Optimistic Tendencies

The problem with these posts, once again and obviously, is that language doesn't allow reader to live writer's life. It never does. That's the point, in the end.

The other problem with these posts, again and obviously, is that an entire volume could be written about August in South Africa 2006 (the "New South Africa" - a term invented in 1994, and with an altogether ironic cacophony of connotations depending on the specific breed of south African uttering the phrase). A volume could be written about the latter half of August, 2006. Or just August 23, 2006. Or the period from 4 to 4:15 PM on august 23, 2006. There is, that is, enough detail in every moment to stretch, analyze, describe, capture, create to make chapters into books.

But there isn't enough time in the world for such capture or creation. Hours spent to describe every second necessitate either a shorter life coupled with abundant reflection, or an alternate definition of "to live." In my last month of travel, I've written less and journeyed more with undocumenting eyes.

As reflection finally came, it came under the haze of moderate hangover sleepy groggy grogginess in an internet cafe on long street, while my mind ached to recall the myriad moments since, well, Tanganyika. To recall the changes, the morphs, the left turns, the right. To recall being robbed of $100 US on our first morning in Zimbabwe whilst the knowledge of the black market there was still a little rough in our minds (when we arrived, the bank rate was 250,000 ZDollars to 1 US dollar, while the black market rate was around 550,000. When we left, it was 250,000 in the banks, and somewhere near 800,000 on the streets. This, in the course of a four day stay - due to the world's highest 1200 percent inflation. Iraq rolls in second with 64 percent.), and also to recall blissfully crisp air walking alongside Elands and two Besotho women in high heels and galoshes balancing suitcases on their heads and an infant on one off their backs heading up into the area of the drakensburg marked "dangerous, may require ropes" on our map at 3:30 PM. It tried to recall, and to portray, exhilaration at whizzing down beautiful mountain canyons on a 125 cc scooter at 60 miles per hour, and at watching southern right whales breach from the shores of Hermanus.

Things that I could have said in that last blog were, say, stories of scuba diving in False Bay - sheltered from the Atlantic Ocean by the Cape of Good Hope (or the Cape of Storms depending on what century you live in). As I swam marveling at the pristine white sea urchins clinging to walls of underwater rock, with kelp forests swaying nearby around shy sharks and starfish, my mind was suddenly whisped away by eyes calling out the sight of a pajama shark. It whirled by, and over a cliffside. As we followed in anticipation, we couldn't believe we saw its dinner. A now 6-legged octopus dangled from its mouth, as the shark thrashed it side to side a few times more. But we were a threat, and the pajama wanted nothing to do with us. It makes a slow motion dart towards Jenny's flippers before realizing four on one is too heavy a threat. It bolts, leaving room for a cuttle fish (squid) to mosey up and survey the aftermath of the once eight legged shellless mollusk. We decompress, we surface, and exits of regulators from mouths leads to immediate fights for words. "Can you believe? Did you see? That's incre...." People just aren't meant to see such spectacular sights as this.

Two days later we returned to the shark infestation of False Bay, where in three weeks three people had been attacked by the Great White. 6:45 am brought us to the docks, where 5 wet-suit clad passengers, 1 dry-suit clad passenger, and 2 plain-clothes passengers in fleece and down coats jumped onto the rubber ducky boat for the long haul through wind gusts and two meter swells launching splashes of 14 degree celcius water over the length of the boat. "Don't you wish you'd worn a wet suit?" Looky here, miss "my camera case cost more than your whole trip..."

Questioning our sanity with feet strapped into the boat floor and hands being torn from the rope handles each time we slammed into a new swell, we nevertheless manage to shiver enough to stay away from hypothermia. And we arrived at Seal Island just in time to spot the few package tourists in big steel boats drinking coffee. We drifted, watching and waiting. And every once in a while, a splash splish splash would break the surface - a technical "breach" - as a seal pup found the end of his days much earlier than he may have expected in the jaws of a great white shark. We watched a flipper or two pop out in the distance, and with down feathers matted completely against my skin wondered if such a miserable experience would really be rewarded only by a few splashes in the distance that might as well have been two-year old pete thrashing around in a baby pool somewhere.

