Walls

You are very fat now!
-Everyone


It took three days in Hargeisa before I was ready for a break. Overwhelmed with the chaos in the city center I decided to travel to the port city of Berbera. On the Gulf of Aden, Berbera has a great hotel just to the east of the city limits where a friend of mine from last time, Brit Steve Atkinson, runs his dive shop out of.

Two years ago it was Steve and his wife Gill who initially encouraged me when I first thought of trekking here. The hotel owner, Abdulkader Elmi, was instrumental in helping me through any red tape that I found in my preparations. Thus, I was anxious to get to Berbera to see them again.

The city itself is nothing special to me. A little poorer, perhaps, and a little less conservative than Hargeisa. Woman are more apt to engage me in conversation here and people just seem a bit more relaxed than the capital. But there are more flies and I get just as much attention wandering the streets so I can’t actually call the city “relaxing” in itself.

Two years ago the police tried to give me a 9 pm curfew, something that annoyed the hell out of me and ensured I would stay out long past that hour if only to bug them. This time they didn't even catch wind that I was in town until the day I left so my only contact with them was a stern warning that I should check in the next time I stayed there. (Yeah, sure.)

The staff at Abdulkader’s hotel, the Maan-Soor, all remembered me as the guy who walked from Hargeisa to Zayla, something that made my chest swell with pride. I was quickly deflated, however, when the the guards and then the manager both separately exclaimed "w'Allah, Mr. Peter! You are very fat now!"

To be fair, yes, I have gained a lot of weight. From a ten year low of 183 lbs just a year and a half ago I was up to 247lbs upon arriving in Africa last month. And the guards and manager were only repeating a theme I have heard at least a dozen times since arriving here. Those who remember me all call me fat. Not big or a heavy or healthy, but fat. I still haven't figured out if this statement is positive, negative or neutral, but it's hard not to get offended at least a little after hearing it so much.

Somali bluntness aside, it was a real pleasure seeing Steve again and to wander the Berbera beaches once again. My third day there I was with another traveler, a splendid fellow from the UK whose name was Phillip. We noticed the pod of dolphins Steve had mentioned sometimes wandered up to him during dives just a little ways off the coast and quickly dove into the Gulf together to try to get a bit closer.

I was surprised when they not only failed to flee but actually swam up to us, spending some ten minutes playing around and frequently wandering within a couple yards of where we were floating before veering off.

Those were a spectacular ten minutes. Part of the time I just floated there as they swam around me. The other part I'd swim towards them and one or two would sit still in the water until I got within a yard or two. Then they would wander off, only to be replaced by another a few yards further on.

I'm PADI certified so Steve took Phillip and me out diving the next day along a nearby reef and, while it was stupendous to explore the reed and spend that hour underwater, it compared little to spending that time with the dolphins the day before.

Back in Hargeisa after five days on the coast I tried to jump into the school project I mentioned a couple posts back. My enthusiasm was quickly stamped out though when I hit up against two brick walls.

I have always wanted to work in a mountainous region called the Sanaag which lies on the Puntland border. I liked this region because it is extremely difficult to get to so the aid agencies operate there less and because it is the least-developed region of Somaliland. Unfortunately, upon in arrival in Hargeisa I was informed that minor clashes had broken out nearby between the Somaliland Security forces on one side and Puntland Security Forces, Somalia’s Taliban group Al Shabab, and the regional militia called SSC (Sool, Sanaag, Cayn) on the other side. That there were clashes was less surprising than the fact that Puntland had decided to ally themselves, however temporarily, with al Shabab, a group well-known for its atrocities in the south.[EDIT: It appears that the al Shabab-Puntland connection was false. Puntland's support seems to be aligning only with the SSC.]

I had also wanted to trek the Sanaag but the presence of al Shabab in this conflict put my hopes for any contact at all with the Sanaag in serious doubt. Then just a few days ago I arrived at one of the ministries and was told “Today, the war begins.” And while it is far from an all-out war, the two sides appear to be getting ready for a possible one if the clashes which have left some 50 dead continue to happen. This would be limited, as it has been in the past, to the eastern regions. Consequently any hope I have in even setting foot in the Sanaag without a well-armed private militia are close to nil.

