Gratitude for African Adventures

Over the course of the last day or so I have entirely lost track of time zones and along with them the hour of day or night that my body clock expects it to be. But as the Air Canada 767 glides across the sky over South Dakota I am aware that it is just past ten in the morning in San Francisco. The sun will be shining on the Bay when we touch down in a few hours, and these last three months in East Africa will begin the natural process of fading into the territory of memory.

I intend to do all that I can to keep the many experiences, lessons and insights from the journey active and alive in my mind, and am returning home with a list of writing projects that will help to keep things sharp through the lens of reflection. Here and now though, hurtling through north American skies with the dust of Nairobi streets still in my clothes and the sights, sounds and smells of the lands I have traveled still very much present in my mind’s eye, I would like to express gratitude for the many hands and hearts who have held me so well in the time since I left home.

It’s hard to fathom the richness of these months; how full they have been with good and beautiful living. From building with earth alongside Masai mamas to encountering up close the charismatic creatures of the African savannah. From being rocked to sleep by the Indian Ocean on the deck of the beautiful Musafir to wandering bustling beachside fishmarkets as the dawn catch is hauled in. From hiking the highland coffee farms of Mount Elgon where the first seeds of a Ugandan permaculture movement are being sown to soaking in the chorus of the call to prayer from the rooftops of old town Mombasa. I have deepened existing friendships everywhere I have gone and sparked new ones with Kenyan tuk-tuk drivers, Swedish maternity nurses, Ugandan coffee farmers, American giraffe researchers and human-geographers, Italian and French nomads-turned-shipwrights, Canadian motorcycle pilgrims, Kenyan-American pilot-parents, and Masai night-watchmen. I am full of gratitude for these many sweet and fortuitous connections.

And also for all my dear friends who held me in their homes like a member of their own families. For Mama Fargo and dear Rose and Juliette, for Joseph, Johnsam, Ignatious, Julius and the mamas who made my extended time at Laikipia Permaculture Centre feel like home. For the verdant homebase provided at Food Water Shelter in Arusha to the brother’s welcome provided by Paolo, Louie and Mbarak aboard the Musafir. For my sweet friends Elin and Sam and Senna…adventures in Ethiopia and the Bay await us! For the incredible welcome of George and Juliette in Mbale, Robert and Slavia on the slopes of Mount Elgon, and the inspiring staff of CAFWA in Gulu. And of course to my dear family-away-from-family, Jo and Siana Stutchbury.

So much thanks also to the excellent travelling companions who  helped make this journey the rich tapestry it has been…to the delightful and ever-adventurous Lindsay Allen and Andrew Sifuri, to my friends and teachers Sasha Rabin and Warren Brush, to the lion-hearted Jesse Smith, to twinkly-eyed and brown-bearded Casparo, and to the irrepressibly positive and heartfelt Gidudu Sam.

And as the plane drifts over the Rocky Mountains and banks south of the Great Salt Lake towards the Pacific Ocean, my thanks go to the beautiful lands themselves that have kept me nourished, in good health, and in constant amazement over these months. Thanks to the open vistas and craggy ridges of Laikipia and the swaying acacias and ambling creatures of Swara Plains. Thanks to the rich volcanic soils of Arusha at the foot of Mount Meru and the tidelands and precious mangrove forests hugging the coastline from Pangani up to the emerald waters of Kilifi Creek. Thanks to the wild grasslands of the Serengeti and the mountains and plains of beautiful eastern and northern Uganda.

And last but certainly not least, thanks to the many unseen loved ones whose support and care back home made my adventures possible. Thanks to my beautiful family whose love I can always feel no matter what far flung corner of the world I have found myself in. Thanks to Michael for his critical logistical support and occasional Warriors updates. And thanks to Glen, John, Kate and Mariah for allowing me to know that whenever I found my way back to the Bay I would have a sweet a sweet place waiting for me to call home.

And thanks to everyone I forgot and to all those whose grace and assistance I never even saw but nevertheless provided for my well-being.

Spring Training in Mombasa

Game on...

