5/23/2007
5/18/2007
Fort of São Sebastião
As previously mentioned in this space, the Fort of São Sebastião is the oldest European base south of the equator. According to Wiki, the Portugese took over the former Arab trading post around 1507 and spent 50 years building this massive structure from locally quarried coral blocks.
This is the courtyard of the pentagonal fort. Each corner is an armed tower, except for the one over the church. From what our guide Mohammed told us (he goes by Henry as well), it sounds like the Portugese barely managed to keep hold on the fort, with all these bandits and Dutch and everyone else attacking the island. On a barrier island, water supply is no joke. The roof was cleverly built in tilted segments with a series of drains and pipes to collect water.
This is the underground pool in the courtyard where the water from the roof is collected. It's quite beautiful and cool. Muhammed/Henry for scale. They wash clothes out of it now, there is some rumor that the water is "bad" and not drinkable. Not sure why - the bottom of the tank is certainly above high tide level. Maybe the World Bank survey team which was at work while we were there has a plan for cleaning out the water tank. Sure would be useful to this little island if it could be drinking water supply.
Bandits/pirates/ enemies of the state who were captured by the Portugese would serve: 6 months solitary confinement (open air but no roof); 24 months hard labor; followed by execution (firing wall shown below). Of course, this was the privilege of white pirates. Black pirates (captured alive) were immediately sold.
A man and his spitsail barquo - seen through the ramparts of the fort.
The canons were mounted on ironwood rockers - the wood was brought from Portugal. Even in the church (future post) the beams are curved and scarfed - looking suspiciously like a ship's keel
DOOR OF NO RETURN
This is the little door next to the windowless block where slaves were kept, after being kidnapped all over Africa by white slave traders and also black Africans. The slaves spent weeks or months crowded in the tiny room before they were pushed out this door to a waiting ship.
** In case you're wondering, the pronounciation is strangely just like "San Sebastian", but pao (bread) is "pow", not "pan". Portugese is weird.
This is the courtyard of the pentagonal fort. Each corner is an armed tower, except for the one over the church. From what our guide Mohammed told us (he goes by Henry as well), it sounds like the Portugese barely managed to keep hold on the fort, with all these bandits and Dutch and everyone else attacking the island. On a barrier island, water supply is no joke. The roof was cleverly built in tilted segments with a series of drains and pipes to collect water.
This is the underground pool in the courtyard where the water from the roof is collected. It's quite beautiful and cool. Muhammed/Henry for scale. They wash clothes out of it now, there is some rumor that the water is "bad" and not drinkable. Not sure why - the bottom of the tank is certainly above high tide level. Maybe the World Bank survey team which was at work while we were there has a plan for cleaning out the water tank. Sure would be useful to this little island if it could be drinking water supply.
Bandits/pirates/ enemies of the state who were captured by the Portugese would serve: 6 months solitary confinement (open air but no roof); 24 months hard labor; followed by execution (firing wall shown below). Of course, this was the privilege of white pirates. Black pirates (captured alive) were immediately sold.
A man and his spitsail barquo - seen through the ramparts of the fort.
The canons were mounted on ironwood rockers - the wood was brought from Portugal. Even in the church (future post) the beams are curved and scarfed - looking suspiciously like a ship's keel
DOOR OF NO RETURN
This is the little door next to the windowless block where slaves were kept, after being kidnapped all over Africa by white slave traders and also black Africans. The slaves spent weeks or months crowded in the tiny room before they were pushed out this door to a waiting ship.
** In case you're wondering, the pronounciation is strangely just like "San Sebastian", but pao (bread) is "pow", not "pan". Portugese is weird.
Some thoughts on teaching UCT students
A few weeks ago, my dad asked me this:
Hi Daughter,
Hope things are going well.
Riding back from yesterdays breakfast with [identifying details deleted to protect the otherwise insulted] I was pondering the skills of a teacher and wondering if [deleted] would be a good one. I was thinking that one
attribute of a good teacher might be the ability to see the problem thru the students view of things. That let to the thought to get your veiw of the issue and the question - are you seeing the world differently in teaching students from different cultures?
Love Dad
So you can see that spell-check culture has not been good to my dad. But more importantly, I wrote him a long email back with lots of thoughts. On 9 May. Since I haven't gotten any response from him, I posit the answer to you, dear reader (hi mom), with some minor edits:
>>
the simple answer is that anyone can be a good teacher.
The complicated way of saying the same thing is that billions of research dollars have been devoted to studying "good teachers" and developing a generalized idea of "best practices" - and that there is no consistency of practice between one good teacher and another, and no teacher is considered good by 100% of the students they teach.
In my opinion the key attributes are to have a personal style, passion for the topic, clear oration, precise expectations, and high expectations. [deleted] already has some of these and the rest I think he will be able to learn as he goes along. He'll do fine. Let him get advice from people in his field - because a key element of a successful class is that the teacher and students share similar expectations and none of us are qualified to help him develop that sense and how to moderate expectations students have about social science classes. Suffice it to say that as soon as he steps in front of the classroom he will likely have major readjustment of what his expectations are in his role as a student - as his role as a teacher
expands. Anyway that's all good.
