May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds
-Edward Abbey
I've been told that I "completely suck" at summations, so in an effort to appease certain individuals I thought I'd have a quick afterward from my travels.
I consider this whole experience a personal success. It looked absolutely nothing as I had originally envisioned given that I skipped travel to Sudan after it became clear a visa would not be soon forthcoming for me, I was denied entry into Djibouti (and nearly locked up by an over-zealous border guard in the process), didn't go the DRC, and never made it to the Tanzanian Spice Islands. On the other hand, I made an unplanned foray into the lower Middle East, took an extra month in Somaliland trekking off the grid, and spent a number of days and weeks slogging my way from Central Africa to South Africa in what retrospectively I can describe as a dash I'll never be able to match in terms of pure ridiculousness.
The most surreal experience in my months of travel, and absolutely the most unexpected, was the Christmas Eve that I spent in Bethlehem. I went from nearly skipping the entire night after my wallet was stolen to being in the inexplicable position of attending an Anglican mass in a Greek Orthodox chapel in the Church of Nativity . . . eventually high-fiving Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. When that was done I wandered with two friends into the Grotto, the small room below the Church in which Jesus was born. Here I somehow was lucky enough to attend the actual midnight mass held that night with a small cadre of Italians.
If that one day in Bethlehem was unforgettable, there were plenty of other rabbit holes throughout the rest of my trip to remind me where I was. I'll never forget getting forcibly escorted to a Borena village near the Ethiopia/ Kenya border after accidentally wandering into a group of well-armed herders in what I later learned was prime cattle raiding territory. Meeting the Obama family in Kenya and having an in-depth conversation with one of Barack's cousins about electoral strategy was rather memorable as well. The feelings of revulsion and horror in Rwanda were more than enough to make me wish I had never been there, but they were unique in their blend and when they sank home were strong enough to ensure I would never forget them. Being briefly detained by their border agents under suspicion of smuggling was, while not amusing at the time, a funny memory to look back on. My dislike of Cairo is also something else if only because it's entertaining me for to say that I dislike any city, much less one as fabled as Cairo, as that. And the mere fact that I eventually got used to stumbling upon burnt-out tanks from the civil war during my Somaliland trek is enough now to make me laugh out loud.
As far as Somaliland goes, the trek there has to rank among my very favorite experiences of my life. That it was so unique, and never before traveled by an outsider in that capacity, makes me extremely pleased to have made the full length. That aside, however, the trek was a wonderful experience that makes me prouder than any other physical feat. In the twenty days of desert walking I lost a total of nineteen pounds; easily the most effective diet I can imagine. It was a beautifully varied experience that took me to regions of the country I never would have otherwise guessed at and has really encouraged me to soon return. I may be back as soon as soon as this winter. If not, I will almost definitely be back after the next election.
I've met some fantastic travelers on this trip. Some of those that I've met from North America, Europe, and Australia could be among my very best friends if we lived in closer proximity to each other. Their stories are fantastic, their plans are inspirational, and their drive to map out in their minds every inch of the world would impress everyone. They hardly think of it in that way, however; to them travel is an art which they have perfected. It's perfectly natural to wander the planet.
That we can spend time together for only a few brief days before parting ways is disheartening. These are tremendous people who will go on to do amazing things in life and I wish I could be there for when they do. Katie the Wisconsinite I met in Egypt, and two more Americans Jaci and Mitch who I met in Jordan. All three of you were fantastic travels partners who I hope to see again in America. The whole slew of Canadians I met in Israel, not to mention a fantastic American, Derek, without whom my Bethlehem experience would never have been. John, the Australian guy who had been traveling for three years that I got to know in Addis Ababa is a hell of a traveler. There was Ben, an American I met in Ethiopia; he's the one who put me in touch with the Somaliland businessman Abdulkaer Elmi, without whom my trek never would have been possible. Steve and his wife Gill, the British pair living on the Somaliland coast and opening up a dive shop, are a couple whose blase acceptence of their own pioneering spirit and adventure inspires me to constantly reach further in my own travels. Aviv and Gad, the two Israelis I stumbled upon at the ridiculous Ethiopia/Kenya border. Michele, from France, who I met on near the DR Congo border in Rwanda. Wesley, a Cape Townian who I traveled with from the top of Zambia all the way to Cape Town and who showed me a terrific time once I reached there. Miki, the Australian, who I spent time with on the Wild Coast in my closing days of the trip and whose travel philosophy comes alarmingly close to mine. And Leslie and Mary, a pair of Irish women I kicked it with in Port Elizabeth.
It's always a pity to leave people like those, but on leaving it is always a comfort to hear the phrase that backpackers so often throw out as a parting; "Maybe we'll cross paths again." Until then, my friends, keep well.
To everyone who kept up on my blog - thank you so much. It felt great knowing that even a few people back in the USA knew what I was up to and were interested enough to follow my path. If I can ever help you with any trip you're taking to the turf I covered in Africa, feel free to toss me an email or phone call and I'll do as best I can.
That being said, Cheers to Minnesota. it's great being back and seeing so many friends and relatives that I've gone without for half a year. The nomadic lifestyle is fun and one that I look forward to again, but Minnesota is always deep in my heart. Culture shock is a non-existent phenomenon to me as long as I have such terrific people to come back to.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
South Africa
Why, when I had cumulatively spent less than six months of my life in South Africa, was it so often the landscape of my dreams?
-Adam Hochschild, A Mirror at Midnight
Entering South Africa was a lot like coming home. Almost from the moment of entry my mind-set changed to one of relaxtion and familiarity; I felt as if I was finally back in a setting I recognized and could calm down in.
That being said, I can say even before I type this post that it'll be the most boring and poorly-written of those I have tossed up here. That's because I'm writing it back in Minnesota and my traveling-and-thinking-in-an-Africa-frame-of-mind has worn off. Furthermore, my four weeks in South Africa were a wind-down from the previous half year. For the first time, I actually felt as though I were on a vacation as opposed to actually traveling. So anyway, this is the first post I've had to force myself to write; consequently, it'll definitely suck.
There was so much to remember and so much to consume even in the liquor and food categories that I was nearly overwhelmed. Black Label beer, Harriers whiskey, Chenin Blanc and Pinotage wine, and Paarl "wine" were my liquor of choice last time and the tastes had changed not at all in the interlude since I had left. I ate bowl after bowl of pojtie, a South African stew made over an open fire in a large cast iron pot. Once again I got to eat Khosa bread, throw chutney on my steaks, and eat cheap, well-made Indian food. There was fast food that I actually enjoyed, especially the chicken joints and the burger/steak franchise called, simply, Steers.
Speaking of meat, the best part of South Africa's food are their braais, or their version of a barbecue. I have to explain that nine of ten times back in America when people say they're going to have a barbecue, they mean a wimpy, stupid barbecue with maybe some dry hamburgers and some hot dogs. To this day I fail to understand why people spends hundreds, even thousands, of dollars on a grill that they barely know how to cook food on. South Africa has it down - their braais are simple affairs with none of the pretentiousness that American grills carry. More often than not they're stone bases with a simple grill thrown on top, easy as that. But they're usually at least twice the size of American grills and are fully stocked with numerous kinds of meat. This is possible because meat is about half the price in South Africa as the USA so they might toss on mutton, ribs, steak, chicken, boervors (the incredibly tasty version of an American sausage), game meat, or any other variety of grillables. A braai in South Africa really is an experience of its own, and it was fantastic to be back for them once again.
Traveling south from the Tanzanian/Zambian border, I got into a conversation with the only non-black on the bus, a colored guy named Wesley from Cape Town. He solved any dilemma I may of had with travel plans by insisting I accompany him to Cape Town and spend some time at his place while he showed me around. This was an incredibly kind gesture given that he had just spent six weeks away up in Burundi, but I was more than happy to not worry about my lodging. So without even thinking about it, my next destination was chosen for me. Not only was a huge weight lifted off my shoulders by finally reaching the coast once again after so many months, but it was great to hang with Wesley and his incredibly kind family. They insisted I stay with them in the suburbs and made it a point to show me the South African good life. My days were filled with braais, potjie, wine, visits to his girlfriend's vineyard, solid beer, and general relaxation.
One day he took me to the Cape of Good Hope, a location that is somewhat desperately billed as the "southwestern-most point in Africa." If that's a lame claim to fame, people are much more anxious to go here than the true southern point of Africa and the one that nobody has actually heard of, Cape Agulhas. This is for two reasons. Reason one is that Cape Agulhas is just a flat, rocky stretch of land that is far enough away from Cape Town to be unworthy of a photo. The cliffs of Good Hope are perfect photo ops. The second reason is that the Cape of Good Hope has always been thought of by the world as the southern-most point, starting from when Bartolomeu Dias became the first European, and possible the first person ever, to round the Cape in 1488. Because of a geographical glitch in the shoreline he mistook it for the bottom of the continent. This mistake continued onwards for many decades and centuries into the future and led eventually to the current state of confusion over what the true bottom actually is. (Whether the possible Phoenician expedition around 600 B.C. and the expedition of Zheng He in the early Ming dynasty around 1421 made the same mistake coming from the east is unknown, but I think it's important to at least note that both of these may have pre-empted Dias.)
Despite what I view as its inauthenticity and tourist-driven feel, I enjoy Good Hope. The monuments erected by ships and expeditions over the centuries and the pounding surf of the Atlantic Ocean are pleasant to check out and the whole area has one of those inexplicable feels where you don't even care about the other tourists and you're just overcome by the history and the beauty of it all. Agulhas, on the other hand, is far less interesting.
When my time in the Cape Town area felt about over I split and made it to Port Elizabeth, my home base for my study abroad. While P.E. is little more than an industrial sea port, I have a tremendous love for the city. As luck would have it the St. Ben's/Saint John's study abroad group was staying in the very flats I was in three years ago and I happened to be friends with a few of them through previous political happenings. Though they were swamped with homework at the end of their semester they were cool enough to drink with me and even made my week by spending a solid hour looking at hilarious C-SPAN clips on TouTube (yes, they were those kind of politicos.) I further looked up some other old friends from the city and spent time reminiscing over Black Label beer. Other than that I was content to take runs along the Indian ocean, cook, and begin think about my approaching return home.
With the last couple weeks of Africa in site I made plans to take one last foray into rural Africa by way of the Wild Coast, an isolated stretch of land north of Port Elizabeth in the warm turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean settled by the Xhosa tribe. It is my favorite place in Africa. Having traveled here a number of times before and taken one enchanting trek with a solid group of friends last time, I was aware this would be the perfect end to my time in Africa.
I didn't feel up for a trek this so I chose a lodge called Bulungula for my home base. This lodge is located as far off the beaten path as any others on the South African coast and has developed a cult following amongst backpackers since it opened in 2004. It's about twelve hours from the closest major cities and completely off the grid, meaning there is no incoming electricity, water, heat, or air conditioning. But there have come up with an ingenious fuel-powered shower that gives off seven minutes of hot water and installed solar panels for a minimal amount of electricity. With nothing to else to keep me busy I was free to walk along the coast, enjoy the glorious food that the lodge had to offer, and relaxed the hell out of myself on the beaches. It's impossible to say enough about these beaches. They are vast stretches of very fine sand that are interrupted only by an incoming river every kilometer or so, shallow enough to easily cross. Some times an incoming hill may block your path and you're forced to scramble over a few rocks, but otherwise you have a straight run at the ocean shared nobody else. I often say that if they existed in the United States they would be swamped with tens of the thousands of people, but here only the cows are present to keep you company.
A favorite aspect of the lodge to me is the clientele it attracts. While it is only a small stretch to call the place paradise, only the off-track backpackers and great personalities tend to show up at the lodge. Age and country of origin are surprisingly difficult to generalize, but extremely rare is the complaint about lack of amenities. After only a couple days there an Australian backpacker, Miki, showed up and was such a ball of fun that I ended up forgoing my original leave date just because we hit it off so well. Not only was she a traveler whose shear years on the road are among the most intense of anyone I have ever met, but we also had a strikingly similar travel philosophy and sense of humor. Soon after she came the two of us got another joiner who was, oddly enough, a member of the South African Parliament. The three of us and the others took up a lot of my remaining time comparing travel stories, giving backpacking advice, and generally acting like backpackers tend to act. I loved it.
Unfortunately, the end happened to arrive. Genuinely regretting that I had to take my leave of both Bulungula and Africa, I traveled back to Port Elizabeth to pick up some remaining things. From here I bussed to Johannesburg for my flights back to the USA.
-Adam Hochschild, A Mirror at Midnight
Entering South Africa was a lot like coming home. Almost from the moment of entry my mind-set changed to one of relaxtion and familiarity; I felt as if I was finally back in a setting I recognized and could calm down in.
That being said, I can say even before I type this post that it'll be the most boring and poorly-written of those I have tossed up here. That's because I'm writing it back in Minnesota and my traveling-and-thinking-in-an-Africa-frame-of-mind has worn off. Furthermore, my four weeks in South Africa were a wind-down from the previous half year. For the first time, I actually felt as though I were on a vacation as opposed to actually traveling. So anyway, this is the first post I've had to force myself to write; consequently, it'll definitely suck.
There was so much to remember and so much to consume even in the liquor and food categories that I was nearly overwhelmed. Black Label beer, Harriers whiskey, Chenin Blanc and Pinotage wine, and Paarl "wine" were my liquor of choice last time and the tastes had changed not at all in the interlude since I had left. I ate bowl after bowl of pojtie, a South African stew made over an open fire in a large cast iron pot. Once again I got to eat Khosa bread, throw chutney on my steaks, and eat cheap, well-made Indian food. There was fast food that I actually enjoyed, especially the chicken joints and the burger/steak franchise called, simply, Steers.
Speaking of meat, the best part of South Africa's food are their braais, or their version of a barbecue. I have to explain that nine of ten times back in America when people say they're going to have a barbecue, they mean a wimpy, stupid barbecue with maybe some dry hamburgers and some hot dogs. To this day I fail to understand why people spends hundreds, even thousands, of dollars on a grill that they barely know how to cook food on. South Africa has it down - their braais are simple affairs with none of the pretentiousness that American grills carry. More often than not they're stone bases with a simple grill thrown on top, easy as that. But they're usually at least twice the size of American grills and are fully stocked with numerous kinds of meat. This is possible because meat is about half the price in South Africa as the USA so they might toss on mutton, ribs, steak, chicken, boervors (the incredibly tasty version of an American sausage), game meat, or any other variety of grillables. A braai in South Africa really is an experience of its own, and it was fantastic to be back for them once again.
Traveling south from the Tanzanian/Zambian border, I got into a conversation with the only non-black on the bus, a colored guy named Wesley from Cape Town. He solved any dilemma I may of had with travel plans by insisting I accompany him to Cape Town and spend some time at his place while he showed me around. This was an incredibly kind gesture given that he had just spent six weeks away up in Burundi, but I was more than happy to not worry about my lodging. So without even thinking about it, my next destination was chosen for me. Not only was a huge weight lifted off my shoulders by finally reaching the coast once again after so many months, but it was great to hang with Wesley and his incredibly kind family. They insisted I stay with them in the suburbs and made it a point to show me the South African good life. My days were filled with braais, potjie, wine, visits to his girlfriend's vineyard, solid beer, and general relaxation.
One day he took me to the Cape of Good Hope, a location that is somewhat desperately billed as the "southwestern-most point in Africa." If that's a lame claim to fame, people are much more anxious to go here than the true southern point of Africa and the one that nobody has actually heard of, Cape Agulhas. This is for two reasons. Reason one is that Cape Agulhas is just a flat, rocky stretch of land that is far enough away from Cape Town to be unworthy of a photo. The cliffs of Good Hope are perfect photo ops. The second reason is that the Cape of Good Hope has always been thought of by the world as the southern-most point, starting from when Bartolomeu Dias became the first European, and possible the first person ever, to round the Cape in 1488. Because of a geographical glitch in the shoreline he mistook it for the bottom of the continent. This mistake continued onwards for many decades and centuries into the future and led eventually to the current state of confusion over what the true bottom actually is. (Whether the possible Phoenician expedition around 600 B.C. and the expedition of Zheng He in the early Ming dynasty around 1421 made the same mistake coming from the east is unknown, but I think it's important to at least note that both of these may have pre-empted Dias.)
Despite what I view as its inauthenticity and tourist-driven feel, I enjoy Good Hope. The monuments erected by ships and expeditions over the centuries and the pounding surf of the Atlantic Ocean are pleasant to check out and the whole area has one of those inexplicable feels where you don't even care about the other tourists and you're just overcome by the history and the beauty of it all. Agulhas, on the other hand, is far less interesting.
When my time in the Cape Town area felt about over I split and made it to Port Elizabeth, my home base for my study abroad. While P.E. is little more than an industrial sea port, I have a tremendous love for the city. As luck would have it the St. Ben's/Saint John's study abroad group was staying in the very flats I was in three years ago and I happened to be friends with a few of them through previous political happenings. Though they were swamped with homework at the end of their semester they were cool enough to drink with me and even made my week by spending a solid hour looking at hilarious C-SPAN clips on TouTube (yes, they were those kind of politicos.) I further looked up some other old friends from the city and spent time reminiscing over Black Label beer. Other than that I was content to take runs along the Indian ocean, cook, and begin think about my approaching return home.
With the last couple weeks of Africa in site I made plans to take one last foray into rural Africa by way of the Wild Coast, an isolated stretch of land north of Port Elizabeth in the warm turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean settled by the Xhosa tribe. It is my favorite place in Africa. Having traveled here a number of times before and taken one enchanting trek with a solid group of friends last time, I was aware this would be the perfect end to my time in Africa.
I didn't feel up for a trek this so I chose a lodge called Bulungula for my home base. This lodge is located as far off the beaten path as any others on the South African coast and has developed a cult following amongst backpackers since it opened in 2004. It's about twelve hours from the closest major cities and completely off the grid, meaning there is no incoming electricity, water, heat, or air conditioning. But there have come up with an ingenious fuel-powered shower that gives off seven minutes of hot water and installed solar panels for a minimal amount of electricity. With nothing to else to keep me busy I was free to walk along the coast, enjoy the glorious food that the lodge had to offer, and relaxed the hell out of myself on the beaches. It's impossible to say enough about these beaches. They are vast stretches of very fine sand that are interrupted only by an incoming river every kilometer or so, shallow enough to easily cross. Some times an incoming hill may block your path and you're forced to scramble over a few rocks, but otherwise you have a straight run at the ocean shared nobody else. I often say that if they existed in the United States they would be swamped with tens of the thousands of people, but here only the cows are present to keep you company.
A favorite aspect of the lodge to me is the clientele it attracts. While it is only a small stretch to call the place paradise, only the off-track backpackers and great personalities tend to show up at the lodge. Age and country of origin are surprisingly difficult to generalize, but extremely rare is the complaint about lack of amenities. After only a couple days there an Australian backpacker, Miki, showed up and was such a ball of fun that I ended up forgoing my original leave date just because we hit it off so well. Not only was she a traveler whose shear years on the road are among the most intense of anyone I have ever met, but we also had a strikingly similar travel philosophy and sense of humor. Soon after she came the two of us got another joiner who was, oddly enough, a member of the South African Parliament. The three of us and the others took up a lot of my remaining time comparing travel stories, giving backpacking advice, and generally acting like backpackers tend to act. I loved it.
Unfortunately, the end happened to arrive. Genuinely regretting that I had to take my leave of both Bulungula and Africa, I traveled back to Port Elizabeth to pick up some remaining things. From here I bussed to Johannesburg for my flights back to the USA.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Tanzania/Zambia/Zimbabwe
Let the trial come.
-Homer, The Odyssey
When I was in Africa three years ago I spent a month in Tanzania, but it was along the coast and in the north following the tourist circuit. Most of my stay concentrated on the spice island of Zanzibar and the Serengeti during migration season, an amazing experience with all of the animals you dream of in your childhood. (Dar es Salaam, on the other hand, was pretty much my own personal Room 101 and remains my least-favorite African city.)
At the root of the challenges I faced this time around was that this is the rainy season in central Africa right now so any transportation was sporadic at best. While in the end doomed to failure, my hope was to rush through Tanzania and Zambia in time for my flight from Lusaka to Johannesburg that was only a few days away.
I should have been able to guess that "rushing" through this area during the rains is like swimming through a giant vat of mashed potatoes. It just doesn't work. But, giving it a shot, I decided to make my way from Bujumbura to Kigoma, Tanzania, travel to a place called Urambo, down to a city I had never heard of called Sumbaranga, and then cross into Zambia and sprint down to Lusaka.
Don't worry about the geography in this post; it's filled with random cities and towns that shouldn't make much sense. The jumble of cities and towns in my mashed-potato journey blurred together in my mind even as I was passing through them. This post will probably seem even more blurry.
Exiting Burundi I dodged a another potential immigration snag after learning that I had been granted only a temporary three-day visa to Burundi and had over-stayed it by well over a week. The customs officials were rather understanding however and allowed me to pass regardless, leaving me with a far better taste in my mouth than I would have thought.
I decided to see if my luck would hold at the Tanzanian immigration office, inexplicably located some 30 kilometers from the Burundian post. Still annoyed that the Tanzanian visa for Americans had recently been raised to $100 and they wouldn't give me a transit visa for a measly four days of travel, I decided to pass them the fake $100 bill I got up in Ethiopia. Sure enough, they took it and I scurried away, gleeful at even one transient moment of being able to pull one over on the locals.
Unfortunately, that was the last bit of good luck I was to have on my travels to the south. Upon reaching Kigoma, I was told immediately by the crowd of people who gathered around me that the road to Urambo had been washed out by the rains and was impassable. Looking at a map, I saw another road leaving Kigoma that went straight south and led to a city called Mpanda. One guy helpfully suggested I take the train to Mpanda that was leaving in an hour, so we took a taxi to the train station to find that the train, incredibly, had already left. He looked as shocked as I felt - something leaving early in Africa? That just doesn't happen!
Nothing else was going south for the rest of the day, so the next morning I jumped on a bus down what my map had optimistically deemed a major roadway of western Tanzania to Mpanda. Unfortunately, it turned out to be little more than a dirt track with major sections washed away, but with no other option I settled in for the long haul. The road was so annihilated that it took six hours to travel one hundred and fifty kilometers before the bus broke down still north of Mpanda. I didn't want to spend the night with the bus in the middle of nowhere so I took off down the nearby train tracks hoping to find a village. After an hour or so a cargo train with about twenty cars came by and I waved, enjoying even a hint of civilization. The conductor just stared.
It took only a few kilometers to reach some no-name village for me to bed down in for the night. The reaction I received was particularly amusing but eventually I was able to sort out a room for me to sleep in for the night at a cool cost of one dollar. My sleep was interrupted numerous times by the dumb-ass roosters in the next lot who apparently had never seen a Disney movie and weren't away that they're only supposed to crow at sunrise and not during the night. Around 5 AM or so I gave up on trying to sleep and walked outside to try for an early start. It was only then, as I looked around for transport, that I realized the extent of how isolated and how small the village, which I had only seen at night, truly was.
There was nothing, nada, zilch, that could transport me anywhere. No buses, no range rovers, not even a motor bike. What I thought was a break came when a group of those from the broken-down bus of last night began to filter into the village starting in the late morning and they somehow got a range rover late in the day to come and transport us. So twelve adults and a baby were crammed into this range rover which took off in the rain on the washed-out roads through some sort of national park with a driver who kept taking swigs of some sort of homemade brew that was at his side. Looking back, I realize how drunk he actually was. I also realize that my travel standards have positively collapsed in Africa, as I wasn't so much concerned with the dangers of the road as the misery of being in the rover. As if the heat, humidity and cramped conditions weren't enough, the general horror was increased five-fold when the guy next to me threw up inside, adding a utterly disgusting smell for what turned out to be another abbreviated ride.
Liquor, rain, and a washed out dirt road are a disastrous combination that I had decided to ignore for lack of other travel methods, but there really wasn't any other option than for the Range Rover to crash at some point. In this case that point was a slight curve in which the driver apparently decided that he just didn't care and kept on going straight. So we drove off the road and directly into one of the enormous trees I had been admiring through the national park. We were going slow enough that it was more of a slide than a careen and nobody was hurt, but it was clear the transmission was demolished and the rover wasn't going anyway. In a road that saw maybe a half dozen cars in any twenty-four hours, it was equally obvious we were the last one for that day.
