Aquila Nights

Take me deep out past the lights, where nothing dims these stars… May 17, 2010

Hello ya’ll!

Well, the neglected blog has been crying out to me long enough…it’s most definitely not for lack of desire to update, but more for lack of time and space to update!! Travel since I got to South America has been pretty full-on – which means LOADS of stories, but a significant lack of ability to write them up!

So here I am finally with a moment to write – sitting in a coffee store in La Paz, Bolivia; sipping the first soy cappuccino since I was in the States, on a lazy Saturday afternoon (which actually seems like morning to me, having awoken around 1pm…!) and the story, as they say,… ‘goes a little somethin’ like this.’

I flew from California, via gorgeous Panama, to Peru. Here I was to join Bree – a gal I’d met at a party in Melbourne ten months ago just before she embarked on a year-long solo journey from Los Angeles to Buones Aires (clearly my kind of person); and a Finnish friend of hers who she’d met years ago on exchange in Budapest, who was flying in to travel with us in Peru for two weeks.

Lima, where we all met, is the capital of Peru, and perhaps the most boring and non-charismatic place I’ve been. The plan was to stay long enough to meet up, and then head right away for the Andes and adventures. The plan, however, was rudely interrupted by severe diahhroea, the flu, and jet-lag (respectively).

When we eventually crawled out of Lima, we ended up spending the next two weeks enamoured by the vast and majestic Andes – crazy little highland towns, massive Cusco (the capital of the ancient Incan empire, and said to be the ‘belly-button’ of the world), wandering among Incan ruins through the Sacred Valley, and hiking through the world’s deepest canyon. We have battled altitude, evenings spent sleeping in bus terminals, a collective painful lack of Spanish, long mountainous bus rides with no promises of making it to the end of the journey alive, and some hairy (and hilarious) mid-night experiences of being left behind in the middle of nowhere by SO many buses whose drivers grossly underestimate the time it takes one to pee.

It’s some of these experiences I want to give you just a snapshot of

Peru was an interesting half-way mark between the third and first worlds (…although maybe my interpretation is skewed a little by recent African adventures!) The highland towns are full of llamas, and stocky Peruvians sporting colourful traditional garb and a significant lack of teeth; enough stray dogs wandering the streets to make it worth considering creating their own Census, and old women with leather tophats defying the laws of physics perched upon midnight-black braids that end tied together below their bottoms, and carrying all manner of cargo (from branches, to babies, to clothes) tied to their backs in fluorescent pink/blue/yellow blankets. The most useful phrase is surprisingly not ‘no, gracias’ (as ‘LA!! shockran’ and ‘hapana, asante’ were damn essential in the middle east and Africa!), but instead is a friendly ‘hola!’ and ‘buonos dias!’. (Though I must admit I was quite disappointed, after nurturing such outstanding bartering skills over the last few months, to find South Americans to not want to con a ‘gringo’ at all!) The food, of course, is a carnivore’s heaven of blood……. and ‘sin carne, sin pollo, sin pesca….mi vegetariano?!’ (‘no meat, no chicken, no fish… I’m vegetarian?!?’), though consistently responded to with a ‘Ci!! Ci!’ and lots of nods of apparent understanding, almost always yields a giant plate of soup sporting a floating leg of cow, and a plate of bug-eyed whole fish staring up at me through the rice. Learning the remedy technique of the surgical-precision ‘it’s ok, I’ll just eat around it’, along with the preventative ‘arroz, con frijoles?! Solo!’ (‘rice, with beans?! Only!’), have allowed me to survive thus far. Compared to Africa, though, South America has been a luxury dream: from availability of products, and the quality of food; to the existence of every-day infrastructure – and toilets!

We spent about a month and a half in Peru, with our longest stop being in Cusco. Here we created a little home for ourselves, meeting lots of people from Couchsurfing (check it out!: www.couchsurfing.org) and exploring all the nooks and crannies of a city built thousands of years ago by (evidently) teeny tiny people. We stayed long enough to have a favourite restaurant, bar, market juice-stall, cafe and park… and even ended up with a base apartment, after staying with one of our new couchsurfing friends. In Cusco, I tried Coca leaves for the first time (the raw product from which they create cocaine…!) – but not just coca leaves… but coca tea, coca chocolate, coca lip balm, coca EVERYTHING! I also tried raw chocolate (cacao) beans for the first time (wouldn’t recommend…!), met my first ‘lucky’ dried llama foetuses, and burned special wood that serves as spirit-banishing incense!

Cusco is the main town in the Sacred Valley – a valley of towering green Andean mountains, running for about 100km, and dotted with ancient Incan ruins and old Incan towns (with Machu Picchu right at the end). We spent over a week exploring the gorgeous Sacred Valley, on two occasions. (We were in the Valley when Machu Picchu was closed, and then when we came back through the Valley it was open, but the tour operators were charging triple to quadruple the right price, after having bought up all the train tickets in advance. So – next trip!) Pisac was the most well-preserved ruins after Machu Picchu, and we spent an entire day wandering through the ancient collapsing rooms, hiding from the ancient tombs built into the rock-faces, and getting hideously lost (somewhere around the sign pointing to the old ‘hospital’) and spending a good hour unwillingly (and often spontaneously!) on our bottoms, dodging VERY spikey cacti, and trying not to fall head-first off a mountaintop. We had a very unique Pisac experience!!

Ollytatambo was amazing for its own reasons – it’s the oldest Incan city that’s been continuously inhabited since the Incans were defeated Back In The Day (you’re familiar with that particular time period, right?). Perhaps my favourite part of my time in the Sacred Valley was a wander we took along the Inca Trail, from Ollytatambo – we were in search of a “left turn off the track, over a wall, kind of into the scrub’. Along this apparent trail, we would eventually come to an old Incan public bathing pool, fed by the natural mountain spring, and completely unknown to tourists. So off we set along the Inca Trail (to Machu Picchu), and to our utter surprise, DID manage to find the right wall/patch of scrub to turn left into! Unsure we would ever find the Incan pool, but sure we’d find adventure either way, we continued to bush-bash through corn-field lots, past bulls grazing in the grass, through thickets and prickly cactus bushes, and climbing over wall after ancient Incan wall……………….. until finally we were thrust from the overgrown bush, into a clearing where there glistened a breath-taking, forgotten Incan masterpiece full of clear pure mountain water. It was HUGE! So we lay around the pool, washing our feet in the ‘waterfall’ spout where the spring water continuously gushed out the other side of the pool, and absorbing the gorgeous quiet seclusion.

It was on our way to and from Cusco, that the Nights of the Abandoning Buses occurred. The first night was a long and bitterly cold journey from Andahualaya, high in the Andes, to Cusco – it was 30 hours of solid hell, with temperatures plummetting and bumpy unpaved mountain roads threatening to shatter bones as we were pounded into our seats. I’m not sure any of the troops truly believed they would make it. Huddled together in the darkness, we made pacts that if ever the bus stopped for just a moment, we would use our collective strategic advantage to conquer two goals in one swift attack – my mission was to take out the luggage bay, and retrieve any warm clothes I could carry, while Bree’s was a search-and-destroy mission for the nearest toilet. Together, we were sure we could succeed. Finally, the bus drew to a shuddering halt, in front of a deserted building, and we leapt to action!! I won’t go into the gory details of what transpired before the luggage bay submitted, but suffice to say, I was safely back in the bus pulling on a jumper and watching out for Bree to reappear from the building. Then suddenly……the door was closing….. the gears were grinding…..the bus was moving…!! Jumper half-on, I bounded from my seat at the very back of the bus, and (without a thought for my own safety), hurled myself over bags and legs, and threw myself onto the cabin door, fists a-pounding. Pinkie-cracking levels of pounding later, the co-driver finally opened the door, and the bus stopped pulling away…. and I managed enough broken Spanish to either a) communicate our predicament with the missing friend, or b) amuse/intrigue them enough to make them stop driving and see how much more awkward my Spanglish could get. They sounded the airhorn, and there finally appeared Bree, head and arms tucked into a ball for aerodynamic stability as she rounded the corner of the building, legs moving so quickly I could barely make them out…….. and to our great relief (and to the other passengers’ great amusement), landed safely back in the bus!

