Africa – At home and abroad

Mad world

September 18, 2026jdewyze1 Comment

Steve and I wanted to go to Madagascar because it sounded extraordinary. It’s not merely one of the planet’s biggest islands but so different from the nearest continent (Africa) it almost qualifies for continental status of its own. I knew that many of the native forests had been cut down, but I half expected the remaining landscape to look like something drawn by Dr. Seuss. In this I was disappointed.

Everywhere we went I saw old friends — plants that thrive in San Diego County: eucalyptus and jacaranda and bougainvilleas and prickly pear cactus and other exotics imported to replace the natives that lived here once. What I should have been prepared for (but wasn’t) was sights like these:

Much of Madagascar’s population descends from people who made their way thousands of years ago from Borneo in Indonesia. They were rice-growing peoples who cut down the Malagasy forests and cleared the land to create floodable fields. Rice paddies today stud the urban canvas of the capital city.

Jigsawed terraces make parts of the countryside resemble Peru (except they cradle not potatoes but emerald rice shoots.)

Malagasies even grow rice in the arid southwest, though there they get only two harvests per year instead of three. All these paddies require irrigation systems so complex we couldn’t begin to comprehend how they worked.

The folks who tend them live mainly in the central highlands but could blend in on the streets of Jakarta. African (Bantu) features are found more frequently on Madagascar’s coasts. Remarkably, everyone speaks the same language (Malagasy), and it’s related most closely to the family of languages still spoken in Borneo.

The Malagasy people we interacted with most (our guides) were warm and thoughtful and seemed extremely intelligent. I kept thinking they’d be college professors, had they been born in America. They all still seemed to be reeling from the political coup that unfolded here 11 months ago. Frustrated by Antantanarivo’s chronic shortages of water and electricity, college students and other desperate residents took to the streets last October (2025) demanding change. The military finally joined their side and the president — a one-time DJ who’d been backed by the French to take power 16 years earlier — fled the country (having accrued a personal fortune reputed to be $200 million). No election has since been held. The colonel who’s in charge says one is being organized that will take place next year. Will life improve then? Our guides shrugged when we asked them. What can they do but hope?

Throughout our 12-day stay, Steve and I kept asking each other: were we having fun? Glad we came? Clearly the answer to the first was: not always. Madagascar’s road system is awful. Billionaires may be able to charter helicopters to fly them to the natural wonders, but everyone else has no choice but to endure hour upon hour of truly life-threatening passing and jouncing and crater-dodging. Here’s a glimpse. Multiply this video a thousand-fold to imagine how we spent a large chunk of our time.

Note that’s a highly flammable fuel truck we’re passing by inches.

And yet. What we encountered along the way made it seem worth it. In the Southwest we drove through a mining town where scrawny, leathery gun-toting Malagasies panned for sapphires in a setting as savage as any from America’s wild past.

In the dripping rainforests, we gaped not only at the lovable lemurs, but other fantastic creatures.

We had experiences I’ve never had anywhere else and will never forget. Let me wrap this up by describing just a few.

Our program called for a stop along the main highway south out of Tana at an aluminum-recycling operation. I was braced for a tourist trap where we’d be offered shiny silver trinkets. I wasn’t prepared for the hellish Dickensian tableau into which we walked.

There were trinkets on the table, recycled from the scrap aluminum…

We watched some guys create an aluminum cooking pot using sand molds.

I’ll never think of recycling in quite the same way.

The almost-finished product; the rough edges still needing to be smoothed. The guys told us they can make 25 of these per day.

Further south, we spent two nights just outside Isalo National Park, an area where Jurassic-era sandstone has eroded into canyons, gorges, and other natural sculptures interlaced with cascades, pools, and riverine forests.

We hiked for half a day with a marvelous Malagasy naturalist named Peter. He pointed out an anthill that locals had broken into to collect the inhabitants. Apparently they’re good for fattening up chickens.

The ant hill after being raided by villagers.

Peter said members of his tribe, known as the Bara, make a tea from these flowers and apply it to the heads of their newborns; it makes the baby’s fontanel close up faster.

Most fascinating to me was Peter’s explanation of the Bara people’s funeral practices. Like most Malagasy, the Bara believe life only really begins after death. Assuming your offspring treat you right, you become a revered ancestor who watches over your relatives, protecting or punishing the living. Even in Tana, treating the dead right means placing them in family tombs and celebrating their arrival there with elaborate parties.

In Bara country, this goes to extremes. First people let the the corpse of a loved one dry out for a couple of weeks in a nearby cave. They then prepare the skeleton by cutting it into pieces that can be packaged in a portable box. A funeral party hauls the box up steep bluffsides to a remote cave close to the sky, where family members never return to visit it. Then back at home, the family invites the entire extended community to a raucous celebration that lasts for days. The more zebu the family can butcher (to feed the partiers), the more the respect they pay to the deceased. (Zebu are the humped cattle emblematic of Madagascar.)

Peter wasn’t telling us about some arcane practice from the past. He said this happens every time one of his fellow villagers dies.

Peter also pointed out this bunch of zebu, being directed by local boys to stomp around on a rice paddy, breaking up the ground.

“Malagasy people are very superstitious,” said Andry, the guide assigned to show us around Tana for our last two days in the country. A native of Tana deeply knowledgeable about everything from endemic bird calls to ancient archeological findings, Andry walked us for hours around the middle and lower sections of the city. After lunch, we drove to the upper town where Madagascar’s kings and queens lived for centuries.

View from the middle city down to the lower town.

That’s the upper city in the distance, the longtime home of Malagasy kings and queens.

The wooden core of the palace built between 1839 and 1841 by the infamous Queen Ranavalona I burned to ashes about 30 years ago. I knew that interminable work had gone on to restore it, and I was thrilled to learn the restoration had finally finished. So we could go in.

Steve and Andry and I hired a Queen’s Palace guide to show us around, a young, very charming guy named Elias. When the palace burned down local people saved many of the contents; these are now displayed in the reconstruction. Elias led us around the exhibits, explaining them all. Then we walked onto the balcony where he gestured to the gate through which visitors gained access to the royal compound. The eagle on the top was a symbol of power. Next to it was a stone phallus that Elias pointed out was circumcised.

“In order to come through the gates, every man had to be circumcised. And do you know: they checked!” he exclaimed, cackling.

He elaborated. Circumcision was a big deal extending way back in Malagasy culture. Even today, circumcision is pretty much mandatory for every male born in the country. “If you’re not circumcised, you can never marry!” Elias said. “Other men will make fun of you.” You can’t be buried in the family tomb but will be condemned to wander forever as a ghost.

Elias and Andry were both laughing, but it was clear this was serious stuff. They said even today boys undergo circumcision between the ages of 1 and 5, and each boy’s grandfather is required to swallow the foreskin — whole and wrapped in banana.

“Just think!” Elias exclaimed. “When we’re grandfathers we’ll have to do that.” Andry laughed again, but he nodded sheepishly. It was true.

We’re standing just outside the royal gate. The circumcised phallic symbol can be seen on top of the arch, directly over my head.

