Nov. 2 2008

It’s been a good news two weeks. The best news is that our insurance dilemma has finally been resolved and we can get on with more interesting things. The next good news was when we arrived home from the safari the Internet was installed in our house. And as some of you know this meant we could get on Skype and actually talk to people. Quality varies from call to call but generally it hasn’t been any worse than calling from our landline in Switzerland. Making those phone calls sure made us feel a lot less isolated.

Then, more good news, it rained this week! Twice! Can’t remember when we have enjoyed a rainfall so much. The first time we were on the golf course and refused to bring out the umbrellas. It was just so refreshing and is already improving the air quality as the dust gets washed down. We felt like kids on the first real snowfall day of the year.

As for the safari, what an amazing week. South Luangwa National Park in Zambia is about a 7 hour drive from Lilongwe, depending on several factors: your driver, the vehicle and the border crossing. We were very lucky with the border crossings. Our driver was very friendly but a touch on the slow side, and coming back our Land Rover broke down. Naturally this happened in a place without cell phone coverage so we had lunch and waited in the blistering sun for a bus we knew was following from the same lodge we had just left. Luckily there was room to cram all of us, and our luggage, on the bus so the delay and inconvenience was minimal. So that’s the bad news for the safari week. The rest was all pretty positive.

We arrived at Marula Lodge on Monday afternoon and were greeted by elephants strolling through the compound, a great omen of sightings to come. No, these are not tame elephants, and we watched cautiously, and quietly, from inside the open dining area as they munched their way across the grounds. Thanks to Arnaud, our colleague and wildlife aficionado, we were able to do a game drive the very first night and two every other day giving us nine drives over the week.

The sightings on the drives were indeed spectacular. We were so fortunate to have an excellent driver and spotter. Thanks to them we saw a whole alphabet of animals. In fact we entertained ourselves on one of the later drives by playing animal alphabet, using only species we had seen, and found several names for every letter except, q and x. The drives are in open cars, with no roof, so it is a very up close and personal experience. We saw lions twice every day, sometimes so close you could reach out and touch them. Not a good idea. We also saw leopards every night. They tend to be much shier than the lions who didn’t appear perturbed by humans nearby at all. Two highlights that come to mind are when we saw a hippo charge through a pride of lions, and watching the parade of elephants make the river crossing at sundown. The former was pretty high energy and the latter almost mystical.

Well, the pictures really tell the safari tale best I think. So I have put a selection in an album at this link:

http://tinyurl.com/safaripics

The pictures at the end are from Tribal Textiles, an artisans’ Fair Trade coop we visited on the way back, before the Land Rover broke down. Everything is made in the workshop by local craftspeople. We were given a tour of the facility and then they had to pry us loose from the shop to continue our return journey to Lilongwe, speed shopping.

So now we are back to work, golf, and trying to keep cool. It’s a little more humid with the rains coming but when it does rain it cools right down to comfortable. Seems hard to believe Halloween has come and gone. Christmas decorations are starting to appear in the stores but somehow it doesn’t quite fit with the temperatures. Best wishes and hope to hear from you soon.