Sunday, August 12, 2007

on my own again...

First things first: Harry Potter loves Zambia

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/tayside_and_central/6934997.stm
(thanks to my Aunt Laura for sending this along :) )


Less cheery news: I just dropped my sister off at the bus station in Lusaka. She is riding down to livingstone where she will hop on a plane tomorrow afternoon. Its a bummer. I really enjoyed having her visit. We saw victoria falls (twice. the first time we went at night b/c the full moon creates a lunar rainbow in the mist from the falling water. it was pretty awesome, an almost complete circle of white light that curved into the cascading water, appearing to become an integral part of the falls.). We went on a walking safari where we didn't see an elephant (to my dismay) but we did see giraffe (to sara's squealing delight), wildebeast, bush buck, impala, monkeys, and a whole bunch of birds. Then we went to Kundalila falls in Serenje district, much smaller than victoria falls, but gorgeous. On the second day, we tried to blaze a trail to a different view of the falls and ending up forging through brush and trees walking up the side of the lower river for 3 hours. It was a little stressful at the time (we had no idea how far we had to go, and we kept thinking we had arrived only to see it was a smaller cataract.) but we stumbled across some really beautiful areas we wouldn't have seen otherwise. On our walk we kept being stopped by almost walking into these huge communities of spiders with tons of webs spanning huge spaces in between the trees. The spiders were pretty big, but somehow we could never see them until we were almost right on top of them. It never got less shocking to find a big spider a few inches from your nose when you could swear there was nothing there before. We tried to go swimming under the falls but it is "winter" here and the water was frigid. We couldn't really stay in for more than 40 seconds at a time. We went and spent time in my village, and sara got to meet daisy, the best dog in the world. and then we spent a few days here in lusaka. in lusaka she got to meet my homestay family, and they were absolutely thrilled to meet her, it was almost comedic how excited they were. now she's on her way home.... I know that's a really really brief synopsis, but oh well. I am sending sara home with a bunch of pictures on a cd and she took a bunch w/ her digital camera, so hopefully w/in the next couple of weeks, i will have becky put them all online so you guys and girls can look at pictures of my house, mountain, dog, travels, and really anything else you want to see.

Now, for the first time in about 3-4 weeks, i am going to go back to my village and be alone again. And that is not all a bad thing. I really enjoyed my vacation and it was wonderful to see sara but i am really looking forward to taking harry potter (which i think has arrived) into the village and reading it 5 or 6 times in the next week. I don't think i could come up with any more perfect plan. to top it off, there is no school this month, so i couldn't really do any work if i wanted to. Just beautiful.

well, that's about it from me now. Be well, and i will talk to you soon....