One would imagine that after this experience, one would learn one’s lesson. Not so.
Being bounced around the back seat of a bus, trying to cling to the back of the seat to prevent myself being dumped on the floor every half-second, clearly exerts some interesting gravity effects on the bladder. So when the bus stopped for a random ‘pee stop’ in the middle of nowhere, I joined about ten men on the side of the pitch-black mountain road. Now if anyone knows about my knee problems, I daresay you can imagine that forest squats are no longer the easiest thing for this old bird. So I trundled my way out out of the bus headlights, found myself a nice tree to use as leverage, and was busy in heaven after approximately ten hours worth of lack-of-toilet-stop…….when I heard that damned bus door closing. I think I actually rolled my eyes to myself in the darkness to accompany the audible “you’ve GOT to be kidding”. So, as the closing of the door was followed by the rev of the bus engine, and the changing of gears, and the crackle of gravel as the bus began to pull away…. there I was, scrambling for dear life down a gravelly path, in pitch darkness, tripping over trees and shrubs, with my pants around my knees, knowing my only worldly possession may soon be the scraggy roll of toilet paper I suddenly clutched so dearly.
The end of this story, of course, involves an indignant, puffed, re-dressing of myself in front of the open door of a now-stationary bus, and an entrance that was greeted with cheers from the still-highly-amused local passengers. *sigh

Since all unfortunate things come in three, there is of course one concluding section to this saga: during our next bus ride, at a local town somewhere in the highlands of Peru, we were told the stop would be 15 minutes. Of course though, by the rule of once-bitten-twice-shy… I RAN through the bus terminal, and I have never peed so fast. I swear, I was back out at that bus in under two minutes. And the bus was there! And then, sure as you like, the second I walked over to it, the freaking door closed, and the bus started to pull away!! I was standing right there, hands open to the sky in the universal ‘what the hell??!’…but the dude on the comfortable side of the door just turned his head from me in apathy, and the bus continued to pull out!! It was more indignant self-righteousness that made me act so boldly, but no way was this happening again. I found the nearest thing to hold onto, and good golly, I held on! Whether inside or out of it, either way I was going to be ON that bus! I think it was more respect/fear of my insanity that made the driver finally stop the bus….. but hey, whatever works, right?

The final really exciting thing we did in Peru (other than the Amazon jungle, which is for the next entry!), was hike the world’s deepest canyon – Colca Canyon. Our trip didn’t even BEGIN well… so I’m not sure what made us think that it was going to end well. It was such a set of trials, I think the story would best be recounted in the tried-and-true ‘fortunately, unfortunately’ structure.

Unfortunately: ALL the buses out of Arequipa to the canyon-rim town, were all full for the next 24 hours.
Fortunately: Some Spanish-speaking Israelis were also being turned away, and they helped to wrangle all of us some seats on a bus that would take us half-way! (We planned to sleep a night there and then rock up to the bus station and beg to stand on the bus for the rest of the way)
Unfortunately: the traffic was piled up for kilometres…. there’d been a horrible bus crash, involving the same company with whom we were currently travelling. We had the front, panoramic seats and got a full horrible view of the totalled bus and all the scene… I spent the rest of the trip feeling a lot more vulnerable than usual.
Fortunately: we made it to the half-way town!
Unfortunately: it was the middle of the night by then, and the terminal was utterly deserted.
Fortunately: we found a nice moto-taxi (like a tuk tuk) whose driver took us to a nice cheap hotel, that was actually open (!), for four hours sleep…. and even more fortunately, at four am when we went back to the terminal, the through-bus did let us on, and we made it to the canyon-rim town by morning. We’d been to the town before (for a first failed attempt at hiking the canyon!), and had met a gorgeous street-dog who took quite the shine to us – sure enough, he found us again this time around, and he followed us all the way down into the canyon! We named him Nomad, and I couldn’t help but let my heart run away with a trillion ideas of how I could adopt him and take care of him and take him around South America before taking him back to Australia with me……………
Unfortunately: rational reason came into play and Nomad is still living his street-life under newspapers on park benches
Fortunately: he was with us for the whoooole trip into the canyon, and I had such fun taking care of him and playing with him and making sure he was ok, that I barely noticed any of the harsh trip straight down 1km of altitude into the canyon!
Unfortunately: I cared a little TOO much for Nomad’s well-being, and ended up giving him much too large a portion of my water supply, leaving me with the beginnings of heat stroke for the last half hour of our descent. Much delirium and many falls later, I arrived in the oasis in the base of the canyon with bleeding scratches, and an almost-broken forearm complete with bone-shaped bruises.
Fortunately: we did make it to the oasis! And it was goooorgous! Little straw huts served as sleeping quarters, with large stone slabs for beds, and thin straw mattresses for an ounce of comfort… it was like sleeping in the open, since through the straw hut walls you could see the stars and hear the wind. There was a natural pool fed by canyon springs, and towering and strikingly-coloured canyon walls all around. It was absolutely magic.

………………………………………

Well… I hope that since I am CLEARLY completely unable to update this blog regularly, that a mammoth-sized post will suffice for a little while at least! I’ll keep up the stamina, and regale you with stories of the Amazon, the Isla del Sol (the site of Incan world creation in Lake Titicaca, the world’s highest navigable lake), and my experience of La Paz and trip down the world’s most dangerous road!!

“A moment, a love, a dream, a laugh… won’t stop til it’s over” April 2, 2010

Hi ya’ll!! Almost two months without updates………. I’m a slack blogger, I know..! The main reason for the absence was the five weeks I took off from travelling, to go ‘home’ – two weeks back in Singapore with Shamraz, and three back in California. Now, though, I am firmly in the depths of South America, and my mode of travelling, and mood, promises for MUCH more frequent updates.

It was great to stop for a bit, just focus on having fun and relaxing, and existing in a place where everything is EASY!! Even after five weeks back in the first world, it still blew my mind to think that everything I could possibly need or want or conceptualise, was all right within my grasp. It never stopped being weird that instead of thinking “I’m hungry” and having to actively seek out food, and then be bitterly disappointed with whatever was placed in front of you (and then always in the back of your mind that THIS might be the meal that could give you cholera or some other yummy ailment)………. where in Singapore and the U.S. and so many more countries world-over, you don’t even have to think. Everywhere you turn there’s a neon sign screaming out at you, offering things you didn’t even realise you wanted until it was right there. The old concepts I had about food seemed so alien to me – that there could be a ‘good’ restaurant or a ‘bad’ restaurant in a developed country!! I was not only satiated, but OVERAWED every time I went out – in awe that not only did I recognise everything on the menu, not only that everything sounded good; but that everything was actually available, and tasted just like it sounded it would, and filled you up, and wasn’t going to make you sick. Even after a month I was still excited by showers, and laundry, and roads, and the ability to walk down the street and not automatically stand out by one glance.  And that was after just less than 3 months in Africa….I can’t wait ’til I go back for a year or so!

