Vasee, however, had apparently seen plenty of rhinos before and so was most interested in a hawk that perched near our car.

In the States we fear wild animals like bears, which will attack you with teeth and claws, or snakes (and the like) which are poisonous. In Africa, your greatest animal danger is instead things like elephants and rhinos and hippos, which aren't usually malevolent but cause huge amounts of damage just by walking around. So if you're quick- footed (and intelligent) enough to escape the lumbering beasts, the other dangerous animals tend to stay far away from humans anyway-lions etc.

Everywhere we go in town seems to be off-limits or avoided by locals. It's very odd. We walk through the streets, surrounded by black Zimbabweans in suits, casual clothes, school uniforms -- the whole city is alive and vibrant and we feel like transient ghosts, slipping through the crowds leaving no mark other than buying the occasional juice or pie. You might see another European or Indian person maybe once per block.

But then, when we go to eat lunch or dinner, or stop at a bar, or go to a movie, we're suddenly in the company of the town's few white inhabitants or tourists. I haven't figured out how this works, there certainly aren't any obvious signs. I guess movies and the kinds of meals we eat are too expensive.

No, that doesn't make sense. Even given the lower wages, there must still be a middle class, which although proportionately small must still number in the hundreds or thousands. Where are these (relatively) affluent locals? Even our hip local guidebook doesn't know. So we're left eating with the city's minority, feeling like we're missing the real pulse of the city. Like we've been shuttled safely off to the sidelines, so the city's inhabitants can get along with working and enjoying themselves.

Not that we feel unwanted. Everyone is very friendly and helpful.

Driving with Vasee is an experience I had forgotten. He's a very dynamic talker, gesturing rapidly and winding through many subjects without losing his point. However, he seems to view driving as a distraction from conversation. He quite often breaks off a sentence, as if surprised to find himself driving a car. He'll brake suddenly, get his bearing and set a new course and heading so he can lose himself in conversation again. This can be very disconcerting when driving at 120 km/h on Zimbabwe's narrow roads with oncoming traffic, or in Bulowayo's busy streets. I consider myself an excellent driver, however given my driving record with several crashes including running into immobile objects for no apparent reason, I don't think I can criticize Vasee. For all that his driving seems erratic, he's never been in an accident.

I have a bit of time to write at the moment-we've got some dead time before we have to pick up my long-lost bag from the airport.

I'm quickly falling in love with this country -- it's cheap, friendly, and beautiful. The rocks are amazing -- wind and rain have eroded the exposed granite, leaving pillars and jumbles that look like a giant's child has scattered his playthings among the bush.

9 October 1997

Well, my bag wasn't there. It turned out to be a misunderstanding, the bag was there this morning. As far as I can tell everything is still there, but the bag was obviously opened, and the software boxes were trashed. [Note on 16 October 1997: the encyclopedia and Cinemania CD's were stolen, as well as a nice Swiss Army knife. Nothing else was taken]

So we left Bulowayo this morning, under the cool cover of clouds left over from last night's thunderstorm. The air heated as the clouds burned off, but the ride was pleasant.

One of the tires almost blew up. The treading was falling off. When we stopped for gas, every car that we'd passed pulled over to tell us that we'd been shedding rubber the entire time. We changed tires at the gas station.

So now we're at this little resort on the edge of Hwange National Park. It's run by a Captain John Pretoria and his wife, Rebecca. Basically we get free drinks and meals, plus game excursions and horseback riding.

Wait, that sounds completely wrong. What I mean is that everything is included in a single price.

We're staying here with three elderly Dutch people. Franz is a Catholic priest, Gerald and Edith are apparently friends of his. Gerald is a prominent businessman and politician, a proud member of the Christian Democratic party.

On the safari, I was a little self-conscious about sitting behind a Catholic priest. I hesitated before starting a discussion on evolution, but the Pope has said he's cool with the whole evolution thing. So I went ahead.

Vasee was far less self-conscious, and would great each new animal sighting with an enthusiastic "fuck!" or "shit!" As we watched the elephants, he'd quietly exclaim "Jesus Christ" once every couple of minutes.

Franz seemed not to notice.

The resort is an interesting place. John returned to Zimbabwe in 1991 after several decades abroad. He built the resort then. He apparently married

10 October 1997

I forgot to mention-the house had only a small generator. It turned off suddenly, cutting me off in mid-sentence (because it was far too dark to write).

The game trip was certainly spectacular. Jonathan drove us in his beat-up little safari truck into a side entrance of the park. We saw literally hundreds (okay, over one hundred) elephants at a watering hole. We parked on the far side of the hole and watched as the herd approached. Sitting and watching 30+ elephants come charging out of the bush straight at you is an awe-inspiring experience. They frolicked in the water for over an hour. Halfway through, another herd came out of the bush and joined them. It was incredible.

