Hello and Merry Christmas to everyone who wishes more information on how Ray and Dave have been spending the last year, and to total strangers who were searching on google.com for "monkey fountain". In 2001 the stock market went down so we didn't build a house; also there was a bit of working and going to restaurants involved as well as feeling bad about the war along with everyone else. We didn't know anyone who was killed directly, which may have been a small comfort to them in their final minutes.

The part that makes the best slide show is our summer vacation. Lights, please.

In June 2001, we went to Africa to see the total solar eclipse, with a brief detour to Rome where we met some of my relatives embarking on a 19-day Grand Bus Tour of Europe. We flew to Johannesburg, rented a car, and drove to Sun City, the place that Paul Simon or Bruce Springsteen or somebody wouldn't play. Sun City is a Casino-Disneyland that was built as a playground for rich whites in the apartheid era. It was located in the former Bophuthatswana, one of the "homelands", so as to be pretend-outside South African mores, like our Indian Casinos and the World Wide Web.
Casinos are one of the least recognized examples of Outsider Art in the world today, an architectural form that has developed, like Watts Towers and the bottle house of Rhyolite, entirely without reference to the canons of Western Taste. Here's a monkey fountain next to a row of elephant statues guarding the bridge between the main casino ("entertainment center") and the water area (slides, artificial waves).
Here are a couple ibises wandering around on the golf course.

This bird isn't in the South African bird book so I can't tell you its name right off. The casino had an aviary you could walk around in and take pictures of a collection of birds from various color-saturated ecosystems.

Since we were hotel guests, we actually got to visit most places on the campus. When you drive through the gate, the guards give you a little card which explains where you are entitled to go. Thus, every hundred yards or so, a colored man gets to inspect the internal passport of any of the mostly white guests, a nice twist on local history. (But not to worry about giving offense to WTO, the guards and maids still don't have health insurance. They're independent contractors, just like you and me.)

We left Sun City and entered Botswana -- the customs people were very friendly. Some Canadian fisherman explained what lines to stand in. The border between South Africa and Botswana is the Limpopo River, but the only gray green greasy we saw was a puddle of chemicals we drove through to check the spread of hoof and mouth disease.

We drove as far as Francistown, a small town in northeastern Botswana, and spent the night.

Here are some AIDS posters on the main street of Francistown, except for the lower right corner, which is a poster in Harare, Zimbabwe. Some years down the road we'll see which approach works best.

  
The next day we drove to Maun, the tourist rendezvous for the Okavango Delta. The countryside looks like West Texas or Bakersfield, until you get close enough to see that the plants and animals are all different. These ostriches were on the shoulder of the highway.
These wild dagga grow near Maun and in the delta. This is not a psychotropic herb despite the pun in the name. It's ferociously sharp and unsuitable for use in the manufacture of Ben-wa balls but the birds perch on the stalk and peck the seeds out.
We found our hotel, and met with our guide for the 11-day camping safari we'd signed up for. The next morning we got on a little plane, and flew to a camp in the Okavango Delta, a large marshy area where the Okavango River ends up (instead of flowing into an ocean). Here are a couple shots from the plane.
 
We were met near the airstrip by three men poling canoes called mokoros, on which we spent the next four early mornings and late afternoons looking at wildlife. The polers were also respectable wildlife biologists -- my guide was named Player, and Ray's was named Johnson. They pushed us through the delta, often through pretty thick reeds.
 
And lily pads.

The ability of all of our guides to see stuff was amazing. They could see a huge field of reeds yet pick out a 3/4-inch "long reed frog". Later that evening, as the crickets started chirping, we heard what sounded like notes played on a marimba, and Dave asked the guides what was making that sound. The answer -- "long reed frog".
The guides somehow also noticed this reed snake, the same color as the reeds.
 
 
There were hundreds of kinds of birds, which the guides often recognized by the sound they made, the tree they were on, or the way they flew. This one is called a "little bee-eater".
There are really cool trees called African sausage trees.
And there are termite mounds everywhere.
 
The camp was very nice and was fully staffed. There were eleven crew for only two guests (us). They fixed lunch and dinner, did laundry. We stayed in huge canvas tents. We frequently heard the hippos munching the reeds, though we never saw them. Apparently one hippo had taken to sleeping in an empty tent site in our camp.
Here's an attractively sculpted termite mound on a little island we stopped on during an afternoon mokoro drive.
This is right side up.
One day we went on a walk on a large island. Our guides (Player, Pilot, and Johnson) warned us that this was dangerous, that we should stick together, and not make any sudden loud noises. We saw lots of stuff on the island, including giraffes, various antelopes (impalas, tsessebes, and wildebeests), and a really cool little creature called a honey badger, which was black with a white back.
There was also a "python vine" climbing up this tree.
On the last evening of our stay in the Okavango Delta, Ray took a little lesson poling a makoro.
 
As we went to the airstrip to fly back to Maun, we heard on the radio that there was a mating pair of lions right next to it.
A jeep from a nearby lodge had been watching them.
When lions mate, they do it for about 30 seconds every 20 minutes for about two days.
 
 
We crammed our tiny amount of luggage into the plane.
We waited for the wildebeests...
...and elephants to get off of the runway.

Then we flew back to the increasingly sprawling town of Maun, the main jump-off point for safaris in Botswana. We got our Land Rover and trailer, and headed to our next camp in the Moremi Game Reserve.

On to part 2...