Staring out of windows

Golden

2010-02-03T06:06:00.000-05:00

I'm kind of stumped. I've never been shy in my use of superlatives on this trip, and I've certainly been in place after place that deserved every one of them. It leaves me with a bit of a challenge, albeit a jolly one: how exactly to get my head or my keyboard around the amazingness of the last month?

Perhaps it's best to start with the basics. If I try real hard, perhaps I can summarize the month's agenda in a paragraph. Here goes.

I arrived in Bamako a few days before Lauren, who landed on the 30th of December minus only her backpack (which would appear a couple days later). We partied it up in Bamako for the New Years weekend, then piled our tuckered-out selves onto a bus and a pickup truck to make the amazing town of Djenne for it's famous Monday market. From Djenne it was off to Mopti for a night, after which we piled into a crowded 4WD for the long drive up to Timbuktu, arriving the night before the start of the amazing Festival au Desert. After 3 days sitting in the dunes until 4 AM, we spent a little while exploring Timbuktu and camel-tripping out into the desert for a night at a Tuareg camp. We then hopped on a pinasse (small motorized riverboat) with 6 other tourists for the 3-day gorgeous journey back to Mopti along the Niger river, camping along the banks for the nights. After catching our breath in Mopti, it was out to the Dogon Country to hike for a couple days and nights through ancient animist villages along an incredible cliffside. From there it was back to Mopti once more, then off to finish the trip with a couple lazy days by the riverside in Segou. On the 22nd, we busted it back to Bamako, did our last minute running around, and Lauren was away to gay Paris and then home. I spent another couple nights there, then took off back down the road to Mopti (again!) and from there onward to do some amazing hiking around the mesas of Hombori, and then to Gao in Mali's far far east, where I start to write this post before leaving for Niger. Whew.

Okay, so that was a long paragraph. It also left no space for the joys of 2 AM patisserie runs in Bamako, of dance floors packed with people from 4 to 50, for curling up on a mattress under the stars on the outskirts of Timbuktu, for wrapping up in sweaters and scarves and sipping hot coffee on our pinasse as the sun rose over the Niger. My paragraph was also severely lacking in the endless parade of insanely cute children, honestly friendly adults, and women never ruffled from their regal dignity by long uncomfortable trips. Then there's the amazing mud architecture, seemingly drenched 24/7 in glorious golden sunlight. There's the music. Oh, the music. Where the labels "traditional" and "modern" stop making sense and people smile, no, grin while they play. Where master bandleaders and famous stars are content to sit in the background and set up a jam, to play in a little garden bar for no cover, or to travel 1000kms to play 2 songs to a spellbound crowd.

Then there's the sound of Dogon villages waking at dawn underneath the towering cliffs. There are all the incredibly strange noises donkeys seem to enjoy making at all hours. There are the games of "child or goat" played when we hear screeching coming over the neighbourhood (and let me tell you, it's often not an easy guess). There's the buzz of ancient engines somehow still dragging buses and trucks and pinasses vastly overladen with people.

Mali was even better than I expected. And I expected a lot. It was dreams of coming there that started off the idea of West Africa in my head years ago. Some places, Djenne especially, I had wanted to see since before I had a clear idea of where they were. I'd also had my expectations tampered a bit along the road by tourists who grumped about the level of hassle and headaches that the tourist industry brings to the place. When I got there, and found myself rarely troubled by a hint of hustle, it seemed even more miraculous.

Miraculous. Like standing at the airport in the cool Malian December night waiting for your love to step off a plane. Like busting past security to find her awaiting her lost bag at baggage claim. Like being able to converse in something other than ten-minute snippets where a day's full of beauty tries to squeeze down the phone line. Eight months was hard. But how better to end it?

The perfection started early. By leaps and bounds, Bamako is the best party town in West Africa. Dakar devotees may argue, but Bamako is smaller, friendlier, and a lot more sensibly laid out for nights on the town without piles of money spent on taxis. Our hotel helped, being outside of the centre but smack dab in the middle of the entertainment district. We had a glorious garden to drink wine in and a pool to jump around in and the comfiest room I've had the whole trip long. Within a short scurry afoot or by clanking cheap minibus were found nightclubs and music venues aplenty. We had a good day of exploring the town (Bamako is surprisingly walkable if you know which routes to take), bought some sweet duds to replace Lauren's still MIA fashionables, and hit the town for New Years, with an amazing dinner of fancified Malian food, then huge beers (and at 4 bucks for a litre mug, cheap ones) were the only price we paid to ring in the New Year with Toumani Diabate, master of the kora, and his band - L'Orchestre Symmetrique.

Effing amazing. The crowd was a mix, from tourists to Malian functionaries and their families to local cool cats. Everyone smiling and dancing in the warm night air. You wouldn't think a band centred around what is basically an upright harp could rock, but they did. I was blissing out. The following nights we took in the Bamako club scene (posh!) and caught a stadium show by the Ivorian master of super-political reggae, Tiken Jah Fakoly (whose music has followed me all over the continent). Glorious. Not a lot of sleep, that weekend. We were both a bit worse for wear, and Lauren rather ill of tummy, when we piled onto a Sunday morning bus out of Bamako.

We went Sunday so to catch the Monday market in Djenne, and with some luck with connections (waiting 20 minutes as opposed to 2 hours for a pickup to fill from the bus turnoff), we were there Sunday evening. The market itself was glorious, people from all over the region plopped down in front of Djenne's main mosque. It got pretty frenetic, but we could and did just duck into the dusty backstreets full of amazingly ornate mud houses whenever we felt overwhelmed. The whole city has a wonderful feel of being someplace completely detached from anywhere where people live and work in steel and glass.

From Djenne it was off to Mopti, the crossroads river port that is at the centre of Mali's tourist industry. I had been warned to expect hassle, but we found little - just a very pleasant city with lots of riverside sitting, a fun harbour, an old quarter, and a super comfy budget hotel with a glorious pool. Not bad. Mopti is the jumping off point for the road to Timbuktu, and after dallying with the idea of hiring a tourist 4x4 for the trip, we decided to skimp a bit on cash and comfort, and all piled into an old land rover (17 of us, counting driver, roof riders, and 13 in the back!) for the surprisingly easy (if ass-numbing drive). Arriving at the river ferry the night before the festival, we found a line of cars that would have to wait until morning to get across, so we abandoned our ride, grabbed our bags, and walked onto the ferry. An hour and a free ride later we were eating a delicious dinner under the stars in the sand yard of our guesthouse, run by a lovely Cape Bretoner lady and her Tuareg chief husband.

The guesthouse, happily, was only a short walk across the dunes to the area where the festival was held, so we could save cash and have a room to stagger back to each night. Stagger we did - 3 nights in a row ended around 4 AM, with the temperatures around 4 degrees! Oh, was it worth it, though... An incredible festival of incredible music. Lots of bands from Mali's north, many of the country's international stars, West African stars, and guests all piled on the stage in a big pile of joyous musicking. It was disorganized, sometimes disjointed, always awesome. We wiggled our toes into the sand still warm from the sun of the day, or cuddled around fires built in braziers around the grounds, buying snacks and tea and beers from wandering vendors and dancing when the spirit took us. Gorgeous.

We took some time over those days to explore Timbuktu itself, which is a charming place. Many travellers romanticise what they will find there, and are disappointed by its lack of grandeur, but we were simply impressed by the nice people, the lovely old buildings, and the sands drifting down the backstreets. It does feel quite far from anywhere, though I feel bad for all those who used to risk life and limb to reach it.

The festival over, we piled into a pinasse (motorized riverboat) for the 3 day trip back along the Niger to Mopti. It was perfect. After some really busy days, we had nothing to do but sit, and eat, and read, and watch the life of the river go by. We camped on the riverside each night and ate under the stars, leaving before dawn in the mornings. Lauren managed to take a tumble into the river (albeit in the shallows - she was washing my shoes, heh), her luggage got a good soaking, and we were both mighty chilly at times, but I should think that the amazing serenity was well worth it.

After charging batteries in Mopti, it was off for the final "big thing", a 3 day trek in the Pays Dogon, a region centred on the Bandiagara escarpment that is legendary for undisturbed animist culture and amazing scenery. Legends well-deserved. Even I who had been hearing how amazing it was from other travellers for months was bowled over by the loveliness. We were fed to bursting, walked to exhaustion, and beered to cheerfulness each day before snoozing under the stars as soon as it got dark. We took a guide, a young Dogon named Kara, who managed to keep us from committing any horrible cultural faux pas, and dictated who rated enough in the priority structure to warrant a gift of kola nuts, the traditional gesture of respect (and stimulants with a good kick - I was pretty jazzed after chewing one). The villages were amazing - one of the last relics of a past long gone. They themselves were often the second or third villages there, the cliffs being previously inhabited by the Tellem, who built houses in caves hundreds of feet up. The Dogon believed they could fly and use black magic to get themselves and their supplies up there each day.

After a return once more to Mopti, we finished our trip in Segou, an old town with a pile of colonial architecture, a lovely riverside, good music, and no organized activities whatsoever, which was a very nice way to wind down. It was from there that we embarked on the last day to get Lauren to the airport for her night flight, and so it was that after 3 and a half weeks of amazingness, I was back to soloing it.

The next couple days were mighty hard, let me tell you. I gradually found my travel groove again, setting out along the long road to Niger. One last stop in Mopti (mostly to sit by the pool, I won't lie) and then it was off to Hombori on a night bus through the moonlit cliffs. Arriving at 3 am, I grabbed a short night's sleep and then set out with a couple German hippies-on-bicycles for an amazing hike around the cliffs. We hitched our way 10 kms from town and then hiked up and around the Main de Fatima, a series of towers that lure rock climbers from all around the world. We took the low path, being sandalled and all.

From Hombori, it was a short ride to Gao, the old capital of the Songhai empire, city far from everywhere, lovely riverside stop, and sad, sad place due to the death of the tourist industry brought about by the extension of travel warnings to the whole region. I was the only tourist in town, sad since the town itself is quite safe - though I wouldn't go rolling through the bush north of there in a 4WD full of tourists right now. That wasn't on my agenda anyway, so I just enjoyed the incredible Songhai food (lots of cinnamon and sausages), a few cold beers and river sunsets, and a trip to climb a giant glowing pink sand dune with the reputation of being somewhat of a convention centre for sorcerors. Lovely. It was from there that I caught my bus down the (lovely) road through what is, in theory, bandit country to the Niger border and on to Niamey, the capital. It's there that I'm sitting as I write this, amongst friendly people, treelined streets, and even more riverside prettiness. My mom will arrive tomorrow for 3 weeks of adventures, including a safari in West Africa's best wildlife reserve and a trip to the deserts around Agadez. I can't wait.
Peace
Josh

Let's talk about race, maybe

2010-01-29T07:28:00.003-05:00

"I like white skin. I see white skin and know that the person is organized. If we were white, this country wouldn't have such problems"

This pronouncement from a fellow sitting beside me at a fish lady's stand in Mopti, Mali, is perhaps a bit unusually blunt. The argument, though, is by no means an uncommon one. All through West Africa, time after time after time, a traveller is confronted by people arguing for their own inferiority. I try my best to argue the other side - that the problems in Mali, or anywhere, trace their causes to history, geography, corruption and colonialism (just for starters), not to anything inherently related to colour. I don't think I often get through to people.

It may seem a bit strange that after an amazing month seeing amazing things with an amazing woman in Mali, talking about race is the thing that I feel most compelled to revive this blog with. I think, perhaps, that does have to do with the Malian experience. Unlike the rest of West Africa, Mali is a big tourist destination for everyone from backpackers to senior citizen tour groups. With the tourists comes an attitude toward foreigners that is often disturbingly servile. I don't necessarily believe that having a Malian scurrying to bring a foreigner coffee necessarily marks a more problematic power relationship than a Sierra Leonean hustling to bring a report full of development jargon. Racism and inferiority often lurk beneath both of them, but the tourist-oriented version is just a little bit more obvious, the whiff of colonial times just a little bit stronger.

Skin colour, and the differences in it, lay down the boundaries of how a Western traveller meets West Africa. It often is a bit startling to hear how callously the terms "blacks" and "whites" are thrown around, mostly by locals whose perception of race is often far more binary than that of foreigners used to having compatriots from different backgrounds. Still, for how often skin colour enters into the conversation, or hides behind it, it can be tricky to figure out just how often you, or the local people you are talking to, are talking about race.

Skin colour, here, is shorthand for so much. To be white doesn't just signify a different background. It means a different culture. It means being impossibly rich. It means being connected to those who dominate the planet, not those who are dominated. None of this is entirely false in the Canadian context, either, but a black Canadian and white one have a great deal more common ground between them than a Canadian and a Malian might do. Not as much common ground as they should, of course. The West is nothing even close to postracial in handing out opportunities to its citizens. But when we talk about race in Canada, we can try to talk about it from the stated assumption (however weakly held it may be by individuals) that all things being equal, people are equal. That the colour of people's skin doesn't really attach to anything qualitative, either individually or as a group. That's a difficult position to maintain in Africa, where skin colour signifies membership in a group with different behavioural norms, different worldviews, different lives.

So, on the face of it, much of the shockingly brash talk about race is actually a conversation about culture. That can still be fraught, of course, but most of us are generally more comfortable accepting that people think or act differently based on cultural norms than the colour of their skin. Fair enough - and I do think that this diffuses some of the conversations that I've had. There exist plenty of explanations for why Western culture is, for example, perhaps more entreprenerial, or why government corruption in Africa is such a problem. When people say "White people are better at x," they usually mean that "x works better in Europe and North America," which is certainly quite often true. That, at least, is the charitable interpretation. I certainly realize that many Africans believe otherwise, a legacy of a dysfunctional and incredibly Eurocentric education system, and a long history of seeming dependance on the West. Perhaps it's time to make the point a whole lot louder that the so-called "donor nations" are actually net recipients of African wealth, not the other way around.

But I digress. The question remains - when, if ever, am I talking or thinking of race? As a traveller I think this is especially pertinent. Like all travellers, I enjoy the odd wild generalization about the people and places that I'm visiting. I think most of us do this. To pick a hackneyed example, backpacking around Europe one regularly finds oneself at tables full of travellers debating the characteristics of this or that nationality - nice Canadians, rude Frenchmen, et cetera. I don't think most of us have too much of a problem with these kinds of discussion, as long as the odd proviso is made that there are many exceptions to all these stereotypes.

The same lines of thought, though, are a good bit trickier in the African context. At one level, this flows from the complexity of personal identity here. When I gripe about people being perpetually late and then yelling at me to hurry (which happens all the time, by the way), am I griping about Bambara people specifically? All Malians? Africans in general? In this case, I think the gripe is fairly applicable all over West Africa - but that generalization provides a slippery slope to the sort of thinking that you catch snippets of every day: "Africans do things this way." When something goes wrong, it's always "TIA - this is Africa." Whenever I hear a group of tourists referring to "some Africans did such-and-such," I cringe, and yet I catch my own assumptions marching merrily away down generalization street all the time. I think it's unavoidable - but that doesn't make it right.

"Fair enough," you might say, "but 'Africa' is still a geographical concept, not a racial one." This is, on the face of it, quite true. There are plenty of shades of skin in any African country. The lighter ones are generally immigrants, yes, but often only in the loosest sense - the Lebanese, for example, have been here for hundreds of years. But let's be honest. When travellers or expats talk about "Africans," they don't include anyone with lighter skin.

This fuzzy euphemism-ing is a dangerous game. Too often, it is backed up by pointing out a string of examples of how people are acting in the way you're complaining about (or complimenting). These examples are usually valid enough - there are plenty of annoying or inspiring things that everyone around you seems to do. The problem comes with the slip from framing things as "In Africa (or better, "in Mali") women do the majority of the work" to "African men are lazy." I've heard both. I've said both. But I fear the second one has all too much in common with the odiously paternalistic racism that one sometimes runs into from unreformed South Africans. The kind that sighs sadly and regrets the various things - you know, promiscuity, laziness, corruption - that "Africans" cannot escape from. As always, I don't think there's a hard and fast line as to what is harmful and what isn't, and I don't believe in policing thought. The word "racist" suffers sometimes from being too strong a condemnation. I do and think and say racist things all the time, especially as a white traveller in West Africa, and I'd rather take as a jumping-off point for discussion rather than condemnation.

Returning from the realm of thought to reality for a bit, it really is simple skin colour that usually defines how I'm treated, at least until I get to know whomever I'm interacting with. Sometimes, people try and take advantage of you. I'm certainly charged the white price for goods most days, especially in touristy places where people see plenty of well off foreigners. From time to time, people befriend you on false pretenses, as is the case anywhere. Far more dominant, though, is the deference I recieve. I am continuously given special treatment - people get up and give me their chairs, boot people out of choice seats on vehicles for me, bend their heads and fetch me what I need. I don't particularly like it. Indeed, it often bothers me. I won't pretend here, though, to be a better person than I am. I regularly use my white-people-powers (as I've come to call them) to make my life a bit easier. Perhaps I take that legroom-ey seat on the long ride. Perhaps I just waltz past that security check. There are a million examples of things like this. To be fair, I would often have to argue 'till I was blue in the face to avoid being priviledged in this way. I also run into a fair share of situations where not using my white priveleges gets me booted not to an equal place on the pecking order with locals, but to the very bottom of it. Sometimes, though, I just use my position without a second thought - and it is that that every traveller needs to keep a close eye on.

Many guidebooks have sections for women travellers, with tips and advice for them in whichever country the book covers. To my utter fascination, the Bradt guides for African countries also offer tips for black travellers, whose experience is a completely different one from mine (and much more likely to involve problems with local authorities). Sadly, though, black travellers are very rare - indeed, aside from Japanese tour groups, it isn't common to see anything but lily-white skin on the African backpacking trail. I have met a few travellers of Chinese or Japanese extraction, who often tell me stories of the fairly crude racist comments levelled at them by local people. So, when I talk about race, I can only really talk about the black/white dynamic, and indeed I think I can only really even talk about the black/white male dynamic, the experiences of foreign women here being so different. It certainly gives you quite a a bit to stew on.
Peace

Yuletidin'

2009-12-24T07:02:00.002-05:00

Spending Christmas in Burkina Faso, amongst the bottom 5 countries on earth by almost any measure of human welfare, just begs for a cliche-laden blog post about the obscenity of our Christmas materialism. I thought about writing that. I certainly often find Christmas obscene. The funny thing is, though, that now is not the time at which I find the contrast most jarring.

It's actually really easy to explain Christmas's excesses to Burkinabes, most of whom can sympathize with blowing an unsustainable amount of money on a holiday or festival or marriage or whatnot. It's common enough in West Africa, as I think it probably is all over the world. Indeed, the significance of these big fetes is probably quite a bit bigger, even in material terms. I wouldn't be surprised if what a Burkinabe family spends putting on a feast for their friends isn't a bigger fraction of their income than even the most rapacious Christmas shopping. Big events certainly are "bigger" in lives that are otherwise so harshly delimited by the shit end of the climactic stick that keeps life in the Sahel so marginal.

To me, the real shock is not the burst of christmas consumption, but rather the continual outflow of money that characterizes our life at home. Here I live, and live rather well, on around 30 bucks a day. That's more than most Burkinabe earn in a month. Splashing out on a bottle of wine at Christmastime is nothing special - but I can buy a bottle of wine every day. Festivals for me aren't tinged by the barely-suppressed desparation of living on the edge of family catastrophe. Unless you're indigenous, not even the poorest Canadians have a lived experience anywhere near as tenuous. Without that sense of risk, perhaps, it's a little bit harder to really pour your emotions into a moment like Christmas.

Indeed, I got just that arguement last night from the neighbourhood salad lady in the back suburb of Bobo-Dioulasso where I was staying. Her sons, like many other young Burkinabe, had left to work in Cote D'Ivoire and come back changed, with money but also with a sudden attachment to having stuff that she was finding rather difficult to integrate. I still think it's a little trite to complain about the erosion of community by prosperity, when "prosperity" means a little cushion that staves off desparation, but clearly it is a real process.

Still, most families have a long way to go before they risk the soulessness that can happen at Christmas time in the West. Even amongst Christians here, present-giving isn't such a big thing. When people splash out on Christmas, they splash out on food for their friends and family, on music, on beer. I can sympathize with that.

Although Christmas' core as a Christian festival is well enough known - most Muslims are pretty down with Jesus, and have some awareness that the day marks his birth - it doesn't really seem to matter much. Everything will be closed, but just as with the ghost-towns that West African cities become on a Sunday, it's mostly a hangover from many years of colonial rule.

That's not to say that Christmas itself is viewed purely as some foreign imposition. There simply aren't enough foreigners here to account for the mass of Christmas decorations and bric-a-brac being hawked on street corners (though, really only in the bigger cities). As with much of the rest of the world, Christmas seems to have become something of a catch-all holiday for those who have the resources to observe it.

So here I am in Burkina Faso, a foreigner with not a hint of Christianity in him who nevertheless has always enjoyed the season. I think I take as much pleasure in ritual, sometimes, as a religious person does, and Christmas is nothing if not ritualistic. My family also spends a remarkably small amount of time together, especially considering how close many of us (at least on my father's side) live to one another, so Christmas is perhaps a little bit more special for it. In any case, I like Christmas. I like the smell of a live tree, decorated as tackily as possible. I like the piles of food that lurk around every corner. I like curling up on a Christmas morning, well-slept and as far as I possibly can get from needing to do anything. I like the snow, when it's there. I like the feeling of connection to a string of recognizably similar days stretching back as far as I can remember.

With all this memory, Christmas abroad can be a bit dislocating. I've done it once before, in India. There, oddly, I was staying in an old Portuguese church on the coast, probably the closest thing to a religious christmas I'll ever have. I even ate fish! This time, Christmas eve will pass with a big dinner out in the garden of my little inn, with music and wine and wine-augmented French chatter. Tomorrow, Christmas day will find me curled up under a mango tree with a book, a pile of chocolates and treats, and not a care in the world. As far as this finds me from a white Christmas with the people I love, I still think it'll be pleasant.

I unashamedly sought the company of other foreigners for the holiday, but I'm happy how I found it - at a place run by a Canadian-Burkinabe couple, deeply integrated into the local community, with their kids and the neighbourhood ones running about, climbing on me and making mischief with the musical instruments. It should be a Christmas dinner with allusions enough to set me to being pleasantly maudlin about home - and I do miss home at this time of year - without being just a table full of homesick white people. This, I think, is good.

And so we will sit, and eat, and drink, and in a couple days return to life as rich travellers in a poor place, travellers who have to go through all this fuss for a couple days of the same communal life that people here enjoy simply for lack of any other option. We can afford to go it alone, to travel alone, to live alone, to only see our family on holidays. However most Burkinabe might like to have that sort of freedom, most never will. Those who earn 30 bucks a month will often give 25 to support their extended families, and in turn depend on those families for everything.

So many of our own Christmas pleasures in the West come from tapping briefly into that communal joy with the safety net of our own potential independance right below us. We give because we can. Others give because they must.

Merry Christmas
Josh

Whoodoo? Youdoo?

2009-12-19T07:41:00.003-05:00

Benin is a country with an intellectual bent, full of little cafes where middle-aged men with glasses are to be found sitting with newspapers, arguing over politics, waving their newspapers about, and pounding back cups of coffee. I myself made a second home at Cafe Eureka, a mere shack on the street corner in Ouidah that proclaimed itself to be "the Cafe of arts and culture". The interior was covered in mathematical proofs scrawled over the rough-cut boards, and I found it a congenial place indeed for a bit of a ponder - though what the proofs were proving escaped me.

All this intellectual infrastructure in Benin is a good thing, because the place leaves you with a heck of a lot to ponder. Especially along the coast, the culture is an absolutely fascinating hybrid. It starts with the Portuguese colonization of South America and the beginnings of the empire of Brazil, whose work was done mostly by West African slaves shipped out from the Benin coast. Early on, several powerful Brazilian families settled in Benin and established control of the trade. They were fruitful, and by taking dozens of local wives, had hundreds of children that helped create a distinctive Afro-Brazilian culture all along the coast as far as Lagos. All through Benin you see Brazilian architecture, meet people named Da Silva and the like, and generall bump into this peculiar hybrid, of one colonial creation colonizing and merging with its own historical antecedant, to create all kinds of complexity, complexity furthered by the split within the Afro-brazilian community, a large portion of which ended up Muslim. Such was the path that led to a beautiful pastel-coloured mosque in Porto Novo, built as an exact imitation of the Catholic Cathedral of Salvador de Bahia in Brazil.

The most famous aspect of this cultural hybrid is the religion that went with it: voodoo, or much more properly, vodun. It's the major part of Beninoise identity for tourists, who come equipped with morbid hollywood stereotypes that are, indeed, not entirely untrue. There really are voodoo dolls, creepy fetishes made from monkey heads, and a general dread of curses and enemies, along with a great deal of death-centric ritual. This is all window-dressing, though, for a truly vibrant animist faith that has a pretty consistent set of rituals from Brazil to Haiti to Benin. To travel Benin is to be immersed in Vodun culture, and the slavery that spawned it.

I wasn't much up for the schlocky side, like paying the local priest to cast bones for your fortune, but that wasn't much of a problem. Most of the time, vodun is just something that's there. In Ouidah, my first stop, a little orderly town full of cafes and museums, you find a sacred forest full of voodoo shriness, and more of them lining the road to the old point of no return, where slaves were loaded into the ships and taken away. You see rich beninoise stop their Mercedes' to offer a quick prayer to one, then drive away in a cloud of dust.

Benin is generally a tidy country. It's very visibly richer than Togo, and has such things - real sidewalks, public squares! - to make it seem positivel sophisticated. A few days in Porto Novo, the capital, pounds that impression right in, with tons of elegant old buildings and more Afro Brazilian history. As nice as it was, the highlight of my couple weeks came at the next stop, in Abomey, the old capital of the Dahomey kings.

There, I dived right back into the vodun, staying at a run-down hole of a hotel run by a fellow who knew everything about the community and the local religious calendar (he was the next president of one of the secret societies). I had the luck to show up in town in time to catch 3 nights of ceremony and dancing, at all of which I was the sole foreigner, which was pretty intense indeed. The first night, the risen dead chased us through the dusty backstreets and beat us with swords until we yeilded coins. The second night, a secret society of women danced together to thank the local river god, and the third night, there was a dance to invite a good rainy season that involved frantic drumming, much spastic dancing and flipping about, and eventually, the killing of 2 goats which were then flung about the dance ground wildly - the dance ground being a patch of dust 5 feet from my room window, so no sleep for me! Well worth it, though - I've rarely felt as honestly admitted into local culture as I did then.

When not dancing, I chased down the ghosts of kingdoms past - Abomey is full of palaces with their selection of creepiness - thrones mounted on human skulls, reliefs of the king beating someone to death with a severed limb. These were not pleasant people, back in the day. They did, however, produce an empire that resisted the French for a long time. It was a rare pleasure to be in an African place which had a historical identity almost entirely rooted in its precolonial past, however bloody that past may have objectively seemed.

It was also an even rarer pleasure, in a complete aside, to be in an African country where cheese - delicious, soft, fried cheese - was a big menu item at street stalls. I nearly died of joy, for days! It was largely in pursuit of cheese, and the Burkina Faso border, that I found my way north, but on the way I found Dassa Zoume, a crazy town buried in epic rock formations, and the town of Natitingou, where the Tata Somba houses (same general idea as the Tamberma valley in Togo) made another appearance. I spent many evenings at my favourite bar in the region, La Breche, which was a restored Tata Somba house where you could put your feet up and look over the Atakora mountains. Joyousness!

And so ended my Benin experience - vodun dancing, snake eating (tastes like chicken!), cafe-sitting, and all. For a place I had few expectations of, it worked out to be a real highlight of this trip.
Peace

Togo-riffic

2009-12-01T11:00:00.000-05:00

The joys of Togo start with the border crossing. Having used my talent for tracking down obscure crossing points, I hopped from Ghana to Togo in the extreme north of both countries, not far from the Burkinabé border. The Togolese border post? A rather jolly little man sitting under a tree. He had the requisite stamps, though, and with zero muss, I was through.

After a night in the pleasant town of Daopong where I discovered that: a) There are mangoes in Togo, with not a sight of them in Ghana, and b) that Togolese beer is incredibly good, I puttered off my way through some gorgeous savannah and mountains down to the the Tamberma Valley.

What a place. For once on this trip I felt like I had stepped into National Geographic. The Tamberma build amazing fortified castle-houses out of mud, using no tools. Unlike most groups, they live amongst their fields, so most of the "villages" are more a collection of farms. Although there is one actual town, with electricity and all the rest, I jumped at the chance to spend a couple nights staying in the compound of the chief of one of the small villages. I paid for the privelege - the chief hosts tourists from time to time, and charged me 4 bucks a night to sleep on his roof. Well worth it, to sleep on top of one of the amazing homes, watching everything glow in the sunset, the stars come out, and the sun come up. In all respects it was a fairly traditional place - lots of topless women pounding millet in the yard, goats running everywhere, all surrounded by gorgeous mountains, maize fields, and enormous baobab trees. It would be wise not to overstate the case though! Although the chief spent the day sitting on a bench in traditional robes gabbing with the villagers, he (like every Togolese person over 15) had a mobile phone with him constantly. His son went to school in town, had a motorbike, and toured me around the other villages. Magic and a half.

From there it was off to Atakpame, the edge of coffee country, where cobbled streets and gorgeous views were found. That, though, was just a quick stop on the way to coffee country itself, the green hills around Kpalime. They bore a lot of similarity to the hills in the east of Ghana, unsurprising given that they are the same hills. Atop them, I could pretty much see the Ghanaian towns that I had been hanging out in. This particular border makes even less sense than most, dating to WWI when the British and the French invaded the then-German colony of Togoland and divided it between them. The French part became Togo, while the British part got tacked onto Ghana, which irks locals to this day, with the territory of the Ewe divided neatly in half.

Although Kpalime was good fun, the real joy was spending a couple days a few hundred metres up in the village of Klouto. The forests there are extremely dense with butterflies; and you can wander off on guided butterfly safaris. I spent a couple days there hiking to discover not only the butterflies, but also all sorts of medicinal plants and the various ways of making natural paints and dyes that get used for fabric paintings all over the region. Really neat. As a solo traveller, experiences with guides are often a mixed bag, but this one was phenomenal.

