Mauritius—Pirate Pair-a-Dice

Always a wake, that small burial at sea, the chance to mourn what's left behind. Some turbulence where we turned the corner on Good Hope, and entered the Indian Ocean. We stayed close to the beautiful, rolling hills of the eastern coast of South Africa:



Forested hills streamed down to sandy beaches. We were eventually across from Kwazu-Natal, the game park a bit inland. Then along Xhosa (pronounced Koza) land, the enormous "rez" where apartheid wanted to shove all Africans. Few outsiders are here, and nobody seems to swim, or even eat fish, which are apparently seen as "snakes." Maybe just as well, as folks in Durban generally surf only inside the shark nets.

Up ahead a memory of Brazil's meeting of the waters. A stream of brown water was reaching deep into the blue sea:







The brown water made it easier to see large schools of black dolphins jumping in unison. Further ahead, we could see the cleft in the cliffs where the flooding river lived:





Then I rolled up my window shade the next morning and Mauritius had arrived:



Water taxis waited for our diplomatic briefing to be over, ready to carry students here and there:



In the harbor, old ships waited, hoping to be wooed by pirates, who have always found these waters:



This beautiful, volcanic island is the poor, illegitimate twin of the evanescent Fernando da Naronha off Brazil. Most folks live along the shore, with high, green mountains and waterfalls inland. There are a few samples of Branjolina invasion, and a couple mock-Mughal mc mansions, which I couldn't bring myself to photograph. This island was passed around like a back-room whore by the French, English and, especially, the Dutch, who brought slaves to work the sugar cane, which is still in abundance here—sugar plantations that throw the eye for miles, up against the mountains.

So there are Africans, Indonesians, Indians and even the Chinese here. French is spoken readily, but mostly with a twisted creole accent and vocab, which drives froggies mad, no doubt. And Port Louie will never be the mini-Paris the French always want any colony to develop. There is the kind of ridiculous fossil-fuel gridlock here that makes no more sense than Oahu, with its pork-barrel freeways instead of the light-rail proposal that should have been built. This place ought to run on solar, with small installations. [Are you listening, mi sobrino?: most of the world is ready for small-scale solar and wind, and we should be seeing to it!]

I was trip leader for another episode of American Pie, taking students on a cata-moron to snorkel. There were a hundred of us, and the binge alchies headed for more than their share of the beer. Soon there was the obligatory chorus line of the bikini brigade on deck. I worked on my sunburn, drinking a beer or two against my thoughts of the always-leaky face-mask and snorkel.

Forced myself into the water with a snorkel, and managed, as Astie will one day, too, to get the Darth Vader breathing going through the mouth, with the help of a mask made for pre-schoolers, which made breathing through my nose impossible. Were there fish? Oui, mon amie, there were some teeny, irredescent blue ones, some yellow and grey ones, with black spots and a whole school of off-white fish maybe a foot and a half long, that looked like barracudas, but without such scary dentures.

Thinking of the film, Open Water, I just grabbed the float trailing 100 feet off the boat, so I wouldn't drift toward India, and kicked my fins (made for someone Jack Black's size), driving myself around the big chunks of rubble and re-bar. The 20-something Mauritians had clearly not brought us to the best reef, which we could see breaking in the distance, but perhaps that preserved it. But they did barbeque some chicken and provide a hearty lunch without running out of beer. And it's hard to beat the sound of the sail on a catamaran...

We had to be back on the ship by dinner time, as we had sucked enough bunk fuel to be on our way. This meant I didn't get my alcohol supply replenished, and had no chance of finding the one bar with a pool table that the diplomats had told me about.

I had dinner by myself on the back deck, watching the sunset in the harbor:





After the monster-swells of the Atlantic, the Indian ocean was a welcome relief, with a trance-luscent surface that was hard to turn away from:



Here's a new screen-saver version for y'all:





What is the horizon, that circle spun around whatever moves? :



The day before India, I opened my broken curtin in my cabin and there were around twenty dwarf spinner dolphins (four-footers) leaping a meter out of the water and belly-flopping. I'm sure scientists believe it's to remove some parasite or remora, but I'm convinced they were showing me how to play again. All their energy at least got my tired carcass back to the gym. Hi ho, as Kurt Vonnegut would say.

I'll let you get a little shut-eye, gauchos, before I describe India, where the senses max out, and where "sultry" is more than the secret word for Throw Momma From the Train...

