Visiting South Africa...

Hello! One more travel update - I'm visiting South Africa. Yes, it is super exciting SA! This will be my first ever visit to the Southern Hemisphere.

Here's the story:

In my line of work, I develop web-based geographic/spatial information systems for conservation, environmental protection, etc. Cutting out the boring stuff, I recently developed a global alerting systems for wild fires and it became, well, wildly popular. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)-Meraka Institute in South Africa wanted to employ my alerting system for their purposes and asked us to customize our system for them. Now the system is ready, and they invited me to South Africa and sponsored my trip there! The purpose of the trip is to help them install the system and train the folks out there on it. Plus, there will be a good opportunity to share research knowledge from both sides. So, it should be fantastic.

I got my South African visa yesterday. And yes, the visa process to SA is not as crazy as the Russian visa - I just had to go downtown DC and give my passport to the embassy. My visa was ready in 3 days! What a relief! Any lessons learned, Russia? No? OK, I thought so!)

I will be flying to Johannesburg and from there visiting the CSIR-Meraka campus in Pretoria! I will definitely post the stories and photos from that wonderful country! Stay tuned, as always!