So Singapore and the U.S. was fun!! It was great to chillax with Shamraz and meet more of his family and friends. We didn’t get up to a great deal, just every-day things, and just existing. We did spend a day kayaking on a lake, went to some parties, saw some theatre and live music at the uni, and basically just hung out.

For the Chinese New Year weekend, I ended up heading into Malaysia with Shim’s girlfriend Aaranya, and two of her friends – with the intent of merely getting a lift as far north as they were heading, and then hopping some trains for the 2000km up to Bangkok where my flight was booked to Los Angeles. In the end all the trains across the Malay/Thai border were booked…so I ended up hanging out in the Cameron Highlands for the weekend, and bumming a ride back down to Kuala Lumpur, where I jumped on a last-minute flight to Bangkok. Not my preferred mode of transport… but at that point it was a matter of whatever would get me to Bangkok in time for my flight to Cali!!!!! Bit stressful… even for me!!!

The Cameron Highlands were lovely! I hadn’t made it to that part of Malaysia last time, so it was great to see some new country. The highlands are famous for two things – tea and strawberries (and sometimes both at once). So we made sure to drive through mountainside tea fields, and we visited a giant strawberry farm and sampled what seemed like every strawberry concoction possibly conceivable. Our first day driving up north was a long one – took the train across the causeway through immigration and picked up the gang’s hire-car in Johor Bahru before beginning the long long haul to the opposite end of the country. Being the start of the Chinese New Year long weekend, it seemed every Singaporean was heading north, so unimaginaly-dense traffic made the journey very long and slow. We arrived in the highlands around 11pm, only to find the hostel the guys had booked, had given the beds away to some other backbackers who’d shown up not half an hour earlier. So we saw in the Year of the Tiger stacked together on a mattress thrown on the floor of the hotel’s common room!

I spent my meagre time in Bangkok basically just having Thai massages!! Ooooooh, so blissful. And for hours! For basically no money! I had the best time ever. I very nearly missed my flight to the U.S., for many reasons. Firstly, having almost run out of Baht (what with all the massages), I was determined to take the local bus to the airport – but when asking at my hostel reception about bus schedules, was granted the reply “well, the bus leaves from out the front… but there’s no guarantee there’ll be a bus, and there’s no schedule when there is.” So I left a couple of hours to sit at the bus stop, watching the myriad of locals come and go as their buses came and went, with slowly diminishing hope of my bus arriving. Then suddenly I saw a flash of the sign in the front of a bus, through the traffic: ‘…RPORT’. And, being hidden from my frantic waving by about three other buses, my bus wasn’t stopping! So, I donned my pack and started running wildly, arms flailing, down the jam-packed road, leaving the laughter of the locals behind me. I’ve never been so appreciative of standing out like a sore thumb – some white kid with a pack twice their size…. clearly the only place I belonged was on an airport-bound bus. Thankfully, the bus stopped, and I made it to the airport. Then, the second major issue – I didn’t know that despite having access to the U.S. by the visa-waiver program, the ‘waiver’ program actually involves an online application before an airline is allowed to let you board the U.S.-bound aircraft. So with half an hour left to get through customs, I was turned away from the check-in desk, to find an internet point to apply for the visa! Needless to say, it all went through ok, but I was the last person onto the aeroplane! (not before being patted down by a group of burly security officials and having my bags searched at the boarding gate!

Being back in California was so amazing. I’d not seen Andrea in too many years, Vicente in long enough, and then I met so many amazing incredible aaaawesome people in my travels, having sooo much fun and so many great conversations and experiences, and who challenged my thoughts and re-invigorated my soul. Ya’ll know who you are

Leaving ‘home’(s!) and such dear old friends and getting back on the road again was so tough, but the CRAZY times I’ve had in just this first month in South America is of course in the end totally worth it!!!! I already have so many stories to tell….but that is the next installment! Now that I’m travelling with internet, I will be writing a lot less, a lot more often. More palatable?!

I send so much love to all you crazy awesome people I am so SO lucky to call my friends, in Melbourne and all over the world. It’s each of you that is the very best bit of life… and it’s you who make it all worth living. I miss ya’ll every day. Keep smiling!!! xxxxxxx

Livin’ in a rhythm where the minute’s workin’ overtime! January 31, 2010

….cont.
We said goodbye to Tanzania from the windows of shuttle-bus seats directly behind the driver – no leg room, our bags on our laps, the engine right below us heating our feet and food-bag to temperatures usually reserved only for monks walking on coals, and the aisle crammed with makeshift seats full of sweaty men who continuously fell asleep and started leaning on us. We were assured the trip would be pretty quick and painless, considering the roads from Arusha and Nairobi had been ‘recently fixed!’…. though it soon became apparent that ‘recently fixed’ actually meant ‘in the process of being fixed’ and involved driving (convulsing?) along a shoddy dirt track, swerving around potholes the size of household swimming pools and piles of rubble as big as the house….whilst out the window not two metres from our path ran an oasis of smooth, glistening black bitumen. Occasionally the actual road would be built enough that we could veer onto it for a while, but inevitably we would come across a giant bulldozer with a hand-painted arrow on it pointing us back to the obstacle course of dust. The highlight of the trip was discovering a whole new meaning for what became our theme song for the journey: “On the road agaaaiin… I can’t wait to beeeee, on the road agaaain’.

We made it Nairobi only one hour behind schedule (so for Africa – right on time!!), and found ourselves gazing out the window in a slight culture shock which started with: ‘oh my god! Traffic lights!!!’ and ended with stunned silence as we took in sights of billboards, real buildings, footpaths, chain stores that we recognised, cars actually using lanes, and a high proportion of people wearing shoes! It suddenly became painfully evident why Kenya experiences so much civil unrest while Tanzania is an exceptionally peaceful country – in Tanzania, everyone is poor (well, except the government), while in Kenya, the slums are right beside housing estates.

We only spent one night in Kenya, at a cosy little backpackers near the centre of town, before masochistically signing ourselves up for a second day of bus travel to get through to Uganda. The woman at the ticket counter had told us that the bus would take eight hours and arrive at 5pm. She lied. The day dragged on and on… it got to 4pm and we still were yet to cross the Ugandan border, despite knowing Jinja was quite a distance into Uganda…and starting to realise we were not going to make it within eight hours! Finally we got to the border crossing at 5pm, stamped out of Kenya and lined up in the burning equatorial sun for the Visa. As we re-boarded the bus we asked how long until Jinja, and were told it would be another three hours!

