Africa: Post #3...Hippo Lakes Twice Daily Safari...

    

 

 

Mary Jane continually evolved with sturdy wit, grace & practiced intelligence... particularly in biology, interacting with botany, while  she was also keenly aware while sussing the web of psychological systems operating together.  She proved to exemplify the many roles of a successful scientist. All of which she gifted us in a teach/learning manner. 

Stephen & I opined about filming her as a promotional tool for the institution. Both of us were shooting, video, with her permission, to capture footage of the wildlife grazing or trotting while listening to her often humorously insightful mental dialogues turning into instructional verbal monologues as we panned onto her happily intense facial expressions. . For me it was an exercise to learn more of what Stephen played with when making. his film BIG JOY...

While not so wild, even in the US, It  was elucidated by the guys we regularly saw, once taking a bath in the dust of the ruts. They seemed particularly entertaining when MJ invented a spontaneous soundtrack with her skilful teach/learning wit.

 

"I think she must be clean by now" MJ quipped as she started the engine to give the cozy bird a nudge about blocking traffic

 

add video

 

It was she who made the schedule for our getting up & out to meet her jeep every morning for the first safari... well before our breakfasts! but enabling us to  catch the earlier rising animals we enjoy, at least usually, more than another coffee... "early birds & worms"sorts of lessons. We were enjoying our stretch out of many of our ordinary. there was more music of birdsong, mixed as well with some  grumblng... more grunts & slower moving creatures as they warmed out of the night's chill air. Many human similarities in trait. We found ourselves beginning to vibe more with our animal sensitivities... visceral teach/learning to take to breakfast. 

We were gradually sagging in the pace of each day's hours, early & late, riding in vehicles bouncing over rough roads or rougher trails. While there were stops for drinks & snacks at least once every jaunt, we rarely had enough time to enjoy the amenities of the nice pool or the hot tubes, which needed to be scheduled an hour ahead to be heated by a wood-fire. There was little of the luxury of free-time in this resort. 

We tried to stage a revolt, which was met with a genuine countering of MJ's logical context that we'd truly bought tickets to a safari, traveling halfway around the world to get to a place where we being very well fed & sleeping in very comfortable beds atop fabulous carpets ... & that is what we were getting in spades. 

Teach/learning, we settled for starting a scant hour later & appreciated the bargain. We'd proven ourselves to be wild animals of our own stripes as well! A lesson we are blessed to have, take, have & hold against an ever uncertain future. I believe we all did prove we are actually educable in our advancing ages. 

Home to dress for our final dinner... we wanted a good group shot of the Hippo Lakes Family Chef Pela came out at each meal to explain his menu & preview his plans for our choices for the days meals. He was quite accomplished & creative, often offered some of the  more exotic bush-meat, tempered with  more familiar options. He always over-fed us & always served an extravagant dessert!

We were being spoiled by a finesse of luxuries quite unnatural to this terrain. 

 

 

  

One of the last evenings she drove us  in  a bigger jeep for the climb...  up some steep rocky trails to an outcropping at the top of one of the highest parts of the property. We could view down on the whole development. The land is several large parcels quilted together as Hippo Lakes has acquired to support them in their continual hope for additional acreage enough to have elephants & other larger wildlife.

 

The dream & the dreaming... grounded with obviously subtle & skillful facilitation... is becoming one big fine reality.

That sense of real space holding conceptual spaces deserves this artfully perched  opera box into which to soak & float in the viewing & contemplation of it all.

... add SFS's group drinks party photo...

   

 This deck 

Our chef came out at each meal to explain his menu & preview his plans for our choices for the days meals. He was quite accomplished & creative, often offered some of the  more exotic bush-meat, tempered with  more familiar options. He always over-fed us & always served an extravagant dessert!

 

 

 

 

 

Africa: Post #2: South of VAST... Hippo Lakes Resort

[African masks at our hotel in Johannesburg airport]

Much of the long flight from Vienna/Paris to Johannesburg was rather dim for me as we both found ourselves ready to retreat into our cubicles.

