Masai Mara

I am back in France and heading back to the US tomorrow. Back to the really real world tomorrow – back to class and three job interviews next week alone, plus I need to finish that pesky master’s thesis thing. I didn’t do too much today but sleep off the flight and go to lunch in Versailles on Matt’s motorcycle. Blasting around the outskirts of Paris on the back of a motorcycle should be really badass, but in late January, it is mostly just cold.

To recap what you missed, the last day in Rwanda was taken up by a visit to the genocide museum and souvenir shopping. I think the former put somewhat of a damper on the latter. The genocide museum commemorates the horrors of the Hutu massacres of the Tutsis in 1994. It is graphic and unnerving. There are pictures of churches filled with hundreds of bodies, all killed with machetes or bludgeoned to death. The survivor pictures aren’t much better; children with huge gaping head wounds were their skulls had stopped the machete blow. It was a tough morning.

The next day we took the early morning flight from Kigali back to Nairobi. The ground staff at Jomo Kenyetta airport managed to lose my bag yet again – 0 for 2 now – but a few minutes of righteous squawking managed to get someone to get on the walkie-talkie to locate one well-worn red backpack. It had been loaded on the flight to Kilimanjaro.

We dropped off our big suitcase at the safari office downtown, picked up our vouchers and headed out to the Mpata Safari camp in the Masai Mara. Instead of the 6-8 hour bus journey, we decided to fly out. We took a tiny little plane with four other passengers. Similar to the system to the Belize islands and most city buses, you tell them where you want to stop and they drop you off. The weather turned as we flew and a massive thunderstorm turned the sky black. It was an incredible contrast to the big green grass and the red clay dirt landing strip. Gazelles, zebras, and giraffes were everywhere, munching on the grass at the sides of the runway and causing the pilot to hit the horn (I had no idea planes had horns) to clear the runway before landing. The terminal was a wall-less thatched hut in the middle of an empty field.

We were met by the guest liaison in a safari truck. We did a little tooling around to look at the nearby animals before heading to the lodge, but not much as the storm was bearing down. We were about 3 km into the 15 km drive when the sky opened up. After a few minutes, *%$@ four wheel drive, you needed an ark. The driver was really moving too. On the way to the lodge, there was an old 1930s concrete bridge that floods over in heavy rain. We needed to get across the bridge before the water got too high. We slid and fishtailed the whole way, but got there. There rushing water was only a foot or so deep and we made it across. Pause for a quick high five and up the escarpment to the lodge.

The Mpata safari lodge was built in the early 1990s by a Japanese architect. All the cabins are made of interlocking circles (like cross sections of snail shells) with odd shaped skylights. I believe that Beetlejuice was called in as a consultant on the furniture. And the view is unreal. We can see for miles and miles over the valley below. The suite we are staying in has a jacuzzi out back too, so you can soak in the hot water after a long day of safari and watch the sun go down over the vast expanse of green below before going to eat you five course French meal for dinner. My life is very hard, as you can see.

One of the most intriguing things about the camp is that it is almost completely Japanese. It is owned and operated by a Japanese company, and most of the other people here are on package tours from Tokyo. We can’t talk to anyone, but on the bright side it takes a little of the Colonel Mustard in the Drawing Room with the Lead Pipe edge of the isolated safari lodge life.

It poured all night.

Next morning we got up at 5:30 am to go on our morning game drive. We loaded up before dawn and headed down the mountain. When we arrived at the bridge we noticed something rather interesting. The concrete bridge was no longer there, replaced by a rushing torrent of water. Safari vans piled up and Japanese tourists took pictures. The drivers thought the fact that we were marooned on top of a Kenyan escarpment with now way to get out or for supplies to get in was quite possibly the funniest thing that had ever happened to anyone. Especially the whiteys that were pitching a fit about making it to the airstrip. No safari drive that morning. I have instead included a picture of our furniture.

By afternoon the waters had receded enough for us to take an alternate route to the park. The wildlife viewing was incredible. We saw six cheetahs, including three lazy cubs, and two males running at full speed trying to take down a baby topi. (Topis are like smaller, dumber versions of wildebeests, about on the same size and intelligence of a standard household washer-dryer.) Momma Topi was having none of it though and cut the cheetahs off. They can only run at top speed for a very short amount of time though, and the topis were able to get away. The two cheetahs then strutted around for a while like a couple of gang-bangers at prep school, then took a nap in the grass.

We saw some other neat stuff too. A bunch of lions just waking up from their morning snooze and some really hungry elephants. We then went back to the lodge to relax in the jacuzzi and eat steak au poivre.

Over the next three days, we saw a bunch of other animals. Highlights included below:

Lions, in bunches. We saw different groups every day. They mostly travel in large packs of females, sometimes with one or so males present, but not always. And they are not receptive the big-maned brothers rolling in on their territory. One group of six females we saw was much displeased by the prospect. Similar to my girlfriends and I in a crowded downtown Boston bar on a weekend, their growls can loosely be translated as “I KNOW you are not trying that tired ass line on my girl here…”

We actually had somewhat of a close call with a lion too. We were down by the Tanzanian border – going to take our pictures with the border marker. As we rolled to a stop, the guide spotted a long fury tail slip into the bush next to the concrete marker. Lion. Older lone male – which are distinguished by the fact that they can’t run well anymore and are known to take out easy targets – like people. There are numerous stories about these old guys attacking railroad camps during colonial times – munching on the help. The guide was a little unnerved and took us to another marker in the middle of a huge open field. No bushes there to conceal predators.

Hyenas – which I had never seen before – are quite possible the vilest creatures to walk the earth that do not hold an elected office. They just slink around looking like they just ate a baby something. The Lion King portrayal was spot on.

At risk of boring you, I will stop there.

At risk of boring you, I will furnish an incomplete list of other things that we saw: black rhino, cerval cat, giraffes, zebras, Thompson’s gazelles, topis, wildebeest, hartebeest, baboon, African buffalo, waterbok, vulture, golden crested crane (among another billion species of birds that went by too fast to identify), hippos, crocodiles, and I know I am forgetting a bunch of stuff. There are so many things on the Mara that you couldn’t always tell where to look.

Well, that will be all for a while now – back to school. I will see if I can arrange something interesting for spring break in March.

Gorilla Tracks

So my two weeks in Kampala, Uganda working on my master’s thesis went smoothly. I had a few amazing discoveries in research, such as the fact the “farm gate price for coffee” refers not to the price a farmer receives at the village level for a kilo of coffee, but rather the price of a packet of imported Nescafe instant crystals, but that’s fine. There were the brief minutes where I heard my thesis crash and burn, but like a phoenix I rise from the ashes to hypothesize another day. In addition, I knocked out a couple other papers for classes due during the break, both written in Africa, by me an America, one about Latin America and another, co-authored with two Europeans, about the Middle East. High five globalization.

