Demonstrations in Zimbabwe are increasing and the firestorm is building for tomorrow’s nationwide shutdown.
Canadian, American and British embassies in Harare have all issued notices of concern asking the Zimbabwe government to restrain its security forces. NGOs are universally condemning the fierce government reaction so far.
For Appearances Sake! Today in black South Africa, black high school girls complained to a black Minister of Education that white teachers insisted they straighten their naturally curly hair.
That takes the cake. Read more
Haunted by doping, having to bribe to get their uniforms then left with no tickets home, the Kenyan Olympic team placed 15th in the overall medal list – the best ever for an African country.
And par for the Olympics. I can’t understand how anyone places a thread of trust in any privately organized world athletic organization.
Less pain now let’s you choose a better burger for that last meal! Your puppy Fido will be all better in time for the apocalypse! Cataract surgery for vampires!
Vultures are in trouble, real trouble. More than half the species worldwide are going extinct. The main reason is a popular Novartis drug, diclofenac.
Obama is trying to be the Great Mediator in Africa having failed in America. Don’t hold your breath.
John Kerry is completing a whirlwind tour of Africa, today, dolling out money like carnival candy and telling the McCoys and Hatfields that they’ll be a lot more if they have Thanksgiving dinner together.
Kerry’s bitter sweet journey carries cargoes of carrots and sticks.
Are we facing a new Arab Spring September 1? Will the “African Fall” be as bloody and consequential?
The Tanzanian president promises a “crackdown without mercy” on protestors planning country-wide demonstrations September 1, setting up a potential firestorm in the northern safari circuit including Arusha and Moshi.
The U.S. continues to strengthen its ties with arguably Africa’s most oppressive regime, Ethiopia, because the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
By doing so if not actually supporting we are facilitating mass executions of regime opponents, widespread suppression of freedom and liberty in a politic totally opposed to our values. This is realpolitik.
For the moment, there is no part of Victoria Falls comfortable for tourists. The Zimbabwean side of Africa’s greatest tourist attraction is ready to explode as President Mugabe’s health fails. Livingstone on the Zambian side Tuesday was filled with the smoke of burning tires and tear gas.
Britain issued new travel advice for Zambia this morning, but it was hardly severe urging its citizens simply to stay abreast of current news. The U.S. currently has travel warnings issued for 39 countries and “Europe as a Whole” but nothing this morning for Zambia.
The daughter wants nothing to do with her mother. That statement has special meaning today in South Africa where 20-year old Zephany Nurse’s presumed mother began a 10-year jail sentence for having snatched Zephany from the hospital when she was 3 days old.
The now legal name given to Zephany by the convicted woman is not known and Zephany’s privacy is protected under South African law. Nevertheless, she said through her laywer, “Don’t you think for once that [her real mother] is my mother. Whether it is true or not is not for you to toy with… think what I am going through, and my father and mother.”
I’ve just completed my 40th year of guiding in sub-Saharan Africa. In March I guided veteran travelers on a 30-day Kenya/Tanzania trip, and I just ended with a wonderful family from San Diego on an 18-day Kenya/Tanzania. Most Americans take 10-12 days for safari.
So my gigs this year gave me an excellent chance to answer the question, Kenya or Tanzania? – not just from my own experience, but that of my clients.
There’s no right answer for everyone. So let’s start with the things which are the same:
SECURITY:
Until two years ago, there was little doubt that Tanzania’s security for tourists was better than Kenya’s, but that’s no longer the case. Multiple tourist incidents in Zanzibar and virtually none in Kenya for more than 18 months has for right now leveled the security in both countries.
Kenya’s upcoming national elections and the increasingly unstable situation in Zanzibar are the two single-most situations that could potentially change the current good security situations in both countries.
But recent terrorism in popular destinations like Paris and Brussels has forced travelers to recognize that insecurity is, unfortunately, a growing component of traveling virtually anywhere. Viewed in this context, both Tanzania and Kenya appear to me a better bet when planning a future vacation than many, many other parts of world, including those like Europe which previously were considered completely safe.
COST:
Both countries offer a wide range of tourist products. There’s no significant difference in prices for the same sort of accommodations and activities.