The second brick wall I hit was slightly more predictably in that the ministries do not see the need to put an emphasis on girls’ education. I was even lectured the other day by a rather high-ranking official on cultural awareness after I had broached the subject.

I’d like to say I’m struggling with the morality of the situation but I’m really not. Girls education seems pretty cut-and-dry to me. I’ll hold off for now the promise from my first post to spell the tangible benefits that a region and country receive from educating its girls, but I’ll summarize everything by saying again that really it’s just the right thing to do.

To say that cultural norms have to be respected is absolutely an appropriate comment to make, but I’m not trying to do something that is out of the norm here. 36% of the students in primary schools here are girls and as far as I’m concerned there is nothing wrong with trying to drive that percentage up.

Furthermore, even the phrase “cultural norms” is misleading. Every society and culture is constantly in motion (and to assume that the forward motion is always towards a liberal or progressive direction is foolish).

Thirty years ago woman were wearing mini-skirts in Tehran, now they can be stoned for doing so. Woman were being educated in Afghanistan decades ago. This was limited under the Soviets, banned under the Taliban, allowed post-war in free Afghanistan, and now is being disallowed under regional leaders. In America there’s always something being branded a “social war” and things that were unheard of even a few decades ago are the norm right now.

Beliefs are always in flux, and the maddrassas being built by conservative (and sometimes radical) forces funded by Saudi money all over the Islamic world do not take into account cultural sensitivity during their teachings.

My hope is for something considerably smaller and less abrasive (and neither progressive nor regressive) than what would be branded any attempt to “change” beliefs here. I want things, if nothing else, to simply stay the way they are here. Educate boys and girls but try to even up the disparity between the two genders.

Right now, people here tell me it’s getting more conservative. The easiest gauge is simply looking at how woman dress. It is the older women, not the younger, who dress more liberally and show off their face. The younger generation are the ones who fully cover their face.

But the largely aesthetic covering (or not) of one’s face is less important to me than whether a woman has the ability to start up her own business, built a hut, tend crops or animals, and act as her own independent person throughout her life. I want the exact same thing for men as well; I think everyone should be educated as much as possible.

This is not a radical concept.

Even if I can make a very tiny dent in that still-too-large population of people who don’t have that option I’ll be incredibly pleased. If I fail, well, then at least I tried.

Obviously my original plans were dead on arrival and, while I find that incredibly frustrating, I purposely hadn’t made any concrete plans while back in America for the very reason that I wanted to talk to people here first. If working in the western or central parts of Somaliland then primary education is already at surprisingly high levels; I wouldn't be needed.

The vocational side of my plans, however, still is relevant. Almost everyone I talk to says that vocational centers are needed nearly everywhere. People graduate from primary or secondary school quite often here and then have no avenues open to them afterwards in which to make money. Vocational training would help solve that issue.

I’m leaving tomorrow for the city of Burao. It’s from here my new starting point for trekking has been moved. Burao deals in livestock from the surrounding nomad regions but supposedly it also has a tremendous population of refugees who have fled the fighting from south Somalia as well as a sizable population of Internally Displaced Persons (otherwise known as IDPs, a distinction from being refugees that really only matters to the UN High Commission for Refugees, an organization that for the most part only help those who have fled across international borders). Many of these people have been here for two decades, which begs the question; after how long, exactly, is one considered just part of the regular population after having fled their home?

I have a meeting with the regional governor and I hope to make inquiries as to the state of education and training amongst the refugees, particularly orphan refugees. While Somaliland understandably doesn’t want to make their refugee populations permanent by opening up schools and other institutions – as refugees are a huge drain on what are very limited state resources - there might be possibilities with setting something worthwhile up.

I’m tutoring a pair of members from the Somaliland Parliament who happen to be from the Togdeer region, in which Burao lies, as well. I’ve recently talked to one about educating the orphan population that lies within the massive refugee camps and he was extremely receptive. If I decide to take this avenue he has said he will help me along.

