Rabbiting On

More from the creative frontline

2011-12-19T17:44:00.000+01:00

Talking about making things: since my iPad is my new best friend, I am constantly discovering apps that allow me to create in materials I used to use, but haven't for a long time. I used to be hooked on screen printing. Something about the logic of layering inks, the mind twisting required to think back to front and in mirror image, put me in a special frame of mind. The only problem is, screen printing requires a lot of space, inks, tools, drying racks...

Enter LetterMPress. Yes, I know it's a letterpress simulation, and therefore mainly for text-based prints. But the same brain-scrambling effort required to put together a decent print makes it better than any game for me right now. Only $2.99 to the end of the month.

Trying a new thing

2011-12-18T14:38:00.002+01:00

So what with the house move and travelling and writing the book (more on that later) I find myself short of time to keep up my diary. I have been writing it since I was fourteen, and I am not about to pack it in now, but for the time being I am looking for a quicker outlet. So I came up with keeping a visual diary, a quick drawing of events every day. It also keeps me in sketching mode, something I have neglected criminally in the last few years, and allows me to practice drawing. I focus on three major events of the day (not as easy as it sounds, I've had a lot going on lately) and try to visualise them. My naturalistic drawing of objects has always been quite terrible, ditto faces and bodies, but I am not letting that stop me. Here are more samples. The sketchbook gives me background colours, but I have decided to move on to a daily calendar type book from January 1st.

It's National day in Dubai. Watch out on the roads!

2011-12-04T10:01:00.001+01:00

The 40th anniversary of it's founding is reason for any country to celebrate. Flags, parties, fireworks... And in Dubai it all happens in the middle of the road. Dubai traffic police is trying to reign things in this year, so the following advice appeared in Gulf News.

Follow traffic rules.
Don't stick posters on car windows that block the view.
Don't stick your head out of windows or dance on the bonnets of you car as this could lead to accidents.
Do not carry more than the number of people usually allowed in a vehicle.
Motorists are strongly urged not to change the colours of their vehicles or tint the windshield beyond the accepted limit.
Don't create chaos on the streets.
Car number plates should not be concealed with decorations and or be spray-painted over.
Motorists should not blow their horns continuously or add devices that increase noise.
Stopping the vehicle in the middle of the road to talk to others creates traffic jams and should be avoided.
Don't blockade the road with spontaneous parades or celebrations.

Reading this on the plane made me think that Dubai traffic police may be a little over cautious and pessimistic regarding people's traffic sense, but judging by the behavious I saw on the road this weekend I am glad that they are on the ball.

Apostrophe crime

2011-12-01T14:55:00.001+01:00

The only excuse could be that it was committed by a German who didn't know any better.

Location:Düsseldorf,Germany

What I'll Miss - Germany

2011-11-14T17:28:00.001+01:00

It's been almost two years (and too few entries on this blog, alas), so it's about time we moved on from Germany. Packing up our stuff has become a well-rehearsed affair, the only novelty lies in the items we sell off this time and whether everything goes into storage or gets shipped immediately to the new destination.

This is my third attempt at living in Germany, maybe my last. What will I miss when I leave?

The bread, dark and heavy with grains, sold by the local baker women who are almost friendly after all this time of me shopping there every day.
The eco-greengrocer round the corner and the fresh produce, including the wide variety of cabbage, root vegetables and apples. Despite being open at seemingly random hours and only taking cash, I always look forward to checking out the season's fruit and veg.
The Folkwangmuseum. Once dubbed 'The Most Beautiful Museum in the World', it is glamorous, airy, and full of amazing Expressionist art. Shame about the cafe that can only be visited after paying the entrance fee.
Popping in to my mum's on a whim, for a cup of tea and a long chat. Anytime.
Trains that run on time. Really, they are! And cheap, clean and stylish to boot. How romantic to know that I can get to Berlin, Moscow, Vienna, without even changing, directly from Essen Hauptbahnhof. Not to forget the iPhone app that let's me look up timetables, the BahnCard that gives me money off the ticket, and the promptly answered phone line with accurate information. Take that, British Rail!
Our glorious flat, the big windows with the hot summer view over the forest, the long desk in the office, the projector and screen for watching movies on the squishy sofa.

Museum of Islamic Art in Doha

2011-08-05T17:09:00.001+02:00

Stone screen

The plan had been to spend Friday, our last free day in Doha. visiting the Museum of Islamic Art (Flash), but Ramadan interfered with that idea. Everything is closed during the day right now, the sweltering heat in August combined with the fasting making a ghost town out of Doha, which by all accounts isn’t a hip place at the best of times. I had been expecting a Dubai-esque city and had been disappointed. Our hotel was sumptuous and brilliantly positioned next to the renovated Souk Waqif, but since everywhere was closed all day I felt I was living in a gilded cage for the week.

Carved water jug filters

So instead of a long Friday ramble round a museum we took our only chance and visited on Thursday evening, when the museum was open from 8 till 11pm. I was wary, already let down my the fancy websites for Doha’s museum city that turned out to be a front for a group of unfinished projects. In Dubai cultural events organisers also had the tendency to hype a venue where the reality was somewhat less glittery than the brochure.

“Calligraphy is jewellery fashioned by the hand from the pure gold of the intellect.”

Wooden screen from India

The walk to the museum was long and hot, along the busy road that followed the corniche. The palm-lined path up to the museum entrance was worryingly quiet and we were relieved that the lights were on inside the building. Walking into the mercifully cooled atrium, above us a dark dome, a staircase floating in a swirl around the central entrance. A carved copper light ring wreathed the empty air. Pale cream marble and shiny black granite formed geometric patterns on the ground - magnificent, spare and classy.

The Atrium

We had no opportunity to dawdle as the cafe - despite assurance to the contrary - was closed. Just as well, since we needed all the time we had to get through the themed galleries on the first floor: Calligraphy, pattern, animals and people in Islamic art, and the connection of art and science. We never even made it to the second floor, where the displays were organised along a timeline covering the geography of Islam: Iran, Iraq, India, Syria, North Africa, Al-Andalus. The ring of display rooms circling the central stairway was infused with a dim and silent atmosphere. High walls covered in grooved greystone and coarse dark fabric swallowed light and sound, leaving large glass display cases to float serenely along the walls and in the centre of the rooms.

“All Islamic pattern is based on the idea that what we see is always and only part of a whole that extends to infinity.”

Brass Astrolabe

Each invisibly-lit case housed just one or two exquisite items, perfectly displayed to enhance its unique craftsmanship: a stone carving so intricate and fragile that I mistook it for a wooden screen, tiny elaborate patterns disguising the stone’s heaviness; a pure white bowl marked with an off-centre line of black calligraphy, modern and abstract despite its 15th century origin; a seven metre long Hajj certificate depicting the holy places to be visited, with six witness signatures to prove the hajji’s travels; a silver soldier’s helmet seemingly designed by a workshop in Middle Earth, complete with an ivory oliphant, a hunting horn carved from an elephant’s tusk; a set of clay filters delicately carved despite being completely invisible until the water jar they are set into breaks; a line of elegant gold calligraphy, written on the skeleton of a dried leaf. In short, if you are in Doha, you must visit the Islamic Art Museum. More photos here.

South Africa 2010

2011-01-31T12:09:00.000+01:00

South Africa 2010, a set on Flickr.

It was as if we were returning home.

Before and after

2010-12-21T14:44:00.001+01:00

Going for a walk in the White a few days ago. Crunching snow underfoot, misty breath, heavy boots, long johns, two pairs of socks, hat scarf, gloves.

Today, whiling the afternoon away at 20C, sipping tea on a terrace while the sunset turns the sky peachy and the air musky with evaporated sprinkler water. Wearing sandals, linen shirt, no socks!

Location:312th Rd,Dubai,United Arab Emirates

My home from the air

2010-08-15T18:46:00.004+02:00

We went flying today, now that Stuart has his license current again. This is first time I have seen the Ruhrgebiet from the air. It's hard to describe how I felt, privileged and awed, surprised at the shape this conurbation takes from the air. Travelling around it on the ground, despite the frequent fields and parks, the Ruhrgebiet feels like a big city, Bottrop joined to Oberhausen which is inseparable from Essen, which is invisibly connected to Bochum, which slowly seeps into Dortmund and so on. From the air there really is no join at all, our navigation takes place along the grid of motorways and canals: the A2 to the North, the Rhine to the West, Ruhr to the South, and Dortmund airspace preventing us from going too far to the East. In between we discover a mass of surprises: The vast swathe cut by the Rhine-Herne canal which is mostly invisible from the road, a fat waterway filled with barges and edged by industrial sites, and the occasional marina;

Canal lock near Gelsenkirchen

I had no idea that they were still working mines, or related coal industry, and there they are, mine shaft elevators, smoking chimneys, black coal heaps. And right next to the filth vast fields are being shorn of their wheat, as if we weren't in the middle of an industrial belt. The local mountain scenery of slag heaps, those monuments to the local past consisting of steel making waste and toxic left overs of the coke industry are not as visible as I expected, as overwhelming as they are when driving along a road only to have a sudden hill rearing up off the plains. I guess landscape flattens out from this high angle. Those slag heaps that have been crowned by a post modern artifice like a wind turbine or Recklinghausen's horizon observatory stick out, the rest melt into the general park/forest/nature area, covered as they are in mature trees and other old vegetation.

Horizon observatory in Recklinghausen

There were surprises like the extensive prison site right near the A42 motorway that no one has ever noticed before, or the strange industrial shapes of water towers, gas containers, coal trains and water clearance ponds. And bridges. There are many, across train lines, canals, rivers and roads, and many are architectural fancies with colourful lines and abstract swirls. Or naturalistic ones, like the dragon bridge in Recklinghausen.

Of course we spend some time house spotting, looking for my mum's house, my brother's. Our own is unfortunately directly below us as we approach finals on the airfield, therefore invisible. We missed many other places of interest, so there will be another flight soon.

And suddenly I am realising that this may, after all my professing that I am a European, a World nomad, that I don't belong to a place, after all that this may be my home. Although I am not sure yet.

The rest of the photos are here:

Location:Zeppelinstraße,Mulheim,Germany

Kirmes

2010-08-10T22:55:00.000+02:00

Germany has the best fairs: big wheels, roller coasters, wall of death and boxing rings. Cranger Kirmes is my favourite, and it's on for ten days!

Reasons for owning an iPad #73

2010-06-06T11:54:00.000+02:00

I've been meaning to read Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" for ages, but have you seen the size of the hardback Stuart bought? Instead, now this:

That's better.

The final cleanup

2010-03-13T13:23:00.000+01:00

Ok, it's been 2 months since our return to civilisation (63 days, to be precise), and it's time to clean up this blog. Going back to normal means that the route, the blog roll and the photos will have to go, so does the calendar and other trip-related links.

But, just in case they come in handy in future, I am not going to delete them as such, instead I will park them in this blog post for future reference.

The route:

View The Big Trip in a larger map

The Flickr photostream:

www.flickr.com

More of fiverlocker's stuff tagged with BigTrip

The calendar:

Nottingham in Scandinavia

2010-02-14T12:20:00.001+01:00

Obviously, we have now well and truly arrived in Europe. Stories from the last weeks will follow. For now, a moment of recognition in Stockholm, even if the meaning is different.

Border crossings

2010-01-08T09:24:00.000+01:00

Arriving in Europe through the Balkans has meant many many border crossings. One day we had breakfast in Macedonia, coffee on the high plains of the Kosovo and dinner on the coast of Montenegro. Countries have blurred, we barely have time to put our passports away, but we have also crossed plenty of invisible borders: the ‘donkey cart on the road’ border, or the ‘reliable road signs’ border, the ‘clean toilets at roadside petrol stations’ and the ‘no more flatbread’ border. Some we have relished (who doesn’t like a clean toilet), but there are some things I miss in this return to old familiarities. There is a marked distance to strangers now. It’s not that I miss the intense privacy intrusions of Ethiopia or the hassling touts of Egypt, but the easy hospitality of Sudan and the friendly curiosity of almost anywhere we pulled up, the willingness to accept my poor attempt at local language in the Arab world.

One of the concerns I had about this trip has been whether we’d be able to cross all those African borders, whether we’d have to bribe people, whether we’d be refused visas or have our car searched. None of these worries became reality in the end. Border formalities were unfailingly chaotic and inscrutable, took a few hours of standing in the heat wondering what it is about bureaucracy that wins through with even the most relaxed nationalities, but no-one ever showed one bit of interest in the contents of our car or gave us grief about our visas. There was of course the exception of Egypt where at both the incoming border at Aswan and the exit border at Nuweiba the officials displayed complete contempt for any sense of efficiency, courtesy or honesty, but that was a big exception. Now we are in the EU borders have become a part of that memory of strange things we did in Africa. We recently crossed the ‘not having to get out of the car’ border, and now they just are no more until we again leave the safe bosom of our home continent.

European landfall

2010-01-06T08:59:00.000+01:00

We have arrived on our home continent. Actually, we have crossed it half way already, in a mad dash to get to central heating and warm showers, i.e. my brother's house. Have a look at the map and you'll see the distances we made in the last three days. Yay for being able to drive in the dark again. I expect the next update to announce our arrival.

Happy new decade!

Syria photos

2009-12-31T10:25:00.001+01:00

Only three days, but what sights we saw! Feast your eyes on a crusader castle in the mist, skeletons for sale and aging olive soap.

Enjoy!

Data update Jordan and Syria

2009-12-30T22:42:00.001+01:00

Jordan: Zain came to the rescue again with a cheap pre-pay card and quick activation of mobile data in the shop in Aqaba (APN: internetpre, username: fastlink, password: fastlink). Data is 1JD per MB, and roaming is possible, but not easy as a prefix number is required. There is no 3G in Jordan, but Egde works in most places.

Syria: We were only there for three days, so didn’t even try to get a SIM card. In a related note, Facebook is blocked, although Flickr is not

Both countries have slow networks although wifi is frequent in hotels and cafes, and usually free.

GPS-less in the Middle East

2009-12-26T23:34:00.000+01:00

Oh, how we love Sally, our voluble GPS, who has been guiding us through Africa with the help of Tracks4Africa, Garmin’s East Africa streetmaps and a useful Mac program for route planning called Roadtrip. With the help of Sally we have been able to cross deserts (although Anja and Jörg’s GPX tracks of the new Sudan roads helped a lot), been able to pinpoint those elusive ferry crossings in Kazangula, Dar Es Salaam and points North; and make sure that we always found a camp site every night, even in the wilds of Ethiopia (although for some reason it didn’t list Tim and Kim’s). But the further North we went the sparser T4A got and when we left Egypt, our GPSing finally stopped and we were officially back to paper maps. Unfortunately the Middle East is neither well mapped nor blessed with book stores where a lost traveller might pick up a route book, so we have mostly been relying on the US basemap Sally falls back on when she is as clueless as we are, and the - utterly unsuited to driving - town maps of various Lonely Planets and Rough Guides (the Bradt guides weren’t even in the running as navigation aides, as their maps seem to have been lovingly hand drawn by a casual visitor to the region without access to any of the freely available satellite imagery, i.e. Google maps). This has resulted in a lot of aimless driving round Arab city centres trying to establish where we are, where we are trying to get to and generally being aggravated with each other. Here is an example of our attempt to find the Baron Hotel in Aleppo:

As you can see we took a spiral approach to our destination, in fact we drove past the hotel a few times before we found it, despite asking a variety of extremely helpful but cartographically challenged pedestrians, peering at miniscule street signs in the dark and trying to divine the direction of North by trying to remember where the sun set an hour ago.

