Gabs culinary adventures

My favorite traditional food in Botswana is dumbling. It's unclear to me what the name actually implies, since they are undoubtedly dumplings. They are giant doughy bread balls that soak up plates full of sauce. Another great part about dumbling is that once you make the dough, you can steam it to make dumbling, or cook it flat and dry in a skillet to make phaphata (giant English muffins), or roll it and balls and deep fry it to make fat cakes. When I told my favorite waiter in the hospital cafeteria that I love the dumbling, he wrote out this recipe for me.
Here's the result from my first dumbling party! Great success!

Here are a few other favorites:

1) Chili bites. I bought these at the grocery when seeing the mixture in a box only cost about 20 cents. How could I pass that up? They basically tasted like falafel.
2) Carrot Cake Pancakes. Sarah's creation. The best part was the cream cheese "topping". Breakfast of champions.
3) Lime Slushies. We discovered about a month ago that our lemon tree in the front yard was actually a lime tree. No wonder the lemons were never getting ripe. We had been blaming Ryan Wells for picking all the fruit before it got ripe, but turns out he just realized they were limes before we did.

4) Digesting. Matt and Tessa's house. Not too shabby.

Addicted

5 hrs 51 minutes! I felt unstoppable. Literally felt like I could do anything for a little under 6 hrs. Unfortunately, the most beautiful marathon in the world was engulfed in a heavy downpour for about 5 hrs, so I didn't see much other than splashing water and my IPOD dying from water damage, but it was so worth it. Amazing feeling of accomplishment!! Thanks to everyone who has encouraged me!

ULTRAMARATHON

Off to Cape Town tomorrow to run 56km along South Africa's beautiful southern coastline!

Of course, what would a trip this year be without disaster. The lesson I've learned this time is to never trust an airline called Velvet Air. They liquidated a few weeks ago and kept promising they'd resume flights soon, but a couple days ago, Sarah and I finally decided it was time to bite the bullet and buy new tickets. British Airways it is! Thank goodness for the Brits! The worst part is that we have to spend 30 hrs in Johannesburg, so Sarah and I will be preparing for our race on bunkbeds tomorrow in a hostel next to the airport.

Cape Town plans include carb loading at a local Italian restaurant, touring the Cape of Good Hope if my legs have any energy after the race, a fancy dinner at La Colombe (one of the world's top restaurants!), and cage diving with sharks!!

Wish me luck!!!!!!

Pictures, Pictures, Pictures!

Chobe Sunset Cruise. Isn't our boat (seen below) fantastic? Sarah and I each had our own bedrooms and sitting areas complete with cable tv and wifi capabilities. As our luxury items, I chose to be fanned by palm leaves, while Sarah opted to be massaged with smoothed diamonds.

Okay, so this is not our boat. The disgustingly wealthy people on this house boat were trailed by a raft piled with crates and laundry lines that served as servants quarters. I also guarantee that unlike us, they did not worry about the size of their boat being a hazard in hippo and croc-infested waters, and they did not deal with this stress by pulling warm alcoholic "sundowners" from a cooler below their feet.

At any rate, we had a fanastic cruise through Chobe National Park, passing beautiful birds, monitor lizards, and enormous herds of large game.

Here are some pictures from our game drive through Chobe on our final morning...after we found a company willing to actually pick us up. Among the animals that were new to us were the giant marabou storks (as tall as humans and known as possibly the ugliest birds alive). They love to eat trash.

And of course, another gem from our flight home to Gabs....

Chobe and Victoria Falls

Okay, okay. I owe you a whirlwind tour of my past month in Botswana.

A few weekends ago, Sarah and I finally made our way up to Kasane in northern Botswana, where we stayed for two nights to explore the Chobe River on a boat cruise, jump across the border to see Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, and go on a morning game drive in Chobe National Park. Of course with our travel luck, that didn't quite happen. Sarah's chronic malarialesque-abdomino-itis-immunodecificency was acting up on the plane, causing her to accidentally drop her passport. The passport continued its comfortable Air Botswana journey on to Lusaka, Zambia, where, by nothing short of a miracle, it was actually recovered and sent back to Gabs. After speaking to approximately 73 Air Botswana representatives in every country in Southern Africa, Sarah managed to convince them to hand it over to Ryan Davis in Gabs.