So, we were dropped off fiiiinally in Jinja in the pitch-black night, not in a town or by a bus station or anything… but instead at a gas station on a stretch of dusty abandoned road, where we were greeted (read: swarmed) by a mob of ten motorbikers telling us they would take us and our hiking packs into town. Turns out these are the ‘boda boda’ and in Jinja have completely replaced any taxi service… but at the time we feared for our non-helmetted lives, and wandered into the service station to find ourselves a mode of transport with walls and roof. Here we found two guys saying they were a taxi, and with this seeming like our best bet, I started haggling the fare with them (somewhat tricky when not knowing the currency) and in a very long and arduous process standing on the side of the road all hiking-pack-ed up, got them down from 40,000 shilingi to 13,000 shilingi. (and turns out the regular fare is 10,000 (AU$5), so woot!)
Despite this very daunting start to our time in Uganda, like I said in the previous post, we’ve found Jinja to be a little slice of heaven, and opted to stay here an entire week rather than continue our journey around Lake Victoria. Jinja is situated on the Lake right at the source of the Nile – which is fed about 70% from the lake, and 30% from a spring on a small island out in the lake…. the Nile starts as The White Nile, named for the mass of water that forms some of the most intense rapids in the world, becomes the Blue Nile in Sudan, and ends up as ‘The Nile’! in Egypt. I find it quite perfect to be starting and ending this African leg of the trip at either end of the Nile.
In Jinja we have had a week FULL of adventure (and our fair share of relaxing and eating too, mind you!!). Firstly, we were off on a horseback safari through the forests and farms on the cliffs above the raging White Nile. To get to the ranch, on the other side of the river and a few km away, we finally had our ‘boda boda’ motorbike experience!! It was liberating and exhilarating to be fully ‘naked’ with no helmet or gear on the back of a screaming old bike down an African highway (and then down African dirt, pot-holed mountain roads)! I had an absolute blast!!!!!! At the ranch we were saddled up onto horses, and with a Mexican couple and two guides, set out on our safari (‘journey’ in Swahili – no lions this time ). I was expecting a nice slow walk atop a horse, with me having little to do apart from sit there, and maybe occassionally stop the horse from eating – much like all my previous experience when I was a kid, and in Tennessee a couple of years back. However, with both Liv and the Mexican fellow being competent on horses, there was the option to have a trot – and instead of telling me to stay back with what I could do, they launched into an impromptu riding lesson, teaching me how to make it go, and how to stay on……. and then away I went! It was great fun once I got the rhythm and stopped being pounded into the saddle with each step. (I have one seriously bruised butt now, though. Sitting has never been such an experience.) As if this new trotting skill wasn’t enough…. they THEN offered up a canter!! I had to switch horses to the guide’s horse, since mine had well and truly got the feeling that I had no idea what I was doing during the first hour of the journey, and refused to go past a trot (clever horse ). With the new one though, we were OFF!! I had not been so scared since the time I went on a rollercoaster. It was soooo much fun, though, and thankfully we all stopped before I fell off (ooooh so close twice, though!). I was shaking so much when we stopped!!!! It was sooo awesome, so exhilarating, and it makes me really want to learn to ride some day!

I was pretty much adrenaline-d out after the cantering experience, but the thing that (almost) EVERYONE who comes to Jinja does, is raft the White Nile, and Liv was super excited to have a go! (Subsequently, I dragged myself along…) It’s a Class 6 river (unraftable), but there’s a Class 5 route that they take people down. I’d done Class 3 rapids in California, but what with my mild-to-intense water phobia (‘mild’ when showering, for instance, and ‘intense’ in public swimming pools), I was not a keen-bean to be thrown out of a raft amid tonnes of gushing white water. So I talked with the company and told them I not only cannot swim, and cannot float, but also (just to help the situation) occassionally panic around water – and was assured that there would be five kayakers that go down the river first, and help get everyone out when rafts capsize in rapids, and that there’s a safety boat that goes down the river as well, that takes the safest route in every rapid and is the ‘most unlikely’ to capsize. So, I geared up and went along, making a deal with our guide that he would stop and let me hop across to the safety boat before every Class 5 rapid. We also made sure to choose a raft with the oldest possible co-rafters – which happily turned out to be a family from Isreal who were in their late 60s/early 70s, and sure to not have vast thrill-seeking desires! (Until the ‘so you’re on a break from high school?’ question came up, we hadn’t previously realised that they were being so grandmotherly/grandfatherly to us, because they – and the guide! – thought we were both 14!) (Though, I figured this childish face played in my favour, what with all the scared safety-raft-swapping I did in front of four packed rafts of quizzical-looking thrill-seeking tourists…!)

So most of the river I spent in the boat with Liv and our four temporary grandparents, on the Class 1, 2, 3 and a tame 4 or two (even two tame 5′s! *gasp!), and it was a hoot! There was one kayaker who was assigned to always keep an eye on me during rapids… his name was DJ, he was wearing a fluoro yellow shirt, and I loved him for many many reasons. Mostly the bit where he was responsible for my life. The worst rapid on the river was a Grade 5 that was especially unpredictable, and my safety-boat-oarsman instructed me that if the safety raft was going to flip, it would be on this particular one… except at a 30% chance rather than a 50% chance for the other rafts. His final words to me as we went over were ‘just DONT. LET. GOOO!’, so I held on to those meagre ropes for dear dear life, ignoring the facefulls/earfuls/nosefuls/mouthfuls of water and trying to see in advance whether the raft was about to go over… then halfway through I’m not sure quite what happened, but suddenly my feet were above my head and I was completely air-borne…save for his voice ringing in my brain keeping my hands FIRMLY on the raft ropes… and a second later I touched back down on the raft, and we were out of the rapid. The first thing I heard was my oarsman laughing manically and saying ‘heey, you held on!!’, and then m’-main-man DJ appeared in his kayak laughing and saying he thought I was gone from the raft for good and had started paddling to go get me! It was sure an amazing rush, but certainly not one I’d be keen to repeat EVER again! Turned out that my original septagenarian raft came through it much more smoothly than the safety boat had! Typical! (‘Sorite though… they had it much worse than my safety raft on all the other 5′s. Hmph.)

Our last day in Jinja we spent leisurely walking about the town and taking in the general atmosphere – Liv did some souvenir shopping and we walked through colonial Jinja with all the run-down old mansions from yesteryear. We took a slow boat ride out over Lake Victoria, out to the island that forms 30% (along with Lake Vic’s 70%) of the source of the Nile, and made like dorky tourists, taking photos in various poses on the huge concrete block that marks the spring. We also saw (and held… eeewww! ) a Nile Perch that a fisherman brought in… something like the hugest fish in the world…? It was just a baby, though. After our awesome boat ride, we found ourselves a nice spot to have lunch down by the fake source plaque spot… in cane recliners on the banks of the Nile, with a Ugandan local beer to complement the meal! It was bliss.

Our bus ride back to Kenya was a bit of an experience (yet again!!) – our bus driver was touched in the head, pretending he was on a speedway (potholes and all!), racing other buses, and using the airhorn like an expression of an underlying Tourette’s condition. The bus ride back to Nairobi seemed to take such a less amount of time than the first though – which just goes to show time DOES fly when you’re fearing for your life

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We, clearly, made it back to Kenya in one piece – spent one day wandering around Nairobi, and re-packing our bags and getting ready for our flight that night! I decided a few weeks back that I did indeed want to move travels on to SOuth America, so managed to upgrade my flights to a round-the-world ticket – so I am currently in Dubai airport, en route to Singapore for a couple of weeks (while Liv is off back to Australia to start back at uni in a matter of days!! Eek!!). After Singpapore I’ll be off to Thailand, on my way to California for a couple of weeks, en route for South America! (Where plans, once again, fizzle out in lieu of random-times and aforementioned wind-following )

Catch ya’ll again from Singapore! Stay well!! xxxxxxxx

…but the sun rolling high, through the sapphire sky… January 28, 2010

Hello!!