So now you know that GPSless driving in foreign countries can lead to frustration, arguments and eventually divorce. Don’t do it!

Best of Jordan

2009-12-25T18:15:00.000+01:00

We only had a week - damn those transit visas - but we crammed in as much as possible in the way of ancient history and art. So here are the pictures, including a prancing horse, a truckload of tomatoes, abandoned racing chariots and a very tall flagpole that is visible from four countries.

Enjoy!

Has John Cleese been moonlighting?

2009-12-24T22:14:00.001+01:00

Looking at the endless roadside portraits of former and current heroes of Syria, which appeared in regular intervals along the motorways, we couldn't help but be weirded out by the strange resemblance between former Syrian president Hafez Al Assad (father of the current president) and comic genius John Cleese - it got us to wondering about the opportunities for hilarity that Cleese would have undoubtedly found in the American accusation of Syria as part of the Axis of Evil or the local destruction of Danish cheese during the demonstrations against the Mohammed cartoons. Plus, one of Assad's sons was called Basil, so there has to be a connection there somewhere, surely? Judge for yourself:

John Cleese

Hafez Al Assad, or is he?

The Madly Memorable Madaba Mosaic Manufacturers are most motivated

2009-12-23T12:36:00.000+01:00

Madaba is famous for its mosaics. Churches and ruins of private houses have floors covered in them, dotted all around this typical small Jordanian town. Most of them date from the Byzantine period, after 500AD, and they depict everything from maps to animals, biblical characters and elaborate patterns. And the best thing?

There is a mosaic school, where people learn to make these cool designs. Unfortunately there seems to be no way for a foreigner to learn to make mosaics, surely a missed tourist opportunity.

We dropped into a mosaic shop, where a young man showed us the mosaic he was making for a French customer. Basically it goes like this:

1 Acquire stones from all over Jordan and cut into thin slices. Cut these slices into strips. Snip small pieces of stone off the strips with pincers to make your mosaic pieces.

2 Draw a design onto a piece of muslin. Keep it simple and use outline and colour gradation to best effect. Remember to draw your design in mirror image.

3 Assemble your ingredients: wallpaper paste to stick the stones down onto the muslin, lots of stone pieces, tweezers and endless patience.

4 Make your mosaic.

5 Cover a piece of wood with cement and place your finished mosaic onto it face down. The cement fills in any uneven areas and gaps.

6 Soak the muslin and wallpaper paste off to reveal your smooth and lovely mosaic.

We spent a happy day wandering around the town’s museums, ambling down the Roman road and finding that even modern local houses still use mosaics for decoration. Often this kind of craft is reduced to becoming yet more tourist tat, but here the skills are still in everyday use.

How low can you go?

2009-12-22T21:11:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, while passing the Dead Sea, we reached minus altitude. After a long drive down into one of the wadis feeding the dying Dead Sea (too much water being taken out of the system for irrigation, not enough water going into the Dead Sea to replace the million litres lost every day to evaporation) we achieved -391 meters. It didn’t feel any different from being at sea level, though. Disappointing.

Pictures from the road - Madaba

2009-12-22T20:36:00.000+01:00

As everywhere else we have been, here truck drivers take inordinate amounts of pride in their vehicles. In this case decoration is in the form of extra bits welded and painted on to the body of the pick-ups.

Chickens keep fresh longer if you don’t wring their necks until after you find a buyer. These guys are kept in cages at the back of the butcher shop - although the rooster is allowed to strut around free.

A front porch to admire. Definitely the sign of a sociable family.

Buffy gets around. We have also spotted a very young Brad Pitt, a smooth Alec Baldwin and a pouty Leonardo di Caprio. These shops sell a range of things, mostly fashion or hair cuts.

While Jordan is a predominantly Muslim country, Madaba has a bunch of (orthodox) churches, but I think the reason for this shop’s success is just that everyone likes a good excuse to decorate their house with glittery things.

View from above

2009-12-22T10:07:00.001+01:00

Here you can see how we are arranged up top. The spare wheel on the bonnet goes with the spare on the back door. The two water and two fuel jerry cans are mostly empty unless we go somewhere remote. The water is a backup in case we spring a leak in the main water tank. The blue boxes hold dive kit, food stashes and camping gear. The middle box has been rigged with three small solar panels that can be connected to the spare battery to top it up. The lid comes off so we can prop it up at an angle to catch optimum sunlight. The box is filled with spare tent covers. Between the jerry cans at the front is the Hilton, our guest tent of choice, and the green square at the back is our own roof tent, home for the last six months. On the right the rolled up awning is just visible.

Weather!

2009-12-22T09:55:00.001+01:00

It's been a while since we've seen clouds (Uganda, to be precise), so we got quite excited this morning, when we looked out of our window here in Madaba, Jordan. Not only fluffy shapes in the sky, but also rain and some sharp winds are letting us know that we have left the permanent summer climes and are heading towards winter in Europe.

Did you know...

2009-12-21T00:44:00.000+01:00

...that there is a flagpole in Aqaba that is visible from four countries? Me neither. It was also news to me that Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia all share a few kilometers of coast line at the top of the Red Sea in the Gulf of Aqaba. Well, not share in a friendly, 'what’s yours is mine’ kind of way, rather in a 'I’m watching you with all the military-strength listening equipment I have at my disposal' kind of way, but share they do.

From the beach at Aqaba it’s possible to see the radar-spiked hills of Egypt opposite and the holiday apartment blocks of Eilat to the North equally well, and if this was a sane place, Aqaba and Elita would by now be almost one city, being located right next to each other. Here, as all along the King’s Highway towards Amman, Israel and the West Bank are visible in the distance across the misty waters of the Dead Sea. From looking at a Middle East Map these feuding countries always looked so big and separate from each other, but in reality there are no geographical dividers, enemies are cheek by jowl here. If there was co-operation, what great things could be achieved!

From Norway to the Red Sea

2009-12-20T15:54:00.000+01:00

Yet another ferry, I thought, oh great! Just what I need after the traumatic trip from Sudan to Egypt. But we had to cross the Red Sea to get from Egypt to Jordan, as the alternative (crossing through the tip of Israel at Eilat) would prevent us from going on to Syria: some Arab nations are not happy to see an Israeli stamp in your passport. So the ferry it had to be: if it meant getting out of Egypt asap, that was OK with me.

So we battled our way through yet another tangle of Egyptian border bureaucracy, taking 4 hours just to get clearance to leave - the process interrupted by prayer sessions, being given the runaround by officials with nothing better to do than sit around drinking tea and held up by yet another stamp requiring baksheesh. So when we were finally allowed to drive up to the ferry we were starving. As it looked like we were only three or four cars from getting on board, Stuart and Alex wandered up to find a good lunch spot while I waited as cars and lorries were backed into the mouth of the ro-ro ferry. As it turned out I had two hours to contemplate not only the mystery of having to reverse cars into a ferry expressly designed for cars to roll on at one end and off at their destination but also the strange sight of a Norwegian ferry in this hot and dusty Red Sea port.

Yes, this used to be the Kristiansand, later the Skagen, which, after being superseded in the Baltic by fancier models, has found a home here in Nuweiba, shuttling passengers back and forth between Egypt and Jordan. When I finally got to drive on to the car deck and wandered up to the passenger levels, it was slightly surreal to see the original names scratched out from the signage to be replaced with the boat’s new name of “M/S Shehrazade”, although there were still signs advising customers that due to Danish customs regulations, the restaurant would be closed until the ship left the port. Emergency evacuation signs in English and German were overlaid with photocopies in Arabic, and there were other printed signs exhorting us to “show your opinion to get your rights”. Not sure that would go down so well with Egyptian customs. We never did work out what those were about.

After spending some time in the overfilled cafe, loud with Arabic television and heaving with smoking Jordanian truckers (all other passengers apart from us whiteys were kept up on deck), we managed to score a ghostly empty restaurant room, decorated with Skandiwegian summer scenes, where we holed up with our laptops for the duration.

The Best of Egypt

2009-12-19T21:14:00.002+01:00

As promised, here are the selected highlights of Egypt. Enjoy!

Sign of the Times

2009-12-19T21:07:00.000+01:00

A closed down cinema in the middle of Aqaba, symbolic of the failing movie industry, unable to keep punters to keep shelling out to visit the temple of flickering lights, because... Noticed the cardboard box in the bottom left corner, on the steps of the entrance? I will give you a close-up and you’ll see the root of the problem:

Yes, TV killed the video star!

Lost in Cairo

2009-12-19T12:05:00.000+01:00

This sign on the way into Cairo should have given us pause for thought. You want to go to Cairo? Sure, all roads lead there, pick a road, any road....

Shame that the GPS co-ordinates for “The Great Pyramids at Giza" on the increasingly unreliable Tracks4Africa map were who knows where, certainly not anywhere near the actual pyramids. So after spinning round the scuzzy suburbs of Cairo’s West Bank we tried following signs for a change.

I think we had just forgotten they exist, as the last reliable road sign we had spotted would have been somewhere around Maun in Botswana.

Long story short, we got there, in the middle of a sand storm. Cairo hazy in the background, pyramids barely visible, we returned looking a lot younger, having been micro-abraded thoroughly.

Egypt Roundup

2009-12-19T11:41:00.001+01:00

I think this will be my last roundup covering just one country, as we are now picking up the speed for the last leg through the Middle East and back to Europe. As you might have noticed, we have found ourselves suddenly tacking on a whirlwind tour of the Eastern Mediterranean, mainly due to our newly acquired horror of ferry journeys (I write this on the Nuweiba-Aqaba ferry, having experienced another fine example of streamlined government processes while leaving).

Anyway, Egypt. Or should I say, Aswan, as we spent the bulk of our time there. Being pedestrians once again has been a new experience. We had to catch taxis and buses (and boats), which was not always a bad thing. The public bus to Abu Simbel turned out to be almost fun (as much fun as a three hour drive through a flat sand desert can be) with our breakfast box provided by the hotel and plenty of reading matter imported by Alex. Yes, Alex has joined us, and fitting right in, has become holder of the kitty and chef extraordinaire. We are now three again, and it feels good.

Being in one place had other advantages, specially somewhere like Aswan where most interaction between foreigners and locals is reduced to the level of selling/buying tourist goods and services. After a few days of passing the same spot the spice seller stopped offering his wares and started joking, the fellucca captains took us for granted and the souq touts offered karkady rather than hassling us. We started telling people we were Nubians from Aswan and found that behind the intense selling pitch were a bunch of friendly, hospitable and interesting people.

Egypt was, obviously, temples and tombs and ruins and pyramids. It was the magnificent temple at Karnak, where ruins are being reassembled by crane, to the envy of the pharaohs watching from the hereafter; it was hard sell from the guides and postcard sellers at every location, hordes of bus tourists crowding the sites and all the tack not being able to overshadow the bombast of Ramses II who was obviously so insecure that he needed colossi in his own image and self portraits as he smites his enemies and pals with the gods.

There were not as many temple visits as I’d liked, but they will have to wait for another time. Instead Egypt turned out to be about making new friends and meeting old ones: It was getting behind the facade and discovering a fellucca captain concerned with his colleagues’ hardline sales patter ruining business for all of them; a fixer who hates the local bureaucracy that is making his job of getting overlanders across the border so unpleasant; a waiter who loves the kitten that hangs around the restaurant tables begging for scraps, the hotel clerk who made sure we always knew the real price for things so we wouldn’t get ripped off. It was days and days of doing absolutely nothing, wandering from hotel roof terrace to Corniche to waterside restaurant, waiting for the day to end so that maybe, tomorrow, Inshallah, there would be news of the car. Eventually it was the battle with Egyptian bureaucracy, which everyone had told us was ridiculous, but which we never in our wildest nightmares could have imagined to be this inefficient. It was finally leaving Aswan, back on the open road, and driving, driving all day, the Nile passing by, people passing by, desert passing by and not stopping ever again.

Photos are here.

Hurghada explained: Sign Language

2009-12-18T15:25:00.000+01:00

So the main nationality of visitors is German...

and Russian.

The age group is young...

but surely not that young!

Irony of the Day

2009-12-16T21:13:00.000+01:00

Cairo suburbs are the filthiest, most disgusting areas of any metropolis I have ever visited. Heaps of sewage are piled alongside the irrigation channel, rubbish bags are strewn on the road side, and a scum of plastic bottles floats on the water near the bridges.

This guy, therefore, has the most futile job in Cairo.

Leaving Aswan

2009-12-14T11:12:00.000+01:00

After two weeks of idling, waiting for the car to catch up with us, it was surprisingly hard to leave Aswan. We had found favourite haunts for dinner, sunset watching and beer drinking, we had made connections: Mahmoud, keeping us up to date with the non-progress of the barge that - Inshallah - would bring our car; Shahad, fellucca captain extraordinaire and his brother Shazy, hospitable Nubians serving karkady (hibiscus tea) on his boat; Mohammed from the Keylany Hotel reception, dispenser of information and correct pricing for all manner of things, and Hamid and his three brothers, wily sellers of tourist tack in the souq, who could also arrange for the sale of anything else required.

Still, the most friendly encounters since we left Sudan took place on our way out of the tourist metropolises of Luxor and Aswan. Attempting to buy bread, we stopped at a falafel cafe in a small village, where my request for “Eish" (my Arabic is obviously coming along in leaps and bounds) resulted in a group discussion by all other customers until we found an English speaker, who, after giving me a big bag of freshly fried bright green falafel, initially refused my attempt at payment, and eventually accepted a few Euros worth of Egyptian Pounds for six flatbreads, 25 falafel and a bag of tomatoes.

Later, looking for crisps and water at a roadside shop near Qena, my miserable Arabic had everyone falling about laughing. The shopkeeper eventually rescued me with stern looks in the direction of his son and daughter, who were wrestling over the privilege of packing my purchases into a bag. For some reason everything I did, pointing to things, getting out my money, even just standing there shrugging my shoulders, made them collapse into heaps of giggles. It still makes me smile now.

We stopped for lunch on a side road, and after convincing the soldiers at the road block - there is a road block at every junction on the Nile Road - that we were not going to get ourselves blown up or machine-gunned on their watch, we ate those lovely falafel with sweet chilli sauce, made all the more tasty by the fact that not one passer-by stopped to stare, and the old man over the road cutting fodder never even threw us a glance. Just as we got ready to leave a young man stopped his donkey cart next to our car and wandered off into a palm grove. He returned a few minutes later with a handful of fresh dates, just picked and thick with honey sweetness, which he offered us, smiling. Asking nothing in return, he got back onto his cart, waved and disappeared.

Photos from Aswan

2009-12-13T22:27:00.004+01:00

On the occasion of having actually managed to get our car legalised into Egypt, including acquiring Arabic number plates and Egyptian insurance, circumventing attempted bribery and completing much form filling, I have posted some photos our soon-to-end stay in Aswan. It's been two weeks, so I feel like I live here. In fact, the felucca captains have stopped hassling us for trade, which is a sure sign that we are considered locals. Warning, there are quite a few pictures. There are ancient faces, cats, boats, foul bowls, graffiti in serif font, Nubian architecture, some sacred altars, as well as graphic images of smitings. If that's too much, wait a few days and look at the Best of Egypt album. I'll let you know. Enjoy

Stuart's Latest Offering

2009-12-12T21:38:00.000+01:00

...is here, covering the drive from Khartoum to Wadi Halfa. Enjoy!

