Well, it's a wild continent, this African place. It took Shannon and I a bit to get into things here, as we spent the first 24 hours ensuring I had enough room in my passport (no problems most likely) and changing all our US dollars into post-2000 bills. That was quite a headache, as no one in this country wants to accept old bills, but it we got it done, met our tour buddies, and we're now on our way through Africa.
The very day we started, we did a game drive that night. I don't think much is going to top that first night, as we got within centimetres of a small pryde of lions in the park. We parked our truck only a few metres from a few females lying in the grass, with another female and a male lying another few metres away. They stretched, yawned and splayed out lazily for a while, before getting the scent of a pack of impalas a few hundred metres away. One by one, the females got up and started moving along the edge of the bushes, looking to start hunting the impalas. Impalas by the way are a deer-like animal, like a small gazelle.
The lions started by using the truck as cover, which meant that one by one, they would walk alongside our vehicle, before creeping into the underbrush. The impalas, which we could only slightly see through the trees as they moved, got extremely nervous, and started letting out a call which sounded like something between a dog barking and a whale exhaling. Our guide pointed out that two lions were hiding on our left, one was deep to the right, and the last was in the middle of the path, acting as a visual decoy to the impala. It was quite a clever plan the lions had, using the wind direction, the vehicle, the bushes and the decoy lion all as cover for the hunt. Unfortunately, lions compensate for their ingenious hunting techniques by being extremely lazy. While three of the lions still were intent on the hunt, one of the females seemily decided things weren't worth the effort, broke cover, and flopped down in the middle of the road. The male soon followed, brushing alongside our truck, and stretching out as well. And so, only a few minutes after it started, the hunt was over, with the lions having nothing to show for it but some very excited tourists.
The next day we spent in Kruger National Park, which is one of the big 3 famous game parks in Africa. It was a good (long) day of seeing animals, but hard to compete with the intensity from the night before. Still, we got up close to plenty of impala, elephants, rhinos, buffalo, wildebeast, giraffe, and even some smaller creatures like a chameleon and a vine snake.
This was all in South Africa, the first stop on our tour. Since then, we've traveled through Botswana, and are now in Zambia. It's getting to be pretty intense, as western goods are either expensive or hard to find (grocery stores are often lacking groceries here), and since we're right on the Zimbabwaean border, there's an eery feeling sometimes when you hear stories from people about the neighbouring country. Things are nearly impossible to get there, and our tour driver, who is from Zimbabwae, spends his days off shuttling food he bought in South Africa to his family in Zimbabwae. Some of the people on our tour took a white water rafting trip down the Zambezi river, which divides Zambia and Zimbabwae, and they came across some people trying to cross the river and smuggle food into Zimbabwae. They stopped the boat and helped everyone across, but apparently it's quite common for people to smuggle like this - something that would blow your mind if you saw how big and scary this river is and how massive the gorge surrounding it is.
Before I go, I'll also mention Victoria Falls (or Mosi-Oa-Tunya as the Zambians call it). I think they're some of the biggest falls in the world - the longest I'm pretty sure, and taller than Niagra though with less volume. Right now the "smoke" or spray coming off them is quite small, though when we got there we coudn't get more than a kilometre close to them without getting absolutely drenched. In the high flow season the water sprays for up to 10 km. I've never felt anything quite as powerful, and when you get close to them, you really do feel them with all the noise, water spraying you, and the ground shaking all around you.
Anyway, gotta run, it's expensive and slow here, which sadly means no pictures (I've been trying for an hour, which means $4 wasted). I'll try again later, but it looks like Africa will have to be photoless. Oh well, use your imaginations.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
The Long Arm of the Law
Time's up now for Shannon and I in Indonesia, but I'm going to backtrack a bit and write about the final days from the island nation. And where better to begin than with our brief encounter with the Indonesian police!
Our final day in Indonesia was spent in Sanur, a quiet little beach town on the southeast side of Bali. We had 12 hours to spend before our flight to Johannesburg, and I needed a jacket, so we rented a scooter to drive to Kuta, about 30-40 minutes away. Of course, renting a scooter and driving from town to town in Bali is a pretty silly idea, but we had enough time somehow it seemed like a good plan.
Within moments, we were lost. Not too badly fortunately, and we managed to turn around and get back on the right track. The bad part of it though, was that we stopped at a light right next to a freakin' traffic police box, with two disgruntled officers working there. And so, as I mistakenly stopped on the wrong side of the stop line in front of the light, we were waved over to the side of the road by the two grumpy gentlemen.
I want to give a dialogue of the encounter, but besides being quite lengthy, it involved a lot of grunts, pointing, glaring and untranslatable blabbering by everyone involved. My position was one of confusion and apology, as well as coyness (I think that's the right word) in that I could not understand the traffic laws no matter how many times he offered them to me to read. Shannon played the angry tourist, giving the cops a hard time as they tried to bully us into paying them a bribe. The cops gave us every English law and diagram available to them, which basically said "you broke the law, so pay the officers money" without stating how much or why. And so once we "agreed" to pay the fine there (the two cops threatened to arrest our scooter once we said we wouldn't pay them), we haggled on the price, settling for 100,000 rupiah - about $12 CDN, and half what they originally wanted.
After 10 minutes with the cops, we were eventually let go, and made our way to Kuta. The drive there was straight along the highway with no turns. The drive back, sadly, was not straight, and no matter how hard we tried to go to Sanur, we contiually found ourselves drifing north, until we were 45 minutes out of the way, and had covered an extra 50km at least. We caught our plane without much worry, but it was one bloody hectic day.
