South Africa - Part II

After Jo-burg we headed to the famous Kruger national park. Elephants, lions, rhinos, bla bla bla. It's amazing how one can become blasé about something that just a few weeks ago was utterly fascinating.

From there we headed to Swaziland, in the hopes of finding some Swazis, I guess. What we did fine instead was rainy, cold lush hills perpetually covered in fog.
It was like living in a cloud, or somewhere in the Northern UK. Now you may think that this analogy is unfair, seeing as I've never been to the Northern UK (at the time of original writing) but the first three towns we passed when we came out of Swaziland (without any Swazis to show for it, no less)were called Belfast, Dundee and Newcastle.
Coincidence? I think not!

Back in SA, we started making our way to Lesotho. Along the way, we had a chance to stop and meet some true Afrikaans farmers...boers; very friendly, amiable people who were very welcoming to us. But there is a dark side: shorts worn with knee-high socks. Mullet haircuts...even on kids, which I'm pretty sure is in violation of UN children's rights.
And big bushy mustaches (this time, at least, the children were spared). It's like being time-warped back into the 70's! I'm now convinced that the Zulu wars were not fought over land and farming rights, but as a matter of fashion sense. Unfortunately, the Zulus lost.

Although Apartheid is no longer around, the effects are still quite evident. The economic divide between white, coloured and black are quite stark. There is also a great divide in opinions about where the country is going. Some see Mandela as a hero who pointed SA in the right direction and acts as a moral guide as well. Others feel it necessary to point out that he was jailed as a terrorist for detonating a bomb in a train station and started sending the country into a tailspin.

Those who have foreign passports have left or are keeping them very close at hand for when they are going to have to flee. Those who don't have a choice...have hope. And lots of it! It really does transcend race and economic boundaries, and maybe these are the only opinions that really matter since they'll be the ones who will make the necessary sacrifices.

I have to point out that the coming into SA also had a very significant effect on The Truck as a whole. In Vic Falls, we had a change of groups as new people came and others left. The rather smallish group which went from Vic Falls to Jo-Burg consisted of merry English holiday makers with tons o' cash to spend on themselves and their new Truck Mates. The rest of us, being the very accommodating people that we are, allowed them. And merriment was had by all.

In Jo-burg, a very different crowd joined us. Again a nurse...and Dutch. I'm not sure if she knew about our previous Dutch nurses or if her constitution would tend towards a Dutch Nurse Sandwich, but in my mind it already had. It's amazing the lesbian orgy scenarios which one can derive with countless hours of driving around...but maybe that's just me.

There was an additional Dutch person and 2 Flemish people as well, so Dutch became the second official language of The Truck, which helped in trying to figure out Afrikaans. There was a quack American, who we forgot in some small, nameless town/toilet break. It was only after 90 minutes of driving that his tent mate noticed he wasn't there. That's the kind of presence this guy has. We did finally pick him up, but by then end of the trip, there were more than a few who felt it would have been better if we hadn't.

There was another Canadian - a Chaos theory something or other PhD student; a Dubliner who thought that the rest of Ireland was inhabited by "Culchies"; an octogenarian from a small place near some other small place in northern England who spoke, I kid you not, without ever using consonants. I didn't understand a word he said for the whole trip. We got along quite well.

Finally there were a group of Welsh, one of whom was the former mayor of Cardiff. It's true! I can't tell you he is, but he is the one mayor without multiple double L's and random Y's in his name. C'mon, there can't be more than a handful of people in Wales who can fit that description.

Oh...and my brother joined The Truck. Since I'm too lazy to take him off this distribution list, I won't say anythng about him.

Anyhoo, long story short, we went through Lesotho, which was very nice and drove along the garden route to Cape Town, climbed Table Mountain went on wine tours in Stellenbosch stopped in some random places along the way and it was all very, very nice.
Next it’s off to Namibia tomorrow morning to roast in 45°C heat.

Oh, and some photos if you're not already bored:

http://www.ofoto.com/I.jsp?c=9s4cmvvd.99y4ydh5&x=0&y=bythvn

South Africa

After driving through the freezing cold wind of the Kalahari - as one expects when driving through the midday sun of a desert - we arrived in South Africa. Almost magically, everything was, well green. It's almost as if they decided the border based on where their lawn finally died.

