The Artsaypunk

I’m so vicariously excited! Given my somewhat reclusive sojourn in the third-world, I haven’t really been in touch with my more extended family. On a whim, I checked in on some Canadian Olympic coverage and realized with a start that my little cousin Graeme Gorham is competing as a ski-jumper. This is Canada’s first ski-jumping [...]

Dad, I miss you still. More than words… and unfortunately, they’re all I have. Love, David Crossing the Bar Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea, But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for [...]

Mother Dearest, I was just reading back through my archived posts (because I’m obsessive like that), but for some reason, this time I tried imagining it was you reading them. And yeah, it made me a little embarrassed. But I know you’re here everyday to check in on me, even if I cuss a bit [...]

After some advice from friends, and a little research with my friend Google, I realized that I might just need a yellow fever shot to reenter Pakistan. Uganda itself is not endemic, but Kenya is, and since I had a stop over in Nairobi (even though I wouldn’t be leaving the plane) there was a [...]

After a restless night in a tree house and a morning tracking chimps, Anna and I were pretty beat. Still, we figured that since we were there, we might as well try to take in a hike at a nearby wetland reserve. We struck off down the road, confident that soon enough someone would come [...]

Despite our fatigue, my sister and I were understandably excited to go tracking chimps in the rainforest, especially since we had travelled a helluva long way in a stinking mini-bus and paid a lot of money to do so. As we ate breakfast, I looked at the other tourists that had signed up, We seemed [...]

I have to admit that after the Great Black Mamba Scare of 2005 I was slightly skeptical about spending the night in a tree. Especially a tree in the middle of a rainforest, ten minute’s walk from the main camp, guarded by a slithering, black poison repository. Now, if we had almost stepped on some [...]

The night before we went Chimp Tracking, I had a restless night, mostly due to the chomping, scratching noises directly over my head. Anyway, when I’m half awake, half asleep, is when I have the dreams I actually remember. I dreamt that while we were out tracking, my sister and I discovered a brand new [...]

Anna and I decided to stay the night in a tree-house banda about a half kilometer back into the forest at the chimp camp. I was excited. Who wouldn’t want to stay in a tree-house in the jungle? And I must admit, just about every crazy-assed thing I do in the third world, I think, [...]

My sister and I decided, in a spontaneous way, to rocket up to Fort Portal, a western Ugandan town near the Congolese border, where, among other things, you can get access to Chimpanzees in their natural habitat. I’m a sucker for monkeys, so we went for it. Jameson, an old-boy at Anna’s school (and pronounced [...]