I’m blogging today (finally!) (I found Notepad on my computer – scooore!) from an incredibly comfy couch in a campsite bar, looking out over the White Nile, in a town called Jinja in Uganda. Jinja stands well apart from the rest of East Africa, and while still holding all the raw charm of a tiny African town – set into the forest in the mountains surrounding the Lake – Jinja also has the basic comforts and civilisations of a western town – such as hot running water, electricity, internet and food over which one doesn’t have to second-guess when it arrives on the table! It’s crawling with Westerners – tonnes of ex-pats who have come for a holiday and been so charmed/exhilarated by the White Nile and all the extreme adventure sports it offers… and never left. So an awesome little community of super-tanned, bleached-haired, board-shorted adventure-junkies (as well as a tonne of rafting/kayaking locals) has sprung up here. We found ourselves in Jinja very unexpectedly – with a week to spare in between the end of our safari in the Serengeti, and flying out of Africa, Liv and I had decided to embark on an odyssey around massive Lake Victoria – it was going to be a lot of days on horrid buses, and not much time in each town… but dammit, it was going to be an achievement! Instead, we made it as far as Jinja (our first destination on this circumnavigation!!!) and decided to stay for the whole week!!

So, that’s where I currently am!! However, I’m going to rewind in time a little, before I tell you about the crazy experiences of the last few days here, and give a bit of a run-down of what we’ve been up to since I last wrote – namely the rest of our Kilimanjaro adventures, the safari in the Serengeti, and a little jaunt through Kenya! (also, I do intend to update this blog a LOT more readily when I’m on a continent that has stable electricity, and internet that runs at a speed at least mildly faster than we all ‘enjoyed’ in the mid-90s!)
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The rest of our time at the volunteer organisation on Mt Kilimanjaro passed much in the same vain as before – playing with the orphan kids who came by, doing some English tutoring, visiting the hospital, and helping the older ‘kids’of Bob’s who lived in the compound with us, with English and computer skills. We had some huge crickets move into our room, and they ended up as our pseudo-pets – we named them (first Jonah, and then when Liv unexpectedly found the second little fella and in her shock swore out ‘Joses!!’ as a panicked mix between our Jonah, and the name ‘Moses’ that we tossed around for a while before settling on Jonah…so Joses stuck for our second buddy). They added a whole new pace to slow Swahili life, and made everything that little bit more exciting – every time we picked something up, we never knew whether we were about to launch a cricket-rocket into the air and accelerate our heart-rates. One of our funniest moments came when Jonah decided to have a sit on the bed next to Liv while we were packing… which was all well and good until I came bounding over and leapt onto the bed to Liv’s startled: ‘NOO! Don’t sit on him!!!!’ Thankfully, he bounded clean away, but I’ve never before moved so fast to get up!! It would’ve been like squishing my first-born……..! For some added excitement to our daily activities, a large extended family of termites moved into our bathroom and started building their termite nests ACROSS the doorway. Add to this bathroom experience a dripping toilet cistern caught in a bucket that overflowed to create a lake around the toilet, a spider that liked to live (only sometimes!) in my face-cloth in the shower, and a toilet seat cracked in juuuust the right spot to sometimes pinch your bum and sometimes not (life’s always a gamble!)… and you might just understand how by the end of our stay, we were quite nervous of our bathroom!!
Another highlight of our time in Kilema was going to visit the homes of the two orphans that we’re sponsoring through school. Rose is being cared for by her elderly grandmother, who has several other kids to care for too, as well as a farm to run. Gilbert is one of eight being raised by his grandparents, and Liv also decided to sponsor Gilbert’s older sister after we’d gone out to meet the rest of the family. To ‘repay our generosity’, the grandmother decided she would give us a parting gift – a chicken for Mama Flora to take home and cook for us. All of this exchange, of course, occurred in Swahili, so all that we know is ‘huh, why’s the boy crawling into the chicken coop.’ ‘woah, he’s got one! I wonder what’s going on…’ until suddenly the chicken was being bound and Mama Flora explained it was about to be dinner. I, clearly not rational in a situation involving something being killed in my honour, started loudly protesting – nay, pleading – all sense of cultural appropriateness out the window. The grandmother and Mama Flora continued to insist, Liv and I continued to insist against it, until it seemed we’d lost the battle, and I promptly burst into silent tears with a ‘Just not the chicken! Anything but the chicken.’ and a quiet pleading to my rational counterpart: ‘Liv… make it stop…!’ I wasn’t quite mentally present for the rest of the situation, and I’m not quite sure what she said, but it clearly did the trick… and the chicken lived to see another day! Perhaps one of the most traumatic – and, in hindsight, amusing – experiences so far!!!!!
For a couple of days toward the end of our stay we made the journey up the mountain to the last town on Kili, as far as you can go before you actually have to start climbing the mountain! Here lives a group of self-sufficient nuns, who own a compound of land where they grow flowers from all over the world, maintain a small orchard, a not-so-small vegie patch, a small banana plantation (much like every family in rural Tanzania!!) and farm a small stock of cows, pigs, fish, chickens, ducks and one turkey (as well as quite a few resident GIANT snails about the size of my whole hand…! Wouldn’t want to step on thooose going barefoot up your driveway in the middle of the night, ey?!) We had an absolute ball – bonding with the animals and wandering around the forested portion of the nun’s compound. Even at the altitude of the orphanage we’d been pretty light-headed and easily-puffed, but up with the nuns it was quite ridiculous. It got the point of stopping ever few metres up a hill to recover and regain our breath as if we’d just run three flights of stairs!! Made me pretty glad I’d decided against climbing Kilimanjaro until next trip (post-intensive-gym-sessions, methinks!)…..!! One of Bob’s older adopted kids, Efuam, walked up to bring us back ‘home’ to Kilema, and during our descent through the villages, a huge torrential downpour struck. The three of us ducked into the nearest shack and Efuam asked if we could wait out the storm on their little verandah….. so there we were for about an hour on little stools, on a verandah on which we could barely fit, nestled in amongst the family’s washing line, singing to entertain ourselves and them, and waiting for the rain to ease a little. As night fell, however, and the road down the mountain turned increasingly into a little raging river, we decided we’d best just take our chances. It took us over an hour to get back home, slipping and sliding and getting completely saturated in the impossibly strong rain. It was so strong we could barely hear or see, and all the moutain paths were full of running water – and all the dirt turned to slippery mud. It was such a ridiculous situation we just laughed almost the whole way down. TUrned out it rained like that through the entire night, and the storms brought down the power all over the region for a couple of days. Everyone was saying they’d never remembered seeing rain like that at this time of the year. Crazy times.

We left Kilimanjaro soon after the nunnery holiday, with a few parting gifts to the kids we’d shared the compound with, and some fabric for Mama Flora to make herself some new dresses with. Then it was goodbye to the kids and Kilema, and off down the mountain to Moshi for a few days to re-organise ourselves and get ready for safari!! So, from Moshi we hopped a local bus (which was a bit like the big brother to the dala-dala) for the two hours to Arusha, during which journey we were kept preoccupied from worrying about whether we would survive the Tanzanian roads and the speeding bus, by instead pondering where the instense rotting fish smell was coming from – the unsettling answer turned out to be; from the bag that was falling out of the luggage rack and resting atop my head the entire voyage. (!)

In Arusha we joined our safari – the expensive and luxurious part of trip. The tour had us booked into an amazing safari lodge for our first night in Arusha – complete with a swimming pool, toilets that flush, and people to carry guests’ bags! I almost had an aneurism in excitement at a ‘soy milk alternative, 30c extra’ on the coffee menu … only for my hopes to be dashed with a ‘sorry, that’s not available this month.’ Our ‘camping’ experience through the whole trip in the Serengeti involved turning up to the campsite and having all our tents meticulously erected already for us, and a hot meal of three courses prepared and served to us on floral dishes on a sturdy camp table covered in a table-cloth!! We thought it was a bit of a joke really… In Arusha we met the rest of our safari companions – mostly middle-aged, richer people from Europe and America, who’d flown out just for two weeks to Climb Kili and go on safari, and escape their bitter resentment at their lives back home. Needless to say, we didn’t find many friends among the group – aside from an amazing woman from Canada who was one of the most genuine and interesting people I’ve met so far on this trip!