We're in business-class, gifting us privacy, with good food & drink along with room to stretch-out & actually sleep; we found ourselves ready to tune ourselves inward, keeping the partition open to the bits of conversational sharing we enjoy while we settled into our bubbles to ruminate Vienna... through a 10+ hour flight through that dark circumference of the globe's solar stasis we flew from European autumn into South Africa's spring. A rolling-ball explosion for my sense of time.  I love finding even vaguely plausible excuses for my own quirky notions about that stuff! 

With the privacy window left open, we could talk & share with with each other while we enjoyed choosing films from a very generous selection menu, with our cocktails savoring the the possibility of previewing them as well while took our time, settled under headphones, through the several courses of the dinner service... by then finding even more private sensory zones while we watched our choices. I felt like I had over viewed the current culture, educating myself in new ways. Another value of travel... 

As my energies continued fading I reclined the seat flat to succumb into a fairly good sleep, but, even on my waking the  cabin was hushed & dim... the shades were mostly closed. I had no idea what time it was, nor how long I slept. Stephen explained that he'd earlier seen through the galley window, light on forest & desert below, which I'd missed. I had to assume the sun was warming the continent which I'm coming to visit &  taste in a ways unlike any of my much earlier anticipations... 

 Since my youth I'd presumed I would approach Africa by way of Egypt's colossally mythic ancient history of art & architecture... or later, the  exoticism of Morocco, both at the "top" of the continent. But no... we were going on safari... into the cultures of botany & biology... of curious plants & wild animals -- oh my! 

The hotel suggested by Hippo Lakes was across a street from the airport... we walked. An arrival bath is always helpful to re-orientate after such travel... happily the tub held us both!  Dinner began our adventure into the wild; we ordered a wild springbok for him... for me it was ostrich.

 After breakfast we gathered in front of the hotel, gradually gleaning others who were to be met by a driver & be taken in a van to our Hippo Lakes destination.  That driver was 

a young African woman named Mary Jane... who greeted us warmly while tending to the efficient organization of our luggage, then, helping us find our preferred seating. Positioning an ice chest full of drinks, handing out around of bottled waters, she started our road trip with smiles all around; she had cared for us so very well. 

We are eight, including us: another couple, Melissa & Andy, from Florida; then, Dana & Ralph, who live in Colorado with two adult daughters... Lexa & Julie , who lie in Chicago. Our already-proven-capable driver's name was soon to be often abbreviated to MJ as she further proves to become the group's safari guide & park ranger staying close to us all through the week.

The road was an efficiently tidy freeway... familiar. We begin forward with makng our acquaintances inside the myriad questions inevitable between strangers-with-a-single-purpose. 

An experience with a herd of elephants living on reserve became the first stop, beginning our education about the animals we've come to see. These were refugees of various sorts... being mostly homeless or retired.

They appeared in the distance as a stately parade to arrange themselves, for display, accompanied & directed by their handlers.

 

The absorbent quality of their thick hide was demonstrated with a bucket of water.

 

We learned that an elephant's foot print is

is its ID, being unique as fingerprints.

This herd of about a dozen, put on a bit of show.  It was fascinating to see them so intimately close, to be able to even touch. I was one of five volunteers to stand at a rail for a demonstration of their fabled memory. We were asked to remove a shoe, then to one at a time hold it out to the animal's trunk, while saying our name as it was grokked & handed back... moving down the line of us. The tender took all the shoes & threw them mixed-up in a pile in front of our behemoth, who, when hearing me say my name a second time shuffled to quickly find my shoe to hand it back to me & reliably do the same down the line. Much better than a circus trick. Few dogs could be trained so well. This has to do with language capability as well as scent. My artist was taking mental notes about their anatomy & taking the opportunity to feel the soft interior surface of an ear flopping open as it was laying comfortably prone being beautiful, docile tonnage! Especially impressive as it rises back to stand... with a wonderfully lurching sort of massive grace!