Arak Attack
One of our stops on Bali involved an amazing island 90 minutes away from Sanur. We ended up forking over nearly 3 times what we normally pay for our accommodation, but it was well worth the money. We went snorkeling, surfing, ate some amazing food and met another couple from Canada at our place. We also hung out with some of the staff at our accommodation, and the other Canadian couple felt that it would be quite fun if the lot of us got together and had some drinks. And so, over 30 hours in advance, we made plans for a game of Uno and a few bottles of Arak to be had between us.
Arak, a sort of fruity Indonesian equivalent to vodka I suppose, was the penalty for screwing up or finishing last during the Uno game. 7 of us ended up playing, and it gave quite a full showing of the cultural differences between our two countries - The Canadians sipped beer and wine while playing, taking the Arak in stride but not really getting too drunk off it, while the Indonesians did there best to avoid it at first, but once they hit that line of "too much", it was hard to stop them from going for more. Well, mostly it was just the one guy, Urope, who kept going back for the Arak, but I think we drank 4 or 5 times more than the Indonesians, and we were all in about the same shape the next morning.
Idiocy
Shannon and I are now in Africa, which I'll write about shortly. We're having an awesome time so far, but there's been a little stress that came along with the trip here which I could have easily avoided - in my excitement to get on the trip and my stupidity in properly preparing, I never got a new passport before coming, thinking my old one had plenty of room, and now I'm nearly full up with stamps and visas. It turns out I'm not as bad as I had first feared, but now, every time we cross a border, I have to crawl half way over the counter and point exactly where I need them to stamp to make sure I have enough room to get out of Kenya and into Egypt. Today was the last big worry stamp, getting into Zambia, so unless the officer in Tanzania is a real jerk, there's no reason things won't work out. Still, the lesson here is to be extra prepared when it comes to traveling, and get a big fat passport cause you never know how big the stickers will be and who's gonna try and be funny and take up a whole page for no good reason.
Okay, gotta run, don't want to get caught in the dark away from home. Not in this continent anyway.
Our final day in Indonesia was spent in Sanur, a quiet little beach town on the southeast side of Bali. We had 12 hours to spend before our flight to Johannesburg, and I needed a jacket, so we rented a scooter to drive to Kuta, about 30-40 minutes away. Of course, renting a scooter and driving from town to town in Bali is a pretty silly idea, but we had enough time somehow it seemed like a good plan.
Within moments, we were lost. Not too badly fortunately, and we managed to turn around and get back on the right track. The bad part of it though, was that we stopped at a light right next to a freakin' traffic police box, with two disgruntled officers working there. And so, as I mistakenly stopped on the wrong side of the stop line in front of the light, we were waved over to the side of the road by the two grumpy gentlemen.
I want to give a dialogue of the encounter, but besides being quite lengthy, it involved a lot of grunts, pointing, glaring and untranslatable blabbering by everyone involved. My position was one of confusion and apology, as well as coyness (I think that's the right word) in that I could not understand the traffic laws no matter how many times he offered them to me to read. Shannon played the angry tourist, giving the cops a hard time as they tried to bully us into paying them a bribe. The cops gave us every English law and diagram available to them, which basically said "you broke the law, so pay the officers money" without stating how much or why. And so once we "agreed" to pay the fine there (the two cops threatened to arrest our scooter once we said we wouldn't pay them), we haggled on the price, settling for 100,000 rupiah - about $12 CDN, and half what they originally wanted.
After 10 minutes with the cops, we were eventually let go, and made our way to Kuta. The drive there was straight along the highway with no turns. The drive back, sadly, was not straight, and no matter how hard we tried to go to Sanur, we contiually found ourselves drifing north, until we were 45 minutes out of the way, and had covered an extra 50km at least. We caught our plane without much worry, but it was one bloody hectic day.
Arak Attack
One of our stops on Bali involved an amazing island 90 minutes away from Sanur. We ended up forking over nearly 3 times what we normally pay for our accommodation, but it was well worth the money. We went snorkeling, surfing, ate some amazing food and met another couple from Canada at our place. We also hung out with some of the staff at our accommodation, and the other Canadian couple felt that it would be quite fun if the lot of us got together and had some drinks. And so, over 30 hours in advance, we made plans for a game of Uno and a few bottles of Arak to be had between us.
Arak, a sort of fruity Indonesian equivalent to vodka I suppose, was the penalty for screwing up or finishing last during the Uno game. 7 of us ended up playing, and it gave quite a full showing of the cultural differences between our two countries - The Canadians sipped beer and wine while playing, taking the Arak in stride but not really getting too drunk off it, while the Indonesians did there best to avoid it at first, but once they hit that line of "too much", it was hard to stop them from going for more. Well, mostly it was just the one guy, Urope, who kept going back for the Arak, but I think we drank 4 or 5 times more than the Indonesians, and we were all in about the same shape the next morning.
Idiocy
Shannon and I are now in Africa, which I'll write about shortly. We're having an awesome time so far, but there's been a little stress that came along with the trip here which I could have easily avoided - in my excitement to get on the trip and my stupidity in properly preparing, I never got a new passport before coming, thinking my old one had plenty of room, and now I'm nearly full up with stamps and visas. It turns out I'm not as bad as I had first feared, but now, every time we cross a border, I have to crawl half way over the counter and point exactly where I need them to stamp to make sure I have enough room to get out of Kenya and into Egypt. Today was the last big worry stamp, getting into Zambia, so unless the officer in Tanzania is a real jerk, there's no reason things won't work out. Still, the lesson here is to be extra prepared when it comes to traveling, and get a big fat passport cause you never know how big the stickers will be and who's gonna try and be funny and take up a whole page for no good reason.
Okay, gotta run, don't want to get caught in the dark away from home. Not in this continent anyway.
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