Chobe Xmas 2008

Long time, no post. For the New Year, this blog will be more active. We spent Xmas in Chobe Park in northern Botswana. You can see some pictures here.

Hooks & Luck

Not only is that a great name for a band, it's what I'll need. Here is a shot of the type of fly (huge), lure and hooks that I'll be using on a fishing trip on the Congo River for goliath tiger fish. See some pictures of the beastie here. (special photo bonus: dog feet in lower right corner)

New Article

A short article of mine, "An Elephant Bouquet," is in the Affairs section of the September issue of Monocle magazine.

The Glamorous Overseas Life

I've just returned from another, the fourth, trip to the Roadworthy Testing Center here in sunny South Africa and I want to share the exoticism. We have been trying for months now to register the 1974 Volkswagen Beetle in our name and one requirement is a Certificate of Roadworthiness from a testing center staffed by women who remind me of clerks in county courthouses - i.e., you are obviously the stupidest person they've talked to all day...until the next guy, etc., etc. The poor dears are besieged by us morons. The car failed the first inspection due to an oil leak and a "dirty undercarriage." Fair enough. Oil leak repaired, undercarriage cleaned. The car passed the second inspection entirely except for a new issue strangely not mentioned during the first inspection. The friend who sold us the car installed a new engine during his ownership and never changed the engine number on the car's registration papers. They care about engine numbers here and this was grounds for failure since I could not prove that the engine was not stolen. No, that's not accurate. I could not disprove that the engine was stolen. I said that the mechanic who did the work died shortly thereafter and his garage closed. The testing center harpy intimated that I might have to produce a death certificate from the mechanic's family. For one second, I imagined knocking on a door and making such a request. I waited for her to start laughing at her excellent joke but both our faces remained long and solemn although there was a malicious light in her blue eyes. So, after several weeks, I drummed up a certificate from a police inspector who could tell, just by looking, that the engine was legitimate and in good standing with the republic and worthy of its roads.

Before the third inspection could even begin, I was refused because of an "administration mark" on the car which had to be lifted "by the Licensing Center" before anything could be done. Four days later, the fourth visit was this morning and the cursed Beetle passed. In gratitude, I stole a fishing magazine from their waiting room. They're going to miss it too because it's an excellent issue about catching South African yellowfish by fly and profiles of the king fish species one might catch in the surf of the Indian Ocean.

I think I'll take myself out to lunch to celebrate although I'm so fatalistic now that I expect the wheels to fall off at the moment I put on the new legal tags. M recently highlighted a quote from Jose Arcadio Buendia in One Hundred Years of Solitude:

"If you don't fear God, fear him through the metals."

Reintegration

New story:

South Africa: No home away from home

While the South African government focuses its efforts on the controversial relocation of thousands of migrants displaced by xenophobic violence to temporary shelters, it is becoming increasingly clear that the next step in the plan – reintegration into South African communities – will be hard to sell to immigrants and communities alike.

Piri-piri

My article about Mozambique's spicy piri-piri sauce is in the latest issue of Saveur.

The article is only available in the magazine but the recipe is online here. It's good stuff and easy to make. You should've seen me nearly kill myself with chiles while experimenting with the recipe.

New Story

A few more pictures are on our photo site. Story:

South Africa: Government to set up shelters for the displaced

New Stories

South Africa: The downside of banning mercenaries

Southern Africa: Who will pay for peacekeeping?

Go Buy This Book

Well. It just won the gold medal of book reviews: cover of NYT Sunday Review.

First review is very good from Chicago Tribune.

I would call this a shameless plug for a good friend except that the book is so damn good that I would urge you to read it no matter who wrote it. So I'm not shilling; I'm promoting literature. This is pal Jonny's first novel, just released, and it is getting a lot of attention already, and not just from people stranded in airports. If you took the state of airline travel as a metaphor for the state of our republic, then this book is a uniquely positioned, very personal letter to the big us - a toast to the great We in our human conditions, our desperate struggles with ourselves and each other and the brilliance of the moments when sunlight pierces the confusion. During my own airport nightmares, I have bleakly thought: All these years of evolution, Western civilization and miraculous creativity and this is what we end up with - fluorescent lights and cancelled flights. A few months ago, I started the book at 11 p.m. and finished it at 3 a.m. During those hours, I was angry, teary, uncomfortable and laughing out loud - a rare gift from a novel. The story is vivid, rugged and toughly compassionate. I found myself caring for a character who I wasn't sure deserved it which made me face, again, one of life's constant queries: How wounded and how big is your heart and what are you doing with it?

Read the book. Just up, this is the book's official Web site.

You can read a description of the story and buy it here.

Whither Journals?

I'm reduced to (not very) public shaming: Some of you out there have journals that were going to be a collaborative correspondence between us. Only one person has sent one and I savaged it with art and nonsense and mailed it back. I have a big stack of supplies ready to use for this purpose but no journals.

You know who you are. Send 'em.

It's Not Just a South African Problem

Related to the story I wrote about mining pollution is a story detailing the same concerns about toxic water threatening the town of Leadville, Colorado:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28leadville.html

Story

A short article of mine about a rum drink from Madagascar is in the March issue of Saveur. If nothing else, you'll learn a lot about butter.