There was a lot of other game as well. We saw a lot of giraffe and zebra, including some pregnant ones. Also other wildebeests and birds. No great cats, however. Maybe in my next trip.

At the moment I'm sitting in my tent, writing by the light of my small electric lantern. We're camped out in a small caravan park on the west side of Victoria Falls.

Tomorrow we go white-water rafting.

12 October 1997

Rafting was excellent. I almost died. Of course, everyone in the boat almost died at some point. I wonder if that's the attraction of extreme sports. You almost die, but don't, so you think to yourself: "Wow, I came really close to death there. I wonder if I can get any closer, and still not die?"

Our rafting guide was a large white Zimbabwean with a booming, raspy voice (he told us several times that his was the loudest voice on the river, and we believed him). Warren informed us during the safety talk that we would have to deal with both "long" and "short" swims. Short swims are when you're thrown out of the boat but have a chance to get back in fairly quickly. Long swims are when you're thrown well away from the raft and end up shooting the rapids on your own.

A particularly charming phrase was "underwater swimming." I assumed it meant being thrown down hard enough that even with a life jacket on, you get submerged for a second or two. In fact, "underwater swimming" is rafter's shorthand for being sucked into currents that pull you deep underwater, spin you around for a bit, then release you and let you navigate through the dark water back up the surface.

The safety talk, while sobering in its description of rescues, didn't scare me. I was sure they had to go through the full descriptions for insurance purposes. I've been in plenty of boats before, and you only get dumped in the water if you dive in or get pushed in by one of your mates. And these rafts were huge gray beasts with safety lines. I was sure we'd get wet, but as we set out on the calm waters of the Zambezi, with the canyon walls towering above us, being thrown out seemed unlikely at best.

The man in front of me was thrown out on the first rapid. Vasee was thrown out on the second, his expensive sandals forcibly removed by the angry river god Nyaminyami. We found one sandal floating in the river, but the other is probably well on its way to the Indian Ocean. Vasee was visibly shaken by the experience. Warren congratulated him on a fine "long underwater swim."

My first swim was also a long underwater swim. I don't remember being thrown out, but I don't think anyone does. In the churning waters of a rapid, there's no such thing as the water's "surface." You're just surrounded by churning white foam, it engulfs the raft and rips you out of your seat.

I remember being tossed around in the foam for a while, thinking "wow this is really wild." Then, just as I was starting to think that being able to breathe would be a great idea, the water got really dark. I think now that I must have come out of the rapids foam and into smoother water. I was deep, so I started to swim for what I thought was "up." The water got lighter, but just as I expected to break the surface, a shadow blocked it. I thought "Oh great, I'm coming up under a rock."

Instead, when I hit the object, it was the soft underside of our raft. I couldn't see where the edge was, so I pushed myself down, hoping the raft would drift away. Instead, of course, the current carried me with the raft, and I came up and hit it again. I was close to panicking, but I managed to scramble out from under the raft using my hands. I finally surfaced, took a deep breath, and grabbed out.

As luck would have it, I grabbed the safety throw rope, which started unraveling as I drifted away. I kicked out and grabbed the raft's safety line, and others pulled me in. Warren boomed angrily that we weren't to be grabbing the safety line, and set about recoiling it. I was just happy to be alive.

The worst part of almost drowning in a white water rafting boat is that you get no sympathy from your raftmates. You cough up some water, take a deep breath of beautiful oxygen, then look up and see six other men staring at you with looks on their faces like "what's your problem?" They put your paddle back in your hand, and off you go to be thrown out in the next rapid.

There were plenty of other comical moments, like when we were all thrown from the raft, or when the raft flipped over in one of the easiest rapids on the river, and I had several other long swims. But none were underwater. Even so, I never lost that sense of terror, which was strongest just before you hit the rapid, with the white water churning and roaring in front of us, and Warren screaming behind us in his thick white Zimbabwe accent: "For God's sake, left turn!"

Just to back up for a second, I forgot to mention more about the Duma lodge with Jonathan and Rebecca. We went horseback riding in the morning, before leaving for Victoria Falls. The previous night, Rebecca asked me in a serious voice if I would mind taking "Rambo," a temperamental horse with a tendency to trot. I said that would be fine, and so found myself presented with a large brown horse the next morning. The stable boy held the horse as I put my foot in the stirrup and swung myself up. I thought I did it rather gracefully, but given that I haven't ridden a horse since I was twelve, and then only once, I probably looked as clumsy as the elderly Netherlanders.

We rode off on a dirt track, with Jonathan in the lead on a white and gray horse. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder. There are no fences in Hwange National Park, so any kind of animal can wander around and attack/trample/annoy the occasional intruding tourist. As it was, the only animals we saw were antelope and the like, which although large and fast posed no threat to us.

