News from the North

The "what a long strange trip it's been" entry. (And I'm not even a Grateful Dead fan.) Sarah McLachlan on the in-flight: cool. I feel...I don't know _what_ I feel. Other than turbulence (several kinds, he echoed). Flattened affect. Maybe Africa forces serenity as a survival mechanism. I have no dramatic philosophical conclusions to draw from the last six months. I'd hate to cheapen them to a few scrawled lines even if I could. Let's just say: I'm more who I want to be than I was when I began. Suppose I should fill in the details of the last few days. They will be sparse: a kind of cumulative literary exhaustion has set in. And I'm tired, too. A long, lazy nothing day in Windhoek, that was Thursday the 3rd. Friday, off to Cape Town, a gleaming blue luxury double-decker Intercape bus through raw wild Namibia. Chilled and sleep-stupid at the border crossing. Woke to green plains and jagged escarpments of South Africa. Shane & Maggie got on at Kee...

OK, so I'm actually in the Sardinia Cafe, but was just in the GG, and it seems like a cooler byline. Sipping Tafel beer. Good stuff. Ex-German colonies have their good points. Beers I recall: San Miguel, Flag, Castel, Brakina, Bock Solibra, Star, Export 33, Mutzig, King, Castle, Zambezi, Bohlinger's, Windhoek, Tafel, Lion. Much to report: >3000 km through Namibia's desert wastelands in the last week. Last Tuesday, long ride from Vic Falls. Rode w/ Jason & Liz & 3 local hitchers. Spent all of 2 hours in Botswana: passed through Chobe National Park and saw hordes of elephants. Then through the fairly lush, river-striped Caprivi Strip, parallelling the Angola border. Trouble struck 20K out of Divundu when the combie (VW van) developed a massive oil leak. Got a tow from a 16-wheeler(!) to town, and when the problem proved unquickfixable, a further 200K to Rundu, where we ate a fantastic meal and crashed in a tent outside the roadside gas station/supermarket/takeaway/...