 Lunch was served afterward on a shady veranda while we talked with a member of the family who deal with the difficulty of owning this herd with the necessity of enough land preserved to sustain them them... tamed, but still wild. That is right lively conundrum for our time. We have different intelligence than when "our west was won" & the buffalo mostly erased, leaving some deficit of knowledge we could use. We're coasting on dependencies of mostly outdated types of  ever-dwindling resources by that short-range thinking.

 New ecology inviting new aeconomies might help save more of the rich resources--dead, sometimes deadly & very much alive--as vegetables & animals... including all the crazy people, of which I am one... celebrating my reluctance to admit.

 Driving off any pavement now, we are invited by MJ to enjoy an "African massage" as she steers to negotiate the ruts. We kept being jolly as we were being told about the land & the seasonal change in the weather as the animals began to appear, as fences & gates lined parts of the road, with names of various large reserves. Many have history as game parks for hunters.  Mary Jane is savvy about this real estate. Her life is part of a mission to save life, not take it as trophy.  Our group is of the same accord. We begin to grok that all of our trips here were seeded by Hippo Lakes' donations to various progressive causes we patronize. We are generous, responsible creatives. Of course we will love being pampered with other exotic fauna. I realize that we've been cleverly captured for observation... by our own kind! 

In the afternoon we get first glimpses of the canvas roofs of our destination in the distances below.

Then we come to water... the first of three lakes... this one being the home for the Hippos who stand in the shallow water above on layers of rock... with only eyes & nostrils exposed... unless they yawn. Several more seriously sturdy gates opened by MJ's remote, bring us onto pavement sweeping up onto higher land, where a covered entrance shelters our stretching out well-bounced muscles into a welcome reception to our home for the next 5 days.   

 

 

   

 Wide brick pathways lead to our tent accommodations. We two new grooms were in the farthest one... "out with the wild animals," we joked appreciatively!

Glamping is one correct word for this situation. 

We approached our "tent" via a steep trex/wood walkway down from those bricks onto a deck rising just above the lake water, sheltered by the fabric roof.  A key-locked double door opening into a large roomy space with a tall headboard hiding a dressing area & closet beyond which a door opens into a generous bath with two sinks, a glass shower enclosure & a graceful tub big enough for two... though we never got time to use it... sigh.

Window shades could keep out weather or allow light in, along with with the view, although they were complicated by multiple functions, as canvas weather sheathing & options of transparent plastic or mosquito netting, all requiring straps, snaps & zippers aligned to properly function. A manual could have helped... 

It was well & tightly designed.

 

It was quite romantic in its furniture... 

 

A collection of colorful genuine carpets finished the space with comfy cush under foot... fans & an AC unit with a heater took care of the air, but we simply preferred enjoying what came naturally.

One might set a Victorian novel here...

 

The shower with a rain-shower head above as well as the hand wand, which I prefer. 

 

An outdoor shower seemed to stay uselessly dry, but its sunlight in which to dry off from our showers was welcome.  

Romance & mystery a bit wasted. Or still to be retrieved when/if we make a return...

Luxurious is indeed the word! I could be too easily tempted to consider a longer more leisurely time here

 Then there was the superb food, daily breakfasts, lunches & dinners, all of which was produced by Chef Pila... who dreams of having his own restaurant one day -- ACCOLADES!

 Meanwhile Mary Jane is in the jeep ready for us while the the animals are milling around outside the gate in the bush, waiting for me to finish this post so that I can begin the next one which is promised to be mostly about them. 

Africa: Post #1... Here we Come! ...

But, we must begin our story in Vienna, Austria: 

Earlier in the year at a political event's silent auction fundraiser, Stephen made a bid --  intending only to begin the action. The item was a pair of tickets to safari at some place called Hippo Lakes, https://hippolakes.co.za/ -- but with no other bids he had bought the trip. 

