Kruger

Visiting Kruger Game Reserve is like driving through The Lion King. We drove all day for three days, stopping every time we spotted something amazing just roaming around. And we only saw a small portion of the park – it’s the size of Belgium.

Antelope

We camped in our tent, stopping at a new campsite every night. We made one big oversight in planning this trip: the website said all campsites had kitchen facilities, so we brought enough groceries for three dinners and road snacks. When we got there we discovered that “kitchen facilities” means “table with hot plate.” No pots and pans, no utensils, no plates. So we ate bread and cheese with a side of trail mix for three days.

Wild dogs are a rare spotting but we were lucky to run across a pack
of them hunting down an antelope.

In fact, the whole camping experience was unenjoyable. The sites were full, but we were the only ones camping in a tent. Everyone around us had RVs with patio furniture and many even surrounded their plots with mesh fences to complete the illusion that they were still in suburbia. Women brought their curling irons. To each his own, but nothing’s more annoying than having to endure your neighbors’ drunken singing, laughing and shouting in Afrikaans while you’re trying to sleep. I think everyone there was at least twenty years older than us; you’d think it’d be quiet by 2am. No.

But the drives were awesome. We saw tons of incredible, beautiful animals that’d we’d never seen before. I got over my fear of driving on the left side. I had “Hakuna Matata” and “When I was a Young Warthog” stuck in my head the whole time. (Previously it was Shakira’s “Waka waka” from looking around South Africa, and “This land is your land” back in the redwoods.)

Pumba!

My favorite moment was sitting up on this ledge and watching a herd of elephants graze below us at sunset.

We could never get close to a hippo out of water.

We glimpsed the elusive white rhino. Or was it black rhino? I mix them up since they're both gray...

This lone bull gave us an angry farewell. We fled out the gates before he could charge at the car.

Swaziland

Smaller than New Jersey

We made it to Swaziland! (Two months ago.) 

At first we stayed with Lewis and Ruby, getting a feel of what Peace Corps Swaziland is like. It’s fairly similar to Peace Corps Paraguay: rural site down a long dirt road, in a poor, land-locked country no one’s heard of, doing development work with locals who are generally indifferent about working on projects, but very friendly. The food here is just as bland and unhealthy as in Paraguay (mealie meal/pap instead of mandioca), unless of course you’re eating at Ruby’s, where it’s the opposite of bland and unhealthy. There’s one aspect of Swazi life that I think makes “community integration” much more difficult: Swazis don’t drink! How would we have bonded with our neighbors in Paraguay if we didn’t get sloshed together at Sunday asados?

Walking through Lewis & Ruby's site. I guess I'm going for the 12-year-old Mormon look.

We helped Lewis and Ruby work on their school library, ate a bunch of good meals, and at night we bundled up to watch movies or play games. I had no idea Swaziland would be so cold! 

We got one siSwati lesson from their tutor, a sweet 20 year old girl who also gave us Swazi names. She named TK Musa, which means mercy/compassion, and me Thandeka, meaning loved/lovely.  Lewis’ name here is Mandla, meaning strength, and Ruby is Ngobile, meaning winner.

They have an awesome garden

After a couple of weeks of chilling with them, we ventured out to do something touristy and visited Mlilwane Game Reserve. We saw our first zebras, wildebeest, and warthogs!

When we went to visit the farm/NGO where we would be working and living for six months, the house they were building for volunteers still looked like this:

They needed another week to put together some temporary accommodation for us, so we rented a car and headed to Kruger National Park in South Africa. We saw tons of animals there, which means I took tons of photos, so I’ll do a separate post on that!

Home...

Oregon Coast

Between South America and Africa we spent one month in the good old USA, mostly in Oregon with TK’s family.

