Kruger National Park

So, after complaining for months about how I am constantly back and forth across to Africa and I never get any time off and how much of a pain in the ass it is to always be away, I finally get a vacation. At which time I, logically, promptly board a plane and voluntarily fly 15 straight hours to Africa.

In any case, I am sitting in an internet café in Nelspruit, South Africa, getting myself together after an incredible safari in Kruger National Park. I arrived in South Africa on Sunday morning, after a brutally long flight made more brutal by having to fly around that stupid hurricane. I then spent nearly 24 hours in Johannesburg without being the victim of a violent crime. (Here’s to beating the odds!) I actually even enjoyed myself, walking down to the neighborhood flee market in the suburb where I was staying to pick up some warmer clothing (it is bloody *cold* here) and a set of Mobuto sunglasses (when in Rome…) and visiting the apartheid museum. The museum was incredibly interesting in that it managed to, tastefully, commemorate hundreds of years of repression and brutality without demonizing the white minority. Though in the same way that it seems difficult to imagine that the American civil rights movement took place during my parent’s lifetime, it is nigh on impossible to believe that apartheid took place during my own. I can still remember class being cancelled in fifth grade so that we could all watch the release of Nelson Mandela from prison.Next morning, bright and early (as before sunrise), I was up and out to head east to the national park (though slightly delayed by the fact that the idiot stoners running my hostel got too f’ed up the night before to remember to unlock the gate for me - leaving me to climb the 10 foot fence in order to get out - which was fortunately the only one in all of Jo’burg not topped with concertina wire. On the way we (that merry band of characters that would be spending every walking hour together for the next three days) broke up the journey by stopping at some of the natural wonders along the way. I remember being fairly impressed with them at the time, but those memories have been completely obliterated by the wonders of the safari that followed, so I will drop the obligatory picture and move on.And we stopped to pick up booze - in the form of a five liter box of cheap but tooth-achingly sweet “dry” South African red, most notable for the warning on the side of the box: “Don’t drink and walk on the road, you may be killed.” (Here’s to knowing your demographic.)Then it was safari time. Our guide was a Afrikaner South Africa who was, like all the world’s safari guides, a crazy bastard. He took personal exception to the fact that I was a vegetarian. (He was the type of guy that didn’t eat any kind of vegetable - ever.) First of all, it was as unnatural as if I proposed sexual congress with a springbok (perhaps even more so). Second of all, I was the only one so cooking a completely separate meal for one person was a total pain in the ass. Therefore he decided to make it his personal mission to badger, bargain and straight up just starve me out until I agreed to eat meat. It actually didn’t take that long. He made a deal with me that if he could find the Big 5 (lion, buffalo, rhino, elephant and leopard) before lunch, that I would eat a ham sandwich. I agreed because, really, I have been on quite a few safaris at this point and the chances of this actually happening were nearly statistically impossible. Yeah. I had a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch - albeit a late lunch.
I will spare you the blow-by-blow of the safari itself, but over two days, notable sightings include: a close encounter with a lioness, multiple leopard sightings including one in a tree with a freshly killed impala, a tiny baby elephant that I went a little crazy taking pictures of, a buffalo during the night game drive, plus the usual assortment of hippos, giraffes, zebras, rhinos, baboons, warthogs, crocodiles, all things hoofed and birds that I could give a damn about. (I have attached a sizable lot of pictures for you to catch the highlights if so interested.It was actually, though, we weren’t even on a game drive for the most memorable moment. We were grilling steaks (as the guides vegetarian meal plan for the evening was “steak or starve” - I had squash for dinner), hanging out by the fire, drinking, when this massive hyena walked by the fence maybe 10 feet behind us. He was attracted by the smell of the grilling meat and came by a few times to see if he could get a taste, fortunately not coming to the conclusion that he could easily hop the 8 foot chain link fence. Which was good because it was massive. I can’t even compare it to the size of a large dog. Think more along the lines of small pony. And, hands down, the world’s ugliest creature.
Other than that, it was all tents, campfire, pre-sunrise risings, sweet wine, and swapping tales, which were probably most accurately summed up by the Irish kid as “no need of the truth getting in the way of a good story.” (He had the hyena nine foot tale and breathing sulfur fire by the 10 pm telling.) Now I am spending the night at another hostel run by stoners (though these seem older and more responsible - this is what happens when you live in an African country where things *grow*) and tomorrow, off to Kingdom of Swaziland.

