How to Ride an Ostrich

In Theory
1. Find an ostrich to ride.
2. Mount the bird.
3. Hold on tight as it sprints around like a bucking bronco.

In Practice
1. Find an ostrich to ride.
2. Give camera to someone to take video/photos.
3. Mount the bird, legs under wings.
4. Adjust butt positioning while bird starts getting visibly annoyed.
5. Grab base of wings.  Do not grab neck.
6. Hook legs as tightly as possible around front of now angry bird.
7. Lean way back.
8. Try to stay on massive, flailing bird as it sprints around, hating you and hating life.
9. Fall back into handlers, attempting not to yank any more feathers out of this poor bird than you already have.
10. Review photos taken by aforementioned 'someone' and get annoyed that they suck at taking pictures and didn’t get anything Facebook-worthy.

All-in-all, it's not something I’d necessarily do again or recommend to anyone because of the minor animal-cruelty aspect of it…but I’m not gonna lie, it was good, ridiculous fun.

Shark Month! (and a bit of conservation preaching)

I’m never going to view Shark Week on the Discovery Channel the same way again.  I just spent every day of the past month admiring, learning about and working with Great White sharks.   I’ve seen each unique scar, I’ve seen them roll their eyes as they go for bait, I’ve seen them extrude their jaw bearing their 7-rows of teeth, I’ve seen ¼, ½ and full-bodied breaches, I’ve touched them as they glide past the cage, I’ve been face-to-mouth as they gnaw on the cage right in front of me and I’ve even suffered a minor back injury after a WWF-style smackdown from a flying Great White.  It’s pretty much been one of the best months of my life.  

I’ve always had a fascination with sharks being that I grew up on the Pacific.  Great Whites in particular.  I fear them yet simultaneously love them and now want to be around them all the time.  I guess that all boils down to massive respect for these awesome beasts of the deep.  I’m going to go through serious shark withdrawal when I leave the program.  They’ve oddly become like pets to me and I have definitely picked favorites:

• Stinger is a 1.9m female who will always have a special place in my heart.  She’s only a lil’ girl, but she has massive personality.  She’s quite feisty and is almost puppy-like in her demeanor.  I’ll never forget the first time we met her when she went up and mouthed a jellyfish not knowing that they sting.  I saw the pink blob disappear into her mouth and then watched as she flinched and spit it out right away.  So cute. I wanted to name her Jelly but I guess that was too wimpy, so Stinger it is.  She’s my girl!
• Flash is a 2.7m female who always puts on a great show.  She makes for awesome photos.  She’s all about the sneak attack from below and loves to make vertical ascents to the surface before explosively breaching out of the water for the bait.   There is no way to see her coming and she’s successfully snagged 22 total baits in January alone.  In comparison, the second-place bait-snagger has only gotten 5.  Note: we do not feed the sharks and only use the bait as a lure.  Think of it like a matador’s cape to a bull.  But there’s only so much reaction time you can have when a shark like Flash is around.
• Little Sharkira is a 2.6m female who is absolutely gorgeous.  She is littered with all kinds of black, white and pink scars that make her look super cool.  Michael, the videographer on the boat, totally has a crush on her.
• Tina is a 3.3m female who just showed up towards the end.  She’s a big mamma with a lot of girth but is very agile.  Her trademark is to make a pass at the bait like she’s not interested and then make a U-turn and go for it full-on.  Such a tease.  I suggested we name her Tina Turner and it stuck.  She’s a super nice, calm shark and is one of those ones that you could do nose-ups and free-dive with.  I mean, not me, but someone else, obv…

I’ve gotten a peek into the world of people who have devoted their lives to sharks, each with a different story as to how they got into this line of work.  Some even started out as poachers who have since done a 180 after realizing how amazing and crucially important these animals are to the health of our oceans. 

Unfortunately, poaching and finning still happens to a large degree today.  Shark populations are being decimated, which leads to a terrible chain-reaction in the oceans.  Sharks keep the populations of seals and other lower-level predators in check.  Without sharks, seal populations would explode which would in turn wipe out fish populations.  So I hope you don’t like seafood because there goes the fishing industry.  And then there’s finning.  The process of finning is sick: once a shark is captured, its fins are sliced off (all the while you can see them rolling their eyes back each time indicating that they do in fact feel the pain) before their limbless bodies are dumped back overboard to drown and sink to the bottom of the ocean.  And what’s most absurd about it is that the fins are mainly used in Asia as an aphrodisiac.   People really suck sometimes.