At first I noticed the cultural contrasts more than I do now (oh so far down the road...) but I think they just add to the spectrum of understanding/background/learningstyle/expectations that is a complex network of connections between each student, the class as a whole, the instructor, and the materials (physical and esoteric) that collectively direct the events in the classroom. Culture would be a different issue for, say, a white teacher going to an Inuit village where cultural relevancy and context needs are somewhat uniform across the student population. Here there are so many cultures coming together that between some individuals, their first common culture will be science. So I have the responsibility to initiate students to the culture and language of science asap - while still balancing the burden which is the white-male-eurocentrism of that scientific culture. One tool for balancing this is to really emphasize the dynamic nature of the culture of science, which is taught in secondary schools as a static thing! Because if the world is static and it's all whiteoldmale now, it's a totally different message than if it's dynamic, and it's all whiteoldmale now. I tell anecdotes about geologists and students I have known in the past and emphasize nationality, race, gender, language - trying to paint a picture of the changing face. Teaching students from all these backgrounds really helps me clarify for myself which elements of the culture are really elements of science discourse, and the way that the discourse manifests in different populations. For example when we're in the field and the students are discussing the geology in another language than English - Afrikaans or Sotho or Xhosa any number of languages which are shared in any small group of students - they have different analogies, turns of phrase, etc. I have always felt that a real test of a scientist is to explain ones work without the use of jargon. The proverbial "tell your grandmother what you do" test. And here we have my students, in the field, bouncing between languages which don't even have the geological jargon, sometimes inserting English words where necessary, but basically exercising the "grandmother test" on their own.
>>
Hi Daughter,
Hope things are going well.
Riding back from yesterdays breakfast with [identifying details deleted to protect the otherwise insulted] I was pondering the skills of a teacher and wondering if [deleted] would be a good one. I was thinking that one
attribute of a good teacher might be the ability to see the problem thru the students view of things. That let to the thought to get your veiw of the issue and the question - are you seeing the world differently in teaching students from different cultures?
Love Dad
So you can see that spell-check culture has not been good to my dad. But more importantly, I wrote him a long email back with lots of thoughts. On 9 May. Since I haven't gotten any response from him, I posit the answer to you, dear reader (hi mom), with some minor edits:
>>
the simple answer is that anyone can be a good teacher.
The complicated way of saying the same thing is that billions of research dollars have been devoted to studying "good teachers" and developing a generalized idea of "best practices" - and that there is no consistency of practice between one good teacher and another, and no teacher is considered good by 100% of the students they teach.
In my opinion the key attributes are to have a personal style, passion for the topic, clear oration, precise expectations, and high expectations. [deleted] already has some of these and the rest I think he will be able to learn as he goes along. He'll do fine. Let him get advice from people in his field - because a key element of a successful class is that the teacher and students share similar expectations and none of us are qualified to help him develop that sense and how to moderate expectations students have about social science classes. Suffice it to say that as soon as he steps in front of the classroom he will likely have major readjustment of what his expectations are in his role as a student - as his role as a teacher
expands. Anyway that's all good.
At first I noticed the cultural contrasts more than I do now (oh so far down the road...) but I think they just add to the spectrum of understanding/background/learningstyle/expectations that is a complex network of connections between each student, the class as a whole, the instructor, and the materials (physical and esoteric) that collectively direct the events in the classroom. Culture would be a different issue for, say, a white teacher going to an Inuit village where cultural relevancy and context needs are somewhat uniform across the student population. Here there are so many cultures coming together that between some individuals, their first common culture will be science. So I have the responsibility to initiate students to the culture and language of science asap - while still balancing the burden which is the white-male-eurocentrism of that scientific culture. One tool for balancing this is to really emphasize the dynamic nature of the culture of science, which is taught in secondary schools as a static thing! Because if the world is static and it's all whiteoldmale now, it's a totally different message than if it's dynamic, and it's all whiteoldmale now. I tell anecdotes about geologists and students I have known in the past and emphasize nationality, race, gender, language - trying to paint a picture of the changing face. Teaching students from all these backgrounds really helps me clarify for myself which elements of the culture are really elements of science discourse, and the way that the discourse manifests in different populations. For example when we're in the field and the students are discussing the geology in another language than English - Afrikaans or Sotho or Xhosa any number of languages which are shared in any small group of students - they have different analogies, turns of phrase, etc. I have always felt that a real test of a scientist is to explain ones work without the use of jargon. The proverbial "tell your grandmother what you do" test. And here we have my students, in the field, bouncing between languages which don't even have the geological jargon, sometimes inserting English words where necessary, but basically exercising the "grandmother test" on their own.
>>
5/17/2007
We are still having fun
May 1: very steep trip up Newlands Ravine:
Sila has learned, after 4.5 years together, and nearly a year of marriage, to identify "bedding":
Sila has learned, after 4.5 years together, and nearly a year of marriage, to identify "bedding":
5/11/2007
Fire in the Park
In early April of this year, a controlled burn fire got out of control for a few days in the northern part of the park. When we visited with Mom in mid-April we saw the burnt area but I didn't realize at that time how recent it was. In trying to find the date of the fire, I also came across this AGU abstract which dealt with the gaseous mercury emissions during another fynbos fire at Cape Point in 2000. Fascinating how much we don't know about chemical cycling during punctuated processes in this understudied landscape.