So we left at 2 am on Wednesday morning I left Kampala for Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. The bus trip was uneventful. As usual I spent the time admiring the scenery and speculating as to exactly what type of methamphetamines the driver was on. We arrived at the border at 9 am, and did the usual song and dance with customs. As I was boarding the bus again, however, the customs guy asked me to open my suitcase. He was looking for plastic bags. They were illegal in Rwanda. My heart soared. Having traveled in over 20 African countries to this point, my mind wandered back to the piles of plastic bags that litter the roadsides and villages across the continent. Disgusting. Marring the scenery. Harming the environment. I swelled with pride as I thought of the new generation of Africans, fostering development while still holding tightly to Mother Nature’s hand. Radiating this inner glow, I fished out the thin black plastic bag that until moments before had held my laundry. I held it high. I asked the inspector, beaming with hope, into which receptacle I should throw the offending hydrocarbon derivative.

He told me to toss it on the ground.

I sighed, tossed the bag on the ground, and got back on the bus. Onward to Kigali and Ruhengeri. We were only in Kigali for about two hours. Long enough to pick up our gorilla permits and accidentally try to check in to the Hotel des Milles Collines (from the movie Hotel Rwanda and the real-life genocide).

Ruhengeri is the town used as the base camp for visiting the mountain gorillas. You hike about 1 1/2 hours up - into the mountains as it were - and then spend an hour hanging out with a family of gorillas, then head back down. This was the single most incredible experience of any of the travel things that I have ever done. You get SO close. The gorillas aren't afraid at all. And the troupe we visited had 3 little baby gorillas. I could bore you to tears with every single second of the experience, but you really owe it to yourself to go yourself someday. I will stick to the highlights and let you check out the pictures. (Incidentally, I literally have 100s more, so let me know if you want to wallpaper your new bathroom or something...)

(1) We were walking down a path from one part of the gorilla group to the other. Suddenly the guide tells us to stop, and stand to the side. I turn back to see what happened. The others in the group stepped to the side and a 300 pound mountain gorilla with a baby on her back went walking by. She brushed against the legs of the person next to me. I had been the first on the lines and a little way down a rocky path. I stepped back as much as I could, but not quite far enough. She stepped on my toes walking by. Just the tips and not enough to hurt, but how many people do you know have had their toes stepped on by a wild mountain gorilla?

(2) The troupe had 9 members, 1 adult male silverback, five "wives" and three babies. The adult male is HUGE. We got within five feet of him while he was eating. They are so much like us. While he was sitting there, lounging in a tree eating bamboo, we had the same posture and expression as a number of adult male humans I have known in my life have while watching football. (You know who you are.) When we are that close the gorilla, you can't make any sudden movements. While is all well and good until he figures out there is no more bamboo within arms reach and decides to pull down a tree. You ever try to move slowly out the way of a falling tree? Twice I was smacked with branches. Damned inconsiderate to the guests.

(3) There was one female who was HUGELY pregnant. She was irritable and ate all the time. And there are people that doubt evolution is real.

(4) There was another female with a baby. The kid was about the human equivalent of the terrible twos. He was all over the place. He wanted to run in the trees. Then climb on dad. Then climb the bamboo. Then see what the deal with these weird pink hairless things with the cameras. At one point he got a little too close to the guide. The female walked up and slapped the guide on the shoulder, encouraging him to perhaps move his troupe of weird pink hairless gorillas away from the baby. Then the baby wanted to get a better view of use so he climbed in the tree on top of us and started to jump up and down. He hadn't quite gotten the hang of the working of all his limbs yet, so he ended up hanging by one arm. Mom grabbed him down, said something in gorilla that mothers all over the world have been yelling at their kids for millennia, and made him sit with her under the tree. He sulked.

I could really go one forever. I have added more pictures than usual this time because they really offer much more of an accurate picture of the experience. Absolutely incredible.

After the gorillas, we caught a minibus to the resort town of Gisenyi on Lake Kivu. Gisenyi is a cute little town right on the border with the DRC city of Goma. Most of the cars and people here are Congolese. (Editor’s note: Goma used to be a provincial backwater in the middle of war-torn eastern Congo. Then in 2002, the nearby volcano erupted, and Goma became the provincial backwater in the middle of war-torn eastern Congo half covered in lava.) We stayed at Hotel Kivu Sun, which is the nicest hotel in town, even if it is the former headquarters of the genocide government. You can't really swim in Lake Kivu. The guidebook says "it is very dangerous to swim, as volcanic gases are released from the lake bed and, in the absence of wind, tend to collect on the surface of the lake. Quite a few people have been asphyxiated." I took a pass on the experience. We only spent a day there, before coming back here to Kigali. We will take a look around town tomorrow, then fly on to Kenya on Sunday.

Paris and the Luggage

So for New Year's I decided to do something a little different, a little change for me, nothing drastic, but just give it a little go and see where it takes me. I went on vacation to the developed world. Paris specifically.

The four days were nice. Matt and I walked around Paris, ate crepes, talked French, etc. We only went to one museum because the lines were around the block because of the holidays. We went to the new museum of developing world art, which is Chirac's answer to the British Museum. The verdict: British museum is much bigger and has a much better collection of stuff, which Chirac's has really neat architecture, and in both cases, the countries from which the artifacts were taken would probably like them back. And the kids all say that colonialism is dead.

The other thing of note we did was New Year's. We went to this restaurant whose name translates to "In the Dark?" It is a restaurant run by blind people so you can see what it is like for one meal. The dining room is completely black. Not a pinprick of light anywhere. You are led to your seats conga-line style - being dropped off by your blind waitress as you go. There are no menus, you get what you are served. You fill your wine glass by sticking your finger in it and pouring very very carefully. You locate your plate by touch, and figure out which section is duck and which is butternut squash by sticking your fingers in it. (In a weird way, it was like the ultimate foodie test - it's amazing how much we rely on our vision to identify what we are eating.) After dinner, we went back to our hotel to watch the Eiffel Tower to light up the new year. Instead of the little TV provided in our hotel room, we snuck out on to the fire escape, went up to the top, then climbed this rickety little metal ladder to the roof. We had a beautiful view of the tower. I took the above picture of the skyline in the other direction. It was weird and bizarre being the only ones up there and with the light refelcting off the clouds.

Then I took a two hour nap and headed off to the airport to go to Kenya. My eventual destination was Kampala again, but it was cheaper to fly to Nairobi and then grab an overnight bus from Nairobi to Kampala. After all, once you have been on a plane for 9 hours, what's 12 more in a bus?

