Saturday, April 08, 2006
Botswana was mellow to the point of being unremarkable. Such organized and relatively prosperous environments lull me into quiescence and destroy my story telling urge.
Nobody encouraged me to expect that our visit to the small South African town of Naboomspruit would constitute a riveting shift toward the exotic. That is because Naboom hosts fewer than three thousand people, an aging, largely white population and could easily have been airlifted from Tennessee--provided it was then stocked with residents whose accent is much more pleasant, whose taste for short shorts and pulled up socks is more acute and who speak of their pick up trucks, fondly, as "bukkies".
The town was recently renamed Mokopane in the recent wave of identity shifts imposed by the new South African government, which is eager to shed the unpronounceable billion syllable Boer/Afrikaans/Monkey Dutch names that have enshrouded all of its rivers, bridges, mountains, streets and towns. These new names will take a great while to settle into common usage, especially in towns like Naboomspruit, where many of the residents find Naboomspruit far more pronounceable than Mokopane. I have not been able to skilfully pronounce place names since I left Philadelphia in 2001-about two weeks after learning how to pronounce Schulykill.
Normally, I am not a birthday celebrator; but since there are no bank holidays on this trip and since events like Thanksgiving, Valentines Day, Halloween or Anarchist Day are impossible to remember while living in a car, I have actually been looking forward to the attention and license that a birthday typically warrants. If we had travelled a few days more quickly (if the car had not persisted in being a completely decrepit glue nag) it would have been possible to bounce around Johannesburg enjoying the risky and engaging night life in the company of friends of friends. However, we were not able to travel so briskly and I was surprised by a round of something awful one minute after my birthday technically began in a rowdy and well filled bar, complete with long-arm dancing and massive Boer farmers.
The people always make the party. On my technical birthday (when the bartender tried to humble me with a double shot of 180 proof, relentless, hot pepper hooch called F U 2) and on my normal birthday, my friends and I were in excellent (massive) hands. People I had met just days before, outdid themselves making my feel worth the trouble and physically uncoordinated. A group of us enjoyed a top quality Braai, discovered that our auto mechanic is a moonshine wizard and learned that all the clubs in Naboom close at midnight on March 29th, 2006.
Nobody encouraged me to expect that our visit to the small South African town of Naboomspruit would constitute a riveting shift toward the exotic. That is because Naboom hosts fewer than three thousand people, an aging, largely white population and could easily have been airlifted from Tennessee--provided it was then stocked with residents whose accent is much more pleasant, whose taste for short shorts and pulled up socks is more acute and who speak of their pick up trucks, fondly, as "bukkies".
The town was recently renamed Mokopane in the recent wave of identity shifts imposed by the new South African government, which is eager to shed the unpronounceable billion syllable Boer/Afrikaans/Monkey Dutch names that have enshrouded all of its rivers, bridges, mountains, streets and towns. These new names will take a great while to settle into common usage, especially in towns like Naboomspruit, where many of the residents find Naboomspruit far more pronounceable than Mokopane. I have not been able to skilfully pronounce place names since I left Philadelphia in 2001-about two weeks after learning how to pronounce Schulykill.
Normally, I am not a birthday celebrator; but since there are no bank holidays on this trip and since events like Thanksgiving, Valentines Day, Halloween or Anarchist Day are impossible to remember while living in a car, I have actually been looking forward to the attention and license that a birthday typically warrants. If we had travelled a few days more quickly (if the car had not persisted in being a completely decrepit glue nag) it would have been possible to bounce around Johannesburg enjoying the risky and engaging night life in the company of friends of friends. However, we were not able to travel so briskly and I was surprised by a round of something awful one minute after my birthday technically began in a rowdy and well filled bar, complete with long-arm dancing and massive Boer farmers.
The people always make the party. On my technical birthday (when the bartender tried to humble me with a double shot of 180 proof, relentless, hot pepper hooch called F U 2) and on my normal birthday, my friends and I were in excellent (massive) hands. People I had met just days before, outdid themselves making my feel worth the trouble and physically uncoordinated. A group of us enjoyed a top quality Braai, discovered that our auto mechanic is a moonshine wizard and learned that all the clubs in Naboom close at midnight on March 29th, 2006.
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