East African ODD-yssey, 2013

Being an accumulation of posts from a long road through Africa and the Indian Ocean via Europe, October through November, 2013 with minor corrections and additional footnotes from the Author.

1) Part the First

2) Going Dutch: On the road to Africa

3) Swahili sunshine: First days on the not-so-dark continent

4) Lamu Quartets: lounging memories of lost time

5) From lows to highlands: Lamu to Nairobi

6)The snowbirds of Kilimanjaro

7) Mary Mommy: An intercessionary prayer en route to Zanzibar

8) Going inland: Tanganyika to Nyasaland

9) From the bottom of the world league tables: Malawi

10) It's Wednesday, this must be Lusaka

11) Songs from the wrong road: South Africa, by mistake.

12) Definitely not vanilla -- Madagascar, the oldest/oddest island on Earth

13) Madagascar is burning: Madagascar North

14) Some people call it Maurice: the pompitus of Mauritius

1) Part the First

The best place to begin is usually the beginning. I haven't got to the middle yet and I've never enjoyed a story that began with the narrator saying 'I died a week ago last Tuesday.' If I want to eat the chocolate biscuits off an Oreo first in order to eat the filling last, I don't begin by eating the filling. 

Clear?

I'll bet Oreo analogies work to illustrate most of life's points.

So here I begin hidden away while Her Nibs does real work. Two months stretching out ahead of us. Over 50 hours of flight time coming up. The flights are the caked-dirt chocolate biscuits to what is hopefully a creamy sweet filling of travel adventure and relaxation. Only this time it's like a DoubleStuff Oreo because we've got two months(!) and Africa is big. Big enough that we must be mad to contemplate going overland for most of our travels. Hell, Africa is big enough that you could fit the USA, China, India, Western Europe, and a handful of other countries into it. And it has as many problems as if you did. But it also has hippos.

The hippopotamus is my favourite big animal. I like the moose, too (though not in Africa) and I suppose I'd be thrilled to see a rhino. Heck, maybe the rhinoceros is my favourite animal. I'd love to see one of those. Giraffes are pretty cool and give the rhino a run for its money. They seem nicely contemplative as well: I imagine them ambling along the plains trying to solve Fermat's last theorem while eating acacia leaves. Do giraffes eat acacia leaves? My memory dredged the words up alongside the image of the giraffe. Do acacias even have leaves? I suppose I'll find out. If acacias are even in Africa. I doubt giraffes eat eucalyptus leaves. Or bamboo. Acacia sounds right. Very Far Side. Imagine if giraffes, pandas and koalas had to compete for their eucalyptic feed. That would be worth watching, if a bit tedious. A panda won't even move twelve feet to have sex. A cage fight would be unimaginably slow. Not that I've tried to have sex with a panda from twelve feet away. Or two feet or twenty feet. I've never even been in the same room as a panda. Especially not one drenched in Chanel No. 5 and wearing a Fredericks of Hollywood teddy. That's all I'm saying.

Rhinos. I picture rhinos snuffling along, dragging their noses along the ground getting high off of hyena shit. 

Hippos ... I like hippos for the same reason I like hound dogs: they are floppy and fat and ungainly but you wouldn't want to get on their bad side. They'll come after you. Like hounds, I imagine they don't think too much and are very flatulent.

Lions? Well overrated. That's just my opinion but they seem full of themselves. They are the pretty animals who swagger and strut and rule the plains but wouldn't last a minute if the hippos rose up to take over. Hippos are either too smart or too stupid to do that, though. This reminds me of P.B. Shelley's line: "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." More to the point, it reminds me of a character[1] of Stephen Fry's who responded to that line with "and lucky for him no one agreed with him! If they were actually acknowledged they'd have to get off their velvet-clad backsides and legislate, not just sit around in big floppy shirts all day, drinking absinthe and trying to get laid." Or words to that effect. And that's what hippos are to me: the unacknowledged Rimbauds (well, OK, Jim Morrisons) of the animal kingdom. Let those who want to rule--i.e. lions, blowhards, and febrile acne'd youth parliamentarians--do so and the snaggletoothed poets and hippos of the world can spend their days scrounging for grass and producing copious amounts of crap.

Tigers. "A tiger?! In Africa?" is one of my favourite lines from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Probably because I didn't know until years later that there are no tigers in Africa. Except maybe in a zoo. I must have been a slow child.

So, the beginning. I'm already starting to get ahead of myself. Full disclosure: I'm actually writing this before departure because there's so much prep that it feels like things have already started. We're all equipped. Only a couple of changes of clothes because on this trip we have to be walking pharmacies and photolabs. Even picked up a couple of pairs of Depends undergarments because I can imagine being wracked with diarrhoea and having to ride in the back of a shock-free Landrover for 10 hours. Does that seem silly? Icky? Too much information? Well, grow up. Who wouldn't want to travel with Depends? It's a great idea. I'm surprised it isn't widely recommended. I hope not to have to wear them but I'm not ashamed to tell the world that I will. Damn it, if all it takes to travel across the pestilential parts of Africa without horrendously and repeatedly befouling myself is adult diapers, I'll proudly wear them on the outside of my trousers. Figuratively speaking, of course. Wouldn't do an ounce of good that way.

Maybe we should have tried for some corporate sponsorship from the manufacturers of Depends for this trip. I could be professionally blogging about the liberating qualities of adult hygiene protection in a continent that is determined to turn one's rectum into a sprinkler.

Anyway, enough. To the bright red lights of Amsterdam first for a few days of R&R, Rijksmuseuming, red-eye doper spotting, and raw herring. Then on to Kenya where we'll journey first to the coast near the border with Somalia, and then back to Nairobi for a couple of days before camping in the Serengeti, sweating in the spice markets of Zanzibar, dabbling our feet in Lake Malawi, going over Victoria Falls in a barrel, creeping through Madagasque jungles in search of lemurs, bats and the elusive aye-aye, and finally sunning ourselves on the fine dodo-bone sands of Mauritius.

Actually, now that I think of it, Depends-related corporate sponsorship of our trip is probably a bad idea. They'd want me to be wearing them all the time so I could tweet things like: "Hippo just rushed me. Crapped my Depends. But no one noticed. The faintest whiff of gardenia. Thanks, Depends!"

Anyway.

Well, that's it for now. The ODDyssey started almost two decades ago: fevered ramblings, pretense, artifice, japes and jeremiads from Europe, Asia, North America, Australia, the mid-Pacific and the Caribbean. And now Africa. The only difference about this trip, really, is that I'm a bit older, a bit wiser, a bit wealthier, and a hell of a lot more fearful. That all boils down to one solid fact: if a border guard tries to sell me his Colt .45 for self-protection, I'll damn well take him up on the offer this time.