I was second, since "Rambo likes to be second." Vasee was last, since his horse Bracken had a personality conflict with Edith's horse. [Vasee has just informed me that Bracken was in fact a pony, and a sick one at that. He's still annoyed that they gave him only a pony.] At first, I tried to micromanage Rambo, guiding him around even the smallest obstacles. That just annoys horses. They aren't cars, after all. You can pretty much just point a horse in the right direction and go. In this case, it was even easier than that, since the other horses just followed Jonathan's horse, and they had been over the trail many times before.

Jonathan led us down towards the river, with one of the typically melodic African river names which I forget now. As we went down the hill, the priest Franz complained that he couldn't lean back in the saddle, because it hurt his back terribly. You have to lean back when taking a horse down a hill. Jonathan looked worried for a second, but then told Franz he'd be all right.

We had to go down one ridiculously steep bank to get to the river. Jonathan and his horse Sultan went down first, and Rambo and I followed. Franz was behind me. He bravely tried to brace himself with his feet swung forward in the stirrups, but he fell forward onto his horse's neck. He might have righted himself then, but his horse kept going through the unsure footing of the river, and after a five-second battle with gravity, Franz was dumped unceremoniously into the shallow muddy water.

Jonathan was beside himself with laughter, but he helped the priest back onto his horse, and we continued through the river. We went through some deeper water, which was up almost to my knees but was higher for other riders on shorter horses. Jonathan was laughing the entire time, and kept looking back at his ragtag following, alternately drenched or baked in the sun. Although he did stop to point out animals and tracks left by leopards and buffalo in the dirt, he seemed to derive a lot of pleasure from dragging naive Westerners through rivers on bored horses.

Vasee and I agreed that Franz was an excellent character, one of the most interesting we met on our journey. As a combination of Catholic priest and Westerner in obscure corners of Africa, Franz must have been in some very strange situations. He just strikes you as a very friendly and talkative person, at ease in any sort of company. He had a great, deep sort of calmness, the sort of character that's solid to the core.

It's good to meet people like that once in a while.

So now we're in Masvingo. We drove back to Bulowayo late Saturday night, stayed at the same Berkeley Place Hotel with the now-familiar owner Nomsa, then left early Sunday. The plan was to see the Great Zimbabwe ruins, then move on to Chimanimani on Monday.

Instead, we got in a car accident. As we tried to overtake a large dump truck, it turned in front of us, and Vasee was forced to drive off the road. We hit a curb, slid through the intersection, then hit a second curb and for a brief second his battered Volkswagen Fox soared like a Zimbabwe hawk. Our flight was rudely interrupted by the red soil at the side of the road. My left arm had for some inexplicable reason straightened itself out the window, and as a result our invaluable guidebook was airborne as well.

We could just dust off the guidebook and use it again as if nothing had happened, but unfortunately that wasn't an option with the car.

The driver of the truck ran out to see that we were okay. The police responded very quickly, and in no time Vasee was explaining things to a young traffic policeman while the senior partner drove me to "a certain white man who deals with accidents." The certain white man was in, and followed us back.

The senior traffic officer was very curious about where we were from. He had many questions about the weather in the United States. He had an uncle who had told him that in Los Angeles it got cold enough to freeze water pipes, and that you couldn't start your car in the morning. I told him that only happened in the Northern States.

By this time the white man had arrived, and we helped him get our car on his tow truck. We said goodbye to the traffic police, and the white man drove us back to town, dropped off our car at a garage, and then took us to a bed and breakfast at the outskirts of town. The owners' daughter worked for him in his office.

So now we're kicking around Masvingo, a small town with a few sights to see. But of course the biggest attraction is the Great Zimbabwe ruins.

The traffic police spotted us later as we were walking around town, and gave us a lift to another hotel. I think they thought we were still looking for a place to stay. In any case, it was an unexpected act of kindness, so to appease any fickle African Gods who may still be angry with us despite our car accident, I should probably perform a random act of kindness in the near future.

14 October 1997

We're in Chimanimani. In a great lodge-it's like the Last Exit in Seattle (college pub near UW) transplanted to the mountains of Zimbabwe.

Yesterday we rented a car in Masvingo. It's great to have that freedom again.

We drove to Great Zimbabwe, a collection of ruins set among the rocky landscape. The whole place had a very haphazard, organic feel to it. Organic because the great stone walls flowed around and on top of granite boulders. Haphazard because the builders weren't very skilled, and they hadn't planned anything before they started.

But it was still an amazing sight. The main hilltop complex was set on a granite outcropping, whose large and rambling boulders formed a kind of fortress on their own, complete with walls and passages and towers and battlements. The man-made walls just added to them.

We walked around the ruins for a few hours, then had a quick lunch and drove off for Chimanimani.