Anyway,
The Bontebok, aka Blesbok - seem to be grazing the few green shoots in the wildfire area. Bontebok and Blesbok aren't exactly the same thing, but both subspecies of Damaliscus pygargus so I'll leave that to the biologists to argue about. Either way they were hunted to extinction and then reintroduced to the Cape Peninsula. While we sat watching this little group, the largest one did a strange kind of dance toward one of the other individuals, not sure of sexual dimorphism so I don't want to over interpret who is who. Anyway the big one put his head and shoulders low down, pointing his chin toward the other bok and sort of shuffled forward toward it - then the two did a strange, dog-like turnabout rump sniffing thing for a couple of turns. Strange to watch.
So sad to see, we found five of these along the road within a few hundred meters of where we happened to park. Angulate tortoises, all pointed toward the open road and relative safety - I wonder how many of these little beasts perished in the fire. They are pretty fast for tortoises but that is still not very fast. Their stubby thick leg bones and vertebrae were laid out around the burnt shells and in some cases, such as this individual, the body was sort of dried in place so that he still stretches his head toward the road.
Life is creeping back into the white sand already - see the tiny pink blossoms in this photo
Desolation...
Anyway,
The Bontebok, aka Blesbok - seem to be grazing the few green shoots in the wildfire area. Bontebok and Blesbok aren't exactly the same thing, but both subspecies of Damaliscus pygargus so I'll leave that to the biologists to argue about. Either way they were hunted to extinction and then reintroduced to the Cape Peninsula. While we sat watching this little group, the largest one did a strange kind of dance toward one of the other individuals, not sure of sexual dimorphism so I don't want to over interpret who is who. Anyway the big one put his head and shoulders low down, pointing his chin toward the other bok and sort of shuffled forward toward it - then the two did a strange, dog-like turnabout rump sniffing thing for a couple of turns. Strange to watch.
So sad to see, we found five of these along the road within a few hundred meters of where we happened to park. Angulate tortoises, all pointed toward the open road and relative safety - I wonder how many of these little beasts perished in the fire. They are pretty fast for tortoises but that is still not very fast. Their stubby thick leg bones and vertebrae were laid out around the burnt shells and in some cases, such as this individual, the body was sort of dried in place so that he still stretches his head toward the road.
Life is creeping back into the white sand already - see the tiny pink blossoms in this photo
Desolation...
Adults only Please!
By special request, for Trifarina:
Let it be known that this picture was taken by my mother's camera.
Let it be known that this picture was taken by my mother's camera.
5/09/2007
Dr Lesser and Cape Point
I've had the good fortune this week to play host to Ian Lesser, one of the greater nightmares ever to pass through UCSC Earth Sciences. Ian has been organizing farms in Kenya for the last while, and has been working his meandering way south to Cape Town for several months. Little bits of his adventures and photography are here on his "blog" but there's so much more that's not there. Anyway we have been hiking all over Cape Town and Ian has been doing his part to wear Sila out every day, much needed exercise and adventuring buddy.
On Saturday we hiked up Devil's Peak, across the front of Table Mountain on Tafelberg Rd (meeting John Rogers and his wife Phil who were trying to collect John's free birthday ride on the cable car!), up Lion's Head, back down along Signal Hill, down through Bo Kaap and across the city center to the train station. We were all hungry and happy to ride the train home.
So yesterday I blew off work and we rented a car and went to Cape Point in Table Mountain National Park. It was a phenomenal Cape Town day with blue skies and a warm wind. We parked at the Point thinking we would walk out to the lower lighthouse, along the False Bay side of Cape Point but took the meander down to the Cape of Good Hope (a few kilometers round trip).
We saw a baboon troup along the road right before we entered the park. The Chacma baboons are populous and prosperous on the Cape Peninsula although there are obvious problems with the proximity to cities, trash cans, open windows with pies cooling on the shelves, pickinick baskets, etc. This troup and a couple of babies, maybe twins?
We walked down through the fynbos toward the Cape of Good Hope, which although synonymous to most people with Cape Point, is actually a slightly smaller promentory adjacent to Cape Point. Here's the view from the path back to Cape Point. It is famously rocky and stormy. The original, smaller lighthouse down low was usually shrouded in fog, eventually the higher one was built and this did help with the alarming rate of shipwrecks. The towering spine of Cape Point is composed of Penninsula Sandstone, nearly the whole of the section, with a bit of the reddish Graafwater Fm. visible on the beach, as you will see below.
