http://www.katyanddave.com/gallery/honeymoon

These were taken by a Nikon D70 SLR digital camera, which I was extremely happy with. It turned on instantly, took great photos, and had a shockingly good battery life.

I took a couple batteries and a charger, planning to charge overnight and carry the spare with me in case I ran out of juice. Standard practice. But I noticed that it never seemed to be low on batteries at the end of the day. So I decided to just leave the battery in to see when it ran out, or at least complained about being low.

That was about halfway through the trip. I then took about 600 pictures over two weeks, including some review and deletion for space purposes, and still haven't changed the battery. I'm not actually sure how this is even possible. Maybe the battery gnomes are switching the battery at night or something. Nice, anyway.

I took a total about I estimate a bit over 1000 pictures, bringing home around 650, and deleting the rest. Maybe a third of the remaining ones aren't quite in focus or have some other problem, and the rest came out reasonably well from a mechanic point of view.

My only complaint about the camera was the autofocus. It was often hard to get it to focus on the animal I was photographing instead of the grass or tree or whatever. Part of the way through the trip I abandoned the autofocus and went to manual instead, which was fine, but caused me to miss a couple good action moments because of the time it took me to focus. I suspect that this is not Nikon's fault in particular, but it was an annoyance.

And so it ends. Bye London; home tonight in time to watch the election returns.

The latest news about Rehnquist is troubling -- the man is very sick.

Here's an interesting scenario: if the election makes it back to the Supreme Court this time, and Rehnquist can't drag himself out of bed to the bench, as I'm sure he's likely to do, there are two likely outcomes.

One is a tie vote. Then whatever lower court ruling stands. Given how partisan the Court was about the issues last time, I think this is probably the best outcome.

But much more likely is that Bush could make a recess appointment to the Court. This person would get to decide whatever issue is in front of the court, would be beholden to Bush alone, not subject to debate from the Senate or any kind of oversight.

I thought the whole idea of checks and balances was to stop this sort of potential cronyism and power concentration. Recess appointments are a troubling way around the whole balance of power that's trying to restrict the power of the executive. They've been abused by this administration, but they in general seem abusable. I wonder if there's a better way to handle the need for new judges when the Senate isn't in session....

Our flight from Capetown to London was shitty. Not because of anything in particular; we just couldn't sleep. And that sucks when your flight gets in a 6:30 in the morning.

Still, we managed to stagger through the day. We rode the London Eye, which was fun. Impressive views, of course, but I also enjoyed pondering the engineering required. It's really remarkable, not least for looking like it should fall over at any second.

We also went to the Tate Modern art museum. Much of it was interesting or beautiful, but much of it was the sort of modern art that just leaves me scratching my head. Why again is a canvas painted in all one color (even if the artist patented the color) art, even great art? I mean, it's a nice color, I'd be happy to paint my bedroom that color, but great art?

It must have to do with the artistic context, about rejection of form and so on; it needs to be put into historical context to be understood. Which I suppose is fine, but for someone who is not an art critic, it seems... stupid. Better than an all white canvas, I guess.

Still, that's half the fun of modern art museums, arguing if it really is art or not. Lots of not-art there in my opinion.


We also went to see an exhibit at the Hayward Gallery called Eyes, Lies, and Illusions, about the evolution of visual illusions over the last few hundred years.

They had a lot of neat rotoscopes, mirrors, and other fun tricks -- seeing movies before there were movies is fairly amusing. I was a bit disappointed, though, overall. They didn't extend it at all into modern illusions, and there are some amazing examples out there.

And the arguably the most important artist interested in visual illusions was barely even mentioned.

Maybe the problem is that I knew too much about the the topic going in, so I had expectations where a random visitor would not have.

Up next: we're going to see the Lion King musical this afternoon. It's gotten great reviews, but I'm a bit sceptical that it really could be all that. It's based on a Disney movie, for goodness' sake. But it's what was available.