***

On the last day of our road trip, we worried about arriving at the Tuliar airport late and missing our flight back to Tana. So we left Isalo very early and wound up with a bit of extra time. Haja drove us to a garden close to the airport. We ate the box lunches we had brought with us, then Steve and I walked around the gardens with yet another local guide.

He explained that a Swiss amateur botanist had come to Madagascar decades ago, acquired a piece of land, and traveled all over collecting native plant species. He’d fenced the property, a degraded grassland, and started planting the natives.

Today more than 900 plant species, more than 90% of them indigenous to the region, are flourishing in the space. Wandering along the pathways, I realized with a jolt: THIS was the landscape I’d hoped to find, eerily alien.

So what if it was re-created by a crazy Swiss guy? He’d recognized some of what’s lovable about Madagascar and worked to keep it alive. Better to have gotten at least this glimpse rather than never have seen it at all.

This is the oldest native baobab tree in the garden. It’s about 150 years old. The ones in the photo at the beginning of these post (which we saw growing alongside the highway) are many hundreds of years older.

Lemur love

September 16, 2026jdewyze1 Comment

Lemurs aren’t the only thing that draws tourists to Madagascar. The abundant avian variety (including more than 100 species found nowhere else) attracts birders. French folks flock to the Gallic hotels and resorts, but at least according to our driver/guide, they aren’t interested in nature. They come to soak up the sun and recapture some of their past glory as colonial overlords. The magnet for the vast majority of other visitors is probably the lemurs, but that wasn’t the case for Steve and me.

I never disliked them, and I’m sure Steve didn’t either. Who could? I just never paid them much attention, even though I’ve seen at least a few in the San Diego Zoo. In the course of our 9-day road trip, however, two things happened: I saw way more lemurs than I expected. And I was smitten.

Before we got here, I wasn’t sure what we’d find. From the other side of the world, the plight of these guys — unique primates that evolved and live only in Madagascar — sounds dismal. Although the island once teemed with them, lemurs now rank as the planet’s most endangered mammals, with all but 3 or 4 of the more than 110 species threatened or in danger of extinction, many critically. Poachers hunt them (to eat or sell as pets), but the biggest threat is the massive amount of habitat they’ve lost as humans have replaced trees with rice fields or cut down old growth forests for the hardwood — or to make charcoal.

I think Malagasy travel outfitters all just assume tourists are desperate to see lemurs. Guides try very hard to deliver, and for us they succeeded splendidly. Here’s some of what they led us to in dripping rain forests and rocky, dramatic dryscapes.

Brown lemurs range fairly widely and their babies mature quickly.

They allowed us to get amazingly close, making it easy to take in their mash-up of parts: dog-like snouts narrowing down to end in wet noses on a body that looks and moves like a monkey’s.

This lady’s baby — can you spot it? — was so young it still clung to her belly, close to the milk supply.

Mouse lemurs — the world’s smallest primates — are nocturnal and solitary. We felt lucky when William got a shot of this one in the rain. (I flipped it. The subject was upside-down in the original image.)

Sifakas are known as “dancing lemurs” for their elegant sideways leaps.

After three to six months, lemur babies switch to riding on their moms’ backs, clinging like miniature jockeys.

We chatted with our guides as we tracked and observed all those animals, and on the endless drives from one stop to the next I often used my iPhone to ask AIs other lemurian questions. The result is that I now know quite a bit about lemurs. I find it riveting, but I won’t try to share most of it; I’m aware that not everyone has succumbed to lemur love. Two things dazzled me so thoroughly, however, I can’t restrain myself.

The Sex Lives of Ring-tailed Lemurs

First, in most lemur societies (unlike the vast majority of mammals), females run the show. Moreover, ring-tailed groups each have an alpha female. She and all her fellow lady lemurs only go into estrus and become receptive to mating for a 24- to 36-hour window that comes once a year — typically all within days of each other! Imagine what this does to the males.

But who could imagine what my AI pals described? The male ring-tails, flooded with testosterone, undergo an amazing transformation. The sweat glands on their chests and wrists stop emitting their normal bitter, leathery odor and begin pumping out a fruity, flowery perfume (“suggestive of ripe pears.”) The guys rub their gorgeous tales on their enticing scents and wave them around the females — “stink-flirting,” the scientists call this. The courtship can degenerate into vicious “stink-fighting battles,” the winners of which get selected by one or more lemur ladies.

We saw nothing of this, of course. It takes place in April. I’m almost tempted to come back then to try to see it. (At the very least, it is the first thing I will search for on Youtube when I get home.)

If the sex only happens once a year, the evidence of its result was everywhere.

This girl didn’t seem the least bit nervous I might move in and steal her delicious fig.

The Call of the Indri

Indris are the biggest of all lemurs, and they live only in the wild. Humans have tried to keep them in zoos, but the indris won’t have it. In captivity they just die. Critically endangered, the ones that survive in Madagascar inhabit the patches of rainforest down the escarpment several hours east of Antantanarivo.

On the second morning of our road trip, a wonderful guide named William who’s been studying the forests around Andasibe for 25 of his 50 years led Steve and me straight to an indri family breakfasting in the foliage overhead.

William leading us through the rain forest.

My first sight of one made me cry out in wonder. An indri looks “like a child in fluffy pyjamas,” in the words of John Gimlette, author of the one of the best travel books I’ve ever read (The Gardens of Mars: Madagascar, an Island Story, 2021). This largest lemur “never goes anywhere, never adapts, and never eats anything but leaves.”

William pointed out a baby, just weeks old, clinging to the back of its mom. We watched the family members leap amazing distances as they grazed. Then the unthinkable happened: they indris began emitting some of the loudest sounds I’ve heard from any living creature. Gimlette compares it to an air raid siren, but it reminded me of whale song, amplified and arboreal. They do it to mark their territory, the scientists say. It seems so foolhardy — how could you make it any easier for a hunter to find you? The indris don’t care. Their days may be numbered; their homeland shrinking. Every morning they sing their songs, spine-tingling, defiant. You must pay attention.

Sick on the road

September 12, 2026jdewyze2 Comments

My usual reaction to getting sick on the road is, initially, denial. When I felt the subtle tightness in my upper chest more than two weeks ago, I dismissed it as irritation caused by the dust churned up on Uganda’s unpaved roads. My occasional coughs the next day had to be merely my body’s attempt to expel the residue, I told myself. But the coughs increased in frequency; Steve began coughing with me.

I switched to optimism. If this was a virus, surely it would be one of those quick-moving upper-respiratory squalls — here one day and gone the next! Our hacking intensified; worsened. Neither Steve nor I ever spiked a fever, and our throats and noses seemed fine. By the time we landed in Johannesburg, however, I was coughing so hard I could imagine cracking a rib. My torso ached from the unrelenting battering.

At the South African hotel, after getting our key-card and the password for wifi, I asked the desk clerk (between coughs) if she could recommend a nearby pharmacy. She advised that if we dropped our bags quickly in our rooms and dashed out the door, we could make it to a branch of Click’s just minutes away.