The safari itself, though, was INCREDIBLE!! We spent five days in the wilds of Tanzania – one night camped at Lake Manyara, where baboons and vervet monkeys played just beside the road and blue monkeys were leaping through the treetops. We spent hours just watching primates!!! From Lake Manyara we drove into the mighty Serengeti… meaning (and it’s easy to see why!) ‘endless plains’ in Swahili. The southern Serengeti, on our first day, provided for our photographic pleasure hundreds upon hundreds of the ‘migration animals’ who later in the season embark on their great migration through the serengeti – wildebeest, zebra, impala and gazelle. After game driving all day and watching endless wildebeet stampedes, we camped at a small bush camp right in the Serengeti national park – with elephants buffalo and hyenas wandering through the campsite all night (though we didn’t see any of this. Going to the toilet in the middle of the night, though, involved a ‘team pee!’ stipulated for safety reasons, and Liv and I saw many low-flying bats!!)

The next day we headed into the heart of the northern Serengeti for that entire day and half of the next – up early to see the sunrise and catch lions and leopards and cheetahs before they lay down in the shade and went to sleep for the heat of the day, and late enough into the evening to see the amaaaaazing sunset across the flat-topped acacia trees. We were in a typical safari jeep, so I spent most of my time standing on the seat with my head poking out the top of the jeep, wind in my face, scanning the horizon for lions and giraffes, being absorbed into the vastness and wildly dreaming about running away and joining the African Zoological Society conducting research in the park! It was magical landscape, and no words could possibly do it justice!! (Photos to come, though!)

In our travels we saw every animal there is to see in the Serengeti. The highlights were seeing giraffes fight (so bizarre!! Never seen any doco with THAT in it before!!), a group of malibu storks and vultures feeding on a zebra carcas, a hippo roll over in a pool and show his cute little stubby legs and white belly, and a leopard who woke up out of a tree at dusk, climbed down, and walked right over to the road and right underneath our car!! It was not two metres below us. The guides had said the whole time that we were likely to see all the animals except a leopard, because they’re so shy and sneaky. It was awesome! However, my camera battery decided that was the opportune moment to die. Not so awesome.

By far the scariest and most intense moment of the safari was when we drove a smidge too close to some elephants who were grazing away from their herd. The mother and baby were a few metres from the road, and the big boy elephant (with mighty huge pointy tusks, and taller than the car, may I add!) was on the opposite side of the road. He came striding up to the car looking ferocious, stopped about a foot from us, took a step back and raised his trunk in a massive loud trumpet call……….thankfully, just before walking off to join the other two! At this point, with the six of us ducked firmly back into our seats and with hearts in our throats, our guide told us ‘Oh wow – that’s what they do to let their opponent know they’re about to charge.’  …..*gulp

After the Serengeti we drove out to Ngorongoro Crater and Olduvai Gorge – the first amazing because of the incredible amounts of flamingo in the gorgeous misty lake in the crater, and because of the white rhino (one of which we saw with a babyyyy!); the second amazing for the history and science and the inspired dreams to suddenly be Mary Leaky.

We spent our last night camped on the rim of Ngorongoro Crater, where we had to ‘bush-pig-proof’ our tents before we slept, for the massive bush pigs that can smell minty toothpaste and will tear a tent apart looking for it. There were also massive vulture birds that were over half my height with strong nasty beaks the size of my arm, loitering around the campsite and generally making an otherwise leisurely trip to the toilet an apprehensive half-jog fuelled by adrenaline. From the camp we watched the sun set (and rise!!) above the crater…gorgeous.
We spent one last night back in the luxurious Arusha lodge, and the next day Liv and I were up at 7am to catch the bus for eight hours, across field and stream, only half the time on roads… and into Kenya.

…..to be continued, in a day or so!

( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX07j9SDFcc !!!! )

“Another year over… a new one just begun!” January 6, 2010

Ugh, again the long delay! Apologies, apologies! Life is busy…but let me tell you about the most epic new year’s eve so far in my little life!

After Christmas, another volunteer (Molly, from the States) arrived on the mountain for a few days, and soon after, the three of us descended the mountain for Moshi-town (or Mo-Town, as the locals like to call it!). We spent our last few days of 2009 exploring (and the girls shopping their hearts out and together buying half the stock of the fabric stores in town), and enjoying the presence of electricity and running water. Mama Flora and one of Bob’s “kids” Salome, who’s now a teacher in the south of Tanzania and had just come home for Christmas, came down the mountain with us, and showed us all the cheap and good places to eat, and did our haggling for us so that we wouldn’t get wazungu prices (white people prices). It was all good fun!

On New Year’s Eve, Salome had gone off home and Mama Flora had gone back up the mountain to prepare for her daughter’s confirmation celebrations the next day, so we three little wazungu were on our own in Moshi for the first time. We started our celebrations with dinner and local beers (with names like ‘Safari’ and ‘Serengeti’, and each of course with a lion or elephant or the like on the label!), on a rooftop bar in the centre of Moshi. The power was out, so we ate by candlelight, and we had an amazing view of snow-capped Mt Kilimanjaro and the beautiful African sunset. I’d never felt more like I was IN AFRICA than I did watching the year turn over, with the ‘rooftop of Africa’ looming into the sky above us.

After dinner (or rather, after it became too dark to see, and we had begun to feel the effects of our Big-Five-clad local beers), we headed off from our rooftop views with the aim of meeting a friend Molly knew through a friend in the States (and had never met), who has been living in Moshi for two years with her Tanzanian boyfriend. So we caught a taxi from the hotel – which was actually more the experience of being herded into a taxi with ‘Moshi Club? Yes, ok, this way!’ ‘wait, how much?’’4000 shilingi’ ‘hapana, hapana, 2000 shilingi’ ‘no, 3000 shilingi!’ ‘ah rafiki, c’mon, 2000 shilingi!!’ ‘ok ok, 2000’ – only to find that they thought we’d said A Moshi club, not ‘Moshi Club’……… and we found ourselves dropped in front of a club quite literally on the wrong side of the railway tracks in the scary part of town, completely deserted aside from drunk club employees milling outside, and a scowl-y band of about 15 military men armed with large guns, loitering at the entrance. Our taxi driver had already left, so we sat down on the steps of the club and called a driver who we knew, to come and get us. 45 minutes and two phone calls (where we had to explain ‘yes, we meant for you to come get us NOW, not tomorrow’) later, our driver came to our rescue and took us to the REAL Moshi club!! It was in the rich (read: white) part of town, just outside of Moshi, called Shanty town. At Moshi club we met Molly’s friends and sat down for a second dinner and some more local beers, while we watched a new year’s performance of drumming, traditional singing, tribal Masai dancing, and the performances of a youth acrobatic troupe. It was absolutely incredible.

