That was fun

I just came back from possibly the most epic vacation of my life (assuming three months sleeping in a tent on the ground does not count as a vacation and is instead in some separate category all together).  Three days on Safari in Kruger, a night in good old Swaziland, and a week in Mozambique where I got to go DIVING in TOFO and it was REALLY REALLY GOOD.

Also...Maputo has lots of gelato, real espresso, and chocolate croissants.  I am deeply in favor of every single thing that has happened to me in the last 13 days, with the possible exception of spending 8 hours of my life in a bus packed with 35 adults and between 6 and 8 breastfeeding infants.  (They weren't always breast feeding though, sometimes their mom's would intersperse the breast milk with orange fanta.  Thats healthy.)

I have an insane amount of pictures, but I also have an insanely slow internet connection.  I promise to actually put some thoughts together and post those relatively soon though.  I know I say that a lot, but this time I mean it.


Also...I wish I was still drinking espresso and eating chocolate croissants in Maputo.  Next to a giant cement sculpture of an iguanadon.  Like you do.

Or hanging out with lions.

Bonus Round

I spent the morning sitting on my couch, listening to "This American Life," drinking coffee, and watching these monkeys hang out in a papaya tree in the yard.  Not too shabby.

In Which I Gain A Mailing Address

Turns out it was much easier to do than I was previously told.  So...feel free to shower me with gifts.  Or maybe just a post card or two:

Rebecca Miller
PO Box D379
The Gables, H126
Swaziland

(A note or two on there clarifying that you really do mean Swaziland and Switzerland wouldn't hurt.  Wouldn't it be great if I was kidding about that?)

Creepy Crawlies

But not Boris the Spider.

I like to take pictures.  Three of my favorite things are graffiti, bizarre signage (so many opportunities around here...) and some of the interesting critters with which I share my habitat.  I absolutely have to post some of the amazing examples of that middle category in the near future, but I've also acquired some pretty good examples of the third lately.  Which obviously I feel a need to share.

 The elusive rainbow colored lizard.  I have been trying to get a photograph of one of these guys since Peace Corps.  I see them around some times, but infrequently enough that its always a little bit exciting.  They're pretty, and fast...and may or may not have some sort of association with lightning.  I'm still figuring that one out.

 This dog's name is Sinkwa.  Which means bread.  Sinkwa is very ugly and very cute at the same time.  She has some sort of neurological disorder and spends most of her time walking around in circles.  Obviously she belongs to a Swaziland PCV.

 I think this is a very small swarm of very bright green locusts.  But I have no idea what a regular swarm of locusts looks like, or really even what a single locust looks like, so I could definitely be wrong about that.

 A tiny little bright yellow slug.  S/he lives on my windowpane from time to time.

A centipede?  Millipede?  What the hell is this thing?  Whatever it is, there are a few too many of them in my house and they are a little bit too big for me to be comfortable with.  I mean....squishing one would have way too much...byproduct.  This one lives on my curtains.  Obviously my solution to this was to buy new curtains.

Tingane-Kwane

Which means...stories.  Or folktales.  Or children's stories.  Not to be confused with tindzaba, which are also stories, but stories that are true-ish, or explain something, or are possibly a report and/or meeting.  Also, tingane-kwane almost always contain a song as part of the story, but those songs have their own word that I haven't quite figured out.

Anyways, I've been interviewing and transcribing like a fiend lately.  More interviewing than transcribing really.  Turns out I hate transcribing.  I'm just going to pay my research assistants to do it while I lay on a beach in Mozambique.  I think this is what it feel like to be half a step up from the absolute bottom of the food chain.

One of the most popular characters that keeps coming up in these stories is a guy/girl named Ncjane.  (Incidentally, SiSwati is a really complicated language that doesn't always designate gender, and animal words tend to be genderless so...a lot of these stories may or may not be gender neutral?  Which is completely fascinating in a country where gender is such a defining aspect of every part of your life).

Ncjane is a trickster.  S/he is like coyote, or Anansi.  He just goes around screwing with people and demonstrating all around cleverness.  Sometimes ncjane is a jackal, but more often s/he is a rabbit.

As told by my informants:

Ncjane, the Elephant, and the Hippos

“Ncjane was taken as a very clever animal.  So she went to an elephant.  And then she said to the elephant, ”Big as you are I can pull you down to the river”  And then the elephant said, “Who, you?  A tiny thing like this?”  Ncjane said, “I can do it!”  And then he went to a damn of hippos.  He came to a hippo, a big hippo.  He said, “I can pull you out of this!”  And they said, “What, you!?”  “I’ll show you!”  So he got a very strong rope, gave it to the elephant.  And to that one he said, I’ll be in the pool myself so that I can pull you.  And then, he gave it to the hippo and said “because I want to pull you out!”  So…these two big animals had to pull and pull! 