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A Safe Landing Back in Kenya

The line between well-deserved relaxation and sloth can be a fine one. Travelling in hot, tough landscapes I find that I fantasize about sandy beaches and easy days, but when the reality is realized I can only abide so much of it before feeling like valuable time for cultural exploration is passing by. My week in Pangani was fantastically pleasant and enjoyable, days spent meandering around Peponi Lodge's palm-studded grounds, splashing around in 75 degree water, and washing down the daily catch with cold Serengeti lager. But by the end of it I found myself unsurprisingly restless. While I managed to get photo sets cleaned up and organized from the two January courses, I even found that the languid pace was not conducive to focused writing. So, a few days ago I broke camp and headed north, switching buses in the northern port city of Tanga and then venturing back across the Kenyan border towards Mombasa. It was a lovely interlude, don't get me wrong! But it felt good to get back into the mix of things, seeing new sights and hearing new sounds. 

The journey by bus from Tanga concluded with a ride on the Likoni Ferry across to the heart of Mombasa, an island connected to the mainland by the ferry and two main highways. My plan was to pass through Mombasa and keep heading north to Kilifi, another beach-front paradise where some friends of mine have a backpacker's joint that is supposed to be the bees knees, and even incorporates what looks to be a quite successful permaculture system. Motoring across the waters on the packed ferry at sunset, the air filled with diesel fumes and the call to prayer, it felt clear that no part of me was ready embrace another week of easy street. And as the ferry made landfall and I set out into Mombasa's salty, crumbling, bustling streets it was also evident that this is the sort of place I love getting to know. 

Mombasa exudes a sort of character I had not yet run across in an Kenyan city. As an important contact point between the East African interior and the influences of India, Colonial Europe and the Arab world, the city has spent the last several hundred years simmering in its own multiculturalism. The resulting patchwork of styles and motifs, customs and  vernaculars has been soaked in the briny Indian Ocean air and baked in the equatorial sun so that its vast labyrinth of roads, arches, passageways, towers and verandas are in a constant state of decay and reactionary repair. Its hot. And humid. And there are trees and vines and other green things finding purchase where they can to sprout out of tumbledown ledges and minaret walls. Most things look as if they could fall down at any given moment, and yet the city teems with life and things continue functioning as they have for a long time. And importantly, this aesthetic is reflected in the cultural norms and in a pleasant and easy diversity. Mosques and cathedrals and Hindu temples sit together in the shade of tall palm trees and people of every pigment and style of dress seems to mix effortlessly in the crowded streets. I'm sure there are tensions, as there are everywhere in the world where people live together in close quarters, but by and large it feels like a peaceful and gentle place where diversity is complementary rather than adversarial. 

It took me some effort to find the right place to be within this framework. It would seem that most foreigners who come this direction use it as a brief waypoint on the way to the beaches stretching north and south from here. Those who stay in Mombasa seem to favor an array of backpacker hostels across the bridges, off the island, in rather removed Nyali Beach or Mombasa Beach. Not knowing where to land on night one, I accidentally found myself in a Taxi leaving town, depositing me in the end at one such place in Nyali. It was a giant walled compound with every possible delight a 20 year old looking to party could possibly dream up. Swimming pool, big screen TV with Champion's League football matches lighting up the large gardens and hookah lounge. Bar parties and chart music blaring through the day and night. I could camp there for $3 a night and given the desperate situation of any Kenyan tourist venue with a large infrastructure these days, they were practically giving away food and drinks just to have a guest. 

The following day i escaped, making my way back to the island and to a wonderful little place called Hotel Royal Palace in the very heart of the labyrinth of Old Town. Housed in a decrepit, white-washed five story tower and run by a very friendly mix of Muslims and Christians, it is a humble place while still showing all the marks of being conducted and cared for with love. Each room is painted and decorated in its own sweet, funky style and a nice little breakfast is served on the rooftop with panoramic views of the city skyline. My window looks out on a tangle of lines with a colorful pallet of laundry drying in the heat, and five times a day my walls tremble as the call to prayer is sung, beautifully, on the loudspeakers in the mosque next door (forming a chorus with hundreds of other similar voices raised across the city). 

It also feels like a bit of a revelation to have a room of my own. Since arriving in early January i think ive only slept in a bed four times, and my sleep was better last night than i can remember it being in a long time. Additionally, i have a little table at which to write, and which i hope is conducive to getting the creative juices flowing. This letter seems like a good start. 

Below are a few pictures from my first day of wandering.

Travel Tales & a Bit of Paradise

This is likely to me my only update for a bit, as I have found an ideal place to hunker down and attend to writing projects that embodies an atmosphere of profound uneventfulness. In other words, paradise found!