I’m telling you all this not because I think my minor medical issues are interesting. They’re not. But getting sick on the road does have one significant upside: the experience can give you insights into how folks handle such problems outside the US. At the Click’s, I was happy to find only two people in line before me at the pharmacy. In minutes I was standing before a young pharmacist who seemed both sympathetic and confident she could fix me up. She fetched a bottle of effervescent expectorant tablets (to break up the chest mucus) and a bottle of codeine-based cough syrup. The two of them cost just under $8.

After bagging up the drugs, the pharmacist locks them in something resembling a hamster cage. Then the customer takes the cage up to the cashier to pay.

I’ve long been a fan of codeine in cough syrup, though I rarely score any at home, now that a doctor’s visit and a prescription and probably pre-enrollment in Narcotics Anonymous is required. I also can dependably rely on the placebo effect. So by every right, I should have bounced back to robust health after I downed my teaspoon of Tussilinct Linctus cough syrup and got a halfway decent sleep that night.

Sadly, I still felt awful the next morning.

I even considered skipping our planned excursion to Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum, the main item on my To Do list for this trip to the city. We went, but spent only about an hour. Had we felt better, we could easily have lingered for several.

The next day, the narrow-bodied Embraer jet that carried us from Joburg to Madagascar’s capital (Antantanarivo, aka Tana) enabled Steve and me to sit together without a third passenger squeezed in between us. This was good because by this point our coughs were so ear-shattering and frequent other passengers were eyeing us with concern, if not loathing. At times my bronchial passages seemed to be seizing up. This freaked me out: I was poised to head out into the Malagasy hinterland. Would some freak asthma attack finish me off there? I worried about this through Sunday night and when Steve awoke I broke the news: I thought we should try to see a doctor before hitting the road. He agreed.

An hour or two later, we met (for the first time) the man who would be our driver/guide for nine days on the road, an unflappable 45-year-old Tana native named Haja (pronounced “Hazza”). Haja has a charming French accent (French is ubiquitous here.) But his English comprehension was excellent. I felt bad disrupting our program for the day. Our schedule had called for us to drive east for about 5 hours to Andasibe, where we were supposed to hunt for lemurs in the chilly, dripping rainforest for several hours, then check into our hotel, then go on a “night walk.”

By my count, Haja took about 20 seconds to digest our near-non-stop barking fits. He shifted mental gears and said he’d check with his office to find the best clinic for us. He was back in short order, announcing that one near the center of Tana had said they could fit us in.

Battling morning rush hour traffic into the city center is probably the last thing Haja wanted to do, but he gave no hint he found it other than a splendid idea. Along the way, we encountered streets so constipated we didn’t move an inch for 15 minutes. But we finally arrived at the small private medical center and took seats in a clean but spartan waiting room.

I think we waited about 15 minutes before a very young man wearing a dark jacket over a white tunic and trousers came to lead us to a small private office. A name tag pinned to his chest proclaimed he was Dr. R. E. Randrianamana. He took a seat behind the only significant piece of furniture, an uncluttered desk, then handed me a slip of paper and asked me to fill in my name and date of birth. Using a combination of his limited English and my limited French, I explained our concerns.

He sprang to his feet, picked up a stethoscope and applied it to first my back and then Steve’s. Our lungs were fine, he declared, which I took to mean I didn’t have to worry through the coming night about asthma OR pneumonia.

Dr. R then started typing at a small monitor — prescriptions for both of us for a short course of antibiotics, fizzy zinc/vitamin C pills we could dissolve in water twice a day, pain pills (if we felt the need), Kooks brand expectorant syrup, and two kinds of antihistamines (one drowiness-inducing, one not). He pushed a button and a miniature printer rolled out an impressive list of our prescriptions, including the dosages. He posed for a picture with me, then bade us farewell.

We waited briefly then were told the fee for our medical consultations was 34,000 ariary per person, about $7.85. We couldn’t get the medicines from the health center but had to go to a nearby pharmacy, where the tab to fill everything amounted to $31.18. I calculated that getting checked by Dr. R and picking up the prescriptions took about two hours. We were barreling off to the rainforest well before noon.

Our haul from the pharmacie. It was a challenge to figure out what to take when.

I was impressed. Of course if I had a brain tumor or a stroke or mysterious fainting spells, my first choice would be to go to the UCSD Medical Center, where I’d be treated by some of the best specialists in the world (at staggering cost).But for a nasty cough, I think Dr. R gave us no less than I would have gotten from any American doctor I could have seen back home (for just pennies more than I pay for parking at UCSD.)

It’s now been four days since we left that clinic, and we’ve improved a lot. My bronchial spasms have vanished, and coughs are no longer interrupting our sleeping. We both are still emitting minor chest-clearing coughs every now and then, but I expect those will soon disappear. Then again, I tend to be optimistic about such things.

Good news and bad news in Uganda

September 7, 2026September 7, 2026jdewyze2 Comments

We’ve wrapped up our fifth trip to Uganda. What drew us back over and over was our work as liaisons between Women’s Empowerment (womenempowerment.org) in San Diego and the Nyaka organization, started 25 years ago by a Ugandan to help AIDS orphans and the grandmothers raising them. In the course of those visits, we’ve come to love the Pearl of Africa and its inhabitants. Once again, on this visit we learned a lot.

This time, along with the liaison work, we included two days of pure tourism. I got the best news of the trip on the first of those two days. On the morning of Friday, August 28, we crawled through Kampala traffic (among the worst in the world) and drove north. A few hours later, we pulled into the Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary and were assigned an exuberant guide named Simon. He recounted the amazing comeback story of Uganda’s rhinos.

Once, rhinos roamed the Ugandan bush. But during the bloody turmoil that unfolded in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, poachers exterminated them. With the dawn of the 21st Century, as peace returned, Uganda could boast that its national parks contained four of the Big Five (lions, elephants, leopards, and Cape buffalo). To see a rhino, however, you had to safari in one of the neighboring countries.

Eventually some dedicated rhino lovers resolved to change that. They found a splendid property, and the Brit who owned it agreed to sell the 70,000 cattle he’d been running on the land, fence the perimeter, and make the place a rhino haven. In 2004, two males and two females from Kenya moved in, and the folks at a Disney property in Florida soon contributed a third pair.

Rhinos don’t reproduce fast. They have only one baby at a time; females give birth only every two to three years. So I was astounded to hear that just 22 years later, Ziwa now counts 53 rhino inhabitants, with all but the original 6 born in the park. The breeding has been so successful the park has sent 8 rhinos to other Uganda preserves.

We bushwhacked our way through tall brush and soon found this mama rhino, resting in the heat of the day under a tree. Sadly, I couldn’t get a good shot of her two-month-old baby, conked out next to her.

At our approach, this young male sprang to his feet. Simon said he was trying to show how tough he was.

A little further down the trail, we all but stumbled on Taleo, the father of the baby. He was one of the original six and he’s still the alpha male in this area. We got within 30 feet of him and had to edge away when he stood up and starting making his way toward us. (Photo by José Nuncio.)