Trout in South Africa

Story from Afghanistan

This article and these photos, by two extraordinarily brave and talented women, are the most powerful story I've seen about what soldiers face in Afghanistan:

Battle Company Is Out There

Lantana

Our good friend Caroline Herring has a new album, Lantana, coming out on March 4. Caroline's record label hired her sister, a talented filmmaker, to make a short documentary about the new songs (which are excellent - this is her best record yet):

New Story

This story of mine was published on Friday, Feb. 15:

South Africa: Paying the price of mining

The Importance of Colors

M saw this painting from across a huge market in Johannesburg last weekend and she beelined to it as if she were a salmon with magnetite in its snout at spawning time. She deliberated for, oh, 45 seconds and bought it from the artist. It is BIG and so vibrant. I keep watching it because it seems like there is movement from people or wind or ocean. It is blatantly happy, and it is good.

Super Tuesday in South Africa

It's easy to forget the imaginative reach of the United States. The financial, the military, the political manifestations are more obvious. But the imaginitive reach about the U.S.'s potential is more widespread. I went to the South African National Biodiversity Institute, also home to the botanical gardens, today to fetch a copy of a paper that appeared in the institute's journal in 1983. The article is about chiles and I needed it for a reference for a story I'm writing. Someone had misplaced the copy that was made for me so I bought some illustrations and cards in the small bookshop while I waited for my contact to return from lunch. Then Anne-Lise found me and took me up to the library on the second floor and copied the article. On the way back down, we passed a mirthful man with a white beard and shining eyes and a sunburnt nose. Anne-Lise asked him where his American friend was and he said he had just left yesterday and would return on Super Tuesday. "Just in time to get off the plane screaming," he said. She bemoaned that now neither of them would have anyone to discuss Super Tuesday with. I told them they could talk to me. They didn't know I was American until then. The man turned around and walked with us and, in the lobby, we had a rapid-fire round table about the candidates. What was remarkable to me is that they spoke like they had a vote.

"I heard on the radio this morning this American journalist saying that if Hillary was the nominee, McCain might win," Anne-Lise said, her brow angry at the idea.

"I don't think that's going to happen," I said, "but it could still be miserable because so many people despise her."

"I heard that Bill Clinton was relaying that he had waited his whole life to see an African-American or woman as president and now it's come in this form," said unidentified man. "He was in church asking God why he did that to him."

"Well, I'm all for Obama," said Anne-Lise. "I'm sick of everyone else starting these wars and arguing and, if it's not him, it would just be more of the same."

"Me too," I said. "I think Obama represents a political evolution of several steps and we really need that. We need to get beyond the established battle lines."

"So you're for Obama and you're for Obama," said sunburnt man, thrusting a finger at us. "Well, I'm for the woman. I think Obama might be too pure for a politician. I think she's veteran enough to know that politics just sucks."

With that, he had other visitors waiting and waved goodbye. Anne-Lise walked me out and wished me well. I drove back into the rest of South Africa where Super Tuesday is still very far away.

That Old Saw About Kitchen Heat

I recently spent three hours in this kitchen of the restaurant Zambi on the waterfront in Maputo, Mozambique. I was learning how to make peri-peri sauce - a hot sauce made from ground chiles. It was the peak of summer and about 94 outside with high humidity. In the kitchen, there were no fans and no real ventilation and there were open grills, bread ovens and steam ovens filled with crabs. I stood there with the chef tasting painfully good chiles. Hot chiles. I can now say that I do not have to get out of the kitchen - I can stand the heat.

When The Lights Go Out

So I'm a month late with the resolution to blog more but, hey, living gets in the way. January was full of travel to Mozambique, Zambia and Swaziland and then a thousand daily details that don't need to be detailed here.

This doctored image is one of the funnier ones I've seen that combines South Africa's recent power crisis with the ever-present doom and gloom about the country's ability to host the World Cup in 2010. The power crisis is a problem of massive proportions: the country's largest mines - gold, platinum, coal - were shut down for four or five days while Eskom, the power parastatal, scrambled to devise a plan that preserves power to crucial facilities - like hospitals - but the plan has yet to be fully realized. At home, we had blackouts every day for a week last week and, before that, several times every week. Eskom has promised that blackouts will be a part of life here for at least the next five years; they're just hoping to become a bit more reliable about it while cities and businesses try to adapt. Traffic lights are the primary immediate hurdle besides the daily multi-million dollar mines. I returned from Maputo, Mozambique to Pretoria recently by bus and the trip was smooth until we arrived in Johannesburg on a Thursday afternoon. The power was out, the traffic lights were out, a huge rainstorm was underway and rush hour traffic was gridlocked like nothing I had ever seen. The bus did not move for 10 minutes at a time. The trip to Pretoria by bus usually takes 45 minutes if traffic is moving. This time it took three-and-a-half hours. Cities are now planning to install solar panels onto the lights and I even heard that Johannesburg is going to install switches into some 200,000 homes that will allow the city to cut power to hot-water heaters when there is a power shortage. In northern Pretoria, furious and stranded train commuters vandalized several cars. Their anger was legitimate but they just reduced the number of commuter train cars. The fault for this crisis lies with the government which restricted Eskom from building new capacity in the late '90s while the government pondered new energy policy (i.e. - how to attract private investment). Then they changed their mind but the economy and power demand had steadily grown for years by then and Eskom didn't raise the alarm about the looming shortage.

It's going to be quite a year here with big political scandals - the president of the ANC, and thereby the presumptive president of the country in 2009, is facing a corruption trial - and power outages.

Thankfully, the wine is good and grapes grow without electricity.

Poet Laureaute

From an interview with Charles Simic, poet laureate of the U.S.:

What advice would you give to people who are looking to be happy?

For starters, learn how to cook.