Arie Goes to Uganda

Arie in Ethiopia: The Merkato

2009-02-08T06:23:00.001+03:00

I was on a plane for Obama's inauguration, so I didn't get to see it. But I didn't miss his speech. For days afterward, vans were driving around Addis Ababa with loudspeakers broadcasting it. OK, so I didn't hear it all at once, but I got the gist. There isn't as much Obamania here as there was in Kenya or Uganda, but he's still everywhere. Even the local news (or is that Al Jazeera?) -- "something something something OBAMA something something GAZA something something OBAMA something ISRAEL something something". One evening late at night I was standing on the balcony of my hotel room looking over the city and suddenly from a PA system I heard "PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA!" And then silence. Here's a photo of a street in Addis.

I stopped by the Sheraton today. It was pretty amazing. I'm used to thinking of the Sheraton as a mid-range hotel -- nice, clean beds, but nothing fancy. Not in Addis Ababa. In Addis, the Sheraton is a massive compound in the middle of the city. Once you get through the gates (and they don't let taxis in), you get to beautifully manicured gardens and an enormous building. The lobby is beautiful. I didn't get to see a room -- $300/night is slightly out of my price range -- but I'm sure they're amazing. I think it's a hotel for rich first worlders who really aren't interested in being in Ethiopia. I heard from a female friend that it's an uncomfortable lobby in the evenings -- there are basically only Saudi businessmen and prostitutes. And she wasn't wearing a turban. No wonder she was getting dirty looks.

From the Sheraton we walked to the Piazza, a neighborhood in the northern part of Addis that has a strong Italian influence. Addis is a very hilly town, and it's about eight thousand feet above sea level. Even coming from Kampala, which is 4000 feet up, I had a bit of altitude trouble. Not outright altitude sickness or anything, but I was often out of breath at the top of a hill. Also I had a sore throat, which is apparently an altitude thing.

Anyway, we made it to the Piazza (shown), which is just a little place where a bunch of streets meet and there's a tiny little green space, a few bushes and trees. A homeless man lying in the bushes saw us walking by and yelled pretty much every obscenity in the English language. I was impressed with his English, honestly. Most people here don't have such good accents.

The Piazza is the upscale part of Addis -- the more expensive stores and restaurants are around here. It's also the area that bears the most obvious Italian influence, with coffee shops scattered around.

Our first stop was the St. George Cathedral, coronation site of Haile Selassie (and a pilgrimage site for Rastafari). Saint George is the patron saint of Ethiopia. His relics were carried into the Battle of Adwa against Italy in 1896, the only time an African army defeated a European one in a large-scale conflict (although it was Italy, so it barely counts). Italy burnt it down in retaliation for an attempt to assassinate the Italian viceroy during the occupation, but it was rebuilt in 1941.

After seeing the church, we decided to get some coffee. Although coffee is now grown all over the world, it's native to the Kaffe region of Ethiopia. Allegedly a shepherd (named Kaldi) noticed that his sheep were more energetic after eating the beans (you could read the Ethiopian Legend of Dancing Goats). Traditionally in Ethiopia it was used for religious ceremonies -- until the early part of the twentieth century, it wasn't legal to drink it in a secular context. It made it to Europe through the middle east -- the Pope was asked to ban it because it was a "Muslim drink", but in 1600 he said it was fine. (It was also repressed by Islamic authorities at various times, and the Mormons still ban it.) To preserve their monopoly, Arab states prohibited the export of unroasted beans or plants, but Dutch smugglers brought plants to Europe.

Coffee is one of Ethiopia's major exports. Something I didn't know is that it takes about one hundred and forty liters of water -- eleven hundred and twenty cups -- to grow the beans for one cup of coffee. It was actually banned by Ethiopia's Christian community until the late nineteenth century, being seen as a Muslim drink. It's a big export of Uganda, though something that surprised me is that it didn't come to Uganda directly from Ethiopia -- Europeans brought it there from Brazil in the nineteenth century.

Anyway, we went to a little coffee shop and I had some. I don't normally drink coffee, but this seemed like the time to start. After coffee, we had a traditional Ethiopian lunch, then went to the Merkato.

The Merkato is a gigantic market. It got its start during the Italian occupation, when the Italians wouldn't let Arabs use the primary market, so they relocated to the west of the city. Over time local merchants moved in as well, and now it's this enormous market -- it covers several square miles and more than ten thousand people work there. It's the largest market in Africa. (The primary market grew up into the Piazza.)

The Merkato isn't like the other markets I've been to in Africa. In Uganda, the markets were sort of large makeshift structures made of wooden planks and plywood sheets and whatever else they could find, with the interiors roughly divided into cubicle-type arrangements for individual vendors. (The markets in Cambodia were similar.) But the Merkato is more like a western strip-mall for pedestrians -- the individual stores are real buildings and there's no real center. Instead, it's just store after store after store.

Like other markets, though, there are districts. We approached through the electronics district, which was basically a lot of guys selling all sorts of little mechanisms and devices. There were also lots of people selling DVDs. We wandered around for a while. There were roads through most of the Merkato, and occasionally cars would drive by, but most of the traffic was pedestrian. As you can see, the roads aren't in good condition.

One of the striking things was the people carrying enormous loads. It's routine to see people bent half-way over with a gigantic package on their shoulders as they walk very quickly. Sometimes children, but generally adult men. The stuff looked very very heavy. I guess that's the primary mode of transport.

Unfortunately, the Merkato is a hotbed for pickpocketing. Prepared, I had left most of my valuables in the hotel safe and kept a close eye on the rest.

We wandered into the khat district of the Merkato. In the road was an enormous pile of plant stalks (shown). I guess the plants are brought into the neighborhood whole and the sellers strip the leaves off. Khat is a shrub that likely originated in Ethiopia whose leaves and stems contain an amphetamine-like chemical. Ancient Egyptians believed that it unlocks divine energy when chewed. It's not incredibly potent -- on the contrary, it's considered less harmful and less habit-forming than tobacco and alcohol.

I'd heard little about khat before coming to Africa, but in this part of the world it's very popular. Major growth countries include Yemen, Ethiopia, and Kenya. Some estimate that forty percent of Yemen's water is used to irrigate khat. Somalia banned khat during Ramadan and there were street protests. A majority of Yemenis chew khat. Saudi Arabia, however, vigorously enforces a ban on it.

Kaht is only potent when fresh (the active chemical breaks down within forty-eight hours) and only grows in this region, so for most of history it was only used in this area. Air travel has brought khat to other parts of the world. The WHO has not scheduled khat because it's viewed as a regional problem. Khat was banned in the United States in 1993. Here's a photo of a sheep skull that was sitting in the road near my hotel.

The Merkato is also the site of an enormous coffee auction every morning, but we had missed that by many hours. Also I don't buy coffee by the kilogram.

More of my trip to Ethiopia coming soon.

Ethiopia: No Puns Come to Mind

2009-02-04T16:20:00.000+03:00

My first full day in Ethiopia. I woke up, had some hotel breakfast, and walked along the road into the city center. Like much of East Africa, there are no sidewalks here -- there are sidewalks in some parts of the downtown area, but not on this road. People walk in the road mostly, or on the dirt near the road if there's 1) room and 2) no giant drainage ditches and 3) no cars parked there (rare to get all three).

I came to a Dashen Bank branch, ducked inside, and tried their ATM. It worked fine. I took out some cash. Lonely Planet was wrong, there are plenty of ATMs here that take foreign cards. Liars.

Entering the city, I first came to Meskal Square, a large open area. To me "square" involves some kind of public pedestrian space, not road, but Meskal Square is just a very large intersection. As you can see, they have some decorations left over from their millennium celebration. But they're not that old -- Ethiopia celebrated the new millennium last year. The Ethiopian calendar, based on the Coptic calendar (which was based on the Egyptian calendar), is about seven to eight years behind the Gregorian calendar because of different calculations as to the date of the Annunciation (when Gabriel told Mary she would conceive Jesus). They add a leap day every four years without exception (we omit it on even 100 years like 1900, except if the year is divisible by 400, like 2000).

The Egyptian calendar consists of twelve months of thirty days each, plus a thirteenth month of five or six days depending on whether it's a leap year. This millennium, their year begins on our September 11 (or September 12 in our leap years). It is now 2001. The rest of the world has more or less switched to the Gregorian calendar, but not these guys. I mean, you go to buy a plane ticket, it's 2009, sure, but someone writes out a receipt for you, it's 2001. Weird stuff.

I was once having lunch with a bunch of people from various parts of Africa, and they were all teasing these two Ethiopian guys about how Ethiopia does everything its own way -- has its own language, alphabet, calendar, etc. They were right, these dudes are fiercely independent. Ethiopia even has its own time -- their day starts at 6am, so when someone tells you that they don't start serving lunch until "six", they mean noon.

Once in the city center, the sidewalks were in much better shape. I walked up through a nice park area and over this river -- lots of green space in the east part of the city. It's a large city -- no skyscrapers or anything like that, but it's dense and spread out. Well, not dense like New York is dense, no one builds up (my hotel, at seven stories, is one of the tallest buildings in the city), but dense like no one wastes space.

I walk through the city a bit. There are a lot of green spaces in Addis, which is nice. There are also a lot of sheep. I'm not sure exactly why. I guess people have herds of sheep even though they live in the city, and either graze them out of town or, maybe, graze them in the city's parks. Maybe? I have no idea. Central Park in New York has Sheep's Meadow. Anyway, there are herds of sheep moving through the city. Here's a photo of one of them. I thought the boy was a bit aggressive with the stick, but what do I know about herding sheep?

I come to this church, which houses the Beta Maryam mausoleum. There are a lot of people standing or sitting around the church, either relaxing and socializing or praying, but no one seems to be going in or out. I stand there looking at the church for a while and a guy standing in front of the door waves me over and asks if I want to see the mausoleum. I do. We discuss a fee and we remove our shoes and he unlocks the door.

He leads me inside. The inside of the church is beautiful -- giant stained glass windows, ornate carpeting, no electric lighting. I linger a bit, taking various photos. The church itself is empty, no worshippers at all. I'm still a little confused as to why everyone is praying outside the church instead of inside it. This is an aspect of Christianity that I don't understand. Although the weather is very nice here -- mid-70s and sunny.

Anyway, he leads me through the central area and unlocks a panel in the floor, and we walk down the stairs into the mausoleum. It's dark and dusty, of course, though there are lights. It's a large vaulted room with still air and four very large coffins. The guy and I talk a bit about why I'm in Ethiopia and where I live and so forth, and then he launches into his guide spiel.

The coffins house the body of Emperor Menelik II, as well as various other imperial figures. Menelik II ruled in the late 19th-century and played a key role in modernizing Ethiopia. Good story: In the 1890s, he ordered three electric chairs so he could modernize executions. Sadly, Ethiopia had no electricity, so they didn't work. Not to be discouraged, he used one as his throne. Reuse, reduce, recycle.

The room also has various things that belonged to them -- their chairs, their parchment books, etc. My guide felt that it was very important that I photograph the chairs.

Anyway, that was the mausoleum. For unknown reasons there were giant tortoises hanging out outside the church. I guess maybe people feed them?

There are a lot of homeless people in Ethiopia. A lot. On every block there's at least one person sleeping in a bundle of clothing. I haven't been anywhere with so many street people -- I'm not sure if that's because other cities don't have the social conditions that lead to the problem, or if it's just that other cities chase them away and Addis doesn't. Many of them are begging, with sheets of cloth covered in small coins, and I see people give to them. Possibly there are homeless people here because there's a culture of charity, so it's possible to survive on the street.

Everyone knows about the famine here in the 1980s. The thing I didn't know about the famine is that it was caused by a totalitarian government, not bad weather. In 1974, Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed and replaced with a Communist group called the Derg headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam. Mengistu's reign of terror involved the direct murder of thousands of suspected enemies of the state, but its most insidious aspect was its use of starvation to suppress insurgency. Mengistu prevented food from reaching regions of the country that opposed his government. More than one million people starved to death.

I remember as a kid having to sing We Are the World every morning in school. They told us there was a terrible food shortage, but forgot to mention that the shortage was engineered. The West sent millions of dollars in food aid, but Mengistu used it to strengthen his regime and prevented it from reaching his enemies. Mengistu's government collapsed in 1991, and Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe, where he still lives. After a trial in absentia that lasted more than a decade, an Ethiopian court convicted him of genocide.

Ethiopia's economy has a lot of problems, largely because of vestiges of Communism. The government controls telephony, so unlike the rest of Africa (and the world), there isn't much of a cell phone system. I tried to get a sim card for my phone (fifty cents in Tanzania) but foreigners cannot purchase them, only rent them, and they're unreasonably expensive. Here's a photo of a slum by a river -- strangely, riverside property is not reserved for the wealthy in Addis Ababa.

The banking sector is similarly restrained by the government -- foreign banks are not allowed in Ethiopia. Period. And Ethiopian banks aren't exactly brimming with capital. Land cannot be owned by private citizens, only leased from the government. Taxes are high, unemployment is high, dissatisfaction is high. The current government has begun privatization reforms, but it'll be slow going.

Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world. On the Human Development Index, Ethiopia is 169th out of 179. (The United States is 15th. Iceland and Norway are tied for 1st.) Here are a few statistics about Ethiopia, and Uganda, the United States, and Norway for comparison:

	Ethiopia	Uganda	U.S.	Norway
Population growth	3.2%	3.6%	0.9%	.35%
Infant mortality (per 1000 births)	82	66	6.3	3.6
Children born per woman	6.2	6.8	2.1	1.8
Median age	17	15	37	39
HIV prevalence rate	4.4%	4.1%	0.6%	0.1%
Literacy rate	42%	66.8%	99%	100%
Life expectancy	55	52	78	80
Education (% of GDP)	6%	5.2%	5.3%	7.2%
Per capita income	$800	$1000	$45,800	$53,300
National debt (% of GDP)	34%	21%	61%	83%
Military expenditures (% of GDP)	3%	2.2%	4%	1.9%
Wealth distribution	30	45.7	46.3	28

A few things on the table jump out at me. Ethiopia spends more money than we do on education, percentage-wise -- that's nice for us. They're poorer than Uganda, which is hard to do, but they still manage to spend more of their budget on their military. Although they are a poorer nation, the wealth is distributed much more equally than it is in Uganda, so there are probably fewer desperately poor people. That's probably a big part of why life expectancy is higher. Their HIV rate is allegedly higher, but no one believes that Uganda's HIV rate is as low as they say.

Anyway. The mausoleum was under a church that was in the middle of the city, but set in a large park-like area. I walked out through the park area, on the way seeing a few more Christian things that I didn't really understand, including a large model of Jesus on a cross inside a glass case that I thought it wouldn't be a good idea to photograph, and this mural.

I also saw some soldiers in an observation tower eyeing me. There are a lot of soldiers around Addis Ababa. Most of the government buildings are protected by the military, I guess.

I walked out of the park area and continued north to the Holy Trinity Cathedral, considered the most important church in Ethiopia after St. Mary's in Axum (which houses the Ark of the Covenant). Before I looked at the Cathedral, I looked at a monument to the ministers killed by the Derg. The monument was next to the Prime Minister's residence, so there were two military guys sitting there to make sure that no one took any photographs. The punishment for photographing government buildings is three months in jail, so I decided not to chance it. Instead, here's the cathedral.

The Cathedral was built in 1942 to celebrate the liberation of Ethiopia from Italy. Like every other church in Addis, it's surrounded by worshippers who don't go inside for some reason. I went to the office outside the church and bought a ticket, which the man assured me included a free guide. I entered the church. It was beautiful inside, with stained glass windows, frescoes on the ceiling, etc. No guides though.

I wandered a bit on my own and then a man approached and explained that he would guide me. I was skeptical and asked if he was the official guide, he said sure. I asked if he was expecting any additional money. He said yes. We negotiated ten birr (ninety cents) and he showed me around. Of course, halfway through the tour, the official guide showed up and they started to argue. I interrupted by paying the first guy ($1) and sending him away.

Not only is it a giant cathedral with lots of fancy religious art, but it also houses the bodies of Haile Selassie and his wife. Allegedly (the Rastafari don't believe that he's dead).

After the church, I went to the National Museum. I was underwhelmed. In the basement was a cast of Lucy ("Dinkenesh" to the Ethiopians -- "you are beautiful"), the skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis from three million years ago that was found in Ethiopia. Lucy's noteworthy because she has the small skull of an ape but the hips and bones of a modern human -- a step on the evolutionary chain. Fine, but it's just a cast. The original is on a controversial tour of the United States -- apparently the Ethiopian government likes it because they get a share of the profits (allegedly to modernize Ethiopia's museums, which they desperately need), but various anthropologists say the bones are too fragile to truck around the country. The Smithsonian refused to exhibit them for that reason. Some anthropologists support exhibiting them in America to " raise awareness of human-origins studies", which I think is code for "stop being creationists".

The upper floors were mostly filled with artwork and handcrafts. Lots of paintings. This one, Victims of Famine (1974) by Eshetu Tiruneh, shows one of the earlier famines from when Haile Selassie was Emperor. The museum also had various sculptures, including a nice one of Selassie himself on a horse, and one of his thrones. And lots more paintings. One room had a bunch of giant flatscreen TVs that were showing a video about how we're all one race and people should try to get along. If only we had more videos.

On the way to the museum, I passed this banner. The Italian influence in Addis is a bit strange. There's a neighborhood in the northern part of the city called the Piazza that has a bunch of Italian restaurants and lots of coffee shops. Drinks like macchiatos (macchiati?) are popular here. But it's not like the rest of Africa -- because Ethiopia wasn't colonized, just temporarily conquered, there's no fundamental Italian sense to the city. It's not like France and Kigali or Britain and Kampala. No one speaks Italian, the cuisine doesn't show Italian influence, and the city looks nothing like an Italian city. There are few Italians visiting Addis (I saw two my whole time -- not like Brits in Uganda).

And despite the banner, I don't think they're really friends. I'm told that this banner actually commemorates Italy's return of some important stone obelisk that Mussolini had stolen from Ethiopia.

Anyway. After the museum I walked to a restaurant that served Ethiopian food that Lonely Planet felt was excellent. For once they were right on. I was a bit concerned when I walked in because I was the only foreigner, but the menu had some comical English translations and the food was excellent. There was a woman sitting in the foyer with a bunch of cups, I think for a coffee ceremony, and she was burning a giant thing of incense, and the restaurant was filled with incense. Most tables were sipping tej, a local honey wine -- the restaurant had its own brewery. I had chunks of lamb in berbere with injera, and it was delicious. I tried to take a few photos unobtrusively but was not especially successful.

I was going to walk over to the Ethnological Museum, but then I saw a sign for LION PARK. Had I had enough lions in the Serengeti? No.

Lion Park is a zoo in the center of Addis Ababa. I paid my admission and camera fee and walked in. The zoo was filled with teenagers and a few adults, mostly couples, sitting on the grass talking or looking at animals. A man was sitting on a bench covered in monkeys, but he didn't want to be photographed. Addis is big on lions because they're the official symbol of something or other. There are lions everywhere, and Haile Selassie was crowned "Lion of Judah".

I walked over to some cages where a large number of teenagers were crowded around a large, angry primate -- I don't know what kind. The kids had some candy and were teasing the little guy, and he kept opening his mouth and reaching for it. One of the boys also discovered that the guy got angry when the boy touched a certain girl, and so of course it became a good excuse for him to grab her. I guess the thing thought it was the alpha male with exclusive mating rights. The whole scene reminded me of the zoo in Hanoi, where teenagers also crowded around monkeys in cages and taunted them with candy. I guess some things are universal.

Anyway, all of that is beside the point. The best part of Lion Park is, of course, lions. There were a lot of them in cages on the side, but the best were in a large round pavilion in the center of the park. They were fenced in by a chain-link fence and by iron bars. For some insane reason I was allowed to walk around the pavilion inches away from the lions. Most of them were clearly accustomed to people and were sleeping or sitting around.

I don't like seeing lions locked in little cages, but these guys didn't seem to unhappy. They were clearly healthy, with big dark manes, and they looked well-fed. They weren't all alone, most were in couples. One of the lions who was isolated was trying to mark his territory by urinating on the crowd. Or else he was just annoyed with them. Either way it was funny.

Safari notwithstanding, this is the closest I've been to a lion. I was going to try to pet one -- this one -- through the fence, and reached out to do so, but then thought better of it -- those things are fast. When I pulled my hand back, the crowd indicated that I'd made a good decision, though one that deprived them of some entertainment. The kids were disappointed, the adults nodded sagely.

I knew the bars were safe, but when one of the lions growled at me and started to lunge, I felt some primal instinct kick in. Lions are really big. I left the pavilion and went to see some of the lions on the side -- a bunch of teenagers were there, and one had discovered that if he ran quickly back and forth, the lions would follow him. He seemed amused.

Anyway, Lion Park was awesome.

After the park, I went to the Ethnographic Museum, which Lonely Planet raves about. Yawn. It was located inside Addis Ababa University (main gates shown here), which was interesting, and a few students struck up conversations with me while I was walking around. The museum occupies the upper floors of the main building, which used to be Haile Selassie's palace before he donated it to form the university. It was founded in 1950, renamed the Haile Selassie University in 1962, and then received its current name from the Derg in 1975. On the first floor was a little exhibit on the history of the building and some paintings. The museum was on the second floor.

The museum itself was dull. There were tons of exhibits about traditional life among the tribes and lots of stuff about Christianity -- there was a whole area for the evolution of processional crosses. One interesting bit was myths and stories from different cultures. There was also a very fancy room with various musical instruments. Sadly, photography was not allowed inside, so here are more lions. Also, the building is also an administrative office, so sometimes there'd be a door in one exhibit that would lead to four guys sitting behind computers and you realize, "oh, this is not an exhibit about university registrars, this is the university registrar."

The best part of the museum was the preserved bedchambers of Haile Selassie and his wife. Seeing things like that always reminds me of how fortunate we are to live in the developed world -- the average American living below the poverty line probably has a nicer bathroom than that of the Emperor of Ethiopia only forty years ago. It looked like a plain institutional bathroom -- so much so, in fact, that there were signs explaining that the sink and toilet was Haile Selassie's and we weren't allowed to use it. If I were emperor of a country, I'd have a hot tub or something, but he had a tiny bathtub.

Outside the university is a memorial to some of the people killed by Italy. In 1937, shortly after Italy invaded Ethiopia, the Italian viceroy was holding a celebration at the imperial palace. Two Eritreans threw hand grenades at him, wounding but not killing him. Italian police immediately fired indiscriminately at the crowd. Once the Italians calmed down, though, cooler heads prevailed. No, just kidding -- as collective punishment they instituted three days of horrible violence, burnt churches and other buildings, and murdered thousands of Ethiopians. Many people fled the city and joined the resistance.

I went back to my hotel, relaxed a bit, then took a taxi to dinner. Despite my limited Amharic and the driver's limited English, we seemed to be getting along well, and I commented positively on his substantial cassette tape collection. He responded, "Many tapes. Very good, yes? I have American tape." He ejected the Ethiopian music and popped in a tape and his radio started to blare: Kung Fu Fighting. No joke. Here's a painting from the museum entitled "Pharaoh of Egypt".

So that was my first day in Ethiopia. Busy. The next few aren't as hectic, coming soon.

Haile Selassie

2009-02-04T16:16:00.003+03:00

Much of the recent political history of Ethiopia is the history of Haile Selassie. Selassie, or "His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings of Ethiopia and Elect of God", was a fascinating figure. He became fascinating early on -- as Crown Prince he furthered the modernization of Ethiopia, distributed lions to Western European leaders, and adopted forty Armenian orphans following the Armenian genocide and had them trained to form a band.

He was crowned Emperor in 1930. He immediately moved toward liberal democracy, establishing Ethiopia's first written constitution and creating a bicameral legislature. Of course, Europe couldn't allow this to continue, and in 1935 Italy invaded. Selassie mobilized his army, famously reminding them that they were going to die anyway, probably of "cough or head-cold", and it was better to die fighting Italians. Italy's modern army had no trouble defeating Ethiopia, especially after they began using chemical weapons and targeting hospitals.

On May 5, 1936, Selassie fled to Geneva via Israel to plead for help from the League of Nations. His speech there is a famous event in Ethiopia, and Wikipedia describes it as "a speech often considered among the most stirring of the 20th century." He was named Time's Man of the Year (the first black guy to appear on the cover), but the League decided not to do anything to help. (This episode inspired the ineffectuality clause in the UN charter.)

Selassie spent five years in exile, mostly producing counter-propaganda to respond to the Italians' stream of regular propaganda. Italy responded by executing several of his family members, looting Ethiopia's churches, and stealing its monuments and obelisks. Finally, during WWII British forces liberated Ethiopia. Selassie returned to Addis exactly five years after he fled.

Restored to power, he continued democratic reforms. A new constitution in 1955 provided broader public participation. He also sent troops around the world to participate in UN peacekeeping missions, saying basically that it would have been nice if someone had done the same for Ethiopia in 1936. But dissatisfaction with his rule accumulated, and there were unsuccessful coups. Communism became popular. Severe famines in the 1970s caused further dissatisfaction, especially when it appeared that Selassie (by then in his 80s) was unaware of the magnitude of suffering.

Finally the military revolted over salary issues. Selassie promised a pay increase, but the Derg ("sixty"), a committee appointed to investigate their grievances and led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, instead staged a coup. They imprisoned Selassie, executed a bunch of people, and then executed him.

Or did they?

Before his coronation as Emperor, he was known as Ras ("Lord") Tafari. The Rastafari believe that God ("Jah") manifested as Jesus and gave the world his teachings, but they were corrupted, so God manifested as Haile Selassie to reform the world. God cannot die, so the alleged execution of Haile Selassie by the Derg must be a hoax; Selassie lives on in hiding and will reveal himself and redeem humanity.

Rastas divide the world into Zion (Ethiopia or possibly all of Africa) and Babylon (everywhere else, but especially the developed world). Babylon has revolted against God, but God will redeem humanity and create paradise on Earth in Zion. Rastafari has strong elements of Afrocentrism, teaching that history is the story of whites harming blacks. The Back to Africa movement is looked upon favorably (since it calls for a return of blacks to Zion), and Marcus Garvey is believed to have been a prophet. For some time there were elements of black supremacy in Rastafari, but they largely disappeared after Haile Selassie condemned racism in a speech to the United Nations.

Many Rastas believe in eternal life -- apparently Bob Marley refused to write a will when he was dying of cancer because that would be giving in to death. Some feel so strongly that they will avoid saying words with "die" or "death" in them, for instance substituting "livication" for "dedication". At the paradise that God will create in Zion, everyone will speak Amharic, the language of Ethiopia, and some Rastas study Amharic now. Rastas famously smoke marijuana in a ceremony called a "reasoning", where they discuss social and political issues. Many Rastas follow the kosher dietary restrictions of the Torah. Many prefer to avoid the word Rastafarianism because they believe they have evolved above "-isms".

You don't actually see many Rastafari in Ethiopia, at least as far as I could tell. I guess Jamaica's a bit more pleasant.

Christianity in Ethiopia

2009-02-03T17:51:00.003+03:00

There are lots of churches in Ethiopia. It was the second country to adopt Christianity as its official religion, after Armenia. Connections between Ethiopia and Judeo-Christian society officially began in the 10th century BCE. According to the Torah, the Queen of Sheba heard of the wisdom of King Solomon of Jerusalem and traveled there to meet and test him. She was impressed, blessed him and gave him four tons of gold, and he bestowed upon her "everything she desired". The Koran has a similar story, with the addition of a genie. Scholars disagree about the location of Sheba, but Ethiopians believe that it's, well, Ethiopia.

And in Ethiopia, the "everything she desired" line has been interpreted to mean that Solomon seduced the Queen. She had a son, Menelik I, who was the ancestor of the Ethiopian imperial line down to Haile Selassie. Thus, the rulers of Ethiopia through the modern era are believed to be the descendents of King Solomon. (The imperial line is still extant, though no longer in power.)

The Ethiopian tradition holds that Solomon served the Queen a very spicy meal but no beverages and then invited her to spend the night in the palace. She agreed on condition that he not "take her by force" (these were classy times). He promised on condition that she promise not to take anything in the palace by force. (She knew what was happening but thought she could go the night without water.) She awoke in the middle of the night unbearably thirsty and reached for water that had been set by the bed, and the King warned her that water was the most valuable possession in the kingdom and by taking it she was breaking her oath. When she took the water anyway, he was freed from his oath.

Allegedly, Menelik I returned to Jerusalem and started telling people that he was Solomon's son. To test him, Solomon had one hundred and ninety-nine other guys stand in a room with him and then had Menelik sent in. Menelik immediately identified Solomon (despite never having seen him) and Solomon accepted him as his son. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Solomon, Menelik's men were stealing the Ark of the Covenant. They took it to the Church of St. Mary in Axum, Ethiopia. I couldn't go check due to flight problems and also they kill you if you try to sneak in.

Ethiopia allegedly wasn't always Christian. Tradition states that in the eighth century BCE, immigrants brought Judaism to Ethiopia (this was the time period for the destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion of Jews). For the following period Ethiopia was a Jewish state. The Aksumite Kingdom in modern-day Ethiopia converted to Christianity in the fourth century CE. A century and a half later, some monks arrived and began a strong tradition of monasticism that continues today. The kingdom fell and a new one arose, same as usual, but the Christianity never went away. Because they converted so early, they follow the Christian Orthodox tradition. Portuguese missionaries converted one king to Catholicism, but there was a revolt and his son switched back to Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity and expelled the Jesuits. A guide told me that Ethiopia's long history of Judaism explains the Jewish symbols mixed in with Christian ones, such as the star here on the roof of a church.

Arie Goes to Ethiopia

2009-02-03T04:00:00.002+03:00

So I decided to go to Ethiopia. I didn't know much about it before I started planning the trip. I knew it was land-locked, Christian, had delicious food, and was poor. And it's in the Horn of Africa, which is the little part that pokes out where all the wars are. And they had a bad famine in the 1980s, and a big war with Eritrea. I was to discover that that was, well, largely accurate. Especially about the food.