Going Bananas

So tomorrow is my last full day on the road. After almost two months and 28000+ frequently flyer miles, I am headed home - provided that I make the three connections between Uganda and Washington and manage not to get quarantined in Europe. I have to say, it’s about time.

I don’t have much to report, but I wanted to post a couple of photos from the field work I did this week, so I am going to ramble on for a few paragraphs anyway. I went with the teams out to Bushenyi in western Uganda, near the Rwandan and Congolese borders. It is a beautiful part of both Uganda (and Africa in general), where dawn breaks over mist shrouded banana plantations stretching across the hills. That’s right – miles and miles of banana plantations. They sure do like bananas out in Bushenyi. For example, a typical culinary day in the life of my field work goes something like this:

Breakfast – eggs, toast and bananas
Mid morning snack – banana
Lunch – two bananas
Dinner – Steamed mashed bananas with beans and peanut sauce

That last one is not anywhere near as gross as it sounds, but after a few days, you really don’t look forward to meal times much anymore.

The other remarkable thing about this area is how unbelievably poor parts of it are. Not in the sense of the West African nothing-grows-and-then-we-starve model, but government service delivery is horrific. Because of the rain and the hills, the roads are total crap, and nothing and no one gets to these areas. The primary school was mostly thatch (swarmed over by hundreds of children in truly tragic hot pink uniforms) and the health clinic was the most depressing I have ever seen. It was a two room cement box, staffed by one (a nurse’s assistant that didn’t look old enough to shave), no electricity, no water (it was hauled up from a stream 3 miles downhill), no beds, almost no drugs, just nothing. There are so few supplies, women who give birth are required to bring their own cotton gauze and razor blades. And in a country where more than 5 percent of the adult population is HIV+ (as opposed to 0.006 percent in the US), the clinic has been out of gloves for over six months.

Escape to Chimp Island

So I didn’t exactly make it home to the United States last week. I even had plane tickets, and then at the last minute the boss sends me to Uganda. For three weeks. And now here I am, hanging out in Kampala, which is okay because I kinda like Kampala. I was an intern here and returned to do research for my master’s thesis, so I know the city a little. It is very different from laid-back coastal Dar es Salaam. Kampala is decidedly Central Africa, with its accompanying leafy hills, Congolese music, beans and bananas, and the sheer crush of humanity. I took a couple of pictures around the main bus station on a Friday afternoon. You can sort of tell how crowded it is, but it doesn’t do it true justice because it is impossible to stop and breathe, much less snap a photo, in the middle of it.

Kampala had changed a little since I was last here in 2007. There are more cars, cell server providers, laptop computers, ATMs and people. They have renamed all commercial establishments after the new American president. And the storks are gone.

I always liked the storks. They are maribu storks, over five feet tall and hideously ugly. They are born a mangy lot, but as a result of some unfathomable genetic compulsion, they pull out the feathers on their heads and necks. This doesn’t do much for them aesthetically. They used to everywhere in the capital, as ubiquitous as pigeons, but in the lead up to the Commonwealth meetings with Kampala hosted in last 2007, the government poisoned them all. Now there are only small packs of them remaining, which strut around with a slightly disconcerting post-apocalyptic menace about them. I take it as a great opportunity to practice with the new zoom lens.

I will spare you the details of the day-to-day work. I basically fill the days with trainings and meetings and revisions, punctuated with terror inducing rides sitting sidesaddle on the back of a motorbike taxi in a skirt and heels with my computer balanced on my lap. And eating beans and bananas. The staple starch here is mashed green bananas, which are usually served with some protein sauce, and a yellow banana for dessert. Since I don’t eat chicken or beef anymore, my life is filled with beans and bananas. Lots and lots of beans and bananas.

