So that's what Alanis was talking about.

(This not our car.)

One of the biggest stresses of this year has been purchasing, insuring, checking out, and now, selling, our car.

And the funny thing is, it's a great car! Festus (we named our car after Festus Mogae, president of Botswana from 1998 to 2008) has given us zero trouble, has been checked out and given a clean bill of health from a mechanic, and really all of the issues have come from external sources. First, the car dealers messed us around, then the insurance people took forever and kept raising their price.


On Friday, we were on our way to meet the person we're selling the car to, to initiate a bank transfer, and a Tropicana truck backed into us while the car was parked in front of the hospital. I'll try not to use the word "shitstorm" too many times from here on.

(And then Festus was granted three wishes and used one to become this car! But then he wished for more wishes and was disqualified.)

The damage isn't that bad, luckily. But it's bad enough that the hood needs to be banged back into shape and the lights need to be replaced.

First, we waited for over an hour for the police to arrive so we could file a police report, which took another hour and a visit to the police station. They also said they were going to fine the (pretty nice) guy who hit us, who as it turns out was at the hospital for a rather unfortunate medical reason, which then made us feel bad for getting the police report, which we now think we can't even use because we don't have time to file an insurance claim before we leave the country in two weeks.

Basically, after visiting four different car repair shops, we're resigned to paying $300 out of pocket to fix the car. But now, our buyer has decided to back out--he had taken a loan out for the full amount and the bank had charged him about $400 in fees, so he didn't have the money anymore. Since the car had been damaged, we had to return his deposit, and even though we offered, in our desperation to fix the damage AND sell the car to him for $400 less, he wouldn't budge, and actually went out and bought a different car later in the day.

So where does this leave us?

Now we have to get the car fixed as quickly as possible so we can show to any prospective buyers we might be lucky enough to stumble upon in the next like three days. If we can't sell it to an individual, we'll have to sell it to a used car dealership and potentially lose another $2000 or more.

All because this truck driver didn't use his mirrors and really just tapped us.

Needless to say, dealing with this is not how we want to spend our last two weeks here and have I mentioned we're hosting 12 people for Passover and I'm not sure how we will deal with not having a car this week?

I'm making a sacrifice to the irony gods asap.

19 days to go

(Have I mentioned there are elephants everywhere?)

This whole "we're leaving Botswana in three weeks" thing is really distracting. I feel like every day is sort of sliding by with very few noteworthy accomplishments (I did fix the internet in our apartment all by myself today, though). So many big things are happening whether we like it or not--we have to pick an apartment this week, I have an interview for a job I'm excited about, and we're theoretically selling our car.

And at the same time it feels like we are so close to leaving Botswana with (fingers crossed!) no major problems to speak of, except one shotgun wedding, one broken rib, and one week stranded in the Namibian desert.

I think my tendency now is to sort of curl up and keep my head down and try to just get through the rest without screwing anything up.

*

Probably that is why my major concern today is chickpeas. Specifically, dried chickpeas. Does anyone else have trouble with these?

I'm trying to get through all the it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time purchases in the pantry, like risotto and dried beans, before we move to Penn housing.

But every single time I try to plump up dried chickpeas they're still "al dente" (as A says) by the time I give up. I started boiling these yesterday morning, turned off the heat and let them soak 10 hours, then boiled again, turned off heat, let them soak another 20 or so hours, and now they've been boiling for an hour and a half (on high! in fresh water!) and they are. still. hard.

Is it because I used them as gelt in a game of dreidel last Hanukah?

*

There's some kind of theater festival going on and Friday evening we had the option of going to one of three different plays. Needless to say, we were so overwhelmed by these possibilities that we spent the night at Fego and then watched The Wire in bed.

Okavango Trip Photo Drop

We've got new visitors coming on Friday, so I've got to get through the rest of A's parents' trip! The Okavango Delta is a really...big...delta. It's quite pretty. The water flows down from Angola, and bring minerals that end up in the Botswana salt pans (I visited some of these in September!). People go there to see the water, and taking a small, low-flying plane is one of the main activities--also mokoro rides, which I previously blogged.

We were led through the delta by our terrific guide, Judge, who was from the village right next to the entrance to the Moremi Game Reserve. The people who live in the village are a mix of Setswana and San. Interestingly, Judge told me he doesn't mind the word "Bushmen" and thinks that his village is better off outside the Reserve (they were relocated decades ago, unlike the people in Kaudwane, where we went in December).

He told us a story about an old woman in the village. When she was a toddler, the Bushmen were still living in Moremi. They were forced to abandon anyone too sick or weak to travel with them, and her mother was one such person. They left her and her mother in a kraal, and moved on. When they saw vultures overhead, they knew the woman had died, and they returned to collect the baby and moved on. Weird story--why not just take the toddler at the beginning--but anyway, his point was that maybe we romanticize life in the bush a bit and there are some advantages to life in a village with opportunities to capitalize on tourism and advance your family's lot in life through education.

