Golden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whoodoo? Youdoo?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Togo-riffic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace

It's a date!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holy Tourist Trail, Batman!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace

Whee!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHEE!!

Banana Pancakes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace
Josh

One region, two planets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keepin' on keepin' on

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

All this running-around!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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