Phase One Complete!

Paging Passenger Burrito?

We're waiting in the Calgary Airport to board our flight to London Gatwick and spirits are still high! Barring one very sad incident where one chaperone hasn't been able to find her passport, everything has gone pretty smoothly. We bade our sad farewells to parents, siblings, significant others, and (saddest of all) dogs and kitties. It'll be at least a month for most us us before we're back on Canadian soil, which is exciting and terrifying all at once. We arrived in Calgary in time to grab a quick lunch in the food court (Swiss Chalet! Christmas in a cup!) and an all-important latte (though Kim and I had to chug ours because we stupidly got them *before* we went through security -- NO LIQUIDS!)

With all the close calls in London the last few days, people are debating a bit about whether or not we should venture into the City during our 14-hour layover. If the worst should happen, a number of train lines could be shut down and some people could get stranded in the city centre. Still, I think we'll be optimistic and head out during our long London wait -- in groups of four or more, with strict instructions to be back in plenty of time for our check-in. There are a number of travellers with us who've never left North America.

Overheard on the Edmonton to Calgary express:

1) Kim Denis and Bruce Cable -- new item?

2) Steve Wenger's alter ego is the Incredible Sulk -- smaller, bluer, and sadder than his better-known cousin, the Hulk.

3) "Where are the blue scarves? Hey, who has the blue scarves?" (I have them -- they were left in the bathroom back at St. Gabe's but we're gonna let the blue scarf manager stew for a while longer.)

After all our packing frenzy, Air Transat was amazing and just checked our baggage without worrying about the weight restrictions! I guess we swallowed all those extra kilograms of ziplocked tour programs for nothing!

We're off!

Just a very quick note to say -- we're on our way! Kim and I will be heading to St. Gabe's to get on the bus to Calgary just as soon as I manage to, you know, dress myself. Last minute checklists are flying through our heads!

Also, in case anyone missed it -- CBC Edmonton is doing a segment on our tour in their series "Beyond Borders". We'll have a video diary and the segment will air in August when we get back. There was a little pre-tour promo for it last night. Check it out here (Real Media Player link).

Yay! So exciting!

The next time we get to lie down in an actual bed -- Monday!

We now interrupt our regularly scheduled blogging...

Breaking news! One of our amazing choristers, Kaeley, has gotten our charter airline to donate the cargo space we need for our choir items! Thank you Kaeley! That means that both Air Transat and Air Namibia have waived the usual fees they would charge for our 300kg of extra luggage. We are so blessed and honoured, and so happy that all our various items (school kits, books, and host gifts) can now be delivered!

Thank you Kaeley! We love our choristers!

Practice Packing

Now, I'm not a high-maintenance packer. My mantra when I travel is something along the lines of, "if it's not my passport or my plane ticket, I can buy it when I get there." (Add to that, of course, 'or my music/uniform' for choir tours.) That being said, this tour is presenting its own special set of travelling challenges.

We're travelling on a charter airline for the first leg of our journey, from Calgary to London; each passenger is allowed only 20kg of checked luggage and 5kg of carry-on. And because we're going through London, that carry-on amount must all fit in one single bag: no purses, plastic bags, camera cases -- nothing, in short, that can't be rolled up and stuffed into the mother carry-on (which, again -- no more than 5kg.) Each of us also will be carrying between 2 to 10kg of choir paraphernalia, things like the beautiful school kits that Wendy Gibb organized, instruments (I got the short straw and have to get a FLUTE inside my suitcase -- no egg shaker or triangle for me!), bamboo poles, and programs.

Packing has become a fairly revered art among the Kokopelli tour group. There's an undercurrent of competition about this in our outwardly non-competitive organization: who can pack less than 25 lbs? less than 20 lbs? Whose suitcase defies the laws of physics and weighs less than 6 lbs while boasting the same cargo capacity as Erin Lange's smart car? Who can fit the most clothes in their carry-on without having it explode in a shower of Gravol and travel pillows? While I'm impressed by some of the feats people are achieving in practice-packing ("My checked luggage weighs 20 oz. and that includes four of the bamboo poles!") my directorial side is starting to worry that we'll arrive in cold, cold Cape Town with 80 papier-maché-wearing singers!

Some helpful travel packing tips:

1. Be 'patient zero' when it comes to the infamous Tour Cold. The first person to get sick benefits from everyone else's hoarded tissues, Cold FX, cold medication, and sympathy. (Later in the tour there'll be less sympathy and more outright disgust.) This way, you can bypass packing your own supplies. (Note: the best way to make sure you achieve 'patient zero' status is to systematically start depriving yourself of sleep for the week before travel. Scott and I are currently tied for this, with Kim pulling in a close third behind us.)

