On this visit to Europe, I felt such a game park tourist. I was spending a fortune every day. The game to be seen is the European citizen in its own habitat, guarded by all kind of rangers, officials of every denomination you can imagine. It starts in the airport buildings, where you see signpost telling the different species where they can eat, drink, relieve themselves, pray, clean their babies, smoke, buy wireless internet time, anything you can imagine, except what we in Africa regard as the most important matter to maintain the park: mating. There are no signposts indicating where one can mate. From this, one could infer that mating can just be done everywhere, like in African game parks, but this is not the case: I did not see any mating anywhere. Nevertheless, like in African game parks the guardians here do worry about the pace of procreation, and have put policies in place to fight what is called the "ageing" of the population of the European Game Park.
Just like the animals in our African game parks, all individual European citizens are electronically tagged and traceable. In Europe, the tracking is done by data on where the game uses a cash machine, where it makes a mobile phone call and where it uses an internet connection. In addition, the number plates of the game's vehicles are regularly photographed from all road sides. Finally, nowadays it can be stopped at police roadblocks at every road or street and examined from top to bottom.
There is one significant difference with Africa: in Europe, the park guardians, the government officials, do not feed on the tourist, as in Africa, but on their own game! I do not mean to say they shoot the old and lame for consumption (though they easily could). They milk it. To that effect they have an elaborate administration of the animals they feed on. Every single one of them is administered with a host of different identifying codes and numbers in a neatly organized and linked set of computers. As a visitor from Africa, it requires some alertness not to be sucked in this European Electronic File Cabinet and stay what you are: a visitor, not item nr. somuch of some species in the Game Park Europe. At Brussels Airport, for instance, one can buy an hour of wireless broadband internet, but then the Belgium government needs your name and passport number. Since you buy online, what you naturally do in order to stay out of the files is find somebody else's name and passport number to buy the air time. However, your login for that hour can not be send through email but only through PROXIMUS SMS, and PROXIMUS mobile phone company is obliged to a real physical passport check before giving out a SIM card. Hence: using the internet though a personal commercial access gate is unsafe. The tourist in Europe may thus be warned that the trip is certainly not without danger. We strongly advise not to do any things that require giving any local government or EU official any code or number that could possibly allow them to identify you in later circumstances. Be sure that they will regularly keep trying to get you in their files.
The bus from Lyon St. Exupry Airport to to Grenoble costs you 20. You sit together with the Europeans, hence we recommend you to follow the latest game park procedures along with all other passengers: from front to rear, they are clicked in seat belts before the bus starts moving. This moving consists of an absolutely boring 95 km/hrs due to a very expensive EU approved speed limiter, and this remains so all along its course over the highway to Grenoble. Since in a bus you sit high above the road, the sensation is that you do not make any progress at all to the destination. Passengers remain fastened until the bus has stopped. This is an absolutely nuts experience. As an African, you have not really seen Europe if you did not go through this unbelievable display of complete debility at least once! The second half of my trip, to the Alpe d'Huez, is of the same length, with an identical bus: even the fabric of the chairs, the paint and all the letters at the inside and outside are the same. But it costs only 4. Lyon-Grenoble is privatized, Grenoble-Alpe d'Huez is not. Both bus lines are monopolies of course. Who would have made the "privatization" deal with whom?
Not an interesting detail for research by me as a tourist. I jumped off the bus and marched to my cabin and car (for their origins click cabin and car) through the landscape known to readers of predecessor pages of the "greetings" (in Dutch): the "Pannerdensche Kop", "Tigre" (tiger Laila was still alive and kicking) and its magnificent upward view into three valleys, leading to La Meije, Alpe d' Huez, Col du Glandon, and Col de la Croix de Fer. This (picture below) is how I found my cabin and car where I had left them one year earlier, at the compound of farmer Dominique:
In the cold winter, Dominique had given up regularly loading the three batteries by running the car engine. He even forgot he had the keys, but opened some drawers in which I found them. That was fortunate, because al spares were locked in cabin and car. All batteries were down. The starting battery gave no voltage at all, The two light batteries (resp. 60 and 240 Ahrs) were on 3 Volts. Total or near total loss of three batteries? To find out I started a charge from the net and lit a cigar given to me in Uganda by a military logistics manager working on Baghdad Airport for the western troops :