Kenya’s economy is performing better than Tanzania’s. Normally when a country’s economy underperforms (such as today in Britain) it creates a buy for tourism: vendor costs decline relative to world prices. This has happened in Tanzania, but unfortunately the government’s reaction in part was to significantly increase tourist taxes erasing what would have otherwise been an advantage in costs.
WILDLIFE:
Both countries have all the great wild beasts that attract folks to a safari. Tanzania has an edge with elephants and other herbivores, Kenya with cats, but they are subtle and unlikely to be noticed on an ordinary safari. Tanzania is a bigger place with more wildlife overall, but you’re not going to travel everywhere and Kenya’s density of wildlife in places like the Mara is higher than Tanzania’s.
Kenya has a greater number of species, in part because of its Great Northern Frontier, the last real wilderness before Africa’s great deserts. There are several big animals like the reticulated giraffe and a number of smaller animals like unusual duikers found in northern Kenya that don’t exist in Tanzania. This unique ecosystem – somewhat like America’s southwest – also gives Kenya an edge with birds.
But Tanzania’s sheer quantity of game is greater than Kenya’s. So while Kenya has more kinds of animals and birds, Tanzania has more animals and birds. But Kenya’s quantity of animals wows most travelers anyway, and few travelers have the biological training to appreciate Kenya’s greater number of species.
AS FOR THE DIFFERENCES…
Many differences are subtle and often radically adjusted by season. Traveling during the northern hemisphere’s summer flips, for example, where the great migration is normally found from Tanzania to Kenya.
But even that can be quickly altered by unusual weather, which is quickly becoming the new norm.
So please recognize I’m making generalizations that might not apply to your own dates and needs:
WILDERNESS:
As opposed to “wildlife” there is much more pristine, undeveloped “wilderness” in Tanzania that you can include on a typical safari than in Kenya. That often doesn’t correlate with animal viewing, by the way, because it often means that wild animals are more easily spooked. It’s also the reason that there’s greater poaching in Tanzania, because the areas are more difficult to police.
Kenya’s stunningly rapid economic development compared to Tanzania’s has pressured its wilderness in a way not seen yet in Tanzania. Kenyans are very sensitive to this, by the way, and I also think Kenyans as a whole are much more conservation oriented than Tanzanians.
But for the “great open country” often associated with a safari, Tanzania is the choice.
BEYOND WILDLIFE:
Both countries offer exceptional beach resorts, and note that half of all travelers to both countries never see an animal! They go strictly for the wonderful beaches and resorts.
Tanzania’s early man sites like Olduvai Gorge have no comparable venues as easy to visit in Kenya. Both countries offer adventure climbing, but Kilimanjaro in Tanzania attracts 5-7 times more people than Kenya’s comparable hiking.
Beyond that, though, Kenya offers much more than Tanzania, starting with the innumerable attractions of Nairobi. Nairobi is a real cosmopolitan city, replete with entertainment, museums and historical attractions available nowhere in Tanzania.
INFRASTRUCTURE:
Airports, roads, wifi, security stations, immigration and customs, taxis, charter air flights, stores and shops, medical care, access to daily essentials like toothpaste and sunblock – all are much better in Kenya than Tanzania. It’s a simple reflection of one country developing much more quickly than the other.
One important caveat to this is the traffic congestion of Nairobi. If properly designed, you can avoid this, but most of the time you can’t. Tanzania’s second main airport, Kilimanjaro, allows incoming visitors to avoid the similar congestion of Dar-es-Salaam. Nairobi has no such alternative. (Mombasa is actually a larger airport than Kilimanjaro, but it serves almost exclusively the beaches, like Zanzibar in Tanzania.)
ACCOMMODATIONS:
There are outstanding accommodations in both countries. With proper care a safari in Tanzania can enjoy just as complete and comfortable accommodations as in Kenya. In general, though, Kenyan accommodations through all market levels are superior to Tanzania’s.
SERVICE & FRIENDLINESS:
There is a great difference between Tanzania and Kenya in this regards. Kenyans are friendlier, kinder, less officious, better educated and trained, and much more willing to help a foreign visitor. Bribing remains terrible in Tanzania and seems under control in Kenya. The likelihood of you being asked on entry, for example, for a bribe is much greater in Tanzania than Kenya.
You can see from the above that Kenya is in a much better long-term position for attracting visitors if it can conserve its pressured wildernesses. Tanzania is still the place for a wild and wooly wilderness experience, something increasingly precious in today’s rapidly developing world.