2. Remember -- the airline can't weigh *you*. While Scott's shrewdly recruited his small-framed mother to exploit this fact ("She's wearing a giant coat with a hundred pockets, and each one is holding a collapsible bamboo pole!"), I think we should take this to the next level. Why not swallow some of our luggage? Think how much carry-on space we could conserve if everyone ate 5 kg of ziploc baggies containing tour programs!

3. Think of items you can pick up along the way. Why bring travel shampoo when you can use the shampoo at the hotel? Scott has expanded this concept even to the singers on tour -- why bring basses and tenors when you can pick some up in Africa?

4. Electronic versions of things weigh less. Just think -- 5000 songs on an iPod vs. 500 CDs, or 30000 digital photos vs. seventeen photo albums, or 30 hours of plane-ride video files vs. several dozen VHS tapes. For that matter, consider this electronic blog vs. the old travel diary I took last time! Electronic is clearly the way to travel!

As many of you know, the new Harry Potter book is coming out while we're away; the die-hard Harry Potterites among us probably wanted to re-read the first 84 books to refresh our memories before digging into the adventures of Harry Potter aged 35 or whatever he is by now. But the combined Potter opus in analog (i.e., paper) format weighs a good 8kg (roughly 4 bamboo poles). The same books in digital format (I'm thinking audio book here, but don't let me stop you from scanning all the pages of each book into a PDF file if that's more authentic to you) weigh -- okay, I actually don't know how much a megabyte weighs, let alone its bamboo pole equivalency (BPE) -- but I bet it's considerably less!

Actually, why not apply this to the choir itself? An average chorister weighs about 65 kg (or 24 BPE) -- times 80, that's a whole lot of room we could use for important things like travel packs of gum and extra uniform shoes. I say we should convert the whole choir into electronic files, start living in the digital age! We can ship Kokopelli to Africa via e-mail and waive the airline costs entirely!

Next time on the blog -- what to do when stuck in Gatwick Airport for 14 hours (that works out to about 23 hours, Greenwich Mean Time).

Welcome to the Africa Blog!

I have about five to-do lists on the go, but items are slowly getting checked off -- and a good thing, too! Only five days from now, we'll be getting on a plane to London enroute to Africa!

As part of my pre-travel organization binge, I dug out my travel journal from our 2004 Africa tour and reread parts of it. It's gotten me even more excited that we're leaving so soon -- there are so many details I'd forgotten about, little incidents and things that happened along the way. The first thing I pasted in the book, before we'd even left, were the farewell concert blurbs that I wrote. The last one's funny -- it's a list of some 'tour figures', things like "59 people...60 seats on the bus", and "$4300 per person...4300 hours spent practice packing".

You tend to forget the blurry small details of travelling after time has passed, but oddly enough, those details are often the things that are recorded because travel diary writing happens, perforce, during the downtimes. From my 2004 journal:

- the LAX Scavenger Hunt challenge list (yay for 14-hour layovers!), including (oddly enough) such items as 'one (1) blade of fake grass', and 'one (1) sample of J.Lo's 'Still' perfume'.
- our first taste of Namibia: "the airline served us a meat sandwich with a side of dried meat"
- a little prognosticating sentence: "We are determined to have Mascato come to Canada."
- mid-tour blahs: "We are a tired group, but no one really understands why. We're way past the jet lag and there haven't been any exhausting days, but we all start drooping around 9 p.m."
- we're going to visit Joe's Beerhouse in Windhoek again, where last time we dined on the "Bushman Sosatie": crocodile, springbok, kudu, zebra, ostrich -- and chicken!
- our African animal names -- including such gems as 'Laelephant', 'Girathi', and 'Nijackal'
- our amazing concert at Wonderboom High School (still, incidentally, the best name ever!) -- including the story of the school's headmaster, whose daughter had passed away at the age of 18, and who was moved to tears by our performance of "Come, Sweet Death".

Finally, Marijke's nephew, who was our tour guide in Cape Town, said the following:

"All of South Africa is paved in gold, and that gold is in our people. You have all picked up a piece of that gold -- you are all a little African now -- and you may do with that gold what you will."

I hope we've each earned our little piece of Africa, and I think that those of us who are lucky enough to be returning are feeling the almost homesick tug of our African selves: the lure of song and joy, of sorrow and mutual understanding, of the desert and the ocean.

Next time on the blog -- practice packing! Yes, we REALLY DO THIS. WE ARE THAT COOL.

You're invited!

You are invited to join Kokopelli for their last performance in Canada before they depart on their 2007 tour of southern Africa.

Thursday, June 28th

Riverbend United Church

(14907 – 45 Ave., Edmonton, AB T6H 5R4)

7 pm

Admission by donation

Join us, as we wish them safe travels and much joy in sharing song and cultures with friends new and old in Namibia, Zambia, Botswana and South Africa.