Equally good was relaxing in the garden of the little place I was staying, drinking endless cups of fresh-brewed coffee that had been grown and dried within a kilometre of me. Mmm! I'm well used to Nescafe by now, but I couldn't help sighing pretty loudly when I tasted the first cup. Even better - it was free!

Fully caffeinated, I spent a couple days lounging in Lome, which has to be the most pleasantly chilled out of all the big cities I've been to so far. Very French - lots of tree-lined avenues and bougainvilleas everywhere, a nice beach and tons of good food. My hotel there was one of those weird pieces of the expat bubble, a little piece of southern France exported wholesale, right down to the greyhaired French guys with mustaches propping up the bar.

The next week was spent doing what I do best - taking it slow! With things to see that I could have done in a day or two, I decided to meander my way for 7. First a few nights on the beach outside Lome, which was my last chance for seaside-ing until April, then off into a sailed pirogue across Lac Togo to Togoville, on to the intense Friday market in the small town of Vogan, and finishing in Aneho, the intensely sleepy old capital.

In a bobble that Douglas Adams would love, on the way to Vogan - or Vogon - I managed to lose my towel! Thankfully no interstellar bypasses or bad poetry came my way over the next few days until I staged a daring rescue mission that took me back to the beach for one last night. Towel recovered, Togo completed.

You don't see too many tourists in Togo, which in many ways is a mighty puzzle. I guess it lacks the Voodoo calling cards of Benin and the English appeal of Ghana; perhaps people are also still scared of a reputation for political instability that is years out of date. It's still a repressive government, and the place is still a bit disconnected from the outside world, but I'm well glad I made it.

Peace

West Africa's better half

2009-11-29T08:38:00.000-05:00

I'm a museum junkie by any standard. Plenty of dusty, tiny, rarely-visited little places have been unlocked for me along this trip. About 85 percent of the time, their exhibits are fairly lame. I justify those visits on historiographical grounds - it's always interesting to see how a place or a people present themselves.

Every so often, though, you happen on a gem. In a big old Brazilian house in Ouidah, Benin, you find one. The downstairs rooms are filled with an excellent exhibition on Women in Africa (done in association with the Museé de la civilisation in Quebec city, as it happened). As is often the case for me, the museum visit was made worthwhile by a single item.

A Beninese sculptor had made a big sundial-esque platform, a circle divided into hours. On that platform were about a dozen finely made bronze statuettes depicting the different jobs a rural woman here takes on each day. The statuettes started just before 4 AM and petered out around 10. If a woman here gets in 6 hours of sleep, she's pretty lucky indeed. I know this. Indeed, I think I know a fair bit, by now, about women's issues in the developing world. For some reason, though, I found this mildly tacky piece of art pretty affecting.

It's hard to overstate how much work African women do. It's a pretty universal experience, especially in smaller villages, to find all the women pounding millet (I wouldn't want to armwrestle any lady over the age of 12 here!) while simultaneously tending several children, cleaning and maintaining the house, and doing pretty much everything else that needs to be done. Not only do women do more than 90% of the domestic work, but they also do more than 50% of the farm labour, often bent double in the fields hoeing by hand with a baby strapped on their back. On top of this, it's women who sell the produce at market. What are the men doing all this time? Quite often getting drunk and listening to the radio. This is much less a charicature than you might think - although of course men do put in work on the farm. Men also take a majority of paid labour, but with that so hard to come by, there's a lot of room to sit around while the women do all the work. Not for nothing have plenty of studies confirmed that a dollar of aid money is twice or thrice as effective if put in the hands of a woman.

The real danger of charicature here is not, though, the depiction of men as lazybones, but of women as some sort of meek domestic slave. The real picture is far more complex than that. Locals often make the point to me that women have a great deal of power over the home and community where most people spend most of their time. There really is a great deal of reverence accorded to women, to their mysterious knowledge and their role as mothers. There are also plenty of women who've escaped and made it as salaried workers, or quite often as rich traders. All across West Africa you come across the "Mama Benz", matriarch of the market, named for their favourite make of car. Many of these women are very rich. All these examples come up regularly, but I think there's a real danger of whitewashing the truth.

No amount of cultural specificity or "local values" can erase the fact that life for most African women is far harder than it need be. Neither can any amount of familiarity with the culture keep this from making me angry on a daily basis. Aside from superhuman workloads, women (rural and urban alike) have to face a society that's incredibly permissive of men and restrictive of them. They may face genital mutilation, and they often face a culture that regards the beating of one's wife as part and parcel of marriage. When I talk about women with local men, the power dynamic is a curious one. Men know they're on top, to be sure, but there's a real undercurrent of fear - fear of these people who can somehow juggle so much in a day while the poor fellow can't keep his bar tab straight.

I shouldn't be too facetious about West African men. I do, reasonably often, meet men with progressive views, or at least people who acknowledge that improving the place of women is vital for society. Too often, though, you chat with a "progressive" man for 5 minutes and wear right through the progressiveness. There are lots of allies here, but not nearly enough.

My position here, as a white, male, feminist visitor is pretty awkward at times. I don't think I necessarily have the right (or the power) to change how men here relate to the women in their lives, but I try to argue the case whenever it comes up over beer. I'm forever explaining, for example, exactly why I think it wouldn't be nice to my partner at home if I took a wife here. This results in many giggles. Every so often, though, I find an argument that gets through. I sometimes find myself telling local guys that learning to cook or clean will get them big points with the ladies... not the tack I'd like to take, but hey.

Above all, what I'd love would be to have more chances to discuss the issues honestly with women. But that's damn hard. Women are much less likely to speak French, are much less often found out in social situations, and are much more likely to get yelled at for wasting their time talking. It really is the language barrier that's the biggest problem, as my life on the road is full of interactions with the women in the markets and food stalls. Indeed, I think "getting sassed by market ladies" ranks up there as one of my big daily activities. Sass yes, serious conversation on social issues, not so much.

I actually find the absence of female conversation in my life pretty exhausting . At home I'd say the majority of my friends are women; I've always found women easier to connect with than men - or at least than "men" in the sports-talkin' emotion-ignorin' sense. In any case, to go from my Canadian millieu to a world where men and women often lead lives unrecognizable to each other is a stress. If I were to avoid conversation with jackass men, I'd have a lot of lonely evenings on my hands.

This is why I often envy the female backpackers I meet - although on the West African trail there are few women travelling solo. A solo woman has the advantage of being able to use her Western-ness to gain access to traditionally male social spaces, while also being able to connect as a woman, with women. Alas, the language barrier is still a big problem here, but women generally have a better chance of bridging the gap on a day-to-day basis than I do.

What viewpoints you might get from those women, of course, is a different matter. When I was in Ghana, hanging around the university crowd, they had an event to discuss on-campus sexual harassment. Some 75% of female students listed "wearing provocative clothing" as a proximate cause - and these are the most educated and priveledged girls in the country. I certainly get laughed at as much by women as by men whenever I talk up equality, and often get the most stringent arguments against it from women. That being said, it's rare for me to have these conversations with women alone; I suspect many of them would have a different answer about how they feel about, say, polygamy (which remains common) if their brother/husband/neighbour weren't there to report on it.

I feel the need to hedge a bit more here. There are many, many women who do at some level escape from all these strictures. I don't want anyone reading this to think that there's some parade of women going by with their heads bowed - it's nothing like that. Quite the opposite, actually - women in West Africa are usually a stronger and more exuberant presence than men. That they are so with such greater obstacles in front of them speaks volumes. I also don't think there's a lot of point in talking broadly about "solutions" here. The role of women's issues in the "development" discourse, and indeed the role of "development" in the feminist discourse are both discussions that I don't nearly have enought of a grasp of to comment on. For me, it's more a question of my experience as a traveller - and there, it's often a strain.

Peace

Mmmmmmm!

2009-11-21T10:50:00.004-05:00

I seriously don't know how I got this far into the blog without posting more about food. I've certainly been meaning to do it... but, well, perhaps I've been too busy eating. To be sure, each new place brings even more new yummy things to my attention, so perhaps I've just been hesitant to write as the story unfolds. In any case, this huge part of my travelling life goes unexplored no longer.

So, food. I love food. I love food even more when missing some of the other creature comforts (having more than 3 shirts, functioning toilets, or temperatures under 35). To a budget traveller food is a lifeline served up in shacks by the roadside.

And shacks they are. A standout feature of the West African eating scene is the vast gap in price between street food and restaurant fare. The same dish might cost you 50 cents on the street and 4 dollars in a restaurant. Suffice it to say, on a shoestring, I rarely end up at places with menus.

Which I don't mind. West African cuisine (and it is possible to speak in broad strokes about the region here) lends itself to streetside service. All around the region, the basic recipe for most meals is sauce + starch = yummy. The starches tend to vary from country to country, with lots of rice in Senegal and Guinea, for example, and much more fufu (a glop of goo made of pounded flour from various grains) along the Gulf of Guinea. You also get To, smaller glops of maize-based pate, and from time to time, couscous. Like most white people here, my preference runs to rice - but unlike many other foreigners, I haven't developed any particular loathing of fufu and its relatives, either.

In any case, you take this starch and over it pour a sauce, often with meat bits or fish bits in it. Sauces are made of many things; my personal favourite is Peanut/Groundnut/Sauce Arachide, especially its Senegalese variant that comes thick, brown, and peanut-y. No points to Ghana for making groundnut soup that just tastes like pepe (the basic hot spice used here). Other sauces are based on green stuff - either cassava leaves, okra, or (my favourite) spinach. Generally there are chunks of something meat-ish in the sauce as well. By far the most common, even far from the sea, is fish. Often it's random little river fishies; they are the cheapest protein here by some measure. Next most common is goat, which pops up in stew or as brochettes by the streetside. Chicken and beef are rare and pricey; pork barely registers (though in more Christian areas, you do find it from time to time)

There are, of course, tons of regional specialties. Senegal goes in for Thibou Djienne, a super yummy fish and veggie mix with the rice steamed in the sauce... mmm! Ghana gets huge points for Red Red, a delicious bean stew served over plantains. I'm in Benin now, where mashed yams emerge as a starch; utter yum.

I'm a vegetarian at home. Not a strict one - ideology being just as silly in your diet as anywhere else - but I rarely eat meat. In many ways though, my diet at home prepared me pretty well for west Africa. "Rice and stuff" is a pretty big staple for any vegetarian, so when I chow down here, I kind of feel at home.

But it's not the big meals that make West Africa great, so much as the little things. You're never far from food in a town, where a continual parade of street vendors go by with buckets of deliciousness on their heads, or grill them by the roadside. Indeed, with rice and sauce generally more of a breakfast and lunch thing here, the roadside barbeque is my usual dinner stop. Tonight, as often, it was a pile of fresh-grilled goat liberally doused in spice and chopped onions, with some fried plantain and a mango for desrt. MMMMMMM. But the snacks go beyond the joys of meat on a stick.

Yam chips, oh yes. Peanuts in every form. Deep fried doughnuts. Roast plantain. Sweets. Dried fishes. Sandwiches of all kinds. Ice cream bars. Fresh yogurt. It goes on and on and on. Togo and Benin even have plenty of roadside salad shacks for that veggie craving.

Just as good as the snacks are the drinks. Often tied up in little plastic bags you find fresh ginger beer (clears the sinuses!) , juice from the baobab tree, iced tea and lemonade (big up to Togo for this one), sweet yogurt drinks, and the love of my liquid life, bissap - sweet hibiscus flower tea, iced down. Many of these are sold frozen from coolers, and letting them melt in your hand is a lifesaver on a scorching day. The best part? Essentially all these things come in good portions for 10 to 50 cents

A whole separate point has to be made about deep fried plantains, which may be the most perfect snack ever created. Roasted plantains get dry; deep-fried they are soft and sweet with just the right amount of salty crunch. You usually get them hot, and with a cold beer they're truly mind-blowingly delicious.

Beer is almost a whole other topic. Each country has at least one unique brew. Most of them are sort of middling lagers that do the job on a hot day, but there are a number of standouts. You can get a mean bottle of stout in Ghana, and the Togolese Pilsner is exceptionally good. They're also usually rather cheap: the standard price for a 630 ml bottle (points to Liberia for 720 ml monsters at the same price) is about a dollar. This goes up in more Muslim places, but not by that much.

And then there's fruit. It's seasonal of course, but my life is full of many kinds of delicious mango, sweet soft papaya, meaninglessly cheap and delicious bananas, occaisional watermelons, oranges and mandarins, tiny sweet pineapples and so forth. I'm a fruit fiend, and it's rare to find a day where I don't down at least 4 or 5 bananas and a couple of mangoes.

My consumption of all of these things is made much easier by my freakish iron stomach. I've been in Africa almost 7 months now. I eat unwashed fruit, drink tap and well water, eat streetside salads and stuff that's been sitting in the sun all day. Not a peep. The only thing that's gotten my tummy really gurgling is a few hubristic attempts at downing whole watermelons in 2 sittings. I don't know much about the vagaries of immunology, and I don't care. I'd be perfectly willing to be sick from time to time as the price of being utterly carefree about food. The lack of sickness is just a bonus. That being said, in general the risks of food, and especially street food, are greatly overstated. I'd be much more worried about restaurants that get 5 customers a day rather than vendors who get 50 - the vendor food is far more likely to be fresh. I know plenty of digestively normal foreigners who would widely endorse this view.

The final thing that matters, oddly enough, in any discussion of West African food is language. Put simply, food in Francophone countries is generally much better. So is the experience of eating it. In Francophone West Africa there are little cafes everywhere where you can have a snack or a coffee and watch the street go by. In Anglophone countries, no dice. They are further burdened by horrid bread. Where in Francophone countries you find tasty crusty baguettes everywhere, in English ones you are stuck with the British bequest of spongey, tasteless loaves that resemble nothing if not wonderbread. Blechh. Any traveler eats a lot of bread, especially when you go away from towns and pack food, so this is a real problem. In any Francophone place you can step out of your hotel and easily find someone whipping up tasty omelettes on bread with a bit of mayo and some cafe au lait or tea (nescafe, usually - let's not be too optimistic here). In Anglophone places (Gambia excepted) you are SOL, as you are with finding a streetside cafeteria in which to be served.

Well, as I knew would happen, I can't write another word without getting a snack!
Peace
Josh

It's a date!

2009-11-11T12:51:00.003-05:00

This trip has gone through many planning stages. It spent years as a vaguely cheery amorphous blob sitting somewhere in the back of my brain. It gradually attained some nebulous lines on my mental African map, some half-formed pictures of what I would find, and, eventually, an air ticket to begin it.

That's as far as I got before leaving home. I didn't know how long I'd stay out, where I'd go, what I'd do, or where I'd eventually catch my flight home from. All that's now settled, and I suddenly find myself a good bit more than halfway along. Intense.

One of the things I got sorted out while in Accra was the last piece of the puzzle: the ticket back to the T-dot. I fly out of Douala, Cameroon on April 12th. After a couple nights in Paris (Necessary for the cheap connection, I swear!), I'll be back on home turf on the 14th. Neatly enough, my flight from Cameroon takes me via Casablanca, making this whole ramble into a bit of a circle.

Not only do I know when I'm coming home, I know roughly where I'll be at any given time from now until that flight. Extremely roughly. This is West Africa, where timetables don't exist, and I certainly am happy to abandon my own best-laid plans if I find something more interesting. Still, after having umpteen hours to peruse the ol' Lonely Planet (I must have the thing pretty close to bloody memorized by now), I have a general sense of what places I want to visit as I go.

Here's the general agenda: I'll be kicking around southern Togo for another week or so, then it's off to Benin. I'll be there a few weeks, checking out all the old centres of Voodoo and nifty creaking old colonial towns, before meandering my way north to the Burkinabe border. I'll spend the last 2 or 3 weeks in December in Burkina Faso, meandering to markets and mopeding to tiny villages and generally enjoying what is supposed to be a mighty laid-back place. Christmas will be there, in the city of Bobo-Diassolo I think.

From there, the pace picks up a fair bit! From Bobo it's a short bus ride into Mali, where I'll head just after Christmas. Hopefully in Bamako by the 28th to set the wheels in motion on my Niger visa, and then on the 30th is the big day: Lauren flies in to Bamako from Canada! Since she has only until January 23rd, it'll be a bit busier than usual - but what a time to be there. We'll catch New Years in Bamako, which is known as a great party town for live music and dancing, and then likely make our way north to Timbuktu for the Festival au Desert (www.festival-au-desert.org) , an amazing music festival in the middle of the Sahara that lasts 3 days. We'll hopefully up some Niger river travelling, some trekking in the Dogon Country, and some serious hanging out in gorgeous old towns. It'll be high tourist season, so we'll be braving some hassle, but it'll be well worth it.

After Lauren flies back home, I'll have 10 days to kick around on my way to Niamey in Niger. There, I'll be fetching my mom from the airport and spending 3 weeks with her - checking out the best national park in West Africa, the last remaining wild giraffe herd, tons of market villages and old cities, and a desert expedition (which may happen in Mali, depending on the vagaries of security and travel restrictions). After she heads back home in late February, I'll be off to Nigeria. There, I'll spend a while in the old cities of the North, meander down to Lagos to check out the craziness, and then meander back north before crossing into Cameroon. This'll probably be three weeks all told.

After my last African border crossing ever (tear!) I should have somewhere near a month to explore Cameroon, which is good, as there's tons to do, and it's a huge country with sloooow transport. There's a ton of trekking in my Cameroon plan, including the Mandara mountains in the North, the Ring Road in the South, and some rainforest action. Hopefully, I'll wind up this whole adventure in a very similar way to how I started it - on the top of a mountain. Way back in May, it was Jebel Toubkal, the highest peak in North Africa. Next April, hopefully, it will be Mount Cameroon, the highest peak in the West.

Then? Home. Intense. One last summer in K-W, then it'll be time to pack up and move out East where the plan is to settle in St. John's, NL. Wonderfulness.

Right now, I can look ahead any length of time I want, and see nothing but awesome. It's pretty damn humbling.
Peace

Holy Tourist Trail, Batman!

2009-11-08T09:12:00.003-05:00

I've been in Togo several days now, and am continually amazed by how much difference a border can make. The legacies of colonialism deserve a separate post, but suffice it to say that the line on the map between Togo and Ghana really does have some reality - the food, the language, the architecture, the attitude of the people, all of it changes completely. To be honest, I like it more on this side.

There is one other obvious sign of crossing the border: the near complete disappearance of tourists. I've seen a couple here, but it is nothing like Ghana, which is overrun by young white folks with backpacks. Indeed, my Ghana experience was set apart from the rest of the trip largely by that fact.

I fully understand why Ghana draws people in. I made no special effort to avoid the tourist trail there as it really does encompass some lovely spots. On arrival, after roughing it through Liberia and Cote D'Ivoire, it was utter bliss to settle in at a beach resort at Axim, which had thoughtfully stuck a couple 10 dollar rooms in corners of what was otherwise a real pricey resort... rarely on this trip have I gotten a fresh towel! I spent quite a while on the coast, which is peppered with castles built by a gaggle of European countries during the slave trade days. Some are excelllent museums; others are just there to be slept in, as I did for several nights occupying the tower at Fort Princess town. Cape Coast, the old colonial capital is a grand old place where I killed several days, daytripping out to the canopy walk at Kakum National Park (fun, but super sanitized), and to more forts.

After Cape Coast, I rolled into Accra to stay with my friend Vanessa from Laurier. Hopping off a shared taxi in a big African city and seeing a friendly face is mighty weird, let me tell you! Weird, but great fun. She is studying at the university in Legon and it was a grand time to hang out with her and the gaggle of other Canadian students there - a mighty night of streetside dancing was had (more liquor stores should just put chairs outside and let things happen!) , errands were run, and things Canadian caught up on. Accra is a huge and disjointed city; not much of a place for sightseeing as such.

I also had the luck to be in Accra for the big game, when Ghana's Under 17 Football team, the Black Satellites (the senior ones are the black stars) won the under-17 world cup final against Brazil by one goal in a shoot-out, having played 80 minutes shorthanded after a player was redcarded. Pandemonium street partying it was! Ghana's parliament is still tied up in the details of the reward package for the players. The Black Stars have qualified for the world cup, and you can already taste the anticipation. Even after 6 months in Africa I find it hard to give a shit about football, but this one even got me going.

After a while of Accra's heat and dust, it was nice to escape out east to the Awatime hills, where I spent a couple days scrambling round hilltops and waterfalls and enjoying the need to put a sweater on at night. I passed back through Accra again and took in a university play in incomprehensible local english, then meandered north to the Ashanti capital of Kumasi, which was an African rarity - a city with a real sense of place, having been capital of the Ashantis for hundreds of years.

Pushing further north I spent a few days in Mole National Park doing walking safaris (I finally found my bloody elephants that I've been chasing this whole trip!) I left the park plenty satisfied, although missing a good amount of blood. Of all the possible ways to get hurt on this trip, smacking my noggin on the bottom of a pool wasn't one I was expecting! I dodged the stitches express by a smidge though, and by now all's right as rain.

After the park, I rang Ghana out in good style couchsurfing with an American peace corps volunteer who shared my love for vegetarian cooking and rants about sustainable urban development. She opened up her wee home to me and I spent a good few days scrambling round the upper east of the country, before heading through some mildly dodgy territory to the Togolese border. All in all, a grand time.

And it was a grand time. Ghana is a beautiful country, with tons to do, easy to get around, with plenty of other foreigners to jabber at. So, the question I must ask myself is: why was I a little bit glad to leave?

A good part of it was cultural. I have come to realize I really prefer Francophone countries. The French may have been terrible colonial masters, but they did leave behind some things that make the life of a solo traveller much easier. Prime amongst them is the simple concept of a sidewalk table. I pass a lot of time at them sipping coffee or beer and watching the street go by. In Ghana, they don't exist. The closest you come are outside tables at bars, but those are usually walled off from the street and blasted by music so loudly that you have to shout to order (extreme volume is pretty common in west africa, but Ghana really takes it up a notch, heh). Street food is also harder to come by, pricier, and not as good.

More fundamentally, I found Ghanaians rather standoffish, by African standards. A good part of this flows from the Anglophone tradition, I think - although in Liberia and Sierra Leone any reticence was overwhelmed by people's happiness to see you visiting. In Ghana, you are quite often sneered at, and people are simply less likely to draw you into friendly conversation, or just nod and say hello as you go by. This got a tad tiring - although it must be said that my standards for niceness have been raised pretty high!

I think I also found Ghana a bit trying because, well, I'm a big snob. I like to feel like I'm discovering a place, to be the only tourist in a town, to have adventures on the way to my destinations and jolly receptions when I get there. I like scruffy hotels and cheap beers with drunk locals. I like to have stories to tell and have a chance to play the grizzled traveller from time to time, wowing the young'uns with a bit of derring-do. You don't get much of this riding on an air-con bus with 7 other travellers, watching movies as you cruise a smooth paved road.

More pointedly, as much as I enjoy a certain amount of time with other foreigners - I'm trying to stop saying "white people", although most of them are - there is definitely a point at which having the same conversation over and over gets a bit exhausting. I spent almost every evening in Ghana with company, and while I'm the first one to admit that a little bit of white people time(see, there I go again!) keeps all travellers sane, I would rather it be distributed a bit more evenly, rather than concentrated in one country. This was especially true since so many of the people I met came from the same demographic - 19 to 23 year old students and volunteers in Africa for the first time. There were a few really profound conversations tucked in there, and some people I really liked, but Ghana also does attract some pretty big groups of, well, airheaded people. When the girls I shared a bus ride with showed up for a walking safari in miniskirts and flip-flops, and were startled when the park ranger lectured them, I could only giggle... Refer to my snobbery here!

There are also huge numbers of "voluntourists" in Ghana, people who have often paid thousands of dollars to a Ghanaian organization to come over here and cuddle babies in an orphanage for a couple weeks, then go touring. I don't want to paint all local organizations with the same brush, but there are a lot of disreputable ones here, and getting volunteers over is definitely big business. I have deep ethical reservations about the whole thing that, for politeness sake, I tried not to voice too often around the hostel table.

Frustrations aside, though, I'm glad I went. Now off I go to nurse a beer on a streetside table - thank you, Togo!

Peace

Family business

2009-10-29T06:01:00.003-04:00

My mom is a pretty cool cat. A good few of you reading this blog probably know her, and know this. If you've been around long enough to remember how so many of us spent plenty of time under her roof during our younger years, you'll know how happy she was to provide a safe space for so many young people to do what they needed to - both profound and idiotic. It's one of the many parts of my upbringing that I'd like to repeat for my kids.

But I'm not here to wax rhapsodic about the days when we all were in and out of the Broadleaf Place door. This post has to do with another reason for my mother's coolness: the gleam that she gets in her eye whenever she thinks of heading off somewhere interesting.

The travel bug either hits us, or it doesn't. I suppose it was possible that I could have grown up and loathed hitting the road, but it would have been damn hard. From an early age, we were tacking family holidays onto her conferences (she's a professor). My earliest clear memories are all from these trips, and those did a good job in getting me on the travel train.

That train really got rolling in my eighth-grade year. Grade eight sucked. I suppose it does for many of us, but I was having one hell of a time as a socially awkward kid whose time was completely wasted by the curriculum. Other than the one day a week that I attended an enrichment program (where many of my closest friends and I met), weekdays weren't exactly a happy time. My parents' solution? To pop me out of school for almost 2 months so that Mom and I could backpack across Europe together. My teachers readily agreed that I'd learn a heck of a lot more that way (ah, the joy of the Individual Education Plan), and we were off. Those weeks of mad dashing on trains and bunking in hostels clearly cast the die for my travel obsession, and I was glad of it.

The trend kept up through high school. We wandered off to England and Poland, and backpacked around the Nordic countries after I'd finished my first solo trip to Southeast Asia. Once university started, I saw less and less of my mother (especially after I moved out), and so our shared reading weeks became the time when we could catch up on months of conversation. By then, I'd had a year on the road myself, making me a pretty expert travel planner. The model emerged quickly: I would plan the trip, make all the arrangements, and lug the bags a bit. She would pay. This got me, a starving student, to Peru, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Iceland, and Eastern Canada.

Not all families travel together well. It's very easy for tastes to differ, but luckily my mother and I are much of the same mind. Neither of us need much in the way of creature comforts, and prefer staying in locally run places. This means hostels in rich countries, or cheap-and-characterful old hotels in poor ones. Works like a charm. As I get older, our tastes also dovetail better and better. Once upon a time, sitting for a morning drinking espresso and people-watching would have been pulling teeth for me, now I can think of few things I'd rather do.

My mom's also a tough cookie. Whether it's trucking it up the paths of Macchu Picchu or holding on to the side of a sailboat chasing whales through the waves, she's often happy for an adventure or two. She's had a lot of pretty tough times in the past years, so it always makes me smile when we hit the road and she realizes just how much strength she's got in her. We make allowances, of course, for the fact that mom's not 20 anymore. We don't pack as much into a day as I might on my own, generally - but to be honest, I don't mind that in the slightest. I've known many younger people who would run in fear from the sort of travel experiences my mom takes in stride.

So, I'm pretty excited for the next stage in Josh n' Mom adventures. On February 4th, about 10 days after Lauren flies home from Bamako, I'll be off to another airport. This time, I'll be picking my mom up in Niamey, the capital of Niger, where we'll spend 3 weeks wandering.

Why Niger, you ask? Admittedly, the place gets bad press. All you really hear about are floods, or political turmoil, or kidnapped diplomats. What a shame this is! Niger is home to some of the most spectacular desert in the Sahara, the ancient trading cities of Zinder and Agadez, one of West Africa's only good parks for proper safari-ing, and tons of riverside market towns to check out. From a practical point of view, it works out wonderfully. Visiting the park and the desert is outside my means as an independent traveler, but with the two of us together, we can afford it. Nowhere else could I introduce my mother to so many of my travel joys at once - Islamic culture and architecture, wildlife, the desert, and the joy of sitting around in little bench cafes, babbling cheerfully in French (which my mother speaks even better than me, courtesy of long practice and a year in Paris).

It won't be all roses, of course. Niger is the poorest place on Earth by most measures, and it'll certainly be at times shocking. The safety situation has calmed down since the Tuareg rebellion in 2007-8, but the government right now maintains some pretty tight restrictions on desert travel (largely as a convenient way of clamping down on political dissent) , which means we'll have a backup plan of crossing into Mali and hitting the sand from there. I'm keeping my ear to the ground, of course, but I'm also super-proud that my mother is happy to distrust paranoid foreign ministry warnings and join me in the middle of Africa. I know she'll love it, and it'll be great to see her. We're still a family, which means at least one good tiff is inevitable, but I'll be happy to soothe it with mint tea and the Niger riverside.

It'll be grand!
Peace

My adoring public

2009-10-26T06:45:00.002-04:00

Toubab. Pomoi. Obroni. Yovo. White Man. I have quite the collection of different names following me around these days. Every local language has a different word for "white person" (although in Sierra Leone and Liberia, people usually just say "White man" in English), and wandering around West Africa, you hear these words a lot.

You hear the cries of "white man" in a few ways. Often times, especially from children, people passing will look at you and chirp "White man, how are you?". Rarely are they interested in an answer, and indeed, when I ask it back, I often get the response "How are you too!". Nonetheless, this one's actually reasonably pleasant.

Equally common are people trying to get your attention. A Ghanaian fruit seller might yell "Obroni! You buy bananas!" as I trundle on by. A lot of local languages (especially those of the Fulani) regularly refer to people by their attributes. For example, a short person might commonly be addressed as something like "Shorty" in most social interactions, so it's not a huge surprise that I will forever be whitey. Apparently, it takes a surprising while for this to drop. A friend of mine lived with a Ewe family in Togo for several months, and they referred to her only as "Yovo" until the very last couple of weeks.

In small places where white people rarely venture, you also often hear "white man" as a straight-up exlamation of surprise, as people gape at this strange hairy fellow trundling down the road, and call to their friends to come see.

In many ways the most common one, though, is the simple statement of my whiteness. Lest I be in danger of forgetting what my skin colour is, I get reminded by kindly passers-by every couple minutes in many places, especially in Ghana. It's not at all clear what response is called for when someone looks at you and flatly states "obroni". Sometimes, if I'm feeling cheeky, I reply with the local word for "black person" (here, it's "obibini") which usually unleashes a giggle or two from the obroni-ist. Sometimes, I just say "true!". Most of the time, I don't really respond, if only because that would sometimes have me continually chattering as I walk down a crowded street.

It's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. I doubt that any of us could imagine pointing and yelling "black man!" at an African walking down a Canadian street. You wouldn't get the greatest reception, to say the least. Yet here, most of the time, it doesn't really bother me.