There are also educational/vocational possibilities I’m looking at the coast towards the Djibouti border, the region I trekked last time. Between the cities of Zayla and Lughaya for instance – more than 150 kilometers by foot – there is not a single primary school.

Any decisions won’t be made for another month or two though. My trek, if it goes through (and nothing is for sure here) will be totally off the grid and will hopefully take around a month so I won’t be able to work much during that time.

Tomorrow morning I drive out of Hargeisa and will take the Somaliland highway to Berbera and then spend a night in what is supposed to be a beautiful mountain town called Sheek. Then it’s on to Burao for two nights where I’ll be getting a guide, buying a camel, and finally starting out on a semi-circle through the mountains that will eventually lead me back to Berbera.

Obviously that time I won’t have an internet connection, but if you ever feel the need to facebook or email me with any goings-on I would really appreciate it. Whether it be personal news or national, it’s always great to hear from people back home.

(Funny story I just remembered; last time I was on trek here I heard that Congress had passed the stimulus bill from a local nomad. Somalis are always hungry for news and have a particular love of politics, including those in the USA. This Somali, a hundred kilometers from the nearest television and who had never even seen a white guy before me, told me both that the bill had passed and what Republican Senators had voted with the Democrats to do so. Even for Somaliland I found this pretty weird.)

Anyway, if there’s any awesome news happening let me know. Also, if you have any thoughts on what I mentioned above it would be great to hear from you. This is uncharted territory for me and many of you are much more experienced or have considerably more insight than I. If it sounds like I’m approaching something from the wrong angle or like I’m just being a jackass in general, I’d love to hear from you.

If not, well, I’ll talk to you in a couple months when I get back, eh?

Be well and stay warm.

The Wild West With a Smile

Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need . . . {flips glasses} . . . roads.
-Back to the Future



When I first entered Somaliland I had the intention of staying five days. I left six and a half weeks later feeling a genuine appreciation about the region and its people. Traveling back into Ethiopia I took along a promise that someday I would be back.

Two years later, I’m here.

What is only very technically the country of Somalia is shaped like a 7. At the top lies Somaliland, an internationally-recognized autonomous region that is unrecognized as an independent nation. Its borders were originally drawn by their British in their almost comically-disastrous colonial tendencies from the mid-1800s. When given independence in 1960 it voted just days later to join the south and from then onward the country was simply part of Somalia.

Quickly disenfranchised from the majority south, however, Somaliland eventually launched a civil war to regain their independence. Despite being outgunned and outmanned by the Soviet-financed south led by dictator Siad Barre, Somaliland managed to keep fighting even after its cities had been leveled to the ground, many of their water sources poisoned, and its herds slaughtered by the thousands.

When Barre was killed in 1991 Somaliland won its freedom by default simply because there was no government left in the south to fight. Though left to its own devices for the last two decades and with extremely limited international support or investment, Somaliland has developed into a perfect example of just what is RIGHT with Africa.

The elections here are free and safe, a new president just having been sworn in this summer. It is moderate and friendly to the west, its citizens are safe and its security forces helpful and friendly. The region has taken surprisingly little notice to the storm of violence and protests hurtling their way across North Africa and the Middle East, evidently content with the small but clearly stable democracy that it has created. Money changers sit on the streets with giant piles of Somaliland Shillings stacked in front of them, not even considering the possibility of being robbed. And its people are absolutely the friendliest I have ever encountered.

There are some sticking points, of course. To the east Somaliland has developed over the years a sticky relationship with its Somali neighbor Puntland, a semi-autonomous region that claims part of Somaliland’s territory. Upon arriving in Somaliland, in fact, I was informed that border skirmishes had once again developed, immediately casting my hopeful treks and the school building plans into disarray and doubt.

Adding the tension, there are rumors that Puntland has teamed up for the moment with the Somali version of the Taliban, al Shabab, in this fight.

Fighting in the east aside, Somaliland is under Sharia Law and though it is a moderate form it still takes some getting used to remembering just what exactly I can and cannot do (e.g. whiskey . . . no). Westerners like me are usually forgiven for minor transgressions of course so I have little need to be worried about getting in trouble unless I open an underground distillery. But in the case of a German man a few months ago, he did something so stupid it’s hard to even fathom.