[my inner Mr. Gupta is already beginning to chatter!]

The Sea—John Banville Overtaken by James Joyce

One moment a scumble of mephitic harbor slop, the next a refulgent patina of rain, dropped like pin-pricks atop the shiny, nimble roll of waves. Out beyond the groyne the haulms of the sea, weeding itself, kelped up on currents, the blue, blue ocean an expatiation of constantly forgotten intent. Clouds, flocculent until the lour late hour rains sky, a minatory momentum—some revenant and revelator, the polished preaching. The wind is, beyond all knowing, a tun-dish and hugger-mugger, this seething horrent of prickly anemones and leg-less starfish, barnacled up against the tide, pooling among rocks, breaking off coral, bleaching the horizon.

A glistening surface, that effulgence etiolated by darkness, with its few stars beckoning with their last lightsomeness, already disappeared, gone dormant far beyond the craquelure at the edge of the cosmos. This apercu of the ocean a cerement for old stories, solar flares and meteorites that burned themselves upon the earth's girdle, entering their fiery death as a congeries of crepitants, bubbling up exactly at the equator of midnight, stones sliced by this centripetal moon that gathers behind its folded cloak, wings wrapped with electricity in the circling that vultures fly, waiting for a galaxy to die, or you to explain why...

South Africa—Beyond Wabenzi and Ubuntu

Welcome back, my naughty monkeys! We're about to put our head down and sniff the rhino muden of de veld and de sprawl. Best to suit up in your best camo gear, put a big stogie in your bwana fly-fishing vest, watch some SNL re-runs of "nani" and "nooni," then assume the position (kneeling again before the altar in Our Lady of Perpetual Ambiguity). South Africa's a lot like that English candy Tommy Pynchon likes, where you bite through the layer of malted milkball and nazi-pan into the eerie center of beef bourgoyne. Your best protection is to continue to be...(let me hear you say it outloud, wherever you're reading this) one with the spice, mis amigoes.

Mandela and Tutu (who has the world's most charged numeral in mythology, 22, on his t-shirt) are real, and I've got the statue to prove it:



“Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language. It speaks of the very essence of being human. When we want to give high praise to someone we say, 'Yu, u nobuntu'; 'Hey, so-and-so has ubuntu.' Then you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, 'My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.' We belong in a bundle of life. We say, 'A person is a person through other persons.' It is not, 'I think, therefore I am.' It says rather: 'I am human because I belong. I participate, I share.' A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they are less than who they are.”

South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Lavinia, Desmond Tutu's personal secretary for decades, is on our voyage, with her husband, Terry, who helped end Apartheid by closing down banking access. Lavinia talked about Tutu the spiritual leader, pastor, husband, father and more. Nelson Mandela held things together with a charismatic and hard-earned, jail-shined scrunchie, but corruption remains, and so many reforms remain to be enacted. The elections coming in April are heading back toward the ANC, but will they really provide the necessary changes?

Tourists go cage-diving to experience the great white sharks in the Ring-o-Death around Seal Island, while folks in the townships (two million, beyond the three million of Cape Town, proper) experience the great White Whale of Captain Ahabery by just surviving another day. Like Brazil, and so many other places, the Haves continue to outrun the Have (K)Nots at a dizzying pace.

HIV spread through the mines, where men working in the city had a city wife, then went home to one in the country. Currently 18% of children are HIV orphans. But Neviropine is helping to keep children from contracting AIDS from their mothers through breast milk. Talking about sex was taboo here, as it was in America. The Bush era did provide $15 million for HIV, but this is a pittance in a country with 25-29% infection rate (it's interesting to know that the highest HIV infection rate in America is in the District of Columbia, where politicians fail to address what's all around them).

The "Bush Colleges" (in the bush, no relation to W) of the mid-twentieth century never became the safety valve of community colleges, as in America. Black students without books or electricity continue to be at a severe disadvantage. The resulting overwhelming unemployment and consequent crime has caused an on-going brain drain. I've heard that every third doctor in Houston is from South Africa (sound right, Kathy?), and many of the young have relocated to Australia. A young white South African woman told me in a store that she had been robbed six times, and was planning on moving to Australia.

The 1990-94 smokescreen of violence between urban and rural people is over, and Thabo Mbeki is gone, but crime is rated "critical" by the American Embassy (the highest rating). American gangs are here; syndicates, including the Russian mob, are, too.