My quest to get to Lusaka had by this time reached crusade-esque proportions, so I gathered my things to set off in hopes I could reach Mpanda by sunrise walking on my own; sleep be damned. Before I left, however, one of the other passengers suggested that if I walked on my own I would be eaten by hyenas. This gave me pause. A quick analysis of the situation stacked reaching Mpanda with being devoured by a pack of snarling wild animals and the "being devoured" thing ultimately lost.
Instead I walked a short ways away to set up my tent. The driver soon walked over and casually told me that he was going to also sleep in my tent, and I told him just as casually that maybe if he hadn't charged me 5,000 shillings more than the others I could have seen that happening. That pissed him off pretty good, and he said there was no way he'd be driving me to Mpanda the next day. Despite my horrible mood, I had to laugh.
"Dude, your car is demolished. Of course you won't be driving me to Mpanda."
He cursed in Swahili and walked away, and I was able to salvage at least one small victory from a trip that was otherwise a complete disaster. Still, I fell asleep ready to punch someone, anyone, in the face. At this point I was nearing hysteria and was surprised I was actually rational enough to keep from tramping off through the forest by myself. My mood had remained sour from my Rwandan experience and had been helped little by the aimless waiting in Burundi. I was increasingly sure that my plane ticket from Lusaka to Johannesburg was going to be a complete waste of money, but even so I was determined to make it to Lusaka as soon as I could. And if and when I missed my flight, I decided that night to forge ahead until I reached the ocean. Any ocean.
I awoke only a couple hours later with a some others and jumped in the back of a truck slowly making it's way down the path to Mpanda. Of course by the time I got there it was too late to go any further for the day so I settled down and drank Serengeti beer for the the next seven odd hours in an attempt to drown my slowly building rage. Surprisingly, it worked, however temporarily.
In the morning it was yet another chicken bus to the city of Sumbaranga, less than one hundred kilometers from the Zambian border. Any sense of victory I felt at finally reaching Sumbaranga however was squashed after being told that all transport for the day to the border had stopped.
No, I decided. That's just wrong. Despite all my delays, if I made it to the border and even partway into Zambia during the night I could still make it to Lusaka by my deadline of noon the next day and catch my flight. So I laid down 50 US dollars for a guy on a motorcycle to drive me there as long as he took me "right now" so I could get to the border before it closed. He agreed and told me he just needed to get a jacket, and then proceeded to leave for an incredible hour and a half while I sat on the sidewalk and silently stewed. It took two more hours to get to the border and when we arrived the Tanzanian immigration official had left for the night. I had to wait a half hour for him to show up and stamp my visa, but then he told me the news that was ultimately fatal for any plans I had to make my flight the next day - the Zambian border was 20 kilometers away and there was no way for me to reach it.
Unbelievable.
After all that traveling, all that misery, there was nothing. I was gong to miss my flight, my South African trek, and now I had to travel nearly a quarter of the continent through countries I had absolutely no interest in. To say I was angry is an understatement. I hadn't showered or gotten an ounce of REM sleep in days and may as well had tossed hundreds of dollars into the garbage disposal for all the good my money over the last few days had done me. My flight was nixed, I was going to miss a trek in South Africa that had been on my itinerary for more than a year.
I slumped into the village guest house (cost: seventy five cents) and tossed my bags in my room. All I had eaten the last two days was a little bread and some oranges, so I wandered around until I found can loosely be called a restaurant and ordered three sets of "meat and rice", figuring that I might as well go to bed on a full stomach.
When I awoke in the morning I was still bitter, but upon crossing the border and being told I had missed the only transport of the day into the Zambian border city of Mbala, at least I wasn't worried. I didn't have an itinerary to keep, so who really cared anymore?
As Africa luck would have it, this was the one time that the Transportation Gods actually worked in my favor at the first time I didn't even need them to. The truck to Mbala, stacked high with giant bags of corn from the nearby farmers and even higher with some of the farmers themselves, came into view just as I was turning back to go into Tanzania. I jumped on that and after a brief forty minute ride jumped off in Mbala, finally entering southern Africa after nearly five months of traveling.
You have to understand that finally getting to southern Africa was a big milestone. For one thing, it meant for the last time leaving the Nile Basin and, more in my own mind, finally leaving the Great Rift Valley which I had inadvertently been following virtually my entire trip. Through desert and tropics, mountains and lowlands, the Rift Valley had shaped the previous months of my life. Leaving it, I entered the rolling plains of southern Africa. ("These hills are grass-covered and rolling," Alan Patton writes in Cry, The Beloved Country. "And they are lovely beyond any singing of it")
Southern Africa was familiar and welcome terrain that represented not only geographical changes but a number of changes in my actual living style as well. It meant no longer having to sit next to hostile looking men holding second-hand Kalashnikovs on the local minibus. Meat that wasn't slaughtered minutes before and a couple feet away with a knife that probably had never been sterilized. Linguini and parmesan cheese in the supermarkets. Good roads with few potholes. And it meant riding in buses which had air conditioning and honest-to-God padding on the seats. Everyone one of these things was a minor miracle and, though I had to remain stoic for the benefit of the other passengers in the back of the truck, I was jumping wildly up and down on the inside when I finally down in Mbala.
Climbing down, I was told that the bus to Lusaka was leaving in only an hour. Because the road was actually paved (whoa!), the twelve hour ride flew by and upon reaching Lusaka I joined up with a South African I traveling south. What had been my final destination of Lusaka was now just another stop-over so I decided to forge ahead to South Africa right away. At this point I was in a stage of travel numbness. I didn't care about seeing any sites or taking any more time in Africa's interior. Even if it meant busing through the last quarter of Africa over the next couple days I absolutely had to reach the South African coast or I was going to implode. From Zambia my Shangri-La had now turned into South Africa and was the be-all end-all. Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, and Durban were all possibilities, so long as I was at the ocean and in South Africa. That signified that I could relax and enjoy the country that I loved so much three years ago.
I had been thinking of spending some time in Zimbabwe, as this is where I traveled on my Spring Break when I studied in Port Elizabeth. It had been a terrific time. Victoria Falls in particular was unforgettable; discovered by Livingstone as he was attempting to find a navigable waterway to the interior, I'd say the discover of Victoria Falls has to be deemed one of the biggest buzz kills in the history of exploration. A glorious sight, but also a fairly large hint from God that Livingstone wasn't going to have much success in his primary goal. Three years ago though, in addition to the extraordinary view of the Falls, I was treated to the unforgettable experience of running wildly away from an elephant that chased me down the banks of the Zambezi River one day as I was exploring up-river. Best. Travel Story. Ever.
But since then Zimbabwe has careened even further out of control. When I was first there, inflation had been at 1,000 percent - pretty ridiculous, but a far cry from the two hundred billion percent (I'm not exaggerating - it really was that high) that Zimbabwe reached a few months ago before they finally scrubbed their currency altogether. Zimbabwe, once a jewel in southern Africa, is now the resident nutjob and still headed by the last African strongman still in power, Robert Mugabe. Mugabe's erratic and paranoid behaviour towards all countries including his own since he seized power from the racist regime of Ian Smith in 1980 has slowly sent Zimbabwe from a gradually tailspin to a complete nose-dive into the ground over the last three decades. The recent cholera outbreak that has infected a hundred thousand Zimbabweans only highlights the complete breakdown of the country's healthcare system, which in reality has affected far more HIV/AIDS patients than cholera patients.
Civil servants in the country make virtually no money, so tourists are prime picking to get a few extra dollars. I had been hearing horror stories from an uncomfortable number of other travelers who had given Zimbabwe a go and but were caught up in countless roadblocks and would be let through only after a bribe, having to pay hundreds of dollars for visas and/or exit stamps, and, in one case, being tossed in the clink after failing to come up with enough cash to bribe his way out of a minor alcohol offense. Definitely not a place I wanted to spend time much time alone in after all of my trouble up north. I still had to travel through Zimbabwe in order to get to South Africa, but I correctly guessed it would be far easier to travel with an established bus company and go straight through than anything else.
It's funny, really, because it was infinitely easier than I would have thought. We entered Zimbabwe territory as the sun was setting and exited as the sun was rising the next day and I experienced no problems at the borders. Except for the border stations I didn't see Zimbabwe in the light, and with the exception of more potholes than I remember I have no other observations about the country in its present form.
Finally as the sun was rising, appropriately, I crossed the border into South Africa.
-Homer, The Odyssey
When I was in Africa three years ago I spent a month in Tanzania, but it was along the coast and in the north following the tourist circuit. Most of my stay concentrated on the spice island of Zanzibar and the Serengeti during migration season, an amazing experience with all of the animals you dream of in your childhood. (Dar es Salaam, on the other hand, was pretty much my own personal Room 101 and remains my least-favorite African city.)
At the root of the challenges I faced this time around was that this is the rainy season in central Africa right now so any transportation was sporadic at best. While in the end doomed to failure, my hope was to rush through Tanzania and Zambia in time for my flight from Lusaka to Johannesburg that was only a few days away.
I should have been able to guess that "rushing" through this area during the rains is like swimming through a giant vat of mashed potatoes. It just doesn't work. But, giving it a shot, I decided to make my way from Bujumbura to Kigoma, Tanzania, travel to a place called Urambo, down to a city I had never heard of called Sumbaranga, and then cross into Zambia and sprint down to Lusaka.
Don't worry about the geography in this post; it's filled with random cities and towns that shouldn't make much sense. The jumble of cities and towns in my mashed-potato journey blurred together in my mind even as I was passing through them. This post will probably seem even more blurry.
Exiting Burundi I dodged a another potential immigration snag after learning that I had been granted only a temporary three-day visa to Burundi and had over-stayed it by well over a week. The customs officials were rather understanding however and allowed me to pass regardless, leaving me with a far better taste in my mouth than I would have thought.
I decided to see if my luck would hold at the Tanzanian immigration office, inexplicably located some 30 kilometers from the Burundian post. Still annoyed that the Tanzanian visa for Americans had recently been raised to $100 and they wouldn't give me a transit visa for a measly four days of travel, I decided to pass them the fake $100 bill I got up in Ethiopia. Sure enough, they took it and I scurried away, gleeful at even one transient moment of being able to pull one over on the locals.
Unfortunately, that was the last bit of good luck I was to have on my travels to the south. Upon reaching Kigoma, I was told immediately by the crowd of people who gathered around me that the road to Urambo had been washed out by the rains and was impassable. Looking at a map, I saw another road leaving Kigoma that went straight south and led to a city called Mpanda. One guy helpfully suggested I take the train to Mpanda that was leaving in an hour, so we took a taxi to the train station to find that the train, incredibly, had already left. He looked as shocked as I felt - something leaving early in Africa? That just doesn't happen!
Nothing else was going south for the rest of the day, so the next morning I jumped on a bus down what my map had optimistically deemed a major roadway of western Tanzania to Mpanda. Unfortunately, it turned out to be little more than a dirt track with major sections washed away, but with no other option I settled in for the long haul. The road was so annihilated that it took six hours to travel one hundred and fifty kilometers before the bus broke down still north of Mpanda. I didn't want to spend the night with the bus in the middle of nowhere so I took off down the nearby train tracks hoping to find a village. After an hour or so a cargo train with about twenty cars came by and I waved, enjoying even a hint of civilization. The conductor just stared.
It took only a few kilometers to reach some no-name village for me to bed down in for the night. The reaction I received was particularly amusing but eventually I was able to sort out a room for me to sleep in for the night at a cool cost of one dollar. My sleep was interrupted numerous times by the dumb-ass roosters in the next lot who apparently had never seen a Disney movie and weren't away that they're only supposed to crow at sunrise and not during the night. Around 5 AM or so I gave up on trying to sleep and walked outside to try for an early start. It was only then, as I looked around for transport, that I realized the extent of how isolated and how small the village, which I had only seen at night, truly was.
There was nothing, nada, zilch, that could transport me anywhere. No buses, no range rovers, not even a motor bike. What I thought was a break came when a group of those from the broken-down bus of last night began to filter into the village starting in the late morning and they somehow got a range rover late in the day to come and transport us. So twelve adults and a baby were crammed into this range rover which took off in the rain on the washed-out roads through some sort of national park with a driver who kept taking swigs of some sort of homemade brew that was at his side. Looking back, I realize how drunk he actually was. I also realize that my travel standards have positively collapsed in Africa, as I wasn't so much concerned with the dangers of the road as the misery of being in the rover. As if the heat, humidity and cramped conditions weren't enough, the general horror was increased five-fold when the guy next to me threw up inside, adding a utterly disgusting smell for what turned out to be another abbreviated ride.
Liquor, rain, and a washed out dirt road are a disastrous combination that I had decided to ignore for lack of other travel methods, but there really wasn't any other option than for the Range Rover to crash at some point. In this case that point was a slight curve in which the driver apparently decided that he just didn't care and kept on going straight. So we drove off the road and directly into one of the enormous trees I had been admiring through the national park. We were going slow enough that it was more of a slide than a careen and nobody was hurt, but it was clear the transmission was demolished and the rover wasn't going anyway. In a road that saw maybe a half dozen cars in any twenty-four hours, it was equally obvious we were the last one for that day.
My quest to get to Lusaka had by this time reached crusade-esque proportions, so I gathered my things to set off in hopes I could reach Mpanda by sunrise walking on my own; sleep be damned. Before I left, however, one of the other passengers suggested that if I walked on my own I would be eaten by hyenas. This gave me pause. A quick analysis of the situation stacked reaching Mpanda with being devoured by a pack of snarling wild animals and the "being devoured" thing ultimately lost.
Instead I walked a short ways away to set up my tent. The driver soon walked over and casually told me that he was going to also sleep in my tent, and I told him just as casually that maybe if he hadn't charged me 5,000 shillings more than the others I could have seen that happening. That pissed him off pretty good, and he said there was no way he'd be driving me to Mpanda the next day. Despite my horrible mood, I had to laugh.
"Dude, your car is demolished. Of course you won't be driving me to Mpanda."
He cursed in Swahili and walked away, and I was able to salvage at least one small victory from a trip that was otherwise a complete disaster. Still, I fell asleep ready to punch someone, anyone, in the face. At this point I was nearing hysteria and was surprised I was actually rational enough to keep from tramping off through the forest by myself. My mood had remained sour from my Rwandan experience and had been helped little by the aimless waiting in Burundi. I was increasingly sure that my plane ticket from Lusaka to Johannesburg was going to be a complete waste of money, but even so I was determined to make it to Lusaka as soon as I could. And if and when I missed my flight, I decided that night to forge ahead until I reached the ocean. Any ocean.
I awoke only a couple hours later with a some others and jumped in the back of a truck slowly making it's way down the path to Mpanda. Of course by the time I got there it was too late to go any further for the day so I settled down and drank Serengeti beer for the the next seven odd hours in an attempt to drown my slowly building rage. Surprisingly, it worked, however temporarily.
In the morning it was yet another chicken bus to the city of Sumbaranga, less than one hundred kilometers from the Zambian border. Any sense of victory I felt at finally reaching Sumbaranga however was squashed after being told that all transport for the day to the border had stopped.
No, I decided. That's just wrong. Despite all my delays, if I made it to the border and even partway into Zambia during the night I could still make it to Lusaka by my deadline of noon the next day and catch my flight. So I laid down 50 US dollars for a guy on a motorcycle to drive me there as long as he took me "right now" so I could get to the border before it closed. He agreed and told me he just needed to get a jacket, and then proceeded to leave for an incredible hour and a half while I sat on the sidewalk and silently stewed. It took two more hours to get to the border and when we arrived the Tanzanian immigration official had left for the night. I had to wait a half hour for him to show up and stamp my visa, but then he told me the news that was ultimately fatal for any plans I had to make my flight the next day - the Zambian border was 20 kilometers away and there was no way for me to reach it.
Unbelievable.
After all that traveling, all that misery, there was nothing. I was gong to miss my flight, my South African trek, and now I had to travel nearly a quarter of the continent through countries I had absolutely no interest in. To say I was angry is an understatement. I hadn't showered or gotten an ounce of REM sleep in days and may as well had tossed hundreds of dollars into the garbage disposal for all the good my money over the last few days had done me. My flight was nixed, I was going to miss a trek in South Africa that had been on my itinerary for more than a year.
I slumped into the village guest house (cost: seventy five cents) and tossed my bags in my room. All I had eaten the last two days was a little bread and some oranges, so I wandered around until I found can loosely be called a restaurant and ordered three sets of "meat and rice", figuring that I might as well go to bed on a full stomach.
When I awoke in the morning I was still bitter, but upon crossing the border and being told I had missed the only transport of the day into the Zambian border city of Mbala, at least I wasn't worried. I didn't have an itinerary to keep, so who really cared anymore?
As Africa luck would have it, this was the one time that the Transportation Gods actually worked in my favor at the first time I didn't even need them to. The truck to Mbala, stacked high with giant bags of corn from the nearby farmers and even higher with some of the farmers themselves, came into view just as I was turning back to go into Tanzania. I jumped on that and after a brief forty minute ride jumped off in Mbala, finally entering southern Africa after nearly five months of traveling.
You have to understand that finally getting to southern Africa was a big milestone. For one thing, it meant for the last time leaving the Nile Basin and, more in my own mind, finally leaving the Great Rift Valley which I had inadvertently been following virtually my entire trip. Through desert and tropics, mountains and lowlands, the Rift Valley had shaped the previous months of my life. Leaving it, I entered the rolling plains of southern Africa. ("These hills are grass-covered and rolling," Alan Patton writes in Cry, The Beloved Country. "And they are lovely beyond any singing of it")
Southern Africa was familiar and welcome terrain that represented not only geographical changes but a number of changes in my actual living style as well. It meant no longer having to sit next to hostile looking men holding second-hand Kalashnikovs on the local minibus. Meat that wasn't slaughtered minutes before and a couple feet away with a knife that probably had never been sterilized. Linguini and parmesan cheese in the supermarkets. Good roads with few potholes. And it meant riding in buses which had air conditioning and honest-to-God padding on the seats. Everyone one of these things was a minor miracle and, though I had to remain stoic for the benefit of the other passengers in the back of the truck, I was jumping wildly up and down on the inside when I finally down in Mbala.
Climbing down, I was told that the bus to Lusaka was leaving in only an hour. Because the road was actually paved (whoa!), the twelve hour ride flew by and upon reaching Lusaka I joined up with a South African I traveling south. What had been my final destination of Lusaka was now just another stop-over so I decided to forge ahead to South Africa right away. At this point I was in a stage of travel numbness. I didn't care about seeing any sites or taking any more time in Africa's interior. Even if it meant busing through the last quarter of Africa over the next couple days I absolutely had to reach the South African coast or I was going to implode. From Zambia my Shangri-La had now turned into South Africa and was the be-all end-all. Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, and Durban were all possibilities, so long as I was at the ocean and in South Africa. That signified that I could relax and enjoy the country that I loved so much three years ago.
I had been thinking of spending some time in Zimbabwe, as this is where I traveled on my Spring Break when I studied in Port Elizabeth. It had been a terrific time. Victoria Falls in particular was unforgettable; discovered by Livingstone as he was attempting to find a navigable waterway to the interior, I'd say the discover of Victoria Falls has to be deemed one of the biggest buzz kills in the history of exploration. A glorious sight, but also a fairly large hint from God that Livingstone wasn't going to have much success in his primary goal. Three years ago though, in addition to the extraordinary view of the Falls, I was treated to the unforgettable experience of running wildly away from an elephant that chased me down the banks of the Zambezi River one day as I was exploring up-river. Best. Travel Story. Ever.
But since then Zimbabwe has careened even further out of control. When I was first there, inflation had been at 1,000 percent - pretty ridiculous, but a far cry from the two hundred billion percent (I'm not exaggerating - it really was that high) that Zimbabwe reached a few months ago before they finally scrubbed their currency altogether. Zimbabwe, once a jewel in southern Africa, is now the resident nutjob and still headed by the last African strongman still in power, Robert Mugabe. Mugabe's erratic and paranoid behaviour towards all countries including his own since he seized power from the racist regime of Ian Smith in 1980 has slowly sent Zimbabwe from a gradually tailspin to a complete nose-dive into the ground over the last three decades. The recent cholera outbreak that has infected a hundred thousand Zimbabweans only highlights the complete breakdown of the country's healthcare system, which in reality has affected far more HIV/AIDS patients than cholera patients.
Civil servants in the country make virtually no money, so tourists are prime picking to get a few extra dollars. I had been hearing horror stories from an uncomfortable number of other travelers who had given Zimbabwe a go and but were caught up in countless roadblocks and would be let through only after a bribe, having to pay hundreds of dollars for visas and/or exit stamps, and, in one case, being tossed in the clink after failing to come up with enough cash to bribe his way out of a minor alcohol offense. Definitely not a place I wanted to spend time much time alone in after all of my trouble up north. I still had to travel through Zimbabwe in order to get to South Africa, but I correctly guessed it would be far easier to travel with an established bus company and go straight through than anything else.
It's funny, really, because it was infinitely easier than I would have thought. We entered Zimbabwe territory as the sun was setting and exited as the sun was rising the next day and I experienced no problems at the borders. Except for the border stations I didn't see Zimbabwe in the light, and with the exception of more potholes than I remember I have no other observations about the country in its present form.
Finally as the sun was rising, appropriately, I crossed the border into South Africa.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Burundi
Dr. Livingstone, I presume?
-Henry Morton Stanley
Burundi was always the biggest question mark of the countries on my Africa itinerary, partly because the little information on travel within the country is limited primarily to State Department warnings, warnings I should add that exist for nearly every country in Africa that most everyone discounts, telling travelers that the best way to enjoy Burundi would be to simply not go there. I looked Burundi up in a Lonely Planet Guide to East Africa that I borrowed from another backpacker but out of the entire book Lonely Planet devotes only a few pages to Burundi, half of which talks about the capitol of Bujumbura and the other half of which pretty much repeats over and over again that nobody goes there.
This was backed up by my Thorn Tree online travel forum, which offers a country-by-country break-down for people to discuss. Whereas a normal African country may receive up to six new topics a day, until the last few months it wasn't uncommon for Burundi to go for half a year without a new post. The reason for this is largely because Burundi shared a lot of the same problems as Rwanda did in 1994 but failed to resolve them as quickly. (It may also be because Burundi is a giant swamp and their food tastes like crap, but hey, it's always easier to blame the civil war for tourism problems.)
Both Rwanda and Burundi are of comparable geographical size and population density, they also both have similar Hutu/Tusti population ratios, thety were both colonized by the Belgians as part of the Congo colony, both experienced ethnic massacres in the post-colonial decades, and both lie next to the geopolitical mess in the Congo.
In 1994, when the plane carrying Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down starting the Rwandan Genocide, it is often forgotten that Burundian president Cyprian Ntayamira was also on board. His death started the same ethnic killings in Burundi as Rwanda, but this fact has been largely ignored by pretty much everyone. Ultimately some 300,000 were killed in the same period as the Rwandan Genocide. While the Rwandan Tutsi rebels, the RPF, drove their adversaries into the Congo for a protracted mess which has lasted until this day, the Burundians have been left with a civil war that ended officially only four months ago. The real fighting stopped a couple years back but one rebel group in the east held out enough to cause problems. You might occasionally have read about a mortar shelling in Bujumbura or an ambush of government troops up until late last year, but by-and-large the rebel group only lasted so long in order to have a seat at the table of political power once they were disbanded. Once they signed the peace agreement a few months back, the Burundian saw peace for the first time in a generation.
The capital city, Bujumbura, lies across from the Congo and at the top on Lake Tanganyika, the world's second deepest lake and a body of water that stretches 700 kilometers from Burundi, down the borders of Tanzania and the DR Congo, and ending up at the top of Zambia. Zambia was my desired destination but I didn't want to travel overland to get there. For one thing, by this time I had driven on a ridiculous amount of buses and my butt was beginning to permanently mold into a bus seat shape. I was also a bit pissed at Tanzania for raising their visa fees only for Americans to $100 and it was rainy season there, so I wanted to skip it if possible. Traveling through the applicable region of the Congo was out of the question because of security concerns, so I decided I would jump on a boat to take me down the lake to Zambia which would let me bypass both countries. I figured that I had eleven days to make it down to Lusaka, Zambia for my flight to Johannesburg, so it wouldn't be a problem.
Well! Talk about foolish!
My very first day in Bujumbura I ambled down to the pier and started asking around for ships. Within ten minutes I was talking to a captain of a cargo ship which was heading exactly where wanted to go in Zambia. It would take two days, he said, but would be leaving within the next three days and he could take me along no problem. Definitely, he said. But he didn't know when exactly, so I had to stick around and call him every morning and run to the ship in order to get a spot. Great, I though.
