telophase | (no subject)

I forgot one more bitch about the Amazon reviews of An Affair with Africa - the person who wondered if Kistner even thought about the TERRIBLE DANGER she was putting her children in. While hanging out in the African bush is, on the whole, slightly more dangerous than hanging out in the American countryside, it's not a horrible danger-filled place where you spend every waking second jumping at twigs snapping. A reasonable amount of vigilance and caution - the same sort you'd exercise in, say, bear country* - and the kids'll be fine. If I had a young kid who was just old enough to appreciate it - four, say - and I was going to a reasonably politically stable area like the south of Kenya or the north of Tanzania, where the big game parks are, I'd go like a shot.

* Amusing aside: while we camped for two years in the midst of the wild savannah surrounded by lions and leopards and crocodiles and such, that doesn't faze me at all. But the idea of camping in bear country gives me the willies.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The Kistner sounds almost as good as your letters. XD

Also, I vote for Telophase-as-measuring-stick photo posts.

Finally, bears are just plain scary, (but poisonous snakes are scarier).

Kistner's experience was more hair-raising: we never were in danger from drunken revolutionary soldiers. :)

There will probably eventually be Telophase-as-measuring-stick photo posts, but Mom is still in possession of the Africa photos - all I've got right now are the letters.

And snakes don't worry me as much as bears, mostly because I cling to the belief that I can outrun them, and that as long as you look where you're putting your hands and feet, you're OK. Bears ... wurra!

Bear country *looks fearful* I love England! The scariest things we have are foxes, which run away from people, and the Adder snake, which might kill you in few days, maybe, if it bothered to put any effort in to it. *grin*

XD I like England because it's so compact - everything is there all tumbled on top of every other thing. When Mom and I were there, we could travel from one spot to another in an hour or two on the train, but here in Texas, an hour or two goes by and you're still in the same place, more-or-less.

I've heard that from other Americans who come visit England. I've never been to America, but I just can't imagine the sheer size involved with it. I'd probably go mad or die of boredom if I had to make a trip from one side tho the other.

Yup. The longest drive I've ever done is from South Dakota, where a job I was at just finished, to Central Texas, where my mom's house was. I did SD to Kansas City in a day, at 6 or 8 hours (I've forgotten exactly how long) and stopped at a friend's house in KC for a couple of days, then powered through a 14-hour drive from KC to my mom's house. That one was not fun. So hearing that I'm going to have to travel 4 hours on a train to get from one place to another place in England? Pshaw! I can read on a train! I can buy lunch on a train! Easy! XD Train travel is part of the vacation for me, especialy since it's a major hassle to travel by train here.

A friend of mine from Texas went to school in Boston, though, and did the Texas-Boston drive a few times. Eesh. One of those times was because he was going on an archaeological dig in Belize and had to drive the truck they were going to use from Boston to central Texas. At that point, one of his professors picked it up and either drove or shipped it to Belize - I've forgotten which. But that's not a drive I'd wanna take.

IME, the most dangerous predator to us humans is generally...other humans.

I'm basically safe in bear country. I get nervous around gators/crocs, primarily because I don't know enough about them to be sure what might set them off.

But I really need a keeper, for my own safety, in the dangerous wilds of... Manhattan.

Yup. I remember talking with a woman once who, when her husband was alive, had accoapnie dhim on a number of safaris in East Africa. Someone else asked "How dangerous is it?" She said "It's not dangerous as long as your guides have guns."

I ahd to step in and point out that the guns were not necessary against the animals, they were necessary to defend against poachers you might happen upon. And that if you stuck to the main tourist routes, the park rangers were pretty good at keeping those routes clear. Poachers, especially the closer you get to north Kenya, tend to be people using ivory and gorilla hands and the sale of exotic animals and whatnot to fund their various war and guerilla activities, at least these days, I think. And so they're not likely to want to be nice to you, but they stay away from the major tourist routes.

As far as animals go, there's no way you're going to be able to drop a rhino, elephant, hippo, lion, or leopard that's running at you. The bigger animals you'd have to hit in exactly the right spot, and they're in motion, and you're frightened, and you've only got a few seconds to aim and fire. The smaller ones stalk and pounce, so you don't see them in time. Safari guards might carry weapons ostentatiously to make the tourists feel safer, but they're not.

The only time I really feared for my life was in Nairobi in 1991, when I was catching a taxi back to the hotel and two men basically cut me out of the line for the taxi rank and bundled me (by myself) into the back seat of a taxi. It was broad daylight and I knew the route to the hotel and I kept my hand on the door handle, ready to jump out if he went the wrong way. He went the right way and delivered me to the hotel and I got out and paid him and he drove off - turns out they were just trying to earn more money by jumping the taxi queue instead of kidnapping people for Nefarious Reasons. But it happened so fast that I was damn lucky they were just doing that, because if they'd managed to get me into the back of a taxi that had the interior handles disabled, I'd have been stuck. And I can see that happening to someone in a matter of seconds. You can imagine that for the rest of the trip I was very, very careful to stand in the proper area for the taxi queue and not to catch the eye of anyone standing around the area.