I say "most of the time", because you certainly do get a fair bit of sneering or vaguely hostile calls. It's always tricky territory to read too much into tone when listening to a foreign language, but it's usually reasonably clear when you're the butt of a joke or a snide comment. Still, given the long history of white people bearing highly dubious gifts in this part of the world, I'm perfectly willing to take the odd verbal jab.

The funny thing is, the amount of calling-out doesn't seem to have any real relationship to how many white people come by a given spot. In Ghana, which is full of white people, it's constant. In Liberia, which gets very few, it's rather rare. It changes from village to village and region to region - when I went out East in Ghana, the streets were creepily silent.

Finally, and perhaps most amusingly, there is the White Person Song. All children know the white man song. The tune is generally confined to one country or region, but within that region it's remarkably consistent.

In Ghana and (so I'm told) Togo, it runs like this (imagine a sing-song here)

Ob-ro-NI, how-are-YOU, I-am-FINE, whatisyourname?

or, the French version (with slightly lower information content)

Yo-VO, bon-JOUR, comment-ca-VA?, ca-VA-bien!

Friends of mine swear that they've heard parents teaching the White Person Song to their children, and correcting them when they get the tune wrong. That would certainly explain it's amazing consistency from village to village to village. Ah, yet another topic I would love to research....

In any case, the day is wandering on, and I just got a drive-by obroni-ing as I sit in the Cybercafe. I think it's time to descend into the market for my daily dose of catcalls, so, as always,
Peace

Click, Click

2009-10-22T13:25:00.000-04:00

When people in West Africa want to get your atttention, they hiss. Try it sometime! Just say "TSSSS!!" nice and sharply as someone goes by. It works like a charm. In any case, as a white fellow, and therefore as a walking pile of cash, a walk in town can be a continual parade ofhisses, and I've largely learned to ignore them. So, when I was strolling down the street in Banjul, the Gambia, a couple months ago, I quite happily waltzed through the hisses and continued snapping pictures of a couple pretty old buildings.

Big mistake. It turned out that the hisses were not coming from shopkeepers, but from soldiers. With guns. Who looked angry. I walked over.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" one of them demanded. I explained I was taking a photo of buildings that were pretty. He was not satisfied. "YOU CANNOT DO THAT!". To avoid further trouble, I deleted the photo in front of him, and meekly accepted his angry lecture on how he didn't want to ever, ever again see me taking pictures around the town. Blah, blah.

I left this encounter feeling grumpy. Not so much at the power-tripping soldier (there are plenty of those), but at myself for forgetting a cardinal rule of travel photography: always look around for people in uniform before you take a photo. Finding them doesn't mean you can't take it, but it does mean you should walk up and ask. This can be serious business; I noticed later the reason for the testy soldiers: I was only a couple blocks from the Presidential Palace. Pull the same stunt in Lome, Togo, and the guards are liable to beat you senseless. Even without the nightsticks, the advent of digital photography means that the old solution (ripping the film out of your camera) has been replaced with a unpleasant coin toss between letting you erase the photo and just plain confiscating your camera. With soldiers' incomes as low as they are, I try to avoid giving them this choice.

In any case, taking snapshots in the developing world,and especially in Africa, is bound by a good many rules, formal and informal. The "guys with uniforms" rule is often connected with its broader sibling "thou shalt not photograph government buildings, power plants, bridges, or anything else paranoid leaders might care about". This prohibition is often actually law. Beyond that, though, it's more about norms of behaviour.

Having just posted another batch of photos up on facebook (check em out! Here are the links: Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote D'Ivoire) I thought it might be worth talking about why they show what they do. My albums, as much as a like the photos I post, cannot and do not reflect the balance of how things actually look to me here. You'll probably notice a great lack of people in them; that's deliberate. I simply cannot bring myself to take photos of people I don't know. In fact, I think it's rather rude when tourists think that having a fancy SLR camera with a big lens somehow gives them license to jam it into people's faces on the street. Even the sensitive approach, of asking people politely before you photograph them, seems too intrusive for me. The people you see photos of are usually people I've been hanging out with. I'm even a little bit nervous when taking pictures on the street and catching people in them; in plenty of places people are sensitive about this, and I really do want to respect that. The result? Photo albums that can't quite capture the spirit that I find so captivating in West Africa - the pulsing blast of colour and noise and people out in the streets. It's a shame.

Beyond the friendly faces, my albums also avoid showing the poorer sides of the communities I visit, especially in the cities where some of the slums can be fairly horrific. There's something obviously voyeuristic about slum tourism, but there are plenty of times that I haven't been able to take a picture of something I simply consider pretty, architecturally interesting, or unique, because local people have (or would have) objected. In Guinea, this was actually a law; you were not to take pictures of anything that was"damaging to the image of the nation abroad". Applied strictly, that might prohibit any and all photography in settled areas, which are rarely free of squalor. I don't take it that far, but I do try and err on the side both of caution and of respect. It's perfectly reasonable that local people don't want their home portrayed as a dump. It doesn't help that the prevailing aesthetic sense in West Africa doesn't put a whole lot of value on age or heritage. I've had a devil of a time trying to explain to locals just why I might want to photograph a particular crumbling house, or just why I think an old, leaky, tin-roofed Krio shack is particularly charming. I think it's my responsibility here to let their judgments stand.

Finally, sometimes in more touristy areas, running around with a camera seems to be a license for people to demand money from you. Of course, if I were taking a picture of something that was theirs, I wouldn't mind, but in Ghana especially opportunistic young tough guys often decide to try and get me to pay for taking a snap of the street, or the hills (which I doubt they own). In those cases, I just don't bother.

In many ways, these rules are different for photojournalists. To my mind, some trampling of local sensibilities might have to be done for the greater good of getting a story out into the world. But only sometimes. There's no reason that journalists should be exempted from the need to make moral judgments about what they're taking pictures of. For most of us mere mortal tourists, though, the calculation is a lot clearer. Giving our Facebook friends a good picture of African life is by no means worth stepping on anyone's dignity.

Happily, there's a simple solution for those of you who'd like to see West Africa in all its depth: come on over!

Peace
Josh

Whee!

2009-10-14T14:00:00.002-04:00

I'm looking forward to December 30th, 2009 more than any other day I can remember. Let me tell you why.

I suppose the story starts in April, 2008, with just about the best first date I've ever had. An afternoon of barefoot studying in the park turned into a blur of conversation, park-wandering,
gallery-visiting, and general joyfulness. In fact, that's not a bad summary of quite a bit of what our relationship came to involve.

To describe exactly how or why Lauren and I fell in love goes well beyond the boundaries of this blog, of our shared senses of privacy, and quite likely of my abilities as a writer. It happened, I'm incredibly happy, and I honestly can no longer imagine feeling otherwise.

"So what the hell are you doing out alone in West Africa?" might be your next question. It's a pretty good one - one I've asked myself countless times. I'll try, now, to share the answer. I am, of course, only sharing my story here. Lauren has her own, and I don't want to tell it for her.

This trip, for me, was never a matter of idle dreaming. I knew I would go. I knew it six years ago, sitting and reading the other sections of "Africa on a Shoestring" on countless quiet African evenings during the year I spent on the road between high school and university. The knowledge of it was the carrot dangling from a stick at the end of university. It was never just something I would do - It was something that defined who I was. Who I wanted to be. Independant. Worldly. Unafraid. Invincible. The usual bag of ego.

Lauren and I talked about this, quite early in fact. Our relationship has always been characterized on an ability to talk openly and honestly about important things, and this was certainly an important thing. But what can you really say? It feels pretty presumptuous, a month or two into a relationship, to start talking about what you'll do in a year. In any case, I don't think I really presented it as something that was going to change - and Lauren couldn't miss how important travel is to me.

And it is important. I sometimes forget that many of the people who I now know haven't known me long enough to see how travel has fit into my life. I've been incredibly lucky - by now I've seen more than 50 countries, and spent a total of something like 3 years out of my 24 out on the road in some way or other. I'm always dreaming of the next trip, and the one after that, and the one after that. Traditionally, time alone on the road has also been the time when I've taken good hard looks at my life and its direction.

All this history came to a head during a stressful day in the winter of 2008, when I logged on to Travelocity and Ryanair and bought myself an air ticket to Morocco, leaving the first of May. There was no return date; anywhere from a year to 2 years was in the cards. Future plans become a hell of a lot more tangible when you have a receipt for them. That receipt kept my head on my shoulders, but it was also a ticket to a conversation that Lauren and I had avoided until then. As the winter rambled on, we finally sat down and talked it out.

It was hard, but as always, it was an open and frank conversation. At the time, it seemed clear to both of us that we wouldn't keep the relationship going while I was away. The real question was how and when it would end. Looking back in hindsight, with all the benefit of fully acknowledged feeling, it's impossible to put myself back into the shoes that sat on the couch that evening and joined in the decision to end the relationship then and there. At that time, though, and under those circumstances, it was the right decision to make. We didn't want to split up at the airport gate.

The next few months were one mighty weird emotional grey area. We both saw other people. We both chatted about it quite comfortably - and I don't think, in either case, our lack of discomfort was feigned. At the same time, we remained very close and very conscious of the fact that very soon, we'd be very far apart. As all this was happening, life kept up its accelerating roll towards the end of term and departure day. You all know how fast time goes by when there are more
things to do than moments in the day. There wasn't a hell of a lot of time to think about the deep end that we were about to dive from.

So we dived. I got on the plane. And I knew pretty early that something was different. I stopped in Oxford to see my old friend Stef. We don't see each other too often these days, and as we talked about the future, our plans, our dreams, I realized that the person she was talking about - the Josh that would never settle anywhere, that wanted only to vagabond around the world doing good and having adventures - that that version of me had been quietly but completely
replaced. She picked this up quickly enough.

"So when are you going to go home?" she asked me. I answered honestly "When I run out of money. When I get tired of it. Or when I start to miss Lauren so much that I can't stand it"

Just saying that out loud for the first time was a relief. Feeling something is one thing. Admitting it is sometimes much harder work. It wasn't ever far from my mind from then on. And so I got back on the plane, and headed of for Morocco. For a couple weeks, I was immersed -
immersed in the sights and sounds and smells of travel, immersed in getting my travel legs back, immersed in conversation with my friend Mike, who had joined me there at the beginning of the trip.

Soon enough, though, I was travelling alone, and it was ponderin' time. After months of being so busy I sometimes could barely think, suddenly I had hours and hours to do just that. To sort through all the mess that five busy years had left in my head. To try and get a handle on who I was now, in May 2009.

As I cruised from place to place in Morocco, living out my daydreams, something weird was happening. I was lonely. Understand that I've never, ever felt lonely before on the road - even when I've been weeks without speaking more than a few words of English, or months without a
familiar face. Never truly lonely.

It felt, honestly, like I was failing as a traveller. It didn't help that Morocco can be a difficult place to make friends with locals, many of whom are out to snag cash from you, but it was more than that. It was a kind of general malaise that had me honestly worried - brave face or not - that for some reason I wasn't cut out for this anymore. Cue soul-searching, round 2!

All through this, I'd been in regular touch with Lauren in a series of long, rambling emails of the most comforting kind. I started to really depend on my visits to the internet cafe to rally my spirits a bit. She had long ago become the person towards whom I directed my own internal narrative when I was seeing anything especially beautiful.

And so I thought. And I thought. And I thought some more. And all that thinking? Completely fucking unnecessary. I knew exactly what was going on. I was in love. I was here. She was there. This was a huge problem.

It seemed pretty reasonable for her to assume that in flying thousands of miles to lose myself in Africa for an undefined period of time, I wasn't exactly concerned with our long-term future. It seemed pretty reasonable that she would move on. Quite unreasonably, this scared the shit out of me. I remember the specific mountain I was staring at, out a window of a Moroccan bus, when I realized that this was what had me tied up in knots. I still agonized for weeks more about what to do.

I wanted to tell her. Of course I did. But what would I be saying? That she should wait like some seaman's wife for me to come home? I worried that it would seem like I was coming right out of left field - I'm well aware that my mental and emotional clock was running a lot faster than normal, that each day held a week or a month's worth of reflection in it, and I wasn't sure that that I wasn't building castles in the air about our relationship itself, about how strong it was, about the future it had.

But that wasn't the only obstacle. It took a while longer to realize that what I really needed to do was face up to my own dreams. Dreams and fears aren't too different, I think. Between the two of them, they lay down the boundaries of our lives, of the possible, of the desirable. We talk all the time about facing our fears, and most of us either have to, or choose to at some time or other. Facing our dreams, though, is a little bit more rare.

I had strung together my entire personal story, the narrative that I used to hold myself together, on this vision of myself as the rugged, independant traveller. At some point, though - and it was my falling in love with Lauren that occasioned this - who I actually was veered well away from who I told myself I was. When we talk about this sort of thing, we tend to speak in tragic tones of "abandoning our dreams." This is a vile little mental trap. My desire not to abandon my dreams of the vagabond life had kept me from realizing what was really going on: that those dreams weren't being replaced, they were being enriched. That my old dreams of travel no longer meant anything without the newer ones, of a home and a family and a life full of art, music, and meaning. Of settling into a way of doing some good for the world around me. Of planting a garden. Of sharing this all with someone. I can't imagine travel not being a huge part of this - but I also can no longer imagine becoming one of the people I often run into on the road, people who've spent 20 or 40 years in a series of dingy foreign bars.

West Africa wasn't going anywhere. Lauren quite possibly was. So when I finally screwed up my courage at a Mauritanian internet cafe and wrote to tell her how I felt, I quite honestly said that building our life together, not wandering around global back alleys, was what mattered to me. I said it, I meant it, and I mean it even more so now - but I don't think I could have said it honestly without spending some time away first. It's a pretty damn expensive way of making important discoveries about my life, but there's not much I can do about that!

In any case, waiting for her reply, I was still a big ball of nervous. I think I wore a couple new grooves into the Nouakchott streets, and puffed more than a healthy amount of hookah at the corner cafes. Since I'm writing this post, I think you can probably gather that the answer I got was a good one. A very, very good one.

There was still, of course, the question of what exactly we should do about it. Those thousands of miles were still there. I was willing to come home right then and there, but I won't lie and say that that was on the top of my list. I asked Lauren if she might want to come join me out here, and to my utter joy, she started to think about it. First of all, though, we had to wait a little, to try this whole thing on for size, to realize how much each of us had been restraining ourselves for the sake of the other. We needed to see whether we could take being apart, and if so, for how long.

There was a mighty barrage of emails, but it swiftly became clear that that just wasn't going to do it. Off I bounced to a little corner store in Senegal, and returned with a cell phone. International calls from African lines are wonderfully cheap, and there have only been a couple evenings since then that we haven't spoken. Without this little gadget, I would have been on a plane long ago. With it, we fell into a rhythm that both of us get a lot out of, and we were able to start thinking of the next few months.

I started this post talking about December 30th, 2009. Now I think I can explain why I'm so excited about it. On that day, I'll be picking Lauren up at the airport in Bamako, Mali, where we'll spend 3.5 weeks travelling. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.

You have to understand why this is so special for me. It isn't just because I'll be seeing the woman I love for the first time in 8 months (though that would be enough!). It isn't just because she was completely excited to jump on the West Africa shoestring travel express with me. It's also because Mali is perhaps the longest-running daydream of all my travel dreams. Holy crap, indeed.

Mali and our plans for it deserve a separate post. Both Lauren and I, though, found ourselves caught by the guidebook's section introducing Malian culture, and particularly its last line:

"Above all, Malians are a deeply optimistic people who love to dance. They love it even more if you dance with them"

A more fitting place to go, I cannot think of . Nor anyone else I would want to go there with. Of course, there is still a long while between now and then (11 weeks - trust me, we're counting), and beingapart is far from easy. I started out thinking that it would be harder for Lauren - who is still in K-W, amongst our shared friends, having lots of experiences that we used to share - then it would be for me, but I'm no longer so sure of that.

If there's one single foundation to my relationship with Lauren, it's the shared joy we take at the discovery of all the beauty in the world around us. Well, what else do I do with my days than spend them doing just that? Not being able to share more than a small portion of it properly over the phone is incredibly frustrating sometimes.

We definitely have our days when it's rough. But by and large, we get by. Indeed, just because "absence makes the heart grow fonder" is a trite expression doesn't make it any less true. I'd like to think that it's not just deprivation, but also the chance to step back and think about just how and how much a future with someone makes you happy. Not bad.

In any case, both of us have certainly built up a long list of things to say to each other, long enough that I'm cheerfully worried that all the long hours on buses (and camels, and out in the Sahara!!) won't nearly be enough to get through 8 months of accumulated beauty. But such problems, I'm glad to have.

I think the title of this post actually expresses how I feel about life right now a good bit better than all these paragraphs:

WHEE!!

Banana Pancakes

2009-10-12T13:38:00.002-04:00

They're tasty things, banana pancakes. They're also symbols of a culture, one that's almost completely absent from West African travel: backpacking. In other parts of the world, youngish people with absurdly large packs and absurdly low budgets have created a very visible subculture that changes very little from country to country. Sometimes they take over a street, sometimes a whole neighbourhood.

Thamel in Kathmandu. Khao San Road in Bangkok. Paharganj in New Delhi. I've stayed in all of them and can testify that the mix of hostels, cheap hotels, cybercafes and restaurants serving up spaghetti (and banana pancakes of course!) is pretty consistent. I remember meeting a fellow in Bangkok once who was actually there to attend a conference on backpacker culture - held, of course, on Khao San Road. This culture also has a pretty strong foothold in South America and even in the Middle East and East Africa. Even where the density of backpackers doesn't support a traveller's ghetto, there is often just one hotel that they congregate at, and businesses to serve them spring up around it.

Let me be clear that I by no means dislike this. I can be a big snob about travelling, but backpacker-oriented places do provide a ton of useful things. They often have message boards and info centres catering to poor travellers like me. There are book exchanges and Western movies on DVD, and other travellers to swap stories (read: drink) with. I've always thought it's not a bad thing to have this around. Every traveller can choose whether or not to burst out of the bubble, and if they really want to drink smoothies with white people all day, well, it's not really my business. I was stuck in Kathmandu once for more than a week, and would be lying if I didn't say that a nightly dose of lasagna was a nice change after two lonely months in China.

In West Africa, I've rarely had that choice. Morocco gets plenty of tourists, but I stayed largely away from where they stayed, as the places in guidebooks were too pricey. Mauritania gets plenty of wealthy French people, but not in the summertime. I pretty much had the place to myself. Ditto with much of Senegal, except for in the south, where I did bump into a few backpackers (and book exchanges!). From then on, though - through Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Cote D'Ivoire - I saw not a single other backpacker. The cheap places to stay were brothels more than hostels, and I passed my evenings drinking beer with locals and reading in my room.

I didn't particularly mind this, and certainly got used to it. The result? Ghana is a shock. I'm in Cape Coast right now, the centre for tourism along the coastal beaches-and-castles circuit, and even though it's low season, there are plenty of backpackers (and richer tourists) about. There are definite signs of smoothies, vegetarian cafes, and probably a banana pancake somewhere, if I were so inclined. There is also, wierdly for me, company. I spent a night drinking wine with a dreadlocked Austrian fellow from one hotel, and am heading off to a national park tomorrow with a Polish girl from my current one. I toured a castle in a group that included at least 25 white folks, which was a mighty change from the fleeting glimpses of them passing by in NGO landcruisers. My throat actually hurts - I've gotten used to spending long hours silently, and a couple days of hanging out with other backpackers has given the ol' vocal cords quite a workout.

In many ways, Ghana, with its developed backpacker trail, will be an exception. I don't expect to see the same number of foreigners anywhere else other than (possibly) Mali, where they also have quite the scene. It is certainly convenient - but I think I'll stick to my rice, sauce, and streetside beers.

Peace
Josh

One region, two planets

2009-10-02T10:28:00.002-04:00

The first thing I thought when I got to Monrovia, Liberia? "Yep. It's Monrovia all right." Deep, I know. The thing is, Monrovia is the first big West African city I've been to where my own mental image of the place before arriving was remotely accurate. Dakar? More sprawling than I expected. Freetown? Much prettier. Monrovia? Well, it was perhaps a bit harder to find bullet holes than I thought it would be.

Otherwise, it was pretty close to what your mental image of Monrovia probably is. Lots of crumbling buildings, burnt out war damage, garbage in the streets, and a whole collection of dubious smells. The sea coast was there, but you could rarely see it. About what you'd expect from a city that, until 2003, had been a war zone for 20 years straight.

I should stop here, though, lest it seem that I didn't like Monrovia. I actually had a great time there. It's certainly an odd place to be, as a backpacker. The city gets a ton of foreigners, but I'd be surprised if there are more than 1 or 2 tourists a year. The rest are there for shady business deals, to work for the UN, or to do aid work. In all cases, they create a market for accomodation and resteraunts that's way out of my budget. The cheapest regular hotel in town runs close to 65 American dollars, and I wasn't having it. Thanks to a recommendation from an online message board, though, I found my way to Monrovia's only budget option... the illustrious Princess Motel.

When I showed up, it took 15 minutes to explain that I wanted a room not for an hour, but for 3 nights. This caused much confusion and phone calls with the boss, but after a bit of cajoling, I was happily paying 15 bucks a night for a little concrete cell with a thin mattress and an amount of nightly noise (this being a brothel) that could wake the dead. Thankfully, one of the fistfights broke the stereo... To their credit, the staff adapted well, and even held a little conference with the resident prostitutes explaining that I wasn't there for their services. They gave me sulky looks for the next 3 days, but stopped pounding on my door.

The city itself was a pretty pleasant place to wander, aesthetics aside. I walked to and fro around much of it, stopping to chat with an endless parade of incredibly welcoming Liberians, whose Americanized African english was a joy in and of itself. It's quite a pleasant way to pass a day, with everyone thanking you for coming and talking about their hope for the future of the country.

Other than wandering about and drinking the 750 ml liberian monster beers, there is precious little else to do in Monrovia, so I followed the lead of other white folk before me, and ate like a pig. Monrovia's an excellent place to do this - the prices are high, but so is the quality. After months of mostly rice and sauce, sitting down in an air-conditioned sushi bar for a feast with a beer and a fine espresso after was pretty close to orgasmic. Same goes for the next day, when I chowed down on cheap and delicious Indian food (the UN soldiers in Liberia are Indian, Nepali, and Bangladeshi, making for a happy tummy for me as restaurants pop up to serve them).

After a few days there, I set out on the road for Cote D'Ivoire. Another standout characteristic of Liberia is how little of it is accessible by road, especially in the rainy season, so I stopped where I could along the reasonably good road, sitting around for a few days in the little towns of Ganta and Gbarnga. From Ganta, though, it was go time - Cote D'Ivoire called.

This was, by far, the dodgiest journey I have undertaken (or will undertake) on this trip. The northern half of Cote D'Ivoire has been outside of government control since the 2004 civil war, and when I reached the border just before closing time, the rebel soldiers didn't even look at my visa. Most of them were illiterate, in any case. Let me not imply that they were unfriendly, though - they were actually reasonably nice people, demanding bribes with a smile on their faces. I got through with a US$1 bribe, paid mostly because I had no other use for the bill.

From the border, though, it was a journey that was a whole combination of things I didn't really want to be doing: riding a motorbike, on a slippery mud road, in the dusk and dark, in rebel territory, uncertain of who was lurking in the bush, with a giant thunderstorm approaching. Grrmph. Sometimes, though, you have no choice - and I at least had a travel companion, a Liberian UN staffer who had masochistically chosen to travel overland. There were plenty of checkpoints along the way, which I somehow made it through without paying a bribe - a mix of backslapping jokes and willingness to snatch your passport from the soldier's hands can work wonders, I say. The journey to Danane passed without incident, but it wasn't without a good bit of worry.

Still, things swiftly looked up. I got my SIM card and a good meal, and got my passport stamped the next morning at the police station, without a single handout. I finally was forced to cough up at the checkpoints along the road to the regional capital of Man, but I at least was able to bargain them to locals' rates - the rebel soldiers even happily broke bills and gave me change! Such efficiency. Never did they even pretend to look at my passport - that was for the government suckers down south.

Man, the regional capital, was once a big tourism centre. It's in an incredibly beautiful setting, and the villages around are renowned for their dances and other cultural attractions. Since the war, though, not so much. Indeed, there was some palpable hostility towards white people there, most of which disappeared when I explained I wasn't French (the rebels, and most other Ivoirians, have some distrust of the French - hostility against French settlers led a lot of them to leave in 2004, though tons have come back). In general, the situation was tense, with elections coming in November that everyone worries will bring a return to conflict. I was watching my back a bit in town, but it was a pretty pleasant place to hang out, otherwise, with all the joys of Francophone Africa - croissants and espressos, sipped at sidewalk cafes full of rebel commanders with aviator glasses, berets, boots, and gleaming pistols. Surreal.

Man was expensive to stay in, so I booked it into government territory the next day on the bus (a scheduled bus! On a paved road!) to Yamoussoukro. Yamoussoukro was the home village of the first President, Felix Houphet-Boigny, and he made it capital of the country. Ministries? Nope. Offices? Nope. Business? Not much. Just a surreal collection of 6-lane highways to nowhere, weird architectural experiments, and the Basilica de Notre Dame de Paix, which the President had built at staggering cost in the late 80s - It's bigger than St. Peters! Walking around it was a bloody weird experience in itself, sitting as it does in the middle of a desolate field, surrounded only by gardens slightly larger than the Vatican. Odd - and it sparked a discussion I'd like to raise later. For now, though, the narrarative calls.

I spent a couple days there, then hit the road to Abidjan, the real capital. What a contrast to Monrovia it was when I rolled in, on a 6-lane freeway, with dozens of skyscrapers in the distance. Cote D'Ivoire may be suffering now, but for some time it was the most prosperous country in the region, and Abidjan got a ton of money poured into it. The Downtown, Le Plateau, is pretty shocking if you've been rolling around the region for a while. Fancy resteraunts, malls, skyscrapers, all that. It's not completly un-African, though; there's still plenty of street chaos, and plenty of city outside of downtown.

I've had a chance to experience more of that than I normally would thanks to the fact that I'm couchsurfing here with Erikson, an affable Ivoirian computer consultant who's putting me up in his apartment in the burbs. It's great fun to stay in a regular neighbourhood (his is all middle-class small apartments and the like) and cruise the town with him on his rounds. Tonight we're hitting some reggae with his friends; Abidjan is the big spot for reggae in Africa. I'm looking forward to it. After some recovery time in the morning, though, it'll be onward for me. I'm headed for Ghana, and don't want to get stuck with slow sunday schedules. A long sit on the beach is in the near future, and it's nice.

So, for once, this journal is actually caught up! I'm sure it won't last, but for now
Peace
Josh

Long roads

2009-09-29T14:04:00.004-04:00

I was originally going to start this entry by linking my Guinea and Sierra Leone narratives a little by a discussion of political culture. I was going to say how stark the difference was between Guinea and Sierra Leone on this front. I was going to talk about the pervasive spirit of resignation in Guinea, especially when contrasted against Sierra Leone, where people complain endlessly, seemingly because they still see hope of change.

I still stand by those impressions. But right now, all I can do is raise a glass to the thousands of people who gathered in a Conakry stadium and told the military regime that they didn't want crazy Captain Camara to stand in the elections. The glass goes even higher for the more than 150 people who were killed when the soldiers opened fire.

The saddest thing about this is that I'm not sure their sacrifice will accomplish much. I hope it will. But the feeling in Guinea when I was there was an almost obssessive need to see some good in the Camara regime, all evidence to the contrary. We all laughed at the hours of paranoid rants that took over the TV every night, but we all hoped that some kind of corner might be turned. I worry that people will simply resign themselves now to yet another tinpot dictator. Let's see if we perhaps can help a bit, either by keeping Guinea in the news, or by pressuring the Canadian government to make some international noise. Unfortunately, I can't help but be a bit pessimistic about the chance of success. I loved Guinea, and it's people - but it often felt like a society slowly stagnating its way downward.

Cross the Sierra Leone border, and that impression changes quickly. I spent a while trying to figure out why. Some of it was symbolic - Sierra Leonean towns are (for West Africa) shockingly tidy places, full of billboards building awareness of AIDS or peacebuilding, or what have you. Part flowed from long talks about politics with everyone (especially taxi drivers, who are the same everywhere), where I got a sense of profound annoyance that things weren't developing nearly as fast as people expect that they could. Some of it was an awareness that Sierra Leone has such obvious potential, especially as a tourism destination. Some of it was just intangible - hotel rooms where things were more likely to actually work, prices that hadn't shot up since my guide was written, etc, etc. In any case, Sierra Leone makes a solid first impession.

Funny, considering that the first thing I had to do was bribe a police officer for an entry stamp. The relevant officer at the border being "away", they sent me to the Police Station in Kabala, the first town where I stopped, where I had to part with 10,000 Leones (about 4 dollars) to hear that thunk in my passport. This was on top of the 15000 that I had paid in bribes at various stages of the motorbike journey in from Guinea - and according to my driver, we got off lightly. The cops in Sierra Leone are well known in the region for being a bit grabby, and so they were - though it wouldn't be until I hit the road out to Liberia that they tried to hit me up again. Unlike Guinea, the place is no republic of checkpoints.

My first stop was the town of Kabala, which remains my favourite upcountry town - set in gorgeous hills that I spent a while scrambling about, with plenty of good eats and small shops around. I sat around town sucking up the local gossip (in English, my oh my!) and getting my head around the partially-English rhythms of Krio, which would throw me off for the rest of my time there.

From Kabala, I made my way to Makeni, the provincial capital and another pleasant-ish town (Sierra Leonean towns being a little bit better laid out and built than their Guinean or Senegalese counterparts). It was just a night in Makeni, though, before I sped myself off on the long, dubious voyage to Outamba-Kilimbi national park.

I say dubious, because in the rainy season, this one's a doozy! The first phase was 6 hours to cover the 50 mile road to Kamakwie, crushed into the hard benches of a poda-poda (minibus). From there, it was another 16 miles by motorbike, which involved a river crossing that would normally be done by ferry. The river, though, was running too high for the ferry, so we loaded ourselves, our motorbike, and several other people into a dubious dugout canoe and were paddled shakily across. Arriving un-drowned and somehow not toppled from the motorbike, I spent 3 nights in the park, taking canoe trips and hikes with the guides, watching the monkeys, and mixing myself camp cocktails from cheap sachets of gin and local ginger juice. Animal sightings, other than monkeys, were minimal - the elephants and hippos are mighty elusive in the wet. It was still a phenomenal place to hang out for a couple of days.