We all know what happened - the ship simply stayed in port. Every ship did, actually. For some unknown reason not a single cargo ship left for nearly two weeks from Bujumbura. I didn't know it was going to be two weeks, of course, so I stayed loyally in Bujumbura, calling every day and being told every day that, no problem, it was DEFINITELY going to leave tomorrow.
It wouldn't have been so bad if I would have been in a city like Addis Ababa or Kisumu, but Bujumbura is a hole. I was there in the rainy season and that meant that it was humid as hell my entire stay. I could have taken day trips into the mountains to hike around, but I was tired of little children following me by the dozen and screaming "Muzungu!" and didn't want to mess with any potential rural dangers so I stayed in that swamp-of-a-city Bujumbura the majority of the time. And let me tell you, even a day there tries your patience.
To begin with, because no backpackers have been traveling there for decades there are no cheap lodges or hostels. This is compounded by what I call the NGO Price Ceiling. That is when the UN and NGOs flood a city or a region that is in some sort of protracted humanitarian crisis. They are willing to throw down hundreds of dollars per room at the local hotels. What this means for the off-track backpacker is that in cities like Juba, Kigali, Harare, and Bujumbura to name a few, the local hotel prices have been dramatically inflated to the point where they are unaffordable. In the end I ended up staying at this run-down "hotel" near the city center for a price that seemed about three times too high. It was on a tree-lined street that may have been pleasant, but "tree lined" in Africa doesn't mean pleasant - it means "place to take a piss every time you walk by." You may think I'm exaggerating when I say this, but I'm not - every time I walked this stretch of maybe a hundred yards there was a minimum of two people using it as a bathroom. Every time. You toss in a humid climate and you have the most god-awful stench you can imagine that grew even worse in the hours after the daily rains.
And Lonely Planet was right - there isn't much to do in the country except get gawked at by the locals. Bujumbura a flat, undeveloped city with no high-rises and little in the way of entertainment. The government, to it's credit, seems to be trying to follow Rwanda's efforts in building ht country up, but these effort have been partially hampered by the ridiculous corruption in the country, exemplified best by the murder of the leading anti-corruption figure of the country while I was there.
The flood of aid and NGO money coupled with the illegal mineral flow from across the lake in the Congo has created a climate that made me nervous, and the dodgy-looking camo pick-ups with guys in fatigues and AKs casually slung over their shoulders that were constantly driving around was an ever-present reminder that up until very recently the country had been in civil war. I've been told that an incredible 25% of the adult population is employed by the defense sector of the country, and with the number of soldiers I saw I believe it. This is a country that needs to find a way to demobilize, and fast.
So I didn't wander about too much. One day I took a stroll down to the point on Lake Tanganyika where a sick David Livingstone had been discovered by the pompous jack-ass Henry Morton Stanley after he tramped across the continent in search of Livingstone. But I was so uninspired I couldn't even bring myself to take a picture. There was just a simple plaque there and a lot of trash. Plus the "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" line that Stanley allegedly tossed out when first meeting Livingstone was probably apocryphal anyway, made up afterwards by Stanley. (Don't think it doesn't bug the hell out of me that it's the most famous line in African exploration.) Even if it was actually said, Stanley's assertion that he though of it only at the moment is pure crap - someone as obnoxious as him would have been figuring out for months what he would say.
(As a side point, I find it humorous that once Stanley "rescued" Livingstone, Livingstone stayed on the lake anyway and eventually ended up dying. A similar fate awaited the recipient of Stanley's next "rescue" on his third and final major expedition into the heart of Africa, a British Lieutenant Emin Pasha who was under siege by the forces of the Mahdi from the north. Though the Pasha allowed himself to be brought back to Zanzibar, he also refused to leave Africa and soon returned back into the interior and eventually had his head lopped off by the locals, thus depriving Stanley of yet another partner for his planned money-making lecture series around the world.)
Other than that, I pretty much stuck to hanging around Internet cafes putzing around on the Internet and drinking passion fruit juice. The Burundians in Bujumbura seemed a bit more acclimated to whites than those in the rural areas and I frequently found a partner to chat with for a couple hours here. The men of Bujumbura were good-natured and enthusiastic and the women were stunningly beautiful and when they laughed at my jokes it actually seemed genuine, so I had a good time with all (except the little kids who I hated, but I hate little kids everywhere).
My extreme frustrations with my housing and the lack of movement from the port were overwhelming for a few days, but eventually I mellowed out. This was helped by advice from my friend Liz who reminded me that frustrations were everywhere; would I rather be frustrated traveling through central Africa, she asked, or frustrated in Minnesota? It was a prescient comment, as after so much travel I had maybe forgotten how lucky I was to be able to complain about being in Central Africa. Buoyed by this advice, I tried to make it a point to calm down and enjoy where I was.
After only a couple days in Bujumbura I discovered that sunsets beyond the lake over the Congolese mountains were sites to behold. They also offered a refreshing break of routine, so every night I wandered down to the lake shore and relaxed while the sun dipped below the ever-tantalizing Congo. I never swam in the lake because of the presence of the waterborne disease bilharzia, but the beach was nice enough to chill out on for hours at a time. I also found a couple local cafes that served non-greasy food and had decent prices, so that improved my spirits as well.
Even so, the lack of a way to get to Zambia was worrying me. Finally, after a week and a half of waiting, I called the Captain one Saturday and he said "Not today, call back on Monday." With the calculations I had made, there was no way that if the boat left on Monday I would have been able to make it in time to my flight from Lusaka. It was at this point I made an incredibly stupid mistake; I decided to forgo the cargo ship and overland it through eastern Tanzania. I'll get into my overland travels in the next post, but suffice it to say that I missed my flight and had a series of travel experiences that ensure I will never again even consider travel through a region during their rainy season.
-Henry Morton Stanley
Burundi was always the biggest question mark of the countries on my Africa itinerary, partly because the little information on travel within the country is limited primarily to State Department warnings, warnings I should add that exist for nearly every country in Africa that most everyone discounts, telling travelers that the best way to enjoy Burundi would be to simply not go there. I looked Burundi up in a Lonely Planet Guide to East Africa that I borrowed from another backpacker but out of the entire book Lonely Planet devotes only a few pages to Burundi, half of which talks about the capitol of Bujumbura and the other half of which pretty much repeats over and over again that nobody goes there.
This was backed up by my Thorn Tree online travel forum, which offers a country-by-country break-down for people to discuss. Whereas a normal African country may receive up to six new topics a day, until the last few months it wasn't uncommon for Burundi to go for half a year without a new post. The reason for this is largely because Burundi shared a lot of the same problems as Rwanda did in 1994 but failed to resolve them as quickly. (It may also be because Burundi is a giant swamp and their food tastes like crap, but hey, it's always easier to blame the civil war for tourism problems.)
Both Rwanda and Burundi are of comparable geographical size and population density, they also both have similar Hutu/Tusti population ratios, thety were both colonized by the Belgians as part of the Congo colony, both experienced ethnic massacres in the post-colonial decades, and both lie next to the geopolitical mess in the Congo.
In 1994, when the plane carrying Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down starting the Rwandan Genocide, it is often forgotten that Burundian president Cyprian Ntayamira was also on board. His death started the same ethnic killings in Burundi as Rwanda, but this fact has been largely ignored by pretty much everyone. Ultimately some 300,000 were killed in the same period as the Rwandan Genocide. While the Rwandan Tutsi rebels, the RPF, drove their adversaries into the Congo for a protracted mess which has lasted until this day, the Burundians have been left with a civil war that ended officially only four months ago. The real fighting stopped a couple years back but one rebel group in the east held out enough to cause problems. You might occasionally have read about a mortar shelling in Bujumbura or an ambush of government troops up until late last year, but by-and-large the rebel group only lasted so long in order to have a seat at the table of political power once they were disbanded. Once they signed the peace agreement a few months back, the Burundian saw peace for the first time in a generation.
The capital city, Bujumbura, lies across from the Congo and at the top on Lake Tanganyika, the world's second deepest lake and a body of water that stretches 700 kilometers from Burundi, down the borders of Tanzania and the DR Congo, and ending up at the top of Zambia. Zambia was my desired destination but I didn't want to travel overland to get there. For one thing, by this time I had driven on a ridiculous amount of buses and my butt was beginning to permanently mold into a bus seat shape. I was also a bit pissed at Tanzania for raising their visa fees only for Americans to $100 and it was rainy season there, so I wanted to skip it if possible. Traveling through the applicable region of the Congo was out of the question because of security concerns, so I decided I would jump on a boat to take me down the lake to Zambia which would let me bypass both countries. I figured that I had eleven days to make it down to Lusaka, Zambia for my flight to Johannesburg, so it wouldn't be a problem.
Well! Talk about foolish!
My very first day in Bujumbura I ambled down to the pier and started asking around for ships. Within ten minutes I was talking to a captain of a cargo ship which was heading exactly where wanted to go in Zambia. It would take two days, he said, but would be leaving within the next three days and he could take me along no problem. Definitely, he said. But he didn't know when exactly, so I had to stick around and call him every morning and run to the ship in order to get a spot. Great, I though.
We all know what happened - the ship simply stayed in port. Every ship did, actually. For some unknown reason not a single cargo ship left for nearly two weeks from Bujumbura. I didn't know it was going to be two weeks, of course, so I stayed loyally in Bujumbura, calling every day and being told every day that, no problem, it was DEFINITELY going to leave tomorrow.
It wouldn't have been so bad if I would have been in a city like Addis Ababa or Kisumu, but Bujumbura is a hole. I was there in the rainy season and that meant that it was humid as hell my entire stay. I could have taken day trips into the mountains to hike around, but I was tired of little children following me by the dozen and screaming "Muzungu!" and didn't want to mess with any potential rural dangers so I stayed in that swamp-of-a-city Bujumbura the majority of the time. And let me tell you, even a day there tries your patience.
To begin with, because no backpackers have been traveling there for decades there are no cheap lodges or hostels. This is compounded by what I call the NGO Price Ceiling. That is when the UN and NGOs flood a city or a region that is in some sort of protracted humanitarian crisis. They are willing to throw down hundreds of dollars per room at the local hotels. What this means for the off-track backpacker is that in cities like Juba, Kigali, Harare, and Bujumbura to name a few, the local hotel prices have been dramatically inflated to the point where they are unaffordable. In the end I ended up staying at this run-down "hotel" near the city center for a price that seemed about three times too high. It was on a tree-lined street that may have been pleasant, but "tree lined" in Africa doesn't mean pleasant - it means "place to take a piss every time you walk by." You may think I'm exaggerating when I say this, but I'm not - every time I walked this stretch of maybe a hundred yards there was a minimum of two people using it as a bathroom. Every time. You toss in a humid climate and you have the most god-awful stench you can imagine that grew even worse in the hours after the daily rains.
And Lonely Planet was right - there isn't much to do in the country except get gawked at by the locals. Bujumbura a flat, undeveloped city with no high-rises and little in the way of entertainment. The government, to it's credit, seems to be trying to follow Rwanda's efforts in building ht country up, but these effort have been partially hampered by the ridiculous corruption in the country, exemplified best by the murder of the leading anti-corruption figure of the country while I was there.
The flood of aid and NGO money coupled with the illegal mineral flow from across the lake in the Congo has created a climate that made me nervous, and the dodgy-looking camo pick-ups with guys in fatigues and AKs casually slung over their shoulders that were constantly driving around was an ever-present reminder that up until very recently the country had been in civil war. I've been told that an incredible 25% of the adult population is employed by the defense sector of the country, and with the number of soldiers I saw I believe it. This is a country that needs to find a way to demobilize, and fast.
So I didn't wander about too much. One day I took a stroll down to the point on Lake Tanganyika where a sick David Livingstone had been discovered by the pompous jack-ass Henry Morton Stanley after he tramped across the continent in search of Livingstone. But I was so uninspired I couldn't even bring myself to take a picture. There was just a simple plaque there and a lot of trash. Plus the "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" line that Stanley allegedly tossed out when first meeting Livingstone was probably apocryphal anyway, made up afterwards by Stanley. (Don't think it doesn't bug the hell out of me that it's the most famous line in African exploration.) Even if it was actually said, Stanley's assertion that he though of it only at the moment is pure crap - someone as obnoxious as him would have been figuring out for months what he would say.
(As a side point, I find it humorous that once Stanley "rescued" Livingstone, Livingstone stayed on the lake anyway and eventually ended up dying. A similar fate awaited the recipient of Stanley's next "rescue" on his third and final major expedition into the heart of Africa, a British Lieutenant Emin Pasha who was under siege by the forces of the Mahdi from the north. Though the Pasha allowed himself to be brought back to Zanzibar, he also refused to leave Africa and soon returned back into the interior and eventually had his head lopped off by the locals, thus depriving Stanley of yet another partner for his planned money-making lecture series around the world.)
Other than that, I pretty much stuck to hanging around Internet cafes putzing around on the Internet and drinking passion fruit juice. The Burundians in Bujumbura seemed a bit more acclimated to whites than those in the rural areas and I frequently found a partner to chat with for a couple hours here. The men of Bujumbura were good-natured and enthusiastic and the women were stunningly beautiful and when they laughed at my jokes it actually seemed genuine, so I had a good time with all (except the little kids who I hated, but I hate little kids everywhere).
My extreme frustrations with my housing and the lack of movement from the port were overwhelming for a few days, but eventually I mellowed out. This was helped by advice from my friend Liz who reminded me that frustrations were everywhere; would I rather be frustrated traveling through central Africa, she asked, or frustrated in Minnesota? It was a prescient comment, as after so much travel I had maybe forgotten how lucky I was to be able to complain about being in Central Africa. Buoyed by this advice, I tried to make it a point to calm down and enjoy where I was.
After only a couple days in Bujumbura I discovered that sunsets beyond the lake over the Congolese mountains were sites to behold. They also offered a refreshing break of routine, so every night I wandered down to the lake shore and relaxed while the sun dipped below the ever-tantalizing Congo. I never swam in the lake because of the presence of the waterborne disease bilharzia, but the beach was nice enough to chill out on for hours at a time. I also found a couple local cafes that served non-greasy food and had decent prices, so that improved my spirits as well.
Even so, the lack of a way to get to Zambia was worrying me. Finally, after a week and a half of waiting, I called the Captain one Saturday and he said "Not today, call back on Monday." With the calculations I had made, there was no way that if the boat left on Monday I would have been able to make it in time to my flight from Lusaka. It was at this point I made an incredibly stupid mistake; I decided to forgo the cargo ship and overland it through eastern Tanzania. I'll get into my overland travels in the next post, but suffice it to say that I missed my flight and had a series of travel experiences that ensure I will never again even consider travel through a region during their rainy season.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Rwanda
"How can people be so cruel?"
"Hatred . . . insanity . . . I don't know."
-Hotel Rwanda
When I was in Africa three years ago I spent a month traveling in Tanzania and at one point found myself only a couple hundred kilometers from the Rwandan border. Riding a local minibus one day, I saw a beggar on the side of the street. He had no legs, and he had no arms. Foolishly I asked the guy next to me if that was from a disease. He paused, and then uncomfortably responded "No. He is, I think, a Tutsi."
I will never forget that.
This time, the first sign that I was nearing Rwanda came from the UNHCR refugee tents a few kilometers from the border in Uganda. They had been recently put there so it was evident that these particular refugees came not from Rwanda but from the recent fighting within the Congo; but being from the Congo these refugees are part of a conflict that has tied the two contries together since the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.
The genocide is a picture-perfect example of the failure of humanity. In 100 days Rwandans managed to murder between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus (think of that - there is a 100,000 plus-or-minus sign in front of the killings) by way of machete, gun, knife, gang-rape, and a variety of other methods. The West did nothing to stop the genocide and the African Union, which for some reason has escaped criticism for doing the same, sat by idly and afterward blamed the West for what had happened in their own backyard. It's important to point out that the genocide didn't stop because Rwandans suddenly and inexplicably came to their senses, or the rest of Africa decided to finally accept responsibility for their neighbors, or the West decided it would have taken only a few thousand troops to stop what was happening. No, nobody cared enough to stop what was going down even after almost a million murders. It was the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the Tutsi rebel group based out of Uganda and led by current president Paul Kagame, who finally succeeded in driving the Interahamwe, the Hutu extremists who were committing the killings, out of Rwanda. So the Interahamwe, flanked by a couple million or so Hutu civilians who understandably assumed that the incoming RPF might want a little revenge after a million of their family members had just been raped and murdered, fled into the vastness of Zaire. More specifically, the mineral-rich, uncontrolled, forested sections of the North and South Kivu regions of Zaire.
Zaire, Rwanda's giant neighbor to the west, was in it's last days under the kleptocratic Mobutu Sese Seko who led from the other side of the country in Kinshasa. He was too busy trying to hold together his crumbling country in the west to worry about what was happeneing in the east.
From the east the Hutu extremists remained a tremendous thorn in the side of Rwanda's rebuilding efforts and a devastating presence to the Congolese civilians, whose government had neither the will or the resources to drive them out. Eventually Rwanda grew weary of waiting for Zaire to act and launched an invasion on its giant neighbor and actually managed to gain control of the entire country. Later, when Rwanda again became tired of the Rwandan-installed leader Laurent Kabila, they invaded the Zaire again, now remaned The Democratic Republic of Congo. This set off what people call the "African Civil War" and is still continuing to this day, primarily in the Congo, but having involved at one time or another a dozen African nations and having claimed five and a half million lives.
But even with both of these invasions the Rwandans failed to take out the highly militarized Hutu Interahamwe, now acting as an insurgency rebel force in the Congo and forever plotting to come back into power someday in Rwanda. So today there is pure chaos in the North and South Kivu regions of the Congo. The mineral resources of the region compound the matter even further.
The obvious rhetorical question that has to flow through every visitor to Rwanda is "How in the hell can something like this happen?" I say rhetorical because there is no satisfactory answer. An easy answer that a lot of people give is that the rigid hierarchical system in Rwanda was to blame because it allowed those at the top to dictate the genocide and those underneath had to carry it through.
Personally, I find this to be the biggest bullshit answer I've ever heard. My Italian relatives who got their heads bashed in with rifle butts on their farm by some Nazis in World War II died as a result of "following orders." Same with my Croatian relatives who were shot point-blank by an asshole Serbian. The "I was just following orders" defense makes me despise whoever says it because the speaker assumes a complete lack of humanity and allows themselves to be painted as victims in their own light. "Well, yes, it was wrong, but I was told to do it, so what choice did I have?" Jesus Christ! If you're told to force your neighbor to rape his own daughter before setting the entire family on fire how could you think that it is acceptable simply because you're following orders? How do you not turn your gun on your superior instead?
I doubt anyone can find a real reason behind the killings. They happened for whatever reasons, because people in mass groups can be stupid and led to do horrible things. In this case, a country raped, mutilated, and murdered a tenth of its population.
Crossing into Rwanda from Uganda, I spent the first couple days in the city of Ruhengeri, a starting point for gorilla tours and exploration of the surrounding Virunga mountains. While I decided it was best to leave the gorilla tours for another time, the fertile, black Virunga Mountains have been a point of fascination for me since I was eleven years old. So I spent two days trampling around the base of the mountains, just wandering from village to village and trying as best I could to ignore the ever-present crowd of children who followed me. Besides those kids, I had a great time in the forest and really enjoyed just generally spending time in the gorgeous Virunga forest.
From Ruhengeri I traveled to the resort town of Gisenyi, which lies on the north shore and right across from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a mess of a country that is the sexiest Pandora's Box I've ever wanted to travel to. I chilled here for a couple days and contemplated crossing into the Congo but ultimately decided that because of a relative lack of money and rumors of troops movements I would come back some other time and really knock the hell out of the place. For now though, I was already starting to feel pretty bummed about being in Rwanda and wanted to exit as soon as possible.
Even though I had been preparing myself for the country ever since I got to Africa, that preparation wasn't enough. The history of the Rwanda was a huge weight wherever I was. Even in the Virunga mountains I had a difficult time escaping it. The writing in this post already seems dry to me, and I think it's because writing about Rwanda in a non-genocide context is just hard. It's difficult to look at anything else besides the killings and its consequences, and even writing about that is damn difficult as well. I've got so much that I think about the killings and aftermath, but besides a bit more on the issue I'll leave it to you to read up on your own. I truly recommend doing so in order to at least partially understand the horror that the country exposed itself to. If you're interested there are a few books I can suggest. Besides being my choice picks, these are also probably the most well-read in the USA so they shouldn't be difficult to track down.
"We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed Along With Our Families" by Philip Gourevitch would be the best one to start out with. Besides a couple historical inaccuracies it's a great book and will give you a decent picture of Rwanda with a specific focus on 1994. "Shake Hands With the Devil" by Romeo Dallaire, the UN Commander in Rwanda whose hands were tied by the Western powers during the killings, is a good book as well. Dallaire has a lot to get off his chest about the genocide; obvious torment in the writing aside, the shear volume of his book makes it clear he has a lot to say. And "Left to Tell" by Immaculee Ilibagiza is a well-written first-hand account from a Tusti women who survived the genocide by hiding with seven other women in the bathroom of a Hutu pastor. Of course there is the movie "Hotel Rwanda," the recounting of how a Hutu hotel manager of the Mille Collines in Kigali housed more than a thousand Tustis and moderate Hutus during the genocide and used every contact he had to ensure their safety. The manager, Paul Rusesabagina, also came out with a book detailing his account, "An Ordinary Man" that is worth a read.
From Ruhengeri I went to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. My first stop was at the Genocide Memorial Museum, a location that had a mass grave with the bodies of some 250,000 of those murdered as well as a museum dedicated to the events before, during, and after the genocide. Inside were rooms with pictures, writing, and interactive videos which gave a detailed look into what happened. On one of the walls I was surprised to see a picture of the church I was staying at in Kigali; upon reading further, I learned that the church priest had betrayed his parishioners during the genocide and led the Interahamwe killers to a large number of them who were hiding. All were killed. Reading that, the thought briefly crossed my mind - were any of them hiding in the room I was staying in?
The center area of the museum had a large room with individual sections that were stacked with skulls, leg bones, clothing, kids toys, and pictures of the dead. This inside area was a tough look; there isn't any mentally preparation you can do for it, and the images stay solidly locked in your memory. I left quickly but haven't been able to get over it. Outside, the mass graves were surrounded by a well-kept garden and covered with huge cement slabs, along with the occasional poignant sign reading "Please Do Not Step on the Mass Graves."
"Please do not step on the mass graves." My God, what a telling phrase. Something I know will stay with me until I die.
I happened to be in Rwanda on not only the 15th Anniversary of the killings, but was also there during their Genocide Memorial Week. The most important day in the week, for reasons unclear to me, was the Tuesday. That day I took a bus to the city of Nyamata, some forty kilometers south of Kigali. Nyamata was the site of a church were some 2,500 Tutsis had gathered to seek protection from the Interahamwe. The Interahamwe still attacked the church regardless, however, with grenades and guns and all inside were killed. The bodies had been left where they laid in and around the Church as a memorial, the same as with another nearby church where the same thing had occurred with 5,000 who had taken shelter.
There was to be a memorial service that day in Nyamata and I was planning to attend, but as soon as I stepped off the bus I felt out of place. I was surrounded by a sea of Rwandans that actually had a place here; no doubt many of them had lost relatives and friends here or elsewhere. Some might have even helped with the killings. But I had no place; I was just a tourist who was sick to his stomach by this whole place.
Exactly then, as I was going though my thoughts, the realization flooded through me that I had finally hit in straight on - I wasn't just horrified by the genocide, I was horrified by Rwanda. That realization was profound for me. I guess under different circumstances I might not have felt that way, but the timing of my trip made it difficult to get away from the genocide. In reality, Rwanda has built itself up nicely since 1994 with the help of foreign aid and is not the back-water country you may think. It has well-kept, efficient roads, crystal-clean high-rise buildings, beautiful gardens, and is largely free from the corruption so prevalent in surrounding nations. There are countless activities for those traveling though it, and really has done a terrific job of presenting itself as a tourist destination. If you were visiting it without any awareness of its history you would consider it a jewel of a country, a complete surprise in the middle of Central Africa.
But when you're there during a day like that Tuesday when the streets are deserted and literally every shop and building is closed down while an entire country looks into its soul and finds machetes and blood, you don't think about the roads and the gardens. You think about the killings.
