Change In Plans

Tallulah with Mimsey

Greetings from Cape Town,  and happy Argus Day!

Every year, on the second Sunday in March, a small army (35,000 cyclists) takes over the Cape Peninsula for a day.  The Argus Cycle Tour is 109 kilometres, and is quite an awesome event.  We watched bicycles blaze down the steep hill by our house for about an hour this morning, the riders smiling and laughing, with only 20 kilometers to go.  As every Capetonian will tell you, the Argus is the largest timed cycling race in the world, and may be the most beautiful.  Every year I promise myself, “next year.”  This year I mean it.

The single road leading into our little village is closed for the day.  Instead of 80 surfers in the water there are only 30, some of whom sleep on the beach the night before.  I am still the worst one out there, but I am inconveniencing fewer people.  Kids play in the streets, and families organize “meet your neighbor” parties.  We went to a three-hour brunch followed by a three-hour lunch.  The isolation and the disruption of normal give Argus Day the feeling of a snow day, but without the snow (and without the 10 below). 

Last night we hosted a small dinner party for some visting friends, which somehow ended up having about 30 guests (including about 12 kids).  The evening ended with all of the kids watching “Marmaduke” projected onto the wall of our bedroom, thanks to the cool new movie projector we got for Christmas. 

Tallulah and friends

The big event of the weekend was the daughter-Dad campout at St. Cyprian’s School on Friday evening.  About 120 six-to-eight year old girls, and their Dads (or “Dad-like male adults”) braved a night under the stars on the school’s field-hockey field.  The campout was a special experience for Tallulah and me: I’m not sure who enjoyed it more.  It also provided insight into what the world would be like without the sensible influence of Moms (and the annoyance of brothers).

The beginning of the evening, when teachers and Moms were still around, was extremely well organized.  Swimming for an hour, then songs and games (while Dads put up tents), then a break, then story time.  By the end of story time, though, essentially all female adults had departed.

For dinner, the school provided huge charcoal grills and packs of sausage and lamb chops.  After the Dads burned meat, groups of Dads and girls sat on the grass to eat.  No one seemed to have any salads or side dishes, or even any cutlery.  Everyone ate meat with their hands, and wiped their greasy fingers on the grass.  Soon after, many of the girls were wandering around with big bags of potato chips and cheese doodles, offering them to their friends, and still not quite believing the junk-food license they were being afforded.  Salty snacks and charred meat: the official food groups of the daughter-Dad campout.

By this time, most of the Dads (me included) were sitting in camp chairs, talking to their friends and having a glass of wine or a beer.  The girls roamed from tent to tent, playing flashlight tag and singing school songs and laughing.  Tallulah remembered that we had chocolate for s’mores, and handed out huge chunks to every girl around.  She got me to lead a game of freeze tag with about 20 first graders.  This was fun until I tripped over the guy wire of a tent at full speed, and nearly broke every bone in my body.

Eventually, girls fell asleep on Dads’ laps, or crawled into their tents and collapsed.  Many of the Dads stayed up until very late, telling funny stories and solving the less-pressing problems of the day.

By 6:30 in the morning, it was light out, and the games of tag and the songs had started again.  Tallulah popped out of the tent as if her hair were on fire, and she was back in the mix with her friends.  Watching the sun rise against the broad face of Table Mountain was beautiful.  After coffee (thank goodness), breakfast and another swim, we made our way home. 

We like it here.  Tonight, both kids were asleep before 9pm.

Greetings from Johannesburg!

Zola’s New Year’s toast was “Anything can happen!” He shouted this before jumping into the pool at the stroke of midnight, up at the farm in Tulbagh. It was an expression of optimism and energy, and has become our family’s new rallying cry. Anything can happen.

The morning of the new year started with three events that would be metaphors if life were a middlebrow novel.

Event 1 was an extremely violent pre-dawn thunderstorm. Tulbagh is on the edge of the Klein Karoo desert. In the 50 or so days we have spent there as a family, down through the years, we had never seen even a flicker of lightning. Suddenly an Old Testament-style deluge.

Event/metaphor 2 was when I realized, as the rain poured down, that the windows of our truck were open. I scrabbled around the dimly lit kitchen and dining room., looking frantically for the truck keys. As I searched, a bolt of lightning struck nearby, and the electricity went out. Somehow I found the keys in the pre-dawn dark.

