We’ve just returned from our exciting trip to Zambia…

I arrived to find a hot peach colored hotel room with puke green bed spreads and cheesy pink and gold framed glamour shots of wildlife. In my bed, there was a scorpion. Now, I am not afraid of bugs, and technically a scorpion is just a big bug thingy, but somehow, scorpions are more terrifying to me than any other animal on the planet – including lions. Keep in mind, I have picked up a scorpion before, but it was one of the ones that stings like a bee. So, I decided as the thing crawled across my hand, that I needed to catch it to identify it. I caught it very carefully using the jar of death, and let it stay in the jar overnight to make sure that it was really really really gone. When I mentioned to the guide that was with us that I had caught a scorpion that had been in my bed, he said, “Oh, most of them are just like a bee sting, they don’t do anything.” When I showed him the scorpion he gasped and said, “Oh no! That’s the really deadly one, it’s just like a poisonous snake!” So the moral of the story is shake out all bedcovers and boots and pants and everything else for that matter before you put it on. – Sarah

Now, my turn to tell my near-death experience. Yes, I too nearly died (Not really, but it was scary – S) , Sarah doesn’t get to have all the fun and near-death experiences here. So, we were wandering around some wildlife park in Zambia, in an open jeep. It’s dark, and we stop and watch something… Impalas, maybe? Some boring animal that we’d seen 27835564231 times before (heck, you seen one elephant, you seen ‘em all) and we’re all on the edge of our seats watching the impalas do something exciting like.. eat, or something. And I twist around and there’s a lion walking up. And she’s like, oh.. maybe two feet away from me. Nothing between her and I besides 2 feet of air. Okay. This is okay. She stops, she looks at me, and she yawns. And she has the largest teeth I have even seen in my entire life. Not Really OK. And she passes by. I have to keep thinking “She’s yawning. She’s bored. She’s not after me. She’s yawning. She will not attack. I am not lion dinner, the impalas are lion dinner, just because there’s a hungry lion 2 feet away from me is no reason to believe that I would be lion dinner.” But she leaves, and that’s okay. I start to breathe again. I turn slowly back to where she has come from and there’s another lion there. But this one isn’t two feet away, this one is rubbing against my shoe. You know, I’d never realized how BIG lions really were. When you’re looking at them in the zoo, your first thought generally isn’t “wow, that thing really could kill me in about a quarter of a second, couldn’t it?” This lion also passes. Thank god. I think if that one had looked at me and yawned, I would have had a heart attack. That’s my near-death experience – I almost had a heart attack in Africa at the tender age of 27. There are 6 of us in the car. All of us on the right hand side of the car have been terrified out of our little skulls (but OF COURSE, I was in the most danger because I was closest) and all the people on the left hand side were relieved that they weren’t going to be the first course.

Then the third lion comes up. This one, kindly enough, walks about a meter away from the car, but she does stop and crouch when she gets to the nearest point to us.

She left too.. at about the same time that we left. This whole thing only lasted about 30 seconds. And 24 hours later my heart is still up in my throat.

Yes, I know that scorpions are a lot more dangerous. – Christi

Well the Zambia trip was lots of fun, but we are very very tired because we sat in the car on a very bumpy terrible road for about 8 hours today. We saw lots of birds, I caught lots of bugs with help, and Christi got to launder money in a home owned by the U.S. government. She laundered at least 700 malawian Kwatcha. (OK that’s only about 7 dollars) While she was laundering money, I was learning how to tie a baby on my back using only fabric and no knots. Somehow it holds a lot of weight, I don’t understand. Anyway, we’ll have to tell you the rest later as eyelids are drooping.

So far we have established a quote of the day system:

4-20-04 “Maybe the luxury buses have brakes?”
4-21-04 “The ability to have bug-free eyebrows is frequently underestimated.”
4-22-04 “The bug light should say: Do not use in tropical areas near water”
4-23-04 “You haven’t really traveled unless you had a chicken riding up your pantleg for at least four hours”
4-25-04 “Deadly scorpions are not my friends.”
4-27-04 “The Malawian hippo dance is a rare art form”
4-28-04 “Accidental money laundering is much more fun in embassy housing”



- posted by Sarah @ 12:40 PM