The tourist trap

It's an interesting thing, people's holiday preferences. Some people enjoy roughing it on local transport and mixing it with the locals at the market and on the street. Others prefer sticking to the big cities, staying in comfortable hotels with limo transfers from the airport where the closest they get to a local is hopefully no nearer than the already terrifyingly thin 1/4" of tinted and reinforced glass separating them in their air-conditioned cacoon from, well, whatever the hell it is on the other side. Others still, apparently, desire a combination of the raw sense of adventure you can only get in a place like Africa whilst retaining some semblance of comfort and safety that can only be provided by comfortable lodgings in a rustic, semi-remote setting not far off a major highway, and some animatronic predatory animals. This is a niche ably filled by Sun City.

OK, this may be taking the description of Sun City too far. I didn't really want to talk about Sun City anyway, but instead the nearby Pilanesberg National Park. But the offerings of Sun City are really such a distraction that I feel compelled to draw your attention to them. I mean what is a game safari when it doesn't carry with it the risk of contracting malaria? This is truly Disneyland come to Africa, and quite possibly the greatest affront to tourism that I've so far seen on this continent.

Perhaps my experience at Pilanesberg was tainted not so much by Sun City but by a week of slow recovery from drug resistant Zambian food poisoining, or the fact that I didn't see anything but stock animals such as impala and wildebeest on the cold, windy and interminably dull game drive. I happened to see an episode of Long Way Down (Ewan McGregor's self-indulgent motorcycle road trip adventure 'documentary') just after we arrived back from Pilanesberg. In one scene his team are charging about the bush in a 4WD looking for big cats. Their guide spots one from afar and after a considerable chase they finally identify their quarry, a very confused looking domestic cat in long grass. McGregor's team were blessed with a sense of humour and managed a hearty laugh at this particular misadventure, but at the conclusion of our safari I just felt empty and longed for the consolation that could have been provided by a tacky animatronic beest at the park exit gate.

To Livingstone, and oblivion

On the way to Lusaka I had a brief stopover in Livingstone, a small tourist town which is pretty much devoted to adventure tours involving in one way or another the Victoria Falls and the impressive Zambezi River.
It was dry season so there wasn't as much water around however the falls were still spectacular, and there was the added bonus of not getting soaked by the spray generated by 900 million litres of water per second spilling over a considerable drop. This also meant it was possible to see something other than spray.
I took the obligatory chopper flight which provided great views but you could probably find better ways of spending your money if you've experienced a helicopter flight in the past.
We also walked around the Zambian side of the gorges around the Victoria Falls. Our taxi driver decided to play tour guide. As it was dry season the top of the falls were devoid of the raging torrents present at other times of the year which left a number of smallish swimming holes which were being enjoyed by the locals. After we left the swimming holes we could see from the opposite side of the gorge just how close some were to the edge. Unfortunately a young girl who was playing to close to the edge slipped and fell the 100+ meters down to the bottom. My group was right opposite when this happened, but we must have been very briefly looking away.
Probably the highlight of this trip was the white-water rafting. I'm not normally much of a daredevil however I decided to give it a shot. I didn't find out until the briefing that there were a number of grade 5 rapids during the 27km journey. How bad could it possibly be? Ignorance is bliss, and it's all too late once you're in the raft.
We managed to stay on through all the rapids apart from one known as 'Oblivion'. Our pilot suggested that there was almost no chance of staying upright in our smaller raft through this one so most of our 'crew' went to the bigger (and much more stable) raft in our group. Sure enough, within about 10 seconds of hitting the long stretch of rapids our boat had flipped and I was plunged into the raging maelstrom. I wanted to swim towards the surface but had no idea which way was up or down so just had to wait until I was spat out the other end, hoping my life vest would figure some of this out for me. I was under for what felt like a long time and I could feel my breath running short but I could also see that it was getting lighter so I figured that I was nearing the surface. Trouble was, it was like floating in foam and I was loath to take a breath until I was definitely clear of it for fear of sucking in a lungful of water.
I did inhale some water when I finally ran out of breath but thankfully one of the support guys in a kayak was nearby and I managed to grab on and he got me back to the overturned raft. A few minutes later our skeleton crew was back at the raft and the guide flipped it and we got back in. I spent the next few minutes removing the water from my lungs and getting my breath back.
Whilst my ride was quite wild a girl on another raft came off at a different set of rapids. Her experience must have been some orders of magnitude more tomultuous as she spent the rest of the trip lying prone across the front of the raft, both arms outstretched with hands gripping the safety rope running around the outside of the boat. She was also crying a shaking and wouldn't move, not even to a more stable part of the craft when heading through the final sets of whitewater.
I didn't find being in the rapids as violent as decent sized surf however it did seem way more out of control. The unpredictable flow of water, whirlpools, overhwhelming current and other hazards are truly something to be respected. For the curious, there's some youtube footage (not of my trip) here.

Greg does ADP

I set up this blog back in 2005 and as you can see I haven't made it very far. Anyways, now as I've embarked on a brief adventure I'd figured I'd give this a go as a means to communicate to the masses (this may be overstating the size of my audience...).



Going back to 2006 or 2007 I noticed that my employer offered the opportunity to undertake a project in the development sector through a program known as ADP. I was fortunate enough to run into someone on the core ADP team in January 2008 at a training event and this chance meeting was a catalyst for converting talk into action. Around six months later I was again fortunate enough to have found a role on an ADP project with the International Red Cross.



I commenced around mid-August at the Geneva headquarters as part of a team of five and I'm now down in Johannesburg at the Southern Africa Zone HQ, ready to head out to the field to meet with some of the people at the coalface of the organisation both here and in a number of the neighbouring countries.