139 sleeps; part 1

Pour yourself a tall glass of awesome and check the photos below: this is Namibia, the country that stole my heart and stopped my travels in their tracks. Quite literally, the first time I saw the Orange, my eyes popped, my jaw dropped and I fell over backwards. I decided right there that I wasn't going back to Tokyo; I was staying in Africa. That was almost 10 years ago.

The first photo is a view from the Guide House where I lived intermittently for 2 years. I spent six months there (June 99 - Jan 00) with my brother Big A. He ran the bar and I took groups down the river on a 3 night, 4 day adventure. The oddest thing about Big A was that he did not tan. At all. He would wake up every morning white as a ghost and when he went to bed at night he was pitch red. There was no in between. When Big A flew back to Toronto in January 00 (on that lovely Ethiopian Airways flight) he was beat red, barefoot and wearing shorts. He swapped his last pair of shoes for some masks for his girlfriend in Canada. What a sweetheart!

When my other brother Big E came I was already up to my ears in legal textbooks so he did the Namibia mission on his own. At one point I put him on a bus to Zimbabwe. He lived on the Zambezi for about 8 months doing sunset cruises and being general dogs body for the cruise, performing such tasks as fetching-the-live-pig-for-the-spit-braai, keeping-the-crocodiles-away-from-the-clients and avoiding-the-hippos.

I think, out of me A and E, E wins on coolest pics, A wins on most awesome hitchhiking story and I win on biggest overall adventure (I haven't even started on Mozambique, Philippines, Trinidad, Tokyo, Singapore....). The bus story and the hitchhiking story will follow. And no, I am not mean for putting my brother on a bus to Zimbabwe.