Students went into port scared, but felt they had been lied to, because of the hospitality they discovered. One student put $5 in his pocket and hitch-hiked to the Cape of Good Hope. He slept rough and had some hair-raising experiences, but was very lucky to make it back to the ship safely. While we're on this, it's worth noting that Cape Town receives huge shipments of drugs, and is the grip of a meth epidemic, as is America.

Yet disembarking here was not the rusty gigantic oil rig of Namibia, but the tugboat and fishing harbor, next to an upscale pier with high-end shops and restaurants within walking distance of the ship. Take a gander, as my beloved tugboats pull us into position alongside the pier:





Table Mountain looks down upon the harbor. It has a "table cloth" of clouds upon it quite often, so it's important to go up it if the weather is clear. Without much sleep, some of us took cabs to the trailhead (where there are warnings about muggers). It was a two-plus-hour, incredibly steep hike up to the top (reminded me of the great stone slabs of the Himalayas), gaining a lot of altitude. But when the fog did clear for a minute or two, here and there, the sight of the harbor and city were worth the effort:



Why am I smiling that Belugah-Boy smile, half way up?: because I've already burned off one pint of the local Scottish Ale, Old Wobbly, which is guaranteed to make your hair thicker! And there are some endorphins already at work, which can't hurt:



When we reached the top, a mythic passage and staircase appeared, the sun burning off the fog: "Mr. Frodo, I think this is the way. Don't follow that nasty Gollum! Sam says come this way!"

"No, Master Frodo, Smigel knows the way, and it's not toward the light. GOLLUM LIKES THE FOG, if he's got his London Fog raincoat!":



From the other side, on top, there's a view back down to the bay:





That night my camera battery went down, so I had no camera for the Jazz Safari (I'll add others' pix of this later; the Orishas apparently want me to memorize all sacred music and vistas). We began by driving to Best Ugly—a trendy jazz club a ways from the port. There was a fine trio of three, middle-aged lads—a decent drummer, a respectable saxman and a whiz-bang bass player. I got their CD to play on my radio show, and had some fine draft beer (not available, alas, on the ship).

Then we broke up into groups of fifteen or so, and went to separate musicians homes for dinner and more music. My group went to the modest, suburban home of a local great (all the music to accompany this blog will be made available soon, when I figure out how to add it). He and his wife welcomed us into the house, and their son, a chef, cooked dinner. I washed all the dishes, attracting a few helpful students who dried them, while listening to our host talk about his life in jazz. He still had the magic, but had a tube with oxygen, as his lung is collapsed. His tales-o-testosterone were cripplingly detailed, including having his teeth kicked out in Zambia for being black. He got on stage with Eric Clapton and others to play without teeth in a bleeding mouth on a borrowed saxophone. I listened with that intensity that any real elder inspires, and soon I was able to ask all my questions, able to be humbled by the answers.

Our passions lead us into these small communities. My love of jazz and blues has taken me literally around the world, where I feel kinship with all those musicians who love the music beyond money and even fame. It was hard to leave, as I realized I'd probably never see this fine musician again.

Then I began my b-day nightmare of leading a trip to Kruger Park, where I've wanted to go since I was a wee splinter of a lad, and saw a map of South Africa in a book about animals in the mighty Estherville Public Library. First I investigated the cockpit of the British Airways plane:



From Cape Town we flew to Nelspruit, the regional airport near Kruger. Out the window, I could see the landscape of mixed crops, just past the enormous plantations of pine and eucalyptus that would become paper pulp:



Let's be honest: my worst nightmare is being a dueno (why can't I make that tilde work?) or babysitter for 85 students ready to disembark into alcohol. But I took on the job to pay my own bar bill on the ship. Because it's the Age of Malpractice, we paid a fortune to stay in a plush resort with a teeny golf course that had crocodiles the size of a Cheney lie on the water hole greens. The whole place was Happy Gilmore meets Meester Rogers re-making Ace Ventura, Pet Detective:



Suddenly I had another big-mula idea. I could become the Po-Mo, Post-Colonial King of a franchise of miniature golf courses all over the "Third World." There would be the Giant Heart of Darkness that opens so Joseph Conrad's protruding head could swallow your little white balls. Or an Idi Amin hole, where the dictator knocked your ball trying to get through his palace into a moat full of real crocodiles with a cricket paddle. The Ghandi hole would have a real Ghandi clone peacefully bring your ball back to the tee, over and over again, in peace, as you began to fume. Of course the Kipling hole would mean putting up through the great cannon of Zam-Zama, your ball being blown a few provinces away into the Punjab, so you'd have to start again. There could even be Rube Goldberg holes, where you putt until your ball rolls into the empty cranium of W, then goes down a chute into the massive noggin of Mao, where it bounces off The Little Red book, before it is spit out of Mao's mouth, hitting Lenin in the back of the head, who falls, releasing a butterfly, which changes the weather far away in Mexico, which unleases a rock that pushes the hand gripping icepick of Trotsky's assassin into his head, thereby proving the Butterfly Effect and calling into question free will (would the assassin have stopped, if he'd had a chance at the last sec?)...[who's ready to fund this beauty?]