We were all wondering if our early morning escapade would fizzle in such a manner, I think. And as motivation waned, so did movement. We settled the engines, and flopped down to relax. No sooner had I sat on the edge of the ducky, inches from the water, than a great white shark breached directly behind me. Jenny's view looking back at me, was a 3.5 meter shark above my head. I jumped in horror, as did we all, thinking that at such proximity it must have been after my hand - me. As I lurched with the speed of a thousand cheetahs the center rail, though, I spun quickly enough to see a white and grey tail sloshing back into the water and a seal pup bouncing, terrified, at the bow of our raft. The duo disappears breifly, and reemerges some twenty feet off. A dorsal fin rises. A tail slaps water left and right. A seal fights for the rest of its life. They disappear again, until the momentary lapse of silence is broken with a huge breach, featuring pink white gums and rows of terrifying triangles of predatory teeth in a gaping mouth aching for its daily feast. With that, adrenaline floods our beings, our minds fight the unreal reality with sobering arguments of disbelief, and the package tour operators openly display their annoyance that $150-a-pop clients are seeing the reality that anyone with a boat can cruise out to the island and witness the spectacle from man even better vantage than their money can afford. Quite deliberately, they cut off our view. We smile obnoxious smiles of victory. Those few seconds will leave indellible memories on each of our futures. Another harrowing visit into the unbelievable natural world.

We threw our clothes in a laundromat and rode in underwear on our scooter back to the dive shop for coffee and conversation. Hours later, still in our underwear, we cruised back on the scooter, picked up the clothing, and set out for what would become a week-long 800 km oddysey on our 125cc friend. We saw those whales. We drank our share of wine in vineyards. We rolled through mountain passes to luxury hot springs and back through harrowing highway traffic on which cars refuse to acknowledge a scooter as legitimate traffic - or its passengers as living beings, apparently.

All these tales could have been in that last blog - but instead I chose the analytical. The change as I saw Africa morph slowly from hundreds of Burundians around our tent to millions of South African Boers and Brits living, in their own words "the colonial life." So it's not, you see, that I'm apathetic right now or always or even increasingly. It's not that I'm antagonistic in all that I do, or that I've hit a spiral toward the deep end beckoning either "go home" (I will, soon enough), or "you need an ostrich pie and a castle lager." It's just that on that particular day, that's what I saw. And each of the hidden moments in that blog (to you perhaps an insignificant prepositional clause, to me a concealed reference to a conversation in Kigali) bears its own joy and satisfaction at travel, learning, growth, and all the other words that my own blog may have turned to cliche by now.

So for now, l apologiize for inadvertent negativities. They are not the whole truth - but only the truth that occasionally spills forth from my naturally pessimistic mind, in this unedited forum. For now, also, editing is put on hold indefinitely. For now I have to go pet the puppy Justin just brought back to the house where we're staying. For now I have to keep my leg elevated with this damned ice back that seems necessary despite my not having even stupid injured it. And for now I have to soak up my last moments of Africa - for even though South Africa is most decidedly NOT Africa, it IS Africa all the same. The next time you hear from me, I should be easing in to culture number 847 on a continent far away.

Everywhere at all

What's the first thing that comes to your mind? What's the first bit of mind-blowing stimulus, the first pill to get you moving toward the obvious overdose? What's the first infatuation? The first bent moment? The first speck of dust on that spongy surface? What are your assumptions? Your impressions?

Where the hell am I?

Cape Town. Eight zillion miles away from a Turkish rug salesman, eight zillion miles away from felafels and, thankfully, baths. We're here, docked in the station of awkward contrast. A journey fulfilled, but only begun as well in this constant never-ending cycle leading never to an end but only to a beginning in the most harrowing cliche of all. For cliches load up with more meaning when you pluck them from your every day rather than from somebody's single dancing line imbedded on brown parchment. Dance like no one's watching, right? Maybe I would if someone would take this damn song off of repeat. Nope, not a metaphor - a deliberate message to the semi-drag queen african running the seventies shop across the hall.

South Africa, where westernization means not westernization but rather richenization. Good roads. Nice restaurants. Rules to keep unnecessary luxuries like privacy and clean sidewalks as steadfast pillars of everyday life. South Africa, where black people are conveniently locked away in "townships" - whose steel roofed shacks, narrow alleyways, clothesline-strewn horizons, and kid-flooded grounds resemble quite nicely the rest of Africa save the pot-hole-less roads leading to their doorsteps. Where white people continue the "colonial lifestyle" as comics on stage flaunt the blatant racial disparities in the humor of metaphorical self-flagellation. "I mean, come on, while we watch this our maid is watching our kids, the gardner is digging up the soil..." nothing has changed. But then, only 12 years have passed since this Apartheid took the center stage that "our" apartheid dominated some 40 years back. The parallels..blah blah.