Sila and Ian and I strolled down the boardwalked trail, out to stoney lookout points that would be seriously gated, fenced, reinforced, and require a certification to enter back in the states. Nope, you can walk over the cliff here, and you will just be remembered as a fool or a klutz, but a lawsuit would be laughed out of court. In every other way, however, the rocky coastal fynbos, with aromatic scrubby bushes and trees and seemingly secret lillies and tiny succulents - is like the coastal chaparral back home only highly evolved. There are so many different species here even a brown thumb like me is stricken by the shear diversity of the fynbos. As we walked we even crossed some kind of invisible line - from a higher, greener, misty fynbos to a lower, sparcer, saltier assemblage.
A side stair off the trail leads down to a steep, pearl-white pocket beach. Sila keeps asking me why the sand is so pure white so I'll tell you all - those blocky gray sandstones you see all around you are the compacted, cemented remains of a periglacial river/beach/shallow marine QUARTZ PURIFICATION FACTORY. Under the sun, wind, and waves, the cements fall away and the self-same grains that were sorted and cleaned on a 400 million year old beach are again left out to the sea. Sure is beautiful with clear blue water. Colder than it looks though! This shot is between Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope - at the very junction of the Two Oceans (Indian on my left, Atlantic on my right, nothing ahead until Antarctica). Ian took this very nice picture.
This towering beach stack sums it all up - at the base the red shales, herringbone crossbeds, ripups, trough crossbeds etc. show a healthy braided river system. Quickly though, at Ian's knee perhaps, the sediment column seems to sterilize and from there upward is only coarse white sand. This event correlates to a time of heavy oxygen in the oceans - that is, a glacial time - and the great icy dunes or quiet sea (not sure which!) that sorted this sand has no analog on earth today.
Another thing without analog on earth is the Dassie (rock hyrax) which is seriously planning an attack on Dr. Lesser as he contemplates covering this rock with climber's chalk. Dassie does not approve (white arrow).
At the Cape of Good Hope we did a bit of tidepooling with the birds. The number of snails, limpits, chitons, tiny starfish, huge starfish, sculpins, and strange exotic anemones was great. I saw no crabs. Not one, not even a hermit crab, not even the sound of a tumbling shell which is so familiar when you surprise a hermit crab who's on a rock and he pulls into his shell in a hurry with no regard to a soft landing. Strange absence. Guess they just don't live here? Also no abalone.
We took the long way out of the park - more on that soon - and as I was telling Ian the story of the strawberry shortcake lunchbox in order to demonstrate how sentimental I am, Sila squeeled the car to a stop to let this guy across the tar road. A beautiful angulate tortoise(Cherisna angulata) - surprisingly fast, much faster than the larger tortoises back home. Wish I could remember the name of that grand old Mohave Desert Tortoise in Grammy Faye's yard - did he have a name? I bet he's still there, and I bet he's a hundred years old. More tortoises in the next post.
On Saturday we hiked up Devil's Peak, across the front of Table Mountain on Tafelberg Rd (meeting John Rogers and his wife Phil who were trying to collect John's free birthday ride on the cable car!), up Lion's Head, back down along Signal Hill, down through Bo Kaap and across the city center to the train station. We were all hungry and happy to ride the train home.
So yesterday I blew off work and we rented a car and went to Cape Point in Table Mountain National Park. It was a phenomenal Cape Town day with blue skies and a warm wind. We parked at the Point thinking we would walk out to the lower lighthouse, along the False Bay side of Cape Point but took the meander down to the Cape of Good Hope (a few kilometers round trip).
We saw a baboon troup along the road right before we entered the park. The Chacma baboons are populous and prosperous on the Cape Peninsula although there are obvious problems with the proximity to cities, trash cans, open windows with pies cooling on the shelves, pickinick baskets, etc. This troup and a couple of babies, maybe twins?
We walked down through the fynbos toward the Cape of Good Hope, which although synonymous to most people with Cape Point, is actually a slightly smaller promentory adjacent to Cape Point. Here's the view from the path back to Cape Point. It is famously rocky and stormy. The original, smaller lighthouse down low was usually shrouded in fog, eventually the higher one was built and this did help with the alarming rate of shipwrecks. The towering spine of Cape Point is composed of Penninsula Sandstone, nearly the whole of the section, with a bit of the reddish Graafwater Fm. visible on the beach, as you will see below.
Sila and Ian and I strolled down the boardwalked trail, out to stoney lookout points that would be seriously gated, fenced, reinforced, and require a certification to enter back in the states. Nope, you can walk over the cliff here, and you will just be remembered as a fool or a klutz, but a lawsuit would be laughed out of court. In every other way, however, the rocky coastal fynbos, with aromatic scrubby bushes and trees and seemingly secret lillies and tiny succulents - is like the coastal chaparral back home only highly evolved. There are so many different species here even a brown thumb like me is stricken by the shear diversity of the fynbos. As we walked we even crossed some kind of invisible line - from a higher, greener, misty fynbos to a lower, sparcer, saltier assemblage.
A side stair off the trail leads down to a steep, pearl-white pocket beach. Sila keeps asking me why the sand is so pure white so I'll tell you all - those blocky gray sandstones you see all around you are the compacted, cemented remains of a periglacial river/beach/shallow marine QUARTZ PURIFICATION FACTORY. Under the sun, wind, and waves, the cements fall away and the self-same grains that were sorted and cleaned on a 400 million year old beach are again left out to the sea. Sure is beautiful with clear blue water. Colder than it looks though! This shot is between Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope - at the very junction of the Two Oceans (Indian on my left, Atlantic on my right, nothing ahead until Antarctica). Ian took this very nice picture.
