These were taken June 18, 2019, in Namibia.

Our cabin at Kipwe Lodge in Namibia.

View from the cabin.

View from the cabin toilet.

The cabin bathroom.

The cabin sitting room.

Another view of the cabin sitting room.

The cabin bedroom.

Driving across the Namibian desert.

Typical of the planes we used when flying between lodges in Botswana and Namibia.

Plaque inside the passenger hut at a Namibian airfield.

A passenger hut at a Namibian airfield. More posh than most we encountered in Botswana and Namibi.

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June 17, 2019 [Note from 2020: Overlap here with yesterday’s entry. I’m repeating myself.] We arrived at Windhoek in Namibia two days ago, after a commercial flight of less than two hours, and were greeted outside customs by Antone, who put us in an enclosed VW van with air conditioning and car seats. He drove us through Windhoek, a relatively new city 29 years old [Note from 2020: That’s what Antone said. Wikipedia says it’s about a century older], the capital of Namibia and apparently a commercial center as well. Antone told us that Windhoek grew up as a crossroads between other major Namibian cities and for its proximity to mines. Because Namibia is surrounded by mountains, the airport is 38 km out of town. We drove out of town, stopping at a Shell service center that seemed a little sketchy, though it was clean and well stocked and I suspect that if I were to ever find myself living and working in Windhoek, that service center would be a place I’d stop for gas and coffee and a snack and never think twice about it. [Note from 2020: It looked like an ordinary American or British highway rest stop. These moments of sheer normality were dissonant on our trip. Almost everything was so alien.]

It was a 3.5 hour drive to our camp, which was frankly too much.

The Okonjima Bush Camp turns out to be inside the Okonjima Game Reserve, which is owned by the Africat big cat rehab center. We stayed in a spacious private round lodge, with a simulated hut motif and what appeared to be stone walls. The lodge was separated in half by a partial wall, with the bathroom facility on the opposite side of the beds. The shower was open.

Opposite the beds, a picture window with two comfortable chairs overlooked a desert plain, beautifully silver lit by moonlight at night.

A separate round building with a thatch roof was a sitting room, with chaise lounges and an open wall overlooking the plain. The wall had a two-foot ledge separating the room from the outside plain. The sitting room is equipped with a jar of birdseed and a small flock of guinea hens comes hopping over for treats when we come into the room, like the dog and cats at home gathering for feeding.

(Click the photos for a bigger view)

We were feted by the staff for Julie’s 70th birthday and our 25th anniversary. The staff came out and sang in African harmonies and brought champagne and fruit and chocolate. We already had sparkling wine in the car from the travel company, so that’s a lot of bubbly. And we have had similar birthday celebrations from other places we’ve stayed. We met a few nice couples at the lodge, and had dinner with one, Becky and Anthony from Leceistershire, England, who have been on many safaris previously, including to Namibia. We had dinner with them and split the wine.

We had spectacular success on our game drives. On our first morning, yesterday, we went to the big cat rehabilitation center, and learned about the work they do there. We saw a few cheetahs in a fenced in reserve.

In the evening we went out in search of leopards. Danny, our guide, had a handheld radio antenna like a capital “I” with broad top and bottom, attached to a device that looked like a walkie talkie. That was used to detect the cats’ radio collars. We located a big, 12-year-old male sleeping on the side of a large riverbed. We watched a while to see if he would get up but he did not. Still, the experience was interesting and we saw a few other animals and birds and stuff so we were satisfied.

On the way to our sundowner drinks Danny caught another signal and so we abandoned sundowners and went in search of more leopards. And we scored big.

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First we found a half-grown leopard cub gnawing on part of a baboon carcass on the side of the river. Then its mother came from across the river, with another cub about the same age. A brown hyena stalked the smell of the carrion, and came slowly down the riverbed, but thought better of the project when it saw three leopards, and retreated with its fur all bristly to look more threatening. Somewhere along the way, the first leopard cub retreated to the top of a dead tree, taking the baboon carcass with it, and it gnawed on the carcass from up there,sometimes letting it dangle, playing with its food.

This whole process played out over the course of an hour or so, and was very exciting.

This morning we went out and used the same radio mechanism to locate several white rhinos. We tracked them quietly on foot for the last part of the expedition.

Then at 1:15 or so our guide drove us to the local airstrip – why didn’t we fly in there in the first place, rather than drive? Compared with some of the airstrips we saw in Botswana, this was elaborate, with a hangar and a small waiting area, a two-room rectangular structure with glass sliding doors, the interior of which looked like it had been transported from an office building in a big city. It was decorated with flying memorabilia.

Our plane was an eight-passenger prop driven Kodiak, and we got to our next destination in 35 minutes.

Getting out of the plane was quite a contrast. Okonjima was a scrub desert, with lots of thorn bushes and other dark green foliage, much like home in San Diego. Temperatures were about 40 degrees F in the morning – I needed my puffy jacket and hat and midweight pants and wished I had gloves too – to barely 70 in the hottest part of the day.

Our current location, Twyfelfontein, is hardcore desert, a flat plain of khaki colored sand punctuated by hardy shrubs each a few dozen yards from the other, and big piles of rocks dozens of feet high, with mountains off of the distance in every direction like a backdrop. The sun was bright and the temperature topped 90, maybe even topped 100. And me still in my heavy fleece, which I ditched quickly.

