Thom's Dad Comes to Africa!

Lately it seems that work has got in the way of our blogging. Most of March through the first week of April Debra was tied up with the review of the clinical trial she works for here in Botswana (if you are interested in learning more about some of the work we do here in Botswana, see CDC's web site: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/qa/prep.htm). Thom has been involved with several activities but the move of CDC headquarters offices here in Gaborone has kept him overly busy the last few weeks. The move is scheduled for May 30 so hopefully it will be behind us soon.

Meanwhile, we did manage to squeeze in a little fun and were very happy that Thom's father (Tom I) could pay us a visit in April. Debra was back in DC for training during most of the time that Tom I was here so Thom II took Tom I to Madikwe for a manly safari adventure.

The manly men stayed at Jaci's Tree Lodge (http://www.madikwe.com/tree_lodge.htm) which happens to have a resident mongoose family (how cool is that!).

More photos of the lodge:

Jaci's Tree Lodge also has a small watering hole with a blind. The highlight of our trip occurred right there at the Lodge watering hole when a giraffe wandered in for a drink. The entire encounter took over 45 minutes as the Giraffe was very cautious and was not thrilled that we were there. Strangely, when we finally started talking the giraffe relaxed and finally got into position to drink.

Of course, a trip to Botswana would not be complete without stopping in to visit the cheetahs at Mokolodi.

The Wild Dogs at Madikwe

On our trip to Madikwe at the end of February we had a very cool experience. We mentioned to our guide, Pule, that Thom really wanted to see the wild dogs. When we were at Madikwe last May we saw a few wild dogs in the boma that were about to be released to integrate with the packs in the park but it wasn't quite the same as seeing the dogs out and about in the wild.

The wild dogs are very special. They are the most endangered predator in the world. They are also known as the "painted dogs" and have never been successfully domesticated. They hunt for fun as as well a food and most game parks can't handle having many if any of the animals. Madikwe has a few small packs that are constantly on the move which makes them very difficult to site. We know because we have driven many, many miles all over the park looking for those dogs.

On this game drive, our guide Pule headed off for where the dogs had been spotted the morning before. We drove quite a while and then on one narrow road, we came across another safari vehicle heading in the opposite direction. They assured us that nothing had been seen from the direction they had come. But Pule persisted feeling confident that the dogs would be close since they had fed well that morning and the day had been too hot for them to want to roam about.

About 2 minutes after we left the other vehicle, Pule spotted some ears sticking up about 500 feet off road. We took off in the direction of the ears and came up on the pack just hanging out. They were a little disturbed at first by our presence but the heat soon convinced them that they should settle back down and continue their rest. This gave us an amazing opportunity to observe the pack very closely for about 20 minutes.

our first glimpse of the dogs:

the dogs settling down under a shady tree:

just hanging out with the dogs:

see how close Thom is to the dogs:

To see many, many more photos of the wild dogs and other things that we saw on this trip to Madikwe, you can view our photos at Shutterfly: http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8AbtWzhs0bt3WQ&emid=sharshar&linkid=link5

The Elephant Who Came to Breakfast

Thom's mother Kathie came for a visit at the end of February. We took her to Madikwe for a night and stayed at Buffalo Ridge Safari Lodge (http://buffaloridgesafari.com/). It's one of the community lodges in Madikwe, managed and staffed by a local community. When we arrived, the manager told us that we were having crocodile ribs for lunch. We immediately thought of Fred Flinstone and his big rack of ribs on top of the car. Thom was really looking forward to tackling such ribs. Lunch turned out to be quite nice even though the entree was crocodile WRAPS -- not ribs. Grilled croc meat, asparagus, cucumber, tomato, too many carrots served in a tortilla wrap.

Anyway, this blog is actually about the Friday morning game drive. When we stopped for morning coffee, our guide noticed that there was an elephant far in the distance coming our way. He told us that although he wouldn't have stopped if he had seen the elephant before stopping, we should be able to finish coffee before the elephant got to us if he continued on the path it seemed he was taking. So we had coffee and hot chocolate while we watched the elephant come closer and closer.

When our guide noticed that the elephant was traveling much faster than it had appeared and not veering from the "road", he quickly packed up the coffee stuff and told us to get in the truck...NOW.

We, of course, obeyed immediately. As our guide mentioned, we really did not want to become famous for being trampled by an elephant on an early morning game drive. Our guide positioned the vehicle so that we could get out of the way of the elephant no matter which direction he decided to take and we had to do a bit of manuevering as the elephant approached. It turned out that the elephant was very cranky. Evidently he had struck out on the elephant club scene the night before and was still looking for "a date".

The cranky elephant did pass by without bothering us and we went on our way to enjoy the rest of our game drive.

If you have a lot of extra time and want to see more of our photos from this adventure in Madikwe, you can view our photos at shutterfly: http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8AbtWzhs0bt3WQ&emid=sharshar&linkid=link5

Penguins in Africa

Did you know there are penguins in Africa? We went down to Boulders Bay in the South African Cape Peninsula National Park this weekend and visited the penguin colony.

This is the welcome sign to the park (note, no shaking hands with penguins is allowed):


This was the first penguin we saw. He came out to meet us as we entered the walkway to the park:

Then we saw all these penguins on a boulder in the distance...

And then we got really close to them!

