"the important thing to remember when you're invited into a silverback gorilla's backyard is just who's the boss"

Uh, no shit, Sherlock?

It never ceases to amaze me how stupid tourists go into a natural habitat and think that human rules apply in these habitats.

There are some good comments along with the article, one of them being:

"Quite what provoked the normally placid silverback into stamping his authority so forcefully is uncertain."

This statement shows the complete lack of understanding that animals are not here to entertain and amuse us without having thoughts and feelings of their own. These tourists were as far as the gorilla may have felt, invading his territory.
Are people that disconnected from reality that it would have made more sense if the gorilla pulled out his teapot and invited them all for a cuppa?

back to earth and reality...

Urk... said I would get the SA report done before the end of 2007. Didn't happen. There's only two short blurbs to go. Here's one of them...

05/10-2007
After returning to Melville, we walked to a shopping center in the area to see if we could find anything interesting, as the weather was quite nice. We bought some CDs with South African music, most notably Freshly Ground (we listen to their latest CD quite regularly). As we walked out of the CD shop, we looked through one of the windows, or maybe doors, or whatever... we got a view of what was going on outside. It looked like a nice little tropical storm had appeared out of nowhere – it was thundering and there was lightning and lots of wind and rain. Ugh. This must have been the bad weather that was detected while we were in flight. I'm so glad this happened now and not while we were airborne or even at 4 am so that we would have to turn back like last time... whew... we got our balloon ride! :-D

Just as well it was lunchtime too, so we wandered into Mimmo's, a steakhouse of sorts. I had a steak topped with cheese and avocado, along with a side Greek salad. I'm glad they had the option of selecting a salad instead of chips/fries/pommes frites. Salad is good...

We had the following wine with our lunch:

Angel's Tears "Red" (Merlot/Cab Sauv) 2006
color: deep, opaque violet
nose: red meat, cherry liqueur, tobacco
palate: Urk, this was served too warm. Otherwise powerful with well-rounded tannins, flavor of concentrated spicy (especially cloves) cherry liqueur, easy to drink. Nice table wine.
grade: :-)+ (for what it is)

After we were done eating, the weather had cleared, so we decided to haul our asses to the guesthouse before the storm started up again. We had to start packing for our flight back to Oslo anyway. Blech. That was not fun. Packing all our wine was an especially annoying task, as we had to deal with weight regulations and all. They really need to get rid of that liquids ban on carry-on luggage too. It's stupid and has nothing to do with security whatsoever, and this has been proven by real scientists, not idiot politicians who think they know about anything in the real world at all. The people who created this ban are selfish, useless, and extremely dumb...

After getting most of the packing done, we got some tasty thin-crust pizzas at The Ant in Melville. It was very good pizza – we got one with bacon, feta, and avocado and one with olives, salami, and various other vegetables. Yum yum...