Event/metaphor 3, still during the thunderstorm, was when I ran the 100 feet or so out to the trucl, getting drenched by the rain. The windows were already rolled up. As I always, always do, I had rolled them up and locked the doors when I went to bed the previous night. Not thinking clearly, I had forgotten. I opened the truck door and sat in the cab for a few minutes, dripping and catching my breath before going back to the house.

So I’ve been wrestling with these three
metaphor events for the last week, wondering if they mean anything. If life were a middlebrow novel, how would the author use them? Would they be ominous or encouraging? Would they be too trite even for bad literature?

A few days later, a fourth metaphor event occurred that I really don’t know what to do with. It definitely seems on the ominous side, though. We were up at Tswalu, an amazing game reserve in the Kalahari Desert with my sister and her family. The Kalahari has gotten a lot of rain recently, which begets a lot of insects, which begets bats. They swooped in and around the dining room as we ate at night.

Outside our befroom door on our second morning, I found a bat that had been neatly decapitated. Like a mob warning, his bat head lay on the floor a few meters away. Our crime-scene analysis indicated that the bat must have flown into a spinning ceiling fan as he hunted insects in the night. None of the staff members at the lodge had ever seen such a thing. My guess is that the bat did not suffer.

Morbid tone. Our time at Tswalu was amazing: spectacular desert sunsets, camping under the stars, a long trail ride on beautiful horses, and chasing animals in a battered old Land Rover. We saw four baby lion cubs under a bush, each no bgger than a one-liter soda bottle. The lion mom looked on with pride.

As we boarded the small plane taking us away from Tswalu, the head ranger asked whether we minded transporting a baby roan antelope to an animal rescue center. In Johannesburg. The newborn antelope was ill and not taking milk, and would otherwise die within hours. We agreed, and watched the baby carefully during the hour-long flight. Another metaphor? We hope the baby antelope thrives, and is soon back in the wild. .

2011 - anything can happen.

Greetings from snowy Amsterdam!

We were lucky in our trip around the world to have very few big travel snarlups: Kathmandu to the Maldives, emergency turnaround halfway between Sydney and Queenstown, a missed flight in India (that saved us from a terrorist attack).

Part of that good fortune was because we were chasing summer around the globe, and had minimal weather-related delays.

At the moment, we are en route from Cape Town to Nashville, but are stuck in Amsterdam. Our overnight flight landed nearly three hours ago, but we are sitting on the runway, within sight of the airport. The snow has stopped, after maybe 6 inches of accumulation, but all is chaos.

Apparently, no planes are leaving, so the gates are all occupied, so no planes can disembark. For some reason (unexplained), they can’t deplane us somewhere and send us to the terminal by bus. Also, they can’t empty the planes at the gates, move them off, and let us get to a gate.

Instead we sit here. And sit, and sit, and sit. My perception of the Dutch being highly organized and functional is eroding rapidly. You would think this is a problem that has occurred at least once before in Amsterdam. It’s a small snowstorm, for heaven’s sake.

So, we are indefinitely delayed, while sitting on board. Kids are watching movies, I am half watching ‘Inception,’ which is baffling. Maybe it requires full attention. Not much risk of us missing our flight to Atlanta, I guess, but we have been told that no trains and buses are running either. KLM’s ineptitude and lack or preparation is shocking.

Postscript: we have now been waiting for nearly five hours on the runway. Twice we have been told by the purser, “in the next half hour,” but they were false alarms. Up until now, everyone on board has been calm and co-operative and patient, but this “all part of life’s rich pageant” thing is no longer sustaining me. Plus, it is starting to stink in here (or maybe that’s just me). Grrrrr. Can’t we get some South Africans to get this situation organized?

Post-post script:
At some point in the last 24 hours we plumbed the 5th or 6th circle of travel hell. It may have been when the gypsy cab driver spat on my feet, after we told hime we did not need a ride. It may have been while the 20-minute train into Amsterdam was stopped for 45 minutes in the middle of the night, about 100 meters from Centraal Station. We definitely hit a low when we clawed our way to the front of a several-hundred passenger queue at 6:30 this morning, and the agent had no record of our recently made booking from Amsterdam to Detroit.