While we visited in the off-season, and the grasses were high, we did see some game, including lots of elephants, some giraffes, zebras, impala, baboons, hippos (out of the water--absurd!), warthogs, etc.

It was also just really, really pretty. The scenery was really different from other parts of Botswana I have visited.

(Elephants! We saw a ton of them.)

(Looking at giraffes makes A's face fatter?)

(Spider safari.)

We flew in and out of our campsite on a tiny little plane. You know how my dad used to work on planes? And even so, one time when I flying with him, right before the plane took off, he said, "I still don't understand how these things get up in the air." That feeling is even more acute when you're in a 6-seater. But we survived, and I was mostly distracted from my anxiety by my nausea.

On to Madikwe!

Riding in a mokoro even though it's terrifying

(Very few days are like this here.)

I really did not want to go in a mokoro. A mokoro is a low-sitting canoe traditionally carved out of a tree (most today are made of fiberglass so they're more eco-friendly). Everyone at Penn knows that a doctor visiting here was tragically killed by a crocodile while riding in a mokoro, and I've been swearing I would not go for a ride in one. Why risk it?

But then everyone was doing it.


Everyone is A's parents (above), who were visiting us last week and took us on all sorts of luxurious and extravagant trips.

Well, A's mom didn't want to do it either, but she got convinced, and then I took two Klonopin and I got convinced, too.

It wasn't even that scary! Just a little bit when we got in, and then during the middle part. Our guide made me a necklace from a lily. A's parents' guide made himself a hat out of a lily pad.


This is of course just part one of a gazillion part series on "Things I Didn't Post Yet But Now They're Really Adding Up, So We'll See What I Get To."

I mostly survived.

(The sun here will eat your face off.)

Thanks for all your concern over whether I was eaten by lions or not. I am alive. It's taken me a while to post because I've been sick since I got back. Anyway, I hope the suspense gave you some insight into the anxious mind.

So, our trip to the pans was many things--awesome, boundary-expanding, educational--but primarily, uncomfortable. You aren't allowed to hike in the national parks because you might get eaten or trampled, so we were basically in a Land Rover for four days straight. Temperatures reached about 100 degrees during the afternoon, and the only way to cool the car was rolling down the windows, which let the dust in. In between, we slept on the ground. Also, the last two days of the trip, I had a bad headcold and my throat was killing me. It was primal.

So back to Thursday. We left Gabs around 9 am and headed north on the A1 highway, which runs from Gaborone to Francistown, another major city. The first site we passed was the Tropic of Capricorn. It means we're closer to the equator than you:


It's good we saw one sight early on because that was pretty much the only thing we saw for the next Nine Hours. The scenery basically did not change the entire day, except for a quick stop at the nicest gas station bathroom I've ever seen and a stop for peanut butter sandwiches in the parking lot of a grocery store in Francistown.

We did discover that the sunsets in the region are unreal. The sun was unbelievably round and huge.


When we finally got to Planet Baobab, our digs for the night, we were all extremely relieved to get out of the car. Planet Baobab is this bizarre, hip campground and lodge in the middle of nowhere. They had a great restaurant, bar, and a huge swimming pool.

Baobab trees are these weird Dr. Seuss creations that look like they are growing upside-down, with huge trunks and weenie little branches. According to Joe, our driver, guide, and source of all wisdom, the local legend is that God was really pissed and threw some trees down upside-down, which I guess makes sense.

They're also big!





As we ate a lovely breakfast of oatmeal, canned peaches, and tea, we kept one eye on the giant ants crawling over our campsite. Joe explained they were "meat-eating ants," which I assumed meant they should be avioided. After breakfast, we drove to the Nxai Pan National Park.

Once we got to Nxai Pan it quickly became clear that this was the real outdoors. This is what a salt pan looks like.


It's basically a big flat, white expanse of nothingness. It's also salty.

We dropped off our trailer on the edge of a pan at our campsite, and headed over to the waterhole to track some animals. On our first drive, we saw lots of kinds of antelope (kudu, springbok, steenbok, impala, oryx), elephants, jackals, ostriches, and lots of kinds of birds. We drove around looking for lions for a couple of hours, with no success.




That night, we camped in an isolated spot. It was pitch black. For the first time on the trip, I started to feel nervous. It didn't help that our guide kept saying things like "Sleeping in Nxai Pan with the lions...what a rush" and "When you enter the National Park, you become part of the food chain." He warned us that lions or hyenas might enter our camp at night, and not to wander even a few feet away from camp on your own without a flashlight. He did Not warn us about scorpions, so when I found a big black scorpion as we were setting up tents, I was taken by surprise. We shooed it out of camp, and that was when I decided that maybe if I took my wise mother and aunt's advice and took a Klonopin, I could enjoy the gorgeous stars and dinner cooked over an open fire a bit more.