I have to preface this incident by saying that I get nervous even talking to a woman here because of the strict moral code with which Somalis in general have towards member of the opposite sex interacting. This German man, an expat who lived in Hargeisa and was married to a Somaliland woman, was caught making pornographic films with his wife and some of her friends. He was lucky to have only gotten four years in prison but westerners here – of which there are few – for the most part wish he had gotten a heavier punishment because of the uncomfortable position that he has put us in.

With so few westerners here that is a terrible impression to give this overwhelmingly conservative region. For a group of people usually so friendly and forgiving, this move was way over the line for Somalilanders. Everyone knows about it, and to make matters worse for me both times I have come here the locals have for some reason thought me to be a German. What before was only a vague insult is now an actual liability and I get the occasional Somalilander marching up to me and shouting defiantly that Germans are scum and I should go leave the country. Yesterday I had a rock thrown at me by a particularly cranky woman (though in fairness it also could have been because she just thought I was really ugly or something).

Despite the apologies to my by all the other locals who witness such incidents, these reactions have left a sour taste in my mouth in a country that otherwise has treated me better than any other I have been to.

I view all of this with a grain of salt though. I think of Somaliland – and I mean it when I say this – as safer than even the USA. As anywhere, danger lies less in where one travels than in how one travels. I am determined to travel well and be safe. In truth, my real challenges lie not in safety here but infrastructure.

After having been throttled in the civil war Somaliland was left with no infrastructure. The international help that would normally have arrived never did because of Somaliland’s curious diplomatic state, so it has been left to its own devices to rebuild. While government and aid have provided good water, business has provided decent mobile phone service, and the authorities have made inroads in education, many essential projects have been ignored if only because of absolute lack of funds from which to address them.

There is, for instance, only one tarmac road in the entire country. It is a huge, winding beast that starts in the northwest in the mountain city of Borama. It travels to the capital Hargeisa, then to the port of Berbera, onward through the livestock town of Burao, into troubled Las Anood, and then into Puntland and all the way to Mogadishu. It is up this road that incredible numbers of refugees fleeing the anarchy in the south have fled.

Other than that road I am left to 4X4s to see the country or finding a desert truck to hop atop with the locals. While perhaps a fun mode of travel for backpackers, the road system here has to be dramatically improved before and real positive change can be brought about here.

They can start that change with the city of Wachale, my entry point into Somaliland and a place in the running for Ugliest City Possible. You wouldn’t believe me if I went into detail but I’ll summarize everything by saying that the actual border is demarcated by – and this is true – a smoldering trash field. To say Wachale could be Satan’s weekend retreat would be a compliment and I never spend more time there than I absolutely have to.

If Wachale is disgusting then the rest of Somaliland’s towns might be described as just plain ugly. To get a decent picture of Hargeisa – really the entire region of Somaliland, picture Edina. Well-care for lawns, sparkling houses, perfect traffic patterns, and cliché suburban restaurants. Now that the opposite of that and you have what I see here.

Except for the pretty mountains that wind through the country the landscape that I’ve seen is mostly yellow sand with thorn trees poking up through the ground. Often one might wander into a dry river bed, but beyond that you shouldn’t expect more than the occasional hill. Unless distant from the highway or other main paths here, villages and towns are covered in litter, the plastic bags often stuck to the surrounding thorn bushes almost as kind of a discouraging Christmas tree. Buildings and structures falling down from age or war are left as they are, similar to rusting hulks that once were cars, trucks and army tanks and dot the roads and paths.

When it comes to Hargeisa I have always maintained that it acts considerably more like a frontier town or border city than the capital that it is. More than any other city, Hargeisa offers pandemonium and an overwhelming assault on the senses. The roads – bumpy dirt tracks created with no sense of planning – are filled with mini-busses and 4X4s who have little sense of driver etiquette. It is common, in the narrow lanes, for a driver to see a friend on the side of the road and stop the car in the road for a chat, seemingly oblivious to the line of increasingly irate drivers behind him who lean on their horns and yell curses.