We took one of the ubiquitous khaki colored trucks, with comfortable seats mounted in the bed, to Camp Kipwe, our home for the next two nights. The camp comprises the usual cabins with a hut motif, built into stacks of boulders on the side of a hill. I have sworn off of my usual media pop culture references for the duration of this trip, but if I had not done that I would say this place reminds me of the Flintstones, whereas Okonjima reminded me of Gilligan’s Island. It’s beautiful and luxurious here, and we have the suite, at the highest point in camp, with a bedroom and living room, and open walls overlooking the spectular desert vistas. Even the bathroom has specatulcuar views of the desert; from the toilet I can see a beautiful plain.

As ever, the food is delicous, though all we’ve had to eat so far is a couple of grilled ham and cheese sandwiches done up for our late arrival, along with small green side salads.

On a housekeeping note: Apparently we may not have laundry this stop. And us sweating in the heat. I don’t think anyone will be offended. Also, I decided for the first time to convert my convertible pants, which I have resisted doing until now because it seemed like getting the legs back on might be a hassle. Why have convertible pants if you don’t convert them?

Also, no Internet here whatsoever for two days. We’ve had good internet in Okonjma; I got to upload photos to the cloud and update Flickr. OK internet in Johannesburg, as you’d expect at an airport and airport hotel. Bad and unusable internet in Botswana. but now two days without Internet whatsoever.

Sundowner in a few minutes, then dinner. Tomorrow we’re up at 5 am for a game drive and visit to some interesting archeological formations and ancient bushman wall decorations. As with the other places we’ve stayed, other than Chobe, we have a nice long break in the early afternoon to regroup. Then we’re off to our next location the day after tomorrow.

I can feel we are on the downhill side of our African holiday.

🌍📓

June 15, 2019 – Yesterday was a travel day. We had an 11:25 am charter flight from the LLT airstrip [Note from 2020: That’s the Leroo La Tau safari camp, where we stayed for a few days], and could have jammed in a short game drive, packing and breakfast before then, but it would have been too stressful. Instead we decided to sleep in, which turned out to be 6:30 am for Julie and 6:55 am for me. We were done sleeping. Noteworthy because at home we can sleep hours later if we don’t have to get up. We packed, had breakfast and killed about two hours reading and such before we left for the airstrip at 10:40 am.

The resort staff, who adore Julie, packed us bag lunches, which was lovely but more to carry, so we had mixed feelings about that.

A guide named Bones, who provided star lessons two evenings earlier, was our driver and with many heartfelt farewells to the staff, we set off for the airstrip. After three days together it felt as if we were leaving friends, as we had before at Camp Xakanaxa.

We drove along unpaved roads. The Toyota moved slowly and fishtailed on fine white sand like beach sand that buried the road. A few times Bones stopped to shift gears to get us out of a particularly deep sand drift. A couple of times he hopped out of the car to inspect the wheels and undercarriage. We slowed down once to avoid goats in the road, and another time to avoid cows. We arrived at the LLT airstrip, with its only building a structure that looked like a Little League dugout, along with fire protection equipment. The airstrip was just a long narrow rectangle of flat packed dirt a thousand or so feet long. We had been told earlier that sometimes flights were delayed because animals wandered out on the runway, and sometimes elephants dragged brush on the runway, which had to be cleared for takeoff and landing. But none of those things were problems yesterday; our plane was waiting for us, a four-seat prop job with the pilot standing beside it. The pilot was named Myello; he had joined us for breakfast earlier. We climbed in the plane and he warned us that the plane was light and the skies were windy, so we might be blown around a bit. That concerned me; I don’t do well with vertigo; my brain shuts down in panic mode. Myello taxied us to the far end of the runway. He consulted a computer printout folded in his hand. We were sitting immediately behind him in the snug little plane, closer than the backseat passengers to the driver of a car. He held his hand behind him to show me a line of text demarcated with his thumb; I saw Julie’s surname, Brown, with letters and numbers in a row. I looked at it blankly. He gave me a querying look. We couldn’t speak because the engine noise was too loud, and he was wearing a headset. The line of text was clearly an important question, but I had no idea what it was. I smiled and nodded and gave him the thumbs up. He appeared satisfied. He reached the end of the runway, turned the plane around, paused and gunned the engine. The plane lunged forward and we lunged into the air. [Note from 2020: I wonder if bush pilots do that pause-and-then-floor-the-accelerator for dramatic effect?]

The warning about rough skies proved overstated. Our half hour flight was relatively smooth and comfortable. I looked out the window and photographed the desert. The desert gave way to our destination, the city of Moun, which is more of a town of a few tens of thousands of people. I could see houses below us like ordinary suburban subdivisions, but with apparently unpaved roads.

(Click the photos for a bigger view)

Moun has a proper, but very small, airport, with a tower and many commercial planes lined up and a terminal where we were met by a porter and representative of our travel company, who together helped us get our bags checked and get us through customs. The porter disappeared before I could tip him. I didn’t tip the travel company representative, although now I think maybe I should have. [Note from 2020: Tipping was a mystery in Africa. I just gave money to people at random.] The terminal has a bare-bones but comfortable cafe, where we had $5 water bottles, attempted to get on the WiFi, and waited for our flight at a gate that looked more like a bus terminal than an airport, crowded with what seemed to be backpackers, safari travelers like us in khaki and olive green, businesspeople – a couple of them tapping on laptops – and just regular people taking a flight.