In Kasane, the troubleshooting adventure was just beginning! We continued our epic tour de Botswana police stations and immigration offices to see if Sarah could still cross into Zimbabwe for an afternoon to see Vic Falls. This usually meant Sarah and one of our hotel managers would disappear into an official-looking back room somewhere while I stayed in the lobby listening to police chiefs try to bait me with terrifying stories of riverboat robberies.

Sarah managed to get a print-out copy of her passport "certified", meaning a police official stamped every sheet with the word "certified". Somehow, Botswana considers this process to legitimize just about anything. Nevermind the fact that they never actually saw a real copy of Sarah's passport or other form of identification. Unfortunately, the Kasane immigration office (pic below) said, "You will have no trouble going, but you will have trouble coming back." For some reason I will never understand, Sarah's first reaction was, "That sounds like an adventure." Ultimately though, I went to Victoria Falls alone while Sarah unsuccessfuly attempted to shop at the one store in Kasane. Pobrecita.

I ended up on a private tour of Victoria Falls in which my guide Stan drove us 2 hrs each way across the border to the falls. Check out my private 15-seater van pictured below. I learned a lot about Stan, particularly about his GERD. He had always thought was a milk allergy, but I explained to the best of my abilities why his diet and lifestyle might be contributing to his GERD. I heard most of Stan's life story over lunch on the curb outside the grocery store. When he had asked where I wanted to go for lunch in Victoria Falls, suggesting the fancy restaurant at The Kingdom hotel, I replied that I'd rather eat something "really cheap and local," thinking maybe he'd know of a great corner lunch booth or something. Nope, we ate at the grocery store, but he was right that it was cheap. I let go of the whole "GERD" thing when Stan ordered chili beef with chili sauce.

Victoria Falls was pretty incredible, but to be honest, I think if you've seen one waterfall, you've kind of seen them all. I did not find this wonder of the world to be any more impressive than Niagara Falls, except for the fact that there were monkeys everywhere and no restrictions about how close you can get to the edge of the terrifyingly slippery cliff. In fact, the path along the Zimbabwean side of the falls takes you to "Danger Point," where jumping from rock to slippery rock to get a better view of your possible death is encouraged. As you near Danger Point, you also get completely soaked from all the mist, which was pretty awesome. I had all my belongings double-wrapped in plastic bags in anticipation of this.

My strategy on this solo adventure was to offer to take as many family photos of Zimbabwean families as I could so that they'd offer to take pictures of me. This had interesting results, because instead of a family member simply taking a picture of me with the waterfall, it was assumed I'd rather have a husband or teenage son in the photo with me with our arms around each other. I now have a collection of photos of me, a random Zimbabwean dude, and Victoria Falls.

If Sarah's travel luck were not already bad enough, our game drive the next morning forgot about us. We waited at our hotel gate at 5:30am in the dark, but no one showed. After many phone calls and poor Sarah thinking she'd flown across the country for only a 3 hr boat cruise and a lot of cat naps in a mosquito net, we finally found a company who was willing to give us a private game drive in the nick of time to catch our flight home. The drive through Chobe was incredible. I'll put some pictures from the game drive and sunset river cruise in the next post, but here's a preview.

Ultimately, Sarah made it onto the plane back to Gabs with a police statement and a certified photocopy of her passport, but without an actual passport. That's definitely its own kind of Bots success if you ask me.

Top 10 Things I Love about Botswana

1) Working and talking with the Ministry of Health convinces me I’m in Harry Potter.

2) Our study nurse Mma Molapisi greets me each day by stroking either my breasts or butt.

3) It’s assumed I will eat everything with my hands.

4) The Dingo drives like a dream even after potholes and speed bumps knock off at least one clanky thing per week.

5) The movie theater has a popcorn condiment stand with 4 different gallon-sized shaker bottles of monosodium glutamate: 1) Salt and Vinegar 2) Chicken flavor 3) Beef flavor and 4) Original.

6) A full plate of lunch in the hospital cafeteria is $4, but a full plate without the two small cubes of beef is $0.25

7) Batswana men in caps and goggles exercise in the pool by sitting on the wall for an hour and then hitting the steam room.

8) The phrase: “There are no crocs” translates to: “There are many small crocs.”

9) If medicine doesn’t work out, I can strike gold teaching 3-yr-olds to blow bubbles underwater.

10) There is not a single place in the city or in the bush where it’s inappropriate to get drunk and dance on tables.

Gabs's Fine Establishments

And of course every establishment touts a portrait of my boyfriend.