It was the right decision.


In the middle of the night, I heard something pawing around the flap of our tent. Appropriately, I flipped out, but after a few minutes, it scampered off. In the morning, I asked Joe about it and he said it was probably a mongoose.

I wasn't warned about mongooses!

I thought that was pretty lame because since I had already survived it, it might as well have been a lion.

We watched the sunrise as we drove toward the water hole for an early morning animal viewing. This time, we did see a huge male lion in the distance. He sat near the water hole and a few antelope kept lookout nearby. As soon as the lion got up and walked away, tons of animals came to the water hole, including antelope and zebras.


As we drove out of the Nxai Pan toward our next stop, Khama Rhino Sanctuary, we stopped suddenly. On the side of the road, outside the park, was a giraffe.


Definitely my favorite animal of the trip. Very weird. We spent the rest of Saturday driving to Khama, which took about six and a half hours. At Khama, we were back in a populated camping ground. I was in charge of dinner that night and I made rice and (unintentionally) smoky beans and chakalaka, this weird curry tomato sauce that comes in a can (I made it by opening the can). Sunday we did a rhino drive, saw four rhinos way in the distance, another giraffe (I'll spare you the photos), a bunch more antelope, ostriches, and birds, and then headed home to Gabs.

*

This is embarrassing.

I still think animals are boring.

Driving around, stopping to look at every steenbok and yellow-beaked hornbill, this does not get my pulse racing. The giraffes were cool, but we looked at giraffes for like all of 20 minutes of the entire trip. We spent most of our time looking at grass or the sun or a rhino that was so far away you could barely see it with binoculars. I got really, really bored.

I actually enjoyed the camping elements a lot more than I expected--cooking on the fire, looking at the stars, waking up early while it was cool and beautiful out. But looking at animals seemed somehow manufactured. There was always this barrier of the car between us and animals, which on some level made it feel like we were watching a program on television. It may have been The Wild, but it didn't feel like it. It felt like an organized, on-road, human-arranged viewing of animals placed there for that purpose.

It's sort of disheartening because I had this suspicion that safari, which is the main thing people do for vacation in Botswana, was not my thing, and it turns out safari is not my thing.

On the plus side, this trip was fun in other ways, and it got me excited for taking more trips in the region and seeing other parts of the country.

*

Also, I look great in a Land Rover.

Into the Wild

I'm not a very nature-y person. I definitely envy people who are wholesome and outdoorsy, like my sisters. People who hear the word "camping" and think "I'm going to have a great time" and not "I'm going to get eaten by a bear."

I have a completely irrational, totally stupid and yet entirely unyielding fear that I am going to eaten by a lion in a very particular way. And I have anxiety dreams about wild animals all the time, usually ones that involve me trying to Get Indoors and instead being singled out by said wild animals to be eaten.

My mom says she used to have similar dreams about tigers until she decided to "be the tiger." Her advice to me was to "be the lion." So sometimes I tell A, "I am the lion." It is not really helping yet.

Also, as anyone who has ever been outdoors with me knows, I don't like when things land on me, especially bugs (though this also extends to airplanes, etc.). Even lady bugs. I especially resent bugs that are "harmless" and therefore somehow to be welcomed in food, clothes, etc.

The last time I went "camping" I spent the entire weekend in our cabin watching re-runs of The West Wing.

So even though I like the idea of being outside in theory--like hiking is nice, if it's a pretty well-trafficked trail and I get to go home at the end--in reality, I am afraid of being outside. I don't even like some particularly not-domesticated parts of Central Park.

But tomorrow, in the spirit of doing things that are outside my comfort zone, I'm getting in a car with four friends for 8 hours or so and going camping in some place in northern Botswana that is best known for how desolate it is.

Also, there are lions. Wish me luck. See you Sunday.

One day to departure

What would we do without Target? How did human beings ever exist before you could buy affordable yet trendy peanut butter, travel adaptors, face wash, and pants all in the same place?

Before our trip to Target, I asked my sister L, the real world traveler in my family (who has spent time in Cyprus, Greece, England, Italy, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Thailand, Laos, China, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, and probably at least ten more countries I can't remember) the ONE thing she would recommend I pack. Here's the long list she gave me in reply (with asterisks next to what I actually got):

a jump rope

peanut butter*

green tea

an eye mask*

ear plugsflash drive (would probably bring a hard drive for a trip this long)*

a moneybelt*

a journal*

those blister bandaid things

throat drops*

a headlamp

more adaptor plugs than i think i need* (four!, plus power strip)

a clothesline & rubber plug for sink

baby wipes or similar*

a travel towel* (okay, a regular towel. what is a travel towel?)

and a LOT of ziploc bags in different sizes*

*

I just want to reflect on the pre-departure experience briefly, namely the fact that people in America are really, really scared of Africa. A friend, hugging me goodbye, said quietly and with only a hint of irony, "Don't die in Africa, okay?"

