Random Rambles

We arrive in Tbilisi after flying via Montreal and Paris.

For our first few days, we check into the Fabrika. It’s a hostel, but also has private rooms.

The Fabrika is in an old Soviet-era clothing factory.

The graffiti on this building is deliberate. But just about every available surface in Tblisi is covered with graffiti. Seems to be a general Euro affliction to deface all of your elegant old buildings with spray paint.

It’s very lively at night.

We spend the first few days gently coming down from jet lag. We visit some museums and sightsee at our leisure.

As in most cities that have a Metro, in Tblisi the underground is the best way to get around.

Built in the Soviet days, it’s a bit shabby but does the job well. And it’s cheap. Hey, compared to the O-train, it’s a model of convenience and efficiency.

The Old Town is the oldest part of Tblisi. It’s full of winding alleys and quaint houses in various states of either full restoration or complete decay.

Tblisi is full of small hole-in-the-wall shops selling fruit, vegetables, and everything else. (SPAR mini-marts are sprouting everywhere like mushrooms, however. No doubt these tiny shops are doomed.)

Maria purchases a churchkhela. They look like candles, but they’re walnuts dipped in syrup made from grape juice.

Lots of sidewalk vendors as well.

There are beggars on the street, too. Probably fewer than in downtown Ottawa, though.

This is the Anchiskhati Basilica, the oldest church in Tblisi. Like, 6th-century-AD old.

We cross the Peace Bridge over the Mtkvari river.

The Mtkvari is the main artery of Tblisi.

It’s also difficult to pronounce.

Here’s a view from the Narikala Fortress.

Some typical Georgian food. The pastry with the cheese and egg in it is an adjaruli khachapuri. The dumpling thingies are called khinkali. The soup is a concoction of beef, vegetables, and garlic. All washed down with a glass of tasty Georgian white.

Sight or Insight of the Day

Tblisi is typically third-worldy in the great number of stray animals in the streets. But there seems to be a campaign to collect strays, spay/neuter them, treat any medical conditions, then release them with a plastic tag in their ear.

They’re very friendly. I don’t think anyone mistreats them, unlike other places where strays are starving, diseased, and despised.

I can’t understand why the authorities don’t encourage individual people to actually adopt individual dogs. They’re extremely good natured (the dogs, that is.) However unthreatened they may be, road traffic is always a hazard.

If we lived here, I’m sure we’d have a houseful of mutts.

OK, enough is enough. It’s time to get back out on the road.

We leave today for the Republic of Georgia. Why Georgia, you ask? Why not? You have to start somewhere.

Originally, we planned to describe in brief how the last two-years-plus has gone. Like most people, we’ve been stuck at home. Of course, first we had to find a home.

Which we did. We are now condo-dwellers. So we won’t be quite as footloose as before.

Maria has become a pickleball enthusiast. I’ve been reading lots of books. Mostly old stuff.

As for recapping noteworthy goings-on, we just haven’t been doing that much. We weren’t even thinking of going anywhere until very recently.

Travel-wise, we went on several canoe trips with friends. And dipped our toes in international travel by visiting Old Orchard Beach, Maine, at the invitation of our friend John.

So this is a short entry in aid of re-learning how compose a blog page, basically.

Sight or Insight of the Day (Year?)

Probably the event that stands out in the recent past is our encounter with a fawn.

It’s a long story. While at the cottage, we came across a baby deer that had lost its mother. We took it to a wildlife rehabilitation centre an hour’s drive away. The fawn stayed in Maria’s lap most of the way.

So long, Ottawa. Tbilisi, here we come.

…or is it? An epilogue is defined as: “a section or speech at the end of a book or play that serves as a comment on or a conclusion to what has happened.“

We can’t believe it’s been four months since our return to Canada. After our two-week quarantine was over, we headed for our cottage, 114 kilometres west of Ottawa.

