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
Showing posts with label Guinea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guinea. Show all posts
Friday, September 11, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
So what's hardcore, really? Am I hardcore? Naah
"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
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
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Food for thought
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?
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.
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?
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?
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