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May 6: Gaborone and environs After a slow start, we get out today. First, off to downtown Gaborone to change dollars to pula. Gaborone looks a little like Davis might if it suffered a string of bad years. It looks to be a city of no more than moderate size, built low and wide with breathing room between buildings rather than dense and tall, and it's a bit run down with many stenciled and hand-lettered signs. Still, there are signs of new construction in many places. The bank is part of a long shopping mall which looks to have been built in the Seventies. We hit up a local handicraft store to scout out the range and price of curios. Didn't get much (I just picked up a fistful of postcards), but I suspect we'll be back later after we get a more solid handle on things. From there, we went a block or two over to the American embassy with Ken to meet Helen for lunch. Once you get past "airlock" gates, the Botswanian guards, who checked under the car with a mirror on a stick for bombs, and the formidable walls, perhaps ten feet of metal-cored concrete, it looks remarkably unremarkable, just an office complex of no great size. Still, we handed our passports over to the Marine guard on duty (one of the guys we had met the night before) and strolled around. We had an interesting chat with Scott Delisi, the Deputy Chief of Mission (#2 man at the embassy, right behind his excellency ambassador Robert Krueger, former senator for the great state of Texas, who happened to be elsewhere at the time) concerning the ghost of the embassy. Apparently, the DCM's office is haunted. The doors act strangely, things move while nobody is looking, computers crash for no apparent reason, and so on. That last might be attributed to their use of Microsoft products, but the rest may need a ghost for a full explanation. The theory about how the ghost came to be runs thusly: some years ago, a former DCM's secretary died and had her ashes sent to the embassy in Botswana. Apparently, she had loved the country and had wanted her ashes scattered from a nearby hilltop. Her request, however, was delayed, misinterpreted, picked up by the wrong person, and eventually carried out the wrong way. Instead of being scattered from the desired hill, her ashes were dumped on the embassy grounds. It was some time after that when the strange effects began. From the embassy, we went off to Oodi, a small village near Gaborone where they do a brisk business in weaving. Oodi is a more or less traditional African village. "Houses" consist of fenced compounds containing a few single-room buildings, mostly square cinder block huts and mud brick rondevaals. Color me ethnocentric, but I think it would look better if the fences were wood or natural thorn bushes rather than rusty steel wire. The weavers spin their own yarn and thread from wool brought in from South Africa, dye it on the premises of their workshop, and make various bits of cloth out of it, everything from place mats to bedspreads. The hand-operated looms they do most of the work on are quite large and look to be capable of producing pieces at least six feet wide. However, their most impressive work is figurative tapestries produced on large vertical looms. Apparently, they do work to order, producing tapestries from a photograph. I didn't get any of those, but I did pick up a few nice items. We happened to arrive at Oodi a few minutes before a party of cattlemen's wives, brought along by an expedition of their husbands, accompanied by the ambassador's wife. As we left, Antone said "Bye bye, rich ladies," although not so loud that anybody outside the truck could hear it. The last outing of the day was a game drive at the Mokolodi game preserve, our first trip out into nature. We, along with one of the Marines and somebody from the embassy, piled into a truck for a two hour drive around the preserve, which encompasses about thirty square kilometers. We saw any number of variations on the theme of antelope, some elephants, cheetahs, warthogs, and ostriches, but the highlight of the evening was getting very close to a family of rhinoceroi: a father, a mother, and a juvenile. The father had, apparently, attacked the vehicle we were in not too long ago, but not with any great enthusiasm. He appeared not to hold a grudge against the truck, although he did stay between us and his mate. Silas, the driver and guide, had a remarkably good eye. We finished the evening with dinner at a restaurant on the edge of the preserve. The place looked spectacular, with an enormous conical thatched roof supported by entire-log beams, although the cream sauce they cooked my venison in was perhaps not the best way to go. Nevertheless, they had some outstanding ice cream and a very good chocolate mousse. |