Driving on to Jo-burg was like driving through the small-towns in the Southern US, except on the wrong side of the road. Of course, the analogy stops once we actually got into the towns, because they seemed to be just full of people hanging around listlessly looking at us. Aparthied may be removed from the political landscape, but the effects and economic divisions - which usually run along racial lines - are still very visibly there.

On second thought, I guess it's much like most small towns in the southern US.

There was a sense of foreboding coming into Jo-burg. Everyone had heard the stories about the rampant crime in the place, so everyone was on the lookout. Every street corner was a potential car-jacking waiting to happen. Even if you didn't have a car, they will supply one for you - that's how efficient they are!

Even the locals we spoke to gave us advice on how not to look like a tourist and, therefore a target. One person at the ATM said "There's an edge to living in Jo'burg...if something bad is going to happen to you, well then it's going to happen". The only people who painted a pretty picture were those working in the tourist industry; and even then the best they could do was "All big cities have crime".

It didn't help things to see every building bigger than a Rubik's Cube to be walled in and topped with electric wires which I imagine are a bit more harmful to people than they are to the elephants which may encounter such fences in a game park. If the farmer in Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" was right in saying "Good fences make good neighbours", then these must be the best damn neighbours since the Mongols and the Chinese!

(I would just like to digress at this point and mention how pompously self-satisfied I am with the literarily insightful and historically sardonic analogy above :-))

Also if there wasn't a sign that said "Armed Response" posted on the wall, there was an armed guard already there. Even the guy who collects the 30 cents to use the toilet at the petrol station had a shotgun. Now he didn't have a uniform or anything, so he may just have been some guy who happened to be there - and happened to be armed to the teeth - but you know what? For 30 cents, I wasn't going to potentially piss him off by asking!

But in all fairness, after all the fear and paranoia about being in Jo-burg...nothing happened. And nobody saw anything happen. Everyone had a good time, which would have been even better if everyone had loosened up a little.

A visit to Jo-Burg would not be complete (I must apologize for plagiarizing every single tourist pamphlet on the planet with this opening) without visiting Soweto township and the Aparthied museum; not at all what I expected. The township is massive and also includes the largest hospital complex in the Southern Hemisphere (which is mostly staffed by Cuban doctors. This, I think is the affect of Globalisation on the brain-drain. As SA doctors flee to Canada and the UK, they grab them from Cuba. Now where Cuba is expected to get doctors from? I don't know. But any conspiracy theorist worth his salt will be pointing a finger at the US and the Monroe Doctrine for Cuba’s woes.

Unlike the vast favelas of places like Rio, here the housing ranges from at the very lowest shoe boxes, to rather impressive mansions at the other end of the spectrum. The majority of people live in tiny houses somewhere in between. Better neighbourhoods are divided from poorer ones simply by a road. There are nine entrances to Soweto (SOuth WEstern TOwnship, in case you're wondering) and during the time of Apartheid, there was no mention of it on any road signs or maps. It practically wasn't there...except for the fact that millions lived there.

Although everyone on the tour was impressed by the level of cleanliness, order and pride within Soweto, there was still a disturbing aspect to it, and to the numerous other townships (which seemed to be much more dilapidated than Soweto) we passed along the way. This was because all the townships - instead of having normal street lighting which would give them a warmer, community aspect - were interspersed with huge floodlight towers which I'm sure were more to the benefit of police raids than the community below. They made the townships seem like huge prison yards rather than communities...and maybe that was the point.

Arriving into Botswana from Zambia...

the first thing you notice is that the roads are paved...flat; which is a major distinction to the mountain-range and bottomless gorge style of paving prevalent in the aforementioned country. I imagine that the long, flat straights would be heaven for motorcyclists...if they can avoid the occasional ostrich, zebra or elephants that occasionally cross the road.

In the safaris, the game vehicles are usually younger than the people driving them, and modifying them to allow for tourists does not consist of simply removing the doors and welding steel planks to the back of the thing. Also, in the game parks, there were well-equipped buildings which housed the anti-poaching units, as opposed to the poachers being the ones with the houses.

Of course, there has to be a down-side...or should I say down-size. As soon as we crossed into Botswana, beer was no longer sold in the half-litre bottles that we have grown fond of in East-Africa and which we considered part of the landscape, well the barscape anyway. Rather, they were sold in piddly little 340 ml ones...which incidentally cost more.

These are the hidden costs of progress which legislators fail to identify!

