Some Recent Adventures

It’s been too long since I posted to the blog. My apologies to any regular readers! It’s been a busy time with my work, which is a good thing, although the puzzles are still there.

I have had a couple of interesting adventures in the last month, which are worthy of reports. The first was a trip to South Africa to see Kruger National Park. A good friend of mine was leaving Lusaka to take a job in London, and we decided that a trip to Kruger would make a good “farewell tour”. So, we booked a cheap trip through a hostel that I had stayed in a few times in Johannesburg and headed down. In Johannesburg we had an interesting time viewing the Apartheid Museum and also having a gold mine tour. In the Kruger area we stayed in a lovely rustic camp that the hostel ran. A highlight for me was having a buffalo (possibly the one pictured here) grazing around my tent at night. The buffalo even tripped over the tent lines a couple of times! Kruger itself was a little anticlimactic. I would have liked more time to explore, but I realized how easy it would be to do a self-drive tour there. The roads are all in good condition, and there are several campgrounds (fenced in) in the park. Anyone up for a trip in 2009? The scenery was beautiful, including some great views of the Oliphants River (shown here with hippos). The other Kruger pictures here are a yellow billed hornbill and a baby elephant!

The other interesting adventure was a trip the weekend before last to Siavonga. This is a town on Lake Kariba, a large lake formed on the Zambezi River for hydro power. I had never been there before and was excited to see the lake, which is just beautiful. I went with a couple of friends from Lusaka, who were going to see another friend: a volunteer who had just married and moved to Siavonga with a guy in the kapenta business. Kapenta are a small sardine like fish that were imported to the lake 20 years ago or so and have really taken off. They are fished at night, using lights to attract them into big nets. Then the fish are dried on islands on the lake before being shipped off to Lusaka and other towns, where they are one of the cheaper protein sources available. The house where we stayed had a lovely view of a marshy bay on the edge of the lake. We had a relaxing weekend chatting, eating, going for a boat ride and watching rugby (a sport I am learning about and finding I like to watch – surprisingly graceful!). I also had a great time bird watching (see the picture) and listening to the hippos at night.