Christmas/New Year's

Christmas was fun! Myself and about 25 other volunteers all shared and booked rooms at the Metcourt, which is one of the nicest hotels in Gaborone, and spent Christmas Eve there. It is such a nice hotel…we all spent the whole day on Christmas Eve sitting at the pool, surrounded by palm trees and lying in the sun in wonderful pool chairs….it was amazing! It was so relaxing and wonderful to just hang out with other Americans and do nothing and spoil ourselves a bit…it was so great to get to put my Ipod in plain sight next to me and not feel guilty about it. Normally, I don’t bring things like that in plain sight…its not smart or safe and mostly for me…it “proves” to everyone how rich people assume I am since I’m a white American. I have to hide things in my bag and most of the time when I do use Ipods or my laptop I feel guilty. Some of the other volunteers and I were talking about it and a lot of us all feel like that…it can be exhausting in a way…we were all loving the break to just be who we are and not have to feel weird or guilty about it. After sitting at the pool all day, we all went back to the rooms and showered and got ready for dinner. We reserved dinner at an Indian restaurant called “The Embassy” and we all had a huge Indian buffet. It was so good and nice to all just hang out and the food was so good! My normal peanut butter sandwiches and regular cereal for all meals took a back seat that day for sure…it was Christmas Eve and we celebrated. The next day on Christmas most of us stayed at the pool again all day long…again…it was so great! It was a really awesome Christmas…really weird though. I mean, it didn’t feel like Christmas at all and still doesn’t feel like Christmas actually happened. It just doesn’t feel normal….but I think that maybe that’s for the best. Since it really didn’t feel like the holidays, my feeling homesick was at a minimal. I definitely missed home, family, friends, my mom’s cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning, Court and I opening our stocking and seeing the family….but I was so preoccupied with everyone around me and being with some really good friends here that is really helped detract me and not feel very homesick. OH! My friends and I did watch the cartoon of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” on Christmas morning in our hotel room on my laptop…that was a nice little Christmas thing that we have now brought to Botswana!!!!!
My friend Mish and I left Christmas afternoon to go stay with 2 other volunteers for Christmas night to make sure we could catch the bus for Francistown the next morning…so that we could head off on our Victoria Falls adventure. Mish and I started hitching at 5:30am to get a ride to the bus rank in Gabs. We got the 6:30 bus to Francistown and we were in Francistown by 1pm…we made it relatively easy…we were in shock. We were expecting it to be a bit of nightmare, but we got really lucky. We spent the day lounging at another volunteer’s house in Francistown for the rest of the day watching The movies, “UP” and “Doubt” in the extreme and nasty heat that is Botswana summer!!!! My house for the record NEVER gets below 80 degrees…NEVER!!! Most nights its between 85-90 and during the day its always around 100. Its sick!!!!!! The farther up north you go the hotter it gets in Botswana…but even with the heat…I want to move to Francistown. It’s the second biggest city/town in Bots and holy mother is that for real! I’m so jealous of the volunteer that lives here and can’t believe the disparity between us volunteers…I can’t even imagine what life would be like here with electricity (having a fan in this heat), running water, every grocery store available and malls…yes, malls right down the road….my life is soooooo different!!!!! Yet, we’re all in the PC and do the same kinda thing…but its so different. Its crazy to me.
Took another 6 hour bus and got to Kasane…saw elephants, giraffe’s and monkeys on the way! Kasane is such a nice place. Its on the Chobe River and so beautiful…we took a boat Crusie on night and it was amazing! I have so many pictures of elephants now its unreal, but we spent about an hour just hanging out with the elephants…at least 50 of them on the shore and right next the boat. Just gorgeous. Saw a lot of Hippos, waterbuck, monkey’s and a crocodile. Mish and James and I spent about 2 ½ hours on the boat cruise and it was absolutely worth it! It was so amazing to be near the water again and to just relax and do the tourist thing. When you’re on the Chobe river you literally have Botswana on one side and Namibia on the other side of the river. Kasane is right next to the Zimbabwe boarder as well. There is a town outside of Kasane that is very near that actually boarders 3 other countries…Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Zambia. The Chobe is so beautiful and I loved watching elephants at sunset on the river, just perfect!
For New Year’s Eve Mish, James and I met up with one of the married couple’s from our group, Shannon and Steve. They are my designated Botswana parents. Shannon is my fake mom here! They are really sweet and it was fun to all hang out on New Year’s Eve at the Safari Lodge on the Chobe earlier in the night. They had a countdown to midnight. So James, mish and I spent the night at the pool dancing to really old 80’s music that they played and just hanging out. We got home around 1am, Mish and I decided that was a good time to make some Rice-A-Roni (which was delicious might I add) and then went to bed around 3am…woke up at 6am to go to Victoria Falls. We went to the Zimbabwe boarder and crossed there…Vic Falls is about an hour away outside the boarder. Zimbabwe is really beautiful from what we saw of it. Mish has family in Zim that are great and they helped us find everything and get hooked up with all the companies and stuff that we needed to. Mish and James had the brain child of bungee jumping off Vic Falls for New Year’s day about a month ago…tried to get me to do it but I said, “no way!” I hate heights….absolutely HATE them! I’m all about trying things that scare me and challenging myself, but free falling is just NOT OK with me! I can’t handle the idea of free falling…too much for me! I was cool with just watching them and then walking the falls later. So, we went to Wild Horizons, a company that you schedule jumps and activities with to find out that they have a bunch of things you can do. I still hate heights with a passion, but James convinced me to do the Zip Line…which might I add goes 70 miles per hour and a distance of 500m through Vic Falls. Not exactly what I had in mind of doing something tame that wouldn’t make me want to thrown up…yeah, not so much! Mish and James decided not to bungee after all and do a bungee type thing instead. They did a Gorge Swing which is free falling all the way down like a bungee jump and then when you get to the bottom you swing for a bit back and forth…I was horrified just watching them. James also did what they call a “Flying Fox” which I where you fly like superman from one side of the falls to the other…that I found out is the most tame thing you can do…I didn’t know that til later though. Lastly, I did the zip line. James and I ended up doing it together. I was planning on just doing it even though I was still a bit in shock that I agree to do this…but then the instructor asked if we were doing it together since we were both going to do it so we thought that would be fun. It was so much better going with James and I’m so glad we did a tandem zip line.
