Bill Murray's Blog, page 110

Africa Vignette Series

At the end of the month we’re heading to the Maasai Mara for the annual wildebeest migration. Between now and then, here is a blizzard of little African vignettes. They are just short little bits, not in any particular order, not particularly edited. Maybe they’ll entice you to visit too one day. Hope you enjoy them. All the photos in this series are from EarthPhotos.com.

11 Botswana

We’re motoring over a dry river and B. slows to bounce over a rut dug into the river bed. He explains it’s an old path dug by the water horse, the hippo (hippos in Greek, horse plus potamos, river).

Around a corner we surprise an elephant who stages a mock charge. B. hastens to reassure that this is not dangerous, but rather just a scare tactic. While elephants have their own personalities, he says, as a group only young males are predictably dangerous. They really might charge.

This guy flares his ears and whirls, stomps, grabs and tosses dust with his trunk, glares a while longer and finally lumbers off around the corner. During the mock charge he keeps his head in the air and his chest out, just like an aggressive human. In a serious charge the elephant pins his ears back and lowers his head and trunk.

Okavango termite mounds rival Burmese pagodas. Same shape and I’d guess sixteen feet high. Is that a giraffe? No, it’s a termite mound. That high.

Geese are always on the move, purposeful, sleek and making a beeline for point B. Marabou storks on the other hand, whose wingspans may approach ten feet appear to lumber into the sky amid a confusion of flapping and whooshing. One night they stalk the camp perimeter.

Stiff, dinner-jacketed birds, the marabou eat anything – fish, plants, another animals’ kill. Then they sleep in the very top of dead trees – above the fray. Any approaching predator, a leopard, say, will shake the tree and wake the stork.

This entire series of vignettes will reside here, in the Africa section. If you enjoy them please have a look at my two travel books, Common Sense and Whiskey and Visiting Chernobyl.

Africa Vignette Series

At the end of the month we’re heading to the Maasai Mara for the annual wildebeest migration. Between now and then, here is a blizzard of little African vignettes. They are just short little bits, not in any particular order, not particularly edited. Maybe they’ll entice you to visit too one day. Hope you enjoy them. All the photos in this series are from EarthPhotos.com.

10 Tanzania

Godfrey’s Land Rover is solid as a rock with two seats, then two more seats, then a bench, then storage behind. Bars extend top to bottom at several strategic locations, for passengers to grab while lurching along bad roads. A panel pops out above the roof and pivots on four legs. That allows you to stand clear of impediments to viewing (unless you’re a basketball player) and gives shade from sun and rain, too.

So we stand up in the pop-top and survey 60 or 80 wildebeests, each looking like an ungainly mix of ox, antelope and horse. Godfrey reckons this herd (which passes through and doesn’t live exclusively in the crater) at about 1.6 million strong, but he says fully a quarter, some 400,000 may die in their annual migration. Looks like they replenish themselves fast, though. There are more moms and kids in this herd than anyone else.

They sound like sheep on testosterone.

One side of the hill asks a question, “Mmmmmm?”

The other side answers, “Mmmmmm.”

Up and down. Tonal. Godfrey suggests they’re introducing themselves by their other name, “Gnuuuu. Gnu. Gnuuuuu.”

There are always zebra around wildebeests. Here they stand, shaking and twitching like neurotics. They get the Day One Most Dispirited-Looking Beast Award. The little ones, and even some of the bigger ones, have an unfledged, unbecoming brown fuzz.

Two ostriches, a male (black) and a female, (brown) cut solitary profiles way out in the field by themselves as the silliest bird in creation comes close by, the crown crane. With a fanned out bright yellow  and red wattle, they’re entirely preposterous.

Suddenly, up from the brush beside the creek, a Coke’s hartebeest bolts right in front of us, dramatically and nakedly all by himself, straight across our path and out onto the plain. These antelopes weigh around 300 pounds but this one bounds light as a gazelle half his weight. Indeed, the Coke’s is one of the fastest antelopes, and an endurance runner. The hartebeest is sort of a white collar wildebeest, presentable and cleaned up, without the straggly mane. A wildebeest with a clean shave.

This entire series of vignettes will reside here, in the Africa section. If you enjoy them please have a look at my two travel books, Common Sense and Whiskey and Visiting Chernobyl.

Africa Vignette Series

At the end of the month we’re heading to the Maasai Mara for the annual wildebeest migration. Between now and then, here is a blizzard of little African vignettes. They are just short little bits, not in any particular order, not particularly edited. Maybe they’ll entice you to visit too one day. Hope you enjoy them. All the photos in this series are from EarthPhotos.com.