I left Arusha yesterday morning on a 7am local bus. A very local bus. Jammed into the last available seat on an ancient and hulking diesel monolith called the Frey’s (pronounced ‘Freyzy’…the local way is to attach a y to the end of many English words, like the school next door to our place in Arusha, Edmund Rice, was pronounced Edmundy Rice), myself and 80 or so passengers bounced and careened our way for 8 hours out to the coastal enclave of Tanga. Buses and mini-buses here for the most part are not large companies but are individually named, decorated and operated—like ships—by small crews of fierce and hardworking conductors who live on the bus and manage not just the transport but the considerable amount of chaos that comes with their large passenger loads and their baggage, livestock and even emotional needs. Many buses and ‘dala-dalas’ (the tiny passenger vans used for more local routes and in which about 30 people can be crammed) are heavily ornate and full of run-down character, plastered with decals stemming from strange western cultural icons (from Mr. T to Barack Obama), English Premier League football stars, and a whole lot of Jesus and—increasingly as we moved towards the coast—Islam. I have seen thousands of buses with names like Faith in God, Screaming White Eagle, The Spider, Mashallah, Chocolate Kiss, and on and on…Frey’s (or Freyzys’) name stems I would think from some previous incarnation as a bus in a more English-speaking land. It was mostly full of friendly but proudly stoic Muslims, the men in smart dress and rounded woven caps and the women in either brightly colored kanga fabric dresses ad headwraps or complete black burkas with only their dark eyes revealed. And lots of chickens. My seatmate was a kindly old Mze (respectful term for an older man) named Muhammed who deals in used car parts and appointed himself as my guide and friend and insisted on buying me bottled ginger soda to share on the ride. I headed for Tanga, one of Tanzania’s larger cities, knowing it would either be an interesting place to spend some days or would provide a good jump off point to other coastal destinations. I knew there was some chance of finding passage on a boat to Pemba Island on the Zanzibar Peninsula (Zanzibar s actually two islands, Unguja and Pemba, with Pemba playing the part of the impoverished forgotten sister to the vibrant tourist attraction that is Unguja) despite contradictory evidence online and in books, and that from there I could book passage to Unguja depending on what I could find out about the cost of being on the island (it sounds as if its impossible to stay there for less than about $40 a night…way beyond my budget). And if not Zanzibar, there were other idyllic sounding places to wander towards to the south, or back in Kenya to the north.

Described in my reading as a pretty hassle-free and laid back place, I found Tanga to be rather brimming with touts and hustlers who made progress towards getting oriented slow and tiresome. I know enough Swahili now to politely and wittily repel these sort, or if need be to tell them to fuck off outright. But the seedy elements in Tanga weren’t taking no for an answer. Combined with not finding a hotel or guest house that felt welcoming or warm, I opted to stash my bag in a derelict ‘swimming club’ (there’s no beaches in Tanga and access to the sea requires buying a daily membership to a swimming club for about a dollar and then using their concrete steps to reach the waters of the Indian Ocean), take a dip, and head back to the station to find passage to someplace else.  My fallback plan from trying to find passage to Zanzibar was to head down a bumpy road to the south to a sleepy little town called Pangani, which sounded like a place forgotten by time and ideal to disappear for a while. Having heard about a quaint lodge on the beach just north of there, called Peponi Lodge, I called ahead and was told I could camp there for $6.50 a night. At the dala-dala ‘stage’ (station) I found that it was rush hour and there were about four hundred passengers trying to get themselves and their luggage onto an inadequate trickle of beaten up passenger vans headed south. The procedure to board one seemed to be to wait—like a sprinter waiting for the shot—for the arrival of a dala-dala bound for Pangani/Pongwe and to then charge at it and literally hurl one’s body into the scrum of people shoving to get into the small side door. In all my travels it was as chaotic and unpleasant of a transportation situation as I have experienced, and my prospects weren’t good given my huge backpack and my unwillingness to essentially physically assault complete strangers, many of whom were muslim women in full formal dress and fierce eyes. This combined with a ring of insistent touts and scoundrels surrounding me, picking at me, trying to ‘befriend’ me, and trying themselves to board a dala-dala to then sell me the seat at ten time its value, made for a good old travel predicament. The drivers of a few of the vans eventually even got so angry at the touts that two separate fist fights broke out, one of which resulting in my least favorite rascal (he was a real serpent and had been a thorn in my side all day) being punched squarely in the face by a very well built and furious conductor. (it should be noted that at not point was any violence or threat of violence directed towards me)