It’s cold in early April. Besides electric heaters in the bedrooms, the wood stove provides warmth.

It snows several times while we’re up here.

(Just to demonstrate how the weather has changed, we have recently gone through as heatwave. Temperatures were over 40 degrees Celsius.)

It doesn’t really feel as if we’ve been home for four months. We scarcely see people, we seldom go out except to the nearby town of Perth for shopping and laundry. If the idea is to avoid contact, we’re certainly doing our part.

In the early days, we have friends over for dinner. Physical distancing is observed.

We eat well here. And it’s not only BBQs.

So we live day-to-day in a sort of middle existence: our travels almost seem like a dream now, as if we never left. But the fact of COVID 19-prompted isolation means that we don’t really feel as if we’ve returned.

It seems unlikely – or at least impossible to predict – that in the near future, it’ll be feasible to roam if you want to.

We are resigned to staying in the country. In a concession to domesticity, we buy a car. (We borrowed one for our first few months here.)

We suppose the next step is finding a permanent place to live.

All in all, we are fortunate to have this place to shelter in.

The days slip by in a slow routine. It’s very relaxing.

There are worse places we could be.

Sight or Insight of the Day

On July 1st, we spend our first Canada Day in Canada for three years.

Our last Canada Day was spent in Bhutan. Was that really a whole year ago? Back then, we would never have imagined that we’d be home at this time.

That’s right. As we create this entry, we are sitting high in a hotel suite overlooking downtown Ottawa, spending two weeks in self-isolation. It’s a long way from the African savanna. Anyway, to take up where we left off…

In Senyati Safari Camp, we enjoy a covered bathroom/living space that comes with our campsite.

We never get tired of watching the elephants at the watering hole.

We can’t take our South African rental car into Zimbabwe. So we arrange a land transfer to Victoria Falls (in Zimbabwe) and rent another car for two weeks, leaving our car at Senyati.

Zimbabwe is undergoing several crises at once (before even taking covid-19 into consideration.) Their economy is in dire straits, as usual. This is the result – as it always is – of bending over backwards and using smoke and mirrors and a labyrinth of bizarre regulations to maintain the illusion that an utterly worthless currency is actually worth anything.

Our first night is spent in Hwange National Park. On our way back to the main road, we stop at he Painted Dog Conservation Centre. (‘Painted dogs’ are what they call ‘wild dogs’ in Zimbabwe.)

It’s extremely professional and dedicated. (Most of the staff we meet are women.) Turns out we were phenomenally lucky to have seen those wild dogs in Moremi.

Besides hosting rescued painted dogs for recovery, rehabilitation, and release, they lead educational programs for youth.

We carry on to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second biggest city.

We go to Matobo National Park. Besides containing the grave of arch-colonialist Cecil John Rhodes, the park is known for its rock formations.

These formations are called ‘kopjes’ (sounds like ‘copies’). They’re found in many places in Africa.

Cave paintings are relics of the San people, the original inhabitants of the southern part of the African continent since, well, forever. (Black Bantu people are relative newcomers. White people even more so.)

Here’s a hunting scene.

This is recognizably a giraffe.

And this is a rhino.

We stay at the Farmhouse Lodge. Not at the lodge itself, but in their campground, a few kilometres away. We have the place entirely to ourselves.

Next stop is the Zimbabwe Ruins. (A running joke since independence is that the misrule of the Mugabe regime has turned the entire country into the ‘Zimbabwe Ruins’.)

It’s a tight squeeze on the trail up to the ‘hill complex’.

View from the hill complex down to the ‘great enclosure’.

A few more views of Great Zimbabwe.

Another crisis in Zimbabwe is a shortage of fuel. We are fortunate enough to have leftover US dollars from our trip to Iran: petrol stations that charge in US dollars are few and far between, but you can fill up immediately.

Stations that charge in local currency, however, have massive lines of cars that wait hours for their turn…

…and of course, many stations have run completely out of fuel.

