Brrrrrrr!

We now know why winter is low season for safaris in this part of Africa. It turns out that it can get very cold in Africa and driving around in an open air vehice across the plains at 7:00 in the morning or 7:00 at night can be down right painful.

At the end of May, Thom's mother (Kathie) and her friend (Vickie) visited from upstate New York (see photo above). Notice how bright and sunny and warm it looks.

The day after they arrived, we took them to Madikwe Game Park for a real African safari experience and very nearly got frost bite. Even the visitors from New York (where it is winter in the middle of May as well) were uncomfortably cold as you can see from the photo below.

We did manage to see some really good game on the trip. We saw elephants out wandering around, we saw a lot of rhinos (groups of 6 or more), and we even saw some wild dogs. The park had exchanged 3 dogs to help with the breeding pool since the pack is so small. The dogs were being kept in an enclosure until they could be released to join the Madikwe pack and we were able to get a really good look at them (photo below).
But our most remarkable experience on this safari was seeing a leopard very close and personal. On our first game drive Sunday evening, just after sundown there was a report that a leopard had been "spotted" close to the fence. And we found the leopard hanging out by the fence pacing up and down alongside the road that runs next to the fence. We parked and the leopard continued pacing about, at times only a couple meters away from where we were in the open truck. We spent about 15-20 minutes in very close proximity to the leopard before we had to give our spot to another group (in Madikwe only 3 vehicles are allowed to be close to an animal at any one time).

The explanation of the cat's behavior (other than just being a cat) is that it jumps the fence to hunt cattle on the Botswana side and then after it's nice steak dinner jumps back across the fence where the farmers can't shoot it. Pretty clever for a cat, don't you think?

A few other highlights:

Tau Lodge at sunrise

Vickie and Kathie learn about rhino poo

The Great Train Adventure

We now depart from our regular posts to talk about something truly fabulous. Friday, June 1 we left Gaborone on the 7:00 am flight to Johannesburg, we then transferred to the domestic airport and caught a flight to Cape Town where we were met by a driver with our names on a sign (Debra loves getting met with her name on a sign!). Our driver took us to the Victoria and Albert Hotel on the waterfront.


We had a lovely afternoon walking around the waterfront, shopping and snacking. Our one disappointment was trying to get a sandwich from Subway. Looked just like a Subway sandwich shop but the sandwiches just weren't right. It was sad. The rest of our time in Cape Town was great and we plan to go back in the not so distant future to explore the city more fully. This trip we didn't have much time because Saturday just after breakfast we were taken to the train station. As soon as the car stopped we were met by Rovos Rail staff who took our baggage and checked us in and gave us drinks and thus, began a most fabulous adventure.

We waited for about an hour in a very comfortable lounge waiting for the rest of the passengers to assemble. It turns out there were 27 passengers total on the train which meant no lines, no crowds, lots of special attention, etc. We were escorted to the train and shown to our suite (The Tsesebe -- named after some sort of a deer like animal (dla)).

Shortly after boarding, the train pulled out of the Cape Town station and we were on our way. The next 48 hours were truly fantastic. The Rovos Rail is an unquestionable first class experience. (We must take a minute to correct a misunderstanding. Before the trip, we thought Rovos Rail and the Blue Train were one and the same. It turns out that is not the case. The Blue Train is run by the government. Rovos Rail is privately operated). So Rovos Rail is described as the "most luxurious train in the world". We haven't taken enough trains to personally endorse this description but we can say we had an incredible experience. The food was really good and served quite interestingly (4 and 5 course meals for lunch and dinner). The service was unbelievable. Every time we left our room, the hostess came in and straightened up everything. In the lounge car and observation car the staff made sure we had constant snacks and beverages. The train experience itself was an amazing blend of history and modern comforts. All the train cars are really, really old and fully restored and the wood paneling and detailing is very nice. You kind of get the feeling that you might be traveling through Africa in the 1930s.

Our journey took us from Cape Town to Pretoria. We had an hour stop in Majtsfontein Saturday evening. Supposedly it's a preserved Victorian Village. They have a creepy museum that even goes down into a basement area that used to be a jail. Frankly "the village" just wasn't very interesting. Maybe in daylight it's nicer.

