Daily Speculations The Web Site of Victor Niederhoffer & Laurel Kenner Dedicated to the scientific method, free markets, deflating ballyhoo, creating value, and laughter;  a forum for us to use our meager abilities to make the world of specinvestments a better place.

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A Note from Laurel

2002 was a travel year for me.

I saw 17,000-year-old cave paintings in the limestone caverns of France and Spain. I saw a tiny, exquisitely carved 15,000-year-old head of a woman near Bergerac. I saw the rock overhangs where Neanderthals once found shelter.

I saw Neolithic temples high on the Maltese sea cliffs. I dined in an 18^th-century palazzo. I saw the Roman mosaics of Carthage.

I saw children playing chess on the roadsides of Tanzania and Soweto.

I sailed to Ithaca, home of great Odysseus, and swam in the sea. I heard about the ancient shipping routes in the Mediterranean and Black Sea. I ran around the Olympic stadium in Athens, and saw the temple at Delphi.

I saw Mount Aetna erupting with 1,000-foot flames that sent a plume of smoke across the Sicilian sky. I saw the boiling pools at Yellowstone. I saw limestone hoodoos created by centuries of shifting seas and deserts, tectonic moves and rivers in Utah’s Bryce Canyon and Africa’s Olduvai Gorge.

I saw the giraffes and the gazelles as they moved to their own tempi in Botswana. I fell asleep in Tanzania to the chant of the ground hornbill. I saw the rhinoceros trotting. I saw the bee-eater feeding its young. I saw the bat-eared fox peer out of its hole. I saw the huge Secretary bird and the Corey bustard walking in the fields. I saw hordes of pink flamingoes standing in lakes by the shore.

I saw cheetahs play in the grass in late afternoon, and I watched them patiently stalk tsesebes. I saw impalas guarding their harems. I felt my first true flight instinct when a bull elephant roared at me. I heard the song of the spotted owl. I saw wild dogs on the hunt. I saw miles-long herds of wildebeests migrating in the Serengeti with their steadfast companions, the zebras and the gazelles. I saw warthogs trot down a town street.

I heard a paleontologist’s “Aha!” as he snapped a photograph of baboons standing as easily as they climb and run on all fours. I lost my lunch to a kite that dived down from the sky as I sat cross-legged by a lake in a 16,000-square-meter caldera of a Tanzanian volcano.

I saw Ethiopian farmers plowing their non-irrigated state-owned fields with oxen. I saw bent women carrying branches of eucalyptus wood to sell at the market for $1.25 a back-load. I saw the Maasai jump high into the air.

I watched the South African landscape from my cabin in a mahogany-paneled train, and wished it would never, never end.

I took home a Maasai beaded belt, used, and an ebony cane. I left Africa without catching malaria, yellow fever or sleeping sickness. I attended a London performance of the Barber of Seville.

In doing these things, I lived my dreams and sensed the dreams of others. Human beings look different to me now. I am not as worried about things, having witnessed the evidence of a human history lasting thousands of years.