This towering beach stack sums it all up - at the base the red shales, herringbone crossbeds, ripups, trough crossbeds etc. show a healthy braided river system. Quickly though, at Ian's knee perhaps, the sediment column seems to sterilize and from there upward is only coarse white sand. This event correlates to a time of heavy oxygen in the oceans - that is, a glacial time - and the great icy dunes or quiet sea (not sure which!) that sorted this sand has no analog on earth today.
Another thing without analog on earth is the Dassie (rock hyrax) which is seriously planning an attack on Dr. Lesser as he contemplates covering this rock with climber's chalk. Dassie does not approve (white arrow).
At the Cape of Good Hope we did a bit of tidepooling with the birds. The number of snails, limpits, chitons, tiny starfish, huge starfish, sculpins, and strange exotic anemones was great. I saw no crabs. Not one, not even a hermit crab, not even the sound of a tumbling shell which is so familiar when you surprise a hermit crab who's on a rock and he pulls into his shell in a hurry with no regard to a soft landing. Strange absence. Guess they just don't live here? Also no abalone.
We took the long way out of the park - more on that soon - and as I was telling Ian the story of the strawberry shortcake lunchbox in order to demonstrate how sentimental I am, Sila squeeled the car to a stop to let this guy across the tar road. A beautiful angulate tortoise(Cherisna angulata) - surprisingly fast, much faster than the larger tortoises back home. Wish I could remember the name of that grand old Mohave Desert Tortoise in Grammy Faye's yard - did he have a name? I bet he's still there, and I bet he's a hundred years old. More tortoises in the next post.
4/30/2007
Smiling people eat fruit and fish
Ilha de Moçambique is a terribly beautiful place. Beautiful because it's a lowriding sandspit on top of (what I believe is) a Pleistocene coral reef. It's surrounded by coral islands with precarious palm trees perched on top and the broad shady streets date back to the 1300s when Arab traders carried ivory and gold from Zimbabwe through this outpost. Terrible because something like 12,000 people crowded onto the little island to escape from the 2-decade civil war, and most of them and their children are still here. Obviously water and hygiene are huge problems. In spite of this, everyone here seemed healthier, happier, and, well, way mellower than the inland farmers. Island time baby, island time.
The center of the island is a huge hole, made when the Portugese (or their slaves) carved building stones from the coral foundations to build the fort (subject of a future post). The hole is now home to about 10,000 people and a booming market of fish/fruit/nuts/out of context used t-shirts from the states. Young ladies roam the streets in giggly packs (chickens!) wearing beautiful Capalanos.
Jodie forgot her "swimming costume" so she picked up a bargain pair of purple shorts with a hole in the crotch. Luckily there are these guys running a little sewing shop near the marketplace. They have old footpump singers nearly identical to the one in my mother's foyer - a hand-me-down from her grandmother I think? which is now a historically interesting curio table. Sort of made me feel like shipping it to Mozambique for these guys to fix up and run. They were so smooth I couldn't believe it.
Our little escort: "I AM JAMES BOND! I AM FROM AMERICA!" To which I responded, naturally, "I think James Bond is from England." And Jodie pipes up, ever so helpful, "Christie's from America! Where Coke comes from!" Ah yes, thanks for that Jodie, your ancesters are horse thieves. Ha! Just kidding. Jodie's Australian. And it just so happens, my ancesters are also horse thieves. My Grampa Sam proved it. So we're not so different, you and me, Jodie.
Like any good Bond girl, this lady runs with the pack of scruffy boys and holds her own in all the kicking and running and wrestling and hustling and all the general Tom&Huck goodness these kids get up to. Terribly fond of her for some reason. Because she's scrappy I think, and was trying to hustle me while in awe of me at the same time? A bold character. These kids could not for the life of them figure out why we took so much interest in rocks, shells, sand and tide pools. These are pretty picked over, but there were still plenty of brittle stars and sea urchins - guess nobody in the Far East has figured out how to make an aphrodisiac from these yet.
By the time we got to Ilha I had quit worrying about why the kids weren't in school. Occasionally you'd see a pack wandering around in school uniforms but a lot of the time there would just be kids everywhere all day long. It didn't occur to me right away that primary school isn't free. This sight (2pm on a weekday, outside wall of a crowded house) just about broke my heart:
Close up:
You go girls.
The center of the island is a huge hole, made when the Portugese (or their slaves) carved building stones from the coral foundations to build the fort (subject of a future post). The hole is now home to about 10,000 people and a booming market of fish/fruit/nuts/out of context used t-shirts from the states. Young ladies roam the streets in giggly packs (chickens!) wearing beautiful Capalanos.