I decided right then that I didn't care to see any more into the the mind of Rwanda. Every person . . . every country has their inner-demons, I suppose. But I don't want even one more glimpse into those of Rwanda.
So I left Nyamata. I got right back on the bus maybe thirty seconds after I got off and spent the ride back to Kigali sitting in disgust and revulsion knowing that this act - GENOCIDE - is still, even in these times, allowed to happen. Knowing that it will happen again. Knowing that despite the proclamations of politicians, military generals and aid agencies across the world of "NEVER AGAIN" after every genocide, it will indeed happen again.
Saying "NEVER AGAIN" might make the powers who stood idly by feel once again righteous, but the blood of the women, men, and children slain by machete remains on the Rwandan dirt. Every one of the 800,000 murderes was a human being with loves and hopes and emotions. Every one of them felt a feeling of horror in the moments before their death knowing that the end was upon them.
The world should be too ashamed to even apologize to Rwanda. Rwanda should be too ashamed to apologize to itself.
I stayed another day in Kigali but in my unhappiness and disouragement I didn't even leave my room. There was nothing there for me I cared to see. The day after I took a bus into Burundi, unhappy with my stay in Rwanda and even more so with my feelings toward humanity.
---------------------------------------------------------------
As a footnote, I should add that I feel no need to reconcile myself with what I think of my time there. Sometimes there is no answer, there is no right thing to say, and there is no need to make yourself feel better about something that happened or how you feel. For me, this stop in my trip was one of those times.
"Hatred . . . insanity . . . I don't know."
-Hotel Rwanda
When I was in Africa three years ago I spent a month traveling in Tanzania and at one point found myself only a couple hundred kilometers from the Rwandan border. Riding a local minibus one day, I saw a beggar on the side of the street. He had no legs, and he had no arms. Foolishly I asked the guy next to me if that was from a disease. He paused, and then uncomfortably responded "No. He is, I think, a Tutsi."
I will never forget that.
This time, the first sign that I was nearing Rwanda came from the UNHCR refugee tents a few kilometers from the border in Uganda. They had been recently put there so it was evident that these particular refugees came not from Rwanda but from the recent fighting within the Congo; but being from the Congo these refugees are part of a conflict that has tied the two contries together since the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.
The genocide is a picture-perfect example of the failure of humanity. In 100 days Rwandans managed to murder between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus (think of that - there is a 100,000 plus-or-minus sign in front of the killings) by way of machete, gun, knife, gang-rape, and a variety of other methods. The West did nothing to stop the genocide and the African Union, which for some reason has escaped criticism for doing the same, sat by idly and afterward blamed the West for what had happened in their own backyard. It's important to point out that the genocide didn't stop because Rwandans suddenly and inexplicably came to their senses, or the rest of Africa decided to finally accept responsibility for their neighbors, or the West decided it would have taken only a few thousand troops to stop what was happening. No, nobody cared enough to stop what was going down even after almost a million murders. It was the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the Tutsi rebel group based out of Uganda and led by current president Paul Kagame, who finally succeeded in driving the Interahamwe, the Hutu extremists who were committing the killings, out of Rwanda. So the Interahamwe, flanked by a couple million or so Hutu civilians who understandably assumed that the incoming RPF might want a little revenge after a million of their family members had just been raped and murdered, fled into the vastness of Zaire. More specifically, the mineral-rich, uncontrolled, forested sections of the North and South Kivu regions of Zaire.
Zaire, Rwanda's giant neighbor to the west, was in it's last days under the kleptocratic Mobutu Sese Seko who led from the other side of the country in Kinshasa. He was too busy trying to hold together his crumbling country in the west to worry about what was happeneing in the east.
From the east the Hutu extremists remained a tremendous thorn in the side of Rwanda's rebuilding efforts and a devastating presence to the Congolese civilians, whose government had neither the will or the resources to drive them out. Eventually Rwanda grew weary of waiting for Zaire to act and launched an invasion on its giant neighbor and actually managed to gain control of the entire country. Later, when Rwanda again became tired of the Rwandan-installed leader Laurent Kabila, they invaded the Zaire again, now remaned The Democratic Republic of Congo. This set off what people call the "African Civil War" and is still continuing to this day, primarily in the Congo, but having involved at one time or another a dozen African nations and having claimed five and a half million lives.
But even with both of these invasions the Rwandans failed to take out the highly militarized Hutu Interahamwe, now acting as an insurgency rebel force in the Congo and forever plotting to come back into power someday in Rwanda. So today there is pure chaos in the North and South Kivu regions of the Congo. The mineral resources of the region compound the matter even further.
The obvious rhetorical question that has to flow through every visitor to Rwanda is "How in the hell can something like this happen?" I say rhetorical because there is no satisfactory answer. An easy answer that a lot of people give is that the rigid hierarchical system in Rwanda was to blame because it allowed those at the top to dictate the genocide and those underneath had to carry it through.
Personally, I find this to be the biggest bullshit answer I've ever heard. My Italian relatives who got their heads bashed in with rifle butts on their farm by some Nazis in World War II died as a result of "following orders." Same with my Croatian relatives who were shot point-blank by an asshole Serbian. The "I was just following orders" defense makes me despise whoever says it because the speaker assumes a complete lack of humanity and allows themselves to be painted as victims in their own light. "Well, yes, it was wrong, but I was told to do it, so what choice did I have?" Jesus Christ! If you're told to force your neighbor to rape his own daughter before setting the entire family on fire how could you think that it is acceptable simply because you're following orders? How do you not turn your gun on your superior instead?
I doubt anyone can find a real reason behind the killings. They happened for whatever reasons, because people in mass groups can be stupid and led to do horrible things. In this case, a country raped, mutilated, and murdered a tenth of its population.
Crossing into Rwanda from Uganda, I spent the first couple days in the city of Ruhengeri, a starting point for gorilla tours and exploration of the surrounding Virunga mountains. While I decided it was best to leave the gorilla tours for another time, the fertile, black Virunga Mountains have been a point of fascination for me since I was eleven years old. So I spent two days trampling around the base of the mountains, just wandering from village to village and trying as best I could to ignore the ever-present crowd of children who followed me. Besides those kids, I had a great time in the forest and really enjoyed just generally spending time in the gorgeous Virunga forest.
From Ruhengeri I traveled to the resort town of Gisenyi, which lies on the north shore and right across from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a mess of a country that is the sexiest Pandora's Box I've ever wanted to travel to. I chilled here for a couple days and contemplated crossing into the Congo but ultimately decided that because of a relative lack of money and rumors of troops movements I would come back some other time and really knock the hell out of the place. For now though, I was already starting to feel pretty bummed about being in Rwanda and wanted to exit as soon as possible.
Even though I had been preparing myself for the country ever since I got to Africa, that preparation wasn't enough. The history of the Rwanda was a huge weight wherever I was. Even in the Virunga mountains I had a difficult time escaping it. The writing in this post already seems dry to me, and I think it's because writing about Rwanda in a non-genocide context is just hard. It's difficult to look at anything else besides the killings and its consequences, and even writing about that is damn difficult as well. I've got so much that I think about the killings and aftermath, but besides a bit more on the issue I'll leave it to you to read up on your own. I truly recommend doing so in order to at least partially understand the horror that the country exposed itself to. If you're interested there are a few books I can suggest. Besides being my choice picks, these are also probably the most well-read in the USA so they shouldn't be difficult to track down.
"We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed Along With Our Families" by Philip Gourevitch would be the best one to start out with. Besides a couple historical inaccuracies it's a great book and will give you a decent picture of Rwanda with a specific focus on 1994. "Shake Hands With the Devil" by Romeo Dallaire, the UN Commander in Rwanda whose hands were tied by the Western powers during the killings, is a good book as well. Dallaire has a lot to get off his chest about the genocide; obvious torment in the writing aside, the shear volume of his book makes it clear he has a lot to say. And "Left to Tell" by Immaculee Ilibagiza is a well-written first-hand account from a Tusti women who survived the genocide by hiding with seven other women in the bathroom of a Hutu pastor. Of course there is the movie "Hotel Rwanda," the recounting of how a Hutu hotel manager of the Mille Collines in Kigali housed more than a thousand Tustis and moderate Hutus during the genocide and used every contact he had to ensure their safety. The manager, Paul Rusesabagina, also came out with a book detailing his account, "An Ordinary Man" that is worth a read.
From Ruhengeri I went to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. My first stop was at the Genocide Memorial Museum, a location that had a mass grave with the bodies of some 250,000 of those murdered as well as a museum dedicated to the events before, during, and after the genocide. Inside were rooms with pictures, writing, and interactive videos which gave a detailed look into what happened. On one of the walls I was surprised to see a picture of the church I was staying at in Kigali; upon reading further, I learned that the church priest had betrayed his parishioners during the genocide and led the Interahamwe killers to a large number of them who were hiding. All were killed. Reading that, the thought briefly crossed my mind - were any of them hiding in the room I was staying in?
The center area of the museum had a large room with individual sections that were stacked with skulls, leg bones, clothing, kids toys, and pictures of the dead. This inside area was a tough look; there isn't any mentally preparation you can do for it, and the images stay solidly locked in your memory. I left quickly but haven't been able to get over it. Outside, the mass graves were surrounded by a well-kept garden and covered with huge cement slabs, along with the occasional poignant sign reading "Please Do Not Step on the Mass Graves."
"Please do not step on the mass graves." My God, what a telling phrase. Something I know will stay with me until I die.
I happened to be in Rwanda on not only the 15th Anniversary of the killings, but was also there during their Genocide Memorial Week. The most important day in the week, for reasons unclear to me, was the Tuesday. That day I took a bus to the city of Nyamata, some forty kilometers south of Kigali. Nyamata was the site of a church were some 2,500 Tutsis had gathered to seek protection from the Interahamwe. The Interahamwe still attacked the church regardless, however, with grenades and guns and all inside were killed. The bodies had been left where they laid in and around the Church as a memorial, the same as with another nearby church where the same thing had occurred with 5,000 who had taken shelter.
There was to be a memorial service that day in Nyamata and I was planning to attend, but as soon as I stepped off the bus I felt out of place. I was surrounded by a sea of Rwandans that actually had a place here; no doubt many of them had lost relatives and friends here or elsewhere. Some might have even helped with the killings. But I had no place; I was just a tourist who was sick to his stomach by this whole place.
Exactly then, as I was going though my thoughts, the realization flooded through me that I had finally hit in straight on - I wasn't just horrified by the genocide, I was horrified by Rwanda. That realization was profound for me. I guess under different circumstances I might not have felt that way, but the timing of my trip made it difficult to get away from the genocide. In reality, Rwanda has built itself up nicely since 1994 with the help of foreign aid and is not the back-water country you may think. It has well-kept, efficient roads, crystal-clean high-rise buildings, beautiful gardens, and is largely free from the corruption so prevalent in surrounding nations. There are countless activities for those traveling though it, and really has done a terrific job of presenting itself as a tourist destination. If you were visiting it without any awareness of its history you would consider it a jewel of a country, a complete surprise in the middle of Central Africa.
But when you're there during a day like that Tuesday when the streets are deserted and literally every shop and building is closed down while an entire country looks into its soul and finds machetes and blood, you don't think about the roads and the gardens. You think about the killings.
I decided right then that I didn't care to see any more into the the mind of Rwanda. Every person . . . every country has their inner-demons, I suppose. But I don't want even one more glimpse into those of Rwanda.
So I left Nyamata. I got right back on the bus maybe thirty seconds after I got off and spent the ride back to Kigali sitting in disgust and revulsion knowing that this act - GENOCIDE - is still, even in these times, allowed to happen. Knowing that it will happen again. Knowing that despite the proclamations of politicians, military generals and aid agencies across the world of "NEVER AGAIN" after every genocide, it will indeed happen again.
Saying "NEVER AGAIN" might make the powers who stood idly by feel once again righteous, but the blood of the women, men, and children slain by machete remains on the Rwandan dirt. Every one of the 800,000 murderes was a human being with loves and hopes and emotions. Every one of them felt a feeling of horror in the moments before their death knowing that the end was upon them.
The world should be too ashamed to even apologize to Rwanda. Rwanda should be too ashamed to apologize to itself.
I stayed another day in Kigali but in my unhappiness and disouragement I didn't even leave my room. There was nothing there for me I cared to see. The day after I took a bus into Burundi, unhappy with my stay in Rwanda and even more so with my feelings toward humanity.
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As a footnote, I should add that I feel no need to reconcile myself with what I think of my time there. Sometimes there is no answer, there is no right thing to say, and there is no need to make yourself feel better about something that happened or how you feel. For me, this stop in my trip was one of those times.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Uganda
His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.
-Idi Amin's Self-Given Title
Despite how awesome I knew Uganda was going to be, my semi-limited time meant that I only ended up spending about a week and a half in the country. That was a shame because there is a whole lot for the wandering backpacker there.
The first stop for me was in Jinja, a popular backpacker stop and the starting point of the Nile (Unless, of course, you could Burundi's spot on Lake Tanganyika, which the Ugandans do not.) Besides that claim-to-fame, the river provides some fabulous rapids for kayakers and rafters and a number of tourist companies have chimed in to offer "adrenaline" activities such as mountain biking in the surrounding hills and bungee jumping over the river. Personally, I find self-proclaimed adrenaline activities to frequently be over-rated, so I limited myself to a day of rafting a few more days of exploring the area.
I stayed in a lodge/camp site a few kilometers outside of town that was on a bluff overlooking the beginning stretch of the Nile, and luck was on my side when I set up my tent and I got a spot on a ledge near the water. The site had an outdoor shower, inexplicably utilized very little, that I used every day. It offered a beautiful view of the water as it started its course towards Egypt. The shower was closed on three sides and completely open on the fourth, so I had to be careful not to get soap in my eyes or I could slip and plunge down the embankment. Totally worth the risk though.
The rafting, for any pooh-pawing I may have done, was a very great time. There were a total of six rapids throughout the day and we flipped on two of them. The last set of rapids, and the second flip, kept me under initially just long enough to feel a beautiful surge of panic. Then, as rapids do, it tossed me up long enough for a brief gulp of air before taking me under again. This continued for maybe forty seconds (that seemed more like four minutes) until eventually I was able to make my way to a shoreline and get picked up by a rescue kayak. If we weren't feeling it before, we all certainly felt the adrenaline at that point.
For anyone in the region, I would recommend rafting or kayaking these. Do it soon though, because a dam that is scheduled to be complete at the end of this year is going to wipe out half of the rapids I took. Bummer.
As I briefly alluded to in my last post, my schedule when traveling is comfortably vacant and I can spend hours doing what in normal times should only take minutes. Case in point was one day in Jinja when I had a craving for a pineapple. (Okay, three pineapples.) The hawkers outside my camp site were selling them at twice the normal price under the assumption that we wouldn't know enough or care enough to go and get normal priced ones from a nearby village. But I've found that walking just a couple kilometers from popular tourist destinations puts you in a different world where the locals are as surprised to see a tourist as if you're hundreds of miles from a tourist hot-spot. You talk to people you wouldn't normally talk to, you see gardens, rivers, waterfalls, and houses you would miss, and you buy food at the local rates. The "local rate" issue might not sound like a big deal, but having to barter with every person you purchase food from for months on end is mind-numbing, so having someone just naturally charge you the correct price is an uplifting experience every time.
On this occasion, the road I was walking looked vaguely familiar and I got a sense of deja vu, but I chalked that up to the fact that I've walked on a whole lot of red-dust roads lined with banana trees. I didn't find any pineapples until I was about six kilometers from my camp site, and when I got there the stall owner was so surprised to see me that she insisted I stay for some banana wine.
By that time I ready to leave it was starting to get dark so I stuck out my thumb at the first vehicle that came by. It turned out that it a bus filled with kids from a local school that were coming back from a soccer match. In the front were a pair of cute Australian teachers who looked to be about my age and were happy to give me advice on good places to hang out, local prices for various foods and tell me about their volunteer work. After a few minutes one of them said "Oh yeah. This road? It's the one in "The Last King of Scotland."
I snapped my fingers - that's where the deja vu had come from! The dropped my off outside my site with a gratifying "no charge!" and I was left thinking about "The Last Kind of Scotland" and Idi Amin.
Of the African "Strong Men" that came out of the Independence period in the 1960s and 1970s, Idi Amin may not have been the worst, but I wager he was the craziest. Besides being an avowed anti-Semite, tossing the Indian population out of Uganda, threatening war with Kenya and actually going to war with Tanzania, killing between 300,000 and 500,000 of his people, destroying Uganda's reputation as a popular tourist destination, allowing his soldiers to kill most of Uganda's big game, and killing a number of his ministers and cohorts, Amin was also rumored to be a cannibal who ate the organs fresh from the bodies of his enemies. The movie, in opinion, hardly does his insanity justice.
Large sections of the country, including its tourism sector are still recovering from his eight year rule that ended in 1979 and his name is synonymous in my mind with the phrase "completely and utterly bat-shit crazy." But maybe that's just me.
The next day I crashed for the first time since being in Ethiopia. I call days like these me "Why-the-hell-am-I-here-when-I-could-be-at-home-with-ice-in-my-glass?" days, and they're typically when a few things go wrong one-after-another. They're days when I'm just tired of it all; tired of moving from bed to bed and city to city in cramped buses, of everyone trying to rip me off, constant power cuts, and tired of having to make new friends every few days.
This was compounded by Jinja's popularity among the backpacker crowd. It's not easy to explain, but I rarely relish be surrounded by large amounts of travelers. It's not a turf issue, as meeting one or two in the middle of the bush is always a thrill and we typically hook up as travel partners for a few days. But being surrounded by them in a city or lodge is disheartening to me for some reason. This was the biggest popular backpacker hang-out since I was in Egypt, and it came as a shock to me to see so many muzungus ("foreigner" in Swahili) in one area. They were all nice enough, but I have gotten used to being by myself or with maybe a couple other muzungus. 50 others all stumbling drunk around my tent at 3 A.M. is something I forgot happened in Africa.
The next day was a complete 180 and my spirits shot up just in time for me to leave the city. This was partially due to a sudden downpour, my first rain since Jerusalem, that was so heavy it cut visibility to just a few feet and signified an end to my stay in drought-regions. I took off on a bus through Kampala and to the city of Rukungiri, home to my friend Megan who is staying there for peace corp. Not only did her place offer the first semblance of a "home" I had slept in on this trip, but she also bluntly told me that I should wash my clothes. The water shortages from Addis all the way to Uganda had meant little extra water for washing, so everything I had was absolutely filled with dust and dirt. We must had gotten seven pounds out of my stuff by the time we were done. So, thank you Megan. Seriously.
Before leaving Uganda I traveled to Lake Bunyoni, a meandering Rift Valley lake that is the second deepest on the continent and travels for 25 kilometers near the Rwandan border. More rain slightly dampened (har!) my mood, but soon I was on my way to Rwanda.
-Idi Amin's Self-Given Title
Despite how awesome I knew Uganda was going to be, my semi-limited time meant that I only ended up spending about a week and a half in the country. That was a shame because there is a whole lot for the wandering backpacker there.
The first stop for me was in Jinja, a popular backpacker stop and the starting point of the Nile (Unless, of course, you could Burundi's spot on Lake Tanganyika, which the Ugandans do not.) Besides that claim-to-fame, the river provides some fabulous rapids for kayakers and rafters and a number of tourist companies have chimed in to offer "adrenaline" activities such as mountain biking in the surrounding hills and bungee jumping over the river. Personally, I find self-proclaimed adrenaline activities to frequently be over-rated, so I limited myself to a day of rafting a few more days of exploring the area.
I stayed in a lodge/camp site a few kilometers outside of town that was on a bluff overlooking the beginning stretch of the Nile, and luck was on my side when I set up my tent and I got a spot on a ledge near the water. The site had an outdoor shower, inexplicably utilized very little, that I used every day. It offered a beautiful view of the water as it started its course towards Egypt. The shower was closed on three sides and completely open on the fourth, so I had to be careful not to get soap in my eyes or I could slip and plunge down the embankment. Totally worth the risk though.
The rafting, for any pooh-pawing I may have done, was a very great time. There were a total of six rapids throughout the day and we flipped on two of them. The last set of rapids, and the second flip, kept me under initially just long enough to feel a beautiful surge of panic. Then, as rapids do, it tossed me up long enough for a brief gulp of air before taking me under again. This continued for maybe forty seconds (that seemed more like four minutes) until eventually I was able to make my way to a shoreline and get picked up by a rescue kayak. If we weren't feeling it before, we all certainly felt the adrenaline at that point.
For anyone in the region, I would recommend rafting or kayaking these. Do it soon though, because a dam that is scheduled to be complete at the end of this year is going to wipe out half of the rapids I took. Bummer.
As I briefly alluded to in my last post, my schedule when traveling is comfortably vacant and I can spend hours doing what in normal times should only take minutes. Case in point was one day in Jinja when I had a craving for a pineapple. (Okay, three pineapples.) The hawkers outside my camp site were selling them at twice the normal price under the assumption that we wouldn't know enough or care enough to go and get normal priced ones from a nearby village. But I've found that walking just a couple kilometers from popular tourist destinations puts you in a different world where the locals are as surprised to see a tourist as if you're hundreds of miles from a tourist hot-spot. You talk to people you wouldn't normally talk to, you see gardens, rivers, waterfalls, and houses you would miss, and you buy food at the local rates. The "local rate" issue might not sound like a big deal, but having to barter with every person you purchase food from for months on end is mind-numbing, so having someone just naturally charge you the correct price is an uplifting experience every time.
On this occasion, the road I was walking looked vaguely familiar and I got a sense of deja vu, but I chalked that up to the fact that I've walked on a whole lot of red-dust roads lined with banana trees. I didn't find any pineapples until I was about six kilometers from my camp site, and when I got there the stall owner was so surprised to see me that she insisted I stay for some banana wine.
By that time I ready to leave it was starting to get dark so I stuck out my thumb at the first vehicle that came by. It turned out that it a bus filled with kids from a local school that were coming back from a soccer match. In the front were a pair of cute Australian teachers who looked to be about my age and were happy to give me advice on good places to hang out, local prices for various foods and tell me about their volunteer work. After a few minutes one of them said "Oh yeah. This road? It's the one in "The Last King of Scotland."
I snapped my fingers - that's where the deja vu had come from! The dropped my off outside my site with a gratifying "no charge!" and I was left thinking about "The Last Kind of Scotland" and Idi Amin.
Of the African "Strong Men" that came out of the Independence period in the 1960s and 1970s, Idi Amin may not have been the worst, but I wager he was the craziest. Besides being an avowed anti-Semite, tossing the Indian population out of Uganda, threatening war with Kenya and actually going to war with Tanzania, killing between 300,000 and 500,000 of his people, destroying Uganda's reputation as a popular tourist destination, allowing his soldiers to kill most of Uganda's big game, and killing a number of his ministers and cohorts, Amin was also rumored to be a cannibal who ate the organs fresh from the bodies of his enemies. The movie, in opinion, hardly does his insanity justice.
Large sections of the country, including its tourism sector are still recovering from his eight year rule that ended in 1979 and his name is synonymous in my mind with the phrase "completely and utterly bat-shit crazy." But maybe that's just me.
The next day I crashed for the first time since being in Ethiopia. I call days like these me "Why-the-hell-am-I-here-when-I-could-be-at-home-with-ice-in-my-glass?" days, and they're typically when a few things go wrong one-after-another. They're days when I'm just tired of it all; tired of moving from bed to bed and city to city in cramped buses, of everyone trying to rip me off, constant power cuts, and tired of having to make new friends every few days.
This was compounded by Jinja's popularity among the backpacker crowd. It's not easy to explain, but I rarely relish be surrounded by large amounts of travelers. It's not a turf issue, as meeting one or two in the middle of the bush is always a thrill and we typically hook up as travel partners for a few days. But being surrounded by them in a city or lodge is disheartening to me for some reason. This was the biggest popular backpacker hang-out since I was in Egypt, and it came as a shock to me to see so many muzungus ("foreigner" in Swahili) in one area. They were all nice enough, but I have gotten used to being by myself or with maybe a couple other muzungus. 50 others all stumbling drunk around my tent at 3 A.M. is something I forgot happened in Africa.
