The Overlooked Nine

After eating our way through Cape Town, we spent the second week of our trip on two terrific adventures into the bush: first we traveled south on the Cape Peninsula to Simon's Town, then we headed east to De Hoop Nature Reserve, which is about a 4-hour drive from Cape Town.

In reality, the peninsula doesn't really count as the bush, although we did manage to get off the beaten track enough to feel like we were out of the city.

De Hoop was absolutely in the bush, complete with sporadic electricity, gravel roads for which our otherwise lovely Honda "Jazz" rental car was not designed, stunningly bright stars at night, and a family of bats living in our cabin.

As a side note, we learned two important things about driving in South Africa. One is that stoplights are called "robots". As in, you'll be driving down an otherwise perfectly normal road, and then you see a sign that says "Robot, 400 meters ahead".

Danger, Will Robinson!

The second (don't read this part, Mom) is that South Africans believe in an unofficial third lane.

Sure, there are lane markings to tell you when to pass and when not to pass.

But in reality, if you're driving behind someone and they're going slower than you are — or even if they think that you might *want* to go faster (or they understand telepathically that your loving boyfriend / navigator thinks you should stop lingering behind this slow person and pass them already) — they'll go ahead and move over so that they're driving half in the shoulder and half in the left lane.

The idea is that you can then pass them by ignoring any pesky markings and driving along the center line. Should you happen to encounter someone coming in the opposite direction, they'll scoot over a little bit so they're driving on the outer edge of the right lane.

Ta-da! The unofficial third lane.

Needless to say, this violates every principle of driving that I have ever learned. But I realized (eventually) that the driving was actually a lot easier and less stressful once I just accepted the third lane instead of trying to resist.

As the robots would tell us, resistance is futile.

Most people who go into the bush to see wild animals have their sights set (literally and/or figuratively) on the "Big Five": the lion, the African elephant, the Cape buffalo, the leopard, and the rhinoceros:

As I've just now learned through the power of the Internet, this list comes from old-school big game hunters, who consider these to be the most difficult animals to hunt on foot.

John and I were also in pursuit of wild animals, though we reluctantly left our safari vests, rifles, gin and tonics, and Land Rover at home.

Although it would be great to see the Big Five some day, I present to you instead our own wildlife list: South Africa's Overlooked Nine.

(As a side note in the interest of due credit, most of the photos here are John's, with the exception of some of the baboon, penguin, and John photos. He is also the featured guest artist for the road owl drawing below.)

1. Baboons

Unfortunately, it seems like baboons are seen as more of a pest in South Africa than a national treasure. Being clever and opposably thumbed, they've figured out that humans (and their houses and trash cans and cars) are an excellent source of food.

Potato chips in particular seem to be as irresistible to baboons as they are to humans.

But we found an organization near Simon's Town that tries to help baboons and humans coexist peacefully. As part of that work, they offer guided baboon walks where one can go into the hills with a local guide and hang out with the baboons for an hour or two.

Our baboon walk was pretty much like being in the middle of a David Attenborough nature show.

After hiking up to the rocks where the 20 or so baboons were hanging out, we were within a few feet of them grooming each other, calling, eating, digging for roots, fighting, nursing, masturbating, and playing with rocks.

(Not all at the same time, thankfully.)

The baboons didn't seem to care very much whether we were there or not, although one of the alpha males did look like he was going to eat John until our guide ran him off.

And one of the babies thought that John's hiking stick seemed like it would be a fun toy.

Aside from that, we just watched them and took about 400 photos and enjoyed seeing a group of primates in their natural environment.

2. Limpets

Just for the record? Limpets are awesome.

They look suspiciously like a shell stuck to a rock, but in reality, they move all over the place, leaving a cute little trail where they've eaten the algae off the rock with their cute little radula.

The best part about limpets (which maybe is not that great for the limpet) is that if you wiggle them veeeeery gently, you can feel how they move a little at first but then clamp down on the rock. Hard.

When we were at Boulders Beach in Simon's Town, we found a limpet in the process of laying its eggs in a spiral pattern.

We noticed it because the egg coil looks a lot like the egg coil of the nudibranch, one of our other favorite mollusks.

This sort of egg-laying operation may explain why there are about 300 billion limpets in the tide pools of South Africa.