Jodie forgot her "swimming costume" so she picked up a bargain pair of purple shorts with a hole in the crotch. Luckily there are these guys running a little sewing shop near the marketplace. They have old footpump singers nearly identical to the one in my mother's foyer - a hand-me-down from her grandmother I think? which is now a historically interesting curio table. Sort of made me feel like shipping it to Mozambique for these guys to fix up and run. They were so smooth I couldn't believe it.
Our little escort: "I AM JAMES BOND! I AM FROM AMERICA!" To which I responded, naturally, "I think James Bond is from England." And Jodie pipes up, ever so helpful, "Christie's from America! Where Coke comes from!" Ah yes, thanks for that Jodie, your ancesters are horse thieves. Ha! Just kidding. Jodie's Australian. And it just so happens, my ancesters are also horse thieves. My Grampa Sam proved it. So we're not so different, you and me, Jodie.
Like any good Bond girl, this lady runs with the pack of scruffy boys and holds her own in all the kicking and running and wrestling and hustling and all the general Tom&Huck goodness these kids get up to. Terribly fond of her for some reason. Because she's scrappy I think, and was trying to hustle me while in awe of me at the same time? A bold character. These kids could not for the life of them figure out why we took so much interest in rocks, shells, sand and tide pools. These are pretty picked over, but there were still plenty of brittle stars and sea urchins - guess nobody in the Far East has figured out how to make an aphrodisiac from these yet.
By the time we got to Ilha I had quit worrying about why the kids weren't in school. Occasionally you'd see a pack wandering around in school uniforms but a lot of the time there would just be kids everywhere all day long. It didn't occur to me right away that primary school isn't free. This sight (2pm on a weekday, outside wall of a crowded house) just about broke my heart:
Close up:
You go girls.
4/29/2007
Boats on Ilha de Moçambique
Ilha is covered with boats. Well, mostly covered with people but there are also many boats. These dugouts are made from a single palm tree, carved out with combined use of fire and a blade. I remember vaguely that the Polynesians used to do it this way as well, but don't quote me on that. Anyway they are brightly painted (either with MCel or Coca Cola logos, how do these corporations get them to do that? Sponsoring the paint?) and make very versatile 1-man sailing or paddling canoes. Conch divers use them and easilly keep one hand on the line while they dive for their prey.
Here is a traditional Barco under construction on the beach. I took a close look at the keel scarf because I knew somebody would be interested. I also spent a good deal of time trying to ask these guys what they used to chink the planking. It turns out to be some kind of fiber- not sure what it was but the closest thing it reminded me of was fiberglass insulation - very fine, matting fibers, only more absorbant. No resemblance to any local materials I could ascertain.
Kiddies playing on a boat which is on the beach for re-caulking (on island time, anyway). Note Vodacom barco in background.
Not a bad place to grow up! These kids are incredibly well-fed and happy compared to everywhere else in Mozambique that I saw - this in spite of the crowding/water/sewage issues on this tiny island.
Here is a traditional Barco under construction on the beach. I took a close look at the keel scarf because I knew somebody would be interested. I also spent a good deal of time trying to ask these guys what they used to chink the planking. It turns out to be some kind of fiber- not sure what it was but the closest thing it reminded me of was fiberglass insulation - very fine, matting fibers, only more absorbant. No resemblance to any local materials I could ascertain.
Kiddies playing on a boat which is on the beach for re-caulking (on island time, anyway). Note Vodacom barco in background.
Not a bad place to grow up! These kids are incredibly well-fed and happy compared to everywhere else in Mozambique that I saw - this in spite of the crowding/water/sewage issues on this tiny island.
4/23/2007
Rapale Gneiss Charnockites
Here it is, Lee-Anne! Look happy because this quarry represents the next nine months of your life! You will be living and breathing Rapale charnockites from now on!! Heh heh. Hazing aside, you can no doubt see why Lee-Anne is so excited. Look at the orderly distribution of charnockitized fractures and K-rich melt veins! Look at the big clear quartzy blobs in those melt veins that could be chock full of fluid inclusions! 
The charnockite is confined to zones on order 10cm-1m thick, corresponding to a surprisingly regular conduit network. You can see from the mafic dike here that the blocks of gneiss were rotated along the charnockite/melt seams, acting as semi-rigid blocks although the edges are somewhat sheared.
Some of the blocks contain folded dikes! But when did they fold? Was it during the regional metamorphism and folding (pan-African Age) or did the charnockitisation have anything to do with it? Looks to me like the former. Jodie helped me measure sets of these folds from the charnockite quarry and a nearby quarry which escaped charnockitisation to check for consistency. In these gneisses where there is no compositional banding, these are the only strain marker!
Tres Amigas before the deluge:
The charnockite is confined to zones on order 10cm-1m thick, corresponding to a surprisingly regular conduit network. You can see from the mafic dike here that the blocks of gneiss were rotated along the charnockite/melt seams, acting as semi-rigid blocks although the edges are somewhat sheared.
Some of the blocks contain folded dikes! But when did they fold? Was it during the regional metamorphism and folding (pan-African Age) or did the charnockitisation have anything to do with it? Looks to me like the former. Jodie helped me measure sets of these folds from the charnockite quarry and a nearby quarry which escaped charnockitisation to check for consistency. In these gneisses where there is no compositional banding, these are the only strain marker!
