COLORADO BEND, TX 2011

You didn’t know that the Colorado River cuts across Texas to empty into the Gulf of Mexico? Well, it does.  And about 200 miles southwest of Dallas/Fort Worth, there is a great spot to camp along the river in Colorado Bend StatePark. The park opened its doors Memorial Day of 1988, after having been a cattle ranch and a cedar farm, making it one of the newer state parks in Texas. It is also one of the more rustic parks in the state. There are no campsites with electricity or a water tap, and there are no real showers, other than a “rinse-off shower” where families line up in the evenings, parents holding up towels as their children squeal and rush through their cold showers.  In Wendel Withrow’s book “The Best in Tent Camping: Texas” (which has served me as an excellent guide, so far), he suggests you “watch for Texas-size red ants and silver dollar-size spiders that seem to like to spin their symmetrical webs between the junipers and directly across the trail. Luckily, it’s easy to go around these scary-looking friends, but don’t forget to check the trail ahead for the far-more dangerous diamondback rattlesnakes as they wait in the shade or come out in the cool of the evening after the hot Texas sun heads toward the horizon”. So, it may not be the best place to be introduced to the great outdoors. In fact, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go, either, but it seemed like a good place for us to further our backpacking practice. So on Friday, William and I again left work early to head out for a weekend of camping with Pumba.

CADDO LAKE: EAST TEXAS OCTOBER 2011

I seem to end up spending a lot of my weekends with boy scouts … not by choice, really (although they seem to be a good group of kids), we just seem to have the same hangouts. October is when you get some of your best camping weather in Texas. So, when we headed out that first weekend in October to camp at Caddo Lake State Park in East Texas, I fully expected to find a mobbed campground. Happily, I was mistaken.

William and I left work a little early that Friday to pack up Pumba, the car and the eighteen-foot tandem Ocean Kayak, and drive the three hours to get to the park before headquarters was scheduled to close (five pm). The park is located less than an hour due east of Shreveport, Louisiana, but still in Texas. It is on the banks of Caddo Lake, the largest naturally formed lake in the south, half of which is in Texas and the other half in Louisiana. Named after the Caddo Indians, the lake is now guarded by thousands of cypress trees bearded in Spanish moss (which is actually not Spanish at all, but actually very much a native plant species). It is one of only 22 wetlands recognized by the Ramsar Convention as a “wetland of international significance”. Whether they consider it “significant” because it is home to over twenty animal species of concern and two that are on the Endangered Species list (the black bear and the alligator snapping turtle – we didn’t see either) or because the area contains one of the highest quality old-growth bottomland hardwood forests or because of its unique historical significance (more to come), I don’t know. But from the moment we passed through the gates, the place had me.

YOUNG AFRICA FOUNDATION

This is a quick call out to any readers, asking for your help. When I was in the interior of Mozambique this summer, outside of Beira, I met a couple who run a foundation called Young Africa. They run several schools in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. They have entered the race to win the Vodafone Grahame Maher Award of approximately US$155,000 that they would use to build the Young Africa Agri-Tech school where founder Dorien Beurskens says they will "educate thousands of underprivileged young people to grow more food and reduce their poverty". Please help by voting for Young Africa on https://www.facebook.com/WorldOfDifferenceNL?sk=app_268436083179266
Voting continues through October 21. Just one click!
Thanks, as always!

CAPE COD DOG

“The cure for anything is salt: sweat, tears or the sea.”  

– Isak Dinesen

                I believe this. I feel this. I have felt this for a long time. The past two years living in Texas have been my first ever away from the sea. That has meant a lot of sweat and tears to keep me balanced. That’s why when I visited Cape Cod in September, my trip was really about visiting my salty people and soaking up my salty, sea air. It was about short runs on the beach chasing the sandpipers and listening to the gulls and the osprey. It was about long walks down to the cut fighting my grandmother for that rare piece of blue sea glass or collecting mermaid scales, mussel shells and lucky stones with my Mom and my aunts for our next attempt at a glue-gun art project. I wonder if that is what it is about for Pumba, too.

ILHA DE MOZAMBIQUE 2011

I just realized that in all my writings about Mozambique, I have yet to mention the almighty and ever-present Piti-Piti sauce (I also saw it spelled piri-piri and peri-peri)!  Mozambique is well known throughout Africa and has a growing popularity throughout Great Britain and Europe for its piti-piti sauce.  It is something akin to a hot sauce; a mix of ground up peppers, lemon juice, oil and other secret ingredients, and people put it on everything from chicken to eggs to cheese. Other than piti-piti sauce, what Mozambique is most known for is prawns and beautiful beaches. The southern beaches apparently get quite crowded by locals and South Africans during holidays, but the northern beaches, perhaps because they are more remote or perhaps because of the exorbitant prices of the lodging, are much less peopled. The Quirimbas Archipelago, in particular, has gorgeous, white sand beaches and remote islands. Dad mentioned that while staying in the northern city of Pemba for a business conference, he noticed a steady stream of private jets coming into the city, loaded, presumably, with people who would then be whisked off north by boat or helicopter to the expensive retreats on the Archipelago. Maybe next trip. Maybe next life. For now, we were heading to Nampula, the third-largest city in the country, to jump off from there to Mozambique Island for our last weekend in Africa.

Immediately upon checking in at the Hotel Milenio in downtown Nampula, it was evident that we would be experiencing a very different Mozambique from what we had seen so far. The hotel was new and very modern, with wi-fi in the lobby. Just off the lobby is a small restaurant where we decided to grab some lunch. It is an Indian/Pakistani restaurant, and, judging from the menu and the clientele, we decided it was going to be very authentic and very good food! Apparently the menu had previously been very poorly translated into English, and the owners decided to give it up and just have the menu in Hindi and some of it in Portuguese.  As I mentioned before, I am a ridiculously picky eater, so I at least want to know what it is that I am going to be eating, but every time I asked in Portuguese or English what different items on the menu were, the answer was always the same: “It’s good! You try!”. So, alright, we finally just picked a few things … and it was good! And I was glad I tried! Judging from the food, the outfits on many of the people we saw walking by on the main streets and the cheesy Bollywood films on the hotel TV, this part of the country has a much greater Indian and Pakistani population. It also remains strongly Muslim- there are mosques side by side with old cathedrals, many people work only a half day on Fridays, and it is that much harder to find a drink.