No one right answer fits everyone and these generalities easily fall apart through different seasons and types of experiences. Never rely just on your friends’ recommendations, although that’s important. Single or even twice-enjoyed experiences often miss the nuances of season and market level. It’s the reason reviews on such places as TripAdvisor can be so misleading.
Never judge a book by its cover, or a safari company or property by its website alone.
Many decisions you should not make alone. Consider an experienced travel professional that can prove his actual experience and who can command your trust, just as you would when purchasing a home or making any other type of investment.
In the end ridiculously few first-time safari travelers are anything but totally satisfied with their safari, usually considering it among the best vacations of their lives!
We were among 30 cars on one side of the Mara river – there were another 30 on the opposite side.
I don’t like crowds in the wilderness, and I avoid them pretty successfully. But this is an exception. If you want to see one of the most dramatic still truly wild components of the world’s last great animal migration, you’re going to be part of a crowd.
True, there are plenty of river crossings on the great migration route that don’t draw crowds, and I’ve enjoyed them. But the classic and most dramatic crossings are in the Mara, and there are only a couple dozen favorite crossing spots.
Unlike so many animals, wildebeest are very finicky eaters. All they will consumer is grass. Grass comes after rain. The wilde’s instinct forces them to “follow the rains,” which generally recede over the course of the year in a northwesterly direction onto Lake Victoria.
Before reaching the Mara, the great herds have crossed at least two and sometimes four or five other great rivers as they move north.
The Mara is the last and furthest northern river before the herds are turned back by developed farm fields, towns and villages. Here they cluster and start moving backwards and forwards across the river seemingly without purpose. The instinct to move is too great, and if the movement is a rebound, so be it.
This has been the case for at least the last half century. Before that they may have continued all the way to the Lake before turning around. The boundary is not natural in the wild sense, of course, and it results in the mass confusion, exceptional drama and photogenic scenes that have become the trademark of the great migration.
A bit further south the herds’ decisions to move back and forth across rivers is governed much more by actual rain. Particularly now with climate change, the intense micro-climates may mean a healthy rainfall a few miles to the north, or a drought, a few miles to the south.
I’ve often watched the herds move north out of Tanzania to Kenya right on schedule in June, but then return months early in August because of early, heavy rains in northern Tanzania.
Keep in mind that a wildlife documentary is simply an edited version of what the Miller Family saw this morning in person. I remember encountering a BBC/Nova film crew once shooting a river crossing here in the Mara, and there were at least 20 vehicles just in their team.
We were watching a newborn zebra being defended by its mom against a hyaena when we spotted massive clouds of dust several miles away above the river.
Our camp driver, of course, knew exactly what “favorite crossing place” was near the dust and we headed for it posthaste. Wilde will jump 20 feet into the river and then try (usually unsuccessfully) to scale the other side of a 20-foot canyon, but they prefer easier entries and exits, often dry river washes merging with the great Mara. There aren’t many, and everyone knows them.
To reach this crossing place, we had to drive through the herds, and that in itself was fabulous. I estimated between 3500-4500 in this particular group. They were racing in multiple files and converging on a plateau just above the crossing point.
We slowed down among their incessant blarting mixed with the anxious barking of the zebra. Clearly this group was getting psyched up to cross!
By the time we got to the crossing point most of the prime spaces were already taken by other cars. But our driver knew the river so well that we went down river all of a few hundred meters where it turned and found a beautiful viewing area right there.
Across the river were four giant crocs, pulled out onto the sun with bellies already bulging with previous crossings.
So then, like everyone, else, we just waited.
After about an hour, all of a sudden, we were surrounded by wilde! They came so fast the dust came after them! This wasn’t the crossing place, this was our secret viewing area, and it was very rocky and steep at the river’s edge.
Then almost as quickly, they moved away back into the riverine forest. For some reason, they weren’t going down the “favorite crossing place.”
After about another half hour some cars began to leave. We thought we would, too, but just as the engine turned on we could see upriver that the first of the group had reached the river’s edge at the end of the wash.
At first they didn’t seem to do anything but grow in numbers and drink the water. After about five minutes, though, the pressure of the racing wilde behind them forced them to start the swim across.