Our flight to Johannesburg was a regular commercial flight, same as any intercity hop in the US. Again, our travel agent arranged to have a porter meet us at the gate, who escorted us and helped us with our bags through customs and deposited us at the CityLodge hotel, located inside the airport, where we spent our first night in Africa 11 days ago. By now we felt like Africa veterans, light years beyond the greenhorns we’d been when we arrived. We’d faced down lions and hippos and elephants and the aggressive porters who hang around the airline check-in desks (completely different than the lovely porters who’d met us at the gate when we landed – we’d have another encounter with the check-in variety of predator the next day).

I had been looking forward to returning to the airport hotel, to enjoy a restaurant meal, sleep in a climate controlled room, and use reliable WiFi. But the room was too warm, the food was mediocre at best and the service was slow, and once I’d spent 15 minutes on the Internet I was done with that, though I did leave my iPhone and iPad connected to back up photos to iCloud and Flickr.

We discovered we were able to check luggage at CityLodge until we returned for our final night in Africa before going home in 10 days. For some reason the desk clerk on our first night 10 days ago told us we couldn’t do that. Huh? Julie insisted we buy a cheap duffle at the airport shops for that purpose, and we did. I filled it in part with unnecessary electronics, including a power brick, several electrical adapters that are lightweight but relatively bulky, and a noise canceling headset, also lightweight but bulky and unnecessary until my flight home. Julie checked clothes and a travel pillow and backrest for the flight home. I estimate we cut our travel weight by about 25% and I am delighted by that.

And now we’re on a commercial flight to Windhoek in Namibia, eager to get back to the bush and resume our holiday.

=-=-=-

Anton, our driver, takes us through Windhoek. He says it’s a city of about a half-million people, only 29 years old, built because it’s a crossroads between other Namibia cities. It’s the nation’s capital, and also seems to be an industrial town. Seems relatively quiet for midday. [Note from 2020: Wikipedia says Windhoek was founded in 1840, abandoned, and then founded again in 1890. I remember it felt more like a large town than a city of a half-million.]

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We were taken on a long, 3.5-hour drive from Windhoek to the Afrikats lodge, which was our next destination. The highway is rural between towns, mostly devoid of human construction, flat and well paved and maintained, two lanes in each direction narrowing to one each way. In towns we see construction, a sign of affluence, alongside poverty, people living in shanty villages. We see warthogs and baboons on the side of the road. Once or twice we pass big clusters of shacks and some tents forming bazaars of traditional crafts.

We drive through mountains. In other places the desert is flat enough to see to the horizon.

It is a long drive, much of which we sit in silence.

[Note from 2020: It was a looooooong drive, in an air-conditioned modern minivan, more comfortable than but not as interesting as the Toyota safari vehicles. Later, when we returned to the US, we asked our travel agent WTF she booked us for a drive rather than a short flight – Afrikats has an airstrip a few minutes away. She said the flight would have cost literally thousands of dollars US. So, yeah, the drive was a good idea.

[Also: I was puzzled during the drive by the juxtaposition of prosperity and poverty – new city construction immediately adjacent to squatter camps. A few days later, one of our guides told us the squatter camps were populated with people who were coming to work on the construction.]

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We stopped at a Shell rest area to stretch our legs and wash up. All variety of people there, very busy. We saw several stout middle aged women wearing traditional clothing, flowing print dresses with two-part hats representing animal horns. A skinny man approached Julie to try to sell wooden beads bigger than golf balls. She has difficulty brushing him off.

[Note from 2020: The dresses are traditional women’s clothes for the Herero, a Bantu ethnic tribe of about 250,000 people. The dress is based on colonial German women’s dresses. Photos and more information on Wikipedia: <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here…>]

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After my Mom passed away in 2000, and then my Dad in 2004, I inherited my Mom’s rolltop desk. It’s in my home office. If you’ve ever done a Zoom call with me, you can see it behind me. It’s not my primary desk; it’s just sitting there with piles of stuff on it.

Yesterday I was looking through the drawers of the desk for a Post-It note. The drawers are mostly empty; I don’t use them. The wide drawer in the top center had some USB thumb drives in the front tray, which I’d put in there myself a few years ago and then forgot about them. In the big wide space behind the tray, there were some bills that have been sitting there since before Dad died. Behind those, two envelopes: One was from 1989, containing two tickets to my middle brother’s college graduation ceremony. They still looked new, red and shiny.

The second envelope had a handwritten address on the front, written by a child in pencil. It looked like one of my brothers' handwriting. Interesting! The return address was Harley Avenue Elementary School. That’s the school my brothers and I attended. Even more interesting!

I opened the envelope and found a letter that my brother had written to his future self, part of a class project. My youngest brother was then 9 years old, and he wrote it to himself at 19. I would have been about 15 then. It was 1976.