Sunday we stopped in Kimberley for an excursion. Kimberley has an old diamond mine known as "The Big Hole". It's quite interesting from an historical perspective. Kimberley is where diamond mining began in southern Africa in the late 1800s. Also, this is where DeBeers came to be. According to our tour guide, it is the largest man-made mine (200 some meters deep -- all by shovels and some dynamite). Thom was hugely disppointed. He thought it was supposed to be the biggest hole. And it's clearly not that at all. The total production from the Big Hole was about 14.5 million carats. Annual production from Jwaneng (previously described in this blog) is 12 million carats. All mining activity is finished in the area but DeBeers still has offices in the town. The mine is now purely a tourist attraction.

So back on the train as we left Kimberley, we came across scads and scads of flamingos hanging out in a little lake that is actually filled from water from the Big Hole. It was a spectacular sight -- very pink.

Monday morning was another highlight of the trip. We stopped a little ways outside of Pretoria and switched engines. The ordinary electric engines pulled away, and we hooked up to a very cool steam locomotive.

And so we finished the rest of our journey being pulled by the steam engine. A perfect ending to a most fantastic experience. For those of you with lots of extra time, more photos of this experience can be viewed by clicking here

The Commute

We have an extraordinarily easy commute to work. Most days we walk to work like this...

(leaving our gate)

(down the sidewalk in front of our house)

(cross the empty lot next to the child care center)

(and then cross the street and we're at work)

One day this showed up smack in the middle of our commute...

(It's a driving school!)

Fortunately for us, it's not a very successful business and has not slowed our commute at all.

Debswana -Part 1, The Diamond mine

About a month after Thom moved to Botswana he had the opportunity to go to the Jwaneng diamond mine. The Diamond mine is the largest diamond mine in the world by production. It is truly awesome. Whe we first arrived at the mine we were given a briefing from the mine manager (because Thom was taking the tour with the American Deputy Chief of Mission, essentially the vice-embassador, there was some VIP treatment going on). During the course of the manager's talk he pointed out that it was unfortunate that we were there on Tuesday because Wednesday was free sample day. Maybe next time....

Rather than try to narrate the trip we thought it would be easier to post some pictures and then describe the pictures. A lot of these pictures don't really need much description as there main goal is to emphasize how big everything is. So here we go....

These first two shots are included to try to give a scope to the size of the mine. At the top of the mine it is roughly 2.5 km by 1.5 km across. The other thing that can kind of be seen in the pictures is the 2 different kinds of soil/rock The diamonds are located in the kimberlite which is the very gray rock.

This next shot is of Thom taken in the dispatcher's control room. The control room is positioned on a tower right on the edge of the mine and the dispatcher can see everything in the pit. The dispatcher is in constant communication with all of the vehicles in the pit and has a computer that is displaying all of the metrics on each vehicle including weight, speed, location, blah, blah, blah.

The next picture is taken from outside the dispatcher's office on the tower. It's another great shot of the mine and specifically you should notice all of the vehicles that are grouped together on the left hand side. That was the active part of the mine for the day. A truck is being filled up about once every minute.

We started heading over to the active part of the mine and passed a fully loaded truck (below). Notice above the front wheel there is a LED display. That display shows how many Metric Tonnes of rock are in the truck. Another interesting bit of trivia is that everytime a truck heads up the hill it has on average 300 carrats of diamonds in it.

In the picture below, the trucks are getting loaded by this massive "steam" shovel. This is an awesome sight and incredibly loud. Every scoop of rock that the shovel dropped into the truck was about 45 tonnes. It was kind of scary just standing that close. The other cool thing to note is that the shovel is electric.

The next picture is included to show the scale of the operation and the size of the trucks. The wheels of the truck are about 9 feet in diameter. and the trucks are about 25 feet high. In the center of the picture you can see the full size bus we were riding around in.

Below is the primary rock crusher. It's job is to crush all stone so that there is no stone more than15 cm in diameter. It's pretty darn effective. We've also included a shot of a truck dumping rocks into the crusher and the mess it makes.

After the rocks are crushed they are loaded onto this conveyer system and then taken up the hill for the rest of the processing. We weren't allowed to see that mostly for security reasons.

So that's pretty much the adventure of the world's biggest producing diamond mine. Hopefully in a couple of weeks I will have a few more photos to share of the Kimberly mine in South Africa which is the largest man made whole in the ground.

Our Love Hate Relationship

Some days are just hard and we call those the "I-Hate-Botswana" days. For example, at the end of February, Debra's laptop stopped working and a day later, Thom's computer stopped working. Debra's laptop was still under warranty and had to be sent back to the US as the country of purchase. We can only hope we will see it again.

