And For Less Disgusting News

I saw an iguana the other day, a baby, no more than four inches from beak to tail. He was taking a long hike across one of the muddy, rutted roads near my house. I'd never seen one before, so I spent at least five minutes crouched beside it. I watched it bob as it walked. It watched me, too, from eyes that bulged but were almost closed in the sun, like miniscule camera lenses. I started to feel the rhythm after a while. Even with those legs — like humans, iguana babies' limbs are little Popeye imitations — its beat was consistent.

All the pictures of adult iguanas I've seen make them look like mud statues. Their swirls of dirty color or their crumbling pebbles of skin — none of it ever endeared me. But this little guy had pink spots on its back, fluffy ribbon-pink, and for a moment I saw past the road's red dirt and thought he could have been an Easter Peep, dyed and wrapped up in a plastic box. I wanted to see the price sticker. When I tried to pick him up, he turned bright green and scampered into the grass. The spell of his legs broke; the animal, I guess, is not physically restricted to its zigzag saunter. He galloped away like a salamander.

I also went to a Zulu church last Sunday, and I think I'll go again. I felt like Margaret Mead fresh off the plane. It was the biggest, loudest Cultural Experience I've had since I came. Riding in a Zulu taxi and stepping into my first pitch-roofed ancestor house never came close. I still haven't written anything on it (I probably should just for the sake of an interesting journal), but it's still fresh in my mind. I'll throw up an account of the morning on this blog in a day or two.

So I'm planning my last two-week stint through Southern Africa! That's something else I'll have to relate in more length later. But I'm only two weeks away from the end of my internship, so I need to start booking lodgings now. I just decided to go to Botswana for a few days, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to get there. There's a bus that heads to the capitol from Johannesburg, but I can't find any times or bus fares online. I'll have to call around. If I can't go to Botswana, I'll have to realize my dreams of a week-long hiking trip somewhere in South Africa. Bleh.

I've only been here two months and I already want to leave again. If I'd been born into money, I'd have drained it all years ago on backpacker's buses and trains.