We dropped our bags, and hurried over the crunchy roaches that have out-lived yuppies everywhere into our pick-up trucks with seats and roll bars behind, which were high enough to discourage big predators for maybe five seconds. Driving to Kruger, I felt like I was in Africa for the first time, with the green rolling hills, and school children along the road. There are several million squatters outside the fenced park, who built the kind of acreages we call Californications in La Grande (where there may be four horses, a dozen sheep, three dogs, four cats, all jammed into half an acre of mud and dung). Many of the men work in Johannesburg, then come back home for a bit when they've made some money. Poachers live in these communities, as well.

Currently Kruger has drawn in animals scared to the park by poachers, so that they have twice as many, say, elephants (14,000, instead of the carrying capacity of 7,000), as they should. As Peter Mathiesen's book showed, elephants are the only creatures besides people who can tear up a jungle and turn it into a desert. And African elephants are more aggressive than Indian ones, unable to learn how to work for The Man.

[Interlude: it's nearly 3 a.m., as we've lost another hour to longitude. The bar is long closed, and the last of the mid-lifers hired as staff have gone as far as they will tonight discussing the differences between the sexes, as well as romance and tragedy. It's just moi, hiding my bottle of rot-gut vino from the security guards and cleaners. So it's time to ride the waves, as if they were thrust under the concrete hobbit bed just for me. ]

[Like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, I'M BACK! Gots me one of the ship's many nano-viruses (everyone compulsively uses the hand sanitizer boxes set up all over, and as we enter the cafeterias).]

So it's best to start Kruger Park not with the Big Five (elephants, rhinos, lions, cape buffalo and leopards), but with the small five, which are connected in theme to the big ones. Par exemplo, check this Rhino Beetle out, complete with his monsterous horn:



But I hear your impatience, so I'll move along up the food chain via the neck of a giraffe:



The males stand a little taller, allowing access to different leaves. These creatures that share camo-spots with other ones are unique in having valves in their neck for blood, so they don't pass out when they bend their head all the way down to the ground.

Nothing says Big Sinco more than my old friends, the elephantes:



We came upon some young males, snorting, then a family crossing the road. There were walking the way I did, as a lad, to church:



Stereotypically, three baboons appeared, like the monkeys of Victorian fame—see no evil, hear no evil, smell no evil?—to eat insects in the dung of larger animales:



All around us there were termite mounds, the top third and more air-conditioning, for the big colonies underground:



Their claws ready, the dwarf mongeese scratch the mounds until the termites come out to become lunch. They may be small, but any member of the stoat family is a fearless creature. [Do you remember, mi hermano Esteben, taking me as a little boy out to hunt weasels at the corn crib at the farm? The ran right at us, unafraid!] And there's Geoffrey Household's great thriller (made into a horrible movie), Dance of the Dwarfs, which is about stoats in South America, and ends in the middle of the word, "imagination."





These green savannahs run on, and down the continent—thousands of miles of trees, bushes and animals—a vista it's hard to get our head around. America would fit inside Africa nearly five times, as the continent is eleven million square miles, plus:



Guinea fowl cleaned their irridescent black and white feathers, rotating their bright blue necks:



Gazelles wander about, skittishly:



Where dinner dines, danger lurks:





I decided to go to high ground, above the pride:



Isn't "wild beast" redundant? He's a handsome extra from Pan's Labyrinth:



In a complex world, it's good to know some things are—each one in a unique way, with different-sized stripes—still black and white:



Back in Capetown, the pier awaited:



I spent the last of my big 6-0 b-day alone in a Jazz Club, the Green Dolphin, listening to a respectable bop quartet, with vocalist. I'd been hoping to see Jimmy Dludlu play guitar, but no such luck. Jimmy plays with the attack and abandon of a young George Benson, when he was fronting for Brother Jack McDuff. Cape Town's older players are boppers, but the younger ones are struggling to define a fusion that is not to be confused with evil oxymoron, "smooth jazz." Jimmy covers the whole waterfront, all puns intended. He's one of many the Hombre Verde will be bringing y'all via DVD or radio show or maybe even on this hyere bloggyspace, if I can figure out how to work it...