I just got off the phone with one of my relatives, who told me as one of her two pieces of advice that if anything happens, I should just get on a plane and get back here. The other piece of advice was "stay safe."

First of all, have I mentioned I have a bit of an anxiety disorder? Constant reminders from friends and family that they feel like they may never see me again are like candy for the anxiety monster.

Secondly, I just want to clarify that Botswana, unlike say, the places I make blanket assumptions about, is actually quite safe. Africa may seem like a monolithic mass of HIV and refugees and blood diamonds, but it's actually a highly differentiated mass of HIV and refugees and blood diamonds. Of those three things, Botswana only has two! (Do you know which? Make a guess in the comments section!)

*

This is probably my last pre-departure post. Thanks for bearing with me as I attempted to blog about an experience I wasn't having yet. I promise my next post will at the very least have more photos.

Two weeks to departure

(An elephant. Probably in Africa. Photo via Peo Pea on Flickr because I started my Botswana blog before I got there.)

Done taking my typhoid pills! And, remarkably, I have developed neither typhoid nor a life-threatening allergic reaction (yet). Congratulate me!

Still have hep A and tetanus shots to go (keep putting them off), and need to pick up malaria pills, cipro...the list never ends. Medical expenses have been by far the most difficult thing to plan for this trip. I have no health insurance right now (since I have no full-time job), so I had to buy short-term insurance to cover emergencies for the summer. Then I had to buy separate international health insurance (also only covers emergencies).

I called my bank, which offers health insurance, and is also a good bank full of nice people. They transferred me to the third party that sells their health insurance. Then the health insurance company transferred me to the third party that sells their international health insurance. Then the international health insurance company sold me health insurance via a third party marketer. By the end of the conversation, I wasn't talking to someone nice from my bank. I was talking to Chris from Ohio who was brusque and didn't care if I'd always maintained a healthy balance in my savings account.

On top of that, you have to read through the company's policies, and they want you to think about things like the repatriation of your remains, which I assume is a small ceremony involving a flag and a justice of the peace. I really do not like to think about my remains. It gives me the heebie-jeebies to even type that I don't like to think about them. I don't mind thinking about being horribly injured, but dying is another thing, because if it's too late for me then why did I spend so much money on health insurance?

Three weeks to departure

(Photo via Flickr since I'm not actually in Botswana yet)

Three weeks to departure and I just swallowed my first typhoid vaccine pill. After taking any new kind of pill, I need to lie down immediately. I've found my anxiety about having an allergic reaction to new pills is so strong that I will begin to feel faint and imagine I am having trouble breathing. It's easier to just lie down right away and then in a half hour or so, I'll know my throat would have been closing up by now and that I'm probably going to be fine.

I've been having a lot of anxiety dreams, mostly about babies. First I dreamed an airplane crashed right next to my old apartment on the Upper West Side. It just stopped flying in mid-air, fell to the ground, paused dramatically, and then exploded into flames. A and I were nearby, and we ended up taking care of the one surviving person on the flight--an Indian orphan girl who had just been adopted by Westerners. Even though she wasn't that cute, we knew it was our responsibility to care for her. But we couldn't take her to Botswana, so we decided to leave her at the hospital.

I do actually have allergic reactions to some pills. Nothing serious, but I will get a rash or hives.

Then two nights ago I dreamed I was pregnant and could see the shape of the baby's foot coming out of my stomach when it kicked from inside. That was weird. And last night there was, again, some baby I was supposed to take care of.

I think about babies in the daytime, too, but not more than normal. Maybe the baby is a symbol of how nurturing I am, or a frantic attempt by my psyche to prevent me from traveling. Then again, my subconscious chose Southern Africa over the baby in the first dream, so...

Last night, we met up with J and Y, our predecessors in Botswana. They had nothing but good things to say, although Y did tell me not to bring my engagement ring (it has a pearl--no diamonds--A and I make constant self-conscious references to its cheapness). That was disappointing because it's pretty and fun to wear. I will probably bring it anyway and then regret it.

Other things they warned us about:

1) People often will simply request your clothing, jewelry, etc. I.e. "I like your shirt. Give me your shirt." This is coworkers, mind you, not random people on the street.

2) Driving is hard or complicated.

3) Finding housing is difficult.

4) Johannesburg and South Africa in general are a bad neighborhood (I stole that joke from The Onion).

5) People maybe aren't so into the Jews.

I think I've been lying here long enough that I can get up now.