The only little snaffoo was that though I arrived safe and sound , the Luggage did not. So I faced the choice of being in one of the most dangerous cities in East Africa, at midnight, alone with no hotel and no luggage, or to get on an overnight bus departing from one of the nasty sections of the city, alone, with only my laptop bag. I didn't even have any toothpaste because the rat bastards at Charles de Gaulle confiscated it because it was 4 oz and therefore MUST be plastic explosives in disguise. Well, off I go. KLM assured me that this happened all the time and that Luggage would be along to K ampala on the next flight. (This happens all the time? Management should have a quick review of what to tell and not to tell the paying public...) So off I went. The bus trip went as smoothly as any 12 bus trip through a developing world backwater. I arrived and checked into the hotel. No Luggage. Next day, no Luggage. KLM has no clue what continent the bag might be on and can I please come back tomorrow? So I decided that the only sensible thing to do would be to camp out at the office until they found my bag. It took 30 minutes before they were calling baggage claim offices around the world to get the crazy white lady OUT of there. They found the bag. They would have it at the hotel by end of business.

Around 3:30 they called. Good news, Luggage had arrived in Kampala. Bad new, it had promptly been confiscated by customs and I had to go down to the airport (which is in another city 30 miles away) and get it out of hock. The round trip took three hours and I managed not to pay any bribes. Most of the time at the airport was taken up with a Kalfka-eque process of obtaining a security badge, which I didn't even need. There was no one manning the security check. But - in true African style - people still formed a somewhat disorderly mob to put their belongings down and pass through the metal detectors, even though there was no one there to look at what was in the bags or stop us if we set it off. I did the same.

So Luggage and I are back together again in Kampala. I will hopefully get enough accomplished on my second year thesis in the next two weeks to do some interesting stuff before I leave East Africa.

Happy New Year.

Black and White Stripes

So there are times when even if things don’t work out as planned, the ride is fun anyway. I spent the first week of December in Johannesburg, South Africa, looking at options and interviewing and whatnot. It turns out that I didn’t get the job that I had flown down there to try for (with McKinsey and Company), but I had a couple other things turn up and may end up there eventually anyway.

I flew in on Sunday afternoon last week. Jo’burg is nothing like what I expected. I thought that I had been in large developed African cities before, Dar es-Salaam, Dakar, etc. but nothing prepared me for this. Johannesburg is a modern city, on par with ones in parts of Asia, Latin America, parts of Eastern Europe, and maybe even the non-coastal US. There is huge amounts of infrastructure, real LA style freeways with triple level overpasses and cloverleaf junctions. There are glittering malls with every designer store imaginable. There are also the townships, which, though extremely poor in parts, for the most part have electricity, running water, sewer systems, paved roads, malls of their own.

I was a little worried when I got to Jo’burg because South African ex-pats that I have met living in Cambridge usually describe it like LA during the crack wars. The city in fact, is laid out very much like LA – spread out over long distances and impossible to navigate without a car. It is the car-jacking capital of the world. At night, you don’t stop for red lights unless it is a busy intersection. At any point during the day, there are certain areas that are no-go districts if you are the wrong color and income bracket. Despite all my fearlessness, I avoided them too. No sense being stupid about things.

So Sunday night, this guy Chris, who graduated from my program last year and now lives in Jo’burg, picked me up at the hotel. We went for a drink in one of the posh areas, then he took me on a freeway drive-by tour of the CBD or Central Business District. The CBD is no man’s land at night. The district is made up of a large number of tall buildings, some ranging up to 50 or more stories. During the 1980s though, when cities all over the world were experiencing capital flight, and especially in the early 1990s when South Africans of a certain mindset, or just economically skittish, took off for Australia, the CBD collapsed. Crime went through the roof, all of the business left, and most people wrote it off. Today, there is a big push for urban renewal in certain sections, but the CBD is left largely abandoned. The huge hotels and office buildings are inhabited mostly by squatters. Chris and I drove by on the highway at night during a huge electrical storm. There was no rain, but lightening bounced off the clouds behind up. The lights illuminated this city of dark, or only minimally lit buildings. It could have been some post-apocalyptic scene out of Mad Max.

The next day, I hung around the hotel, trying to get some work done and rent a car. I wasn’t particularly successful in either endeavor. Automatics in South Africa are just about impossible to find, and there is no way in hell that I would be able to drive a stick shift on the wrong side – shifting with my left hand. I wouldn’t even begin to know how to sort out all those pedals. That evening, I went with Chris and friends to this posh part of town for dinner. The waiter at the restaurant was great. It was like Chelsea meets game warden. He was unshaven, in a flannel shirt with a greasy pony-tail, but described the antelope special with truffles and red wine reduction like the trendiest West Side hotspot. And with crazy accent they are sporting down there. Dinner was fantastic.

Tuesday I went on a town of the Soweto township. The first thing that I learned is the Soweto is not an Africa word, it is an abbreviation for SOuth WEst TOwnship. The second thing I learned is that certain parts of it are really nice, paved roads, sewers, running water, well-nicer than anything I have seen even in some of the better neighborhoods of West Africa. And it is 100% black Africa. I asked the guide if that could really be true, I mean even Harlem in the 1920s had some mixing. Nope. No white people live here. Maybe maybe one or two in mixed marriages, but even that was unlikely. The tour guide who had Bob Marley dreds and well displayed apartheid chip on his shoulder told me it was because white people wouldn’t live here. Later, someone else told me it was because real estate prices collapsed during the white flight of the 1990s, and most people can afford to live among their own kind (which is incredible nuanced –people of English decent and Boers and Indians and blacks and all the colors in between – everyone has their own neighborhood.) In any case.

There were some very poor parts of Soweto – about as poor as you would see in Burkina. It somehow seemed much stranger in a country where you can go to the Jimmy Choos store in the same city.

The best part of the whole tour was driving by the power plant. What brilliance!

One of the things that really sort of turned me off the whole township thing was the guide. He was all about telling us how he was going to show us that black South Africans during the 1980s were not terrorists and really freedom fighters. I tried to explain that at least in the part of the United States where I grew up, Nelson Mandela was a hero, even before he got out of jail, and that my issues were generally with white South Africans. I remember having cupcakes and watching him walk out of jail in Ms. Mosley’s fifth grade class. He was having none of that – somewhere deep inside I must have thought ANC a terrorist organization. Oh well. The whole country is still trying to shake off this massive apartheid hangover, can’t fault the little snags along the way.

The next day I went on safari! Well, it wasn’t really a safari. The roads in the park were all paved and you could drive around without a guide in your little Clio with your buddies and a cooler of beer. It was more like a 100 acre zoo pen where things could eat each other. The most interesting part of the trip was the company. I had spent the previous evening thinking about race relations in South Africa, whether I could really live in a country like that, etc. I get on the safari van the next morning and meet the 4 African American Southern Baptist preachers and their wives that I will be spending the day with. It was a very quick and humbling reminder that I really don’t understand race and regional relations all that much in my own country – so who am I to judge?