In the Eastern Highlands, we spend a few days in Chimanimani.

This little girl carries her doll in a blanket on her back, just like mom.

We hike to the Bridal Veil Falls.

We really like our accommodation in Chimanimani. Dee and Jane, our hosts, have two friendly dogs (and a friendly cat) that keep us company.

This one is Rocky.

And this one is Carny. He’s completely blind. Always has been. We’re impressed by the way he gets around the property.

After spending a few days in Harare, our plan is to visit Mana Pools National Park, then take the Kariba Ferry as a shortcut (via Lake Kariba) back to the western part of the country.

As it turns out, Mana Pools is only accessible for 4WD vehicles. And the Kariba ferry is cancelled due to a lack of paying customers. As an alternative, we visit the little-visited Mavhuradonha Wilderness, tucked up against the Mozambique border.

Then we begin our mad dash for Johannesburg – it’s a full day’s drive to Bulawayo and another to Victoria Falls.

In Vic Falls, we stop for a glass of wine at the Victoria Falls Hotel.

It’s a wonderful old pile of colonial decadence.

The falls themselves are pretty cool.

We get thoroughly soaked walking the path that faces the falls.

This is our last act of overt tourism before we make a beeline for Johannesburg in an attempt to beat the national border lockdowns that are nipping at our heels.

Sight or Insight of the Day – What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

Beware of black swan events!

We wind up traveling from the northeast corner of Zimbabwe all the way back to Canada with breathtaking speed.

• Beginning at dawn in Mavhurdonha, we drive to Bulawayo – virtually the length of the country.
• We plan to spend a few more nights in Hwange National Park, but decide to head straight to Victoria Falls instead.
• We drop off our Zimbabwe rental car and get an overland transfer back to Botswana.
• After a night in Senyati Lodge, we drive to Francistown, Botswana.
• Next day, we cross the border into South Africa and drive to Johannesburg.
• That very night, we decide we’d better try and catch a flight back to Canada ASAP. We manage to find one the next day (in theory).
• We arrive at the airport. While waiting to check in, we are told by Turkish Airways that the Istanbul-Canada leg of our flight ‘is cancelled’.
• My sister manages to book us on a flight that day: Johannesburg – Amsterdam – Paris – Montreal.
• Next evening, we arrive in Montreal, where we are met by my sister and brother-in-law in two cars.
• We overnight near the airport and drive to Ottawa the next morning.
• We check into a very comfortable high-rise apartment-hotel for our obligatory two-week quarantine.

Now we stare at each other in disbelief – just a few days ago, weren’t we sitting in our shorts & T-shirts having a barbecue, marveling at the sky full of stars while a family of elephants pass silently in the dark three metres away? Today we’re looking out over downtown Ottawa at the ass-end of a Canadian winter.

So our random rambles may now be over. We don’t know what the near future brings. But neither does anyone else. Happy ramblin’, everyone. Stay safe. We’ll see you on the other side of this thing.

And remember: Life is a Highway.

From Maun, we drive to the area of the Makgadikgadi Pan.

We pitch our tent at Planet Baobab. The covered tent sites are a bonus.

Name checks out: there are majestic baobabs throughout the property.

We arrange a dawn safari to visit a meerkat colony.

Along the way, we see hundreds – maybe thousands – of zebras. Apparently, this migration is the second-largest one in the world.

Zebras can run surprisingly fast.

Breakfast is eaten after sunup. It’s cool in the early morning here.

A golden orb web spider hitches a ride.

We are told that meerkats prefer to stay in their burrows when the weather is this cool. So we’re lucky to find a group of hardy ones that are out and about.

We are amazed how close you can get to them.

The Makgadikgadi Pan, according to Wikipedia, is one of the largest salt flats in the world.

On the way back, we stop in a wee settlement and buy some marula nuts.

The strong wind moves the tall grass in a hypnotic ballet.