We did make a good call by finding a (one-star) hotel in town last night after our flight was eventually cancelled. Being cheap, I wanted to wait for some of the promised “thousands of comfortable beds” that several passengers said never showed up. We made another good call (literally) by asking our wonderful brother-in-law, Jason, to book us a new flight through delta.com. Many people waited 5-6 hours in customer-service lines in the airport, only to be turned away when the agents went off duty at 11pm.

Incidentally, according to a recent study, the Dutch are physically the largest people in the world. The largest of the Dutch must be police officers, and several hundred of them were deployed at the airport this morning, as tempers have definitvely started fraying. Huge cops, automatic weapons (that Zola immediately identified as MP-5s or “skinny poppers”), angry crowds: we need to get back to South Africa, where are calm.

Many other comedic adventures ensued. Our hotel room was a large basement closet, that smelled of smoke and had a prison-style window high on one wall. We got ripped off badly by a taxi driver who sped off when I questioned him on the fare. We got booked onto the wrong Detroit flight, which was then promptly delayed by three more hours, late into Saturday afternoon. None of us have changed clothes, bathed, or brushed our teeth in three days. Our luggage is nowhere to be found.

India charmed us onto a flight to Atlanta, which is only three hours delayed. We are sitting on the runway, ready to go, but I don’t want to jinx it. Hard to believe that a six-inch snow storm created this much havoc in one of the world’s busiest airports. Everyone has more or less kept his/her sense of humor (Dad occasionally excepted), but we are ready to be in Nashville!

Note: this post is a month out of date.  India is fine now, but this was a rough experience for her, and for the rest of us.

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For anyone who travels a lot on business, the greatest fear is a real medical emergency back at home when you are inaccessibly far away.

When I left for Cairo last Saturday afternoon, India was fine.  By mid-afternoon on Sunday, she sent an e-mail reading, “I must have the flu.  Shivering and shaking, and threw up on the beach.”  We talked and e-mailed back and forth, as she started feeling worse and worse.

India is as hard as nails, and for the first couple of days she kept assuring me (and herself), that it was nothing serious.  Zola was grown up about helping around the house, taking care of Tallulah, and taking care of himself.  India felt the situation was manageable.

On Tuesday morning, she finally went to see our family doctor in Cape Town.  He diagnosed a bacterial infection, and gave her some oral antibiotics, but couldn’t realy tell much else.  She spent the day driving around, and taking care of the kids.

From the other end of the telephone line (unfortunately 10,000 kilometers away), I could hear her condition getting worse.  Her fever climbed to about 104,and she became increasingly incoherent.  Her breathing was erratic and gaspy, and she coughed continuously.  On Tuesday evening, our doctor friend, Paula, drove to our house, and took India to the hospital.  The kids went to stay with our friends, Paul and Lucille.

Once she was in the hospital, getting intravenous antibiotics and rehydrating, India and I both figured that she would start getting well almost immediately.  South African private health care is excellent, but this particular hospital seemed disorganized an understaffed.  They kept forgetting to re-attach her IV, or to give her paracetamol, or to keep her properly hydrated.  More important, no one seemed to have any idea what was really wrong. 

Unfortunately, on Tuesday night, by the time we realized that I really needed to be with her in Cape Town, I had missed the one flight per day from Cairo to Johannesburg.

Throughout the day on Wednesday, she wavered between feeling bad and worse.  Our phone conversations were surreal.  I would excuse myself from a meeting in Cairo, hear my wife in pain and sometimes in delirium, feel absolutely powerless and very scared for her and for us, and then go back into the meeting.  The emotional dislocation was unlike anything I had felt before.

Finally, I got on the Wednesday night flight, and got to Johannesburg early on Thursday morning.  With good fortune, I skipped directly onto a Cape Town flight (getting on line at the ticket counter three minutes before a 200-person group visiting from Rutgers University showed up), and I was in Cape Town by noon.  When I got to the hospital, India was a little better, but in very rough shape.  The antibiotics appeared to be winning out over the infection, but she was still very sick.

That evening, she had laparoscopic surgery.  Complicating (or maybe explaining) the situation, she had tested positive for pregnancy, and our doctors were worried that it was ectopic.  It turned out not to be, but the surgery confirmed that her internal organs were all inflamed and infected.  The pregnancy, which we wre assured was non-viable, was an emotional twist that we were completely unprepared for.