How to ... Get your car out of customs in Egypt

2009-12-12T11:30:00.000+01:00

We managed to extract the car from Egyptian customs, but only after witnessing the most flamboyant display of ineptitude, corruption and disorganisation so far on this trip.

The setting: Aswan’s ferry port, witness to weekly passenger ferries and occasional cargo barges from and to Wadi Halfa in Sudan, and a suburban hellhole complete with sewage repairs and begging children, site of the Aswan traffic police department.

The actors: various overlanders, both amateurs like us and professional drivers of overland trucks; M., the fixer extraordinaire; K., his slow-witted taxi driver (employed by M. only because his uncle is the head of the customs department); a near-blind customs official and assorted policemen on the hunt for baksheesh.

The mission: to convince Egyptian customs, traffic police and various other unmentioned government agents to release nine cars and trucks from the customs zone of the ferry port so that we can bloody well finish our journey.

The backstory: most of us have been waiting to move on for more than two weeks, variously in Aswan, Wadi Halfa and assorted locations in the Sudanese desert. The barge carrying the cars (which runs on a separate schedule from the passenger ferry) was delayed due to Eid, weekends (Fridays) and other unexplained vagaries of Arabic origin. The barge had arrived on Thursday afternoon, complete with five Landrovers, two overland trucks, one MAN truck and a Landcruiser, as well as three dogs. It was now Saturday. Everyone was tense in a different way, everyone wanted to get out of Aswan as soon as possible.

The timeline:

8am - waiting for K. and a second taxi driver to pick us up. Fourteen people sizing each other up at the hotel; I don’t like what I see. Two stroppy Australians and a South African motorbiker who has been heard to call the locals kaffirs. Great.

8.30 - The taxis arrive. We drive to the police station. K. and two members of the group disappear inside with carnets, passports and money. The rest of us get acquainted while leaning on the bonnets of banged-up taxis (ours has done 750,000 km). The Dragoman driver is reading the Daily Express. She must be homesick.

9.30 - The others re-appear, the grand total of their achievements a collection of blank forms in Arabic. We pile back into the cars and take the bumpy road to the port.

10am - Arrival at the ferry port. K. takes the first group through to the offices, while we in the second group are left behind to fend off baksheesh attempts by the gate keeper, who is trying to charge us to pick up our cars.

11am - After a series of phone calls to M. and strong words with the various fixers he sends, we are let into the office as well. We spend an eternity watching the near-blind official painstakingly copying driver names, chassis numbers and registrations from the English forms to the Arabic version. This takes two hours for nine carnets, with multiple breaks for tea and smokes.

12.30 - The barge is now available, sort of. M. has managed to convince the crew that just because the normal pier is blocked by the Minister of Agriculture’s boat (he is returning from a visit to Sudan, and seen speeding off in a very shiny black Merc), we should still be able proceed with unloading. So in order to drive the cars off the barge, we have to manhandle the strangely engine-less craft to shore by all together pulling on a rope, while the captain and his crew shouts encouragement. Taking the trucks and cars off takes a grand total of 15 minutes.

1.30pm - We are still waiting in the port car park for something to happen. M. brings tea. Suddenly a customs official appears, spends 2 minutes peering through the door of each car, asking if we have knives (?!?), and vanishes. Silence returns. We haven’t had lunch. In desperation I spend some time cleaning the fridge and kitchen in our Landrover.

2.30pm - A policeman, ferried in by K. for the occasion, takes rubbings of our chassis and engine numbers before demanding payment for overtime. After collecting E£10 per car he is taken back to town by K. and ennui descends one more.

3pm - We are told to come back tomorrow to complete formalities, as the traffic police has gone home. Aargh!

The denouement: Stuart spent all of Sunday at the traffic police to arrange insurance and registration. He was finally allowed to leave, sporting Egyptian number plates, after yet another official tried to extract a bribe for not doing a proper check. Our fixer, to his credit, called his bluff and told him they’d be happy to unpack the cars so he could do a more thorough search. Luckily the official decided he valued knocking off on time more than the money and let them depart at 4pm.

How to ... Do Nothing in Aswan

2009-12-10T18:45:00.000+01:00

We’ve been here for nigh on two weeks now, and while Aswan has many attractions (Temple of Isis! Nubian Museum! Tombs of the Nobles!), two weeks is a long time to be waiting for your car to arrive (and your spare clothing, and, yes, stationery - I can’t last long without my stationery bag). But we are still here, so I thought I’d give you an insight into our day and how we stave off boredom:

9.30am - Roll out of bed and climb up to the roof terrace for breakfast - it’s the same every day but at least you don’t need to brave the streets in search of nourishment. We have pancakes and fruit, lemonade, tea, toast with butter and jam and triangles of cream cheese. It took us a few days of trying to change some parts of the order (cold milk instead of hot, scrambled eggs with the toast) to realise that it’s not worth the trouble explaining this to the Manuel-like waiter every morning. Now we just eat what we’re given. Thanks to Alex we have a supply of magazines to read over breakfast, and there is wifi internet, so Stuart can get his fix of email.

11am - If the weather is hot (not that it’s ever really cold, but on occasion we’ve had cloud and the temperature drops to a chilly 20C) someone might sunbathe on one of the two loungers, and there is even the possibility of jumping in the plunge pool on the roof. It’s freezing, so perfect for an overheated holiday maker. The roof terrace sits above the busy Salah-en-Din Road, so there is an orchestra of toots and shouts to listen to. It’s easy to while away most of the morning here.

1pm - We are rationing ourselves to one item of touristing a day, so by this time we may get on the ferry to the west bank of the Nile for a visit to the Tombs of the Nobles, or take a fellucca boat to visit the botanical gardens at Kitchener Island. It’s not hot through the day, so practically any amount of wandering round ruins is still a pleasant activity. Unfortunately going to a tourist attraction always involves a huge amount of bargaining with the local 'business men’, fellucca captains or ferry ticket sellers, guides and assorted vendors of food and tack. It’s still hard work, even after our varied experiences throughout Africa, and here bargaining is much more a normal part of the day, unlike further south, where bargaining is mostly part of the tourism infrastructure (i.e. locals pay a fixed price and mzungus/faranjis are charged as much as possible). So we tend to start with a certain amount of hesitation, because we know that the first price we are quoted will be massively inflated compared to the prices charged to locals. Still, with a bit of good humour we normally manage to keep relations civil, and we spend a few hours acting as if we were the average tourist.

4pm - Hunger sets in. We seem to manage with two meals a day here, which might be due to the climate or just that we don’t actually do anything all day. Whatever, we retire to our local haunt, the Aswan Moon, discovered after a thorough investigation of the local eateries (we tried two other ones before settling on this one). The restaurant is set partly on the bank and partly on a pontoon set on the river. A fabric-covered awning keeps out the sun, so it’s a good place to spend the rest of the afternoon till sunset, watching the felluccas pass by, herons coming in to land and generally admire the light on the sand dunes on the other bank where they are not obscured by the hideous construct of the Mövenpick Hotel on Elephantine Island. Our late lunch consists of lentil soup with a squeeze of lemon, grilled chicken with rice, hummus, babaganoush and flatbread, strawberry juice and Om Ali for desert followed by a Turkish coffee. We have learnt to spin this out until it’s dark, chatting with the waiter or Shahad, the fellucca captain, and sometimes we get a visit from Mahmoud, who is arranging for the car to get here from Wadi Halfa (Inshallah) and who regularly gives us updates that turn out to be incorrect.

7pm - Back to the hotel to watch movies (thanks to the blessings of iTunes, Pirate Bay and the hotel’s fast internet connection). There is more tea drunk while sprawled on the bed in the room, eating the chocolate Alex brought from England - thanks, Alex! Early nights are a given, since there are so many reasons to get up in the morning - not.

Views from the road - pedestrian edition

2009-12-06T23:42:00.000+01:00

The view from the roof terrace includes the herd of sheep living in the ruined plot below us.

Two kinds of people you can depend on for constant hassle as you walk down the street: The caleche driver who will take you anywhere for 5 pounds and the fellucca captain with a good price.

The souq is split between selling glittery things for tourists and useful stuff, like these huge foul bowls for the locals.

We are close to the beginning of the high season in Egypt and many cruise boats are anchored here to be refitted and cleaned up before they go back to Luxor for the winter rush.

More random specialisation of Egyptian shops. This one concentrates on blenders and sewing machines, presumably on the premise that it doesn’t matter why things whirr round, as long as they do.

Mobile Data Update - Egypt

2009-12-05T17:51:00.001+01:00

After multiple visits to both Mobinil and Vodaphone Egypt it transpires that there is no mobile internet for pre-paid phones in Egypt. To think how relatively easy it was to get mobile data in Sudan...

Bummer.

Sudan Roundup

2009-12-04T09:20:00.001+01:00

Sudan was country number 10. We well and truly left Africa and returned to the more familiar bosom of the Arab World. It was pleasant to be somewhere familiar after the sweaty otherness of East Africa and the complete alien culture of Ethiopia. To be honest, we raced through Sudan, despite being given a four week pass. There are no ATMs in Sudan, so we had limited amounts of money to spend, plus we had to catch an earlier ferry than we had planned due to the Eid al Ahra holiday. We entered Sudan halfway upcountry with the Nile, took two long driving days to Khartoum, spend a few days in Khartoum and a few dawdly days more or less following the Nile north to the edge of Lake Nasser, seeking out the remains of the Kushite empire. Then we left on the adventure that is the Wadi Halfa ferry.

From Ethiopia the terrain changed completely. After weeks of cool and populated mountains we were back at 500 m altitude and a landscape that is endlessly flat and monotonously yellow and red. The soil is a fertile dark brown where it is irrigated, vast harvested fields running to the horizon. Northwards desert proper begins, black rockscapes on fine red sand. The Nile winds its way through this barrenness, providing a sweep of green and blue in the monotony. Alongside its water life is possible, endless stretches of habitation reliant on the fields and date farms kept alive by pumps and donkey power. Always within reach of the river, but separate, set into the silence of the sands, temples and pyramids of the Kushite civilisation. Rulers of Nubia and for a while, Egypt, the Kushites left sandblasted ruins which German archaeologists are attempting to rescue before they fade into the desert. Pointy pyramids modelled on Giza (but smaller, steeper and altogether different, as if the blueprints were transmitted by Chinese whispers) erupt by the side of the road along with exquisitely decorated temples proclaiming the superiority of the local kings and queens.

Sudan was big earthenware jugs provided as a public water supply, regular features of the road; low mud brick houses enclosed by decorated walls to keep out wind and sand; heat making the asphalt glassy and reflective like a mirror held up to the scorching sky, oncoming trucks wavering in the mirage, seemingly floating. It was camping in the desert again at last, solitude and stars galore, just as soon as we found a place where we wouldn’t get stuck. It was good roads (built by the Chinese to access Sudan’s natural resources, as in Ethiopia), allowing us to drive all day and make good distance. It was also the worst possible traffic snarl I have ever encountered, proving that Khartoum is up there with Dubai, Nairobi and Chennai, filled with lunatic drivers. Sudan was too short (don’t I say that about all our countries?), but it made a powerful impression.

While the panorama was unchallenging to our desert-proven eyes, our human encounters offered unexpected surprises: There was Ahmed the assured money changer in Wad Madani’s gold souq, dispensing cash and foul with equal aplomb; hospitable Magdi at Wadi Halfa who put us up in his new house for the duration; the casual acquaintance we encountered at the petrol station out of Khartoum, who invited us to stay with him for a few days - another time maybe! Such kindness, such honesty and simple friendliness. After the incessant press of people in East Africa and before the anticipated rapaciousness of the Egyptians, what a breath of fresh air to be treated like friends.

And then there were the variously vehicled overlanders we came across: American cyclists Mary and Greg, the Irish bike riders who insisted on completing their Cairo to Cape (or rather Addis to Cape, then fly back to Addis to cycle to Cairo), the Belgian boys on their way South, eager for GPS co-ordinates and information on road conditions, and fortuitously, on the roadside, Monty the Landrover, whose blog is giving us all the info we need to get through Egypt and onwards. Not to forget the crowd of Algerian footie supporters before and after their victory over Egypt, a nicer group of sober football fans you couldn’t hope to meet.

It feels as if Africa is over, and we are entering a new phase in our journey. We have acquired a new travel companion and decided to brave the Middle East route rather than the ferry to Italy, so the drive onwards will be both longer and more interesting. Of course, as of today we are still carless, so right now we are not going anywhere, but as soon as we do, you will know all about it.

Sudan pictures

2009-11-29T22:54:00.001+01:00

Due to the super internet connection here at the Keylany Hotel I have managed to put up the best photos from Sudan already. If you can handle so many images in quick succession, have at it:

Enjoy!

Here we are... what now?

2009-11-28T20:38:00.000+01:00

Aswan: Lake Nasser, Abu Simbel, Kitchener’s Island, souqs, feluccas, temples, museums - the possibilities are endless. Most people who come to Aswan rush from sight to sight, aware that they only have a few days to see it all. They sit in a cafe drinking mint tea, for the experience. They stroll down the corniche, for the view. They drink in the sounds and smells of the city, because they are leaving far too soon.

We, on the other hand, are landed here. Of course we were going to spend a day or two, recovering from the Wadi Halfa ferry, taking a look at the temple of Philae, meet up with Alex. But basically this was our entry and moving-on point for Egypt. Instead, thanks to Eid al Adha (ironically a celebration of sacrifice), we are stuck here waiting for our car to catch up with us from Wadi Halfa. This gives us a whole different view on the town. Instead of an exciting holiday destination it has become a temporary home for our lost souls. Street vendors quit the banter and nod sagely when we tell them we are here for the duration, the hotel is promising a good room for the long-term tenants, and walking the streets we are more interested in the location of the cafe round the corner and the shop selling phone credit than the pretty view or the souvenir bargain.

Luckily the town has been quiet today, one advantage of the Eid holiday is the absence of cars and people. The few shops that are open cater to the tourists who have descended from the Nile cruise ships which throng the Corniche moorings belching diesel fumes. Other than the mzungus there are groups of rowdy boys on bikes and girls dressed up to the nines roaming the streets, trying out their meagre English on any foreign-looking passer by. We eat lunch, go for a walk, and back to the room to lose ourselves on the internet. Only ten more days...

A sad admission

2009-11-28T16:08:00.000+01:00

We are having MacDonalds on the waterfront, I am afraid. Overcome with the need for some perverse familiarity - and free wifi as well as spotless toilets. At least the sunset is home made Egyptian.

Change of plan

2009-11-27T20:01:00.001+01:00

It seems most overlanders go through this: before you start you make a plan. You pore over maps, read guide books, google locations, make top ten lists of places to visit. Then you leave and it all changes anyway. You meet other travellers who tell you about that beach, that park, that camp site you HAVE TO go to. So your route changes a bit and it’s all good. But then comes that moment when you make a mayor change. Like the Irish cyclists we just met who couldn’t get visas for Sudan initially so instead of travelling Ireland to Cape Town they went Addis to Cape, and then, when they could get the Sudan visa in the end, they flew back to Addis to carry on the rest of the way to Ireland the other way around. That’s thinking outside the box.