They walked until the depth of the river forced them to swim, and wilde do this by successive leaping. Water was splashing all of the place. I watched a croc leap out and grab the side of one wilde. It was soon mayhem. Six or seven abreast were swimming across, many getting drowned by others behind them, some actually swimming back across the river!
A half hour later it was all over. A very small group of about 25 wilde for some reason remained on the wash and didn’t cross, but the bulk had move onto the other side and were congregating on the plains and starting to graze.
We found a nice place much further down the river to set up our wonderful breakfast, but the river runs fast here, and numerous “floaters” or dead wildebeest passed by us.
The great migration is like one little muscle in Mother Earth. It’s a reflection of the ecological heritage that makes our planet so awesome. Until we free ourselves completely of our biological roots, we need to truly experience the power of our organic world so that we can concede that we’re only one piece in an infinite universe of life, beholden to the great migration as the wildebeest are to the rains.
We’re in the Maasai Mara, Kenya’s best game park and the top of the great Ngorongoro/Serengeti/Mara ecosystem.
She had killed a wildebeest yearling this morning without much effort. Large files of the great migration are coming through the salient. We saw three groups of about 400 wilde and another of about 1000 that was running in single file.
We even watched a small group of several hundred try to cross the Mara River. Only one did! But the others’ reluctance was understandable. The river is already littered with dead wildebeest among very fat, giant crocs.
So the young female leopard that probably weighs around 120 pounds max had pulled the 220 pound yearling into the crux of a tree about 6-8 feet off the ground. That’s not very high for a leopard who can easily lift 350 pounds 20 feet into a tree.
But she was with an older daughter and I wonder if maybe she was teaching her how to lift the kill. In any case, they made haste with their feast, eating more than half of it in a single setting. That, too, is unusual for a leopard which may take a week to finish off its kill.
The urgency was in part because there were so many vehicles trying to watch them. The Mara gets a bum rap sometimes regarding too many vehicles, and for the vast majority of our game drive we were alone or just with our other vehicle in the Miller family safari.
But a leopard is prize stuff. So all the vehicles in the neighborhood came to see them, and that meant when we arrived there were another 7 vehicles. Once we got our fleeting pictures, I insisted we move on, as even more vehicles were arriving.
I felt she was understandably nervous. The would move together out of the deep bush to one side, then the vehicles would move to that side, and they would move to the other.
It was a fantastic first game drive for us!
We followed the river for the migrating wilde, encountered great herds of buffalo, saw elephant and a bunch of other stuff. The Mara is one of the most beautiful parks in my estimation. As the afternoon light cut across the prairie stopped distantly here and there by a single struggling acacia tree, there was a sense of wild peace you just find nowhere else.
Tomorrow we’re going out for most of the day. Stay tuned!
We’re in The Selous, a giant, uncontrollable river delta a bit like the bottom of Louisiana, a reserve the size of West Virginia in central Tanzania.
The Selous is not for everyone. Even now at a cooler time of the year it’s extremely hot and humid. Game viewing is restricted to not very many tracks, or by boat on the Rufiji River.
But it is the river which makes this such a wonderful safari experience. And with a massive dam planned in the next ten years, it’s an urgent experience, as well.
Approximately half of all of Tanzania is drained by the Rufiji and Ruaha Rivers through The Selous into the Indian Ocean. This is a wild unkempt wilderness, not quite as ever-changing as Botswana’s Delta, but similar. The great sand rivers change courses easily.
We stayed at a camp on the Rufiji and it was spectacular. Our tents were on the embankment just above the high water mark, so that now it is easily 15 feet down to the water. From my deck I looked over the great Rufiji, about a mile wide at this point, defined by great stands of Borassus palm. Since we’re on a bend, there were wonderful sand bars used by numerous crocs and hippos.
On our first river excursion we bucked the extremely strong current until we came to the first lake created as a side-water by the river. This is a main feature of the Rufiji and it results in more placid water not sure for our game viewing, but for the animals as well.
We saw tons of giraffe and impala together with waterbuck and buffalo, zebra and wildebeest on the dense game area along the shores of the lakes and river. We pulled close to elephant pondering whether or not to cross (and swim) the deep lake.
This is a time that resident birds nest, and the bird rookeries were exploding with activity. We spent a good amount of time at one, a white-fronted bee-eater colony. Our pontoon boat pushed right up to the edge of the water underneath the colony.