The return of Uganda’s rhino was inspiring news to me. We heard more the next morning in Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda’s largest and most-visited nature preserve. The southernmost contributory to the Nile River cuts through the middle of it, at one point squeezing through a 23-foot-wide gorge before plunging more than 140 feet downward. The immense hydraulic force generated by the passage has inspired Ugandans to boast that Murchison Falls is the most powerful waterfall on earth.

Pathways at the top of the falls offered drenching, thundering views.

The next day, we took a boat ride on the Nile to a point near the bottom, another splendid viewpoint.

In the course of our ride on The African Queen, we passed so many hippos and crocodiles I lost count. On our game drive, too, we had wonderful luck seeing elephants, giraffes, warthogs, and a variety of monkeys and antelope. We struck out with lions, but I got closer than I ever have been to a leopard (notoriously elusive.)

Seeing all those animals was delightful, but better still was hearing from our guides that poaching in and around the park has all but disappeared, partly as the Uganda Wildlife Association has persuaded former poachers to switch sides — paying them more to protect the animals than they’d earn from killing them. Surrounding communities have also learned that conserving wildlife can enrich the humans living near them.

The continuing growth of the grandmother groups was not news to us. When Steve and I first learned about it 13 years, the Nyaka AIDS Orphans Foundation had organized about 7000 women over the age of 50 into 124 groups. Every time we’ve visited, those numbers have increased. Today more than 24,000 grandmothers belong to 273 groups.

What blew us away, however, was seeing the new model for further expansion Nyaka has begun implementing. Instead of setting up and administrating new groups by itself, the organization has begun partnering with grandmother-support groups started by other entities. Nyaka is teaching them how to add a microfinance component — giving the women a way to borrow small amounts of money to start projects that will generate more family income. We visited two of the new groups and came away thinking this model has real potential to spread throughout the country. If it does, it will improve a multitude of lives.

The very best thing about all our time in Uganda over the years has been the chance to meet ladies like this. With her loan, this grandmother was able to build up a tailoring business. Though the amounts of loan money are small, the impact can be profound.

As for the bad new, it wasn’t terrible. We were reminded that Yoweri Museveni, the heavy-handed autocrat who’s been in power forever, is now almost 82 and growing more and more feeble. His son seems poised to seize power when the old man shuffles off. And the son is unlikely to be any Nelson Mandela.

Neither the son nor his father dreamed up the Trade Order that Ugandans learned about this past February It’s been very bad news for a staggering number of folks. That order abruptly banned street vendors and hawkers from selling their wares along sidewalks, streets, and other public thoroughfares. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard this. The vendors who line Ugandan’s byways are as much an emblem of the country as huge banana-bunches strapped to the backs of boys peddling down the roads. Selling produce or used clothes or other small goods has long been one of the lowest rungs on the ladder of economic opportunity here. Yet police and other government officials across the country have been smashing the little stands and confiscating the goods. They’re telling people they must reconstitute them in tidier spaces approved by the government.

We’ll see how well that works out. Or maybe Steve and I won’t. We’re not sure we’ll ever get back. We still have a long list of places we haven’t yet gotten to. Madagascar was one of them, but Sunday that changed. For the next 11 days, we’ll be bouncing over the roads of the land of the lemurs.

This may look like sunset, but it’s actually sunrise over Murchison Falls National Park.

To the antipode — and beyond!

August 15, 2026jdewyze1 Comment

If I could drill down from my house in San Diego through the center of the earth, penetrating to the other side of the planet, the drill bit would emerge in water — specifically, the Southern Indian Ocean. That point, my home’s antipode (to use the geographer’s term for the diametrically opposite point of any place on the globe), is closest to the tiny islands of Reunion and Mauritius. I will almost certainly never venture to either of them. But in just a few weeks, Steve and I should land in Antantanarivo, the capital of Madagascar, whose eastern coastline lies less than 500 miles from Reunion.

Madagascar is considered to be part of Africa. But some say it should rank as the Earth’s 8th continent. It split off from the African mainland about 160 million years ago. Since then its geological development has been distinctive, and most of the plant and animal life that has evolved doesn’t exist anywhere else.

Lemurs are the superstars. More than 100 different species live on the island, almost all of them threatened with extinction.

I’m sure we’ll see lots of lemurs, but they’re not the only thing drawing us to our antipode. The island’s other flora and fauna will be fascinating. The human history is relatively brief but often wildly exotic and exorbitantly bloody. And I have to admit: we’ve come to appreciate various ends of the earth. What will the vibe be like in this one?

We’ll be taking a long, winding road to Madagascar, leaving Sunday morning and journeying through Paris, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, and Johannesburg. I’ll report on the details, as I can, along the way.

We won’t cover the whole island. It’s way too big, the fourth biggest in the world (three times the size of Great Britain.) But we’ll be driven through a big swathe of it (very roughly along that red line.)

Girl party in the land of the Swazis

October 16, 2023October 17, 2023jdewyze6 Comments

Imagine you have recently grown a pair of breasts, and it’s a beautiful spring day, and you can take off almost all your clothes, get together with your pals and thousands of other girls, and sing and dance for the king. This is a blast, I can report, having just observed eSwatini’s Umhlanga Red Dance Festival, where all this action unfolds. Attending it was one of the biggest strokes of luck of my travel life.

Months ago, I had read about the festival (which Lonely Planet describes as “one of Africa’s biggest cultural events.”) The main event is a week-long celebration in which girls from all over the country flock to the main royal palace in Lobamba bearing reeds to (symbolically) help repair the queen mother’s home. Traditionally the monarch of this tiny (still-polygamous) state also chose a wife every year from among the nubile young dancers. The political unacceptability of a 50-something-year-old man annually picking out a teen virgin to add to his harem ended the match-making aspects of the festival around a dozen years ago. But in other ways, the tradition remains unchanged from its inception. “It’s like your 4th of July. Or Thanksgiving.” A celebration of national identity, asserted our guide, Myxo Mdluli. (I thought: not quite. I’ve never been to any turkey-eating feast that was this much fun.)

Back around May, I looked up the date of the festival, and any hope of attending it vanished when I learned it takes place sometime in August or September. What I didn’t know was that a one-day satellite reed-dance festival also happens at Embangweni, another of King Mswati III’s residences. At some point on Friday, during our seven and a half-hour drive from Pietermaritzburg (in South Africa) to a game park in southeastern eSwatini, Myxo mentioned the smaller event would be taking place the next day. Would we like to go?

Changing our itinerary and driving 90 minutes to get to Embangweni seemed a trivial price to pay for participating. We arrived a little before noon at what felt like a combination fairgrounds and sports field.

A large area for food vendors had popped up, and a gigantic VIP tent was serving a buffet lunch. Myxo spotted a cluster of colorful figures moving up a dirt path and urged us to get closer; it was a group of local girls arriving to participate.

He prodded me to walk up and greet them, and I felt like an instant rock star. The girls exploded in grins. They threw their arms around me and began mugging for the camera.

I should mention that they weren’t just strolling in, they also were singing, producing a marvel of complex harmonies and rhythms and solo counterpoints. We moved on and soon realized all the groups were singing, pretty much non-stop; floating among them took us through an archipelago of enchanting musical islands.