Until next time.

N.

P.S. If you don't want to receive these just drop me a line. Happy to oblige. It's all mostly just self-indulgent drivel, after all.

[1] Amusingly enough, as I now recall, in a book entitled “The Hippo.”

2) Going Dutch: On the road to Africa

Well, there you go. Flights. I scribbled diseased rumblings on the flight over as I struggled with the stuff of night terrors in my 46cm of seat space. I've carried luggage with more cubic capacity than KLM provides in Economy class. 

At least they don't use some euphemistic whore of a name like 'comfort class' or 'traveler class.' It's cheap, point final, comme disent les parisiennes, and that's that. 

But I'll spare youse those notes because I do tend to go on a bit about the burned-out hopes and dreams of our 1950s flight enthusiast forebears. Alchemical substance abuse eventually lashed my ego into its seat and provided respite for my tired brain if not my body. 

Mens sana in corpore sano.

Or, kill the body and the head will die. 

So, Amsterdam, once again. I'm sitting on the counter in the washroom of a 4am hotel room trying to wrestle with my technology (not a euphemism) and hopefully get tired enough to go back to bed. Thoughts:

Amsterdam is what Vancouver's Commissariat of Progressive Electors aspire to: an efficiently anarchic mélange of buses, trams, bike, scooters, motorcycles, unicycles, and cars liberally wending their ways in a low-CO2 haze of dope smoke and pretty waterfront walkways. I think Mayor Gregor and his well-heeled utopian socialist backers were seduced by the image of pretty Dutch girls breezily cycling by, skirts a-flutter, cell phones in hand: an image likely brought about by too many fermented-past-the-consume-by-date banana/strawberry smoothies. They want to indulge in social engineering without the requisite geological and physical engineering: Vancouver has hills. And bridges you need to descend to before ascending only to descend again and ascend back to any place of interest. Grow a pair, Mister Mayor, get some earth movers, and raze our city like Haussmann or the Rothschilds. Then build your Amsterdam-by-the-sea. 

But Holland already has one. And it sure is pretty.

October 3

(although, technically, so was the above passage)

I'm still adamant that no culture does breakfast as well as British expat offspring (not the Brits themselves, they're horrible at breakfast). Case in point: these continental types serve sausages boiled, not fried. Now that may be healthier but it just amplifies the unsettling fact that I am eating pig guts in a condom. 

Yesterday we wandered muchly through the streets, jetlaggedly squinting at the world with suspicion. We even took a canal cruise.

A canal cruise is touted as must-do in Amsterdam. I'd amend that to read 'a must-do if you are desperate to throw your money away.' Don't do it unless you've found a lovely little open air boat to do it in. Or an antique glass-walled boat. Only use the big companies if you want to sit inside a coffin of cloudy Plexiglas listening to a pre-taped reel of banalities in six languages. 

Seriously, you should see Amsterdam from the canals but choose wisely. There's life on the water beyond the chlamydia festering in the used prophylactics floating in the waterways of the red-light district: grizzled captains talking through their cigarettes, beautiful women motoring off to the university, herons and swans, barges and houseboats. I'd like to spend a day in a small boat just exploring. It's not a Venice with meandering mazey canals: it was all planned and dug, but it is charming and harmonious and utilitarian and practical in a very Dutch way.

Amsterdam has, it claims, more nationalities in one city than any other on the planet. True or not, it has good food. We dined out on Indonesian last night and I’d love to find Surinamese food. But that amused me: just like Germans trying to find a German restaurant or Thais eating Thai, I led us to that most Vancouver of restaurants: a hip, modern take on Asian cuisine. Comfort food.

Today we are sitting in a cafe in the Jordaan district, having strolled through the streets, window-shopped and enjoyed the quiet atmosphere of this hip and sun-soaked neighbourhood of yuppies and rich hippies who lost their souls but not their funky fashion sensibilities.

Lots of police sirens wailing frustratedly as their occupants struggle to get past all the roadwork. The city is digging up the precise trams and metro stations we want to use and it is inconveniencing the Grijpstras and De Giers[2] of today. We saw one car driving in the bikelane and sidewalk to get past the construction only to be thwarted at the last moment by a garbage bin cemented in his way. So it goes.

[2] Amsterdam cops in a series of excellent novels and short stories by JanWillem Van de Wetering. 

October 4

Met up with friends from The Hague for dinner last night and a catch-up only to discover that we might cross paths in Tanzania in a fortnight and Hawaii in December. Queer, that. But not, I suppose, really. It's like next door neighbours running into each other in Barcelona. There's currents and trends in the tour circuit just like anything else. This year Rome, next year in Jerusalem. Odd with this couple, though, as their travels are generally more exotic than ours.

Ah, what more to say? It is a good place, a lovely place. I ate my herring and I ate my ice cream. We wandered the canals and marveled at the people. Then it was time to leave, to board the plane and go. 

Need I write about the piggy-eyed Frau and the sour mouthed cockney behind M on the airplane? Not really. It's all the stuff of bad legend.

Sorry, this isn't ending well. I'm sitting on a rooftop in Lamu Town, on the north east coast of Kenya, drinking tea, watching the Technicolor laundry waft and wave, and listening to the kids at play in the streets below. I'm starting to relax and can't work up the bile anymore. Amsterdam is starting to fade because the trip proper has started and I've got my pipe, a tin of Flying Dutchman tobacco, my tea and the sunshine. Oh, the heat is heavy today, so heavy, and my bones don't ache anymore. Life seems very far away.

3) Swahili sunshine: First days on the not-so-dark continent

October 5

Kenya welcomed us in a burned out airport. Just a month or two ago the JKIA international terminal burned down in what could have been a disaster for the country. Nope, they had things up and running, Kenyan style, in a few days. It took murderous thugs in a shopping mall to put a dent in the national mood. Perhaps I should begin there:

A number of people wondered why we hadn't cancelled our trip because of the recent unpleasantness in Kenya and Madagascar. Most were well-meaning, a few gleefully tried to inspire fear. Well, tough. What, run a marathon in Boston instead? Ride a bus in London? No. We don't intend to put ourselves in danger but these sorts of threats are random. A bombing at a marathon. An attack on a shopping mall. Planes flying into buildings. A decapitation on a Greyhound bus in rural Canada. The most vile, posing-pouch-wearing, Koran-burning pervert can walk out of danger safely just as a nun walks in and gets blown up. Totally random. Enough said.

