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By a rather major miracle, we gave a full Etheater presentation on a 48 ft screen (big white wall) in Gaborone Botswana last night to a crowd of 300. We had the University of Botswana Dean of Science and a Government Minister, and US AID officials, among other dignitaries, in attendance.

By another major miracle we are on the ground in Harare Zimbabwe and through customs with all personnel and equipment. We will present in the ~3000 seat Sheraton Conference Theater tomorrow night.

However, we may have less than 100 people in attendance because of severe fuel shortages in the capitol.

Botswana has the two of the biggest and best diamond mines in the world and also has fantastic game reserves. With the revenue from diamonds and tourists, this country of only one million people is very wealthy by African standards. However, there are also many very poor people. Gabarone has had a functioning democracy for 30 years. The Gaborone has some very good blacktop roads, but many of the lower quality blacktop and the mostly gravel roads have been devastated by the recent flooding. We could feel the ater lapping at the bottom of the car as we drove through 14" of water Monday night going to dinner. Driving on the left side of the road in the dark and rain was pretty nerve racking. I dodged a pothole Tuesday that would have hung up the car if I had hit it.

Some of our equipment (that was in our luggage) was 48 hours late arriving in Botswana. However, that was due to foul-ups in London, not Africa. The show went beautifully in Gabarone to a crowd of about 300 in the Boipuso Hall at the Convention Center there. We projected the Etheater ~ 48 feet across on a big white wall in a room that could hold over 1000 people. People were very excited seeing the marvelous Earth science datasets displayed in such a compelling manor. We did a zoom in from outer space to Boipuso Hall in Gabarone using 1000m NOAA AVHRR, 30m Landsat 7, and 1m aerial photography data.

Jesse Allen has prepared a number of fabulous 3D animations of Africa using Landsat 7 and DTED data including spectacular flybys up the Kuiseb River rom Walvis in Namibia and of the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Town area in South Africa.

Both Meredith Bene and Jesse Allen have been doing a great job of presenting the Etheater under very trying circumstances, including putting up with a pretty cranky sleep-starved boss.

Gaborone and Harare are a strange mix of South African and English electrical outlets so we are constantly converting between US/English and S. African plugs and outlets. After Botswana/Zimbabwe Australia, Japan, South Africa, Paris, Munich, and Switzerland (all with different outlets) we are ready for almost everything. Our computer and A/V equipment have power supplies that work anyplace in the world, so we only need the adapters for the different outlets.

Fritz flew business class to Geneva, on March 16th, as a United Nations invited guest for the World Meteorological Organization. He is tired, but in reasonable cheer despite the projector problems. I will bring a spare with me from Goddard. Fritz and Mike Manyin arrange with the projector makers, Proxima, to have " A spare in the air" sent to Goddard to replace the spare I took with me.

On the morning of March 17th, Fritz calls to tell me that one of the three projectors has arrived in Geneva dead. Fritz is also unable to get onto e-mail or call home because he cannot get a dial tone. A diaster is looming and we do not yet know it.

I left Baltimore Washington Airport Friday afternoon with val1 and a projector and rush home to get Zorro, my cat, shuttled up to Baltimore where he will be staying with one of his best friends, Sabrina, and Sabrina's owner, Robin.

To my pleasant surprise, I am met in Johannesburg by a friend I made on the last trip here, Val Worth. We shuffled my suitcase over to Air Botswana where they ask if I can take an earlier flight. There are only two passengers on the flight I had asked for and they are asking us to take the previous flight an hour earlier to save them flying an extra plane.

Val takes me home for an hour or so of rest before we have to head back to the airport. This is wonderful: I get a chance to clean off some of the airplane gunky-ness, shave, have a nice relaxing cup of Roobis tea, get a very nice invitation to stay with them when I am back in Johannesburg for a day later in the week, then back to the airport to get on the puddle jumper plane to Gaborone.

Fritz, Bob Swap, and our lead contact in Gaborone, Frank Ekhardt, met me at the Cresta Hotel where we will set up our first presentation. I met Bob Swap and Frank last year for the Johannesburg presentation. Fritz and I will move into the presentation hall in the afternoon, after a church outreach function leaves, and get everything set up. Fritz's luggage is supposed to come in on the 2 PM flight.

Meredith is still in Geneva. She will get on her plane to Harare, Zimbabwe later today. Fritz arrived in Gaborone yesterday with the computer equipment. I arrived last night. Fritz does not yet have his luggage.