With the work load here being a little more manageable than in some places, I decided to take some time off on Saturday afternoon and Sunday to explore the city a bit. On Saturday I took in the downtown sites, including the Kasubi Tombs, where the bodies and/or jawbones of the local tribal kings are buried. And, notably, has the largest thatched structure in the world. I also saw the national museum, which included the requisite poorly taxidermed local wildlife and a fun section of Ugandan Olympic athletes. (The photos were obviously taken by media from other countries, as they showed Ugandan runners trailing far behind the Ethiopians and Kenyans, Ugandan boxers taking incredible shots to the head from Russians, etc…)

Then Sunday I decided to get out of town, birdwatch, check out some monkeys. I took a two hour local boat ride out to an island in Lake Victoria to visit the chimpanzee sanctuary. This was after having dinner with a primatologist the night before, all of whose stories ended with the phrase “and then the chimp ripped the guy’s face off.” Chimps are very aggressive creatures and apparently that is a common thing for them to do to a human. The sanctuary chimps seemed pretty mellow, clapping and carrying on to get the attention of the handlers to be thrown another orange or pumpkin. Plus they were behind a high voltage electric fence. Some of the birds were actually more aggressive – dive bombing anyone that walked too close to their nest. It made for some moments of hilarity when an unsuspecting human did it, but took on a bit more of a nature channel life-and-death struggle when a pair of three foot long monitor lizards went after the eggs. The bird’s attacks were unsuccessful, the lizards being just too big and scaly, but readers will be happy to know that they were chased off by the stampeding herd of camera toting tourists.

Crap We Buy

So every once in awhile, my spoiled princess self is required to get back to my roots. Kicking and screaming, they tear me out of the posh hotel in the capital, dump me in an over-crowded 4x4, and send me out into the bush to do field visits.

This time I headed southwest of the capital into the foothills of Iringa. Before leaving, I had been assured that it was only a 3 hour drive on a good road. I reflected on that nearly 8 hours later as I scooped water out of a bucket in my hotel room to futilely try and rinse the dust out of my hair. I can’t argue that it was a spectacular drive though, passing through winding hills and sun drenched valleys, dotted with huge ancient baobob trees. (And I saw the answer the age old question pondered by every Peace Corps volunteer serving in Africa – what would happen to a baobob tree if you hit it full speed with a lorry. Answer: not all that much. You will, however, need a new lorry.)

The most fun part of the drive is the part where the road cuts through Mikumi National Park. At first you notice a not so subtle shift in the road signs, from cell phone ads, public service condom announcements, ads for “Bob’s snake sanctuary and campground” (what could go wrong!), to ones that say “WILD ANIMALS, next 50 km,” “Please do not feed the baboons,” and my favorite, a black silhouette of an elephant superimposed on a red and white exclamation mark. We drove fairly slowly for those 50 km, partly because it was fun to pretend that you were on safari instead of an interminable car ride, and partly to keep from superimposing ourselves onto an elephant. (Road accidents with the wildlife here are common.) We saw antelope, zebra, giraffe, etc, your typical safari offerings, and managed not to clip anything endangered.

The only things that we even came close to hitting were the baboons. Longtime readers know that I hate monkeys, oft describing them as raccoons that can think. I *particularly* hate baboons. They are like raccoons that can think and outweigh me by 20 pounds. And they are such insolent bastards. They dogged us the whole second half of the trip, even well past the boundaries of the national park, standing in the middle of the road, just glaring at you as you either leaned on your horn or weaved into oncoming traffic to avoid them. In all, they probably added as much time to the trip as the construction and bad roads combined. Stupid monkeys.