I took a photo with my iPhone camera and sent it to my brothers for their enjoyment. In situations like this, I marvel at what my 1976, 15-year-old self would have thought about that technology. I was a die-hard science fiction fan then; I would have loved it

The message was unremarkable. I don’t think my brother’s head was in the assignment. He is wondering what the prices will be 10 years in the future, and whether inflation will still be a big deal. Inflation was a big deal in 1976.

My youngest brother and I both had the same teacher when he was in second grade and I was in third, Arlene Kaufman, who of course we called Miss Kaufman. I actually heard from her two years ago on Facebook. Yesterday, I looked her up again on Facebook to let her know about the new find, but she seems to have deleted her account. When I heard from her, she was living in Queens, NY, parts of which were hard hit by Covid. I hope she’s doing OK.

Here’s how I heard from Miss Kaufman (I’m just going to stick with that name) two years ago: A year or so before that, in my random Internet cruising, I came across the cover of an early edition of the science fiction novel Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein. Miss Kaufman had a small library in the corner of her classroom, which contained that edition of that book. It was one of the first two chapter books I read. The other was a biography of Helen Keller. And I loved Red Planet. It awakened a love of reading, science fiction, and Heinlein that sticks with me to this day.

A year after the first post, Miss Kaufman wrote to me on Messenger; she said a former student of hers had forwarded the post to her, and she said she remembered me too. I received the message from her while I was in a hotel room in Florida on a business trip.

I wonder what that must have been like for her. You remember a 9-year-old-boy and you turn around and he’s a 50-something man writing from a hotel room in Florida. I mentioned this insight to a friend recently, who said Miss Kaufman is probably used to it. I guess that happens to teachers frequently, if they are good teachers with long careers who touch many students' lives.

Now that I think of it, regarding the Helen Keller biography: I love history now too. So thanks again, Miss Kaufman!

I never did find the Post-Its. It turned out I did not need them. I used a memo pad instead — from my first job in tech journalism, at Open Systems Today, 30 years ago. They gave me far too many of those memo pads and I rarely have a need for them, so they sit around my office. I photographed that with the iPhone, too, and sent it to my editor on that job, who I recently reconnected with about freelance work.

My office is like an archeological site. I really need to declutter. 📓

Julie has picked up a few words of Tswana, one of the two major languages of Botswana. The other major language is English:

Kealeboga =thank you Dumela mma= good morning - different ending if you’re talking with a man vs. talking with a woman.
Re mono fela= we are just here
Re kgobile= we are relaxed 📓 🌍

In the morning at home, I look at the news. Here in Africa, in the morning I look at the gnus. A herd of wildebeest gathers on the plain outside our cabin as the sun rises.

Last night, one of the guides gave us a brief five-minute tour of the African starscape. One thing I keep forgetting is that we are in the southern hemisphere now, so the stars are completely different. Until last night, I forgot to look up at the sky. I can see Alpha Centauri, Antares, the Milky Way and those other places I’ve read about in science fiction books for so many years.

The man doing the star show used a laser pointer that shot out of visible beam of light, so he could easily point out the various stars in their location, as if we were in a planetarium. I did not realize laser pointers could do that. I thought you had to point them at something to display a dot at that location.

It is now about 20 after eight on Thursday morning. In a few minutes we will be leaving for what is billed as a cultural visit to a local village. I have no idea what is in store for us there. But I am looking forward to it!

Yesterday afternoon we saw a Toyota truck go by in the evening game drive, carrying a full load of black people. It was the first time I had seen black people in the back of the Toyota, as passengers, rather than driving. Our guide told us that they were teachers from the same school that we are going to visit today. They look very young, as though they were teenagers and students themselves.

The cultural event proved to be an excursion to Khumaga (khoo mah cha), a nearby village of about 2,000 people. We drove in on an unpaved dirt road, past houses ranging from circular mud huts to plain square brick buildings to small neat houses with proper windows and fences and cars in front that would not have looked out of place in a middle class American neighborhood. We saw some people, but not a lot, men walking in pairs at the kind of deliberate pace you maintain when you’re going to be waking a long way. Children waved to us cheerfully; we grinned and waved back.

We visited a school for kindergarten through seventh grade. A teacher told us briefly about the school. She seemed citified, in a brightly colored floral skirt and blue double breasted jacket that might have been a fleece. Fleeces are ubiquitous here, the resort staff wears khaki fleeces as part of their uniforms. The teacher asked for donations and seemed shocked when we told her, truthfully, that we had not brought wallets or cash. I’ve gotten in the habit of locking my wallet, cash and passport in my room safe when arriving at a resort. We just don’t need it. We’ll arrange a donation later today.

We went into a seventh grade classroom and the children broke into three groups to crowd around the three of us who visited from the resort, me and Julie and a man in his 70s who had previously volunteered at the peace corps, so he was familiar with this kind of place and situation. His wife, who is disabled and uses a wheelchair, waited in the Toyota.