On a lighter note, at least there is some work being done to protect sharks around the world.  South Africa was the first country to enact conservation laws with the USA and Australia not far behind.  

So now that I’ve convinced everybody to love sharks and stop killing them :), I will leave you with a few interesting bits of information on Great Whites:

• They are warm-blooded.  Their core temp hovers around 25C.
• They have the ability to detect electrical fields, pressure changes and vibrations in the water.
• They roll their eyes back into the sockets to protect them while preying.
• They like their personal space.  Great Whites are the only shark that doesn’t like touching.  You’ll never see a Great White feeding frenzy.
• They constantly regenerate new teeth.  Their bottom jaw has 7 rows of teeth at any one time waiting to replenish those that fall out. 
• There is a social hierarchy based strictly on size.  The smaller shark always gives way to the bigger shark.
• Females grow larger than males.  Males can get up to around 6m, females 7-7.5m, but are believed to be able to grow larger (!!!)
• Their favorite food is whale due to its uber-high energy-content.

Based on my time with the program, I took it upon myself to collate some of the data they’ve been collecting to come up with some sweet insights.  Bar charts, pie charts, the whole shebang. Not gonna lie, it’s actually cool to analyze data on sharks…no offense to all the wrinkle and zit creams I used to analyze, but shark data is way more interesting...

Highlights:

• Total Sightings: 150
• Total Individuals (estimated): 45
• Total Number of Trips: 21
• Average Sightings per Trip: 7
• Average Size: 2.6m
• Share of Females vs. Males: 90% F; 10% M

I LOVE SHARRRRRRKSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!

PS - we did some work tagging smaller species of sharks in the bay.  Pajama sharks, leopard catsharks, etc.  We also took some bait down on a dive with us where we fed, pet, hugged, kissed and “put into tonic” about 15 of these little guys.  So hilarious and awesome.

PPS – I must also note that I met some of the coolest peeps ever while on the program.  Naturally they taught me some phrases in Afrikaans and Xhosa, clicks and all...which is way hard, btw.  I learned how to say, “good morning, how are you, fine thank you, I’m a hungry hippo, you smell like fish, you need a pedicure,” and for those times when tourists do not listen to the fact that you are only allowed to go #1 in the bathroom on the boat, “whose turds are those?”

Namibia Rewind

I haven’t had the chance to write about Namibia yet so I’m going to rewind a bit and talk about how much I loved it there.  Then I’ll get to the sharks.

Before I started researching for my trip I had probably heard of Namibia twice in my life.  Once in elementary school geography class and the second time sometime probably in middle school.  Let me just tell you now that Namibia is awesome and totally underrated.  It is definitely in my top 3 favorite countries.   

Namibia is a massive place and very spread out - it’s one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world - but it has a ton to offer in regards to game parks, culture & scenery.  My favorite aspect, though, was the scenery.  The dunes of the Namib desert were unlike any landscape I’d ever seen.  Specifically Dune 45 and those of Sossusvlei.  The colors were so simple – black petrified trees, orange dunes, blue sky, white salt pan - yet in such beautiful contrast with one another that it made you feel like you were standing in a Windows desktop.  Which, actually, we were…Dune 45 is the site of one of their stock photos.

Not only that, but there’s a smattering of adventure activities to choose from, which, for me, was an added bonus.  That stuff always sucks me in.  The sandboarding and quad-biking in particular were unreal as the size of the dunes made for double the fun.  Not to mention the sand-sledding where I got clocked going 73kph (45mph) while hurtling down the side of a dune on a piece of slick plywood.  Fastest chick speed of the day!  You KNOW it!

In conclusion, Namibia is rad.

Happy Belated New Year!

What'd you do for New Year's?  Drank your face off?  Cool.  Well I touched a Great White shark.  Chomp on THAT!

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.