Thom's computer though needed to be replaced. Purchasing a new Dell was reasonably painless. But transferring the data from the old computer to the new computer turned out to be one of our worst I-Hate-Botswana days. We went to a couple of electronics and computer supply stores but none of them had the external hard drive case that Thom needed. One of his IT staff gave him a lead on a store out close to the airport so at lunch one day we headed out to find it.

We found what we thought to be the store but it was basically an internet cafe with a few computer hardware pieces on display in the window. Thom called his contact who assured him that was the correct store. We found the part that Thom needed in one of the window cases and finally asked a woman if she worked there. She explained she was waiting for us to address her since she wasn't sure if we were shopping or waiting for someone else (?).

The rest of the encounter went something like this...
Thom said he wanted to buy an external hard drive case and she said, "We don't have those." Thom said, "What about that one in the window?"
The strange sales clerk said, "Oh you just want the box not an external hard drive?"
Thom said, "Yes, that's why I said hard drive 'case'."

The strange sales clerk managed to find the key to the window case (eventually) and had Thom double/triple confirm that was what he wanted and acknowledge that it was in fact just a "box". Thom also asked to purchase a UPS which she was able to add to our order. Then the difficulties really began.

The hard drive case wouldn't scan. There was no price listed in the window case or on any of the boxes in the window case. The strange sales clerk hunted around for several minutes leaving the store at one time, going to the store next door, going to the back of the shop, calling someone on the phone, but all to no avail. She finally explained that the item was not included on the price list and the manager had instructed her not to sell it until he could confirm the price. She ended by saying, "Perhaps you'll pop back in tomorrow to buy it?"

Thom was already out the door grumbling, "I hate Botswana." Which left Debra to say, "Probably not," to the strange sales clerk as she hurried to catch up with Thom.

But then there are other days that elicit the reaction, "I love this place!". One of our recent I-Love-This-Place days, was right after Easter. Both of us had been sick back and forth for several weeks but then Debra developed a cough that was keeping everybody awake at night and nyquil just wasn't helping at all. We mentioned at lunch with friends one day that what we really needed was cough syrup with codeine in it. And one of our sources of insider information told us to just go to the pharmacy. Usually that sort of stuff can be sold without a prescription around here.

So after a coughing incident at work that made everyone think Debra had developed TB after working in the program for a couple of days, we headed off to the Skylab Pharmacy next to our Braai Place (more about that in a future blog).
We went to the back of the store and Debra told the nice helpful pharmacist, "I need something for this terrible cough." And the phamacist asked, "is it a dry cough?" and then starts laying out stuff on the counter. And then he instructed, "take this pill" and Debra did and then he said "drink 2 caps of this" and she did and then he told her "chew this" and she did (right there at the counter in the pharmacy). We ended up with a week supply of cipro, a bottle of cough syrup with codeine, and too many chewable vitamin C tablets and a promise that Debra would start filling better in 4 hours. It actually took about 24 hours but Debra did finally stop coughing. Oh, and our total bill at the pharmacy -- about $12!! We love this place!

A Walk in the Park

First we must apologize because there are no pictures to accompany this post. Yesterday just didn't seem like the sort of day that would need a camera. But the story is too fabulous not to share.

May 1 is a holiday in Botswana -- Labor Day. Because we had the day off, we booked a walking tour at Mokolodi (the game park 15 minutes outside of town, see previous posts for more). We arrrived at 10:00 am for our tour (as booked several days before) and were told that we couldn't have a booking at 10:00 because the walks were done at 7:30 and 4:00. We sorted that out and finally set off with our guide to experience Mokolodi on foot.

Our guide explained that most likely we would not see many animals because they come out in the early morning and late afternoon but we didn't mind about that. We really just wanted to be out in the fabulous fall weather walking around seeing the park from a different perspective. The guide seemed to want to make up for the lack of animals by pointing out all the different plants and quizzing us relentlessly about them but otherwise it was a lovely walk.

We started out by the Animal Sanctuary which neither of us had paid attention to before. They keep injured animals there and then release them back into the park when they are well again. Some of the animals are never well enough to leave the sanctuary. There is a pair of grey fluffy vultures there that are absolutely hilarious. They can't fly so they'll never leave the sanctuary. One of the them followed us around as we walked the perimeter of the fence. It was just weird. We'll get a picture of him the next time we're out there.