Random political thought of the day: does the Boston Red Sox world series victory impact the election at all?

I've been lax about updating. Here's a longish post to catch up.

We spent a few days in Capetown. It's a really beautiful town, I can easily see living there. Pretty much everything you'd ever want is right there, including excellent hiking and rock climbing literally inside the city on Table Mountain.

But for all that, Capetown was certainly a letdown. This is not a criticism of Capetown per se, but rather a comment on how amazing the game viewing parts of the trip were. There's just no way that a city could match up, no matter how amazing it was.

Culturally, Capetown is a really strange place. It's still largely non-black, compared to the rest of the country, though that's changing fast. Our guides in Capetown and in Jo'berg both claimed that the ruling ANC party is encouraging blacks to move to Capetown so that the ANC can gain the legislature seat there.

There were some things that made us very uncomfortable in discussing the race issues with our guide, most obviously the word "colored". It's used non-perjoratively to mean a person who is not white but also not black. It was apparently an entire class of people with more rights than the blacks but fewer than the whites under Apartheid, with the interracial rules applying such that you couldn't marry anyone not in your specific class. That led to a lot of applying to get into a different class than the one you were in, even if it was a downgrade, so that you could marry who you wanted.

But that whole conversation was hard because the word "colored" is so weighted in American vocabulary. Plus we just have a hard time talking about race in such specific terms. It's amazing the shitty things that people do to each other for reasons as stupid as melanin levels. I do wish it were easier to talk about it though -- that might make getting over this whole problem as a species that much easier. Our guide also mentioned how hard it was to get a job if you were white, due to affirmative action. I'm sure affirmative action plays a part, but it seems like any discussion of how hard it is to get a job should probably at least mention the 40+% unemployment rate. Just competition with people formerly forbidden to have your job should make it harder to get one.

One of the things we did was have a little meal at a Moslem woman's home in Capetown, in the Moslem district. It was a beautiful little area, full of hundred year old homes, all of which are protected by a historical preservation society. Our host was extremely nice, and made us excellent samosas and other little foods, but didn't eat herself since it's Ramadan at the moment.

She asked us where we were staying, and we said in a hotel in Constantia (a Capetown suburb). She replied, "That's a very nice area. Lots of coloreds there."

This suggested two things to me. First, that the word "colored" really is not perjorative there; and second, that people think and talk about race in a much more direct way than we do. Neither of these things was new in concept to us, but we hadn't internalized it, since her comment still was surprising.

We spent the rest of the time shopping (kill me) and generally hanging about. Oh, we went to the vast and impressive botanical gardens. Not really my cup of tea, but they were beautiful, and featured (among many many other things) a kind of cycad (Encephalartos woodii) of which there are only three left in the world. All male, so no more after these ones die. It'll live for several hundred more years, so it's not super urgent, but still. Impressive.

Next update: London.

Well, the germans were in fact annoying, but luckily they aren't willing to get up for the morning game drives, so we didn't have to put up with them this morning.

Last night we had an interesting experience. The lodge arranged for what they called a "honeymoon bath", where when we got back from the game drive there were candles scattered around the bathroom, the bath was drawn and nice and hot, and there were bubbles in the bath and champagne in a bucket on the floor next to it. Which increases our champagne count to 6.

We're now in Capetown, which is a beautiful coastal city much like San Francisco might be if it had Monterey's coastline. It turns out that the Spafari tour that we're doing didn't get sold to anyone but us, so the tourguide for the next couple of days gets to cater to us specifically. He's nice enough, but I have to wonder how someone chooses to become a tourguide who talks pretty much nonstop when he has a stutter. Kind of annoying, but he's knowledgeable and nice, so it's fine.

Tomorrow we're touring the winelands. I can't imagine it will be as much fun as looking at beasties, but I'm sure everything will be beautiful.

We are going on our afternoon game drive in a few minutes, but I just wanted to grumble here. In 3 of the 4 drives we've had here, we've been alone with the guide and tracker in the vehicle. But once, we were with a family of germans.