So long story short, after a lot of back and forth we have cancelled our Tunisia-Italy ferry, have sacked our Libya fixer and have decided to hang a right in Alexandria, travel through Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Greece and the Balkans to Germany. Shouldn’t take too much longer and we have the satisfaction of having done it all by road. Let’s just hope the Balkans in January isn’t that cold (yeah, right).

So if you are interested, the calendar is updated with approximate new dates (you can see the calendar at the bottom of the page). Of course, until we are re-united with our car we have no idea how long we will spend in Egypt, and therefore all dates are highly flexible.

The tea lady - Sudan style

2009-11-25T14:50:00.000+01:00

This lady will make you a coffee or tea you will never forget. She has cinnamon, mint, cardamom or ginger and she's not afraid to use them. On the left she has a small charcoal burner where she boils the water and a bowl to wash up the tiny glasses and chased silver tea pots. Her assistant, a young boy with a tea tray, runs through the market to deliver orders hot and fresh. There's always time for tea, as we found out in our few days here.

EDIT: Now as moving pictures!

How to...Make Coffee - Sudanese Style from Fiver Löcker on Vimeo.

Another milestone

2009-11-25T14:12:00.002+01:00

We have boarded the Wadi Halfa ferry from Sudan to Egypt. The fact that it's a few days before an Eid holiday is good and bad. Good, because the ferry is quiet and we are avoiding the crazy rush of people and goods being loaded that everyone warned us about before. Bad because we had to leave Sally behind since she goes on a separate barge and that only runs when there is cargo coming from Aswan. Because of the holiday all trading has stopped so no barge. It's all very frustrating having to leave her parked in the customs compound, but Magdi has promised to look after her and drive her onto the barge when it finally comes.

The view from our cabin

As it turns out the ferry isn't so bad. The cabin has air con and is cleaner than some hotel rooms we've slept in, there is power and we are in the right side of the boat for Abu Simbel, which we should pass this evening. There's space on the deck to walk around, and we brought food and water to keep ourselves in good spirits. Now all we have to do is get to Aswan and wait for normalcy to return so we can get our car/home back.

OMG Pyramids!!!

2009-11-23T14:31:00.000+01:00

They are not so well known, they are steeper and smaller, they were built later and not by the Egyptians, but there's lots of them and wow, they are stunning. The pyramids at Meroe and Jebel Barkal and the assorted lion, Amun and Nut temples are hardly visited, lying a day or two north of Khartoum they are not that accessible, but going there is so worth it. Some structures are badly damaged, deep grooves showing the strength of sand and wind over the millenia, but on the inside of temples we saw lions and crocodiles crouching at the feet of queens and godesses, kings offering lotus flowers to ibis headed gods, prisoners leading elephants, broad shouldered warriors.

Wadi Halfa

2009-11-23T13:56:00.001+01:00

It does feel like the end of the earth. Silence at the port today will undoubtedly give way to noise and craziness on Wednesday when the ferry leaves. For now all is locked up, the tea lady has gone home early and there is only the slow drip of the water butts leaking onto the stone to keep us entertained as we wait for our fixer to return. In two days, Inshallah, Egypt. Until then, the end of the earth.

Ethiopia Roundup

2009-11-23T13:29:00.001+01:00

Arriving in Ethiopia, after the Marsabit road ordeal, was like returning to the real world from a wild and (potentially) dangerous frontier. On the Ethiopian side of the border there were hotels and tarred roads, and the metropolis of Addis Ababa beckoned. We had not made it to Lake Turkana - another time - but we had got as far as the remote and mysterious land of Abyssinia. And it defied all our expectations. We had heard conflicting views from fellow travellers coming south: it's amazing, beautiful, exotic, with friendly people and delicious food. Or: Ethiopians are horrid, they hate foreigners, stone throwing and pushy begging is the norm. Ok, so everyone either loved or hated Ethiopia, everyone had a strong opinion. What was it going to be for us? From Moyale with its dreary hotel we drove straight up north, not looking left (Omo valley) or right (Bale mountains), and finally stopped at Awassa, a workaday town on the edge of a Rift valley lake. Another few hours hop took us to Lake Langano (there is a sting of lakes following the Rift Valley south), where we finally found a place we wanted to stay for a few days. After getting the car fixed up in Addis Ababa and procuring more cash in preparation for ATM-less Sudan (http://rabbitproductions.blogspot.com/2009/11/more-money-lessons.html) we left for our version of the historic northern loop, and the mystical rock-hewn churches of Lalibela (http://rabbitproductions.blogspot.com/2009/11/lalibela.html). Leaving the Rift Valley behind us for the last time we scaled the highlands to Gonder and a few quiet days at Lake Tana with Tim and Kim (www.timandkimvillage.com).

And that was Ethiopia. We spent almost three weeks, but it felt like days. As it turned out the people were stunningly helpful once we got to talk to them, but if we just stopped by the road to look at the view or dive into a shop, we would be crowded, people staring with no sense of allowing for personal space, and once we did have a stone thrown at us from nowhere, and good shots that the Ethiopians are (they use slingshots to keep the birds out of the fields) they hit one of our new solar panels. So there is a weird disconnect between people who couldn't do enough for us (hello, Global Hotel), people who gave us their insight into Ethiopia (Thanks, Tim and Kim, Getaye, Alex, Zabene, Zegaye, Daniel) and the anonymous stone thrower together with the never-ending phalanx of children shouting "Gimme Money!" Like many other things in Ethiopia, it remains a mystery.

Ethiopia was surprising vistas of mountains, endless hills and valleys covered with fields and grazing; it was eroded volcanic plugs sitting in the midst of fertile lands like squatting giants; it was another beginning for the Nile (the Blue Nile this time) from Lake Tana, which carries 90% of the water that keeps Egypt alive; it was tea coloured lakes languishing placidly in the valley of the Northern Rift, surrounded by nothing much more than silence. Ethiopia was the last we saw of the Rift Valley, a geographical feature we had followed north ever since we arrived at the slice of water that is Lake Malawi, and what a goodbye it was: twisting Italian-built roads took us up and up and up to the cool and windswept highlands, looming mountainsides tamed by the need for farm land with terraces and small irrigation projects, coffee farms with their drying frames, and endless villages along the road, houses fenced by cactus or acacia hedges, herders with goats, donkeys, humpbacked cows, camel caravans and the ever present women carrying water containers from the pump to their homes.

Ethiopia was also surprisingly developed. The road infrastructure was new and well-maintained and where the road was unfinished we saw constant work: graders preparing surfaces for new tar; men and women tightly wrapped against the wind and dust carrying large rocks to the side of the road; diggers far below chomping holes for drainage and culverts - a strange mix of high and low tech. Most of the country seemed electrified, judging by the ever present cables running alongside the roads and into the hills. In fact, when we were in Lalibela, it was a surprise to see the outline of the village by the lamps shining in the windows, a sight we had forgotten since the long-ago days of Namibia. The mobile network is so-so, but considering the remoteness of many places it's amazing it exists at all. Since the internet relies on mobile networks, we were cut off from our web fix for ten days, giving us a nicely disinterested view of the world for a while. We saw school children in uniforms every day (although we found out that schools teach in two shifts, which can't be good for the quality of teaching). As opposed to most of Africa we found that pretty much anywhere had running water, but in keeping with most of Africa, hot water was erratic and water pressure, well let's just say it was not all that.

Ethiopia is unique in Africa: a script with 200 characters that looks like something JRR Tolkien might have invented; octagonal churches topped by elaborate crosses and filled with fantastical frescoes like involved comic book stories; very varied building styles, from huge rondavels to two storey Tukuls, from groups of neat square huts surrounded by high walls with elaborately painted front gates to peaked reed domes topping the central house in a compound, as well as faded Italianate rows of flats and glass fronted skyscrapers in Addis Ababa. Its people, half African, half Arabic with a different look altogether: lighter skinned with angular features, tall and handsome in a new way; a long long history (dating all the way back to King Solomon) intersecting with the empires of Egypt, the rise of Christianity, with Portuguese as well as Indian influences, mentioned by the Greeks and Romans as the faraway land of Punt or Abyssinia. Ethiopia has a palpable identity we have missed in previous countries with their indelible impression of colonialism and not much remembered history before that. Here there is a church that has been keeping records for a thousand years, there are artefacts from former glorious times, there was a royalty until recently that counted its (imaginary, but nevertheless respected) roots from the mystical love affair of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Like Egypt, Iraq and China, there is a pride in having been one of the first great civilisations, and in this case we had the added pleasure in finding a culture that has not been turned into clichés (it's hard to look at Pharaonic culture and not see The Mummy).

Mobile Data update

2009-11-22T13:25:00.000+01:00

A short bit of information about mobile data, my favourite travel obsession in Africa. After having data access in Botswana (Orange), Zambia (Zain), Malawi (Zain), Tanzania (Zain), Kenya (Safaricom) and Uganda (MTN, expensive!) it was disappointing to find when we arrived in Moyale on the Ethiopian border that we couldn't buy a SIM card until we got to Addis Ababa. A whole week without Facebook, email or news feeds. How would I live? When we got to Addis one of the kind people at the Global Hotel procured a SIM card for me, which was just as well as even for a pre-paid card you need proof of local residence. Not easy for travellers, then. Credit was easy to get, as there is only one mobile phone company (Ethiopian Telecoms), but to my great disappointment there was no mobile data for pre-paid SIMs. Ever since Botswana I have been able to get email and other internet on my phone with just a pre-pay card, so it was a surprise that Ethiopia didn't have that service. I don't think it's to do with local demand, as even a very poor country like Malawi provided mobile data, it's just built into these modern mobile networks. Oh, well, so much for monopoly suppliers! The real bummer was that even in the places where there is nominally reception we couldn't make calls, because the power supplies for the mobile phone masts were down. Lalibela, where we spent a few days, and which is a mayor tourist attraction, had no mobile phone access while we were there, which was really hard for the local guides and other small business people, as everyone relies on contact through the mobile since no-one has a landline. Sudan on the other hand was a blessing. We still didn't get a SIM until we got to the Afra Mall in Khartoum, but there we found our old friend Zain, a Kuwaiti company covering 12 countries in Africa and the Middle East, who set me up with a pre-pay card and mobile internet (APN 'internet', no user name and password!). Sweet. I still needed to fill in an application form and show my passport, but I put that down to Sudanese love of bureaucracy and tracking what people are up to (until recently you needed photo permits to take pictures of the Northern pyramids and registration every time you stayed in a new town, very Soviet). Pre-paid mobile data is not cheap here - I have used €30 in 6 days, but that included ordering books on Amazon while driving through the desert, so I guess I am paying for the convenience. I have a SIM card for Egypt, but am not holding out much hope for data, as I know the Egyptian authorities are not too keen to have its people connected (iPhones sold in Egypt don't have GPS, for example). I will keep you posted.

People We Meet Part 3: The Overland Tourists

2009-11-20T20:15:00.000+01:00

We call their tents pimples. They usually show up late and leave very early, and they make such noise that they wake every honest sleeping camper. They travel from Nairobi to Cape Town in 6 weeks and stop to take group photos at the equator. Their big trucks are orange, but manly with huge wheels and customised storage for kitchen equipment and tents. They are the overland trucks, carting the gap year youth of the Western world through the wilds of Africa. In the evenings the girls congregate in the toilets for make up sessions and the boys strut their stuff in their low hanging boxers, just like preparations at home for the Friday night clubbing experience. I wonder what these people carry in their luggage, because we certainly don’t have space for more than one decent outfit per person. At Guma lagoon they used all the hot water, and in the Mara we found ourselves listening to complaints about the shortness of the toilet breaks during the trip. At Track and Trail camp in Zambia a catastrophe was narrowly averted when a group of American youths cornered a passing elephant to take photos and refused to take the mock-charging and flapping ears seriously. A local ranger told them they could stay and eventually be trampled or slowly back away and show some more respect for the wild life.

Occasionally we meet groups of more mature travellers, a sign that overland trucking has become a more acceptable form of holiday travel. In Botswana we encountered the Rolling Hotel (above) which was novel in that the tourists didn’t have to put up their own tents, but slipped into a Japanese hotel style cubicle in the truck itself, a claustrophobic experience, I imagine, but it does keep you away from mosquitos and creepy crawlies.

Luckily they move on fast, so when they descend on us at a camp site or resort, we just have to stay put and they will be gone again. Now that we have reached the countries considered more volatile we have left these types of organised tours behind.

Ethiopian images

2009-11-19T14:11:00.000+01:00

Bear with me on this one, Karthoum internet is not making it easy for me. Here are some pictures from our too short visit to Ethiopia:

More money lessons

2009-11-19T13:25:00.000+01:00

Everything financial had been working so smoothly for us all through Malawi (despite its' scarcity of ATMs), Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, that we forgot that replenishing our funds was not always straightforward. Rumour had it that there were only two ATM locations in Ethiopia (in Addis and Gonder) and none in the whole of Sudan, which has had sanctions imposed so that VISA and Mastercard didn't work anywhere. We neglected to get more US dollars in Nairobi (which are always useful for changing money in the unofficial market), and when we got to the Ethiopian border we somehow managed to change too much of our US dollars into Ethiopian Birr. It was only when we reached Addis, hoping to draw more money from the ATM and change it to US dollars in preparation for Sudan that we found out how scarce the greenback is in these parts. I had a kafkaesque encounter at the bank and forex where I was told that there was only US$150 available per person, but only when showing and airline ticket leaving the country. When I told them that I had arrived and intended to leave by car I was firmly assured that this was not possible, no-one arrives by car into Ethiopia. Luckily the very pragmatic sales manager of our hotel used his contacts to procure us US$1000 for a fair rate and even got the guy to come to the hotel so that we could safely make the transaction.

Stuart changing money at the bag shop

Rumours were correct and the only other ATM was in Gonder. Having stocked up with US dollars in Addis, we were more concerned with acquiring Sudanese Pounds at this point as we were on our way to the border. When Stuart visited the bank on the Ethiopian side of the border (money changers were strangely missing from this otherwise busy border crossing) he was referred to the bag shop across the road where a guy changed our excess Birr into a few Sudanese Pounds. This was enough to get us through our custom expenses and to pay for the toll on the Khartoum road, but not enough to pay for the Nile hotel in Wad Madani, even after we had bargained them down from 90 to 60 SP. We had read that it was possible to change money in the souq at the goldsmith shops, so we took a walk in the mild evening air. It was easy to find the souq, although at 6pm not much was happening yet. Some non-verbal communication with a Quran-reading goldsmith later and we were sent to see Ahmed round the corner. Ahmed had a future as an extra in a Harrison ford adventure movie, sitting fat as Jabba the Hutt in front of his safe, counting thick wedges of various currencies. In front of him a desk laden with ledgers and receipts, flanked by hangers-on, he shook our hand and was happy to do business. In between handing out rubber-banded chunks of cash he offered us a reasonable rate, but before we could complete our transaction with this unofficial banker the communal dinner arrived and we were urged to take part. A huge metal bowl of foul (a mix of pita bread, tomatoes, cucumber and cooked beans with lots of spice) was placed on a table and everyone tucked in - right hand only. We were then served cool clear water in bashed metal mugs and, finally, our very own chunk of cash.

Now, in Khartoum, we realised what a good idea it was to equip ourselves with plenty of cold hard cash, as we have met two groups of overlanders going south that have to hurry to Ethiopia because they are running low on money. I hope the cyclists make it to Gonder before they are broke.