I also realized, with a jolt, that unlike that first group we encountered, most of the girls were topless and wearing beaded mini-skirts that covered either tiny black panties or simply their bare bottoms.

This group was composed of Zulu gals who came to dance (but couldn’t present reeds, that being reserved for the Swazi females.)

The Zulus gathered into a little group and individuals took the center ground to show off their stuff. The ability to deliver kicks very high and fiercely seemed to be a goal.

The range of ages was remarkable, from quite young…

To confident young women…

Though the costumes were skimpy, the stylistic variety was riveting.

We learned that participating royals (princesses and maybe their close cousins?) could be distinguished by the feathers they alone were entitled to wear.

Around 1:30, phalanxes of Swazi girls began lining up at the palace gate to deliver their reeds.

The numbers were staggering. We never heard a count, but the dancers clearly numbered in the thousands. For a while we watched them entering the arena, a parade that looked more jubilant and exultant than anything Macy or the Rose Bowl organizers ever dreamed of.

With no end to the marching girls in sight, however, we sadly had to depart before the formal dancing ceremonies began.

We had to go because we knew it would take us two hours to drive to the cabin I had booked at Hlane Royal National Park. Indeed the sun was setting and the front-desk receptionist was closing up when we finally got there a little before 6 pm. Once again we lucked out. Myxo had suggested Steve and I see if we could join the 5:30 (“sunrise”) game drive the next morning, and for about the price of two movie tickets at The Lot, we were able to sign up for seats in one of the game-drive vehicles. We went to bed early in the cabin, illuminated only by two kerosene lanterns and a candle.

As if the reedy extravaganza hadn’t been enough, we wound up seeing more famous animals up close on the next morning’s game drive than anything I’ve experienced before.

Almost instantly a giraffe appeared in front of our vehicle, strolling along as if to say, “Follow me and I’ll show you some cool stuff.”

Everyone in our Cruiser wanted to see lions, so we drove into that section of the park and in less than 5 minutes came upon this guy, patrolling the perimeter of his domain.

Our driver-hide said the predator wouldn’t see us as individual potential snacks but rather would only register our lumbering Land Cruiser, smelling of diesel fuel.

If you’d never heard of lions, I think you’d still know this guy was dangerous, he’s so muscular and powerful.

He looked indifferent to us, but a shiver ran down my spine as he passed.

A bit later, we came across one of his lady friends…

Then we almost drove into this mature female white rhino and her two-year-old offspring.

…but as mothers will do, she ignored him and he finally settled down to snooze beside her.

In any normal week of my life, encountering this many high-octane marvels in less than three hours would have been enough excitement to call it a day. But with Myxo, we spent the rest of Sunday doing more: visiting a cultural center and then the national museum, stopping at a craft center, seeing a bit of the capital city, Mbabane. By the time he dropped us off at our last hotel in eSwatini, we felt we had lucked out with him too.

I’ve reflected that the biggest roll of the dice for any independent traveler, like me, is who I hire to drive us around. For the Lesotho/eSwatini part of this trip, I didn’t have many choices. It’s not like mobs of people want to fly from Joburg to Maseru then be driven across Lesotho, then up to Swaziland and schlepped around there for several more days. In the end, I had to use two separate outfitters. Pretty much all I knew about Myxo came from his website, and while extensive, some details were sketchy.

Topping that was the fact he showed up in Pietermaritzburg with a young woman named Mazui whom we assumed was a girlfriend. (Myxo introduced her but never explained her presence in our vehicle.) It was an odd twist, but she was very nice and we didn’t mind buying her a burger and milkshake at the Wimpy’s where we stopped for lunch. (Myxo declined any food, saying he had some snacks to munch on.) When Steve asked if we’d fill up at the Wimpy’s stop, the guide said he wanted to wait until we crossed the border. Petrol would be 2 rands a liter (about 40 cents a gallon) cheaper on the Swazi side. The border crossing was a breeze and Myxo didn’t hide his relief at the fact we hadn’t run out of gas. He made a beeline for the town’s only fuel station only to find they had nothing to sell.

We continued on down the highway, and I must report, the situation felt pretty grim. The sun was setting. Myxo seemed unsure where he might be able to find another fuel source. I spent several long minutes wondering what would happen when we shuddered to a halt in the gloom, in this distant part of Swaziland near the border of Mozambique. Then miraculously, we saw a station up ahead. It had gas for sale.

Mazui also seemed relieved as the numbers mounted on the pump.

Luckily (again), that was the last flaky thing Myxo did. He always showed up on time. His vehicle was new and impeccable (and capable of operating on fumes!) We never would have seen the dancing virgins or those lions and other animals, had he not suggested those activities. He didn’t get us killed on the road (the biggest danger anywhere we travel, in my opinion.) And we had some of the most wide-ranging and provocative conversations we’ve had with any driver anywhere. Steve and I and Myxo talked about human origins and culture and whether he should start a blog to promote his business and Swazi politics and race relations and more. I’m not sure how long I’ll remember what we learned in the national museum. But I don’t expect to forgot how fortunate we were to spend three days of our lives with him.

Lesotho

October 14, 2023October 14, 2023jdewyze1 Comment

Who knew the capital of Lesotho is Maseru (our destination early Wednesday morning)? I learned around 10 years. It was then, a few years before Steve and I had retired, that I conceived a crazy plan for us to go on an epic quest to visit every one of the 54 countries in Africa. I had this notion we would set up a website and attract legions of readers who would be riveted by our adventures as we tried to accomplish this difficult task. Steve gulped but agreed to go along; we announced our plan to a number of friends. I learned the name and capital city of every African country and spent many hours working on routings.

Reality (including the fact Steve’s mom was in her late 90s) finally changed my mind, and now I know it would not have been a good plan. I think it would have quickly worn us down; become drudgery. But I’ve retained some of my huge appetite to see as much as possible of this continent I like so much. That’s part of why we tacked on quick trips to Lesotho and eSwatini (the former Swaziland). Another is that we so enjoyed our visits two years ago to Europe’s smallest microstates. The same questions apply: how do these little chunks of territory surrounded by big burly states survive?

We blew through Lesotho in less than two days, yet even that brief interval delivered a strong taste of the place. I had found a South African company, Roof of Africa, to drive us clean across, and one of their driver-guides, Sandile, met us as we emerged from the brief immigration formalities at the airport. Sandile, 35, spoke excellent English and proved to be thoughtful, well-informed, and curious — an excellent traveling companion.

Over the course of the next 34 hours, we learned a lot about each other, as well as the history of Lesotho, which was occupied for millennia by San (aka Bushmen) hunter-gathers. Bantu peoples from the north arrived in the 17th century, and irritated by the Bushmen’s propensity to snatch their cattle, they drove them to the Kalahari Desert and other places no on else wanted to live. Later those Bantu clashed with white Boer settlers and their neighboring Zulus. The modern history of Lesotho began when a charismatic leader named Moshoeshoe united all the Bantu clans, placated the Zulu’s rapacious leader, Shaka, and worked out a deal with the Boers in which he traded a bunch of territory for independence. Sandile took us to the Thaba Bosui, Lesotho’s Plymouth Rock, birthplace of the landlocked little country that still survives.