My little group of children, mostly boys 11-13 years old, pushed up against me in a circle. They asked me how old I am and marveled at the number (it amazes me too, kids) and admired my hair and shirt and shoes. They asked me what kind of animal is my favorite (our dog and cats at home – but in Botswana I like elephants, giraffes, zebras, gnu and baboons). They told me what they want to be when they grew up, a doctor, scientist, dentist and soldier. They asked me what kind of work I do, and seemed satisfied with the answer. They loved elephants and told me with relish that they can kill you. They showed me a worksheet of what to do and not to do when you encounter elephants. There is an elephant overpopulation problem in Botswana; the beasts trample crops and destroy property. The government is considering reversing the ban on hunting, to reduce numbers. The boys asked me my religion; I said Jewish, non-practicing. I don’t know if that registered. Earlier, the teacher had said the children study world religions and she listed a few, of which Judaism was not one. That’s reasonable; we Jews are few in numbers, just a few million in the whole world, and maybe a child in an African village has no need to know about us.

The kids and I ran out of things to talk about but they cheerfully demanded to be photographed, so we did that. They mugged for the shot and then crowded around the iPhone to see how the photo came out.

Afterward we visited the kindergarten, about 25 children in a one room building with a concrete floor and metal roof. They sat on the floor and colored and greeted us cheerfully. Then we visited a woman who wove baskets; she wore a pink bathrobe, belted carefully to make it look more like a dress.

Tomorrow, which is Friday, will be a travel day. Saturday too. Multiple hops to get from here in Botswana to JoBurg, where we will again spend the night at an airport hotel. I must admit I’m looking forward to a dinner that is not a production number, and going shopping at the airport stores for additional camera accessories. The on a plane Saturday morning for two flights and a road transfer to our next stop, in Namibia. Namibia and Botswana are neighboring countries so hopefully there will be direct flights between them one day.

📓🌍

Leroo La Tau, our current safari camp, is in the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park in Botswana, on the banks of the Boteti River. The resort is on a cliff overlooking a river and plain. We can go out on a deck and see wildebeest and zebras and elephants and stuff. Last night when I woke in the middle of the night, I heard a terrible screeching. It sounded a little electronic. Today I imitated the sound for our guide, Gee. He said it sounded like a jackal.

Gee is knowledgeable, enthusiastic, efficient and friendly, as all our guides have been. He has a restful energy, unlike TS, who was great but who could be a bit jangly. The hotel staff loves Julie, and treat her like a queen, which she deserves! Julie has been trying to learn a few words of Tswana, one of the common languages of Botswana (the other is English). I have followed her lead. We regularly butcher “thank you” and are working on “hello” and “good morning.” There is also “slowly slowly,” which seems to translate roughly to “take it easy” or “mellow out” or “chill.” Also, “we are here,” which seems to have a deeper meaning I have not been able to ken.

I am drinking far more liquor now than I do at home. At home I have 0-4 drinks per month. Here I have been having 3-4 drinks per day. At the end of the afternoon drive we have “sundowners” in the field; the guide mixes drinks and lays out snacks on the Toyota tailgate, or on a little panel that folds down from the front of the truck. I hae gin and tonic. Before dinner, we have more drinks. I have discovered Amarula, a liquor made from local fruit and milk. I’m told it tastes like Baileys, which I have not had in many years. Amarula is delicious. Then we have wine with dinner. I feel like Keith Richards.

The reason I don’t drink Baileys at home is that milk gives me an upset stomach (though I can no trouble with cheese and yogurt, which I love and consume regularly). Here in Africa, though, the milk doesn’t bother me.

And now it’s night and we’re in bed. We can hear water lapping not too far below the cabin. And we can also hear a variety of animal sounds, including a loud grunting that may be one or more hippos just a few yards away.

📓🌍

We’re on a 12-seater Cessna now, on our way from Camp Xakanaxa, where we spent three lovely days, to our next stop, the name of which I cannot remember.

TS, our guide at Camp X [Note from 2020: I’m not going to spell it out] is tall, thin and handsome, with dark black skin and a broad smile. He tells people his name stands for True Story, because he only speaks truth. At other times, he says the name stands for other things. He has a dry sense of humor. He is passionate about being a guide, with a deep knowledge of nature and a strong drive to take us to see the most interesting animals and birds. He finds them by listening to their calls, driving slowly while hanging his head off the side of the truck to watch the ground for leopard or lion tracks, by consulting with other guides on radio, and apparently by extra sensory perception. When he hears over the radio that the other guides have found some fascinating animal, he throws the truck in gear and we careen across the road, bouncing high in the air. A few times I’m completely airborne above my seat. He usually doesn’t say what he’s after, but I know that when we’re moving at that speed it’s something good. Yesterday it was a leopard, which we could barely see when we arrived. That’s just how it goes; game drives are a lot of patience and luck.

TS is opinionated about which animals are worth stopping for – lions, leopards, elephants and giraffes – although elephants are less interesting than leopards, so we do not stop to see elephants on the way to a leopard. I love baboons and monkeys but TS thinks they are a waste of time so we do not stop to see the monkeys. That’s ok; we’ve seen plenty of monkeys anyway.

TS tells us he comes from a small farming village in Botswana, with 35 brothers and sisters from multiple mothers. Many people in the village were unschooled and illiterate; they believe book learning is a waste of time, compared with learning what they need to know for farming.

TS sat next to a group of Italians during lunch, and asked them how to say hello in Italian. Later, after I asked him, he said everybody he knows growing up came from that one little village. Now he meets people from all over the world. The world is an amazing place.

