Bill Murray's Blog, page 111

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.

4 Zambia

Sure, the getting here was miserable. The long haul was more than thirteen thousand kilometers – leave shore over Charleston, South Carolina and don’t see land again until Cape Town. As if the continents were mountain peaks, you slid down the valley called the Atlantic on the flight map. That got us to Cape Town where it never dawned. The gray of winter just brightened up.

Nine more hours of airports, and these were the difficult ones, desynchronisis raging, hours 18 to 26 or so straight in a public place. Now, finally, Lusaka. Here we are.

We hunt around the Lusaka airport and somehow find a woman who’s going the same place we are. She’s named Beatrice, from the copper belt up near Lubumbashi, Congo.  Up there, there are tons of ex-pats in the mining trade, so it’s a place that needs a travel agent, which Beatrice is. Next we find Ryan, the pilot from Durban, and finally Kitty and Maeva who are also lost and that’s all of us, so we load up the Cessna and head for a town on the Zambian border with Malawi called Mfuwe.

As we walk across the tarmac, Maeva, Kitty and Mirja discover that they’re all three Finns, which is incredible. Three out of six random people in a Cessna from Finland, a country of just five million.

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.

3 Tanzania

Tanzania generally comprises the former German East Africa. Germany came late to the Scramble for Africa, as the Europeans’ colonizing land grabs came to be known, and left early, because it was stripped of its colonies after the Great War. Its important colonies were only four – today’s Togo, Cameroon and Namibia along the west coast and today’s Tanzania, in the east.

For a while, German Chancellor Bismarck hung back from colonizing Africa with plaintive realpolitik: “Here is Russian and here is France,” he said, “with Germany in the middle. That is my map of Africa.”

Bismarck was no cosmopolitan, hardly a product of the European salon. A provincial, a scion of Prussia, he declared “The only healthy basis of a large state which differentiates it essentially from a petty state, is state egoism and not romanticism.” And by 1884, as Britain and France were madly laying their African stakes, a sense the Germans called Torschlusspanik, or “door-closing-panic,” took hold in Germany, a fear that it might be left out. Traders felt mercantile pressure from their British and French rivals, and let the government know it.

Maybe it was best to get while the getting was still good. Bismarck reexamined, applied a dose of egoism and with the support and urging of business interests from Hamburg and Bremen, Bismarck instructed the German explorer Dr Gustav Nachtigal to seize Cameroon, Togoland and Southwest Africa, which is now Namibia.

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.

Friday Photo #34, Notre Dame Cathedral, Montreal HDR

The Notre Dame cathedral, downtown Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

There are 87 more photos from Canada in the Canada Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. And see all the Friday Photos.

Have a good weekend!

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.

2 Botswana

The Okavango Delta is known scientifically as an alluvial fan, caused by sediment carried by the river and the smaller streams it forms. Alluvial fans occur in Death Valley in the U.S., the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang, China and even on Saturn’s moon, Titan. The ones on aTitan may be caused by channels of methane.

The Okavango fan, caused by good old fashioned water, deposits two million tons of sand and silt every year and drains summer rain from a catchment area of about 58,000 square miles (150,000 square kilometers), something like the size of Nepal or Tunisia. At the top of the fan is Mohembo, near the Namibian border, with Maun at the bottom, about a hundred fifty miles away.

A labyrinth of channels, islands and plains brings forth papyrus swamps, forests and savannah, habitats for elephant, lion, crocodile, hyena, leopard, zebra, cheetah, porcupine, monkey, serval, baboon, wild dog, hippo, giraffes, buffalo, wildebeest, kudu, warthog, impala, tsessebe and countless more, some 80 species of fish and 400 species of birds, making it one of the world’s great bird sanctuaries.

In a normal year the flood waters course through Mohembo in December or January, pass through the middle of the delta around April, and reach Maun by the end of June. We visit in March, and the waters haven’t yet arrived. Last year they didn’t arrive at all. At the time of our visit the Okavango delta is cracking under a fierce, tenacious drought.

