Introduction

Into and Then Out of Africa (with apologies to Isak Dinesen).

1.  Introduction

(In August and September of 2014, Irene and I took a trip to Southern Africa — specifically South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Botswana, followed by a week in London.  This is the first of many emails / blog posts that discuss that trip and illustrate with photos — mostly taken by me.  Instructions to subscribing to these emails are in final paragraphs after the heading Instructions)

According to the interwebs, the longest distance anyone can be from any other place on the planet — the antipode of that place — is approximately 12,450 miles.  And the furtherest away we would be on this trip was about 10,630 miles in Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa.  So while not quite the antipode of San Francisco (which is somewhere in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of South Africa), it still is hella miles from home (to use the slang that Wikipedia attributes to originating in the Bay Area).  You can see the antipode on this map in the bottom right corner.  Port Elizabeth is on the left side of the map, not quite half way up from the bottom.

San Francisco Antipode

I've promised highlights of this trip to many of you.  This will not be a full description of this trip nor always a chronological version.  The trip was wonderful and unexpected.  The unknown they (as much as I have been able to figure out) say that travel broadens the mind.  Two quotes best illustrate this to me: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,” said Mark Twain.  And Samuel Johnson said, "The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are."

These highlights will vary from post to post.  Sometimes you will get what happened on a day or, more often, the part of a day.  Sometimes you will get what I remember from several different and often disparate days and, fair warning, I may include teasers of future posts or references to prior ones.  Sometimes you will get ideas that are only vaguely related to days.  Some of these thoughts will be mine.  Some will have benefited from discussion with Irene.  Some has been enriched by what’s found elsewhere.  All will be accompanied by photos — usually 5 to 10 in each post. 

The plan is to have one post every three days.  A few items are ready to go and I will mete these out using that schedule.  Of course, if I get distracted (not that that ever happens), there could be an interval of more than three days but I’m hoping to keep it to that.  Some of the photos will be videos.  And don’t worry — you won’t be getting all or even a large number of the (over 6,000) pictures I took.  If you want more when this is done, ask and I’ll give you access to the entire set of edited photos stored online.

I know some of you have been expecting these photos for some time.  I can only say that it has taken this long to assimilate the entire experience into some form that I felt I could share it with you.  And, yes, there will be wild animals — but not exclusively or even predominately.  Southern Africa is much more than that.  Do you now that South Africa's Cradle of Humankind and the University of Witwatersrand's Origins Centre are two landmarks in terms of the origins of humankind.  We did all come from Africa.  Twain and Johnson are right.

Link to full resolution photos

Instructions

(Now, a brief discussion of logistics.  I've mentioned a blog a few times in this email/post.  A blog is geek-speak for weblog which itself is pretty geeky sounding.  In the pre-computer days we called them journals.  They are a way for a person to post information on the internet and share it with others.  I'm using a blog as a combination photo-album and slide show with written rather than oral commentary.  Each entry is called a post.  So, where do you find this blog?   Either click on this link:

http://bichael-africa.blogspot.com 

or paste the above into your browser.  You'll be taken to the first post of the blog which is the same as this email.  

(If you want to just check back here every three days or so and read what is newly posted, go for it.  You need to do nothing more.  But if you want to be notified about a new post by email, then go to the upper right corner of the webpage, just below the brown-red heading, where it says, "Receive Blog Postings by Email."  There is a place for you to enter your email address and then click on the button marked "Submit"  That's all you have to do.  And you will then receive an email containing each entry as it is posted by me, and you can either read it in your email or in the blog post itself.  

(If you tire of getting these emails, there is a link near the bottom where you can click to stop them coming.  And I won't use your email address for any nefarious purposes -- besides I already have it if you received this email.  If you want to share this blog with others, you can give them the link shown above and they can sign up too.  And if all this is too much for you -- and while I have tried to make my directions clear I may have failed -- then ask me for help.

(Now a note that many of you may wish to skip -- it's about the size, resolution, and clarity of the photographs.  The blog requires that I post pictures of a static size and while I have tried to choose a fairly large size, there may be times when a few of you might want to blow up these pictures even bigger. Or you may suffer from age-related vision degradation -- I know it well.  I've included in each post, a link to the actual photos used, as posted on my SmugMug account.  There you can view the photos in full resolution and even download them to your computer -- it's the little symbol under each photo clear to the right that looks like a downward pointing arrow with a horizontal line underneath it.  Please use that to download photos and ignore the "Buy Photos" as I don't sell my photos.  In fact, if you take leave of your senses and actually want to use one of the photos feel free to do so.  Just let people know it's my photo and if you're going to make money off of it, then let's talk.

(Now a note that all but the most geeky of your will want to skip.  Why don't I just sent you emails of each posting?  I wish I could but the simple matter is that mass emailings tend to fool some of your email programs into thinking I'm spamming you.  Hence the use of the blog workaround.  And I'm pretty certain that at least three of you receiving this email will tell me another way I could have gotten around this.  Oh well, I'll use that for the next set of photos after I return from a trip to Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan later this year.)