3. Ostriches

So there we were, minding our own business, driving along the winding road to the point at the end of the Cape Peninsula, when we spotted a family of ostriches with their crazy big eyes and dinosaur feet, snacking away at the grass between the road and the beach.

This was our first ostrich encounter but by no means our last; there are a lot of ostrich farms in the Western Cape, but there are also a lot of wild ostriches running around.

Fortunately for us, they're one of the easiest animals to see from the road or the trail, since it's hard to miss a giant black blob that looks like it's suspended in space.

Sometimes, the ostriches were up close and personal. We were eating lunch at a camp site in the middle of De Hoop when we had a visitor.

We didn't seem to be a worthy distraction from her single-minded (would it be wrong to say "bird-brained"?) pursuit of tender shoots of vegetation.

This is one of those photos that turned out to be inadvertently artistic, and that somehow captures the weirdness of being visited during one's picnic by an ostrich.

4. Southern Rock Agamas

These little lizards are hard to spot at first, but once you see one, all of a sudden they're everywhere.

The only thing I like more than John's photo of this agama is my photo of John (who is deathly afraid of heights) inching his way toward the edge of the cliff in order to take the photo.

5. Bat stars

Maybe it goes without saying that I love poking around in tide pools.

It's not quite as fun as scuba diving, but it does have a few advantages, such as being able to look for critters indefinitely without having to worry about running out of air.

One of the most exciting things we found in the tide pools on the Cape Peninsula were tiny little bat stars.

(For purposes of taxonomical purity, these are not technically bat stars but Parvulastra exigua, but to us, they looked like miniature bat stars.)

Some people (I'm thinking here of my sister and my friend Helen) find it weird and vaguely disturbing to think that something without a face is so cute.

But I really don't see how anyone can possibly resist the cuteness of the bat star.

Especially when it's surrounded by a whole bunch of super-cute snails.

6. African Jackass Penguins

Bat stars are wonderful, but the top attraction for most people at Boulders Beach in Simon's Town is the giant colony of penguins.

It was extraordinarily fun to watch the penguins waddling around, hopping across the gaps in the rocks, finding good places to bask in the sun, interacting with their mates, and getting in and out of the water.

It was equally fun to watch the people who were walking around, scrambling over the rocks, and taking photos of the penguins.

Down at the beach, it's possible to get in the frigid water and paddle around with the penguins. And with the scary European men who think that Speedos are appropriate penguin-viewing gear.

That weirdness aside, it was pretty amazing to wander around on the beach and find penguins splashing around in the water and hiding in every little nook and cranny.

The penguins didn't seem like they cared too much about all of the people milling around, and there was at least one penguin who looked like he was ready to get on the tour bus:

7. Garden Spiders

Seeing these beautiful, giant spiders in the late-afternoon sun was an exciting bonus on the way back from our baboon hike.

Our guide seemed mildly amused when we suggested that he could branch out and lead spider walks if he ever got tired of baboons.

8. Cape Spurfowl (Veldchooks)

These football-shaped birds are to South Africa as pigeons are to New York City: they're everywhere, and they seem to think that people exist for the sole purpose of bearing food.

Technically, they're spurfowl, but we started calling them "veldchooks", which is a combination of veld (which is literally Afrikaans / Dutch for field, but also refers to the grasslands and scrublands where said bird can be found) and chook (which is Australian for chicken).

Spurfowl is a fine name and probably refers to some important scientific principle about the bird, but doesn't really convey how cute and curious they are.

"Hi! I'm a veldchook! Who are you? Where did you come from? What do you have in your car? What sort of delicious things do you have to eat? Where are you going now? Hey, wait up! We're coming with you!"

9. Road owls

Last but absolutely not least: the road owl.

On our last night at De Hoop, we skipped the extraordinarily British dinner at the bush camp (and I don't mean "extraordinarily British" in a good way) and ate dinner at the restaurant in the Nature Reserve.

This was something of a moral victory for us and for the Reserve, which had been without power for two full days and had been trying to feed its guests with a paltry assortment of salads and preserved meats.

Anyone care for some springbok carpaccio with a slice of melon and a celery stick?

After a lovely dinner, we left the park around 10. It was absolutely pitch black: no moon, no stars, no artifical lighting of any kind.