As I thumb-type this, we are in a small 12-seater Cessna, with those same Italians, on our way to the next stop for three days. We loved Camp X and felt a connection to the place and staff there but I’ll be glad to sleep indoors. And wake up indoors too. The tents at CX get cold at night and in the early morning when we get up for our dawn game drive. They give us hot water bottles after dinner, one each, which we carry to our tent in our arms and tuck under the blankets. And the blankets are lovely and warm and the sheets are clean and white. It’s quite cozy – despite how cold it is outside, 40 degrees, I still find myself throwing the blankets partway off during the night.

But it is most definitely not warm when we wake up.

And it’s dark at night too; camp power is provided by a generator and some of the tent lighting runs on batteries. The generator goes off around 10 and goes back on a little before wake up.

The food at Camp X is fantastic. [Note from 2020: True for all our camps.] I’m going to need bigger pants. Meals are served in a big tent; we eat at big long wooden dining tables and real chairs, with china and linen tablecloths and napkins and separate glasses for wine and water, like a restaurant. We serve ourselves from buffet tables and talk with the other guests and guides, who eat with the guests, about what we saw and did that day, although we did get into a brisk political discussion with a few Germans one night. I would have preferred to talk about the game drives. Political discussion is one of the things I’m getting away from.

The German who talked politics asked me, the next night, about my work. I had resolved that for the duration of this trip I would not volunteer what I do for a living, but would tell people when asked. So I did. I think next time I’ll make something up, like “Mafia accountant” or “large animal veterinarian.”

I’m thumb typing this on a 12 seat plane from Camp X to our next stop. 50 minute flight. We just swerved abruptly and I was overcome by vertigo and I closed my eyes. Julie said she saw another plane that we had swerved to avoid

Landing now. I’ll put away my phone.

And now we are at the Leroo La Tau Lodge, still in Botswana, this time on the desert. It’s 1:26 pm, we checked in, got our orientation talk from the manager, and had another enormous and delicious lunch. I brought two sets of pants, one for cooler weather and one for warmer weather. I should have brought bigger pants too.

LLT is designed along the same lines as CX, with huts with thatched roofs. But LLT is a complex of buildings, rather than tents on platforms. We’re told to expect cooler weather here.

This is the Kalahari Desert. Coming in on our 12-seater plane – Clement was our pilot again – we saw small villages of huts and cattle and goats penned in with rough fences, called kraals. On the dirt road to the camp – more bouncy bouncy in one of the ubiquitous converted Toyota trucks – we saw a truck going in the opposite direction, with a middle aged white couple in the cab. The woman, in the passenger seat, had a small dog on her lap. It occurred to me that this was the first time we’d seen animal who was a pet,in a week.

CX and Chobe Lodge were surrounded by electrical wire fences, high enough to stop elephants but let other animals through. We saw baboons on the lawn in front of our cabin in Chobe. A resident hippo wanders around CX, his name is Oscar. We saw him just outside the camp when TS drove us in to the camp on our first day; TS cautioned us that Oscar is not domesticated, he is a wild animal, and hippos are vicious too, and can move fast when provoked, we should stay 30-40 meters away. Not sure how you can do that in the camp, but it was a moot point; we did not see Oscar again.

When we drove up to CX, two managers greeted us with a big smile and a goofy dance. A short time ago that would have made me uncomfortable; I would have assumed it was a residue of colonialism and racism. Now I think it’s just how they do things. One of the managers was a tall, handsome, erect young man named Mox, with deep black skin and a broad smile. Unlike his colleagues, Mox spoke in a British-inflected accent; he told us later that he was educated in a private track in a public school and – he confessed – has an English girlfriend. (“Shocking,” I said, and he was surprised that I said it, but Julie explained that I was kidding. I said it with a deadpan that any American would have recognized I meant the opposite of what I was saying, but that inflection doesn’t translate. We told him that we have absolutely no problem with mixed-race relationships.)

But we did not know any of that when we were checking in. I saw him as another native member of the hotel staff, who likely spent his entire life in Botswana. So I was surprised when he said, as he picked up our bags to carry them off, “Alright alright alright!” Surprising to meet a Matthew McConaughey fan so far from home!

I’ve been thinking here about the legacy of colonialism. At home I had a vague, unarticulated idea that colonialism was unalloyed evil and that it had left a false skin on African culture that would inevitably be sloughed off as colonialism receded in the past. While I’m still no fan of colonialism, I now think the Africans regard the colonial legacy as part of their heritage, just as much as their native roots, and are in no rush to slough off European influences, any more than the English are looking to rid themselves of Roman and Norman influences. In general I have encountered similar attitudes when dealing with people in the developing world. In past decades we worried about American cultural imperialism, but people who live in the developing world seem happy to take what pleases them or is useful from American and European culture, and retain their native traditions where those are pleasing or useful. This also applies to China, which can’t be described as a member of the developing world anymore; it’s a superpower rivaling America, maybe soon to surpass us. [Note from 2020: I’m not certain I agree with my 2019 assessment of geopolitics here and post-colonial culture. I’d only been Africa a week when I wrote it, and less than four weeks total.]

Last night at CK I woke up in the middle of the night and heard animals calling nearby. I turned over in bed in the dark and saw, on the canvas wall of our tent, the shadow of a vast animal moving slowly by. I turned over and went back to sleep.