 

We had already been working-out the details of a family trip to the British Isles, so that safari bid complicated our lives even more because in our usual busy-ness of NW summers... we neglected reading the details, only to discover the deadline to schedule left us less than two months to be at home between the two long trips! 

 

But in a year holding my 80th birthday & his 75th while celebrating our 30th anniversary, plus the procession of activity to facilitate my intention to retire... we acquiesced to a sense of fate & bought tickets. 

 

Oh! One more thing... to further finesse that sense of cooperating with fate -- Stephen & I decided that we would finally get married! 

 

The reasons, pro & con, are so multitudinous I will not try to explain the ins & outs of those reasoning's throes over many years. Now, however, I am  my own  quietly & slowly observing & perceiving  subtylywet profound  change in the broad fields & depths of our ever-maturing love. Thus this trip ultimately became quite more truly our honeymoon...

 

Hopefully you have read my posts about the cruise around The British Isles. Now that we have returned from Africa, I begin posting more...  with gratitude... having had one fine grand adventure!

 

This being such a long journey in distance & time Stephen's good sense & experience as a seasoned traveler gave us the gift of a a generous stop in Vienna to allow our bodies time to adjust to the 9 hours of jet lag. Besides, he had lived there for a year in the 1980s & maintained many friends with whom he maintains active connection. I've met a number on my previous visits, vicariously as well as in his stories & sharing news. 

 

 It was 24 years ago when I was spending time with Helen, Stephen's mother, with our brother Mark in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunsthistorisches_Museum. There I was astonished & delighted when I turned to find myself looking with very intimate focus on a piece I'd studied at the University of Denver... The Cellini Salt Cellar... a magnificently rare feat of sculpture chased out of gold & silver by an artist as well known for his rowdiness as for his great skill. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benvenuto_Cellini] It has long been this young, practicing grace in my aging, gay, sculptural artist jeweler's imagination. The saliera is a fair bit of erotic dream for its form as a nude pair  of male & female god-bodies lounging around a shell-shaped container to hold precious salt as a symbol of wealth & power in front of the royal diners. I can egotistically identify. Only a short time later that I learned it had been stolen. Happily it was returned so I was anxious to see it again, now in a better protected case.

What an over-the-top object! Stephen caught my wonder in the moment... from both sides of the new display

In a roomful of similar cases, each displaying more valuable & complicated objects of virtu [

a small, valuable, and exquisitely crafted item]... this museum is full of such treasures. Each salon or room, is crafted, floor to ceiling, with similar excessive attention. 

I love ivory, (& I have carved mastodon ivory, which is deemed "legal" because that species is extinct...). but because we are headed for Africa, where elephant ivory is illegal, but still poached, I am compelled to simply enjoy the work of past centuries...

With museum fatigue from such rich visual fare, Stephen somewhat ironically suggested we get a coffee at a shop offering memories he wanted to share of coffee & pastries... equally rich & creamy!

 Then, back in our room, I was struck by the quilted white headboard carrying the notion of "schlag" (the whipped cream Vienna loves on a coffee or dessert) to yet more excess.

 But then I want to share another detail of our bathroom... panels of etched glass enclosing the shower & toilet. Vienna simply doesn't really ever stop at the simpler side of design...

"Excess is best!"

 

There were three of his friends we wanted to see while there:

 Hilde, a longtime friend of Stephen's while he was living in Vienna, working with the UN. I'd met her while I was still living in downtown Seattle, & she was visiting, leading a group of university students studying English. She is still lively as a university professor having two children & grandchildren.  

 

Susie is married to an international reporter. Theirs is a complex history...  & She served us a wonderful lunch... with the dumplings I remember appreciatively.

  

 A woman named Ilka became Stephen's deepest friend from his Vienna year.  She & her husband Peter became close to the entire family through various visits back & forth over years, even before I came along & I observed her to live up to the legend when I got to meet them my on my first European travel, to Italy. They holiday at a resort close to the Austrian/Italian border... Just before another planned visit from the whole family, we got the news of her death in a kitchen fire. Peter tried, but could not rescue her, living to mourn with us rather than the reunion we'd hoped.

