The 2001 Explorers Eclipse Holiday in Zimbabwe - One person's experience, by Martin Mobberley The trip to Johannesburg On Friday June the 15th, my father drove myself and Nick James to Heathrow airport to catch our respective flights to Johannesburg for the start of the June 2001 Explorers eclipse holiday. Although on the same holiday itinerary, we appeared to be on different flights..obviously, there were too many Explorers Travel eclipse chasers for one plane ! We were set to rendezvous with the Moon's shadow on June 21st close to the Zimbabwe/Zambia border, but before this we would see some spectacular sights. This would be my sixth time under the Moon's shadow, with Hawaii (91) and Truro (99) being cloudy but Chile (94), India (95) and Curacao (98) being clear. It would also be my seventh Explorers holiday as, in addition to my four previous Eclipse trips, I had been on the 1998 Darjeeling Leonid (utter nightmare) trip and the highly successful 1999 Sinai Leonid trip. At Heathrow, I headed for Terminal 3 and my Virgin Atlantic flight, while Nick headed for Terminal 1 and his South African Airways flight. As I sat in the departure gate waiting to board my plane, I hoped to recognise friends from previous holidays. Prior to the final details and tickets arriving I had assumed that all those on the basic itinerary would be travelling together. Even when I knew there were at least two separate flights, I hoped to see some familiar faces. However, as the time came to board the plane, I was rather disappointed that I could only spot, in the far distance, one person I easily recognised, namely Ken Medway. Where were the Mason's, Hewitt's and McGee's of the eclipse-chasing world; on previous trips there had always been plenty of jovialities and reminiscing at the departure gate; but not this time. Oh Well, it was a night flight, so I might be able to cat-nap the 11 hour ordeal. The flight passed without incident (except for bad turbulence over the Pyrenees) and, half-a-day later, I was installed in the Holiday Inn, Johannesburg.....tired, dehydrated and with bloodshot eyes (why do long- haul flights always do this to me?), but my luggage had arrived and my 5 inch ETX optical tube assembly had escaped as hand baggage....spot on 5kg in it's foam padding (actually Virgin allow 6kgs as overhead locker baggage). I had been worried about my main case too, which was over 21 kgs in weight (20 kgs being the ticket limit). However, I saw other travellers cases weighing 25 and 26 kgs, producing no more than a "tut-tut" from the Virgin check in, so I need'nt have worried. One distinct improvement in this Explorers holiday over others I have been on was the speed with which room keys were given to travellers when they arrived at their destinations. There is nothing worse than going through immigration, baggage reclaim and the bus journey to the hotel, only to find you are hot, tired and sweaty, gagging for a shower, a drink and a lavatory but you have to form a ludicrous queue at the hotel, to sign a piece of bureaucracy and get your keys. For most of the hotels on this trip, room keys and a form "to fill in when you've freshened up" were available almost immediately on arrival. It's little touches like this that can make travellers travel again with the same company. Certainly this aspect of the trip was far better organised than on the previous Explorers holidays I've been on. After a shower and a rest I wandered down to the bar to seek out others and find out exactly who else was on the other plane that had left Heathrow for Johannesburg at the same time. As I approached the bar I was greeted by a vision....it was Beverley, my Caribbean eclipse Scuba Diving buddy (see TA 1998 March) things were rapidly improving ! Also, Nick had arrived, plus Nick Hewitt, Brian McGee, Beverley's dad (the infamous Konrad Malin-Smith), Mike Frost and others.....had I been on the wrong plane, or what! There was just enough time for a lunchtime chat with people before we were off on a tour of the Gold Reef mine park/museum; this involved descending 220 metres into a mine and praying that the lift cable did'nt snap! Claustrophobia was never far away in the dark, packed, lift and I have almost forgotten Nick Hewitt's fondling of my elbow in the blackness !! A high pitched scream from the other lift shaft made us wonder whether Ann Widdecombe had stepped into their cage ! It was on this descent that I asked the current BAA President why he'd included a picture of Rod Hull without EMU in his recent Presidential address (BAA Jnl, June 2001, p 128, fig 8.) Well, we survived the mine, although the staccato of the hydraulic drill made us think that Prince Dependra of Nepal was dropping in for tea. How on earth so many people had spent their lives working underground in those conditions I will never know....but I should, because my grandfather and all my Dad's brothers, once worked in the colliery in Rugeley, Staffs. On our way back from the mine I stole some pleasant moments with Beverley and plundered her popcorn as we slowly meandered back to the buses. As we all had a very early flight to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe the next morning and we were flagging from our long flight of a few hours before, an early night was on the cards. The two Nick's (Nick H. working in his capacity as tour Medic/Undertaker) myself and another Explorers guide (Karen Wynne) had an evening meal in the hotel and memories of past Explorers successes and nightmares were exchanged. One never-to-be-forgotten incident that evening was the paying of the bill