The sidewalks are lined with hawkers and khat sellers, constantly shouting out to friends and pedestrians, all of whom shout back even if the car is right next to them. And I want to impress upon you the volume of hollering that is done here so you don’t think I’m just making some general observation. Somalis are – and I suppose this can be argued, but definitely not against my experiences - the loudest people on earth.

I do not say this lightly. They are naturally gossipy and are extremely prone to arguments, often joining a discussion that has nothing to do with them and then loudly proclaiming their viewpoint to anyone that will listen. I have been kept up to ungodly hours both in the rural and urban areas by the impassioned arguments of the locals as they beat up some inane subject long into the night. Upon questioning the next day, they deny there was any argument and simply say they were having a normal discussion, something my bloodshot eyes clearly show is false.

A nearly complete lack of white people here combined with Somali curiosity means that every few steps someone shouts "Wah-ria!" ("Hey!") at the tall white guy passing by, so if walking around for the entire day I am forced to exchange greetings and pleasantries with up to a couple hundred people. This practice alone exhausts and sometimes overwhelms me. I try not to dally long because sometimes a crowd gathers around me and I am roped into answering the same trio of questions (“What is your name? What is your nationality? What is your job?”) in a mind-numbing Sisyphean punishment until some passing elder takes pity on me and yells and everyone to leave me alone, waving his cane at the gawkers.

Mixed with all this on the streets and sidewalks are donkey-driven carts, goats, the occasional sheep, and the even less-often camel who wander the streets at will, threading their way through the crush of pedestrians and poking their heads into anything that appears as though it might possible have once been edible.

Finally, on the outside of this chaos, are the legit stores and restaurants who offer imported goods, most of which comes from the Arabian Peninsula and Asia. The stores are clean and well-kept, the restaurants are not. Most every building is one story, though some buildings are two and in the city center a small group of buildings may rise five or six high.

Flies are everywhere here and are really the most aggravating part of Somaliland. I took a repellent of 99.8% deet to help deal with them but even this is only partially effective. Somalilanders appear to have at least slightly less hatred towards them but despite my best efforts to ignore the obnoxious buzzing horrors they drive me absolutely batty. The one saving grace is that Somalilanders often burn incense, mostly frankincense and myrrh, to dissuade them. It is a lovely, calming smell. In a true contrast to the annoying flies, the incense here is among my very favorite sensations.

In short, the country is controlled chaos. It’s the Wild West with a smile. The place takes some getting used to but once that happens it feels wonderful.

This dusty region, an isolated pocket in Somalia, should make me feel lonely. Sometimes I do. But much more often this feeling evaporates because I feel so welcomed and liked by the local people. Walking down the streets can be exhausting after answering all the greetings and it can be nerve-wracking to be stared at by so many people so consistently. But many of the locals and the returned diaspora are quick to invite me to tea and I’ve found it easier to make friends – genuine friends, friends who will call me up to chat as though we’ve been acquaintances for years even after having talked to me for maybe five minutes – than any other time in my life. These people have a hospitality I have encountered nowhere else, a resilience to match, and a belief in the future that makes me proud to be here.

-----------------
Before I sign off, I want to write one final note.

Three days ago I lost two people from my life back in Minnesota. One was a relative, one a friend who I knew through my work in politics. Expressing any sort of feelings about those who have passed is difficult and, in the form of a side note on a blog post, probably trite. Maybe I shouldn’t write anything at all. But I wanted to say that both were good people – really, truly good people – who always treated me well and who will be missed by many. That is all I’ll say about them here. To those who knew them better than I . . . really, to those who knew them at all . . . I wish you the best in working through the thoughts and emotions you will be dealing with in the coming days, weeks, and beyond.

Sometimes, words will not suffice.

Back to Africa

One of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Home, one feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood... A journey, in fact, appeals to Imagination, to Memory, to Hope, -the three sister graces of our moral being.
- Sir Richard Francis Burton



I always find it a thrill to come back to a country I haven't seen in some years.