Botswana is famous for two main natural phenomenon (excluding gold and diamonds), the Okavango River Delta, which is the largest inland river delta in the world and the Kalahari Desert. In what seems to be par for this trip, the delta was dry, thus making it simply an “inland”. Meanwhile we were plagued by thunderstorms and cold weather in the Kalahari.

We started our expedition into the Okavango in the traditional manner; on a narrow dug-out canoe called a “makoro”. These boats are known for their amazing stability; and they are…as long as they're on dry land! As soon as they're placed in the water and then two graceless westerners and a guide are placed into them, everything changes - mostly for the wetter. Now the Okavango is not completely dry...there are still small, reed-lined rivlets that crisscross each other like roads in a badly planned city. In fact, current theory suggests that the delta was modeled after Rome.

After several hours through this labyrinthine waterpark, we arrived at a clearing where we would camp for the next three days. With the help of the guides and porters, we got out stuff off the boats and pitched camp. And that's when the porters walked away...to the next town which it seems was only about half an hour away. That's when the idea first dawned on us that we may not be as secluded as we thought.

That afternoon we went for a game walk to see the local fauna, which included baboons, warthogs, elephants (which came precariously close to our camp on another night) and lions. Now we didn't see any lions, but there were tracks. As we walked for hours into the heart of the delta, our guide stopped us and pointed out the various tracks in the sand. There he pointed out the hoofed kudu tracks and the lion tracks which followed in the same direction. To our disappointment, though not surprise, the most proliferous tracks of all in this the deepest, most savage part of the Okavango were the long, continuous parallel ones of the elusive...4x4.

As bad as this may seem, all was redeemed when we took a bumpy, low-altitude and quick turning scenic flight over the delta in a tiny Cessna. Seems there was some water down there after all.

Then we drove...and drove and drove through nothing but shrubs small trees and fences - while scarcely passing another vehicle, let alone a town, hut or even a hitch-hiker - in order to get to the Kalahari. This is where the famous Bushmen live of "The Gods Must Be Crazy" fame. Unfortunately, the reality of life in Botswana is not the romantic ideal we have of these people. Since all of Botswana has been fenced off like a huge suburb to keep the domestic cattle from wild animals, the Khoisan (or San as they're called) can no longer continue in their traditional nomadic lifestyle. As a result, they migrate towards cattle towns and alcoholism has become a big problem.

We saw the San in a makeshift human zoo-type setting. Basically, a family or group are taken from one of the remote towns and placed in a "fake" authentic village for a month to live "traditionally" so that the tourists can ooh and ahh over them. It was very uncomfortable, but it turns out that they are better paid doing this than they would at other jobs and they are free to go when they choose. They do not seem to mind, and soon as the initial awkwardness passed, they seemed quite happy to have us there and have something to do.

The rancher who ran this "show" was a skeletally thin Afrikaaner called Vampy...or Vimpy...or Voompy. I'm not sure, but I kept thinking about the Umpa-Lumpa song from Charlie and the Chocolate factory when I heard is name...which is probably why I can't remember it correctly!(Actually, I think his real name was Willem). He was quite interesting in his views of the San with whom he grew up and spoke one of the dialects fluently. When we asked why he didn't employ them on the farm, he answered that they had no marketable skills for farming, and besides, they tend to leave and not return when they feel like it, or more often than not, would go on a week-long bender after pay-day.
When we asked about some of the more obscure elements of San society, like the trance-like dancing, he attributed it to boredom, "What else is there to do in the middle of the desert with no TV or radio...I'd be dancing too"

From there, we drove in the freezing cold, as one would expect to have in the Kalahari to the South African border.

I'm out of time and this is way too long already, so I'll send it as it is and include a link to some more photos:

http://www.ofoto.com/I.jsp?c=9s4cmvvd.6vbf4qh5&x=0&y=m9nqdu

The Mighty Zambezi...revisited

OK...the Zambezi: a river which flows over a big cliff, creating what is known as Victoria Falls. Due to the nature of the gorge, it's quite difficult to see the falls except from above...either by helicopter or ultra-light.

Now, ultra-light is a far better way of doing this for the main reason that it's much, much cheaper and secondly because of the nature of the ultra-light itself. You see, the ultra-light is basically a death-trap. Some guy once decided that his hang-glider wasn't fast enough so he stuck a fan on the back of it. This worked until the extension cord came unplugged. So he got a really long extension cord and that worked until he was high in the air...and then came unplugged. After a few more tries, it was found that a motorcycle engine worked much better...even during pesky power cuts.