I was coming from Arusha, in Tanzania, where I went on safari. In Arusha, the day of my flight to visit Ethiopia, I read through Lonely Planet: Ethiopia to make sure I had everything covered. That's when I spotted the little warning that there were no ATMs in Ethiopia. Uhoh. I had some U.S. dollars, but to be safe I took out some money from the ATM at the airport. Of course, that was Tanzanian Shillings. (Spoiler: There are plenty of ATMs in Ethiopia. Lonely Planet has no idea.)

My flight was on Ethiopian Airways, an excellent airline. We landed first in Nairobi, where we sat for a while, then in Addis Ababa. On the plane I got to talking to the girl in the row behind me -- she was from Arusha and it was her first time on an airplane. She was flying with us to Nairobi and then to Addis, from which she would fly to Dubai, then Houston, then some local flight to a U.S. university where she was starting college. She seemed a bit nervous about the Dubai to Houston leg, which she said was her longest flight, six hours... I took a look at her schedule and sure enough, the flight landed six hours after it took off. The look on her face when I explained time zones...

I spent much of the flight learning a few phrases of Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia. It's written using the Ge'ez (or Ethiopic) alphabet, a complex alphabet that has minimal connection to the Roman alphabet. I didn't even try to learn it. Amharic has a bunch of sounds that aren't in English, but I decided not to worry about that. Two of the six or so vowels are close to schwas, and I can't really tell them apart, but it turns out I'm hard to understand because I can't get them right. Oh well.

Ethiopia has visas on arrival for people from "tourist-generating countries", including America. I was a bit concerned because their website says you can only have a visa on arrival if you are arriving from one of those countries, but I figured I was, indirectly. I got off the plane pretty quickly -- I was sitting in the first row behind first class, so they let us off first, so I was the first off and the second guy to arrive in the visa room (some businessman dude pushed past me). I got my visa with no trouble, got stamped in, and I was in Ethiopia.

Before I left the secured area I tried to exchange my Tanzanian shillings for Ethiopian Birr. They didn't take Tanzanian shillings. I got a bit more worried about the currency situation.

I had reserved a room with the dubiously named Z Guest House (which was full, so they set me up with the D Guest House), but despite their promises there was no one waiting for me at the airport. I hunted around for a bit, no one showed up. A few touts saw me looking around confused and tried to talk me into staying at their hotels, but I resisted. After checking out an ATM that clearly did not take foreign cards, I went to a booth for the Global Hotel, which promised to take credit cards.

Global Hotel is a luxury hotel -- not on the level of, say, some of the absurd places I stayed while on safari, but pretty damn nice for under $100/night. The only drawback is that it's half a mile from the city center, but cabs cost $2.50 to anywhere in town (and shared taxis cost 15 cents). I checked in, dropped off my stuff, and went down to the hotel restaurant (it was pretty late).

The menu was western food, which disappointed me. But then I spotted "traditional dinner" in the corner and ordered that. It was amazingly great. Giant plate of injera, big thing of lamb meat sautéed in berbere, another little dish of very thick berbere, delicious. It was served with these two giant rolls of injera. It was my first Ethiopian meal in Ethiopia and I was very happy with it. Also, it cost $3. Something odd about this city is that accommodation is expensive and everything else is dirt cheap. I think I had one meal that cost more than $6 my whole time there, and that was in a western hotel.

Ethiopian food is amazingly wonderful. The core of the cuisine is injera, which is spongy sour bread made from an Ethiopian grain called teff that substitutes for plates and silverware. A typical meal might be a large (pizza-sized) piece of injera covered in various types of stews. A stew would normally be made of chunks of some meat soaked in lots of onion and berbere (a sort of paste made from chili pepper and many other spices, very strong). You usually get additional rolls of injera to use as silverware. It's not like the food in any other part of Africa (or the world, really). Although there's a lot of butter and fat in the food, every single Ethiopian I saw, regardless of how wealthy they were, was very thin.

Stuffed with lamb and spongy sour bread, I was sleepy. More coming soon.

Arie Goes to a Crater

2009-02-02T07:19:00.002+03:00

This is the last day of my safari. You might want to start at the beginning.

Today was our only day in the Ngorongoro Crater. We woke up early and piled into the car. The gates to the Crater are supposed to open at 6:30am, but we were told that the rangers arrive at the park around 6:30 and then go around unlocking the gates. It's about a twenty minute drive to the floor of the Crater, and we were there around 7, not bad. For some dumb reason our resort didn't start serving breakfast until 6:30 (geniuses: your raison d'etre opens at 6:30, try serving breakfast before that), so we took a packed breakfast.

This and many other buffalo were waiting for us. Apparently the park service has been putting out fires for many years here, and fires tend to destroy taller grasses and allow shorter grasses to flourish. The increasing quantity of tall grass has led to more buffalo and fewer wildebeest and gazelle. These things are pretty damn big, that's for sure, no wonder they need all that grass. Most people say hippos are the most dangerous mammal here, but our guide thinks it's buffalo.

The African buffalo is one of the "big five", the five animals that Europeans tried to drive to extinction. The others are lions, leopards, elephants, and rhinos. Wealthy white Europeans (and Teddy Roosevelt) swarmed all over this region a century ago trying to kill as many as they could. With its macabre history, you'd think we could let the term die, but instead it's been reimagined as the five animals that the current generation of rich white people who show up here should try to view. This seems stupid to me -- the five were chosen because they were ferocious, not because they were rare or beautiful or interesting (giraffe > buffalo). But that's how it is. Our lodge gift shop sold "Big Five" t-shirts. (This here is a wildebeest, but you can't tell, right? I couldn't either. I think the key is the beard.)

Buffalo can weigh up to a ton. I just finished Guns, Germs, and Steel, which makes a big point about how there were no friendly animals like cows for sub-Saharan Africans to domesticate; apparently the African buffalo is dangerous and unpredictable and not amenable to pulling plows and being milked. Lions can kill buffalo if they work in teams, but other than that, even crocodiles will leave the adults alone (once in a long while hyenas will take down an adult). Unlike other prey, buffalo will sometimes fight back. There are instances where after lions have killed a buffalo, the rest of the buffalo will charge the lions and harass them for hours, even chasing them into trees (and not just the tree-climbing lions either).

We saw some zebras and some other animals, and then came upon a family of hyenas. I'm against hyenas, mainly because I'm a big fan of lions and you gotta support your team, but baby hyenas are pretty cute. This family only had one baby, and they had a little burrow and he kept poking his head out of the burrow. The hyenas were very close to various prey, mostly buffalo and zebra, but the prey wasn't scared -- I guess there weren't enough hyenas to pose a threat.

Next we saw some lions with a kill on a hillside. Unlike the Serengeti, you can't leave the roads in the Ngorongoro Crater, so we couldn't get too close. Using binoculars and zoom lenses, we watched as a lioness and her cubs polished off the kill and then trotted down the hill to join the dozing male. On the way they were joined by another lioness with two more cubs. As you can see, these cubs looked pretty happy.

One of the baby cubs had a feather in his mouth for some reason and he really wanted to keep it -- he kept dropping it, stopping, picking it up, and then running to catch up with the others. It was adorable. The lions curled up in the shade near the river and started to nap. I guess the whole pride had eaten, so they were content to lie around for the day.

We also saw a couple of buffalo lumber slowly away from the lions. They probably were too big to be in any danger, but why take chances? For some reason, each buffalo had a little white bird who seemed to be his friend. Each buffalo's bird stood near him while he ate grass, and when they lumbered away from the lions, the birds hopped alongside. On these lions you can see the faint rosettes -- cubs have them, and they're visible sometimes on females' bellies, but they fade entirely on adult males.

We ate breakfast and then drove for a while looking at the wildlife. Buffalo when they're grazing tend to form these long single-file lines. I'm not sure why. One possibility is that they can see more of their surroundings that way, so it's more likely that one will spot an approaching predator. But buffalo are so big that they don't have too much to fear from predators (only certain lion prides can hunt the adults). Not sure.

There were a lot of zebra, especially a lot of baby zebra. One thing I found interesting is that some (but not all) of the baby zebra are brown and white instead of black and white. And as this picture shows, it's not just the color of the fur -- the brown fur is very different from the white fur. It's much longer and puffier. The white fur looks like short hair, the brown fur like shag carpeting. Most brown zebra apparently turn black with age, but a few don't.

We also saw ostrich and warthog. I don't have a lot to say about these warthog. They have big teeth, they enter their burrows backward so they can spring out at predators that attack, all the big cats eat them, people carve their tusks like elephant tusks only smaller, and when they eat they kneel down so it looks like they're praying. Or possibly when they pray they muck around in the dirt so it looks like they're eating. Who can say?

Next we drove to the hippo pool. At first we thought there was a large rock in the center with hippos around it, but then we realized that the large rock was in fact the backs of dozens of hippos. It was still cool enough that many of them hadn't yet fully submerged and their backs were dry, making them look like grey rocks. As we watched, the day heated up and one by one the hippos did barrel rolls, getting themselves wet.

There was tasty-looking grass around the pool, but none of the grazers were anywhere near it. Maybe it's the wrong type of grass. More likely, maybe the hippos don't like zebra company. Hippos are mean and I don't know how well the tolerate other animals. Well, there was this black bird that was hopping from hippo to hippo pecking their backs and they kept trying to roll him under, but he'd just hop along like a guy on a log in a river. They had to tolerate him. In this photo are what look like ducks. The hippos tolerate them too.

There were also a tall white bird. The hippos didn't seem to care about that guy either. Down the river a bit, zebra were drinking from the pond. The hippos didn't mind them, or if they did, they didn't give any indication. Like, for instance, one possible indication would be chasing the zebra down, drowning them, and devouring them. They do that sometimes (rarely), but not today.

One hippo was on the riverbank walking around -- a fairly rare occurrence during the day. He didn't seem to be eating, though. We watched as he sort of lumbered around for a while and then walked over to the riverbank. I got my camera ready for the swan dive (or the hippo dive) but it was more like watching someone get into a very cold pool -- he stepped up to the bank, his hind legs kept walking while his front legs stayed still until all four were perched at the end, and then he sort of slowly stepped into the river. Pretty soon he was swimming along happily.

Here's a photo of the most punk zebra I've ever seen -- the kid dyed his mane to match his stripes. Well, he's too young to have dyed his own mane, his parents probably did it for him. What am I saying, this dude's parents don't get along. Probably he lives with his mom (most zebras are nursed for a year), but his dad gets to see him on weekends and one weekend his dad helped him dye his mane so the kid would think he was "cool". Probably also to piss of his mother, and when he got home on Sunday night she was all "what have you done to your mane?" and he said "what's the big deal?" Whatever, this zebra totally pwns. He'll probably grow up to be a stockbroker, if he isn't eaten by lions.

Near the hippo pool was the flamingo lake. There were no roads near it, but from what I could see, there were roughly one trillion flamingos. This is a really bad place to be a brine shrimp. Assuming that's what they eat. I don't really know. We also saw some zebra eating grass right next to a zebra skull. Personally if you put a human skull next to me at the sushi bar, it might temper my appetite, but not these guys. Photo below.

Next we found elephants. Although this isn't really impressive -- when your target is fourteen feet tall, weighs six tons, and walks around smashing trees that are in his way with his enormous tusks as he stamps around, you don't get much credit for finding him. Anyway, we found some elephants and watched as they ate lots of plants.

We stopped to use the bathrooms and left the car roof and door open. This proved to be a mistake. As I was walking back toward the car, I saw a vervet monkey jump onto the roof and then swing into the vehicle. I knew what was coming (because in Cambodia a monkey stole my driver's food from our tuk-tuk) and I ran over and tried to kick some monkey ass, but I was too slow -- the monkey found our lunchbox, pulled out a bag of crackers and a pastry, and jumped out and climbed a tree.

Another monkey landed on the roof, so I grabbed my cameras and slammed the door. The noise scared him off the car, and I got in -- the rest stayed away while I was in there. Our guide came back, secured the rest of the food, and closed up the car. Then we stood and watched as the stupid monkey slowly devoured our crackers.

Our guide told me that when a monkey wants food, you have to let him have it, because otherwise he'll either bite you or take a camera, climb up a tree, and then drop it. My feeling is: Whatev, Chamberlain, I don't negotiate with terrorists. I wanted to throw rocks at the vervet until he gave our crackers back, but apparently some pansy law says you can't throw rocks at wildlife inside conservation areas. And it doesn't have an "unless they steal your crackers" exception. Here's a photo of the zebra and skull that I couldn't fit above.

Anyway, after the stupid monkey ate our crackers, he tried to eat the pastry, but evolution has not yet taught him about plastic wrap. He couldn't pull it open (in fairness, I can't most of the time either) so he ended up trying to eat the plastic wrap. That was at least somewhat satisfying. There was a big sign saying not to feed the animals, but it's not like we did it on purpose. We got back in the car and drove on.

Next we saw another lion with another kill. Again, though, she was far from the road, so we didn't get a good look. I think it was a wildebeest. Also there were some elephants in very tall grass. One of them was giving a bunch of white birds a ride around the grass. I assume that they switch off, and soon the little birds will fly the elephant around the Crater (I envision one supporting each foot). Also there were hartebeest and ostriches.

Lunch time. We pulled up to a large lake at a site that's been set aside for people to eat at, though I'm not sure if the animals know that. There were a ton of other groups, some of which were very large. We ate sitting in the car -- the actual picnic area had a ton of marabou storks and kites and we watched other visitors guard their food. After lunch we walked a bit and saw another few hippos in the lake, but we didn't walk too far because of lions. Then back in the car. Here's a photo of that other hippo I mentioned above getting ready to dive.

This photo is from the drive out of the Crater. The Crater gets a lot of rain but the surrounding area doesn't -- somehow the Crater traps rainclouds. So the land looks very interesting sometimes, with lots of clouds and then sunny land right in front of it. I took a lot of photos and I'm putting them anywhere where I don't have appropriate wildlife photos (like the first photo).

So we'd seen all the major fauna except rhinos, and there were rhinos somewhere in the Crater, and we'd been looking all day. So had everyone else -- every time we passed a car, the guides would ask each other (in Swahili) if they'd seen any rhinos, the answer was no. We were beginning to get pessimistic when we saw a bunch of cars clustered in a spot on the road. We drove up to them and followed the lines of the lenses and binoculars to two large grey blobs. Not the ones in the picture, those are hippos.

Sure enough, these were rhinos. A mother and her baby. At first they were just resting on the ground, but as we watched they got up and walked around a bit, and then the baby started to nurse. I bet rhino milk is tasty. They're called black rhinos but they're not really black. It turns out they're called black rhinos only because white rhinos are called white rhinos (and "white" might be a mistranslation of the Afrikaans word "wijd", meaning "wide" as in the lips -- white rhinos have broader lips). In real life they're the same color.

The Crater is one of the few places where black rhinos live. There were once hundreds, but during the colonial era, Europeans hunted them for sport. Now there are fewer than two dozen left. I'm not sure what kind of jerk can look at one of these and think it would be fun to kill. Poaching continues, of course, thanks to ongoing demand for rhino horn, used for dagger handles in the middle east and in traditional Chinese medicine (it's not an aphrodisiac, it's used for fever). It's such a problem that some countries tranquilize rhinos and remove their horns so that no one will poach them. If it were me, I would tranquilize and remove the poachers.

At one point a bunch of wildebeest walked over, and four of them lined up in front of the rhinos and four behind. It looked like a formal honor guard. There were a few hyenas around; my theory is that the mother rhino said to the wildebeest, "if my baby gets killed by hyenas or poachers or Germans or whatever, basically I'll just rampage and kill every wildebeest I see" and they decided they'd better guard the little guy for their own safety.

Rhinoceroses, or rhinocerim, are pretty awesome. They're really big, weighing more than a ton, they live a really long time, and they have those cool horns. Their brains are small for their size. They can live to be sixty years old and they have a great sense of smell, though poor eyesight. A group of rhinos is called a "crash", though I don't know who makes those up. I think it should be me. Rhinos have an ancestor who was twenty feet tall; too bad that dude's not still around. Here's a river that runs through the Crater.

Black rhinos have eighty-four chromosomes, the most of any mammal. They stole the extras from giraffes, who are miffed about it but can't do anything because rhinos have those sharp horns. Maybe the giraffes would try something if they knew that the horns are made of keratin (the protein that makes hair and teeth), not ivory, but they don’t and it's important for conservation purposes that no one tell them. Black rhinos mostly have two horns, a big one in front and a smaller one in back, though some black rhinos grow a third horn behind the other two. They can weigh up to two tons. The rhinos, not the horns.

We watched the rhinos for a while. Once they settled down, we drove a bit more and passed another lion resting in tall grass. We also checked on the lioness with the kill, but she was still doing her thing. Next we saw a couple of elephants, one of which had enormous tusks. I mean, tusks can get to ten feet long, and these weren't ten feet, but they must have been four or five feet long. As far as I'm concerned, that's a lot of tusk.

Some more lions, some zebra, and then it started to pour -- horrible downpour all of a sudden -- and we decided to call it a day (well, our guide decided that and didn't tell us, but I was ready to go so I didn't protest). I took this photo while it was pouring, strange to be in heavy rain and see the sky. Couldn't spot any rainbows. We drove up the steep access road and back to our absurdly fancy lodge to relax for the rest of the day.

So that was pretty much it. The next morning we checked out, piled into the car, and drove back to town. On the way we stopped at a souvenir store, called a "curio" store -- the word's everywhere here. The store was stuffed with ebony carvings, but we managed to find a few things whose creation didn't require the destruction of endangered species.

Next stop was the place where we had our first night, this time for lunch. Again, lunch was comically fancy. After lunch, our guide gave me a lift to Arusha, where I got a little hotel for the night -- back to traveling on a budget, sadly.

The hotel was a decent place, with internet and hot water. What it didn't have was cold water -- the power kept going out, and the cold water tank was uphill and served by a pump, so it was empty. The hot water heater, though, was fine. So I took a very, very hot shower. The next morning, our guide picked me up and drove me to Arusha airport (for $50, allegedly the standard taxi rate for a car to the airport -- I think that's right), and I was off to Ethiopia.

So that was my safari. Good times. You could go on to read about my trip to Ethiopia.

Journey to the... well, edge of the crater

2009-02-01T19:07:00.004+03:00

This is from day eight of my safari. You might want to start from the beginning.

The next morning we had breakfast, said goodbye to the staff, and piled into the car. One last drive around the super-dusty Serengeti and then off to Ngorongoro Crater.

Our first stop was the zebra in the tree to see if we could spot the leopard. No sign of him at first, but the zebra had been dragged to a higher branch -- clearly he had stopped by. Then we saw the guy -- the sound of our car had scared him away from his kill. As we drove up, he was trotting back into the copse. We drove by and he laid down on the floor, partially concealed by plants. This time, though, we could see him.

Being watched by a leopard hiding in the bushes is a little uncomfortable. It's not clear if the leopard is thinking, "when they go away I'll eat my zebra" or "mmm, those look tastier than zebra... if I just get the can open..." There's probably some ancient reflex that triggers when you look into bushes and see golden predator eyes looking back at you. The reflex is "Hmm, I'm about to get eaten. That's bad."

After a while, we realized that the leopard wasn't going to come out until we left, so we left him to finish his zebra in peace. We drove on a bit and passed a dead newborn gazelle -- it was either stillborn or died immediately after birth. After seeing yesterday's newborn gazelle take its first steps, it was very sad. It must have been born very recently because predators hadn't found it yet. Something like that won't last long out here.

Then we saw this guy. I don't even think this is a zebra, I'm pretty sure he's a horse. Look closely at his eye, that's totally make-up. I think maybe he fell in love with a zebra and they got married and had kids, but then she left him to migrate and he didn't get to see the kids anymore. So he disguised himself as a zebra and now he's hanging out with the herd and helping to raise his half-horse half-zebra children. It's tough because he's gotta keep doing his make-up and all that, and he's almost gotten caught dozens of times already. Robin Williams gets all his ideas from African wildlife. Alternatively, the horse is a KISS fan.

We drove a bit more but things in our area were quiet, so we headed out of the Serengeti, wiped the dust off our faces, and drove to an overlook where we could see the entire Ngorongoro Crater and the active volcano that towered over it. There were a couple of Maasai there, a boy and a guy, and they kept trying to sell us little trinkets for $5. As we looked at the crater, another Maasai boy drove a herd of cattle by us -- they were on their way out, having finished grazing for the day.

Next we went to a picnic spot near the Crater for lunch. There were a bunch of other safari vehicles there and various other groups eating lunch. There were also a bunch of marabou storks, those hideous disgusting birds that live in Kampala and follow you around trying to steal your children. Also there were kites, the nasty mini-vulture birds, sitting in the trees.

The kites weren't getting close to us, but the nasty marabou storks were -- as soon as we pulled out, say, a chicken bone, they would all walk to within a few feet and stare at the food. The things are maybe four feet tall and eighty pounds and very sharp, so you don't really want them near you. Fortunately they're afraid of people, so I could chase them away -- at least, they'd waddle away when I came at them, and then slowly reapproach once I started eating again. Here's a photo of much better birds.

My mistake was thinking that the storks were my biggest problem. I had scared most of them away and was eating a vegetable-stuffed pastry thing that was pretty tasty when suddenly WHOOSH, a kite swooped down and snatched it out of my hand. Sadly for the kite, I had a bit more of a grip on the pastry than the bird expected, and it couldn't get it -- instead the delicious vegetable treat was knocked into the dirt. It didn't look so appetizing anymore, so I stood back and watched as a bunch of birds flew for it. A disgusting marabou stork got there first, picked the pastry up with its horrific beak, and dropped it into its nasty gullet. Annoyed, I ate the rest of my meal in the car as the storks eyed me jealously.

The rest of our meal and drive passed without incident, and finally we arrived at our lodge. We had told our company when they were booking the safari that we didn't want something incredibly luxurious, midrange would be fine, but listening clearly wasn't their strong suit. This place was absurdly fancy -- our room was gigantic, with an enormous picture window overlooking the crater and rocking chairs so we could relax and enjoy the view.

For some reason, even though we were in East Africa the staff at the lodge were wearing West African traditional garments. I asked our guide if there was any connection between the clothes and the region and he said no, the owner just needed a uniform. I guess most of the visitors think, "oh, that looks African" and that's what he wants. Unrelated: The lodge charges the equivalent of $24 per hour for internet access. That made me hate them.

The Ngorongoro Crater is an amazing thing. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the region is the only place in Tanzania where wildlife are protected and yet people are allowed to go about their lives. It's occupied by the Maasai, who first reached the Crater in the nineteenth century and drove out the existing inhabitants (the Datoga). The Maasai are now permitted to graze their cattle in the Crater itself, but they can't reside there (only in the surrounding area, which is also part of the protected region) -- each morning they lead them down and each afternoon, back up. Meanwhile, the Crater is home to twenty-five thousand animals, the highest density of wildlife in Africa.

The Crater itself is a caldera, formed two million years ago when an enormous volcano exploded. The explosion was so powerful that the volcano blew itself up, leaving a giant crater -- the largest intact crater in the world (that's not underwater). Although the Crater is still fairly small, it hosts a wide variety of ecosystems -- there's forest (leopard), savannah (buffalo, elephant, antelope, lion, rhino), swamp (hippo), freshwater lake (more hippo), saltwater lake (the rare saline hippo that I just made up), river (drinking water), scrubland (warthogs), all sorts of things (all sorts of things). The Crater has water year-round, so much of the wildlife doesn't migrate. This tall grass is what lions like because it's easier to sneak up on food.

Our guide told us that Ngorongoro is the Maasai word for "bowl", but that's not the origin of the name. When the Datoga people were living in the area (before the Maasai arrived), there was a man who lived in the Crater who made cowbells, and he was called Ngorongoro, an onomatopoeic word for cowbell. The Crater was then also called Ngorongoro. When the Maasai arrived and found that their word had the same sound and was appropriate, they kept the name. Could be, I guess, but sounds unlikely. This photo is of the surrounding area, not the crater.

The walls of the Crater are pretty steep -- too steep in most places for wildlife. There are access roads, though, and there are trails that wildlife can use. The region might benefit from more migration -- the lions in the Crater are inbred because new lions rarely find their way in (lions are generally territorial, though there are nomads). Many of the herd animals leave the Crater in the dry season.

This warthog is staring at the wall thinking "damn, that thing is so tall, how the hell do I get out of here?" Most animals hitch rides with safari cars, but no one will pick up warthogs because they're so ugly. Poor warthog. If you see a warthog by the side of the road, give the guy a lift to the top of the Crater. It's not his fault he's ugly.

I'm not sure why, but there was nothing scheduled for us for the afternoon ("It's your second-to-last day. You should sit around and not look at any wildlife."). We asked if we could go on some sort of walk in the Crater, but our guide told us that we would need a different guide, and our lodge's guide was already out with another group. Instead he found us a park ranger who was willing to take us on a two hour walk through the Crater for a small amount of money. Our guide dropped us at the ranger's station.

Turned out no. A two hour walk through the Crater became a forty minute walk from the ranger station back to the hotel (no crater or wildlife involved). The ranger was out of breath from the exertion of walking around and had to take frequent rest stops, and we walked through various plants and he told us questionable things about their traditional uses. The only animal we saw was a banana slug. I petted it. It felt like a slug. When I touched it it tried to hide its antennae, which was kind of cute.

Resigned to our fate, we sat around the hotel for the rest of the day. Dinner was incredibly silly considering we were on the edge of the Ngorongoro Crater, deep-fried calamari, some decent fish, chocolate-covered bananas for dessert. The next day was our last safari day and only day in the crater, so we went to sleep early, eager to get an early start.

You can read about my last day on safari, in the Ngorongoro Crater.

Green site, sort of, a mostly undisturbed ecosystem (9)

2009-01-31T02:44:00.002+03:00

This is from day seven of my safari. You might want to start from the beginning.

We got up around 6 so we could be in the car by 6:30. The car is a Toyota Land Cruiser, but not the little SUV-type ones -- the real thing. Apparently based on the Land Rover, it's a very large vehicle -- front row for the driver, then three rows of seats, then a fridge(!) and then a gated area in the very back for luggage. The cleverest feature is the roof panel -- it's attached by these arms that swing up so that the panel lifts about three feet up. That way you can stand comfortably inside the thing and your head is above the roof so you can see all the lions, but the panel is over your head so you're not in the sun. As long as it's not early or late -- if the sun is near the horizon, you're in it, but then you don't burn. The car has two gas tanks, 4WD (only four wheel drives are allowed on certain roads), and is extremely rugged -- there were a few spots where I was sure we would get stuck, but no. Incidentally, it turns out that to get your guide permit, you have to be able to basically take the engine apart and perform complicated repairs.

We saw a lot of other safari vehicles out there -- most were like ours, with the pop-up roof panels, but some had roof panels that just folded out of the way. Those people were standing in the sun. That is not as good. The idea is that the roof arms on our car interfere with photography, but I developed a technique that solved the problem: taking a small step to the right.

Some vehicles were much larger than ours, with several panels, and some were stuffed with people. I wouldn't have wanted more than two people in the back of ours, because we did a lot of walking around inside the vehicle to see animals on various sides.

So we drove out of camp and the first thing we found was vultures eating the remains of an animal that, from the looks of it, had been killed yesterday. We didn't see any of the exciting vulture drama that we saw before, but it was still interesting. It looked like a smaller animal. It must have been a recent kill because the jackals hadn't found it yet.

Then we saw a cheetah. At first we couldn't figure out what he was doing -- was he hunting? Normally the cats don't walk much unless they're hunting. Then we realized that he looked pretty full, and guessed that that was his kill that the vultures were eating -- he probably took down a zebra last night, ate his fill, and then abandoned it. Maybe he was coming back to eat more.

While we were looking at the cheetah, some rangers drove up to us. They seemed friendly enough, and they had an extended conversation with our guide in Swahili, during which he handed them something. They waved and drove off. It turns out that there are some parts of the Serengeti in which you're not supposed to drive off the roads, and this part had recently been made into one of those. There was a fine involved.

An interesting quirk of the system is that different permits are required to be in the Serengeti and in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, but there's no demarcation of the boundary between them. The rangers, of course, know where the line is (or claim to), and are quick to fine (or extort a bribe from) anyone caught allegedly on a side for which they have no permit.

Next we came upon this dead zebra stuck in a tree. Leopards haul their kills into trees to protect them from other predators (including lions, which routinely steal leopard kills, though a hungry enough lion will try to climb a tree to get a leopard kill). Near the tree was a large copse, and there were a bunch of guinea fowl around it. The fowl were hooting like crazy, and our guide explained that they do that when something dangerous is around. Thus, we guessed that the leopard was hiding in the copse.

We drove all around it but didn't see any leopards. We ate breakfast (inside the car -- just because you can't see the leopard doesn't mean the leopard can't see you). Looked a bit more but couldn't see him.

Giving up on the leopard for now, we drove off (sticking to the roads) and found some lions. They had clearly hunted last night -- their bellies were extremely full. They looked very happy, they were relatively active for lions (they sometimes moved around), and the females were visibly pregnant. A healthy pride. There were two males, one with a large dark mane, one with a golden mane, and several females. The females were very affectionate, licking each other's faces, a behavior which is common after hunting and appears to express pleasure.

This lioness has spots on her belly. Cubs are born spotted; the males lose their spots, mostly, while the females sometimes retain them on the underside.

The prey in the area could clearly tell that the lions were full and not interested in hunting because they didn't seem afraid at all -- not that they walked up and poked the lions, but there were gazelles and zebra grazing happily within easy sight of the lions. Normally when we saw predators, even sleeping lions, there was no prey in sight, and we wondered if the predators choose places to sleep where there's no prey or if the prey runs away at the slightest scent of predators (probably the latter). Here, the lions were obviously no threat and the prey wasn't too afraid.