But Peggy's fascinations in white privilege as a dominance of the majority obviously has it all wrong. Here, the whites living in their whitewashed walls whose price tags would indicate preferance but which instead proclaim an aura of the indistinct, the bland, the most godawful boring as KFC flags whisper through the wind of this anti-entropic monotonous existence - these whites dominate the economy as it exists. To see an african on a multi-speed bike disturbingly disturbs in its flaunted irregularity. A white gas station attendant takes us by surprise, as does a pale-skinned begger, for so distinctly have the racial roles been imbedded in our minds in the few short weeks we've been inside of this massive country's borders. I cringe at the thought of my own return to complacent living - to being led instead of leading - as I roll through a township on the outskirts of Hermanus (the center of which is occupied by bland buildings, a beautiful sea front, and white people doing what white people do - marveling at the world that they have time to marvel at. Ignoring the toils in the outskirts). I see the seas of black african faces walking the sidewalks while a rain of white faces behind steering wheels plows through in its hurry to get wherever it thinks is the next important stop. And I don't know what I think.

In Livingstone, Zambia, the native Kenyan turned only-black-resident-in-northern-michigan had returned to see how to help. "Something needs to change. All this effort of 50 or more years of aid work, and nothing's been accomplished. We're all trying to hide from the truth." Repeated revelations that change hasn't come flow from all the quandrants of our one mind, and exasperated denial seems the easiest path. Easier, that is, than recognizing reality in pluralistic truth, in agonizing realities our minds don't believe in. In drastic action as simple action. There is no spoon.

I write, but find words difficult that would normally flow easily from fingertip to bland black keyboard to speckled abstract beautiful screen. Ideas from nothing don't flow today as many days, because of this insufferable gap in literature. A month? More? Of silence, there has been too much and not enough all the same. For I reveled in a month of somewhat idle existence, where I let myself live less deliberately; where without words I felt little push to achieve anything too extraordinary. I settled in for a nice relaxing stroll through regions of the planet where, I forget sometimes, most Americans couldn't even point out on a map. I gave in gleefully, and whale watching overtook township mingling. I slowly merged back into my color and my role, beginning with a first class cabin chugging down lake Tanganyika while the third class clambered up and down the rope ladders outside at every "port." I can't say I'm proud of the shift, but I'm not ashamed either. And nobody around here seems to notice. Or care.

But these damned three-week travelers do love to flaunt/revel in their oblivion. "We came overland from Istanbul?" Whoa. Holy crap. I can't imagine. "So you saw victoria falls, then?" I will punch the next person who asks if I visited the tourist-infested overrun town on the Zambian-Zimbabwean border where no one cares to acknowledge that the onslaught of fast water is, well, a wee bit exaggerated in its spectacularity. Instead, the city seems intent to paint over the obvious with a sidelong admission you'll miss if you're not looking carefully.

"You went to the falls this morning? Great! Now you can kayak, bungee jump, skydive, raft, riverboard, fish, abseil..." And the coverup begins. An entire community based around a natural wonder whose easy access has rendered all that much less wonderful has re-written itself around adventure. Use the natural wonder ploy, then suck the money. And all the three-weekers in Cape Town are in. They've been marketed to successfully. They're on their way. Clean the kayaks. Get ready.

That's just part of it, though. At this point we don't want to tell the newcomers about where we've been any less than they want to hear about it. They wouldn't understand. They can't. And we don't know where they come from either. Why they would never want to let a breath get in the way of their next uber-important sentence or plan.

But what's worse - an all-american two week jaunt through Europe, or a five month marathon through Africa, where Zambia alone is larger than France, England, and Ireland combined? But without it, of course, I'd probably still have no idea what a Boer is. And I surely wouldn't know just how godawful Ugali and Sheema are. Or that they're the same thing.

Trying to remember what the hell the question was in the first place. Cape Town, sure. But where the hell am I?

Whoa

Turns out, I'm in South Africa now - stunned by the drastic changes, the people, the pleathora of culture that's not nonchalant on a rural farm somewhere, but rather posted on bulletin boards and posters all over towns and cities. But mostly, stunned by the lights. The lights that burst the ground to the sky, and turn the latter black, the moment you cross the border from Zimbabwe. The very second. What exactly are we afraid of in this night, after all, that we must blast it to an oblivion at the hands of obnoxious artificial light? Are we fighting off the inevitable wrecking crew by cramming twice as many hours into the sun's day? Why?

Anyhow, my hands are frozen as the weather has changed drastically, and my pocket can't afford this superhighway business right now.

Sorry for the delay, but we'll catch up later. And in the meantime, I'll be in Bergville, or rather near Bergville in the drakensburg range alonside Lesotho.

Peace and love.