From there, I caught a moto all the way back to Makeni, which my rear end thanked me for (poda-podas being the only method of long-distance African transport I truly loathe), and one excellent bush taxi ride down a great road later and the mountains of the Freetown peninsula were rising in front of me.

I got lucky with my arrival. I would stay in Freetown almost a week, and sunshine was mighty rare indeed. When I rolled in and was buzzing through the backstreets to my hotel, though, the whole city was bathed in golden afternoon light.

For reflections on life in Freetown, I strongly encourage you to head over to Mike Brown's excellent series of posts at his blog, 42.6. He does the deeper issues far more justice, with far better writing, than I can manage. I, then, will keep my reflections on Freetown nice and subjective. So, what is Freetown, to a tourist?

The short answer is, phenomenal. Unlike so many African cities, whose only shreds of character come from the remnants of colonial administrative buildings, Freetown's backstreets are visually fascinating. There are tons of old houses, built by the Krio (settlers, too, but freed slaves) in the 1800s. Central Freetown feels like a city with a history, more even than Dakar does. The setting for the city is also pretty damn gorgeous, with big green mountains running into the ocean (the only place in West Africa that this happens). I spent a good while wandering up into the hills for some glorious views over the city. There is a huge length of beach in the city itself, along the edge where most of the foreigners congregate - but Lumley beach is nothing special, and I chose to spend most of my city time downtown. I stayed in an area that became an open-air food fair a night, with piles of grilled meat and delicious snacks up by candlelight. Between that, and kicking it on the hotel balcony, watching the street craziness, I was set.

Freetown is a bit of an odd place. I saw more white people there than I have in quite some while -but only once did I see one on foot. All the rest of the time, they were driving by in SUVs. There's a vast crowd of development workers, mining people, and other folks in town but (with my utmost apologies to the hard-working non-SUV people at JHR), they definitely seem to live in an extra-strenght bubble. Double-sad, since Freetown is a phenomenally safe city to wander around.

I had visa runs to do and plenty of errands to run, but I did manage to make the 30 minute hop out into the hills outside of town to check out the Tacugama chimpanzee sanctuary, which takes in rescued pet chimps from around the country and prepares them for the wild. Or at least theoretically - they have yet to rerelease any, and that part of their plans seemed pretty seat-of-the pants. Nonetheless, the lengths to which some of the staff went during the war, running rebel lines to get supplies to the chimps, were pretty damn heroic. I arrived just too late for their morning tour, which was a blessing in disguise, as I killed the wait time by following some hiking trails they had marked out through old krio villages (with churchs that could be in Southern Ontario) and round to waterfalls and the like. Excellent times.

Finally tearing myself away from the delights of Freetown, I headed down the peninsula to little Bawbaw village, about a kilometre up the coast from River No.2, the most famous beach in Sierra Leone. The wonders of the off-season got me a beachside guest house on Bawbaw beach (gorgeous!) for 20 bucks a day, all meals included. And what meals they were. I haven't eaten so well since I left home. A typical dinner was: one huge fresh crab. One huge fresh sole. Couscous with peanut sauce. A whole papaya, sliced. I was in blissful pain for a couple of days, once of which I passed on the white sands of river 2 itself - which is, indeed, quite spectacular.

A complex plan to hop a fishing boat from the village of Tombo foundered on the boat's decision to not exist that week, so I found myself poda-podaing to the city of Bo, which was a surprisingly pleasant place to hang out, drink a cold star beer with the locals, and celebrate the end of Ramadan by stuffing myself silly. My onward plans from Bo were also foiled by the absence of boats, as after a couple hours by motorbike to get to the jumping off point for Tiwai Island animal sanctuary, we arrieved at the office to find that for the first time in 10 years, the river was running high enough to close the park. Nuts. So, instead of a couple days of monkey chasing, I got to see the obscure back roads from Bo to Kenema! Not the greatest deal, but not bad.

I only stayed one night in Kenema, at an especially dubious disco-hotel which kept me from much sleep (but did provide a parade of prostitutes to knock on my door, oi). Kenema is a diamond town, and not an especially lovely place by any standard, so I was happy to hit the road for the Liberian border in the morning. The road out, as the road in, was a doozy of mud and mess, but we reached the border town by 5 PM. I didn't feel like trying to make Monrovia that day, so I crashed in a cheap border hotel and was glad of a blissful night's sleep.

And that, there, brings the Sierra Leone narrative to a close. I'm trying hard to hold back for a second from a million digressions, so look back here soon for a Liberian catch-up.
Peace
Josh

Mmm... Books

2009-09-15T12:21:00.004-04:00

One of the many reasons I loved Freetown was just around the cornerfrom my hotel. A whole downtown street full of used booksellersstocking loads of English books. The going rate for a good paperbackedition of something good? About 5000 leones, or $2. I am currentlyburied in "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy, and by the timeI left Freetown my backpack was weighing me down something fierce.
Books, you see, are a rare, expensive, and quickly consumed commodityfor me. I'm a reading fiend. Always have been. Even during school, mymost common way of avoiding my readings was to, well, read. Oftenheavy non-fiction, since with scarce time to read for pleasure,literature always seemed to be getting bumped from the lineup infavour of nifty ideas. At home I always have a stack of books waitingon my shelves, a newspaper every morning, and an Economist every week.These things are very important to me.
In theory, solo travel with its aforementioned piles of time to fillis an excellent time to catch up on reading, and I certainly use it assuch. I do get plenty of reading done - in 4ish months on the road,I'm well past the 40 book mark - but this dream scenario crashes intoa wall of practicality in a number of ways.
The biggest problem is my reading speed. I've learned to gobble bookspretty fast, and if I'm not careful I'll tear through a whole book inone sitting. While this, in itself, is pretty fun, when you have asmall backpack (and don't want it to weigh a ton), you can't wellcarry a library with you. I've often had 6 books with me at one time,counting guides and French dictionary. In a 35 litre pack with all myother stuff, this is a heck of a lot.
Second, of course, is availability. English books are not easily foundin largely Francophone West Africa. I'm a good scrounger of streetstands by now, and I know to stock up in Anglophone enclaves, butweight limits make me dependant on finding a steady flow rather thanrare stockpiles.
My final limit is expense. New books are generally way outside mybudget. They often cost as much here as at home (around $12). If that$12 only gets me 5 or 6 hours of reading time, It'd be cheaper to goto an internet cafe and read there! Of course, books are for all thetimes when cyber cafes are not at hand, but still... The exception tothis rule are Penguin Classics, staple of travellers everywhere. Evenwhen you can't find anything else in English, you can usually trackdown a pile of Bronte, Austen, and the like for $3ish a pop. The paperis thin, the print small, and (in the new editions) 100% recycled. Mysaviours.
And so it goes that this trip, like other before it, is giving me achance to work my way through the classical canon. The literarybackdrop for my travels all over the world has often, and oddly, beenVictorian England or 19th Century Russia. More of the first, though -for some reason, although Penguin has a wide selection, it's far morelikely to produce DH Lawrence or Jane Austen than Dostoeyevsky. Thismakes me sad, as Russians are my favourite authors from that time. Along series of Indian train rides even got me through War and Peace!Still, beggars can't be choosers here.
In the end, my literary diet looks something like this: 40% classics,20% new or more topical reading (often begged from other travellers ortraded for at hotels) and about 40% crap. The crap largely comes infrom hotel bookshelves, which seem to be the dumping ground for everyhorrid novel our culture can produce. It's a literary Chinese buffet:cheap, filling, and pretty much devoid of nutritional value. I assureyou, it was not by choice that I read "Confessions of a Shopaholic"one evening in Nouakchott.
When I find a hotel with a shelf full of English books, though, myrestraint crumbles. I can read as much as I want! No rationing! Iusually read all of them before I leave. I regularly steal from them,too, although I think I usually improve them by leaving somethingbetter behind in the place of whatever I'd just purloined. In anycase, these hotels are few and far between, especially once you leavebehind the rudimentary backpacker trail that meanders through Senegal.
Rarely do I fuss about technology, but there are definitely days whenI dream that I had with me one of those e-book doodads, loaded up withevery book I might want to read over the trip.
But no. It's an addiction, and I need to be wary that books don't takeover my life. I didn't come halfway around the world to read, and Ithink if I did have access to unlimiteds supplies, I might give in alittle too often to the temptation to hermit myself when stuck indead-end towns, and miss out on the random interactions which are suchjolly good fun.
Just as I don't want books to dominate my agenda, I also don't wantthem to dominate my perceptions of a place. This is why I'm always abit leery of books about places I am. At all costs I avoid straighttravel narratives, and I'm even a bit cautious about books on thesocial issues or culture of a country, books that I think are greatbefore or after a visit, but not necessarily during one. The familydramas of Victorian aristocrats are incongruous companions indeed, butthat incongruity keeps them from warping my perceptions of, say,Guinea.
The exception here for me is works by local authors. Usually I can'tafford to buy them, as they go at Western prices. Used copies, though,are my friend. I'm well aware that local authors have as much theirown take on the culture as any foreigner, but I can mentally slot itin as part of my efforts to understand what makes local people tick,rather then what white people have said on the subject.
To wit, I just finished reading Camara Laye's "L'enfant Noir", hisautobiographical story about growing up in colonial Guinea. I read itwhile in Guinea, and rather enjoyed being filled in on the details ofplaces and practices I had seen and only partially grasped. I alsoenjoyed it because it represented a milestone for me: the first timeI've read a novel in French and really enjoyed it, from a purelyliterary perspective. A lot of that has to do with it being written ina simple, clean, realist style that is a lot easier for someone of myrusty French to grapple with. The story also provided enough contextfor me to puzzle out what I didn't understand without continuallydiving for my dictionary. I still missed words, and once in a whiledidn't get a sentence, but never missed a whole passage.
Contrast that to my first attempt at reading in French, OusmaneSembane's "Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu", a story about tradition andmodernity set around the Dakar-Bamako railway. There, knotty grammar,obscure terminology, and a complex structure had me scratching myhead. Way above my reading level - I didn't finish it.
In many ways, French books solve some problems for me. I just finishedPaulo Coelho's "The Alchemist" in French, and it took me much longerthan the 180 pages would have in English. So economical! But my Frenchis still nowhere near the lever where reading it uses the samerelaxing part of the brain as English. For the forseeable future,reading literature in French will remain work.
For the next little while, I have it easy. Sierra Leone and Liberiaare both Anglophone, and I should be able to stash enough books to getme across Cote D'Ivoire and into Anglophone Ghana. After that, though,it's a big wall o' French: Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger.Not until Nigeria will I hit the Anglosphere again. Best keep theDictionaire close.

Peace

Josh

Monotasking

2009-09-12T06:56:00.005-04:00

I cannot for the life of me remember the last time I was seriously bored. This is somewhat surprising. For all the romanticism of heading of on African Adventures, if there's one constant to the style of travel I do (low budget, public transport, long stay), it's the amount of time you have on your hands.

Sometimes, you're waiting for something - most often for passengers to fill your bush taxi. I've had 5-minute waits and 36 hour waits, but the average seems to be about 3 hours if headed somewhere smallish (and I often am).

It's not only waiting, though. As a solo traveller, I simply have a lot of time to fill. Take today - or rather, take September 8th, the day I scribbled this blog entry on paper for future typing. I was spending the morning on the porch of my little guest shack at Outamba-Kilimbi National Park in Sierra Leone, waiting for the rain to stop. My expedition there lasted a total of 4 days: a full day to get in from Makeni over rough roads, 2 days in the park, and a day back out to Freetown. In those 4 days, how much time did I spend "doing things" in an organized sense? About 8 hours or so, going out on canoe trips and hikes with the guides. As the only guest (as I so often am in this region in this season), that left plenty of hours to take care of.

The same happens in towns. Although there I can find locals to hang out with over beer or tea, there really is only so much small talk possible (or desirable) in a day. Even after running my town errands - getting money, say, or attending to endless Birkenstock repairs - there are still plenty of hours to pass.

Some of those extra hours I fill with sleep. I get a lot of it. My typical evening goes someting like this: settling in around 5 for a couple of beers, then heading out at 7 or 7:30 to track down dinner. I usually talk to Lauren on the phone each day around 8:30, but after that I'm often quick to bed - my lights are regularly out by 9:30 or 10. When you're out solo, going out clubbing or elsewise filling the late hours doesn't so much appeal, and also has a way of running up your bills. If I have nowhere specific to go the next day, I usually wake up around 7 or 8. This gives me 9 or even 10 hours of glorious sleep! I justify this in a number of ways.

First, I think I can credit a lot of my physical resilience on this trip to taking good care of my body. I'm essentially never sick, not even a sniffle, even though I eat and drink without much attention to clean water or washed and cooked food. I recover quickly from even the most bruising bush taxi ride or brutal hike. In short, I feel like a million bucks most mornings, a far cry from the last 5 years of university when, even though I think I lived much healthier than most, strong cofffee, red wine, and sleep deprivation were major parts of my lifestyle. I still jump out of bed each day instantly awake and ready to go (freakishly so), but now it's purely by choice, not because of the lingering pressure of having too much to do that day and not enough time.

Sleep or not, though, I still have many daylight hours to fill - and many places I am don't have things you would consider "sights". Therein lies the importance of one of the definitive solo-traveller skills: monotasking.

I remember how much I used to marvel, whilst at the laundromat, at the people who would show up alone, pop in their laundry, and just stare for the next hour. Sometimes they weren't watching their laundry, they were just just picking a spot on the wall and looking at it. This boggled my mind - I was never there without a magazine or a book. I think that I understand much better now that I spend a good portion of my day just looking around and thinking, whether it be through a bush-taxi window or while out on a long hike.

When I'm doing things, they are sequential instead of overlapping. I don't read while I eat. I eat, then read. I don't devote a lot of effort to planning out my errands in town; I just wander, often in circles, and let things come to me.

What a luxury this is!

To be able to take a day and savour every experience individually and without distraction is something few of us have much chance to do, and I do it all day, every day. This savouring casts a lot of new light on old pleasures. Take coffee, for example. I certainly don't need it most days on the road, having kicked the addiction early and now getting adequate sleep. I don't need it, and that's what makes it all the more of a joy to drink. Instead of guzzling a big mug of the stuff with my morning paper, trying to WAKE UP FAST! I sit most mornings and just look around me, enjoying the morning sounds and the light and yes, the caffeine buzz. Most mornings, it's simple black instant nescafe, but I savour each cup more than any of the delicious organic brew I used to stock at home. If you gave me a cup of that right now, my pleasure centres might overload.

Broadly speaking, the same goes for alcohol. Although I was never physically addicted in the mode of coffee, I've always drank a fair bit - and rarely would go for a day without at least a glass of wine in the evening, maybe as I cooked dinner or got my class readings done. Once again, though, the pleasure, and the complexity of that pleasure, that I get from a couple local beers (which are nothing spectacular, objectively) is way more than I used to grab from even a good glass of wine. Cheers to a life free of distractions.

Aside from tippling, you also learn to enjoy being free of mental noise, and having as much time as you like to think about whatever you like. For me, the big share of this time is in bush taxis and other such transpoirt. I chose not to bring an MP3 player very deliberately, to not be cut off from the aural texture of the trip. On long journeys, though, this can mean silence. People don't talk much in cars, and music is rarer than you might think, either because the tape deck is broken or (more likely) the driver needs to be able to hear all the strange noises coming from their exceedingly dubious car.

Add to this many hours on long hill trails and you have a ton of time alone with your thoughts. The tiny bits of trip planning and logistics are dealt with fast (though I spend a lot of time on long-range daydreaming) and you are left to think of whatever the hell you want, with no time limits. Once again, luxury!

This doesn't mean it's all profound pondering, by any means. One day, I spend a while playing the whole album "Americana" by the Offspring through in my head, just because I felt like it (it's a classic road album for me). Another couple hours one day was devoted solely to the many pleasures of LEGO. This is my mind on "shuffle".

I am, though, generally of a thoughtful bent, which makes The Big Things pop up pretty often. Life. Love. The Universe. I've spent a lot of time articulating and refining (or discovering) my views on all of itl Similarly, I find myself hashing out positions on all sorts of philosophical and political issues that I had only vague leanings on before. I also write in my head. Whole blog posts are lurking in there, already composed. Some of them will never get typed up, but most will - and drawing them out beforehand means a lot less money spent on internet time, since they then come out as fast as I can type.

It's a pretty rare opportunity to get to know yourself and the world around you so well, but it doesn't always come easy. I've had plenty of practice travelling alone, and it's definitely a learned skill. Without it, it's easy for solo travel, even to the most beautiful and fascinating places, to become a lonely and boring business. Some of it is a matter of temperment, of course, but a lot isn't. I get better at it as the trip goes on.

So what happens to all this when I get home? I'm not about to pretend that I'll choose to stare at a wall when there's a fresh Economist sitting on the table next to me. I think it's more subtle than that. Perhaps simple a better understanding of what we give up, when we speed up. I've never identified with the "slow" movement, such as it is (Read "In Praise of Slow", the most elitist manifesto ever), but I think that being on the road has reinforced something already a pretty important part of how I hold myself together: the art of appreciating the million small beautiful moments that crop up around us each day. It may become clearest as a travel survival strategy, but it's something we all can use.

Peace

Josh

Keepin' on keepin' on

2009-09-11T11:45:00.002-04:00

So far, my view of Freetown has been largely divided between embassies and internet cafes! So it is when you roll into the big city after time in the sticks; in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and I expect likewise in Liberia, there is almost no internet access upcountry, and what little you might find, rarely works. So it was for me, and so I have about a billion things to do, and umpteen issue-centric blog posts I’d like to put up. Before I let my passions for ranting get ahead of me, though, I think I ought to give y’all a bit of a narrative on where I’ve been, what I’ve seen, and all that other stuff that travel blogs are supposed to be about.

So, where did we leave off? I believe, other than my babble about Conakry, the tale left the rails at the end of my Senegalese sojurn. So, join me on the road to Kedougou, the little city at the centre of Bassari Country in the far Southeast of Senegal. The road there took me through the biggest national park in Senegal, Niakolo-Kioba (I think), and we had some fine roadsight boar sightings, as well as sending a good many monkeys and baboons running from the dust of our bush taxi.

It was for that beautiful drive that I had chosen the Kedougou route into Guinea, knowing full well that it was a tad less traveled than the others. There’s really little to distinguish the few roads, though. They all suck. On all of them, the 200 kms or so takes a minimum of 24 hours to cover. In my case, I waited about 36 hours at the taxi park for the passengers to accumulate. This was frustrating, but not as bad as you might think – taxi parks are good place for cheap food and long chats, so that’s what I did. Still, I was pretty happy when we accumulated the requisite 18 passengers (!) that were to be shoved into the Land cruiser (plus, of course, 5 more riding the luggage on the roof) . I was glad to snag the front seat, though I shared it with a fellow wracked by malaria, who kept passing out in my lap. And so it goes.

The journey was epic. Like passing 26 hours (we made good time) in a land cruiser commercial, fording rivers, climbing rocks, skirting cliffs, and fairly often getting out to walk. With a few hours sleep on the floor of a village mosque, we made Labe in Guinea by late afternoon the next day. Labe is a pleasant enough town, a busy busy market town and administrative centre for the Futa Djalon, the highland area of Guinea. We were already up almost 1000m from the Senegal plains, and it felt glorious. Even more glorious was the profusion of tasty fruit and veg in the markets, the explosion of cheap brochettes on the street, and the Guinean habit for Café Noir, little cups brewed strong in those silver stovetop espresso thingers. Glorious.

My first night in Labe, I actually found the limits of my iron stomach! Here’s how to make Josh do a lot of toilet dashes: take 27 hours exhausting travel. Add one empty stomach. Fill that stomach with 2 cups strong black coffee, a pile of spicy brochettes, 2 big beers, and a whole fresh pineapple. Shake, and wait for Josh to get served. Oi. This was made more amusing by the horror-movie aura of this particular cheapie. Such things are common enough in Guinea, where the nicer hotels are generally placed for quiet (and privacy – officials come with mistresses) out in the outskirts. Josh no likey that sort of thing, so I was often chasing the most basic brothel rooms close to the market.

It was no worries, and I was right as rain the next day. I went and visited a pretty neat environmental education garden, run by a little man named Alpha Bah, who has been practicing and teaching sustainable organic gardening, useful medicinal plants, and environmental stewardship to local schoolkids for something like 25 years. You think the environmental movement has it bad in Canada? Try Guinea, where the government just wants the resources, and most local people see a beautiful mountain and say to you “all we need to do is cut down those trees and we could farm it!.” Knowing full well that the soil would wash away in a couple years, you sigh. And discuss. And understand that for people on the edge of starvation, foresight can be a luxury.

And starvation – or at least hardship – it often is, especially during this time of year, the rains. The verdant lushness of everything disguises the fact that most food plants are still in the ground, drinking up the rains. It’s the farthest point from the last harvest, and poor families on marginal land have tough times about now. You wouldn’t know it to see it though – you have to ask, as I did when having a beer the other week with some agricultural development folk.

From Labe, I headed even higher up to Mali-ville, the highest town in Guinea at about 1300 metres, sitting right near the edge of the escarpment that falls down to Senegal. What loveliness. I stayed at a great little lodge funded by Finland (and with an odd stash of books in Finnish, as well as, to my joy, English novels). It was basically like a cottage – I had a bedroom, and since I was the only guest I had the use of the kitchen to myself. It even smelled like a cottage. What wonderful nights sleeps I had there. When not sleeping, I hiked out to the edge of the escarpment and dangled my feet over the edge of the drop, looked at cool rock formations, took in amazing views, and cruised the town drinking beer, watching local soccer matches, and slurping coffee in the rain in the company of the gregarious fellow who managed the hotel. Perhaps to my greatest joy, I raided the market for veggies, oil, and vinegar, and took advantage of having a kitchen to make the biggest salad you’ve ever seen, washed down with a plastic bottle of horrid, $2 French “wine”. Bliss.

After a couple of days in Mali-ville, I headed back to Labe and onwards to the town of Pita, where I passed an afternoon watching French soaps with 10 cent coffees and 20 cent cones of soft-serve. Classic Guinean entertainment, that. I spent the night there so as to catch an early bush taxi down the bumpy but gorgeous road (that’s generally true of every road in Guinea) towards the little village of Doucki, famed throughout traveler-land and visited by our own Mike Brown not too long ago. After hours in the bush taxi in which we were outpaced by a friend on a bicycle, and another couple kilometers on foot into the pouring rain, I had my feet up in a hammock in the compound of the illustrious Hassan Bah.

Hassan is a ball of quirks. About 5 feet tall, he leads you on incredible hikes through “Guinea’s Grand Canyon” (for once, not hyperbolic) while chain-smoking cheap cigarettes and striking absurd tough-guy poses for pictures. You pay him 20 bucks a day, and you get a traditional hut, 3 solid meals, and all the hikes you can stand. And what hikes they are – it’s wonderful to be in a country not so paranoid about safety! Some of them involved climbing up or down cliffs inside waterfalls, or up wood “ladders” (read:bundles of sticks) up other roaring falls. In the rainy season, everything is gorgeous, the countless falls spectacular, and everything very slippery (Hassan calling “go softly” was almost a mantra on our walks.) I stayed 4 days, covering all his routes, and it was some of the best hiking I’ve ever done. I swam in waterfalls at the edges of cliffs, swung from vines in the rainforest, and somehow avoided even the slightest injury. Glorious – be sure to check out my pictures, when I get them up. I’ll link them here, because it’s hard to do justice to Guinean scenery in words.

After my sojurn at Hassan’s ended (just in time to miss the naming ceremony of his gorgeous new son, unfortunately), I meandered down to Conakry, crashing the night in a town halfway along the road. I’ve written about my Conakry experiences, so I’ll skip for the sake of brevity and jump ahead a week, when I hopped back into a bush taxi (or was shoved – the Guinean variety always carries around 12 people in a seven-seater station wagon). After a nice days drive down a good road, I roared into the old French hill station of Dalaba, and had my feet comfily up in the sunroom of a cheap hotel, sipping tea and watching the sun go down and the rain descend over the mountains. Gorgeousness.

In Dalaba, I took advantage of there being a tiny tourist office to get hooked up with a guide, with whom I hiked out through the hills (carpeted by imported pine forests, surreally), looking at natural bridges and other such pretty things. It’s quite strange to come upon a stand of trees where French pines, Chinese bamboo, and local plants are fighting it out for supremacy. The next day, I hired a motorbike to take me out on a long round trip to one of the best waterfalls in the country. No messing around with bouncing down rocks with this one. It’s just river, meet cliff. Fall. On rainy roads it was an epic effort to get there – I’m always impressed by the ability of cheap Chinese motorbikes to keep moving when up to their engines in a puddle! We got mighty wet and messy, I half-fell into a river, I was covered in blood from thorn scratches, and I was happy. I was even still amused a couple hours later, when we slid out the motorbike twice in about 100 metres of ultra-slick track. We were moving slow enough that my only injuries were from the bike landing on me – and unlike some friends of mine, I was wearing pants and didn’t get fried by the exhaust!

I figure at least one moto crash was inevitable, so I’m glad I got a mild one. Indeed, I think it made me less paranoid about riding on them for long distances, which is good – I’ve had to do quite a bit of it lately. It’s actually rather good practice in controlling your fear. You see, if you see a slippery section ahead and tense up too much or shift around getting ready to bail, you make it way harder for the driver, and the crash way more likely. I’ve gotten used to it enough by now, although sometimes I’m completely sure I’ll take a tumble. I still don’t actually like long distances by motorbike – the view is nice, but your ass gets mega-sore, and you can’t relax and zone out the way you can on even a packed bush taxi. Still, they’re a necessary part of travel, especially in the rainy season when so many roads are impassable or just not bothered with by bigger cars.

Onwards from Dalaba, I made a stop in Kankan, Guinea’s second city. Nothing special, but a nice university town with very nice accommodations at the Catholic mission. Say what you will about organized religion (and I say a lot), but they do a mean job of providing tidy, cheap, central places to stay all over this region. I would later stay in the one in Nzerekore, and in some random town in the middle of the night, and both were lovely. I was stuck in Kankan a while with transport complications, but eventually made my way down to the town of Kissidougou, and from thence far south to Macenta, and finally along the GLORIOUS paved highway into N’zerekore, capital of the Forest Region.

The Region Forestiere is a bit misnamed. Almost all of it has been cut down by now, but it does have a few draws. After marshalling myself in N’zerekore for a day, I made my way to the little town of Bossou to go track the group of habituated chimpanzees in the patch of protected forest there. It was a hell of a job to find them – we hiked through thick bush up and down steep hills for about 3 hours. Just as I was getting tuckered out and tired of falling down muddy slopes, we were reenergized by some serious chimp yellin’. It still took another hour of slogging before, lo and behold, there was a chimp chomping happily on some leaves in a tree. We heard the others nearby, and suddenly we were walking down the path about 2 metres behind the chief of the group, who led us quite cheerfully through the forest until he found a good tree, which he banged on for a while, and then settled into. We settled in and got to watch the chimps for an hour or so. It was a gas.

Chimps are amusing, especially ones habituated to people. They knew we were there, but most of the time ignored us, just casting a disdainful glance now and again if I made too much noise. We sat beneath the big boss’s tree and watched the parade of chimps coming to pay their respects by grooming him and being groomed. I had a laugh when one of these grooming sessions turned into a loud and enthusiastic bit of mutual masturbation between the two fellows (chimps have a lot of sex for pleasure, and are not fussy about the sex of their partner). It went on and on, louder and louder, until they were interrupted by one of their moms! How embarrassing… Though I think this less of a faux pas in Chimp society, I fancy I saw a sheepish look on their faces as they went back to grooming, erections raging.

After returning to N’zerekore, I set out again for the forest. This time, I stopped for the night at the Forest Classe du Ziama, the last bit of virgin rainforest left in the country. Theoretically, there were elephants to be found, but with increased poaching and decreased food, they had buggered off to the other side of the forest at the time. Still, a day hiking through the rainforest is always almost a spiritual experience for me, and so it was. Passing the evening with a couple beers in the little clearing where I was staying, as dusk descended over the mountains, was also a big plus.

By this time, though, it was getting past a month in Guinea, and my feet were itching once again. I needed to head up to Faranah to take the road down to Kabala in Sierra Leone. What followed was the mother of all bush taxi rides. What should have taken 9 hours took 36 after we dropped an axle (!) on a bump in the road. The driver fixed it with a seatbelt (!!) and managed to get the car to the next village and fix it. That fix, though, only lasted another 30 kms, along which our muffler and bumper fell off (!!!). Finally, we just walked into the next village, while the car somehow limped in. After many hours of repairs (and no real chance to catch another car), we finally rehabilitated the thing, to much rejoicing.

Finally, after spending the night in Faranah, I tracked down “Salone Boy”, the one moto-driver with the permits and the gumption to brave the Kabala road. No cars run in the rains, and trucks just bog down, for good reason. The 90 kms to Kabala took us 5 hours, which involved taking the bike through waist-deep water a number of times. By early afternoon, though, I rolled into Kabala, Sierra Leone, just over a week ago.

That, though, is another country, and another story. This entry is long enough already! Thanks for reading, if you made it this far.
Peace
Josh

The frat house at the end of the universe

2009-08-20T10:27:00.004-04:00

I had a parade of commonplace experiences the other day. I woke off, stretched, and made a viciously strong cup of coffee to burn off the brain-fuzz that a couple cheap bottles of Spanish wine left in my head. I paced the house, picking up and pouring out the plastic cups full of booze into the sink, washing the dishes, straightening the furniture, and cleaning the floors before settling into a comfy couch with another coffee and a copy of the Economist. Nothing amiss, really - the aftermath of hundreds of evenings. This one, though, was in Conakry, the Guinean capital; not a place I had expected to be passing evenings playing tipsy rounds of apples-to-apples.