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.

1 Botswana

Gradually, sandy ground gives way to traces of green below. It’s the end of the rainy season but so far this year it hasn’t rained. It’s been seven years since a good, healthy rainy season.

By now the channels should be full and wildlife ought to be thriving and dispersed. Instead it’s dry as any dry season, which is good for game viewing because the game tends to concentrate around what water there is. It’s awful for the game, though, and a disaster for the people of Maun.

Over 5800 square miles the delta’s height varies only about six and a half feet. The ground is at 3100 feet. We cruise at 6500 feet, first due north to Shinde Island Camp. I search in vain for any landmark. Ron must be flying by experience, or the compass, or just the seat of his pants. Endless channels and water spits meander to nowhere.

Search as you will, there are just no roads, no landmarks. But after 40 minutes we angle toward a dirt strip where a lone elephant stands and flaps his ears in mock charge. Doesn’t bother Ron.

A Land Cruiser waits in a clutch of trees. Shorty leaves for Shinde camp.

“How do you find places like this?” I shout over the engine at Ron.

“You just get somebody to show you what to look for,” he shouts back, “then practice.”

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.

Friday Photo #33, Cappadocia

One of the main attractions in the Cappadocia region of Turkey is the sunrise balloon flight, seen here over the countryside surrounding the village of Goreme. Most of the providers congregate their balloons in a field on the edge of town. I heartily recommend Lars Erik More’s Kapadokya Balloons. They do their tours on their own for a much less mass-produced experience.

Not that the only way to enjoy Cappadocia is from a balloon. Just walking around, there are remarkable views wherever you look.

And you can stay in a hotel in a cave. Here’s a room we stayed in. Pretty darned nice. All in all, Cappadocia is far more unique than a Turkish beach vacation, and it’s just a short domestic flight from Istanbul or Ankara.

There are 382 more photos from Turkey, including many more from Cappadocia, in the Turkey Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. See all the Friday Photos.

And have a good weekend!

Africa Is Big

By the end of the month we’ll be back in Africa and in doing some prep, I found this, which is the coolest thing ever. Good to keep this in mind.

Graphic from Kai Krause, here.

Enclave Surrounded by Enclave Surrounded by Enclave Surrounded by Another State

Sorry to see it go. 

Friday Photo #32, Vietnam Hill Tribe Girls

These girls were selling soft drinks alongside a bumpy detour around road construction on the road between Lao Cai and Sa Pa, in the extreme north of Vietnam. It’s an outstanding and colorful trip. You can take the night train up from Hanoi, very romantic, then after a visit to Sa Pa, connect to the Chinese border town of Hekou and continue on into Yunnan Province. All very exotic and worthwhile.

There are 443 more photos in the Vietnam Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. And see all the Friday Photos.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

Hurry, Go to Cuba Like, Right Now!

It was  inevitable, and now comes this frightening news:

“Carnival last week announced plans for weeklong “people-to-people” cruises starting in May on a 710-passenger ship of its new “fathom” brand focused on “social impact,” such as volunteering.”

•••••

Three years ago we joined an “educational tour” to Cuba. There were eight or ten of us and yes, there were some obligatory stops, but supervision was both good hearted and lax. Because of transportation snafus at Miami, which was just chaos, we managed to talk our way onto a plane a day before the rest of the small group, which gave us a free day, and we declined to join a couple of the activities, with no objection from our tour company. This arrangement is not ideal, but it seems to me far better than waiting until all restrictions are lifted and there is a monstrous Carnival cruise ship opposite the Malecon and there are more Americans than Cubans in La Habana Vieja.

Think about it, and if you are so moved, read this article, How to travel to Cuba before it gets mobbed by Americans.

Here is my article about Cuba, March 2012. And check out the photos from our trip to Havana on EarthPhotos.com.