My friend Deanna and I both agreed that we felt very strange leaving Africa. Upon returning from our safari, we spent one night in Nairobi before catching a flight to London. We had seen so many things — gorgeous and lush landscapes, amazing and majestic wildlife, and poverty on a level that we had never personally witnessed before.
Feeling a little empty upon returning from the safari, we ordered room service in our hotel and to our surprise, Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery was playing on television in Nairobi that night. It was an unexpected but very welcome taste of home.
When I finally arrived home, it felt so strange to come back to this life where one’s every whim could be fulfilled almost instantaneously and with minimal effort. Things aren’t like that in Africa, especially outside the city. We saw people cultivate their food and graze their skeletal livestock along the roadside. Refugee families walked long distances to draw water from a huge watering hole in one town. Six year olds were working, leading a herd of goats and cattle instead of going to school. Everyone was doing back breaking work, either hauling water, firewood, or digging and planting. The smallest things in Africa come as a result of hours and sometimes days of work and sacrifice. Being able to have so much at the expense of so little effort, everything back home seemed so surreal and artificial.
Like a kaleidescope, the elements of the sky in Africa are constantly moving and changing. One could sit back and watch the horizon for hours and it would never look the same one moment to the next.
Although we were fortunate enough to see ONE cheetah during our safari (the handsome guy above), we were unable to spot the elusive and shy leopard, so this still from Bringing Up Baby will have to do.
I still have a boatload of pictures from Africa, safari pics specifically, to post but haven’t gotten around to it for some very good reasons.
1) It takes FOREVER to post pictures on wordpress blogs.
2) I’ve been working on taking better care of my health.
I started off the new year with a cold. That cold led to major lethargy and weird sleeping patterns. My acupuncturist saw me for the first time in 9 months and told me I was suffering from damp heat, indicated by my lack of energy, my inability to sleep, poor digestion. my insatiable thirst and that thick white coating on my tongue. What I like about acupuncture as opposed to Western medicine is that acupuncturists will give you a specific explanation for why you’re feeling so bad. A Western doctor would say there’s a universe of possible causes as to why you feel bad, but at least you’re not going to have a heart attack or stroke tomorrow.
An acupuncturist on the other hand would tell you that your bodily imbalance is driven by damp heat in your liver. Your lungs are weak. Your kidneys are on the fritz. You have phlegm in your heart. (I think he meant that last one figuratively.) Basically they’re telling you that you feel bad because your organs are not functioning at maximum capacity due to poor eating habits, lack of exercise and inability to manage stress.
Thankfully though, as quickly as they break the bad news, they know how to remedy the situation as well. I went in for two sessions and had all sorts of needles poking out of my legs, stomach and arm. At a later session, one even went into my face, right on my forehead (didn’t hurt one bit!). The first session was a bit painful — when some of those needles went in, they really hurt. That’s a sign that my body is really unbalanced.
In addition to needle treatments, my acupuncturist gave me some herb pills to strengthen my system and some tea to help with the insomnia. Knowing that herbs take time to work, I faithfully downed the herbs and drank the tea. After a week of still feeling bad, I suddenly work up on Saturday with a lot of energy. I had so much energy I felt like running, so I went to the gym and ran and lifted weights. I checked my tongue — that thick white coating has gone down a lot. So has my insatiable thirst. I finally realized that at my age — exercise and better eating is a matter of do or die. You might not die tomorrow, but who wants to have the energy of an 80 year-old before you’er 80?
On that note, here’s a clip from Anthony Bourdain when he visited a Chinese doctor in China who told him that he was so imbalanced, he was basically a lost cause. I like how he says his “yang is in a bad place.” Fast forward the clip to 4:30.
One of the smaller exotic specimens we spotted during our safari was the African dung beetle, who spends the majority of its time eating and rolling dung into perfectly round balls for its offspring to live off of. This unsung hero (or garbage man, if you like) of the African wilderness works tirelessly to break up dung and bury it, thus fertilizing the land.
Unfortunately for this particular dung beetle, he and the large ball of dung he spent hours rolling were run over by the van following us. Seconds after I snapped his picture, we heard a loud crunching sound and that was the end of poor Mr. Dung Beetle!
