In the margins of tourism

Getting into full holiday mood, L, E and I spent yesterday in an elephant "sanctuary" (elephants rescued from the wild, etc.) and this morning in a hot air balloon above the Magaliesburg hills - both exciting experiences with a satisfactory level of anticipated thrills. Elephant skin is hard and tough with bristly hair all over, and their eyelashes are like wire brushes - but the backs of their ears, their tummies and the pads under their feet are soft - we know because we've felt them; these massive, powerful animals submit to these palpitations by tourists with incredible patience - or perhaps they like it in some surreal dream of interspecies sensuousness, who knows? For the tourist it certainly feels like an incredible privilege to be allowed this intimacy without being "flattened like a pancake" as the guide said would happen with a real wild elephant - which can run at 35 km per hour so "don't bother to run" if they charge you.

Ballooning is also a great experience - flying is always wonderful in whatever form, I think, but this was particularly exciting and yet relaxing at the same time - when the gas burners aren't on there's total silence, the basket slowly rotates, the land passes smoothly and dreamily underneath (today, at least - this depends on the wind, and today was calm; the "captain" refused to answer questions about emergency landings), and you finally come in to land with a gentle bump - the ground crew was waiting for us and manoeuvered the basket on to the back of the truck before we got out - this giant, fragile structure was pushed around by two men as it hovered a few feet above the ground. The scenery was very beautiful.

But in some ways the more significant thrills of being in Africa come from the unanticipated and unfamiliar - a family of meerkats begging around the restaurant tables; bromiliads (which I've only ever seen in pots) growing wild under the trees; a troupe of monkeys passing through the trees at the edge of the balloon field ("we get baboons too"), giant shiny black beetles with white legs wandering through the undergrowth; the language of the guides ("ooh, if that big elephant nudges you you'll fly like superman"; "they're on African time, man, if not today then tomorrow"; "if an elephant does chocolate mousse for poo we know she's sick"), the use of paraffin lamps instead of electricity for illumination at night (and the rather worrying fact of total darkness all around these small pools of light, darkness filled with insect noises and various rustles), the extraordinary vegetation everywhere, the red earth, the vast cloud-decorated sky, and so forth - it's the context that makes it all so special.