Here's how it came to pass. I was on my way in an overcrowded bush taxi to do some hiking in the little village of Doucki (more on that one in another entry) when we overtook a rather odd sight: a white fellow scurrying up the road on a mountainbike. It was odd enough to make our driver stop, and I chatted enough to figure out that he was an American Peace Corps volunteer based in the market town closest to Doucki. Our bush taxi being prone to troubles, we spent the rest of the 40 kms leapfrogging each other, until he rolled into the site only 10 minutes after I did. Justin (the volunteer's name) was a fine fellow who had picked up pretty solid command of Pulaar (the main local language) during his time working at the local health centre. After a time of the usual shit-shooting, he mentioned that he was headed down to Conakry to run some errands on the weekend, and did I maybe need a place to stay? The Peace Corps maintains "transit houses" at their national HQs for volunteers that need to come through the capital (almost all work in rural locales), and they can invite guests. Having failed to find anyone on Couchsurfing in Conakry, I was pretty pleased.

And so it came to pass that I rolled into Conakry on Saturday morning, killed the day eating chinese food and fiddling around on the internet, and after a long and complicated mission with a bewildered taxi driver (a Conakry universal), I found myself passing through the guarded gates and metal detector into the Peace Corps compound. The surrealness was just beginning. White SUVs with radio antennas were parked out front, while the house itself resembled a youth hostel - big dorms with air-con blasting, lounges with comfy sofas, a massive library of beat-up books, a kitchen, and a TV room where there was a continual movie playing. This all served as backdrop for a cast of characters that ran to around 20 people while I was there, as there was a conference on at the time.

Peace corps volunteers are stationed in little rural spots, usually alone, for 2 years. I have a lot of respect for their commitment - how many projects would do so much better with people who could stay that long? When they come in out of the sticks, though, it's all about the creature comforts, and largely about forgetting where they are - accomplished through care packages of snickers bars, delivery pizza, and an awful lot of beer. I certainly can't blame them, and I would be lying if I said that I didn't enjoy some good, solid vegetating on the couch. At home I'm a big putterer, and I must admit I've definitely missed pouring a glass of cheap wine and fussing in the kitchen, so that's exactly what I did. More importantly, it was nice to have some English-speaking company, especially with a bunch of varied backgrounds and a pile of local knowlege. Many of these people have lots to complain about - projects rarely go according to plan - and I drank it in. I'm still an inveterate optimist, and I find it damn hard to open my mind up to being bothered by anything here. It's a useful stance, as a traveller, but I do appreciate being filled in on the frustrations Guinea has to offer to others. Some of them I'll never share; I was, for example, the only dissenter in a hate-session against Guinean coffee (which I love). Others, though, I know well enough. Bureaucracy and the frustrations of the NGO world, corruption in Guinea, and all the sorts of personal struggles that come from being a long time away from home. On the downside, a big house full of short-term guests coming to let loose a bit definitely began to resemble the never-ending house parties of years past. Odd.

Was this a way of experiencing the "Real Conakry"? Not a chance. But the walled off compound full of white people is as much a part of the African cultural landscape as anything else. It's a world I usually view with some distaste - and I still will relentlessly mock all white land cruisers - but at the end of the day, a lot of important stuff happens behind walls just like that. The peace corps isn't the big spender that other NGOs are, of course, but in sending people out to rural locales, it is much more the face of the West. In Guinea, where few travellers go (I wouldn't be surprised if I'm the only backpacker in the country right now), I am continually assumed to be American, as they are the only white faces that really pop up outside the capital.

In any case, I'm not about to judge anyone for needing a few days off from the grime and grind of daily life. As much as we become comfortable with local norms - and I think I'm fairly far along this path, as travellers go - we remain foreigners. There's no point in denying that spaghetti, dvds, and heineken are more familiar to us than peanut sauce on the street. I certainly felt the battery-charge effects of all of it, and for the first few days in Conakry, was quite content. The days stretched, though (I was waiting for a visa), and even though I spent lots of time wandering the town, life in Peace Corps land was making me antsy. After 6 nights in Conakry, I finally bailed out back into the highlands for a bit of solitude, hiking, and 70 cent meals on the street - and it kinda felt like home.
Peace
Josh

So what's hardcore, really? Am I hardcore? Naah

2009-08-19T08:14:00.002-04:00

"You can't go down there, it's too dangerous!"

Under some circumstances, getting this sort of advice from a local person might have made me think twice (or three times). I was in Dakar some weeks ago, laying out my plans for the few weeks ahead, which were to head off to the Gambia, and then down into the region of Senegal known as the Casamance, which sits between Gambia and Guinea-Bissau. The Casamance has been in the grips of a separatist struggle since the 70s, which grew out of a long historical resistance to the French colonial divide-and-rule strategy. You see, when the French arrived in the Casamance, they found a local tribal structure that had no heirarchical order for them to exploit. They had to import other tribes from elsewhere to rule the place, who were hated by the locals just as much as the French. From then on, there has been a separatist movement in the region, and the armed struggle has killed several thousand people over the past 30 years. About a week before I got to Senegal, 3 people were killed in a roadside ambush.

So, to go or not to go? The Casamance is known as the most beautiful and welcoming part of Senegal, with tons of community-based tourism that, in quiet times, attracted people to tiny villages all over the region. Peace treaties have been signed, but instability in Guinea-Bissau (which had in the past supported the rebels) had also flared up recently. The matter was complicated by the difficulty of getting reliable information about the Casamance while in the North of Senegal. Most Senegalese people, and plenty of the expats who live around Dakar, don't have a clue what's going on there, and think it far more dangerous than it actually is. "Asking around" is actually pretty tricky, but on a combination of advice from travellers, message boards, and (I admit) a bit of gut instinct, I chose to go. I'm glad I did.

The fears about security in the Casamance are a joke. Problems do exist, specifically on one road through one area, and almost entirely at night. You wouldn't catch me passing anywhere in the Casamance at night in a bush taxi anyway, so that one wasn't much of a worry. I passed that road in the daytime (which few foreigners do), and it was fine - although there were tanks lurking in the villages, and plenty of combat-clad soldiers patrolling. Realistically, though, the danger of a daytime ambush is almost infinitesimally small, and can't compare to the chances of much more prosaic things like car crashes.

Once I was through to the gloriously pleasant city of Ziguinchor, I actually found more foreign tourists than anywhere else in Senegal - primarily Spaniards, for whatever reason. The region really is incredibly beautiful, especially in the rains, with lush forests and rivers and huge trees full of fruit bats sweeping into the air at sunset. I spent 10 days or so in the region, staying largely at Campements Villageois, community-run tourism projects that are usually built in traditional forms to help preserve the architectural skills involved in constructing what are often huge, multi-story mud-and-thatch buildings. They're great places to stay, integrated into small villages with lots of opportunities to meet locals. I wandered the forests around Affiniam, drinking palm wine (which tastes, when freshly tapped, pretty odd - think fizzy, alcoholic, slightly sweet, with a hint of lettuce and big mac sauce. I shit you not). I rented a mountainbike in Ossuye and toured the red-dirt roads through the little villages, putting 30 kms of tiredness under my legs in a morning. I kicked back for a few days on the Isle de Carabane, where my little hotel sat right on the water at the mouth of the Casamance river, perfect for beer-drinking, eating tons of barracuda steak, and exploring the crumbling old remnants of the first French trading station in the region.

I capped it off with a couple days at the glorious beaches on the Atlantic at Cap Skiring, where green jungle hits white sand. The rains held off for a bit, and I got myself a good sun-scorching. Not being a huge fan of just-beach towns, though, I rolled out fairly fast. After a stop to run errands in Ziguinchor, I took a Murphy's law fulfilling chaotic bush taxi ride (4 vehicles, 6 breakdowns, and 16 hours to get 35o kms!) to the junction town of Tambacounda, then caught an early morning bush taxi to Kedougou, which took me through the best national park in Senegal. I saw some boars and baboons and other beasties from the taxi window without paying a cent!

Getting out of Senegal proved a bit of a challenge. From Kedougou to Guinea, the roads are might rough as they climb up the 1500 metre plateau of the Futa Djalon. In the rainy season, there ain't much traffic, and I waited 2 full days before we finally found the 17 people to cram inside the land cruiser (another 5 on top!) for the 26-hour, 200 kilometre drive. It was truly epic - like spending 2 days in an SUV commercial.

So, in the end, the Casamance experience was nothing but wonderfulness. It does, though, highlight an element of travelling here that people at home ask about pretty often. So how do I answer the question "Is it safe?"

The short answer is simply "Yes". The chance of the stereotypical African nightmare scenario - crazed soldiers with guns, bombs, terrible tropical diseases - is so miniscule as to be not worth worrying about anywhere in this region. Cranky soldiers you do have, but at worst they might want money, not your head. I'm likely to be passing through the rebel-held North of Cote D'Ivoire in a little while, and even there I have reliable reports that it's fine to pass through as a traveller.

This isn't, of course, true all over the continent - I wouldn't take a trip to Somalia, Darfur, the Eastern region in DRC, parts of the Central African Republic, or some parts of Congo-Brazzaville right now - but those are the only places I'd mark right off the list, and I am no fan of needless self-endangerment. There are those travellers who get a thrill out of passing through dangerous situations, but I don't consider myself one of them. I like going to places that few people go, which quite often means facing the perception of danger, but I can happily do without the reality.

Even the more prosaic traveller worries about the region are generally overstated. You're more likely to be pickpocketed in Rome than in Conakry or Banjul, and you're more likely to be mugged in K-W than in almost any West African town. There are exceptions of course - downtown Dakar can be a sketchy place at night, and in some other places it is best to take a taxi after dark, but by and large it is actually amazing how safe this region is - considering that I regularly walk around with enough money to make several years income for local people, as I'm sure they know. With even a modicum of street sense, West Africa is fine and dandy - I say quite honestly that I have felt far more threatened on KW streets a couple times than I ever have on the road. The trick is to ask widely, ask often, and trust your gut. If something feels sketchy, you bolt - but that rarely happens.

So why the perception of danger? Because people are terrible estimators of risk. We greatly overstate dramatic scary things like rebels and plane crashes, and greatly underestimate the more prosaic risks - and West Africa, like anywhere, doesn't lack those. The only real risk I encounter over here? The roads.

Bush taxi drivers are often maniacs who pass on blind corners, drive way too fast in the driving rain, and generally sow mayhem on the rough roads region-wide. I have on occaision felt like I'm taking my life in my hands, especially since due to my height I usually chase after the front seat next to the driver (cheerfully known as the "death seat" in many countries due to the frequency of head-on collisions). I've had a couple scares, and even a couple scrapes - on the way into Conakry we lost a rearview mirror to a passing car, and the other week in Senegal we slid sidelong into another. No-one was hurt in either, but it certainly does get discomfiting, especially when you're stuck with 13 other people in a station wagon where none of the doors can be opened from the inside (this happens often). In West Africa, bush-taxi stories replace poop tales as the basic traveller common-ground.

The perils of bush-taxi travel are, by leaps and bounds, the most dangerous things I will face this trip - and it would be wise not to overstate them. For all the craziness on the roads, it's actually surprisingly infrequent to have serious accidents, and I'm really not too fussed about things that are so out of my control.

So, is any of this "hardcore"? I think not. Although pretty far removed from the day-to-day experiences of home, a bit of familiarity with life on the road bursts every bubble of percieved difficulty that one might carry over from the West. With a smile on your face and a couple looks around, this is no place to worry.

Peace
Josh

Food for thought

2009-08-05T14:20:00.007-04:00

A few weeks ago, Margaret Wente wrote a column over at the Globe and Mail - "Enviro-romanticism is hurting Africa" - that I think is well worth a read. I want to use it as a jumping-off point for a discussion. Be warned, though - it's classic Wente, throwing her broad brush around much as ever.

I've actually got a confession to make on that front. However far apart we may be on the political spectrum (though I'm less inclined to paint her as a straightforward right-winger than some are), Margaret Wente is by far my favourite national columnist. She's pretty often off-base (look at her pieces on indegenous peoples for a pretty huge miss) , and the broad brush does come out all the time, but she does have a nose for bullshit, hypocrisy, and unsubstantiated claims that I appreciate. At her best, she's not so much right-winged as hard-assed and critical-thinking, which commentary can always do with. In any case, I'd much rather be provoked into arguing with a piece than put it down in boredom - as I usually do with the party-line windbags at the National Post.

In any case, the crux of her argument here is that the organic movement is a danger because it shifts emphasis from yields - how much is getting produced - to methods. Perhaps in the West, where we already produce far more than we can consume, this is more understandable, but what do we do about Africa, the continent most passed-over even by the green revolution. The problem is obvious enough: populations in the poor world are growing, and yields are not growing fast enough to match. The old oversimplified argument - that to feed the whole earth organically would take way more land than we have - does have some resonance here. What do we do about NGOs that push organic agriculture to African farmers? What relationship does that have with the organic movement in the west?

To me, the most pressing part of the piece actually comes early, when Wente notes that the people who embrace organic agriculture most fervently are the same who are most inclined to care for development agendas - people who, generally, care. I'd consider myself one of those people. I'd consider most of my friends in that group too, and many of us have been involved in some way with reducing the impact of our food consumption - whether through supporting local farms, not eating meet, growing food, or buying organic.

I've also spent much of the last couple of weeks chatting with Senegalese and Gambian farmers, subsistence and otherwise, as well as having the chance to meet a couple local people doing environmental education and activism in West Africa - a pretty tall order. It's all provoked the need for me to lay out in print some thoughts about the interconnectedness of food.

I've long been pretty antsy with the idea of a "local food movement" or an "organic movement". Sticking "movement" onto anything always seems like a step towards the sort of dogmatism that says simply "Organic = good" or "local = good" without thinking about what criteria we're using to establish exactly what "good" means. So what are those criteria? Why do we buy local, or buy organic?

As far as organic foods go, there tend to be two justifications - either that they are better from the point of view of health, or that it's broadly better for the earth to not be pouring pesticides and other byproducts of industrial agriculture into watersheds. This argument is far more convincing than the health one - I haven't found anything really convincing to say that organic food is any healthier than non-organic.

But what do we do about the rest of the world, where the need to minimize our impact must be balanced with the need to drastically increase yield? Although population predictions tend to be overly pessimistic, there will certainly be a great many more mouths to feed in the global south over the next while. What place does organic agriculture hold here? It's hard to say. Obviously, most poor subsistence farmers are already essentially organic - they don't have the money to invest in chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and such. There certainly are plenty of NGOs out there that are encouraging people to keep to this style, either for ecological reasons, or to capitalize on the organic fad in the West. These are the people Wente is hitting at, I think somewhat unfairly. As long as you aren't too much of a locavore (and here we have a conflict a-brewing), making the link between rich consumers and poor producers makes sense - it's basically what the fair-trade movement does. The problem, though, is that this can never be more than a niche. It's hard to imagine every single Westerner demanding organic food, but even if they did, people in the poorer parts of the world still need to be fed - not all agricultural products are internationally traded, obviously.

To my mind, the problem is again the blanket labelling of chemical or biological technology as "bad". Encouraging and helping people to move to a more technically sophisticated agricultural model, to me, doesn't seem to necessitate pushing people to adopt the particularly idiotic one we use. There must be some middle ground here - limited use of chemical fertilizers, say, or genetically modified crops of a certain type (maybe bred to resist bugs, instead of to survive huge pesticide doses). Perhaps equally important to their effects on yields, though, is their social impact.

Subsistence farming sucks. It's backbreaking, heartbreaking, and tedious work overwhelmingly undertaken by women and children. I think we have to be very careful about promoting the continuation of "traditional" models that specifically keep women oppressed and children out of school. It is easy to overromanticize the peasant model, and I think I often have. When we in the west devote ourselves to our gardens, go WWOOFing or buy organic, we are making a choice. West Africans don't have any such options. Context, as always, is everything. To my mind, organic agriculture has a big place in the chemical-soaked West. In the South, not so much - at least not yet. I really feel I need to read up more on the specifics of this stuff, though, as so much of this really depends on actual, empirical data.

Indeed, thinking big, if a move towards organic production does lower yields within the industrialized countries, it might not be such a bad thing. We'd have less cheap crops to subsidize and dump onto the global market, something that depresses prices and does a lot of damage to the economies of poorer countries. This, of course, brings up another question - how does trade fit into all of this, once you start looking at things through an ecological lens?

One of the big reasons behind the local food movement - though far from the only one - is the desire to minimize our "food miles". On face value, this makes some sense. I want to minimize the amount of carbon and other pollutants that my life adds to the biosphere, and trucking/boating/flying food all over the place to get to my table certainly does add a good pile of stink.

This gets tricky fast, though. If I want to be a really good locavore, I change my diet so that I buy fewer and fewer foods that cannot be produced locally. But I also care about the poor around the world, a large number of whom are farmers. To my mind, buying a bag of tomatoes from a farmer in Guinea will almost certainly benefit that farmer much more, proportionately, than buying it from a Canadian. There is, though, the ecological impact of sending all that food across the ocean. Aaargh, tangles!

Some of these tangles solve themselves. Southern climes are generally pretty friendly to plants, so it may well be that the life-cycle carbon footprint, even including shipping, could be lower if you grow some things in Guinea. For the sake of argument, though, I'm willing to accept that this probably isn't the case for most crops. We need to realize that this is a place for some serious cost-benefit analysis - broad principles really don't get us very far here. We can't just evaluate things on the grounds of carbon emissions, or poverty reduction, we have to try our best to think out where any decision helps and where it hurts - because it all does both.

I don't know nearly enough of the details of any of this to propose any sort of solution, so I'd invite anyone reading to jump in. To my mind, the end seems at least partially evident. We have one big part of the world that dumps way too much crap on our crops, and one big part of the earth that dumps way too little. Perhaps, in the end, it will even out. On the shorter term, maybe we should think about multiple global food markets, one for fancy organics and those who can afford them, and one for those who can't. This way, maybe, we can minimize the market distortions that we dump on the heads of those who can't bear them.

As with many things in my mind, a lot of this comes back to good ol' trade policy. We subsidize our farmers to grow cheap crops, then dump them on the markets. Then we raise tariffs to make sure that processed, value-added goods from poorer countries can't make it past our doors. I can't imagine a system better designed to promote rural poverty. From an ecological standpoint, too, rather than shipping bulk produce around the world, there's one hell of a good carbon argument for encouraging the development of agricultural processing capacity at the source - we just have to get comfortable with the idea that sometimes this will put our farmers or factories out of business. Unless you can show me a convincing reason why a Canadian citizen deserves any better chance in the world than a Guinean, I'm all for it.

At the end of the day, sitting and thinking about this surrounded by young women bent double all day over rows of peanuts, I don't really feel I have any right to tell them much at all.

Thoughts?

Pip pip, tally ho

2009-08-04T13:22:00.002-04:00

Goodness me, the travels just keep rolling, and my blogging doesn't keep up. At the moment I've just settled in Guinea after an epic bush taxi adventure - but put that story in the queue, 'cause it's time to talk Gambia.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a sillier colonial construct than Gambia - pardon me, "The Gambia", the definite article added in a wierd collision of nascent nationalism and colonial English. Article or not, it's a pretty silly set of lines on the map, with a border that lays the whole country out as the 20 kms or so of land to either side of the first 450 kms-ish of the Gambia river.

Looking for rational delineations between Gambia and Senegal? You won't find them. The ethnic mix, climate, agriculture, and linguistic composition of the area does shift as you head further south, but the gradual overlapping of these things has nothing to do with the colonial borders themselves. Gambia was simply the corner of the coast that the English nabbed for themselves as a slaving, then as an anti-slaving outpost and trading port.

Crossing into the Gambia is a fine illustration of all this silliness. Hop out of your bush taxi, take 5 minutes for passport stamping, and you're on your way. The landscape looks the same, the people still speak the same local languages, but a lot of other things instantly shift. Signs change from the cutesy-simple French of Senegal into pompously anachronistic colonial English. The architecture changes from the more decorative French colonial style to utitlitarian tin-roofed British. The shopkeepers switch from Lebanese to Indian.

It's amazing how consistent the symbolic language of colonial powers was. Walking around in Banjul, the old capital where I was staying to do some visa runs, was an odd experience for me. The atmosphere of the city owes much more to Kampala or Nakuru (in Kenya) than it does to Dakar. At times, you could be forgiven for thinking yourself in India, or indeed in any English tropical colony.

It was oddly comforting. I realized on a moment's reflection just how much of my last big trip - a 14 month odyssey before university - was spent in the Anglophone sphere, and how adjusted I had become to the little visual and aural details that go along with it. Not all of these are nice; getting into Gambia brought with it a great increase in official stuffiness and snarkiness, which seems to have a more jocular tone in French. I got lectured by a couple cops and soldiers while I was there (it's also a fairly repressive government - witness all the posters wishing a 'Most Happy Birthday to His Excellence El Hajj Mohammed Jammeh!") which gives a bit of extra grist to the annoying-cop mill.

Gambia, in any case, is a weird little place. There are parts of it I loved: Banjul was a fine little city full of old Krio architecture brought there from Sierra Leone in the 1800s. There are a couple exquisite little nature reserves you can walk around. I spent a few days at a phenomenal village ecotourism project along the river, where I learned to cook some local food (to the amusement of the kitchen ladies) and hung out at the school in between bouts of hammocking. I went farther upriver to another gorgeous lodge, not quite so community-integrated, but worth it for having your own little house on stilts in the mangroves, with a balcony to jump off the river to swim in. Swimming at night was magic - the river is full of little bioluminescent beasties that look like sparks underwater. When you swim, an explosion of light surrounds every movement, and the sparks get caught in the hairs on your arms and legs, giving your body a halo. Magic.

A brief venture into the anglosphere is also practical. I loaded up on English books again - though with my absurd reading speed, they're all now finished. By the time I get home, I'll probably have the entire 19th century canon dealt with. Oi. Local newspapers in English were fun, and it was nice to have chats with locals without struggling in French - though I found, as is often the case, that rote-learned English doesn't lend itself to understanding questions from a foreigner. This is less of a problem for me in French, as I simplify in my own head just to get the ideas out!

There was also a decidedly unseemly side to Gambia. Alongside the numerous snarky cops, you find everything you normally would in a place that depends on the Winter influx of resort tourists. 30 minutes in a minibus brings you to the resort strip, land of pizzas, british pubs, prostitution, and hustling just like you find in a thousand other places around the world. Surreal. Even in the low season, there were groups of tourists about making merry. I won out, with a big gaggle of young belgians picking me out as a starving backpacker and treating me to beer and pizza. I didn't mind - cheese conquers all. But I couldn't help but breath a bit of a sigh of relief that after the meal, I could jump back into an overcrowded minibus, to crack beers with African traders in my sleazy port hotel. Four star holdidays aren't my thing, and the atmosphere of disconnection that follows them sometimes pervades Gambia, even upcountry. You can't pass through a village without kids chasing you screaming "Toubab!" and demanding pens and candy. Nothing too shocking, except for the fact that in Senegal, it didn't really happen.

(Incendentally, I did however meet, in Senegal a week later, my evil nemisis - a couple of middle-aged French tourists with a guide, wandering the Casamance for 10 days handing out pens and candy to any child that could toddle. To all readers: do me, and every other solo traveller a favour, and NEVER do this. After a few such visitors, the relationship between local kids and foreigners is mangled beyond recognition, nevermind what it does to create longer-term dependant mindsets. Urrr.)

So that, in a nutshell, was the Gambia. After 10 days, with newly minted visas for Sierra Leone and Guinea in my passport and a hankerin for some Francais in my heart, it was back into Senegal to explore the Casamance. That, though, is another story.
A bientot, mais amis
Josh

They aren't here for the scenery...

2009-07-30T09:55:00.002-04:00

I think most of us have the same mental picture when we here the phrase "sex tourism" - that of the old white man paying for a sleazy tour to Thailand, probably for child prostitution. This isn't just an image - I've seen this sort of thing the world round, not just in Southeast Asia but also in the Middle East, and yes, in Senegal, where certain beach resorts are notorious for octogenarian European men and their underage companions. It's pretty fucking disgusting.

It's hard to express just how morally abhorrent it is when people travel specifically for the purpose of abusing children. It's certainly a matter for international justice. One problem, though, with the discourse being so focused on the extreme cases, is that honest and frank discussions of the role that sex plays in travel is pretty hard to come by.

The question that a few weeks around the Senegalese coast has raised for me is this: who, exactly, is a sex tourist? Clearly the old men who fly down to hurt underage girls fall into this category, but they're an extreme. Plenty of people, though, do pay for sex here. As a western man, if I go to a nightclub, I will be approached by dozens of prostitutes, and they obviously get enough business to keep coming back. There are, of course, male prostitutes here as well. I get propositioned fairly often, if more subtly than in, say, Morocco - the taboo against homosexuality is a big deal here. Along the beaches, a Western woman will find herself offered sex pretty regularly in some places (although much more so in the Gambia). I have libertarian inclinations about prostitution (at least when consenting adults are involved), so I'm not about to judge these people as harshly as I would the aforementioned octogenarian. In any case, these relationships are at least clear: people are exchanging cash for sex, period. There isn't a lot of room for misunderstandings or grey areas along these extremes.

The more interesting case, I think, is also the more common. What should we think about the many young and middle-aged Western women who come for 2-week holidays and instantly end up with gorgeous young Senegalese boyfriends? Everywhere you go in this country, you see couples like this, and however optimistic you might be about intercultural romance, you can't help but assume that many of these relationships are a bit more prosaic. You can bet your boots that most of these relationships don't last once she's on a plane home - and it's almost always a "She". Senegal having the same gendered double standard as most other countries, a local man can get away with strolling around town holding hands with a foreign girl. If a local woman tried the same, it would be incredibly destructive to her life and reputation (at least, if she was anything but a member of the "westernized" upper classes. In any case, these short-term relationships are almost always between Western women and local men. Relationships between foreign men and local women tend to divide more clearly into serious ones - often ending in marriage - and prostitution.

The question, of course, is how to think about what it is that these young men are doing. The recipe is pretty obvious: you have Senegal, with beautiful beaches, cheap flights to Europe, and most importantly, legions of underemployed young men who spend their days working out and end up with spectacularly sculpted bodies, but still no money. Obviously, it isn't the easiest topic to raise, but I get a sense from asking about it that some women pay these men directly, but most just give some parting presents or gifts at the end of their holiday. You see the same thing all over the Carribean.

Here's where the real moral grey area kicks in. I'm not so cynical as to rule out the possibility of real romantic relationships between Westerners and Africans. I see them quite often, and marriages are common enough - a good part of the tourist infrastructure is run by mixed couples. Still, there are two immense gulfs to be crossed here: culture, and money. There is almost always some ignorance of the other partner's culture when the relationships begin, and there is almost always an incredible income gap. In relative terms, it would be like dating a millionaire. I've had plenty of friends run into this a few months into a relationship, when the local partner suddenly decides that the relationship is serious enough to start asking for serious money. Does this mean that the whole thing was done under bad faith? Not always, no. But sometimes. That's the big minefield, of course - the very real emotional attachment that runs both ways in relationships that might also be built on the hopes for a material better life. When a young lady comes down here for a 2 week affair and falls for the fellow, it's not easy to know what to do.

So who is exploiting? Is it the young Senegalese who try and make some money out of lusty Westerners, or the Westerners who use promises of gifts to sweeten the deal? I'm not sure I'm comfortable judging either side harshly or on anything but a case-by-case basis, but it is, I think, something that deserves a little bit more discussion than it gets.
Peace
Josh

C'est Marveilleux!

2009-07-15T12:23:00.000-04:00

I had to at least title this entry in French. I'm currently in Banjul, The Gambia, which is a tiny little outpost of Anglophone-ness buried within Senegal, and I'm suffering from a bit of French withdrawal. Banjul is a pretty sleepy little place, but actually mighty fine for a bit of puttering and visa shopping - but more on that a little later.

When I last jumped on the narrative train, I believe it was a couple weeks ago in Nouakchott, where I was readying myself for the meander down to the Senegalese border and on towards St. Louis. I suppose, then, I'll just jump right back in.

Borders are strange things. They're unpredictable, even when you think you know the general spirit of a place pretty well. The Mauritania-Senegal one is an especially good example of this, with what must be the only collection of pushy and unpleasant people to be had in all of Mauritania lurking around their side of the Senegal river (which forms a border) demanding dubious "fees". I was tired, and couldn't be bothered getting into an endless argument, so I ended up throwing a couple of bucks into the pot o' bribes. Not a big loss, but an annoyance. The whole process on the Mauritanian side is a bit obnoxious, but once you've found yourself a boat across the river and been stamped in (with no fuss) to Senegal, it's easy-peasy.

The change was immediate. Suddenly, the terrain was largely greenish savannah and irrigated farms, and suddenly there were ads and billboards everywhere! It's odd how these little visual cues are the first thing to make an impression. The villages on the Senegalese side often look like your imagined typical African scene, with mud and thatch huts clustered around little dirt yards.

After a couple of hours in a shared taxi which (miracle of miracles!) only had as many bums as the 7 seats would hold, we rolled into St. Louis, the first French settlement in West Africa. It's quite the place. Coming into the downtown (which is on an island in the Senegal River), you roll across the Pont Faidherbe, which was the technological marvel of 1897, when it's mobile iron spans were built to cross the Danube. Being unemployed up north for whatever reason, it was shipped down to Senegal and riveted into place.

The island itself is a lovely place, all full of crumbling old French buildings in shades of ochre and pastel, balconies and flowers and washing lines everywhere. It comes really alive about once a year, in May, when it hosts an international jazz festival, but even now it was a revelation to see beer signs and old creaky bars on corners. After dropping my stuff off at the youth hostel (where I had a room, and a balcony! oh, low season), I made a beeline for a cold Flag, and my goodness it was lovely.

I've realized how important a part of my day a good cold beer really is. It's bloody hot and humid here, in the 35 range most days, and most days I'd gladly sacrifice a good meal if it means I can afford another icy cold lager with my feet up. It's highly important for my sanity - and it's a mighty fine way of meeting local folk! My favourite place in St. Louis turned out to be the local fire station (!!) which concealed a little bar for the firefighters that had the coldest and cheapest beers around. In Senegal, it's definitely a quality/quantity tradeoff: for about the same price is 330 mls of Flag, a pretty solid lager, or 630 mls of Gazelle, a slightly weaker but perfectly passable one. Needless to say, I'm a Gazelle sort of fellow.

Arriving on a Sunday, unfortunately, the music scene was a bit dead until the next weekend. I passed a couple of lazy days in St Louis soaking up the atmosphere before taking off again, this time only 20 kms down the coast to a campement (campground/inn) called Zebrabar, run by a European couple in the midst of the Langue de Barbarie national park. It's a gorgeous place - the Senegal river runs parallel to the sea for quite a while, separated from the Atlantic by only 100 metres or so of peninsula. Much of the south end, where I was staying, is a national park to protect the masses of birdlife and other species that live there.