Of course, all this development cost money, and the way to make it back is to stick a tourist in behind the driver, so close you could remove the lice on his head (assuming he wasn't wearing a helmet...safety first, you know!) and do some free falls over the falls. The idea is that tourists – being the idiots they are - would pay to have their life pout in jeopardy.

Personally, I thought it was well worth the money.

Now, the big thing at Vic Falls is the white water, which in dry season (which it was when I originally sent this out) is meant to be some of the best in the world. Here, the tourist has two main ways to spend money risking their lives:

• rafting
• river boarding

I, of course, tried both.

Now river boarding basically involves going to some house and stealing an extremely buoyant ironing board (you can test the buoyancy in the bathtub if quiet enough not to wake the owners), putting on flippers and a life vest and jumping in the river with the sole intent of going under the rapids and (hopefully) popping up on the other side.

Rafting, on the other hand, involves getting all your chums who have never been in a raft together and try to keep this very unstable inflatable banana-like contraption from flipping over in the rapids.

Boarding is a solitary sport, apart from the guide and the other boarders with you. You follow the guide because, as he points out, if you go anywhere but where he tells you, you die. Once in position in front of the rapids you just sort of wait as there is nothing else you can do. You can try kicking with your fins, but the current being as strong as it is, it won't make a difference. Once you arrive at the rapids, you take a breath and hold on to your board in the hopes that your air will last until you pop back up again. And you always pop back up again, except maybe on your very last time boarding...in which case it will be your last time doing anything at all.

Rafting, on the other hand, is a team event. You spend the first couple of minutes practicing skills you will forget at the time of high stress when you'll really need them. The rest of the time is then spent listening to the river guide on the raft barking commands like "paddle hard", "back", "left", "right", which are rather useless since you forget what the all mean as you soil yourself when coming up to the first rapids.

And so begins the bumping of paddles, shoulders, elbows, heads etc. until the point in the rapid is reached where it's too late to do anything after buggering up the raft position so badly. So you huddle in the raft and wait and see whether it flips or not. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. Or as happened in our case, the raft was not very well inflated causing it to fold back over a rapid, some stayed in and others were flung out...I being one of them.

All in all, riverboarding seems much easier. You are already in the river, which will carry you where it wants to despite your best efforts so there is no reason to worry about how to not get thrown in. Rafting on the other hand is a tease. You're riding on top of a very bumpy river and you do everything possible to stop the big banana from flipping over, which is really what IT wants to do, given a choice. You are tricked into believing that if you work very hard, you won't flip, you’ll be fine and dry and all is good. The reality of it is that even if the thing does not flip, you get pelted by waves, may get thrown overboard and the raft is always full of water...and you’re knackered from all the paddling.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, Vic Falls are pretty cool, too. You know...lots of falling water and stuff.

And finally...photos!

http://www.ofoto.com/Slideshow2.jsp?index=1&Uc=9s4cmvvd.3y0yztp5&Uy=-o4eg3l&Upost_signin=BrowsePhotos.jsp%3fshowSlide%3dtrue&Ux=0&collid=477302801105

The Mighty Zambezi...sort of

Before I start on the Zambezi thing....I must rant.

The Rant:

This rant is against all birders. Now I'm sure they are fine, upstanding people who love their children and pay their taxes, but they have no business being on an extended trip with normal people. These are the kind of people who spend their days looking at birds they've already seen before or hunting around for birds they've never seen and then cross-referencing with The Bird Bible so they can smugly chalk up another sighting and let the world know about it...whether the world wants it or not.

"Oh look everyone, it's a speckle-backed African flatulence warbler. They're very rare. We have only seen it twice before (and smelled it once), so you should kiss our feet for pointing it out to you, you ornithologically-challenged ignorant masses!"

Bid deal; they can identify birds and happily live in their own little warbly world. But actually it's not that easy. It seems that in order to see a bird, and to "bird" properly, the entire safari vehicle must come to a grinding halt for several minutes while the birds are viewed. Now there are a lot of birds in Africa...about every 2 meters. At that rate, a 3 hour safari which would ordinarily allow normal people to see lions, elephants, leopards, etc, would have travelled about 20 meters before having to turn around to go home.