Chimanimani is excellent. It reminds me of the Cascades and the Lake District mixed together. Rolling green mountains with spectacular views. Very relaxing. I wish we had a few more days here. It's kind of raining now. One of those grey misty days where you don't know whether you're in wet fog or light rain.

I still can't get past my sense of awe regarding the landscape. On the road to Chimanimani, we passed some incredible rock formations, square boulders stacked on top of each other in a precarious balance. One particular hill was an impressive jumble of upright stone pillars and lush green trees. It looked like someone had dissembled a Mayan temple in the middle of a forest.

15 October 1997

In the Harare airport. I'm early, it's only ten minutes after nine o'clock, my flight doesn't leave for over two and a half hours. I'm out of local currency, so I didn't want to kick around downtown.

Harare is very cosmopolitan. Not compared to London or New York, perhaps, but it is certainly a large international city. The town had a slightly English feel to it, probably because of the roads, but fortunately Harare has ignored the English tradition of ugly cities and is actually constructing some very pleasant buildings.

We visited our last street market yesterday, in the center of Harare. There were a number of very good salesmen, but I was in an excellent bargaining position since I was nearly out of money. I might have paid too much in Zimbabwe currency, but as far as American dollars go I got some great bargains.

[Very cool-even here in the Harare airport, advertisements list an email address]

We went for a short hike yesterday morning in Chimanimani. Unfortunately it was very foggy, we didn't see any of the surrounding hills, and in fact it was difficult to see the path twenty meters in front of us.

Anyway, we were glad that we went for a hike the previous night. One of the dogs, a young collie I think, followed us from Heaven's Lodge up the large hill nearby. She was bounding far ahead and behind us at first, but as we approached the summit she stayed close to our heels, lying in the shade at every opportunity. She seemed to recover more energy at the top, and she ran well ahead of us all the way back. That was quite helpful, since she found the trail back to the lodge.

The views were spectacular. To the west, Zimbabwe's soft green rolling hills faded into the setting sun. To the east, more dramatic rocky crags were lit by the low sun. When we returned to the lodge, we sat outside with our Bohlinger's and watched lightning play at the peaks of the eastern mountains. Some of them must have actually been in Mozambique. It looked like beautiful country, but unfortunately the Mozambican side of the border is littered with land mines.

Vasee is now on his way to Masvingo, to collect his car. The total repairs came to around $850, which is about $75 US dollars. Had we known repairs would be so inexpensive, I'm sure we could have planned a more interesting accident.

Masvingo was a nice enough place, probably a very typical mid-sized Zim town, hot and dusty but still a welcome break from the scrub with its shops and restaurants. Edgar, the smooth-talking sharply-dressed travel agent who procured our rental car, would have been at home in even the most hectic western travel agencies.

Masvingo was also home to the Breezy Brae, the bed and breakfast on the outskirts of town where we stayed. It was built on the edge of a large granite dome. I was impressed at the gardens, they had an amazing array of colorful trees and flowers, growing in a thin layer of soil atop the hard granite backbone.

The owners asked one of the maids to show us to our room, and to help us with our bags. The maid was young and pretty and looked far too frail to be carrying our heavy bags in the heat. We gave her our lightest backpacks, just to appease the owners, and followed her down the dirt road to our room, dragging our bags behind us.

That night I climbed up the granite hilltop, hoping to get a clear look at the night sky. My only disappointment for the whole trip is that I never really saw the stars. Even on clear nights, the moon was very bright, high in the sky. The few stars I could see were alien, and even though I don't know all of the Northern constellations, it was clear the stars I saw never appeared in the Northern sky.

Anyway, the moon was bright that evening, and there were a number of clouds. So I didn't see many stars.

The wind at the top was very strong. I think a storm was blowing in from the North.

It was not a terribly comfortable position, standing on top of a granite dome as thunderclouds rolled in, with only a lightning rod to keep me company. Since I obviously wasn't going to see any stars, I headed down. I heard some strange noises as I descended, but the only animal I saw was a small gray frog, hopping around near the door to our room. At least, I think it was gray. But everything looks gray in the moonlight.

The Breezy Brae was also home to some of the worst red wine I've ever had. We'd had some good luck with Zim reds in Bulowayo and so ordered a bottle of red at the B&B without trying it first.

Vasee wasn't able to finish his first glass. I downed two glasses, more in a fit of machismo than anything else. That was a bad move. The wine cleared my sinuses, but also killed most of the bacteria in my intestines. I was unable to eat anything for most of yesterday. Fortunately my stomach has recovered in time for my travels today.

Well, it's time to check in for my flight. Vasee is probably rolling into Masvingo right now. Hopefully his battered Volkswagen will make it from there to Durban, a total drive of around 1500km I think.