OK, so let me walk you through my horror…They harness you up and put James and I side by side sitting in the harness…they hook everything that they need to and then told us to sit on the edge of the cliff anf start to go down to be sitting in the harness…that was the moment when I literally had the thought of, “ok, yeah, I really don’t want to do this…what on earth did I get myself into and why isn’t this whole thing just over already?!?!” I was so freaked and James who had already done 2 things was like, “ok, cool, Em, this will be awesome…” I told him to shut up! Haha So, we’re dangling our feet about 260 feet over the earth and we were instructed that we have to sit side by side and put our hands across one another’s waists and that’s how we would be going down. Told to lift our feet up to not hit the edge and then…WOOSH!! You’re gone. So fast, I literally couldn’t breathe for the first several seconds and immediately closed my eyes and just kept screaming, “oh my god, oh my god, oh my god…” in my head. I couldn’t even make a noise at first I was so scared, then James starting screaming at me, “open your eyes, danmit…open them, keep them open.” So, I did and I’m glad I did and slowly the adrenaline made life a little happier and not as scary…for about a minute that is!!! The line starts to slant up towards the end so then you go backwards and eventually slow down a bit. We flew through the line in no time and was so fast I couldn’t believe it. It was beautiful looking at the falls. James kept yelling to me how proud of me he was and trying to distract me so I could stay in my happy place and not realize that we had stopped and were literally sitting in the middle of know where on a wire 260 feet above the falls and we both had heard a ripping noise and now had images in our heads of just directly dropping to our deaths…we talked about how I basically just scared him from being so scared and apparently clawing my nails into his side while we were sliding down this horrendous thing..no joke. He has a bruise. I do now, looking back recall James saying, “ow,ow,ow..” but I was way too involved in myself at that moment to really think that through…haha He tried to show me the bruise but that required him to move us both while we were hanging above anything ground-like and so I told him I would kill him if he moved. The instructor guy came down to get us and pull us back to the top, cause that’s how it works. James is sitting there like no big deal and that we didn’t just hurtle ourselves towards a huge mass of rock on the other side and chatting up the guy taking us back. James continued to remind me in between the chatting to look around and enjoy this moment and not to close my eyes…I did and a we slowly are feeling every aspect of the harness and how little is holding us up, how far up we are, and that every jolt makes a new ripping noise…the adrenaline started to quickly wear off and all that was going through my head was, “oh my god…I really do hate heights….why the hell am I not on ground yet…I’m going to die!” Finally, we got back up and Mish started yelling at me, “that was so cool, how do you feel…don’t you feel alive?” My response was, “NO, glad I did it and thank god for James…but never again.”
Its one of those experiences that I’m glad I had and its amazing to know that I zip lined through one of the 7 natural wonders of the world…very cool…but holy mother. I’m done now! I love to challenge myself and prove to myself I can do things that scare me and like Mish told me about not bungee jumping…” you’re in the Peace Corps already…you don’t have to prove anything to anyone…you’ve already done it.” So, I happily am now going to take that and sit with it for a bit and think of my Zip line as a horrifying, James bruising, can’t breathe, I still really do hate heights revelation, harnesses do hurt, I love the ground, wonder of the world moment that can be the icing on top of the cake!
After our adventures in the air we went to lunch and tried to enjoy Zimbabwe. Then we went to Victoria Falls and oh my lord is it gorgeous. Absolutely amazing! We walked through 2/3’s of it…we walked for hours and didn’t have to time to cross the bridge to Zambia to see the other 1/3 of the falls. BUT it was unbelievably. We all took so many pictures…we have hundreds of photos of water, water, and more water…but its pretty water the falls are HUGE and we were soaked by the end of it cause of all the mist that flow at you…the trials through the falls to get to all the outlook spots were you can get new views an sights of it all looked like a tropical rain forest. It was amazing! So beautiful. The trees were dripping, the sun was shining its insane African sun that it always shines and its just a forest of flowers and green everywhere. So cool! My favorite part was the rainbows. The Falls have beautiful rainbows in the mist and right in front of the falls itself. Just gorgeous! Unreal!! Its no wonder why its one of the 7 natural wonders!!! We walked around and couldn’t believe how amazing it was, just taking more and more pictures and getting wetter and wetter as we got closer and closer. After several hours, we had to leave…didn’t want to but had to. Due to the political unrest in Zimbabwe, PC’s won’t allow us to spend the night in Zim, we can only take day trips…which is a shame cause the bits of Zim I saw, I really love. It was beautiful and peaceful and everyone was so nice…and they use American currency now so James, Mish and I spent a good few minutes just staring at our green American money…its been awhile since we’ve seen that…it was glorious. We got back on our bus, spent a little more time hanging out with Mish’s family and thanking them for everything and all they’re help and then the driver they have took us to the Zim boarder. Got back to Botswana by sunset and then finished off our day true Botswana style and having fried chicken for dinner….it was a good New Year’s!!