This was a reproduction of the original founding community. Note that residents of Lesotho are known as the blanket people. Staying warm here is an issue.

Now that I’ve driven across it, I understand why both Shaka and the Boers decided it wasn’t worth trying to conquer the place. The land is harsh and high (over 9000 feet in many places), and icy winds slice through the passes, even now, in late spring. Massive mesas and buttes reminded Steve and me of a grayer, grassier version of the American West. It looks nothing like anything we’ve seen anywhere else in Africa but at times reminded us of the South American Altiplano or Tibet.

Most of Lesotho’s 2.5 million citizens are very poor. They survive by farming crops like sorghum and wheat, and grazing animals. Nowhere have I seen so many shepherds, young boys who’ve dropped out of school to spend their days and nights looking after various types of sheep (Merinos being most prized) or Angora goats or cattle.

More than once I did a double take when I realized the cowboy riding a horse near the road was black.

The biggest disappointment of this trip came in Lesotho, when I learned Sandile would not be driving us back into South Africa over the Sani Pass. Travel writers rank this road through the Drakensberg Mountains as one of the world’s great driving experiences. When I received Roof of Africa’s proposed itinerary, I assumed we would experience it, as it was on a straight line from our hotel Wednesday night and our destination Thursday (the city of Pietermaritzburg.)

But Sandile explained there was simply no road connecting the dots. Few roads of any kind cut through this brutal territory. Instead we had to cross the border at lonely place called Qacha’s Nek, then jolt for an hour to get back on good South African tarmac. (We learned that many South Africans like the idea of Lesotho residents coming across the border about as much as some Americans welcome Mexican immigrants.)

Neither Steve nor I regretted our little dash through the mountain kingdom. It’s fun to be reminded of the existence of places like Ha Moka (another stop we made Wednesday.) A tiny village today, it began in the early 1800s when a guy named Moka moved into a big local cave to hide out from the nearby community of cannibals. (Apparently they had been driven by drought and starvation to start catching and eating humans.) Moka married and eventually invited four other families to live in the cave. They built tidy little clay houses that look more like hobbit homes than anything we’ve seen outside the movie set we visited in New Zealand.

The inside of the cave houses was actually clean and pleasant.

Our guide at the site told us the last member of the fourth generation of the cave dwellers just died last month. She has descendants, but it’s not clear any of them will move into the family’s cave house. As for the cannibals, even though they had eaten his own grandfather, King Moshoeshoe got them to stop their evil ways by giving them some cattle. More proof that he was one of the world’s better kings.

The spiral aloe, the national flower of Lesotho.

Wet and Wild

October 12, 2023October 12, 2023jdewyzeLeave a comment

A more accurate name for this post might be Lazy and Boring. After we reached the Zambian border and turned in our Land Cruiser, mostly what we did was luxuriate in a glorious setting. Great for us but not much to read about. Still, we did get wet and saw a couple of wild marvels.

One of the great natural wonders of the world lies at the far northwest corner of where Zimbabwe meets Zambia, so the first thing we did upon driving there from Hwange National Park was to go to Victoria Falls National Park (on the Zimbabwe side). I’d been worrying for months that only a trickle of water might be pouring over the escarpment. The end of the dry season is an excellent time for seeing animals but six months off from when the water levels are highest.

I had nothing to worry about. A poster near the park entrance makes it clear that high and low season at the falls offer very different experiences.

At the peak-flow times, the mist is so dense it’s hard to see much. Instead we watched a breathtaking amount of water plunge over the cliff in some places…

…but also got clear views of the rocky geology. It was spectacular, and seeing it in person fulfilled a long-held dream.

Friday night we ate crocodile croquettes and good pizza at the Vic Falls branch of The Three Monkeys then slept at the B&B where we dropped off the Land Cruiser. The next morning a local guy transported us to the Zambia border, where the passport-stamping formalities took only 20 minutes. A second driver drove us across the 118-year-old bridge financed by Cecil Rhodes…

and then on to our splurge for the trip — a beautiful lodge on the banks of the Zambezi.

Both of us were tired, so it was pure pleasure to enjoy the river views, nap, and swim in the riverside pool.

In the late afternoon of our full day at the lodge, we boarded a sunset cruise on the river.

Along with drinks and hot hors d’oeuvres, it served up views of animals strolling or snoozing on the banks:

…as well as our first hippo of the trip…

…and some startling views of an elephant orgy featuring both sex…

…and snuggles.

Then it was time to pack up, say goodbye to ZImbabwe and Zambia and head off on the last phase of this trip: South Africa, Lesotho, and eSwatini.

Camping in Africa

October 9, 2023October 10, 2023jdewyze1 Comment

Years ago when I was working as a journalist, I met a remarkable character named Bill Wheeler. Bill had abandoned his career as a San Diego anesthesiologist to devote his life to adventuring, mainly in Africa. He documented his travels using his prodigious photographic talents. In one interview, Bill recounted how he had spent his very first night on the continent: driving to a game park, getting out of his vehicle, and pitching a tent. He was terrified of being eaten alive, but all he could do was to take a couple aspirins, the strongest pain relievers he had with him.

I remember laughing and laughing at the thought of pitching a tent in an African game park. I couldn’t conceive of it. Now I know what it’s like, firsthand.

Steve and I self-drove and camped for a couple of nights because it made Zimbabwe affordable and accessible and because Ant Bown (of Manapools.com) convinced me we could do it safely. We did NOT do it because we love camping so much. Steve was a Boy Scout in his youth, and over the course of our long marriage, we’ve camped on a number of occasions. Still, given a choice between a cozy lodge and a sleeping bag on the ground, I’ll usually pick the indoor snooze every time.

To say I was nervous about the camping portions of our Zimbabwe program is an understatement. Yet when we finally reached Ant’s base in Harare and had our 90-minute introduction to our vehicle, I felt exhilarated by the ingenuity of the Land Cruiser’s outfitting. It had AC and a two-person tent affixed to the rooftop. A sturdy freezer held the frozen meals and other supplies we had pre-ordered.

We could heat our meals and water for coffee on a cute little cooktop…

…using a compact armamentarium of kitchen tools.

We’d be able to recharge our battery with solar panels, if necessary.

In such a rig, I could see how we might actually be comfortable.

We had four nights of cottage stays (first in the eastern highlands and then in the Save Valley Conservancy) before our first taste of tent life. By then, Steve had become convinced he didn’t want to sleep on the Cruiser’s roof but instead would use the ground tent with which we also were supplied. Our destination was the Lake Kyle Recreational Park, not far from the Great Zimbabwe archeological site (one of our top sightseeing goals.)

A commanding but friendly official at the park’s front gate toted up our fees — $29 for the park entrance and campsite. We also opted to pay an extra $50 a person to go on a 4 pm “rhino walk” with a ranger guide. The entrance official told us how to get to the campground, and he said we could pick any site; we’d be the only folks there. Since we had time, we decided to set up our tents so we wouldn’t have to do that after the game walk.

