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
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Sweetness
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
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
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
One fine day
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
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
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Tied in knots over pizza
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
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
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