The trip was fun. I got to see my first zebras. (Only gorillas and polar bears left and I will have checked off everything in a box of animal crackers!) I saw my first African rhinos. I had the best elephant experience I have had yet. There was a big group with three little babies. It was balls hot so the whole herd was playing in the watering hole. They looked just like big kids. They would stand and sway their trunk back and forth, then just haul up and fall over like a tree, kicking and splashing and spraying each other. The little ones were really having the best idea. They looked just like they do in the cartoons. Running in and out and splashing around. It was great. The driver was happy because we were happy. (Things had been a little tense for a while because the Baptists had apparently put in some advanced prayer for a lion and the driver wasn’t delivering.) In order to keep us happy, he kept backing the van closer and closer to the edge of the water. Then one momma elephant caught wind that maybe we weren’t a big white shiny metal elephant. And she charged. The driver threw the van into gear and hit the gas. Fortunately Toyota can still outrun mother nature in a dead 100 meters. It was especially tense for me, who was sitting along in the back seat watching the elephants waves its ears and chase us.

For a late lunch on the way home we stopped at the Johannesburg version of Las Vegas. Slot machines are depressing in the first place, but way more so when the people are funneling a measurable portion of their yearly income into them. There was also this horribly gaudy hotel that was supposed to be African safari meets Italian renaissance. In place of gargoyles, picture 15 foot high stone sculpted antelopes leaping from the turrets. Horror show, and not in the edgy cool Clockwork Orange sense.

The next two days were occupied by interviews and me desperately trying to get some school work done before I returned home. I didn’t get the job at McKinsey. It might have had something to do with my lack of enthusiasm for mining, which is a huge chunk of their income. “Why yes sir! Even as a little girl I dreamt of being part of the exploitative mineral extraction business in Africa!” Probably the best for everyone involved.

The last day that I was there Chris and I decided to go on a little adventure to see the other half of South Africa. We went to the Voortrekker monument. This was built in the late Art Deco (translation : fascist) style and could best be described as what Robert Moses would have built if he had been a raging racist. The monument commemorates the trek of the early settlers (chosen people) through hostile Zulu territory to the land that is now Johannesburg. It is big and stone with incredible beautiful and intricate bas relief carvings. The whole thing had the air of doing the stations of the cross before Easter, and the place does had an almost religious significance to the Boor population. The problem is that the original carvers did not have a particularly flattering opinion of either the actions nor physical traits of the Zulu actors in this little drama. So now the new government doesn’t know what to do. It is tough to enough tourism to something that is so unabashed in its message, but at the same time, if you try to flatten or even change it, 15 percent of the population is going to go absolutely apeshit. So it just sits there.

Then I headed back to collect my things, and began a 28 hour epic trek of my own back to Boston. It was a little tense when a mechanical failure left us stranded on a Dakar runway for 3 hours (time was ticking down and I had finals to take…) but it was all good and I made it home. I am heading back to Africa on January 1st to spend a couple weeks doing research for my second year policy paper. It probably won’t be all that exciting. (And then, on Tuesday, I sat for four hours trying to meet with THIS mid-level bureaucrat… and on Wednesday, I sat for only two hours before I met THAT midlevel World Bank official.) But I will try to get into at least a little bit of trouble so that I have something to send…

Drunk Flying and Subsequent Central American Adventures

Just want to start this post with a shout-out to all the long time readers that I met for the first time at Katie’s wedding. It was great to meet you. I hope you all had a good time.

I returned safely from East Africa and in time to make the wedding, no coups or other disaster this time… The wedding was great. I had a pastel dress, pink nails and a French twist. Most of you wouldn’t even have recognized me. After the wedding, I stuck around long just long enough to have a couple Bloody Marys and then headed south to meet my roommate in Belize. The goal was to spend a couple days diving and poking around Mayan ruins before heading over to Indiana to don my red dress and drinking shoes for A&E’s wedding…

I arrived in Belize City after an unnecessarily arduous flight with a four-hour layover in Dallas. (Security in JFK is off the hook. In Dubai coming back from Dar es Salaam, I went through with a liter and a half bottle of water and an entire toiletries kit. In New York they call the bomb squad for a tube of toothpaste and half finished Snapple.) And it is a good thing that I had four hours in Dallas. It took me two and a half hours and two terminals to find a salad that didn’t have some kind of deep fried animal product on top of it. (Airports are up there with shady horse farms and India in the rankings of places that I don’t eat meat.) I eventually convinced the guy at the Asian food stand to give me just carrots, broccoli and fried noodle, but not before he tried to add fried pork, chicken, beef, etc…

Upon arrival in Belize City, I immediately bought a ticket to the island of Caye Chaulker, a backpacker hangout and diving mecca off the coast. I had an hour to kill officially, of course I actually had more because the plane was late, so I headed over to the airport bar. There I joined not one, not two, but THREE sets of honeymooning couples at the bar, also waiting for their flights. (You can tell the new couples because the girls all have “wedding nails” and the guys are fiddling with their bright shiny new rings.) The bar was run by this midget, Jet, that had been selling rum punch and beer to honeymooners for forty years. He wanted $5 US for a Dixie cup of rum punch. I asked him if he thought he was in Manhattan. We bantered back and forth for a while before I finally agreed to buy one. He walks over to the bar (which inexplicably had a bottle of Listerine on the top shelf…) and stops. He looks at me and says, “you know what? I like you. You are a pain in the ass.” He drops two ice cubes into the cup, fills it with dark brown rum and throws in a splash of juice. The drink was the same color as the bottle of rum. It was so strong that I could barely drink it, and I can usually do turpentine shots without wincing. So I had two of these while waiting for the plane and was already flying high when the eight-seater finally showed up.

Now Caye Chaulker is only a fifteen minute flight from Belize City. It actually is a “by request” stop, meaning that the plane to San Pedro will drop you off if you ask them too. Like a city bus. I asked the pilot if I could be the co-pilot if I promised not to kick the pedals. He said okay. One of the honeymooners was a nervous flyer and just about dropped dead when he saw (1) the size of the plane, (2) that I was the co-pilot, who he knew had just spent 90 minutes at the bar… But it all ended well and I hopped off with my backpack and went to meet Dennis at our cabana - which was only accessible by walking along the beach. Caye Chaulker was pretty small place. No cars. You walked everywhere or took one of the golf cart taxis.

Next day we did a bit of diving. Nice, warm water, lots of fish… grouper, sea turtles, sharks… The day after that we decided to go out to Blue Hole, a deep collapse crater 60 kilometers out in the ocean. It was a really cool dive. You descended in a free fall where you couldn’t see the bottom, only sharks circling in the murk. You drop through the sharks (they are only Caribbean reef sharks – not really dangerous – but a little unnerving when the swim within inches of you.) When you reach the maximum depth of the dive – 140 feet down – the water gets crystal clear and there is a deep overhang with huge stalactites to swim between. It was one of the best and most eerie dives I have ever done.