Of course, as these things go, I arrived just in time to discover that the field team I was meeting was delayed for a day, and so I had some time to kill. There isn’t much to recommend itself in the way of tourism in Iringa town, so I decided to visit the deaf and blind craft center and buy some crap (ah, how prophetic those thoughts turned out to be…) The visit starts out with a tour of the different workshops, which do weaving, sewing, bead making, pottery, etc, then a swing by the café for some passion juice, and then, inevitably, to the gift shop. As a general rule, I never give to beggars in the street, preferring to spend wildly at places like this. So I bought a recycled glass bead necklace, a shirt theoretically (and somewhat miraculously) sewn by a blind woman, and a couple picture frames and note cards made of the local specialty product: elephant dung paper. That’s right, here at the craft center, they collect and process elephant dung into assorted stationary products. Now all I need is a beau to send notes to, because nothing says “I love you” like sweet nothings scrawled across dry elephant shit. (Maybe this has something to do with why I am not married…)

The rest of the field visit proceeded fairly uneventfully. I checked some standard deviations, went out to the village to observe some interviews, GPS’d a few fields and called it a day. On the way home, I really got to chance to embrace my roots in a little $4 a night guesthouse, complete with complementary tire sandals for my bucket bathing convenience. And eat every meal with my hands. And spend three and half hours drinking chai on the roadside and waiting for a local bus to ride me the 9 hours back to Dar (the bus was only 90 minutes late in actuality – there is apparently a scheduled two hour delay on Sunday mornings so the road crew can dynamite out the pass – the timing of which might or might not have anything to do with the largely Muslim areas feelings about the resident Anglican mission.)

And now I am back in Dar for a few days before heading back to the United States for a couple weeks. I apologize for not having much in the way of pictures to share for this posting. Most of the shots on the camera are of irrigation techniques and intercropping examples – titillating for training purposes, not very exciting as travel photos.

In Love with Lombok

Unless you are actually Indiana Jones (and don’t think I don’t try), it is tough to have much drama on business trip. They are all pretty much the same, high heels and powerpoints. Just last week I was forced to spend five days discussing quantitative research methodologies – which was as dry as it sounds until you looked out the window and remember that you are in Lombok, this tropical paradise just east of Bali in Indonesia.

I will spare you the details of my actual presentation (there were greek symbols involved), and instead post pictures of my scuba diving adventures. I was able to escape for a day and a half – two day dives and a night dive. In general the diving was fairly standard, clownfish, bomb-headed parrot fish, a white tip reef shark or two, phosphoresce at night… but then there were the turtles. So many sea turtles. It got to the point where you just stopped counting them and started just hanging out with them. And what you don’t get from watching Finding Nemo is how big some of these bad boys are. The average full grown turtle size is 3-4 feet long and they routinely weigh more than I do. And if you are hovering between them and where they need to be, it is advised that you move on along. I posted a couple of what I consider to be the most photogenic of my new friends.

I have subsequently left Indonesia and flown to Tanzania, stopping just long enough to see the boys in Singapore (and gorge myself on chili crab) and lose my luggage in South Africa. But eventually me and all my various bits have found ourselves to Dar es Salaam for a couple weeks. I am staring down some long hours in the office, but I will see what I can do about having at least one Indiana Jones adventure for you.

Zanzibari Rains

So I am back in Dar es Salaam to finish up a few last things before I head back to Washington. I spent the last five days with one of the field teams off the coast of mainland Tanzania on the island of Zanzibar. It is an interesting place. Having been a separate state until the 1960s, it leaned a little too far to the left and was consolidated into the much larger mainland Tanganyika to keep it from becoming the Cuba of the Indian Ocean. (Though in what must have seemed like more than fair compensation in the minds of the colonial powers, the archipelago was able to lay claim to half of the letters in the name of the future country, despite having less than 5 percent of the population.) Once known for exporting spices and people, it is now known for exporting spices and importing people – with tourism being the main source of hard currency. All this taken together with the tropical setting results in a drink which is one part decaying sultanate and colonial majesty, one part fundamentalist Islam, and one part delicious sea food, blended and served in a coconut.