The next day was a complete 180 and my spirits shot up just in time for me to leave the city. This was partially due to a sudden downpour, my first rain since Jerusalem, that was so heavy it cut visibility to just a few feet and signified an end to my stay in drought-regions. I took off on a bus through Kampala and to the city of Rukungiri, home to my friend Megan who is staying there for peace corp. Not only did her place offer the first semblance of a "home" I had slept in on this trip, but she also bluntly told me that I should wash my clothes. The water shortages from Addis all the way to Uganda had meant little extra water for washing, so everything I had was absolutely filled with dust and dirt. We must had gotten seven pounds out of my stuff by the time we were done. So, thank you Megan. Seriously.
Before leaving Uganda I traveled to Lake Bunyoni, a meandering Rift Valley lake that is the second deepest on the continent and travels for 25 kilometers near the Rwandan border. More rain slightly dampened (har!) my mood, but soon I was on my way to Rwanda.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Kenya
President Obama, President Mubarak of Egypt, and President Kibaki of Kenya are all flying in together to a conference. But soon it gets very cloudy and the pilot gets lost. So President Obama says "No problem, I got this" and he walks over to a window, opens it up, and starts feeling around. After a minute he pulled his arm back in, closes the window, and says "We're in New York." The other two are amazed; they ask "How did you know that?" Obama answers "I felt the Statue of Liberty."
A little later they're still lost and the pilot wants to know where they are again, so Mubarak says "I'll give this a shot," opens a window, feels around, pulls his hand back in, and says "We're over Cairo, now." "How'd you know that?" the other two ask. "I felt the Sphinx," he says.
Yet later they're still lost. So Kibaki decides that he'll give it a try and so he opens a window to feel around for a few seconds. He pulls it back in, takes a quick look, and says "Yep, we're over Nairobi right now." "Why do you say that?" the others ask him. He says "Someone just stole my watch."
After Djibouti decided to be incredibly lame and not allow me entrance I decided to skip Yemen because of difficulties in crossing the Gulf of Aden. Instead I spent my time back-tracking through Ethiopia and chilling out in Addis Ababa. This was a small problem in that my timeline, for the first time on the trip, was beginning to get a little crunched. Unfortunately, Addis Ababa had a bit of a hold on me.
You how there's nothing particularly appealing about potato chips? Well, you eat one, and it gets a little addictive, so then you just keep on going until all the chips are gone and you're stuck feeling bloated and unhealthy. Well that's how Addis Ababa was for me. It was a nice enough city, and even though there wasn't anything stand-outish for me it was a bit addictive and I spent longer than I should have. After six weeks in Somaliland I was so tired of over-cooked spaghetti and boiled goat that I could scream, and I hadn't gone that long without liquor since I was . . . well, we'll say 21. So Addis Ababa was my place to drink good, cheap beer and eat tasty national food while at the same time gathering myself for the trip south. I had an ambitious plan for crossing into Kenya that I had been working on for close to half a year.
The southwest corner of Ethiopia is called the Omo Valley, located at the confluence of Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Kenya. Because of various wars in the region guns are cheap and easy to get, and the nomads have no problem with offing each other. But it's really isolated and I had gotten wind of a crossing there that involved some 50 kilometers of hiking through the desert until Kenya's Lake Turkana, the largest desert lake in the world. One guy had done the from the south six years ago and I wanted to be the first from the north, but upon arriving in the southern-most city in the region I was met by a policeman who told me 1) I couldn't cross this way 2) It was illegal for me to even be in the town. So I guess that's why nobody has done it from the north side.
I spent a couple days working my way east towards the real crossing, a city called Moyale which has its own reputation among overlanders as being the craziest on the Cairo-to-Cape Town Circuit. Come to think of it, it may be the most infamous in Africa among backpackers.
I say this because it takes two days just to get there from Addis Ababa. Once there, you're in an obnoxious, mosquito-filled town whose only transportation are cattle trucks heading south through the miserable dirt path. Up until only a couple years ago, banditry on the Kenyan side was a real problem and travelers frequently reported getting shot at by shiftas. If you managed to get a spot on a truck and miss the shiftas, you still had to contend with three days of horribly uncomfortable riding until you reached Nairobi.
Paul Theroux wrote about this crossing with great zeal in his cross-continent Dark Star Safari . It was here, he writes that his convoy of trucks were shot at by shiftas and two separate trucks broke down before he was finally able to make it on the third to Nairobi.
While the shiftas were no longer a problem, nomadic fighting is, and word reached me that two days before my crossing some three hundred Borena had been killed in a firefight in the exact area I was crossing. But it's the only overland choice, so after a night in Moyale I took off through Immigration to try my luck.
I happened to meet a pair of Israelis who were also crossing that day into Kenya, and together we looked for a vehicle to take us south. The were both intent on not taking the trucks, as only a few months before a friend of theirs riding on top of one of the trucks died after falling off and breaking his neck. But I didn't see any other option, so I decided I was going to bite the bullet and travel this way. It wasn't until I actually saw the trucks, though, that I realized why so many injuries and deaths actually occur on this road.
These hulking monsters were stuff full of cattle down below and the "top" was only a series of metal bars providing support. A total of 36 hours of riding this precarious perch seemed beyond miserable - it sounded stupid. A huge stroke of luck came my way however when I was lashing my bag to the bars as one of the Israelis showed up and said there was a 4X4 willing to take us south to Marsabit, the first major stop, for only $15 USD each.
I didn't hesitate, and so took an infinitely faster and more comfortable car ride. After only a few hours of riding we finally saw a welcome change of landscape in that the desert began to give way to a green landscape and I decided to spend some time in the city of Marsabit before continuing onward.
After exploring a nearby crater I climbed Mount Marsabit and continued on away from the town for what was to be an afternoon hike. Not far into my walk, however, I stumbled upon a group of surprised Borena herders armed with spears and World War I-era Winchester rifles. While there was no common language between us they responsded to my presence with real interest and after a short discussion gestured with their guns that I was to follow them. (It is times like this that I regret never checking in with the local US embassies to let them know I'm in their respective country.)
The small detachment led me away from the herd and back to their village, about an hour from Mt. Marsabit. The group motioned me towards a tree so I parked it there to observe the goings-on. It appeared they were mostly nomadic, as I didn't notice any permanant buildings in the village, though there were more weapons than any villages I had ever been to previously. That very fact was a bit unnerving given the fact that I didn't know what the hell was going on, but I was treated well enough so I decided not to worry about it.
Sure enough, after no more than a half hour a local ranger pulled into the village and cordially told me that while I was very welcome to explore Kenya, I had been wandering in prime cattle raiding territory and these helpful villagers, while slightly bemused at my appearence, were more concerned for my safety than anything else. He graciously drove me back to Marsabit where I caught a transport to safer regions.
Speaking of safety, I was anxious to avoid Nairobi and decided to bypass that entire part of the country. Instead I headed to the western side of Kenya, criss-crossing the equator and eventually making it to Kisumu. This city is the third-largest in Kenya and lies on the shores of Lake Victoria, the second-largest freshwater lake in the world (What-what Lake Superior!). It is a great climate here and was good fun wandering around the lake.
But entering Kenya meant entering tourist grazing area, and I wasn't impressed with the amount of hawkers that Kisumu presented to me trying to get my money. Not as bad as in other areas of the country, I was told, but still pretty obnoxious. In this part of Africa the hawkers who focus on tourists are called "touts", meaning "ticks" in Swahili, and the name fits them well. Whether or not its true, I think of them all as eager to rip me off and then laugh about it to their cackling tout friends as soon as they have their hands on my money, so I'm typically pretty cold to these guys.
Before leaving Kenya I wanted to make a stop in the village of Kogelo, an hour outside of Kisumu. Kogelo has risen to a position of prominence in recent years as the homestead of the Obama family, so I made it a point to get visit there. Surprisingly, there were no touts there and it seemed every bit as a typically village would here. It was clear that they were hurting a bit because of the late rainy season like the rest of the country, but they sold normal priced soda and beer and were friendly to the white guy who showed up not knowing any of the local language.
Despite the lack of rain for Kenya, which has affected millions, the area is located on the Great Rift Valley and has beautiful, rich soil that supports a variety of greenery and provides a gorgeous background. (This change from the desert and semi-arid land of Northern Kenya, Southern Ethiopia, and Somaliland was refreshing and put me in a lasting good mood that has largely stayed with me.) And Obama's family is very welcoming to outsiders. I was greeted by two of his cousins who introduced me to his grandmother, a woman who appears to have taken her own rise to prominence in stride and conducts herself in an extremely dignified, if somewhat amusing, manner.
The next day, in a minibus heading towards the border, I saw a roadside hut with a keg outside of it. One of the joys of backbacking, of course, is that there's no schedule to keep so I had to driver stop and jumped out with my bags to hike back to the hut for a drink. I found they were selling Senator Beer, named in honor of Obama after his 2006 senatorial victory. It was a bit less than a dollar per liter, so I spent the afternoon with a group of fun locals downing liter after liter in the shade of a banana tree. For any liter I bought them, I was offered an equal amount of liquor in their homemade palm wine, and in short order the lot of us were quite silly.
I stopped counting after six liters but I'm reasonably sure I at least made it to a ten before I called it a day. By the time we were done the busses had long passed for the day but I was in no condition to ride anyway. The fellows I were with were in similar straights and we decided to hit the hay right there, in the hut.
The next morning saw me with a blinding headache dulled only slightly by my typically hangover remedy of alka-seltzer, milk, and electrolytes. But one by one my fellow drinkers from the previous night left and eventually I flagged down a bus heading towards the border. It was in this condition I entered Uganda.
A little later they're still lost and the pilot wants to know where they are again, so Mubarak says "I'll give this a shot," opens a window, feels around, pulls his hand back in, and says "We're over Cairo, now." "How'd you know that?" the other two ask. "I felt the Sphinx," he says.
Yet later they're still lost. So Kibaki decides that he'll give it a try and so he opens a window to feel around for a few seconds. He pulls it back in, takes a quick look, and says "Yep, we're over Nairobi right now." "Why do you say that?" the others ask him. He says "Someone just stole my watch."
After Djibouti decided to be incredibly lame and not allow me entrance I decided to skip Yemen because of difficulties in crossing the Gulf of Aden. Instead I spent my time back-tracking through Ethiopia and chilling out in Addis Ababa. This was a small problem in that my timeline, for the first time on the trip, was beginning to get a little crunched. Unfortunately, Addis Ababa had a bit of a hold on me.
You how there's nothing particularly appealing about potato chips? Well, you eat one, and it gets a little addictive, so then you just keep on going until all the chips are gone and you're stuck feeling bloated and unhealthy. Well that's how Addis Ababa was for me. It was a nice enough city, and even though there wasn't anything stand-outish for me it was a bit addictive and I spent longer than I should have. After six weeks in Somaliland I was so tired of over-cooked spaghetti and boiled goat that I could scream, and I hadn't gone that long without liquor since I was . . . well, we'll say 21. So Addis Ababa was my place to drink good, cheap beer and eat tasty national food while at the same time gathering myself for the trip south. I had an ambitious plan for crossing into Kenya that I had been working on for close to half a year.
The southwest corner of Ethiopia is called the Omo Valley, located at the confluence of Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Kenya. Because of various wars in the region guns are cheap and easy to get, and the nomads have no problem with offing each other. But it's really isolated and I had gotten wind of a crossing there that involved some 50 kilometers of hiking through the desert until Kenya's Lake Turkana, the largest desert lake in the world. One guy had done the from the south six years ago and I wanted to be the first from the north, but upon arriving in the southern-most city in the region I was met by a policeman who told me 1) I couldn't cross this way 2) It was illegal for me to even be in the town. So I guess that's why nobody has done it from the north side.
I spent a couple days working my way east towards the real crossing, a city called Moyale which has its own reputation among overlanders as being the craziest on the Cairo-to-Cape Town Circuit. Come to think of it, it may be the most infamous in Africa among backpackers.
I say this because it takes two days just to get there from Addis Ababa. Once there, you're in an obnoxious, mosquito-filled town whose only transportation are cattle trucks heading south through the miserable dirt path. Up until only a couple years ago, banditry on the Kenyan side was a real problem and travelers frequently reported getting shot at by shiftas. If you managed to get a spot on a truck and miss the shiftas, you still had to contend with three days of horribly uncomfortable riding until you reached Nairobi.
Paul Theroux wrote about this crossing with great zeal in his cross-continent Dark Star Safari . It was here, he writes that his convoy of trucks were shot at by shiftas and two separate trucks broke down before he was finally able to make it on the third to Nairobi.
While the shiftas were no longer a problem, nomadic fighting is, and word reached me that two days before my crossing some three hundred Borena had been killed in a firefight in the exact area I was crossing. But it's the only overland choice, so after a night in Moyale I took off through Immigration to try my luck.
I happened to meet a pair of Israelis who were also crossing that day into Kenya, and together we looked for a vehicle to take us south. The were both intent on not taking the trucks, as only a few months before a friend of theirs riding on top of one of the trucks died after falling off and breaking his neck. But I didn't see any other option, so I decided I was going to bite the bullet and travel this way. It wasn't until I actually saw the trucks, though, that I realized why so many injuries and deaths actually occur on this road.
These hulking monsters were stuff full of cattle down below and the "top" was only a series of metal bars providing support. A total of 36 hours of riding this precarious perch seemed beyond miserable - it sounded stupid. A huge stroke of luck came my way however when I was lashing my bag to the bars as one of the Israelis showed up and said there was a 4X4 willing to take us south to Marsabit, the first major stop, for only $15 USD each.
I didn't hesitate, and so took an infinitely faster and more comfortable car ride. After only a few hours of riding we finally saw a welcome change of landscape in that the desert began to give way to a green landscape and I decided to spend some time in the city of Marsabit before continuing onward.
After exploring a nearby crater I climbed Mount Marsabit and continued on away from the town for what was to be an afternoon hike. Not far into my walk, however, I stumbled upon a group of surprised Borena herders armed with spears and World War I-era Winchester rifles. While there was no common language between us they responsded to my presence with real interest and after a short discussion gestured with their guns that I was to follow them. (It is times like this that I regret never checking in with the local US embassies to let them know I'm in their respective country.)
The small detachment led me away from the herd and back to their village, about an hour from Mt. Marsabit. The group motioned me towards a tree so I parked it there to observe the goings-on. It appeared they were mostly nomadic, as I didn't notice any permanant buildings in the village, though there were more weapons than any villages I had ever been to previously. That very fact was a bit unnerving given the fact that I didn't know what the hell was going on, but I was treated well enough so I decided not to worry about it.
Sure enough, after no more than a half hour a local ranger pulled into the village and cordially told me that while I was very welcome to explore Kenya, I had been wandering in prime cattle raiding territory and these helpful villagers, while slightly bemused at my appearence, were more concerned for my safety than anything else. He graciously drove me back to Marsabit where I caught a transport to safer regions.
Speaking of safety, I was anxious to avoid Nairobi and decided to bypass that entire part of the country. Instead I headed to the western side of Kenya, criss-crossing the equator and eventually making it to Kisumu. This city is the third-largest in Kenya and lies on the shores of Lake Victoria, the second-largest freshwater lake in the world (What-what Lake Superior!). It is a great climate here and was good fun wandering around the lake.
But entering Kenya meant entering tourist grazing area, and I wasn't impressed with the amount of hawkers that Kisumu presented to me trying to get my money. Not as bad as in other areas of the country, I was told, but still pretty obnoxious. In this part of Africa the hawkers who focus on tourists are called "touts", meaning "ticks" in Swahili, and the name fits them well. Whether or not its true, I think of them all as eager to rip me off and then laugh about it to their cackling tout friends as soon as they have their hands on my money, so I'm typically pretty cold to these guys.
Before leaving Kenya I wanted to make a stop in the village of Kogelo, an hour outside of Kisumu. Kogelo has risen to a position of prominence in recent years as the homestead of the Obama family, so I made it a point to get visit there. Surprisingly, there were no touts there and it seemed every bit as a typically village would here. It was clear that they were hurting a bit because of the late rainy season like the rest of the country, but they sold normal priced soda and beer and were friendly to the white guy who showed up not knowing any of the local language.
Despite the lack of rain for Kenya, which has affected millions, the area is located on the Great Rift Valley and has beautiful, rich soil that supports a variety of greenery and provides a gorgeous background. (This change from the desert and semi-arid land of Northern Kenya, Southern Ethiopia, and Somaliland was refreshing and put me in a lasting good mood that has largely stayed with me.) And Obama's family is very welcoming to outsiders. I was greeted by two of his cousins who introduced me to his grandmother, a woman who appears to have taken her own rise to prominence in stride and conducts herself in an extremely dignified, if somewhat amusing, manner.
The next day, in a minibus heading towards the border, I saw a roadside hut with a keg outside of it. One of the joys of backbacking, of course, is that there's no schedule to keep so I had to driver stop and jumped out with my bags to hike back to the hut for a drink. I found they were selling Senator Beer, named in honor of Obama after his 2006 senatorial victory. It was a bit less than a dollar per liter, so I spent the afternoon with a group of fun locals downing liter after liter in the shade of a banana tree. For any liter I bought them, I was offered an equal amount of liquor in their homemade palm wine, and in short order the lot of us were quite silly.
I stopped counting after six liters but I'm reasonably sure I at least made it to a ten before I called it a day. By the time we were done the busses had long passed for the day but I was in no condition to ride anyway. The fellows I were with were in similar straights and we decided to hit the hay right there, in the hut.
The next morning saw me with a blinding headache dulled only slightly by my typically hangover remedy of alka-seltzer, milk, and electrolytes. But one by one my fellow drinkers from the previous night left and eventually I flagged down a bus heading towards the border. It was in this condition I entered Uganda.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Friday, March 13, 2009
Somaliland, Part II
"A tourist? No, my friend, you are a soldier."
-Somaliland soldier to me, after I explained my trek. Best compliment I've ever received.
Looking at my map of Africa one day in Berbera, I noticed a city on the top of Somaliland identified as "Saylac.” The map showed a path to get there along the coast, so I grew curious about somehow making it there. It was located just south of Djibouti, and since I planned on going to Djibouti anyway I figured that I might as well give this “Saylac” place a couple days of my time as well.
Actually, there wasn’t a “road,” I was told after some inquiry, but more a path. That made sense, as with the exception of the one highway snaking through a few of the major cities in Somaliland, no real roads actually existed. If a 4X4 or a huge truck wanted to go anywhere else in Somaliland, it could take anywhere from twelve to forty hours. For a foreigner, it would be expensive as well. And it would be hard to make it through the security checkpoints.
This isn’t the way I wanted to travel, but I still wanted to get to Saylac somehow. Eventually - and I don’t quite remember how - I hit upon the idea of just walking there. Certainly more difficult than driving, but a hell of a lot more fun.
I literally had no idea how I could pull that off. But when I made the connection that what I knew as "Zayla" was actually "Saylac" (the "c" is silent is Somali and acts like a subtle "ah") and was also called "Zeila," I decided I absolutely had to go, regardless of any logistical questions that I had.(Note: Most would English spelling for the city are Sayla or Zeila. But I first heard of the city from Burton and he said Zayla. So for those sake of romanticism I've going to call it by his version in this post.) This is because Zayla was a port city that for hundreds of years was the center of power for this part of the world. It was an extremely important area that tangled frequently with other regional powers and was likely the jumping-off point for Islam in the continent of Africa. I was told that it even had the remains of the second mosque ever built, some thirteen hundred years old. While that in itself seems implausible, the history of the place was intriguing. Though the port has long since ceded its power to other cities, I was anxious to go for another reason; Ibn Battuta, possibly the most intense explorer ever – and a guy who makes Marco Polo look like Sarah Palin in terms of travel experience – had once visited Zayla. Furthermore, Richard Burton had used Zayla as his jumping-off point for his expedition to Harar.
The chance to go to a place where my two favorite explorers had both visited sealed the deal for me. One way or another, I decided, I was going to go there.
Before I start out I should warn you about a couple things. One is that this post is pretty long and I’m anxious to get south into Kenya. What this means is that I haven’t done much proof-reading on it. Please excuse the mistakes I’ve made and the somewhat jumbled writing style. And it doesn't read like any sort of epic adventure because it's not. Really, it's just a normal walk through a somewhat abnormal area. So it may get a bit tedious. But part of the reason I did the thing was to prove to a number of people that it's totally acceptable to do a trek like this in Somaliland and that extraordinary things WOULDN'T happen. While I enjoyed myself and I received a great deal of entertainment, I ultimately found that to be that case. Also, while it may be a bit monotonous in its current form, I still left out a lot of the village names and a good deal of other information that doesn't have a lot of use. But if you're traveling in this part of the world and have wandered over to this blog for whatever reason and want more details, toss me an email (peterpolga@gmail.com) and I'll respond as soon as I can.
Anyway, actually getting the trek together was an experience unto its own. Typically something like this would be hard enough, but those normal problems were compounded by the fact that nobody appears to have just wandered off like this here in a while. Initially I wanted to keep everything under the radar, reason being that the fewer people who knew about my trek the fewer could stop me. But as I began to make my rounds gathering support and gear I found that keeping something like this a secret in a country so small is a hell of a lot more difficult than I would have thought.
These are the issues I was dealing with: Getting a camel, guide, and guard. Getting proper permission for the security checkpoints I would run into. Rounding up food, water, and gear. Finding a proper map and figuring out an acceptable path. Extending my Somaliland visa for another month. And trying to do that while not running into a ministry or security officer who would stop me.
I won't bore you with the details, but this added up to nine days of running around to a total of six different ministries, three security buildings, the Somaliland Mine Action Center, and the Electoral Commission. This was exasperating in itself, but everything was compounded by the fact that all of the ministries appeared terrified that if something happened to me - which they all assured me would never be the case - they would be held accountable. This meant explaining every single detail I could to them and assuring them that I would bring however many guards they wanted. Plus, and this was the most frustrating, every office closes at noon for "lunch."
"Lunch" means that everyone goes to chew chat - I wrote about chat in my Ethiopia post - and then don’t come back to the office until the next day. This is an incredibly annoying aspect of Somaliland, and it has helped me to dislike chat on a personal level. Whereas in Ethiopia it seemed like a pleasant local custom, here it seems to have almost taken over many aspects of normal life. It's common for men with horribly stained, worn-down teeth to come up to me and demand money. When I ask what they want the money for, they answer "to chew." Now, this is kind of like a parade of strangers telling you on a Minneapolis street that they want money to support their marijuana habit. It gets really old really fast.
Not to delve too deeply or read too much into the chat-chewing habits, but it is part of a larger issue here that I find annoying. Chat is not cheap – one bunch will probably cost around $4, a lot of money here. It seems that whenever anyone gets that money, instead of saving it for a rainy day they always, ALWAYS spend it. That concept of living day-to-day is something that is well-suited for the nomadic lystyle upon which Somalis have traditionally lived, but in a culture that has moved towards democracy and capitalism this can lead to no good. The waste of time and money with chat is no good.
Of course there is another side of the story, and far from everyone in Somaliland chews, but for a country to have actually rearranged its schedule for the chat-chewers there has to be a pretty significant population that do. I've talked to a number of Somalilanders who have lived in the West for while and then come back here. They tell me it didn't use to be like this, but something in the last couple decades has changed all that. It annoys a lot of them, too.
Anyway, I was helped a great deal by my friend from Berbera, Abdulkaer Elmi. Without him, there's no way I could have pulled this off. He had contacts with just about everyone I needed to talk to and was responsible for putting me in contact with the guy I go the camel and guide from. He also pointed me towards another of his friends, Ahmed. Ahmed as well proved to be invaluable, meeting with me nearly every night to give advice, guide me toward relevant ministries, and translate for me when I was in talks to actually get my hands on the camel and a guide. Really, just an all-around solid guy who went so far out of his way to help me that I can't even understand it. It must be a Somali thing.
As I drew closer to my start date I picked up another traveler, a British guy a couple years older than me who lived in Yemen but was in Somaliland on vacation. His name was Peter as well, though I'll refer to him as Pete as a point of reference for my post here. Because of visa issues he only stayed on the trek until we got to the coast, but he was a real solid part of the walk and I'm really glad that we met up together. After he agreed to come with me we spent the last few days scrambling around getting last-minute supplies and trying to round up a guard to come with us.
The guard issue was becoming a real sticking point, as we had sworn to every ministry we went to that we would get one. Everyone assured that without a guard there was no way that we would make it past the checkpoints. This was particularly exasperating to me in that part of the reason I was doing this was to prove that the whole place was safe and I didn't want two guys with AK-47s trailing after me. But they were only $10 per day per guard so eventually I just resigned myself to having them along.