After that it was back to the surface for a couple more dives and then back to shore. Next morning we began the long trip across Belize and into northern Guatemala to see the ancient Mayan city of Tikal. First we took the “ferry” to the mainland (some guy with a big open motorboat) and then got on the bus. The trip was long and slow and meals consisted of cheap corn chips bought along the roadside at the border. We arrived on the outskirts of Flores – where we would be spending the night – just in time to get caught in a dead stop traffic jam caused by student protests. We ended up walking, taking a minibus, and then walking again before we finally got to Flores and a place to stay. We ate dinner and crashed. We had signed up for the 3:30 am departure to see the sunrise in Tikal.

Of course neither Dennis nor I had brought an alarm clock. We bought a cheap Chinese plastic piece of crap in Caye Chaulker – which didn’t work. Dennis woke up at 3:20. I will spare you the details of the ensuing dressing packing and leaving debacle. We made the bus. After a 50 kilometer ride to Tikal and a 45 minute hike through the dark – we climbed the temple steps to wait for the dawn. We sat on the top, surrounded by mist and jungle in the dark, listening to the disturbing calls of the howler monkeys out in the bush. As the sun rose and it grew lighter, we saw the tree tops and tops of the other temples fading in and out in the mist. The monkeys and parrots screamed and toucans flew through the sky. Really cool experience.

We spent the rest of the morning hiking around and climbing temples. More toucans and spider monkeys. Just before lunch we set out on what would turn out to be a hot and long and hot journey back into Belize and south to do more diving. Most of the time we road in the back of converted school buses across the bumping roads. Dennis and I gave into our adolescent tendencies and sat in the back – where all the cool kids were – just like middle school…
So now we are in Placencia – a tiny dot of land on the bottom of a peninsula sticking out into the Atlantic that is less than 100 meters wide at points. We had hoped to be underwater by now, but stupid tropical storm Ernesto has kicked up too much chop so we are beached. There is a chance we could get out this afternoon, but it looks like if Ernesto doesn’t want to take a cue from his namesake and visit Fidel and Raul right soon, we are done diving for now.

Just another day at the office.

So despite the fact that I work for the World Bank, my office is in the Ministry of Finance here in Uganda. The ministry is in a fairly large block of government buildings: foreign affairs, communications, courthouse, etc. are all here. About an hour ago I am sitting at my desk, completely absorbed in the exciting world of statistical analysis of poverty indicators, when there is an EXPLOSION of automatic weapon fire right below my office. I pause and wonder if they have overthrown the government, always a concern when working in sub-Saharan Africa. It is quiet for a while so I go back to work, vaugely wondering if maybe I should do some regressions to prove how bad Museveni's government is/was. If it had been a coup and some heavily armed person should enter my little office, I better have something to offer the revolution, no?

My office mate came back a little while later. He told me that it was nothing special. A prisoner had just escaped from the courthouse next door and they needed to get him back, which they did. Then he started laughing as he told me the entire cafeteria had hit the deck when they started shooting because it was right outside the windows. Ha ha, joke's on them! Anyway, happens once in a while, nothing to worry about, back to work.

Conquering the Elusive Giraffe

Many a year ago now, myself and three fellow Peace Corps volunteers set out on an ill-fated trip to see giraffes in neighboring Niger. Just about everything imaginable that could go wring did, and I never got to see any giraffes.

But this weekend I was redeemed! I booked a weekend safari to Murchison Falls national park in the northwest of Uganda. I had wanted to go last weekend, but I couldn’t get Friday off work, and besides the park is only about 20 miles from the Congolese border which would not have been the greatest place to be if the entire region collapsed into armed strife (again) following the Congolese elections last weekend.

So I blew off work on Friday and joined 15 fellow tourists in two vans for an eight hour drive north. The other people in my van were a group of four Israeli tourists, who were very happy to have picked this particular part of Middle Eastern history to take a six month vacation, a Canadian medical student, and teenage American aspiring wildlife photographer, and a Kiwi Blue Helmet working in southern Sudan (Kiwi Blue Helmet: a United Nations Peace Keeper of New Zealand-ish origin). The trip was basically uneventful, except for the tsetse fly store we have to transverse right before we reached the lodge. As tsetse flies have painful bites and are carriers of river blindness, we had to close the windows. But as it was boiling in the van with the windows closed, we would open them just a crack to get some air. Which was fine and dandy until we hit one of the crater-like potholes on the road (occurring every five to ten feet), which would bounce the windows open, letting in the some of the swarm that followed the van. We would then have to slam the windows shut and try to kill the ones that got in. I had two kills. I Kiwi Blue Helmet had none, which just goes to prove the conventional wisdom that UN Peace Keepers couldn’t hurt a fly.

We arrived at camp and were shown to our tents. I got to share with Blue Helmet (who was, despite my constant teasing, an incredibly nice guy). We were given a stern warning that warthogs and hippos were common features inside the camp. Warthogs will find their way into any tent where there is anything edible. You are financially responsible for all warthog tent damage caused by edible things, including something as benign as an empty Snickers wrapper. Hippos were a bigger deal. They tended to feed on the grass in between the tents at night. Should you encounter one on your way to the bathroom at night, don’t approach it and climb a tree if it tries to approach you. (I don’t know about this. Hippos kill more people per year than any other wild animal in Africa. The trees didn’t look like they would support the weight of a healthy child, much less a full-sized adult with a determined hippo at the bottom, as hippos weigh as much as your standard SUV.) There was a poor older Dutch woman who was so scared that she insisted that a bucket be brought into her tent. Fortunately the rains had come recently so there was other grass to eat in places outside the camp. Midnight Hippo Bathroom Blocking is apparently a big problem in the dry season.

So Friday night Blue Helmet and I and a bunch of the other guests got rip-roaring drunk in the safari bar because there really isn’t anything else to do in a tented camp in the middle of no where in northwestern Uganda. We wanted a thunderstorm roll in across the forest and played guitar and drank Tusker, and just generally acted like colonialist frat boys.

This all caught up to us a few hours later though. After crashing in the tent somewhere around 1 am, somewhere before six am feel this blinding white light in my eyes and hear someone asking repeatedly if I am awake. Blue Helmet has his military issue flashlight two inches from my corneas. He is still drunk and thinks this is great. He jogs off to shower as I drag my bones out of bed and into my clothes. Blue-y and I had gotten a little too smashed and had forgotten to order breakfast for the morning. He had a couple of granola bars and a can of peaches in heavy syrup. We made do. Before you feel bad for us, we weren’t the most hard up of the previous nights drinkers. Xavier, an adorable little French 22 year old kid with a snaggletooth, walks over to us after we finish our breakfast and are hunkered down in the predawn light waiting for the van.

Xavier: Wot iz zis?
Blue-y: Its paa-ches, mate.
Xavier: Zwhere iz zit from?
Blue-y: New Zealand mate.

At which point Xavier picks up the can containing the remaining syrup and walks away contentedly drinking it.