Though most of my time there was taken up with the rather mundane crap of earning my living, I did decide that I was going to take the weekend off. I had all sorts of *fun* non-work activities planned, diving, shopping, sightseeing, lobster on the beach… When Saturday morning arrived, I threw back the mosquito net and opened the shutters to my balcony, and of course it is pissing down rain. Bloody hell. Not to be dissuaded from my pre-planned good time, I put on my bathing suit and slogged over to the dive shop. Barack, my Kenyan dive guide and I, loaded the gear onto a wooden boat with a somewhat sickly sounding Yamaha outboard and started across the white-capped channel. Even in my full wetsuit, it was a cold trip. But once we were underwater it was fine. The lack of direct sunlight overhead and the murk because of the currents made it difficult to see. Coming upon each new corral head or sunken boat was like making a fantastic discovery. Or so I told myself because god damn it I was having *fun* on my day off. The second dive followed one of the shortest surface intervals in recorded history because it was just disgusting shivering in the rain as the boat tossed on the waves. I should have appeciated it though. When we came up from the second dive, we discovered that the wind and rain had really kicked up. The boat captain was soaked and annoyed as hell that we had spent another hour underwater. We climbed in the boat and headed back across the ocean channel. What had been chop and whitecaps in the morning were now full blown ocean rollers. And the direction of town was perpendicular to the wind, so the waves hit hard on the windward side, crashing spray over windward passenger (me), then rolled the boat hard to the leeward. Twice we lost the rail under the water, sending water crashing across the deck and scattering the heavy air tanks. To pass the time, Barack shouted stories over the wind about wooden boats like this one that had sunk in the last two weeks. His aggregate death toll was at 75 when we finally entered the harbor.

After a hot shower, I awaited a break in the rain to take a look around town. In a fleeting hour of intermittent drizzle, I was able to visit the National Museum, the Sultan’s Palace, and the former grounds of the slave market. (At the latter I found the largest spider web I have ever seen, pictured here. Keep in mind those babies are the size of your palm. Spiders? Why does it always have to be spiders?) Lobster on the beach was tabled for tuna at the bar.

By the time I woke up this morning the choices were pretty much build an ark or get out of Dodge. I headed to the airport to see if I could get on an earlier flight. It didn’t bode well that the water in the airport parking lot reached nearly my ankles. Everything was delayed, but I could fly standby for the first flight out. A few hours later, I found myself in the standby seat (ie the co-pilot’s chair) of a 12 seat plane, trying to make small talk with the Canadian pilot as we waited to clearance for takeoff. “So how long you been doing this?” “10 years.” “Always here?” “No I flew in the Canadian Arctic for 5 years.” “I see, sounds cold. Any special advice for flying a single engine prop across the ocean during a monsoon? (ha ha)” “Nah, I have to say it worries me though, the single engine…” “Oh.”

WHAT IS WITH THESE PEOPLE? Don’t they know it is not good for tourism to tell people that they might die doing said tourist activity? My day off is supposed to be *fun*. Being reminded of my own frail mortality is decidedly not *fun*.

Tepid Tanzania Training in Tanga

Alright alright, I have been in Tanzania for almost a month and haven’t posted a blog entry. Fine, I know. I have been remiss in my duties. But, other than the noteworthy yet not particularly interesting event of my hard drive crashing, not too much going on here. (My battle weary computer had soldiered on despite receiving a near fatal blow in an overhead luggage rack on the Guate City – DC direct in March 2007, but alas, the heat, humidity and Confliker onslaught of tropical Tanzania did her in. Her hard drive finally gave out in the small town of Tanga, where she was lovingly attended to by an Iraqi émigré with radical clerical wallpaper on this cell phone – my national origin notwithstanding – but, in the end she just faded away… RIP). So you can’t blame my technologically hobbled self too much for being a little slow with the posts.

