Saturday, Oct. 23, 2004

yebo gogo

ok, so let me tell you about my spring break. we left for the orange river on teh border of namibia and SA on friday. by sunday we left early in the morning for our three-day expedition. we packed our two-person rafts with everything we would need to survive on the river for three days. we spent our afternoons floating down the mostly serene river, but there were some rapids strong enough to capsize one person's boat. those were scary, we swam through them too and i hit a rock! at night we would camp out on teh side of the river, under the stars, amongst the scorpions. we were 10 hours from the nearest large city, so you can imagine how the stars were. we drank the water from teh river, we washed our dishes in it, we bathed in it, we washed our clothes in it. . . it was unlike anything i had ever experienced before. it was amazing.

then we left the river for the kalahari desert. we went to the transfronteir park in botswana and south africa. we spent our mornings and evenings on game drives. the kalahari is famous for its lions and cheetahs, but we saw neither. but we did see some giraffes, and a hyena and a thunderstorm, the latter two much more rare than the lions, so i thought that was cool...
one of our trucks broke down in the middle of that though, so we were kindof stranded in the desert for a bit. kind of miserable, but it wasn't too bad. some people decided to pass the time by being intoxicated for every second of it. that pisses me off. people need to learn not to depend on alcohol. there was a pool at our campsite and some people thought it appropriate to strip naked while swimming. what the fuck. so there were some group tensions, but it didn't detract from the overall experience.

but now i think the river has left me with . . . intestinal problems . . . now i have 3 more weeks of work and then i take a 2-week road trip across south africa and into mozambique, where i will get real third-world country cred. i can't wait to tell you all about that.

anyway, its a saturday night so i'm going to head off, but i just wanted to let everyone know what i'm up to! Tootsiens!