            That story, they are trying to show that...don’t think, because you are big you can think bigger than a small thing.”

The above is hysterical in person, I promise.  As is this one:

Ncjane and the Lion’s Den

 Now this story, it goes like this:

            “There was this animal, the lion.  The strongest animal in the woodlands.  Now, because it was kind of going out and hunting for food, and at the end of they day was always coming up with nothing, then it said to itself, “I’m going to stay inside my cave and pretend to be sick.  And I’m going to scream for help.  Each and every hour scream for help.  So that when an animal comes inside…I mean, it will ask outside ‘what is happening?  What is happening?’  I will say, ‘come in my friend, and help me.”  And when the animal comes inside, he pounces on that animal and eats him.  Such that it went on that way, it caught several several unsuspicious animals.  Until that time that that animal he talked about –Ncjane!  Ncjane he came.  And he said, “How.  Why are you crying so loud?  What is wrong with you?”  [The lion] said, “Ah…I am very sick.  I urgently need your help my friend.  If you could only come in.”  And then Ncjane said, “No.  I want so much to come in and help you.  But when I look down I can see some of the feet of animals going in.  But I don’t see them coming out!  So I’m afraid I won’t be able to help.”

The Humidity is Making My Ice Cream Melt

Swaziland, in addition to holding the record highest HIV, TB, and possibly moonshine consumed per capita, also has the highest amount of lightning strikes in the world.  I think I mentioned that its the rainy season now, which usually lasts from about November/December through early February, and this tiny little country is more than living up to its statistics.

The storms here are wild.  In South Africa I thought they were something, but here I feel like I've moved up to a whole new level.  Like I've moved into a house that doesn't have a metal roof and so might not be immediately singled out for a lightning strike and so the weather gods decided we need to kick it up a notch.  (bam).

There's a good storm starting up right now, as I write.  I'm sitting at Mantenga Lodge, which is basically my office, and staring up at execution rock while the thunder gets ready to really make a statement.  I've been chatting with a pair of Austrians one table over about their vacation through South Africa and Swaziland, and on the inherent 'awesomeness' of the house brownie.  (Its certainly awesomely large.)

I like sitting here and watching the storm.  The thunder is a constant rumble, there's never much of a break between rolls, and it feels like its coming from all around us.  Intermittently there are flashes of lightning from behind the clouds and around execution rock.  You always know when a storm is coming here.  The air gets so thick -- mere humidity doesn't even begin to describe it.  I think a few years ago I wrote about how it would twist and press and wring itself into such a tight, full feeling that there was nothing it could do next but explode.  Here that still holds.  It presses itself onto your skin, invades your lungs and your hair and your living room.  You have to push through it to walk up a hill or out of a building.  It gets hot, too.  Miserably, horribly hot.  While I admit that I am a giant whiner when it comes to any temperature below 65 degrees or above 85, I think its still too hot for any rational person to be happy with.  I carry my lime green umbrella around with me everywhere.  In the insane heat it gives me a little bit of shade, and when the intense rain inevitably follows, well...then it protects me from that too.

Now the storm is really going.  The lightning flashes are getting more distinct.  When they get really close they become so clearly laid out that you can almost see each little tendril of electricity shooting out in search of anything it can find to make contact with.  It is cinematic.  The lightning comes in a spectrum of yellow, green, purple, and orange tints, all on top of the same almost sickly shade that I can only describe as what electricity looks like straight.  Or maybe its just my eyes that create that impression, like they need the color for a chaser after such a powerful shot of straight light.

After the thunder and lightning have made their points for a while, the rain gets started.  And it can start fast.  Today it looks like the most of the downpour might end up somewhere else, but on days when it does decide to come down on top of you -- look out.  The rain will slam down with a crazy intensity for about 20 or 25 minutes, and then let up and vacillate between proper rain and a mild drizzle for the next 24 hours.  Like it took so much effort to get out there, and put so much work into the initial downpour, it doesn't want to just walk away afterwards.  I can respect that.

Now it looks like we're back to the light drizzle phase.  Looking out at the mountain again, its become disgustingly beautiful here.  The sun has begun to shine through the clouds, but there are wisps of cloud and fog drifting around the peak of Execution Rock.  (The Austrian tourists, having finished their awesome brownies, are having a photography fest.  Good call, Austrian tourists).  The mountains are full of granite outcrops and slopes, and those have all transformed into impromptu waterfalls.  Which the sun is intermittently shining onto and highlighting one after the other.  The thunder is still coming and going, but it seems as if for the moment the storm has decided to direct itself elsewhere.