for the evening meal. Even Billy Connolly would have been pushed to match the entertainment provided at the restaurant payment point. A very stressed hotel official was trying to cope with a deluge of western credit cards and sheaves of various currencies, while operating a dodgy payment terminal on which the number "8" did'nt work.......tough, if your bill had the digit "8" in it! In addition, the credit card validation system was taking 30 minutes to connect to the other end !! Onward to Zimbabwe and Victoria Falls On the next day's dawn flight to Victoria Falls in the NW corner of Zimbabwe, Nick James and myself shared an entertaining hour with John Mason, who had, tragically, chosen the only seat on the ageing 727 which became horizontal as the aircraft increased in speed! On arrival at Victoria Falls, the party was, sadly, split up into three hotels, but we occasionally met up again at the main attraction (the Falls themselves) or by determined efforts to contact the other hotels and arrange taxis between them. The intrepid Scuba Diving class of 1998 (myself, Nigel Evans and Beverley) had a happy re-union at Victoria Falls...the first time we had all been assembled since the superb Carribean Eclipse of Feb 26th of that year - without a doubt my best ever eclipse holiday. It was great to have two evening meals with Nigel and his wife, Alex (who works in the BAA office) at the Kingdom hotel. As many readers will know, Nigel takes his eclipse and meteor photography VERY seriously. With a battery of 6 cameras and a psion computer + tripods and cabling, he had restricted Alex's personal baggage allowance to 5kgs for their 2 week holiday!! Even more remarkable, Alex finds this quite amusing............ What can I say about the Victoria Falls.....awesome. I just kept on asking myself, why does'nt the water run out.....where does it all come from. If you slipped and fell in within a few hundred yards of that drop..... don't even think about it! The two day stop at the falls featured a sunset cruise on the Zambezi (plenty of hippo spotting) and a helicopter flight over the falls themselves - spectacular ! From the Kingdom Hotel there was much southern constellation spotting taking place at night and Mars was at the zenith. If only I could have stashed my 0.36m Cassegrain in the Virgin overhead locker!! By day, I set up my 127mm ETX tube + solar filter on a tripod by the hotel pool and queues of people formed to look at the many sunspots on view. One of these people was Doug Biesecker, discoverer of about 100 (?) SOHO comets, who I'd last seen at IWCA II in August '99. He was travelling with a 20cm reflector and CCD and hoped to get some SOHO comet astrometry done during totality. Apparently, Fred Espenak, the renowned NASA eclipse expert had been at the hotel the day before. The route to Harare From Vic. Falls it was on to Bulawayo via the Hwange Game Park (we will gloss over the buses getting lost en route!) and a fascinating close-up encounter with some small, medium and MASSIVE elephants, wildebeeste, giraffes, zebras and various other alien lifeforms. Lunch was provided at the game park and it was another chance to meet those in the other hotels. This was my second encounter with elephants on an Explorers holiday. I'd ridden on top of one with Richard McKim during the Indian eclipse trip. It was at this point in the holiday that I really did start feeling somewhat isolated, as, for the evening in Bulawayo and the 3 subsequent nights in Harare, I frequently found myself in hotels with people that I did'nt know at all. If you travel alone, a significant part of the pleasure is sharing the experience with friends....but if you know virtually no-one in your hotel, a hotel restaurant and bar can suddenley be quite a lonely place, especially when you are 6,000 miles from home. Attempts to rendezvous with others in their hotels failed miserably as, although I could receive other's text messages on my mobile phone, they could not get my replies. In addition, phone calls to the other hotels never seemed to get through, or messages were never passed on. I was rescued from my depression by Ray Emery of Leeds A.S., who found himself in a similar predicament and, later, by Tom Boles and his wife and friends who were briefly in the same hotel as me in Harare. I still feel quite cheated by this part of the holiday as most of my friends were all in the same Harare hotel for the last few days of the trip and so I missed out totally on the post-eclipse celebrations. It turned out that they were trying to contact me too, but their messages never got through to my room phone! All very sad ......... Well, after hundreds of miles of bus travel on totally traffic-free roads (due to the Zimbabwe economic crisis and fuel prices) we arrived in Harare on the Wednesday afternoon (June 20th) and it was time to check all my equipment and re-pack it for transporting to the eclipse site the next morning. After numerous bus journeys and plane flights, at last, I was within a few hours of the eclipse centre-line and all my equipment had survived unscathed....what a relief. Eclipse Day Eclipse day dawned and a convoy of "ELWEIRDA" coaches converged on the Zimbabwe/Zambia border (16d 31'S, 31d 57' E) A staggering 450 eclipse chasers travelled with Explorers on this day! The bus convoy stopped as close as it could to our observing site and we then trecked the quarter mile or so to our positions by the river bed. The site was huge, sandy and rocky and it was soon apparent that carrying out my usual eclipse video interviews would be seriously hampered