This evening as we were washing for dinner we heard the sound of two male elephants nearby disagreeing loudly.

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I literally squeed when I saw a mother baboon carrying her baby. “Oh my god it’s a baby baboon!” I exclaimed in a high pitched squeal like an 11 year old girl. The baby dropped off the mother, stood on his hind legs a wobbly moment, then looked puzzled and fell over. Who would not squee at that?

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Dawn river cruise. Instant coffee from metal camp cups at sunrise, mixed with hot water from a Stanley insulated bottle

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Kasane International Airport, outside Chobe National Park in Botswana, is tiny, but it is clean and modern and efficient. [Note from 2020: Kasane is small, but a proper airport. Many of the other places we caught planes were just airstrips — a grassy field with a long cleared strip, often graded but not paved, to accept small planes.] We’re here on our way to Camp Xakanaxa (pronounced ka-ka-na-ka), in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. The plane is a Cessna 208 or 208B Caravan. It seats 12 but we are the only two passengers, along with pilot Clement and another guy, who I think is the baggage master. Other than the road, I don’t see a sign of human habitation from the air.

I watched the ground go by outside the window of our little plane. Dozed off. Woke up. Same. Ground was greener and wetter and swampy. We descend for landing. I see a few houses.

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The Okavango airport is a dirt airstrip with no buildings, just a structure like a Little League baseball dugout with a sign that says VIP Lounge. Good to see irony thrives in Africa. There is no Starbucks.

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TS, our driver, was moving fast and the truck was rocking and rolling over rutted roads. I was daydreaming when suddenly I was knocked off my seat and hit the unpadded metal floor on my ass, hard.

I was uninjured, which was lucky, because that’s how people get permanent, disabling back injuries. On the other hand, had I gotten a permanent, disabling back injury, it would have been a better story than everybody else’s story. Everybody else gets back injuries reaching for paper towels from the top shelf of their kitchen cabinets.

We parked next to two sleeping male lions, and waited a half hour for them to wake up. For the first part of that time there were about four other trucks parked in a semicircle, watching the lions. How would you like to be sleeping in bed and wake up to find 25 people in a semicircle around your bed staring at you while you slept?

TS asked whether he should get out of the truck and wake the lions up. We said sure, and he laughed. Funny guy, that TS. We agreed that taking a selfie with the lions would be a great way to become world famous and score many views and likes on YouTube. Unfortunately you would not be around to enjoy the celebrity.

Internet connectivity here at Xakanaxa is crap, electricity goes out at 10 pm so I’m just going to power down my phone at bedtime so it has maximum charge for tomorrow. Shocking!

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Yesterday was our first full day really in Africa, when we got out of the airport/hotel complex in Johannesburg to the Chobe Game Lodge in Botswana . This place is posh, with a vaguely colonial style and dozens of staff, smiling and jumping to attention. Indeed, service is both overly attentive and not quite what we wanted.Four or five people serve us at each meal, and yet service is slow and it can be difficult to find someone if you need something. I ordered a rump roast for dinner last night from a gemsbok, a type of antelope. It was delicious, but very tough, and I sawed at it for minutes with a standard table knife, looking around for a server to ask for a sharp steak knife. But there was no one to be found. There had been two separate people there a few minutes ago to take our drink orders, separately and with unnecessary redundancy.

When choosing our meals, Julie pointed out one dish, which was labeled as spicy, and asked how spicy it was. The waitress smiled and said promptly that it is spicy. Julie said, yes, but HOW spicy. The waitress smiled and said it’s “spicy.” Yes, said Julie, but is it VERY spicy. On a scale of one to five, Julie said, where five is extremely spicy and 1 is not spicy at all, how spicy is it? The waitress said, “I’ll have to ask the chef,” and left the table, returning with the answer. “Two.”

Another example: Breakfast yesterday was a buffet of cold food. There was a server at the buffet, a smiling young woman with a “TRAINEE” badge. I asked her if I could get any hot food, and she said no, this was all cold food. The buffets had veils in front of them, I expect to keep out flies, and in some areas when I wanted something it was this young woman’s job to lift the veil so I could serve myself, as I would at any buffet. Flavored yogurt and fresh and canned fruits.

When I got to the table, the waitress brought over our menus. Of hot breakfasts. “B-b-b-b-b-ut,” I said to myself. “The waitress over there just said ‘no hot food.” And why is there a waitress serving at a buffet – doesn’t that defeat the whole “buffet” concept, making it more of a “cafeteria.” Then I realized that the waitress was thinking I was asking if there was hot food at her station, and she answered truthfully. I did not ask her if there was hot food elsewhere, so she did not answer that question.

The whole place is like that. Communications difficulties. But the food has been delicious, and we had very nice sandwiches for lunch, sitting out on a deck while we could see giraffes and elephants not too far away. So, we are having a fantastic time.

We got lucky with an upgrade to our room – a whole suite, two bedrooms and a sitting room. Everything is spacious and beautiful.

I took more than 300 photos yesterday alone. Wednesday evening, the day we arrived, I chatted with a fellow Californian who was taking no photos at all. He and his wife and daughter had been traveling 10 days. He said he’d been on trips with people where everyone was taking photos and he took none, because he figured the photos part was covered and he was free to just enjoy the experience. I endorse this point of view, and you can expect the rate of photography to trickle off as the trip progresses. But for now I am having a great time taking photos.