Kenya welcomed us happily and dropped us at a taxi rank at 7am. The plan was to get over to the smaller Wilson airport to catch a 2pm flight to Lamu Town. We decided, instead, to use the time to see a bit of Nairobi. So we haggled with a driver to take us around for a few hours. And it beat sitting in an airport for all that time. We hung out with some giraffes at the giraffe centre, a place that provides urban youth with a chance to see and interact with these goofy, wonderful beasts. A few can be hand fed or, in my case, mouth fed. Standing on a high platform, I held some food between my lips and one of the young giraffes came and nibbled at me with its lips like a horse or alpaca before its slithery tongue whipped the food away.

Freaking wonderful. I love giraffes. They are my new favourite animals. All ungainly with their moose legs, but delicate with their movements, they just enchanted us. We were like goofy little kids. 

Like the times I spent sitting on hilltops in Australia with kangaroos, I'd love to sit and watch these guys for hours. They have a staccato grace that defies description. 

Although, I've got to say, their tongues are freaky as all hell. They are two or three feet long and thin and black and wet and it was like being attacked by one of those vicious demon phalluses that always crop up in Japanese animated horror films. The redemptive aspect of these tongues is that they are coated in a saliva antiseptic properties (given the scratching the tongues get from acacia thorns) so it ain't all bad. Not even a whiffy smell.

From there we walked through the bush a bit to catch some bird life along the Gogo River. Big aloe plants and delicate songbirds with fluffy topknots. Warnings to avoid giraffes because they have a mean kick. If you want to know how mean, you can look it up because I don't have the stats.

Actually, it wasn't exactly smooth sailing to get to the giraffes. First we were too early, so we stopped in at a roadside tourist shop where we took some coffee and relaxed for a bit. Our driver, Francis, had the loveliest ugly face. He sort of had a giraffe face: long, with an emaciated look to his temples and cheeks, but he had the jowliest monster dewlap of a neck—a turkey wattle—that framed it all from his ears down. He was a big man with sad eyes and a sweet manner.

So, back to the park for nine, but the guards insisted that we wait four more minutes because that's how it goes.

Then to the elephant sanctuary to watch the orphaned baby elephants get their morning feeding from huge milk bottles before they rolled in the mud and blew dust over themselves with their trunks. Sweet animals, but so too are the young of most mammals. Puppies, kittens, children, joeys, and all: they are all cuddly and lovable before they grow up into coarse, snarling adulthood. There's a lesson in there, possibly one involving Oreo cookies[3].

Then to the airport where it turned out that we were the only ones booked to fly to Lamu so we had the Cessna to ourselves and we watched the city edge become farm and grassland, terraced farms in the red earth, coastal flood plain, then the ocean itself. We circled around the island on which Lamu sits and came in on the single strip on Manda Island, to be greeted by two porters sent from Jambo House to pick us up. 

We were charmed immediately by the airport with its open sides. It takes twenty steps to walk through to a single path leading to an old corroded jetty. Three men sat fishing with a single line and hook and the ferry waiting for us came straight out of an improbable movie. It's so rickety and worn and held together with twine that you think 'there has to be a well-hulled boat under all this. This is just to impress the tourists.' No. Not so much the African Queen as the pox-ridden African Dame Edna it was built in 1945 and seems to have been built, at that time, with the wreckage from a dozen other boats. One man controls the rudder while the captain sits in front of an old diesel engine that he coaxes into life and massages with murmured prayers and love messages to keep going. 

The ferry crossing takes under ten minutes as Lamu is just across a channel full of dhows either slowly sinking at anchor, resting on the sand, or sailing along laden with fish destined for the market in town.

Lamu. There are no cars in Lamu except some government jeeps and an ambulance. Donkeys are everywhere. Everywhere. Donkeys and children. The town is reckoned to be the cradle of Swahili civilization and has been a major centre of Islamic learning for centuries but there is a mix of Christians and agnostics as well. There's even some Maasai people wandering about in their red wraps and walking staffs. The streets are a chaotic mix of donkey shit, children, and open drains. 

Actually, I kept thinking that the tight streets leading to Jambo House—our residence for a week—must be what Amsterdam was like before public sanitation and banking became our secular religion. 

Enough. My second bowl of Flying Dutchman tobacco is nearing an end and my bottle of Tusker malt beer is getting warm. Must enjoy life instead of reflecting on it. Until later.

[3] But probably not.

October 6

We hooked up with an American and a Chinese, Lee and Edison, who came in on the bus from Mombasa, a trip that hasn't suffered recently from bandits and I would have loved to have done had we been able to afford the time to do the 10 hour train from Nairobi to Mombasa that often takes 22 hours due to breakdowns and general 'issues.' Alas, time did not permit. 

Some may wonder why that would be preferable to a two hour flight in an essentially private plane. The answer lies in a combination of temporal and spatial displacement: I suffer from cultural impossibility shock when I fly. There is no transition between one place and another in an airplane. I pass through a door into a metal tube, survive like a feral child, then exit said tube by the same door. There is no gradual change. Unlike a train, a bus, or a boat, in which the sense of time passing is linked with distance on a human scale, the airplane dislocates me in a process[4] of dehumanization and infantilization (strapped into my seat with murder on my mind) through which the only visible change takes place not outside a window but rather in me: all flop sweat and jangly nerves, it takes a while before I really recognize that, yes, I am in a New Place, not just in a heightened state of paranoid anxiety. I settle down and recognize that it is the place and culture that is different, not me. 

Or both. Really, who do I think I am with this drivel? Alain de Botton? I don't have the hairline[5] to be a theoretician.

So, Africa. Lamu. Two fellow travelers. Together, we hired a dhow to take us out for a sunset cruise. Captain Barack, his first mate J, and J's youngest brother who was learning the ropes. Not that there are many ropes on a dhow. There's pretty much only one and it is manipulated to take the triangular sail either to portside or starboard of the angled mast depending on the winds. This was a Mozambique dhow that sailed like a charm, whipping past the Lamu dhows that wallowed like dugongs in comparison. 

Captain Barack asked me: are you a fisherman? I replied that I like to fish and grew up by the sea. The young mate said: I can tell you are a fisherman. Your father is a fisherman. I can see it in your face. Barack then offered to let me take the rudder and it was one of the best experiences of my life: squatting at the aft, holding onto the wooden pole that controlled the rudder and cutting through the waves while chewing on J's miraa (khat, chewed with gum to cut down on the bitterness). We were racing another dhow and I had to make some sharp turns to cut its wind and the feeling of the dhow turning, the sail filling, and the pressure on the rudder was all transmitted up into my arm and shoulder and chest and I thought: this is sailing!