We were in the Jazz, creeping along the gravel road back to the park entrance, when I saw something unusual at the edge of the road.It was shaped a little bit like a big, fat rodent standing on its hind legs, but the closer we got, the less it seemed like an animal and the more it seemed like a giant, vertical rock.

Since I am sometimes guilty of imagining animals out of clumps of dirt, I said something like "What is that?" And then, "Oh, I guess it's a rock."

But then, as we crawled past, John said "No, it's an owl!" just before it flew away.

Luckily for us, there was another owl just down the road. Sitting in the middle of the gravel path, minding his own business, swiveling his head around and around as owls tend to do.

I love owls almost as much as I love tide pools, so this was very, very exciting.

We're not really sure why the owls were sitting in the road.

One theory is that the rocks get warm during the heat of the day. Another theory is that the owls can more easily see little round rodents when they scurry from one side of the road to the other.

Or maybe sitting in the road is just what owls like to do.

Honorable Mention

The Overlooked Twelve just doesn't have the same ring as the Overlooked Nine, but I wanted to point out three more categories of South African animals that are worth an honorable mention:

The hermit crab

If I had an animal totem, it would definitely be the hermit crab. They're just so adorable and grumpy.

Live ungulates

We did see a few ungulates out in the fynbos, including the bontebok (top) and the eland (bottom).

Notice the typical ungulate pose, which communicates a somewhat dimwitted curiosity about whether we're about to kill them:

Dead ungulates

Despite my general disdain for vehicular safari tours, we gained a new appreciation this past week for how difficult it is to find large grazing animals while walking around on human legs.

They cover so much more distance than we do, and it's hard to see them when you're standing on the ground instead of sitting high up in a 4x4.

In De Hoop, we had a funny series of hikes while in pursuit of the animals of the park, which include but are not limited to zebras, elands, bonteboks, mongoose, rock hyrax, cape otters and the occasional leopard.

On the first hike, we saw an amazing array of animal droppings but no actual animals. As in, wow, John, look! There is yet another kind of animal feces!

On the second hike, we saw an amazing array of dead animals but no live ones. As in, wow, John, look! There is yet another dead ungulate!

Along with the long shadows cast by the late afternoon sun, the skeletons gave our hike a real 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death' kind of feel to it.

Dead or not, they were beautiful and interesting in their own way.

The Rapture

We're on the verge of going off the grid, and before that happens, I wanted to post a few of our photos from Cape Town.

While John has attended roughly 77 talks on various and sundry physics topics — Cosmic Deceleration Parameter q(Z) Dependence Upon Gravitons, anyone? — I've been touring around Cape Town, hotel-bunny style.

I've spent a fair amount of time at the Waterfront, with which I've developed something of a love-hate relationship.

It's a beautiful area along the water, and the abundance of restaurants and English-language bookstores make us feel like we're experiencing the rapture.

But the whole place definitely has a Fisherman's Wharfy, tourist ghetto feeling to it. It's a lot more interesting to walk the mile or so into downtown, which also has a tourist infrastructure but doesn't feel so much like Cape Town Disneyland.

One redeeming feature of the Waterfront is that it's still a working harbor, so there are all kinds of boats and piers and shipping containers to feed my secret love of all things industrial:

Fur seals are another big highlight for pinniped fans like us:

Cute marine mammals aside, it's hard to say what about Cape Town makes us the happiest: the food, or the weather.

Even on the days when the weather forecast says "cloudy with light rain", there might be an hour of clouds and a form of cloud-based moisture that might be rain if you really used your imagination, followed by an entire day of brilliant sun.

This is in sharp contrast to the Netherlands, where a "10 percent chance of rain" just means that it's going to rain all day.

And the food! In addition to gorging ourselves on sushi, we've also had delicious South African, Ethiopian and Cape Malay cuisine. Just look at how happy and well fed we look!

This morning, I picked up a rental car and drove it by myself, on the left side of the road, back to the hotel. My post-driving trembling notwithstanding, I'm really excited to have a car.

Using our combined powers of observation to survive the totally counterintuitive driving, we're leaving Cape Town tomorrow. First we'll head down the Cape Peninsula to Simon's Town, where we hope to see penguins and baboons in the wild.

Then we'll drive east to De Hoop Nature Reserve for more quality time with the creatures of the sea!