Over the Falls

Things that have been known to sail over the edge of Victoria Falls:

• Water
• Rocks
• Humans
• Hippos
• Crocs
• Elephants

Spontaneity in Malawi

My thought process in deciding where to go after my Habitat project pretty much went like, “hm, I think I’ll go to Malawi,” and next thing I knew it I hopped the next bus out to Lilongwe (capital of Malawi). What was supposed to be a 12-hour journey turned into a solid 16 sweaty hours of attempting to sleep to the soothing sounds of frenzied bus honking, African tribal music, African choir music, Beyonce, Tupac, Akon and R.Kelly. Lo and behold I arrived at my backpackers (aka hostel) in Lilongwe at some ridiculous pre-dawn hour and hung out in the lobby for a few hours before they opened.

The beauty of staying at a backpackers is that you glean a lot of information and opportunities by meeting other travelers and overhearing their conversations. This is what opened the door for me to buy my tent as well as what set the rest of my Malawi travels in motion: that morning, two dudes heard me talking about wanting to camp the rest of the way through Africa. Bam, they had a tent for sale. Later, I heard a group talking about going to Cape Maclear so inquired about an extra spot in their car. Bam, I rode bitch in their car on the way to Cape Maclear.

As it turns out, my little hitch-hike to Cape Maclear turned into a week-long caravan extravaganza complete with 5 Israelis, 1 Belgian, 1 German, 1 Aussie and me. We paraded around southern Malawi as part of our own little tour group complete with getting group discounts as well as setting up a kitty – i.e. pot of money – to use for buying groceries and necessities. Aside from getting stopped at every police roadblock along the way (show me your brake lights, where are your triangles, where are your reflectors, give me some Fanta) it was nothing short of fantastic.

The highlights were relaxing along the shores of Cape Maclear as well as our 3-day backpacking trek up Mount Mulanje. Cape Maclear was all-around good times between swimming, snorkeling, reggae jamming, hair cutting (a bday buzz in Noy’s case) and drum seshing. Mt. Mulanje was a bundle of joy, beauty, excitement, hilarity, accomplishment, illness, dread and exhaustion all wrapped up in a package of awesomeness. After a solid week together, we hobbled our way back to Blantyre (#2 city in Malawi) where we had our final dinner and began to part ways.

I continued up the coast with the Israeli crew and got to learn some very important Hebrew phrases. You know, stuff like good morning, good night, sleep well, whatever, that’s BS, kiss my ass, I am a hungry hippo, go shave your beard and a standard pickup line which I successfully used on another unsuspecting Israeli traveler in Nkhata Bay.

Sadly, this is where I had to say goodbye to my new Middle Eastern friends and was back on my own. This was also where, for the first time, I felt a bit homesick. The lake at NB reminded me so much of the ocean complete with what looked like ride-able waves. I unsuccessfully attempted some body surfing before taking on the waves in a dugout canoe. Helen Keller would’ve had better luck at a game of hide-and-seek. A dugout canoe isn't exactly conducive to much of anything but wobbling around the surface of calm waters, let alone sloshing around amongst crashing waves. I had to turn back after realizing 80% of the canoe was submerged in water. The local kids definitely got a kick out of the crazy mzungu nearly capsizing her canoe.

I spent the next few days in Nkhata Bay chilling out lakeside and meeting some awesome new peeps including a pair of girls from Seattle who shared my weird sense of humor and pace of life.

So now I am back in Lilongwe where I’ll be helping out some Peace Corps volunteers set up for the launch of the EveryOne campaign for the Save the Children Foundation to combat mother & child mortality in developing countries.  Should be great!

Oh yeah, and while I’m here I need to to stock up on bilharzia meds after all that time swimming in parasitic-worm-infested waters. Gotta love African disease paranoia.

Little Known Facts

Black mambas are not black
Black rhinos are not black
White rhinos are not white
Papayas taste like poo

A Little Blood, Double the Sweat & a Few Tears

I am learning quickly that keeping a blog is like giving yourself homework assignments. It’s something you know you need to do, always procrastinate on, and sometimes need to half-ass just to get something turned in (aka uploaded). Lack of internet access doesn’t help the situation, but I really do want to keep up with this.
That said, I’m a bit behind on entries. I haven’t gotten a chance to write about my first volunteer project along my travels, so here we go.