At about 11pm we moved on to an outdoor club called Glacier, where the ‘official’ new year’s celebrations were taking place. There was a huuuuge bonfire, big grass huts set up with squat toilets (read: holes in the ground), an outdoor dancefloor and local band, and hundreds of Africans and western people milling about, dancing and drinking and chatting. We danced a bit, absorbed the atmosphere, and were generally once more overwhelmed by the feeling that we were seeing out the year in the middle of Africa, under a haunting full moon forming a halo of eerie yellow in the wispy clouds above. (Our second full moon cycle since leaving Australia – crazy!) Even the turning of the year was celebrated, not so surprisingly, in classic “Swahili Time” – with none of that old countdown nonsense, and about ten minutes after the real midnight as shown on my carefully calibrated phone, probably just when enough people decided it was about midnight, and started to feel like lighting fireworks. (Swahili Time is both liberating, and frustrating at the same time! Liberating in lifestyle, frustrating at mealtimes and when forced to wait hours for someone to show up to a meeting time/place!) There were the main fireworks set off, but in addition to that there were small pockets of individual fireworks being set off by locals…so we fast learned that if we saw a kid running, it was wise to take cover or move in the same direction, coz he’d just lit a bunch of fireworks in the crowd! The traditional Tanzanian way of marking the turn of the year is to fire a round of bullets into the sky, too. This added to the adrenaline already pumping through our poor wazungu bloodstreams!

Soon after midnight we were quite worn out from said adrenaline, and from bad sleep in our hostel the night before, and decided a hasty retreat back to a rooftop in Moshi was a superb idea, to share some more beers between the three of us and sit in humble awe of imposing Kilimanjaro and the epic African night sky.

Back at our hostel rooftop bar – ready for a quiet beer to top off our awesome night, on our way to bed – we found a group of travelling guys, two from Israel and two from Slovakia, who had just arrived from Zanzibar. So we shared beers and travel stories and Swahili words we’d respectively learned, and ended up back in their dorm room, chatting until 4am about differences between cultures, including a demonstration of the differences between smoking a bong American-style verses Israeli-style (!).

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Our epic 24 hours of new year’s continued into the first day of 2010. Our saviour driver came back to pick us up from our hostel in the morning, dropped Molly off to her hotel (where she was to meet her mum and sister just returning from climbing Mt Kilimanjaro!), and drove Liv and me the hour back up the mountain, ‘home’ to Kilema.

Now, this first day of the year is quite auspicious for this mountain village – 300 kids were having their confirmation at the church this morning, one of whom was Mama Flora’s little girl, Lilian. We missed mass (oh, woops) and arrived just in time to find everyone leaving the church – hundreds of beautifully-clad children in suits and dresses, clambering into the back trays of utes (trucks) to be driven in family hoards back to their respective celebrations. We found Mama Flora and her gang, with relatives who’d come from all around Tanzania for Lilian’s special day, and eventually (Swahili Time!) all started to move in the direction of Mama’s parent’s house. Now, we’d been a bit dubious about wanting to attend this confirmation ceremony, neither of us really knowing what to expect, and a bit chastened after thinking an African Catholic mass would be a good idea last week and then getting to the church to find it was three hours of Swahili in hard-backed pews (although worth every minute of it, in hindsight, for the amazing singing of the last half hour!!). However, an African (and maybe Western?!) confirmation is an incredible celebration!!! (And as it turned out, we were apparently something of guests of honour, so were two-fold lucky that we didn’t decide to stay in Moshi with Molly!!)

The celebrations started in the dala dala (terrifying small mini-vans that serve as public buses, with bench seats, that are probably licensed to carry about 10 yet routinely fit 30, and proceed to hurtle around towns at speeds at least double what a sane person would deem safe – and up and down mountain dirt roads that one would otherwise rather tackle only in a four-wheel-drive, at 20km/hr). So squashed into a dala dala, children all over everyone, the family started up singing a traditional Swahili song that was basically ‘look at Lilian, shining and beautiful’ repeated, lead by Mama Flora and followed in a chorus from everyone else. They sang this all the way home, and then we were stopped at the entrance to the grandparent’s place by an aunt who continued the chanting for a good five minutes, keeping us outside the premises, until a traditional drinking instrument (for which I’ve forgotten the name but is essentially an African wooden cup on a long stick…you’d know it if you saw it!) full of ‘mbege’ (local brew…. fermented banana mixture with millet something-or-other, that the locals drink by the barrel) which had to be passed down the line to a Swahili chant, and everyone passing the threshold had to drink in Lilian’s honour. We were then led into the yard, and Lilian and her little helpers (like bridesmaids, but for confirmation?) were seated in the place of honour on the verandah, overlooking the rest of the family and friends seated in rows across the yard (probably about 50). We too, much to our dismay, were seated on this raised ‘stage’ facing all these people!!!! (Liv through a gritted-teeth-smile: ‘no! I don’t want to sit here, Iwanttositdownthere!!’ Jem, also through gritted-teeth-smile: ‘And juuuuuuuust keep smiling…..’)

The ceremony progressed with speeches, translated especially for us every second line by an uncle come from Dar who had impeccable English, then an amazing feast lunch, and then a cake-eating ceremony where Lilian had to feed everyone a piece of cake on a toothpick. More speeches, and a short sermon by the priest and some prayers (during which Lilian’s older bridesmaid-y helper girl, Nancy, who we’d got to know on Christmas day with all the dancing and who had particularly good English too, got a fit of improper giggles because apparently every time we did the crossing yourself thing I was getting confused and apparently ended up waving my hand in front of my chest and hoping for the best… kind of like first learning the Nutbush in a large group of people who already know every move and the music is going too fast).

The most memorable part of the celebrations, however, came during the present-giving ceremony. It was a simple concept – the gift-giver would approach the ‘stage’ where the girls were sitting, would hand the present across to Lilian, then shake Lilian’s hand, then the hand of the older girl Nancy, and then the hand of the younger girl Lulu (probably about 5 years old). Mama Flora and her husband gave their gift, shook the hands, and stepped down. The priest came up; same deal. All a very smooth ceremony, clearly an important ritual. And then Olivia and I were summonsed up. Already nervous at having to do this in front of everyone, with one uncle filming and one uncle snapping photos of us, and still just mimicking what everyone else was doing, we stood up, and approached the girls with our gift. We handed over the present to Lilian, both shook her hand, and then both reached out for little Lulu’s hand. In one instant, she’s stretching out her little hand with a big grin on her face… the next thing we all know, she’s unexpectedly let out the biggest sneeze I’ve ever heard, right into her hand that was poised right near her face on its way to shaking ours. We froze. Lilian and Nancy froze. Lulu froze. We all just stared in horror at the brain-sized lump of snot filling her tiny hand, all of us knowing that Liv and I had to shake that, all of us knowing that this is a crucial part of the ceremony… all of us knowing there was no way in the world we were willing to be fulfilling that duty! The girls leapt to action, clearing it all up as best they could, while Liv and I (helpfully) dissolved into a fit of barely-contained giggles before noticing no-one else was laughing (!), and through yet again gritted-teeth-smile/giggle we comforted each other ‘hand sanitizer, it’s ok, hand sanitizer!’ as we forced ourselves to shake poor little Lulu’s hand.

It was soon after this that the celebrations were winding up and we were beginning to pass out on stage from our four-hours sleep the night before, so we summonsed a dala dala and hurtled our way back through the villages to our ‘home’ at Babu Bob’s compound. Mama Flora tells us the singing and dancing went on until 1am that night.