by the effort of clambering over obstacles to get to people. I searched around for other BAA colleagues, but could'nt immediately spot them. I was also starting to get some irritating twinges from my back.....it was time to stop, rest and set up the ETX. Konrad and Beverley were close by so, at least I was near to someone I knew! We had arrived at the site with well over an hour to first contact...a luxury, so it was time to relax, don my Fred Espenak Eclipse 2001 T-Shirt (which attracted much attention) and drink some water! Shortly after setting up shop, Nick James managed to track me down and pointed out where the others were located. However, I was reluctant to move, now I was in place, especially with my back giving me a few warning signs. I filmed my first interview with Konrad and his unique triple-camera/prune tin filter array and then I trecked off in search of the others while Beverley kindly guarded my Meade ETX. At the furthest outpost of the empire, I located Nigel Evans who was just setting up his six camera system, in a deliberately inaccessible corner, so as to avoid interference with his meticulous schedule. It took some considerable mountaineering to get to him, but an interview was obtained. Further entertaining interviews were then snatched with the one-and-only John Mason, Nick Hewitt and Nick James. Of my five previous eclipses, I had twice before been under the Moon's shadow at the same site as Nick James: in Hawaii and Truro. Both had been clouded out....surely this curse was about to be broken ? After finishing my interviews I then trudged back to my own equipment, still being patiently guarded by Beverley. First contact was now looming and I attached the 5x converter to my camcorder to capture the event. Dead on queue, a notch appeared in the bottom left corner of the Sun; there was not a cloud in the sky. We'd travelled thousands of miles, checked in and out of many hotels, and endured much hassle, but it was now time to savour the reward. Throughout the eclipse we were visited by friendly local school children for whom we had all brought biros, paper and books, which were eagerly snapped up. It has to be said that the Zimbabwe people were some of the most polite and friendly I have met anywhere in the world and it is a tragedy that their country's political problems have made them so starved of fuel and resources. During the eclipse my ETX and solar filter attracted much attention from other eclipse chasers and some of the school teachers, who were keen to take a peek. As with all the eclipses I've been to, as the Moon's disc encroached further onto the disc, you could cut the anticipation with a knife. More noticeable than in any other eclipse I can remember, the temperature quickly dropped from the high twenties to the high teens as second contact approached. With a couple of minutes to go to totality the scene became chilly, eerie and unreal. The two hundred or so first timers (mainly people who'd been disappointed in Cornwall in '99) were obviously spellbound as a deathly hush descended. With under a minute to go, the gods started turning down the big dimmer switch on the sky. If you are human, you get a lump in the throat and a tear in the eye at this point and any casual observing schedule you had planned goes straight out of the window. Apart from videoing the event, I had planned to take photographs through the ETX at 2nd contact, mid-totality and third contact. Because the ETX' photographic and visual foci are not parfocal I had inserted a 31.7mm diameter extension tube in the visual drawtube to equalise the optical path length, enabling me to critically focus for photography , but still flip the mirror to visual mode during totality:- the best of both worlds. However, as second contact became imminent I could'nt bear not to watch the ingress diamond ring with the naked eye......others could photograph it, I wanted to savour it. With whoops, cheers and exclamations from the crowd, the last intense part of the Sun's disc smoothly extinguished at about one 'o clock on the moon's face and the magnificent corona emerged. It was just before 15:15 local time (13:15 GMT). Immediately apparent was a stunning pink prominence at the three 'o clock position on the disc, rising almost 2 arc-minutes above the solar surface. The corona itself was a fairly typical solar maximum corona, lacking the long E-W equatorial streamers of solar minimum eclipses (like India in '95); this corona was vaguely symmetrical, but not perfectly circular. It had stubby 'wing' like features to me which I find hard to describe. Oh, for the ability to sketch fine details like Richard McKim - because no photograph could do this justice. Superimposed on the corona were a whole series of stunning radial spikes.....awesome. The overall impression to me was like a giant eye staring down from the sky, with the moon the pupil, and the corona the iris. White towels had been placed on the ground for shadow band detection, but once again I was too preoccupied with the Corona too look. Shadow bands were seen by Nick James and others at 3rd contact. Then there were the planets and stars: Jupiter was most obvious, but Saturn was also visible, along with Sirius, Procyon, Betelgeuse, Rigel and Capella. I was positioned not far from Mr Greg Smye-Rumsby who was experiencing his first ever total solar eclipse...and we all knew about it....."Ohhhhhh My God, I can't stand it. Look at that! Bllloooodddy Hell. Oh My Lord, Oh My God, that is staggering. I'm blessed to be alive. My Lord, that is fantastic. My heart is going like the