Land of Shere Khan

Land of Shere Khan

We weren’t going to tip over, at least I didn’t think so. But when our “guide” clonked out and bounced onto the rubber floor our raft of four plus him started twirling in the fizzy white water like an alka seltzer dissolving in a glass.

This was my first time on Nepal’s Rapti river and my rafting experience was very limited, although fortunately on a few rivers in Alaska that seemed as cold and wild as this one. But I was no paddle captain. Thank goodness that the other two rafts – both behind us – seemed OK. Until we saw in the distance what we had been looking for, but what was now suddenly a mortal threat:
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Survival Suicide

Survival Suicide

Feel the epiphanous relationship of the disaster in The Sudan with Kaylin Gillis and Ralph Yarl.

It’s called destruction. It emerges from hate, love or some other intense emotion. Amplified by modern technology it grows exponentially, quickly fuses into cultural movements and governments like a Covid virus strangling our pulmonary cells. And then – always – it explodes into war.
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Linking Language

Linking Language

Now few believe in the power of language that I do, and Manvar Singh’s excellent time line of the word “indigenous” developing from the 16th Century into various versions including Maasai anagrams is almost fascinating. But what does it really have to do with the Maasai being kicked out of Loliondo?

Singh’s New Yorker epistemology of “indigenous peoples” and the resulting evisceration of same peoples’ aspirations is terribly incomplete and as useless as he tries to portray those aspirations.
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Grand Migration

Grand Migration

One of the most successful of my over 100 migration safaris in the last half century!

Why? Well, first of all, because of the people. From Cleveland, New York City, Reno and Chapel Hill – though they had not known each other beforehand, we’re all now the best of friends! Self-selected for my migration safari, I always know it’s the perfect group!

But also:
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Inflation Indeed

Inflation Indeed


The Kenyans have figured it out. Inflation is caused by the Chinese. This blockbuster revelation almost rivals Rupert Murdach’s admission FOX lied and American government agencies suspicion that Covid, like inflation, is a Chinese virus. Whether or not it reaches the profound level of balloons remains to be seen.
Mama mia mama mia, Is this the Real Life? Is this just Fantasy?

I’m currently in Nairobi where yesterday there was a major protest against the Chinese. It seems to have brought together almost all the bickering factions trying to assess blame for inflation.
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Guilt Trips

Guilt Trips

To everyone planning travel : Listen to NPR’s latest podcast of “To The Best of our Knowledge” after, of course, first reading this blog. And then, buy and read “Beyond Guilt Travel,” remembering, of course, this blog.

“To The Best of Our Knowledge” is an often dead-pan basement interviewing machine adroitly edited to keep you awake. When successful you actually learn quite a lot. Ditto for this week’s podcast about travel.
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KLM Backwards

KLM Backwards

Twenty years old I thought I was an up-and-coming journalist albeit of a different kind. Because the Movement into which my age conscripted me was winning. We young, naive often reckless kids were actually stopping the war in Vietnam, and we “journalists” played a proactive part in bringing that about.

Why am I writing about this on Martin Luther King Day?
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Chee Whiz

Chee Whiz

Tired but infuriated I watched the House Havoc to its end. Then just as my brain sensed a wee bit of insight a client sent me the Times’ article castigating tourists who drive too close to cheetah.

Alas that sliver of insight from the Speaker’s brawl wasn’t, in fact, drown in the rage provoked with the Times’ story. Good insight like a piece of petrified wood gleams even brighter in the white water of rage:

Half-truths, cherry-picked truths, like the bits and pieces of glass on the kitchen floor can’t possibly tell you what’s just shattered or how it fell in the first place or what to do to prevent it happening, again. Rather, the shattered glass is a sensational, reportable event, just like too many cars lining up to watch too few cheetah.

But where did all those cars come from? Who’s in them? Who’s driving them, washing them, fixing them, financing them? The Times doesn’t care about that, but that’s the crux of the story.
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Seal Attack

Seal Attack

Yesterday a baby seal, about the size of a small black lab, attacked multiple swimmers at Cape Town’s popular Clifton Beach. I’d come down exhausted from watching the House disaster, in need of several items of ordinary African news. And the first I found was this.

The seal first attacked a kid, then an older man rescued the kid and got attacked, then the lifeguards blew out warnings but one woman didn’t notice and the seal really bit a chunk out of her until a guy grabbed it, swung it around and then threw it back out to sea… where it immediately turned around and swam back to attack him.
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Failed Demo

Failed Demo

Tomorrow the modern African country that started the Arab Spring in 2010 will officially end democracy in Tunisia. This is neither a coup or proletarian revolution. It’s what the people want.

Tunisia is and always was one of the most progressive and developed societies in Africa. It was no surprise that the “Arab Spring” started here. And I don’t think it’s really their fault that the democratic experiment of 2014 will fail. It’s the fault of democracy itself.

This massive political and social retrograde is happening because democracy is seen as having suffocated economic development. Too much talk and not enough action.
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OnSafari: OnPolice

OnSafari: OnPolice

Joe Biden landed in Egypt for the COP27 conference just as we began our first day of the Egyptian safari. I was about to post this blog (two weeks ago) just as Egyptian police announced that reporters and bloggers be put on notice: Don’t criticize the government.

Regular readers know how unlikely I would criticize anything much less a big African government, basically believing everything in the world is honky-dory, but valor being the better part of splendor I conceded to my valuable clients that their interests were paramount: no blogs about modern Egypt until I was out of the country.
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OnSafari: Woman’s Peace

OnSafari: Woman’s Peace

It was the perfect time for a woman to make a move. Her great-grandfather Ahmose had started her family’s dynasty by defeating the barbarians who had so blithely overrun the ancient kingdoms with their new invention, the chariot. It didn’t take Ahmose long to make his own.

Her grandfather Amenhotep was therefore able to consolidate rule once again where it belonged, with the rulers of the North who had before the chariot charlatans had ruled for nearly two thousand years. Her father Tutmose solidified a reign that many consider the beginning of the greatest dynasty in all of Egyptian history in part by marrying his favorite daughter, Hatshepsut, to her half-brother, the pharaoh-to-be Tutmose II.
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OnSafari: Aswan

OnSafari: Aswan

The incredible multi-thousand year old history and monuments of pharaonic Egypt draw nearly 12 million visitors a year. But I’m getting really fascinated by the much later periods, when first the Greeks, then the Romans, then ultimately Muslims took control of the empire.

The basic pantheon of Egyptian gods existed from about 5000 years ago, about a dozen deities that explained creation, the difference between good and evil and the afterlife associated with each. But with time the collection of gods increased substantially, and with it the elaborate tombs and monuments and ceremonies that created a civilization that became encapsulated in myth and held stable by fierce ideology.
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