I set off on assignment with Habitat for Humanity Zambia in the rural village of Kaoma, 6 hours’ drive from the capital city of Lusaka. I had no idea what to expect when signing up for the program, except that we were going to be building houses, conditions would be rugged and it would be super hot. Needless to say, all 3 expectations were met. Let me elaborate:

The Cause: to eliminate poverty by providing simple, decent houses to families in need
The Group: We had a total of 12 people between volunteers, our group leader and HFHZ liason. It was a good mix of people overall, except when taking into account the fact that the whole volunteer group was women. Why is it that women dominate any kind of volunteer work? Seriously, any volunteering I’ve done in the past has been at least 80% women. I’m gonna have to look up the psychology behind why men are so cold-hearted. I keed, I keed. But I digress…
The Conditions: We stayed at a small community center in a village at the edge of Kaoma. There was no electricity or running water, but we came prepared with our headlamps and there was a local well where we were able to pump water for bathing. We slept six to a room, were given straw mats to lay our sleeping bags on, had some shelves to explode our stuff onto and rigged our mosquito nets up along the rafters. Sure, we had some creepy crawlies, the odd stench of death and decay and a resident mouse trying to chew into some granola bars, but you just have to ignore all of that and it’s totally fine.
The Work: The work was tough. Temperatures hovered around 100 degrees every day with relentless sun blasting our skin and eyes. We hauled bricks & lumber, shoveled rocks & dirt, mixed mortar & concrete. We stacked, laid, lifted, pushed, pulled, scraped, stabbed, slammed, jammed, hammered and painted. Thanks to our stellar teamwork and group of seriously tough chicks, we finished 2 homes in a matter of 10ish days. This came as a surprise to the locals, as they didn’t anticipate a team of all women could tear it up so hard.
The Food: I was surprised to hear we’d be buying most of our food from the Shoprite grocery store in Lusaka before heading to Kaoma. Naturally, being a group of Americans, we loaded up on the standard necessities for survival in the African bush: chips, cookies, Nutella, soda & candy. Thankfully, HFHZ hired some local women to cook us authentic meals during our stay: rice, maize-meal, veggies, beans, greens and chicken/beef/fish.
The Community: I love, love, loved our little neighborhood! Every day we walked the 5min stretch between “our house” to the build site, greeting the local families along the way. There was a group of about 15 kids that would walk with us, holding our hands and helping us carry our supplies. They’d hang out under the tree all afternoon waiting for us to come play with them during our water & shade breaks. We worked alongside the local masons, Liswaniso, Sililo-Sililo and Humphrey, who made sure we weren’t screwing anything up. We taught them the phrase “chop chop!”, which they got a huge kick out of, and would accompany any request with “chop chop!” and a huge grin.

Notable Happenings:

• Ali and I got to play some netball (bball) with some Zambian secondary school girls. We didn't do too shabby.
• We got to celebrate Zambian Independence Day by checking out a Sunday church service followed by a celebration at a nearby soccer (football) field. By the time we were ready to leave, we pretty much had the entire town’s population of children following us around like we were a mzungu freakshow.
• Halfway through our stay, we noticed our well got super crowded with people lining up their buckets. Turns out an elephant knocked down the power lines in Kafue National Park, where the power is routed through from Lusaka. They had no other way of getting water but from our little well.
• On our last night by the campfire, our van driver showed up from Lusaka bearing marshmallows. We’d been on the hunt for them since Day 1, so it was a fantastic surprise. We then showed the masons and kids how to make s’mores. They were skeptical at first, but by the end of the night they were all about it and had melted marshmallow all over their faces.
• We had some serious black mamba paranoia that was exacerbated when Humphrey told us we were at the start of the rainy season, which is prime black mamba time. As a storm brewed in the distance, we envisioned BMs raining from the sky. Molly added to the freakout factor by sharing some little-known facts about mambas, including the fact that they are not black. Well that's nice.

Overall, it was an amazing experience. It felt great to be able to lend myself to a worthy cause and become a part of the community in Kaoma.