See how close Debra is to the penguins! (but she is not shaking hands with them...)

These are the penguins sitting on nests:

If you look really close you can see some of the dark gray fluffy baby penguins:

These guys were such posers! Seriously they just stood on this rock and posed. We guess they make extra money doing that.

The Dark Ages

You may have read some of the recent coverage about the power shortage in South Africa (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7208628.stm). SA has recently determined that they do not produce enough power for their country and for the past several weeks have been doing rolling power outages throughout the big cities. Some of the stories that have been reported on the local news is that parts of Pretoria have gone without power for 8 hours per day; the cable car going up Table Mountain in Cape Town lost power and people were stuck in those cable cars for 3 hours; there are no generators left to buy in SA, etc., etc., etc. Directly related to this power shortage, the Rand has fallen to 7.4 to the $. Back in November it was 6.5 to the $. Thom's new favorite joke: What did they use for light in South Africa before candles? Answer: Electricity!.

How does this affect us, you might ask. Botswana relies heavily on SA for much of its electricity. There was already a plan for SA to decrease contracted power coming to Botswana and plans are underway for Botswana to begin producing its own power by 2010. So starting in January this year, we have a little less power coming into Bots from SA. That was manageable. However, Botswana also contracts with Mozambique for some power and that gets routed through Zimbabwe. Evidently Zimbabwe has lines down right now and has been very slow to make repairs and that along with the other cut has had a serious impact on life here because Botswana has had to initiate rolling power outages to manage the power shortage we're now experiencing.

Monday was the worst. We lost power for almost 8 hours (6:30 am until after 2:00 pm). Tuesday we were out from 3:30 pm until after 6:00 pm. Wednesday it was 7:15 am until 9:30 am that we had no power. No warning was given that power was going to be cut off. And all these outages affected home as well as work since we live so close to where we work. Friday evening we lost power in the middle of a party just as it got really dark. We managed to get more candles lit and served dessert before the ice cream melted so no real crisis.

Our friends and co-workers who have lived here for a long time are having the hardest time dealing with the recent development. Botswana has enjoyed uninterrupted power supply for decades and no one is prepared to go long periods of time without power. We, of course, are coping quite well, with only an occasional tantrum and/or melt down (for example, if the power goes out before the coffee gets made, that's a crisis situation). We could use a few more candles though...

Movie Night

We tend to focus on the exotic aspects of living in Botswana, but we also have regular, ordinary adventures as well. Last night, we went to see National Treasure: Book of Secrets at the Riverwalk Cinemas. It only has 4 screens and we don't always get the newest movies but we do get most of the really popular movies fairly soon after they are released and it turns out there are a lot of perks to going there. We left work at 5:10 with plenty of time to get to the 5:30 movie.


The usual cost of a movie ticket is 30 Pula (about $5) but on Mondays you can get 2 for 1 tickets. One of the cell phone providers has a code that you send by text message to a phone number that is provided on a poster in their shop window directly across from the movie place. They send you back a text message with a different code that you give to the box office when you buy your movie tickets. And then you only get charged for 1 ticket. So we got 2 tickets for the movie for 30 Pula (about $5).

So when you buy your tickets, you have to pick out your seats and they show you a seating chart which happens to be totally backwards from the layout in the theater. But you get to pick your seats and even if you are the only person in the theater, if you do not sit in the seat that you chose, they will make you move back to your assigned seat. So we carefully chose our seats and paid the 30 Pula for the tickets.



Then we got some popcorn and a coke and some M&Ms for 26.50 Pula (about $4.40) making our movie date total expenses less than $10.





There were about 10 other people watching the movie with us last night. A much larger crowd than usual for a Monday night. We thoroughly enjoyed the movie and had a lovely evening.

A Green Christmas

When we were on vacation in Maryland earlier this month, we went to the NASA Goddard Visitor Center with Deb's friend Mandy. They have this cool spherical screen that they use for all kinds of educational purpose but they showed it to us just for fun. One program they ran was the weather for the past 30 days and they zoomed in on Botswana and we said, "Wow, looks like Botswana has been getting a lot of rain while we've been away." That was something of an understatement.

Yesterday after work, we drove out to Mokolodi, the local game park, just to see what was going on out there over the holidays. When we were out there in July, we made a donation for drought relief because the situation had become so bad that they were shipping out some of the DLA because there wasn't enough plant life to feed them all.

However, these days, it's freakishly green!!!

There's plenty of grass for all the DLA and even the little baby DLA!

At World's View overlooking the park:

From World's View -- that's the Gaborone Dam (the city reservoir) in the background. There's lots of water!!

Here is our rugged Toyota Hilux Surf at World's View:

The rain has had a rather negative effect on the roads through the park, so Thom enjoyed some serious 4-wheel driving. Apparently the rain has also washed out a few of the "do not enter" markers for some of the roads that are off limits to the drive-your-self-ers and we accidentally ended up in some quite dodgy territory. But we lived to tell about it and did not have to be rescued by the Park Rangers (which would have been terribly embarrassing) so just another part of the adventure.

Unbelievably this is the lake in the park. In July it was barely a mud puddle:

And then there were the giraffes!

We saw this one shortly after we entered the park:

And then coming down from World's View we came across this one:

Don't you think they're looking a little fat these days?

Happy Holidays from Hotswana!!!