The Mana Pools Twelve Step Program Continued: The Stay

Step One:  Initially feel contented with your national parks lodge surroundings.  Then FREAK OUT as you read the BED BUGS comment written in the last entry of the guest book.

Step Two: Strip the beds search every mattress, thinking the info you know about NYC bed bugs will be applicable to Africa’s.  (It’s not.) Do all of this very loudly while friend Dan tries to sleep with a migraine. 

Step Three: Find no evidence of bed bugs, look at the sun going down, think about the five and a half hour trip you just finished, and decide to stay.  After all, who could know about bedbugs so quickly during their stay?  The guest book must be incorrect.  Still, stay very paranoid the rest of the trip.

Step Four: Watch as Luke, the youngest of the Mullens, downs Benadryl after Benadryl (strong, drowsy allergy med) as his eyes swell, his nose runs uncontrollably, and hives break out on his skin.

Step Five: Eat a sweltering but delicious dinner and relax next to the river, hearing quaint hippos grunt across the water to each other. Watch your child step on a thorn. Become swarmed with bugs.  Go inside.  Watch as black bugs come out of all the living room furniture and scream and dance as your four year old cries while you get them out of his shorts and shirt. Panic more and rush everyone to bed under the safety of mosquito netting.

Step Six: Boil as you drift off to sleep, listening to the night-long sounds of the hippos and elephants grazing by on their way in and out of the water.

Step Seven: Awaken to a beautiful morning, bright and early.  Grab some pumpkin scones before getting in your not-sounding-quite-right-anymore car and heading to various pools to take in the early morning wildlife.  Return to the lodge when you realize you have forgotten tow ropes and have almost gotten stuck a number of times.

 

 

If we hadn't seen a lot of animals, I would have blamed Dan's Bob Marley pants.

Step Eight: Return to the lodge to find that despite the locked doors, screens, and bars on the windows, monkeys have broken inside and eaten everything they could get their hands on.  Imagine them licking your toothbrushes as you play a game called Find the Monkey Crap, watch Julie turn using baby wipes into a fine art, and grieve for the now empty Ziplocs (I used to call these baggies, but locals laugh at this) where chocolate cookies once resided.

Nothing will bond two people together like cleaning up monkey poo.

Step Nine: Enjoy your first Egg McMullens before locking things up again and heading out to the parks office.  Take note of how miserable Luke is as he downs three times the human dosage of Benadryl and tries to keep his eyes open.

Jonas happily finds a snake skin while breakfasting.

Step Ten: At the parks office find out a big storm is coming to Mana Pools that night.  Request a guided hike with a less than charismatic man named Amos.  Get in the car to head to a good spot, then stop at the edge of the river.  Find the river (the only way out) rushing high over the bridge, too high to cross. It has been dry our entire stay, so where did all of the sudden water come from? Amos will say that they must have had a large storm up north in Zambia. Dan Mullen will say the dead hippo clogged the cistern below.  Either way, there is no crossing the river.

 

Step Eleven: Drive to a different spot, wondering how you will ever get out of this place.  Take a guided hike with Amos and an AK 47, tracking hippo through poisonous trees and foot-deep mud.  Make sure it is over one hundred degrees.  Finally come to the mouth of Mana River, where it flows into the Zambezi, and take in the amazing view.

Amos leads the way.  Way to wear neutral colors, Mullens.

 

Step Twelve: Look at Luke, who is sleeping with toilet paper in his nose and no longer has eyes.  Think about the storm to come and the fact that one extra day in the park means we will each get only one meatball for dinner.  If the monkeys have not already eaten them.  Hurry back to the lodge and pack everything as fast as possible. Hose Luke down -literally, use a hose- and find a hornet’s nest in the living room furniture. Yes, you will forge the already risky river to get out as soon as possible.

The Mana Pools Twelve Step Program: Preparations

Step One: Convince friends (the Mullen family) who also have a free voucher with the national parks to go to Mana Pools with you.  Make sure they are not campers and are very hesitant.  This is perfect, as Mana Pools is a notoriously remote, rugged, and dangerous must-do on every traveler’s adventurous Zimbabawe list.

Step Two: Watch as every local around your friends freaks them out about things like flooding rivers, car problems, tsetse flies, and wild animals.  Find out the forecast for the weekend is torrential downpours and give your friends an out.

Step Three: Become surprised when your friends don’t take it.  But do listen to them joke constantly about cancelling or going home early.

Step Four: Remember two days before that everyone will need malaria pills.  Scramble to go to the first available dr you can find for a prescription.  Watch as she looks everything up in a medical book on her desk.  Try not to laugh out loud when chit chatting with the dr turns into finding out that she was actually a vet for twelve years before doing a two year “round” in a hospital to become a doctor.  Scramble to get to the pharmacy and start all eight travelers on malaria pills immediately.

Step Five: Change your departure time at least three times, dependent upon how timid or confident each family is feeling at the moment.

Step Six: Spend a day cooking and packing, getting extra petrol, ice, coolers, and tow-ropes.

Step Seven:  Drive 4 hours to the edge of Mana Pools, situated at the bottom of a mountain.