On Friday, India really got much better.  Whether the antibiotics or her immune system won the battle over the infection, we don’t know.  By Friday evening, though, she was off the IV, feeling very grumpy, and ready to go home.  Both kids were tearful with relief when we brought them to see her.  I think was more scary for them than it was for India or for me. 

Finally, on Saturday morning, we brought her home.  Tallulah made a huge poster, copying the words “Welcome Home” from a balloon we had bought at the hospital.  We are all very happy and relieved to have her back, but still completely clueless about why she was sick.  India’s plans to run the Two Oceans ultramarathon in early April are off, which is sad for her.  She was in great shape, and would have had a phenomenal time.

All of this has been scary, and disruptive, and unpleasant.  We are glad that the worst is behind us.

Greetings from Cape Town!

We have had a tumultuous, action-packed last several weeks.  India was deathly ill in mid-March (more on that later), and spent an awful week in the hospital.  I have been to Egypt twice, for extended visits, and to the U.S. once, on a two-day bounce dive.  The kids finished their first term at South African school, and spent the holiday on safari with us in the Northern Cape and in KwaZulu Natal.

India’s family came to visit South Africa, and joined us on the trip to KZN.  Our brother-in-law flew back a week ago, but India’s sister and her three kids, and her parents, have been staying with us in Cape Town.  They were scheduled to fly home, via Amsterdam, four days ago (incidentally, while I was up in Cairo).  The Icelandic volcano has caused a massive change in plans for them, so they are staying in Cape Town, more or less indefinitely.  The airlines are saying that April 29th is a reasonable expected departure date.  It is nice having them here, but a bizarre turn of events.

So, our lives go on here, with the house filled to capacity.  The “peace” in the title of this post is because I am sitting on the deck at daybreak, watching and listening to the waves break on Llandudno beach.  It is too early for surfers or people walking on the beach.  The waves are pounding the rocks, and a fine marine layer of mist is settling in.  It is difficult for anyone to get very agitated when the scenery is so magnificent and calming. 

Driving home from a dinner party last night, I said to India, “I love living here.”  We have many parts of our lives still to sort out, but the basic decision to return to Cape Town feels like a good one.

I am on my way from Cape Town to Cairo, to spend a week doing some work.

The phrase “Cape to Cairo” was once widely used to describe the ease that the old South African army would have in fighting other African countries. As in, “Cape to Cairo in a month.” It is also a classic dream road trip. India is probably brave enough to try it, but I wouldn’t be.

At any rate, it should be interesting. I’ve never been to Egypt before. The economy is booming, Cairo is meant to be sensorily overwhelming, and it will be good to be doin substantive work.

No one is happy about me being away from home for a week. All of us feel, finally, as though we are getting into a rhythm in Cape Town. Zola is getting the hang of his 13 subjects and lots of homework and activities. Tallulah has been to the horse-riding center enough times that she has favorites among the horses. India is well known in her boxing gym.

I will be back soon enough, and we will continue settling in. We have a slew of activities and visitors in April, but fundamentally, it has started to feel as though we are living in South Africa. Life is good here.

Greetings from Cape Town!

Door to door, the trip took 34 hours. Our year of traveling sort of trained everyone, so it was fine. The individual TV screens in economy class make this feasible, even fun, for the kids.

We went to a wedding on our first evening in Cape Town. The bride was a South African woman who we have known since she was four (tempus fugit), and the groom was a South African who had grown up in the US. The wedding was held at Leeuwkop, the Western Cape premier’s official residence. It is the equivalent of the governor’s mansion, but built in the 1690s, and set into the side of Table Mountain, overlooking the city and the port.

The wedding, and the groom’s family, were Orthodox Jewish, which made for an interesting ceremony. There were official contracts in Hebrew, and the bride making circles around the groom, and lots of ancient formality. Tallulah was a flower girl, and spent the whole ceremony chasing flower petals that had been blown off the path by the teeth-rattling wind. Zola was a ring bearer (or ring barrier, as he called it), so he stood in the chupa with the wedding party, holding one of the four wooden poles to prevent the structure from blowing off the mountain. He looked a little shaggy and unkempt, but I don’t think anyone minded.