I am in the airport in Johannesburg, waiting to meet Val Worth's parents (I really should remember their names!) and her daughter, Ashley, who is a zoology student at Wits University. She has just finished classes and her grandparents are getting her at the University (Varisity in South African lingo) before swinging by to pick me up. I will stay with them and their zoo (Two cats, four dogs, and at least three large fish tanks. And that's one dog less than last time. Their wonderful energetic and very friendly German Shepherd, Roger, passed away of old age a week ago.).

Yesterday in Gaborone, there were some problems to solve. In all the stuff we brought, including miles of electrical cable with U.S. plugs, and yet more miles of cable using the local British standard plugs and/or the South African round plugs, there was only one female to female VGA adaptor. . . in the suitcase that failed to make it to Gaborone with Fritz. Frank found a shop willing to custom make us one on the spot, and they had one for us by late afternoon. The RAID tower kept having an audible alarm go off and it was not clear what it meant. A bit of fiddling and experimenting uncovered that it was overheating, though we could not find a spot that was actually getting hot. However, taking the skin off the RAID disk tower and placing a large fan right next to it solved the problem.

Another of our technical contacts, Simon Wills, arrived. Simon has an SGI monitor for us, one of the heavier pieces of equipment we did not lug from the U.S. Thank goodness. But alas, I got a slight surprise when I turned the monitor around to find there is only a single HD5W style video in line, rather than the two lines; SGI line and VGA line that I am accustomed to from all my sgi experience. For setup and testing to make sure everything works, that's just fine. But we would need a SECOND female to female VGA adaptor to include the monitor in the chain for the presentation. Simon assures us there's no problem: he'll get his hands on a high resolution VGA monitor which we can put in the circuit instead.

The University of Botswana people arrive around lunch time and got the audio setup started, while I got the projectors and computer set up, and everything is going fine. In the afternoon Simon returned and swaped the SGI monitor for a VGA monitor.o.

The show went quite well. About 250 people attended, quite a turnout for a small city like Gaborone. One of the Botswana ministers (The minister for transport, I think) was in the audience, as were quite a few people from the University of Botswana, some representatives from the U.S. Embassy, and a good many students from the University who were quite interested in the show. Bob Swap preceeded the etheater presentation with a scientific overview of SAFARI 2000.

Many students working on engineering projects and graphics programming attended. They appreciated being able to see that the show was not "canned" and required human operation and some computer work and run it. After the show, I spent at least half an hour with a dozen or so students who asked questions about the setup and operations, OpenGL, and so on. Which meant I did not get to the finger food which was being served, but Fritz was kind enough to grab some food for me.

Breaking down the show went smoothly.

Bob and Fritz are to head out to Harare rather early, but they do decide that having dinner is not such a bad idea.

The next morning, the 23rd, I have a relaxed breakfast by myself, check out, and fly back to Johannesburg. I will stay with Val Worth and her family tonight, then fly to Cape Town tomorrow, get settled, have a day there, then meet Meredith at the airport and get us and the equipment back to the hotel. I am really looking forward to seeing Meredith.

Monday's presentation at the International Symposium on Remote Sensing and the Environment in Cape Town Sommerset-West was also a big success.

NASA Associate Administrator for Earth Science, Dr. Ghassem Asrar, and NOAA Associate Administrator for NESDIS, Mr. Greg Withee, among many other remote sensing specialists from around the world were in attendance. Terra/MODIS Principal Investigator, Michael King, gave the "Etheater paper", with myself as a co-author, in front of a packed auditorium and 400 in attendance on a 12 x 36 foot screen. The paper included the first Terra/MODIS observations of Southern Africa. We got numerous positive comments on the presentation.

This morning Dr. Harold Annegarn of WITS University in Johannesburg, Michael King, and I did a talk show program for one of the major Cape Town radio stations where we described the NASA Earth Science program and the Etheater presentation the previous evening. We made up five questions on Southern Hemisphere climate, geography and weather that the listeners answered. Providers of successful answers received a NASA EOS CD-ROM.

Tomorrow we are over-subscribed for two Etheater presentations in the 1000 seat Linder Auditorium in Johannesburg. Presentations in Pietersburg, and Pretoria will complete the tour that was designed to explain the global remote sensing program to the general public and to facilitate the Safari 2000 ground truth experiment in Southern Africa.