This is a philosophy I’ve been thinking of for some time actually, how social media makes us observers of our own lives, taking photos or (if you’re like me) thinking of things to say about what you’re doing. So yeah the long term goal for this trip is less photos and thinking of things to say online, and more being in the moment. But for now I’m doing the other thing.

I get the idea this fellow I was talking with worked in tech, like me. But I’d made another rule for myself this trip - if anyone asks what I do I’ll gladly tell them, but I won’t volunteer my work when I’m introducing myself, which is a thing that I’m told is characteristically American in social situations.

Yesterday was very scheduled, and I gather that will be typical of this trip. Up at 5 am for a dawn game drive, get driven around the bush on a flatbed open truck with padded seating for about two and a half hours. It’s cold in the morning, temperatures in the high 40s or low 50s this time of year. We wear light winter coats.

Then it’s back to the lodge for breakfast at 8:30 am.

River cruise at 11 am, then back to the hotel for lunch at 12:30 pm. There’s a choice between eating in the hotel restaurant, which is an enclosed deck, nearly like being indoors, or on an open air deck. We chose the open air deck and feel we chose wisely, with beautiful food and delicious views. I meant to say delicious food and beautiful views, but I like the other way.

After lunch I tried to have a nap but only got in about 20 minutes. Yesterday was the day that jet lag hit me hard. I got about three hours of sleep Sunday, the night before we left California, then only a few minutes of sleep on the 24 hours or so we were in transit. Then I was wide awake at 1:30 am Thursday. I don’t think those days add up, by the way. Traveling for 48 hours through nine time zones gets confusing, like a complicated time travel Doctor Who episode.

I laid in bed until about 3:30, and heard a lion roar not too far from us, which was thrilling. The lion did not sound anti-Semitic in his food preferences, like she would gladly have eaten me. I was glad to be indoors behind thick walls. I got out of bed and sat reviewing photos and writing in this journal - that was the most recent entry before this one – until it was time for the morning game drive.

Even the afternoon attempt at a nap was refreshing, and we were up again for a 3 pm tea. The tea was served by about a half-dozen servers dishing up tea and savory and sweet pastries. Again, too much service – that’s 2-3x the number of people needed to do the job. Or, really, we didn’t need any servers at all; just put out the beverages and cakes and let people help themselves. But instead we had a half-dozen people serving up food.

I let Julie order first, as a gentleman does, and everything she ordered sounded good so I just said “the same” to each. The servers thought that was hilarious; they laughed and laughed.

A few days before we left for Africa, I talked with a friend and former colleague and the conversation turned to our upcoming trip. I had completely forgotten until that moment that this woman I was talking with had LIVED for a time in South Africa. I asked her for tips and she pointed out that we were traveling to third world countries, and we should leave our American expectations about service behind. Things that seem like they should be easy will be difficult (steak knives, hot breakfast). Things that seem like they should be difficult will be easy. We’ve only been in Africa a couple of days but I think I’m starting to understand.

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Chobe Game Lodge, Chobe National Park, Botswana – Lovely surprise at breakfast this morning. The waitstaff came over with a cake and sang “happy birthday” and “happy anniversary” and one or two songs with an African rhythm, all done with African multipart harmonies, one of the women ululating occasionally and little synchronized dance moves. It was all very beautiful and silly and fun.

I had temporarily forgotten that this was a celebration of a milestone birthday for Julie. The birthday itself is October. And also a celebration of our 25th anniversary, which was in December.

I suspect the guiding hand for this and one or two other pleasant surprises, is the travel agent who helped us arrange the trip , Vanessa Hensley at African Portfolio. onsafari.com. So far, we have found working with her and the company to be a fantastic experience – I rate them 7 out of a possible 5 stars.

Julie did about 85% of the work with Vanessa on planning the trip. I kicked in for the final few weeks but mostly my role has been showing up. I’m pretty good at showing up.

River cruise in a few minutes.

I wrote a longer journal entry this morning but I don’t know if I will ever post it. I was cranky at the time. Nothing helps you get over being cranky like cake for breakfast. With occasional ululation.

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Dinner tonight: Buffet style, served on linen covered tables in a clearing over a short boardwalk from the lodge. Marimba band playing one the path a bit of a distance away, far enough to be pleasant but not overwhelming. Thandi was our waitress again, for the fifth time or so. We’re starting to get fond of her. I had steak filet with a pepper sauce. There was a tasty local bread, a distant cousin to naan. I asked the server what kind of bread it is; he said “local bread.” Ah.

One of the foods was ox tail. A woman did not understand what the serverwas saying, so he said “ox,” then stuck out his butt, pointed at it and said “tail.”

I also had poached pair in red wine, for dessert.

Now Julie is packing. I already have, as far as I can. I made a separate pile for things I brought and now regret including three pairs of heavy cargo pants, and two external power supplies for our gadgets. I also wish I’d brought a camera strap instead of the camera holster I did bring, and I wish I’d brought a light knapsack to use as a daybag, in addition to my computer bag, which is good for travel days but too much to bring on drives and boat cruises.

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