The safari game drive itself was incredible. We saw herds and herds and herds of giraffes, a bunch of elephants, cape buffalo and warthogs, things of varying sizes with hooves, a small pride of lions enjoying something that was until very recently in its abbreviated history something with hooves, birds of every color, ill tempered monkeys, etc etc etc. We had one really big score though. We saw a leopard. They are almost impossible to see in the wild. It was sleeping up in a tree until our van and the pack of gawking people with camera hanging out of it, scared it down. It dashed off into the deep brush, and, as if to prove my theory that pintades (guinea fowl) are the dumbest creatures in existence, four of them dashed after it.

After the game drive I went back to the tent to crash. I was hurting a bit from the night before and wanted to grab a quick nap before the afternoon trip to the waterfalls. I had been asleep for about a half hour when I feel the tent shaking and hear a grunting noise. I think that Blue-y is screwing around with me because he knows how hungover I am and how desperately I needed to sleep. I sit up with homicide on my mind and look out the tent window. A warthog is trying to eat the grass under my tent. I could have unzipped it and slapped him on his porky ass. He eventually walked off and I went back to sleep.

The afternoon was a boat cruise up to Murchison Falls themselves. As we boarded the fairly sizable boat with somewhat questionable sea-worthiness, the captain pointed out the life jackets. This was a mere formality as it turned out because we saw hundreds of hippos and nile crocodiles on the three hour trip. As I mentioned earlier, hippos are huge and dangerous, and the nile crocs are 10-25 feet in length. Drowning would be the least of your problems if you happened to end up in the river.

After a far tamer evening, I spent my second night in the tent, and then headed out in the morning. We were supposed to do some hiking around the top of the waterfall, but it was pouring rain so the trip was brief. Although Blue-y and I managed to get our act together enough to breakfast this time, Xavier apparently had another long night. He took a beer along for the morning hike in the rain.

Then it was back to Kampala. On the way out of the camp, we drove though a big herd of baboons, using their big bare red asses to show us that they thought of us driving through their morning hang-out. We stopped for matooke for lunch, the staple meal of Uganda (it is green bananas, cooked slightly, then mashed into a paste. With enough salt it and the appropriate sauce it really isn’t all that much worse than some of the things that Mom boiled or microwaved for us as kids…) And then back to the city. Then back to work for my final week in Africa (this trip).

You too can drown in a landlocked country!

So, as promised I did something death defying on the weekend for this dispatch.

After a relaxing day on Lake Victoria at Uganda’s only near-olympic size swimming pool on Saturday, I spent Sunday white water rafting on the headwaters of the Nile.

(The pool was built to be the first Olympic sized pool in this part of Africa, thereby allowing the resort that houses it to host international events, gain notoriety, turn a profit… But alas, due to the usual developing world attention to detail, the pool turned out to be two inches short. And was thereby relegated to being a “near-olympic-sized” pool, catering to Kampala’s well-healed ex-pat population.)

And now, without further ado, the death-defying part. I got up on Sunday at sunrise and boarded a bus filled with hung-over tourists and headed to the headwaters of the White Nile. Way up here the water is clean enough to swim in and wild enough to have one of the world’s highest concentration of class-five rapids.

We got to camp and picked out our equipment, lifejacket, helmet and paddle. The river guide was a Kiwi (New Zealander) kid that had thick blond dreadlocks and an expression that mad it clear that be believed himself impervious to drowning. He asked us to sort into three boats, regular, crazy and death-wish. I was one of the first ones in the death-wish circle.

He explained us to the basics of rafting, which basically consisted of forward paddle, back paddle, and swim if you find yourself in the river. AND DO NOT LOSE YOUR PADDLE if you get dumped. People are free to make more of, paddles cost money. We did a practice drill of flipping the boat in the still water, because he said that on average the boat will go over two or three times during the course of the day. (Yeah, we went over three times before lunch.) The drill was a little scary as I got stuck under the boat, and that was in still water. The guide told us not to panic if we find ourselves in the river. Just grab your lifejacket and count to five and you will be on the surface. Then swim to the boat, wait until still water, wait until the boat is flipped back over, climb in and do it all again.

So off we went. Through the rapids, laughing, screaming, getting soaked, getting tossed as the boat flipped. It was really good fun. Getting tossed is like getting caught in a wave when you are swimming in the ocean. You know when you don’t dive deep enough and get washed ashore… (I know this because Dad was really into bodysurfing when we were kids. I would go out into the waves with him. Six foot waves, six year old child, what could go wrong?) If you live in a landlocked place, or aren’t familiar with getting caught in a wave, just climb into an ordinary household washing machine and put it on the “SuperWash” setting.

The picture isn't me. They wanted $30 for a CD of the pictures of me drowning. The picture is the one they put on their promotional material. They are going for a certain type of client.

On the third time we went over, we flipped at the start of a long string of rapids. I was in the water, one… two… thr… pop! Back on the surface. I opened my eyes just in time to see the wall of water crashing on top of me, one… two… three… pop! This time I got two gasps of air before BANG, back down I go, one…two… three… four… Anytime now… Seven… Uh-oh. Eight… Hmm, better open my eyes to investigate… nothing but brown water… that’s not good (surface water is white)… ninetenele… pop! Gasp! Dunk! One… two… three…

This continued until I washed into the still water. I was heaving and exhausted when the safety kayak caught up with me. Boy was I glad to see him. He asked for the paddle that I had doggedly held on to for this entire ordeal. Then pointed and told me to swim for the boat. Upon getting back in, another rafter which had taken a similar trip down the river asked about drinking the water, because, like me, had just ingested a couple liters. Guide responded, oh man, don’t want to do that, that’s dangerous.

We flipped over once more during the course of the trip. Eventually an older woman in the boat (a horse trainer from Canada with, inexplicably, a diamond implanted in her left front incisor), asked the guide to stop flipping the boat. Chicken. Man, I hope I am not that yellow when I get into my 30s.

We got all the beer we could drink on the endless bus ride back to Kampala.

Other than that, I am living the quiet ex-pat economist life here in Kampala. I have a room at a guesthouse at the local university. I take a moto-cab (glorified moped with an extra seat attached to the back) to work. Because I am always in a skirt, I ride like the African women do, sitting sidesaddle, ankles crossed hanging over traffic and my laptop balanced on my lap. The way that most of these guys drive, zig-zagging through traffic moving rather in indiscriminant directions, all in all, my daily commute is probably more dangerous than the rafting trip.

Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda, Greetings from, Ka-amp-ala!

So I am in Kampala, Uganda. You can definitely tell that Uganda is a couple clicks down on the old development ladder from Tanzania. Kampala actually looks like an African city, with dirt and beggars. So much for the false glories of East Africa as exemplified by Dar es Salaam.