Well, not entirely no threat. Not to me, that is. We were pretty close to them, and a friend had told me that when she was on safari, the lions ignored them entirely until someone opened a car door, at which point all the lions immediately perked up and started to walk over. I wanted to see that, so I opened the door. The lions didn't care. When I slammed it shut they all looked at the noise, but that was it.

I was leaning out the window taking photographs and the older male lion (pictured here) walked over -- not close enough to bite me, he stopped maybe ten feet away. I was leaned out pretty far, and I guess I was too far out -- he looked at me, growled a little, and then roared very, very loud. I quickly got back into the car. Those guys can jump fast and far and are very sharp.

Then we saw an ostrich. They're goofy. Also some elands. I had ostrich meat in Nairobi. It was tasty. Ostrich is red meat.

Next we found another lion pride. This one looked hungry, but they weren't hunting -- the sun had risen a bit and maybe it was too hot. They asked if they could borrow my phone to order pizza, but I told them I was out of airtime.

We drove a bit more and were going through a herd of gazelle (making them run away) when suddenly our guide stopped and pointed at the ground near the car. Folded up in the grass was a tiny newborn gazelle, still wet from birth, lying as close to the ground as possible and keeping as still as it could. We saw that one of the adults hadn't run too far from us and was watching us carefully -- she was the baby's mother. When a newborn is threatened, it knows instinctively to lie down and hold still and try to blend in, and the mother runs a distance away and tries to look nonchalant. Baby gazelles are incredibly vulnerable and are often eaten by predators, and mothers don't want to give them any clues (babies don't smell like gazelle right away, which helps them hide).

We immediately started backing up while the mother watched us carefully. Finally we had gotten far enough away, and the mother, eyes on us, slowly walked back to her baby. We watched as she methodically licked the baby, cleaning off the liquid, and meanwhile the baby slowly took its first steps. It had a lot of trouble at first, straightening its hind legs and falling, trying again, falling, getting the balance right, then straightening its front legs, falling, then trying to straighten its front legs first, then all four at the same time. Then it hesitantly began to walk.

After trying for a while, the little guy managed to stagger a few feet across the savannah before falling. Its mother encouraged it by standing a yard or so away, and the baby would stagger over to the mother to nurse, and then after a few seconds the mother would take a few steps and the baby would walk over and nurse some more. It took about fifteen minutes for the baby to go from newborn on the ground to standing confidently, and after half an hour it was walking fairly well. Our guide told us that within a few hours, if it was lucky enough to avoid predators for that long, it would be running as well as any gazelle in the herd.

We returned to camp for lunch and a break (the animals don't do much during the hot part of the day), then set back out. After watching some zebra run really fast (not sure why, nothing chasing them), we visited the happy lion pride from the morning, but they still seemed content to sit around. Next we checked on the zebra in the tree, no change.

Then we came upon a bunch of lions. There were six adults sitting under a tree with two little cubs. After further inspection, we determined that two of the adults were actually adolescents, so it was actually two cubs, two teens, and two babysitters. Female lions in the same pride try to time their births to coincide because otherwise one cub will be a bit bigger than the other and crowd out the other one at feeding time and it will starve, so many prides have several cubs of the same age.

We watched these guys for a while -- the cubs were more active than the adults, as expected. The adults were very affectionate, periodically walking over and licking and biting the cubs. Cubs first start exhibiting stalking behavior at three months old, but they don't participate in hunts until they're one, and they don't actually kill much until they're two. Lions are fully mature at about three years old. Animal Planet had video of an adult lion that had captured alive a baby warthog, and brought the warthog to its cubs so they could practice stalking and killing.

We started to drive on, but quickly drove back when we realized that they were on the move. The lions had been joined by the rest of the pride, and after some reuniting licking and biting, they set off for somewhere, stopping periodically to sit. The pride was very large, fourteen lions, the biggest our guide had ever seen. The lions proceeded in roughly single file, and we proceeded to follow them. Lion parade is the best parade.

One thing about this part of the Serengeti is that it was very very dusty. We were at the end of the dry season, we hadn't had the expected rains, and the soil was primarily volcanic ash (tiny particles). The plants didn't do a great job holding the soil down, and there were a lot of dirt roads (with safari vehicles chewing them up). Every car had a giant plume of dust behind it, and most animals were kicking up dust trails when they ran.

For most of our time in the Serengeti, we popped open the top and stood while we were driving, but today the dust was so bad that we couldn't stand it (except for brief periods while wearing sunglasses). What looked like clouds in the distance were actually dust storms. The dust got everywhere -- everything turned brown, camera lenses were covered in dust, little piles of fine brown powder built up in the corners of the car. When you return from a drive, staff at the lodge greet you with wet towels. In Ndarakwai and Lake Manyara we didn't need them, but here they were very useful.

It had gotten late, too late to be on the roads, so we didn't get to see where the lions were headed. We went back to our camp (passing a few more newborn gazelle on the way), watched a beautiful sunset, had dinner, and went to bed.

One neat thing about camping in the Serengeti is that sometimes there are animals around the tents, especially at night. We didn't have any run-ins with predators, but various herd animals went by at night. The presence of animals also means you have to be careful when you go outside at night (basically, you can't unless there's a guy with a gun accompanying you).

Next is one last drive around the Serengeti, then on to Ngorongoro Crater.

Who Hasn't Herd of Elephants?

2009-01-29T17:25:00.002+03:00

This is from day six of my safari. You might want to start from the beginning.

The Serengeti opens at 6. Sort of. Our camp was inside the Serengeti, so we had been there all night, but you're not officially allowed to drive on the roads until 6am. So we woke up at 4:45am to get an early start. Quick breakfast and then off we went. They don't allow night drives, apparently because poaching was a big problem and it's hard to distinguish poachers from tourists at night. So far my "shoot on sight and let the jackals sort them out" strategy has not been adopted.

I mentioned before that we were staying at a mobile tented camp that had been set up in the southeast corner of the Serengeti because that's where the Great Migration was expected to be. Unfortunately, it hadn't rained in this area over the past few weeks (as it usually does), so the wildebeest hadn't come. Our guide thought they were nearby, so today we decided to try to find them. We drove north.

First thing we saw was a jackal standing around. It's good to see scavengers because it means there might be a kill around -- you especially look for vultures, either swooping down to something or, better, circling something (which means they're waiting their turn, so it's fresh). Animals watch vultures too, and vultures watch each other -- if one lands, the others will come see what's up. I didn't get a good photo of the jackal, so here's a shot of one of yesterday's cheetahs.

Indeed, next thing we saw was a hyena eating a wildebeest. Hyenas will scavenge or steal kills from other animals, so it wasn't necessarily a hyena kill. There was only the one hyena, though, and a single hyena can't steal from much -- they need a pack to threaten a leopard or a lion. And there's no way a single hyena could kill a wildebeest. Probably it was the remains of a lion kill (though lions will steal kills too). The hyena was surrounded by vultures that were patiently waiting their turn. Soon after we arrived, he walked off, presumably stuffed.

Then the vultures settled in to eat. At first a lot of them were pecking away at the corpse, but then one really big one fanned out its wings and starting waddling over to the others and standing like a flasher and making vulture noises (shown here). I guess he was scary because all of the other vultures backed off. The others were brown, he was black and slightly larger. They stood by and watched him eat, and whenever one came close he would make noises at it. Then another of his species came along and the two shared the kill.

We drove on a bit and found lions. As expected, they looked well-fed (probably it was their kill)-- when you see lions, you immediately get a sense of whether they've eaten recently. Happy full lions just lie around, they have visibly swollen bellies, and they roll around a little in the sun and groom each other. Hungry lions also lie around a lot, but they pay more attention to their surroundings and don't play as much. Prey can tell the difference too -- wildebeest will graze much closer to a pride of lions that has recently eaten. These guys' faces were also covered in flies, I assume because there were tiny drops of blood and meat.

Serengeti lions usually hunt wildebeest and zebra, but some prides will specialize in different prey. Lion prides have been known to specialize in giraffes, elephants, seals, and cattle. Certain prides develop tactics that allow them to take down adult buffalo, which are normally too big and dangerous for lions -- these prides generally have the males deliver the actual killing bite.

I would have been content to watch the lions all day, but no one else was, probably because lions don't do much -- they sleep sixteen hours per day. We moved on. We saw a bunch of wildebeest and zebra, but that's like going to the Pacific Ocean and finding water. We also saw a couple more hyenas sitting watching the wildebeest, but the wildebeest didn't seem too concerned. The herds were very large and the hyenas were hiding in the grass very close to them, but the herds ignored them. Sometimes a younger wildebeest would stumble into the grass where a hyena was hiding, see the hyena, and run away, but there were no attacks.

Our drive took us through an area that had tsetses. These disgusting flies are about twice as large as a housefly, are an ugly green color, and distinctively fold one wing over the other when they land. They're attracted to black and dark blue, so we weren't wearing those. The flies live off of mammal blood, and their bites hurt -- a lot, I'm told, and you can feel them sucking your blood out. Here's a photo of a hartebeest. These guys hate tsetses.

Tsetses are the vector for trypanosomiasis, or African sleeping sickness. There are two types -- a kind found in West Africa that causes gradual lethargy, and a kind found here that causes sudden death. Wonderful. It's called sleeping sickness because it infects the brain and makes you tired right before death (100% fatality rate if not treated). Fortunately, even the kind here takes a few weeks before you become sick, so it doesn't ruin your safari.

Tsetses and their disease are so formidable that there are places in the region that have never been settled even though they have excellent farmland because the flies live there. Tsetses are largely responsible for the dearth of animals such as horses in the region today. Most native animals (like these wildebeest) are at least somewhat adapted to them. Sometimes farmers pour pesticide on the back of cows to kill tsetses.

In both tsetse areas I've visited there have been tsetse traps. These are blue and/or black cloths covered in poison hanging from trees. I have no idea why the flies like blue, but they do, and they fly over and die. For unclear reasons, there was a ranger station right in the middle of the tsetse area. I guess this is where they send you if you piss off the head ranger. Incidentally, "tsetse" means "fly" in Tswana, so "tsetse fly" is like "ATM machine" or "PIN number". Cheetahs dislike redundancy.

Anyway, a bunch of tsetses flew into our car and buzzed all around us. Fortunately, my insect-hunting skills had been honed from months of killing malarial mosquitoes. There was much wapping of guidebooks. Final score: Arie -- 3, Tsetses -- 0. The rest fled in terror. Flawless victory.

We drove a bit more and saw some giraffes and some elephants. The giraffes were in a small group, maybe three or four, and they were snacking on various leaves. The elephants were in a much larger herd, maybe a dozen elephants. There were a bunch of baby elephants with them. We drove a bit more and saw more giraffes, a group of six standing under a tree. It's funny how trees here have evolved so that they grow as fast as possible until their tops are out of reach of the tallest giraffes, then they fan out.

Aristotle thought the elephant was the smartest of all animals, though he basically just made that up. The largest recorded elephant weighed twenty-six thousand pounds and was fourteen feet high. The best part of the elephant is clearly the trunk -- they use them to eat, to drink water (they inhale it into the trunk and then spray it into their mouths), to poke stuff, to smack leopards who get too close, and for lots of other things.

Tusks are very good also, although some elephants have evolved to be tuskless in response to pressure from poachers. Probably peer pressure. Like right- and left-handed people, elephants are right- or left-tusked. Certain "amphibious" elephants use either tusk equally. Some tusks can be ten feet long. One sad thing about elephants is that their teeth constantly grow in the back of their mouths and push forward, and the teeth in front fall out. Eventually the teeth stop growing, but the last set fall out and the elephant can't eat, and it starves to death. Elderly elephants sometimes live in marshy areas where they can eat some soft grasses without chewing. Except for the tooth problem, elephants could live much longer than they do. Millennia, probably. When elephants invent dentures, the world will be overrun. I for one welcome our elderly pachyderm overlords. Meanwhile, here are some lion photos.

Elephants are one of the animals that recognize themselves in mirrors -- others include apes, dolphins, and magpies. Their digestive systems are really inefficient, so they have to eat a lot of food -- elephant dung consists mostly of undigested plant matter. They look peaceful and friendly, but poorly socialized elephants have been known to rape and kill rhinoceri and other elephants. In India, elephants kill hundreds of people every year. Here's a lion at sunrise.

But we were looking for leopards. They're difficult to spot because they tend to rest in trees (they're good climbers and stow their kills and cubs in trees). After a lot of unsuccessful driving, we stopped and climbed these weird rocks to look for leopards. Well, we didn't expect to find leopards on the rocks, but vantage is good. The rocks hid an extremely colorful lizard (see photo below) and some tiny little rock mammal thing called a hyrax. These guys are very primitive mammals, and they have a lot in common with lizards -- like they're not very good at being warm-blooded, so they have to sun themselves a lot. Leviticus says they're unkosher.

The rocks are called kopjes (apparently also "monadnocks", "inselbergs", and "bornhardts", those crazy geologists). The Serengeti is odd -- it's a large grass plain, but just below the dirt is a very hard layer of rock, which is why there are few trees -- they can only grow where the rock layer is cracked and they can get roots through. The area is geologically active (see earlier post re: great rift valley), though, and millions of years ago magma burst through the rock in various places. The magma left hard rock like granite surrounded by softer rock like limestone, and over time the limestone eroded, leaving these odd shapes.

This photo shows the colorful lizard. It was so saturated that I thought it was a children's toy, but he swore he wasn't.

We didn't see any leopards from the kopje, but we did see a car parked near a tree. That's a good sign. We drove over in a hurry to see what they were doing. That's one of the advantages of somewhere with other people -- I had been concerned that the Serengeti would be crowded, but it wasn't. The other people were more of an asset than a detriment. And it's not just where they are -- the guides have radios and exchange information on rare animal sightings, and they talk when the cars pass.

Sure enough, the other car was parked next to a leopard resting in a tree. Leopards are the big cats that have done the best in the modern world -- they're not considered a threatened species (though they have lost a lot of habitat -- they used to range from Korea to South Africa, but now they're mostly here with a few in southern Asia). They're very adaptable, with the most varied diet of the predators. They prefer to live in wooded areas and can handle temperatures from the hot savannah here down to well below freezing in parts of Russia.

Leopards are solitary creatures, coming together only for mating. As a result, if a leopard is injured and cannot hunt, it will die (unlike, say, lions, where the pride can nurse a wounded individual back to health). So leopards generally hunt creatures that offer a low risk of injury, like gazelle, although a sufficiently hungry leopard will hunt big things like elands. When a leopard's range overlaps lions, it tends to hunt smaller prey out of feline courtesy.

Leopards can run at almost forty miles per hour, can jump about fifteen feet (ten feet vertically), and can swim very well. They normally hunt at night but will hunt in the daytime if something tasty walks by. Unlike other big cats, leopards are excellent tree climbers. After killing something, they will drag it up into a tree so that lions and hyenas can't steal it. They can drag something three times their body weight. They also stash their cubs in trees to keep them safe.

As you might expect, leopards have an easy time killing people. Normally leopards prefer tastier food, but a leopard who's injured and can't hunt gazelle might turn to people. In one case, a leopard in India allegedly killed more than four hundred people (after a poacher injured it so it couldn't hunt regular prey). It was eventually arrested, but it was never convicted because it kept eating the jury right before the verdict. We watched this leopard for a while, but he (or she) didn't seem interested in hunting us, so we moved on.

During the search for leopards our guide took us on a brief diversion to see some Maasai paintings on a rock. He explained that they were over a century old and were made when the British were chasing the Maasai out of the area. One guidebook says it's a strange and mystical experience to see such old paintings by an unknown artist, but I thought it was a waste of time that could be used for animal viewing. Here are some wildebeest from the morning.

We said goodbye to the leopard and drove on to the Great Migration, which was just around the corner from the leopard (third leopard from the right and straight on 'til morning). The Migration is pretty damn Great. More than a million wildebeest move slowly in a three-hundred-mile circle through the Serengeti and Masai Mara. In winter they wander down to the southeast area, and in February they give birth to hundreds of thousands of calves, half of which will die, many to predators. Then they work their way west (the famous river crossing is at the Grumeldi River in the southwest corner of the Serengeti). Later in the year they slowly move north, following the rains across the border into the Masai Mara in Kenya. As the Masai Mara dries, they return to the southeast and the cycle starts again.

Wildebeest have to drink every day (unlike gazelles, which can get enough water from grass), so they have to follow the rains. When the herd spots rainclouds in the distance, they walk in that direction. The Migration isn't a pre-programmed thing, it's just the result of weather patterns. I thought the Migration was ancient, but it actually began in the 1960s. Inoculations eliminated the bovine disease rinderpest in the region, leading to a vast increase in the wildebeest population. They were too numerous to survive in any one region, so they started to migrate with the rain.

The migration isn't just wildebeest. Zebra and wildebeest are friends and hang out together, possibly because they spot predators in different ways (zebra use sight, wildebeest scent, or vice versa), but also possibly because zebra have a crush on wildebeests' sister. Zebra generally precede wildebeest and eat the taller grass, revealing the short grass preferred by wildebeest. Zebra try to time their births to coincide with the wildebeest calving, but they're not good at it, so there were already lots of newborn zebra running around. Wildebeest can delay birth for up to two weeks if there's no rain, and we saw no wildebeest calves at all.

Another reason the animals migrate together is that unlike almost all other species, wildebeest have a xenocratic government -- leadership by other species. This photo shows President John Monochrome, current head of state, standing on Proclamation Rock. He was elected in 2002 to a ten-year term after a bitterly contested election (he defeated Mark Stripesalot in a close race that Jimmy Carter described as "generally fair, though marred by repeated hyena attack"). Monochrome has broad support thanks to his wildly popular "eat lots of grass" and "avoid the lions" policies, though he's widely viewed as out of touch with today's wildebeest youth. Fortunately for him, wildebeest mature in three to four years.

There were also tons of gazelle, many of which were babies. I'm not sure if gazelle try to time their births to the wildebeest, but if so, they fail at it. Also there were impalas.

A lot of hyenas were hanging around the wildebeest. Hyenas are pretty nasty guys -- unlike the big cats, they have a lot of endurance (a hyena's heart is one percent of its body weight, a lion's is half a percent). They won't ambush a wildebeest, they'll just chase it until it's too tired to run. And they won't kill it, they'll eat it alive. Hyenas and lions are natural enemies -- lions will kill hyenas and then not eat them, I assume out of spite. Maybe hyena doesn't taste good.

Hyenas are hunters, but their ancestors were bone-crushing scavengers (good band name) -- they ate the bones and marrow from saber-toothed cat kills. Some of their ancestors were enormous -- there was a four-hundred-pound proto-hyena that could crush elephant bones. Modern hyenas still have very strong bites. They are extremely intelligent, apparently rivaling some primates. A hyena's digestive system is highly acidic, allowing it to digest skin, teeth, fast food, bone fragments, and horns, and is strong enough that it can eat carrion with little fear of infection.

Anyway, the Migration is pretty amazing. There are just vast fields of animals, as dense as they could possibly be, grazing, drinking, making animal noises, sitting around, playing ping-pong, sleeping, whatever they do. They were roughly organized by species -- a bunch of zebras in one area, a bunch of wildebeest in another. There was a small river, and the animals had formed an enormous queue and were slowly crossing it. Sadly, it wasn't big enough or permanent enough to support crocodiles.

Near the Migration was a large lake filled with flamingos. Well, OK, it was filled with water, but then there were a lot of flamingos in it too. MS Word approves of "flamingoes" as a plural also. Not "flamingtzim" though. Flamingos turn their heads upside-down to eat. Romans considered their meat a delicacy. There were also lots of other little birds standing in the lake, but they weren't as pink or as long-necked as flamingoes so they didn't deserve as much attention. Flamingos are kind of boring, though, so then we went back to the giant herds.

We had a picnic lunch near the herds, and then drove back to camp. On the way back we saw some cheetahs, this time possibly hunting -- they were hiding in a little stand of grass in the middle of a large plain, and there were gazelle pretty far off. We watched them for a bit but they didn't move much, so we continued home.

We got back around 4:30pm. Having been up so early, we weren't too upset when our guide suggested we call it a night. Another beautiful sunset, incidentally. Our schedule for the night said "9PM -- WALK UNDR LEPARD TREE PLEAS AND DONT LOOK UP KTHNX" but we were a bit too tired so we skipped it.

My next day in the Serengeti.

Seen tiger? Confused, this is where lions live (9)

2009-01-28T17:20:00.001+03:00

This is from day five of my safari. You might want to start from the beginning.

The drive from Lake Mayara to the Serengeti takes you through the Ngorongoro Crater, so we stopped at a scenic overlook and looked down into the crater. But we were going to visit the crater later, so I won't say much about it now. One weird thing is that you need different permits to be in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and Serengeti National Park, but there's nothing to demarcate the boundary so you can easily be in the wrong one.

We drove first to our tents. We were spending three nights in a "mobile tented camp", which is basically a bunch of really fancy tents that are somewhat portable. They try to anticipate the wildebeest migration, and the migration was expected to be at the extreme southeast of the Serengeti, so there we were. Unfortunately, our guide explained, the rains that should have hit the region over the last few weeks never came, so the wildebeest had not followed their usual path into the region. He thought we might be able to find them anyway.

Anyway, the tents themselves were perfectly nice, with electricity, running water, flush toilets, etc. We had lunch in the dining tent, and it was excellent considering we were in a tent in the Serengeti.

Serengeti is a Maasai word that means "endless plain", and you can see why. There are a lot of places where you can see to the horizon in several directions at once. In many area, hills or rocks rise up in the distance. It's extra-endless if you drive in circles.

We started our game drive. Right away we saw a few animals -- some buffalo, lots of zebra, gazelles, a vulture pecking an old piece of an eland, some jackals, a hare, and a tortoise. (The tortoise was moving, the hare was not. There's a lesson in there somewhere.) Zebras make a funny sort of barking noise to communicate. They don't make it too often, but it's very distinctive, and you wouldn't guess it came from a zebra. Mostly it's to warn about predators.

Next we saw a dead zebra. It did not make any noises. It had been dead a few days, I guess -- predators and scavengers had eaten its entire insides and eyes, leaving only the skeleton and skin. I suppose pretty soon some hyenas would arrive and chew on its bones, and something would show up and chew its skin off, and all that would be left would be the skull (can't chew a skull). Hollow animals are a little creepy.

There are a lot of zebra on the Serengeti. Wikipedia says that they are black with white stripes, not the other way around, but Wikipedia is really stupid sometimes. Lions are colorblind, so zebra stripes help them blend in with the vertical lines of grass. Zebra like to stand in groups -- even just two zebra in an area will tend to stand right next to each other. I think they're taking advantage of the stripes to try to look bigger and confuse predators. It didn't work on me. Apparently it doesn't work on lions either. An alternative theory is that the stripes confuse tsetses.

There are also a lot of skulls on the Serengeti. Not a lot like enough that you can't drive around them, but enough that you stop noticing. Or you say "oh, another skull, I think that one's a gazelle." Or "can I take a zebra skull home?" (No.)

I got out and photographed the dead zebra a bit. It didn't smell bad, probably because all the parts that might smell were eaten. It was just strangely hollow, like a life-size zebra puppet.

We continued our drive. The Serengeti is crammed with animals. We saw a ton more zebra, many tons of wildebeest, and large herds of gazelles. Zebra and wildebeest like to hang out together -- wildebeest have an excellent sense of smell but poor vision, and zebra have great sight but poor smell, so they help each other spot predators. Also one of them is good at finding water and the other at finding grass, but I forget which is which. ("My zebra has no nose." "How does he smell?" "Terrible.")

Unlike the other places I'd been, most of the animals in the Serengeti are acclimated to people, so you can basically drive right up and pet them. There were lots of deer and antelope, and I took the opportunity to learn to tell them apart. In the interest of having lots to say so that I can show off more photos, here are a few of the tasty horned things you might see in the Serengeti ("on the Serengeti"? "about the Serengeti"?):

First, elands, which are the least acclimated to people. These are easy to recognize because they're the largest of the antelope -- males can reach two thousand pounds. That's a lot of antelope. The name comes from the Dutch word for "moose", which makes sense when you see them. Unlike the other prey on the Serengeti, they're skittish, so you can't drive anywhere near them -- they run away at the slightest noise. They have blunt corkscrew horns, in case you have to recognize an eland skull. I bet they're delicious. (There are also "giant elands", a different species, but strangely they're smaller than regular elands. If you’ve got it, you don't need to brag about it.) I don't have any good eland photos, so here's an elephant.

Next are gazelle. These are small and they don't have the three black butt stripes that impala have. There are two types common here, Thomson's Gazelle and Crane's Gazelle. Thomson's have a thick black stripe on their sides and black tails, while Crane's have less distinct black stripes and white tails, and are usually slightly larger. They hang out together during the rainy season in massive herds -- thousands of gazelle -- but separate when it's dry for some reason. I don't understand why there isn't an Arie's Gazelle. I'm going to get one.

Lions won't usually bother with gazelles, and we saw gazelles grazing fairly close to dozing lions. Cheetahs are the gazelle's major predator. To escape, gazelle have learned to run fast -- about fifty miles per hour. Cheetahs are faster (seventy miles per hour), but can only run at that speed for a few seconds and can't turn as fast.

Thomson's gazelle do something kind of funny -- when attacked, first they jump straight up, then they start to run away. By doing so they signal all the other gazelles in the area that there's a predator in the area, thus helping the herd, but the time it takes to jump like that makes it more likely that they'll get caught. Me, I'd just make a noise, but these guys jump.

Then there's Coke's Hartebeest, which has horns that come out sideways and then make a ninety degree turn. They're also antelope. I don't know much about these guys. I assume they're tasty. Wikipedia doesn't know much about them either. I guess if you don't have stripes, you don't run really fast, and you're not gigantic, you don't get much attention.

Maybe there are other types of antelope out there, but we didn't see them. Well, we saw a small number of bushbuck, impala, and dik-diks, but I've already talked about those (and I don't believe in bushbuck). Here's a photo of a lion. Throughout the Serengeti entries I have a lot of random photos of lions. This is because lions are (a) great and (b) photogenic (when awake).

We drove around a while longer and then saw cheetahs. Three large cheetahs, all sitting under a tree. They were extremely spotted and seemed to be alert, looking around a lot, though they weren't in a hurry to do much. It's funny how much they look and act like housecats, curling up, stretching, rolling on the ground. We watched them for a bit but they didn't chase any gazelles so we moved on.

Next we came to lions, a semi-large pride stretched out on some grass. Some of the lions were lying in the shade under a tree, but others were sleeping in the sun. We watched for a while and then one of them walked over to us. I thought it was finally time for the Lion v. Land Cruiser throwdown and had already started taking bets (pari-mutuel, it was 3:2 on the lion), but instead the lion just wanted our shade -- she laid down right next to the car and went to sleep.

All the lions were sleepy. In fact, almost all the lions I saw in the Serengeti were sleepy or asleep almost all the time. I could do a substantial photo collage of yawning lions. Maybe I'll try a coffee-table book. "Tired Cats of the World".

As the day cooled, the lions became a bit more active, but we were running out of time (you have to be out by 6pm or so unless you are furry and my beard hadn't grown in enough yet). No time to see if they decided to hunt.

On the way back we stopped by the cheetahs again to see if they had decided to do anything, but no, they were still content to lie around. Can't blame them, really. Also they were licking each other's faces a lot. One of them did get up and walk around a bit, but it's not clear why. There wasn't any prey around. We saw some wildebeest a ways off, but wildebeest are too big to be hunted by cheetahs. Unless these cheetahs had obtained firearms or something, in which case we'd all better watch out -- hungry, armed, and can run at 70mph. Just like Chuck Norris.

Also on the drive back we passed some African foxes, which have hilarious ears. I guess they do a lot of listening. I'm not sure what they eat -- my guess is small mammals and lizards and stuff. Maybe they need to hear them. I think it's a defensive thing -- like one hyena says to another, "let's go eat those foxes over there," and the other one's like "you moron, look at their ears -- they heard you and they're running away." That first hyena's an idiot.

We were also lucky enough to see this guy. I've spent the past few months in Uganda, where the food is basically bland grain-based stuff. Tanzanian food is similar, but with more flavor, largely due to this creature here, the cheetahworm, which produces large quantities of cumin and cardamom and deposits them underground. The Maasai manhood ritual involves riding one.

So that's what we saw on day one in the Serengeti. We came back by sunset and had some dinner and early to bed so we could get up before sunrise.

Oh, and sunset was beautiful. All the sunsets at the Serengeti were beautiful. I guess because you can see the sun all the way to the horizon, and there was just the right amount of cloud cover. Maybe all the dust in the air helped too. We couldn't see sunrise, there were mountains in the way.

You could read about more Serengeti adventures.

Lake Manyara: Day Two

2009-01-28T01:03:00.005+03:00

This is from day four of my safari. You might want to start from the beginning.

We woke up early the next day and set out on a morning drive through Lake Manyara National Park. This time we didn't see any lions, but we did see elephants, including a few babies. We found them just as they were crossing the road, and they swarmed all around our car, totally uninterested in us. I guess we're not food and we're not going to eat them, so that's where it ends. Here's one of the babies nursing. I wonder what elephant milk tastes like.

We also saw some giraffes, though we didn't get as close to them, and we saw baboons. We saw a lot of baboons, in fact -- our guide told us that it's a local joke that they place should be renamed Baboon Park. I got tired of baboons pretty quickly. They sit around, they eat insects, they climb trees, end of story. We heard from a park ranger later that they're actually very dangerous and can kill people, but it's hard to imagine. Maybe death by boredom.

We also saw a lot of impala. Not just a Chevy brand, impalas are these skittish little deer that can be recognized because of their distinctive butt markings -- three vertical black stripes. Apparently the local term is "one eleven" for some reason. I don't really get it. I also don't know why you'd name a car after them. I mean, it's not like lions or tigers, really strong and tough and all that. They're pretty fast, I guess. Chevy Impala: Skittish and Tasty. I dunno.