Sadly, in so doing, I missed the chance to focus on the sunset, abandoning poor M to the dubious charms of our sailing companions, meaning that I am a terrible fiancé, but I understand that a sailor's first mistress is the sea herself. In this case, the Indian Ocean. Given the chance, I'd have sailed her north towards Mogadishu and taken my place along the pirates of the Somali coast. Arrggh. 

Actually, those pirates are not amusing people at all. I've compounded my crassness by suggesting they are. So it goes. 

As we sailed along, Barack set up a small charcoal brazier and made a vegetable stew and rice. We dined on that and fish (snapper?) he grilled having cut latitudinal grooves from spine to belly which he stuffed with a paste made from tamarind, black pepper, garlic, red pepper and more. This, with cut passionfruit, oranges and papayas made dinner. For dessert he sliced bananas vertically (in their skins), put chocolate inside, and grilled them on the coals. 

We didn't dine on the boat. We pulled up to a large raft with other boats—a floating bar—and ate there while locals and a few lusty twenty-something tourist ladies gyrated and ground against each other to dance music from an old stereo that needed periodic kicking. After our excursion, the four of us were initially bemused by this explosion of noise and just stared in anthropological wonder. I felt like a hairier Margaret Mead. We ate, danced, and later piled back into the dhow with some of the captain's friends who needed a lift back to Lamu. Using an upturned plastic bucket as a drum, they sang a combination of Swahili songs and western music. M managed to record a medley of Karma Chameleon, Country Roads, You are my Sunshine, and more. As they sang, we lay back and looked up into the Milky Way and damn it all if it wasn't a perfect moment. 

We hit the beach with the tide too low so we jumped over the side and waded ashore and back to our muezzin-and-amorous-cat infused dreams.

[4] A process, I remain convinced, that is manufactured to ensure quiescence. Quiescence being a lovely word that needed to appear in these writings at some point.  

[5] Or, rather, the lack of one.

4) Lamu Quatrains[6]: lounging memories of lost time

October 7

Woke. Ate a sweet pancake, mango, passionfruit and toast
with four cups of tea.
Went to the bank, drank a Guinness
then came back for a nap

Abbas wove us through Lamu Old Town and New Town
Into Swahili houses that rise up
with sweet smelling central courtyards
and views with cool breezes.

Swahili houses have no walls
just spaces. Spaces created by coral blocks.
Neither roof nor floor
but a space divider of mangrove sticks and plaster.

Abbas the guide
Walks through the streets unmindful of us
poor foreigners:
unsophisticated and gawking.

Lamu Old Town, famous for its carved doors,
Swahili history and heritage, 
has been sold, 60%, to whites
because only whites can afford history.

Lamu people sold their old houses
to buy two in New Town with plenty left over. 
So New Town overflows with chatter
And the laughter that Old Town forgot. 

Our crab at dinner has been upended
and has a body of curried meat
and thick claws that we snap at
and crack open hungrily

Wandering home in the dark
We are led to voices singing somewhere all around us
We circle twice
but it takes a local to show us where the Catholics are choiring

Jambo jambo.
Assante sana
Squidgy banana
Don't say hapana

[6] I’d originally written ‘quartets,’ hoping that each line of each quatrain could stand independently. At least, that was my post hoc rationale for getting it wrong in the first place. 

October 8

Captain Baji sitting at prow
while his man Adam rudders the dhow
and we burnt, micro-fibred, well-fed whites lean out
to take pictures of exotic people and places

Manda beach is empty
with the finest reddish sands
(made from a pulverized millennia of coral creatures)
that suck at my toes like quicksand.

High noon on Manda beach with the sun overhead
Tall coral stacks all around us casting no shadows
We sat under a low thorn acacia tree
and spat water at each other in the Indian Ocean

Our dhow captain's curry
(red, with beans and eggplant),
chapati and grilled baby tuna
with coconut rice and a Tusker beer

A turtle looked at me in my dhow one day
I forget which one
Then he ducked his head
and returned to a more interesting world

To get to Takwa Ruins we had to
sail in a dhow
and wade through a mangrove swamp with our pack on my head
but the Kenyan gov't got there first. 500 shillings entrance fee.

October 9

The houses drain to the street at dusk.
Street drains flow to the sea.
A donkey brays three times at two AM
then wanders away.

Swahili drunken laughter outside the window.
One man calls to another:
jambo mambo mumbo-jumbo.
I sleep better with their beer-happy noise.

Seafront donkeys at the dump
nosing through bottles, papers, children.
Gautama said that all life is suffering
But at least they aren't working for the man today.

Bank guards with machine guns
drowse scowlingly in the heat
Their frowns must cost a lot of money
because I see their guns are rusty.

Donkeys dragging bundles of mangrove poles
Pull up a dust cloud of laughing children
Who run to keep up
along the waterfront as they go home for lunch

Schoolchildren
All with crisp starched glowing white dress shirts
are better dressed than anyone else in town
except the women with their decorated black robes and hot eyes

Dhow captains lounging on the jetty
Shela? Shela? Shela! Shela beach?
500 shillings to go, brother!
No takers, they resume their captainy talk.

Three tourist ladies in bright wrapping colours:
one with bared legs
one with bared shoulders
and one with suspicious eyes

Drinking passionfruit juice at noon
in the Sea Front Cafe
Henna'd women in hijabs gaze in
But I shyly avoid their looks

A cart full of dead chickens,
being pulled by two running men
Like a scene from Roald Dahl
I expect the birds to wake up and scatter into the street

Lamu streets are dirty
But even if they were swept every hours
This old trading town would still smell
of drain water and dusty donkey shit.

Big truck tire wheels on wooden push carts.
Or pull carts?
One man pulls, two men push
doing donkey work on Main Street

My coconut prawns
with chapati and a salad of tomato,
peppers and onions
Has enveloped my head in a swarm of flies

Brother
I am not asking for money
But what goes around comes around Allah be praised
So can you buy me some flour and oil so my children can eat?

Small Kenyan bills are so dirty and worn
They have a velvet all their own
Like a loved child's toy
Or a baby rabbit's warm coat

My shirt is soaked with sweat
Which is good
Because I only have to take it off for five minutes
And the dampness will feel cool against my skin

It was hot on the wharfside today
So I packed my pipe and smoked it walking along
And suddenly all sorts of men, not touts, 
Wanted to talk with me and shake my hand in welcome to Lamu.

5) From lows to highlands: Lamu to Nairobi

October 10-11

A nasty cold and lack of sleep has brought us to a momentary standstill, but that's part of the point of Lamu: drowsy frowzy humdrum heat of the Swahili coast lazy afternoon, nathin' to do.

A word about where we are staying: Jambo House. Jambo House is cheap and cheerful. It is run by a Bavarian named Arnold. He dislikes beer. A queer fellow, but friendly and talkative.