I haven’t seen much of the city yet, but so far the most interesting thing about this place is the Marabou storks. Some cities have pigeons, Kampala has Marabous. They are everywhere. On roofs, in trees, in the street, everywhere. Which would sound like a standard urban problem, but Marabou stork are quite a bit taller than I am (admittedly that is not to impressive for a human, but this is a frigging BIRD), with a six foot wingspan. These things are huge. They are taller than the TV antennas. I’ll see if I can get a good picture.

I left Dar at 6am on Saturday morning. In my infinite wisdom, I decided to take a bus instead of flying to save a couple hundred bucks and see some of the Tanzanian, Kenyan and Ugandan countryside. The trip was supposed to take 22 hours, but it ended up taking just shy of 30, counting the two hour midnight stop in Nairobi. Thirty hours is a long time to be cooped up on an African bus.

The countryside in Tanzania was beautiful though, through the foothills of Kilimanjaro. I was hoping to see a zebra out the bus window, everyone said that it was possible if not likely, so I kept up a quiet intense vigil for the 12 daylight hours that I had, carefully scanning the horizon for zebras. Except for one false alarm with some hoofed thing with curly horns just shy of the Kenyan border, I didn’t even see a dog. *sigh.

Since I have been in Kampala, I have been working with the Ministry of Finance to finish a World Bank study. It is interesting to work in a government office here. “Good enough for government work” is a decidedly lower standard.

Other than that, I have just been trying to find a place to live. I have been in five hotels in five different nights, before I just gave up and decided to pay through the nose for a really expensive one so I could get some sleep. The first one was nice, but in the suburbs, an hour from work, right next to a really loud bar TV playing Mexican soup opera dubbed into English, and strangely, had no sink. I had to brush my teeth in the shower. The second night was a dumpy backpacker joint that charged a (small) fortune for a room with no fan or openable windows that was a five minute slog through the rain to the bathroom, which was filthy. The third night was in a “tourist hotel” downtown, where my window opened onto the enclosed courtyard bar, where Rod Stewart and Linda Ronstadt echoed off the walls to all hours of the night. The fourth night I stayed a hotel conveniently placed between two huge open air discos. I could feel the base in my teeth, as much as Michael Bolton has base. Took a pair of sleeping pills to salvage that night.

So now I am paying a (large) fortune to stay at a nice hotel with a pool and excellent restaurant. I can’t keep it up for more than a couple days, but it is nice to sleep for once. I will try to do something death defying this weekend to make up for this whiny dispatch.

Pemba Island

I spent the long weekend on the island of Pemba, off the coast of Tanzania in the Indian Ocean, north of Zanzibar, and as my archeologist buddy puts, on the bog end of no where. Pemba is a lush green island known for clove plantations, scuba diving and poverty. I was most interested in the second of the three, at least on this trip.

I flew out of Dar on the smallest commercial airliner I have ever been on. There were six of us on the plane. The pilot hopped into the plane, looked back at us, asked okay? Then starts down the runway, taxiing like a drag racer, trying to put on his seat belt while talking to the tower and jaggering with the guy behind him in Swahili. Total African cowboy. The flight itself was definitely noteworthy. You could look out the window to the blue-green water and coral reefs. And the flight was short so we only topped out at 3500 feet. And even that was uncomfortably far away from the ground. This guy wasn’t a particularly good pilot. I am pretty calm flyer, but there were moments when we were bouncing around the sky that I had my airplane mantra “People die during take-off and landing, planes do not fall from the sky” running through my head.

At the airport I got to again deal with my least favorite people on earth, taxi drivers. I was locked in a heated argument with a driver (over 80 cents and principle), when he made the cardinal mistake that any driver can make with me. What are you going to do? Walk? Listen buddy, it’s only 3.5 miles and I have two hours of daylight left. I told him to ask one of the other five passengers if they need a ride. And hitchhiked into town.

The place I stayed in was an old mission house turned dive shop. Pemba is 99.9999% crazy conservative Islam (little girls as young as four or five were veiled), so the mission was probably more profitable in its current incarnation. It was a very communal living type of place, with all of us sitting around a big table on the deck for evening meals. I stayed in the dorms with a 30 something Austrian guy who said he was European Commission diplomat. He about as much of a diplomat as James Bond was a special trade envoy, but live and let live.

The next day it was out on the reef. It was a miserable morning with pouring rain, but it doesn’t matter much when you are underwater. The diving was beautiful. The water was crystal clear, there were no other divers and the reef was well-stocked with brightly colored fish. I tried out my underwater camera for the first time. Shooting fish underwater is like trying to take pictures of roving herds of puppies from the back of a motorcycle. You move, the current moves and the god damned fish will not just hold still and get their picture taken. My first day’s work was met by the divemaster with the comment, maybe you should stick to coral, sponges and fish whose defense mechanism isn’t flight. But the diving was fun anyway.

That night we all hung out on the deck and drank beer while the sunset over the banana plantations. The view was only marred by the cloud of mosquitoes that hung in the air. Occasionally a Pemba native “flying fox” would swoop through the air. (Flying foxes are bats that appear to answer the age-old question of what happens when a vampire gets it on with a werewolf.)

Next morning it was back out to the reef. The diving the second day was even better, there was less current and I stuck to shooting pictures of sponges. And a scorpion fish, who is so mercilessly poisonous that he didn’t seem to mind my camera six inches from him.

That night was more of the same with beer and balconies and flying foxes. Next day I couldn’t dive because I was flying out that afternoon, so I decided to go see Mark the archeologist at his dig site at the north of the island. I got on the daladala (public pickup truck) that ran north. I explained to the driver where I wanted to go by pointing to a picture of a ruined mosque that was in my guidebook. It came in handy as I was dumped off on the side of the road in a rice paddy. I eventually found some women washing clothes and two children were promptly dispatched to lead me through the rice paddy and mint fields to the dig site. Mark and the other archeologists apparently don’t get many visitors because I was very well-received. Mark and the other head archeologist gave me a tour of the site, showing the 14th century mosque they had under excavation, and the other mosques they had dug up in years past. Their special mission this year was to figure out how the common people lived. Rather unfortunately for the archeologists, the common people lived in mud houses. So they are digging centuries old mud out of current mud. Again, live and let live.

Mark also showed me the old fort and an excavation he was working on of a 9th century mosque. As we careened through the knee-high grass and fields (Mark never walks anywhere), he pointed out the hundreds of bits of broken pottery that littered the field. People were planting in a place where they had apparently been breaking pots for over a millennium. He lets me keep a couple of the nicer shards I picked up, which I am sure will lead to an amusing story in a couple weeks as I am arrested at the border for smuggling antiquities out of the country.

Then I got to spend a half hour digging. You take a little trowel and very carefully dig very slowly. Then another team shifts what you have just dug up. I found three pottery shards and a broken piece of ostrich egg. Which leads me to believe that perhaps Indiana Jones movies are a bit edited for the general audience.

