Legacy of Cecil the lion

I read an interesting article in Jamie’s Oxford Today: The University Magazine about Cecil the lion, or rather the legacy of the Cecil incident.  Cecil, of course, was the lion killed by a trophy hunting dentist in 2015 in Hwange, Zimbabwe.  The article doesn’t appear to be online just now, but there is this site.

Lindsey and I visited Hwange in 1984, and again, with our sons, in 1994.  It used to be a very popular game park, though in 1984 is was quiet due to the savage Gukurahundi.

Main Camp, Hwange, 1984, with some Americans and Dutch.

In 1984 Lindsey and I hired a car along with some other people we’d met, and had an enjoyable game drive around the game park.  On the way back to our campsite, as the sun went down, we crossed the path of some lions, almost certainly now I think about it, Cecil’s ancestors.  That was a thrill, until we suddenly realised that there was no wall or fence around the campsite, and that we were due to sleep in a small tent.  However, we lived to tell the tale.

There were quite a lot of lions in Hwange at that time.  The article in Oxford Today points out that ‘regulated and well-managed, responsible and ethical hunting can provide multiple benefits in Zimbabwe to local communities and the national economy’.  I have no argument with that statement.  Controlled hunting can help the survival of other animals.  The Oxford Today article mentions the fact that research is ongoing to study the economics of hunting versus phototourism, the results of which will be interesting.  Why is it one versus the other, you may well ask?  Well, it’s not, really.  Hunting usually takes place in very remote areas where phototourists would be unlikely to tread.  Hmm – except in some shooting reserves further south.

Outside of Hwange, hunters have a quota of kills.  This has, however, an unusual ‘perturbation effect’ – territorial vacuums are created that encourage male lions from the park to move into.  The work of WildCRU at Oxford encouraged the Zim government to drastically reduce the quota.

The article also points out that Palmer, the dentist, had all his papers in order.  He was legally entitled to shoot game, whether you agree with this or not.  So, much of the outrage is probably unjustified.  He should not have shot Cecil, however.  Cecil had a GPS collar.  Theo Bronkhurst, Palmer’s guide, should have seen the collar.  In any case, Bronkhurst didn’t have the correct paperwork (this is disputed [details here]), and neither did the landowner of Antoinette farm, Honest Ndlovu, on whose property Cecil was killed, though this is also disputed.

Once lawyers get involved, just about anything can become disputed.

I can’t find any photos of our 1994 trip to Hwange, but the above looks like Jamie on the same trip in Matopos, which is to the south-west of Zimbabwe.

Cecil’s partial legacy is that many people were outraged by his shooting, and donated funds to WildCRU, which has allowed them to continue with some excellent work.

Rewards for nothing

A while back, Fat Mac received a phone-call from his bank, asking him to go into his local branch, which he did, although he didn’t really want to, being more interested in becoming a recluse.  The bank chappie took him into an office and asked him to log in to his digital account.  Fat Mac looked blank, so the chappie entered some of Mac’s details for him, and then said, “Now enter your secret password, please.”

“Whit?”  Mac asked.

“Your secret password.  It will probably be something memorable.”

“Ah cannae ‘mind it!  Hiv ye nae got it here?  Ye’re ma bank efter a’ ”

“No, we don’t have details of your secret password.  Only you know it.  How do you log in from home?  Don’t you use it then?”

“Ah dinnae login frae hame!  Ah hiv enough wars against machines wi’oot doin’ online banking.”

“Well, I’m afraid we can’t continue, if you can’t remember your password.”

“OK.”

“What was it that you wanted to find out about anyway?”

“Nu’hin.  Yous asked me to come in.”

“OK.  And what do you want from us, then?”

“Ah’s jes wannae be left alaine.”

Today, I was expecting something vaguely similar when I went into my bank for an appointment about their Rewards account.  I’m not keen on the whole concept of their Rewards service, and I was fully prepared for the following sort of conversation:

“Hello Mr MacLeod.  And why do you want to change to a Rewards account?”

“Mainly because it seems the easiest way to stop you phoning me and emailing me about it.”

However, it didn’t go like that.  Eventually, I got switched to a Rewards account, and it seems that it will be financially beneficial for me to do so.  I tried to find out where the money comes from that makes it so, but the girl didn’t know.  We eventually agreed, at my suggestion, that it was probably because other banks were offering similar services, so my bank needs to compete with them.  However, giving me, who has enough already, more, probably means that they are taking it from someone who doesn’t have enough, by way of high interest charges or something.  That’s why I’m not keen on the whole thing.  But – anything to stop some cold calls.

Most of my appointment time at the bank was taken up with the girl trying to replace the initial A with my full middle name in their database, which she wanted to do for unknown reasons (I’ve been with the same bank for 45 years and it has never been an issue).  This involved first and second attempts which didn’t work, then she logged off her system entirely, re-logged in, ran through several drop-downs, typed in my middle name, saved, logged out, restarted, and so on, for about ten minutes until the bank’s database finally accepted my middle name.

Watching her do this allowed me time to tell her about my sister’s current problem with her middle name in her attempts to get a visa to visit a country in the East.

My sister followed the online visa application process to the letter.  The online form said:

Given Name (As in Passport)

So she entered her given name.

