You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'travel' category.
I got back from Afrigraph Friday night / Saturday morning. Our flight was delayed by an hour, so we played Hearts while sitting at the Vida e Cafe that was placed, surely for our convenience, right next to the boarding gate.
The last few days of the conference was interesting. The paper presentations began on Wednesday, but that was only a half day – for the second half we were packed into a bus and driven off to Maropeng to do the tourist thing followed by the conference banquet. We apparently arrived too late to visit any of the caves, so instead we got to see the visitor’s center, which is a large, fun ride / science exhibit. Soon after it starts off it has a constructed boat ride, where each boat (seating four) travels through this diorama of the creation of the earth, full of mist and wind and waterfalls that fall across your path and turn off just as you pass under it.
The rest of the visitor’s center consisted of exhibits showing off what we know about australopiths and their fossils in a museum type of way, with life size australopith models, a fossil collection, and interactive thingies. All good fun.
Friday completed the conference with a full day of papers. The last day of a conference is always the worst for attendance. People disappear after lunch as they run off to catch flights home, so I tend to think that the last day should always be only half a day, but that never seems to be the case. Oh well.
Afrigraph is being held at the Centurion Lake Hotel, in Centurion. We’ve been given a largish room to use for the conference, set out in the usual way — rows of tables topped with jugs of ice water, cordial, and notebooks.
Today was just a day of tutorials, my favourite being Dave Schreiner’s (of the red book fame) tutorial on OpenGL 3.0, and a new framework he’s involved with, The Open Compute Library, or OpenCL. OpenGL 3 doesn’t seem that much different from the 2.x versions, although it seems to have deprecated all the immediate mode and fixed-pipeline functions. Which is a shame, honestly, since the basics of real-time rendering can’t be taught (or used, if you don’t care about performance) more trivially than with some glBegin, glVertex3f, glEnd calls (as opposed to setting up vertex buffer objects, coding vertex and fragment shaders, then binding and running them). OpenCL, on the other hand, is a cross platform framework for writing applications on CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, and so on, with a bent towards numerical processing. No official implementation of it exists at the moment, but it seems that nVidia, AMD, Intel and Apple are all going to have implementations of their own.
In the afternoon we had a tutorial by two animators on how they use Maya and ZBrush to model and animate characters, and a short discussion on the adoption of technology in developing countries.
Most of the day was good: it was interesting running in to people I haven’t seen in ages and catching up with what they’ve been doing. And then this evening everyone I was staying with at the guesthouse had dinner with Dave and his wife, Vicky, at a fancy restaurant in Centurion Mall whose name I failed to catch. The food was good, though. James, Bruce (Merry, who’s joined us at the guesthouse), Marco and myself ended the night playing a game of Hearts, something I haven’t done in years. But I still managed to pull off shooting the moon, which left me feeling pretty chuffed.
Our flight up to Pretoria was with Mango airlines, and took off at around 14:00. Five of us piled into James’s car to get to the airport: Marco, Patrick, James and myself were all flying to the conference, and Ingrid was acting as our trusty airport-transport person.
I haven’t flown in almost exactly a year, and I miss it. That feeling as the plane accelerates down the runway and pushes you back into the chair gives me a bit of a rush. And so does turbulence, but unfortunately we didn’t have any throughout the whole flight.
James has rented us some rooms in the Lapalosa Lodge guest house, which have turned out to be really awesome, with heated towel racks, decanters of Sherry, a collection of various teas, and so on. There’s also the obligatory mini-bar, which I haven’t looked in to (mostly because it has a notice that the mini-bar isn’t free, and I’m a poor student).
And, to my great delight, there’s free wireless Internet in our rooms 
Tonight we’re going in search of food, armed with a trusty GPS — that Marco brought — to tell us where to go, and the Internet, to tell us what our eating options are. And tomorrow the conference begins.
Tomorrow I’m off to the Afrigraph conference. I haven’t been to a conference in quite a while, so I’m looking forward this one, especially since I’m not presenting — so all I have to do is sit around, talk to people, and eat the food. Yay! Thursday the conference has an outing to Maropeng, which I somehow managed to miss when I was at my last conference in the area. I’ve heard good things about the touristy goodness that is the Maropeng Centre, and hopefully there’ll be a tour of some of fossil localities in the area.
Just got back from spending some time at Greyton with Monique, John, and Monique’s roommate, Julie. It was interesting to see how well-off people do semi-rural living, where homes have septic tanks, brown coloured hot-water, an army of mosquitoes, but also Internet connections, security alarms, and a large collection of modern art. Monique’s place has a really great hammock: large and made from wooden slats, just perfect for lazing on with a blanket and some pillows.
Got some good stuff for Christmas: the comic Breakdowns by Art Spiegelman, and the album Opheliac by Emilie Autumn. I also got a hand-powered paper-shredder. Not entirely sure what to do with it, but I’ve had a few moments of fun shredding bits of defenseless paper and then chuckling like a loon.
The other day I was looking through all the old documents I’ve collected on my PC over the years, and came across a blog entry I wrote for my trip to Kenya. I never finished, and I’m not going to now. But it made an interesting read, so I’m posting it here for anyone that’d like to see it. The file that it’s from is dated Wednesday, 13th September, 2006.