9 Madagascar

Zoma means Friday and it’s also the name for the positively teeming Friday market in Madagascar’s capital city, Antananarivo.

It’s strange to prepare for theft, but that’s what they admonish. Fix your bag to minimize what they get if they slash it open. The Bradt Guide to Madagascar: “The Zoma is notorious for thieves. It is safest to bring only a small amount of money in a money belt or neck pouch. Enticingly bulging pockets will be slashed.”

From a hill above Independence Avenue, a sea of white umbrellas washed out ahead in every direction, swallowing up the main square, flowing into busy little eddies beside stairways, up the hills as far as the eyes could see. Up one hill, down the next.

We paused. This was big, sprawling, daunting and dramatic. We clasped hands and dove in. Flowers first, down on the right. Then a jumble of sundries, the multitudes and the advertised danger, rarefied by the dry hot sun.

Someone reached out and tugged at Mirja’s skirt. Beware the “voleurs,” she warned.

Buy whatever you will. Locks and hinges. Grenadine drinks. Bright plastic jugs. Chicago Bulls caps. Greasy food rolls. Major motor parts. Michael Jackson T-shirts. A vast selection of wicker. Bon Bon Anglais Limonad. We bought a “Madagascar” ink-pad stamp that actually printed “Madagascap.”

Must’ve been three or four hundred meters down one side. Too tight to turn, too close to walk two abreast, too tense to relax. Still, smiles from the stalls. Dignity, not desperation. Some smiles, and lots of open looks of wonder.

All the way down and halfway back we didn’t spy anyone from our part of the world, probably for an hour.

Baby clothes. The tiniest shoes you’ve ever seen. Embroidery. Crocheting – napkins and table covers embroidered with lemurs and scenes from traditional life.

The Malagasy are a little smaller than me in general and I was forever bumping my head on the edges of their big white umbrellas, knocking my sunglasses off my head.

Mirja tried on mesh vests.

Down by the train station, the varnished wooden trunk section. Turning back, furniture. Circuit boards. Tiny piles of tacks. Stacks of feed bags.

There is a classic trap: there is a Malagasy 5000 Franc note. Then there is another that says 5000 also in numbers, but instead of reading merely “arivo ariary,” it reads “dimy arivo ariary,” which I believe means five times five thousand and in any event definitely means 25000 Malagasy Francs, even though in numbers it says 5000.

The feed bag guy wanted 1100 (27.5 cents) for a multicolored “Madagascar” bag. Realizing it just as the bill left my hand, I gave him not a proper 5000 but one of the 5000’s that are really 25000. After a lot of consultation with a lot of people, I got the correct 23900 in change.

We walked up each side of the Zoma – past the train station, bureaux travel, the Library of Madagascar, and made it to the top of an adjoining hill unrobbed.

Here at the top of the hill stood the country’s symbols of power: the Central Bank, High Court, Ministry du Promotion de l’Industry. A band was set up to play on a flatbed but never did. There was hubbub, amplified music and lots and lots of people. Up here the kid beggars that you usually tolerate because objectively, their circumstance ain’t like yours, swarmed so that they might have carried us away, so we turned aggressive and swatted ’em back.

By midday, unscathed and self-satisfied, we sat with our backs to the wall like in any good western, at the Hotel Colbert’s terrace bar, already having seen a week’s worth in one morning. Hotel Colbert had a dubious five star rating, apparently not from any organization in particular.

It was a gorgeous day and the city was so picturesque, completely foreign. We ordered Heinekens in the haze. At Hotel Colbert smoking was still as big as it ever was. Yellow Benson and Hedges ashtrays as big as your head took up a quarter of each table, and flaccid, bibulous Frenchmen sat nursing their Three Horses Beers, and hacked and smoked too much.

This entire series of vignettes will reside here, in the Africa section. If you enjoy them please have a look at my two travel books, Common Sense and Whiskey and Visiting Chernobyl.

Africa Vignette Series

At the end of the month we’re heading to the Maasai Mara for the annual wildebeest migration. Between now and then, here is a blizzard of little African vignettes. They are just short little bits, not in any particular order, not particularly edited. Maybe they’ll entice you to visit too one day. Hope you enjoy them. All the photos in this series are from EarthPhotos.com.

8 Zambia

We cross the Luangwa River at a hand ferry in its first night of operation. They’ve been working on it all day.

Two men sit on a wooden platform mounted on pontoons with us and the Land Cruiser aboard. They work wooden handles to slide the barge along a cable that stretches to the other side of the river, and pull us across.

The grass on the other side has grown to waist high. The Land Cruiser parts it like a ship, until we come around a corner and pull up short to admire a dramatic full moon rise. Then John, the guy in charge of the Land Cruiser’s spotlight, swings into action.