We saw many old friends at the wedding, which made us feel welcome and at home.

31 December was India’s birthday, so she set the agenda. She ran from our house in Llandudno to the base of Lion’s Head mountain. We met a group of friends there, and climbed up in the morning sunshine. Tallulah climbed the whole way by herself, spurred on by her friend, Sienna, who was climbing by herself for the second time. At the top, we sang Happy Birthday and ate carrot cake. For India, this was nearly perfect.

Although we have gotten a little color, and look healthier than we did in NY, we are all still feeling jet-lagged and out of sorts.

Tallulah has been collapsing at about 7pm each night (the wedding was tough), and getting up with the sun at 5am. She has been calling us “father” and “mother”, and asking us to call her “daughter.” Not sure what type of coping mechanism this is.

Zola got a huge sack of plastic army men, and has been setting up elaborate set-piece battles, with Byzantine rules about what each piece can do. Occasionally, he runs around yelling “Suppressing fire!” and diving for cover into a sofa or onto the floor. He makes a lot of machine-gun noises too.

India has been running long, long distances, soaking up sun and beautiful views. She is overjoyed to be here. I’m happy that everyone else is happy, but am feeling apprehensive about work, and separation from the rest of the world. I will get over it, and we will be fine.

In the meanwhile, we have a lot of logistical and practical stuff to do (cars, health insurance, school uniforms), and we want to go surfing. It is nice to not feel pressure to see people and do things on a rapid-fire schedule, since we are staying indefinitely. This feels like a very relaxing holiday at the moment.

Cape Town is pretty awesome.

We are midway through the long trip to Johannesburg. South African Airways flights stop in Dakar, Senegal, to refuel and switch out the crew in the middle of the night.

Our last night in New York was bittersweet. At Zola’s suggestion, he and Tallulah and I went to Bleecker Street Pizza for dinner. This was our regular stop on the walk home from school. India and I did not make it to Minetta Tavern for a last celebratory drink, but can go on our next trip together.

We were in the car (actually, and fortunately, a 12-passenger van) by 9:30 this morning. For complicated and uninteresting reasons, we had to fly from Dulles, rather than from JFK. Having the van was fortunate because we had about 800 pounds of luggage (literally), and needed a big vehicle to ferry it.

The drive was easy, security at Dulles was tedious and very slow, but we made it through in plenty of time.

Ignoring all conventional wisdom, I ate airport sushi while we waited for the flight, and it was terrible. Aside from that, no drama.

We should be in Johannesburg in another 10 hours, and finally on the ground in Cape Town a few hours after that. It really is kind of a long way.

Happy Halloween from Greenwich Village!

A year ago, we were wandering around in Tokyo, our kids lamenting that they were trick-or-treating far from home. Halloween is not a big holiday in Japan, but it is very well organized. Households register on the internet if they are accepting visits from trick or treaters. Our friends printed a color-coded map, which we followed to find candy.

This year, we are in the white-hot, freaky epicenter of the American Halloween celebration. The Greenwich Village parade passes 25 feet from our front door. There are tens of thousands of spectators and participants, and hundreds of police officers on the street.

It should be an interesting evening. Lu is a cat, Zola is a hobo. He has fake rotten teeth, and a great cardboard sign that reads “Will work for candy! God bless U”.

India is some kind of leather-clad Superheroine for Peace. Think Emma Peel from ‘The Avengers.’

‘m dressed as a grumpy old Halloween humbug. It’s a stretch role for me.

All around us are sexy French maids, sexy Mario Brothers, sexy skeletons, and sexy Pilgrims (???). Transvestism abounds. These are only the spectators. Because the marathon is tomorrow, there are many European and Latin American visitors standing on the parade route, wondering what to make of it all.

Start flying the freak flag, America. Magic is afoot, and the goddesses are wearing leather chaps on 6th Avenue.

PostScript- much later. We stood on 6th Avenue for over an hour, waiting for the parade to start. Zola sat on the curb with his sign, and an abject look on his face. A few people gave him money. Lu sat on my shoulders. More people packed in, until the spectators were at least ten deep behind the barricades on both sides of the street. I’m glad I’m tall.

