Frank in Africa ‘08

hey hey people,

so Namibia is awesome, after finally being able to get out of the city and run around in the Namib I’ve made up my mind that I like this country.

On our free day we decided to try and see as much of Namibia as possible, we got left at 5am and drove to a little german village near the coast (can’t remember the name) on the way there we made a few stops to take pictures, the desert is reallyt f’ing huge and beautiful. I turned over a lot of rocks because I really wanted to take a picture of a snake or scorpion, but they were nowhere to be found. I guess there simply arent any snakes in Afrika…

after we arrived in the village and picked up some lunch we drove to the coast, it really smelled like rotting fish there and I wondered why so I decided to go have a look, there were lots of dead octopusses and fishes everywhere, and a lot of crayfish, and there were lots of people (white people) catching them, it felt really wrong and strange because it can’t be that all those animals just died there…

after that we headed to some sand dunes along skeleton coast which was really impressive, it’s basically what you expect it to be from all the pictures you’ve seen only much much much bigger. I tried to run up a sanddune and well, was exhausted for a while, the view was stunning with the ocean on 1 side and the sand dunes (also an ocean) on the other.

I took lots of pics and Marieke did some sand boarding there, which looked scary.

after that we drove back (3 hours) to a wildlife park close to Windhoek where we had a safari, the surrounding were really different from what we had just seen, it was a jungle, we got to see a lot of cool animals (crocs, lions, rhinos, oryx, gemsbok, heartbeast, giraffes etc. etc. it took about an hour and a half and I really enjoyed it.

Jelle filmed a special Webisode while we were there, a sorta behind the scenes crews day off video, which will be some sort of easteregg on the site.

After the safari we had dinner, I ate Oryx which tasted good.

when we got back to the lodge I was really tired, and went to bed pretty early.

what a great day.

Tags: Namibia by Frank
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So we left Windhoek Namibia and are now in Capetown SA.

Everything went ok, the flight from Namibia to South Africa was amazing, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, our planet is so amazing, why even think of exploring the universe when most people haven’t even seen more than 5% of this planet, the landscape changed constantly, and the colors of the plants/water/sand/rocks were really impressive. I took a lot of pictures of it through the window of the plane but I don’t think they’ll be any good.

After arriving in Capetown and going through customs (new stamp in my passport =)) we headed to the green elephant house, which is a backpackers place, we’re renting a house here for almost a month. after we got all our bags out of the Van and moving in we quickly noticed that it was gonna be difficult, 7 people in 2 bedrooms, the 3 girls have 1 room, and the 4 guys have another, then there are 2 rooms for the rap artists, a kitchen, 2 bathrooms and a little garden.

After getting settled we headed to the coast, capetown is a modern city (even compared to the windhoek city centre), we took a daladala and the beach was breath taking, I walked down the beach which was surrounded by high mountains and watched the sun go down, it was just what I needed after a long day of traveling and I felt peaceful. there were pretty big waves, the water was cold, and there weren’t many sea-shells, just a lot of Kelp.

we had dinner at a fancy restaurant, which made me feel out of place, I had mussels in cream/white wine sauce, and a windhoek lager, after dinner we headed back to the house.

was a long but good day.

Tags: Namibia by Frank
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I’m writing this while watching a dog poop in the grass I walk in every day, there are 3 little dogs here we’re not allowed to feed, but interacting with them seems so simple compaired to the human communication sometimes.

Today I was supposed to go an take pictures at the videoclip shoot, but as so many times before the AVM crew failed to load the video for us to edit or atleast communicate to us in time that we had to do it. All of this resulted with Beer not being able to edit, and taking over the photography while I uploaded the latest webisode. As soon as Beer was in the Van and on his way to the location they changed plans again, dropped him off back home with a camera and didn’t ask me to come along or anything. But I can’t complain, I’m sitting in the sun, writing a blog post and thinking about taking a quick dive in the pool.

I spend most of last night talking to 1 of the german girls (Nina who’s birthday we visited a few days back) while somehow hearing other people discuss the project in the background, it felt good to distance myself from them for a while, and interact with somebody unrelated to the project, and hear about what other people are doing in a country like Namibia.

Last night we had a BBQ and even though I felt sick I still ate a lot and enjoyed myself. the Oryx was really nice.

I’m starting to get sweaty so its time for a dive, followed by a shower and a shave…and we’ll see after that.

Tags: Namibia by Frank
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soooo, lets finally write down the full story about what happened to my laptop.

As I wrote before the hard drive crashed because I killed a mosquito that had landed on my laptop, I hit it pretty hard which resulted in the head of the HDD skipping or breaking or something.

So after getting a new HDD (thanks Grrr) and a leopard copy (both these items were in Blaxtars bag that was missing for 8 days) I tried to fix my laptop for the first time. After opening the laptop case and putting in the new HDD without a problem I tried to install leopard… here’s where the trouble started…

1: my superdrive (CD/DVD player/burner) is broken so I had to use another computer to do it, which is fine, I had done this before and didn’t expect trouble, I tried 1 of the powerbooks and quickly realised the copy we got seemed to be Intel only or something, so I tried Beers Macbook pro, which also failed horribly with kernel panics and other fun stuff,

which led to point 2: basically the copy of the disk we got from college wasn’t burned the right way (as 1 could expect from the IT guys at college), after reading some forums about how the problem had to do with the DVD header being set wrong, we attempted to reburn it the right way, the problem was that a dual layer DVD was needed, and since this is africa, it was nowhere to be found, after 6 computer stores, Jeroen actually found an apple store that refused to help because they were doing inventory, but in the end we found a store that had the needed DVDs, so after burning, it didn’t work, so I got an external harddrive for 130 euros, and tried to use that as a boot disk, which also didn’t work, this all cost me about 2 days…

so I gave up for a while and waited for the teacher from college to get here and bring an original Leopard DVD, after receiving that yesterday, it was as easy as 4 click and 1 hour of waiting for it to complete the installation… I now once again have a laptop…it is a great thing.

Nina named it for me, since she felt like it’s such a personal extension of your life that it should have a name. His name is “mr Nilsson” atleast that’s what she said, my laptop isn’t the complaining type…

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So here I am, my laptop is fixed (finally!), I’m sitting on my bed feeling like crap, I just caught a bad cold, we all know how it starts, you get this weird dry feeling in the top of your mouth, and before you know it the slime is everywhere. funny thing is that a cold is also 1 of the symtomes of malaria, but I’m not worried.

Now how did I get this you might wonder… well… a teacher from college arrived yesterday, he had a cold, and since my immune system is probably pretty weak from the malaria pills my guess is a handshake was enough to make me feel this bad. We’ve all heard the stories before about westerners introducing bad virusses to tribes wiping them out completely, guess this is not simular but it still sucks…

what else, uhmm, think we’re gonna have a “Braai” today (basically a BBQ) with the german students who are also staying at the lodge. there will be lots of meat which is always good, especially since I had vegetarian food yesterday (some of the people in our crew are vegetarians). I don’t know how much I’ll eat though since I’m not feeling that well.

I finished the webisode today, and it should be online tomorrow for you all to see at www.virusfreegeneration.eu/hiphoptour/

Tags: Namibia by Frank
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