Then we walked along examining animal foot prints and poo and saw a couple of wart hogs. We stopped to drink some cokes that the guide had brought along and then we rounded a corner and came up on a giraffe. Yep it was quite a moment. He was standing there having a snack off the top of a tree and we just stood there about 15 meters away. It was such a totally different perspective and feeling just walking up on a giraffe without any fences or cars or any barriers. It was so, for lack of a better word, natural. We could have stayed there all day checking him out but our guide started getting bored so we headed off.

As we walked back to the park entrance we came up on the one thing that Thom wanted to see. That's right, ostriches. Thom had recently seen the "Dirty Jobs" episode about the ostrich farm and was ready to wrangle ostriches. Well it turns out that undomesticated ostriches aren't really into being wrangled. From ground level they are really big (and goofy).

So that was it. We headed home and the rest of the day was just as fabulous.

Victoria Falls - Part2: WOW

In our last episode about Victoria Falls we talked about getting to Livingstone, Zambia. Today we talk about how cool it was once we got there.

The lodge where Keith and Thom were meeting up with Carmen and Jason at was called the Tongabezi. It was quite spectacular to say the least. The accomodations were awesome and the service was great. Keith and Thom ended up arriving at about 2:00 that afternoon and checked in. They were then shown to there cottage called the treehouse. It's called that because it is built around a tree and absorbs the tree into the architecture. It was really amazing. The next couple of pictures show some interesting pictures of the cabin.

This picture captures how the tree is key to the architecture. It holds up the roof and also the bed netting. The back of the cabin is the rock of the river bank and the front is open, overlooking the river.

The bath, shower and sinks were located on the level below the bed and the main deck. The tub is made out of molded concrete. As you can see this whole area is also open facing the river.

This picture was taken at about 6:30 in the evening. Keith and Thom were still waiting on Carmen and Jason to arrive (They were on African time). This is from the deck in front of the sleeping area.

So Carmen and Jason finally arrived and much food and wine was shared through the evening catching up on what everybody had been doing lately. About 10:00 we went to bed because we had a big day ahead of us.

So we woke up the next morning and had a great breakfast (all the food here was amazing). Carmen, Jason, and Keith ran out to see a small game park located close by in the morning. At about 11:00 we all piled in the truck and headed for Livingstone Island. To get there we actually had to go to the Royal Livingstones and then take a boat out to the island. The thing that makes this island so cool is that it's located right in the center of the falls. As you can see from the next couple of pictures we were right at the edge of the falls. It still blows my mind to think about walking through the water getting to the different places just a couple of meters from the edge. There were no safety rails or ropes. You would just never experience anything like this in the U.S.

This monument was laid in 2005 to commemorate the 150 year anniversary of Livingstone discovering the falls. Not that he actually discovered it but he gave the falls some great PR. The falls in the background are the Zambia side of the falls. Because it was high season the was a lot of water on this sise.

This is on the other side of the island. We walked along the edge of the falls the entire way. There were several times when we had to walk through rushing water just a few feet from the edge of the falls. The Zimbabwe side of the falls is in the background of this picture. There was a lot more mist on this side which made it difficult to get many more pictures. During low season there is a pool you can swim in just behind where we are standing that comes right up to the edge of the falls.

So after our trip to Livingstone Island we decided to go and see the falls from the viewing side. They actually charged to go into the park. Having grown up near Niagara Falls Thom found this is a bit weird, but what the heck. We actually went over to the Sun and asked if we could enter their. The guard gave us a fake room number and told us to give him $20 when we came back. It was about half the cost so we said OK if we had gone to the correct place to get in. So we got into the park.

This is from the second viewing area. The falls go on for probably another 3/4 of a mile beyond this. This is the last viewing area where we were dry.

As we were heading down to the viewing area we went by a concession renting rain coats for about a dollar (Carmen and Jason had brought there own). Thom being the cheap bastard that he is said "I don't need no stinking rain coat." Well as it turns out, Thom needed a rain coat. The mist was unbelievable. It was everywhere.

As you can see there is no staying dry. There was so much mist in this area and the rest of the way that most of the time you could only hear the falls.

To see all the pictures that Thom managed to take at the falls click here.

That night we went back to the falls to see the "Lunar Rainbow". It was really cool but impossible to photograph. Ok, at least not possible with my little Powershot. But it was none the less very cool. The "rainbow" did not have all the colors of the spectrum!

So that's the story of Vic falls.