We saw some ostrich standing by the lake. They look goofy, but they can run fast. They look goofy when they run too. We also saw mongoose, though only briefly, they also run fast. All I know about mongoose is as follows: In Jungle Book, Rikki Tikki Tavi the mongoose ate snakes. Maybe real mongoose eat snakes. They are mammals, probably rodents. The plural of mongoose should be polygoose. They look too small to take on any big snakes. They like to run really fast and don't like being photographed. Update: I learned more things. Mongoose are immune to snake poison and really do fight snakes. Meerkats are a type of mongoose. It is illegal to import mongoose into the United States because they kill native species.

We also saw this beehive. Well, this isn't the beehive, exactly, this is the actual bees -- for unclear reasons they all huddle together like this. Maybe they fan their wings to keep the hive cool or something. These guys are incredibly nasty -- they'll follow you for more than a mile if you piss them off. Apparently illegal honey gathering is a bit of a problem in the national parks in Tanzania -- people will sneak in at night and light fires (the smoke drives the bees away) and then steal honey. Because they're in a hurry, they're not careful with the fires, and sometimes they spread.

The highlight was this hippopotamus, submerged in mud. As shown, we got very close to him -- the mud patch was right by the road. It's a bit weird that he was doing this because there was plenty of water -- normally hippos only sit in the mud during the dry season, when there's no water deep enough. We drove a bit too close and he got annoyed and walked away. I don't think anyone else had been by yet that day or someone else would have scared him off -- one of our guidebooks said that Lake Manyara Park was generally empty in the mornings, and that definitely seemed to be true.

We also saw this warthog and its babies. As shown, nursing. Then we left the park.

After the morning game drive, our guide drove us to a little place in town where we had lunch. At our patronizing opening briefing, they assured us that the food was from the hotel so we didn't have to worry about it (God forbid we eat local food! The horror!). Sure enough, it was a full white tablecloth-type arrangement with various admittedly tasty foods.

When we booked this safari, I thought I had made very clear that we were not interested in "cultural tourism" -- we only wanted to see wildlife. So while I wasn't surprised to find that we were suddenly being given a tour of a banana plantation, I was annoyed when we started getting lectured on how the bark of a local tree cures everything including malaria, and I was pretty damn angry when we were shown how locals brew banana beer.

The worst part was when we were subjected to a lecture on how they carve wooden statues and masks and were then invited to support them by purchasing some of them. They were carving ebony and were bragging about how the trees had to be at least eighty years old before they could be cut down and carved into stupid tourist crap. The wood of an ebony tree is a light color when the tree is young, but as the tree ages the center of the tree grows into a dense near-black wood. Tourists love it, so East Africa is now covered in ebony masks, statues, animals, everything. Many types of ebony are now endangered. I knew that the piano craze in the nineteenth century resulted in tremendous demand for elephant ivory (to make the white keys), but I did not know that it also resulted in tremendous demand for ebony (for the black keys). They were also carving mahogany, which is also endangered.

Then we were led through a local market and our guide pointed out various things for sale ("These are potatoes." No joke.). I was really pissed off by the end of it -- I'm not sure if the company that planned our safari misunderstood what we wanted, or if they just didn't care, but it was a waste of time that could have been spent looking at tree-climbing lions. Fortunately, after that experience I knew to be on my guard and I kept us out of all subsequent non-wildlife activities.

Thatz was it for Lake Manyara. We left the tree-climbing lions behind us and went on to the Serengeti, where we just looked at wildlife for three days -- perfect. You could read about my first day in the Serengeti.

Arie Goes on Safari: Lake Manyara

2009-01-27T03:42:00.001+03:00

This is from day three of my safari. You might want to start from the beginning.

So as not to build undue suspense, let me make clear right now that this entry discusses tree-climbing lions.

The drive from Ndarakwai Camp to Lake Manyara took us through Arusha. We didn't get much of a look at it, though we did pass a clocktower that's supposed to mark the half-way point between Johannesburg and Cairo. We also saw this mural, not sure what it's about. It looked like a nice place, fairly developed, etc. It's the center of tourism in Tanzania, I guess, because of its proximity to both the Serengeti and Mount Kilimanjaro. I'll be back in a week or so and I'll get a closer look then.

Lake Manyara itself is an enormous lake that never completely dries, so it has game year-round. It was pretty low for our visit, though -- in this photo, you can see a lot of the dry lake bed. The lake is at the bottom of the rift valley. Like the other continents, Africa is on an enormous tectonic plate. Unlike the others, the plate is tearing in half. In a few hundred thousand years or so, Africa will be two continents (that's right, continents reproduce asexually (except Australia and New Zealand, of course)). The line starts in Lebanon, goes through Israel, then offshore through the Red Sea, and then splits in two, one line dropping through the border of Congo and Uganda and the other through Kenya and Tanzania. There are active volcanoes here as part of the rift, though I didn't get to see any lava (I was hoping for aa, whatever the hell that is).

We arrived at Kirurumu Camp at Lake Manyara about mid-day and checked out our tent -- I was unimpressed. The least they could do is cordon off the toilet. Amazing how quickly you develop high standards for tents, huh? Also, this camp had no mosquito nets, just like the last one, only the last one was in a place without mosquitoes. Kirurumu Camp is a few miles from Mbu Town, which is on the Mbu River. Mbu is Swahili for "mosquito". If you're two miles from Mosquito River, you should damn well have mosquito nets. Actually, none of the places we stayed had mosquito nets even though every non-safari hotel in the region has them -- I guess they don't want to frighten the tourists. And also they don't care, because if you get malaria you won't get sick until you're long gone. There's a giraffe in this picture, believe it or not.

We went to lunch, which was acceptable. There was a large group of American college students near us, and I listened as the girl asked the trip director if she had to keep taking Cipro (an antibiotic) even though she felt better, and the director responded, "I always stop taking antibiotics as soon as I feel better. You should too." For some reason I was not permitted to set them on fire. Probably because tents are flammable.

We got in the car and drove to Lake Manyara National Park. At first it wasn't very exciting -- the vegetation is fairly dense and it's hard to see much. There were a lot of baboons playing along the road, but honestly, there's only so much baboon antics you can watch before you get tired of it. And that's not much. They sit around, they eat insects, they bite each other, they have funny butt patches, time to move on. We saw a few deer too (like the one in the previous photo).

Then we saw a few Land Cruisers (everyone drives Toyota Land Cruisers) clustered around a tree and drove over to investigate. In the tree there was a large half-asleep male lion curled up among the branches. The story goes that in Lake Manyara, mosquitoes are enough of a problem that allegedly, one day a lion climbed a tree to get away from them. (Like us, he was not provided with a mosquito net). It worked, and he taught all the other lions, and now Lake Manyara has tree-climbing lions. Lions aren't great climbers (their claws aren't designed for it -- unlike leopards, which have non-retracting claws), so they can only climb trees like this one, with lots of branches near the ground.

It was mid-day -- fairly hot -- and this lion was not interested in doing stuff. Except being in a tree. We sat and watched him for a while. Mostly he was dozing, sometimes he'd look around a bit, maybe yawn, then go back to sleep. Everyone around us was pretty excited, me included. I mean, come on, lion in a tree. Also, we were viewing the park from an open-top safari vehicle, and there was a lion in a tree above us. I guess either he didn't want to jump in, or he hasn't figured it out. One wildlife book said that lions view safari vehicles as a single large entity, not a steel can filled with tasty primate treats. I'm not so sure. (Update: definitely not. See later entry.)

The best part of the lion, measured in terms of goodness, is the mane. Lions, like me, fight large prey and each other by biting at the jugular vein, so the mane protects them when fighting over territory and females -- this way every conflict isn't fatal to one of the lions. Manes become darker with age, and healthier lions have darker manes. Manes are insulating, so male lions overheat easily -- one reason that females do most of the hunting. Lions can reach forty miles per hour, but not for very long.

After determining that the lion wasn't going anywhere, we drove over to the hippo pool. Hippos can't sweat, so they spend the hot parts of the day mostly underwater. Despite being grazers, they're more comfortable in water -- their closest relatives are whales (not, as the name suggests, horses -- hippo is Latin for horse). They are very heavy (almost ten thousand pounds), can run very fast (thirty miles per hour), and are very aggressive (lots of biting), but that didn't stop us from getting out of the car for better photos. Fortunately, I had brought my bathing suit, so I went for a quick dip. It turns out hippos spend most of their time in the water because they have a swim-up bar in there. Pretty smart.

Hippos mostly eat grass. They tend to emerge from the water at dusk to eat. Once in a rare while they eat meat -- I saw footage on Discovery Channel of hippos killing and eating a wildebeest. Although they spend their lives in water, adult hippos can't swim -- they move by jumping off the bottom. Like me, young hippos can swim somewhat and can control their buoyancy. Hippos give birth and nurse underwater. Their preferred drink is scotch, which they prefer to cut with soda but usually settle for river water, and they're always complaining about not having ice cubes. Do not make "on the rocks" jokes to hippos, they have heard them all before.

They like to topple boats, probably for fun. I'm told that when they're on land, they like to have a clear path back to the water, and they're most dangerous if you block that path. Wikipedia says that some guy imported four hippos into Colombia, and after he was arrested the government decided they were too difficult to seize and left them alone. Now there are sixteen. Hippos are the best invasive species ever. I hope someone introduces a few to the Central Park Reservoir. Or my bathroom. There were also buffalo near the hippo pool. I guess they're friends.

After watching the hippos for a bit, we went back to see how the lion was doing. Still treed, it turned out. We watched for a bit but it was getting late, so we went back to the camp. I tried to signal discretely for the lion to jump in the car and come back with us, but he had a blind date with a wildebeest in a couple of hours.

Our dinner was good, but there was some sort of group of guys singing and drumming at us. They were singing this horrible pop song that seems to be everywhere in this country -- ask anyone who's been to Tanzania about the song that starts "Jambo / Jambo Bwana" and they will cringe. There was a bowl in front of them, but putting money in it did not make them stop.

Early night, lots of game to see the next day. That was day one at Lake Manyara.

Arie Goes on Safari: More Ndarakwai Ranch

2009-01-27T02:50:00.003+03:00

This is from day two of my safari. You might want to start at the beginning.

We had asked for a wake-up call the night before, and at 5:45am someone knocked (sorta) on the flap of our tent with coffee and cookies. We got up, got into the car, and off we went. (This photo of the moon is actually from the night before, but too bad.) The morning drive was fairly productive, in terms of wildlife observation -- zebra, dik-dik, some other kinds of deer. I asked one of the dik-diks why his name was so dumb and he replied, "What's wrong with 'Steve'?" We came back for breakfast around 8:30am and then set out again, this time encountering a family of elephants. It had been cold in the morning -- I borrowed another Maasai blanket -- but by noon it was very hot.

We came back for lunch, then rested a bit until the weather cooled down, around 4:30pm. This time we went for a walking safari -- past the baboons at the entrance, then various deer and zebra, and we climbed a very large hill. The terrain in this area is very hilly, remnants of ancient volcanoes that dropped big chunks of rock. We had a pretty decent view from the top of the hill.

Then we walked down to a waterhole. The resort had built a sort of two-story treehouse next to it so that we could watch animals drink. That's the treehouse in this photo. They were also waiting there with snacks (popcorn) and drinks. We sat and watched as various animals approached the waterhole and cautiously drank. I had some lemon tonic. Most of the animals had soda, but a few (mainly the gazelle) had a beer or two. Some jerk buffalo ate all the popcorn.

There aren't many predators in Ndarakwai, but the animals still seemed very cautious -- much more so than anywhere else we went. Most of the animals we saw elsewhere were blasé about people, but not the ones here. A family of giraffes approached the waterhole and watched us very carefully, slowly inching forward while keeping their eyes on us, and it took them maybe fifteen minutes to work up the courage to drink. Giraffes drink in a weird way -- their necks are an awkward length to just bend down, so they have to do a sort of partial split, splaying their legs out to bring their heads closer to the ground.

After the giraffes, a herd of zebra came to the waterhole, followed by some wildebeest. For some reason, I think it's funny when zebra drink. They make me think of Snoopy. It's extra-hilarious when zebra and giraffe are drinking at the same time. Animal Planet is too hung up on shows about rescuing puppies -- they should have a show called "awkward animals try to do everyday things". After the sun set, we walked back to camp and had dinner.

Then we went for a night drive, again with the guy and the spotlight. Another African wildcat, if it's not just a housecat, and some elephants and wildebeest. The elephants were the best part. The next morning there were blue monkeys outside our tent, but they didn't seem to be bothering anyone. Well, they did clash with the tent. Green monkeys would have been better. We packed our bags and we were off for Lake Manyara.

Incidentally, here's a photo of the inside of our tent at Ndarakwai Ranch. You can see that even though it's a tent, it's pretty nice -- wood floor, regular beds, a little desk. You zip in and out and the walls are made of canvas, but there's a little walled-off bathroom with a flush toilet and a shower. To take a shower, you let them know you want one and they put a bag of hot water on a stick over your tent and the hot water runs down onto you. There are windows, and you zip them open and closed, and there's a little porch out back (that is, a section of the wooden floor not covered by the tent). Luxury camping, I guess.

You could go on to my adventures in Lake Manyara.

Arie Goes on Safari: The Beginning

2009-01-22T07:02:00.005+03:00

It seemed silly to go all the way to East Africa and not see any lions, so I booked a ten-day safari in Tanzania. We were picked up at Kilimanjaro International Airport and driven in a rather large Toyota Land Cruiser (the real kind, not the SUV) to a place called the Serena Mountain Village, an unreasonably fancy resort a few miles outside Arusha. We didn't get there until 11pm, but the staff were expecting us and were waiting with dinner, which was also unreasonably fancy. Instead of bed nets, half of our room was cordoned off floor to ceiling by a net -- a new approach, and honestly not a great one. We woke up, had a ridiculously ornate breakfast, sat through a patronizing briefing ("Some of the roads here are not paved! Souvenir sellers might try to rip you off!"), and set off for the bush. This picture shows a vervet monkey. Foreshadowing: These things are evil.

Our first stop was Ndarakwai Ranch, a private reserve set between Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya. When I heard we were staying in tents, I pictured the tents we used in summer camp -- little triangle things that are a pain to pitch. No. Our tent was larger than most New York City apartments, with separate compartments for the shower, toilet, and sink area. No electricity, but lots of lanterns and a flashlight. It was loosely attached to a wooden platform and had zippers to get in and out, though we figured out that it was easier to enter by stretching the bathroom flap open. Also there was wireless internet (and a charging station in the central area). There were no mosquito nets, but then there were no mosquitoes -- too much altitude, too cold at night.

The food at Ndarakwai Ranch wasn't bad at all. As expected, it was all western food -- pretty much everything we ate on safari was western food. I don't think they want to scare the white people with matoke and ugali, fine, but it gets a little silly -- at one point we were sitting in a mess tent in the Serengeti eating spaghetti.

Our first activity was a game walk. At Ndarakwai the activities are supposed to be group activities, but the only other guests were a large group of French tourists, so we got a private guide -- I think they felt bad for us. He was Maasai, although the only outward sign of it was the large holes in his earlobes (a Maasai cultural thing). At least, those were the only sign until a few minutes into our walk, when a fly bit me. I wondered aloud if it were a tse-tse fly (they carry sleeping sickness) and without blinking he grabbed it out of the air, looked at it, said no, and let it go. That's a zebra skull in the picture.

Ndarakwai has permanent water, so it gets a good stream of wildlife. No lions, though. The first creatures we encountered were baboons; a tribe of them lives near the resort. Baboons are interesting little primates. Their distinctive feature is a set of large pads on their butts. The pads are basically giant calluses that provide cushioning when they sit. They're omnivores -- they mostly eat fruit, but we often saw baboons picking at the dirt for insects. Some have been known to kill monkeys, sheep, and goats. They live in troops that can contain hundreds of baboons. Troops can have conflicts with other troops, and baboons have been known to take babies from other troops as hostages. Someone told me that baboons can be vicious to humans -- allegedly a baboon ripped off someone's arm and beat him to death with it. I'm not sure I buy it, but they do have very strong jaws. Male baboons sometimes stick to their dominance hierarchy in determining who gets to mate with females, but a male often attempts to seduce a female by acting friendly -- grooming her, giving her food, etc. I assume this works about as well for baboons as it does for humans.

Next we climbed a termite nest, then watched some zebra do their thing. The wildlife at Ndarakwai is not habituated to people, so you can't get very close to it. That is, the zebra run away from you. I just finished Guns, Germs, and Steel, and the author asserts that zebra are ill-tempered and too nasty to ride. They seemed to me to be skittish, but then, I didn't climb on any of them. Not for lack of trying. This photo shows elephant footprints -- before we saw elephants, we saw plenty of signs of elephants -- footprints, broken trees, etc.

Then we saw a dik-dik, the smallest antelope. They're named after the sound they make when scared. If all animals had onomatopoeic names, lions would be called roars. That would be great. Leopards would be silents. Dik-diks are monogamous and are almost always seen in pairs. Next there was a family of warthogs, which are endearingly cute in a very ugly sort of way, and then eland, which are the largest antelope. Finally we saw a herd of deer. Our guide claimed that they were waterbuck. However, later we saw other deer and he claimed that they were bushbuck. Then whenever we saw deer and I would say "look, bushbuck" he would say "those are waterbuck" or vice versa. I think it's a trick they play on mzungu.

One thing about Ndarakwai Ranch is that its setting is beautiful. Mount Kilimanjaro is towering over the area on one side, though it's almost always draped in clouds -- there were only a few times that we had an unobstructed view of the peak. On the other side is Mount Kenya, also usually cloud-covered. The sun rises near Kilimanjaro and sets by Kenya, which provides for beautiful views. The drawback to Ndarakwai is that there are few predators around -- I was slightly mollified by our guide's promise that we would see plenty of lions in Serengeti. (He was correct.)

We saw some other animals on the walk -- the best were giraffes, which are extremely goofy. They look very elegant when they walk, but they're hilarious when they try to run -- it looks like they're trying to gallop, but they can't get any speed because of their huge heads. I guess it's tough when your center of gravity is so high. I saw giraffes at the giraffe center in Nairobi, Kenya, but it's different in the wild. For one thing, they don't lick your face. Also there were elephants.

And we saw vervet monkeys. I've seen these in other places too -- in this case, the Entebbe wildlife preserve, but again, different in the wild. For one thing, they're not trying to steal your food. Well, they probably would if you had any food. (Update: A vervet monkey tried to steal my food. Details soon.) The Ranch keeps most animals out -- baboons are strictly forbidden -- but most of the monkeys are allowed on the grounds. We saw blue monkeys on the grounds a few times.

As part of our walk our guide took us to a Maasai village. I'm highly opposed to "cultural tourism" and was resistant, but he insisted that it would not be the typical cultural tourism experience. Reluctantly we followed him to a string of huts and cattle nearby. I was pleasantly surprised -- it wasn't a fake village, no lecture on Maasai customs, no pressure to purchase Maasai handcrafts (no gift shop at all), it was just the home of a Maasai family that lived in the area. Our guide seemed to be friends with them. They seemed nice.

The Maasai are a tribe that live in Kenya and Tanzania. They're fairly well-known because they still live a largely traditional lifestyle, they dress in brightly colored clothing, and they occupy land near the national parks. Traditionally, they're nomadic herders, and there are nearly a million of them today. It's not clear how they reached this region; one Maasai guy told me that their story was that they originated from the Middle East and came to Egypt, but were poorly treated there so they decided to leave. He explained that "Cairo" is a Maasai word that means "where should we go?" They then proceeded to Ethiopia, which is a Maasai word that probably means "not here" or something, and then finally to East Africa. I think they should stop stealing my people's origin story -- we Jews were the ones who originated in the Middle East, came to Egypt, were mistreated, and left. Also, just like us, the Maasai don't eat milk and meat at the same time. Culture thieves.

The Maasai don't farm. There's a cultural taboo against "breaking the land" (planting, plowing, etc.). Instead, they depend on their herds for survival -- lots of milk and cow blood and a little meat. Uncircumcised children might eat vegetables too, but adults are expected to survive on only milk and cow blood and occasional meat (this sounds unlikely and unhealthy to me). They get the blood through a special slit in the cow's jugular vein that's supposed to be painless to the animal. I asked our guide and he said that no one drinks cow blood anymore... well, then he admitted that teenage boys do it because they think it will make them stronger. No one else, though. Because of the land taboos, traditionally they don't bury their dead, instead leaving them for scavengers.

Maasai used to be purely nomadic and were often cattle raiders (allegedly they have a myth that their deity gave them all the cattle in the world, so they are justified in stealing cattle from non-Maasai). Modern society has more or less ended these practices. Most Maasai now live in permanent settlements and cattle raiding is rarely practiced. Our guide told me that the government is pressuring them to send their children to school (primary school in Tanzania is mandatory for children ages seven to fourteen, though it's not generally enforced against the Maasai and the government has trouble enforcing it against many others).

Culturally, Maasai don't kill wildlife (mostly), and that meant that Maasai lands were crawling with big game. And that meant that when various governments wanted to establish wildlife parks, Maasai lands were prime targets. Maasai have been displaced from all of the major wildlife reserves. Though they still occupy about half their traditional land, more than any other single tribe in Tanzania.

This photo shows a newborn goat nursing. It's hard to see in the small version, but that's the placenta hanging from the mother.

Traditionally the Maasai wore leather dyed bright colors, but recently they have switched to cotton. They have retained the bright-colored garments, though, and they are generally very plain -- either no pattern at all or a very simple pattern. One-piece garments wrapped around the shoulders are common. Lots of jewelry too. The normal housing structure is a few huts, usually made of clay with grass roofs, and a wooden stockade for cattle and other animals. This photo shows the thorns of an acacia tree -- they grow everywhere and have giant thorns.

Maasai tradition measures wealth in cattle and in children, and a man must have plenty of both to be considered rich. Children of both genders are "circumcised", though it sounds more like mutilation. Boys were circumcised in large festivals that were held once every decade or so, after which time they were considered warriors. Adults were typically (and often are still) polygamous and polyandrous, and there's no custom of fidelity among spouses. Allegedly, girls who became pregnant before they were circumcised were fed to hyenas.

I think this family consisted of two brothers, several wives, and many children. They were wealthy, in Maasai terms -- they had very large herds of goats, sheep, and cows. I love goats and sheep, so I spent quite a while among the herd. Clearly a lot of white people pass this way because none of the family members were interested in the random mzungu petting their sheep. Well, one kid tried to wave at us, but his older brother quickly made him stop, which makes me think they had Instructions.

We found out that it's not surprising that the Maasai let visitors to the Ndarakwai Ranch tour their houses -- they receive twenty percent of the Ranch's profits. At first they were not excited about having to give up some of their grazing land for wildlife, but I guess the profit-sharing plan changed their minds. I wonder if that's why this family was so rich.

The experience was surprisingly pleasant -- the family were content to have us wandering around their herd, I got to pet sheep and goats, and no one tried to demonstrate traditional handcrafts at me. I'd still have rather spent the time looking at lions, but it wasn't a wasted hour. This boy was trying to play with a baby goat, and he was clearly very pleased to have fallen over while trying to catch it.

Incidentally, I ran into our guide the next day and he was wearing traditional Maasai robes. Apparently the French tourists didn't like that he was dressed in western clothing and made him go change. He seemed to be in good humor about it. This photo is of a plant from our walk, I'm not sure what kind.

After we had spent some time among the Maasai, we said goodbye and our guide led us back to the lodge. We had a surprisingly tasty dinner and then went out on a night drive, which means that we sat in a Land Cruiser while our guide (same guy) shined a red spotlight into the trees and on the ground looking for animals.

We saw a few little guys -- most notably a bush baby, which is a kind of primitive primate related to the loris. They're tiny and move very quickly, and it was dark, so he was hard to see. That's him there in the tree. We didn't get to see aardvarks, sadly -- they dig up termite nests with their strong claws and then stick their nine-inch tongues down into the tunnels to fish out tasty termites. We saw some zebra and some giraffes, though. Also various bucks of some imaginary kind, African hares, and African wildcats, which might not be real things. They looked like housecats with striped tails.

It is cold at Ndarakwai at night -- the coldest I've been in Africa. Fortunately they provided us with Maasai blankets for the drive. That helped a little. We got back to the resort, requested a wake-up call, and went to bed.

So ends the first day of my safari. You could continue to day two, more Ndarakwai.

Arie Goes to Dar es Salaam, Then Leaves

2009-01-20T11:32:00.000+03:00

You could read about my trip from Zanzibar to Dar es Salaam (by ferry).

I got off the ferry at Dar es Salaam (which means "house of peace") and was immediately surrounded by taxi drivers. I guess a lot of dudes show up from this ferry towing luggage and needing to go somewhere. I didn't need to go anywhere, so I fought my way past them and out of the dock. There were more waiting just beyond the dock entrance, so I went in from the sea a few blocks to what looked like a major commercial street.

Dar is the largest city in Tanzania (almost three million people) and the largest city I've visited so far. Dar was the capital of German East Africa and then a major port when the British seized the territory after World War I. The capital of Tanzania was moved from Dar to Dodoma in central Tanzania decades ago, but the bureaucracy refused to leave, so most of the government is still here.

I only had a few hours in Dar, and they weren't going to be much fun because I was towing a suitcase (and the sidewalks are not in great shape). Not much time because I had an afternoon flight to Kilimanjaro International Airport just outside of Arusha. I had a few missions -- buy a new cellphone, have breakfast, and buy a hat with a wide brim that did not say something stupid like "Kilimanjaro Adventure!" or "Tanzania! Terrific!" I accomplished two of these missions.

Being a white guy and lugging a suitcase down a street in Dar is an easy way to find cab drivers. I avoided them and walked into a cellphone store, but I guess he didn't want to deal with me because he quoted insanely high prices. When I explained that I was not an idiot, he suggested I try another store. I did, they had fair prices, and I successfully bought a new phone. I also asked the clerk how much I should pay for a cab to the airport and she said not more than 10000 shillings ($8).

I also had to buy a sim card, the thing that makes cell phones work. In the United States, when you buy a cell phone it's tied to a certain cellular company. In the rest of the world, you buy a phone separately and then you buy a sim card from a cellular company. The card makes the phone work. I had bought one the previous week so I knew the price was 1000 shillings (seventy cents). I stopped at a random phone booth to buy one, and was thrilled when the guy demanded 2000. I handed him 1000 and glared at him and he shrugged and tried to look ashamed. I bought airtime from someone else.

Mission two: plain hat. Total failure. All the hats I saw said something stupid. I don't even think there are any hats on this continent that don't say stupid things.

Mission three: breakfast. I went to J.J.'s Restaurant, had some chips and some bananas, and decided to call it a day. I walked outside and it actually took me almost thirty seconds to find a taxi -- the driver wanted 20000 shillings, but I laughed and walked away and he followed me saying lower prices until we agreed on 10000.

So I didn't really get to see too much of Dar -- just that one street, a few streets by the waterfront, and the road to the airport. It seems like a decent enough city, although one in which everyone tries to rip off white people (pro tip: don't lug a giant suitcase around).

Here are my preliminary impressions: The roads are good quality, especially compared to Kampala, and the buildings seem fancier and taller. There's a lot more new construction. It's clearly a richer area. The matatus (share taxis) are in better shape. At the same time, it has the sort of shacks that seem common in East Africa. There's clearly poverty, although it's a much richer, more modern, and larger city than any other I've visited so far.

The airport, however, is a piece of junk. Most of the fun stuff is outside -- there's at least an internet café, so I spent a few hours reading the internets. There's no food. Well, there may have been, but it was up three flights of stairs, no elevator, and I had luggage. Good place for an airport restaurant.

I was trying to buy plane tickets, so I asked at information if there was an Ethiopia Airways desk. They said there was, but I would need a security pass to go there. I asked for a security pass and they gave me one (...) and directed me to some guards, who had me walk through a metal detector and then sent me around the back.

Around the back turned out to be around the actual back -- I was standing behind the ticketing counters looking at a giant pile of other people's luggage. High security at this airport. I went up a flight and found a door marked Ethiopia Airways. It was, as I had suspected, not a ticketing office, just a little office where a couple of people with a computer kept track of current flights. They were confused how I got there, and I was too, so I went back to waiting outside the airport.

Finally the agents started checking people in for my flight. I dropped off my luggage and went to the gate only to find another X-ray. The guy opened my carry-on bag and pulled out my container of aloe (see earlier post re: sunburn) and told me I couldn't have any liquids on the plane. In disbelief I glared at him, but he pointed to a sign that said, well, the same thing. So it's OK to let random people wander around unsupervised behind the gates, but it's not OK to let a burnt mzungu fly with a container of aloe. Fine. He tried to take it away, but I made him wait while I smeared some of it all over myself. (If it were nitroglycerin or whatever, wouldn't we have figured it out right there and then?)

I had a couple of samosas, got attacked by a bathroom sink, and sat down to wait for my flight. It was an hour late -- a bit sad because I was supposed to land at Kilimanjaro just as the sun was setting, which would have afforded a nice view of the mountain, and now I was going to land in the dark. I almost had two seats to myself, but someone had vomited in the seat pocket of the seat in front of me and it hadn't been cleaned (nice work, Precision Airlines), so the guy assigned to that seat had to sit next to me. The flight itself was fine. Kilimanjaro International Airport is very small -- one flight every few hours. As we were walked on the tarmac they unloaded our luggage, and we watched them drive it over to the luggage thing and put it on the conveyor belt. It was like seeing behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, disillusioning.

And then I was in Arusha, ready to start a safari. A guy was waiting with one of those neat little signs with my name on it, and I was off.

A write-up of my safari is coming soon.

Arie Leaves Zanzibar

2009-01-20T10:46:00.003+03:00

This is from the end of my trip to Zanzibar. You might want to start at the beginning.