Finally, the parade started. Unfortunately, the rain started at about the same time. It’s a very democratic parade: anyone can march, costumed or not. We saw some incredibly elaborate group costumes, some giant skeletons, many people in no costumes at all, and scores of ’sexy policewomen.’. There were several elaborate Michael Jackson group tributes (think Thriller video).

Despite what I had thought, the whole experience was surprisingly wholesome. Despite the masses, everyone was very polite and calm. It was a pleasant, only modestly chaotic environment. You get the sense that the NYPD has things under control.

After watching for over an hour, we walked to a party at the townhouse home of one Zola’s classmates. The nearly mile-long walk in the pouring rain and with the crowds took about 45 minutes. We were happy when we got there.

When it stopped raining, we walked back. The crowds had doubled at least, and at times we could not move at all, hemmed in by people. I’m glad Lu was on my shoulders. Still, everyone was polite and calm.

Lying in bed, I can hear the crowds roaring outside. The actual parade ended a few minutes ago, after three hours of continuous marchers. I’m not so sure it stays entirely wholesome as the night deepens.

We had fun, and are all exhausted. Lu fell asleep on my shoulders, and Zola asked me to stop reading after only two pages of ‘Red Badge of Courage.’ Happy Halloween!

legion stream

HAPPY KID IN A JET BOAT

Greetings from Russell, New Zealand!

This is one of the most beautiful parts of an overall incredibly beautiful country.  We have had a very relaxing few days here.

On Tuesday morning we chartered a boat, called the Sea Eagle, and went sailing from Whangaroa.  The Maori place names here, like Whangaroa, are frequently fun to say.  “When you get to Kawakawa, take the State Highway north toward Pakaraka.  If you see signs for Urupukapuka, you have gone the wrong way.”

ABOARD THE SEA EAGLE

The Sea Eagle is a 15-meter steel-hulled sailboat.  It has been well loved, but seemed extremely seaworthy.  The skipper, Paul, once lived on it for five years.  He has sailed the Sea Eagle to Fiji several times, and to Tonga twice.  These places are impossibly far away from New Zealand.

Paul was an interesting character.  He is in his late 50s, and has been a professional bass guitarist (loves the Red Hot Chili Peppers), a restaurant chef, an aerobatics pilot, a competitive sky diver, and a marine-winch salesman.  He and his partner moved up to Whangaroa because Russell (population 500) got too crazy for them.  Mostly now he gardens, takes groups on his sail boat, and chills out.

Paul was an excellent sailor and good company, although India and I sensed we should steer clear of politics.  In passing, he mentioned that “we” should nuke Fiji and Somalia, and that New Zealand had to be prepared to fend off hordes of poor Indian immigrants when “the days of anarchy come.”  OK.

The sailing was almost perfect: sunny skies, gentle and steady breeze, flat waters.  We sailed out of Whangaroa Bay, around Stephenson Island, and back into port.  Zola and I got to steer most of the time.  The four-hour duration was perfect for India.

 On Wednesday, we indulged in an activity which was extremely rare in our year of travel: we hung out at the house and did basically nothing.  Zola completed a double dose of on-line math.  India and I each went for a run.  We sat by the pool and shivered (New Zealand is unambiguously colder thn we expected).  The kids watched cartoons.  We talked.  We admired the view of the bay and the islands.

Overall, it was like having a very relaxing day on vacation in a beautiful place.  Hmmmm.

Since I got back from Switzerland, and we have been in the last two weeks of the trip, our family dynamic has subtly shifted from “open-ended travelers” to “vacationers.”  I have not been as obsessive about keeping in touch, and not so worried about dwindling into irrelevance.  We have started making social plans back in New York.  Our peripatetic “new normal” of the last several months is coming to an end.

Today, our last day, we shifted back into high activity gear.  We toured the Russell Museum, and went for a short (but unbelievably scenic) hike to Tapeka Point.  We are going on a long jet-boat ride later, and Zola and I have reserved mountain bikes for the late afternoon.  This evening, Eagles Nest is sending a chef to our villa to cook us a final dinner.

Ultimately, we are still in denial about the trip coming to an end.  Maybe that is because we are not yet sure what the future holds for us.  We will continue to talk and plan on the 300-hundred hour trip back to New York.