The campement itself had everything I could ask for - a little beach, a hut to sleep in, a terrace looking out over the river, an observation tower to look over the countryside, hammocks to laze in, and ice-cold beers to accompany the lazing. Not bad. Even better, they had loaner kayaks, and since I was the only guest, I had pick of the litter! Arriving early in the morning, I took the kayak out and paddled downriver, silently sneaking up on cranes and terns, hearing the Atlantic crash on the other side of the trees. Superb. After 5 hours on the water, though (going upriver is hard!) the rest of the day was devoted to swimming and lazing. The next day, same deal - although the wind played up and gave me a chance to play with the kayak a little bit more actively, whee!

After a couple days there, I caught a ride into town with the owners, and managed to snag a cheap bus to Dakar, instead of the pricey shared taxi. As I was well aware, this was a bit of a slower proposition, and it took all day to get to Dakar - not helped when our driver pulled off the road into a sandpit and all the passengers had to help push the bus out! Dakar being on a peninsula, there is only one main highway in and out of a city of 7 million people. That highway is currently being rebuilt, which leaves just 3 or 4 lanes of snarled road to negotiate into the core. It took the better part of 3 hours to get in from the outskirts.

Dakar is a difficult city to quickly describe. For some reason, my brain keeps tending towards comparisons with Nairobi. At some level, that makes sense - capital of English East Africa and capital of French West Africa, both the regional powerhouses of modernity, yadda yadda. The two, though, are very different places - and given the choice, I think I'd rather hang out in Dakar.

My experience there was certainly coloured by circumstance. Thanks to the wonders of Couchsurfing.com, I was able to avoid spending 25 dollars a night on a downtown fleapit, and instead was run around town by the highly awesome Lizzie, a Wolof-speaking American doing some vaguely-defined volunteer work for the summer before starting a paid English teaching stint in the fall. Being a guest is always nice. Being a guest in a big, complex city is even nicer, especially when your host (unlike so many expats) has a social circle that includes a great many Senegalese, not just other foreigners.

After a hurried couple of phone calls, Lizzie picked me up near the bus station, and we were then picked up by a friend of hers, the ever-characterful DJ Sega (Sega being his real name, kick ass), a local fellow who is apparently a fairly big deal on the party scene. We passed the evening at his place, wandering the neighbourhood and saying hi to all and sundry, being fed and greeted and all that, before winding down the day with a beer on the roof of the hotel of a Canadian co-worker. Not a bad intro to Dakar.

Lizzie lived in N'gor, which is effectively a village that happens to be within the city limits, 12 kms north of downtown. A really pleasant little place, far from the hustle and bustle of the big city (the headaches of which, I think, are exaggerated). We met another of her friends, got some great local grub (I love peanut stew!!) and I took some time to putter around the centre of town. It being a weekend, the goal of my Dakar visit also included some going-out, and we managed that with a giggle. On the Saturday night, we went out for a birthday of a Gabonese fellow to a club downtown which provided us with what is certainly one of the definitive (if odd) west African experiences: being the only people in the club who are neither French soldiers nor prostitutes!

It was actually a rather fun night - unlike American GI's, French soldiers aren't afraid to get mighty funky on the dance floor. There are a number of photos lurking somewhere of one of them who took a shining to me and repeatedly picked me up, threw me around, and planted big wet kisses on my head. Not my normal milleu, but an experience nonetheless! The next day, we managed to take in 2 Dakar institutions. First came heading to a stadium to catch a few bouts of les luttes, traditional wrestling, the Senegalese national sport. What a time that was - these fellows are massive hunks of muscle who win matches when they knock the other guy solidly down, usually with a combination of punches and holds. Some matches last 30 seconds, others 5 minutes. What with the drumming and the dancing and the chanting, it's a whale of a time. The star attraction was the current mega-champ, Elton "Le Bulldozer", a massive mound of muscle in the midst of whose fans I was sitting. Needless to say, when he handily won his match, they went nuts.

Apparently, when your guy wins in the ring, part of the victory celebration is to chase the other guy's fans from the stadium and have a wee riot in the streets! I was glad that we lingered at the top of the stadium, because things got pretty dicey for a bit, with the Elton fans routing the others through the neighbourhood, pelting them and their buses with fist-size rocks. Oi! We snuck out the side way, with our heads happily un-smashed, and finished the evening with another Dakar classic: music at Just 4 U, a small garden bar/resteraunt that hosts concerts every night, 7 days a week - indeed, they often host 2. These aren't small timers, either - people like Orchestra Baobab play, as does Cheikh Lo, who we had the pleasure to see. Bad-ass. After his set, a Senegalese jazz band came on and did some mighty fine things; adding djembes and other local rythm-makers makes for a great sound.

I spent one more day in Dakar, touring the lovely Isle de Goree, the ancient French island town in the harbour that was a transshipment point for millions of African slaves; there are a couple great exhibits on the island about it, and the place itself is one big historical hangover with no cars, just cobbles, pastel houses, and flowers everywhere. With a wee bit of tout-dodging when you arrive, it's even tranquil. Not bad. All in all, a good rounding out of the Dakar experience.

After the odyssey of roadwork that it took to escape the city, I hopped a series of shared taxis down the Petit Cote to the village of Palmarin. The taxi-ride was something special, largely through terrain that could have been drawn from a Dr. Suess book. The Senegalese savannah is just that - not quite forest, but with plenty of trees about 15 metres apart from each other. Lots of these (especially the amazing Baobabs) look pretty otherworldly, which makes for grand starin' if you get a window seat in the taxi.

Palmarin itself is actually a series of villages, more substantially built than most (ie, tin rooves and concrete, not thatch), and fairly heavily Christian, which leads to the presence of pigs and booze even in the smallest hamlet. I stayed at a little campement that gave me a hut to myself - with my first private bathroom of this whole trip! The girl working there dissolved in giggles at my excited reaction to the toilet. Understandable, perhaps. This place also did it's job well with the hammocks and beer, and I spent lots of time wandering the villages and countryside, chattering with locals and snagging a family meal in someone's courtyard.

On leaving Palmarin, I set course for the place I wanted to spend my birthday, which involved a night in the city of Kaolack on the way. Even the Senegalese, even those from Kaolack, rag on Kaolack. I must say, they have some reason - it is Senegal's capital of 3 things: heat, beggars, and flies. It also makes a good claim to leadership on garbage and mud. That being said, the market was quite a sight, and there were a couple survivable spots to the place. I've been in many armpits of the Earth, and this place ain't near the bottom of that list. Nonetheless, I wasn't too sorry to clear out the next morning, especially with my destination:

I chose to birthday gift myself 2 nights at Keur Bamboung, an epically awesome ecotourism project in the mangrove swamps of the Sine-Saloum delta. I don't regret the choice. The site itself is gorgeous; to get there involves a boat to an island in the heart of the protected area, than a donkeycart ride across the island. You get put up in thatch and brick huts, all built of locally sourced materials by the village folks, with solar power and rain water. They all sit up on a sandy bluff overlooking one of the channels through the mangroves, so you can jump in for a swim whenever you like.

Better than the setting, though, was the history. Some years back, in the early 90s, the 14 local villages got together and realized that overfishing and other exploitation was destroying the local ecosystem, and that their future lay in ecotourism. Without government help, they created a protected area, forbade fishing and hunting, and enforced it with their own volunteer patrols as they worked to build the lodge. Some years later, the government embraced the place and declared it all a national park, but the lodge and the people involved are still overwhelmingly locals.

It wasn't even that much of a splurge. For $44 a night, you get your own little hut, all your meals, and guided excursions. We hiked through the savannah, seeing boars and birds and eating fresh cashew fruit on the first evening, then I spent my birthday morning on a mangove "hike", a 2 hour walk done largely in hip-deep water. Rounded out with some kayaking, lots of swimming, and the world's friendliest staff, and it was not a bad choice, not a bad choice at all.

Leaving there, I needed to head to the Gambia. This trip had potential for headache and delay, involving, in order: donkeycart, boat, motorbike, shared taxi, walk, border, walk, border, shared taxi, boat. It could have taken all day, but the travel gods smiled on me and had me in Banjul within 3 hours! I suppose, for the statistics to work, Murphy's law does have to have an opposite. I'm in Banjul now, and I'll leave the narrative there.

As far as Senegal in general goes, my first couple weeks (I'll be back in the south soon) left me pretty impressed. As a traveller, in Senegal you are met with a decided indifference. Not unfriendly indifference, but merely the indifference that comes from people
a) having seen plenty of white folks before, so big whoop
b) having lots of their own business to attend to
c) being somewhat intrinsically reserved.

It's funny, as Senegal markets itself as the country of "Teranga", hospitality, and tries pretty hard to promote that image to tourists. I don't really see the need. It was actually refreshing not to always be the centre of attention, and when you actually need help or information or just want to chat, people were nothing but friendly and forthcoming. Every country seems to try and set itself up as especially welcoming, and obviously it can't be true for all. Senegal feels more like it's global image (as far as I've always percieved it): like a country that's going places. It's rather neat. It'll also be interesting to see how the psyche changes as I head to the Casamance, the area south of The Gambia that has traditionally been more isolated, host to a slow-burning separatist rebellion, and also very explicitly known for it's hospitable welcome to travellers. Only time will tell, and I can't wait.
Peace
Josh

Purty Pictures

2009-07-14T06:39:00.002-04:00

I think most people who read this journal do have Facebook accounts, but just in case you don't, I finally remembered to get the stable links to my photo albums so far. You can look at these without needing to log in to anything.

Morocco 1
Morocco 2
Morocco 3
Mauritania
Senegal 1

Happy peeping!
- Josh

Plastic people, you're such a drag

2009-07-12T11:27:00.000-04:00

Frank Zappa lyrics aren't exactly the first cultural referent I would expect to come clanging into my head standing on a Senegalese street corner, but clang it did, and got stuck there. The Senegalese, just like much of the rest of the world, are plastic people. Not in the Zappa-esque sense of overconsumption, though, but more literally. Day-to-day life here is wrapped thickly in plastic.

Most of us think of the plastic plague as an artifact of specifically Western consumerism, the kind that demands single-serving convenience and water in bottles and twenty layers of bag for everything. It's certainly enough of a horror even in the West, where our skills with waste-disposal generally keep the volume of plastic being disposed of far from the public eye. It goes to the recycling plant, or often to the dump, where the winds and the water grab a hell of a lot of it and carry it out to sea.

One of the more horrifying book chapters I've read recently was on just this subject. In Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us", he poses a thought experiment - what would happen if all human beings simply vanished? How long would the world take to recover? What elements of our lives on the planet would linger behind us the longest? The book is a fun read and generally good brain candy, so I won't go over all it's arguments here, but a few of his points about plastic are worth paraphrasing.

We've all heard different numbers quoted for how long plastic will take to biodegrade - 10,000 years, 25,000 years, whatever. What those numbers actually are are code for "we don't really know,but a really long time". No one, at this point, clearly understands the long term impact that plastic products are having and will have on the ecosystem. When we say "biodegrade", it isn't even clear what we mean in plastic's case. Although the forces of wind and water certainly do break down larger structures like bags, the molecular bonds of polymers are pretty durable. We aren't even all that sure that they'll break down at all. They may remain indefinitely in the ecosystem at microscopic sizes, small enough to saturate the biological systems of animals, especially sea life. In much of the ocean already, fish caught for research carry as much plastic as organic matter in their stomachs. Having only produced the first plastic consumer goods in the 40s, our grasp of the consequences is a bit limited.

It's pretty hard to grasp the scale at which all this is happening. I can walk down a Senegalese beach and swear at the thousands of empty water bottles, but I don't even know how to frame a thought about the patch of the Pacific the size of Texas (!) that is coated in plastic where the currents meet.

If it were simply a matter of greedy western folk gobbling Evians and dumping the results on the rest of the world, moral clarity would be a bit easier. It's more complicated than that, though. One thing travel in West Africa has taught me is the massive impact that plastic has had, by no means all negative.

To understand this, all you need to do is sit for an hour or two in a Senegalese bus station. Women come by every few seconds selling just about anything, all wrapped in tiny plastic bags. There are nuts, fruit, donuts, but most often there are drinks - water sellers and juice sellers all convey their wares in tiny plastic bags, tied off at the top. You bite the corner and suck the juice out of them, often waiting for the frozen bits to melt. It's a godsend in a sweaty bus station, and it does employ legions of women who would otherwise have no easy way to divide up their goods into lots small enough to sell.

Convenience, then, plays a part just as it does for us in the West. But single-use or otherwise small packagings of items also make up a big part of market business here for a simple reason: most households don't have enough cash on hand (or appropriate storage) to buy anything much in bulk, even if it would be cheaper over the long term. The prevalence of plastic allows a local woman to buy enough detergent for a single load of laundry, or have bags to carry home fruit each day. The short-term nature of the average consumption pattern, though, makes the environmental impact worse. If you get 5 plastic bags every time you go to the market, and you go every couple of days, that's a lot of added environmental stress.

Much is made of the ability of poor people to recycle, and indeed, people here can certainly not afford as much disgusting waste as we regularly engage in up North. It would be a mistake to overidealize, though. People throw things out all the time. Littering is universal, and you get strange looks for not doing it. Even if that plastic bag is re-used, it will get tossed eventually. When combined with the nonexistent or barely functional waste collection services, you get the universal scene of much of this planet: lot after empty lot coated in garbage, most of it plastic. It enters into the ecosystem the same way as at sea, as local livestock swallow bags and bits as they graze. It blows in the wind until it finds itself caught in trees. It flows down creeks and outlines the flows of the local watershed as the garbage gets to the sea. Once it arrives on the coast, it meets the waves of trans-Oceanic trash that wash up from around the world. It hurts the heart to look at - and it's at a scale far beyond simple cleanup.

So what the hell do we do? Some of you reading this might remember when a group of us made our way down to Waterloo Regional Council to argue in favour of a ban on bottled water in regional facilities. We were met by representatives of Nestle and the drink producers association who spat out consumer choice justifications for their product: "People want it! They should get what they want!" or "If you don't give them that, they'll just drink pop and get fat". The smug little fellows in suits even tried to bribe council with gifts of free recycling programs and other donations.

Thankfully, they lost. Hopefully, they continue to lose. The thing is, though,that consumer-choice arguments that might not hold water in the West, where we can easily afford the slight cost or inconvenience of living differently, carry a bit more weight where people's material life is more marginal. I am not comfortable lecturing a woman in a Senegalese bus station about plastic consumption, even though the impact on the environment of her product might be even worse than in the west, where it has a passable chance of being recycled.

Bans might, though, have some role to play. In India, Himachel Pradesh and Maharashtra have banned plastic bags (probably the worst offenders) already, and South Africa has banned the thin ones. The efficacy of the bans, though, remains to be seen - how exactly do you fine a subsistence farmer $2000? How do you justify it, ethically? This certainly is not the whole story.

A big part of the solution, I think, is the same as with many other developing-world environmental problems: raising people's income. Just as people with more money don't need to suffocate over charcoal and dung stoves, they also have the money to invest in bulk purchases of what they need. The problem here is obvious though: with more income also comes more things to get wrapped in plastic in the first place. There's no easy way out.

On the longer term, there may be scientific solutions. Truly biodegradeable replacements with measurable decay cycles may become common. We might even engineer organisms to eat the stuff - or they might evolve naturally in a plastic-soaked environment. At least a few sci-fi books have been written on this premise, with the obvious consequences of plastic-eating beasties providing good pulp fodder. Still, it may play a role.

At the end of the day, though, I think the best we can do is change our own behaviour and pour as much resources as we can into sustainable replacements. We have no moral authority to dictate anything else to the poor majority of the planet to whom plastic may have made a real difference. In any case, we do produce incredible masses of the stuff - and I doubt that the thousands of water bottles that I see washed up on the coast here were all emptied by thirsty Africans. More than anything else, I'd love to see those smug PR people from Nestle go for a stroll around a fishing village choked with them, and pick every single bloody one up. Grrmph.

In any case, it's a problem, and a big one. As much as I am loathe to portray Sub-Saharan Africa as the basket case of troubles that gets exposed to the West, there's just as much silliness in naively closing one's eyes. I don't know how to change this - but I do hope we figure it out.
Peace
Josh

Sweetness

2009-06-27T14:26:00.004-04:00

Mauritania is, by all accounts, a pretty sweet place. Sweet in the colloquial sense, with tons of amazing desert vistas and crazy ancient towns to take in. Sweet in the personal sense, with people going to the ends of the earth to make you feel welcome. Sweet also in the literal sense - the amount of sugar consumption in this country is madness! I've heard all sorts of reasons behind it - that the desert heat makes it important to stay hydrated being the most sensible - but in any case, it is impossible to pass a day here without umpteen little shot glasses of sugar-laden tea. A friend of mine, heading out into the desert with some nomads, was shocked when they packed 10 kgs of sugar per person for the 20 days, but they finished it to the last grain. A good travel narrative title for this country might be "how to get diabetes in 10 days", and I'm assured that that ailment is indeed a huge problem, once hardy desert dwellers become city folk.

Perhaps because all this sugar has my brain running at hummingbird pace half the time, it seems like I've been here far longer than the - goodness me! - only 12 days it has been. I certainly haven't been rushed; I've been going about my travels at the natural pace that infrequent shared taxis dictate to me. For all the beauty here, it's fairly concentrated in a few spots, so the country is easily seen quickly.

Before I launch into a narrative, though, I think this might be a time for a bit of background. Mauritania is a bit of an unknown quantity in the West, or at least within the Anglophone world. It's amazing, actually, how much influence the linguistic heritage of colonialism has on the cultural awareness of a place. It's quite rare to see anglophones here, with the vast majority of travellers being French. There are even direct flights from Paris and Marseilles right to the tiny desert towns that are the centre of the nascent local tourist industry. This isn't just a Mauritanian thing, of course. Say "Africa" to an English speaker and they'll likely first think of Kenyan Safaris or some such. Say it to a French speaker, and it's West African colour that comes to mind first. Indeed, there are plenty of Canadians that make it to this end of the world, but most of them are Quebecois. To be fair, it would be difficult here to get along without a bit of French, and without the ability to converse you do lose quite a bit of the ability to connect with local people that is so essential for solo travel. My French, while still not great, is happily improving fast. I'm at the stage where I can generally discuss reasonably complex concepts with atrocious grammar, but quickly and properly pronounced - which serves just fine. I'm starting to catch myself thinking in French from time to time, and once I've got a good head of steam, I'm finding it an excellent language for a good rant.

But I digress. Mauritania. A name that, in and of itself, means very little. Before the French came, there was no such place. There was a vast swathe of desert that was a major intersection of trade heading from the Mediterranean south to Subsaharan Africa, East to Timbuktu, and West to the sea. The Empire of Chinguetti (the town of which I was in not 5 days ago) was a major power, as were several other of the big West African Empires. The population has long been divided on caste lines, with the "Moors" (Arabs who settled here as Islam spread) on top of the Haratin (black Africans who have adopted Moorish culture) and black Africans who retained their own traditions and ended up enslaved or otherwise at the bottom of the social pyramid. Indeed, it's not a proud mark on Mauritania's history that it was the last country to outlaw slavery (in 1982!) and it's an open secret here that it still persists. Certainly, I see every day examples of the casual racism with which blacks are treated by the Moors. A Senegalese/Mauritanian fellow with whom I spent a long day talking told me many stories. His way of resistance? He would work for the Moors, but he refused to learn Hassaniya, their dialect of Arabic. I understand the sentiment. Between that and the (much, much exaggerated) presence of a fundamentalist movement here, Mauritania doesn't get great press.

This is a shame. While I won't write off the racial tensions that exist, it would be unwise to exaggerate them. Mauritanian society is defined by an extremely dignified friendliness and hospitality, especially towards foreign visitors such as myself. The combination of desert culture (and 75% of the place is desert) and Islam's duty to guests combines to capture you up in a great swirl of hospitality and care. It's also incredibly safe. Not everywhere would I happily toss my pack into the back of a pickup truck to head out of town, then wander the market for an hour knowing that it would be there when I come back. Most rooms here don't have locks, and indeed, I've been sleeping outside most nights, and never need I worry about theft. It is a million times less likely here than in, say, Rome. The people are certainly in the top 5 of "nicest in the world" for me, and while I don't think it's humanly possible to displace the incredible Sudanese, the Mauritanians (who are culturally quite similar), are definite contenders for second or third.

The country itself is a bit oddly divided. Along the coast are Nouadhibou (where I first stopped) and Nouakchott (the capital). Both of these cities were thrown together essentially from nothing at independance in the 60s, when Mauritania was bustled out the French door to prevent its absorption by Morocco. As such, they don't benefit from their era. Both are vast, disorganized sprawls of concrete block buildings, empty lots, dusty streets, and no sidewalks. Both are shockingly unfriendly for pedestrians, I think maybe a casualty of the 1960s mentality that thought that even in the Developing World, everyone would soon be driving. Brasilia and Chandigarh are casualties of the same thing - but Mauritania doesn't have their architecture. In any case, the cities themselves are still fairly pleasant, being filled with Mauritanians.

The real emotional heart of the place, though, is the high desert plateau of the Adrar, where ancient stone trading towns and date oases still pop up from the sands, and where the cultural identity of the dominant Moorish nationalism is deeply rooted. It is there that the tourism industry, such as it is, is centred. In good years, Mauritania used to get 700,000 people. This last year, they got 13,000, casualty of a bunch of scares in the West that makes people think the place infested with Al Qaeda. It isn't. In any case, tourists come in the winter, when temperatures are more sensible. Now, in the summertime, I often had places to myself.

I arrived first in Nouadhibou, where it was my intention to catch my breath a day, and then hitch a ride on the empty train heading back to the iron ore mines in the desert. Unfortunately, as sometimes happens, circumstances didn't co-operate. I went to the train "station", a dusty box buried in a sand dune, and waited with a pile of locals until someone somehow got word that there would be no train today. Try tomorrow (if God wills it). So, tomorrow I tried - same thing. Although I was having a pleasant enough time in Nouadhibou, there wasn't much to do there. I spent most of my days wandering the town or hanging out with a gang of Gambian friends I accumulated at a local cheapo restaurant. Rumours had it that the train wouldn't be back online anytime soon, so I made an executive decision to cut my losses and head to the Adrar the long way, via Nouadhibou.

The taxi driver taking me back from the station saved me time (and money, and discomfort), by showing me where to catch a bus instead of share taxi down to Nouakchott. I killed the afternoon at the bus offices chatting with the workers, who fed me a massive lunch of camel and couscous - it is essentially impossible to go anywhere here without being fed. Finally, it was on the bus and across the desert, stopping every so often so everyone could pile off and pray. By 11:30 at night we arrived in Nouakchott, where I spent an unwise night inside, getting eaten by umpteen mosquitos, instead of out under the comfy tents and mosquito nets out in the yard (where I am staying now).

The next day, it was up early and out to the outskirts of town to track down a shared taxi to Atar, the major town of the Adrar. These taxis are always a gamble - they leave when full, which may take forever, and your level of comfort is highly variable. This time, I got luck on departure - we left within 30 minutes of my arrival at the yard - but I lost out a bit on comfort. It was an old 80s station wagon, on top of which we piled about 1000 pounds of luggage and trading, and into which (counting children), we piled 14 people. This car not being made for tall folk, I could only sit hunched over, with my chest approaching my legs rather too closely for my liking. Although the little ones didn't take up adult space, they made up for it with a good shift system that made sure at least one was crying at all times. In such a way, we put-putted out onto the road. Having said all this, and even though the trip took 8 hours in the heat of the day, it was actually kind of fun. Once again, we stopped and some fellows fed me a pile of camel for lunch, and by the end of the day, I reached Atar.

Dusty and exhausted, I went to the hotel listed as cheapest - and had to spend 15 minutes wandering the streets looking for someone to open the place! It wasn't a bad deal, though, as for the normal price of a hut they gave me a proper room... with air conditioning! Such things are to good to be true, and indeed the power promptly cut. Nonetheless, a good cool shower and a cool drink make a world of difference after a dusty trip, and I spent the evening wandering town, strolling along the river (this being the wet season, even desert towns have them) and chowing down on some cheap grub. When I got back to the hotel, the power even came back on! Unfortunately, I'd forgotten that I've by now kicked my caffeine habit, and the big coke I drank for thirst at 9 pm kept me up for hours... That'll learn me!

The next morning, the hotel fellow showed me where to find the banged-up pickups to Chinguetti. After killing the morning sitting about, then filling the back with everything the market had to offer, by noonish we roared out of town towards Chinguetti along a beautiful road climbing up a pass to the top of the plateau. The road, like much in the area, is being rebuilt by Total, as oil has recently been found. A couple hours later, we rolled into town.

Now, 2 pm in a Saharan town is about as close to post-apocalyptic as you get. Everyone sensible is sleeping through the hottest part of the day, and after being dropped at my auberge, it took me 25 minutes to track down the fellow who ran it (I felt a bit bad). The fellow, Yahya by name, turned out to be a genial sort who happily cut the rate in half for me (I was the only guest), then brought me home to his family for tea. They invited me back for dinner, after which, it turned out, there was a wedding! And not just any wedding. An Italian man who ran a guesthouse there was wedding a local girl, and causing quite a stir. Of course I was invited!

After a quick nap, Yahya picked me up in his donkey cart and we went cruising the town, visiting the dancing and drumming that the women of the wedding party were getting up to, then grabbing eats for dinner. It's experiences like this that a solo traveller lives for - sitting out in a yard in the middle of the desert, sharing a meal of camel as you watch the stars pop into view. The wedding itself was a gas - my foreign status got me into the family section, where I met another foreigner, a Quebecois fellow who had been there for 3 months learning to ride a camel, which he had bought, to keep for trips! It takes all sorts. After a great night of music and fending off local ladies, it was still too hot to crash inside, so I slept out on the roof, with the milky way to keep me company.

The next day I spent exploring Chinguetti, which is one of the ancient universities of the Islamic world, home to thousands of priceless manuscripts in private libraries, all ringed by amazing sand dunes. Out of this world. I toured one of the libraries with the local imam, had some poetry read, and drank tons of tea with all and sundry. Not a bad life.

The next day, it was off to Ouadane, the other ancient town of the Adrar. To get there involved going down the same road back to Atar, and then up the same road most of the way to Chinguetti, but not much I could do about that. Freakishly, my shared taxi left a) exactly on time b) not full and c) travelled exceedingly fast. Freaked out as I was, I didn't mind, as this let me find a jeep to Oudane the same day. We rolled out of town about noon, then stopped for an hour under a culvert where my fellow passengers made a fire and cooked up a huge lunch of spaghetti and camel which they plied me with until I could eat no longer. Joyous.

Arriving in Ouadane is an amazing thing. The half-ghost town sort of ... falls down the side of an escarpment in a pile of half-inhabited ruins and fortifications. There I stayed at the auberge of the amazing Zaida, one of the fiestiest businesswomen I have ever met. Over my couple days there we talked a ton of politics and development and women's issues, all of which were utterly fascinating. It was supposed to have been election time here June 4th, but the elections were postponed due to an opposition boycott. Zaida, like many, recognizes the whole thing as a sham, but sees some tiny shred of hope in the intentions of Gen. Aziz, who led last year's coup and is looking to legitimate it. By and large, people here see the election clearly as an attempt to preserve access to aid money now dependant on Western measures of democratization - an issue which itself demands another post. Zaida herself was content working locally, setting up a co-operative for single women (most of whom had divorced their husbands) and building her tourism business. She had been to France, which she thought a silly place, and we came to a general agreement that while it's silly to romanticize the poverty of a place like this, there must be some median between that and the insane consumption that so bothered her (and me!) about the West. Needless to say, this was all good French practice.

My time in Ouadane was passed in the usual way - exploring and drinking tea. The first night I was there, though, I was lucky enough to be woken in the middle of the night and chased inside (I was again sleeping in the yard), by one of the most incredible thunderstorms I have ever seen. I stayed up most of the night watching the lightning from inside my little hut doorway. After a couple days, though, it was time to head off again to my last stop in the Adrar, the oasis of Terjit.

Once again, shared taxis treated me well, and I arrived there by mid-afternoon. What a place it is. In the middle of flat-topped desert mountains, the road heads up a canyon that narrows until the village pops up in a sea of green date palms. At the very head of the canyon is the spring itself, which burbles out from the rock and makes a stream with a series of pools for swimming. Although only about 100 feet wide, you're surrounded by 300 foot cliffs and crazy dripping limestone stalactites, while the ground is shaded by date palms and lush greenery. There are birds chirping, frogs hopping, and the air is rich and moist. It looks rather like you'd imagine paradise - and coming in dusty and hot, it seems even more so. I dropped by bag under my bedouin tent, tossed on my swimwear, and dove in. That's about as active as I got for a couple days, although it being date harvest season, I did wander around the oasis picking and eating the groundfalls until I could stomach no more. At night, the people who ran the place left and I had it to my self, swimming in the pools surrounded by glow-worms and stars. Amazing.

Even more amazing, when it finally came time to tear away and leave for Nouakchott, on getting out to the road, the very first car going by (within 5 minutes) offered to take me directly there for a very good fare! This saved me hours of rides and waiting, so we cruised off in comfort into the big city. Arriving here on a Friday afternoon sees this already sleepy place an utter ghost town for afternoon prayers, but it was a good excuse to get some laundry and other puttering done. As you can see, there's not much else to do here - I've had a chance to catch up on internetting quite a bit. There are, though, nice people, coffee (for the first time since I got here!) and hookah pipes to be found, which is a lovely thing. About the only "tourist attraction" is the fishing port, from whence I just returned - and it is indeed something to behold. Although the city is theoretically on the ocean, you wouldn't know it - the coast is 5 kilometres from the centre. Hop a quick taxi, though, and you are brought to amazingness. The port is not a harbour, but merely several kilometres of beach lined with thousands (literally, at least 10,000) traditional fishing boats. Fishers go out in them, sometimes for just a day, sometimes for up to 5 ( a scary thing in the open sea in a glorified canoe). Come out to the port at the end of the day for sensory overload as the boats come in, beach themselves, and are heaved up onto blocks by hand by their crews, chanting all the way. The smell is intense - a mix of fish guts and fuel and ocean and sweat, and the sight is amazing... an endless line of colourfully painted boats as far as you can sea. You grab a cup of hot spicy coffee and wander down the beach, dodging donkey carts full of fish, trying not to get a boat dropped on your head, and checking out the produce (I saw at least one Hammerhead shark, sadly). Everywhere, the scene is the same. Teams of gruff, burly men man the boats, while between the boats on upturned buckets sit big, fat, beautiful African ladies in regal-looking robes and jewels, directing the sales with an iron fist. It's pretty epic.