A few days before I had to leave, I walked to the docks to find out how to get a ferry to the mainland. The walk to the docks involves braving a gauntlet of touts who are very eager to sell boat tickets, but I ignored them and made it to the Sea Star offices. There are only two ferries, a 7am and a 4pm ferry, so I bought a 7am ticket (Lonely Planet is lying, there is no 10am). Most of the touts are selling tickets for a slow overnight ferry -- leaves at 6pm or so, arrives at 8am the next day. Pass. On the way back from the docks I stopped at Mercury's, named for Freddie Mercury (who was born here for some reason) and had a pretty decent pizza, which is all they serve at 4pm.

My last day in Zanzibar, I went to the Palace Museum, which was mildly interesting -- lots of history of Zanzibar and bits and pieces from the sultans' collections. One bit I thought was interesting was the Sultanas' sitting room -- Sultan Seyyid Khalifa had two wives (I think sequentially), a traditionalist and a modernist, and the traditionalist's half of the sitting room was furnished with the intricately carved wooden furniture that was common here (shown in this picture), while the modernist's was furnished with western furniture (in the next picture). The museum also had a big exhibit on Princess Salme, a princess who married a visiting German guy and moved to Germany and then wrote books about her life. It wasn't interesting to me, but they're apparently really into her here.

After that I visited Beit el-Ajaib (House of Wonders), which is now a national museum. At the center was a large dhow, the first built in modern times. Around it were various exhibits about the history and culture of Zanzibar, including big sections on Islam and topics such as food, clothing, etc. It was fairly well done. To my dismay, though, an entire floor of the House of Wonders was occupied by an exhibit on the life of Princess Salme -- clothing she wore, a copy of her Quran, etc. But I wasn't really there for the museum -- I had heard that the balcony at the top of the building was a good place to observe the city and I figured it'd be nice to watch the sun set from there. A lot of the photos in the other Zanzibar entries were taken from the balcony.

I ate a fish for dinner, stopped at a bookstore (The Total Package: a history of packaging), then walked around taking a few night photographs (and got yelled at for taking a photograph of the Ministry of the Economy (if they don't want it photographed, they shouldn't cover it with funny neon lights)). I changed some shillings into dollars so I could pay for my hotel, went to bed, and got up very early to get the ferry.

The ferry ride wasn't bad. It was a speedboat, and I had paid for first class ($40 instead of $35 -- Lonely Planet said it wasn't worth it, so I knew it was). If you take it, sit on the right -- I was on the ocean side, not much of a view. We had comfy airline-style seats and movies -- first Rush Hour, then the beginning of Rush Hour Two. The ride took just over two hours, and then I was in Dar es Salaam.

You could read about my brief visit to Dar es Salaam.

Forodhani Fish Market, Zanzibar

2009-01-19T15:00:00.001+03:00

You could start at my first Zanzibar post.

For dinner on most nights I went to the fish market near Forodhani Gardens (the gardens are under repair so the market is outside it). In the market are a bunch of tables that are totally covered in various types of seafood -- whole lobster, crab claws, octopus, squid, skewers of all sorts of fish. Tons of food. I like the squid and octopus lightly grilled with lemon juice. The fishermen swear that everything on the table was caught fresh the night before, but I don't believe it -- they don't sell everything and there's no way they're throwing away a pile of lobster claws. Late one night I saw one group wrapping the unsold skewers in newspaper, and one day around 5:30pm I saw them unwrapping skewers and setting them on the table.

Each table has a little bench or picnic table for patrons. One annoying thing about the fish market is that there's a constant stream of touts trying to sell things, so you can't really just sit and relax -- if it's not some guy who wants to sell you a CD or some jewelry, it's a guy with a story about how he has malaria and only needs a few thousand shillings for treatment. Still, the fish is good. The fish tables are lined up at one end of the street, and at the other end are a bunch of guys selling various tourist things -- jewelry, t-shirts, etc. There are a few guys dressed in traditional Maasai clothing who seem to be official lantern maintainers.

The Forodhani market is supposed to be in Forodhani gardens, a beautiful little park right on the ocean that looks like a wonderful place to have some fresh seafood while you watch the sun set. Unfortunately, the park is closed for construction. I took this photo from a balcony -- the park is surrounded by large walls of corrugated metal. Large walls of corrugated metal are not as pretty as a seaside park.

We've gotten to know a few of the people who work at the fish market. One of the fishermen walked with us for a while and told us a few stories of his life, including how he ended up in prison. It seems that he wanted to visit family in Canada, but he didn't have money for air fare. Instead, he found a cargo ship that was headed to Canada. He gave a sailor one hundred dollars to sneak on board the night before it sailed. He took what he thought was enough water and food and holed up in the engine compartment for what the sailor said was a thirty-six day voyage. Unfortunately, he didn't take enough food, and ran out while at sea. After two days without food, he became weak and wasn't thinking straight. He staggered out of the compartment and was brought to the Captain, who turned him over to the Tanzanian embassy in Canada. He claimed that he was Somali and needed asylum, but they didn't believe him. He was returned to Tanzania and spent six months in jail.

He also complained to us that there were too many mainland Tanzanians in the Zanzibar tourism industry. There's always been a lot of tension between the mainland and Zanzibar, and I guess this guy, a native Zanzibarian, was living proof. He was upset that Zanzibar doesn't share in revenue from mainland sites like Kilimanjaro, but newly discovered oil deposits on Zanzibar will be exploited by the mainland government. I have no idea if any of that is true. He would like to see Zanzibar as an independent nation, as it once was. I'm told a lot of people in Zanzibar feel that way.

He also told me that the guys dressed as Maasai are not really Maasai -- they only dress like that to get attention from tourists. I have no idea if that is true either. (In a strange reversal, I would later meet a Maasai guy in mainland Tanzania who was frustrated that tourists got upset if he wore western clothing.)

My frustration with the way people treat tourists here peaked one night in the fish market. I had walked through earlier in the day and purchased a fresh coconut for 500 shillings (fifty cents). At dinner, I walked over to the coconut seller and tried to buy another coconut, but a guy quickly jumped up and ran between us and insisted on mediating the transaction. And demanded 1000 shillings. I explained that I had bought coconuts before and I knew that they cost 500, but he swore up and down that the price was 1000 and he was just helping me buy one. After some argument, I told him to just admit that the coconut was 500 and he was taking 500 for himself, and after some further argument he admitted that that was right.

Besides the Forodhani fish market, which is just there for tourists, there's a real fish and meat market on the main road, nowhere near the beach. I've been there a few times to buy fruit and bread. It's a little trickier because the people mostly don't speak English and don't seem interested in playing elaborate games with foreigners (me: *points at coin, points at bread, offers coin*. bread seller: *blank stare*.), but the prices are roughly one tenth of what they are at the tourist markets. This photograph of a giant ray is from the real market -- a guy had just cut that slit in the top with a giant knife. The photograph above of the grapes is also from the real market -- I bought half a kilo and they were handed over in a large brown paper bag. They were great.

You could read about me leaving Zanzibar.

Slavery in Zanzibar

2009-01-11T15:01:00.002+03:00

You might want to start with my first post about Zanzibar.

Historically, Zanzibar was a major center for the spice trade, but it also became the capital of the Arab slave trade. The Arab slave trade began in the seventh century, and over a thousand years took at least ten million people out of Africa. By the nineteenth century, more than fifty thousand slaves were passing through Zanzibar's slave markets every year (and David Livingstone estimated that far more died in transit).

Although it did not reach the scale of slavery in the New World, slavery was widespread in the middle east. In the Ottoman Empire, for instance, twenty percent of the population were slaves, and the slave trade continued into the twentieth century (in the 1950s, Saudi Arabia still had 450,000 slaves). Slavery is still present in Africa today, but it is usually not public. Slavery is now illegal throughout the world (though a prominent Islamic cleric in Saudi Arabia has called for its legalization).

At first, slaves were captured south of the Sahara and brought overland to North Africa. But as maritime commerce in the Indian Ocean developed, the eastern ports, principally Zanzibar, came to displace the overland route. Slaves were captured en masse in East Africa, brought to the Zanzibar markets, and then shipped in dhows to points all over the known world, from the middle east to China. This chamber was for men -- more than fifty people would be kept in here waiting for their turn at the auction block. There was another chamber next to it, same size, for women and children.

Slaves from Zanzibar also made it to Europe. Although there were slaves in Europe throughout the middle ages, it wasn't until the fifteenth century that slaves were imported en masse into Europe from Africa. In 1452, the Pope issued a papal bull that legitimized slavery for non-Christians (papal infallibility at work). But slavery in Europe never reached the scope of New World slavery, probably because of the differences in farming systems. By the sixteenth century, most slaves were transported directly to the new world for work on plantations.

Britain became opposed to the slave trade in the early part of that century and banned the trade throughout their empire in 1807 (the United States banned importation of slaves in 1808). Despite pressure from Britain, the slave trade did not end in Zanzibar until 1873 and slavery was not abolished there until 1897 (the government compensated slave owners during emancipation).

One afternoon I walked out to what the map said were the slave markets and a preserved slave chamber. The stone statues in the photos above were from a memorial next to where the old slave market was, a sculpture called Memory for the Slaves. On the site of the old market there is now a church, and the church altar is on the spot where there used to be a whipping post. The photos above of slave chambers are from next door -- oddly, the rest of the building is a restaurant and guest house, though they've preserved the slave chambers downstairs. A guy hanging out outside the chambers told me that they used to cram fifty people into the chamber.

My next Zanzibar post is about the Forodhani Fish Market.

Zanzibar -- The Beach

2009-01-11T14:53:00.003+03:00

I've written some other things about Zanzibar that you might want to read first.

Throughout my time in Zanzibar there were no clear sunsets. The skies were clear all day, but a mass of clouds would always form on the horizon at sunset. This is the closest I got (I'm not complaining). The one morning I got up before dawn, the sky was cloudy.

The beach by Stone Town is fairly nice -- smooth sand, gentle waves, etc. For unclear reasons, there are always several large ships anchored at the beach loading or unloading vehicles. One afternoon some friends invited me to sit on the beach with them and have a drink while watching vehicles get stuck. I wasn't sure how they knew it would happen, but I went along. Turns out it always happens.

Getting a car onto a ship from the beach involves lowering a ramp from the ship to the sand, and then trying to drive a vehicle from the road across the sand and then up the ramp. The ramp is steep.

The day we were watching, they tried to get a large truck up the ramp. The truck built up a good head of steam on the road, floundered a bit on the sand, and made it nearly a third of the way up the ramp. Unfortunately, it was a rear-wheel drive truck, and the back wheels started to spin in the sand as it sank backward. We watched as they spent an hour or so digging pits under the wheels so they could slide planks in and hooking the truck up to some sort of winch on deck to pull it up. Nothing worked. I stopped by later that day and the truck was on board, so they worked it out somehow. Anyway, this happens every single day. It's not like Zanzibar doesn't have a perfectly good port.

One evening at sunset I walked out to the beach to find a large group of local kids (and a bunch of tourists) crowded around the surf. The kids were taking turns running into the water and doing very impressive aerial maneuvers -- backflips, somersaults, etc.

There are a lot of these little boats floating offshore. As shown, they're tied to the shore. I guess they're used for all sorts of tourist things -- fishing, spice tours maybe, sunset cruises, that sort of thing. I didn't go on any of the boat activities except diving, so I'm not really sure.

Unrelated: There are a lot of cats in Zanzibar. I hadn't seen any anywhere in East Africa previously, but I guess Zanzibar has rats and mice.

Somewhat related: I visited the remains of the Hamamni Baths in Stone Town. They were large public baths used in the nineteenth century. In the entrance was a room where there would be a large bonfire, and people would sit in little alcoves surrounding the fire. This is the light coming in through one of the alcoves. In the back were a steam room, toilets, and little showers and other water-related rooms. I think there was a hot tub, although as best as I can figure out it was a large stone bath with a bonfire next door.

My next post is about slavery in Zanzibar.

A Brief History of Zanzibar

2009-01-10T15:42:00.005+03:00

You might want to start with my first post about Zanzibar, discussing Stone Town.

I don't have any photos of things that happened many years ago, so here are a few random photos I took while in Zanzibar. This is a lit-up tree outside a hotel in Stone Town.

Zanzibar has a colorful history. Trade routes included Zanzibar at least since the common era, and trade communities were established on the island by the twelfth century. Vasco de Gama landed on the island in 1499, and Portugal captured it in 1505. It remained part of the Portuguese empire until 1698, when the Sultanate of Oman expelled the Portuguese. In 1840 the Sultan moved his capital to Stone Town.

The Sultanate was gradually disassembled by Europeans, mainly Germany and Britain, who by 1892 had taken all of the Sultanate's East African territories. In an 1890 treaty Germany agreed to let Britain establish Zanzibar as a protectorate.

In 1896, a ruler disliked by the British ascended to control of Zanzibar. This led to the Anglo-Zanzibar War, which lasted from 9:00 to 9:45 a.m. on August 27, 1896 -- called the Shortest War in History. After a short naval bombardment, the ruler fled to the Germany embassy and a pro-British ruler took power. But the British decided not to risk it any more -- in 1913 they began to appoint the ruler directly.

In December of 1963, Zanzibar became independent from Britain. About a month later, a Ugandan guy led a rebellion and overthrew the democratically elected government. There was widespread fighting and thousands were killed, mainly Zanzibarians of Arab and Indian descent. To stem the chaos, in April of 1964, Tanganyika agreed to merge with Zanzibar, creating the nation of Tanzania. Zanzibar remains a semi-autonomous region of Tanzania.

There's a lot of tension between the people of Zanzibar and the mainland. Much of it is religious -- Tanzania has a substantial Muslim minority, but Zanzibar is 98% Muslim. Some is economic -- I met people who complained about the relationship between the regions. Probably there's also some complex ethnic tension that I don't really understand.

You could go on to my post on Stone Town's beaches.

Arie Learns to Dive

2009-01-10T14:49:00.004+03:00

No photos in this one. I don't have a camera that works underwater yet.

This was in Zanzibar. I've written other stuff about my trip to Zanzibar.

Wandering around Stone Town, I passed by One Ocean, a scuba diving center next to the beach. On a whim I ducked in and asked what was involved in learning to dive. They told me it took four days -- exactly the time I had left in Zanzibar. Seemed like fate. I signed up.

The normal training involves a swim test on day two, but I'm not a strong swimmer and didn't want to waste a day if I were going to fail the test anyway, so I told them I wanted to take the test first. An instructor led me to the nearby hotel pool where I floated for ten minutes (primary problem: not getting bored) and then swam three hundred meters using a snorkel and fins (primary problem: not getting hit by German tourists jumping into the pool). Easy.

Day one of dive training involves a lot of sitting around and very little water. There were five videos to watch, with written exams after each one, plus a final exam at the end. It was dull. Fortunately, I test well. Also I learned to use the Recreational Dive Planner, a plastic card that says how much time you can spend at various depths before you have to surface, and how long you have to spend on the surface before you can go back under. Now divers have watches that do it automatically and more accurately. Using the RDP is like doing long division with paper and pen (law school simile: looking up keycite numbers in the book) -- you learn how and then never do it again.

Day two was our first dive. It was a "confined water dive", which is a fancy way of saying we suited up and sat at the bottom of a swimming pool and practiced what to do if we run out of air, if our goggles fall off, etc. Some Europeans were swimming at the other end of the pool, they seemed nonplussed. My biggest problem was using the regulator, which is the thing you breathe through. Actually, my problem wasn't using it, exactly, it was not singing Regulate by Warren G. feat. Nate Dogg every time someone said "regulator".

Day three was our first two ocean dives. We met at the dive center along with a few other groups, piled onto a boat, and motored out for about half an hour until we reached a coral reef. We wetsuited up and dove in. We spent about half an hour on the bottom, swimming around the reef and looking at fish, coral, and strangely shaped crustaceans. Then we surfaced, had a snack, and sat on the boat while excess nitrogen leaked out of us (exciting, huh?). After an hour, we went on a second dive, which was more eventful -- we saw a giant turtle, got attacked by a remora, and swam by an enormous school of tiny silver fish that all jumped away from us every time we came near. We also saw a few sting rays hiding on the sea bottom covered in sand, but I know about Steve Irwin so I stayed away. Thirty-seven minutes on the bottom that time. We were about forty feet underwater. The boat ride on the way back was incredibly choppy -- fortunately I don't get seasick. Unfortunately I do get sunburnt, and that afternoon I bought some aloe and basically covered myself in it.

Coral is neat stuff. What looks like one organism is actually a blob made of thousands of little coral guys. Some coral leave behind skeletons when they die, and over many years these skeletons become coral reefs. Reefs are good for diving because many are beautiful in themselves and because they're where the fish live. Most coral get energy from algae that hang around and photosynthesize, so reefs tend to be in water shallow enough for sunlight to penetrate. Coral also get some energy from eating plankton and small fish. (Most coral can eat small fish. Some coral are really big. Divers look a little like fish. Hmm.) Coral can sting, and some coral have poison potent enough to hurt people.

Day four was our last two dives. I wore a full wetsuit this time to protect against more sunburn. Again we motored out to a coral reef, went under, practiced a few more skills, and then swam around a bit, this time about sixty feet underwater. This dive was pretty good -- we swam through another school of fish, but these were very large. I was not able to catch any. We also saw a little moray eel hiding in a hole, and an old woven fish trap sitting empty on the sea bottom. Also a mango seed, but that wasn't very interesting. We sat on the boat for an hour until our nitrogen levels were low enough and then went back under. This time we just swam around for a bit among the reefs and fish.

So that's it. I'm now an open water diver, allowed to dive without supervision down to sixty feet. Allegedly the certification group is going to mail me some fancy ID card.

The staff at One Ocean was very patient -- they were more or less happy to answer all of my questions, which mainly concerned whether there were any sharks or electric eels (no), whether I could ride a giant turtle (no), and why I can't breathe my own exhaled air (plenty of oxygen, but the carbon dioxide partial pressure is too high).

Diving is awesome not because you're breathing underwater, but because it lets you explore places you couldn't otherwise go. The actual underwater part is kind of annoying -- you have to breathe through a weird rubber tube, you can't stop breathing for even a few seconds or you might die (really), and you might get recompression sickness or nitrogen narcosis even if you follow all the guidelines. But it's worth it for the chance to swim in the middle of schools of fish, chase angelfish, ride giant turtles (no), and watch remoras try to stick themselves to you. Also I look good in a wetsuit.

You might want to read my next post about Zanzibar.

Like a Rolling Stone Town

2009-01-08T21:00:00.004+03:00

I flew into Zanzibar from Mombasa on a small propeller plane, always a good time. The flight from Mombasa took less than an hour and we had a nice view of the island (and surrounding islands) from the plane. We landed and walked into the small airport -- there was no one in the immigration booths, and most of the people from our plane walked right past them, but we (and a few other people) waited until some government official showed up and had him stamp our passports. Not sure what those other people are going to do when they try to leave the country.

I changed a little money (managed to negotiate the rate) and then we shared a taxi with some people from the plane (actually people I had met on the Nairobi-Mombasa train). The taxi dispatcher wanted to charge us twice the normal rate to stop at two hotels, but we worked it out with the driver. We drove first through Zanzibar City and then into Stone Town.

Figuring it might be hard to get a hotel room, I had emailed a hotel ahead of time, and the taxi took us to it -- well, the taxi took us near it, because the roads inside Stone Town were too narrow to drive through, and then he walked us the rest of the way. The hotel wasn't very nice, but I left my stuff inside the safe and we walked around Stone Town a bit.

The capital of Zanzibar is Zanzibar City, and Stone Town is the oldest part of Zanzibar City. (Technically "Zanzibar" is the whole set of islands, and Unguja is the large island, but I'm going to do what all tourists do and call the island Zanzibar.) Stone Town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Parts of Stone Town are three centuries old, though they've only been using stone since the mid-nineteenth century. Given Zanzibar's role as a trading center, it's not surprising that there are Arab, Persian, Indian, European, and African architecture styles mixed together. Many of the streets are very narrow, though that doesn't stop people from zooming down them on motorcycles.

Stone Town itself is on the tip of Zanzibar, jutting out into the ocean. The shore is mostly sandy beaches, and the beachfront property is mostly expensive resorts and restaurants with ocean views. Then there's a large road that follows the coast, and then the dense, narrow streets of Stone Town are inside that road. It's a beautiful place.

Unfortunately, much of Stone Town has been taken over by the tourism industry. On every block are stores selling the same mass-produced carvings, jewelry, and t-shirts (although there were also men painting paintings, which surprised me). Outside every store are employees who call to every white person who walks by trying to get them inside. Henna painting, hair braiding, and massage parlors cover the region. The wider roads are filled with taxi drivers, the narrower ones filled with people hawking spice tours, money changing, cashews in bags, sunglasses, and who knows what else.

Still, Stone Town itself is very beautiful, if you keep your eyes above head level, and walking around was amazing. We wandered through the tiny alleys and slightly larger streets for a while (Lonely Planet's map is wrong, big surprise). Eventually we came upon some very nice hotels, and I checked the rates and they weren't very high. We returned to our hotel, I got my bags (and paid a small bit for having stored them in the safe all afternoon) and dragged them to a much nicer hotel, Hotel Shangani.

I like Hotel Shangani -- good mosquito net, air conditioning, nice people. It's run by strict Muslims -- Zanzibar is 98% Islamic -- so they don't allow alcohol on the premises and guests aren't allowed in the rooms at all. Also, it's conveniently located -- about thirty seconds from the beach. The beach is fairly nice -- I hear there are nicer, quieter ones elsewhere on the island, but I was happy with it.

One annoying thing about Zanzibar is that some jerk decreed that foreigners must pay for their hotels in U.S. dollars. That's fine for people coming from the United States, but less so for me -- I arrived with Kenyan shillings, Ugandan shillings, and a few Rwandan francs, but no dollars. And the ATMs here spit out Tanzanian shillings. So I take Tanzanian shillings out of my U.S. dollar account (and pay a commission), buy dollars (and pay another commission), and give them to my hotel, which will then buy Tanzanian shillings with them (and pay another commission). It's basically a complex system for keeping foreign exchange bureaus in business.

Over my five days in Stone Town I became increasingly frustrated with the street touts. It's pretty much the opposite of most of Uganda -- there, people would come up to me on the street just to chat. I have not had a single interaction with a Tanzanian that did not involve some sort of solicitation. I'm sure other parts of Zanzibar are great, but this place isn't for me. I normally love to wander in new cities, but the constant harassment makes it unpleasant.

Yet for all that, Stone Town is a beautiful place. Blocking out the constant calls of "hello my friend" and "yes, mister" and "you are welcome" and "karibu" ("welcome") and "jambo" (pidgin for "hello") and "may I ask you a question?" and "where are you from?" and all that, it's a pleasure just to walk and look at the buildings. Swahili architecture is very distinctive, and Stone Town is apparently some of the best preserved examples of it.

The doors of Zanzibar are especially noteworthy, apparently. I'm told that there are fairly strict rules as to how they can be displayed -- doors made in the sailing era may have a rope motif on the outside, doors from the slave era may have a chain motif (as shown here), and other doors can have any other motif. I didn't see many rope-outlined doors, but there were plenty of chained doors. Also notable are the balconies, which (like those in Mombasa) were built so as to preserve the modesty of the women standing in them, whatever that means.

My next post is about learning to dive in Zanzibar.

Arie Goes to Mombasa

2009-01-08T16:33:00.004+03:00

You might want to read about my train ride from Nairobi to Mombasa.

The train pulled into Mombasa and we took a taxi to a hotel where I had reservations. Waiting in the lobby, I read the rate card -- it said a single was 3500 shillings (about $50) per night. Finally the lady at the desk told us that the room would actually be 9000 shillings. I pointed to the rate card and she explained that that was for December, but now it was January. We left.

Taxi to a new hotel. Full. Apparently there was some sort of Islamic event happening and the town was filled with people in traditional garb. They had booked all the hotel rooms. Trouble.

Fortunately, we found a hotel with space -- it was run by religious Christians. The room had a/c, which was nice. I took a quick shower (no showers on the train) and discovered that the shower had no showerhead -- showering in it was like standing under a giant sink. Pretty great, really.

Mombasa is a city on an island (Mombasa Island). The Swahili name for it means Island of War because so many wars were fought over it. It's actually fairly small -- fewer than one million people. For no good reason I always imagined it to be a massive city, with millions of people, skyscrapers, etc. In fact it's small, spread out, and doesn't have much in the way of steel construction. The city has been the preeminent East African port for centuries, playing a major role in the ivory and spice trade and probably in the slave trade as well.

We walked down to Fort Jesus, the major tourist attraction in Mombasa. (No one else appreciated the irony of naming a military building after a guy who spent his life talking about peace and love.) On the way we passed roughly five million people wearing traditional clothing. After talking to a few people, we learned that there was an important spiritual leader in town. He was ninety-seven and had an annual conference in a different city every year, and his followers from all over the world came to the city for three days.

After I took a quick phone call, we went into Fort Jesus. Entrance was 800 shillings ($12), but they had a 400 shilling rate for East African residents (like me). But even 400 seemed a bit high -- there wasn't much to see, just the remains of a few walls and chambers. The view was nice, I guess. There were some large whale bones in one room that had been carved into some sort of shape, and one room had a giant graffiti mural drawn by sailors centuries ago. It wasn't very good.

Vasco de Gama was the first European to visit Mombasa, in 1498, and Portugal sacked the city in 1500 (they didn't waste much time). The Portuguese built Fort Jesus in 1593 in an effort to cement their control over the region, but it didn't really work -- by 1698 Mombasa was controlled by the sultanate of Oman. Portugal took it back in 1728, but Oman regained it in 1729. The British took it in 1824, but Oman took it back two years later. Zanzibar conquered the city in 1837, but Britain reconquered it in 1887. City of War indeed. Mombasa was the capital of British East African territory and part of Zanzibar, but it was ceded to Kenya when Kenya became independent.

In the field in front of the fort was a soccer field, and two teams were playing a game. One team was all white people, the other team black people. We walked past the field down to the rock beach, where some kids were swimming. There was also a sewage pipe dumping into the ocean, so it didn't smell very nice. As we watched, a boat carrying a new soccer team pulled up and the players got out. This team was dressed in Jamaican colors. The white guys were adults, but the teams made of black people were younger -- late teens, maybe early 20s.

Then we went to the Old Town and walked around a bit. There were lots of the white-garbed guys, and signs all over directing them based on various codes -- women in group E5 should go to one area, men in G7 should go to another. Highly organized.

I was very excited to discover fresh coconuts for sale. I loved them when I lived in Cambodia, but was disappointed to discover that they aren't available in Uganda. Fortunately, they're common on the coast. They seemed a little smaller than Asian coconuts, though my memory might just be exaggerating the size of the latter.

The Old Town was very pretty -- lots of Swahili architecture. Lonely Planet said to look for balconies that were built to protect the modesty of women, which I assume means solid bottoms and panels on the bottom. I guess once the whole city looked pretty much like this.

There was a lot of graffiti. Most of it involved European soccer teams. One wall said "WE ALWAYS ACCEPT THE REJECTED WIVES". I have no idea what that means but I bet it's unpleasant.

Most of the roads were very narrow, though that didn’t stop people from driving down them. Mostly motorcycles and bicycles, sometimes tuk-tuks or full cars.

Unsurprisingly, the people in Old Town were pretty much accustomed to white people walking around taking pictures. There were also a bunch of street vendors and internet cafés, and the people we encountered were very friendly. Lots of stores selling trinkets, jewelry, etc.

We wandered back to the football field to watch the game. What I think was a semifinal was just wrapping up -- a team dressed in Italian colors apparently won. Apparently the team was so into being Italian that they learned some of the language. Sadly, there was no final -- for unclear reasons, one team withdrew. That didn't stop the other team from celebrating, lifting its captain up in the air, screaming, etc. They got a trophy. We left.

The next day I took a taxi to the airport. The Mombasa airport isn't very impressive -- no internet café, which really should be standard at airports, and not much in the way of food. Just like in Entebbe, they pulled the double-X-ray maneuver -- one set at the front door and another to get into the gate area. My boarding pass had the wrong times on it, but so did everyone else's. I boarded the small propeller plane that was to take me to Zanzibar.

You can read about my trip to Zanzibar.

The rhythm of the rails is all I feel

2009-01-06T13:39:00.001+03:00

This is from day three of my trip to Kenya. You may want to start at the beginning.

I've only taken an overnight train once before, in Thailand, and it was a generally good experience, so I thought I'd try it in Kenya. (Interestingly, that was two years ago to the day.) On the advice of Lonely Planet, I booked ahead -- specifically, I asked a company called East Africa Shuttles to book a first class ticket for me (and sent them some money via Western Union) and gave them my first name.

The morning of the train ride, after my safari, I stopped in at the train station to pick up my ticket and the train station had no idea who I was. Concerned, I called the guy from East Africa Shuttles and he explained that he hadn't bought it yet. Fortunately, there was still room on the train. I reserved a ticket (under my last name) and told them that the guy would come pay for it.

I came back to the station around 5:30pm just to make sure, and yep, he had stopped by and paid for the ticket. They started handing out boarding passes just after 6pm. Each person received a ticket, a boarding pass, and a card entitling them to dinner at a certain time -- all of them were first seating, at 7:15pm. I asked for second seating and was told to ask the steward.

At check-in, I was given two boarding passes -- one for my first name and one for my last name. I was going to argue, but then I remembered that there were two beds in each compartment. I had just been handed a private room. Sweet.

I waited on the platform for a while, the train was a bit late. Meanwhile, I did as the local kids did -- walked out onto the tracks -- although I did it for the photos, they did it to drink from the water tap between the tracks.

Third class boards at the front, and at that end of the platform was a large crowd of Kenyans. I understand that third class is just seats, no beds. I'm not sure what second class is like, I would guess four beds in each cabin but with no doors between cabins (like in Thailand). I was in first class at the back of the train with lots of other mzungus.

