Treeple and the the dancer

Today I found this tree and was immediately struck by the fact that it was so obviously human once. My guess is that it was a dancer of sorts, some kind of performer definitely. Initially I got a distinctly feminine vibe, but as I look at it now I think it's more likely a man, stuck forever in a climactic flourish, a performance-ending posture designed to bring the audience to their feet in adoration and from whence he might properly bask in this glorious moment.

Then my thoughts turned to the reason behind this (sad?) fate: was this a punishment? A reward of some sort? A consolation prize? What had this man done to deserve this? Was he killed prematurely in a car crash? Was he murdered by a rival suitor? Did he hang himself? Overdose? Was he thereby rescued from something that pursued him?

In ancient Greek mythology, Daphne is saved from the amorous advances of Apollo (who is literally chasing her) by her father, the river god Peneus, who turns her into a laurel tree. Apollo is so irredeemably smitten with Daphne that he uses his powers to render the tree ever-green, so that in a way Daphne is granted eternal youth of a sort.

The word used to describe this transformation is δενδρόω (Dendroo), which means "turned into a tree". In ancient Greek mythology, arboreal transformations of this sort are not infrequent, and, depending on circumstances, can be either rewards or punishments.

Another favorite (more recent) example - which might actually be read as a variant of the Daphne/Apollo story - is Radiohead's There, There from their 2003 album, Hail to the Thief, in which Thom Yorke is pursued through a forest before eventually being transformed into a tree. The track is awesome, and the video ranks as one of my all-time favorites from their collection (already bulging with incredible work).

So there is precedence for this kind of thing. I'm not sure about how this figures in African folklore/histories, though I would certainly like to find out now that I've found a (once) living example.

The real question, though, is about the tree itself: who was this person, and why was he condemned to this eternal unbending existence? There is something strangely triumphal about the whole thing - almost too much of it for the story to be entirely sad somehow. The tree has a monumental or commemorative feel about it I think - surely a testament to to some great thespian of the Chobe; even better perhaps, the thespian himself, glorying endlessly in his dramatic achievements. Or perhaps this is actually a sad reflection on what might have been. Perhaps I will write this story myself, thereby adding another layer to the lore. Would that be wrong? I don't know.

The Death of Travel

Many years ago on a beach in India near a town called Gokarna, I witnessed a scuzzy, dread-locked Englishman launch into a tirade against an apparently innocent fellow-beach-goer for the heinous crime of Being a Tourist.

It sounded like this: "You facking tourist FACK! How dare you?!"

Now, while this might at first seem a little pots and kettles, there was a more to the exchange than that. You see, this other chap had actually made a serious error: he had dared to inquire as to the whereabouts of the facilities. This question so incensed his companion for a very simple reason: he had just revealed himself to be that most despicable of things to India's travelling riff-raff (worse even than a stingy front-desk manager or a salesman who refuses to haggle) - a tourist. Only a tourist would ask after the bogs on a remote beach in Karnataka. A traveler would never ask such a question. A traveler would simply relieve themselves in the most convenient and least obtrusive manner available - which in the case of a beach is pretty fucking obvious.

This same dread-locked individual later tried to convince me that the sound of a boat-engine under water was actually a dolphin attempting to communicate with me (while I was relieving myself, incidentally), so maybe we can take his view on the situation a little less seriously. The point, though, is that there is a terrible yawning gulf between real travel and clicky-snap production-line instagram-braggy tourism. The fact that most real travelers tend to be odoriferous Eurotrash need not detract from my next claim either, which is that travel is infinitely superior to mere tourism.

Unfortunately, in the eternal battle between tourism and travel, which is fought in never-ending cycles of trail-blazing, normalizing, commercializing, and fucking off somewhere else, tourism is winning. Travelers, real travelers, are losing out, and the places they've inadvertently helped open up to package tours, touts, pimps, drug dealers and all of the other horrible things that go along with them are one by one becoming all but overrun by that lowest form of humanity, the snooty camera-laden here-today-gone-tomorrow tourist.

This is bad.

This is bad for a number of reasons, the first of which is obvious and totally beside the point: travel as an experience is superior, and tourists, by being tourists and not travelers, are actually losing out. This does not, to be clear, trouble me overmuch. The real problem is that there are people and places which are traveler friendly, and, one-by-one, they're being overrun.

Take Botswana, for example. I live there right now. This is my idea of travel. I like to live and work in a place for a good long time, settle into its rhythms, really get intimate with the people, see the sights and hear the sounds properly. This is what uptight French intellectuals refer to as the longue durée - when they're talking about something completely different, that is. But the idea holds true nonetheless - it means something like long-view, and to me that's the only way to really get to know a place properly. If I get to see fewer places as a result, that's fine by me because I've seen what I've seen properly. So I live in Botswana, which has just been named Lonely Planet's Destination of 2016.

Botswana was kind of traveler-averse to begin with. It is expensive to be here and to do things here. Things like eat, for example. It is easy to get a visa, but back-packers are few and far between, and there is not much of a "scene"as a result. Long-stay travelers like myself have a really hard time because work-permits are really difficult to come by. The sad thing about this is that Botswana is a country that is really worth traveling in. For a start, it's huge, and there are so many things to see that a seven-day whistle-stop safari just doesn't cut it. Sadly, that seems to be the only thing going at the moment aside from the occasional lonely self-drive and the many wagon-trains coming out of the South.

This is also bad. Bad for the tourists. Bad for the businesses set up to offer a little more than a three-day all-inclusive package deal, and ultimately, I think, bad for the environment because all of these fuckers demand flushing toilets.

Full circle - the end.

No but seriously, please, despite what lonely planet says, and despite the fact that you want a Victoria Falls Selfie, a Delta selfie, an elephant selfie and a Namibian selfie despite only having a week to do it in, please don't whistle-stop Botswana. The truth is that at the end of it you won't really have been there. Thanks.