With all that fishiness behind me, Mauritania is now a done deal. It's up early tomorrow to scoot for the Senegalese border - tomorrow night should find me propping up the bar at a fine jazz club. Should be quite the change.
Peace
Josh

One fine day

2009-06-17T14:53:00.011-04:00

I wrote this 10 days ago, but the internet ate it - I like the idea, though, so I decided to finish it up. I'm catching up on messages and news in Nouakchott now, so look here for a couple posts soonish. And now, onward!

My life on the road is dense with experiences. There are far, far too many to adequately write up, even when cybercafes are common. One of my worries, then, is that posts will more often be broad than deep. Posts like the last one serve a purpose, to be sure, but they have obvious limits.
With that in mind, then, I think I'll confine this post to describing, in more detail, June 15th, 2009. This wasn't a particularly "typical" day, as it involved a border crossing. It was simply a day that brought a smile to my face, and perhaps a day that can give a sense of the rhythm of life as a solo traveller.

8 AM - I wake up in a little hotel room in Dakhla, Morocco, the last town before the Mauritanian border. For a city 1000 kms from anywhere, it's a surprisingly developed place. There is lots of governnment money here, and a few foreigners either passing through en route to West Africa, or staying to Windsurf. There's even a Best Western. In my little 7 dollar hotel room there is just two twin beds and a closet, with a wood-shuttered window through which I can get a glimpse of the ocean from between the buildings. I'm a little bit bleary-eyed this morning, my neighbour's Rihanna obsession having kept me up later than I would have liked. I roll out of bed, dress, and scoot down the hall to wash up. This done, I head out into the streets to get breakfast.

Morocco is not an early-rising sort of place, and the streets around me are still largely shuttered at 8 30 AM. As in any Moroccan town, though, I can smell that the patisseries are up and running. I stop in at one and pick up a couple pains au chocolat for 30 cents each. Chucked into a paper bag, they accompany me around the corner to one of the many local cafes, where the usual rank of men with newspapers is sitting starting their days. I grab a seat outside, exchange some mumbled greetings with the fellows, and order a cafe au lait. After 30 minutes of munching and sipping and watching the world go by, it's time to hit the road.

(Luck treated me well 2 days previous. Rolling into Dakhla after 27 hours on the bus, I decided to have a look round for rides into Mauritania before committing myself to paying an extortionate 50 dollars for a seat in a shared taxi. It being low season, I hadn't been optimistic, but lo and behold, on walking in to the only place in Dakhla with beer, I had found the only 2 customers, a couple of French fellows headed my way who happily offered me a place. They were staying at a campground outside of town, so it was to this campground that I had to find my way the morning of the 15th.)

With this in mind, I grab my pack from the hotel and flag down a taxi with a free seat (essentially all taxis are shared here). Ten minutes and a dollar later, I find myself sitting in a cracked plastic chair at the campsite. The French folk are nowhere in sight, but the manager tells me they're expecting me. Eventually, one pops up on his way to the shower and says hello. I wait around for a while, petting what must be the world's most lackadaisical cat, until the French fellow appears again, this time driving what must have once been a fish delivery van in its French past life. He takes off into town to get gas. Soon after that, Frenchman 2 - Jacqui! - appears in a beat up Renault wagon and stops to chat. The Renault is crammed with garage sale bric-a-brac: air conditioners, bikes, radios, food processors and such. Jacqui tells me that his friend and he plan to drive it all across to Senegal, where they will sell everything - including the cars, the bikes, even their suitcases - before flying home. There is a small group of French traders who regularly do such trips, as you can actually make a solid profit on an old used car if you're willing to drag it that far.

Although shooting the breeze in the sun is nice, it is now getting towards noon, and with a long drive ahead, it's past time to go - but Frenchman 1 has disappeared! To my rescue come Helodie and Antoine, a French couple about my age, also staying at the campground. They're off to Niger in their 1986 Peugot hatchback, and they gladly clear a space for me in the back seat. By 12 30, we bid goodbye to Jacqui and hit the road. After a quick stop at the police checkpoint outside of town (this being disputed territory), we hit the open road - a smoothly paved 2 lane highway that shoots 365 kms through the desert to the border.

Antoine and Helodie are very French. We make the border quickly, barrelling down the empty road at 130 kph, windows down, Edith Piaf blasting from the stereo as my hosts chain-smoke stinky roll-your-owns and we all stare out at huge white sand dunes to our left and the Atlantic to our right. We stop once to spend our last Moroccan change on chocolate and coffee at a gas station, where some travellers coming the other way sell me a bit of Mauritanian cash; enough, I think, to get me from the border to town.

Arriving at the border, it's bureaucracy time! The police first must radio our port of entry to confirm our identities. This takes about 30 mins, as we sit in the shade and shoot the shit with jolly and bored border guards. As it turns out, they have no doctor on base, so when they discover Helodie is one, she is drafted into making a quick diagnosis of one man's stomach troubles, which involves him engaging us all in a long narrative about his gastrointestinal history.
Approval having come through from the police, it's customs' turn. The customs fellow is much more interested in flirting with Helodie than inspecting her car, so that goes quickly. Finally, we hand over our passports to the Gendarmerie (the RCMP equivalent) and are motioned on our way. This gives us the privelege of driving 200 metres to another Gendarmerie post, where we wait for 30 more minutes. Finally, we are ushered out of Morocco.

Leaving Morocco also means leaving the paved road. Although the highways on both sides of the border are in good shape, the 4 kms of no-man's-land between them has no road at all, only a rough track surrounded by car carcasses. Our trusty Peugot bottoms out hard a couple times in the 20 minutes it takes us to cross this. On the other side, we are met with another series of offices to scurry between. First is the customs shack, where the fellows are far more interested in buying the car than inspecting it. Next comes passport control, passed with a smile. Finally, we buy some mandatory insurance for the car and are on our way. I had bought my visa in Morocco, which was good, as Helodie and Antione are a shade to honest with their plans and are only granted a transit visa that they must extend.

We roar out from the border back onto paved road. About 5 kms on, we come to the intersection where a gendarmerie post marks the branch of the road that heads to Nouakchott (where the French folk are headed) and Nouadhibou, where I am going, 30 kms the other way. I say a quick goodbye and good luck, grab my pack from the car, wave my arm in the air, and within 30 seconds a banged up old Mercedes shared taxi stops for me. I begin to feel properly African as I see the live goat lashed dubiously to the trunk. They have a free seat, so I hop in the front - that makes it the driver, myself, another fellow, and my pack in the front, and another 4 in the back. We roar off down the road, chatting amiably in French as the folk in the cab welcome me to Mauritania.

After a couple police checkpoints, we pull into a dusty lot that is the Nouadhibou "station". After a day of sitting, I decide to stretch my legs and walk to my auberge - I see a sign pointing to the centre ville, ask to confirm it, and head off down the main drag. The walk is pleasant, in the fading sun at 6:30 PM. The town is noticeably poorer than Morocco, with its main components being low, concrete buildings, drifting sand, and lots of goats. It's also loads friendlier, with everyone smiling, waving, or shaking my hand as I go by. I walk on. And on. And on. By the time I've walked for 45 minutes, I begin to think it wasn't the greatest idea, but by now, I'm stubbourn about finishing, and I walk on. Finally, in the last light of the day I reach the central town, ask some friendly folk, and find my way to the illustrious Camping Abba.

The auberge is largely set up for overland drivers, with a large lot for parking and camping that sits empty, surrounded by whitewashed walls and some few rooms and shared spaces. There aren't many guests, so they give me a 3-bed room to myself for the price of a dorm. I think it helps when I tell them I walked - turns out I had just schlepped about 8.5 kms with my pack on my back! The hotel staff are amused. My room isn't much, just a few beds, a tiny window, and paint peeling off the walls, but it suits me just fine. I drop my backpack, wash up, and shoot the breeze with the folks there for a while, until I notice that I'm utterly starving.

I promptly set off back into the centre looking for an open restaurant. The streetlights are broken, and it is not in every African city that I would happily trundle in darkness, but this is Mauritania, one of the safest places on earth, and I don't have a worry. As I'm starving, I decide to stop at the first place I see, which is a 24 hour restaurant on the main drag. The lady running the place laughs when I ask whether they're serving food, says "of course!" and tells me the menu. It's pricey, for the area - a meal is 2000 oughiyas, or about $6, but I'm too tired to go hunting around for cheaper. I settle on the fish (this is a port), and the lady asks me whether I want fish eggs? Of course, I say, being a fan of the things in sushi form. It's good that I do - when I get my meal, it emerges as an enourmous plate of fried fish, with a sort of hockey-puck cake of eggs that was utterly lovely. With salad (fresh veggies are a rare thing in my life these days), bread, and fries, I was laughing. I pass my meal chatting amiably about Islam with some folks in the restaurant as we watch inane Moroccan soap operas.

With a full belly, I wander out onto the street again and over to the fruit stalls, which are lit by bulbs on strings hanging over their wares. I see with joy that I've come far enough south to be in cheap mango territory, and spend $1.50 on 2 kilos of deliciousness. After a long trundle back in the darkness, I tuck into a huge mango and read a chapter or two of "Wuthering Heights" (classics are all I can afford to buy!) until, at about 10:30, my head gets droopy and I hit the pillow.

Such was a day.
Peace
Josh

All this running-around!

2009-06-08T11:35:00.006-04:00

This is too cute not to be apocryphal, but I had someone tell me once that the East African slang term for a white person, muzungu, was etymylogically descended from another piece of slang, kazungu-zungu, which means "drunk" and literally translates as "my head's going round and round". The connection? What else do we foreigners do but meander pointlessly about? Not to mention drink. In any case, if anyone is reading this from East Africa and can check this piece of traveller gossip, feel free. I'll work with it, because going round and round is exactly what I've been up to for the past few weeks, in the best sort of way.

As of last actual travel update, I was writing from the Atlantic seaside town of Essaouira, where Mr. Mike Brown and I were doing our best to chat up the town drunks and stay attached to the ground in the face of some of the fiercest seaside winds you've ever seen. We did, in fact, have a showdown with nature on our last full day there, when we quested down the beach on hearing rumours of there being a ruined house in which Jimi Hendrix had written. We found the ruins, alright. We even startled awake the homeless fellow who was squatting in them. Upon further googling, of course, Hendrix had never actually been there, nor had he based "Castles in the Sand" on them. He had, however, spent a good long time in the area, and it was a quite interesting walk. Walking back, however, reminded us just why that town is the windsurfing capital of North Africa. In any case, with good food, a gorgeous old town, cold beers and sunsets to be had, Essaouira was a winner.

Life isn't all seaside and sunshine, though, so the following day it was up early and off to the bus, with a brief iterlude as we were pursued down the early-morning street by a rather disturbed fellow mumbling nonsenses, pointing at us, and throwing some pretty hefty rights at the air. I think he got distracted by a plastic bag, and we made our escape. After a couple hours of highway cruising, we arrived in Casablanca and settled in the lovely Hotel Colbert, a hotel 2 floors up in an old art deco pile for which we fabricated some sort of relationship to its satirical TV host namesake.

Casablanca, amongst travellers, gets a bit of a bad rap. I blame Bogie for filming the whole movie on a Hollywood soundstage. As the major port of entry to the country, and as the biggest city, most people pass through it. Lots of them expect some orientalist vision of Moroccan souks, or a city straight out of the 40s, full of piano bars and intrigue. You get neither. What you do get, though, I rather like. Much of the central city was built in the prewar years, and there's something I've always liked about old art nouveau and art deco buildings gone slightly to seed, with washing hanging from wrought iron balconies and clanking elevators in stairwells. That's central Casa. It's full of old cafes and bars in which the decor clearly hasn't been updated since the French left in the 50s, which when combined with the ubiquitous bow-tied waiters, does give it a bit of a decadent edge. Mike and I explored just that by launching into a proper pub crawl, managing 8 or 9 fine establishements before last call (at 11!). Hookah pipes were smoked, locals chatted to, and when one place turned out to be a brothel, prostitutes effectively dodged. A fine evening. Interestingly, although this was less true in Casa than it has been in some other Moroccan cities, bars are the one place where you may see the gender balance even out. While sitting at a sidewalk cafe table drinking tea is an exclusively male preserve, bars are socially transgressive enough already that you do find a reasonable feminine presence. As far as atmosphere goes, think the grungiest suburban strip mall joint and you might be on the right track.

This is not to say that we spent all our time in Casa just drinking in the local culture. Wandering around the city led to some cool finds, including the unfinished Catholic cathedral, where a few dirhams got us climbing the bell tower and running roughshod on the roof. Continuing the religious theme, we took in Casa's major tourist attraction, the feck-normous Hassan II mosque. Built on billions of dollars in public subscriptions in 1993, to designs by a French architect, the place holds 25,000 people inside and 60,000 in the outer courtyard. I was marvelling at the intricately carved ceiling so far above me when the tourguide mentioned nonchalantly that the whole bloody thing was on rails and opens like a stadium roof! Oi vey, oi vey...

Rounding out our major monotheistic religions, Mike's last day in Morocco was partially spent chasing down the Jewish museum, the only one in the Arab world. Our taxi driver clearly had no clue where it was, but neatly solved the problem by driving to the Jewish part of town, finding one of Casa's 5000 remaining Jews, and asking him! Blunt, but fairly effective. Eventually, we got there, and the museum was actually fairly interesting, with most Moroccan cities having hosted large Jewish communities until the foundation of Israel drew them away. After that, it was time for one last beer, and Mike headed off to catch his plane and resume his madcap African cris-crossings.

As for me, the next day saw me hopping on a go-train-esque commuter run to Rabat, capital of the country and a rather different place than Casa. When the French built them, they intended the relationship between the cities to echo the Washington DC/New York one, and so it does. Casa is the brash, busy economic powerhouse, while Rabat is a lower-rise, tidier, hassle-free government town. It also happens to be rather pretty, with a pleasant old town, some beautiful old whitewashed homes in the old Kasbah (fortress) and a new town with plenty of cafes and palm trees. I heard mumblings that day of concerts in the evening, and upon a quick internet check, discovered that I had wandered in for the final weekend of the Festival Mawazine, a "festival of world rhythms", and would be treated to a free Alicia Keys concert that night, and Stevie Wonder the next. Both shows were fantastic, although it was interesting to see the local audiences, normally so quick to dance, a bit unsure how to come to grips with Western idioms and English stage banter. Surreal. Rabat, otherwise, is a city of small pleasures - cheap fish sandwiches eaten overlooking the sea, quiet cafes and gardens and other little escapes, all a pretty good way to recover from the surprisingly crowded concerts. At one of the other shows, there was a stampede that left 11 people dead, something I wasn't even aware of until a few worried comments popped up on my facebook wall!

For all its joys, Rabat is a difficult place to kill more than a few days, so by the 24th I was off again, to Asilah, a tiny seaside town famed for gorgeous beaches and one of the prettier medinas in Morocco. Pretty it was - but I must admit, I wasn't a fan. Having been thoroughly gentrified, bought up by rich Europeans and filled with galleries, it was eerily quiet, completely unlike the old towns anywhere else. I rented a shack on a family's rooftop for a couple nights, which was lovely, although finding it involved a frustrating experience with some rather agressive touts. In any case, it's hard not to be a bit charmed by whitewashed walls and seaside castles, so I was far from grumbling. The main beaches were nothing to write home about, being coated (as, unfortunately, many are) with plastic bags and other sea detritus. Nonetheless, I spent a gorgeous day reading a book, attempting to swim in 6-foot waves, and turning myself a nice lobster-ey shade of red before hitching back from the beach in a dump truck and cracking a can of beer at sunset. Not bad, not bad at all.

It is, however, way too early in my trip for me to need a vacation, so I was soon off from Asilah to Tangier, another city unfairly slighted (in my mind) by foreigners for dirt and hassle. I suppose if you do arrive on the ferry from Spain and are chased through the streets by touts as soon as you pass customs, you might think something like that. With my arrival by train and easy settling into a cheap hotel with orange trees out my window, I wasn't complaining. Tangiers itself is a historical oddity, a city that was an international zone, run by a pretty dodgy council of representatives from 26 countries. As such, it was never a part of French or Spanish Morocco, and long served as a shelter for all sorts of shady dealings, artists seeking refuge, and other misfit things. That atmosphere lives on in a fairly pleasant way, with a thick layer of decadence lying over the place. The night I arrived there was the night of the European champion's league final, and the city was divided tribally, with different cafes devoted to Barca and Man U fans. It was the only time I've seen a female majority on the streets here, as essentially every man between the ages of 15 and 50 was in a cafe watching. Now, I'm no football fan, but I arbitrarily decided to support Barcelona because their shirts had "Unicef" on them instead of a corporate logo. Since they gave Man U what can only be described as a royal whupping, I was well placed to enjoy the festivities, which turned the city into a giant mass of car horns until well into the night.

After a few days there, it was goodbye to the seaside and off into the mountains. My first stop was Tetouan, which was once capital of the Spanish Protectorate and still maintains a distinctly Hispanic style in the new town, as well as the old, which is sometimes called Little Grenada (after the capital of old Islamic Andalucia). I spent a couple days there chatting with locals, making meals out of generous free beer snacks, and kicking my feet up on the balcony of my hotel room (which I shared with some impressively girthy roaches!). Continuing with the Andalucian theme, it was then off to Chefchaouen, the town in Morocco that probably draws the most backpackers.

This is not without reason. The town itself is gorgeous and clearly shows its Andalucian heritage with blue-washed walls and red clay roofs and pretty little squares. More important, from a backpacker perspective, is that 2/3 of the region's land is devoted solely to the growth of kif (marijuana), making this place once a famous stop on the hippie trail. Although those days have passed, there are plenty of stoned backpackers about, and plenty of people offering you everything from copious amounts of weed to the finest colombian coke (the path of which I would love to trace). Not being one for the international drug trade, I still rather enjoyed the place. I met up with the ever-affable Simon, a Quebecois fellow from Montreal here for a short trip, and we scrambled up one of the mountains hanging over the town, which took a solid day's climbing.

Since we were going the same way, Simon and I stuck together for a couple days, and he made pleasantly intellectual company as we made our way to Fez, grand-daddy of all ancient Moroccan cities, with an old medina that defies description (or navigation). Mile upon mile of twisted alleys leading to all sorts of mosques and squares and markets and workshops and other such chaos. As it happened, we also showed up for the Fes Festival of Sacred music, which led to encounters with sufi devotional chanting, Islamic rock reggae, dubiously religious pop, and other such fun. Having a tight schedule, Simon left quickly, but I lingered in Fes until last Thursday, wandering the "new" (post 14th century) town, taking in the tunes, and making 4 meals out of a huge watermelon, something my guts were regretting for a couple days.

Having heard that Mauritanian visas were no longer being issued at the border due to the upcoming elections, I needed to head back towards Rabat. Since embassies are useless on weekends, I stopped a couple days in Meknes, another old imperial city of some import. The town itself was nothing too impressive, it being a Friday (which sees most old-town places shut their doors), but it was well worth the stay for a hotel with loaner novels (I read 3!) and the chance to hop a couple shared taxis and walk through the countryside to Volubilis, the best-preserved Roman site in Morocco. I had the good fortune of arriving just after a school group led by a Canadian prof, who I stalked around the site all day for interesting tidbits. I'm not normally much for tours, but when visiting a huge ruined site, they can do wonders. Instead of colums and stones, I could see in my mind's eye this little provincial Roman city where only 2 actual Roman families lived, the rest made up of local Berbers frantic to imitate their Roman rulers by ordering Mosaics and columns from catalogues. Neat. The setting also helped - that part of Morocco is a solid Mediterranean climate, and the rolling hills of grain and olives around it look a lot like Tuscany.

And so it goes. From Meknes, I've now returned to Rabat, where my passport has been dropped off, along with $50 and a smile, to the Mauritanian embassy for a visa. With luck, it'll be ready tomorrow, and the next day I can start making my way south. I must admit, I'm looking forward to a bit more rough-and tumble travelling. Enough of these 4 hour train rides and sit-down toilets, I say! And I think I'll get my wish. From here, it's a quick 5 hours by Train to Marrakech, and then it'll be a 25 hour bus ride to Dakhla, the last town in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. There, I have to hunt for rides as there is no scheduled public transport, but within a few days I should either have found a spare seat somewhere, or paid for one in a 4WD. It'll be a long slog the 500 kms across the Mauritanian border to Nouadhibou, where I'll stop to rest, get some cash, and then wait for a trip I've been dreaming of for years - rattling my way across the desert for free in the empty hoppers of the world's longest train as it heads back to Zouerat to pick up another load. I can't wait.

So there we go. Now y'all know where I'm at. If I have the energy, I'll post a couple more times about Morocco. I'd love to discuss, for example, the food - but we'll see. In any case, look to my facebook tomorrow for some photos to go along with this long stream of babble.
Peace
Josh

"Bonjour, Mes Amis!"

2009-06-07T12:11:00.006-04:00

"My friend! Over here! Bonjour! Hola!" is certainly one of the more consistent parts of the Moroccan soundtrack. In many of the more touristed Moroccan cities it's pretty rare to cover more than a block without a few such salutations coming your way. Broadly speaking, these hails usually lead to one of a few things

1. A storekeeper whose shop you're passing by wants you to come in.
2. Local kids shreiking and running about
3. A tout wants to take you down to the shop, restaurant, or hotel that will pay him the best comission for bringing you in.
4. A hustler wants to invite you "to his house, for tea," which usually involves wandering down isolated alleyways until he can try and intimidate some cash out of you.
5. Somebody just wants to stop and have a chat.

Obviously, each of these possibilities entails a bit of a different reaction! As I'm not a shopper, souvenir sellers usually get a grin and a "La, shukran" (No, thanks) as I walk along, and rarely does it cause any problems. Similarly, local kids are usually a lot of fun to chat and play around with, although it does make you want to find and kick the first tourist who thought handing out candies was a good idea. After persistant refusal of some especially persistant children the other day, one of them did manage to bean me (at a good 25 feet!) with a pretty substantial rock. But no matter. Rock-throwing kids are a constant in many places, and a good chance to practice your locally flavoured scowling.

The touts and the hustlers, though, present a bit of a different challenge. The problem here is certainly not particularly severe - I've been in many places where it was worse - and in many cities and towns here it's pretty absent. There's also been a severe crackdown in recent years by the tourist police. I've had friends who've left Morocco, in the past, with a decidedly unpleasant impression of the place because of the hustle, which I certainly don't see anymore. Places like Tangiers and Fes were once legendary for persistent harassment, and in both I was barely bothered.

That being said, the problem does exist, and it can be damned frustrating. This is especially true in smaller places, where the fellow that sticks to you like glue will likely see you 10 more times after you finally shake him. As a lone traveller, it is always a challenge to get your sense of a place and learn to dintinguish hustlers, muggers, and con artists from the honestly friendly. With my feet still relatively fresh on the ground, there's not much else to do but err on the side of caution. When approached by people on the street, I pretty much never go with them. Although it leaves me safe, it also leaves me feeling like a bit of an asshole. Even when I'm well aware that the running friendly commentary from someone beside me is just a pitch to get me down an alley (and these ones are often pretty obvious), I still feel rather rude in ignoring or dismissing the poor fellow. It would be easier if the tone were lighter-hearted, but it actually gets a wee bit tense at times. A fairly common exchange runs along these lines:

Josh (for the 10th time) : "Sorry man, not really interested"

Hustler #1: "Okay, fuck you"

That one, I don't mind - indeed, it's actually a bit funny. The ones that get my gourd run more along these lines:

Josh: "Sorry man, I'm gonna head this way"

Hustler #2 "Sorry, sorry, sorry! Stop being so paranoid! I'm inviting you
to my home! To meet my family! And you're scared! You'll never enjoy Morocco
this way..."

The more agitated the second response is, the more sure you are that you've met a hustler. The thing that bugs me about it is that, criminal or not, the fellow has a point. I am well aware that by seeking to avoid unpleasant interactions with people like this, I unwittingly avoid and sometimes offend honestly hospitable Moroccans. This especially grates me because I usually enjoy travelling in Muslim countries more than any other. If this were Syria, say, or the Sudan, I would go with these people almost unhesitatingly. This gets easier as you travel for longer, but it never stops being an issue. As a lone traveller, you're generally regarded as pretty batty by local people, who would never opt for being alone, and thus are often approached in all friendliness. Indeed, this is one of the big selling points for me of travel alone - the opportunity it affords to be taken into people's homes and lives with incredible generosity. If I feel like I'm missing out on those interactions because of being over-cautious, I get down on myself for it. The skin does thicken, of course, and it has to, but I don't want to ever be one of those travellers who heeds embassy warning sheets and only talks to other foreigners for fear of being robbed. Without trust, independant travel is impossible. That sort of street sense, though, does not always come as fast or as discerning as I'd like.

Morocco, in any case, is an odd kettle of fish. It recieves gaggle upon gaggle of wealthy European tourists dropping in for a week and trampling over all sorts of local customs and cultural traditions. When a bunch of loud, brash tourists in short-shorts and tank tops rampage through the Medina buying every trinket in sight, I can completely sympathize with a perception of them as walking dollar signs. I just wish that perception didn't overflow so much onto independant travellers who really do want to cross cultural barriers.

And of course, it often doesn't. The vast majority of my daily interactions with Moroccans are exactly what I would like them to be - interested, generous, and honest. The difference? These are people who don't chase me down to the street. I come to them, either chatting in the market, or whiling away an afternoon drinking tea with the local fellows. These people have pretty widely varied attitudes towards their pushier brethren on the streets - many feel a bit ashamed by it, but others (and me, most of the time) simply remember that these are people who still live in what is relatively terrible poverty and are simply trying to survive. That is what really matters, of course, and I don't really begrudge anyone for it.

I am, however, aware that hustle is more related to tourism levels than it is to GDP. Where foreigners are a novelty, they're still much more of a guest. It shall be interesting to track that change over the next week as I head across from Morocco (one of Africa's most visited countries) to Mauritania (one of it's least). I expect the change will be pretty abrupt.

Talking about plans reminds me that this post was originally intended as a long-overdue update on what I've actually been doing! Whoops... Look to this page tomorrow for that one, as I'm in Rabat fetching visas and running errands and have precious little else to do. Until then, as always,
Peace
Josh

Tied in knots over pizza

2009-05-27T12:23:00.004-04:00

To those of you seeking a travel post, I apologize - you'll have an update on my scurrying to and fro in no time. For the moment though, I want to stop and reflect for a little while on some broad issues that I've been thinking about recently, albeit ones that are definitely being illuminated by the travel experience.

I got thinking about the subject of this post - globalized culture, cultural appropriation, authenticity, indigeneity, etc. - while wandering Tangier at noontime looking for cheap eats. As I passed a shop with cheap and tasty looking slices of pizza in the window, my own internal debate began something like this:

Voice #1 "Mmm...pizza"
Voice #2 "But that's white people food!"

I even got as far as debating with myself whether the fact that the slices were thin and square - ie, Italian-style rather than American - granted them enough exoticism to make their way onto my daily menu. Such are the trifles that sometimes consume the thrifty traveller. Still, this debate actually happens fairly often. As a shoestringer, my food choices are already pretty constrained, as I can't afford to eat local delicacies all that often. At the very bottom end of the scale, the cheapest food is also often very local, but that can make it damned hard to find if you're not in the mood to walk an hour into the oldest part of town to track down your boiled sheep's head (which, by the way, is lovely). As it stands, in many parts of many towns in many countries I've been presented by a menu that is pretty internationally consistent: burgers, pizza, and shawarma. All of which I like. None of which I would, on the face of it, consider "authentic".

To most travellers, myself included, authenticity matters. In our own minds, we aren't bumping over dusty roads for umpteen hours just to end up in some ersatz western fast food joint with shitty ketchup, or (in my case at least) in some anonymous business-class hotel that could be anywhere from Toronto to Kinshasa. I'd like to think that the most important part of travel is immersion in cultures - however one defines the term "culture" - that have different sets of norms about what to eat, how to act, what art to create, or how buildings look. We do this in the face of a world in which "Western" culture seemingly predominates, which lends itself to judging local experiences on some sort of sliding scale, with one end made up of the sort of middle-of-nowhere village life that ends up being idealized, and the other end festooned with McDonalds arches.

I actually spend surprisingly little time thinking about culture, especially considering that I subscribe in political theory, at least broadly speaking, to a school of thought called contextualism in which the most basic concepts - morality, meaning, knowing - are legitimately sensitive to the context in which they were concieved. Although this isn't limited to cultural context, it certainly includes it. The idea is to find some middle ground before dropping off the theoretical cliff and becoming a total cultural relativist, arguing that one can only judge one's own culture (whatever the hell that might mean). In any case, both contextualism and travel (I think) are dependant on the idea that cultural norms have some intersection with physical place. That's where this gets interesting.

As with most of the things that we hold as solid around us, when you put the idea of "local culture" under the microscope, it gets very fuzzy, very fast. Take, as an example, the city of Tangier. The site, or at least roughly this spot, has been occupied in succession by paleolithic and neolithic hunter-gatherers, some of the earliest agriculturalists, a civilization that we would now identify as Sub-Saharan, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Berbers, then Arab tribes that arrived with Islam in the 7th century, then the Portuguese, the English, an international council, and finally a sovereign Morocco. How, exactly, do we sort out what "local" culture means in all that context? The local history museum pulls an interesting fast one, referring to the Roman, Portuguese, and European eras as "occupations" while cheerily describing Islamic "settlement". In reality, the Islamic move into North Africa was very much a conquest, one that replaced the indigenous (at the time) Berber culture with imported tribes from North Africa, often at swordpoint. The Romans actually get a better claim on the word "settlement", as they often did found new cities, rather than take over existing ones. Still, it's probably best to keep everyone in the conqueror column. At the end of all this tumult, of course, white people fly into Morocco viewing hijabs and robes as authentic expressions of an indigenous culture, and the rest as colonialism. Hmm.