Finally the train pulled in and we got on board (that's it on the right). I met my neighbors, nice people, and examined the room. The sleeping cars had narrow hallways on one side and fairly spacious sleeping rooms on the other. My room was pretty fancy as far as trains go. Lots of small unexpected amenities, though, like a private sink with an outlet for an electric razor. The door locked, which was nice. But there were lots of weird little things, like broken buttons and switches -- it clearly hadn't been well-maintained

That's my cabin in the picture. Once the train started moving, a staff member came by and took one of my tickets, saying it entitled me to bedding. Then the steward came by and introduced himself and at my request traded me for a seating card entitling me to sit at second dinner (8:45pm). My thought was to try to see the countryside while it was light out. There was a sign over every window saying it was dangerous to lean out the window, but my neighbors and I spent most of our waking time leaning out the windows with no trouble (well, I was almost hit by an acacia tree once, but no actual trouble).

At about 7:30, a crewmember walked through the train banging on a small xylophone-like thing to announce first dinner. Second dinner was around nine, and the xylophone guy came back. He warned me to take all of my valuables to the dining car. While we were out, a guy came by and made our beds. The food wasn't stellar but considering it was train food, I wasn't disappointed. We ate off of EAR (East Africa Railroad) china, which must be years old by now. This photo was taken out the window, that's another train going by. When we got back, an employee warned us to keep our windows locked while we slept. I slept reasonably well considering I was on a train.

I awoke just before sunrise, around 5:45, which was good because we had entered Tsavo National Park at 5am and I wanted to watch for animals. Sure enough, I was just getting to the window when we passed a herd of wild buffalo. The only other wild animals I saw were antelope, though we passed many herds of cattle and sheep and goats. Apparently sometimes you see elephants and giraffes.

The train runs every day and more or less on a schedule, so children along the route know when to stand there to watch the train go by. Lots of kids stand there and wave, although more or less half of them are begging for money. One of them threw a rock at a friend of mine.

The train made a lot of stops, but we were more or less unaware of them at the back of the train. We'd look down the train and see lots of people in third class getting on and off, but they didn't even announce the stops for us.

As we pulled into Mombasa, we got a bit of a view of the city. It was a lot smaller and more spread out than I had pictured, though I admit I had no basis for thinking there would be skyscrapers. We arrived at 11:30am, an hour and a half late, for a total travel time of sixteen hours. A quick negotiation with a taxi driver and we were on the way to a hotel.

You might want to read about my time in Mombasa.

Arie Goes to Nairobi: More Like Snoreway

2009-01-05T12:34:00.004+03:00

This was my only real day in Nairobi (I wrote about my initial impressions before), and Lonely Planet was singularly unhelpful in deciding what to do (it recommended coffee and Chinese food). Instead I decided to have a wildlife adventure.

I woke up a bit before 6, checked out of my hotel, and got in a cab. The driver took me to Nairobi National Park, a wildlife preserve a few miles outside of Nairobi. The park is surprisingly large considering it's right next to Kenya's capital, and it's really odd -- big expanses of savannah with steel skyscrapers rising in the background and jets flying overhead.

We drove around the park a bit as the sun rose -- first to an overlook so we could try to spot animals. We didn't, really, so then we drove around a bit blindly, saw a few antelope, nothing special. A few birds. I'm not really into birds -- they all look more or less the same to me. This one is yellow. I guess there are lots of unusual birds in East Africa. Shrug.

Pretty soon, though, we had to stop because there were lions in the road. Two of them, females, probably hunting. Fortunately they weren't hunting mzungu -- I had the windows rolled down and they didn't seem interested in jumping in. They basically ignored us as we drove right up to them and took photos. They stayed on the road for a bit and then meandered south in the direction of the antelope. We were apparently very lucky to see lions, most visitors to the park don't.

When I arrived in Kenya I was a little disappointed to find that there weren't lions on every street corner. This was more like it, I thought -- out here for an hour and already two lions. At that rate I'd have seen thirty lions by the end of the day. Sadly, and I'm writing this now so that the reader isn't in suspense, these were the only lions I saw. They don't have manes because they're female (though certain males, particularly those adapted to swimming, also lack manes) -- lionesses do most of the hunting in lion prides.

We drove a bit more and saw some antelope and then a zebra. I just finished reading Guns, Germs, and Steel (overrated), which asserts that zebra are too ill-tempered to be domesticated. They looked friendly to me, but my driver said I wasn't allowed to go play with them or he would get fired. Fine. I stayed in the car. Also I thought they ran in giant herds so their stripes made them blend together or something, but there were just a couple.

Then we saw two rhinoceri. These guys are white rhinos, the same species that I petted back in Entebbe, although again I was not allowed to get out and pet these. Apparently it's very rare to see these too. We then drove on to various groups of antelope and then ostrich. First we saw one ostrich, then two, then maybe twenty. At this rate, the world will be filled with ostrich within weeks. Fortunately, they're very tasty (see below).

After a bit we came upon some giraffes. They were basically standing around looking at stuff from above. The driver said that they were looking out for lions, but really lions will rarely attack adult giraffes because giraffes kick very hard, and because when lions bite giraffe legs they tend to slide downward. Baby giraffes, however, are tasty lion treats.

We drove a bit more and found a little lake surrounded by birds. Some of them were marabou storks, the worst of all birds, and others were crested cranes, the national bird of Uganda. Then more zebra, the giraffes again, some birds, more antelopes, and we left the park.

Our next stop was a giraffe center. I'm sure they had some sort name that would excuse it, like the Giraffe Wildlife Preservation Group or the Giraffe Education Center or something, but really it was a place you can go to feed and pet giraffes.

Sure enough, there were three or four giraffes standing around and a bunch of keepers and buckets of food pellets. I took a bunch of pellets in my hand and immediately a surprisingly large head on a very long neck dipped down and licked them out of my hand while I petted it. Giraffe tongues are raspy and purple.

I felt bad that the giraffes had to bend so far down (they already have blood pressure problems -- so would you if your heart had to pump blood that high), so I climbed up into a little pavilion that the center had built at about giraffe head level and fed the giraffes some more. A keeper warned us not to come too close to one of them -- "Betty likes to headbutt". Then he suggested that I feed her, which I did, and then he suggested I try to snuggle up to her and stroke her head while I fed her. I think he was trying to get me headbutted. The moment I ran out of food she went for me, but I was expecting it and dodged.

Then I went back downstairs and at the direction of a keeper put a food pellet between my lips and a giraffe bent down and licked it up. That was surreal. The keeper explained that giraffe saliva is antiseptic, but I wasn't really concerned -- how many illnesses can jump the giraffe-man barrier? And anyway, that would be a great way to get sick.

Incidentally, giraffe saliva really is antiseptic. They eat acacia trees, which are covered in thorns, so their faces get cut a lot, so they've evolved antiseptic saliva to deal with it a little. Also some of the trees they eat have a symbiotic relationship with ants where the tree produces sugar for the ants and when the giraffe tries to eat the leaves, the ants run into the giraffe's mouth and nose and sting it. One of the reasons giraffes have such long tongues is to lick the ants out of their noses.

Our next stop was an elephant orphanage. There are a lot of orphaned baby elephants in Kenya. Much like people, baby elephants without good role models can grow up to be poorly socialized, violent, and prematurely sexualized. So Kenya takes all the orphaned baby elephants it can find and puts them together into a little elephant pack, where they're reared for two years by a bunch of keepers. Every day between eleven and noon they feed the babies, and for that hour only the area is open to visitors.

I'm told that the New York Times Magazine recently ran an article about this place, which might explain why it was so crowded. There were tons of people, but fortunately elephants (even baby elephants) are pretty big, so we could all see. The first pack they brought out comprised the youngest elephants, and they were very excited to be at feeding time.

Feeding time is also mud time, it turns out -- the keepers filled buckets from the waterhole and poured them into the dirt, and the excited baby elephants immediately ran over and starting rolling in the mud. They were clearly happy elephants. I went to an elephant camp in Thailand where the elephants were trained to perform various tricks and they seemed fairly content with their lives, but these guys were different -- they weren't domesticated or even tamed, they were just wild baby elephants having fun in the mud.

Then they led them away (by way of the edge of the field, so I got to pet them) and brought out the adolescent elephants. They keep the orphans in packs because the elephants make friends amongst the pack, and each pack is released into the wild when an appropriate group of adults is nearby, but never before every member of the pack is at least two years old. This pack was almost ready for release -- there were only two elephants left that were under two years old.

The adolescent elephants were fed milk -- three large bottles per elephant. They were clearly very excited about the milk. After feeding the adolescents played in the water for a while, rolled around in the mud a bit, and then walked off. The keepers tried to get them to play some soccer, but they weren't into it. The orphanage also had a baby black rhino in a cage. He used to come out and play, but apparently one day he got violent and now he has to stay in the box. Rhino jail.

After the elephant orphanage, I went to Carnivore, a famous restaurant outside Nairobi. It serves all sorts of exotic meats (I had lamb (OK), beef (not bad), chicken (good), ostrich (my favorite), alligator (a little fishy), and crocodile (second favorite)). And a very dry brownie for dessert. Carnivore is sometimes considered one of the best restaurants in the world, but I wasn't convinced.

Then a taxi back to my hotel -- I straightened out some plane tickets and then took a taxi to the train station to wait for my train to Mombasa.

Incidentally, I was continually struck by how different Nairobi is from Kampala. The roads are in much better shape, there are more and taller buildings, lots more infrastructure. There are virtually no motorcycles, and no motorcycle taxis at all. There are matatus (share taxis), but they're different from the ones in Uganda -- they are driven more carefully, they're better maintained, and they all have speed governors that limited them to 80 kilometers (about fifty miles) per hour. But the biggest difference is that they are highly decorated -- lots of posters covering the back windows, fancy paint jobs, etc.

Nairobi would be a great city, I guess, except that the crime problem really ruins it. It's unsafe to walk at night and walking in the daytime is borderline (when I went to walk to an airline office mid-afternoon, the hotel tried to send a guard with me). My taxi drivers made sure to roll up the windows and lock the doors when we were downtown, even mid-day. When we were near the train station, I suggested that I walk the fifty feet to the door because of the mess of cars there, and the taxi driver told me that I wouldn't make it to the door with all my bags. Great place to visit. Incidentally, this sign was up at my hotel -- it explains that the staff cannot open the safe, and then says "Should you wish to illegally take our money collection, you may take the complete safe. PLEASE DO NOT HARM OUR STAFF." This from a hotel with a twenty-four hour security guard. In Kampala, virtually all the guards carried automatic rifles, but here I saw virtually no weapons -- even the police were unarmed. I'm not sure if that's part of the reason why the crime is much worse here, or if weapons would just mean that the robberies would become murders.

Either way, I'm not eager to return.

You might want to read about my train ride to Mombasa.

Arie Doesn't Go to Karimojong

2009-01-05T08:18:00.002+03:00

When I was waiting at the bus stop in Mbale, I met a man who was a Karamoja warrior. I know this because he introduced himself as a Karamoja warrior and proceeded to mime shooting a gun, to flex his biceps (they weren't that big) and to show how flexible his arms were (very flexible). He also showed me the scars that had been left in his chest and stomach in some sort of ritual. He was very friendly, though we had trouble communicating because his English was very poor and my Karimojong is nonexistant.

Karimojong is a region in the northeast of Uganda (and really part of western Kenya). Karimojong gets very little rain, some years none at all. Thus, the Karamoja have always been herders, not farmers. Cattle are very important in their society, as they represent not only survival but also wealth. There's thus a lively, long-standing, violent tradition of cattle raiding.

In the 1970s, firearms found their way to Karimojong. In 1980, there was a major drought. Those two factors together pretty much screwed everything up. Raiding increased exponentially, until it had gotten so bad that herders fled to the far reaches of the region so they couldn't be found. Cattle buyers disappeared -- it was not safe to buy cattle and try to transport them out of the region. Relief groups were cautious because their trucks had been hijacked before. About twenty percent of the population starved to death. Further droughts in the 1980s led Kenya and Uganda to launch semi-successful military operations to quell raiding, but starvation continued. Desperate people turned to game meat, and Karimojong's population of giraffes, zebra, ostriches, and antelope were essentially destroyed.

Firearms have a funny history in Karimojong. The British ban on guns lasted until Idi Amin took power in 1971. In the early 1970s, Karamoja, frustrated by the government's inability to stop raiding, made crude homemade firearms and used them to rob police officers of regular guns. When Amin's government collapsed in 1979, Karamoja raided the regional army headquarters and carried away cartloads of weapons. Over the next decade, they defeated every one of the central government's periodic forays into the region using the government's weapons and ammunition from across the Sudanese border.

Museveni, the current President, was unable to disarm the Karamoja. The local government responded by enlisting the Karamoja, or at least the most respected members of the community, in a brigade called the Vigilantes. Membership was only open to "leaders" who owned their own guns. A leader was defined as one who owned many cattle, who was feared for his military prowess, or who had proven his skills of divination. They proved effective, and Museveni incorporated them into the army, paying them a salary of 10,000 shillings ($10 at the time) per month. (Women could not be Vigilantes because they did not own guns.)

That's more or less where things stand today. There has been a decrease in violence, but the region is still very dangerous. Thirty years ago, most Karamoja had some cattle. Today, most have none and a few, the most successful raiders, have many. Prostitution has appeared in the region for essentially the first time, as has distilled liquor. Cattle raiding remains a major problem. Non-Karamoja don't travel in the region if they can avoid it except in a convoy or with an NGO known to the community. There's a bus to one of the major cities that was hijacked a few months ago. There's only one bus line in Karamoja -- a competitor tried to run a bus, but on its first trip it was shot up by Karamoja warriors that were probably hired by the main company.

Despite reasonable effort, I didn't get to visit Karimojong while I was in Uganda. Sad -- it's very different from the rest of Uganda, both geographically and anthropologically. Most of my Ugandan friends seemed to think of the region as a foreign country, not really part of Uganda proper. That guy at the bus station was the only Karamoja I met.

source

Nairobbery

2009-01-01T19:20:00.004+03:00

I arrived in Nairobi this afternoon. Initial impressions:

Taxis are really expensive
This city is more spread out than Kampala
The plains surrounding the airport are totally stereotypically Kenya -- broad expanses of scrub and bushes with periodic lone trees rising in different spots
Nairobi has a lot of crime. There are security guards everywhere, but unlike Kampala none of them are armed.
The roads are really good.
The hotel (Kenya Comfort Hotel) has a lot of security and a working elevator, but the rooms are small and expensive. The people are nice.
I picked up open wireless in my hotel and it's the best internet I've had since arriving in Africa.
The TV doesn't have CNN. Yay.
Gas is cheap compared with Uganda. My taxi driver tells me it's because Uganda has no refineries, so they have to import fuel from Kenya.
Haven't seen any lions yet.

Everything's closed today, but I'll tour a bit tomorrow.

You might want to read about my second day in Nairobi.

Arie Meets the Abayudaya

2008-12-30T17:46:00.003+03:00

In the 1930s, a Jewish man named David Solomon was in Uganda working on various development projects for the British authorities. In 1937, he was sent to the town of Mbale, four hours outside of Kampala, to build a pumping station. One day while at work he saw a group of Ugandan guys wearing white robes and head coverings watching him carefully. He asked them what they wanted and they told him that they had heard he was a Jew, and they wanted to meet him because they were Jews. At first he thought it was some sort of joke, but then they showed him a Torah and described their religious practices. Solomon had encountered the Abayudaya, a community of Jews living in eastern Uganda.

I wanted to encounter them too (I have a history of encounters with unlikely Jews), so on Friday morning I took a boda to the Kampala bus station (pictured) to get a bus to Mbale. Mbale is a town in eastern Uganda and its history is tied in with that of the Abayudaya (which means, roughly, "People of Judah").

British and French missionaries arrived in Uganda in force in the 1880s. Semei Kakungulu, a politician and the hero of our story, converted to Christianity and led Christian forces to victory in the war against Arab ivory and slave traders from the north in the 1890s. Having risen to prominence, he married two of the king's daughters (there was an intervening divorce) and led the Buganda kingdom to a number of military victories, subduing various other tribes. In 1894, when Uganda was declared a British protectorate, England gave Kakungulu substantial control over the Ugandan military and he brought much of the country under their control. In gratitude, they appointed him governor of the eastern province.

I arrived at the bus station at 10am. Various people asked me where I was going and I said Mbale and they pointed me towards a corner, where a tiny ragged-looking bus was loading. The conductor asked for 20,000 shillings ($10), and I decided to wait for the next one. Sure enough, a shiny new blue bus pulled in and started to load for Mbale (15,000). I asked when it was leaving and they assured me that it was leaving right now. Those familiar with Africa know that this was a lie. I knew too, but I got on. We sat for an hour while the bus loaded. The vendors just say what they're selling, they don't hiss (the Rwandan way), although they're allowed to walk onto the bus to wave water bottles and portable radios at you. They're not very aggressive. (I forgot a toothbrush and toothpaste, but was able to buy a set from a vendor.) The ride itself was three and a half hours because there wasn't much traffic. We stopped a few times for food, to let people off, and once for a bathroom break (a large row of bushes). Pictured is some chicken that a roadside vendor was selling.

We pulled into Mbale at about 2:30. It's a really cute little town -- two main streets that intersect at a small clocktower, some side streets. Mbale was founded by Kakungulu. It lies at the base of Mount Elgon, a large ridge that towers over the town -- a striking sight. Mbale grew quickly and is now the third-largest city in Uganda (population: 75,000). I went straight to a hotel, the Mt. Elgon View Hotel (there's no view but the rooms are nice), checked in, and had some food.

Kakungulu was not satisfied with the post of Governor of the eastern province. Other parts of the country were governed by kings, and he wanted to be made King of the east. The British balked, but he declared himself King anyway. There was some conflict, and finally he gave up politics in disgust and returned to Mbale to devote himself to religion.

Lunch for me was Indian food at Nurali Café -- decent food. Not bad. The staff of my hotel were familiar with the Abayudaya and got me a taxi. It was about a half-hour drive, including a search for gas (most places were out).

When Kakungulu returned to Mbale angry with the British, he fell into the cult followers of a guy named Malaki, who preached biblical literalism and forbade his followers to eat pork, allowed polygamy (reasoning that Abraham did so), and forbade all medicine and medical practice. The Malakites' refusal to allow vaccinations led to Malaki's exile after a plague swept the region.

Kakungulu remained with the Malakites for a while, but he spent long periods meditating on the Old Testament. In 1919 he announced that all the commandments of Moses were binding and circumcised his sons. The Malakites responded that only Jews followed all the commandments of Moses, and Kakungulu responded, "Then we will be Jewish!"

The paving stopped about a third of the way to the Abayudaya and the road wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible. I wasn't sure we were going in the right way until I saw a sign for Semei Kakungulu High School with a Jewish star on it. Finally we drove up to Nabugoye Hill, which houses the largest of the six synagogues that exist today.

Kakungulu and his followers adhered to the Torah to the best of its abilities -- for instance, they slaughtered meat in a kosher way and followed Succot and Passover. But with no guidance except the Torah, the Abayudaya had practices that didn't exactly mesh with contemporary Judaism. They sacrificed animals, baptized children, allowed polygamy, and forbade any use of medicine. Anyone caught violating the rules of Shabbat was severely punished. Their place of worship was called the Jewish Church. In 1926 he met two Jews in Kampala who came to Mbale and lived with the community for six months teaching them about modern Judaism. When he died, in 1928, there were more than two thousand Abayudaya. (He died of either malaria or tetanus after refusing medical treatment.) David Solomon came in ten years later. The Abayudaya went through difficult years following the death of Kakungulu, culminating in persecution under Idi Amin. Today they number about one thousand.

At the top of Nabugoye Hill were a number of small buildings. This is the first one I noticed -- the Shalom Internet Café. I didn't see anything I immediately identified as a synagogue, though I did notice the Semei Kakungulu High School with a Jewish star painted on it. There were a number of children playing in the area and most of them were wearing yarmulkes. Many waved and some shouted "Shabbat shalom!"

The taxi drove on a short winding path to a brand new building overlooking the valley. I paid the driver and walked in, noting the Mezuzah on the wall, and was greeted by a friendly Ugandan woman named Rachel who invited me to sit down and have a drink. I had reached the Abayudaya guest house, a building built for the express purpose of housing western Jews who come to visit. There I met a number of other members of the community and was continuously surprised by the biblical names -- Isaac, Samson, Moses, Israel, etc.

It was almost Shabbat, so the rabbi was off preparing for services, but I was told that I was welcome to photograph the synagogue before Shabbat began. I didn't recognize the synagogue at first -- from the back it looks like an ordinary building, but when I went to the front I knew I was in the right place. Again, there were a lot of kids playing outside the synagogue and they were very excited to see me. I took photos of one kid and showed him the photo on the camera and he got very excited and got all the others to run over, so I spent a while doing that. I guess there aren't a lot of mirrors here, and they don't get to see themselves much.

The inside was what you might expect. There was a small podium at the front, assorted chairs, and a few fluorescent lights. At the back was an ark for the Torahs. The morning of the day I arrived, a rabbi from Arizona had delivered another Torah -- the synagogue's fifth. The intention is to spread them to the other synagogues in the region.

They also have several shelves of prayer books that I assume were donated used by various synagogues. In the corner was a menorah balanced on a battery. Many of the windows were broken, which was just as well because there was no air conditioning.

As I waited and played with the kids, people started to assemble for Shabbat. I had expected to be the only white person there, but that was inaccurate. There were more mzungu than Ugandans. Several of the groups were from synagogues in the United States, some traveling with their rabbis. There were also a few Israelis who were camping nearby and a couple of other travelers like me who had just heard about the community and decided to stop by.

Just before sunset, the Rabbi showed up. Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, son and grandson of past community leaders, went to rabbinical school in Los Angeles and Israel, returned to his community, and finished the process of modernizing the customs and observations. He was trained in the conservative tradition.

The service itself was fairly standard Shabbat fare and I recognized some of the melodies. It was tri-lingual -- English, Luganda, and Hebrew. The songs lasted much longer than they would in the United States, I think that's a Ugandan thing. The rabbi's sermon was about the importance of doing things that are extraordinary -- he emphasized how extraordinary it was for the white people here to have come all the way from various places.

The Rabbi believes that the Abayudaya would benefit most from integration with the mainstream Jewish community. Partially for this reason, he and the Abayudaya generally are extremely welcoming toward visitors.

The Abayudaya are not recognized as Jews by most orthodox sects. However, the people of one of the villages, Putti, are in the process of formal orthodox conversion to Judaism. They intend to make aliyah (move to Israel).

After services, Rabbi Gershom invited all the white people in attendance to stay until Sunday, when there were three weddings scheduled and also the annual music festival. I had planned on going back on Saturday morning, but how could I miss all that? I went back to Mbale, had some food, and went back to my hotel. My room had a balcony, so I took a couple of night photographs of the town.

The next morning I went into town, got some money out of the bank (long ATM line) and went to the market. I hadn't brought enough clothing for three days, but shirts were a dollar each and socks fifty cents, so that wasn't a problem. Newly outfitted, I had lunch at the Landmark Inn and went back to the Abayudaya community. Incidentally, Mbale has few internet cafés, but it does have an internet phone booth -- the first I've seen in Uganda. Five cents/minute for calls to the United States.

Saturday afternoon with the Abayudaya was very interesting. Much of the community gathered in a circle outside the synagogue and the Rabbi led a discussion about the week's Torah portion. The portion concerned the elevation of Joseph from slave in Egypt to high official, and the Rabbi questioned the community as to whether Joseph could be considered a good person given that ten years passed and he did not let his parents know he was alive. After a very sophisticated discussion (much of which was in Luganda and had to be translated), one of the visiting rabbis suggested that Joseph understood that if he sent word to his parents of his elevation, his brothers (having tried to kill him) would flee and there would be no Jewish people.

On a boda ride back from the community into Mbale, we suddenly came upon an enormous group of Ugandans in some sort of parade. The kids were very excited, waving their arms and screaming. We pulled over to the side of the road as they passed, and all that could reach me gave me high fives. I later found out that this was part of a circumcision ritual (tribal, not Jewish). Circumcision is mandatory in many tribes, and from the description I've heard it's a rather brutal process. In this region it's a rite of passage into adulthood and only performed once every two years. Some people feel so strongly about it that they will circumcise corpses rather than allow a body to be buried uncircumcised.

The real fun was Sunday. The first of the three weddings was scheduled for 9am, so I arrived at 8:30. The people there were already hard at work cooking -- here's some matoke getting steamed. It won't surprise anyone familiar with this country to hear that the first wedding started at 12:15pm -- apparently the bride couldn't get her make-up right. At the first wedding the groom was one of the rabbis from another community -- I'm told he was seventy years old. The bride was in her early twenties. The other two couples were much closer in age. The ceremonies were fairly standard -- a Ketubah ("where did you get the Ketubah?" "PDF."), a Chuppah, the groom smashed a glass under his foot, we sang "Simcha Tov, Mazel Tov". The women did a strange sort of ululating scream. The weddings were fairly short and were done by 3pm, including lunch. I left as they were setting up for the music festival. One odd thing was that the brides looked very unhappy -- I'm told that it's customary in this region for the woman not to smile, or else people think that she is a prostitute. The guests, though, were extremely excited -- lots of shouting, dancing, screaming, etc.

To make sure I got back on time, I had stopped in at the Elgon Flyer bus office on Saturday -- I heard that they were clean, uncrowded, and driven safely. They assured me that the bus left at 5pm on Sundays, and that getting there at 4:40pm would be fine. I showed up at the bus park at 4pm to find that the bus had already left. A man explained that there was a big crowd trying to get back to Kampala -- sure enough, a big crowd was standing there. He told me that I should get on the next bus that came in. The next bus came in and the crowd mobbed the door. The driver let five or six people on and then it left. Not being willing to elbow people in the face meant that I wasn't getting on.

Fortunately for me, a man came up to me and we got to talking. When the next bus came in, he said "Mzungu, I will get you on the bus." As they were loading, he pulled over someone who must have been an official and they talked briefly. The official said "Mzungu, you have 15,000 shillings?" I held up a bill and he waved me onto the bus -- Gateway Bus Company.

The bus ride was fine. It was a little crowded, but the driver drove safely. There were a lot of chickens on the bus. At my feet were two with their feet tied together so they couldn't move. Apparently eastern Uganda is known for its chickens, so lots of people bring a couple home after a visit. A few minutes into the ride, I felt something nudging my leg. It turned out that a third chicken had gotten lonely and wanted to come play with these two. I lifted my foot and she walked over.

The two who were tied up weren't any fun, I guess, so then she came over to me and started nuzzling my leg. Then she discovered my bag, and apparently the handle is the perfect size for a chicken head rest. She went most of the ride snuggled against my leg with her head happily tugged into the handle. Most of the chickens were pretty quiet except when it was time to get off the bus -- you carry a chicken by its feet, and they squawk and flap a lot.

And that was my visit to the Abayudaya. We got back around 9pm, I had a quick dinner and went to bed. The end.

Incidentally, many Abayudaya, along with a local Muslim community and a local Christian community, grow coffee that's sold by a company called Mirembe Kawomera ("Delicious Peace").

source source

Ugh

2008-12-30T16:16:00.002+03:00

The LRA's statement that it would not respond to the government's attack on their camp was apparently false. Starting with a massacre in a church, the LRA has killed more than two hundred people in Congo over the last week. The LRA issued an official denial. It's not clear how Congo will respond, nor is it clear what the LRA hopes to accomplish and how mass murder will achieve those goals.

Arie Goes to Rwanda: Arie Leaves Rwanda

2008-12-25T12:00:00.001+03:00

This is from my trip to Rwanda. You might want to start at the beginning.

After leaving the Murambi genocide memorial, I took the moto back up to the Gikongoro bus station and took a share taxi back to the Butare station, where I took a moto to the Hotel Ibis -- allegedly the best restaurant in town. It was some sort of white person magnet -- I saw more white people sitting outside that place during lunch than I had seen my whole time in Rwanda. Lunch was good. The Ibis was in the center of Butare town, so I looked around a bit -- if Rwanda had horses, Butare would only have one. It's apparently the intellectual capital of Rwanda, hosting the National University, a seminary, the Institution of Scientific Research, and other institutions. After lunch I went to the National Museum, but I really wasn't in a mood to appreciate it. On the way I stopped at an internet café and reserved a ticket on Rwandair's flight from Kigali to Kampala the next morning. (That's not Butare in the photo, but I really like how the sky came out. All the photos in this entry are from the bus ride back.)

I walked back to the bus station and bought a ticket on the Onatracom bus to Kigali. The bus being late, I ended up waiting for more than an hour. I had thought I would sit and read a bit, but my skin made me too much of a curiosity. Lots of people wanted to talk to me, but few spoke English and my French is limited to simple things like "where is the museum?" and "I do not speak French." One kid translated for a few other people, mostly requests for money. (Something about Rwanda is that people asked me for money all the time. Not necessarily beggars, just random people on the street.)

One Rwandan man came over and explained to me in very bad English that I looked like Rambo. I didn't understand him at first because Rwandans don't generally distinguish between L and R, so I thought he was saying "lamb bone" or something, but then he said "Viet Nam Rambo" and mimed a machine gun and I got it. Then in what I hope was a misunderstanding he started saying "I love you" and gesturing for me to kiss him. A bunch of guys had gathered around, and he started saying it more and more forcefully. My technique to diffuse tension in Uganda (saying "Obama!") didn't work. Instead, I continued smiling broadly and arranged a few bottlecaps into a little soccer goal, and got them to play some bottlecap soccer. That did it.

The bus finally showed up. It was almost empty, but I was relieved to be on my way back and in a safe mode of transport. Wrong. The driver was apparently psychotic -- I still cannot believe how fast we were driving. The roads are narrow and very hilly, with sharp turns, and are uphill or downhill the whole way. The uphill speed was limited by the weight of the bus. The downhill speed was not limited in any way. A few times we went so fast that I'm pretty sure I felt myself get heavier.