An undefined scatter of ground animals scurry around the ground, rodents that would be alarmingly big back home. Turn the spotlight up and dozens of reflected eyes stare back from a stand of impala, who must feel vulnerable, exposed from cover of darkness.

Genets and civets, which are related to one another and to mongooses, the civet more elongated, the genet like a cat with fox ears. The bush baby, or ‘night monkey’, is a tiny primate whose eyes, when caught in the light, glow like the red end of a smoking cigar.

A beehive clings to the side of a baobab. Here is a porcupine.

We’ve stayed out so long it’s cold coming back. These are extensive drives. They might run from 6:00 to 11:30 in the morning and well after dark in the evening. Long past sunset we come upon a sign that reads, “Main Gate, 15K.”

Abraham offers around blankets.

This entire series of vignettes will reside here, in the Africa section. If you enjoy them please have a look at my two travel books, Common Sense and Whiskey and Visiting Chernobyl.

Mt. Cotopaxi Rumbles

 

This photo shows Mt. Cotopaxi’s proximity to Quito, Ecuador’s capital. Those houses are part of the sprawl around Quito, and the photo was taken from downtown (in March 2007). Cotopaxi last erupted in the 1940’s.

Africa Vignette Series

At the end of the month we’re heading to the Maasai Mara for the annual wildebeest migration. Between now and then, here is a blizzard of little African vignettes. They are just short little bits, not in any particular order, not particularly edited. Maybe they’ll entice you to visit too one day. Hope you enjoy them. All the photos in this series are from EarthPhotos.com.

7 Namibia

Late in the afternoon our pilot, a very young girl with blond hair and blazing blue eyes, took three of us up in a Cessna for a trip out over the dunes. She explained that at the coast (55 kilometers away), sometimes they run safaris on the beach, so if we saw any cars we had to let her know immediately!

That was curious. Why?

They could spoil our fun, she grinned. We were required to fly at 3000 feet, but out there she said she would drop us illegally to 500.

Where in the world can you flaunt rules like this if not on the desolate coast of bloody Namibia!? And so we did.

We retraced the morning’s route from the airstrip across the road from our lodge, into the park and down along the tar road.

They’ve numbered the dunes, 1 to 70 or 80, and we did a pinwheel around Dune 45, somehow an icon. Bernard had stopped for us to see it, too, driving us in the morning, and indeed, folks had been already there and climbing it.

Before sundown, though, dune 45, and all of the dunes, stood deserted. Everyone had to be out of the park at night.

We did a long turn around “Big Daddy,” which they repute to be the world’s tallest sand dune, and in the same sweep took in the dead vlei and Sossusvlei, and the dune we’d climbed in the morning. They call that one “Big Mama.”

The road ends here and beyond, nothing but dunes, horizon to horizon, and no place for engine trouble.

This entire series of vignettes will reside here, in the Africa section. If you enjoy them please have a look at my two travel books, Common Sense and Whiskey and Visiting Chernobyl.

Thundering into Paro…

… in the land of the Thunder Dragon. Enjoy this video of landing at Bhutan’s international airport.

Africa Vignette Series

At the end of the month we’re heading to the Maasai Mara for the annual wildebeest migration. Between now and then, here is a blizzard of little African vignettes. They are just short little bits, not in any particular order, not particularly edited. Maybe they’ll entice you to visit too one day. Hope you enjoy them. All the photos in this series are from EarthPhotos.com.

6 Tanzania

The Ngorongoro Crater is a result of faulting, the remnants of a volcano probably larger than Africa’s tallest peak, Kilimanjaro, created a couple or a few million years ago. At some point long ago, further rifting caused the fast withdrawal of lava from beneath the volcano, resulting in its collapse.

Today it’s the largest unbroken and unflooded volcanic caldera in the world; it is huge, with an area of 92 square miles (259 square kilometers). It’s 610 meters (2001 feet) from rim to floor and a massive 192 miles (310 kilometers) in circumference. A drive around the rim is the distance from Boston to New York. Imagine.

Just as the sun sets and colors instantly fade, the road crawls around the edge of the escarpment, and Lake Manyara spreads before us. Then, over the north side of the hill, we bear down in a dive for the crater rim.

All of the lodges sit along the rim – none on the floor. There are five: the one where we’ll stay and three others, which host visitors from various tour operators, and one private lodge for Abercrombie and Kent safaris. I’ll take the opportunity to perpetuate a good story, even though I can’t say for sure if it’s true:

When Geoffrey Kent and his parents founded their tour company in Kenya in 1962 they knew Kent Tours lacked that certain magic. But Abercrombie, now, there’s a name that speaks of aristocracy, so Mr. Kent’s tour company became Abercrombie and Kent. They say there never was an Abercrombie.