Back in a land of cakes

2009-11-18T14:34:00.000+01:00

Yay for Khartoum's Afra Mall, where we scored free Internet, a SIM card with data and these delicious cakes. It's true that Ethiopia had good cages with fresh juice and divine coffee, but the cakes were still a bit hit and miss and often not the freshest. Here, there's chocolate and cream and glacé cherries. Yum.

How to finish that roof top

2009-11-16T18:34:00.001+01:00

Ethiopian houses of the reed roof variety (I am sure there is an anthropological name for them) have a funky way of making a finish, to hold the reed together and allow the smoke from the cook fire to escape, probably. While the purpose is the same, the execution of this architectural element depends on the materials available, so they all look different, made from old bottles, bicycle tires or clay pots:

Sleeping in Ethiopia

2009-11-15T15:30:00.000+01:00

Most of this trip has been a camping holiday for us, equipped with a roof tent and the Hilton (our sturdy Coleman family tent big enough to satisfy any Kiwi camper) as well as a small pup tent borrowed from my brother, we always had lots of sleeping options. Occasionally we treated ourselves to a room (or it's my birthday and I am forced to spend it in a five star hotel), but mostly camping worked out well, because the countries we visited catered to campers. Level sites, a bit of grass, shower and toilet were usually provided, and sometimes we got so much more.

Not so in Ethiopia. The concept of camping doesn't seem to have reached here, so most camping takes place in the courtyards of the numerous hotels (Ethiopians must be prodigious travellers, judging by the number of hotels in every little village, and the number of people walking along the roads or perching on the back of trucks). Unfortunately the fact that we don't use the rooms doesn't have any impact on the price, we are always charged the same whether we camp or stay in a room. If the rooms were clean and comfy, we would be happy, but we have had the range from unfinished, grotty, uncomfortable, cockroach infested to badly maintained, slightly dusty and raw electricity cables hanging loose. What's strange is that while the rooms are mind-bogglingly furnished, with plaster falling off the walls, curtains that don't cover the windows, doors that don't shut and tiles that are broken, mis-matched furniture and randomly rigged wiring ( usually close to some running tap), the staff in all the hotels have been beyond nice and helpful. No-one ever understands our frustration with the non-functioning hot water or the lack of towels, but they are always more than happy to move us to a new room, bring us towels, buy us SIM cards or arrange for black market US dollars.

The one time we hit the jackpot was in Lalibela, and all thanks goes to tripadvisor.com, where we found updated recommendations that were better than the guide book entries. The Tukul Village hotel had big rooms and even bigger bathrooms, a hot shower and white sheets on the comfortable beds, a balcony looking out over the town and best of all it was all finished. No concrete floors in the bathroom or missing fittings, no raw power cables or loose door knobs. We could have cried, and we did stay longer than planned just to enjoy the novelty of a clean room. The hotel was new, and so was the other pleasant place we stayed, The Sabana resort at Lake Langano. It boils down to maintenance, we have decided, the same lack of upkeep that have made the railways unusable, roads fray at the edges and get pockmarked with potholes, that mean perfectly viable buildings just disintegrate over time and most aid projects fail if there is no contingency made for long term servicing. This is why new hotels are nice and old ones are always described in the guide books as having 'faded charm' and 'former grandeur'.

Views from the road - Ethiopia

2009-11-13T14:48:00.000+01:00

Road kill is rare in Africa - not enough cars - but when it happens at least there is an impressive raptor to clean up the mess.

There’s no escaping it.

Graves are often set next to the road and topped with images of wealth and power to show off the importance of the deceased.

There are places where Haile Selassie is still remembered - this outside the National Museum.

As many women as men are occupied on the many road works to upgrade the failing Italian road infrastructure.

Finally, camels!

A priest soliciting donations.

Someone is having a bad public transport day.

Lalibela

2009-11-12T14:00:00.000+01:00

I had little pre-conception about the 8th wonder of the World, the rock hewn churches of Lalibela. They were 12th century, so I imagined little hovels of stone. They were carved from the rock, so I imagined a facade like Petra in Jordan. What I found could not have been more impressive, breath taking and unlike a medieval Petra if it tried.

Lalibela is suffused with religion in the most lively way. Our guide was a chanter and our receptionist was up at 6, wrapped in his white shama on his way to pray. Young boys from the countryside dream of growing up to become priests, who are part of village life with their wives and families (unlike Catholics, Ethiopian orthodox priests are allowed to marry). Orthodox religion is fused into people's lives for better or worse (the church is the only entity in Ethiopia apart from the state that owns land, so there is little incentive to raise the peasants above their current level of ignorance and poverty), there are churches in every small village, priests are sitting by the side of the road soliciting donations and dispensing blessings, flanked by a picture of Mary, a donation box and a shiny umbrella.

I had thought of Ethiopia as a remote and unreachable place, like Albania or Tibet, never to be seen by me, so reaching Lalibela was unexpected, despite being on our route from the beginning. We arrived there after two long days of driving on gravel roads through the mountains north of Addis Ababa, breathtaking views and old Italian-built roads and tunnels making us think we were in the Alps. We were tired when we got there and debated whether it had been worth it, but our visit to the churches the next day wiped that question from our minds.

The churches are by the nature of their architecture not really part of the village, but sited separately in three locations in the hills. They are quite invisible from the road, apart from the protective roofs that have been built over them to protect the rock from weather. The churches are really underground, carved down into the softly pink volcanic tuff that once flowed over the region and hardened like raspberry meringue. To create the churches first a trench was excavated around a square block of rock, which was then pierced to create the interior of the church. This makes the buildings flush with the rocky ground. Access to the churches is via the trenches surrounding them, which are kept scrupulously clean by troops of cleaners, who remove dust and lichen that may damage the buildings. The churches are still in a poor state, a mystery to me as they have been in constant use for the last 800 years, owned by a living church that doesn't look short of money in other ways (something like 700 priests, monks and apprentices are directly employed by the church in Lalibela), There are cracks in the facades from a 17th century earth quake, badly executed maintenance from previous regimes and general decay inside and out.

Regardless, the space is quite unlike anywhere I have been before. After descending into the trench we faced an awesome building, Bete Medhane Alem, the biggest rock hewn church in the world. It's incomprehensible to me how an architect, a sculptor, a builder could think themselves into the negative space to be created, where instead of erecting a new construct a solid shape had to be hollowed out, detracted from, with all the implication that once something is removed it can't be added back in. The amazing thing to me is that the churches look like real buildings (they even have fake wooden window supports, copying a local contemporary building style, even though, being stone, they are not needed), with windows and doors, pillars, steps, internal arches and decorations, drainage and storage spaces, seats and ledges.

Walking around the first complex of churches (there are three), with its 6 churches all tangled up with walkways and staircases, trenches connecting each to the next, holes in the walls that used to give homes to hermits and mummies, dead ends and hidden entrances, one is completely cut off from the day above, it's cold and dark where the town is hot and dusty, its quiet where the town is full of children on their way to school and touts drumming up business. Stepping inside a church is even gloomier, and there is a strange absence: paintings draped and drums abandoned on the carpet where the chanters left them after morning service; empty benches where worshippers crowd in the mornings; curtains drawn on the altar and holy shrine, not to be revealed until the next mass; carpets rolled up awaiting a holy day so that they can be unrolled to spruce the place up. The lone priest sits in vigilance waiting to display the churches cross to visitors, and reads his prayer book.

Some of the churches are decorated inside, apart from the paintings propped everywhere, mostly new prints of saints, although some are painted on cloth and look to be no older than a few hundred years. They don't seem to be valuable, maybe they get replaced when they wear out, the image more important than the craftsmanship. Bete Maryam has carved and painted patterns covering the pillars and a series of cartoon like frescoes depicting miracles and the annunciation. They are easy to decipher, in a naive style with simple symbolism so even I could keep up.

The interiors are quite dark, making for moody shots of light streaming in though door ways and touching the edges of pillars, illuminating rather than lighting. What light falls through the small windows and doors is already diminished by the fact that we are underground, with a canvas roof over our heads. A few cold strip lights are haphazardly rigged under the ceiling, wires strung across frescoes and in and out of window frames. This gives a utilitarian feel to the mysterious gloom, harsh electric light cutting through the dark with white smears. The light creates rooms different from the physical space, highlighting a folded up carpet or the corner of a painting, giving importance to disjointed parts of unrelated objects.

In amongst all the theatrical decorations, the drapes and images, sits the priest, sometimes busily chanting from his prayer book, sometimes dozing until the guide suggests that he display the church's treasure. Then he poses in a lit space in front of the picture of his saint, all solemn seriousness clad in white, draped with a colourful shawl. Posing over, he plonks the cross down on a stool, covers it with a cloth and returns to his meditations.

EDIT:

And here finally, two countries on, are the rest of Stuart’s fantastic photos:

More power from the sun

2009-11-09T13:28:00.001+01:00

Supplementing the power supplied by our second battery (to prevent the primary battery from being accidentally run down while charging laptops and such) has been an aim for a while now. We were constantly running into limitations of our admittedly large electricity needs, specially when we were parking up for a few days, so the engine couldn't recharge the additional battery. Our workaround consisted of a combination of incessant searching for mains power (not always easy in countries where even the power supply for locals isn't constant), always charging when on the move, and occasionally running the engine for a half hour when the inverter started beeping. It didn't help that the deep cycle battery was of lower capacity than we would have liked, and, as we later found out, wasn't a sealed unit, so at one point had actually run dry.

Ever since Maun in Botswana we were looking for solar panels to fit to the roof. Finding solar panels is not a problem in Africa per se, as there is a slow and steady development towards self sufficiency with electricity in the face of governments' inability to provide its citizens with a reliable power infrastructure. The problem is getting the right size and capacity to fit a car roof, where most panels are built to supply a household and be propped up on the ground. So we looked again in Lusaka, and in Dar es Salaam, but kind of gave up eventually.

At last, in the unlikely location of an upmarket shopping mall in the embassy district of Nairobi, while looking for a rechargeable torch, we came across a system just small enough and light enough in size and sturdy enough to withstand the bumpy roads, and now we are kitted out with a full 36 W set of three small panels screwed to the lid of one of our roof boxes, plugging into a controller and then into the new deep cycle battery we acquired in Marsabit.

Unfortunately the Ethiopian habit of throwing stones at passing cars meant that two days after finalising the wiring and making the setup work we got hit and cracked the glass cover on one of the panels, reducing our capacity. It's fixable, though, and luckily was the only stone throw we received.

Ethiopian Millenium

2009-11-07T18:03:00.000+01:00

Today is not November 7th 2009, today is 28.02.2002. Ethiopia is way behind in many ways, and most noticeably with the date. The millennium happened only just over a year ago, so Addis Ababa is still festooned with celebratory messages. Oh, and 9am is 3 o’clock and 1pm is 7 o’clock, because just as the Maasai time starts being counted from 6am (time of sunrise more or less all year round, being so close to the equator). So arrangements can get a bit confusing. Luckily the Ethiopians seem to be able to adjust to our ignorance and use European date and time with us. Thanks!

Lucy in the Sky

2009-11-06T20:58:00.000+01:00

Today was a big day for Stuart. Today we visited Lucy, the Australopithecus Afarensis skeleton found near Harar in the 1970s that showed that humans walked upright 3.2 million years ago. She was very small, but big enough to have a restaurant named after her.

Kenya roundup

2009-11-05T17:32:00.000+01:00

At one point it seemed as if we would never leave Kenya, as if we would bounce back and forth from Jungle Junction campsite in Nairobi in ever decreasing circles, attached by a rubber band to the little bit of easy living we could find in East Africa.

We arrived from Tanzania on a car repair mission, then, suspension repaired and with an improved double suspension, we headed out to Maasai Mara and on to Uganda. We returned to Nairobi to meet up with Mark and Martina (and to say goodbye to Merryl, who left us for the other side of the World), left again for a short visit to Lake Elementaita north of Nairobi. Then we returned again on our way through to the South, for a lost week at the beach, diving and dozing. Returning for the last time to Jungle Junction we finally got ourselves ready to move on to Ethiopia (which was not without its hiccups) but we finally got out of Kenya, despite all signs to the contrary.

Why was it that we drifted round this country for such a long time? We stayed here longer than anywhere else, criss crossed the country in an aimless pattern, spent the a whole week in one place, the longest time on the trip so far, and returned to some places multiple times, something we hadn't done anywhere else. Was it that we were glad to be somewhere we liked, as opposed to the unpleasantness of Tanzania? Did we lose our way halfway through the trip? Was Kenya just so fascinating that we couldn't leave?

What is certain is that Kenya turned out to be an eye opener. One of the better regarded, more well-off, more stable countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, it is a place that wears its problems on its sleeve. Kenya has a terrible infrastructure: In Nairobi most houses, if they have electricity at all, only get switched on every other day. Big cities like Kisumu, Mombasa, Nakuru have the worst roads we have seen in any country. Everywhere we went there were signs of the current drought, from starving cattle to grey and dusty game parks, and not all of it can be put down to it being an El Nino year. Deforestation is turning hillsides into scrubby deserts that fail to support the subsistence farmers scrabbling to make a living there, and government support in the form of road maintenance and power or water supply is non-existent. The most exclusive neighbourhoods and most expensive tourist lodges in the most expensive game parks we have come across in East Africa are in Kenya, so ready cash can't be the problem. Kenya is the first place where recent history is still palpable to the casual visitor, and it's depressing to think how far a small place like Malawi might have to go when even a relatively well-positioned country like Kenya can't get its act together. It didn't help that I was reading a book about Kenyan corruption scandals (It’s Our Turn to Eat by Michaela Wrong), which put much of these problems into a political context.

Then again, the preconceptions we had about Kenya, where Nairobi is called Nairobbery and we were urged to lock up absolutely everything in and on the car lest it was ripped off, turned out not to be applicable to us. We even left our car parked outside a hotel in Nakuru overnight (nervously, and only because of a lack of off-street parking) without having so much as a fingerprint in the deep dust covering the door handles in the morning. Coming from Tanzania we found Kenyans to be more restrained and friendly, taking no for an answer even in very touristy places, although we were still very aware of being quoted mzungu prices. Bargaining hasn't stopped, it's just that our counterparty has been a lot more amenable to reason.

Kenya is potholed roads and nonexistent signage, suicidal matatus (what counts for public transport here, broken down mini busses painted with hopeful slogans and apparently totally unaware of road rules) and crawl-slow lorries; it's a street that suddenly disappears in the middle of Nairobi, leaving nothing but deep holes and mud and oncoming mini busses in a typically unlit part of town; it's witnessing two serious accidents and two obviously drunk drivers in the space of one night time trip - and being involved in our own little accident, taking four hours to extricate ourselves from the financial fallout of replacing a scratched door on a Nissan (not so) Hardbody; it was visiting the mythical beauty of the Masaai Mara only to find that the Masaai who are supposed to care for it don't and the rangers seem to care only for the tips from photographing tourists, in the process ruining the environment their livelihoods depend on, and it was left to us to restrain our guide from harassing the wild animals; it was the sorry sight of a parched savannah and deforested mountains, and wondering where all the money goes when a visit to a game park can cost US$250 per day.