The bee-eaters nest in holes dug from the clay sides of the river. There were easily several hundred and we watched with fascination as they managed their one hole among so many others.
Just before we left, a monitor lizard appeared, its tongue flashing out into holes looking for eggs. The bee-eaters descended on it en masse but it wasn’t deterred. We watched him come up short from a couple holes before we had to leave.
I think the single most impressive thing about river game viewing in The Selous is the crocodile experience. There are so many the place begins to look like a set for an Indiana Jones move.
Probably not as big as we find on the Mara or Grumeti Rivers, or in far north Kenya, but the sheer numbers staggers the imagination. These crocs subside mostly on fish, and there are some incredible fish in the river!
Ben and Charlie went fishing and came back with over 25 kilos of fish! The largest was a catfish around 12 kilos.
But on the next day we saw that fish is not the sole diet of these river monsters. On our game drive, which focused along the shore of the river and lake, we were watching an idyllic scene of impala and waterbuck in a beautiful landscape with a small stream flowing into the lake.
I remarked to everyone to watch the impala, because they are masterful leapers. Shortly after I said this, a young waterbuck raced across the river (didn’t leap) and its left leg ended up in the snout of an 8–foot long croc! Snorting the waterbuck disappeared limping into the bush.
The animal persisted and pulled its leg free, and the croc followed it a few meters out of the water before slipping back.
Fish eagles are the trademark of wild Africa. They look and act very much like our bald eagles, but they have a piercing, undulating call absent from our eagles. I see them practically everywhere in Africa where there is water.
But here in The Selous they are remarkably vocal, calling constantly and often while flying. I think this is because there are so many of them, territories are very competitively obtained, and the screaming comes from the victors.
I was surprised how little good wifi we’ve had the last week. One of the staff at our Selous camp explained that the demand has grown so significantly that the infrastructure just isn’t there. So stay tuned! I’ll blog whenever I’ve got a signal!
On a two-day hiatus from my Miller Family Safari, I find myself in a Poe or King hell: Dar-es-Salaam.
The family’s foreign exchange student joined them for the first ten days. The two of us peeled off the group yesterday so that I could shepherd him onto his international flight home to Paris.
Unable to catch up with the family in Zanzibar for two days, I’m staying in Dar es Salaam. The Ramada Resort on Mbezi Beach had a good deal, and I also booked their “40-minute” transfer from the airport. It took two hours.
This was 7 p.m. on a Thursday night. My savvy cabbie avoided the main roads as much as he could. We wound our way through a maize of small streets that anywhere else in the world would resemble a walking mall, but with nano-millimeters to spare we passed giant petrol trucks and mammoth buses, but at least we were moving.
It was dark. No street lights, so the only illumination was the ubiquitous “open” and “welcome” neon signs of the myriad of shops lined up one after the other. Bridal shops, grocery stores, children’s toys to many pharmacies were doing a robust business, many with lines of people waiting to get in. People crossing the street, 3-wheel tuk-tuks and an unending barrage of motorcycles somehow effortlessly wove in an out of our two moving lines of mammoth traffic.
But this clever navigation had its limits. Three or four times we had to get back on a disastrous main road: Four, five or six lines of vehicles moved often quickly then stopped … once for 25 minutes. White uniformed policeman at several intersections wielding large red or green neon batons waved tides of vehicles forward and back in a futile attempt to unclog the mess.
Two minutes less than two hours I arrived at my destination, 11.2 miles from the airport. Taxi fee: $70 with tip.
Of course I was frustrated and exhausted, but I couldn’t help thinking of the people who live here, of the enormous resources spent just coming and going. Easily 1 out of 4 large trucks were petrol tankers. Sometimes my cabbie decided to turn off his car engine, but usually not. He explained that was hard on the engine and used even more gas.
What percentage of the gas was used to stand still? But that pales in comparison with the time all these people have lost of their productive lives.
Speaking with staff at the hotel I learned that most of them live in reasonable proximity to the hotel, but that was less true of management and specialty services. One woman said she spent five hours daily getting to work and back! Another has been given a room in the hotel, and “commutes” home (15 miles away) on his days off!
Most African metropolises are a mess. Urban immigration for the last two decades has stunned social anthropologists by its magnitude and speed, and Tanzania is right there at the top of the charts.
Of the estimated Tanzanian population of 55 million, nearly ten percent reside in Dar es Salaam. Add surrounding communities in the area where I stayed Thursday night and it’s likely around 8 or 9 million.