 

 Now Peter has passed & we've continued communication wit his widow, Christine -- "call me Cris"... whose English is only slightly so vague as our German, a difficult beginning… evolved into a lovely evenig, including a train ride to a Heurigan, a traditional rural & casual drinking spot in the vineyards with simple food. Stephen often remembers times there with Ilka & Peter. Making this an important addition to  our memories of this trip. Knitting history in continuing stories. Cris gifted us socks she'd knitted as we parted at a different station so we could go on into the city to our hotel & to pack for Paris io meet the long flight to Johannesburg!

Bergen, Norway: Hanseatic League, Music, & Lighthearted Lutherans

 

It became too suddenly the last day of our family cruise... becoming time for our goodbyes to Bill & Mark as they left the boat to fly back to Minnesota via Iceland.  This has been great time for the six of us... especially for Mark. He was the beginning & driving inspiration for us all!

Thank you, Markoos [a playful family nickname]!

 

  

 

 In Bergen, we visited a Lutheran church with a lively happy vibe & rainbow luminosity...

...with stalls walling-in the pews with gates... a rather severe mix of values, it seems to me, if still handsome.

 

But, I did love such mix as the sweetly crafted angels hanging around the alter. 

  

 Might I have I found this year's holiday card?

 

 Mark became a naturally close mimic... 

 

 

 

A gazebo decorates a park like a band-shell...  

 

 

 However, Edvard Grieg is the nation's musical hero.

A composer I have appreciated & loved since high school when I bought a vinyl album of the neglected Broadway show The Song Of Norway. 

Bergen is one of the cities of the Hanseatic League, a medieval trade association between the ports of the Baltic & North Seas between the 13th & 17th centuries, rising to economic & political power.

  We took this as another of the history lessons as part of our cruise. These buildings are being refurbished yet again... being wood, they have burned & been rebuilt several times over the centuries. 

 

These are the houses whose gables are seen in the photos I made from the boat as we came into the port which were historically the businesses & homes of the Hanseatic merchants. One is now a museum & another is a demonstration of the architectural conservation of the neighborhood, but most are shops for the tourist trade...  business continues to be newly lively, even as the herring trade is no longer so vital. 

 

 This was my single shopping spree of the cruise. I'd been looking for a gift for Momo, and found a scarf of strong color based on a fragment of salvaged door frame, in one of these antique buildings. 

 

 ... It's rich & sassy-soft like her... 

 She's been busily working on the complicated changes happening in our two studios as the GRB Bells business gradually changes location.

 

  

 We, as well as Alice & John, stayed on in Bergen, with separate plans & hotels, but desiring a dinner double-date to debrief & take our farewells. 

We elder siblings celebrated a year & half's successful strategic planning for this cruise. We shared a sweet evening!

 

Midday the four of us boarded the slick, fun & functional funicular going up the mountain, which we'd  seen from the port... 

 The translucent tube left from a cleft in the rock climbing smoothly into the sky.

Bringing us into a panorama around the boat. A fitting place for a farewell to Viking Saturn... We appreciate your finesse! 

 

   This view shows the tower yet higher up... that being the hike Stephen & Bill made the day before.

 

 We took a bit of the walk up toward along the trail beginning their hike, discovering beds of very lush moss pillows even more verdant than I've seen our own Northwest forests... this being a more "eastern northern European northwest" version. 

 

Norway is obviously another adventure needing larger future than our time to even begin to explore this taste of now... much less digest it.

 

 

 A rich version of land after a sea adventure... 

 

Stephen & I, had yet another day before following Alice & John because we wanted to visit Troldhaugen, Edvard Grieg's home. [See a future post...]

 ***

 Now I'll share another bit of infrastructure in the city park which impressed me... these simple finials gracing hundreds of feet of quiet, elegantly handsome garden railing.