When I went into the relevant visa office the other day with her passport and supporting papers (I was doing this for her as my sister lives in the north, where there is no visa office) I was told that her application had been rejected.  It was rejected because she had not entered her middle name in the online Given Name box.  I asked if it could be entered by hand (no), by the visa chap (no), by my sister returning to the online system (no).  She would have to start again at the beginning.

I pointed out that the form, a copy of which I had in my hand, said, definitely, Given Name – in the singular, and not Given Names or even Given Name(s).  But that didn’t work.  My sister has to start at the beginning of the (lengthy) process, and I will need to attend the visa office for her second attempt.  And she may (we don’t yet know for sure) need to pay a second processing fee.

My sister has since pointed out that passports actually have:

Given names

i.e. in the plural, as their heading, making it logical for her to have entered only one given name in her application.  But we all know that you cannot win against bureaucracy.

Whether she has to pay a second application fee may boil down to what the definition of ‘s’ is.

The girl in the bank, as she was rebooting for the third time in her attempts to get my middle name into their rather stubborn system, told me about her friend’s husband.  He was born in the east but has lived all his life in the UK.  He only holds a UK passport, not a dual nationality passport.  Her friend and husband had been planning to visit the east to see where his ancestors came from.  But the husband could find no official records of his birth place.  They therefore wouldn’t give him a visa to visit the country of his birth.

No, you can’t beat beat bureaucracy.

My son Jamie is currently stuck in Ghana.  He’s supposed to be in Ethiopia, but is having ‘visa problems’.

Odds and sods, Morocco

Our comfy transport

Above is the casbah where we had a nice lunch in a restaurant.  You’d easily pass it by on the road south, without knowing how nice it was.

Our hotel in Zagora

At the pottery

Tagines

Lunch stop in M’Hamid

Spot the non-Tuareg djembe drummer

Some more balloon kids

Our group at Telouet

Christmas greetings

Genna & Brent’s wedding: Part 4

The reception took place in the marquee, so we didn’t have far to go.

Freshly baked bread was a delicious way to start off the wedding feast.

Then someone noticed that the sun was setting, so the bride & groom had some photos taken on the beach.

The buffet was delicious.

The bride’s father gave an excellent, entertaining speech.

In fact, all of the speeches were very good.

Genna & Brent’s wedding: Part 3

Then came the bride, and her proud father.

Genna & Brent’s wedding: Part 2

Just a wee reminder – if you click on the photos below, you should be able to see slightly better quality, larger photographs of brides and grooms and guests, etc.

So that’s the guests, the best man & ushers, the groom with his mother, and some of the bridesmaids. Oh – You’ll have to wait until Part 3 to see the lovely bride arrive for the wedding.

Jamestown Walking Tours

One of the things we did in Accra was to go on a Jamestown Walking Tour.  Jamestown Walking Tours are operated by Jamestown Community Theatre Centre.  See also Act For Change, a group of young people using forum and popular theatre as a means of communicating to the public.

Lindsey, Kat & Jamie wait for the tour to begin

The tours are run by an enthusiastic group of youngsters who take you around some of the oldest parts of Accra and into the back alleys where you probably wouldn’t feel comfortable without a guide.

Jamestown is mainly a fishing community, inhabited primarily by the Ga.  The harbour is a very busy place and is rich in smells and sounds.

Amedzofe & Mt Gemi

We stayed two nights at the Abraerica Hotel, just outside Amedzofe (pronounced: “ah-may-jo-fay”).

Abraerica Hotel

Driving up the escarpment to Amedzofe reminded me very much of Zomba, Malawi, where we lived for two years in the 80s.  It was a few degrees cooler up in the Avatime Hills at 600m, which was welcome after the heat of Accra.

Amedzofe is a fairly sleepy place, but our driver Ben had mentioned to the tourist office the previous evening that we’d be calling in the next day, and Edwin was there in the morning to take us up My Gemi, which at 872m is supposed to be the second highest hill in Ghana (its not a mountainous country!) .  It seems funny to be required to pay a small amount and have a guide to take you up a wee hill, but that’s how they do things in Ghana, and it works fine.

Godwin pointing out something to Lindsey

It takes less than half an hour to walk up Mt Gemi from the village, but we enjoyed the exercise and the view from the top.  It wasn’t clear enough to see Lake Volta, in the distance.

The Tourism Centre has written an informative history of the town, which was once part of German Togoland, with the Bremen Mission administering the area. Edwin told us that Mount Gemi actually stands for Ghana Evangelical Mission Institute.

In the distance, Mt Gemi

Evangelical Presbiterian Training College, Amedzofe

Edwin briefly showed us the grounds of the E.P.Training College.

Misssion graveyard

Later that evening we got talking to two French chaps who were eating at the Abraerica.  Thirty five years earlier, they’d taken the old campervan we’d seen in a garden in the village across the Sahara and into Ghana!

Ho, Hohoe

As Jamie & Kat had some work to do early in the week, for $100 US/day we hired a car and driver via Jolinaiko Eco Tours and took off up into the Volta Region.

Our hired vehicle, waiting for the ferry across the Volta River

The modern ferry at New Senchie

Volta River, downstream from the Akosombo Dam

The roads were fine, and our driver Ben knew the routes, which took us across the Volta and on to a busy place called Ho.  Two days later we passed through another town called HoHoe.

First stop was the Agotime Ecotourism Centre at Kpetoe, where Lindsey tried her hand at kente weaving.