Nothing disastrous happened during the set-up, but it reminded me of the contrast between staying in a hotel and erecting a ground tent. Hotel: you sign the register, maybe show your passport, then you can walk in your room and flop down for a nap. Tent: you have to haul out the cumbersome tent bag out of the Cruiser, find and roll out the ground cloth. Unpack the tent. Stake down its corners, find the poles, fit them together, get them to stand up so you can clip the tent body to the framework, pound in more stakes. It’s a pain!

Opening up the roof tent presented different challenges. You had to start by wrestling off its straps and cover, very tough to do since it was so high and we had nothing to stand on.

Here’s a view of Steve struggling to do it.

Once it was uncovered, one of us had to get up on the tires to extend the ladder.

Eventually I learned to scramble up there.

The other person then used the roof tent ladder as a lever to pop the structure open.

When I climbed up and into it, it felt solid enough, and unzippering the windows covers yielded some cool views.

I particularly appreciated being able to see the sky.

Later I would have to get my gear up and into it (including the instant-coffee canister I’d bought in Harare to serve as a chamber pot. No way was I planning to climb down that ladder and toddle off to the “ablutions” in the dark.)

After this setup, we had a splendid rhino walk with a gun-toting ranger who led us straight to two large groups of the massive herbivores.

Shot with my long lens, these white rhino look closer than we actually got to them — but not by much.

Although our guide said most white rhino were pretty chill, he didn’t like the stare we were getting from this big male. So we moved on.

Back at our campsite, Steve and I made dinner, which included grilled burgers, a nice salad, and brownies washed down with cold milk.

I thought the table cloth, supplied by Ant, was a nice touch.

Both of us went to bed early, slept well, and woke at 5:30 to pack everything up and put it all away. Because we were clumsy, almost 3 hours passed before we cranked up the Cruiser and hit the road. I felt grubbier than I had in memory, but we were otherwise fine.

We stayed in hotels for the next four nights. Our final two nights of camping came in Hwange National Park, one of the biggest game preserves in all of Africa. Ant had booked us into two separate sites, and they couldn’t have been more different from each other. The first, Tusker’s Camp, is located in a forested area just outside the east side of the park.

It’s not far from the property occupied by the Painted Dog Conservation group, a non-profit devoted to helping this highly endangered predator (not a dog at all, although they look like they could be relatives.) We spent almost an hour learning about them and visiting the only current occupant of the rehab facility.

After being attacked by a lion, Lucky (as she was named) was treated at the center. But she still limps too badly to return to the wild. So she’s a permanent resident.

We then found the park administration office, booked a 7 am game walk for the next morning, and made our way down some truly awful roads to find Tusker’s.

We never glimpsed the fancy Ivory Lodge that Tusker’s adjoins. Our home for the night was an unfenced piece of land overlooking a distant water hole lined with elephants.

That black clump at the water’s elephant consists of elephants…

They looked like this through my telephoto lens.

A solitary, laconic attendant named Reginald showed us the amenities — a clean bathroom close at hand; a pleasant dining platform. I asked if any dangerous animals were likely to put in an appearance, and he replied that they usually didn’t come to where we’d parked but tended to stay in the brushy area maybe 50 yards away. Reginald then chopped some wood, built a fire, and disappeared. We never saw him or any other human again during our stay.

Some parts of the hours that followed were sublime. We set up the tents more efficiently than we had done at Kyle Lake. Steve made gin and tonics, which we carried up the viewing platform.

As the sun set, we sipped our cocktails and took in the action around the water hole. The elephants had tanked up and moved on, but dozens of baboons dashed in to get a drink, then retreated back into the woods. With the light fading, we dined on excellent beef stew (the last of our pre-ordered meals), and by 9 I had climbed up the stairs to my sleeping perch. Within 5 minutes, I was dreaming.

I awake with a jolt shortly after midnight to the sound of footsteps and soft rumbles below. Peering out my windows, I couldn’t see what was moving, but it felt very close. “Steve!” I hissed. “Do you hear that?”

“Mrmph,” I recognized Steve awakening. A moment later came the unmistakable sound of a big feline, growling.

“Oh my,” Steve said.

“Do you want to come up here?” My voice was pitched at least an octave higher than normal.

“No,” he said. “Go to sleep.”

But how could I? Given what Reginald had said, I didn’t really think the lion or leopard would make it up to the Cruiser’s roof to rip my tent apart. I was less sure about Steve’s fate, and more than anything, I felt flooded with adrenaline, on full alert.

We didn’t hear the big cat growl again, but for the next two hours, a wild panoply of noises surrounded the Cruiser: snorts and chuffles and lots of footsteps. They would disappear for a few minutes, then some new creepy noise would make me sit bolt upright. At one point, I heard the loud improbable whisper of rain. Outside it was still dry as a bone, and I realized I was hearing the shish, shish, shishing of what sounded like a large group of heavy-footed animals moving through the nearby stand of brush and trees. Elephants? Buffalo? I think it had to be one or the other, but I couldn’t see well enough to confirm that.

And then the noises all stopped. The animal party broke up. When I woke up around 5, my fitness device showed that I had finally gone back to sleep a little before 3. Comparing our sleep scores later that morning, mine was 66, “Fair,” according to my Oura ring. Steve, in contrast, snoozed for almost 7 and a half hours, bagging him an “Optimal” sleep score of 88 (one of his best for the trip.)

Somehow I got through our busy slate of activities for Friday. We packed up our stuff faster (practice does help) then went on yet another great walk with a sweet and patient ranger. We slogged over some of the worst roads of the trip to cross a blackened section of the national park that verges on the Kalahari Desert.

The ravaged landscape was so grim, we began to wonder if we would find any place to stop and eat our lunches. But we continued to spot bunches of elephants, including a large group near a place on the map labeled Shumba. The entry gates looked almost Gothic.

But a large tree provided welcome shade.

One old female elephant made her way from the herd to near us. Steve and I argued for days over whether she was checking us out (my theory) or just hoping for a spare banana (Steve’s.)

Robin’s Camp was our final campsite. When we reached it, we concurred it was nicer than many campgrounds we’ve visited in America. Like Tusker’s, Robin’s abuts a lovely lodge equipped with an inviting swimming pool we could have used, had we more time, but again we wanted to get the tents up before the sun set. Unlike Tusker’s, the Robin’s campground was fenced, and two of the other campsites were occupied by tourists. Inside the spotless lavatories, overhead rain-shower heads provided abundant hot water. Our spot had a picnic table, a grill, even electrical outlets for charging up our devices. Once again we ate well and I was asleep before 8:30. This night I didn’t hear a sound other than the buzz of insects.

It almost felt mundane. But two final encounters transformed our stay into something extraordinary. While we were sipping our morning coffee, a pair of red-billed hornbills landed on our Cruiser’s doors and seemed amazed to see their reflections in the windows.

They acted fearless as they hung around, and when I tossed one of them seeds from my muesli, it gobbled them down.

Around sunset on Friday evening, I also had noticed a large group of what looked at first like squirrels — maybe 20 or 30 animals — bolting toward us. They came very close and then tumbled into several holes so close I could have tossed a pebble into one of them. A couple of them stood up on their back feet, and I gasped.