What brings him to a place like this? I like to think he killed a man; it's the romantic in me.

Jambo House is good place with colourful rooms, running cold water and a pleasant rooftop terrace on which to write, to eat, and to drink cold beer and listen to the town sounds reverberate through the narrow streets. It's a wretched place to sleep if you can't filter out those same sounds. Me, neither muezzin nor meowl, bray nor brawl will keep me from my snoreful slumber. I gladly throw the cacophony back in their faces.

But Lamu when you've stopped running, sailing, beaching is an altogether different place. When, instead of walking into crowds you just sit for a spell and let the crowds whorl past you the anarchy takes on subtle patterns. Lamu is particularly good for this because, for the most part, locals are content to ignore you if you just sit still.

Wandering the town at a snail's pace, I sat for a spell in Makungi Square, the town square in front of the old fort that protected Lamu for some 150 years. To the west is the fort; to the east is a gate to the seafront; the south, beside the fort, is the marketplace, divided between a vegetable/spice/etc market in a collapsed parallelogram of shops with the courtyard under great awnings, and the sweltering meat market: a building with one central aisle, various fish and meats being chopped and hung on hooks. Outside the market are the cages of fowl and the odd bleating young goat. The town square has two great trees around which the men sit and play their games. 

Although the square is not to be used for commerce without the permission of the curator of the fort, I see that there are various ways around that prohibition. A juice vendor keeps one foot outside the square. Men show up with, say, a few brushes or canes or an ancient sewing machine. They place these down on a table or on the ground and then sit some ten or fifteen feet away. They aren't hawking their wares but if someone expresses interest a deal can be arranged. 

The only person to bother me is the same man who approaches us at least once a day: a milky-eyed old beggar who would like a shilling. There is also a madman in town but his beat is the waterfront and he speaks in tongues except when I address him directly at which point he breaks into an impeccable Korda British colonial accent: 'yess sah! Very good of you to remember me sah!' 

The fort itself has few attractions except for the triggering of a bout of nostalgia in me—nostalgia for playing soldiers—and I sent a few cannonballs into the marauding corsairs and shot at a screaming horde of scimitar-waving slavers in the street.

Women do not sit in the square. That would be lazy. But they pass through and stop to chat. The mingling of cultures here sees a woman swathed in black from her head to toes--only her eyes showing--walking arm in arm with a woman in capris and a blouse. They stop to talk with a woman whose black robe is topped with a vibrant head scarf. 

Authenticity. I rambled on about authenticity in Florence and Venice and the destructive tourist quest for the 'real' people in the real place. Here, in post-colonial Africa, as in Asia or among the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, the foolishness of that search is magnified. I like how it is expressed in a quote from Gina Apostol -- I grabbed it from an article about Borges in, I think, the New York Review of Books[7]:

"In anti-colonial poetics in Argentina, in the Philippines, and elsewhere, the question of “tradition” is dominant: what makes a literature “Argentine”? What makes a story “Filipino”? It’s a question that always drove me nuts — because the arguments always seemed at best foolish, and at worst dangerously essentialist. Anti-colonial critics at one point suggested that one must isolate “Filipino-ness” or “Argentine-ness” and find some pure, untrammeled state beyond history, when the “native” was pristine and untouched by the foreign, or even time. But the Filipino or Argentine or Kenyan or Indian is necessarily hybrid, condemned to deal with the past: history makes our identities irreducibly multiple. The Filipino is Western and Asian, European and Ifugao, animist and Christian, all simultaneously and vertiginously so. To isolate what is “Filipino” is to seek a chimera." 

Here, of course, you have the centuries of Indian Ocean trading, intertribal conquest, control from Oman, the influence of the Germans, the rule of the British, independence, and US cultural dominance conspiring to create an authentic mélange of ancient, modern and multicultural influences. 

Bah. Enough of this blather. This sort of thinking is what can make me a remote travelling companion at times. 

Actually, I can be a good traveling companion, happy to go with the flow and with few vested interests in seeing particular things, but I can be an irritating one as well. I am very security conscious except when it comes to answering questions. I am simultaneously terrified by people and interested in them. This creates a nervous condition in which I talk too much and too politely in an attempt to be liked. It can drive M nuts to hear me blithely answer questions about where we are staying and what our travel plans are. Beware! The world is full of cons and I'm the sort who'll fall prey and laughingly pay up, delighted at the audacity of the cons, particularly if there is a good line of patter. I like a con and will occasionally go with it just to watch it play out[8]. The friendly local, though, will be the cause of my death or dismemberment some day. I've got no problems avoiding dark alleys and shell games and 'my friend has a shop, good prices' and all the rest, but whenever someone comes along and starts a conversation about history or geography I fall right into it. Then I'm practically giving away my PIN number, my mother's maiden name, the name of my first pet, and the place I was born. 'Where are you staying?' is the worst. I happily blurt it out before I can control myself. I'm the proverbial deer in the headlights when it comes to direct questions. But, damn it, I shouldn't HAVE to be. All the guidebooks SAY that the local cultural mores involve avoiding direct questions and responses. 

This was never a problem for the early travelers on this continent:
'Where are you staying, my white brother?'
'Well, when you cross that river head in the directions of those mountains. When you find yourself shot by my man you will have arrived. Cheerio, old bean!'

So expect one day that a thuggee or dacoit will slither through the bars of my room and murder me with an assegai while I sleep. Not very fair to my traveling companion. Must. Shut. Up.

And so, Back to Nairobi. The same ferry boat to the airport in Lamu. Noticed this time that the old engine needs a hand crank to get it started.[9] The captain controls the engine speed/power with a string tied around his finger. The ferry leaves, the plane comes down to land and we board. 

On to Nairobi where we are fortunate to be staying with friends. Blessed fortune. Friendly smiles and the chance to let the rigidity slide from our faces for a couple of days. Friends of friends who have opened their home to us. Toby and Katrin and little Theo and Ella. Not only are they wonderful people, they have hot water! Oh, sainted luxury! Their driver, Paul, picked us up from the airport, got us through the Friday evening traffic and deposited us at their apartment in the cooler, but considerably thicker and more toothsome Nairobi air.

Ah, Nairobi! The climate here is lovely. It is in the highlands and every day has felt pleasantly like a summer's day in Vancouver. The jacarandas are in bloom and we wander or lounge in their shade.

Nairobi. For years the name sounded dusty to me. I thought of arid slums and concrete apartment blocks. Now it also conjures up soft images of cool breezes, the tinking of the Blacksmith Plover, of gospel singing and sermons in the 6am air of a Sunday morning. But I get ahead of myself.