The next day I explored Cape Town around the piers. Nearly bought a gas-can guitar made in the townships:





While I had trouble holding these, that presented no problem for local players. Here's one singing in maybe Xhosa. I get the feeling the lyrics run along these lines:

Ran out of gas, baby
Can't drive my car no mo
Thaz right, I ran out of gas
Can't drive this here car no mo
But I gonna play this here gas can
'Til it get up and go!



Here's a band JLR would enjoy, that was kinda like Doc Hook's and Clifton Chenier's gramps getting together:



As much as I love art and music from around the world, African art and music have always moved me directly and profoundly, in a visceral way. It's easy grasp why Picaso and others would have turned to African art to rejuvenate modern, "Western" art, as the Africa and Europe have long been connected through Spain. Just as flamenco is where the gypsies/Roma went north to Spain, after their long journey from Rajastan in India, so Africa is where they turned south, and the drums got bigger.

But African art has never been "primitive," as Stanley Diamond clearly points out in In Search of the Primitive. Instead, if you look at it differently, it is profoundly "scientific" and philosophical. For example, I've noticed that a map of the human nervous system is almost exactly African sculpture: the head, hands, genitals have more nerves, so are portrayed as "larger than life." Of course there are the other religious and symbolic reasons for these "exaggerations," but these artworks are telling. Most masks have no eyes; instead there are slits, which barely show the "real" eyes of the gods/goddesses or spirits who are "riding" the horse of that person selected to wear the mask. This is a cunning way to see both the abstract principle and the actual incarnation at the same time. Chinua Achebe makes a half-hearted run at this in his novel, Things Fall Apart, where the God kills its human horse.



There were rooms and rooms full of African art (old and new) in Cape Town, and I got in trouble for snapping pix like these:







So I can't tell you about my most important purchase, but Jim, detective that he is, might figure it out if I say it's the lodestone to the multibook—real, no longer a picture...

I needed to do something different to celebrate the celebration of b-day alone, so I followed some advice (thanks, Patti!), and visited a psychic in Cape Town. I tried to have no expectations, and the part of me that knows gypsies don't believe in reading palms, even though they make a living doing it, let go of any logic about this. It was actually 2/22/09, Ishmael Reed's b-day, and I saw eight signs that included "reed" on the way to the psychic. In Yoruba and New-World Voudoun, 22 is not only connected with the highest incidence of twinning (outside the current hoo-hah of tourists searching the conspiracy of Nazi Joe Mengele in the possibly in-bred part of Brazil he prowled, possibly doing his medical "experiments") in the world. [In Yoruba Land, traditionally one twin was killed, and the other one assumed his/her power; the child born after twins was sacred, which is one of several reasons Michael Jordan and LeBron James have jersey numero 23].

Anyhow, the psychic had me continue to pick 7 cards (another sacred number in Reed's cosmology, as 3 x 7 = 21; but 7 is also connected to 11, half of 22). While some of her responses and questions were the kind where she could hedge her bets, some of her answers were a little uncanny, and I wonder if some will come true? If they do, will it be self-fulfilling prophecy?

Back on the ship, I decided to check this against some goofball websites on astrology. First I turned to that jolly poofter and fruitcake Don Juanny Kaner at bubble.com. His advice was exactly the opposite for Senor Pisces. Once again I had been led full circle, back to Our Lady of Perpetual Ambiguity. I opted for my Third Oracle, the medicinal bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label. Drank him in, while playing my Soloette travel guitar, and decided that life was pretty good. And if I spontaneously combust without love/sex, I'll have donated my body to the science of the media: "Pheromone Back-Draft Explosion Self-Immolates Oregon Professor and Vaporizes Indian Pool Par." A bystander, Mr. Gupta, claiming to be the instant reincarnation of the Professor, said, "God bless my Shiva, I've never seen anything like it! One moment here, the next moment he was like a big chapati held too close to the fire!"

Finally it was time to return to the ready, white and blue ship (I've been trying to think how I could change the initial from MV Explorer to MS Explorer, but so far it would take far too much duct tape):