Much to my surprise, we made it back to Kigali safely and we didn't kill anyone on the way (although two people had to dive out of the way as we barreled down the road). I tried to have dinner at a restaurant recommended by Lonely Planet but it had closed a long time ago. I grabbed a quick dinner and laid down in my hotel room and watched Cool Runnings and tried not to think about my day.

I had arranged for a taxi driver to meet me at 5:30 the next morning and I wasn't surprised at all when he knocked on my door at 5:15. At the airport, Rwandair didn't have my reservation, but it didn't matter because there were plenty of seats on the plane. The plane itself was a little propeller plane, four seats to a row, maybe eight rows. The pilots were white guys, and the plane didn't say Rwandair -- it said "Air Services Company". I guess they subcontract. The flight was fine, much less swooping than I expected for a plane that size. There were maybe five or six passengers. Rwandair breakfast is surprisingly nice -- a little box with a croissant, roll, sweet brownie thing, and yogurt.

I think the guy at Ugandan immigration tried to trick me into admitting that I wasn't planning to leave Uganda. He asked me how long I was staying and I said three weeks. He saw that I had spent a few months in Uganda already, and we got to chatting about my trip to Rwanda, and then he said something like "you must be glad to be home, and now you can stay and you don't have to travel anymore." I said "no, I will be leaving in three weeks" and he grunted and stamped my passport and handed it back.

Unexpectedly, not much traffic between Entebbe and Kampala.

So that was my trip to Rwanda. The highlight was definitely the gorillas. Rwanda's an amazing country to have experienced such horror so recently and to have bounced back so completely. Excellent infrastructure, friendly people, good food. Gorillas, too. And of course everywhere you go is gorgeous. If I spoke more French, I'd be tempted to live in Kigali rather than Kampala.

The Murambi Genocide Memorial

2008-12-24T10:47:00.005+03:00

This is the second entry about my trip to Rwanda. You may want to start at the beginning.

This entry is very disturbing and has photos of corpses. Don't read it unless you're prepared to see them (Mom, you should skip this one). Instead, you can read about my journey home (coming soon).

My last day in Rwanda. I decided to go see the Murambi Memorial, which is in the southwest part of the country. I woke up early again, around 6:30, and was surprised to find that Kigali was almost deserted. The streets of Kampala are packed the moment the sun rises, but I guess people sleep later in Kigali. I couldn't find a place for breakfast until seven.

I decided to try Atraco Bus, went to the station and bought a ticket to Butare. The bus started empty, but we picked up a full load at Nyabugogo Bus Station. The drive was fine until a boy down the row started vomiting. Also his mother, sitting next to me, kept spitting into a plastic bag (and plastic bags are illegal in Rwanda -- they seize them at the airport). That was pleasant. I insisted on having the window wide open so I could breathe fresh air, and that caused some friction with other passengers, who apparently wanted to breathe horrible vomit air. The window stayed open.

Butare was about two hours away -- it took a little longer than that because we stopped in a number of small towns to pick up and discharge passengers. Finally we arrived and I hopped out. The taxi park was basically a big dirt field with a bunch of minibuses in it.

Outside of Kigali, not many people speak English. A lot of people were curious about why there was a white dude standing around. I wandered a bit asking for the taxi to Gikongoro before I found someone whose English was good enough to correct my pronunciation -- it's "ji-KONG-or-o", it turns out. He showed me which minibus to take and suggested it would be slow, but I wasn't in a hurry. When the share taxi was half-full, we started out, driving to another dirt lot behind a gas station where a bunch more share taxis were waiting. We all climbed out and into another one and we were off.

It was about a thirty minute ride in this one to the Gikongoro. The Gikongoro bus station was a bit nicer, with a big fence around it, though the town is much smaller. Outside of the bus station I took a boda to the Murambi Memorial. It was about a mile or two downhill on a dirt road. At the memorial, I took the driver's number so I could call him when I was done.

When I walked up to the memorial, a woman wordlessly came out to meet me and gestured for me to follow. We walked around the new museum building to the older technical college buildings behind it. She unlocked a room and gestured for me to enter.

Inside were two large tables. Spread out on the tables were dozens of corpses that had been soaked in lye to preserve them. The lye had leached out all the color, so the corpses were a dull matte white. The air was still. The sour smell of lye pervaded the room. An angry wasp was buzzing in the corner.

Murambi used to be a technical school. In 1994, when the genocide started, Tutsis in the region fled to the local church. The bishop and the mayor met with them and told them that they would be safe in Murambi, where troops that were stationed in the region would protect them. Tens of thousands of Tutsis went to the school and barricaded themselves in.

The government immediately cut the water and power and the soldiers disappeared. The people tried to defend themselves with stones, but after a few days without water they were too weak to hold out. The militias overran the school and killed fifty thousand people, most of whom were buried in mass graves surrounding the school.

After the genocide, some of the bodies that had been buried here were exhumed. The clothing was removed and the bodies were soaked in lye. The lye leached the water out of the tissue but preserved the skeletons and much of the rest of the bodies. The effect was to dry them out and preserve them. The rooms of the college are filled with the preserved corpses.

I wasn't going to take photos. I wasn't even really going to do anything except stand there horrified. But as I stood in the room, the woman gestured toward my camera. I looked at her and she gestured more forcefully. In retrospect, I guess it makes sense -- they did this so it would be seen. Anyway, thinking about them as photographic subjects was easier than thinking about them as people.

Most of the corpses were adults, but some were children. In many cases the cause of death was clear: Many of the skulls had large gashes in them. Some of the ribcages had what were probably machete wounds. Others looked like they had been killed with masu, which are clubs studded with nails. A few of the children were missing large pieces of their skulls.

I staggered out of the room and the woman nodded at me and led me to the next room, which she unlocked. The layout was similar, two large tables covered in preserved corpses. More of these were children. Most were naked, but some of them were wearing shreds of clothing. I'm not sure if they were preserved and then dressed again, or if the clothing survived the preservation process.

The involvement of the pastor in the massacre at Murambi is typical of what happened across the country. Church officials in Rwanda mostly supported the genocide. One famous story involves two thousand refugees who had taken shelter at a hospital in Mugonero. They heard that the hospital would be attacked the next day, and seven pastors wrote a letter to the president of their local church, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, which said:

How are you! We wish you to be strong in all these problems we are facing. We wish to inform you that we have heard that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. We therefore request you to intervene on our behalf and talk with the Mayor. We believe that, with the help of God who entrusted you the leadership of this flock, which is going to be destroyed, your intervention will be highly appreciated, the same way as the Jews were saved by Esther. We give honour to you.

Ntakirutimana replied, "There is nothing I can do for you. All you can do is prepare to die, for your time has come."

Rwandans all over the country sought sanctuary in churches, and all over the country they were killed. More Tutsis were killed in churches than anywhere else. In some churches so many people were gathered that the militias had to spread the killings over many days, cutting the victims' Achilles tendons so they couldn't run away in the interim. Several church officials were brought up on war crimes charges.

A man walked over and took the job of unlocking the doors for me. He led me to four more rooms similar to the first two. Although the preservation process changed the form of their bodies, their personhood wasn't suppressed or concealed. There was more than just skull and bones, and in the flesh that was left you could clearly see the shape of the face, the expression frozen in death. And there were little touches of humanity. One of the bodies was still wearing a rosary; she held it in her hand as she died.

The lye had left most of the bodies bald, though a few here and there still had a little hair left.

Most of the victims of the genocide were bludgeoned to death or were cut with machetes or bashed with clubs. The militias generally tortured their victims before killing them, often amputating limbs one at a time. Soldiers began offering to shoot Tutsis in the head for a price, to spare them the torture. Many who could afford it accepted.

After the sixth room, the guide led me to the second building. The first room had on one side a table with preserved corpses, but on the other was a different layout. One side of the table was covered in a very large pile of bones. I think they were femurs -- they were fairly large and regular. The other side was covered in skulls. As with the bodies, the fatal wounds were often obvious. He indicated that the rest of the rooms were similar to the ones before, and he wasn't inclined to show them to me. I didn't argue.

Churches were not the only places where people failed to find sanctuary. In hospitals, doctors killed their colleagues, patients, and refugees as they arrived. Some of the most horrible massacres were in maternity wards, where people fled thinking that no one would kill newborn babies. Schoolchildren ran to their schools only to be killed by their teachers. The chairman of a human rights organization was charged with complicity in the murder of twelve thousand people.

The guide then led me into a large room with bookshelves full of clothing and explained that it was the clothing of the victims. Then we went out back. The museum had markers to show the spot where the French flag had been planted, and this sign indicated the spot where the French soldiers played "volley". I was a bit confused because France didn't send troops in until two months after the massacres here and I didn't realize they reached this far south.

Then he led me to the mass graves. As with everywhere in Rwanda, the scenery here was beautiful. This was probably the most incongruous experience I've ever had -- looking at a mass grave with beautiful rolling hills fading into the mist beyond it, listening to the sounds of children laughing and playing. After, he led me to room with a guest book and donation jar.

When the RPF took over Rwanda and stopped the genocide, they had to shoot all the dogs. They had developed a taste for human flesh.

This picture shows one of the mass graves after excavation. Across the country, Rwanda exhumed the bodies and reburied them in consecrated graves.

Article XIII of the Rwandan Constitution provides that "Revisionism, negationism and trivialisation of genocide are punishable by the law." In other words, it is illegal to question the government's version of the facts. I'm not sure what to make of that.

Articles LXXVI and LXXXII require that thirty percent of Rwanda's parliament and senate be female. It was felt by the drafters that women would not allow similar atrocities to occur again. Rwanda recently became the first country in history to elect a parliament that's more than fifty percent female.

I called my driver and sat to wait. The guide asked if I could wait while my moto took him to grab lunch, and of course I didn't mind, but then another visitor showed up and he had to abandon his lunch plans.

The rest of my trip to Butare is coming soon.

source

Arie Goes Gorilla Trekking

2008-12-23T15:27:00.007+03:00

This is from day three of my trip to Rwanda. You might want to start at the beginning or read about how I got here.

I woke up early, which was good because the driver was at the hotel to pick me up at 6:15. Dry toast for breakfast. He drove me to the Rwandan tourism office at Kinigi, which is near the border of Volcanoes National Park. Very dramatic, with the volcanoes encircling us. There were a lot of white people there, mostly to do other treks -- golden monkeys, Dian Fossey's grave, etc. Mostly Europeans -- the U.S. economic trouble has really hurt gorilla trekking.

There was this display that shows shoes twenty feet away from a gorilla -- you're never supposed to get closer than that. That's for your protection, sure, but also for the gorillas -- they can catch most human diseases. See below for whether we followed that rule (no). Also, they ask that if you're sick you not go (you get the permit fee back). Gorillas have died from diseases caught from tourists.

Baby gorillas are tiny little puffballs for the first four or five months, until they learn to walk. They're "infants" until they're three, then juveniles until six, then sub-adults until eight. An adult male is a "blackback" when young, but at a certain age they start to develop the characteristic silver saddle-shaped fur patch on their backs and are then known as "silverbacks".

We had two guides, a younger one and an older one. They insisted on referring to each other as "silverback" and "blackback", but really it was barely funny the first time. We were assigned to the Sabyinyo Group, one of the five gorilla families that are habituated to humans. Sabyinyo allegedly means "teeth" -- the top of the Sabyinyo volcano is broken off, unlike the others. The guides gave us instructions -- basically, don't get too close, if a gorilla approaches you don't make eye contact and back away slowly, if one attacks just sit down and don't fight, that sort of thing. Apparently one of the babies in the group likes to play with tourists' clothing.

So while we were drinking coffee and learning about not fighting the gorillas, a team of trackers was already on the mountain looking for the gorillas. The trackers set out early, find the gorillas, and then radio our guides to tell them where to enter the park. We piled into vehicles and drove to the base of the volcano.

The drive was not smooth. The road to the volcano was the worst road I've ever been on -- unpaved and the potholes were so big that the 4WD safari vehicle got stuck a few times. It winds through various farms and there were little kids waving and chasing us around, as usual. One kid herded some goats at us but we were faster.

Finally we arrive at the base of the volcano. Waiting for us are three guys with AK-47s. They keep them on hand in case they have to scare off forest elephants and forest buffalo, and probably also to shoot poachers. I take a moment to field a phone call, we grab hiking sticks, and we start walking. I wondered if maybe the armed guys were also there to deal with rebels -- the top of Sabyinyo Volcano is the border with Congo (and Uganda) and we're about ten miles from where the rebels are active. But there isn't much danger -- Rwanda is probably backing the rebels (Rwanda denies it), and anyway the rebels aren't really interested in harassing gorilla trekkers. And three random guys with AK-47s probably can't handle a heavily armed rebel force that's spent the last five years living and fighting in the jungle. No, I think they're for elephants.

After a bit we come to this large rock wall. It's apparently goes all the way around the park, even where the park becomes the Virungas National Park in Congo and Mgahinga Gorilla Park and Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda. This way the gorillas don't climb down (mostly) and domesticated animals don't go up. The guides talk on the radio a bit to find out where the trackers are and then we walk along the rock wall for a while (that is, we walk on farmland), hurrying when we walk past beehives, and then we climb over and we're in the rainforest.

It's dark in there. The guides have machetes and they cut a path through the plants for us. They stop periodically to point out various plants -- I get to taste eucalyptus (eh) and some other plants. One of the guides keeps impersonating gorillas -- screaming and grunting and destroying trees. I feel bad for the trees. The guides also tell us about the different noises that gorillas make -- grunts when they're happy, screams when they're angry, and proceed to demonstrate.

After hiking for a while, we come to a little clearing where the trackers and their armed escort are waiting. The gorillas are just ahead, and you can't bring food or anything interesting, so we all drop our packs (I had no pack so I dropped my jacket and Clif bars) and our walking sticks.

And then we walk twenty or thirty more feet and there's a little black fuzzy ball in the distance. The guide tells us to stop walking, and I think, "this is it?" And then I notice the enormous silverback gorilla sitting ten feet away from us. We all see him at once, and the silverback appears nonplussed as a phalanx of camera lenses emerge. In fact, he ignores us. As if we're not there, he snacks on some leaves and then turns and ambles away.

We follow. This silverback is named Guhonda, which means the chest beating that gorillas stereotypically do (I didn't see this at all), and he's head of the Sabyinyo family. Our guides keep making grunting noises, but Guhonda ignores them and us and just keeps walking. We keep following.

A gorilla walks on all four limbs, but its hands are curled back so its weight rests on its knuckles. Strange to see. Like all great apes except humans, the arms are longer than the legs. Gorillas are very strong, but they're peaceful -- they move slowly (although they can run quite fast) and aren't generally aggressive.

Guhonda stopped to eat a lot -- gorillas basically have to eat most of the time. It's tough to be five hundred pounds when your diet is leaves -- silverbacks have to eat about seventy-five pounds of leaves each day. He kept stopping to eat, we kept stopping to watch him eat, it was win-win. Gorillas eat mostly leaves and bark and shoots, but they sometimes eat ants and fruit. They don't seem to eat lizards -- for reasons unknown, gorillas have an inborn fear of lizards, even little ones like chameleons.

Someone asked me if they bathe and if they smell bad. I didn't notice any special odor, though there were a lot of unfamiliar scents in the jungle. Gorillas don't bathe because they don't like water -- they won't cross even a small stream unless there's a bridge over it, and Dian Fossey noticed that they're unhappy when it rains. Of course, it rains most days, so that keeps them somewhat clean.

As we followed Guhonda through the forest, we sometimes saw other gorillas through the trees. They seemed to be generally cohesive, each gorilla doing its own thing but aware of the others. Sometimes one of them would want to pass us, and the guides would quickly get us out of the way. A mother gorilla with a baby on her back passed by a few inches from me.

After winding through the forest a bit, we come upon some other gorillas. Soon there are a bunch of them together -- a mother with a baby, a few females, an adolescent male, and Guhonda sitting there watching the whole group as they eat and groom. Gorillas can be identified by their noses -- they're unique, like fingerprints.

The whole thing seemed strangely human. We heard a little sad crying noise, and from behind us a tiny baby gorilla looking very distraught came ambling through. The baby was six months old, barely old enough to walk. We got out of the way as his mother walked up, and the baby saw her and ran to her arms and his sad noises turned to happy ones. It was very sweet. She took him to what I guess is a tasty bush and he stood on her belly and tried to climb the trees to eat their leaves, sometimes falling out.

These gorillas are mountain gorillas, a subspecies of the Eastern Gorilla. Their technical name is Gorilla berengei berengei, named after Robert von Beringe, the first European to see one (and the first European to kill one). King Albert I of Belgium was persuaded to establish a park by a naturalist who wanted to study them. But the most famous gorilla watcher has to be Dian Fossey, thanks to her book and movie Gorillas in the Mist. This is where Fossey lived, and Rwanda plays her up to tourists as much as they can -- they offer treks to her grave, there are signs about her work, that sort of thing. It's all a little ironic given that Fossey was opposed to allowing tourists to visit the gorillas.

After twenty years of living in the hills, Fossey was stabbed to death up here in the mountains. The standard explanation is that she was killed by poachers because of her strong anti-poaching stance, but there's fairly strong evidence that she was in fact killed because she was an obstacle to gorilla tourism.

Anyway, Guhonda didn't do much once the family was together -- basically he sat still for a while, then laid down. I think maybe the gorilla version of Maslow's Hierarchy is pretty shallow: food, family, sleep, the end. Most of the other gorillas were more active -- there was some grooming and some fighting. The fight was between an adolescent male and what I think was one of the older males. Lots of biting. A gorilla has very sharp teeth and in extreme situations can kill another gorilla, but these were just playing.

The gorillas were very peaceful considering how close we were. But at one point we were so enthralled with watching two of them that we didn't notice a third approaching us from the side. Getting in a gorilla's way is a good way to start a fight. He (she?) lifted his arms, made an angry noise, and came at me in what I think was meant to be a threatening way. The guides quickly jumped between us and made gorilla noises until it calmed down. The only other incident was when one member of the group set up a tripod and one of the gorillas tried to grab it. The guides did the same thing and the gorilla backed off.

There aren't many mountain gorillas left in the world -- they're classified as critically endangered. They don't breed in captivity, so the ones in this region are the only stable population. Unfortunately, poaching is a big problem. In Rwanda and Uganda they're not generally hunted, but in certain Congolese cultures gorilla meat is highly desired -- apparently serving it at a wedding is a status symbol. Having a gorilla in a cage in your house is also desirable for some reason. And gorillas often get caught in snares set by poachers to catch other animals (silverbacks can untangle and remove a rope snare that catches a member of their family, but they cannot remove wire snares). Park veterinarians generally intercede if gorillas are injured or sick only if it's due to humanity -- a tourist gives a gorilla influenza or one gets caught in a wire snare.

Conservationists were a bit worried when rebels in Congo seized the Virungas National Park, but I hear that this has worked out well for the gorillas. Although tourists are staying away, rebel leader Laurent Nkunda has apparently given orders that the gorillas are to be protected. Some of the Congolese park staff has apparently been able to continue monitoring the gorillas and keeping them healthy, although many have fled. One person told me that the Congolese military was involved in poaching and charcoal smuggling (a major cause of habitat destruction), so the gorillas are actually safer under rebel control.

You only get to spend an hour with the gorillas -- I guess they need some alone time. The guides led us away from the family, hacking a new path through the forest to a clearing where our stuff was waiting (not the same clearing -- we had gone pretty far, ambling after the gorillas for an hour, so the trackers moved our things). As we were walking out, the rain started -- perfect timing, really.

On the way out, we passed a gorilla nest. Gorillas sleep in these nests and make new ones each night. They don't share except infants and their mothers. They can't really reuse them because they don't have set territories -- gorillas wander the mountains each day and aren't attached to any particular area. They'll fight to defend their families but not their land.

The rain made the drive back even worse than the drive in. The roads were so bad when muddied that the little children who chased our car were able to catch it, and the guide had to open the door and swat them away. We arrived back at the tourism office to receive official certificates that say we visited the gorillas, I have no idea why. They misspelled my name.

Chimpanzees are our nearest relatives, but
gorillas are close. We all have a common ancestor, but gorillas split off about seven million years ago, slightly earlier than chimpanzees. I spoke to someone who had done several gorilla autopsies and he said that once you have the fur off, gorillas look just like people, except with longer arms and slightly odd ribcages.

I went back to my hotel, had lunch, looked at my photos, and then tried to find where to get the Onatracom bus. Lonely Planet says buy tickets at the petrol station, which is very helpful because there are only about ten petrol stations in town (and no one in town knew -- one moto driver, when I said "Onatracom", took me to what might have been a youth hostel). Finally I bought a ticket for the Virunga Express bus, a minibus. To my surprise, it was also driven slowly and carefully. As expected, I was the only white guy on the bus, and the people around me were fascinated with the maps of Rwanda. Back in Kigali, I had dinner at Chez Robert, one of the fanciest restaurants in town. Overpriced and boring.

So that was gorilla trekking. A great experience for me, and Rwanda doesn't seem to mind -- painted on the wall of my hotel was a mural that read, "Given Peace, Gorillas Bring Currency". As for the gorillas, it's hard to say. They don't seem to care that much about having people follow them around. I guess they're at increased risk of contracting our exciting diseases. On the other hand, without the thousands of dollars per day that trekking brings in, I'm not sure Rwanda would be that into protecting them. Not an ideal situation, but it appears to be sustainable, at least in the short term.

You might want to read about my next day in Rwanda, at the Murambi genocide memorial.

Arie Goes to Ruhengeri

2008-12-22T20:26:00.005+03:00

This is from day two of my trip to Rwanda. You may want to start at the beginning.

My wildlife preferences lean toward the "mostly lies around, chases and eats antelope, possibly has a golden mane" variety, so I was going to skip gorilla trekking entirely to concentrate on large cats. But everyone I met who had gone said that it was amazing (usually in a quiet, deep voice while looking straight into my eyes), and who am I to argue with everyone? So in early December I emailed Rwanda's tourism office asking for a gorilla permit. They offered some dates and I chose Friday, December 19th. Normally you wire them the money ($500) in advance, but it was late enough that they said I could just show up.

Viewing gorillas in Rwanda requires one to go to Rwanda ("When you go to Rwanda, first you must travel there, and once you are there, you have arrived."). I arrived in Kigali, the capital, on Wednesday, December 17. I had the airport taxi take me straight to the Rwandan tourism office to confirm that I actually had a permit waiting. Everyone said permits were really hard to get, so I was a little skeptical that I had basically reserved one via email with no down payment on two weeks notice during the high season. Sure enough, they didn't seem to have any idea of who I was and why I was waving money at them, but it didn't matter because they had spare permits for that day. It turns out that gorilla trekking is way down -- normally almost half the visitors are from the United States (about a thousand per month), so U.S. economic problems hit gorilla trekking pretty hard. (All gorilla trekking in Congo is currently halted because rebels have taken the Virungas, but there isn't much spillover I guess.)

Thursday morning, after visiting the Kigali genocide memorial, I went back to my hotel, picked up my bag, and headed to the Nyabugogo taxi park (pictured), which looked very similar to Kampala's except it was cleaner and better organized. Lonely Planet said that Onatracom Express was probably the best company, so I walked into their offices and found out that the next bus wasn't leaving until 2pm (it was about noon). Perfect; I bought a ticket, got lunch across the street, and came back at 1pm to sit and wait.

I didn't have to wait for long. Within maybe five minutes a large bus pulled up and one of the people waiting told me to go get on. I figured, sure, and did. Sure enough, over the next hour the bus filled up. I was happy to get on early because it meant choice of seats -- I chose a window seat so that I could take countryside photos.

Sitting on the bus for an hour waiting was interesting because of the large number of vendors that sell things to people who are sitting on buses waiting. Amongst the many things on offer were things that made sense for a long bus ride -- bread and water, soda, juice, biscuits, and candy -- and things that didn't -- jackets, shirts, perfume, soap, shampoo, eggs. The guys selling eggs also had little bottles of pepper oil, I don't know what that's about. I think the eggs were hardboiled.

There weren't any other white people on the bus or even at the bus station. I got a lot of attention -- all the vendors were shouting "mzungu!" in addition to the normal hissing, which is apparently how they signal that they would like to sell something. The people on the bus were also curious why there was a white guy there, and one guy, John, came and sat down and we chatted for most of the ride (his broken English was better than my much more broken French).

Eventually the bus started and off we went. I was a little concerned about the bus ride because Rwanda is basically a country made of hills with thin winding roads around them, but the roads were in excellent shape (some even had guardrails!) and the bus driver drove slowly and safely. I was really surprised. (It turns out that Onatracom is government-owned, maybe that's why.)

Rwanda is a beautiful country. I couldn't stop taking photographs, and now I have about two hundred photos of terraced farms with faded hills rising in the background. Finally John said, "you really like mountains, yes?" Yes.

As with walking around and sitting on the bus, a mzungu on a moving bus is instant excitement. Virtually every child we passed would see me and get excited and wave (and I'd wave back and then they'd get really excited and usually shout "mzungu!"). The other people on the bus were also curious about me -- one young child kept toddling over and staring at me. She didn’t speak any English, so we were reduced to standard adult-child interaction -- peek-a-boo, making faces, high fives, etc. Some other people also asked me questions that John translated, mostly about why I was in Rwanda. One of the girls, Jillian, borrowed my copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel for the ride.

The bus stopped for a few minutes for a snack, but failed to do an adequate headcount so we almost drove away without someone -- as we pulled away someone heard him yelling. We drove through a bunch more hills and some more tiny towns. As we approached Ruhengeri, John invited me to visit his village, which he said was right on the border with Congo. He took my cell phone number and, at Jillian's insistence, my email address.

Rwanda is a very hilly country except in the extreme southeast, where it meets the Tanzanian plains. The largest hills are in the northwest, where the gorillas are. As you approach the region, the hills get higher and higher and finally you start seeing giant mountains -- volcanoes -- in the distance.

Finally we pulled into Ruhengeri. I went to Tourist Rest House, where I had reserved a room, but the room didn't look very nice, so I took a moto up to Hotel Muhabura. (One moto driver asked for 3000 francs ($5.50), I walked away and found one who drove me for 300, a reasonable price for a short trip.)

Hotel Muhabura is very, very nice. It was apparently Dian Fossey's home when she wasn't living in the forest. The staff are friendly and the rooms were excellent. No complaints at all.

After checking in I walked over to the Rwandan tourism office down the street to make sure that I knew what to do the next day. The office turned out to be a guy in a small room and he spoke little English and had no idea what was going on. I left. (Among the many errors in Lonely Planet is the claim that you have to show up at this office at 7am for the gorilla trek. Actually it's the office in Kinigi.)

So basically it turns out that you need transportation, which means you need someone to drive you from the park headquarters to wherever the gorillas are, and then wait there for a few hours, and then drive you back. This is a bit of a racket, and the going rate is currently $80. So OK, I called a tourism agency and they said they'd pick me up the next day at 6:15.

At the hotel I met some interesting people, including a guy who teaches agriculture at a nearby university. One of the things he told me is that the UN is fairly unpopular here -- they have a habit of driving in the middle of the road full speed and forcing everyone else off -- usually into ditches. People throw rocks at them. Apparently it's worse in the Congo -- the UN has been implicated in diamond and coltan smuggling (their planes don't get searched) and they were getting so many Congolese soldiers killed that a group of widows and wives finally lined up on a road near Goma to block a military convoy. The UN fired on them.

He also told me that the (endangered) crested crane is highly sought after by poachers because it mates for life and is thus traditionally used to help troubled relationships. A minor problem is said to be cured by eating the eggs and feathers, while major problems require you to eat the bird's beak and feet.

I broke my own rule by having dinner at the hotel, but I wanted to get a full night's sleep. (Also it's the best restaurant in town.) Sure enough, I was out by 8:30.

You might want to read about my actual gorilla trek.

The Rwandan Genocide Memorial in Kigali

2008-12-22T20:19:00.004+03:00

This is the second entry about my trip to Rwanda. You may want to start at the beginning.

I woke up early, bought a raincoat (it rains in the rainforest, go figure), had some breakfast, and then took a moto to the Kigali genocide memorial. They sent me downstairs first, to an exhibit on the Rwandan genocide.

I've written a bit about how the genocide occurred and France's involvement in it, so I'll focus on the museum instead. It's a beautiful building, with glass stele inscribed with relevant quotes, understated décor, and stained glass windows so well-placed to catch the sun that you don't even notice at first that they portray piles of skulls. The downstairs exhibit, about the Rwandan genocide, is very well done. I held it together until I reached the part that showcased people who had sheltered Tutsis during the genocide. There was also a hall where families that lost people were invited to place photos of their relatives. The museum uses a lot of video, either projected on the walls or on display screens.

The second floor was a series of exhibits on other genocides -- the genocide of the Namibian Hereros by the Germans, the Armenian genocide by the Turks, the Holocaust, Cambodia, and Yugoslavia. (Cambodia is the odd one out since the horrors of the Khmer Rouge probably don't constitute genocide.) There was also a hall of photos of Rwandan children who had been killed in the genocide and little fact sheets about them -- things like "Favorite toy: a doll. Cause of death: machete." A staircase from the second floor led to the gardens. Amidst the gardens were mass graves (the photo at the top is of a mass grave).

On the outside of the building were little plaques with quotations from children. In case the picture is too small, here's what this one says:

In my search for a hideout, I found Jerome, his legs were cut off. I could not leave him in this state. I tried to lift up Jerome so that we could leave together, but the car of the commune stopped near me. It was full of machetes and other instruments of death. I lay Jerome down on the ground and ran because a man got out of the burgomaster's car to kill me. He finished Jerome off. I saw this when I looked back to see if anyone had followed me. I will never forget the way Jerome's face was filled with desperation. Whenever I think about it, I cry all day long. -- Eric, 13.