My arguments against a guard fell on deaf or uncaring ears anyway. I would usually start by asking them if the country was safe, to which I would always receive and enthusiastic endorsement of. If was safe, I would then ask, why did I need a guy with a large gun trailing after me to protect me from bandits?
The problem wasn't bandits, I would be told, but rather hyenas along the coast. Or it could be the guys suffering from PTSD from the civil war; a lot of them live in the bush and could give me trouble. Or security checkpoints that might try to get a little money out of me. Or maybe it was the bandits . . .
Nobody could make up their minds as to what the actual need for a guard was, but everyone was in agreement that we absolutely, positively, definitely needed one. Or two. That was a disagreement. As was what branch of the security services was going to give us the guards, especially as the SPU, the branch that typically provides guards to foreigners, refused to on the grounds that our estimate of twenty days was too long to loan a soldier.
The day we were to leave we had finally landed a meeting with the head of the security services for the country. I was a bit nervous walking into his office, as this was a guy who would either make sure we got the soldier or else could keep us forever in Hargesia. After a bit of back-and-forth, we told him that we wanted however many soldiers he thought we needed for a maximum of twenty days. He paused, mulling it over, and then leaned forward and said "No, it is too long. I cannot give you any soldiers."
That put Pete and I in the bizarre position of arguing FOR a guard, though that was only until we realized we had a way out of the whole thing. “Could the commander,” we asked as politely as possible, “write us a letter saying that we DIDN'T need a guard for us to show to and security people we would meet along the way?”
"Yes," he answered. And that was it. No soldiers, no weapons, just a letter saying our party of four - Pete, our guide Aden, our camel, and me.
I ducked a meeting I had somehow gotten with the Foreign Minister - I wasn't sure if it was a meeting with him or just another way to hold us up - and we scurried to load up our camel before anyone could stop us from leaving. The camel wasn't as big as I expected, but was still a good looking animal. Pete Christened her "Beast," and my name for her was "Zayla", in honor of our ultimate destination.
We loaded up in about thirty minutes and we off, leaving Hargesia and its bureaucracy for others to deal with.
Briefly referencing Burton again, he once said before setting out with John Speke to discover the source of the Nile that "one of the greatest times in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands." If there was a time in my life where that applied, it was here. But instead of feeling any huge joy, I felt more of a sense of relief. I was DONE getting ready for this damn thing, and I was actually walking! What was in front of me wasn't on my mind, but rather what I had already gone through to get to this point. My shoulders still had tension in them and that wouldn't really go away until we were a couple days into our trip.
Physically, the walk in front of me looked like this: Of the three legs I had divided the trip into, the first was from Hargesia to the coast, a village named Buloxaar. The next leg was up the coast to Lughaya. Finally, from there we would dive back into the interior and then make our way to the final destination of Zayla. Altogether, I was told, it would be a bit more than 500 kilometers. The camel ensured that I wouldn't have to carry much, and all I took on my back was a small bag with water for the day and some personal items. So the bag never weighted more than twenty pounds or so, and even this weight I cut back on as the trip progressed.
As was the custom here with nomads, our group would sleep until sunrise, grab some breakfast, and then head out around 7 or 7:30 AM. We walked until around noon and stop to eat. After lunch we took a brief nap during the worst of the midday sun and then set around three in the afternoon and walked until around eight. That schedule is in theory, at least. In reality, we occasionally spent half a day just resting or maybe got a late start and ended up walking a little ways into our lunch break or a couple hours past sunset.
Every village has a hut called a "dirgid," ("waab" on the coast) which is a hut that those passing by can sleep in for free. This is under the assumption that any meals purchased in the village will be from the hut owner. Beds are nonexistent though, so having your own sleeping material is a must.
That first day was thankfully uneventful. It was a simple walk to our midday stop and after a brief rest we took off for our first night's sleep in a village called Belliga Cas. We had been late starting off in the morning so our hike lasted well past sunset and we watched the full moon rise over the hill to our right side. As it was right over the horizon it was at least as large as the setting sun had been and this cast a terrific shadow of our little band. Trailing behind the camel, Zayla, its shadow reminded me of "Song for My Father" and I hummed that for the rest of the night.
We arrived in Beliga Cas, a village of around fifteen huts lining the road, around 10 PM and didn't even move our stuff into the dirgid, instead sleeping by the side of the road and taking off early the next morning. But we ran into our first problem after less than two hours of walking when our camel Zayla refused to go any further. We had, it turned out, over-loaded her. Well, more realistically, they just hadn't given me a camel the size I had asked for, but that didn't matter. All that mattered was that it was clear Zayla wasn't going any further.
So I watched the stuff while Pete and Aden walked back to the previous village. Communication between Aden and Pete and I was difficult because while Pete spoke Arabic, neither of us spoke Somali and that was Aden's only language. But from what I gathered we were going to make camp there and Aden was going back to the village for a phone. So while I was waiting I began collecting a pile of firewood for the night, and during the course of my wandering took my shirt off and changed into shorts. I figured, stupidly, that I was by myself so I could show a little skin and work on my tan a bit.
But after less than a half hour I looked up to see a herd of around fifty camels being driven past our site by three nomads. Not wanting to be seen with so little clothing on in this conservative society, I ran back to put on proper clothes. Arriving back on at packs, I realized that our camel Zayla, even though her legs had been tied together and her neck tied to a tree, had gone missing.
It didn't take a genius to guess that she had decided to join the herd that was passing through. So I tossed on a shirt and, in front of the slightly befuddled-looking nomads, began looking through their herd for the camel whose legs were tied up back was still somehow walking. I found her after a brief search but then had the problem of getting her back to our packs. Camels, even a mid-size one like her, are impossible for someone without any experience to control. Zayla apparently realized this and took off galloping in another direction with me chasing after her, just barely matching her speed. Finally, one of the herders took pity on me and jogged over to help. He somehow collected her, brought her back to the bags, and tied her up while I watched in embarrassment.
After a while longer Pete and Aden made it back and I was told that we were heading back to Belliga Cas for a couple nights while a second, much more reliable, camel came our way. So we waited a couple hours until a truck came by and jumped on to ride back.
It's a pity that, of the places we had to spend extra time in, it was Belliga Cas we were stuck. There really wasn't a whole lot to do there and the surrounding desert was very boring. A good purchased there though was a Somali walking stick called a "xangol," also used to keep snakes away, build shelters with the thorn tree branches, and herd animals with. This xangol ended up being a real good buy and I grew extremely attached to it throughout the trek. Even now it feels strange walking without it.
The next day our new camel arrived. This was a large male, and definitely up to the task of carrying our supplies. But he was whiny, constantly moaning whenever he loaded him up or when he got the least bit tired.
“I don’t wanna!” I could almost hear him complain. “I don’t WANNA!!!”
And, in a twists that was eventually going to have an impact on me, he was horrified by engines. This doesn't sound so bad when that maybe two trucks a day attempted to navigate the difficult paths. But this camel's reaction was to start bucking and run away from the road, causing the bags to slip and sometimes adding a half hour delay while we re-tied them. Because of his size and his timidity, I christened him "Little John."
There were mountains in front of us, but I wasn't able to determine based on my map or on sight if they were simply large hills or actual mountains. I guessed the former, and initially this prioved correct and the incline was inconsequential.
But after midday that incline began to increase and I realized I had been wrong. We were climbing, and though it wasn't steep enough to make walking difficult, eventually the elevation we were reaching meant that a thick fog rolled in and visibility declined to around ten yards. In the middle of what I thought was going to be a pure desert walk, it was really enjoyable walking through the dark, covered in mist. Occasionally a nomadic fire would peak through the clouds or the bleating of a goat drifted our way, but other than that it was a very quiet and very mellow walk. This mountain pass was apparently a popular one for the nomads because we started to see numerous herders, mostly with goats or camels, wander by. White people, especially those without 4X4s, never came this way, so we always got a look of shock from those we passed.
We made camp in a village that could have been huge for all we could see but turned out the next morning to be only three or four huts. Though I was woken up numerous times during the night by conversations from nearby Somalis – who never seem to quiet down for those sleeping around them – and the herds wandering by, the night was pleasantly memorable because our camp site was close enough to the path so that I could see the herds as the came and disappeared through the clouds. At one point, around four in the morning, such a large herd went by that I sat up to count the animals. I reached 460 goats and 62 camels by the time the last of them were swallowed up in the fog.
Our midday rest the next day was at an equally enjoyable site, at the bottom of the mountains near the first water springs and first gardens we had seen so far. A local gave us some veggies and Pete and I dined on those and talked to a local jewel hunter from Hargesia who was spending time looking around this area of the mountains. I nicknamed the stop "Gemstone Springs" in honor of both him and the algae-green springs we filled our water containers from. The weather that day continued its streak of perfection, and that made the walk extremely pleasing.
In fact, with the exception of a couple days after Buloxaar, the weather turned out to be almost ideal for the entire trip. Temperatures in the Somaliland winter tend to hover 80 degrees with mostly cloudless days. Likewise, the actual walking was easy enough because the terrain was typically flat, though loose sand in many areas turned out to be incredibly annoying to deal with. Dry riverbeds were typically a little harder to walk in because they represented large rocks to trip over in the dark, but it was at least easier to navigate. The land showed no signs of moisture until we got past Lughaya and any vegetation was typically limited to the low-lying thorn trees, whose two-inch long spikes would occasionally pierce through our shoes and into our feet.
Other than those thorns, the country here is ideal for trekkers - as it is a nomadic culture, the infrastructure is already largely in place. Every half day there is either a village or even just a couple huts for the traveler to rest in. They sell food, limited to pasta or sometimes rice, for a dollar a plate at lunch and dinner and a sort of Somali pancake for breakfast. Fresh water came in barrels from Hargesia and was free to the travelers wandering by to fill our containers, but often the water came to us via used jerry cans so it had the annoying taste of oil with it. The only other drink you would typically find is "Somali Tea," a quick addiction. It is black tea loaded with cloves, ginger, cinnamon, cardamom, sugar, and milk, and they serve it everywhere in Somaliland. It taste just fantastic and you can buy an entire thermos for only 30 cents.
That night, after a long walk, we made it to another set of springs in a village called Seley. The crowd that gathered around us was typical. In every village between half a dozen and thirty people would surround us to look at the crazy white people, often the first to ever step food in their village. At first this custom was amusing to me, but as the days wore on I began to tire of it and by the end of the trip I wanted to jump up and scream “Stop looking at me! If you’re just going to stare at me, at least help un-tie the bags!”
Anyway, we spent the night here and the next morning as well - besides letting our camel, Little John, rest up, these springs had been described as "hot springs" to us and I was anxious to relax in them a bit.
Unfortunately, my mind had gotten ahead of reality, as the springs were far from relaxing. Set against a gorgeous rock backdrop, the springs were actually very muddy affairs and contained only slightly warmed water that had an obnoxious sulfuric tinge to it that worked hell to my various scrapes. To add to that, I had only just begun washing my clothes in one of the springs when I received a strong push from the back and turned around to look straight into the thirsty face of a large male camel less than a foot away. He was flanked by another half dozen camels who were all staring intently at me as if to say “What on Earth are YOU doing here?”
This was surprising, as camels are typically timid and almost never will approach and touch a stranger. But the message was clear - if I didn't leave the hole they were going to kick me out. So I scrambled up the rocks and had to wait until the entire herd of about 20 camels had had their turn to drink. Bummer.
Our continuation towards the coast that night ran into a brief hurdle after we got lost for couple hours after sunset, but eventually we made it to Buloxaar, an old city on the ocean which had been the British administrative center back in the day. It was the largest village we had been to thus far with one hundred fifty people. This meant that there was a shop in the village where I could get cookies and soda. But more importantly, this marked the end of the first leg of my trip and I was finally back at the coast.
Pete had visa issues needed to get back to Yemen, so he decided that he would leave the trek here for Berbera and catch a boat back to Aden. In the meantime, though, we spent a few days wandering around the port city and taking in the sites. The “sites” were primarily limited to the old British buildings along the beach. These lay in ruins, half covered in sand and already swallowed up by vegetation along the beach after less than forty years. They were fun to wander in, and Pete and I had a good time exploring the old school house where Peace Corp teachers had given instruction in until they were tossed out of the country by Somali dictator Siad Barre a few decades back.
The beach itself was a site of perfection and, because the village of Buloxaar was a few kilometers from the water, I assumed that isolation was a given. So my first morning there I took down the beach and decided that some skinny-dipping was in order. Unfortunately, the mayor had sent one of his minions to make sure I was safe and after a half hour he came upon me. He wanted me to come out to talk to him, but he didn't speak English and it was difficult to try to explain that I was naked and I wanted him to go away. Finally, after what I thought was an unnecessary amount of gesturing, he wandered a distance away so I could collect my shorts and go tell him that, yes, I was safe and, no, I wasn't planning on being in any danger so would he PLEASE leave.
He did, but I was spooked at someone else wandering along so I left my shorts on and spent some time on the beach just taking in the vibes. It was so relaxing, actually, that I fell asleep for a while and had to contend with a wicked sunburn for the rest of the trip. The beach, though, was worth it.
A couple days later Pete caught a truck that was going to Berbera so he could make it to Yemen. From here on, our trek was limited to Aden, Little John, and me. We set off north the same morning Pete left, starting our second leg in an uncomfortable heat that made me nervous even before we started off.
Whereas the temperature had previously been rather mellow, today was a first-class lesson in walking through hell. I hadn't expected the heat and packed only two liters of water for the half day walk to the next village. But by 8:30 AM my thermometer read 85 degrees and had climbed past 105 degrees by noon. Soon after that, it was 110. It was at this point that the name "Morning Star" popped into my head, and I decided that this was the perfect name for the are that we were walking through.
Desert travelers always caution you against rationing your water so by eleven o’clock that morning my drinking water was finished after only four hours of walking. I gave a couple shots at retrieving the spare water I had somewhere in a bag lashed to Little John, but Aden refused to stop due to the amount of time it would take to un-tie and re-tie everything. At first I was okay, with this, but if I would have realized that our next stop wasn't until 2:30 PM, I would have put up a hell of a lot more of an argument. Aden, ever the plodder, kept up his pace while I began to fall behind.
That day I received a picture-perfect education in dehydration. Three and a half hours of walking without water truthfully doesn't seem like a long time, but you'd be surprised how quickly you dry out here in the sun. The word “parched” doesn’t do it justice. My thoughts wandered back to travel writer John Hemingway's "No Man's Land," an account he wrote in the mid-80's on some of his more colorful experiences in East Africa. The particular chapter I thought back to was on a trek he made along with four porters in the brutally hot Kedong Valley of Kenya. Hemingway, no novice to the perils of East Africa, made what should have been a fatal mistake in his planning for what he guessed to be a three day trek.
The average person on a desert trek requires a minimum of a gallon of water per day, with two gallons per day being a much safer bet. But a gallon of water weighs ten pounds, and with three days of trekking and five men total, that equaled 150 lbs of weight, or a full 30 lbs per man, even at the bare minimum 1 gallon per day. For reasons he doesn't make clear in the book, Hemingway set out with less than a gallon per man for the entire trek. It was only at the end of day one, when it was too late to turn back, that he realized his folly.
His second day was spend almost entirely without water and he quickly developed symptoms of dehydration walking through the desert towards what he increasingly assumed would be his death. As the day wore on and the temperature rose further, he soon started showing signs of severe dehydration. Sitting down for a rest meant hell because it is 20 to 30 degrees hotter within a foot of the ground than above that level, so he kept packing on, farther into a desert wasteland that logically offered no chance of respite.
"Stopping is suicide," he wrote, "going is worse . . . My mind reels under blame and hopelessness, knowing that I should have been firmer [with the water rations], and thinking how ridiculous it will be to perish from lack of water after only two days. I am insane and so is Africa."
That last line is the line that I repeat over and over; "I am insane and so is Africa." It's not meant in an ironic or amusing way, just as a statement of fact. It seems impossible to dry out so quickly, but really, hiking through the desert gives you a hard lesson in the human body and its limits. Stopping for a rest may bring temporary relief, but its impossible to hide from the sun and the heat never dissipates - stopping only ensure that you lose that much more moisture from your body before you get to your ultimate destination.
I am insane and so is Africa. It doesn't matter how much you read about thirst; actual thirst is a thousand times worse. All of the information about the signs of dehydration, proper clothing, and orientation fly right out the window when it finally happens. You can't adequately describe dehydration because it's largely a mental problem besides being a physical one. Seeing the heat radiate from the ground is only worse by feeling it . . . seeing the distance to be walked is worse only by actually walking it . . . seeing your skin clam up and turn those unnatural colors is worse only by feeling the pinch of your skin and realizing it doesn't have the moisture to change back to its normal self. (Disconcertedly, it instead stays in the shape you pinched it to.)
Feeling the sense of inferiority is an experience unto its own - you can't control anything except for the movement of your legs. Everything else that normally seems so mundane - the turning of a faucet to get tap water - is far beyond your reach. The desert is the one sure sign that humans cannot conquer all - we can't beat it back. We might strip away mountains, re-route or damn rivers, and build tremendous skyscrapers, but we can't conquer the desert.
I am insane and so is Africa. It's -300 degrees in Minnesota right now; people are happily complaining about frozen radiators and frostbite, clearing icicles from theirs roofs, and sledding down hills filled with wonderful snow.
Am I exaggerating? Well, in a manner of speaking. This was roughly my train of thought while walking, but that's not to say that I wasn't perhaps going a little overboard at the time. Even though logic told me this was simply too stupid a way to pass out, I found myself thinking that this was an absurd moment of my life and there was nothing and nobody to help me if I collapsed. And then I thought "Wow, what happens if I collapse?" Yes, if there has been a time in my trip thus far where my mind was nearing hysterics, it was now.
Hemingway, who seemed to have a knack for getting out of these situations, eventually made it to a road that had been built in the months between when he made his fly-over and when he actually made his trek. That road saved his life.
And let me tell you, I've never been so happy to see signs of humanity when the village finally came into view in the distance. If I would have had the energy I would have done a little jig the rest of the way.
But instead I stumbled into the village and couldn't even be polite asking for water ("biyo"); I just held out my nalgene and signaled that I was thirsty. At this point I was showing signs of moderate to severe dehydration and, I think, suffering from heat stroke as well. My stomach had been wretching up acid, my skin was clammy, and I had been walking through dizziness. Another 45 minutes to an hour and I really think I could have been in trouble.
As soon as I got the water I ripped open my oral rehydration salts, tossed them in the water, and then guzzled it without stopping for air. Ditto with two more liters. Then I went into the guest hut and passed out.
Luckily Aden had some family in this village and was fine with sticking around a while, so we spent the rest of the day there. Later, when I was awake and able to stand up again, I bought a goat for $35 and feasted with some of the village elders. As I was the purchaser, I had the honor of eating what I only figured out later was the liver (gross). Still, I also got as much of the boiled meat as I wanted and it was different than the food I had been getting used to, so I was pleased. And after the rest and the food I moved back up from the 10% physical capacity I had been feeling to around 50% physical capacity.
The next day I moved to 90% and was feeling good when we set off. By noon we reached our expected village which consisted of only four huts. The two of us had the typical pasta for lunch with a few glasses of Somali tea and then began preparations to go on.
Up until this point, there had been few moments of excitement on this trek. I was well aware that anything "exciting" out here was probably bad news and I had been hoping to keep it that way. But by a quirk of unfortunate timing the only truck of the day happened to pass through the village at the exact time that we were loading the bags onto the camel, Little John.
As I mentioned, Little John is absolutely, one hundred percent terrified of motor vehicles. This occasion proved to be no exception. He leapt to his feet and started bucking, sending the half-tied bags flying and scattering those loading him. I was the strongest guy there and I didn't want him bashing one of the huts down, so I jumped in and grabbed the rope to bring him under control. Another guy came forward to help me and we held him in place until he could chill out a little.
Unfortunately, Mr. Truck had caught a fleeting glance of me and decided to back up for another look. The two of us who had been holding him weren't expecting this and had loosened our stances a bit, and this was enough for Little John. He gave a tremendous buck and that sent me on a collision course with the dirt. I had a brief glance of the other guy being launched airborne and then I nailed the ground and rolled into a piled of firewood.
When I came to a few seconds later Little John had mellowed and a small circle of people had formed around me with concern. I felt really stupid, lying there, until one of them came forward, help me to my feet, and gave me a big thumbs-up, flexed his muscles, pointed at me, and then gave me another thumbs-up. The others, realizing that I was okay, wandered away to finish their tea after giving me what I think was their sympathy.
Besides a sizable gash in my head I had also torn up my right knee and gotten a foot-long tear in my left calf. More than any physical injury was the mental one - this is the exact sort of stupid move that I always seem to make; now, the first white guy to visit this village just got tossed by a camel. Stupid, stupid, stupid!
I shouldn't have been concerned though, because people in both that village and the ones later on didn't think it was funny. It was just normal concern and, depending on how enthusiastic Aden was about re-telling the story, an impressed look and a high-five. Apparently, the fact that I was able to get Little John under control in the first place was notable, as was the fact that I was up and walking within a couple minutes of the toss. So in time I wore my battle wounds with pride.
The few days of walking were time for me time to heal from my tumble and pick off the multiple layers of dead skin from the Buloxaar sun burn. In short time we made it to the port city of Lughaya. This marked the end of my second leg of the trip and a day and a half of rest to let myself heal up and prepare for the last leg into the interior and eventually to Zayla.
Lughaya can actually be described as a small town instead of a village, with a population of three hundred people. To me, it was a metropolis where they not only had soda, snacks, and fruit, but electricity for three hours a day as well. The ocean surf was too rough to swim in safely so I spent my time wandering down the beach visiting some of the small fishing communities that Aden and I had missed on our way in.
Leaving Lughaya represented a change in trekking style from what I was used to. Instead of villages well-spaced every half day there was just a giant empty space for the next few days. Not only that, but I had been warned before leaving Hargesia that this area represented a serious hyena threat. I knew Aden wanted to take me into the interior but I wasn't sure where and even with a translator it was difficult to lay out exactly what his plans were. Still, he seemed confident so I decided to leave my fate in his hands.
Traveling northwest from the coast, the two of us now moved into prime grazing territory. Added to the camels and goats we had seen since the beginning of the trip were sheep, mule, and even the occasional cow herd. The green landscape meant that nomads from all over Somaliland, Djibouti, and Ethiopia had come with their livestock. For me, besides a change in scenery, this meant the addition of milk to my diet. So I decided to make a little experiment with my eating habits.
The three types of milk in that region came from camel, goat, and cow. Cow milk was scarce, whereas goat milk was not. But goat milk had an unfamiliar and unwelcome taste to me so that was my least favorite. Camel milk was supposed to be the healthiest but almost as scarce as cow milk. And in Africa it's typical to let the milk sit for a day in the sun so it develops a sour, lumpy quality to it that takes some getting used to. Added to that was the tendency of some here to store milk in the same used jerry cans as water, so you never knew when your bitter, lumpy goat milk might also taste like it came from a pump at the local Super America.
Still, for years I had read about nomads around Africa who lived their entire lives only on milk or on milk and blood. I was curious if this was a quality that these nomads had adapted to over generations or if a foreigner with a frame like mine and eating habits to go with it and do the same thing. Ergo, I resolved to go 48 hours drinking only milk and see if I could keep the same walking pace as before.
Aden came through for me in good form. It turns out that his insistence that we travel back into the interior was because he had family in the area. Not only did that mean that we had a hut to sleep in or next to every night, but we also had unlimited milk from their herds for me to drink for those two days. And honestly, I felt absolutely great consuming only that milk. I never felt a single hunger pain the entire time I was on the milk-only diet and had no energy cravings. The camel milk in particular really refreshed me and made me want to get a camel for Minnesota so I can have fresh milk every day.
By this point though, even with the fun milk diet and the increasing greenery along the way, my mood was beginning to flag. Physically, I was starting to feel worn-down from the two-plus weeks of walking and from various infections received as a result of my camel toss and other random scrapes. Mentally I was in a small funk because I had reached what roughly could be described as the halfway point of my trip in Africa and for some reason this was having an effect on me, not to mention the fact that I was nearly done with this trek.
Little things began to annoy me - the small hole in my sleeping mat, the guy in a village who would just stared at me without blinking for an hour straight, the gasoline-tasting water, the fact that Somalis didn't seem to have a "Volume Control" button when it was nighttime and I was trying to sleep . . . all of these are minor consequences to be expected when traveling, especially while traveling into the middle of nowhere. But I was tired of dealing with them and my internal reaction started to grow testier.