Well, I'm now in Cape Town. Email from Zimbabwe was impossible and here it's only difficult! There is one computer in the hotel for all of the guests to use for email. Since I'm not inclined to stay up until 1 am to get on it, I've had a hard time finding it empty. (I think Jesse was more willing to do that, so you may have heard from him!)

Zimbabwe actually was someplace that I wish I had more time for. I'd really like to go back there some time when I have more free time to explore.

It was the weirdest thing to see skyscrapers in the background and women crossing the street with baskets on their heads in the foreground.

Driving was actually not bad either. I've learned to shift with my left hand and feel pretty comfortable driving on the 'wrong' side of the street now. (Although from what I hear, that's when you get into trouble!) Fortunately my host in Harare was very gracious about helping me to get the hang of driving there. She also made sure the rental people gave me a car with gas in the tank and asked questions I never would have thought to ask - does it have oil, are the tires all good, does it have headlights... And people there are very patient with slow drivers!

Cape Town is beautiful. The mountains go right up to the water and the water is so clear and blue. I'm tempted to go for a swim except that the exposed parts of my skin seem to be burning to a crisp from the malaria antibiotics! Today I explored Cape Point and the nature preserve. I saw baboons chasing people away from the tables so that they could eat the food that was on them! Now my hands are so sunburned that I need to keep running them under cold water to stop the pain!

I think the shows went well. I'm sure Fritz will be writing more about them. Tomorrow I leave for Petersburg. Hopefully, I will have a chance to get on email again soon!

My morning was spent on the `phone with various people arranging details and confirming setups for Mike King's presentation at the International Symposium on Remote Sensing for the Environment (ISRSE) tomorrow at lunchtime, and for Fritz's two presentations on Tuesday, the 27th, at the University of the Western Cape. Everything for the ISRSE setup seems well in hand, courtesy of the hard work of the conference coordinator, Diedre Cloete. I am unable to reach Elsworth McPherson in the Geography and Environmental Science department at the University of the Western Cape since it is a Saturday and the University is closed, but our central contact for the southern Africa tour, Lisanne Frewin in Johannesburg, assures me that the details are in hand. It is not clear that there whom has handled the screen reservation and whether a computer monitor will be available for us, but both are clearly solvable problems if they are not already taken care of by Elsworth.

Once all the calls are made and I have confirmed all appears to be well, I take the afternoon off to explore Cape Point Nature Reserve down at the southern end of the pennisula south of Cape Town. It is beautiful countryside and it is amazing to see the mountains which rise so high out of the plains and the ocean. I manage to see a herd of ostriches at one point trying to find a way to cross the road, and down at the very end at Cape Point, I have to avoid the friendly babbons who fortunately recognize without prompting that my camera is not edible: they apparently have a habit of snatching food from visitors. I walk down onto the beach on either side of the Cape of Good Hope, which some claim divides the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic. Apparently this is a point of contention: Cape Aghulas further down the coast is the most southerly point of Africa and they claim the honour of dividing the oceans. In case the Cape of Good Hope people are correct, I walk on both beaches and hence put my feet in both oceans.

The drive back to the Lord Charles along the Atlantic coast gets interupted where the road has been closed on the way back up past Hout Bay. There were terrible bushfires here in late January, which the SeaWiFS satellite had seen and recorded, and apparently the fire damage has caused the land to become loosened and landslides have covered sections of the road. But I take some good pictures of the fire damage before heading off to the Cape Town airport where Fritz, Sharon, and Meredith are arriving.

Fritz has his own rental car, but Meredith and I give Sharon a lift to her hotel on the Strand. This gives me a chance to catch up with Meredith's adventures in Geneva and Harare. Sharon proved a godspend convincing customs in Harare to permit the computer equipment to come into the country without extra duty charges and hassles. She also is a great help with Meredith in learning how to navigate in Harare. Meredith had to rent a minibus to have a vehicle with enough luggage space for all the computer equipment and to have a full tank of gas. Driving it on the other side of the road was apparently something of a challenge! Tomorrow we will sent up the equipment for Mike King's lecture on Monday at ISRSE.

During the morning while Meredith is putting the final touches on tuning the projectors for the screen, I am largely on the `phone confirming that all is ready with the University of the Western Cape for Fritz to give two shows in the Great Hall there tomorrow. Now it is a Monday, people are in their offices and a few calls confirms that virtually all the details are in hand. This gives me the chance to get in to see Michael King's talk, relay information to Fritz, and help Meredith with breaking down the equipment and packing it to take it to the Great Hall.