[7] Actually, the Los Angeles Review of Books.

[8] Or so I tell myself after the fact. 

[9] Like the jalopy in an old Archie comic. 

October 12-13

Nairobi is smaller than I thought it would be. It sprawls, but the central business district is compact and walkable. M and I headed out down the road to the Uhuru Highway, joining a growing throng of people walking into town and learned a key lesson: walk signals exist only to thin out the crowd. Like streets in every developing country I've been in, the trick to crossing is to (preferably go in a group and) see a pause in traffic and just go for it. Here, though, they attempt to fool you. The one crossing that had a little red/green character was a joke. First, there are three stages to the crossing and none of the walk signals were synchronized. Second, the green man appears only when the perpendicular traffic also gets a green light. Third, it appears a few seconds before the traffic gets its light so we were a few steps into the street when the traffic surged towards us farting out grey smoke and sparks. 

We headed to the Maasai market down in the town square. Admission is free largely so the pickpockets can maximize their take. Actually, there may not have been pickpockets; there was no need for them as the vendors are adept enough at fleecing their victims. Techniques included the handshake that holds on and drags you to the wares, the pressing of items into one's hands and refusing to take it back, and the wonderful line used only near the entrance: 'brother, all the prices in this market are fixed, no difference, no need to look anywhere else, come see my paintings.'

Interestingly, many people wanted to trade something for my little manatee button and Marie with her six backpack buttons could have walked out with stocking stuffers for everyone. 

Row upon row of blankets laid out with wares. In it all there were three or four vendors with intriguing items (i.e. those distinct from what everyone else was selling) but we just don't have the room. I'm sort of torn that I didn't pick up a Sudanese pipe and a jolly little coloured number from Kenya itself.[10]

Funnily, I could count the number of Maasai at the market on seven of my toes. I'm not sure where the name for the market came from but I'll bet the Maasai are ticked at the thousand or so interlopers. Of course it is likely that we weren't even at the Maasai market but had stumbled across a massive jumble sale that had spontaneously erupted. 

We survived the onslaught by adopting the stance of royalty (hands firmly clasped behind back, meeting every entreaty with 'Very nice. You have many nice things. Mmm. Yes, very nice.') and we ventured to the National Museum and Snake Farm which was renovated a few years ago.

Lucy. We said hello to Lucy, a distant great-aunt, or what remains of her. Australopithecus afarensis. M insists that the bones on display are replicas. I demur. This is a world of relics we inhabit and these may be some of the holiest in the Darwinian pantheon. What need to insist real bones? It is our belief that makes the relic real. 

The museum seems to address the warts of its history head on. From the same article I quoted earlier I will add this: "Anyone who has grown up in a country where history has been created by the words of its occupiers understands this existential condition — the sense that who you are is a fiction, the result of texts constructed by others." I'd go further and apply this to any country but what's the point. It's just a digression.

Enough. We saw the snakes at feeding time fight and writhe around each other in caduceus form. We saw a lungfish, land tortoises and crocodiles. We returned to attend Theo's 5th birthday party—a pleasant outdoors affair —where we met a wide range of Nairobi types. The expat community itself is a bit of a strange things in any city. It includes those who desperately want a bit of home to cling onto and those who don't particularly enjoy the company of other expats but do so for the sake of the children. Happily, this group was quite friendly. Me, I think that had I continued to live overseas I'd have been the one sitting out on the verandah long after dark drinking too much fifth-rate whiskey, avoiding others, and eventually shooting myself in the head one rainy afternoon while the gramophone skips in its grooves. 

Last night was a bit spooky. I woke in the wee hours to the sound of drums and thought myself in danger John Buchan style. The drums were talking and they weren't saying anything healthy for me. It took a second to realize that it was really just the beat from the rave music blaring somewhere on the university grounds. My casual Edwardian-era racism was soothed and I fell asleep. 

Ah, but what else to write? The pleasant walk in the Arboretum where church groups meet to pray and sermonize and jog in circles and praise The Lord and break apart to talk to shrubs or murmur under trees? The trip to a shopping mall for Indian food and supplies and a carrot cake milkshake? The great talks about our hosts' decades in Cambodia, the deplorable reputation Canada suffers from in the rest of the world and its wretched foreign aid policies, the way the first world trains parents to mistrust their judgment and rely on 'experts' and plastic consumer goods to protect their children, the challenges of running a business in Kenya? Jane's chapatis and samosas? The Jam? All a jumble of happy sense-impressions.

And then it was time to leave and we enjoyed our last cool evening of birdsong and company under the jacarandas. Tomorrow we join the safari group at 7am and bus our way south towards Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti.

Peace.

[10] I was plagued by the certainty that I was meant to get a pipe in every country I visited, having first picked one up in Amsterdam. My fear put paid to that ambition. 

6)The snowbirds of Kilimanjaro

October 14

The official tour has begun and it has been one jolly jolty drive after another. 

Toby was kind enough to drive us to meet our safari tour group this AM and luckily the location was only a kilometre away as the crow flies. Driving there meant an elaborate roundabout detour, a realization that a median was in our way and a few ins and outs through the university grounds but meet it we did. 

And what a tour! 

There are 19 women and 3 men. The women are largely 20-something blondes from Germany, Austria, Australia, the USA, the Netherlands, Canada and Denmark. The three men are ... well ... me, an older fellow, and a Dutch fellow. 

I don't know how to feel about that gender ratio. Actually, I do. I feel paternalistic, which means I've probably already given up on life, sex, and happiness. Instead of Rodney Dangerfield I'm more like Foghorn Leghorn[11] from Looney Tunes: 'I say, I say, I say, stay away from the hens, boy!'

It's a multinational group and the estrogen levels are daunting but I will still consider it my Kiplingesque duty to educate these young ladies in the ways of righteousness. M approves wholeheartedly of my evangelical fervor but does insist that I not play musical tents in furtherance of my task.

And if any of that seems creepy[12], consider that even as a bachelor my eligibility rated somewhere below Bill Nye the science guy and only slightly above Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman[13].

We took the highway south out of Nairobi, crawling through "The Jam" in the city itself. Actually, that reminds me: it is fortunate if one has at least a passing familiarity with Elizabethan English while travelling in Africa. The same might hold true for India. Middle English helps too. Or James Joyce. Why? Because English is spoken here and spoken well, but some of the constructions are so ingenious and—to our ears—twisted that a familiarity with more fluid and creative English helps. Like with everything else in Africa, one must be relaxed and contemplative with the communication. 

The road south. Marabou storks lined the highway trees out of town. The highway was generally in good shape, what part of it we could actually ride, that it. There is so much road construction and detours onto dirt tracks that attempting to write, read, or otherwise engage oneself is impossible. In fact, at one point we had to detour from the detour because they were reconstructing the original detour. 