Kenya was Nairobi, which saved our sanity, civilisation at last, when we were desperate for a bit of familiarity (although Marabou storks glaring from the lamp posts and slums next to posh malls kept the affinity in check): we relished in breakfast at Java Junction, dinner at a proper Italian restaurant with proper service, supermarkets selling prosciutto and parmigiano and a real Land Rover repair shop, a national museum that hadn't been thrown together in a day, some thoughtful historical and art projects and the sense of it being a real cultural centre.

Then there were the cool people we met: Joseph the Cambridge-educated ornithologist Masaai, obsessed with birds, who had met David Attenborough and Angelina Jolie (not at the same time), had cool stories of colonial life in Happy Valley and who revised my accumulated resentment of 'guides' who often have been more clueless than we are about their 'area of expertise'; Kiwi and the Mango Man and the other guys on Tiwi Beach who kept us in fresh fish and prawns and fruit and cashew nuts and without whom we would not have eaten so well without having to actually get out of the hammock; Christoph from Jungle Junction, about whom I have raved once already, and who is doing a much better job than I even know in keeping overlanders on the road North or South, and who does all this amongst the craziness that is Nairobi and Kenyan bureaucracy and a raving community of colour-conscious website crazies; Mildred the ape researcher in Kakamega, we had too little time to find out everything she knows about blue and Colobus monkeys, although we realised it must be much when she can recognise them by name in the dusk at a distance of twenty meters; and lastly (but only because we met them on our last days, on the way out of Kenya) there were Peter and Rita the Dutch couple running Gadissa Lodge and a centre for disabled children in the Wild West of Isiolo, Swiss Henry who provided us with two new roof rack brackets and a cottage as a pit stop on the dreaded Marsabit road, and Mr Mangia, who sold us a deep cycle battery when we least expected it.

I have not mentioned the diving on an incredible reef in the Indian Ocean, the wildebeest we watched crossing the Mara river in the face of crocodile attacks, the romantic plains around Lake Elementaita where I finally understood how one can fall for Africa despite all the craziness, the total paradiseness of palm trees on a white sandy beach, the forgotten beauty of North East Kenya where the remote desert belongs to the Samburu and the cattle rustlers and that might be the only way it will stay as untouched as it is right now. I haven't mentioned them because the pictures will describe them better than I ever could.

Beefburger Ethiopian style

2009-11-05T11:22:00.000+01:00

Yummy food in Ethiopia, although sometimes the potentially familiar ends up surprisingly interpreted. We are big fans of the fresh fruit juices, orange, mango, papaya, pineapple and even avocado (not for Stuart, obviously). And the goulash, with fish and lamb, spicy but not too much so. There is a definite Italian influence in the quality and strength of the coffee and the cute little pastries, all flaky and chocolatey, and ice cream is everywhere.

The solution to all your problems

2009-11-02T06:50:00.001+01:00

Seen in the posh suburb of Karen, home to British High Commissioners and government ministers.

Shopping Part Three

2009-11-01T16:24:00.020+01:00

Development aid is a big business, and this book together with the Yellow Pages for East African NGOs were available everywhere.

Adult reading schemes are big in Kenya, and these books don't tell kids stories.

In a country where only a few percent of the population has electricity, petroleum lamps and spares are essential shopping.

It is hard to imagine that the target market for pet grooming products has great overlap with that for farm animal feed, but by the spread of cattle herds and other assorted live stock in the city I guess that's a faulty assumption in Nairobi.

I like the way that the incense suppliers of Kenya are so non-denominational.

The cliché has finally arrived in the shops, would Karen Blixen approve?

The dreaded Marsabit Rd

2009-10-29T16:24:00.000+01:00

Officially it's called the Trans East Africa Highway and while yes, it is in fact in East Africa, and it crosses some of it (from Nairobi in Kenya to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia) it is emphatically not a highway of any kind. It was our only way to points North, so there was no way of avoiding it, but we were not looking forward to it.

Stories we had heard made us dread this part of the journey more than any other, what with the bad condition of the road, the potential for banditry by the local warring tribes (mostly fighting amongst themselves over cattle and land, but still, cross fire...) and the remoteness. We had been told this was the worst road in Africa, averaging 20km/h speed and that if it rained we would surely get bogged down. Some friends recently drove the same way and had to take a soldier armed with a rocket launcher, and then were still stopped at a police checkpoint to wait for an escort of tanks and army trucks. Someone else warned us that a favorite way of holding up cars is to drive a herd of cattle into the road and then threaten the passengers until they give up their valuables. One area we were driving through was actually called the Plains of Darkness, straight from Lord of the Rings, and there were only few villages along the way, but when we did have flat tyre, two cars stopped in quick succession to offer help, and for accommodation we found two lovely spots, Gadissa Lodge in Isiolo and Swiss Henry's camp in Marsabit, as well as getting some help fixing up the car from Mangia's Hardware shop.

A road can get a reputation, and it's not always warranted, and now, after having completed the Marsabit Road and having arrived without incident in Ethiopia, I think that this is one of those traveller stories, a myth of a road that represents the adventure of traveling through Africa by car, that makes even those of us who take the 'easy' route up the East coast (rather than the uncharted and seldom used West coast route with all its unstable countries and even worse infrastructure, where everyone only speaks French) feel as if we are still trail blazers. We have a long list of broken and damaged bits on the car, but really it was an uneventful trip. The one thing no-one had thought to mention to us is the incredible beauty of the landscape and the variety of traditionally living people along the way.

Damages on the Marsabit Rd:

2 eggs - crushed inside a plastic container in the fridge

1 wingnut holding on the high lift jack

2 roof rack brackets - sheared at the welding point

1 tyre including wheel rim - spectacularly blown out and irreparable

1 strawberry yoghurt container - not easy to clean from the fridge, specially combined with raw egg (see above)

2 screws holding the dashboard

1 can of coke, having lost all its fizz mysteriously and having been squished into a square shape on the bottom of the fridge

some paintwork, where the bonnet constantly bounced on the chassis, now padded to minimise the oscillation

PS: It was my birthday for a whole weekend!

2009-10-27T14:56:00.000+01:00

- about an age and a country away, but I did say I would write more. Well, as we have no space in the car for all the birthday presents I might have got, this year my treat was going to be of the non-physical variety. For weeks I had noticed Stuart and Merryl whispering and suddenly shutting up, and whenever we did any trip planning there was a gap around my birthday where they couldn’t tell me where we were going to go. Then Merryl mentioned that she would be going rafting on my birthday weekend and a little later we were heading for Kampala, but I still had no idea of the size of the surprise until we drove around Kampala on the day before my birthday after Merryl had left, trying to follow the GPS without giving away the destination. We were going somewhere in town, but the GPS kept sending us down closed-off roads. Eventually we did end up where we were going, the Kampala Serena Hotel, poshest of the posh in that part of the World. A whole weekend in a real house with real rooms and real windows! Not only that, but there would be running water, straight into a nice bath tub, with white towels, and a toilet that flushed, and a shower with water pressure (my big obsession), and a sink with a mirror and everything! The water might even be hot, if I wanted it...

And that was just the beginning. There was a huge bed with white sheets and the mattress was most un-lumpy, and there were lots of plump pillows, and little bed side tables, and lamps I could switch off from the bed without getting up, and in the evening someone came to turn the bed down.The room had air con and a mini bar and a balcony and a soft chair, and a TV with lots of channels, none of which were silent or fuzzy. To crown the luxury there was wifi with a decent speed and no cut-outs (which is more than can be said for the other 5 star hotel we tried recently, where high-speed internet translated to 192kbps). Too much!!!

A whole weekend with this luxe lifestyle made me quite crazy, I didn’t know how to spoil myself first. Should I have a bath (of course) or a snooze on the bed? What could I download while I was here? Should I watch some TV? Or order room service. It was quite stressful, I tell you, and on top of all that Stuart and Merryl had arranged for me to have a massage and a manicure in the spa. As it turned out that was the best thing that could have happened, as I was totally relaxed after that.

And yet more photos

2009-10-27T06:52:00.000+01:00

This time from diving at Tiwi beach near Mombasa:

More Kenya photos

2009-10-26T20:14:00.000+01:00

I have had far too much to drink tonight in the fancy Italian restaurant, and I have a suspicion Stuart flirted with the waitress as I was ogling the maitre d' but anyway, I am not too sloshed to give you a link to the latest Kenya photos (since we are on our way out of Dodge finally and all).

Enjoy, as usual...

People We Meet, Part 1: The Independent Travellers

2009-10-26T17:59:00.000+01:00

So I promised that I would write about the people we meet on our travels, and now that we have been on the road for slightly over 100 days (yay!) I feel that we have met a good collection of different types of people, so I am going to write a little mini-series.

Let's start with the non-locals. There are a few varieties of those, one of which is the independent traveller (as opposed to the overland tourists, who require a separate post with their big trucks). We meet them at designated traveller hangouts like Fat Monkeys at Lake Malawi, Jungle Junction in Kenya and Eureka Camp near Lusaka. It’s usually a couple between 30ish and 50ish, who have put their jobs on hold to spend a year or more travelling. They drive a robust 4 wheel drive, or a huge MAN truck, or a bashed up old Defender, and they can spend hours discussing car fitouts, routes and favourite camp sites in a range of countries and continents. Some are driving the classic Cape to Cairo (or Cairo to Cape) route, while others loop down through West Africa and up the other side, while we have also met a few open-ended trips, where the plan really just consists of “a year in Africa, a year in Asia and then who knows.” Example:

Jan and Trevor - they left London in their kitted out Landrover for a gap year, driving through Europe, to Turkey and round the Med into the Middle East. We met them in Uganda where they were heading to Rwanda to finally arrive in South Africa at the end of the year. Trevor is a twitcher, so Stuart got on famously with him, as Jan and I were busy sharing movies and audiobooks from their terabyte drives. Entertainment is important on a long journey like this.

Poomba, aka Mandy and Jacques, had been on the road for 14 months when we met them at Fat Monkeys on Lake Malawi. They were heading back home to South Africa from Australia, having shipped the car to Novosibirsk to cross Asia and Europe. Their Land Cruiser was home made, and after such a long trip everything most definitely had its place.

The first big truck we encountered made quite an impression on us. Two German guys had dissolved their company to pay for a brand new truck to be fitted out so that they could go on a World tour. When we met them in Lusaka they had already spent a year dawdling their way down from Europe, planned to spend another year in Southern Africa before shipping the monster truck to South America and carrying on. They were so self sufficient, they looked like they may never return to stationery life.

The Black Hole and how I fell into it - and returned

2009-10-26T13:57:00.000+01:00

It all started in Uganda. We had planned on going from Tanzania through the Serengeti to Rwanda and round Lake Victoria to Uganda. Instead, because our suspension broke, we had to go to Nairobi to get it fixed. This meant that our visit to Uganda (we scrapped Rwanda in the end) was a detour rather than another place on the route. Returning to Nairobi to meet up with Mark and Martina for their two week holiday we had another detour, going to the beach. Added to this the fact that we are half-way through the journey, and somehow I lost track of the spirit of travelling to a destination.

The messy route (see the blue line for the planned route)

Yes, we were moving from place to place; yes,we were seeing new things, but we kept looping round as if we had lost our way. A week of totally flopping out on the beach was just the last straw. With the ocean in front of us and a country we had spent the best part of 5 weeks in behind us it felt like we had become mired. From the start we had been all about the forward movement, the going North, the putting miles under our belt, the getting there. Now we were meandering around the fixed centre of Jungle Junction and we seemed to be unable to extract ourselves from its pull.

Long story short, we are off to Ethiopia via Lake Turkana tomorrow, a great big new adventure as we leave behind the relative civilisation of Kenya for the unknown North.

Uganda Roundup

2009-10-12T16:11:00.000+02:00

When we worked out our route we had planned to travel from Tanzania North to Rwanda and Uganda, looping round Lake Victoria to enter Kenya from the west, but problems with the suspension prevented us from doing this. Instead we spent a few days in Kenya, heading up to the Lake and Uganda for a slow meandering arc returning us back to Nairobi after a couple of weeks. The result was that travelling in Uganda felt a bit aimless, being without a northward goal. The place still managed to get into my new top 3 country list (with Malawi and Namibia), for the amazing rain forest, the chilled people and the very funky monkeys (red-tailed, blue-tailed and black and white Colobus). We had no trouble to speak of, despite ongoing problems in the DRC next door and recent riots in Kampala related to changes in government.

Uganda also provided us with two new top ten campsites, a fab birthday treat for me and the fulfillment of one of Stuart's life ambitions, to see the mountain gorillas. We started to call Uganda the land of surprises, as it was so different from our expectations, and just when we thought we had worked out what kind of place it was, a new and unexpected vista opened in front of us.

Uganda was hills after hills after hills of green fertile farms, growing bananas, coffee, plantain and potatoes all mixed up together; it was riding our horses through the sugar cane fields and saying Jambo to every single child along the way, including stopping business at the local primary school; it was the perfect camp site and the wettest, a fabulous lake location where we got stuck due to the beauty and great company for far too long; it was also the frustration with badly-maintained sites that had so much going for them if someone just bloody well fixed the plumbing!; it was our first encounter with real rain forest, a green and dense mass of leaves, mushrooms and monkeys, being chased by the most evil mosquitos, struggling for air in the damp, cloying, hot, wet air; it was intense downpours which broke our awning and my patience, giving us clammy clothes and shoes for days and a great excuse for watching movies for a few days.

And then, after we decided that Uganda was pretty much a big lake and a lot of forest, we arrived at Queen Elizabeth National Park and discovered the Western Rift Valley, with its volcanos and crater lakes, great big hollows where we could watch elephants crossing the high grass way below us, where herds of Topi grazed among Uganda Kob, where water buffalo wallowed in grey damp patches until the layer of mud cracked off their hide, where pools of blue water shimmered against the salty edge separating wet from green, where we could see the next rain storm coming from an hour away across the acacia plains, a grey mass swallowing up the ground and the horizon.

Either we are getting more sociable or Uganda just has more interesting people, but we made some real cool new friends: a particularly good source was the Rwenzori guesthouse in Fort Portal, where we chatted with Donna the gorilla marketing lady from VSO, an auditor working on anti-corruption campaigns for USAid, some chimp researchers, an Israeli couple on holiday who entertained us with their horror story of getting Malaria on the second day of their trip, and the host himself, an opinionated Brit with fourteen years in Uganda and he was not holding back. We learnt a lot. Mustn't forget to mention the other overlanders, Trev and Jan, Anja and Jörg and Ben and Kate, fantastic company and deep wells of information, GPS tracks and ripped DVDs.

Views from the road

2009-10-10T18:40:00.000+02:00

Road works. Spreading large rocks across the road is one way to ensure no-one drives on this new stretch. Another popular potion is the paying of green branches instead of using road cones or warning signs. At first we thought that a careless truck had damaged the roadside bushes, until we came around a corner and almost drove into the back of a steam roller.

Candelabra Euphorbia, a completely useless tree as far as I can make out, consisting of a normal tree trunk with a bunch of cacti attached instead of branches. Honey made by bees collecting from these euphorbias is inedible as it burns the mouth and the fruit is poisonous.

Stuart's last conference call with London took place on the side of the road at Bwindi Impenetrable Forest Reserve, amidst banana plantations and small curious village children.

The rain in Uganda falls mainly not on the plain

2009-10-09T18:15:00.001+02:00

I haven't written much about the weather on this trip, mainly because we haven't had much of any note. It's sunny, warm, with blue skies. There were a few cold nights in the South, where it was winter when we left, and in Namibia we had night frost one time, but otherwise we have not noticed the weather.