Tres Amigas before the deluge:
4/17/2007
Nampula people
Sorry taking so long to update, don't know if anyone but me reads it anyhow, these days...
Here are some belated reflections of the people of Nampula province... They seemed to get a big kick out of three crazy red-faced white ladies sweating like pigs in a quarry facing the afternoon sun.
The three of us rented this 4-bed bungalo at Touristo Complexo NASA for $25 US/night. This seemed cheap, but the dinners were expensive and (in my opinion) not as awesome as fresh veg from the roadside. Chicken and chips, chicken and chips! But we got lots of nice bats, bugs, lizards, etc. Every chicken we ate in Mozambique was missing the breast. The only time we saw chicken breasts was on LAM (Ligne Aero Mocambique). Is it possible that the national airline is high-grading the breasts off every chicken in the country?
My pal Paola worked at the touristo complexo. She spoke Portugese with a rare diction, and incredible patience, which enabled me to attempt social conversation with her. This was facilitated by the use of Lee-Anne's Portugese phrasebook, which was designed for some English retiree going to Portugal to shop, etc.. Many of the phrases were not useful to me, such as "Where is the golf course?", and "What time is tee-off?" Those actually sent us into crazed giggles because I would be seriously less surprised to see a golf course spring up in Kodiak than I would in rural Nampula Province. Anyway Paola was great. Going to school. No marriage until 25. She has set herself a lonely course of education in place of normal social development and we loved her!
Here's Jodie in the background doing some surface mapping in the quarry, while in the foreground, a man builds fires to crack off building stone plates of the self-same rock we have traveled so far to collect.
These kids hung around watching us every afternoon. We started calling them the "Lost Boys" (one of them brought his sister one day when I took this photo). They were pretty cute but it was unsettling to see kids this young completely roaming on a scary cliff of rock. There was a younger bunch too, maybe 2-3 year olds. Maybe we westerners overprotect our kids too much? These kids were sure-footed and surely independent... but maybe not eating so well... They considered our empty water bottles a huge prize. Luckily as the quarry became the locus of hellaciousness in the afternoons we were emptying plenty of water bottles for them.
On our last day we were all spent but Lee-anne kept working! Tenacious student. Tenacious L. To distract the afternoon crowd of watchers, Jodie organized a paper airplane throwing contest. This was HIlarious because she made a kindof crappy paper airplane, the kind that will fly a bit if you just give it a gentle toss but will nose dive if you throw it hard, as bigger boys are want to do. A medium-sized boy won the prize: 5nMt.
Here's the taxi driver who we hired to take us out to the quarries on our first night in Nampula. He thought we were nutso. But look at the view!
A man taking rolls to market:
Here are some belated reflections of the people of Nampula province... They seemed to get a big kick out of three crazy red-faced white ladies sweating like pigs in a quarry facing the afternoon sun.
The three of us rented this 4-bed bungalo at Touristo Complexo NASA for $25 US/night. This seemed cheap, but the dinners were expensive and (in my opinion) not as awesome as fresh veg from the roadside. Chicken and chips, chicken and chips! But we got lots of nice bats, bugs, lizards, etc. Every chicken we ate in Mozambique was missing the breast. The only time we saw chicken breasts was on LAM (Ligne Aero Mocambique). Is it possible that the national airline is high-grading the breasts off every chicken in the country?
My pal Paola worked at the touristo complexo. She spoke Portugese with a rare diction, and incredible patience, which enabled me to attempt social conversation with her. This was facilitated by the use of Lee-Anne's Portugese phrasebook, which was designed for some English retiree going to Portugal to shop, etc.. Many of the phrases were not useful to me, such as "Where is the golf course?", and "What time is tee-off?" Those actually sent us into crazed giggles because I would be seriously less surprised to see a golf course spring up in Kodiak than I would in rural Nampula Province. Anyway Paola was great. Going to school. No marriage until 25. She has set herself a lonely course of education in place of normal social development and we loved her!
Here's Jodie in the background doing some surface mapping in the quarry, while in the foreground, a man builds fires to crack off building stone plates of the self-same rock we have traveled so far to collect.
These kids hung around watching us every afternoon. We started calling them the "Lost Boys" (one of them brought his sister one day when I took this photo). They were pretty cute but it was unsettling to see kids this young completely roaming on a scary cliff of rock. There was a younger bunch too, maybe 2-3 year olds. Maybe we westerners overprotect our kids too much? These kids were sure-footed and surely independent... but maybe not eating so well... They considered our empty water bottles a huge prize. Luckily as the quarry became the locus of hellaciousness in the afternoons we were emptying plenty of water bottles for them.
On our last day we were all spent but Lee-anne kept working! Tenacious student. Tenacious L. To distract the afternoon crowd of watchers, Jodie organized a paper airplane throwing contest. This was HIlarious because she made a kindof crappy paper airplane, the kind that will fly a bit if you just give it a gentle toss but will nose dive if you throw it hard, as bigger boys are want to do. A medium-sized boy won the prize: 5nMt.