“Are they Timons?” I wondered, thinking of the Lion King’s comic meerkat.

Steve knew better. He exclaimed that they were mongoose. “I’ve never seen one before!” He sounded awestruck. (He now insists they are his favorite of all the animals we have ever seen in Africa.)

They didn’t reappear again until around 7 the next morning (Saturday), when one or two popped up. They looked around, clearly cautious.

Our Zimbabwe guidebook later helped us identify them as banded mongoose.

Within a moment or two, chirping noises erupted. The animals seemed to be discussing whether the coast was clear. They reached some consensus, and the whole group spilled out again and streaked away, shockingly fast.

I’d camp next to those guys any day.

In the footsteps of our ancestors

October 8, 2023October 8, 2023jdewyze5 Comments

Last Tuesday as the afternoon sun lowered, Steve and I stood over the grave of Cecil Rhodes.

This guy, after whom the country of Zimbabwe once was named (Rhodesia), occupies one of the most dramatic final resting places I’ve ever seen.

I knew almost nothing about Rhodes before this trip, but now I can tell you: he was a ruthless, rapacious visionary. The son of an English minister, he was so sickly as a child, his family sent him as a teenager to Africa in the hope it would toughen him up. Once there, Rhodes heard about about the diamond action in Kimberly (in what’s now South Africa), moved there, and raised money (from the Rothchilds) to start buying up mine leases. He wound up essentially cornering the world diamond market and founded the De Beers Company (still a powerhouse in the diamond world.) He also resolved to build a rail line from Cape Town to Cairo through all the British possessions along the way. To do that, he needed to take the land ruled by the Ndebele king (basically today’s Zimbabwe and Zambia) and fill it with Englishmen, who would ride in comfort upon those Rhodesian rails.

Using lies, deception, and the muscle of the English crown, Rhodes succeeded so well that by the 1950s and 60s, white people held all the power in Rhodesia, and they transformed the place into something that warmed many Western hearts. At the same time, resentment among the natives built, and a vicious guerrilla war began in the 1970s. The insurgents triumphed in 1980, when the Brits relinquished their claim on the place, and the modern state of Zimbabwe was born. For most of the time since then, the black Zimbabwean elite, every bit as greedy as Rhodes, has done a pretty dreadful job of ruling. But personally, I can’t fault them any more than I blame Rhodes. He started the mess. I didn’t spit on his grave, but if anyone else had been there and done that, I wouldn’t have objected.

Nonetheless Monday through Wednesday nights, Steve and I stayed in an institution that symbolized the heart of white Rhodesian rule for 127 years, and if I’m honest I have to report: we enjoyed it.

The Club Bulawayo, both a private social club and a hotel, today is still a grand old structure paneled in expanses of dark, very shiny wood.

We were more than comfortable in our large room, spotless and equipped with comfy beds, a nice shower, and decent internet. Food served in the building’s central courtyard was good, and the handful of folks on the staff (all black) were uniformly warm and welcoming. In many ways, however, the Club is as broken as were Rhodes’ dreams of continental mastery. The 300-plus-year-old grandfather clock on the second floor still chimes, but the elevator doesn’t work (so we had to lug our bags up 62 grand steps to reach the second story). The parquet in the lobby gleams, but the corridor outside our door looked shabby.

We saw so few other guests that at times I felt like we had sneaked into and made ourself at home in a museum.

Steve and I devoted one of our two full days in Bulawayo (Zimbabwe’s second largest city) to urban amusements: visiting the national Museum of Natural History, the old railroad museum, the central public library, and more. Like our stay at the Club, these provided more tastes of lost imperial glory.

Rhodesia’s railroad system was once a marvel.

Rhodes had ordered that the streets of this city be built wide enough so a wagon pulled by 24 oxen could make a U-turn. When the ox teams disappeared, hordes of cars never replaced them, so today you can stroll around the central business district without fear of being mown down.

For our other full day, we had to choose between two excursions outside the city. We could have visited the Khami Ruins built about 600 years ago by people who had abandoned Great Zimbabwe after it collapsed. Steve and I had visited the Great Zimbabwe complex a few days earlier. Considered the greatest archeological site south of the Sahara, it met my (very high) expectations.

A young archeology student named Shylet was our excellent guide.

Part of the site, where a series of kings lived, crowns a high vantage point.

The king’s chief wife occupied this enormous lower complex.

But Great Zimbabwe is basically a medieval castle, and the Khami ruins would have been more of the same (only smaller and younger.)

The alternative offered an experience of antiquity orders of magnitude older. So on Tuesday we drove about 30 minutes south of Bulawayo to the Matobo Hills. You could visit Matabo National Park just for the geology (or to see Rhodes’ grave, which lies within it.) Fantastic rock formations dominate the landscape, including gigantic boulders that look like they could crash down at any moment.

For us, however, the big draw was the rock paintings that line the walls of thousands of caves.

We visited two of them. The first was relatively easy to reach, down a shady dirt byway off the rocky main road. A friendly young museum attendant greeted us. His name was Knowledge. (“Yeah, seriously,” he said, aware of the humor in his parents’ choice.) He gave us a thorough, adept tour of the small but excellent museum, which filled us in on the humans who once lived in these rough shelters as long as 40,000 years ago.

Some time around 13,000 years ago, they started decorating their caves with paintings of the world around them. (Actually, even older paintings may exist; the layers underlying the cave floors have not been conclusively excavated.) The little museum contains reproductions of some of the best — far more complex than any cave paintings I’ve ever seen before.

I can’t explain everything that’s in this reproduction of a painting in the Botwe cave, but the guy at the top left was trying to hunt the huge lion and got his arm bitten off. The person two rows below him, horrified by these happenings, has his arms on his head — a prehistoric Munchian Scream.

After our tour, Knowledge led us to the Pomongwe cave a bit further down the path. The space is lovely, big enough to have housed a clan of maybe 100 folks, but sadly, the paintings were damaged around 100 years ago, when inept curators tried brightening them up with linseed oil (in preparation for a visit from some British royalty). Still, we could see how extensive and impressive they once must have been.

Knowledge urged us to visit Nswatugi Cave, less accessible but in much better condition. To get to it, we had to drive quite a bit further along dirt roads that were all but deserted. Then we had to find and follow a series of green arrows painted along the path.

This sign refers to just the short final bit. The beginning part was much steeper.

Parts of the hike required scrambling up steep rocky inclines lined with brush where black mambas and puff adders lurk; other sections went up stairs and across flats. What we found at the top was worth it all.

A wonderful menagerie parades across this cave’s walls…

The images moved me in a way I find hard to articulate. Thousands of years before the Egyptians began playing in their sands, these simple hunter-gatherers stood in this space, re-creating the world that surrounded them. One thing we’ve learned on this trip is that traditionally, Africans have seen their ancestors as a link with the divine. I’ve never been able to empathize with that. I’m not particularly interested in my own great-great-grandparents and certainly can’t conceive of worshipping them.

But it strikes me now that the San people who lived in and decorated Matoba’s caves are also my ancestors. Now that I’ve seen their art, it’s not that big a stretch to imagine kneeling before them.