Somehow I didn’t take a single picture in Oregon, except once at the coast. Maybe setting down the camera is a side effect of feeling at home after so much travelling. Whatever “home” means. The first time I came back after two and a half years in Paraguay, I felt like an alien observing strange human behavior, stupefied by America’s wide highways packed with huge vehicles holding one person each. I never expected to cringe at the sight of someone using paper towels to wipe a counter, but that’s exactly the kind of thing that would send me into distraught reflections on mankind. Not to say that a few years in Paraguay turned me into a native, or that one place is better than the other. A good chunk of my Peace Corps service was spent wrapping my head around the Paraguayan psyche and their customs that initially seemed absurd, i.e. the general avoidance/fear of spending any time alone, and the preference of many adults to live with their parents for their entire lives, and even the little things like their use of a tablecloth instead of a napkin to wipe their mouths with. I grew to love Paraguay, but I could never feel completely at home there, not least of all because every walk through any public space brought on long, unabashed stares from children and adults alike, usually accompanied by hisses, whistles, “que lindas son tus ojos,” and “kuna poraaa.” That gets really old after three years. But then I returned to the U.S. to realize that American customs are no less absurd. (Try explaining Halloween to a foreigner.) One thing Peace Corps does is make you feel precariously connected to two different worlds and somewhat estranged from everybody in both, except for those few crazy RPCVs who did it all with you.

Anyway, since that first bout of reverse culture shock, it has become less jolting to go back and forth between North and South America. This last visit was, more than anything, incredibly comfortable. We thoroughly enjoyed English conversations with family and friends, carpet, hot hot showers, good food and drinks, and not being stared at ever. By the end of it I felt so at home in Oregon that I was as melancholy as I was excited about moving to Swaziland.

During our U.S. trip (or was it our U.S. return from a South America trip?) we took a mini road trip down to the Redwood Forest. I LOVED it there. We camped in the car and hiked on trails that wound through the biggest, tallest trees on earth. Beautiful.

Amelia really loves her cows :)

On our way to Africa, we paid a visit to some of our dearest Peace Corps friends on the east coast. Anita, Kyle, and Dan led us through New York City debauchery, and then Amelia introduced us to rural Massachusetts, her family, her newly acquired cows, and some of her favorite watering holes and swimming holes.

Then we flew off to spend the next six months (or more?) in a continent fairly new to both of us, and more specifically, a country fairly unknown to anybody: Swaziland. 

Colombia

Our whole crew, minus Stefi. Can you tell which one hasn't shaved in 6 months?

The first thing we did in Cartagena was meet up with the Yancey brothers and Phil & Stefi. We had parted on separate adventures after our Uruguayan Christmas, and six months later we all finished our South American trip in Colombia. 

Fishing/spearfishing adventure. Add some bikini-clad women and you have a beer ad.

I caught two red snappers! They were delicious.

We wandered up the coast to smaller beach towns, where we fished, spearfished, hiked, and relaxed. We wanted to venture into the Tayrona national park, but instead of paying for the costly camping grounds, we just asked a local fisherman if he could drop us off on a secluded beach. After stocking up on water and pbj, we squeezed into his little boat and drove about an hour to a serene cove. We camped a few nights, busying ourselves with cards, campfires and little explorations. One night the boys ran around the beach chasing crabs and catching them with their hands. They were probably the smallest crabs to ever be eaten, but so delicious. They cooked them in salt water over the fire, and we got maybe two bites out of each one.

Phil, Stef, and the fisherman who steered us through an hour of ocean and dropped us off on an empty beach.

Our lovely campsite

The boys disappear and return with coconuts

Which are great for holding rum.

Then our beautiful, dizzying, relaxing, exhausting trip through five countries came to an end, and we flew back to the U.S. I'm grateful for every experience we had, from sharing a Christmas fish feast with wonderful friends in Uruguay, to running around salt flats and cactus forests in Argentina, hiking through gorgeous mountains in the Andes, chasing pumas in the Amazon, playing with Panamanian preschoolers, canoeing through tropical mangroves, and sailing through the Caribbean. I’m lucky to have a wonderful partner to meander through foreign countries with, who’s always open to a complete change in plans, always up for a drink, prefers living in tiny houses with minimal possessions, and willing to carry on the awkward or tiresome conversations with strangers when I get antisocial. We suffered together through altitude sickness, sea sickness, random mystery sicknesses, and all the transportation frustrations, miserable bus rides, fruitless hitchhiking, long boring waits in bus stations, border crossings and airports. TK has lugged my bags, taken care of jungle bugs for me (cockroaches in Panama are HUGE!), pushed me to do things I swore I couldn’t, sometimes made life more difficult at the time, but better in the end. We’ve woken up in countless hostels, bunk beds, mosquito nets, hammocks, cabins, and once to the stare of a spider monkey hugging the top of our tent.

South America has given me nearly four unforgettable years in all and we’ll be back, but in the mean time there are more huts, farms, mountains, and beaches to wake up to, in Africa!

So glad I quit grad school!