After reading the reports of snow and general disruption in Europe, and on the East Coast and in the Midwest of the USA, I felt I had to provide our readers with warmer felicitations for the New Year.
Basically I am just too hot to write anything much, let alone a profound and insightful treatise on the three scourges of Africa. I will do that later this month.
I am sitting in a small bungalow on a private game farm called Ingwelala - sleeping leopard - (http://www.ingwelala.co.za). I share the bungalow with two partners, one from South Africa and one from England. Seventy-five percent of the bungalow walls are made from mosquito-proof gauze (obviously to keep mozzies, as we affectionately call them, from attacking us while we sleep), and chicken wire, to keep baboons from eating our food and hyenas from eating us – if the mozzies have left anything.
The farm – nothing is actually cultivated here – is 3000 hectares in extent (nearly 7000 acres) and borders the huge Kruger National Park. Animals have approximately 30,000 unfenced square kilometres in which to roam, while we are confined to our own 3000 hectares. The farm has a small village with approximately 200 bungalows, whose owners have rights to roam with the animals over the 3000 hectares.
I have been here for nearly two weeks with relatives and friends, including a Dutch couple, who were delayed 5 days in arriving because of the snow at Heathrow. They are in mild shock at the temperature differential.
Anyway, after reading Yrsa’s post yesterday and remembering the many times I wandered down the Mississippi from my house in Minneapolis to watch the New Year fireworks in sub-zero weather in degrees F (approximately -20 in those pesky C degrees), I decided to wish our readers best wishes from +40 degree weather (over 100 degrees F). And high humidity.
I would write more, but the heat is doing me in!
So, to all of you, whether hot or cold, I give you my hottest good wishes for a healthy, happy, and prosperous 2011.
Stan - Thursday
Stan - Thursday