We pass through Gweta village on our way back to Planet Baobab.

It’s a long, flat drive to Chobe National Park.

We go on a safari in Chobe.

The Chobe River divides Botswana from Namibia and gives the park its name.

A lion appears in the road. (About 30 seconds after I say ‘Now we’ll probably see a lion’ when our guide gets out to fix a loose battery terminal in our non-starting safari vehicle.)

He is very casual as he saunters down the road. We follow him for ten minutes or so.

He stops to watch some young hippos play-fighting by the river.

Another safari vehicle joins in stalking the big guy.

He decides if it’s worth his while to try for an impala.

He doesn’t even spare a glance as he marches along, metres away from us.

The lion eventually tires of our company and heads off into the bush.

Elsewhere in the park, we come across a flock of marabou storks.

Marabout storks are counted among the ‘Ugly Five‘.

We stay at the Senyati Safari Camp, not far from Chobe. On the drive to nearby Kasane to do some shopping, elephants crossing the road are a common sight.

Senyati has a waterhole in front of the lodge that attracts all kinds of animals, especially elephants.

They also have a cool ‘photography bunker’. You go through a short tunnel and get a waterhole-side view.

It’s a nice way to end the day. Especially because Botswana has dozens of lodges where the guests pay 500-plus US$ per day (and per person!) to enjoy something similar.

We, on the other hand, pay 20 US$ per day to camp. (Of course, in this unfenced camp, you might get squashed by an elephant in your tent. Or visited by hyenas or leopards in the night.)

Sight or Insight of the Day

On the way to Chobe, we spot an incongruous trailer from England.

We later find at the Botswana-Zimbabwe border scores of unlikely vehicles from the UK. It’s a bit of a mystery.

We see our last entry is dated February 29th – leap day! As is common in Africa, we go weeks at a time without finding decent WiFi.

Anyway – in Maun, we stay in a covered tent at the Okavango River Lodge.

A lively place, but our waterfront site is very relaxing.

We book a safari to the Moremi Game Reserve, departing at dawn. We are joined by Durk, who is days away from retirement from the Netherlands foreign service.

Our guide introduces himself as ‘Frog. Just call me Frog.’ OK.

An opportunistic horn-bill tries to panhandle some food while we have breakfast at the park gate.

An elephant enjoys his breakfast, too.

As do the zebras.

Giraffes, too.

A pack of wild dogs crosses the road. We follow them to a nearby waterhole.

There are four or five hyenas gnawing on the remains of a buffalo in the waterhole.

Our guide says he has never been this close to a pack of wild dogs – or seen so many at one time.

We confirm later – in Zimbabwe – that seeing a pack of wild dogs is indeed a rare encounter.

There is a tense standoff between the two groups.

We carry on. A troop of baboons doze in the road.

An unusual sight – a party of banded mongooses scamper by. They stop to cavort with the young baboons for several minutes.

A lot of what we see is flat grassland.

A crocodile the size of a Buick crosses our path.

Lunchtime. We have a picnic in a shady grove after Frog makes sure there aren’t any dangerous critters in the area.

After lunch, we pass a hippo pool.

Next day, we arrange a trip by mokoro through a part of the Okavango Delta.

Durk joins us for this excursion as well.

There are Monet-esque lily pads everywhere.

Those distance dark spots in the lake? They’re hippos, keeping an eye out so we don’t get too close.

Hippos kill around 500 people in Africa per year. Slightly different than the Disney hippos.

A marbled reed frog appears in the vegetation. Mystery solved: our guide shows us the business card for his guiding business: ‘Reed Frog Tours’.

An island makes a good spot for lunch.

After lunch, we go on a walking safari.

On the way back, the sun beats mercilessly on Durk’s bare head. His poler fashions a cap for him out of lily pads.

With the exception of the odd palm tree on the horizon, we could be paddling canoes through Algonquin Park.