I’ve got various other posts about Kenya dotted around on the blog, as well as pictures on flickr.
Herewith, Kenya:
“My Kenya trip began on Saturday the 15th of July with a 6:00 am flight
to Jo’burg. Needless to say I was up bright and early — in body, if
not exactly in spirit.
“Thankfully the flight itself was short: a two hour trip to Jo’burg,
followed by a four hour trip into Nairobi’s Yomo Kenyatta Airport.
We’re always carrying extra luggage with us, including the laser
scanner (all 40 kilos of it), and a tripod (another eight kilos or
so), but this time the airline gave us no hassles, making this one of
the most painless and pleasant flights I’ve been on.
“Nairobi reminds me of other capital cities I’ve visited in Africa: a
melange of modern buildings and damaged buildings, the poor and the
run down next to the rich and the snooty. Expensive buildings stand on
pot holed pavements beside rickety buildings for who it would be
polite to just understatedly say that they’ve seen better days.
“Cars crowd Nairobi’s streets and their exhaust fumes hang in the
air. You can smell it everywhere, and it fills your nose with an awful
grey gunk. Thankfully there was no wood smoke. Mixed with smog it
becomes earthy and rotten, feels like a rasp to your lungs. For me,
wood smoke has become an instant reminder of Mali; it was something I
smelled whether in Bamako or Tombouctou, and memories of Mali will
live with me a long time because of that.
“I was told not to walk around Nairobi alone. “Make sure you don’t
carry anything valuable with you,” said the hotel’s concierge, a
Muslim lady in her 60s. This led to one of my first thoughts of
Nairobi being, “Why, this sounds like Jo’burg.” Still, as a stranger
in the city I felt safe wandering the streets. But the concierge, the
one with the warning, seemed to want to clutch her heart when I
mentioned that I was going to walk to the National Museum. Her concern
made me think that my feeling of safety was illusory. I took a taxi
instead.
“One of the interesting things I noticed is the invasion by South
African companies. I found a Steers while wandering the streets; I ate
at Wimpy. Mortene Target sells itself as Mortein Doom and Vodacom
advertises themselves something along the lines of “Tanzania’s
favourite cellular network”. This rebranding as an “east African”
country is interesting, especially considering that it’s a South
African company owned by Vodafone, a company from the UK. Vodafone
isn’t, as far as I’m aware, African in even the vaguest sense.
“This east African rebranding is not completely arbitrary. Kenya seems
to place some importance in their being an east African country. For
instances, passport control have gates for east African citizens. You
can often find tiered prices for goods or services, with Kenyan
nationals paying the cheapest, east African nationals the next, and
the remaining foreigners the highest. A tourist’s first impulse might
be that they’re being cheated out of their money, but imagine being
able to use Table Mountain’s cable car at rates not targeted towards
people who earn Euros, Dollars or Pounds.
“I spent my first few days in Nairobi alone. We were air freighting
some of our equipment into the country and for various reasons it was
arriving a few days after we reached Nairobi, and I had to spend a day
or two organising it. I can’t say that being alone in Nairobi is the
rockin’ thing to do for a holiday, but it wasn’t too bad. I tried to
see the National Museum, only that turned out to be closed for
construction work. Instead I visited a snake park and ogled puff
adders and cobras, Nile crocodiles and one single, lonely looking
Mississippi Alligator.
“After three cold nights in Nairobi, flying to Lamu island was a
relief. I flew out of Nairobi’s Wilson Airport, which is much smaller
than Kenyatta. And for the first time I flew in a small plane: a Twin
Otter, which at my count seemed able to seat eighteen people. I was
surprised at how smooth the flight was. The day was overcast and had
been raining, but there was little bumping and jiggling of the plane
while flying below the clouds, and none at all while above. The plane
landed at an airstrip on Manda island, which from the sky is all
mangroves and coast line and greenness. As you step off the plane the
island greets you with pleasant heat and high humidity, which stands
in stark contrast with Nairobi’s Cape Town like weather.
“Just beyond the airstrip is the coast and a peer. Motor boats wait to
take tourists across the short stretch of water separating Manda and
Lamu islands. Across the water one can see Lamu town. It stretches
along the coastline, climbing slowly up the island’s slope. From a
distance the town appears white plastered and old, built in
layers. Boats lay docked along its seafront, helping the town look
idyllic; other boats move along the coast, helping it to look lived in
and busy. Standing on the peer you feel that there is only one place
the waiting motor boats will take you. And this is so.
“Heinz had a guide meet me at the airport and organise the boat across
to Lamu. My guide lived in Lamu Town, which he spoke of during the
short boat trip, pointing out some of the landmarks that I couldn’t
easily make out over the distance. All that remember is being told
that 18 000 people live in the town.”
It’s been a while since I’ve gone traveling. In fact, I haven’t really gone anywhere since I quite my job last year. Which is why I was happy when my ex-boss asked if I’d like to come along to help with their field work in Ethiopia.
Later today I’m off in a Jet-Plane to Addis Ababa, and then Lalibela, to continue on the field work that the group started a few years ago (while I was working for them). I’m looking forward to traveling again, and I’ve missed Ethiopia — it’s a beautiful country with friendly people.
Recent Comments