So that was the memorial. At the time, my only similar experience was visiting Tuol Sleng, the misnamed Cambodian genocide museum, but this is very different. Tuol Sleng was a death camp and torture center and was converted into a museum by the Vietnamese for propaganda purposes. The Rwandan memorial was a purpose-built museum designed to inform, not to shock and anger. Tuol Sleng was perhaps more powerful because it's the actual site where horrors occurred, but this museum was far more informative and honest.

I walked most of the way back to the hotel. The walk back was a little surreal -- I know I keep harping on how beautiful this city is, but I was especially struck by it on the walk back to town. I guess the incongruity poses a bit of a challenge. As usual, there weren't many white people in this part of town, so I got a lot of attention. I was a bit morose when I came out of the memorial, but the squad of children that formed around me when I reached the road brightened my mood pretty quickly.

A few days later I visited the Murambi Memorial, which was a very different experience. I'll post about that soon.

You can go on to the next entry, which has some good photos of volcanoes and no depressing stuff at all.

Rwanda, Day One: Arie Rwanders Around

2008-12-21T13:12:00.001+03:00

So I decided to go to Rwanda. I was torn between taking a bus from Kampala to Kigali (the capital of Rwanda) and flying. Here are the advantages and disadvantages as I saw them:

Bus Advantages

See the countryside
Costs 20,000 shillings ($10)
Maybe meet some interesting people

Bus Disadvantages

Takes at least nine hours, probably more
Ugandan roads are in horrible shape
Leaves very early in the morning
Very crowded
Often breaks down
The drivers are very bad
A friend was on a bus that hit and killed a child
Another friend saw a bus tire explode and take off someone's foot
In recent memory the bus company has not gone a year without at least one fatal accident

Plane Advantages

Forty minute flight
Ethiopia Airlines has never taken a turn too fast and fallen off a mountain road

Plane Disadvantages

Costs $275

So this morning I bought a ticket for a flight to Kigali. (Incidentally, Ethiopia Airlines's website wouldn't sell it to me, too short notice, but Expedia would.) I also called to reserve a hotel room.

Of course, a forty minute flight does not mean a forty minute trip. My flight was scheduled for 3pm. Left at 1pm, the drive to the airport took an hour (very good, not much traffic). They were X-raying all luggage at the door, and I figured that was smart -- save time, it has to be done, no security check later.

There was very little signage and I couldn't figure out where to go. The staff seemed confused as well. I asked various people about my (3pm) flight and got different answers: "It is on time." "It has been delayed to 5pm." "It's not delayed, it's always been scheduled for 5pm." "It will be leaving early." I had no idea what was going on but I pressed forward, got my boarding pass ("the plane is on time") and went to immigration (emigration?) to get stamped out of Uganda. A dude was trying to cut the line one person at a time by saying he had a 3pm flight, though it was only 2:20. No.

After immigration was yet another enormous line (the fourth line I encountered), this one for another bag X-ray. I don't know why they need two. One guard said my flight was at 3pm, the other said it was 5pm. I tried asking one guard what the other would say if I asked him, but they just stared at me.

Then I got to the fifth and final line, this one to be admitted to the waiting area. The plane showed up and we were led across the tarmac and onto it. The guy sitting next to me, who was holding an American passport but had an African accent, asked me if I was going to Addis Ababa or to Nairobi. I told him neither, Kigali. He asked what country that was in. Not knowing how to pronounce an ellipsis, I blinked a few times and told him Rwanda, the country where the plane was going. He said no, it was going to Addis Ababa. Concerned, we waved down a flight attendant. Based on our conversation, here is what I think happened: Ethiopia Airlines had two flights leaving Entebbe -- a 3pm to Kigali and a 5pm to Addis Ababa. Not enough people signed up for one of them, so they were combined -- the 3pm would carry everyone to Kigali and then go on to Addis Ababa. That explains the confused airport stuff.

Couldn't see much of Rwanda from the flight. I also couldn't see the equator, though at some point the plane crossed it -- my first time in the southern hemisphere (rejected blog post title: Arie Goes to Summer). Sadly, we're coming up on the Winter solstice, the day when the sun is directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, so I will not get to have the experience of having the sun directly overhead, nor will I see it to the north (which would be really weird). (Unrelated: If sundials came from the southern hemisphere, "clockwise" would be the other way. (If sundials came from the tropics, clockwise would probably just be "east".)) (Edited to add: The solstice is right now.)

I did get my first decent glimpse of Rwanda as we were descending. It's called the Land of a Thousand Hills, and from first glance that appears accurate. It's also allegedly one of the most densely populated countries in the world, and that also appears accurate -- every bit of every hillside was either sporting a dense cluster of houses or farmland (usually cut into broad terraces). It's the densest country in continental Africa. The flight landed a few minutes before it took off (yay time zones) for a total travel time of three hours.

Having been colonized by Belgium instead of England has had a number of important effects on Rwanda as compared with Uganda, many of which are immediately apparent. The most important of these is that they, like all sensible nations, drive on the right. Unfortunately, all the signs are in French. So it's a mixed bag.

Kigali is the most beautiful city I have ever visited. Like the rest of Rwanda, it's extremely hilly, so the city is basically built on hillsides. Everyone always has a gorgeous panoramic view of the city stretching over nearby hills with verdant farm-covered hills fading to a bluish grey in the background. The poorest shacks in Kigali have a view that surpasses the nicest Central Park view apartments in New York City. The sheer majesty of it almost brought a tear to my eye. No one else seemed impressed, but walking around, I had to keep stopping just to take it all in (no wonder I got pickpocketed (see below)).

Except for the amazing texture of the land, much of Kigali looks like Kampala. You see similar stores, similar buildings and signs, similar groups of people sitting around doing a similar kind of nothing. But Belgium knows city planning. Large broad divided avenues give way to majestic traffic circles -- not Kampala's tiny little traffic knots, but enormous stately grass-covered affairs with fountains or statues in the center. And the roads are in much better shape -- driving here is like driving in the United States, whereas driving in Kampala is like driving in a city where the potholes are so large and old that some are now protected by UNESCO. And there seems to be very little traffic. Also there are sidewalks (the reaction of people in Uganda to this news has so far been disbelief.)

So Kigali is really nice. Apparently Rwanda gets a ton of foreign aid from governments that feel guilty about sitting on the sidelines during the genocide (or, in the case of France, committing genocide themselves). Corruption is also much lower. The difference between Kampala and Kigali can be seen in, for example, the motorcycle taxis. In Kampala, they’re anyone with a motorcycle and some spare time. Here, the motos are licensed, the drivers wear shiny green vests and helmets, and they each carry a spare helmet for the passenger. It's way better, especially at night -- when you hail a boda in Kampala in the dark, you're basically hitchhiking with a random stranger. Here it's more like taking a taxi.

Then I walked to my hotel. People were very nice and were happy to give me directions (Lonely Planet's map has non-existent streets on it). Incidentally, no one in East Africa seems to know right from left -- I've noticed this in Uganda too. At one point two guys seemed to be following me, so I slowed down and let them pass. They slowed down too, so I stopped and they stopped and then I guess they realized I was on to them because they walked away. I have no idea what they wanted but the streets are much too crowded for violent crime so I assume it was either to sell me something illicit or to try to steal something. Also, street hawkers here are much more aggressive than they are in Kampala -- every couple of minutes I have to turn down an offer to change money or to buy a Rwandan flag or something like that.

I checked into my hotel, Hotel Isimbi. Although it's cheap ($30), it's without question the nicest place I have stayed since arriving in Africa. The room is large and there's a balcony, bathtub, and mirror. Excellent. This photo was shot from my balcony. I dropped off my stuff and walked around the city a bit.

Someone picked my pocket. I mentioned that last week in Kampala someone tried, but my New York-trained senses kicked in and prevented it. They didn't fail me this time either, though the pickpocket was much better at it. A scraggly guy walked near me, saw my phone in my front shirt pocket, and then squeezed past me. I felt a slight touch on my chest, looked down and saw that my pocket was empty. I turned to him as he was walking away, touched his shoulder, and said "give it back." He tried to look confused, so I grabbed him by the arm and said "give back my phone." He said he didn't have it. Not letting go, I shouted "Thief! Police!" The streets were crowded, and people stopped to see what was happening. Still holding his arm, I shouted "Thief!" again and a man from the crowd grabbed his other arm. A woman also grabbed his shoulder and people started to walk in our direction. I shouted "Police!" one more time and the guy shot his hand into his pocket, pulled out my phone, handed it back, and ran away. I let him go, and, to my relief, so did the crowd. I think if he hadn't given it back, he would have been killed -- at least, that's what mobs do to thieves in Uganda.

I was a bit shaken. I took a moto over to a nice place called New Cactus at the top of some hill and ate an immense amount of tasty food (I had eaten only bananas today). Another thing I'll say for the Belgians, they left a good culinary tradition. Lots of cheese, which I'd been missing. I walked through dark streets a bit and then hopped on a moto for the rest. Went back to take a bath, watch a little CNN (apparently some dude threw a shoe at some other dude), and write this post.

Incidentally, my Ugandan phone works here without a hitch.

Day two is here.

More info

2008-12-17T11:05:00.003+03:00

The attack on the LRA base this past weekend was apparently called "Operation Lightning Thunder", which makes me think that the Ugandan People's Defense Force has a group of pre-adolescent boys thinking of its mission names. The military has not released details on whether Kony escaped the attack. The rumor is that he fled to Central African Republic, but the military denies it. Apparently Kony's deputy spoke to some people yesterday and admitted that "things are bad", whatever that means. The LRA says that he is still alive.

The aerial bombardment of Kony's camp was apparently the first of two stages in the attack. The military has now cordoned off the region and is processing the people inside it, with a camp set up to receive non-combatants. The UPDF also dropped fliers written in English and Acholi urging the rebels to surrender -- basically stuff like “We came here because of you. Give peace a chance and come home"; “You have the blessing when you come home. Abandon conflict and turn to development"; “The whole world cares about you. Use this chance to get out of the war.” “Your parents are still alive. They want you home alive too.”

source

Uganda is in ur base, killing ur doods

2008-12-16T05:27:00.005+03:00

Some more details about Sunday's attack on the LRA base have been released. One of the surprising things is that the governments of Congo and Uganda cooperated in the attack; Uganda supported a rebel uprising in the Second Congo War, and that caused a little friction between them. The countries only restored diplomatic ties last year. We don't yet know how successful the attack was, but it was apparently launched against the LRA's major headquarters and Uganda says a lot of damage was done. Apparently Acholi leaders are upset about the attacks, presumably because it might be the beginning of more violence in the region.

The other bit of interesting news is that the LRA says they will not retaliate after all. They "complained to the mediators", but Kony says he will "show restraint".

In unrelated news, a UN-commissioned report apparently concludes that Rwanda has been helping the Congo Tutsi rebels -- something everyone has suspected but Rwanda has denied. The report says some mortar fire came from Rwanda in the latest attack, Rwanda has been giving the rebels troops, and Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame, has been taking to rebel general Laurence Nkunda on satellite phone. Rwanda says that last accusation will have to be verified. The report also concludes that Congo has been backing one of the Hutu rebel groups that's operating in eastern Congo. Basically, it seems to be a proxy war in the making.

And so it continues

2008-12-15T05:54:00.002+03:00

The Ugandan government announced yesterday that they had launched an attack on an LRA base on the border of Sudan and Congo. The military, which cooperated with Congolese and Sudanese troops, suffered no casualties. The LRA says they will retaliate.

The Panto

2008-12-12T11:11:00.002+03:00

I wrote previously about when I walked into National Theater and watched the tail end of a rehearsal for a British Christmas pantomime. We went to see the actual show last night. It was pretty amazing. It hit all the pantomime traditions -- the lead, Robin Hood, was played by a young girl, and in a little meta bit, Robin disguises himself as a girl to win the archery contest (and everyone talks about how he can't pass for a woman, which I thought was mean). There was a lion that attacked Maid Marion and Robin killed it (boo pro-poaching message). The Dame (a man in drag, a big part in every panto) was Maid Marion's mother.

The plot was fairly standard Robin Hood. The highlight was when Robin won the archery contest and the Sheriff sprang his trap, but Robin escaped -- when a boda driver drove on stage and she hopped on the back. Awesome.

I think not.

2008-12-11T22:17:00.003+03:00

The other day a friend and I were negotiating with a boda driver in a dark area at night, though we were under a streetlamp. There were a lot of people around -- three or four other boda drivers, a lot of little stores in the area, lots of people walking by. A woman walked directly behind us -- she was maybe late 30s, early 40s -- and as she walked by, she slipped her hand into my pocket.

My anti-pickpocketing skills have been finely honed by more than two decades of life in New York City. If the pickpockets in New York can't get my wallet (none ever has), there's just no way some random woman in rural Kampala can. I felt her hand in my pocket and I clamped my hand over hers and she got all embarrassed, said "sorry", and ran the hell away.

It's not surprising that she ran away. Like much of the developing world, Uganda has a very direct way of dealing with thieves: mob violence. A friend was in the market the other day and someone tried to steal something from a vendor. The vendor screamed "thief!" and the thief tried to get away, but someone grabbed him and hit him and then a punch of people started kicking, and my friend stood there watching as the mob killed the (accused) thief.

I was chatting with a Ugandan guy the other day and he said that this was a very effective system and suggested we try it in the United States. He told me that in Uganda, thieves run *to* the police, not away from them, because the police might protect them from the mob.

In this country, you have to think carefully before shouting "thief". I puzzle over some of the moral issues here.

Incidentally, the mob apparently deals with car accidents in the same way. Standard advice here is that if you are in an accident where people are injured, drive immediately to the nearest police station to report the accident. Hurry.

Today

2008-12-11T14:26:00.005+03:00

A few people have asked me what my typical day is like. I don't like to write about work and no day is really typical, but here's my day so far. I woke up at about sunrise (thanks to the neighborhood roosters), switched the hot water heater on, got back in bed and read for fifteen minutes. Back up, quick shower, and then tried to make some breakfast. The bread I bought wasn't sliced right so the slices fell apart and the pieces were too small to toast, so I just ate them as-is, grabbed my motorcycle helmet, and I was out the door. (Usually breakfast is toast with peanut butter and honey.)

The dirt road from my house opens onto a little hill, and at the top is the nearest boda stage (that is, place where motorcycle taxi drivers hang out). As I walk onto the paved road of the hill, they see me and one of them drives down and turns around. I get on (we don't negotiate anymore -- I pay 2700 shillings, about $1.35, to get to work each day). We drive for about twenty minutes, always the same way -- down our hill, up another, past Makerere University, down another, and then around the edge of town to my office.

Work keeps me pretty busy, but at 1:15 I go with a coworker to get lunch. I pay 4000 shillings ($2) for a plate of chewy beef and french fries, and 800 shillings for a bottle of water. After lunch today I took another motorcycle taxi to the Kenyan embassy to pick up my visa. (Incidentally, it turns out that officially you can only pick up your visa between 11 and 12:30 and you have to bring your receipt. If you're nice and smile at them, you can get around both of these requirements.) The boda driver waited around to bring me back to the office. On the back of the boda, I looked at the visa and got confused -- why did it start on October 12th, and why does it expire on January 3rd? Then I remembered that they write the day first.

Back at the office this afternoon, I did some more work, then I wrote this entry. Then I wrote this sentence. Also I wrote this sentence. This one I actually wrote before the previous one, just for novelty. I edited the post later to add this sentence. That pretty much brings us up to date.

So that's a random morning and early afternoon. Typically I'd stay here for a few more hours, then go out for dinner or go have some sort of evening adventure. Tonight, I think both. Then a boda back home, and probably to bed early because the roosters will wake me up at dawn the next morning.

Joseph Kony

2008-12-11T10:49:00.004+03:00

Another history post. To make it a tiny bit more interesting, I've added a bunch of photos I took outside my house yesterday.

To the extent that the story of Joseph Kony has a convenient beginning, it lies with an Acholi woman named Alice Auma. The Acholi are a tribe that live in northern Uganda and have been in and out of power (Obote, first Prime Minister, was from the north. Idi Amin overthrew Obote and massacred the Acholi, Obote returned after Amin was driven out, now we have Museveni, whose power base is in the south). The traditional religion of the Acholi involves spirit-mediums (spirit-media?), women (and men with female characteristics, such as not living on their ancestral land) who are believed to communicate with and be possessed by spirits. Acholi culture adapted to the introduction of Christianity by determining that spirit-mediums could be possessed by the Holy Spirit or angels, which are good, or by evil spirits, which are bad. Many spirit-mediums refer to themselves as prophets and their spirits as angels. All sorts of (literal) witch hunts were conducted as spirit-mediums who were believed to communicate with bad spirits were murdered.

So in the mid-1980s, Auma claimed to be possessed by a number of spirits, including Wrong Element (an American) and Hassim (a Muslim). She was apparently a non-noteworthy spirit medium operating as a traditional healer in Acholiland.

In 1986, Museveni, the current President, overthrew the government of Uganda, which had been run by an Acholi. This led to widespread fear in Acholiland that they would lose power and influence (Museveni's power base was in the south). Widespread fighting continued between Museveni's forces and rebels in the north. Auma announced that she had been possessed by the spirit Lakwena ("apostle"), which had instructed her to stop healing people and form an Acholi movement to conquer Uganda and institute heaven on earth.

Auma raised an army, the Holy Spirit Movement, and convinced a rebel military force to lend her some troops. She had some surprising initial success against the government's forces, and was able to march to within fifty miles of Kampala. I say surprising because her tactics included having her soldiers strip naked and then anointing them with oil that would make them invulnerable if their hearts were pure, giving them stones that she had blessed so that they would explode like grenades, and having her troops form into the shape of a cross and then march directly at the enemy while singing hymns. Apparently in initial encounters Museveni's troops got scared or confused and ran away.

The Holy Spirit Movement was popular in Acholiland because it did not terrorize civilians and rape and pillage in local towns, unlike the other rebel groups and probably the Ugandan army. After her initial successes, she marched out of Acholiland with ten thousand troops. Once out of Acholiland, without civilian support, her army was basically mowed down by the Ugandan military. Auma fled back to Acholiland (on a bicycle), as did the surviving soldiers and retreated into the background of history.

Joseph Kony was also a spirit medium operating in Acholiland in the 1980s. His older brother was a spirit-medium, and Kony inherited his brother's powers when his brother died (some say Kony killed his brother). When Alice Auma was active, Kony recruited some soldiers and tried to join her. She refused to accept him, saying Lakwena had rejected him. Angry, he attacked and killed some of her forces. After Auma's defeat, Kony, claiming to be her cousin, formed an army to battle the Ugandan government. Kony claimed that he was possessed by Juma Oris, one of Idi Amin's ministers (who was emphatically not dead, and who Kony met at one point), as well as "Silly Sindy", Silindt Makay, and "Who Are You?", a spirit that gives Kony combat advice. His cult, like many others, incorporated Islamic as well as Christian ideas. His followers believe he has all sorts of magic powers, including imperviousness to bullets and the ability to read minds.

In 1988, when Uganda reached a peace treaty with the other rebels, some dissatisfied fighters joined Kony and he began forcibly recruiting soldiers (including children) to swell its ranks. Kony also gained experienced military commanders who convinced him to stop having his troops march in cross formations while soaked in holy water, and instead make them fight like soldiers (they still used the magic bullet-resistant oil though). These troops made Kony's forces into an actual rebel force instead of, well, a ragtag band of psychotic clowns. Kony's group was reformed as the Lord's Resistance Army ("LRA"). This is about when Uganda started to take notice, and the military attacked Kony and decimated his forces.

The LRA's stated goals include establishment of a government based on the Ten Commandments. To accomplish that goal, they have engaged in a horrific campaign of violence and terror, mutilating civilians, kidnapping children and adults, and basically being jerks everywhere they go. They also demand increased infrastructure spending, universal education, encouragement of foreign investment, an independent judiciary, and improved foreign relations, but I think maybe they just stole a USAID pamphlet from somewhere and crossed out USAID and wrote LRA. Although in their defense they do have some familiarity with international events and are capable of some level of political analysis (they used to call in to live Ugandan talk radio until the government pressured the radio stations to stop taking their calls).

So that's how it went for about seven years. The LRA would sneak into a town, kill a bunch of people, and kidnap a bunch of children and adults -- the boys, adults, and most of the women and girls would be forced to become soldiers or slaves, while the most attractive and intelligent of the women and girls would be given to LRA members as wives. To ensure the loyalty of the children and make sure they didn't try to return home, the LRA might force them to kill (and possibly eat) their parents and friends. The LRA would also mutilate many of the surviving villagers, particularly those who were believed to have tried to warn the Ugandan military. If villagers tried to warn the military, the LRA would cut their lips off. As Kony explained, "You report us with your mouth, and we cut off your lips. Who is to blame? It is you! The Bible says that if your hand, eye or mouth is at fault, it should be cut off." He's right; Matthew 5:30 says, "And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell." Also, Matthew 18:8-9: "Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire."

When the LRA left a camp, the Ugandan military might show up and chase them around a bit, and maybe kill some of them. After various military campaigns against the LRA, by the early 1990s, the LRA had been reduced to a few hundred soldiers.

Then Sudan stepped in. President Omar Bashir (you know, the guy who's probably responsible for Darfur) thought it might be fun to give them refuge just across the border in southern Sudan and lend them weapons and give them some advisors and food and training. In fairness, it was revenge for Uganda supporting the Sudanese People's Liberation Army ("SPLA"), a rebel group trying to overthrow Bashir. The LRA continued to terrorize the Acholi from across the border. At this time, the Islamic elements in the LRA's theology became more prominent. The LRA also began fighting the SPLA, which necessitated an increase in troop strength and therefore an increase in abductions.

That continued for about a decade. Kony and his men lived in southern Sudan and snuck across the border to kill Acholis and kidnap more people to swell their ranks. The LRA abducted tens of thousands of people, many of them children (but many adults -- contrary to public belief and repeated UN and ICC statements, the LRA mostly abducts adults (two thirds of abductees) and mostly men (three quarters)). The LRA also conducted a deliberate terror campaign, mutilating and killing civilians, especially children -- LRA soldiers would often sweep into a town and kill all the infants and toddlers. The LRA did not use rape as a weapon, but they did kidnap many girls and use them as rewards for loyalty. Kony himself is believed to have as many as fifty wives.

Incidentally, the LRA raids mimic a pattern that's been present in the region since the 1850s, when raiders from the north came into the region searching for ivory and slaves. This might be deliberate. Also, not all "abductees" are carted away at gunpoint -- for years, people in the north lived intermixed with LRA guerillas, oftentimes people known to them, and many lent short-term assistance. Some were "abducted" for very short periods, possibly just to help carry food or supplies.

So from 1987 to 2005, the LRA terrorized the Acholi. For lack of a better option, they ran away. Specifically, they ran into massive camps established all over the region. These are "internally displaced persons" camps, not refugee camps -- someone somewhere decided that you're not a refugee unless you cross an international border. So there are these massive camps all over northern Uganda that at one point held more than two million people -- eighty percent of the Acholi people. These camps are pretty much the worst places in the world -- packed full of people, no clean water, not enough food, horrible diseases (there's a hepatitis C outbreak right now that's killing lots of people), all sorts of horrors. And they've been there for twenty years. Life in the camps is bad -- a study of one camp found that the overall mortality rate was 10/10,000/day -- that is, one out of every thousand people die each day (a rate of 1/10,000/day is considered a crisis). Another study found that four of five people in one region had witnessed torture, and almost two-thirds of the women contemplated suicide. Making things worse, the Ugandan military has not been able to protect the camps entirely from the LRA, so sometimes the LRA sneaks into a camp and kidnaps and mutilates and kills some people anyway. But the camps are safer than the rest of the country. Even people who continue to maintain their farms began sleeping in the camps at night, walking up to several hours each night to get there and walking back each morning.

As you might expect, the camps are also crawling with white people. Most of them are there trying to make things better somehow. A lot of them are succeeding -- the camps are only possible because of western aid. There are white people bringing food, clean water, providing medical care, all that good stuff. Some white people are also doing less humanitarian things -- like organizing football games. And then there are the white people who just show up in the camps hoping to help somehow but not knowing what they're there to do. Local authorities have asked that that stop happening please.

This is essentially the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

Uganda has an amnesty program for LRA soldiers. Pretty much anyone can walk into an amnesty center, admit that they were an LRA soldier, and turn over their weapons. In return they receive a resettlement package. Tens of thousands of LRA soldiers have used this program and are now living in their communities again. At first the LRA punished towns that accepted amnesty-seekers with brutal violence. Also, there's some resentment that former LRA soldiers get free stuff while victims get nothing.

But wait, there's more. So in 2003, apparently frustrated with Sudan's support for the LRA, Museveni asked the International Criminal Court ("ICC") to get involved. (The ICC is supposed to be impartial, and many called for it to investigate the Ugandan army's war crimes in addition to the LRA's. But they have not issued warrants for any Ugandan officers. Many perceive the ICC to be working on behalf of the Ugandan government, a perception fueled by their joint press conferences.) In 2005, The ICC issued arrest warrants for Kony and four of his commanders. Kony himself is wanted on thirty-three counts, including murder, enslavement, sexual enslavement, and rape. Sudan, a signatory to the ICC treaty, agreed to knock it off, and Kony fled, probably to Congo.

Without the support of Sudan, the LRA hasn't really been viable. The violence in northern Uganda has essentially stopped. More than half the people in the camps have returned home and almost all the people who remain are there not because they're afraid of the LRA, but because they can't return home. Eighty percent of the remaining people are disabled or elderly and cannot rebuild their homes. Some have lived their whole lives in the camps and have nowhere to go. But mostly, northern Uganda is rebuilding.

Meanwhile, peace talks with the LRA have been underway for two years. As far as I can tell, here are the positions of the various interested parties:

Joseph Kony: I'm not going to stop fighting until everyone agrees that I don't have to go in front of the ICC. I might not stop even after that though. You can't tell because I'm a total whackjob.
President Museveni: This Kony guy is a total jerk and I hate him. But I did ask the ICC to drop the warrants in return for peace. Also I support amnesty, but not for Kony because he's a total jerk.
ICC: Um, we totally got manipulated by Museveni, huh? OK. Well, fine, how about this: We refuse to drop the arrest warrants no matter what, because otherwise there's a culture of impunity. Even if that means more violence and death. So nyah.
Many NGO workers: The ICC is prolonging the war and should be shot. And anyway, the Acholis have a culture of reconciliation that doesn't involve punishment and they just want peace.
The Acholi: No, actually, we're quite OK with the idea of punishment. This guy deserves it, he's a total jerk. Some of us just want the war to end, but others would like to see war crimes trials. You could write a book about what we think. It's complicated.
Tim Allen: Look, I wrote a book about what the Acholis think. My conclusion: "It's complicated."
A lot of people: Can't the CIA or the Mossad or someone just take this guy out? Come on, he keeps making satellite phone calls, those are easy to trace. Bam! One bullet, problem solved. Send Jason Bourne or whatever.
Sudan: um please stop indicting our president for war crimes kthxbai
Dutch people: Kony knows that the ICC's prisons in Holland are really nice, right? Like, he'd have air conditioning and satellite TV. And Indonesian food. Someone should show him some photos, we bet he'd surrender.
Former LRA Soldiers Who Have Returned HomeJust so we're clear, all the former LRA soldiers who have returned home are still entitled to amnesty, right? Also, Joseph Kony has superpowers and he's bulletproof.
The Acholi: Wait, air conditioning? That's not punishment. Can't we just execute him? Also, we would like some air conditioning. What does Indonesian food taste like?

So recently the Ugandan government got tired of playing around and they told Kony that he had to sign a peace treaty before the end of November. He agreed. So they set up a big peace treaty signing for November 29th. Kony didn't show up. A few days ago, Kony explained to the media (Kony is very media-savvy, and the media love it) that other people wanted for war crimes -- Charles Taylor, Jean-Pierre Bemba -- signed peace deals and then were arrested and taken to the Hague, so if he signed a peace treaty and came out of the bush, he might be arrested too.

And that's basically where things stand now. Kony's hiding, probably somewhere on the Sudan/Congo border. Northern Uganda is relatively peaceful, though there are no guarantees. The governments of Congo, Sudan, Uganda, and Rwanda promised to attack the LRA if they didn't sign the treaty in November, but it's unclear how a renewed military push would be different from the previous ones (and Congo can't even control its own rebels, how can they help with Uganda's?).

Anyway, that's basically the Joseph Kony story.

Update: Some more information came out today about last weekend's failed peace treaty signing. Apparently Kony doesn't like the other side's negotiators, and is demanding a phone number where he can reach Museveni directly. Museveni passed on his number, and the call should take place soon if it hasn't already.

source source source source source

The fish was a lie

2008-12-09T11:18:00.005+03:00

Last night we went to dinner at a “pork joint”. Kampala is famous for its pork chops, and the best pork of all is supposed to be served at the pork joints, little roadside restaurants clustered together in a neighborhood near Makerere University. I don’t actually eat pork, but I heard that these restaurants also serve an amazing fish with salt and avocado, and I eat all those things.

So we walked over to Pork Talk, a cute little restaurant that clearly does not get a lot of mzungu (white) traffic. A short conversation with the waiter revealed that they did not serve fish. We moved on. A coworker had told me that the best pork joints were set back a bit from the road (so you don’t get dust in your food), so we went down a side street and into what I think were probably three or four restaurants sharing an entrance (which explains why the waiters were all trying to get us to sit in different areas). A waiter assured us that they had fish, so we went upstairs and sat down.

They didn’t have fish. I had chicken and cassava. The chicken wasn’t bad -- nothing special, ordinary grilled chicken, reasonably tasty. I’m told the pork was about the same -- not delicious, not awful. Oh well.

After dinner, we went to check out a little pub called Europe Learns About Africa, which is an unavoidably awesome name when you’re with a European. But the pub was empty and looked lame, so we moved on. Oh well again.