One night, only two days out from Zayla, we ran into a dry riverbed that was blocking our path. Previously, we had usually passed through anywhere between two and six of these in any given day with no problem, but this one had really carved out a place for itself and was around five meters deep. There was no way that Little John could make it down, and after an hour of walking up and down the side in search or a way across the packs on Little John began to slip and we decided to make camp right there. Though there were numerous nomad camps in the area, the closest village was a day’s walk away and we both realized that our chances of making it across the river in the dark were around nil. So we figured this was as good of a spot as any to hang out.
Aden went off to a distant light in order to secure some dinner for us while I set up what was needed for the night. He returned with a large container of cow's milk which was a real treat - it was my first cow milk of the trip, and after nearly two straight days of the camel milk and odd-tasting goat milk, this was as good as any other dinner. It had been a long day of walking and the cool night that was wafting in combined with the "food" was a pleasant reminder as to why I had decided to do this trek in the first place. My various cuts and scrapes faded in importance and I was overcome with a feeling of real happiness.
Edward Abbey writes in “Desert Solitaire” - a book which makes even more sense now - about the difference between loneliness and simply being alone. There are times in every trip where I feel loneliness, and this trip has been no exception. Never on this trek though. This was a trek to feel alone, not to feel loneliness.
That night, falling asleep beside that dry riverbed, I felt more alone than in years. There wasn't a soul in the world save Aden who had a clue as to where I was and it felt great. From a guy back home whose hands are glued to a keyboard and a phone is all too often in use, taking an hour just to watch shooting stars was pretty fantastic.
I fell asleep happy.
Taking away the forty minute break for lunch the next day, we walked for thirteen hours to our first real village to speak of since Lughaya. Thirteen hours was a bit beyond my limit and when we finally came to Ceel Cashado my feet felt like they would explode. During the day I had aggravated an old ankle injury and had been walking differently as a result, so my calves ached a good deal as well. But it was worth it because I spent the night at the police station and they rolled out, wonder of wonders, a fish-net bed for me to sleep on.
What under normal circumstances would have seemed like a misery was on this trek a god-send. This was the first bed I had slept in since leaving Hargesia, and my sleep was as comfortable as any I can remember. I never woke up during the night and spent the next morning resting in my bed while Aden went off to chew chat from the tip I had already given him.
Ceel Cashado was my last stop before Zayla, and the day's hike was done with the knowledge that I was nearing my ultimate goal. If I had been expecting to feel any sort of exultation over this fact during my walk, I instead spent the day in a sort of sullen daze. Physically I hadn't really recovered from the day before, but it was also because my heart really wasn't in the walk anymore and I just wanted to be in Zayla. These last twenty-five kilometers seemed irrelevant - I just wanted the thing to be over with.
But twenty-five kilometers goes by quickly and the lights of Zayla came into view just after sunset. I wasn't at all sure what to expect from the city as I had neglected to pay attention to any contemporary accounts of Zayla, but census people back in Hargesia had told me the population was around four hundred and that made it the largest town I had seen since leaving the capital. The port had long-since silted up and the population had been steadily decreasing since 1900, but it was still a transit point for goods from Djibouti and cities with fifteen hundred years of history don't just disappear that easily.
I was surprised, to say the least. I had been expecting something of a charming, quiet fishing village with historical ruins all around it. The ruins were certainly there, but I also found a city with shops and cafes that contained more than the spaghetti and Somali tea I had gotten used to. Two large communication towers rose above everything, and the hum of vehicles coming and going never ended through the nights I spent there.
Still, despite its history, tourism is negligible. The math teacher, who took to being my guide for the city, told me that a tourist may come along every month or two. This is understandable given the difficulty in reaching Zayla, but I think that its place in history should ensure more than half a dozen tourists a year. As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, Zayla contains what locals claim to be second mosque ever built, so as soon as I woke up the next morning I wandered over to the site. What I saw was one of the most depressing historical sites of my life.
The mosque, largely in ruins, was not at all the place of veneration I would have expected. The only part of it that was still standing was the first direction, which faced towards Palestine. The second section, which had faced towards Medina, had long since disintegrated and joined the rest of the mosque in a heap of rubble on the ground. Trash partially covered the rubble and it was clear that no care was being done to ensure that what was left of the mosque was kept up. A stray soccer ball from the kids playing yards away would have been more than enough to knock down the only section of the wall still standing. Even without that soccer ball it was clear that it would fall down within a couple years if nobody stepped in to help it. And given the few tourists who made it up this way, it was clear nobody would care to make any investment into this historical site.
The rest of the city was like that, as well. Other history was left to decay, joining the silted port in helping to send Zayla into irrelevancy. On top of that, the city was large enough not to have the "dirgid" for me to stay at and instead I bedded at the local police station. Sleeping so close to the prisoners, in their miserable cell, was not among my favorite memories on the trek.
But Zayla was still Zayla, and there WAS a lot of history there as long as you had someone to show it to you. When the tide was in the beaches were fun to walk along and maybe even swim in if got deep enough. Having regular electricity was also a treat, if only for the knowledge that it was there if I inexplicably needed it.
The morning of my third day in Zayla I snagged a ride on the back of a government truck going to the border about thirty kilometers away and made what turned out to be an incredibly ironic statement in my journal after getting punched out of Somaliland - "No issues exiting!!! On to Djibouti!"
My excitement was quickly stamped out after I suffered what I'll describe as an immigration catastrophe trying to enter the country. While avoiding any lasting consequences, I was nonetheless physically shoved out of the Djibouti immigration building and back into the no-man's-land between the immigration buildings. Luckily my old savior Abdulkaer was only a phone call away and he happened to be talking with the head of Immigration when I called, so I was allowed back into Somaliland and took a horribly uncomfortable eighteen hour ride back to Hargesia on what is, and I type this without a grin, the worst road I've ever driven on. If you want to call it a road. Whatever the name, it was eighteen hours of dust and sand, bumping, scraping, and occasionally breaking down. And it was mostly during the night, which meant that my sleep was . . . sporadic.
My mood, hardly positive to begin with, turned even more sour when I realized that my IPOD had gone missing. And, I realized later, some money to go with it. As it was a shared taxi, I'm pretty sure it was one of the shifty guys in back who had grabbed my stuff, but I couldn't be certain.
Arriving back in Hargesia, the 4X4 dropped me off at the hotel of my benefactor, Abdulkaer. While he was still in his Berbera Maan-Soor hotel, I was going to stay here for a while to recover. I tossed my bags out of the car, but before I could begin making my way inside to check in the manager came out and said "No, go to your room first and clean up."
The message was clear - I was a mess and the other guests would be freaked out by me. The Mann-Soor is pretty much THE hotel of Somaliland, and the manager was doing the understandable thing of being nice to me while still ensuring I didn't track sixteen pounds of sand into the hotel with me.
Almost without pausing I grabbed the key and trudged to my place across the compound. Opening the door, I threw my stuff on the floor and took and minute to look in the mirror. Only then did I appreciate just why the manager had told me to come here first.
My hair, not having been cut in three months and filled with dust and dirt from three weeks trekking and an eighteen hour ride with windows open, had turned into a giant, gritty, white-man fro. My clothes were all brown from sand, and my arms and face were brown and slightly peeling from sunburns. I was still carrying my xangol, the Somali walking stick, and I wore an expression that I can only describe as exhausted, frustrated, and angry all-in-one. My eyes had a distant expression to them that I couldn't shake no matter how hard I tried. Had I been looking in on myself, I would have laughed.
A real bed, and a shower, and a choice of food were all blessed gifts to me. Thorn scratches, infections from my camel toss, the Buloxaar sunburn, and my ankle injury had all combined to put in a position of frustration and I was loathe to walk much for the next couple days. I ate a whole lot in an attempt to get back some of the twenty pounds I had lost while in the bush and generally just enjoyed the feeling of a cushion beneath me.
When I eventually did go out, I was impressed by the attention I got from people at the ministries, the Maan-Sor, passing policemen, and even some of the regular citizens as I wandered around Hargesia over the next few days. Word appeared to have gotten around about me and I was a minor celebrity. Every time I went out on the street I would be stopped by people asking if I was “The Camel Guy.”
I was flattered, but in reality nomads do this sort of thing all time here without anyone blinking. I hiked a little more than 500 kilometers; a good distance, but one that hardly stacks up against what many of those same herders I passed had been walking. The only reason I got any attention was because I was a white guy from America who did it.
With everything that happened, I want to go back soon and do another hike or a number of hikes through different parts of the country. People along the way were so kind and the walk was so enjoyable that leaving was difficult and coming back is almost a given for me.
I don’t have much more of a summation besides that, except to say I’m really happy that I made that trek. Any difficulties along the way were relatively minor and my enjoyment of walking so much through a country as isolated as Somaliland was immense.
Cheers to a great walk.
-Somaliland soldier to me, after I explained my trek. Best compliment I've ever received.
Looking at my map of Africa one day in Berbera, I noticed a city on the top of Somaliland identified as "Saylac.” The map showed a path to get there along the coast, so I grew curious about somehow making it there. It was located just south of Djibouti, and since I planned on going to Djibouti anyway I figured that I might as well give this “Saylac” place a couple days of my time as well.
Actually, there wasn’t a “road,” I was told after some inquiry, but more a path. That made sense, as with the exception of the one highway snaking through a few of the major cities in Somaliland, no real roads actually existed. If a 4X4 or a huge truck wanted to go anywhere else in Somaliland, it could take anywhere from twelve to forty hours. For a foreigner, it would be expensive as well. And it would be hard to make it through the security checkpoints.
This isn’t the way I wanted to travel, but I still wanted to get to Saylac somehow. Eventually - and I don’t quite remember how - I hit upon the idea of just walking there. Certainly more difficult than driving, but a hell of a lot more fun.
I literally had no idea how I could pull that off. But when I made the connection that what I knew as "Zayla" was actually "Saylac" (the "c" is silent is Somali and acts like a subtle "ah") and was also called "Zeila," I decided I absolutely had to go, regardless of any logistical questions that I had.(Note: Most would English spelling for the city are Sayla or Zeila. But I first heard of the city from Burton and he said Zayla. So for those sake of romanticism I've going to call it by his version in this post.) This is because Zayla was a port city that for hundreds of years was the center of power for this part of the world. It was an extremely important area that tangled frequently with other regional powers and was likely the jumping-off point for Islam in the continent of Africa. I was told that it even had the remains of the second mosque ever built, some thirteen hundred years old. While that in itself seems implausible, the history of the place was intriguing. Though the port has long since ceded its power to other cities, I was anxious to go for another reason; Ibn Battuta, possibly the most intense explorer ever – and a guy who makes Marco Polo look like Sarah Palin in terms of travel experience – had once visited Zayla. Furthermore, Richard Burton had used Zayla as his jumping-off point for his expedition to Harar.
The chance to go to a place where my two favorite explorers had both visited sealed the deal for me. One way or another, I decided, I was going to go there.
Before I start out I should warn you about a couple things. One is that this post is pretty long and I’m anxious to get south into Kenya. What this means is that I haven’t done much proof-reading on it. Please excuse the mistakes I’ve made and the somewhat jumbled writing style. And it doesn't read like any sort of epic adventure because it's not. Really, it's just a normal walk through a somewhat abnormal area. So it may get a bit tedious. But part of the reason I did the thing was to prove to a number of people that it's totally acceptable to do a trek like this in Somaliland and that extraordinary things WOULDN'T happen. While I enjoyed myself and I received a great deal of entertainment, I ultimately found that to be that case. Also, while it may be a bit monotonous in its current form, I still left out a lot of the village names and a good deal of other information that doesn't have a lot of use. But if you're traveling in this part of the world and have wandered over to this blog for whatever reason and want more details, toss me an email (peterpolga@gmail.com) and I'll respond as soon as I can.
Anyway, actually getting the trek together was an experience unto its own. Typically something like this would be hard enough, but those normal problems were compounded by the fact that nobody appears to have just wandered off like this here in a while. Initially I wanted to keep everything under the radar, reason being that the fewer people who knew about my trek the fewer could stop me. But as I began to make my rounds gathering support and gear I found that keeping something like this a secret in a country so small is a hell of a lot more difficult than I would have thought.
These are the issues I was dealing with: Getting a camel, guide, and guard. Getting proper permission for the security checkpoints I would run into. Rounding up food, water, and gear. Finding a proper map and figuring out an acceptable path. Extending my Somaliland visa for another month. And trying to do that while not running into a ministry or security officer who would stop me.
I won't bore you with the details, but this added up to nine days of running around to a total of six different ministries, three security buildings, the Somaliland Mine Action Center, and the Electoral Commission. This was exasperating in itself, but everything was compounded by the fact that all of the ministries appeared terrified that if something happened to me - which they all assured me would never be the case - they would be held accountable. This meant explaining every single detail I could to them and assuring them that I would bring however many guards they wanted. Plus, and this was the most frustrating, every office closes at noon for "lunch."
"Lunch" means that everyone goes to chew chat - I wrote about chat in my Ethiopia post - and then don’t come back to the office until the next day. This is an incredibly annoying aspect of Somaliland, and it has helped me to dislike chat on a personal level. Whereas in Ethiopia it seemed like a pleasant local custom, here it seems to have almost taken over many aspects of normal life. It's common for men with horribly stained, worn-down teeth to come up to me and demand money. When I ask what they want the money for, they answer "to chew." Now, this is kind of like a parade of strangers telling you on a Minneapolis street that they want money to support their marijuana habit. It gets really old really fast.
Not to delve too deeply or read too much into the chat-chewing habits, but it is part of a larger issue here that I find annoying. Chat is not cheap – one bunch will probably cost around $4, a lot of money here. It seems that whenever anyone gets that money, instead of saving it for a rainy day they always, ALWAYS spend it. That concept of living day-to-day is something that is well-suited for the nomadic lystyle upon which Somalis have traditionally lived, but in a culture that has moved towards democracy and capitalism this can lead to no good. The waste of time and money with chat is no good.
Of course there is another side of the story, and far from everyone in Somaliland chews, but for a country to have actually rearranged its schedule for the chat-chewers there has to be a pretty significant population that do. I've talked to a number of Somalilanders who have lived in the West for while and then come back here. They tell me it didn't use to be like this, but something in the last couple decades has changed all that. It annoys a lot of them, too.
Anyway, I was helped a great deal by my friend from Berbera, Abdulkaer Elmi. Without him, there's no way I could have pulled this off. He had contacts with just about everyone I needed to talk to and was responsible for putting me in contact with the guy I go the camel and guide from. He also pointed me towards another of his friends, Ahmed. Ahmed as well proved to be invaluable, meeting with me nearly every night to give advice, guide me toward relevant ministries, and translate for me when I was in talks to actually get my hands on the camel and a guide. Really, just an all-around solid guy who went so far out of his way to help me that I can't even understand it. It must be a Somali thing.
As I drew closer to my start date I picked up another traveler, a British guy a couple years older than me who lived in Yemen but was in Somaliland on vacation. His name was Peter as well, though I'll refer to him as Pete as a point of reference for my post here. Because of visa issues he only stayed on the trek until we got to the coast, but he was a real solid part of the walk and I'm really glad that we met up together. After he agreed to come with me we spent the last few days scrambling around getting last-minute supplies and trying to round up a guard to come with us.
The guard issue was becoming a real sticking point, as we had sworn to every ministry we went to that we would get one. Everyone assured that without a guard there was no way that we would make it past the checkpoints. This was particularly exasperating to me in that part of the reason I was doing this was to prove that the whole place was safe and I didn't want two guys with AK-47s trailing after me. But they were only $10 per day per guard so eventually I just resigned myself to having them along.
My arguments against a guard fell on deaf or uncaring ears anyway. I would usually start by asking them if the country was safe, to which I would always receive and enthusiastic endorsement of. If was safe, I would then ask, why did I need a guy with a large gun trailing after me to protect me from bandits?
The problem wasn't bandits, I would be told, but rather hyenas along the coast. Or it could be the guys suffering from PTSD from the civil war; a lot of them live in the bush and could give me trouble. Or security checkpoints that might try to get a little money out of me. Or maybe it was the bandits . . .
Nobody could make up their minds as to what the actual need for a guard was, but everyone was in agreement that we absolutely, positively, definitely needed one. Or two. That was a disagreement. As was what branch of the security services was going to give us the guards, especially as the SPU, the branch that typically provides guards to foreigners, refused to on the grounds that our estimate of twenty days was too long to loan a soldier.
The day we were to leave we had finally landed a meeting with the head of the security services for the country. I was a bit nervous walking into his office, as this was a guy who would either make sure we got the soldier or else could keep us forever in Hargesia. After a bit of back-and-forth, we told him that we wanted however many soldiers he thought we needed for a maximum of twenty days. He paused, mulling it over, and then leaned forward and said "No, it is too long. I cannot give you any soldiers."
That put Pete and I in the bizarre position of arguing FOR a guard, though that was only until we realized we had a way out of the whole thing. “Could the commander,” we asked as politely as possible, “write us a letter saying that we DIDN'T need a guard for us to show to and security people we would meet along the way?”
"Yes," he answered. And that was it. No soldiers, no weapons, just a letter saying our party of four - Pete, our guide Aden, our camel, and me.
I ducked a meeting I had somehow gotten with the Foreign Minister - I wasn't sure if it was a meeting with him or just another way to hold us up - and we scurried to load up our camel before anyone could stop us from leaving. The camel wasn't as big as I expected, but was still a good looking animal. Pete Christened her "Beast," and my name for her was "Zayla", in honor of our ultimate destination.
We loaded up in about thirty minutes and we off, leaving Hargesia and its bureaucracy for others to deal with.
Briefly referencing Burton again, he once said before setting out with John Speke to discover the source of the Nile that "one of the greatest times in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands." If there was a time in my life where that applied, it was here. But instead of feeling any huge joy, I felt more of a sense of relief. I was DONE getting ready for this damn thing, and I was actually walking! What was in front of me wasn't on my mind, but rather what I had already gone through to get to this point. My shoulders still had tension in them and that wouldn't really go away until we were a couple days into our trip.
Physically, the walk in front of me looked like this: Of the three legs I had divided the trip into, the first was from Hargesia to the coast, a village named Buloxaar. The next leg was up the coast to Lughaya. Finally, from there we would dive back into the interior and then make our way to the final destination of Zayla. Altogether, I was told, it would be a bit more than 500 kilometers. The camel ensured that I wouldn't have to carry much, and all I took on my back was a small bag with water for the day and some personal items. So the bag never weighted more than twenty pounds or so, and even this weight I cut back on as the trip progressed.
As was the custom here with nomads, our group would sleep until sunrise, grab some breakfast, and then head out around 7 or 7:30 AM. We walked until around noon and stop to eat. After lunch we took a brief nap during the worst of the midday sun and then set around three in the afternoon and walked until around eight. That schedule is in theory, at least. In reality, we occasionally spent half a day just resting or maybe got a late start and ended up walking a little ways into our lunch break or a couple hours past sunset.
Every village has a hut called a "dirgid," ("waab" on the coast) which is a hut that those passing by can sleep in for free. This is under the assumption that any meals purchased in the village will be from the hut owner. Beds are nonexistent though, so having your own sleeping material is a must.
That first day was thankfully uneventful. It was a simple walk to our midday stop and after a brief rest we took off for our first night's sleep in a village called Belliga Cas. We had been late starting off in the morning so our hike lasted well past sunset and we watched the full moon rise over the hill to our right side. As it was right over the horizon it was at least as large as the setting sun had been and this cast a terrific shadow of our little band. Trailing behind the camel, Zayla, its shadow reminded me of "Song for My Father" and I hummed that for the rest of the night.
We arrived in Beliga Cas, a village of around fifteen huts lining the road, around 10 PM and didn't even move our stuff into the dirgid, instead sleeping by the side of the road and taking off early the next morning. But we ran into our first problem after less than two hours of walking when our camel Zayla refused to go any further. We had, it turned out, over-loaded her. Well, more realistically, they just hadn't given me a camel the size I had asked for, but that didn't matter. All that mattered was that it was clear Zayla wasn't going any further.
So I watched the stuff while Pete and Aden walked back to the previous village. Communication between Aden and Pete and I was difficult because while Pete spoke Arabic, neither of us spoke Somali and that was Aden's only language. But from what I gathered we were going to make camp there and Aden was going back to the village for a phone. So while I was waiting I began collecting a pile of firewood for the night, and during the course of my wandering took my shirt off and changed into shorts. I figured, stupidly, that I was by myself so I could show a little skin and work on my tan a bit.
But after less than a half hour I looked up to see a herd of around fifty camels being driven past our site by three nomads. Not wanting to be seen with so little clothing on in this conservative society, I ran back to put on proper clothes. Arriving back on at packs, I realized that our camel Zayla, even though her legs had been tied together and her neck tied to a tree, had gone missing.
It didn't take a genius to guess that she had decided to join the herd that was passing through. So I tossed on a shirt and, in front of the slightly befuddled-looking nomads, began looking through their herd for the camel whose legs were tied up back was still somehow walking. I found her after a brief search but then had the problem of getting her back to our packs. Camels, even a mid-size one like her, are impossible for someone without any experience to control. Zayla apparently realized this and took off galloping in another direction with me chasing after her, just barely matching her speed. Finally, one of the herders took pity on me and jogged over to help. He somehow collected her, brought her back to the bags, and tied her up while I watched in embarrassment.
After a while longer Pete and Aden made it back and I was told that we were heading back to Belliga Cas for a couple nights while a second, much more reliable, camel came our way. So we waited a couple hours until a truck came by and jumped on to ride back.
It's a pity that, of the places we had to spend extra time in, it was Belliga Cas we were stuck. There really wasn't a whole lot to do there and the surrounding desert was very boring. A good purchased there though was a Somali walking stick called a "xangol," also used to keep snakes away, build shelters with the thorn tree branches, and herd animals with. This xangol ended up being a real good buy and I grew extremely attached to it throughout the trek. Even now it feels strange walking without it.
The next day our new camel arrived. This was a large male, and definitely up to the task of carrying our supplies. But he was whiny, constantly moaning whenever he loaded him up or when he got the least bit tired.
“I don’t wanna!” I could almost hear him complain. “I don’t WANNA!!!”
And, in a twists that was eventually going to have an impact on me, he was horrified by engines. This doesn't sound so bad when that maybe two trucks a day attempted to navigate the difficult paths. But this camel's reaction was to start bucking and run away from the road, causing the bags to slip and sometimes adding a half hour delay while we re-tied them. Because of his size and his timidity, I christened him "Little John."
There were mountains in front of us, but I wasn't able to determine based on my map or on sight if they were simply large hills or actual mountains. I guessed the former, and initially this prioved correct and the incline was inconsequential.
But after midday that incline began to increase and I realized I had been wrong. We were climbing, and though it wasn't steep enough to make walking difficult, eventually the elevation we were reaching meant that a thick fog rolled in and visibility declined to around ten yards. In the middle of what I thought was going to be a pure desert walk, it was really enjoyable walking through the dark, covered in mist. Occasionally a nomadic fire would peak through the clouds or the bleating of a goat drifted our way, but other than that it was a very quiet and very mellow walk. This mountain pass was apparently a popular one for the nomads because we started to see numerous herders, mostly with goats or camels, wander by. White people, especially those without 4X4s, never came this way, so we always got a look of shock from those we passed.
We made camp in a village that could have been huge for all we could see but turned out the next morning to be only three or four huts. Though I was woken up numerous times during the night by conversations from nearby Somalis – who never seem to quiet down for those sleeping around them – and the herds wandering by, the night was pleasantly memorable because our camp site was close enough to the path so that I could see the herds as the came and disappeared through the clouds. At one point, around four in the morning, such a large herd went by that I sat up to count the animals. I reached 460 goats and 62 camels by the time the last of them were swallowed up in the fog.
Our midday rest the next day was at an equally enjoyable site, at the bottom of the mountains near the first water springs and first gardens we had seen so far. A local gave us some veggies and Pete and I dined on those and talked to a local jewel hunter from Hargesia who was spending time looking around this area of the mountains. I nicknamed the stop "Gemstone Springs" in honor of both him and the algae-green springs we filled our water containers from. The weather that day continued its streak of perfection, and that made the walk extremely pleasing.