Sight or Insight of the Day

On our walking safari, we come across the remains of a long-dead hippo. Probably killed in battle with another hippo.

Its remaining thick hunk of flesh looks like a giant pork rind.

Among the list of tasks to accomplish while in Johannesburg: collect our South African visa extension.

You get three months on arrival. We knew that we wanted to spend more than that in the area, so we applied as soon as we got here.

This turns out to be expensive, time-consuming, and vexatious. At long last, we pick up our passports with the much-desired extension.

The day we leave Johannesburg, we spend a large part of the day at the Cradle of Humankind Information Centre and nearby sites.

Among other things, we learn that ‘Lucy‘, one of our unimaginably-distant ancestors, is named after ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds‘.

(Cultural tip: good (but a bit violent, like most Luc Besson films) sci-fi film from 2014, ‘Lucy‘, with Scarlett Johansson. It has a barely-there, tangential connection with the fossilized Lucy, too.)

A nearly-complete Australopithecus Africanus skeleton was found in the Sterkfontein caves.

‘Little foot‘ was big news in 1997.

Besides the paleoanthropological interest, the cave is wonderful in itself

This is where the boffins do their work. (But not today, because it’s Saturday.)

Next day, a few more hours of driving brings us to the Botswana frontier post.

Once across, we spend the night in the small town of Kanye. Then we drive 875 kilometres to Maun.

This is the longest single-day drive we’ve ever done, including in Australia, the usual home of the marathon driving session.

Sight or Insight of the Day

‘Pula’ is an interesting setswana word. Besides being the name of the local currency, it also means ‘good fortune’ and ‘rain’ (which is good fortune in this often-dry country.)

Pula also features prominently in the Botswana coat of arms.

We fix a leaky tire in Clarens, South Africa before crossing the border into Lesotho.

Lesotho, like every country in Africa, suffers from appallingly bad government. It’s pretty, though.

(I often marvel how places like Canada and Australia can have politicians that range from ‘mediocre’ to ‘God-awful’ and still be nice places to live. Most places are not that lucky.)

Two aspects of Lesotho stand out: horses and blankets.

Basotho blankets serve many purposes.

The blanket culture starts young.

We spend a week at the Maliba Lodge. We alternate between taking road trips and hiking in the park. (The lodge is located in Ts’ehlanyane National Park.)

One day, we visit the Katse Dam.

You can tour the inside of the dam. (But can’t take pictures, for some reason.)

There are a couple of Danish nurses on our tour of the dam. They’re volunteering at a hospital in a town up the road.

Goats and sheep abound. Lesotho is a big producer of mohair. Or was, until the government gave sold a monopoly on the export of mohair to a single Chinese man. (Who has stopped paying the farmers.)

No part of Lesotho is lower than 1,000 metres above sea level.

Another day, we drive around the northeast of the country as far as the Letseng diamond mine.

We spot this unusual bird along the way.

Some days, we hike the trails that criss-cross the park.

This beast appears nightly near our rondavel in Maliba. It’s a full-grown eland. And it’s huge.

On our way to Roma, we stop near Leribe to see some dinosaur footprints.

Supposed to be 200 million years old.

Roma is an interesting small town. We stay at the historic Roma Trading Post. We are so charmed, we spend five days here.

Our little bungalow has its own garden.

Thaba Bosiu is where the Kingdom of Lesotho got its start, under King Moshoeshoe.

This is Mount Qiloane.

It’s reputed to be the inspiration for the distinctive basotho hat, or mokorotlo.

…which is also found on the license plates….

….and the national flag.

From Thaba Bosiu, we drive to the historic town of Morija.

We get lost on the way back to Roma. Turns out we stumble onto a private dwelling area that belongs to the King of Lesotho.

Security personnel point us to the right track.

Next morning, we spend a few hours in Maseru, the pocket-sized capital city.

After departing Lesotho, we break our journey in Kroonstad, then it’s up the N1 to Johannesburg.