Here's the taxi driver who we hired to take us out to the quarries on our first night in Nampula. He thought we were nutso. But look at the view!
A man taking rolls to market:
4/08/2007
Bedrock Geology of Nampula Province (Rapale Gneiss)
Here's a bit of geology for those who care! We toured several quarries in and around Nampula, trying to get a grip on the variation within the Rapale Gneiss. At a quarry in the city (Lee-Anne and Jodie and I agreed to name it "Nampula Quarry" but I am now thinking we should have been more creative) I found them! The big Folds!!! In this exfoliated landscape, it's hard to get at a vertical fold with a sub-horizontal axis from atop a dome, especially since the quarries are the only desert varnish-free surfaces. I am truly fascinated with this landscape and I wish I could find a geomorphologist who would work on it.
The Rapale Gneiss is a tonolitic orthogneiss (that means it is a metamorphosed rock, which was formed from a tonalite, which is like a granite only it has basically no potassium feldspar and not so much quartz, either). The mineralogy is plag-bt-Hbl-quartz-sphene(?). Amphibolite-facies metamorphism (Pan African age, 600Ma) created a biotite foliation of variable intensity, which is roughly axial planar to the folds. The folds are hard to find, because the rock is almost never compositionally banded. In the first photo you see an anticline, plunging ever so gently east toward the charnockite quarry. The little cut face gives a cross sectional view of this assymetric fold.
Lest you get the idea that things are orderly in this gneiss, here's Dr. Micheque posing with a folded meta-mafic-dike? thing? which is west plunging. the dike is paper thin and has an incredible chocolate tablet structure, where a sheet of 3-5mm biotite books seems to have been brittley stretched by plane strain and the joints filled in with quartz/feldspar veins. Then the whole mess was recrystallized, was crosscut by felsic dikes, and then sat there quietly for a half a billion years until Dr. Micheque paid the quarry man $25US/ton to have somebody make it into brick-sized building stones for his new house in Nampula. Wooee!
Elsewhere in the Rapale gneiss, and never in the charnockite quarry, we see these Hbl poikioblastic things with sub spherical quartzes and also euhedral feldspars inside. They aren't overprinted by the biotite foliation; in fact, they form in low-biotite zones. My theory at the moment is that they have grown post deformation, during the oft-referenced isobaric cooling? Which may not have been isobaric in all directions, if you catch my drift. Anyway they will be Jodie's problem I think. Can't wait to see them in thin section. Could they be the zones which are readily charnockitized? They are about the size of the "opx" lumps in the charnockites.
Too bad I didn't take a whole lot of photos around the "ordinary" gneiss, at least not ones that are worth posting on a blog. Anyway here's Jodie, Micheque, and Lee-Anne at sunset on our first day in Nampula, after we hired a cab to take us to the Rapale gneiss "normal" quarry. I think this is a nice photo of Jodie explaining some wack-ass geochemistry. Ha just kidding Jodie!
The Rapale Gneiss is a tonolitic orthogneiss (that means it is a metamorphosed rock, which was formed from a tonalite, which is like a granite only it has basically no potassium feldspar and not so much quartz, either). The mineralogy is plag-bt-Hbl-quartz-sphene(?). Amphibolite-facies metamorphism (Pan African age, 600Ma) created a biotite foliation of variable intensity, which is roughly axial planar to the folds. The folds are hard to find, because the rock is almost never compositionally banded. In the first photo you see an anticline, plunging ever so gently east toward the charnockite quarry. The little cut face gives a cross sectional view of this assymetric fold.
Lest you get the idea that things are orderly in this gneiss, here's Dr. Micheque posing with a folded meta-mafic-dike? thing? which is west plunging. the dike is paper thin and has an incredible chocolate tablet structure, where a sheet of 3-5mm biotite books seems to have been brittley stretched by plane strain and the joints filled in with quartz/feldspar veins. Then the whole mess was recrystallized, was crosscut by felsic dikes, and then sat there quietly for a half a billion years until Dr. Micheque paid the quarry man $25US/ton to have somebody make it into brick-sized building stones for his new house in Nampula. Wooee!
Elsewhere in the Rapale gneiss, and never in the charnockite quarry, we see these Hbl poikioblastic things with sub spherical quartzes and also euhedral feldspars inside. They aren't overprinted by the biotite foliation; in fact, they form in low-biotite zones. My theory at the moment is that they have grown post deformation, during the oft-referenced isobaric cooling? Which may not have been isobaric in all directions, if you catch my drift. Anyway they will be Jodie's problem I think. Can't wait to see them in thin section. Could they be the zones which are readily charnockitized? They are about the size of the "opx" lumps in the charnockites.
Too bad I didn't take a whole lot of photos around the "ordinary" gneiss, at least not ones that are worth posting on a blog. Anyway here's Jodie, Micheque, and Lee-Anne at sunset on our first day in Nampula, after we hired a cab to take us to the Rapale gneiss "normal" quarry. I think this is a nice photo of Jodie explaining some wack-ass geochemistry. Ha just kidding Jodie!
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