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OR Tambo Airport
Johannesburg Airport greets on the right note. If there’s one note of consistency between my older writing and now, it’s that I usually have better things to do with my time when I’m tapping these out. In this case a speaker’s note for later in the week. In theatrical parlance, a script of sorts. Just as I am with improv, I’ll be pretty rubbish if I don’t prepare one for tomorrow. But here we are anyways.
Let’s see. London was April, which means it’s time to move on to the bigger ticket item from September to November. Faced with three conferences more or less in a row, I opted to stay on the move for close to two months. This meant bouncing from South Africa, to Slovenia, to Russia, sandwiching in about two weeks of telecommuting from various hostels in odd parts of the Balkans. It wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had, but it certainly made for an interesting change of pace.
So we’ll take it piecemeal, starting with South Africa:
Cite-ation Needed. The trip to South Africa was for the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna (CITES for short). CITES is another institution that has
hornbill thoughts
The author (left) mimics the call of a hornbill. struggled to keep up with the speed of change since its founding. CITES has always included trade as part of its mandate, and its staff have historically hewed to that mandate. But often that trade has threatened entire species with extinction. Look no further than the African elephant or lesser known species like the hapless helmeted hornbill for examples. That’s not to say that trade can’t be handled sustainably, just that it’s damn difficult when the money’s good and the penalties for trafficking wildlife have historically failed to match the crime. Multimillion dollar smuggler kings have gotten a sentence measured in months, not years. Trade out the resource and such a penalty would be unthinkable for any other of the top three smuggled goods (drugs, people, firearms), but there we are.
The atmosphere at CITES was weirdly festive for a two week debate about the future of entire species and livelihoods that depend on them. And honestly that might have been part of my problem. Here’s another contrast between travel for work and pleasure:
Work First. This should be pretty obvious, but it’s actually crucial in the CITES context. Events are going on all the time. There’s a
million things to see, people to talk to, and more free food and drink than there probably should be at every event. It’s immensely distracting, and it turned me into a networking hummingbird. Which is of course not what I supposed to be there for. My own thoughts and attitude going into the event weren’t also in the best headspace to begin with, and rattling them further certainly did me no favors. That’s not to say good, truly good things, didn’t happen. It’s just that my role in the events was not the most productive and I had to rethink some things as a result.
The Conference is Home. The Conference is Life. Living in the box of meeting rooms, scouting events and holding translation sets until my ears moulded to their shape was pretty much the nature of the game for two weeks. During that time I left the square two block radius around the conference center about once, for a rally. Not that the really wasn’t interesting, but never again do I want to eat a burger from the one restaurant I went to more times than I’d like.
Play Second. Here’s the funny truth. It’s
Savannah Elephant
Note the dam in the background. The park was more or less cobbled together from the countryside. not like conferences have to be just an intense professional sprint. My layover was through Paris, and I managed a day's worth of wandering around. At least it was enough time to shred the wheels on my suitcase. Our final weekend was spent visiting a wildlife park called Pilanesberg. It’s an odd, if beautiful 500 square kilometers cobbled together at the behest of a nearby casino. If that weren’t odd enough, its entire population of wild animals are all descendants from Operation Phoenix, what was at the time the largest mass relocation of animals ever conducted. The result is an impressive, if extremely synthetic circular reserve conjured out of a dozen former Boer farms and one conspicuous brick dam. I watched elephants play in the mud of the reservoir, and baboons clamber along the parapet. Very much a caged vision of life after humanity.
Second meant a psesudo professional trip to an animal sanctuary. Lionsrock is no less synthetic than Pilanesberg, and was converted from a game park that used to cater to the canned hunting industry. In this case, lions that were parked in a 4 acre plot. Basically a handicap for, shall we say, the less capable hunters to get all the thrill of shooting something that comes with no statute of limitations. Lionsrock today was an animal refuge, a place where formerly domesticated cats could live out their days in peace and relative comfort. I wish I had a joke here, but it was a sad if beautiful place. Incongruously, they also do weddings.
I left South Africa after about two and a half weeks with my mind a million miles away from everywhere else, and unfortunately my luggage inn another place entirely, but that’s a story for another time. Til then.
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