Thanks, Kijkwijzer!

You would think that going to a movie theater would be a fairly universal experience: you pay a relatively inflated price to sit in a relatively comfortable seat to watch a movie on the big screen and hope that the other people in the theater aren't too talky and annoying.

I knew to expect some differences here, like intermissions and assigned seating and bringing coffee or beer into the theater in a lovely mug or glass. (The last two, by the way, also happen to be hallmarks of certain overpriced theaters in the U.S. You know who you are.)

But it seems like every time I go see a movie in Nijmegen, I discover some outrageous (if minor) thing that I just didn't see coming.

This time, it was "Kijkwijzer", the Dutch equivalent of Motion Picture Association ratings system in the U.S.

A system after my own heart, it uses a series of cute little black & white icons to point out what you can expect in the movie of your choice.

"AL" stands for something (alles? allemaal?) that means "everyone", and the numbers refer to the ages for which the movie is appropriate.

As someone stuck in the 1970's school of parenting, I find the 6, 9 and 12 distinctions a little overbearing, but I'm generally on board with the part about labels for movies that indicate age appropriateness.

(In reality, I'm stuck in the "Gee, that seems like a great job for someone else to do" school of parenting, but if I were to parent, it would be as a member of the 1970's school. Just look at how well I turned out!)

The rest of the icons, from left to right, stand for violence, sex, scary, drug/alcohol abuse, discrimination, and coarse language.

Violence? Sure, I get that. Sex? I get that, too. What I don't and can't get is the icon showing what it would look like if you sat at the end of a bed with two people having sex on it.

(I'll pause here while you scroll back up, look closely at the icon, and then fall out of your chair.)

Almost every Dutch person I've met seems to have the impression that all Americans are prudes. I usually protest this vigorously, but this icon seriously blows my mind.

If there were an icon depicting sex in the U.S. — and I think it's safe to say that there probably wouldn't be — it would probably take the form of an euphemistic kiss or embrace, like a logo you might see on a box of condoms, not the bottoms of feet of people engaged in the act itself.

The next one on the list is "scary", which I also struggle with a little bit. The cute spider works well enough for, say, Night of the Living Dead, or Poltergeist.

What it doesn't work for is Precious, the movie I went to see. Sorry, Kijkwijzer, but Precious was tragic and complicated and scary in the worst-side-of-humanity sense of scary, not scary in the big-hairy-spider sense of scary.

The next one is drug / alcohol abuse, smartly depicted with a syringe. Nice work, Kijkwijzer. No problems there.

Which brings us to discrimination, with an icon that appears to be a group of white overlords standing in a group, threatening a person of color.

Not to put too fine a point on things, but this? From the people who brought you Black Pete? Seriously?

I am all for pointing out (or kijkwijzing) discrimination in its many nefarious forms. But I can't for the life of me figure out why this is on the list of things to alert viewers about in a movie. Any way you spin it, it just doesn't make sense:

"No, baby, I don't want you to go see that movie with your friends. It has discrimination in it."

"Do you want to go see a romantic comedy tonight?" "Mmmm...no. I'm more in the mood for something that depicts, I don't know, maybe some discrimination?"

"You know, I think it's high time that we took little Maaike to see a movie with some discrimination in it."

"Hey, have you heard about that movie Precious? I'm thinking about taking John on a date to see it." "Oh, you'd better be careful. I've heard that it has discrimination in it."

What puzzles me even more is how Kijkwijzer determines whether or not a movie deserves a discrimination rating. It's hard to describe in just a few words, but Precious is the story of an obese, illiterate, black teenager whose mother beats her and whose father rapes and impregnates her.

So I can understand that it has a violence rating and a coarse language rating, and while I'm not fully on board with the scary spider rating, I can let that one go. (I'm not sure why it didn't also get the sex sticker, since the rape scenes gave a pretty clear picture of what was going on.)

But I've really thought about this a lot, and I can't figure out what exactly about this movie triggered the discrimination rating. My first (admittedly cynical) thought was, is it just because this is the Netherlands and the movie has black people in it?

There are other possibilities, of course: is it because the mother makes disparaging remarks about gays? Is it because the family calls the baby with Down Syndrome (somewhat affectionately) "Mongo?" Is it because of the daily harassment Precious takes for being obese?