Our hosts at the University of Western Cape are Elsworth McPherson and Ewadis Daniels from the Geography and Environmental Sciences department. We met them, store the equipment in one of the computer rooms at the University, and get a chance to look at the Great Hall. It is a very nice venue, with seating for somewhere in the range of 1000. We have arranged after a little shuffling around to use the same large screen for our e-theatre presentation as was used at noon for Michael King's talk.

Once the equipment is dropped off and we've all had a chance to see the Great Hall, Fritz heads back to the Lord Charles Hotel in Somerset West where the conference is occuring, while Meredith and I head for Simons Town to find Boulder Beach. Boulder Beach is one of the places that the Jackass Penguins roost. Their unfortunate sounding name comes from the fact their call sounds like the braying of a donkey. We see a few near the parking lot and get excited... only to discover a few minutes later that we have gotten excited all too soon. We find the beach so covered in penguins that we have to be careful where we step!

We have a nice dinner on an ocean front viewing seat at a restaurant in Simons Town. My ostrich steak is occasionally interupted by the braying of the pengiuns...

The set up in the morning goes reasonably well and Paul Duncan and his crew from Launching Pad Productions do us the extra courtesy of modifying their screen so that it is a single piece 32' x 14', rather than the two piece screen it has been the previous day. This requires a lot of work on their part driving new studs into the screen so it can be hung from its full size frame, and they do this knowing that they will not have a lot of calls to do this size screen, but also know this will make our show that much better.

The afternoon show goes well, but runs somewhat overtime and many of the audience are university students and have to leave around 4 PM to get to their next classes or to catch buses. We end up losing about a quarter of our audience, but put on a pretty good show for the 250 or so who stay for the full course.

The evening show goes a little more smoothly once it starts, but not so smoothly beforehand. Ten minutes before the presentation is about to begin, one of the two projectors freezes up and stops playing out new imagery. We swap projectors quickly, realign the new right side projector, and check everything out. Then an invited speaker from the MTM Science Museum to open in Cape Town later this year comes and discovers there is not a slide projector for him to show his slides. Elsworth finds us a slide projector and quite unintentionally, our projectors and the SGI workstation get unplugged in trying to get the slide projector connected. So we end up starting up from scratch again and loading all the pieces as fast as we can once the system comes up. So again we end up starting a little late, but get the first speaker to the podium before we are done loading so we delay things as little as possible. I miss the opening talk, but it is long enough to get everything into memory and ready to go.

Our audience bears with us, and all 100 of them are treated to a fine show. The MTM Science Museum director is so impressed that he invites Fritz to give another E-theatre presentation as part of the planned museum opening in November. It even turns out that we have provided material in the past for the museum through Tom Vansant at Geosphere Productions. Our animations of Landsat 7 data in the Cape Town area were generated last year for a previous set of E-theatre presentations in South Africa, and those animations, via Tom Vansant, have been given to the Museum.

Meredith and I are up late again getting the equipment packed, but are able to make it back to Somerset West in time to join the others at the hotel for a dessert and a victorious glass of champagne. This was our ninth presentation in 13 days in 4 countries on 2 continents: rather a lot of presentations! The computer equipment is secured in the hotel to travel with me to Johannesburg tomorrow.

Our first destination for the day is Table Mountain, a huge mountain that rises a little over 1000 metres (more than 3000 feet) over the city and has a large flat top from which it gets its name. There is a cable car to the top which we take rather than hiking in the interest of getting to see more. This is not something I recommend for people who are agrophobic: the view from the cable car is quite amazing and the ascent is quite steep and the cars are a long way above the ground most of the way. And if that isn't enough to cause disconcertation, the entire inside of the car rotates around in a circle as you go up to give everyone the panaromic view. Not only is this a little disorienting, it means you can't hold onto anything because the floor is rotating while it is not! The view from the top all the way around in all directions is quite amazing. We can see all the places that everyone has been pointing out in our Landsat data animation and it is interesting to get this new view. Up at the top, we find a couple of Rock Dassies, a local critter found only on the mountain. In fact, the isolated ecosystem at the moutaintop supports a very rich ecosystem.

We hike around the top, including climbing down and back up the Plattesklip Gorge which divides the tabletop in two. The walk to the far side of the top gives us wonderful views of the Cape flats, False Bay, and Stellenbosch.