Kilimanjaro appeared in the distance, snow capped and hazy. The further out of town we got, the more Maasai we saw, in the roadside shops as well as strolling through the fields with their cattle. 

The border was orchestrated chaos, of course, but orchestrated nonetheless. All the passport photos we took for visas seem to have been for naught as Kenya and Tanzania border posts have computer cameras and they transmit our photos immediately. Likewise with our fingerprints. 

Who needs to know about that? The fact is, we saw Kilimanjaro before the snows disappear off of it until the next ice age. That's the thing about climate change, it isn't a problem on a global scale, only on a living creature scale. The Earth will survive long after we cease to, and the snows will return to Kilimanjaro, which will itself erode or be scoured off the face of the earth by glaciers. 

That may not be me writing, it may be the milk stout that I've drunk in the bar at our campsite in Arusha. An old lady named Ma runs the campsite and god forbid you get on her bad side. Otherwise she's sweet as hell and the bar serves campers, the odd local and a few Maasai who venture in to receive her greeting before heading out for parts unknown. 

Before I leave this day I have to remember the dust devils. The desert and dusty places of the earth are full of the manifest Lord: burning bushes, whirlwinds and madmen. Enormous pillars of dust storming across the earth in the most exotic shapes and pierced with shafts of light. If God didn't exist we'd have to create God out of the desert storms.

[11] The big southern-talking rooster. You know the one. 
[12] And it does. 

[13] Another comic book reference. I recommend it. Slightly. 

October 15

We left Arusha with the sunrise, having transferred into safari land cruisers. Toyota Landcruisers. Toyota owns the African car market. It makes sense for locals to keep buying them because the country is littered with plenty of spare parts. 

To get to the Serengeti we have to climb up over an old volcanic mountain range. Below us the river delta is shining like a National Guitar and the air grows colder. Cool air, acacia trees and dry dry earth. 

Also gyppy tummy. Didn't fully realize I was on Africa until now. A bit of a bug? Virus? Reaction to the anti-malaria medication? Malarone produces side effects very similar to malaria itself. Got that feverish sense of time. There's a scintillation in my eyes and everything has slowed down and we climb up and over the mountains and the Serengeti is glowing in its own light, faceted like a diamond.

[From this point forward I'm now writing under the light of a near-full moon on the beach in Dar-es-Salaam]

I don't know how or what to write. Yes, we saw giraffes lurching across the plains, baboons giving piggy-back rides to their young, herds and herds of zebras, impalas, gazelles, wildebeests and more. It's hard to encapsulate the Serengeti. It is a massive area and mostly flat, flat like the Canadian prairies, flat like bobbing in the ocean. It stretches to the horizon, enlivened by the odd rocky outcrop on which lions may lie stretched in the sun. It's the dry and dusty season, with the rains looming in the future but at the moment only the vanguard of the Great Migration of wildebeest and zebra have arrived. Given that, I can't imagine it in a month or two. I'd dearly love to come back in the rainy season to see the green lands, the fat animals, the young gamboling and frolicking in their new skies. Another time, and when we do that we'll come with a natural history or photography tour group so we can really engage with the Serengeti: sit and watch, enjoy a particular animal for a while. 

Because the Serengeti is so massive it dwarfs all attempts to photograph or describe it. I suppose the best I can do is attempt a negative analogy. Recent Hollywood attempts to capture epic battles (Lord of the Rings, the Rome series, etc.) have really boosted the number of extras or computer generated images to lend oomph to the battle scenes. The intent is to make the battles seem grander. That's misleading because human history has largely been dictated by only a few hundred or thousand belligerent males pounding the shit out of another few and then claiming a whole country. Where am I going with this? Well, the Serengeti would swallow all those armies, CGI or otherwise and leave their bones to rot. This place is daunting to the human spirit. The oldest human fossils have been found here. It defies time. It is a vast plain on which the seasons play out year after year and we human beings are just so much protein that it swallows up without a burp. 

It's a strange place. You can look out and see the plain in front of you littered with zebras to the horizon, turn away, and turn back to see only empty grasslands. 

Hippos wallowing in their mud. A leopard crossing in the headlights one 5:30am start, followed shortly by a lioness. A cheetah and her three infants playing in the grass. Another cheetah chasing two intruders out of her territory. Spotted hyenas with their looted meat. Elephants lumbering into trees and forcing them to the ground in order to get the tasty leaves. It's all there. Buffalos with their beady eyes taking the measure of our cars, Warthogs with their butts in the air, noses to the ground. Mongooses. Jackals. A lion and a few lionesses spending the afternoon in the bushes. Eagles, storks, kites, secretary birds, multicoloured little pretties, all of them. Tick tick tick. Snap snap snap. In the album, but to what end? What can our simple photos do that National Geographic hasn't done?

All that was gorgeous. 

Oh, a memory. Just prior to entering the Serengeti we stopped in at a Maasai village in the Ngongoro conservation area where the Maasai are still allowed to live and roam (tho the gov’t wants to move them out of there too). Nomads, colourful, subsisting on meat and a drink made of blood and milk. Supposedly. I think they pop the odd Mars bar when no tourists are looking. The Maasai are everywhere in Kenya and Tanzania, but mostly on the plains. You see them in the fields tending cattle, in their bright red and blue blanket/robes, silver earrings and stretched ear lobes, lots of beaded necklaces and bracelets. Herding goats, at the shops, walking with their staffs and bush knives. And cellphones.

I don't know. I don't know. Some Kenyans expressed admiration that of all the tribes, the Maasai have best preserved their culture. But culture is a tricky things. I'm a firm believer in individual rights but group rights ... I don't know. To rip off Churchill once again, culture is nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash. I'm with the leavers, the people who resist the group and go their own way for at least a while. Slavish adherence to tradition and culture is all about fear, absorbing old offences and wounds, and insularity. My tribe is the tribe of skeptics who say 'fuck dis shit' and go someplace where they aren't part of a tribe. And create culture and traditions.

The Maasai make a buck out of their culture at any rate. Good on them, I suppose. Most will demand payment for you to take a picture of them. I understand that. I hate it when people take pictures of me running along the seawall in V'ver. At the village, one of the chief's sons collected $10 US from each of us, then the village did a welcoming song and dance. We participated in a jumping contest, saw their kindergarten, and then the insides of their houses. The man showing M and I around kicked a young sick mother and her child out of the house so we could see it. Over our protestations. Fucking hell. Then they tried to get more cash out of us "to support their school." My first instinct had been to forego the village and I wish I had.[14] I like their blankets/robes, though.