This changed when we reached Uganda. The region is in the small rainy season right now, and while Kenya is suffering from a horrible drought, Uganda has rain almost every day. This meant that for days, while we were camping out at Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, we had wet feet, wet socks, wet shoes. When it rained it was not a shower or a drizzle or even a proper cloudburst, but a torrential downpour lasting hours without letup, fat drops banging on the tent roof where we took refuge to watch a movie. The water washed down the paths and cascaded over steps, collected in small lakes on every level surface and dripped from reed roofs and leaking drainpipes.

It makes the rainforest the dense green mess that it is, of course, impenetrable indeed, but it made me miserable after a few days. Nothing was drying, and at one point we lost the awning (which we use as an ancillary tent in bad weather). The weight of the water that collected during one deluge was so heavy it bent the 1 cm square welded aluminium strut that holds the awning horizontal (it has since been fixed).

It is amazing to me that the subsistence farmers who live around Bwindi handle these torrents of water so well. They live in small huts with reed roofs, no windows or doors, walk along stony paths and have no real means of drying anything should it get wet. It's like permanent camping. This water is good for the forest, and the banana fields, but it can't be all that healthy for humans.

Before and after - a short goodbye

2009-10-09T17:42:00.001+02:00

Before:

After:

Merryl has gone home and we miss her mucho. Come back soon, Merryl, your mug is waiting for you!

Border Crossings

2009-10-09T16:11:00.000+02:00

Crossing into Kenya from Uganda, at Busia, was the usual mayhem. Goods trucks were parked in long rows down the main street waiting for their paperwork to clear. Young guys run up to the car to offer their services as middle men to handle our customs and visas for a fee. We learnt very early on, at Kazangula in Zambia, where the signs at immigration insist that no brokers are allowed to deal with the officials, that we didn't need or want someone helping us. As it turns out, at every single border crossing there is a very simple process: get the visa, sort out the car through customs, pay any taxes or fees, done - move on to immigration on the other side and repeat with other taxes to pay and other forms to fill in. That sounds easy, but of course is attended by uncertainty and chaos. Still, we wouldn't trust someone with our passports, our dollars, our car papers. Instead we found a place to park in the midst of trucks, soldiers, vendors selling cold drinks and snacks and officious looking men, and wandered off to find immigration to get our exit papers.

One thing that has been singularly lacking at the borders has been decent signage. There are any number of huts and containers serving as offices, forex shacks and barracks, but nowhere a clear sign who does what and where to go next. The best option for us in the beginning was to follow the overlanders in front of us and hope they knew what they are doing. Eventually we worked out to look for the distribution point of immigration forms, although those are sometimes just photocopied sheets, so that is not so easy either.

Once we have located immigration, we fill in forms that are never looked at again by another human being - first name, last name, passport details (which I know by heart by now), length of stay, mode of transport, contact details. Then we get scrutinised to make sure we match our passport photo and sometimes have to fill in a big ledger, too, and that's usually it. We haven't overstayed our visa anywhere yet, so I don't know what would happen in that case. I suspect a small dollar amount would take care of it.

After immigration, customs. Stuart usually does that part. It means getting the carnet stamped to leave the country, and sometimes the payment of exit taxes. When we left Kenya, we had spent two days over our seven day transit limit and had to pay US$40 for road tax. No big deal as we hadn't spent anything coming into Kenya. Getting the car out of a country is usually also a pretty easy affair. No-one has so far even wanted to look at the car in case we were smuggling something, or even checked our insurance.

Before we started I thought that the border crossings would be day-long events, where our car gets taken apart Cold War style, our intentions are scrutinised and we might be sent back for lack of the right paperwork. As it turns out we are through much faster than the backpackers travelling by matatu or the overland trucks with their crowds of youths. May it stay like this for the rest of the journey.

Pictures from the road

2009-10-07T20:35:00.000+02:00

Literary bend or political comment?

The Ankole of Uganda breed cows for the size of their horns and have 100 different names for the colour of their cows' skin. They don't raise cattle for dairy or meat, but for social status, and cattle are the currency attached to the bride price, a hot topic in Uganda today (there was a whole page article about the formalities of bride price in the paper last weekend). Unfortunately this little obsession results in overgrazing and soil erosion. Nowadays there are efforts to interbreed the Ankole cows to make them yield more milk so that they have some practical use.

I wonder how often people who have checked in actually check out again. Very Hotel California.

The Ugandan border town of Busia is obsessed with uniforming the border staff. The colour scheme is cool. Money changers wear yellow jackets on the Ugandan and purple jackets on the Kenyan side, and the bicycle taxi drivers (?riders?) wear a fetching shade of pink. Fab.

Did I mention...

2009-10-07T15:41:00.000+02:00

...that we had an accident? Yup, our first day driving in Nairobi, and we run into another car on a roundabout. I have in the past experienced some crazy drivers, I spent 2.5 years in the maelstrom of Dubai's motorways, mixing it up with multiple different driving cultures, and even drove a minibus in India once, but never have I experienced drivers with such nerves of steel. Normally one look at our bull bars and people tend to back off, so slowly but surely elbowing your way across a junction tends to work (they even managed to intimidate Joburg minibus drivers, a notoriously rude lot), but here everyone plays chicken and we blinked too late. The result was a huge dent and scratch down the other car and a little bit of paint to be scraped off our bull bar. Shame (as they say with a smirk in South Africa)!

Since we are mzungu the traffic warden who didn't witness the accident took one look at us and decided it was our fault, not the guy who pushed his Nissan (not so) Hardbody into us in his desire to cut across in front of us. This meant sorting out a replacement for his damaged door. There followed 4 hours of tense negotiations (thanks, Fred!) in a backyard smelling of rotten fish (fertiliser factory) until we managed to negotiate the cost of a replacement door for an already dented, fertiliser-smelling wreck of a Nissan ute down from US$1000 to $70, which was a bit more realistic. We have been more respectful of African drivers since, mainly because we suspect that any damage will always be our fault, and as the t-shirt says: "This mzungu's ATM is out of order."

How cool...

2009-10-05T21:43:00.001+02:00

Is this pillow case. We're staying in a hotel tonight (I know, again, but it's not a patch on the Serena, and this still is a camping trip, mostly) and they are obviously a bit worried about bedding going missing, so the sheets are tagged. I want to steal my pillow case, but Stuart said I'm not allowed. So I took a picture instead. Cool, not?

The lowdown from Stuart

2009-10-05T20:46:00.000+02:00

You can find the story of our Uganda trip as narrated by Stuart here and here.

Free publicity

2009-10-03T22:41:00.001+02:00

I have no idea how, but we have been added to the Africa Overland Network. Here's our page with a link and everything. Oh, and you can rate our site, so off you go...

Birthday treats

2009-10-03T19:54:00.001+02:00

I have to write an extensive post on the fabulousness of the Kampala Serena Hotel, a weekend here being my birthday treat, but just to get you going, here is the cake the hotel came up with. I love this place! And the water pressure, well it's amazing...

It's almost over

2009-10-02T22:41:00.000+02:00

We are on our way back from the little detour that is Uganda to re-join the main Africa Overland corridor, so here are a few photos from our last weeks. There's something for everyone: gorillas, lakes, rain forest, tiny mushrooms and a cow with really big horns.
Enjoy!

Public Awareness

2009-10-01T17:58:00.001+02:00

"Causes of high spread of HIV/AIDS on border points"

(from a leaflet on display at the Tanzanian border)

"Young officers at border points find it a matter of pride to have sexual contact with foreigners -- not knowing that they endanger their lives by contracting HIV/AIDS

Sex is used as one of the means of corruption from people who criss-cross the border on business missions. This causes the respective staff ti have an array of lovers and hence run the risk of contracting the killer virus. Wrong notions on the use of condoms to the effect that it renders men impotent also greatly contribute to the infection rate. There are also people who pour petrol on theis sexual organs immediately after having sexual sessions believing that the liquid could stiffle (sic) any infection. This (sic) people end up damaging their private parts.

Remember:

Avoid staying jobless. There are people who find themselves with nothing to do and hence go for drinking sprees which ultimately tempt them into having sex...."

The perfect campsite

2009-09-19T17:51:00.000+02:00

The perfect campsite

We are in Uganda, country number 9, and staying at the Haven, a lodge near the source of the White Nile. It's raining for the first time on this trip, but this place is so fabulous, so comfortable that it could stand as the epitome of the perfect camp site. So here are the ingredients, which I have determined to be necessary for a great camp site after exhaustive research in 9 African countries, encountering the best and the worst that the tourist industry can come up with:

First the basics, the foundation if you will. There should be a lawn, green and fresh, covering the tent pitches, and we should be able to drive our car onto it as we have a roof tent and it's really annoying to have to look at the grass rather than be on it. The pitch should be nice and big, so that we can spread out with our other tent, our table and chairs and general kitchen acroutements (sp?). It helps if the ground is flat so we don't have to navigate back and forth for ages to find a good spot to park the car. It's nice to have a little border to separate us from the other campers, but not too high so we can't meet new friends. This lawn should be dotted with shade giving trees, just big enough to fit the car and the tent under, but without gooey fruit that drop on the tent and make a mess, or worse, without being a monkey sleeping tree as they tend to pee from a great height during the night. If the camp site looks out over an amazing valley, or a lake with gently lapping waves, or a similar view of great stunningness, that is an extra bonus. If we can see fish eagles hunting or elephants crossing the dried up riverbed or hippos grunting the day away, our life is complete.

Next come the facilities, and this is where many camp sites do badly. Toilets, to get the gross item out of the way first, don't have to be flushing, long drops are fine as long as the smell is under control, they are clean and airy and there is toilet paper. I have to praise Mushroom Farm (Malawi) here, where not only is the long drop nice smelling, but the product is composted and used on the organic vegetable garden. Showers don't need to be hot, although I would not have wanted cold showers in South Africa or Namibia in mid-winter. And most places could manage hot water if they took the Haven as an example, where the owner has installed solar panels for water heating, and even though we are in the rainy season now, there is always enough sun to have lovely hot showers. The thing that is essential with a shower, and often taken for granted, though, is water pressure. You can have as much water as you like, if it dribbles out of the shower head you are not going to get clean. And we have had many a shower lacking sufficient pressure, from Sesriem in Namibia to Aruba in the Maasai Mara. Personally I find good water pressure trumps fresh water, as I was happy to have a slightly salty shower (at Makadi Beach in Tanzania) or one that is a bit rusty (Green View Lodge, Mbeya), but when I am standing naked in the shower and turn the water on I like to see more than just a trickle. The shower room should be a decent size to facilitate getting dressed, although it doesn't have to be a private cubicle for the pitch (as we had in Swakopmund and El Toro, Botswana). It's nice but unnecessary. More important is that there is a good lock on the door and a bit of privacy. There should be no dusty corners where dead flies congregate, nor grubby edges making it impossible to put down my soap, and while on the subject of putting things down, a few hooks, a ledge and a bench outside to keep my clothes dry and my towel in reach are surprisingly often afterthoughts. Also, if there is a tap, it's good to be able to open it, and if the shower head doesn't fall on my head that also helps my cleaning enjoyment. German run camp sites like the Haven are remarkably consistent in providing good quality showers. Maybe it's our history of heavy engineering?

Next come the non-essential niceties. That includes water taps dotted round the tent sites, a sink for washing up, a washing line, and - for us most important - a power supply so we can sit and tap away at our laptops to our heart's content. Tables and benches, sometimes under cover, have been a specially useful addition, so we don't have to get our own tables and chairs out. Where there is a bar or restaurant there is often a nice view to sit and compute or capture footage while drinking a cold Savanna, and the bar staff is usually happy to provide us with electricity in exchange for us running up a bar tab.

Last but not least on our travels we have found security to be most important. It's a sad fact that we have had thefts from our car in two places, and both were not Nairobi car parks, which we have been warned about at great length, but camp sites. A fence and a security guy who walks around at night are pretty standard, although that didn't help on those two occasions. Just being in the centre of the site rather than at the edges seems to make a difference, or just makes us feel safer. Security from wild animals also becomes an issue, as we have had jackals chewing straps off our bags, elephants charging Stuart into the toilet, baboon attacks on our food and nocturnal visits from village dogs.

My top list of camp sites so far, in no particular order:

Mahangu Lodge, Namibia

Guma Lagoon, Botswana

The Haven, Uganda

Jungle Junction, Kenya

Makadi Beach, Tanzania

Naukluft, Namibia

Track and Trail, Zambia

Mushroom Farm, Malawi

Fat Monkeys, Malawi

Abiqua, Namibia

Look at these!

2009-09-19T13:48:00.000+02:00

Stuart took some incredible photos in the Maasai Mara. Take a look: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fiverlocker/tags/kenya/

Breakfast/Internet

2009-09-19T13:38:00.000+02:00

The strangely named Pap cafe on Parliament st in Kampala is out current favourite hangout for food and wifi. And lovely it is indeed.

Before and after

2009-09-18T19:12:00.000+02:00

Man, we drink a lot of tea on this trip and our mugs bear witness to that. On the top is my mug in its normal state after many early morning cuppas and on the bottom is Stuart's mug, which Merryl took the scrubbing pad to so that it looks like new. We bought these in Maun one monts into the trip and they already lost their handles. Oh well.

Views from the road

2009-09-15T09:10:00.001+02:00

There is a big Muslim community in Tanzania, but the main language spoken is Swahili. Useful Swahili phrases: Karibu - Welcome

Habari - hi, how are you?

Asante Sana - thank you very much

Indeed. Any number of things are sold by the side of the road. That includes garden plants.

Doing the Maasai Mara crush

2009-09-14T08:28:00.001+02:00

Kenya = Maasai Mara, the famous game reserve that spans the border to Tanzania where it is called the Serengeti. Full of animals and home to the Mara river crossing featured in countless wildlife documentaries, where thousands of wildebeest and zebra throw themselves across the river trying to evade the waiting crocs and lions. Land of empty open plains swaying with grass, the odd tree decoratively breaking the endless horizon, where vast herds of exotic animals graze, from zebra to impala, gazelles of every variety alongside elephant and giraffe, eland, reed bucks, topi and kongoni; where predators roam looking for easy pickings, lions, leopards, cheetah, hyena and fox, a place to go at least once, although it would be hard to think we will never return.

I had heard many stories before we came, had a picture in my mind of how it would be, and it all turned out exactly like that and at the same time completely different. Access to the park is unlike any other we had been to, the road up to the first gate was terrible and only got worse as we pushed on to Aruba Bush Camp, whose owner, a Bavarian lady, we had met at Jungle Junction in Nairobi, and who promised hot showers and clean toilets at her camp site. Due to the bad infrastructure, the lack of signage and bad tracks in the park we had been told to take a guide, so Daniel, a local Maasai, hopped in the car with us in the morning. This turned out to be an advantage as well as a drawback. Daniel knew the roads, so he took us into the park through a shortcut. He was also on the phone a lot, for reasons of navigation, it turned out, as the mobile was the communicator for those guides not belonging to a lodge (their cars are equipped with two way radios). So in order to find out where the game was he called and was called, and he promptly took us to a spot where we could see a cheetah. A cheetah, wow! These guys (or often gals, as the females are extremely territorial and keep all males out of the way) are pretty hard to spot, as they are very shy and spend most of the day in hiding. But there it was, all lean and elegant, if panting a little from the heat, a real live cheetah in the wild.