Eventually I managed to take advantage of the arrival of a dala-dala at a moment when most other would-be-passengers were distracted trying to board the previous one, and found an impossibly small space to smash my backpack into the rear hatch, hanging mostly out over the road. I then forced my way into the van, to the horror of a large
group of elegantly dressed and very proper muslim ladies (me: enormous, white, foreign, sweaty, grizzled, dirty, them: ornate, elegantly groomed, proper, chaste, fearful). All seats were long gone and I mashed myself into the cluster of bodies standing wherever
possible. The ceiling began at the level of my solar plexus, so I was required to bend my body at a total 90 degree angle, my torso and head hanging over upset looking passengers. Babies cried at the sight of me, I couldn’t help but position my balls, etc, a few inches in front of the wide, panicked eyes of a young muslim woman in full black
burka. To some small success, I broke the ice by describing myself—bowed over completely with back in immediate spasms—in Swahili as a ‘Mzungu Twiga’, or ‘white (as in foreign) giraffe.

The following hour and a half ride down an impossible dirt road, undercarriage scraping on each bump and pothole, was one of the least comfortable experiences I can remember having, but seems to have opened the doors to paradise. With the sun setting I flung myself out of the dala-dala into the fresh coastal air and followed a small trail
through the jungle to ‘Peponi Lodge’. There I found an exquisite refuge of bamboo and rattan bandas (cabins), a beautifully elegant open restaurant and bar (replete with gorgeous décor from bookshelves carved from old wooden fishing boats to antique nets and woven crab traps hanging from the rafters), and a clustering of breezy lounge
spaces, all spilling easily down to a perfect white beach and the Indian Ocean.

Owned by a British-Kenyan couple living in Dubai (and managed by their daughter) and staffed by some enormously friendly Tanzanians, Peponi is far from roughing it or from being in the cultural mix (as I usually like to be). The place is an absolute bubble, with cold beer and beautiful seafood at arm’s reach and so much quiet that it feels
like time has stopped. I fantasize about these places while in the crush of hot and chaotic travel, but can’t always actually find it in myself to get quiet enough to stay for long. In this case, though, it may be just right. I have a huge task list of backlogged writing and other projects that need attention, including articles about the courses in Kenya and putting together a personal website that runs. And while the bandas here are upwards of $40 a night per person, I have my little tent pitched just above the water under a bamboo roof for just $6.50 a night plus an extra dollar a day for electricity. I’m
sharing the place with a kindly retired couple from Toronto, two easy going forty-something’s from Montreal who rode motorcycles here from Kigali, an intriguing and thoughtful anglo-Tanzanian gentleman who now lives in Portland and runs a small NGO in Southern Tanzania focused on sustainable agriculture and micro-finance (bridges will be built!) and a nice girl from Seattle who lives with her Masai boyfriend somewhere
in the interior and needed a trip to the sea. Five minutes after my arrival I was seated at a table with the lot of them, ordering a fish curry, and enjoying a very pleasant evening. I ended it by hiking a quarter mile or so out to the low tide mark for a swim in warm water
full of bio-luminescence, stars above and the distant lights of fishing boats on the horizon. I also got stung by about a dozen jellyfish and palmed a sea urchin with my left hand (I’m still looking for a needle today to perform another surgery to get the spines out).

Anyhow, all of that is to say that I’ve found a very sweet spot here and actually have good reason to stay put for a while and put my head down. The one element that is missing is a good internet connection (I can get just enough service here to shoot off an email but not nearly enough to do what I need to do) but rumor has is it that a similar
lodge down the beach a bit has a solid connection that I can sit and use so long as I order a drink. My only other quandary at the moment is that my external hard drive, containing all my photos from the first month) is on the fritz and claims to be corrupt and unreadable. Hopefully I am tech savvy enough to get it back in working order
without needing to seek urban assistance.

Well. That was more than I planned to write. Sometimes the words just want to be put down. So thanks for getting through it is you did, and lots of love anyway if you didn’t! I’m gonna go have a swim!