Here Jonas weathers the long car ride with a handful of dried meat known in Africa as biltong.

Step Eight:  Have the woman at the gate tell you that you need a permit to have two vehicles in the park. You must drive back up the mountain for said permit. (The permit is free, but it would of course be too easy to just keep a pile of them on hand at the gate.)

Sorry, Jonas.   No riding on top of the car today.

Step Nine:  Drive another hour and a half into the park. Pretend you are on The Dukes of Hazard.  Though the crossing rivers are not bad, there are killer puddles and pools of deep water and mud in the middle of the roads.  Make sure to get stuck and thank heaven for the tow rope.  Stop at least ten times to kick the cracking rims of your tires back on.

We are originally from rural Iowa, but somehow this is the first time we've ever had to do mud running.

Here friend Dan wades in what smells like fermented juice and elephant urine to tow our car.

Step Ten: Come upon a hippo kill on the only bridge into camp.  See hyenas and marabou stork and vultures, taking their turn after the lions have left.  Drive through the party after taking pictures, as you must get to the other side of the river.  Sorry, hyenas.

Step Eleven: Arrive at the national parks lodge to check in. Come upon a human party, where beer is forced upon you after you provide the hosts with salt for their meat.

At the parks lodge we are greeted with elephant bones and jars of elephant fetuses.  Ryan -of course- tries to buy some.

Step Twelve: Arrive at your lodge. You think it is awesome, until you read the last entry in the guest book:  SEVERE BED BUGS…

Souvenir

It doesn't look so funny, but for a full year I have smiled every time I’ve seen this picture on my computer screen.  

This is the picture our car rental company in South Africa sent us at this time last year- three months after our visa visit to Jo’Berg and Capetown.  Traveling across South Africa in three identical silver Nissan Levinas was a hilarious experience that had people doing a triple-take wherever we went.   The traffic-ticket picture we were surprised to receive three months later?  One of the funniest lil' souvenirs we’ve ever had. 

Pieces of Learning: Products and Pushes

Some more random tidbits about the products and cultural trends I've found in southern Africa....

-It won't seem abnormal to a variety of people from other countries.  But to an American it is a bit weird.  There are no crutches on this continent.  In America, medics, nurses, and hospitals are equipped with crutches that lean on the ribs below the armpit.  Here, braces that fit around the forearm, like the ones pictured below, are standard. These are what are known as "crutches."

-Here a large percentage of students, even those who have expensive imported sneakers and sports-specific shoes, do gym class in bare feet.  No matter what the color or economic bracket, this is a very normal cultural push in Africa.

-Meet the most common pot scrubber in our country, plastic mesh fruit/veggie bag.  Here it is common for Shona to ball these up to make their own - a valuable commodity that only comes from grocery stores.  We never throw ours away; they always go to the staff.

-There is a large push in Africa for male circumcision.  You can find this push everywhere, on bumper stickers, tee-shirts, billboards, and other random places- like this car we came across in South Africa: "Over 93,000 free male circumcisions a year!"

-Plain products can often be hard to find.  Our first year here I think we found plain white toilet paper twice.  And plain white marshmallows?  Forget it.

 -Most of the masses in southern Africa use bar soap. Referred to often as "green soap," these bars are used for bathing, hair washing, laundry washing, and dish washing.  At over a foot long, and hard but oily, these potent bars are everywhere!

-It is hard to find plain honey.  Honey is marketed most often as a specialty of flavor, like wine... On the left is Msasa honey, made from the seasonal nectar of Msasa trees. It is known for its nutritional value and is a dark cooking honey. The honey on the right is a jacaranda honey.  Again, it is produced during a specific season in southern Africa, and is known for its sweetness. 

Bus-ting Out

Happy Valentines Day to the Americans I love.  As we take another road trip across the landscapes of Africa, I'm celebrating this American holiday of love by showing you something I continue to love: this ridiculous, always unique, public transport system of southern Africa.  Enjoy some more pictures of the humorous buses of Zimbabwe.  Apologies for some bad pictures, but these buses stop for no one, including their passengers...

 

"Slim Shady" and "Durban's Finest"

 

 "Real Two Stars" and "King of the Jungle"

 

 "Four Sisters" and "Love Prevails"

 

 "Jon Best" and "Svorai (Shona for despise or look down upon us) My Father"

 

"Silent Killer" and "Hosana"

 

 "God Given"

 

"Scorpion" and "Tasha"

 

"City Boy Cab" and "Against All Odds"

 

 "Transformer" and "Noxman"

 

 "Best Yet to Come" and "Roselux"

 

 "Zimboy" and "Towdah" ("praise")

 "If Jesus Say Yes: Who Can Say No"

 

 "Work" and "One Leg Trans"

 

"Counter Attack!" and "You Never Know!"

 

 "Let Them Say What They Want" and "The Future"

 

 "Nice and Easy" and "Ronaldo For Boss K's"

 

 "Chief Ndega" and "Highly Favored"

 "Blessing"

Never got the name of this one, but apparently you can bring your couch home on the bus.  Literally.

The story on this humorous transportation system:

http://wellitsafrica.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-bus-system.html