Two years back Addis Ababa, Ethiopia was my sanctuary after having fled Cairo, a city I view with extreme distaste and whose charm and allure has changed little since rioters began burning down half the city in recent days. Consequently I immediately fell in love with Addis, a city with tasty food, good beer, beautiful women, friendly inhabitants, and tree-lined boulevards. Sure, the smog was still pretty bad, the touts (Swahili, meaning "tick" . . . usually teenage boys trying to rip off tourists) insufferable, and the tap water sometimes a disconcerting color of red. But after Cairo it was a God-send.

Later on Addis was my stop after leaving Somaliland, a infinitely better experience than Cairo but still a place where I had lost twenty-five pounds in a month and a half. Addis, with its cheap food, was a brief stop for me to gain back a few pounds before continuing onward into the southern deserts.

This time, I viewed the city through the lens of someone just having left America. While it is wonderful to be back I realized quickly that I had neglected to steal myself for the this-is-Africa, inshallah, chaotic lifestyle that had seemed so natural by the end of my last trip to the continent. Africa is Africa and no matter how much I like somewhere here it is still wildly different from the comparitvely calm lifestyle in the US. My first day, dodging careening cars, avoiding the prostitutes and hearing "ferengi!" - a rather insulting term for "foreigner" - screamed at me by children everywhere, served as something of a shock to my system.

Fortunately it took only that first day to turn my mind around about the place. I remembered oddly specific directions around the city ( “ . . . turn right at the second Oil Libya . . .) and wandered to some of my old restaurants. I relaxed and read, chatted with other backpackers, got a little sunburned, and made some friends amongst the locals. I dove right into drinking tapwater but surprisingly got few results, my body evidently keeping any immunities it needed from the last time around. The food was likewise easy on me and that alone tempted me to stay a bit longer, but I was anxious to get to Somaliland.

I've made little secret in recent months over my hopes for this trip, one that will hopefully combine both business and pleasure. The recent riots have ensured my planned trip to Yemen is a no-go and a decision by the Somaliland Liason Office's in Addis to only grant me a single-entry visa has also nixed my Kenya plans; consequently my tentative schedule says that the next three months will be in Somaliland, the autonomoius enclave of northern Somalia.

For my hopeful treks everything is still up in the air for the moment. The Sanaag Region, a mountainous hard-to-reach area which lies on the Puntland border and has been my dream to explore for two years, is high on my list. Same with the lower-Awdal on the other side of the country. Maybe, if the gods will it, I'll end up heading back to my old stomping grounds from my previous Somaliland trek as well.

But my main purpose here this time around isn't the trekking. Instead, I'm going to be trying to navigate the ministries in an attempt to get permission for a small non-profit that I'm hoping to start up this summer.

I hope you'll bear with me here for a moment while I delve into a brief story that relates to this.

Last time, going from village to village in some areas that even the the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the central government failed to penetrate, I would run across the occasional and inexplicable English speaker. Regardless of whether it was a child or an elder, I always made it a point to ask out of shear curiosity what, if anything, they wanted in their village. To a person, everyone said a school.

For the first couple weeks it was a mere side-note to what I was doing and I thought little of it. Towards the end of the trek, however, still well into the interior and far from any roads or paths, I came to a small village whose name now escapes me but whose faces I’ll remember for a long while.

The village had around seventy to eighty people. The poverty and malnourishment was telling, yet the village lived because it housed the only water well for miles around. Even though I know little of grazing needs it was clear on my walk in that the soil was of poor quality and the entire area was suffering the consequences of over-grazing.

One of the men there spoke some English. He was very proud, he told me, to show the first white man he had ever seen around the village.

Clearly there was little to actually see. The goat and camel pens, the dirgid (sleeping area for passing nomads), and the various huts. The well, of course, which he saved to the near end.

Finally, he announced, we would see the school. He led me towards a small enclosure about 15X15 feet. It was supported on two sides with large pieces of corrugated tin and a third side with unrooted thorn bush. On top lay more thorn bush to shield the kids from the sun. The students, who looked as young as four and as old as fourteen, were drawing in the dirt for lack of paper and were being taught by a man holding up a torn piece of cardboard.

Looking at the only school I saw for seventy miles in each direction, next to a man so proud of it, I felt positively devastated. Angry, really.

