African Diseases

I keep telling everyone they must travel to Africa.  I am totally genuine when I say this, but I should include the disclaimer that if you are to come here, check your paranoia at the door.  

The amount of stuff to be paranoid about while in Africa is endless: personal safety, logistical issues, health, etc, etc, etc.  Within each lies many sub-issues to keep your brain busy, but let’s talk health.  Even before I left for Africa I got jabbed with a smattering of injections aimed at preventing various tropical, sub-tropical, sub-Saharan and equatorial diseases.   The list of diseases you can contract is seemingly endless; double that for the number of ways in which you can contract them.  Hence, travel here is not for hypochondriacs, germ-o-phobes or generally faint of heart.  

That said, the main ones that have cropped up during my trip include the following:

• Montezuma’s Revenge….or I guess we can call it Mandela’s revenge being that I’m in Africa: I’ve somehow managed to get by relatively unscathed by this.  Well, there was that time on a mountaintop in Malawi…but overall my record is pretty stellar, likely thanks to my Steripen (knock on wood).
• Malaria: the best prevention is not getting bitten by mosquitoes.   Ha, good luck with that.  The second-best prevention is to take malaria pills.  After 3.5 months and starting to get a nauseating reaction to mine, I decided to stop taking them.   Granted, I’m safe here in South Africa, but I’m about 4 weeks too early in aborting the process.  It’s cool, I plan to start back up when I get to Mozambique.  I still have a year-ish to find out if I'm in the clear, so that gives me something to look forward to.
• Bilharzia: if you get a rash after swimming in bilharzia-risk areas (pretty much any lake in Africa), you probably have it.  I got a rash.  I took the pills, though, so should be able to live past age 40.
• Putzi/Tumbu Flies: no one told me about this until after I hung my laundry out to dry overnight a bunch of times.  Apparently they lay eggs on damp clothes at night and then when you put them on the larvae burrow into your skin and you basically become host to a colony of maggots.  So that’s cool.  No run-ins yet...well, there was that one time I found 20 frenzied caterpillars on my shirt in Botswana...but I’ve for damn sure stopped doing my laundry in the evenings.
• African Nail: mysteriously 6/20 of my finger and toenails began to detach from the nail bed.  Lovely.  Seems to be returning to normal, though.  Not that I expect my nails to look good until I get home since it always looks like I have a reverse french manicure with brown tips anyways. 

This post is dedicated to my family.  Mostly my mom & dad who don’t already have enough to freak out about.  XOXO.

Christmas Ass-Kicking

(Disclaimer: I realize I’m WAY far behind on blog updates and pretty much skipped all entries about one of my favorite countries in the world – Namibia.  Once I’m done tourist-izing Cape Town, I plan to get back on that…)

Christmas.  I’m not particularly religious (read: not religious at all), so I’m not one of those people that gets all freaked out and bent out of shape if I don’t have something planned.  However, being that many places - be it businesses or entire cities - shut down to celebrate one of the world’s biggest holidays, you need to think outside the box to keep yourself entertained.  Such was the case yesterday in Cape Town.  Africa as a whole is very religious, Christianity being the backbone throughout most of the places I’ve traveled so far.  Hence, my options for what to do for Xmas consisted of not leaving my apartment* to read the rest of my book**, go to the beach, or climb Table Mountain.  My new Aussie/Dutch/American friend Ginger and I debated over beach vs. TM, but TM won out as it’s pretty much a must-do while here. 

We had talked about doing a little wine & cheese picnic thingy up top and envisioned a totally cute little Christmas afternoon overlooking the city and being one with nature.  We should have known things weren’t going to go as planned after hopping on one of the most hilariously ridiculous minivan taxi rides up to the trailhead.  Picture a heap of scrap metal with wheels glued on.  We couldn’t help but laugh each time we stalled out on a hill and the driver had to e-brake it, turn the damn thing off, on again and slam the petal to the ground to get this POS to lurch forward for the next 30ft before repeating the process. 

Finally we made it to the trailhead and set off up Platteklip Gorge.  After 20 minutes of hiking we realized that Table Mountain is a bitch.  We really underestimated her rocky slopes and the gale force winds we’d be faced with.

Long story short, Ginger and I basically threw ourselves into the neverending stairmaster from hell in which the 2 hour ascent consisted of us lobbing our legs up each behemoth step, repeating how we were not expecting this, praying that the wind would die down enough for the cable car to re-open service for the way down and asking “why don’t they tell people it’s this hard”?  

Finally we managed to hoist our out-of-shape selves to the top where the wind was howling.  I’m talking to the point where you’d have to catch your balance after each gust.  Thankfully the views were totally worth the effort.   Cape Town is probably one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever been to and seeing it from the top of a mountain was way cool.  We walked around, took some photos, awed at the type of footwear decisions people make for hiking (think leather business shoes) and managed to find a little sheltered cove to set up our picnic where we nourished up before our hike back down.   

Before setting off on our descent we longingly looked at the cable car station at the base of the mountain wishing we had the option of taking the luxurious 5min ride down, all the while well aware that the stairmaster of death was awaiting us.  The next hour-ish hike down consisted of much the same conversation as the hike up: this is nuts, I was expecting a trail not a monster staircase and why don’t they warn people about this?  Now that we've successfully made it down, I may have to start looking into prosthetics because I’m sure I just lost 20 years off my knees.

Despite the struggle, we were totally good-natured about it and laughing at ourselves the entire way.   It really was a great day and if anyone asks me what I did for Christmas 2010, I can tell them I got my ass kicked by Table Mountain.

*I’m lucky enough to be staying at a friend of a friend of a friend’s super cute apartment in Sea Point

**I’m halfway through book 2 of the Millenium series and am thoroughly hooked.