Six Lanes and Three Zebras

Driving back to the apartment after another in a long string of trips to Home Affairs, South Africa's version of the INS (or whatever they changed the name of the INS to lately), stuck in traffic in the worst afternoon bottleneck I've found in this city yet, I happened to glance over at the hill where Katie first spotted that zebra several days ago.

Since that day, we've seen several of them nearly every time we've driven past the spot, just off the highway and over a cyclone fence, grazing there quietly alongside dozens of antelope-type creatures that we've been unable to classify due to our sub-par knowledge of antelope-type creatures.

They were there again this afternoon, heads down, munching happily. There were at least three, this time a few steps apart from the antelope-type creatures.

I spotted a sign about the zebras a few weeks ago when we were at the Rhodes Memorial, a massive Lincoln Memorial-looking monument to a dead guy of questionable worthiness for that type of structure. The zebra sign said that the ones we saw, with stripes that only cover about the front half of their body, were once very common but had vanished. Now, through breeding zebras that had the recessive gene, they'd revived the sub-species. Even in that short explanation, I probably butchered the biology or the genetics involved in the process, but the point is, they're rare.

We had dinner with my friend Alex and his wife Toni last night. It was at a really nice place, as they were here for the start of their honeymoon, having gotten married just this past weekend, and we were celebrating. It was interesting to talk to them about their initial impressions of the city, viewed through the haze of their jet-lag. They were as surprised as we were at how unlike the Africa of their imaginations it was. In fact, they were a little down on the place.

And though Katie and I continue to laugh at how everyone thinks we've gone off to rough it for a year, I was a little defensive. We love it here. And the fact is, even if we're not living in the bush, it is an adventure. And it IS Africa. In that six-lanes-wide traffic jam, where two of the cities major highways come together, I just had to look up and to my right for proof.