I was angry that anyone who wanted education received one of such unbelievably poor caliber. I was angry that there was no support from anyone outside the village in what they were trying to accomplish. I was angry at myself for thinking so negatively about the place. But most of all I was angry because I knew it wasn’t enough, that these efforts would fall short of helping the village or its inhabitants in any tangible way.

Still, for the benefit of my guide I tried to look impressed and so I asked him what subject the children were learning.

“Here, there is one subject," he answered. "Math.”

I looked at the dirt. It was simple addition.

When I asked if there was any sort of vocational teaching he answered passively, saying the village had been made of a collection of refugees two decades before and any skills their home villages had once had were lost in transit. Math, he implied, was really the best and only thing they could teach. There was no resources for any further teaching. They would have liked a real school or even some teaching material I was told, but no help had come from the outside. He didn't expect any in the future, either.

These kids - the village - were trying. They all wanted to learn and were proud of this pitiful step forward, a step that ultimately would do the children no good and not change their future one iota. The land could not support their population growth without some sort of change. Proper grazing patterns, animal husbandry, frankincense collection, and any other of the possible avenues for making their lives better were simply not known and not being taught. The best that they could do was figure out their livestock numbers.

Despite their best efforts their children would not be educated. They would not have better lives.

This was not a case where an opportunity was there and passed up; this was a case where no opportunity existed . . . and one never would.

I left the village that day and continued on my trek. But that experience has stayed with me, always nagging me, always reminding me of a job that needs to be started. Because those villages are all over Somaliland and Somalia. Parents who want their children to learn and succeed, who want their children to have better lives than they had. One-room schools missing two sides held together by twine, without pencils or paper or proper teachers. Boys and girls whose future holds a way of life ever-squeezed by unsustainable population growth with no other option than to keep walking the increasingly over-herded countryside.

That was the seed that was planted in my mind two years ago. Since then I have thought more and more about education in Somaliland. There is a model of school creation and sustainability made famous by Greg Mortenson (Three Cups of Tea, Stones into Schools) that I would like to turn into a pilot project in rural Somaliland. This model incorporates working with – and not over – local elders and officials in the building and teaching process, a vocational center for post-primary graduates that teaches local practices, the taking-over of the school by the locals as the graduates are able to start earning money, and the extremely important point of an equal participation rate between the genders within four years of the school opening

There are a number of similarities between the regions of tribal Pakistan and Afghanistan that his NGO works in and rural Somaliland. Among those similarities are populations that are under threat of becoming radicalized due to outside forces (in Somaliland’s case these forces are al Shabab from southern Somalia, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from Yemen, and madrassas being funded by conservative Muslim factions from Saudi Arabia), a rural population that is not being reached by the government or NGOs, and a marginalized female population whose collective and individual futures can be drastically improved with education. That last point is one that is the most important to me though I’ll get into reasoning in a later post.

So, in tying up this long post, I’m in Somaliland to see if I can get permission for a pilot project that incorporates much of the Mortenson model of school creation. I’ve never before delved in to the non-profit world and am quite nervous at the prospect, but a number of my friends and family have been helping and encouraging me in recent months with the initial planning stages. This has given me a huge boost in confidence and I owe everyone who I have talked with a good deal.

Still, I've approached this trip with more trepidation than any other I've taken before and that is in large part due to this potential pilot project. Truthfully, I was initially hesitant to even write anything about it because as I look at the potential hurdles ahead (unwilling officials, lack of enthusiasm from the villages, a bad education model, access to my region of choice not being granted) I'm nervous that what I've been thinking about for so long will be extremely difficult to accomplish. Time will tell, I suppose.

The ministries were extremely responsive the last time I was in Somaliland so I have great hope that they will help me along the way. Likewise Somaliland itself if filled with amazingly friendly and helpful people, some of whom I've kept in touch with these last two years and I'm sure will be able to offer advice.

One way or another it’s all going to be an adventure and those are fun, so I’ve decided not to fret too terribly much.

Cheers to Minnesota, though truthfully it is very wonderful to be back to Africa once again.

Quick Note

Everything below this post was written on my Cairo to Cape Town trip from 2008 to 2009.

Final Thoughts

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.