And this is only when they can identify the birds! When they can't, it somehow becomes the poor driver's responsibility - above and beyond making sure the vehicle isn't attacked by rhinos or the passengers carried off by crocodiles - to give the layman term for whatever the birder is pointing at in the distance. Now, to their credit, these drivers, who speak English usually as only their third or fourth language, manage to get it spot on everytime.

But the birders will not be seen to be one-upped in the grand art and science that is looking at birds though binoculars, oh no. If the driver answers, then there is some other question to be asked, as if to say, "I was only testing you with an easy one...now here comes the real question". And the real question is usually some thing like (and this is a true to life example):

"Now is that bird a brood parasite?"

What the hell? A brood parasite? I cold see the driver's brain trying to make a connection with the word "parasite" from some ancient biology class and "brood", as in "worry about something". I could also see the rest of the group look around in part embarrassment and part pure disbelief and rage. Just as the right amount of silence passes, the birder then says "that's when they steal other bird's nests". You could hear the dozens of virtual hands smacking the birder about the head at this moment.

Mind you, in all fairness, the birders sometimes also add a bit of levity to otherwise tense situations. In the accident involving The Truck, I told y'all about last time, our resident birder arrived on the scene as we all did. Amidst the gasps and questions we were all asking regarding about how such an event came about and whether the driver was OK (I forgot to mention that between the time of the accident and police arriving on the scene, thieves tried to make away with everything on the truck - including the tires - but were stopped by the driver who was hurt in the melee) she remarked "I think it's a fish eagle".

We were all dumbfounded. Maybe the shock and trauma of it all loosened the last few feathers in her head and she was no longer able to communicate in a non-bird related language.
What's a fish eagle?

The statue on top of the fountain...it's a fish eagle.
Stupid us...we were staring at that big truck partially submerged in the water instead!


OK...that rant was longer than I thought it would be. I'll really talk about the Zambezi next time. Promise.

Mzungu Express Update II

We left Zanzibar with happy/strange memories and headed for Malawi when tragedy struck The Truck. But before getting to that, I should introduce The Truck's passengers. Our truck is made up of the ordinary and quirky hodgepodge of people; The Kilimanjaro Krew from previous posts, the doctor and wife from near London, the Cornish couple and Australian woman and her 75 year old mom (whom looks like Burgess Meredith from Rocky...I think I mentioned this before) and the older couple from Victoria, BC who can do nothing but stare at birds. A lion could be having tea with a hippo while elephants Tango in the background, and they'll be looking at the bird sitting on the rock... even if apparently dead.

But we have one couple that can turn this rather ordinary group cool...and that is our Dutch Blond Lesbian Nurse couple. I kid you not! I could not make up this demographic if I tried. Well, anyway rumour started circulating The Truck, that they were not lesbians at all, but just very friendly in the way that Dutch Blond Nurses are. The verdict is still out, but most are deeply saddened by this development and almost everyone is in denial. I'll keep you posted about how they pan out.

So anyway...we crashed The Truck...a lot! So much so in fact, that we made the front page of the Zambia Daily Mail and the Times of Zambia. I'm finally on the front page, and it's not about a conviction or police hunt. Ha...my schoolmates were all wrong!

So here's what happened: We're driving into Lusaka (the capital of Zambia) when we smell something burning. Having a strict "No Immolation" rule on the truck, we realised it was not once of us. We get out, and see the engine has spewed oil over the radiator. The whole mess is smoking and The Truck is definitely not going to go anywhere unless a very, very strong tailwind instantly come up. This is the kind of mechanical failure that the water temperature gauge, the oil pressure gauge and the automated fault detector on the this Daimler-Mercedes truck would detect before it got to this stage. And they all would have...if they worked!

It seems none of the dials on the dash work! Hence even at a standstill The Truck is always cruising at 60 KPH with the engine humming at 4500 RPM.

The tour guide/driver (who later later in the journey even becomes the scourge backpack-stealing baboons) takes off to town to get a tow-truck for The Truck and a minibus to get the rest us to the campground. The Truck was to show up there later on with our tents and equipment, but it never did. So we just checked into the chalets there and go to sleep. Next morning still no truck, but somehow our tents had arrived.

Later that morning we are taken via minibus to meet up with The Truck, which we thought would be the garage where it was being repaired. Instead we are taken into the centre of Lusaka. And right there in the middle of morning rush hour we see The Truck sitting half in a fountain surrounded by the main city roundabout.