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Since then, we’ve settled back in to mountain time… with the daily rains, the constant dropping out of power, the dial-up net that’s never reliable, and our sparse little room that becomes more and more well-loved each day! Since new year’s we’ve had the orphans coming around every day to play jump-rope, and soccer, and blow bubbles with mixture that Molly brought with her (she brought enough little toys to deck out the orphanage for a year!!). One little girl, the first person I’ve met who I’ve known to be HIV positive, has become like my shadow, though she doesn’t speak any English. I sat on the steps outside the compound this morning drinking my tea and little Scholer sat next to me with a cup of warm milk and mimicked my moves – drinking when I drank, scratching her nose when I scratched mine. Then Liv and I played dress-ups with a couple of the kids, and we all blew up balloons and played outside until they started popping. Mama Flora organized for the older kids to come by each day for a few hours of English tutoring, and today was our first ‘session’… a bit difficult with varying levels of English between them, and difficult with their shyness at telling us whether they understand, whether they already know it…or telling us anything at all really!!! Hopefully as they get to know us, they will come out of their shells!!!

Well that’s all for now. I’ll try to write about Egypt in the coming days. Hope ya’ll are well and happy. xxxxxx

Christmas on Kilimanjaro!! December 25, 2009

Merry Christmas everyone!!! Well this is shaping up to be one of the most interesting Christams’s so far for me – I am on Mt Kilimanjaro at the orphanage, and an uncharecteristic monsoon-like rainfall is keeping us all confined to the tiny house, and electricity has been off all morning! There are 8 local kids playing cards and being mischievious, mama Flora and another local woman cooking up a big lunch on the fire in the kitchen – stranded with us coz of the rain, unable to walk the 45 min walk back to their house through the forest. Olivia and I have been hearing stories from old Babu Bob, and entertaining ourselves in the candlelight by singing Christmas carols, attemping to drown out the torrential rain on the tin roof of the shack, and trying to remember words to old folk songs from the 70s with Bob (Joan Baez’s ‘the night they drove old dixie down’ killed a good two hours until between the three of us we finally remembered all the words!!), and eating lots of fresh mango and pineapple and drinking amazing local African coffee! The electricity has come back on for the past half hour so I’m just giving a quick update to wish you all some seasons greetings!!!!! I hope you’re all having (or have had…still not used to the time difference!) an amazing Christmas day. Enjoy your electricity for us!  Here’s an update I wrote offline yesterday, and gives you an idea of how things are here on the mountain so far! Gimme a few days and I’ll write about Egypt and Zanzibar too!!! Merry Christmas everyone!!! Missing you all tonnes xxxxxxxxxx Jem

December 24^th 2009

Finally! I have arrived at Kilimanjaro!! After a month of living out of a pack and travelling constantly, it’s such a great feeling to know where the next few weeks will be spent, to be able to unpack, and to happily not have to worry about feeding myself! Olivia and I arrived laaate, late last night to the mountain after 12 hours on a bus from one side of Tanzania to the other. I (thinking it’d be a matter of rocking up and hopping on a bus – and forgetting it was Christmas-time) hadn’t booked the bus from Dar es Salaam up north to Himo, …so we arrived in Dar at 6pm the night before we were to travel, to find all the buses completely booked out! Luckily we came across a nice toothless old fellow who was in the know, and he took us under his wing and somehow managed to magically wrangle us seats on a full bus…… we had to get up at 5am, and then delays kept our bus from leaving Dar until 9:30am, but we were still overjoyed to be on a bus at all!!

Up in Himo one of the orphanage organizers, Flora, had been waiting for us at the bus stop for many hours – yet was somehow still in amazing spirits when we finally showed up! There were so many buses coming in to the one-shelter bus-stop, however, that our bus kept going and just let us off on the side of the road, with small dala-dala vans honking us to get out of the way, and locals swarming us to try to get us into a taxi (‘You are come to climb Kili!’ ‘No!’ ‘Yes, you are! Come this way, you stay overnight, climb in morning!’ ‘We’re not climbing the stupid mountain!!’). So we stood on a slight embankment, laden with packs, sleepless, hungry and bedraggled, until Flora could walk from the bus stop to where we’d been dropped off. Flora is a gorgeous Tanzanian ‘mama’, who never stops chatting (often to us in Swahili until she realizes we’re staring at her blankly and changes over to English with a hearty laugh), never stops smiling, and seems to know absolutely everyone on this side of the mountain. After collecting us from the side of the road she then found a portion of road for us to stand around ‘inconspicuously’ (yeah right!) while she wandered off to find us a taxi at local prices rather than white prices. The taxi took us up onto Kilimanjaro, and we watched out the window as lights and people became fewer and fewer and the bush became thicker and thicker, until we reached a quiet little village called Kilema. Babu (grandfather) Bob and Flora run their orphanage on the outskirts of Kilema.

Here we were greeted by Babu Bob himself – an ex NASA computer programmer, and then ex US Peace Corps volunteer, who has lived in Africa for the past 25 years. Now here is a man who loves to talk. I have never heard so many words come out of one person before. And what makes things more interesting is the long, frequent pauses where it appears he has passed out, but in fact is just trying to remember what he was saying. I panic a little every time, hoping he hasn’t had a stroke or something… (he claims to have had three already – as well as 40 bouts of malaria, 2 cases of paralytic polio as a young’un, a 15-inch bowel resection (now using a colostomy bag) and his most recent operation where they killed the AV node of his heart and he’s now kept beating by a pulse generator. Now there’re some batteries you don’t want to run out of…)

Babu has four Tanzanian ‘kids’ who he’s taken in and put through school, one who’s made it off to grad school in England, and three who are still living in his little three-room house here. Their room is next to ours. These rooms are deliciously barren! It would be grossly exaggerating if I described the bed Liv and I are sharing as a ‘double bed’… so it’s a good thing we’re both tiny! It does seem to us a bit like a king bed at the moment, though, since a particularly rough night we spent at a shoddy hostel in Zanzibar last week – the beds were probably the same size as this (maybe a single and half), but Zanzibar was as hot and humid as a sauna AND electricity-less, and  one of the mosquito nets was broken…. So we bunked in under one net, confined to our own impossibly small piece of bed where we could sleep in one configuration not touching the net for mozzies, and each other for the heat. It was a painful, painful night! But, more about our Zanzibar experience later…!

So apart from our seemingly king sized small bed, there is a wardrobe, and a wooden stool large enough to hold a jug of water and a glass….and that’s it! We’ve got our own little ‘ensuite’ room, with a toilet that uses half of Lake Victoria to flush, and a shower that feels more like being peed on than taking a shower…but it turns out we have the only working shower in the facilities, so we’re very happy with our piddling-shower experience! The electricity in Tanzania is only on about half the time – the country has happily produced all of its electricity from hydroelectric power for ages, but because of the drought of the last two years, there’s no longer enough water coming through to power it, so the country suffers wide-spread black-outs randomly every day. There was also no malaria this high up the mountain until recent years – again due to the drought and steadily rising temperatures.

Just down the road is the banana plantations of the village, and a snaking dirt trail along which women walk to the local tiny market with loads of fresh cut bananas that weigh as much as I do stacked on their heads…where they trade their fruit for the vegetables of the farms the other side of the market.

The Journey November 26, 2009

I am off – with open heart, open mind, and an open ticket – to explore Africa and Asia (and maybe South America) for the next 4-10 months. (Who knows!) Internet access will be few and far between, but I aim to update this travel blog whenever I can, as well as upload photos to Facebook at every opportunity!

Come along, won’t you?  

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The Itinerary THUS FAR:

 1. Dubai

2. Egypt – Sahara desert, sailing the Nile, hangin’ on the Red Sea. (Nov-Dec)

3. Tanzania – Zanzibar (Dec)

4. Mt Kilimanjaro – working at an orphanage and teaching English in a school (Dec-Jan)

5. Serengeti Safari, Masai Mara – Kenya (Jan-Feb)

6. …………..???!