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Until Friday we’re at MalaMala Game Reserve in the Mpumalanga province of South Africa. We arrived yesterday afternoon on a twelve-seater airplane that picked us up at Phinda, the reserve where we spent the previous three nights. Mpumalanga Province is in the eastern part of the country. According to the brochure, MalaMala “is part of a conservation gene pool that covers 5.5 million acres of land in the heart of the South African Lowveld.” It’s certainly huge, I can’t argue with that! Since our first day at Phinda I’ve been noticing how different South Africa is from Botswana. The climate and geological/habitat contrasts are hard to ignore, as are the ethnic differences in the lodge and reserve staff. In Botswana, we had a wonderful guide named Martin. He (and all the staff, with the exception of ... read more

You have not truly lived until you have been charged by an elephant. I say that because I now believe that in order to know how alive you actually are, you must (at some point) feel very close to death. An encounter with the matriarch of a breeding herd of elephants is a great way to do this; I really recommend it. It's extra efffective if she charges you three times. More on this later. I'm writing from our hotel in Johannesburg. We're overnighting here--we came from Botswana this evening. We stayed at Baines' Camp in the Okavango Delta. It was beautiful. The camp is five rooms on stilts, a boardwalk connecting them, and a main lodge/dining area. The whole thing sits on top of the delta, and the area directly in front of and below ... read more

Where to begin? We're at Baines' Camp in Botswana's Okavango Delta. The camp itself is amazing--it has a maximum capacity of ten guests and sits in the middle of the swamp on stilts. The main building is open-air and includes a living room, a campfire pit with a porch around it, an outdoor dining patio and an indoor dining room. The rooms all have a bedroom and bathroom, and a porch that looks out onto the delta (which is beautiful--it's not a gross, smelly swamp--for the record). At night, you can roll your bed out onto the porch and sleep under the stars. The beds all have mosquito nets so you don't get eaten alive while you sleep (the bugs aren't bad to begin with). The maids put hot water bottles between the sheets while you're ... read more

Buenas noches a tod@s, Remember me? I used to have a blog. Wait, no--that's not quite right. I still have a blog. What I used to have was time to write in it. What do I have now, instead of time? A family, four classes, and an internship where I work 20 hours a week. A free hour is harder to come by lately. A lot has happened since I last wrote, 79 days ago. Here are some quick updates: School My semester will end on April 30, two and a half weeks from now. I'm taking the following classes: Social History of Latin America, Social History of the Dominican Republic, Migratory Processes of the Contemporary Caribbean, and Social and Cultural Identity of the Contemporary Caribbean. None of them are particularily stimulating. In fact, I would ... read more