I’ve written about Nairobi’s congestion often in the last several years, and the new highway system that came on line last year did seem to help … a little. But even in Nairobi’s worst times, it did not take two hours to go twelve miles.
This was a real education for this old safari guide. All the pontificating about how to help the developing world, how to share the world’s resources, seems meaningless after this experience. Until the chaotic congestion of African cities is resolved, how can anything else begin to be done?
I suppose as we age the accumulation of changes so untethers us from our foundations that it seems apocalypse is right around the corner. Nevertheless, this safari truly makes me wonder if African wilderness will be around much longer.
I remind myself that in 1979 Peter Beard published a best-selling book, The End of the Game, and his predictions couldn’t have been more wrong. There was not the near total collapse of the wild animals in East Africa he predicted, but in fact a tripling of the animal populations.
So I’m hesitant now to render a similar prediction. Few knew the East African wilderness as well and intimately as Peter Beard. Few were as moderate or unopinionated as him.
Yesterday we left the crater for Lake Manyara National Park. The crater was enormously stressed, but not by the customary impacts of a normal dry season. This was a much different dry season, one framed by the extremities of climate change.
The single-most easily observed effect of climate change in East Africa is the severity of micro-weather cells. The crater like the Serengeti was severely dry, more so than normal. But the areas hardly a few miles away in the higher elevations of the crater rim and Karatu butte were soaked. Not so much by current rain (although there has been some unusual showers) but by the floods of the last rainy season which went on nearly a month longer than normal.
Drop back down to Lake Manyara and the desiccation of the veld was as bad as the Serengeti or the crater floor. Yet the lake itself is massive. Rivers flowing into the great lake itself are so strong that tracks I used in the rainy season in March are now under water!
All this because the higher elevations – a soaked micro weather cell – continued to drain off the unusually wet season.
Grass on the veld doesn’t grow because a nearby river is flowing, but it does mean that a normal light shower provides just enough moisture to bloom grass on that desiccated veld: I guess the best way to explain this is that despite an unusually hot, dusty and dry veld, an unusually high water table supports grass growth at the slightest encouragement.
We saw ridiculous numbers of baby buffalo in the crater. (Buffalo eat very little of anything but grass.)
We encountered so many giraffe in the Serengeti around lakes Ndutu and Masek that 8-year old Donovan began each game drive by announcing, “I guaranteed you we’ll see giraffe.” Masek and Ndutu were unusually large for the same reason as the crater lake and Manyara: heavy continuing runoffs from the nearby highlands.
Giraffes main food are the leafs of the acacia tree. Deep rooting acacia trees tap easily into a high water table. The acacia near all these lakes are leafing anew and even blooming, something not normal before November.
More than a hundred elephant around Lake Masek, dozens in the crater forests, and yesterday, almost a hundred elephant in Lake Manyara is not something I expected to see, now. There were many babies, and elephant abort at the slightest indication of a drought. Elephant are the most voracious consumers of vegetation on earth. They can easily move great distances and they don’t remain in areas without food.
So why sound the alarm?
Elephant, buffalo and to some extent giraffe, easily move great distances and fairly rapidly. Other animals don’t. Impala are home-bodies, with family collections rarely shifting far. Hippo might travel ten miles a night to eat, but they don’t easily adjust their territories, returning to the same river bed or lake each morning.
We normally see hundreds if not thousands of impala on a normal safari. I think so far we’ve counted 35 or so.
The first four hippo we found were frozen dead in the dwindling waters of the Seronera river, their hides already cracked wide opened and storks already picking into them.
All the 20 or so hippo we saw in the crater were crammed into the single lake at Lokitok with none in other normal areas like the well-signed “hippo pool.” At the famous hippo viewing area in Manyara we saw only a couple hippo and they were all very sick, their hides chalked with salt.
Could it be that only those animals capable of rapid shifts in territory will now survive? There’s more water than ever, but it comes as torrential rains in shorter intervals into smaller areas followed often by severe heat and drought.
Animals that can react to these anomalies might not just survive but prosper. Those that can’t will die. But the matrix that emerges will be radically different from the one that has existed all my career until now. Can the ecology retool and resync this fast?
My gut says no. But then so did Peter Beard’s almost a half century ago.