The smooth ribbon of the N1 is a far cry from the potholes of the Lesotho road system.

Sight or Insight of the Day

We admit it – we’re suckers for baby animals. We pass many on the roads here.

The mountain climate seems to make them extra-fuzzy, which amps up the cuteness factor.

From the Natal coast, we go inland to the town of Dundee.

This part of KwaZulu Natal is the site of many battlefields dating from the Boer War and earlier, such as the Zulu War of 1879.

One of the first and most disastrous battles of that war was Isandlwana.

(You might notice we have a different car. Nelson was recalled to the Thrifty rental car lot in Durban ‘to be put on a sales list’. We are given a slightly larger version of the Datsun Go, the Go Plus. We name him Shaka, after the great Zulu king.)

The distinctive saddle-shaped mountain looks just like it does in the famous painting by Charles Fripp in London’s National Army Museum.

Not very far is Rorke’s Drift. Unlike Isandlwana, which was catastrophic for the British, Rorke’s Drift was a scene of almost incredible heroism.

I remember seeing this movie, Zulu, as a kid. Later I learn that it’s based on an actual event, the defense of Rorke’s Drift by a handful of British soldiers against an army of thousands of Zulu warriors.

While driving between Islandwana and Rorke’s Drift, we catch sight of some ceremony going on in the fields.

We visit the site of the Boer War battle of Elandslaagte.

All of these battlegrounds are now isolated, peaceful spots. Hard to imagine the blood and slaughter that briefly disturbed the landscape so long ago.

(An interesting historical tidbit: fighting on the Boer side at this battle was a Hollandercorps made up of Dutch volunteers. Among them was a brother of Vincent Van Gogh (Cornelis) AND a brother of Piet Mondrian (Willem).)

Not many people are drawn to these historical places. I complain in a long-past blog entry that even the Second World War holds no interest for most people alive today. So these century-old conflicts are really ancient history. Even though the Boer War had significant Canadian involvement.

We drive though this scenic part of Natal to the Drakensburg and wind up camping at the Hlalanathi Berg Resort.

In Royal Natal National Park, we hike the Rainbow Falls Trail.

As it turns out, this is the same trail we hiked when we were here a few years ago.

Butterflies are everywhere.

From here, our next stop is Lesotho.

Sight or Insight of the Day

At our campground, we form the habit of feeding the birds in the morning.

We get all kinds, including this handsomely-crested hoopoe.

It’s a green drive down to Durban. The highway down from Hluhluey follows rolling hills.

Durban is a modern port and home to many Indo-South Africans. We sample a local specialty – bunny chow.

We visit the KwaMuhle Museum. This building was once the headquarters of the City’s Native Administration Department. It’s now a mini-Apartheid Museum. 

Downtown Durban has many Victorian buildings.

And lots of markets.

A Durban landmark is Moses Mabhida Stadium, built for the soccer World Cup in 2010.

On a sunny Sunday, we go to uShaka Beach.

Next stop up the road is Umkomaas. This is a main town for diving on the Aliwal Shoal.

We use the services of the Aliwal Dive Centre. Our first night, we’re invited by the dive crew to join them for a braai.

I sign up for two dives. The first is a shark dive.

A bucket of sardines attracts the sharks.

The sharks, I’m happy to say, completely ignore you.

To be honest, this breed of shark is not known for its ferociousness, like some sharks.

The second is a plain old shallow reef dive.

One day, we visit the Oribi Gorge.

Among its delights is (what feels like) a death-defying suspension bridge.

Sight or Insight of the Day

We have lunch at the Oribi Gorge Hotel. On our way to the start of the hiking trail is a grassy field that contains half a dozen pigs.

I stand by the fence. One trots over. I pet him through the wire and he immediately sinks into a trance and tumbles on his side, eyes closed in bliss. A second pig rushes up – same thing happens. A thirds waits his turn to feel my magic touch.