It's difficult to know where to start on the issue of indigeneity. Oodles has been written on it, some of which I've read, but not nearly enough to make me an expert. There's a lot of obtuse journal articles out there in the cultural studies milleu. Some are useful, some are not. In any case, I think that the compressed time scale in Morocco - at least 13 distinct "cultures", many more if you properly subdivide the era of Muslim rule - helps point out the difficulties I have with ascribing inherent value to being indigenous to a place. In Morocco, the question emerges obviously: how long do you have to be here to qualify? Are Arab Moroccans really "locals"? If so, are the Europeans? One has been here 1200 years, the other 300. Where shall we place the cut-off? The Berbers, of course, were here before - but not forever.

Although this is a testier subject in Canada, the same thing of course applies. Unless we subscribe to the quasi-religious school of thought that has Native Americans emerging from a parallel evolutionary track in North America (for which there is no evidence whatsoever), we quickly realize that Native Peoples, like us, are immigrants. In broad terms, their ancestors came from Asia sometime around 25,000 years ago (or more). More relevantly, the current arrangement of tribes that was frozen into place by white people is one that has changed often enough within historical record. The methods were usually what we would consider colonial - conquest and war - although there were plenty of exceptions to this. I'm not for a moment trying to compare European colonialism and indigenous conquests on scale. Europeans managed to annihilate, through disease, murder, and policy, somewhere around 90-99 percent of the population. Native nations never destroyed so thoroughly - although there were certainly times when one nation overran and erased another. In any case, indigeneity even in the settler states of North America and Australia is a tricky thing to really grasp. For K-W residents, the Six Nations is perhaps the best example of this issue, as in their case they were granted the Haldimand Tract rather a while after Europeans arrived on the scene - it was certainly not Iroquois territory from time immemorial.

Where am I going with all of this? Back to the pizza place in Tangiers.

As a libertarian at heart who identifies, at least broadly, with the political left, culture and globalization ties me in knots. Leftist discourse here often spins the narrative of Western dominance. You know the one. With all the money and power lying in the West, our culture overruns the world, steamrolling local languages and cultural forms and leaving behind a homogenized, Westernized, secularized global culture. I think there's much more to it than that.

To be sure, this aggressive picture of Western imposition has some truth to it. During colonial days, our strategy to deal with local cultures, especially when the conflicted with Western Judeo-Christian norms, was to stamp them out and kill the people who practiced them. Who knows what the world cultural scene would look like had slavery, colonialism, and the rest never happened. But it did. To me, trying to erase the colonial legacy in favour of some chosen version of "indigenous" culture is often to chase shadows - thus the discussion above. What was lost was surely beautiful and to be mourned, but it isn't coming back.

In any case, murder is no longer the main method of Western cultural imperialism. The market is. Here, we have a problem. When I find Schwarzenegger posters in Mongolian gers, packed McDonalds' on New Delhi streets, or Moroccan Pizza joints, I'm not confronting something put there at gunpoint. These art forms, ideas, foods, are legitimately popular. Indeed, McDonalds is always a fascinating social scene outside of the West - and you rarely see white people there. People like Western action movies, rap music, and food. They are willing to pay for them, and they do, quite often at the expense of their local traditions, and very often at the expense of their local languages.

There is surely something being lost here. There is, though, clearly something being gained - or it would not be happening. When we refuse to acknowledge this, the Left - in our anti-globalization guise - becomes strangely conservative. We arrange our value judgments in such a way that we seek to hold onto what has gone before, to protect a version of local cultures that are no longer current. Some would argue, of course, that there's good old false consciousness at work here, that people have been brainwashed into accepting a hollowed out Western culture that is objectively less good than their own. There's no way to disprove that, but I call bullshit on it on grounds of being patronizing, assuming that we educated ones can somehow see beyond it and that it's our job to pull the ignorant locals back to "authentic" culture. Blech.

Perhaps it's the economist in me, but I can't help but see this as a cost-benefit situation. The costs are the loss of the traditional arts and languages. These costs, to be fair, are huge. On the benefits side, there are all kinds of new cultural forms that come from the hybridization of culture. Indeed, even a passing look at the cultural history of Morocco, or any place else, reminds us that all culture is just that, a hybrid. By looking to restrain this, by viewing the advance of globalized culture as a threat, we're making a value judgment that the past is so important, it's worth sacrificing the possibilities of the future for. I can't sign myself up to that.

I think, in the end, there is perhaps a simpler reason for why the Left gets upset about culture. It isn't just that we export it. It's that what we export is often such shit. Listen to all the wonderful, interesting music coming out of Canada. What do you get in the rest of the world? Celine Dion and Shania Twain. There's more than a little snobbery at work when we find ourselves embarassed at a KFC sign in Beijing. That, though, is a separate discussion. I'd be the first to agree that I'd rather my own life be free of fast food and commercialized monotony. I just don't think I have the right to dictate that to anyone else.

I do, of course, write all of this from my position at the top of the heap as a white, affluent, male Canadian. Perhaps I would speak differently were I personally marginalized - and indeed, I think we have every responsibility to support those around the world who identify as such. We just shouldn't be the ones doing the identification. The picture in the sphere of culture is also a whole lot fuzzier. In movies, it is not Hollywood that dominates, it's India. In sports, not white men but black, and in music women often find cross-cultural appeal. It's still all a bit of a muddle, but one that I continue to find utterly fascinating.

Anyways, my cards are now on the table, but I'd love a bit of discussion on this one. What say you all on cultural imperialism? My comment field awaits.

And, by the way, the pizza was delicious.
Peace
Josh

Markets and Mountains and Missions, Oh My!

2009-05-16T18:18:00.006-04:00

Internet cafes are surprisingly interesting places. I come to get caught up on my e-mails, check the news, creep around on facebook for a bit, and (heaven forbid) update this blog. I must admit, though, I also come to peep at the various social dramas going on around me. This has gotten to be even more amusing since the invention of Skype - at this moment, I'm sitting on the top floor of a dank old building in the middle of old Essaouira, a port city on the Atlantic coast full of history and beautiful architecture, and all I can do is listen to the dreadlocked Moroccan across from me try and seduce someone (in English, albeit abrupt) over video, while the girl at the other computer whispers sweet nothings in Arabic into her mic. The trademark of our generation must be just this - the gradual disintegration of the barriers between public and private spaces. But I digress. I'm in Morocco. Here's a brief run-down of the last week or so.

I arrived in Marrakesh on Monday morning courtesy of a 2 pound Ryanair cattle-class flight that had me sleeping on the floor of Luton airport the night before. A short city-bus ride later had me at Djemma-el-Fna, the centre of the old town and one of the world's great public spaces. During the daytime (such as when I arrived) it is populated by fruit-juice sellers, dried-fruit dealers, flower salesman, snake charmers doing all sorts of odd things to gaggles of cobras, and men who try and place a monkey on your head in return for whatever protection money they can extort. As is so often the case, the hotel I had thought of was suffering from Lonely Planet Disease - the decline in quality and increase in price that comes from the guaranteed business of being included in the guidebook. After an hour of backstreet meandering, checking what must have been 2 dozen hotels, I settled on the second I had looked at - the rather well-named Hotel des Amis, running about $12 for a double room, and worth every penny.

Marrakesh really is quite full of the scenes one would expect of a Moroccan city - covered markets full of bright fabrics, carvings, and metalwork, carpets (and their salesmen), minarets blasting the call to prayer 5 times a day. What it isn't, though, is some sort of anachronistic hangover from the middle ages. Those minarets are blasting their call from loudspeakers. Buried in the market are umpteen mobile phone shops. Internet cafes abound. Motorcycles are absolutely everywhere, including in alleys barely big enough for two people to walk, let alone drive. It's noisy, smelly, chaotic, and alive. I was pretty sold after one afternoon, and after tracking down Mike Brown at the train station, we spent a few days getting even more sold on the place.

On the first day there, we spent much of our time getting thoroughly lost - perhaps the single best thing you can do in any foreign place. We put a good many kms of alleyways underfoot, and got caught in more dead-ends than I care to count. Excellent. We did, later, get to seeing some of the tourist sites - the Saadian Tombs, with their beautiful plasterworks, the ruined, but beautifully empty Palais el-Badi, and the gorgeous Palais al-Bahia, pieces of a history that is headed toward 1000 years. There was a good deal of mint tea sipped throughout the process, with Moroccans being fond of a blend that runs about equal between tea, mint, and sugar. Excellent. After a good walkabout, we jumped round the corner to the neighbourhood hammam, or bathhouse, for a good steaming.

Once again, noteable mention must go to Djemma el Fna, which at night transforms itself magically into a huge open air food market, with stalls serving up piles of food of all kinds. Over a few successive nights, Mike and I downed good portions of sausages, local fishes, steamed snails, sheep's heads, and other delicacies of the kind that travelling makes one more prone to enjoy. All of this to a background of storytellers, drum circles, singers, and one man who tried to make money somehow from a hedgehog. To each their own.

The city's delights, though, can only last so long, and with the mountains shimmering in the distance from the roof of our hotel, it was time to head for the hills. We caught a couple shared taxis (involving 7 people shoved into an old Mercedes banging up the mountain roads) to the town of Imlil, starting point of the trek to Jebel Toubkal, tallest peak in the High Atlas range.

One of the many reasons I like Mike Brown, and like travelling with him, is that he possesses an invincibility complex that rivals or even exceeds my own. Unlike me, tricked out with a pile of shiny new MEC gear bought for a year of adventuring, Mike arrived with what he had available from his Sierra Leonean stash of cold weather gear. I went with boots, toque, jacket and sleeping bag. Mike went with running shoes, windbreaker, and warm thoughts. Even with the acquisition of a hat in Imlil, he definitely had to tough it out.

The trek itself was gorgeous, and utterly exhausting. We started from the village with a steep scurry up switchbacks that took us to a path that overlooked another village, snagged onto a hillside like a barnacle on a ship. We pushed forward, hopped a few streams on some well-placed rocks, and pushed up a rocky path that moved steadily (and occaisionally steeply) up the hills, following a stream of meltwater up towards the source. The first day's hike takes around 6 hours, at the end of which you find yourself at the mountain refuges set up with chalet-style dormitories at the foot of Toubkal itself, in a little valley surrounded by grey peaks and bits of snow. Having hauled 40 pounds of food and gear up to there, I was a wee bit sore, but exhilerated by a perfect day. After a night piled into a chilly dorm, listening to the drunken singing of a huge group of Slovene climbers, it was 5:30 am, time to rise, shine, shove some bread and Vache Qui Rit cheese (it's everywhere) into our mouths, and get climbing. Stepping outside the lodge at that time of morning was pretty magical - you could look towards the end of the valley and look down at the cloud deck sitting over the countryside. Over us, it was only blue, sunburn-inducing sky.

The ascent to the top of Jebel Toubkal took about 4.5 hours, and although never a technical climb (ie, no crampons or ropes) was often a bit of a scramble, with long stretches up very steep snow slopes, or hopping from rock to rock, or simply wheezing our way ever upward. Although I left my big bag at the bottom, I was definitely feeling my lack of cardio, with a good many breathless stops on boulders. In any case, by 11:30 AM we were surveying the mountains around us from the highest point in North Africa - 4 167 metres up. I took a quick nap, a tone of photos of the utterly stunning view, and headed down a bit after Mike, who had managed to mangle his knee solidly, making the descent pretty torturous for him. We had decided early in the day to descend all the way back to Imlil and catch the taxi back to Marrakesh, which proved a wee bit ambitious. We did make it to Imlil, to stagger exhaustedly into our hotel at 8 30 PM, after 14 hours of trekking. With the resteraunts closed, we fed ourselves on general store food, making it a full 2 days without a real meal. Needless to say, we slept well. One hell of a trek, it was - I've climbed things called mountains before, but neither of us had really experienced the proper alpine thing, glaciers and crags and all. It was absolutely sublime.

The next day, it was back to Marrakesh by shared taxi, and then right onto a luckily timed bus - we had decided to head to the coast instead of back to the valleys of the Atlas, with both of us a good bit debilitated by the climb. It took us about 4 hours to get to Essaouira, with one bus breakdown in mid-journey to make it a bit more entertaining. Essaouira itself is something else entirely - a gorgeous, whitewashed town on the Atlantic, surrounded by 17th century French fortifications that can be climbed for incredible views. It's full of little treed squares, cafes, restaurants with soft pillows against the walls, a windy beach and a busy fishing port. Mike and I being who we are, we found our way to the local seaside drinking den - bars being few and far between in Muslim lands - and had a few beers with the local drunk. Indeed, the pursuit of beer has taken us to great lengths here, hidden as it often is in unmarked little places, reserved for the sketchiest of men - never women. Today, our mission was made easier by a further revelation - the local wine shop, unmarked and surrounded by local ne'erdowells. How did we find it? A friend of ours collared a local who was visibly drunk and asked him. This information was passed through some other acquaintances, and presto - a 5 dollar bottle of Cab Sauv to drink on the terrace as the sun goes down.

Essaouira is lovely, and will be home for a few more days - it's perhaps one of the most picturesque places I've been in a long time, with wrought iron and carved doors and bright fabrics and markets all demanding your attention, and great fresh food filling our bellies. It's a tough life, let me tell you.

And now for something largely familiar

2009-05-09T18:53:00.007-04:00

It's an interesting feeling to arrive in a foreign place and not need a map. A week ago, the morning found me happily puttering across London in the morning light, quite satisfied with moving in a general direction. I have family and friends in London and around Britain, the flights are cheap, and it's pretty much halfway to anywhere, which has led to a good many passings-through. Depending on how you count it, I should think I've been to London itself 15 or 20 times. Foreign, it ain't. Pleasant, it is. I know where to find good food, good art, and good people. What else could I ask for?

I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, though. My first stop in the old country was farther south. After just enough time to grab a wedge of brie, a bag of apples, and a quick picnic in Hyde Park, I stumbled jet-laggedly into Paddington station and caught a train south to Penzance, in the extreme southwest of Cornwall.

No matter how tired or grumpy I am, I love starting journeys from underneath big old iron train sheds.

Cornwall is a special place. My aunt Maggie (from my father's side) lives there, with her partner Ev, and her son Nick, in a farmhouse overlooking the town of Newlyn, the sea, and rolling fields as far as you care to look. Like so much of the English countryside, it's picturesque to the point of absurdity. Wandering around the fields and hedges and streams there always reminds me just how deeply woven the English countryside is into the fairy-tale aesthetics of our childhood. Stone cottages and burbling brooks and bright yellow canola fields all lurk somewhere in our subconscious - for all the multiculturalism of Canada, the symbology of our upbringing is overwhelmingly English.

In any case, my attachment to the Southwest is more than aesthetic. It's home - one of four places (Kitchener, Warsaw in Poland, Cornwall, and Southwest Uganda) that could lay claim to that label in my mind, places that I've settled and just lived, rather than toured. I spent the first summer of university in Cornwall, working for the family business (a clutch of shops and one restaurant, scattered about the region). It's a home base for me, a place that, as my family finds amusing, I tend to pass through on my way to some adventure or other.

As a place to charge batteries, the farm could scarce be better. There is an ancient stone farmhouse and barn with a couple modern additions, a gaggle of gorgeous gardens, vegetables growing in one corner, sheep grazing on the fields, and chickens laying delicious fresh eggs for me to mangle my cholesterol levels with. They have a separate guest cottage that has that perfect "cottage" smell, with cool sea air and warm blankets and rustic furniture. After a great meal, cooked by my quite-skilled cousin, and a few glasses of wine, I can usually count on the best sleep of my life - and so it came. 13 hours of bliss later, life seemed a lot more sane.

The days passed by pretty blissfully down south. I made liberal use of the espresso machine recently added to my aunt's kitchen, talked about big plans and small joys and family gossip as the business bustled around us. Being a guest, I was a good excuse for my aunt, who's been in some ill health recently, to get out and about. We made our way through the countryside to beaches and villages and potteries and absurdly low-roofed pubs.

My aunt Maggie is quite a character. She broke with her stick-in-the-mud Kitchener family long ago, running off to first a costume designer in Stratford, then a potter in Cornwall, where she raised her two children amongst the kilns and workshops, scraping by on no money, living in rough village shacks until she scraped together enough money to start a store and buy a rough old farmhouse above the village of Newlyn. Cut ahead some 40 years, and that rough house has become a few acres of paradise, the stores multiplied, and my aunt, now past 70 and a grandmother, still runs the business tightly. They don't come cut from such cloth that often.

Although by now quite wealthy, I have the utmost respect for the lifestyle that they have chosen. There is no ostentation, no fancy cars or absurd clothes. What there is is quality - good food, good wine, art and craftsmanship, support for family and friends, a pace of life that makes much more sense. To my eyes, this is England writ large - at a given income level, people here simply cannot afford as much useless crap as we can in Canada, nor is there quite enough space to mangle the landscape with humvees and executive homes. It's not all quaintness and flowers by any means, but there is a distinct sense, even in the london rat race, that it is at least possible to live a little bit more sensibly then we do. The buses go everywhere, even to tiny villages. The train functions. There is usually a store within walking distance of everyone. England has its share of disgusting exurbs, but the pillaging of the countryside is far more restrained than in the open spaces of North America.

Indeed, I'm often struck by how many things in England share a form with their Canadian equivalents, but simply work better. I watch their politics quite closely, and while their electoral system and distribution of parties mirrors ours almost exactly, I've been quite enjoying watching MPs jump like rats from the sinking ship of the Labour government over the course of a week of scandals. In Canada, with party discipline making MPs into useless robots, the quality of the political discourse - and indeed, the parliamentary system itself - is much, much lower. It's nice to see a backbencher calling out his party leader on his BS, even if it is still largely a self-interested move.

In any case, I'm digressing a bit from the travel narrative here, and the sunshine is drifting in the window rather seductively, so onwards we go. After a couple days more in Cornwall, with some time to hike out between the fields and along the cliff paths that ring the coast, I hopped the train back to London and dropped in on my cousin Mark, an architect who lives with his Spanish wife Helena, and their two kids, Josh and Lucas, in a gorgeous part of West London. In the past, I've stopped in only briefly here, so it's been very nice to root myself in their home for a few days and catch up. It's a fluently bilingual household, so my Spanish comprehension is even getting some practice.

Having been in London so many times, there is still a lot I haven't seen. I tend to sink into old habits and go to the same museums all the time, troll the same markets, and wander the same neighbourhoods. This visit has been a good change - I've explored a ton of the city that I've never seen before, dropped into some more museums (all the English ones have free admission, which is a joy).

As it happens, there's a bit of a K-W convention going on here right now as well. On Thursday I took the train to Oxford to meet Stef Simmons, an old friend of mine doing her doctorate in quantum physics there. Oxford is stunningly beautiful, of course - every image you have of what a "classic" university looks like originates there. Having a friend to visit, though, makes it that much better. Her student card got us into some off-limits colleges, got us dining in Hogwarts-ish dining halls, and got us a punt (flat bottomed riverboat) for free. We spend the afternoon punting down the river (as soon as I discovered how to use a 15 foot metal pole to make a boat go) with a bottle of good wine and a load of esoteric chatter. Bliss. Hanging out with physicists was a grand old time - the scope for Schrodinger-related jokes is much bigger than I had thought. Beware.

Back in London, the Canada convention continues. Although I missed one friend due to my unfortunate loss of his phone number, my friend Danielle flew in from Canada on an art trip, with her friend Sarah. After a day of hookah cafes and hippie markets, Stef and I tracked them down and we made it an evening of pints and wandering in proper London fashion. It's a bit surreal, meeting up on the streets with people I saw in K-W not so long ago, but it's good fun. The run continues today, as I'm headed out in a couple hours to meet the lovely Kate Applin for an afternoon pint as she passes through.

All in all, a great way to start a grand adventure... but this ain't no European sojurn! Africa calls. Tonight, after a sunday roast and taking in the new Star Trek movie with my cousins, it's off to the airport for a night on a bench, before catching my 6 AM flight to Marrakesh. I land there at 8:35 tomorrow morning, after which I'll head into town, grab a hotel room and a couple strong arab coffees, and go to the train station to meet Mike Brown, coming in from Casablanca. We're planning a couple days in the town, a few more in the mountains, and a few more in Casa before he flies out. It should be a blast, and I'll try and post from there in a week or so.

Until then, here's a link to a few of my England photos - I'm taking advantage of a fast internet connection to post some now. I'll get them on Flickr soon for you non-facebookers.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2223186&id=187901051

Peace

Josh

And I'm out!

2009-05-01T09:50:00.003-04:00

Here we go.

I'm just about to pull the plug on the cable modem, return the last couple bits and bobs, zip the backpack and be ready for my ride to the airport. The giddiness is definitely kicking in.

It's been a very nice long goodbye over the past couple weeks - full of picnics and patio beers and dancing. There are many things about the people in my life that I'll miss. For the first time, I can also say that about the place. Sitting yesterday in the working centre cafe, munching on delicious food for the umpteenth time, it hit me harder than normal that there are many things in K-W that I have come to love.

But it's definitely time to go. A long walk along the Cornwall cliffs and a hand-pulled pint in the village pub is calling my name. My flight today takes me to London, where I'll catch the Great Western train down the coast to Penzance. It'll be a very pretty 5 hour ride, past red cliffs and blitzed coastal towns, until I get to the end of the line and head up to my Aunt's hilltop redoubt to chase sheep and sleep deeply in the sea air.

Catch you all on the flip side.

Peace

Josh

"Where is it that you're going, exactly?"

2009-04-14T22:15:00.005-04:00

An excellent question. I've been getting it a lot, unsurprisingly.

When I hear it, though, I tend to bump up against my own little bit of reticence about travel. I do often feel that talking too much about my coming adventures - and I already talk a lot! - is a bit of a poke in the eye to those who aren't caught in the same swirl of good fortune as I am.

When I get asked about my destination, I usually give a wave of the hand and refer to "West Africa", or at best give a mumbled response about Morocco, Mauritania, and then a general southwards ramble. I realize, though, that I'm unwillingly contributing to one of my pet peeves - the lumping together and shrinking of "Africa" into a peculiar little ball of preconceptions and remembered images. You know, that place with the black people. And the elephants. And the starvation - can't forget the starvation. Oi vey. When I answer "Where are you going" with "West Africa", it simply begs for the conversation to continue along oh-so-predictable lines. You know, the ones that run:

"Oh, Africa! I have a friend/family member/pen pal/long lost rich dictator uncle in Africa. I'll give you their e-mail, maybe you can meet up!"

This conversation happens more regularly than one might suppose, even amongst Canadians who get noticeably peeved when asked if they know "Bob from Ontario" or some such. Bearing this in mind, it's time for a bit of a detail festival. Follow me for a moment as I draw out the vague mental map that I've sketched over a good many strenuous daydreaming sessions.

As many of you well know, I'm nothing if not a planner. Even when I'm ostensibly wandering aimlessly, my aimlessness generally encompasses some sort of agenda. I could never just wander off to Africa without some plan of action, and nor would I want to. Making the plans for a trip is just such a delicious part of the whole experience. I'm also fairly disciplined when it comes to these things. When I have a 30 day visa to a country, I'd rather use it efficiently than spend a week propping up yet another scruffy bar with the local collection of wandering white folk.

That being said, low-budget travel, especially in its African variety, is all about uncertainty. Sometimes, you get stuck in a mud hut for a few days, waiting for the next truck to pass. Either you love it, or you find some other kind of traveling to do. I love it. I also love the freedom that the road grants me to make spontaneous changes to my plans. All this is a long-winded way of saying that every bit of my grand scheme should be taken with a huge hunk of salt. If I find something especially interesting to do, a project I can be of help to, or a job that can bolster my ailing travel budget, I'll likely stop and take up the opportunity, plans be damned.

To have plans to rip up at a moment's notice, though, involves... planning. Who'd have thought? So, here goes, the grand hypothetical agenda for the next year-ish of my life:

May 1 - Fly out of TO. Land in England to see family and friends, swear at sheep, and hit my head on pub ceilings.

May 10th: Fly from London to Marrakech, Morocco.

May 11th: Meet the illustrious Mike Brown, fresh from his Sierra Leonean adventures, in Marrakech. Spend some time hiking in the High Atlas Mountains, exploring Casablanca and surrounds until Mike flies out on the 21st-ish.

From then on, I'll be rolling solo. The grand plan might look something like this:

I'm planning to spend a month and a half, perhaps a shade longer, wandering Morocco. It's cheap, it's interesting, and my Arabic is pretty rusty. Somewhere approaching late June, I'll hitchhike the long coast road south to the border with Mauritania, on the other side of which I'll climb onto an ore car and ride the longest train in the world.

After a month or so in Mauritania (during the "Very Hot" season. The other one is just "Hot"), it'll be time to make a choice as July rolls on: South or East? South takes me to Senegal and further points along the coast, while East would take me to Mali, the place I've dreamt the most about for many years. High summer, though, is an awkward time to be meandering about the region. In the desert, it's the hot season. On the coast, the wet. I have to choose one or the other for a few months.

Although from a traveler's point of view, mud is actually rather more annoying than heat, I'm leaning towards choosing the wet route. I'd rather brave the rain, experience the west coast in its greenest glory, and save the Sahara for October/November when conditions are ideal. That means that come July, I'll likely be on the road south into Senegal. There's much to see there, but word on the street is that things are pricey, which will probably take me on a bit faster of a beeline across the border to Guinea as July turns to August.

From Guinea, the plan is to head South once more into Sierra Leone (Mike Brown's erstwhile home base), and thence to Liberia in all its utter historical oddity. After Liberia is the first place at which my plan becomes truly sketchy. My first choice would be to head overland into Cote D'Ivoire, but this border has been known to be both impassible in the wet season or caught up in political instability surrounding the troubles that erupted a few years ago on the Ivoirien side.

My sources at the world's most useful messageboard leave me optimistic, though, that this will be a navigable journey. The hangover from the troubles, and the inevitable massive price inflation that the exodus of tourists and influx of aid workers and soldiers brings, will likely move me on from Cote D'Ivoire with some dispatch. If things work out the way I'm guessing, late September or early October will see me enjoying a bit more beaten track in the rather more touristed land of Ghana.

After that, the pull northwards will probably become inescapable as the weather in the desert cools down. The plan is to drift north through the wonderfully named, and apparently quite charming capital of Burkina Faso, Ougadougou, and from thence onwards into Mali.

Mali. I've been salivating about this country for years. The sheer amount of musical talent that emanates from this corner of the world staggers the brain, and I can't wait to park myself in Bamako, the capital, and spend a week just taking in shows. After that follows two more dreams of mine - to hike in the amazing Pays de Dogon, and to ride a barge up the Niger river all the way to Timbuktu. I can think of few better places to ring in 2010 than under the Saharan stars, and that's exactly what I plan to do if my Malian sojourn stretches to the end of December - which it may well do.

From Mali onwards, my agenda gets fuzzier. My most likely route will take me from Mali east to Niger, then south into Benin. From Benin it'll be time to head east into Nigeria, where my e-mail tells me that millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains await me. Even without them, I may have a few friends hovering around Lagos then whom I will owe a hello to. In any case, by mid-February of 2010, I should be taking a pause to re-evaluate my cash situation and my energy levels.

If my starvation rations have left me a financial cushion, or if I've somehow managed to earn a couple bucks along the way (trust me, I'm scheming), then the next phase of the journey will start to take shape. With my fondness for lines on maps and epic overland journeys, I'm entertaining seriously the idea of spending a further 6 months or so making my way overland from Nigeria all the way to South Africa - a journey that would take me through Cameroon, Gabon, Republic of Congo, the DRC, Angola, and Namibia. It's not a trip for the faint of heart, but nor is it particularly suicidal - the Western regions of both Congos have been spared the worst of their countries' recent depredations.

This would be a pricey proposition, which means it may not happen - I may run out of money and have to break for home,or I may decide to settle down and do something productive for a volunteer project. If the stars do align and my feet are still itching, then summer 2010 might find me in Cape Town.

15 days and it's go time.

- Josh

120 Days

2009-01-01T22:32:00.003-05:00

May 1st, 2009. 9:45 PM. Air Transat Flight 522. 120 days from today. No return ticket.

Big changes, it seems, always come down to strings of numbers. That flight takes me from home to England to see the family and walk the fields. From there to Morocco.

From there... who knows? Mauritania, Senegal, Mali. Down the West Coast and up to the Sahara. Bumping around on boats, buses, the backs of trucks. I can feel the dust already. With a bit of scrimping, saving, and starving, I should be able to swing a year or 18 months. With a job along the way, it could stretch a good bit longer.

Five years. Five years since I landed back in K-W after a year out wandering. Five years of university. Five years of building a life for myself, a life way, way too beautiful and rich to even begin to cover in a blog post. There's so much more to leave behind then there was the last time - and that's exactly why it's time to go. I've never been a big fan of living on momentum, and it would be way too easy right now just to step into rest of my life.

I've almost forgotten what it feels like to wake up in the morning in complete control of my life, to have time to slow down and think, to look around and drink in everything around me. I've almost forgotten what it's like to be really scared: not stressed, or exasperated, or nervous, but just refreshingly frightened. It seems a bit perverse, but I miss the rare bad times almost as much as the good ones. How can you really get to know yourself without being alone and afraid from time to time?

More to the point, there really is nothing better than watching a sunrise in a new place, sitting and having a cup of tea with the people there, struggling along in a language not your own. Climbing mountains and jumping in rivers and shoving your brain full of as much detail as it will hold. That's what I daydream about every day. That's what I'll be doing 4 months from now. Surreal.

There's a heck of a lot to do in those 4 months, and if the past 4 are any guide, they'll go fast. The unfortunate side effect of a busy life (and one where I cling pretty tightly to my independence) is that there is a lot of winding up to do. Sorting out money and doctors and dentists and taxes and all that mundane stuff looms. At some point, I do also have to finish university, too. Hmm. In that sense, this is a bit of a different kettle of fish than it was 6 years ago. This time, I'm facing a completely open-ended journey. This time, I won't have a home to come back to. This time is the time to finally uproot myself from K-W.

I will, of course remain in contact. Through the wonders of cross-pollinating technology, I think I've managed to build a web between my Facebook account, my new Flickr, and my blog. Those of you that are Facebook-friendly should find journal entries and photos popping up there. Otherwise, here are the actual blog and flickr addresses:

http://bootsandabackpack.blogspot.com

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootsandabackpack

Journals are great, but they're just journals. Not much use for saying goodbyes. So, let's set something up. Come May, I won't see any of you again for at least a year or two. Knowing life, it may be much longer than that as everyone speeds of in their own directions. This definitely calls for a glass of wine, or a walk in the park, or a cup of tea somewhere comfy. There's been a lot worth celebrating in the past five years. I'll see you all around.

Peace

Josh