Ali – For only the second time, the International AIDS Society meeting was held in Africa, the region with the highest prevalence of HIV in the world. So, since this is one of my favorite meetings, and I had never been to Africa, I made the long trek to the Southern Hemisphere with my travelers dissentsentary prophylaxis in hand (two tabs of pepto bismal with every meal if you wanted to know).
The meeting did not disappoint. This is the only professional meeting I know where you can go to a session on Grindr and gay dating apps and then have a colleague later say, ‘Hey I saw you in the Grindr session; I didn’t know that was your thing,’ and have this all be run-of-the-mill collegial interaction. Other regular features of the meeting include the shaming of the pharmaceutical companies, which occurs with such predictability that it makes you wonder whether the drug reps manning the booths are in on the game or if they are just the drug company employees who drew the short sticks.
On my first day in Durban, I joined one of the conference-organized safaris and hoped on a tour bus at 7am heading for HluHluwe, 3 hours away. For the $150 price of admission, I wasn’t sure what to expect – I mean this price would get you only a light breakfast in Zurich. The tour bus seats were about half an American rear-end wide and thus I became quite intimately acquainted with the two delightful traveling companions that sat in my row: Steph the HIV advocate from Ottowa and Lissette the Panamanian doctor. Upon arrival at the preserve, Steph secured us a jeep ride with Rob, our fantastic tour guide who had a six sense for spotting animals
One of the implicit goals of the safari seemed to be to spot the ‘big 5’ (which refers to the 5 hardest animals to hunt on foot, namely the Lion, Buffalo, Rhino, Elephant, and Leopard) so you could tell the other tour participants and then feign sympathy that they hadn’t had similar good viewing luck. Thanks to Rob, we saw all but the leopard and this was the best $150 ever spent. Compared to seeing the animals in their element doing their thing, the captive animal zoo experience I now know is a bit like a bad Elvis impersonator or a mall Santa. The rhino poaching stats that we got were horrifying enough to make me fairly certain that some subset of the big 5 won’t be around much longer unless the US expands its drone program to target poachers (call your congressman!) or all the animals move to Texas and open-carry AK-47s for self-protection (call the NRA!)
For the rest of my time, I stayed in the Durban area, which, due to the large Indian population, has a good amount of Indian- inspired local culinary delights including the gut-busting Bunny Chow – a bread bucket filled with curry for about 60 Rand or $4 (4 pepto for this bad boy). My ‘Durban-nice’ (said like ‘midget-tall’) hotel was Indian-ocean front and had free breakfasts, which in my book made up for any amenity-deficit. The most notable thing about Durban, and by extrapolation South Africa, was the consistent friendly warmth and helpfulness of the South Africans. I have finally found a people that beat out the Canadians for friendliness (sorry Canada. But you still have the Strategic National Maple Syrup Reserve! They’ll never take that away!)