This entire series of vignettes will reside here, in the Africa section. If you enjoy them please have a look at my two travel books, Common Sense and Whiskey and Visiting Chernobyl.

Africa Vignette Series

At the end of the month we’re heading to the Maasai Mara for the annual wildebeest migration. Between now and then, here is a blizzard of little African vignettes. They are just short little bits, not in any particular order, not particularly edited. Maybe they’ll entice you to visit too one day. Hope you enjoy them. All the photos in this series are from EarthPhotos.com.

19 Malawi

When we met, our driver told us, “I am Everlasting.” We sort of looked away, and then we realized that was his name.

Everlasting was a slow, deliberate speaker, easy enough to understand once you got acclimated. His “S’s” kind of trailed off.

The Lilongwe River lolled by the market, near the old city administration building “from when Lilongwe was a small town.” The new city hall, beacon of progress, had a “Ready Print” shop sign in a window on the second floor.

Everlasting showed us the flame tree, its red flower. What he called a tube tree at the central outdoor market, where a smiling little boy saw my camera and excitedly grabbed his friend’s arm.

The mosque.

A few kilometers out of town, people along the roadside carried everything you could imagine. A stack of firewood, one guy with a dozen bright crimson pin wheels twirling in each hand.

“These people are coming back from the market. They have been selling.”

They’re Chewa, originally from Congo via Zambia, and among the longest settled Malawian tribes. Portuguese contact with the Chewa came as early as 1608, with evidence of the first Chewa kingdom just before the 1492 voyage of Columbus.

Everlasting began a lecture on goats: They should be tied so as not to eat the maize. Sometimes you cannot see where the goat is tied because the rope is so long. But sometimes the rope is gone away.

If you see a forest, Everlasting said, it is probably a cemetery. Village people cannot use cemetery land for growing, so, sensibly, they choose stands of forest for their burial grounds.

On a flagpole the national flag hung limp.

“The wind is not blowing so it is closed,” Everlasting explained. Across the flag a red sun rose from the top of three bands, and Everlasting said that represents fire.

“The national team when they have done well we call them the Flames. When they have not, well, then it is silent.”

When Everlasting got particularly involved in his stories, he’d punctuate his remarks with the car horn. Talkin’ and tappin’ and tootin’.

This entire series of vignettes will reside here, in the Africa section. If you enjoy them please have a look at my two travel books, Common Sense and Whiskey and Visiting Chernobyl.

Africa Vignette Series

At the end of the month we’re heading to the Maasai Mara for the annual wildebeest migration. Between now and then, here is a blizzard of little African vignettes. They are just short little bits, not in any particular order, not particularly edited. Maybe they’ll entice you to visit too one day. Hope you enjoy them. All the photos in this series are from EarthPhotos.com.

5 Madagascar

The road had been curvy down to Ambatolampy, about halfway to Antsirabe. Zebu carts far outnumbered cars and refreshingly, there were almost no motorbikes or mopeds. At Ambatolampy, Manou knew of an American with a Malagasy wife who ran a horse stable. Did we want to stop?

So just on the other side of town we turned up a dirt track at a sign, “Manja Ranch 1 km.” and spoke English with the man of the house. He’d just awakened (it wasn’t yet 9:00), didn’t offer his name, and drank tea without offering us any. Just another anti-establishmentarian who couldn’t or didn’t want to do it the American way – from St. Louis, posted here as an engineer eight years ago.

Quit, married locally, stayed. Goatee, a little wild-eyed intensity, and a 70’s-mod orange and blue striped shirt. He’d started the horse farm, with a half dozen or so horses and more servants, and he was trying to entice groups from Tana down into the hills.

First, he needed to get into the guidebooks, of which there were then exactly two: Hilary Bradt’s Guide to Madagascar (“I don’t know why we’re not in there.” He felt it personally. “We’ve written her. People have written her for us. But you know, she’s getting lazy. She only comes to Madagascar three weeks a year anymore.”) and the Lonely Planet guide, in which he’d got a mention (“They stole a lot of stuff from Hilary.”).

He groused that the government counted every arrival as a tourist arrival and thus while there were 52,000 “tourists” last year, really there were only about 30 or 35,000. The government kept ticket prices too high, there was no reason this country should be as poor as it was.

He blamed Ratsiraka (the former ruler) but also his predecessors for taking too long to jump start tourism. This would be the year that decided whether they would stay or sell and go. He muttered quite a bit.

This entire series of vignettes will reside here, in the Africa section. If you enjoy them please have a look at my two travel books, Common Sense and Whiskey and Visiting Chernobyl.