And I don’t have much in the way of good stories. I was ensconced in one of the nicest hotels in Tanzania for two weeks while I worked in the National Bureau of Statistics. Except for the occasional avalanche of unfiled telephone book sized questionnaires that stretches to the ceiling in most offices, it’s a statistics bureau. Not a whole lot super exciting going on there. Then I went up to Tanga for a training. And while Tanga got plenty of CNN play for being close enough to Mombasa, Kenya to appear on the inset map during all those Somali pirate shenanigans, not much going on *in* Tanga. The most exciting part (for lots of different players in fact) was me learning to drive on the other side and not kill the large numbers of pedestrians, donkey carts, children, bicycles, chickens, etc that share the narrow roads. This was only permitted by my colleague during moments of dire necessity.

I did spend a week doing field visits, while is always interesting. (And alls I have to say to Peace Corps Tanzania is buck up – you have palm trees!) As I spent most of the day during this time listening to people conduct interviews in Swahili (and having the general utility of a lawn gnome), I passed the time making faces at the children. And oh boy am I funny looking. I have included a few pictures of some of the better reactions…

Things are looking up for me now though. I am doing field visits in Zanzibar this week. And anywhere that involves white sand beaches, fresh fish, and the ubiquitous culinary use of coconut milk, is going to be a-okay in my book.

What Up Niger?

(It’s pronounced NEE-jair.)

So, nearly four years since the last time I set foot in West Africa, I was back. Niger is just to the east of Burkina on the Sahel belt, so the climate and culture are very similar. To be honest, the whole experience was a little strange, like what I would imagine going back to the small town where you went to college would feel like. If the small town where you went to college was brutally hot, dusty and almost inconceivably poor. I have been lulled into complacency by years of working in Asia and East Africa. Things are different in the West.

Niamey is more low-key than most African capital these days, in that the country is still too poor to have enough cars to clog it with smog and traffic. Not to say that driving wasn’t adventurous. My taxi-man of choice for the week, Moussa, was constantly yelling out his window (the Nigerien equivalent of leaning on the horn) at trucks, bikes, motos, cars, pedestrians, dogs, camels, sheep, goats, donkeys, herds of cattle, etc that moved willy-nilly about the town. There were cops at most of the intersections to direct traffic, but it was the hot season, so they spent most of the day watching the chaos from underneath a shady tree.

The hotel where I stayed was the only four star hotel in all of Niger, having a swimming pool, exotic flowers, and a jazz band that played on the terrace overlooking the busy John F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge. Disorientingly incongruous with the world outside.

I don’t really have much in the way of fun stories to tell. I spent most of my time in meetings. I did do some shopping in the famous silver markets, visit the Grand Mosque, and pick up few West African specials for my fellow Burkina Peace Corps volunteers (including a kilo of peanut flavored beef jerky, which made for an amusing interaction with the drug sniffing dogs back at Dulles.) But that’s about it.

The only vaguely interesting story I have was buying West African beer to bring back for my RPCV friends. Beer is a little tough to find in a Muslim country like Niger, but I have a good instinct for these sorts of things. So I go into the marquis, with Moussa waiting in the car like I am off to score an eight-ball of coke, and ask the kid behind the bar for four bottle of beer. I tell him that I need to pay for the bottles as well as I am taking them back to the States. (In West Africa, you can’t take the bottles out of the bars because they are recycled. Not in the melted and re-made we do it here. As in taken, (theoretically) washed, refilled and re-capped.) Kid thinks that is the funniest thing he has ever heard. No, serious, I need to pay for the bottles. When he finally figures out that I actually do plan on bringing these four bottles of beer to the United States of America, he gets really excited. He calls his friend over to tell him. And I recognize the language they are speaking as Morre (of course it is the Burkinabe selling beer). I look at them and say, “Eiya! Bwen taara fo? Nassara wunda Morre! Maam ya Mossi. Maam yuur la Ouedraogo Mariam. Maam yiita Yako!” (which is basically all the Morre I could speak even if you held a gun to my head, and means “Hey! What’s wrong with you? White people understand Morre! I am Mossi. My name is Mariam Ouedraogo (typical Burkinabe name). I am from Yako!”) Kid literally fell off his bar stool. Now he was convinced that I was some sort of weird mythical creature. He was still staring at me slack-jawed when I picked up my sachet of beer and jumped into Moussa’s waiting car.