clappers. That is like the slowest sex you can imagine......Hubba, Hubba, Hubba...." Well, eclipses affect different people in different ways!!!! Hands shaking, I switched from binoculars to the ETX and flipped the mirror to visual mode. I stared through the 26mm plossl (73x mag) at the eclipsed sun. No words can describe what I saw. I've never used a powerful telescope at an eclipse before, but I'll never go without one again. Imagine the most exquisite photograph of an eclipse you will ever see, with all the prominence and corona detail perfectly exposed.....and then make it a hundred times better. I wish I could have captured that view somehow, but no film can reproduce what I saw. At mid-totality I switched to photographic mode and took a few snaps. Analysis of my previous eclipse efforts had convinced me that with long focal lengths (the ETX is 1900mm) on an average tripod, shutter vibration will wreck the results unless the exposures are 1/125th or less. So this time I was using faster film (400 ASA Fuji Superia) to get the prominence exposures down. With longer exposures, shutter vibration can cause shaking of as much as 2 arc-minutes ! The policy payed off; my 1/125th exposures were slightly unsharp; the 1/250th ones, much sharper and the 1/500th exposures razor sharp. There was enough light to have risked 1/1000th and still captured the prominences. Plus, the 400 ASA film was not too grainy to give a superb result. Switching back to visual mode I watched the closing stages of totality through the ETX as the bottom left hand edge of the Moon's disc glowed pink and then an exquisite mix of pink and white as the chromosphere emerged. Switching back to naked eye I then savoured the exit diamond ring/third contact to whoops and cheers from the crowd. The sky rapidly lightened and, apart from the eerie illumination, the world had returned to normal. Predictably, the 3 minutes 15 seconds had seemed like a minute; these things are always just too damn short!! As the Moon's shadow passed away, an eagerly anticipated future event slipped into the past and thoughts turned to Australia and beyond. Rumour has it that Brian McGee is thinking about Russian Ice-Breakers for the Nov 2003 Antarctic eclipse! The onboard movie might be "Titanic" perhaps? How many planets with sentient beings are there in the Universe and how many have a Sun and a Moon that are the same apparent size in the sky and whose relative motions allow spectacular eclipses to take place. I'd like to bet this might be the only place. In which case, how lucky we eclipse-chasers are. The Holiday winds down With the eclipse over we made a steady progress back to our buses and from there to our hotels. I've already mentioned that the final days of the holiday were ones where I felt rather cut-off. I missed out on the post-eclipse celebrations, which is something I deeply regret, and all because of phone and hotel communication problems. Fortunately, Tom Boles, Richard Parks (a superb Explorers tour guide) and a few others came to my rescue and much time was spent discussing the virtues of the Paramount GT-1100s mounting with Tom. But I really would have liked to have been in the Harare Jameson and not the Oasis for the final two nights, as it transpired that most people had rendezvoused there. On the Saturday afternoon my allocated coach picked me up from the Harare Oasis for the trip to the airport and my flight to Johannesburg and thence to Heathrow. Would I be with people I knew this time? As I waited to check my baggage through to Johannesburg I was relieved to see first Nick Hewitt and then Konrad and Beverley turn up....at last some friendly faces to have a laugh with !! In the dying hours of the holiday things were looking up. After an entertaining hour long flight in the same 727 that had taken us to Victoria Falls, we landed in South Africa. At Joburg airport I wished everyone well (most were on the SAA flight to Heathrow, I was on Virgin) and I got a big hug from Beverley (which would set anyone up for an 11 hour flight). After a fleeting glimpse of John Mason, who flew past my field of vision, arms flapping, like John Cleese on steroids, I checked my baggage through to Heathrow and then spent an entertaining couple of hours with Ray Emery who was also returning to Heathrow on Virgin Atlantic. After 11 hours, the Virgin flight arrived at Heathrow a full hour before the SAA one and I was able to reclaim my baggage at Terminal 3 and get round to Terminal 1 where my Dad was waiting for the other flight and Nick James to emerge. Finally, the SAA flight landed and familiar faces started to emerge from baggage reclaim. Another big hug from Beverley (I could get addicted to these!) and finally John Mason, Nick Hewitt and, last of all, Nick James, emerged. It was bloody good to be back in civilisation, but for most it would be back to work on Monday....UGH! So, all in all, a highly successful trip and a masterpiece of logistical operation by Brian McGee and Explorers. To get 450 eclipse chasers to the Zimbabwe/Zambia border in safety and in a troubled third world country, with a crippling fuel crisis is an achievement that cannot be underestimated. Meticulous planning is the hallmark of Explorers and it enabled me to see my fourth clear eclipse. Maybe next time I will end up in a hotel with all my friends, or at least always with the people on the same itinerary. Not easy with the logistics involved, but crack that problem and these holidays would be perfect. I found that this was a view shared by the majority of lone travellers on the trip. Martin Mobberley