Then it was back to town to shower, grab my bag and head to the airport. Flying back I discovered a new cost saving method that could be huge boost for the struggling domestic airline industry. Stay with me here. So you buy a plane that seats fifteen passengers. Which is good. But what would be better is to buy a plane for fifteen people and put sixteen people in it anyway. You really only need one pilot right? On the way back they wanted to seat me in the copilot’s seat, a common practice on overbooked planes. (“Madam, copilot, yes?) You just have to be careful not to hit the pedals on the floor. I was tempted, but I decided to let one of the kids sit there. He cared more than I did. I would probably feel less guilty if he took out a plane full of people because he was trying to take a picture out the window.

So I am back in Dar, finishing my last week here. Next week it is on to Kampala, Uganda…

Zanzibar

So in an effort to escape the boredom of a weekend in a city where you know no one, I caught the 4 pm ferry on Friday from Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar. Zanzibar is the main island of an archipelago that, along with the mainland of Tanganyika, make up the country of Tanzania. Zanzibar has a history of kind of funny unions. It was part of the sultanate of Oman for a couple centuries. And, yes, your working knowledge of geography is correct, those two are not even remotely close to each other. Then it got to be its own sultanate for a while before being a British protectorate. Then it started had a revolution and started making all sorts of Marxist rumblings at a time when Marxist rumblings got you a large dose of CIA intervention. Instead, we just bought off the right people and, instead of turning into an African Cuba in the Indian Ocean, it became part of this weird hybrid union, Tanzania. The Zanzibaris are still a little pissed off about this and make you gets your passport stamped coming onto the island. The culture itself is really interesting. It used to be an Arab ruling class, an Indian merchant class and then an African peasantry (which also serves as the main export – slaves). Then there was a revolution bit and heads rolled (literally) and things got a bit more mixed up. The city is still a hodgepodge of different neighborhoods and architecture. Most of the (crumbling) center of the city is called Stone Town, and is a maze of little alleyways, much like a Middle Eastern souk. And they have really intricately carved doors. In different styles. Mark told me.

The boat ride over was uneventful. We watched Craig David music videos and some weird movie in Swahili about a white tribal chieftain and a black American pro-golfer (you feel like someone in casting didn’t get the memo…) that had lots of safari animal humor. I arrived after dark in a really dark port. You had to walk through narrow lanes in the shipping containers to get to the exit, all filled with the most wretched of Africa’s creatures, taxi drivers. There was no way that I was running the gauntlet alone, so I waited for the biggest meanest African lady I could find, and followed her. If she only had an umbrella to beat them with…

I found my way to the Pyramid Hotel, politely waited until the World Cup match went to commercial, and checked in. The hotel is a remodeled traditional house, and my room was on the top floor, so it involved a staircase that was more ladder than staircase. But the hotel water and ceiling fan worked most of the day, and I had a traditional Zanzibari bed, so I couldn’t complain. For dinner I walked down to the fish market to find a good selection of grilled aquatic creatures on sticks. The market is famous for tables covered in all sorts of seafood, you could get lobster and crab if you were confident that it was fresh enough… I settled for tuna and prawns. The problem was that it was well after dark and I had to negotiate the narrow alleys of the old city in the dark. The alleys are only about 5 feet wide and don’t go in any one direction for much for than a couple yards. You could get lost for months in the old town. I eventually made my way out and got something to eat, but I had no idea how I was going to get back. Then I spied Purple Shirt. Purple Shirt had been in the lobby of the guest house and I had followed him part of the way out. He was about my parents age (so OLD), had a bright purple shirt, pink shorts, black socks and brown shoes. (If you look very closely at the seafood picture, you can just see him in the background.) He also had this really distinctive walk, like a penguin with hemorrhoids, but fast. I went up to him and asked if I could follow him home. He looked at me skeptically, but agreed. Somewhere, some old actor said this is going to be the start of a beautiful friendship. So that is how I met Mark. Mark is an archeologist, and as I discovered over the course of the weekend, a minor British television celebrity. (People kept coming up and saying, excuse me, aren’t you…) He has the mannerisms of a cartoon British academic, but was unbelievably interesting. He had been “digging up the place” for about twenty years and consequentially knew every bit of history of the town. He had found a good chunk of the local museum. So I started asking him questions. He started telling me stories over a glass of sugar cane juice (Katie would love this stuff – they squeeze fresh sugar cane right in front of you into a glass, it is so sweet that you have to put lime juice in it to make it palatable.) Next thing I know, I am chasing after him all over town as I get a nocturnal tour. We are peering over fences, running around the alleys, and he just lets himself in to the historical sights like the fort, all while giving me a running history of the place in this very hushed whisper. The whole enterprise had an air of a junior high mystery story (like Big Sister and the Missing Hairbrush), but was incredibly entertaining at the same time.

The next day, Mark wrote his paper for some keynote speech he is giving next week, and I went on a spice tour. Spice tours are the requisite tourist activity on Zanzibar, and involve going out into the countryside to see how vanilla, pepper, cloves, coffee, nutmeg, ginger, turmeric, etc. etc. etc. are grown. The nutmeg was the most interesting one. It is the alien looking thing in the picture. And I learned if you take enough of it it acts like an aphrodisiac (or “make ‘orny” as the guide put it). I think if you ingested the require amount of nutmeg for it to work you would likely get cancer or die of nutmeg poisoning or something – probably why it hasn’t yet overtaken Spanish Fly on the commercial market. Then it was fish and coconut milk over rice for lunch (I was on this tour with 25 other western tourists, some of which actually left the tour and took a taxi back to town rather than sit on a plastic mat and eat rice and sauce – stupid stupid people.) Then a weird 40 minute drive to look at a beach for 10 minutes, and then an hour back to town…

I got back and left word for Mark that I would be at the Africa House Bar. It was the refurbished version of the old English colonial club. It is much better now because anyone willing to pay the exorbitant prices to drink Tusker beer and watch the sunset is allowed in, unlike the olden days when you had to be in the social register in addition to paying exorbitant prices. Mark eventually came in and we sat around drinking and discussing Zanzibari history (we had gotten back the 9th century by this point…). Then dinner, ice cream, and more late night running though the city to look at churches, mosques, caravan houses, etc.

Next day I went sightseeing while Mark finished his paper. I saw all the things he had told me about, but it wasn’t near as interesting. I met him for lunch and he promptly took me to all the places that I had missed during the morning. Then a quick lunch (who knew that octopus went so well with spicy tomato sauce…) and some fast souvenir buying before heading to the boat. Mark was great at negotiating. He had been in Zanzibar longer than some of the merchants and was having absolutely none of this price gouging… I bought a really neat Zanzibar chest. Then back to the hotel, grab my backpack and dash to the ferry. I made the last boat home with 10 minutes to spare. And unfortunately, I now have to work all week until I can go and do something more interesting again.