Unfortunately that was also our introduction to how things work in the Mara and the drawback of having a guide in the car with us. There were three other safari cars around, each of them nudging in to see the cheetah better, taking turns to close in, overtaking and cutting each other off, in the process pushing the animal to move on just as it had found a shady spot to rest. It was looking increasingly harassed and when we told Daniel that we didn't want to approach any further he looked at us, mystified, and carried on encouraging us to go even closer. It took some will to refuse, but we could as we were driving ourselves. A side effect of all this jostling was that all the cars went off the main track, crunching over the vegetation and churning up the dry soil. It hasn't rained here yet, the Mara is the driest it has been since the 50's so the environment is very fragile, and I was shocked to see that all through the day not only did big 4x4 Landrovers and Cruisers drive on the lesser used tracks, which cut across the plain all over the place, but in the search for a better view they would drive into thickets, reverse over shrubs and pull up right on the river bank, making new tyre marks that would then be used by other cars. Part of the problem is of course that there is no established road system in the Mara such as we are used to from other parks, whether that be Kruger or Etosha or South Luangwa. Even when the signage was bad, there were always clear road markings and offroad tracks were blocked by stones and Do Not enter signs. there is nothing of the kind here, and I have yet to even see a map of recommended routes.

Another problem are the tourists who push the guides to drive ever nearer to the animals, and since most guides are dependent on the tourists' goodwill and their tips, they are happy to oblige. I felt that Daniel considered this just the way things are and since there is no penalty for bad behaviour and no immediate impact he is happy to carry on and satisfy the tourist wishes. Of course there is a long term impact on the environment and - through stress - on the animals. I wonder if the guides were paid a wage, or if they got ranger training so that they could gain an understanding of the impact of their actions combined with the confidence to be guardians of the landscape rather than collectors of tips, if better infrastructure and more policing of visitor behaviour would help here. I am sure many people have already thought of solutions to the problem, but it's sad to see that not a lot seems to get implemented.

Our stop to watch the river crossing became another ambivalent event. The Mara river had slowed almost to a trickle anywhere else, but here there were still rapids, and they were crowded with a dozen patient, scaly, and hungry crocodiles. There also floated the carcass of a wildebeest, horn stuck on a rock, slowly bobbing in the stream, apparently too smelly to still be interesting to the pre-historic beasts hanging around for the next victim. Along the bank a herd of wildebeest was crowding at the edge of the river, bumping and retreating until one took the - literal - leap into the water, and then they were all running, jumping and leaping over each other, pushing from behind, at the point of no return until they - on reaching a deeper channel - had to swim a way to reach firm ground again and stream up the other side to safety. Somehow this time they all made it across, maybe because after a large group had crossed the throng suddenly screeched to a halt and the rest of the herd stumbled back up onto the bank to find another crossing that was not quite so croc infested. Another flow of bodies took place out of our sight, but we soon realised that this one hadn't gone as well as the last. As we watched, a sleek brown body came floating round the bend, legs akimbo, occasionally a horn popping up from the water. Too slow, or maybe a stumble, a bump at the wrong moment, and a wildebeest had become a victim. The carcass was surrounded by crocs, who, pushing and snapping and twisting, tried to take a bite, jostling each other not unlike the ungainly Landcruisers when lining up for a photo of the evasive cheetah earlier in the day.

Unfortunately the ridge was lined with up to 20 cars, all heads sticking out of the roof hatch, 1200mm lenses cranked up to get that perfect shot, pink snappy cams next to pro level camcorders, all facing the iconic sight. Lodge cars were arranged as in a car park. When the spectacle was over they vanished round the corner in expectation of an even better view - and then, to our luck, most of them disappeared. It was lunchtime at the posh lodges.

Finding Jungle Junction

2009-09-13T08:25:00.000+02:00

What's the most elusive thing we've encountered on this journey? Not cheetahs or leopards, not the endangered fish eagle or the malachite kingfisher, the nocturnal hippos or the tiny lion ants that hide in the ground and wait for their prey, no it is Jungle Junction, the much-praised camp site in the middle of Nairobi, which every long distance overlander waxes lyrical about, with its acclaimed showers and copious internet, and not least of all its accommodating and generous host Christoph. The problem is, it advertised itself with a latitude and longitude only, even a Google search didn't yield any more detail (such as a street name, maybe) and, having entered the co-ordinates into our GPS, we still struggled to find the entrance gates in the whirl and commotion that is Nairobi on our first day. We drove round and round the block until a kind stranger pointed out the black iron gate with the large double-J cut into it. Ah, there you are! The problem with Jungle Junction is that it's just so easy to stay there. When you arrive you have usually just come from the wilds of either Ethiopia or Tanzania, and you are ready for some civilisation. But Nairobi is overwhelming, the biggest city in East Africa, so you also need a place to hide out from where you can occasionally venture out into the crazy city to sort out your visa or buy that thing that broke, but where you can retreat and pretend you are in another place, a calmer place, an organised place with no surprises. Jungle Junction provides normalcy, sofas in the lounge and reliable internet, a clean kitchen and fixed prices for washing, dinner and drinks. It's really just a big family house with public spaces downstairs and some guest rooms upstairs, camping on the front lawn and showers in an outhouse round the back. the front door has a reception added to it and houses a large fridge filled with drinks dispensed on the honour system. Internet is fast and free, so fast that I feel like I am back home, and that's such a comforting feeling. Yes, there is the problem of only having electricity during the day every other day, but at least he's clear about this up front, and it's just as he says, power returns every evening at 6pm. Then there are the notice boards, fantastically useful and split out to list accommodation on one, Nairobi info on another, there's a board holding restaurant info in the kitchen and a free for all where visitors can leave their cards and photos by reception )I had no idea there were so many overlanders with business cards).

Oh, and there's Christoph's motorbike workshop. He is a former BMW engineer and seems to be the go-to man for servicing bikes in the region - i.e. Eastern Africa (he fixed up the Long Way Down bikes when they had a problem in Tanzania). But Christoph is not just helpful for bikers, he has knowledge of everything, from computer repairers to solar panel suppliers, all neatly stored in a set of business card books, each section labelled for easy reference. And really, it's Christoph who is the biggest asset of Jungle Junction. He has created an oasis of calm and organised peace, a quality that propagates to employees and guests alike. Everything is immaculate and cared for, from the big cushions on the sofas to the crockery in the kitchen, nothing is flashy, but everything is looked after by all, and there is an orderly and considerate spirit around the place. There are reminder lists posted on the walls to clean up after yourself, to use water sparingly and to refrain from leaving stuff around (e.g. "Monday is fridge day, everything not labelled will be chucked out"; "Don't leave food on the surfaces, put it in the cupboard", etc), long enumerations spiked with creative spelling and apostrophe crimes, but I suspect that it's really Christoph's calm presence, his open helpful manner and uncynical attitude that makes everyone want to behave well here. I know it worked for me. And for your information, Jungle Junction can be found on Amboseli Rd in Lavington.

Tanzania roundup

2009-09-12T07:55:00.001+02:00

I guess I promised to do country roundups so I will do one for Tanzania, too. But it's hard. I have so few good memories that I am struggling with the decision to write, even. It's ironic, when we were hanging out in Malawi we worried that we wouldn't have enough time in Tanzania, due to the visa limit that required us to leave on September 10th. As it turned out, we were there for less than 12 days, and left on the 7th, and gladly.

Tanzania is big, so that meant that we really only drove through it. Add to that the fact that we stayed in Dar Es Salaam and Arusha for a few days each and you can imagine that there were a few long driving days. So why did we rush through one of the best regarded tourist countries in the East of Africa, a place many people go to for a holiday of a life time, with such romantic and famous locations such as Zanzibar, Ngorongoro Crater, the Serengeti and Olduvai Gorge?

Dar Es Salaam was interesting as the biggest town we have been to since Lusaka, although it certainly was not as organised or developed. We stayed a few days by the beach there, I think we were hiding out from Tanzanian reality under the palm trees. We did go into town, always fun as we had to cross on a short ferry journey, to see the museum and get the car fixed up - again and do some shopping. After that we made straight for the Serengeti and Ngorongoro (via a night at the foot of the invisible Kilimanjaro), but unfortunately had more car trouble and had to return to Arusha after a visit to Ngorongoro instead of crossing the Serengeti and heading to Rwanda. A three day stay in Arusha finished off any lingering sympathy for Tanzania and we headed off to Kenya. Coming from Malawi and Zambia we had gotten used to a very easy and pleasant life style. There were cheap and comfy camp sites within reasonable driving distances, nature reserves with reasonable entrance fees, more or less available shopping locations, with fresh food on the roadside and small but useful supermarkets just prior to running out of supplies completely and most of all people were friendly even at tourist locations, even when they were trying to sell us stuff we didn't want, even though we would sometimes get overcharged. Not so in Tanzania. Tanzania was mzungu (white person) prices and being mobbed when shopping for pineapples by the roadside; it's an overpriced hotel room with no hot water or electricity, which isn't fixed because "you didn't complain enough"; it's being charged US$480 for a day in Ngorongoro crater, and then told we'd have to pay an extra US$20 for the guide; it's signs at the Dar Es Salaam campsite: "inside camp=safe, outside camp=unsafe" and Merryl harassed while walking on the beach; it's the sight of corruption and the resulting neglect of every public piece of infrastructure, except for the government part of town; it's being stopped by traffic cops for speeding using dubious equipment and then finding that the fine is less if there is no receipt; it's money changers at the border who are seriously good cheats; it's street vendors and touts who really won't take no for an answer, rude to the point of insult when we show no interest in their rip-offs; it's being charged for parking even though there is no signage indicating official involvement anywhere in sight; being charged for guide fees for a guy who uninvited trundles after us; it's neglected camp sites and neglected museums and neglected streets and neglected parks...; oh, and it's the loudest mosques we have encountered anywhere, including Egypt, Jordan, Dubai or Malaysia - and it's Ramadan, so the Imam is on the loudspeaker from 4.30 am to 10pm at full blast, turning even the locals off. I'll stop with the negative now, you get the picture. On the other hand, there have been small moments of pleasantness, kindnesses from strangers: the Indian shop keeper, an elderly gentleman, who made sure we counted our change and printed out a receipt so we could be sure we had paid the right money, he saw us for the insecure visitors confused by yet another new currency that we were; the Maasai guards on the beach at Mikadi, looking all haughty and unapproachable in their strange clothes and clinking jewellery, but who always had a cheery "Mambo Poa" for us when he passed, jauntily flicking his cow tail to keep the flies away, jingling with every move; the gate keepers at Ngorongoro crater, who decided that we didn't need a guide after finding out that I am German (one of the guard's brother in a Roman Catholic priest in Cologne, with the improbable name of Innocent), although still concerned we would get lost - it's a crater, for Pity's sake, it's got walls all around it!; and finally Mussadiq, the awesomely helpful suspension dealer in Arusha, who gave us back our faith in the place after all the crappiness - he found bushes for the suspension, let us park in his back yard, negotiated with the annoying parking attendant and refused to take any money on the basis that he didn't have the exact right parts we needed - what a guy! And then there were, I have to admit, incredible views in the Ngorongoro crater, Baobab valley demands a return visit and Dar was a cool melting pot, which makes it a potential place to live for a little while. Still, glad to be in Kenya now.

Meryl's Latest Missives

2009-09-09T23:25:00.000+02:00

Oh, and you HAVE TO read Merryl's latest - a bit behind the trip, as these are stories from Botswana, which I personally can barely remember, but they are the funniest nevertheless. Read and make sure you are not drinking coffee at your computer at the time...

Change of Plan

2009-09-08T22:43:00.003+02:00

If anyone actually follows our calendar (at the bottom of this blog page) they will notice that we are in Nairobi, not at Lake Victoria on our way to Rwanda as planned. We are still trying to get to Rwanda, but had to miss out on Olduvai Gorge and the Serengeti due to our repeatedly failing shock absorbers. Very boringly this has happened twice now (previously in Zambia), both times on very bad roads, and we have decided to go to the East African capital of Nairobi, where it is possible to buy anything, to have the suspension looked at. These problems should not occur on a freshly installed system, so we are concerned to get it set up for the much worse roads of Northern Kenya.

Long story short, we are now in Nairobi for a few days and then hope to head off to Maasai Mara and on to Uganda. We will be doing things backwards from the planned route, and will have to retrace our steps later, but this way we are safe - and get to spend some time in a real metropolis again. Yay for cinemas, Apple dealers and broadband internet!

And now for Tanzania...

2009-09-08T22:05:00.001+02:00

And here are the photos from Tanzania. Despite being a kind of crummy place, we saw beautiful things, so take a look:

Finally broadband = pictures!

2009-09-08T22:00:00.002+02:00

Here finally, after crossing all of Tanzania without a decent internet connection, are the best photos of Malawi, our favourite place so far. We are now in the famous Jungle Junction in Nairobi (more on that later), where we are slaughtering the bandwidth, so hopefully more pictures from Tanzania next. Enjoy:

What's wrong with this picture?

2009-09-06T21:31:00.000+02:00

Tingatinga

2009-09-06T14:38:00.001+02:00

I really like this style, it's loud and witty and cool. I wish more street artists would take it to heart, rather than copying out endless pictures of dancing women.

Rabbiting On

More from the creative frontline

Trying a new thing

It's National day in Dubai. Watch out on the roads!

Apostrophe crime

What I'll Miss - Germany

Museum of Islamic Art in Doha

South Africa 2010

Before and after

My home from the air

Kirmes

Reasons for owning an iPad #73

The final cleanup

Nottingham in Scandinavia

Border crossings

European landfall

Top blog posts of 2009

Syria photos

Data update Jordan and Syria

GPS-less in the Middle East

Best of Jordan

Has John Cleese been moonlighting?

The Madly Memorable Madaba Mosaic Manufacturers are most motivated

How low can you go?

Pictures from the road - Madaba

View from above

Weather!

Did you know...

From Norway to the Red Sea

The Best of Egypt

Sign of the Times

Lost in Cairo

Egypt Roundup

Hurghada explained: Sign Language

Irony of the Day

Leaving Aswan

Photos from Aswan

Stuart's Latest Offering

How to ... Get your car out of customs in Egypt

How to ... Do Nothing in Aswan

Views from the road - pedestrian edition

Mobile Data Update - Egypt

Sudan Roundup

Sudan pictures

Here we are... what now?

A sad admission

Change of plan

The tea lady - Sudan style

Another milestone

OMG Pyramids!!!

Wadi Halfa

Ethiopia Roundup

Mobile Data update

People We Meet Part 3: The Overland Tourists

Ethiopian images

More money lessons

Back in a land of cakes

How to finish that roof top

Sleeping in Ethiopia

Views from the road - Ethiopia

Lalibela

More power from the sun

Ethiopian Millenium

Lucy in the Sky

Kenya roundup

Beefburger Ethiopian style

The solution to all your problems

Shopping Part Three

The dreaded Marsabit Rd

PS: It was my birthday for a whole weekend!

And yet more photos

More Kenya photos

People We Meet, Part 1: The Independent Travellers

The Black Hole and how I fell into it - and returned

Uganda Roundup

Views from the road

The rain in Uganda falls mainly not on the plain

Before and after - a short goodbye

Border Crossings

Pictures from the road