We really don't like them. They are selfish and demanding of the driver, have no real interest in what we might want to do, littered (we saw them chuck gum out the side of the rover into the game reserve), and wear really strong cologne.

Why is this relevant? They are going with us again today. Bah.

We're now staying at the beautiful Royal Malewane private game reserve, right next to Kruger National Park.

This place is incredible. It is by far the most posh hotel I have ever stayed at, by a very large margin. The cheap rooms are freestanding suites complete with air conditioning and a small pool, a beautiful deck, and so on. The lodge is also fantastic -- the last two days, there have been leopard sightings off of the breakfast deck.

The basic daily life is about the same as in other safari camps, except really early here. Wakeup is at 5, the morning game drive starts at 5:30. Last night we got to watch a pride of lions complete with cubs feeding on a kill. Beautiful.

Off to lunch now, where instead of a menu, they give you a list of "luncheon suggestions" ahead of time, and then you tell them what you want, on or off the menu. They claim to be able to make whatever you want; we haven't tried to disprove that yet.

Update to the statistics section: we've had two more bottles of champagne show up in our rooms since then. One more set of lingerie seen. Someone commented on the size of our luggage -- we were restricted to 20 pound bags. I have no idea at all where Katy is keeping all this stuff. I guess it folds down pretty small....

For some reason I think involving the proxy server here, I can't get to my email. So the only people to hear from me will be the people who read my blog.

Hi to the both of you.

We floated peacefully over the African landscape this morning in a hot air balloon. It was beautiful. Another couple on the ride got engaged. How sweet.

It was almost worth the 4:10 am wakeup time.

Some to-date trip statistics[1]:

Length of trip so far: 10 days
Number of accomodations: 4
Number which provided Champagne: 3
Number of flower petal hearts left on our bed: 4 [2]
Unemployment rate in South Africa in 2002: 41.8%[3]
Unemployment rate for South African whites: <10%
Number of white South Africans who complained to us about losing their job to affirmative action: 1
Number of game animal species identified: 31
Number of birds identified: 57
Amount of time in hours spent on airplanes: 23.5
Number of books read: 9
Spa treatments: 4
Number of lingerie outfits worn: 5 [4]
Number carried on trip: Unknown


[1] Some of these are estimates.
[2] the two Grace Hotels did it; one left three hearts on the bed.
[3] Source: http://www.csae.ox.ac.uk/resprogs/usam/default.html
[4] So far, only by Katy

We just got back from three days in the Okavango Delta in Botswana.

Getting there was a little bit of a pain -- first the flight into Botswana, then a bush pilot took us in his Cessna Caravan to a landing strip near the camp, then we rode for half an hour to get to Stanley's Camp.

The camp itself was very nice, with running water to all the "tents" where people slept. The only inconvenience was that our tent was a long way away from the main area, and we had to be escorted back and forth at night for fear of animals.

And in fact we were woken from an afternoon siesta in our tent by a herd of elephants that wandered by, completely surrounding the tent. It was fun to see them up so close, tearing up trees and chomping on brush as they wandered past. Katy especially liked the baby elephants with the herd.

Most of the time while we were there was spent on game drives, where you hop into a range rover jeep and drive around looking for animals. The most unusual thing we saw was something called a pangolin. It's not that much to look at, but our guide mentioned that he'd been working in the delta for 6 years and had never seen one, so it had rarity value.

And we got to see some big cats, including a small pride of lions (one male, three females), and a leopard. And lots of various antelope and birds and wildebeasts and such.

Oh, and the one other activity we did was called an Elephant walk, where we hung out with three tame elephants for a morning. They're very impressive creatures, and it was fun to spend some time in close proximity to them. It was significantly the most touristy thing that we did, but it was still entertaining. The elephants were playful and fun, and enjoyed stealing people's hats on putting them on.

That's probably enough updating for now. I'm going to see if I can figure out how to put up some pictures.