But those all seem like very minor side notes to the central struggle with abuse and to a lesser extent, illiteracy.

Sure, it doesn't take a huge leap to realize that there are forms of longstanding, systemic discrimination influencing Precious' world in general and her experiences with the welfare and education systems in particular.

But something tells me that the fine people at Kijkwijzer aren't contemplating the socioeconomic history of inner cities in the United States when they slap that little discrimination sticker on a movie like this.

So I continued to be puzzled by why the discrimination rating exists in the first place, and why this particular movie gets one.

And last but not least, we have coarse language. Not to be confused with a warning for projectile vomiting from men without arms.

What Happens In Amsterdam...

Ah, Amsterdam! Because nothing says “family vacation” like a dildo shop next door to the hotel.

This weekend, my mom and I left the safety and rain of Nijmegen for the cultural treasures and rain of Amsterdam. I hate to admit it, but after ten months in the Netherlands, this was really my first time in Amsterdam proper.

A number of things surprised me about Amsterdam, but the most shocking was the number of people I saw wearing sweatpants.

You know: Amsterdam. City of canals and art and gays and ultra-progressive social policies like legalized prostitution and marijuana. And bleeding-edge fashion. Such as sweatpants. Regular, gray, straight-legged, American-style sweatpants.

We were also surprised by the sheer volume of artifacts just relating to the history of the city of Amsterdam. I acknowledge that the city is more than 400 years old, but seriously. There were a LOT of artifacts in a LOT of museums, all illustrating just three basic ideas:

• Guilds of men bearing crossbows policed the city and enjoyed having group portraits painted. Possibly more than they enjoyed actually firing their crossbows in defense of the city.
  
• Dutch trading companies made a tremendous amount of money building worldwide empires.
  
• The sanctioned flavor of Christianity changed every 50 years, but in the proud tradition of Dutch social tolerance, as long as you didn’t make a big fuss, you could pretty much worship however you wanted.
  

We visited many of Amsterdam’s signature museums, but we also hit some of its tiny specialty museums, of which there are also a shocking number.

Like the houseboat museum, which is a charming, houseboat-sized showcase of... (I know the suspense here is killing you) a houseboat.

We skipped the Bags & Purses Museum, as well as the Torture Museum. It’s debatable which of those would have actually been more torturous to visit.

Did I mention that it rained day and night?

I have to admit that my biggest concern about taking my mother to Amsterdam was not the pot or the Red Light District (though we partook of neither, in case you’re wondering).

It was the bicycles. She’s generally pretty alert, but if you haven’t spent the last ten months training yourself not to step into the path of speeding bicycles, the intermingling of bikes and pedestrian on the busy streets can be a little dicey.

Fortunately, the only true threat to my mother’s health and well being came when she dumped a sachet full of salt into her morning coffee. Needless to say, this was not a gentle introduction to the otherwise delightful Dutch buffet breakfast.

Me: Were those packets next to the coffee?

Her: No, but they were right next to the packets of brown sugar!

Me: Um...I think those were mustard seeds.

My mother, who has a long and storied culinary history of swapping salt in for sugar, tried to invoke the Vegas clause with respect to the salt incident.

But because what she actually proclaimed was, “What stays in Amsterdam, happens in Amsterdam.” said clause was null and void.

Sorry, Mom.

After Amsterdam, we ignored wretched weather forecasts (one of which actually used the term “wretched”) and took a train across the Flemish countryside to Bruges, a small Belgian city near the coast.

Lots of people had recommended Bruges as THE day trip to take from Nijmegen, but I was a little skeptical. How great could some obscure little Belgian city be?

As it turns out: really great!

In short, Bruges is a lovely, beautifully preserved medeival city with a strong but not overly commercialized tourist infrastructure. Plus: canals, museums, churches, restaurants, chocolate shops, cafes, and miles and miles of twisty little streets with gorgeous old (really old) houses. And a fully operational nunnery.

It’s a lot more interesting than it sounds.

I realize that this doesn’t really help my argument, but some people even call it “The Venice of Belgium.”

There’s not much going on in Bruges other than tourism associated with the places I mentioned above. Fortunately, we only experienced a few Disneyland moments.

Like one of the churches’ infinite-loop PA-system announcement inviting you in 7 languages to lay hands on its holy relic and thanking you in advance for your donation.

