Heading home -- GULP!

Ooh, here's a picture of me with the nurses who gave me a goodbye Basotho hat last Monday morning! They called me "Lerato" all morning, the Sesotho word for love, and the name they gave me several weeks ago. They are so wonderful. They gave me one to take home to Kevin, as well, and we are going to be the best-shaded and most stylish residents of Seattle. Hmm... pictures may have to wait until Heathrow internet.






So this sad day of departure has finally come. I'm glad to have had a full week away from Motebang adventuring at Kruger; the weaning has been a bit gentler than it could have been. This may be an abbreviated post since I still need to grab lunch and my bags before catching a ride with Tlalinyane to Moshoeshoe International Driveway. Sooo... where to begin.

Mrids dropped me in Maputsoe (site of my fighting stick purchase) and I walked across the border to Ficksburg and the waiting stand of combis. I got stuck in the same damn spot - back right over the wheel well - with my backpack on my lap containing my knitting and Dickens novel (can I get whiter?). The ride was about four hours to Jo'burg and by the time we took a lunch break after two hours my knees, jammed into the seat in front of me, were throbbing and I could barely feel my left buttock. I pretended I was outlasting a group of hateable opponents on Survivor and travelled back in time to hang out with little Master Paul Dombey. At the lunch stop two men asked me for my American number (not an uncommon experience, but more likely outside of my little town) and one explained that he hadn't spoken with white people much even though they lived in his town and officially nothing was segregated. Interesting. We arrived at the totally overwhelming Jo'burg bus station (Maseru's got nothing on this madness) and, happy that I'd made an English-speaking friend on the ride, fought my way through the crowd in pursuit of his red hoodie as he rejected overpriced taxis and eventually found me a van that could drop me at the Ritz Backpackers. I had thought that was going to be easy and was really grateful that I didn't have to spend an hour as the only foreigner in a sea of white unlabelled vans. Luckily, I had a map that showed an outline of my route to the Ritz and, yelling out "Stop!" just in time, tumbled out through the full house with four bags onto a street corner a block from the hostel. yay!

I haven't done much hostel-staying but this place was nice enough if populated and owned by strange characters. I found a Pick-n-Pay down the street and had apples, cheese, crackers, and bottled water for dinner, watched a little rugby, avoided sensationalist stories of gun violence told by a drunk carpenter in a (successful) effort to impress 18-year-old gap-year girls in affected gypsy clothing.

I woke up at 5 and was picked up with Claire, also from the Ritz, by Gideon ("Chchchchideon" in Afrikaans) at 5:30 for the 12-hour scenic drive to Kruger. We picked up Camille on the way who turns out to have been an English major at Cornell graduating in 2002, to have brought her knitting, and to sleep in an "Ithaca is Gorges" t-shirt. She's working in London in international higher education. Then we got Chris, who just quit his banking job in London to travel and reassess what makes him happy -- perhaps DJ-ing? Then we got Lucinda, an Afrikaaner just done with both a course in nail care and a stint in rehab after a suicide attempt, the details of which she was bursting to tell us at lunch. So we five happy campers travelled to a few scenic pull-offs and finally to a camp just outside of the park for drinks, a foot-dip in the pool, outdoor dinner, traditional dancing, and a nice night of sleep in permanent tents.

We woke up at 5:30 to head into the park, meet our guide, Sam, and the other members of our tour group, and begin what turned out to be three full days (since I extended my trip by a day) of driving around Kruger and having a generally exciting and jolly time.

If this internet in the Maseru LeBoHA office will let me, I'll upload a smattering of pictures, but let me just say that I was worried that 30 years of zoos and Discovery Channel specials would dull my awe at seeing the park. I could not have been more wrong. It was completely different to see 150 giraffes on the first day, to yield to zebras, impalas, elephants, wildebeest, and kudu, to happen upon a pride of lions feasting on a recently killed water buffalo, and to guard my breakfast from southern yellow-billed hornbills and glossy starlings.