Down from the mountain, we take our shoes off and stroll in the waters of the eastern Atlantic on Camp's Bay. Depending on whether you use Cape Point or Cape Aghulas as the dividing point between the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, we either have or have not put our feet in both of these oceans now. The Atlantic is quite cool here, but the white sand beach is beautiful and the mountains rise practically at the beach up to the Twelve Apostles.

Then it gets to be time for me to get to the airport, wrestle four items of luggage and three carryons onto South African Airlines, and get on my flight to Johannesburg. The luggage is 104 kg, well beyond the limit, but the excess baggage charge is not too galling and everything gets on the plane. I meet Dr. Harold Arnegan from Witwatersrand University at the longue as he is taking the same flight back to Johannesburg with me. He introduces me to a local beer, called Hansa, on the flight which is rather nice. The flight to Jo'burg is a couple of hours long, which makes it somewhat late when we get there. We are met by Peter, a driver for one of the government ministers who has volunteered to help the SAFARI 2000 activities with driving people around. We take the equipment to the Geography Department at Wits and store it in one of the basement rooms where it will be secure, before taking me to my home for the next two days, a room at the Wedgewood Mews in Melville. It seems like a very nice place, but I fall into bed far too soon to really appreciate it much.

Jesse - Johannesburg, South Africa 30 March 2000 I get up in the morning to a nice breakfast at the Wedgewood Mews before heading back to Witwatersrand University to retrieve the computer equipment and set up for a pair of shows. Although the presentations are free, Computicket (the South African equivalent of Ticket Master) is handling tickets to be given out free to keep the audiotorium from becoming overcrowded. The evening show is already totally "sold out" and the afternoon is at least three quarters full as of the morning. Given that Linder Audiotorium can hold 1100 people, this is going to be quite a crowd!

I spend the day in the audiotorium setting up and testing. I have a couple of problems with one projector refusing to update the display. A little coaxing with power cycling and graphics reboots gets it back in line. Dr. King arrives from Cape Town in the early afternoon and we talk through his program. We do make an unfortunate discovery that one of the animations we wanted to show, the San Francisco Onion Skin which shows how data from Landsat are combined to form different kinds of false and natural colour images, is missing. On the other hand, the animation program disk is 100% full, so the lack of San Francisco made it possible to have other things such as the brand new MODIS image of southern Africa. It is disappointing, but we will work without it.

I try an experiment for the afternoon program extending some ideas Meredith gave me about running the program without showing icons or the Unix prompt. It doesn't work out quite as planned, but I muddle through halfway through the presentation pulling up the prompt after all and madly typing out file names as I need to get new pieces up.

After the program is over (and despite the problem, the talk does go quite well), I spend the next three hours fiddling trying to work out what went wrong and how to fix it. It appears that the Interactive Image Spreadsheet does not take kindly to the commands to lower the imagery to the back of the stack, so I try a different if slightly inelegant solution and practice it several times to make sure it works the way I expect and the setup is stable. Success!

The evening venue is packed just as promised. Things start a little late after the crowd takes a long time at the front door getting the materials we are handing out. The posters, information, and lithographs are very popular. Which is really good because five minutes before we are about to start, the other projector decides to freeze! A little last minute coaxing again gets it unstuck, but I am still putting in the last setup for the program when Dr. Arnegan starts the introductions. But the last minute panic is well hidden from the audience and we get a flawless program in the evening to a packed audiotorium.

After the show is over, I pack up and get everything back into secure storage at Wits before heading back to Melville and getting dinner with several of the scientists and education outreach staff. I am easily talked into going to Dr. Arnegan's home with Michael King to have an after-dinner glass of Amurula, a wonderful dessert liquer made from the fruit of the Marula tree, a favorite fruit of elephants. Apparently when the Marula fruit is ripe, it is not all that odd to see the occasional staggering drunk elephant staggering around...

I turn in for a good night of sleep at Wedgewood Mews again to get ready for another busy day tomorrow driving to Pietersburg and meeting up with Meredith for a presentation there to the general public on April 1st.

22 March 2000 7:00pm University of Botswana, Gaborone
NASA Presenter: Fritz Hasler
NASA Technical Presenters: Meredith Bene & Jesse Allen
Contact: Susan Ringrose
University of Botswana
Email: ringsue@noka.ub.bw