It seems that the the tow-truck started to haul The Truck, but halfway to Lusaka, the driver demanded another huge amount of money, or he would go no further. Having no choice our guide/driver calls the owner of the camp where we were staying, who promptly took his truck out to tow The Truck the rest of the way. But he didn't have a tow bar...just a rope. The road leading to the roundabout encircling the fountain runs downhill. The Truck started picking up speed, and with no engine, it had no brakes and limited steering. They tried putting The Truck in gear to slow it down, but... Anyway, The truck tore down some steel pillars and jumped over a concrete barrier to land halfway into the fountain, which by the time we arrived was filled with oil.

We spent the next two hours surrounded by rubberneckers until a huge 40 tonne crane (it said so on the side) came, blocked the morning traffic altogether and picked the whole truck up out of the fountain to be towed away. We were taken by mini-bus to to Livingston, our next stop on the tour. What about The Truck? Well that's another story...

Mzungu Express Update I

Sorry for the delay, but it seems that all the Internet connections between Tanzania and South Africa run over a single Tin Can and string modem.

Right, in case you're wondering "Mzungu" is the Swahili equivalent to "gwailo" or "giajin", and basically means silly white people who burn too much in the sun.

Well from where I last left off, The Truck made it to Zanzibar. Well more accurately, the people on The Truck did, the truck itself stayed because Zanzibar is an island and although there are many thing the truck can do, floating is not one of them (keep this in mind for later on). So, Zanzibar was quite pleasant; people were not at all aggressively trying to sell you everything in site and I managed to get some diving in. It was an uneventful dive where the pretty coral and fish was offset by the whining woman of a dive-buddy I had, who just had to tell the whole world that she used up too much air because she was physically shivering because her wetsuit was too big bla bla bla. At one point her air tank clocked her on the back of the head when a wave hit her. I shouldn't have laughed, I know, but then having to have to hear of the bump it left all the way back to shore, I'm glad I did.

On the final day there, I met a young guy while walking on the beach named Mohammad...I mean that was the guy's name, not the beach's, but then again, it could have been Mohammad Beach as well. Anyway, to make a long story just plain convoluted, we got talking about this and that, and he seemed quite articulate and intelligent. He invited me to lunch. But being the kind of person that is sceptical of such invites in general - not just when you are the only white guy miles away from anywhere on a beach potentially named Mohammad while talking with a guy with the same potential - I refused...also because I was starting to get a bit bored, but I did offer to buy him a drink.

So we're in this local restaurant and he tells me he's 20 and a student and he has to go do military service in a year and then hopefully university to become a doctor and marry his current girlfriend.

Seems OK, and like Mohammad Beach, could all be potentially true.


Then...
"Can I ask you a favour?"

Here it comes, I was thinking, but let's see.
"Well that depends what it is."

"Well Zanzibar is a Muslim country and many thing are difficult to get here that maybe you can send me when you get back home"

"OK, what kind of things?"

"Naked Nudey books"

"Ha!" I thought to myself...or did I laugh out loud? Can't say for sure

"You see, some of the boys at school have some, but sometimes they will not show me and when I ask to buy, they are very expensive. I would like to have some for me...and my girlfriend."

This might just be the tip of the iceberg; the opening of and rapid thrust into Pandora's box (excuse the pun..hee hee hee). I'd better test him.
"What kind of books would you like?"
I'm thinking he's going to mention some depraved titles involving sea creatures and office furniture, but instead he only says:

"The kinds with 'black peoples', if you can."

Now who am I too deny a young man his god-given right to decent, wholesome man/woman, one-on-one (or there abouts), African-centric porn? Just because his country would deny it to him, why should I follow in the same fanatical footsteps? After all, I eat pork, drink alcohol and break who knows how many other pillars of that faith, so why not this?
"How many do you want?"

"Only one. Sometimes if it is a big package, the people at the post office open it. If they find the books...they will keep it themselves and then sell it at a high price."

Damn corrupt system...how could they? I mean keeping the population in deliberate poverty is one thing, but taking someones porn is just not right! (just to be fair, Zanziabris tend to live a higher standard of life than the rest of Tanzania, which by the way stands for Tanganyika Zanzibar Independent Area)
"OK...I'll see what I can do...what's your address?"

He gives it to me. Now I never expected my IT career to last forever, but even so, international porn distribution was not what I was considering as an alternative. The irony of this whole encounter hit me when I saw the address which was care of someone or other at the "Department health, women and children". Just the place where porn would be welcome!