The Adventures of Mom

Back to diamonds- the best way to make sure you aren’t supporting the blood shed? The governments are trying to get a certificate of origin program initiated so that people only buy authorised diamonds, but having known of a certain millionare’s family yacht that went missing off the coast of Greece, only to be rediscovered in Albania-( with a new captain holding legitimate papers for it!), certificates of origin could and would be forged.  People in the real world can do anything when there is money at stake. Anymore information can be gleaned from www.amnestyusa.org/diamonds/index.door other sources via a Google search online.

I have only been to Africa once, and that was, believe it or not, an accidental adventure. While traveling with my friend, Lisa, through Europe on our Interail (Eurail for the yanks) adventure, we decided to take a quick day trip to Morocco, as our train tickets included the ferry ride from Algicaras to Tangiers. We thought we would pop over, do a spot of shopping and be back in time to catch a train to Madrid (foolish girls, we were). So we left our gear in Spain and took a roll of toilet paper, water, and a change of underwear in a day pack and hit the ferry. (Five days later….)

On the ferry we met up with three single guys, all traveling on their own. We were greeted by a man with a knife upon our arrival in “friendly” Morocco, who demanded our money. The port police shooed him away with a laugh (must have been a local!) We were persuaded by our new traveling companions (over a beer) to see Marrakesh, and as our tickets included the trip, well, why not?

Well, the short of the long of it, we were hounded and chased by angry men who demanded to be our guides, violently swore at by because we would not give them our money or buy their stuff, that I seriously believed that these people thought f* you was a word to be as casually used as hi or bye! We slept on wooden pallets on a hotel rooftop under the stars (it was cheaper), I was sick as a dog- from eating a salad in the market- and ended up crawling on my hands and knees up and down the two flights of stairs to the toilets, because I was too weak to stand up. It was a weird combination of heaven and hell- nightmares and fantasies that will make for many stories (watch for the articles to come)- we did run out of toilet paper and that’s when I learned that Michael Landon had died in the US, as I was onto newspaper by then… yeah, gross! By the time I left (5 days later), I was exhausted, dehydrated, had diarrhea that would haunt me the rest of the summer. Even though there were good memories mingled with the bad, I would not rush back to Morocco.

 I watched a movie last night called Blood Diamond. It had Leonardo DiCaprio in it and my husband had picked it up, thinking it was a treasure-hunting thriller. It turned out to be about Sierra Leone in 1999 and the blood diamonds, or conflict diamonds, as they are also called, that fueled the civil war. Wow, talk about graphic- lots of machete swinging, gunfire and- well true grit (not for children to watch, but unfortunately, the children there at the time had no choice).  This movie haunted me through the night, as did Dicaprio’s character saying, “it’s girls like you, who get all googly-eyed and want the big rock on your finger that created this situation- the western demand for the commodity, resulting in bloodshed. I will stop there as I need to do more research before I go all political, but I did have to see if the blood diamonds were fact or fiction, as I have never heard of that term before.

  Dicaprio plays a Rhodesian diamond smuggler in the movie. I had met a couple of Rhodesians once ( now Zimbabwe). They were at my 21st birthday party- friends of friends. They mentioned- or someone else at the time did, that they had their money wrapped up in diamonds. At the time the government had freezed their assets and they were unable to take money out of the country. I recall joking about smuggling a diamond out instead. Wow, the stupidity of youth! I do not know what happened to them- we had drunk too much vino, danced and air-guitared on the balcony all at this venetian styled manor house in the countryside of Corfu, a greek island located off the coast of Albania, and that was the first and last I saw of them.

Welcome to the blog. I should have stated this earlier, but I was too busy rambling. If you have arrived looking for talk on leaky diapers and infant acid reflux, perhaps I should direct you to the nearest parenting website. If you’re looking for gunslinging adventures- well, the only thing I’ve ever shot was a rat on a telephone line. My children are of preschool age ( 2&4) girl and boy, and these are tales of daily life and past musings. You will probably find them highly opinionated sometimes political, sometimes outlandish, but the tales are of true adventures, past and present (the opinions are all mine). Intrigued? Read on….

 I used to say I crammed the lives of five people into mine, with world travels and crazy adventures, and it would not matter if I died tomorrow, because atleast I had lived, (and I’m only in my mid-30’s!- okay bordering closer to the other edge), but with the birth of baby 1 and baby 2, I would like to hold on to see them both graduate high school- maybe even University. So now I am selfish with how I throw my rings- I remember when my brother  Scott and I used to go caving when we were school kids. We would squeeze into the most amazing small cracks in the earth and lower ourselves down with ropes. I remember the one cave had bones of animals in it. They were in a pile, so they had been brought there by something bigger- never found out what that bigger thing was. There were caves all over the place near where we lived- you could sniff them out! The outside air would drop in temperature and you could smell the dampness, then voila, sure enough, a crack in the earth just begging for exploration.

I came face to face with a bat in one such cave. I climbed down the rope into the unknown, switched on my flashlight and right next to my face was the meanest, ugliest face with pointy teeth. He was hanging next to my head from an overhang. I screamed and he took off, further into the cave. I laugh about it now, but it was scary back then. I think if my kids told me they were squeezing into holes in the ground to explore an underground world of blind fish, bats and the unknown, I might have a fit- then again, I might say- take me with you!

Alas the caves in the area are being filled so that developers can continue the rape of the land, as I like to call it- razing the trees, wildlife- everything into the ground to stick up their concrete houses two feet from each other. If you happen to buy into one of these monster sites, who knows, there may be a batch of animal bones right beneath your house!

  My four year old son said that to me over breakfast. I think my jaw dropped. I wished I could regale him with tales chasing pirates, running from Indians, and all that good stuff of Peter Pan fodder. I may not have had such tales- I’ll leave those for his bedtime stories, but I loved seeing his eyes widen when I began with, “my sister and I chased rhinos on elephant back- no we were the ones on the elephants, not the rhinos- in Chitwan National Park, in a country in the Himalaya mountains… and thus the adventures of mom were born.