In fact, with the exception of a couple days after Buloxaar, the weather turned out to be almost ideal for the entire trip. Temperatures in the Somaliland winter tend to hover 80 degrees with mostly cloudless days. Likewise, the actual walking was easy enough because the terrain was typically flat, though loose sand in many areas turned out to be incredibly annoying to deal with. Dry riverbeds were typically a little harder to walk in because they represented large rocks to trip over in the dark, but it was at least easier to navigate. The land showed no signs of moisture until we got past Lughaya and any vegetation was typically limited to the low-lying thorn trees, whose two-inch long spikes would occasionally pierce through our shoes and into our feet.
Other than those thorns, the country here is ideal for trekkers - as it is a nomadic culture, the infrastructure is already largely in place. Every half day there is either a village or even just a couple huts for the traveler to rest in. They sell food, limited to pasta or sometimes rice, for a dollar a plate at lunch and dinner and a sort of Somali pancake for breakfast. Fresh water came in barrels from Hargesia and was free to the travelers wandering by to fill our containers, but often the water came to us via used jerry cans so it had the annoying taste of oil with it. The only other drink you would typically find is "Somali Tea," a quick addiction. It is black tea loaded with cloves, ginger, cinnamon, cardamom, sugar, and milk, and they serve it everywhere in Somaliland. It taste just fantastic and you can buy an entire thermos for only 30 cents.
That night, after a long walk, we made it to another set of springs in a village called Seley. The crowd that gathered around us was typical. In every village between half a dozen and thirty people would surround us to look at the crazy white people, often the first to ever step food in their village. At first this custom was amusing to me, but as the days wore on I began to tire of it and by the end of the trip I wanted to jump up and scream “Stop looking at me! If you’re just going to stare at me, at least help un-tie the bags!”
Anyway, we spent the night here and the next morning as well - besides letting our camel, Little John, rest up, these springs had been described as "hot springs" to us and I was anxious to relax in them a bit.
Unfortunately, my mind had gotten ahead of reality, as the springs were far from relaxing. Set against a gorgeous rock backdrop, the springs were actually very muddy affairs and contained only slightly warmed water that had an obnoxious sulfuric tinge to it that worked hell to my various scrapes. To add to that, I had only just begun washing my clothes in one of the springs when I received a strong push from the back and turned around to look straight into the thirsty face of a large male camel less than a foot away. He was flanked by another half dozen camels who were all staring intently at me as if to say “What on Earth are YOU doing here?”
This was surprising, as camels are typically timid and almost never will approach and touch a stranger. But the message was clear - if I didn't leave the hole they were going to kick me out. So I scrambled up the rocks and had to wait until the entire herd of about 20 camels had had their turn to drink. Bummer.
Our continuation towards the coast that night ran into a brief hurdle after we got lost for couple hours after sunset, but eventually we made it to Buloxaar, an old city on the ocean which had been the British administrative center back in the day. It was the largest village we had been to thus far with one hundred fifty people. This meant that there was a shop in the village where I could get cookies and soda. But more importantly, this marked the end of the first leg of my trip and I was finally back at the coast.
Pete had visa issues needed to get back to Yemen, so he decided that he would leave the trek here for Berbera and catch a boat back to Aden. In the meantime, though, we spent a few days wandering around the port city and taking in the sites. The “sites” were primarily limited to the old British buildings along the beach. These lay in ruins, half covered in sand and already swallowed up by vegetation along the beach after less than forty years. They were fun to wander in, and Pete and I had a good time exploring the old school house where Peace Corp teachers had given instruction in until they were tossed out of the country by Somali dictator Siad Barre a few decades back.
The beach itself was a site of perfection and, because the village of Buloxaar was a few kilometers from the water, I assumed that isolation was a given. So my first morning there I took down the beach and decided that some skinny-dipping was in order. Unfortunately, the mayor had sent one of his minions to make sure I was safe and after a half hour he came upon me. He wanted me to come out to talk to him, but he didn't speak English and it was difficult to try to explain that I was naked and I wanted him to go away. Finally, after what I thought was an unnecessary amount of gesturing, he wandered a distance away so I could collect my shorts and go tell him that, yes, I was safe and, no, I wasn't planning on being in any danger so would he PLEASE leave.
He did, but I was spooked at someone else wandering along so I left my shorts on and spent some time on the beach just taking in the vibes. It was so relaxing, actually, that I fell asleep for a while and had to contend with a wicked sunburn for the rest of the trip. The beach, though, was worth it.
A couple days later Pete caught a truck that was going to Berbera so he could make it to Yemen. From here on, our trek was limited to Aden, Little John, and me. We set off north the same morning Pete left, starting our second leg in an uncomfortable heat that made me nervous even before we started off.
Whereas the temperature had previously been rather mellow, today was a first-class lesson in walking through hell. I hadn't expected the heat and packed only two liters of water for the half day walk to the next village. But by 8:30 AM my thermometer read 85 degrees and had climbed past 105 degrees by noon. Soon after that, it was 110. It was at this point that the name "Morning Star" popped into my head, and I decided that this was the perfect name for the are that we were walking through.
Desert travelers always caution you against rationing your water so by eleven o’clock that morning my drinking water was finished after only four hours of walking. I gave a couple shots at retrieving the spare water I had somewhere in a bag lashed to Little John, but Aden refused to stop due to the amount of time it would take to un-tie and re-tie everything. At first I was okay, with this, but if I would have realized that our next stop wasn't until 2:30 PM, I would have put up a hell of a lot more of an argument. Aden, ever the plodder, kept up his pace while I began to fall behind.
That day I received a picture-perfect education in dehydration. Three and a half hours of walking without water truthfully doesn't seem like a long time, but you'd be surprised how quickly you dry out here in the sun. The word “parched” doesn’t do it justice. My thoughts wandered back to travel writer John Hemingway's "No Man's Land," an account he wrote in the mid-80's on some of his more colorful experiences in East Africa. The particular chapter I thought back to was on a trek he made along with four porters in the brutally hot Kedong Valley of Kenya. Hemingway, no novice to the perils of East Africa, made what should have been a fatal mistake in his planning for what he guessed to be a three day trek.
The average person on a desert trek requires a minimum of a gallon of water per day, with two gallons per day being a much safer bet. But a gallon of water weighs ten pounds, and with three days of trekking and five men total, that equaled 150 lbs of weight, or a full 30 lbs per man, even at the bare minimum 1 gallon per day. For reasons he doesn't make clear in the book, Hemingway set out with less than a gallon per man for the entire trek. It was only at the end of day one, when it was too late to turn back, that he realized his folly.
His second day was spend almost entirely without water and he quickly developed symptoms of dehydration walking through the desert towards what he increasingly assumed would be his death. As the day wore on and the temperature rose further, he soon started showing signs of severe dehydration. Sitting down for a rest meant hell because it is 20 to 30 degrees hotter within a foot of the ground than above that level, so he kept packing on, farther into a desert wasteland that logically offered no chance of respite.
"Stopping is suicide," he wrote, "going is worse . . . My mind reels under blame and hopelessness, knowing that I should have been firmer [with the water rations], and thinking how ridiculous it will be to perish from lack of water after only two days. I am insane and so is Africa."
That last line is the line that I repeat over and over; "I am insane and so is Africa." It's not meant in an ironic or amusing way, just as a statement of fact. It seems impossible to dry out so quickly, but really, hiking through the desert gives you a hard lesson in the human body and its limits. Stopping for a rest may bring temporary relief, but its impossible to hide from the sun and the heat never dissipates - stopping only ensure that you lose that much more moisture from your body before you get to your ultimate destination.
I am insane and so is Africa. It doesn't matter how much you read about thirst; actual thirst is a thousand times worse. All of the information about the signs of dehydration, proper clothing, and orientation fly right out the window when it finally happens. You can't adequately describe dehydration because it's largely a mental problem besides being a physical one. Seeing the heat radiate from the ground is only worse by feeling it . . . seeing the distance to be walked is worse only by actually walking it . . . seeing your skin clam up and turn those unnatural colors is worse only by feeling the pinch of your skin and realizing it doesn't have the moisture to change back to its normal self. (Disconcertedly, it instead stays in the shape you pinched it to.)
Feeling the sense of inferiority is an experience unto its own - you can't control anything except for the movement of your legs. Everything else that normally seems so mundane - the turning of a faucet to get tap water - is far beyond your reach. The desert is the one sure sign that humans cannot conquer all - we can't beat it back. We might strip away mountains, re-route or damn rivers, and build tremendous skyscrapers, but we can't conquer the desert.
I am insane and so is Africa. It's -300 degrees in Minnesota right now; people are happily complaining about frozen radiators and frostbite, clearing icicles from theirs roofs, and sledding down hills filled with wonderful snow.
Am I exaggerating? Well, in a manner of speaking. This was roughly my train of thought while walking, but that's not to say that I wasn't perhaps going a little overboard at the time. Even though logic told me this was simply too stupid a way to pass out, I found myself thinking that this was an absurd moment of my life and there was nothing and nobody to help me if I collapsed. And then I thought "Wow, what happens if I collapse?" Yes, if there has been a time in my trip thus far where my mind was nearing hysterics, it was now.
Hemingway, who seemed to have a knack for getting out of these situations, eventually made it to a road that had been built in the months between when he made his fly-over and when he actually made his trek. That road saved his life.
And let me tell you, I've never been so happy to see signs of humanity when the village finally came into view in the distance. If I would have had the energy I would have done a little jig the rest of the way.
But instead I stumbled into the village and couldn't even be polite asking for water ("biyo"); I just held out my nalgene and signaled that I was thirsty. At this point I was showing signs of moderate to severe dehydration and, I think, suffering from heat stroke as well. My stomach had been wretching up acid, my skin was clammy, and I had been walking through dizziness. Another 45 minutes to an hour and I really think I could have been in trouble.
As soon as I got the water I ripped open my oral rehydration salts, tossed them in the water, and then guzzled it without stopping for air. Ditto with two more liters. Then I went into the guest hut and passed out.
Luckily Aden had some family in this village and was fine with sticking around a while, so we spent the rest of the day there. Later, when I was awake and able to stand up again, I bought a goat for $35 and feasted with some of the village elders. As I was the purchaser, I had the honor of eating what I only figured out later was the liver (gross). Still, I also got as much of the boiled meat as I wanted and it was different than the food I had been getting used to, so I was pleased. And after the rest and the food I moved back up from the 10% physical capacity I had been feeling to around 50% physical capacity.
The next day I moved to 90% and was feeling good when we set off. By noon we reached our expected village which consisted of only four huts. The two of us had the typical pasta for lunch with a few glasses of Somali tea and then began preparations to go on.
Up until this point, there had been few moments of excitement on this trek. I was well aware that anything "exciting" out here was probably bad news and I had been hoping to keep it that way. But by a quirk of unfortunate timing the only truck of the day happened to pass through the village at the exact time that we were loading the bags onto the camel, Little John.
As I mentioned, Little John is absolutely, one hundred percent terrified of motor vehicles. This occasion proved to be no exception. He leapt to his feet and started bucking, sending the half-tied bags flying and scattering those loading him. I was the strongest guy there and I didn't want him bashing one of the huts down, so I jumped in and grabbed the rope to bring him under control. Another guy came forward to help me and we held him in place until he could chill out a little.
Unfortunately, Mr. Truck had caught a fleeting glance of me and decided to back up for another look. The two of us who had been holding him weren't expecting this and had loosened our stances a bit, and this was enough for Little John. He gave a tremendous buck and that sent me on a collision course with the dirt. I had a brief glance of the other guy being launched airborne and then I nailed the ground and rolled into a piled of firewood.
When I came to a few seconds later Little John had mellowed and a small circle of people had formed around me with concern. I felt really stupid, lying there, until one of them came forward, help me to my feet, and gave me a big thumbs-up, flexed his muscles, pointed at me, and then gave me another thumbs-up. The others, realizing that I was okay, wandered away to finish their tea after giving me what I think was their sympathy.
Besides a sizable gash in my head I had also torn up my right knee and gotten a foot-long tear in my left calf. More than any physical injury was the mental one - this is the exact sort of stupid move that I always seem to make; now, the first white guy to visit this village just got tossed by a camel. Stupid, stupid, stupid!
I shouldn't have been concerned though, because people in both that village and the ones later on didn't think it was funny. It was just normal concern and, depending on how enthusiastic Aden was about re-telling the story, an impressed look and a high-five. Apparently, the fact that I was able to get Little John under control in the first place was notable, as was the fact that I was up and walking within a couple minutes of the toss. So in time I wore my battle wounds with pride.
The few days of walking were time for me time to heal from my tumble and pick off the multiple layers of dead skin from the Buloxaar sun burn. In short time we made it to the port city of Lughaya. This marked the end of my second leg of the trip and a day and a half of rest to let myself heal up and prepare for the last leg into the interior and eventually to Zayla.
Lughaya can actually be described as a small town instead of a village, with a population of three hundred people. To me, it was a metropolis where they not only had soda, snacks, and fruit, but electricity for three hours a day as well. The ocean surf was too rough to swim in safely so I spent my time wandering down the beach visiting some of the small fishing communities that Aden and I had missed on our way in.
Leaving Lughaya represented a change in trekking style from what I was used to. Instead of villages well-spaced every half day there was just a giant empty space for the next few days. Not only that, but I had been warned before leaving Hargesia that this area represented a serious hyena threat. I knew Aden wanted to take me into the interior but I wasn't sure where and even with a translator it was difficult to lay out exactly what his plans were. Still, he seemed confident so I decided to leave my fate in his hands.
Traveling northwest from the coast, the two of us now moved into prime grazing territory. Added to the camels and goats we had seen since the beginning of the trip were sheep, mule, and even the occasional cow herd. The green landscape meant that nomads from all over Somaliland, Djibouti, and Ethiopia had come with their livestock. For me, besides a change in scenery, this meant the addition of milk to my diet. So I decided to make a little experiment with my eating habits.
The three types of milk in that region came from camel, goat, and cow. Cow milk was scarce, whereas goat milk was not. But goat milk had an unfamiliar and unwelcome taste to me so that was my least favorite. Camel milk was supposed to be the healthiest but almost as scarce as cow milk. And in Africa it's typical to let the milk sit for a day in the sun so it develops a sour, lumpy quality to it that takes some getting used to. Added to that was the tendency of some here to store milk in the same used jerry cans as water, so you never knew when your bitter, lumpy goat milk might also taste like it came from a pump at the local Super America.
Still, for years I had read about nomads around Africa who lived their entire lives only on milk or on milk and blood. I was curious if this was a quality that these nomads had adapted to over generations or if a foreigner with a frame like mine and eating habits to go with it and do the same thing. Ergo, I resolved to go 48 hours drinking only milk and see if I could keep the same walking pace as before.
Aden came through for me in good form. It turns out that his insistence that we travel back into the interior was because he had family in the area. Not only did that mean that we had a hut to sleep in or next to every night, but we also had unlimited milk from their herds for me to drink for those two days. And honestly, I felt absolutely great consuming only that milk. I never felt a single hunger pain the entire time I was on the milk-only diet and had no energy cravings. The camel milk in particular really refreshed me and made me want to get a camel for Minnesota so I can have fresh milk every day.
By this point though, even with the fun milk diet and the increasing greenery along the way, my mood was beginning to flag. Physically, I was starting to feel worn-down from the two-plus weeks of walking and from various infections received as a result of my camel toss and other random scrapes. Mentally I was in a small funk because I had reached what roughly could be described as the halfway point of my trip in Africa and for some reason this was having an effect on me, not to mention the fact that I was nearly done with this trek.
Little things began to annoy me - the small hole in my sleeping mat, the guy in a village who would just stared at me without blinking for an hour straight, the gasoline-tasting water, the fact that Somalis didn't seem to have a "Volume Control" button when it was nighttime and I was trying to sleep . . . all of these are minor consequences to be expected when traveling, especially while traveling into the middle of nowhere. But I was tired of dealing with them and my internal reaction started to grow testier.
One night, only two days out from Zayla, we ran into a dry riverbed that was blocking our path. Previously, we had usually passed through anywhere between two and six of these in any given day with no problem, but this one had really carved out a place for itself and was around five meters deep. There was no way that Little John could make it down, and after an hour of walking up and down the side in search or a way across the packs on Little John began to slip and we decided to make camp right there. Though there were numerous nomad camps in the area, the closest village was a day’s walk away and we both realized that our chances of making it across the river in the dark were around nil. So we figured this was as good of a spot as any to hang out.
Aden went off to a distant light in order to secure some dinner for us while I set up what was needed for the night. He returned with a large container of cow's milk which was a real treat - it was my first cow milk of the trip, and after nearly two straight days of the camel milk and odd-tasting goat milk, this was as good as any other dinner. It had been a long day of walking and the cool night that was wafting in combined with the "food" was a pleasant reminder as to why I had decided to do this trek in the first place. My various cuts and scrapes faded in importance and I was overcome with a feeling of real happiness.
Edward Abbey writes in “Desert Solitaire” - a book which makes even more sense now - about the difference between loneliness and simply being alone. There are times in every trip where I feel loneliness, and this trip has been no exception. Never on this trek though. This was a trek to feel alone, not to feel loneliness.
That night, falling asleep beside that dry riverbed, I felt more alone than in years. There wasn't a soul in the world save Aden who had a clue as to where I was and it felt great. From a guy back home whose hands are glued to a keyboard and a phone is all too often in use, taking an hour just to watch shooting stars was pretty fantastic.
I fell asleep happy.
Taking away the forty minute break for lunch the next day, we walked for thirteen hours to our first real village to speak of since Lughaya. Thirteen hours was a bit beyond my limit and when we finally came to Ceel Cashado my feet felt like they would explode. During the day I had aggravated an old ankle injury and had been walking differently as a result, so my calves ached a good deal as well. But it was worth it because I spent the night at the police station and they rolled out, wonder of wonders, a fish-net bed for me to sleep on.
What under normal circumstances would have seemed like a misery was on this trek a god-send. This was the first bed I had slept in since leaving Hargesia, and my sleep was as comfortable as any I can remember. I never woke up during the night and spent the next morning resting in my bed while Aden went off to chew chat from the tip I had already given him.
Ceel Cashado was my last stop before Zayla, and the day's hike was done with the knowledge that I was nearing my ultimate goal. If I had been expecting to feel any sort of exultation over this fact during my walk, I instead spent the day in a sort of sullen daze. Physically I hadn't really recovered from the day before, but it was also because my heart really wasn't in the walk anymore and I just wanted to be in Zayla. These last twenty-five kilometers seemed irrelevant - I just wanted the thing to be over with.
But twenty-five kilometers goes by quickly and the lights of Zayla came into view just after sunset. I wasn't at all sure what to expect from the city as I had neglected to pay attention to any contemporary accounts of Zayla, but census people back in Hargesia had told me the population was around four hundred and that made it the largest town I had seen since leaving the capital. The port had long-since silted up and the population had been steadily decreasing since 1900, but it was still a transit point for goods from Djibouti and cities with fifteen hundred years of history don't just disappear that easily.
I was surprised, to say the least. I had been expecting something of a charming, quiet fishing village with historical ruins all around it. The ruins were certainly there, but I also found a city with shops and cafes that contained more than the spaghetti and Somali tea I had gotten used to. Two large communication towers rose above everything, and the hum of vehicles coming and going never ended through the nights I spent there.
Still, despite its history, tourism is negligible. The math teacher, who took to being my guide for the city, told me that a tourist may come along every month or two. This is understandable given the difficulty in reaching Zayla, but I think that its place in history should ensure more than half a dozen tourists a year. As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, Zayla contains what locals claim to be second mosque ever built, so as soon as I woke up the next morning I wandered over to the site. What I saw was one of the most depressing historical sites of my life.
The mosque, largely in ruins, was not at all the place of veneration I would have expected. The only part of it that was still standing was the first direction, which faced towards Palestine. The second section, which had faced towards Medina, had long since disintegrated and joined the rest of the mosque in a heap of rubble on the ground. Trash partially covered the rubble and it was clear that no care was being done to ensure that what was left of the mosque was kept up. A stray soccer ball from the kids playing yards away would have been more than enough to knock down the only section of the wall still standing. Even without that soccer ball it was clear that it would fall down within a couple years if nobody stepped in to help it. And given the few tourists who made it up this way, it was clear nobody would care to make any investment into this historical site.
The rest of the city was like that, as well. Other history was left to decay, joining the silted port in helping to send Zayla into irrelevancy. On top of that, the city was large enough not to have the "dirgid" for me to stay at and instead I bedded at the local police station. Sleeping so close to the prisoners, in their miserable cell, was not among my favorite memories on the trek.
But Zayla was still Zayla, and there WAS a lot of history there as long as you had someone to show it to you. When the tide was in the beaches were fun to walk along and maybe even swim in if got deep enough. Having regular electricity was also a treat, if only for the knowledge that it was there if I inexplicably needed it.
The morning of my third day in Zayla I snagged a ride on the back of a government truck going to the border about thirty kilometers away and made what turned out to be an incredibly ironic statement in my journal after getting punched out of Somaliland - "No issues exiting!!! On to Djibouti!"
My excitement was quickly stamped out after I suffered what I'll describe as an immigration catastrophe trying to enter the country. While avoiding any lasting consequences, I was nonetheless physically shoved out of the Djibouti immigration building and back into the no-man's-land between the immigration buildings. Luckily my old savior Abdulkaer was only a phone call away and he happened to be talking with the head of Immigration when I called, so I was allowed back into Somaliland and took a horribly uncomfortable eighteen hour ride back to Hargesia on what is, and I type this without a grin, the worst road I've ever driven on. If you want to call it a road. Whatever the name, it was eighteen hours of dust and sand, bumping, scraping, and occasionally breaking down. And it was mostly during the night, which meant that my sleep was . . . sporadic.
My mood, hardly positive to begin with, turned even more sour when I realized that my IPOD had gone missing. And, I realized later, some money to go with it. As it was a shared taxi, I'm pretty sure it was one of the shifty guys in back who had grabbed my stuff, but I couldn't be certain.
Arriving back in Hargesia, the 4X4 dropped me off at the hotel of my benefactor, Abdulkaer. While he was still in his Berbera Maan-Soor hotel, I was going to stay here for a while to recover. I tossed my bags out of the car, but before I could begin making my way inside to check in the manager came out and said "No, go to your room first and clean up."
The message was clear - I was a mess and the other guests would be freaked out by me. The Mann-Soor is pretty much THE hotel of Somaliland, and the manager was doing the understandable thing of being nice to me while still ensuring I didn't track sixteen pounds of sand into the hotel with me.
Almost without pausing I grabbed the key and trudged to my place across the compound. Opening the door, I threw my stuff on the floor and took and minute to look in the mirror. Only then did I appreciate just why the manager had told me to come here first.
My hair, not having been cut in three months and filled with dust and dirt from three weeks trekking and an eighteen hour ride with windows open, had turned into a giant, gritty, white-man fro. My clothes were all brown from sand, and my arms and face were brown and slightly peeling from sunburns. I was still carrying my xangol, the Somali walking stick, and I wore an expression that I can only describe as exhausted, frustrated, and angry all-in-one. My eyes had a distant expression to them that I couldn't shake no matter how hard I tried. Had I been looking in on myself, I would have laughed.
A real bed, and a shower, and a choice of food were all blessed gifts to me. Thorn scratches, infections from my camel toss, the Buloxaar sunburn, and my ankle injury had all combined to put in a position of frustration and I was loathe to walk much for the next couple days. I ate a whole lot in an attempt to get back some of the twenty pounds I had lost while in the bush and generally just enjoyed the feeling of a cushion beneath me.
When I eventually did go out, I was impressed by the attention I got from people at the ministries, the Maan-Sor, passing policemen, and even some of the regular citizens as I wandered around Hargesia over the next few days. Word appeared to have gotten around about me and I was a minor celebrity. Every time I went out on the street I would be stopped by people asking if I was “The Camel Guy.”
I was flattered, but in reality nomads do this sort of thing all time here without anyone blinking. I hiked a little more than 500 kilometers; a good distance, but one that hardly stacks up against what many of those same herders I passed had been walking. The only reason I got any attention was because I was a white guy from America who did it.
With everything that happened, I want to go back soon and do another hike or a number of hikes through different parts of the country. People along the way were so kind and the walk was so enjoyable that leaving was difficult and coming back is almost a given for me.
I don’t have much more of a summation besides that, except to say I’m really happy that I made that trek. Any difficulties along the way were relatively minor and my enjoyment of walking so much through a country as isolated as Somaliland was immense.
Cheers to a great walk.
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