Daddy, I had the whole land rover looking for pangolins but Sam said he'd only seen two in seven years, so I guess we didn't have much of a chance.

On day two we saw the big five plus a pair of cheetahs before lunch. Ridiculous. The Romanian designer of children's handbags living in Milano stood up at 9:00 and yelled, "loooook, loooook!" and we all followed her excited gaze to a dark, skulking leopard following a herd of impala through tall yellow grass.

On day three we returned to where we had, the prior evening, seen a freshly-killed water buffalo and found four female, four male, and seven lion cubs taking turns basking in the sun and tearing the hooves off the remains of the buffalo. Hyenas made wide, impatient circles around the group and vultures waited in nearby treetops.

By night Chris, Camille, and our day-two friend Ben, sat around the campfire getting to know each other, drinking beers purchased from the shop inside the park, and listening to the sound of buffalo, lions, and impala in the bush just beyond the electric fence. Once, while searching the camp for wood for the fire, Ben and I followed the sound of a snorting male impala only to discover--to the near wetting of my pants-- that it was a snoring male Afrikaaner.

On our final morning, Friday, we all got up at 5 for a dawn bushwalk. We followed Gordon and Thomas and their rifles --single file and silent-- down a white rhino path into the bush, stopping for wonderfully informed explanations of giraffe and elephant prints, scratching posts coated in mud, engorged ticks, and rhino blood, collective spider webs, the sighting of a Verreaux's (giant) eagle owl, the sound of a male lion roaring in the distance, a demonstration of the anaesthetic properties of the leaves of the silver cluster tree and the strength of the rope made with its bark. Gordon grew up in Kruger, went to the primary school in the park, and is some kind of head guide. He seems to know everything about kruger flora and fauna, had stories of killing charging elephants, of fighting poachers in search of rhino horns, of leading training exercises for bush guides, of treating wounds with medicinal plants, and was the first person in years to make me really yearn for a parallel life. I could have made a very happy rifle-toting bush guide, I think.

After a final breakfast at our initial cushy camp, Timbavati, we piled back into the van with a wonderful couple from Brussels -- Philippe teaches international law and human rights and Luis does nanotech research -- and Pastor, our new guide and driver, and took the more direct route (8 hours) back to Jo'burg. I spent another night at the Ritz and, much to the delighted surprise of my black drivers ("A white girl in a van?!") took the hostel shuttle back to the monster combi stand and compressed my femurs for the 5 hours it took to get me back to the Ladybrand/Maseru border. I waited in the darn passport stamping line for an hour, told two men it was no use asking for my American phone number, schlepped my bags across the bridge, and threw it with great relief and some shoulder pain into the awaiting LeBoHA van driven by Kat and passengered by Aude. We dropped my stuff at the intern house, picked up Carrie and Taryn (a visiting BU public health professor) and headed to Mimmo's, the Italian restaurant where I had my first dinner in Lesotho, for a final sup-sup and chat. It was really nice to have a table full of friends a new (to my life, not to Lesotho) and interested ear in Taryn to whom I could babble on about how much I've learned and felt changed by my time here. On the eve of departure I realized I was grateful to be asked to summarize my experience and attempt to make some forest from my new trees.

In an hour I'll pack up and fly out to Jo'burg, Heathrow (with a quick chance to catch up with a ninth grade friend from our London year and her very new son) , and then Boston, arriving Tuesday evening. Thursday Laurel and I will have a graduation party in our back yard (she has mulched and planted and I can't wait to fire up the grill and just BE THERE under the tree with friends), Sunday I will graduate from medical school (sorry, what?!), and Monday I will drive home to Ithaca a doctor with a ten-day trip to France promising wonderful talks and laughs with my old high school friend Julia and the Southern Alps giving us time to reflect. In early June Kerry and Ross will have a baby girl in Ithaca and, after smelling her head and promising to visit as often as I can, I'll drive my whittled-down belongings in and strapped to the outside of my Volvo through Huron City and on to Seattle, land of Swedish family doctors, old friends, and new mountains. What a trip this all is...