Or the bell towers, which really lay on the charm by chiming every 15 minutes. This is great, except that the first carillon tune we heard was “Stars & Stripes Forever.”

Nothing says “Medeival Capital of Europe” like John Philip Sousa!

Or the street musicians, who added lots of old world atmophere except when playing an accordian rendition of “My Way.”

The weather wasn’t wretched, after all, except for a driving rain that started the minute we stepped off the train.

After that, the clouds parted and coughed up some nice light for the 700 photos we took.

No trip to Belgium (or the Netherlands, for that matter) is complete without an order of friets.

Though I took pity on my mother and didn’t make her eat them with a big, delicious glop of mayonaise on top.

The Elusive Pontje

I'm embarassed to say that it's taken me ten months to learn the first commandment of navigating in the Netherlands: Thou shalt not underestimate the impeding power of water.  

John recently escaped the pressing gloom of fall in Nijmegen with a strategically planned work trip to Argentina.  By work trip, I mean two weeks of spending all day out on the sunny pampas and all evening eating Argentinean steak and drinking Malbec.  

I'm thinking that I should change the focus of my job search to pursue something with lots of "work trips." 

Luckily for me, the planets and the vagaries of the airline industry aligned in such a way that my mother was able to come and visit during the same two weeks.  

After arriving early on Saturday morning, she's been gamely battling jet lag, joining me on my circuit of favorite Dutch thrift stores, and surrendering to the roulette wheel of my cooking skills.  

Fortunately for me, I have a mother who is perfectly happy knitting while I mutter to myself and try to write cover letters and blog entries.  So: so far, so good! 

Today brought an unexpected day of sunshine, so we set off on foot toward the nature reserve just south of where we live.  We walked and walked and walked and walked and walked.  And then we walked some more.  

We logged most of our kilometers after deciding to strike out for Persingen, whose claim to fame is that with 89 residents, it's the smallest town in the Netherlands.   

Let me pause here to point out that until you've seen the smallest town in the Netherlands, you really haven't lived. 

By "deciding to strike out for Persingen", what I mean is that I said something like, "why don't we head over to Persingen?" in a tone of voice that suggested that a) I knew how to get there, and b) walking there would be a reasonable undertaking for the afternoon. 

In one sense, it's easy to navigate in the Netherlands because everything is so flat and you can see exactly where you want to go.  For example, the tiny red church in the middle of Persingen: 

In another sense, it's impossible to navigate because you can see where you want to go, but there are all of these goddamned — ahem, I mean lovely! — moats and canals and rivers and streams between you and your destination:

(And even when there aren't sanctioned bodies of water, chances are good that you will get stuck in swampy, marshy fields if you try to strike out on your own.)

First, we spent a fair amount of time walking away from Persingen in order to cross two large, water-filled ditches in order to head back toward Persingen.  

We then found what seemed to be a direct path across the polder to Persingen, only to be stopped by the second commandment of navigating in the Netherlands: Thou shalt not pretend that thou doesn't understand what verboden toegang means.    

In the interest of not angering Dutch farmers (or their livestock), we set off in the other direction to try to find another, less forbidden path.  

Now we were walking away from Persingen again, with no immediate options for a more direct route.  But then we started to see hand-lettered signs directing us to a "Pontje".  I had absolutely no idea what a pontje was, but it sounded a lot more fun and promising than verboden toegang, so we went with it.  

We hiked along a winding, muddy path next along a marshy pond (could that be the pontje?), past a guy picking berries (could that be the pontje?) and then over a small wooden bridge (could that be the pontje?).  But the path kept going and going until lo and behold, shining in the afternoon sunlight, stood The Pontje: a small ferry to get us across the Meertje and on our way back toward Persingen.  

By ferry, I mean a metal boat shaped like a cage, with a hand-operated crank that one can use to coax the hulking contraption along its cable.  

Verboden toegang notwithstanding, I really do love the Dutch.  

The only catch was this: after our triumphant (and necessarily brief) tour of Persingen, we headed west along the Meertje and back toward Nijmegen, trying to outrun some ominous fog bearing down on us from the east.  

But now we were on the wrong side of the Meertje with no pontje in sight.  So we walked and walked and walked until we returned to civilization. 

And by civilization, I mean the closest bridge.