[14] It costs money to preserve a culture. It also seems, at times, to cost people their souls. 

October 16

Want somebody to tell me
Answer if you can
Want somebody to tell me, 
what is the soul of a man.

I'm going to ask the question
Answer if you can
If anybody here can tell me
What is the soul of a man?

I've travelled in different countries
I've travelled in foreign lands
I've found nobody to tell me
what about the soul of a man

I saw a crowd stand a-talking
I came up right on time
To hear a lying doctor say
A man ain't nothing but his mind

Want somebody to tell me
Answer if you can
Want somebody to tell me, 
Tell me what is the soul of a man.
-- Ramblin' Jack Elliott

I don't know. I don't have the answers. I've got questions. The endless savanna and masses of wildlife do that to a man. M and I took a balloon ride up up up into the early sunrising morning. Whether on the balloon or on the ground you get a real sense of the roundness of the earth and its revolution around the sun. The plains seem to turn to the sun and I got a vertiginous feeling just watching that big ball of fire come into sight. 

But the balloon. We went up high and came down low, skimming the ground at times, skimming the tops of the acacias at others. Giraffes, gazelles, warthogs, hippos. Then, too soon, we came down in a bit of a bumpy landing and drank champagne. Well, crappy sparkling wine, but so what? I'm a firm believer that champagne is a panacea for all ailments and Friexenet (or however it is spelled) can't hurt[15]. That was followed with breakfast in a field, all linen and silverware, sausages and eggs. They set up two toilets in the field, each surrounded on three sides by canvas. A loo with a view. We could sit on the toilet and look out at a grazing herd of zebras. To wash up, robed men in turbans poured hot water out of brass ewers. All wonderfully tacky and not at all tongue-in-cheek. I loved it. 

So I spent the next few hours with a good buzz on, having quaffed the better part of a bottle of bubbly. Met up with our group again, cleaned up and smoked a pipe to scare off the lovely young ladies[16].

The remainder of the day was spent viewing wildlife on our way back to the mountains so we could descend into the Ngongoro crater. The drive out, dusty and full of ostriches and zebras took us back past the most wonderful tree, the true Yggdrasil, the tree of the world, standing alone in hectare after hectare of savanna, casting a huge shadow with roots that are likely entwined in the skeleton of a powerful queen from hundreds of years back. That tree on its own defies my attempts to capture the Serengeti. 

Mind, I wrote that humanity is dwarfed by the Serengeti. True, although we've come up with efficient ways to destroy it and the rest of the natural world. We punch above our weight in that regard. Part of the awesomeness of this place is the realization that however big it is it is hemmed in on all sides by we horribly imperfect, murderous parasites[17].

Leaving the park on our way to a campsite on the rim of the Ngongoro crater, our Landcruiser broke a spring and we came to a stop on the edge of a dry red earth dustbowl, near to a Maasai village (all brush wall, mud and acacia huts, herds of cattle and goats). The locals came out in waves to have a look at us, attempt to extort money, and offer us a place to stay. I was in full feverish hangover mode at this point (c.f. champagne breakfast, squirting bowels, twinkly eyesight) and could not be anything close to sociable. M was in her element, practicing her Swahili, holding her own, chatting with the chief's sons. For me, that nervous energy that can make me chatty turns into moroseness and trepidation when I am sick. 

Oh, and don't let the supposed poverty fool you. Yes, Africa has many poor people, horrendous quantities of poor and starving and homeless, but you have to be analytical. In some cases, poverty is dire and disease rampant. In other cases, a person chooses to live in a hovel for economic reasons. The Maasai we encountered, for example, look like they have nothing; however, they have masses of cattle. Like a first-worlder being house-rich but not having two dimes to rub together, some people make the choice to look out on their herds and not sell a cow or two that could pay for a child's education, housing, Coco Puff cereal. 

But the breakdown provided a rich experience, one that will linger in our memories. It also afforded us a sunset view of a line of giraffes above us on the crater rim. Like the last scene from Bergman's The Seventh Seal, the giraffes seemed to be dancing their way into the sky. This gorgeous image burned into my mind as the earth flipped its backside to the sun and we hastened to camp. 

[15] In retrospect, it can. But aspirin helps. 

[16] See previous footnote.

[17] I see that this is a theme I keep coming back to. A bit pessimistic, what?

October 17

Go to Africa and prepare to be amazed but don't expect unqualified emotions of any sort,

The Serengeti reminds me of a statement I heard from a Nobel Prize winner[18] —he had the distinct fear that the universe is too complicated for our minds to really grasp it, that the mathematics are too rich, the concepts too vast. Well, the Ngongoro Crater brings the Serengeti down to scale. It is Edenic. It's like Conan Doyle's lost world. It is a rich little paradise with resident populations of all the Serengeti's big attractions. 

To get into it you have to skirt the crater rim and take a steep road down the crater walls to the piss-flat crater floor. Looking down on it as you drive you get the idea of perfection: to the south is the forested lands, below is the salt lake, to the west, fresh rivers, to the north the grasslands. It couldn't be more orderly if the universe was creatively designed. In the dusty earth we saw warthogs, jackals, ostriches. In the forests we saw families and families of elephants, Throughout, zebras and buffalo and impalas and gnus and all sorts. In the fresh water, hippos. A black rhino harrumphedly and determinedly lying in the short grass with its snout out in the sun. Two lionesses lithely pawing their way through the grass and into a gully to snare a wildebeest. Hyenas arguing over scraps, flamingos and hippos in the salt lake and giraffes on the ride up the other side of the crater. I stayed standing in the Landcruiser, head out of the car, because I didn't want to miss a minute of the three hours we were allowed to stay in the crater. Imagine if you will, standing in the cold overlooking the entirety of Eden. Then imagine leaving it. Dirty, dusty, tired and unable to sleep. And fearful. Fearful that my memory is crap. Photos don't capture things too well and I can't rely on my memory to capture each of those perfect little contented moments. Already the memories are bleeding together and fading. 

Perhaps all that will be left for me is the memory of Yggdrasil reassuring and mocking me as it rises in the savanna. I am leaving Ngongoro and the Serengeti wondering about all that life out there and listening to Ramblin' Jack Eliot and wondering about purpose and creation and destruction. All that life consuming life. I feel like Jack Kerouac when he burst into tears at the news of a friend's baby daughter being born: "You've brought her into this world just to die."[19]

N.

[18] Still can’t remember his name.

[19] He might have been drunk at the time. At any rate, it was a pretty shitty thing to say. In vino merda. 

7) Mary Mommy: An intercessionary prayer en route to Zanzibar

October 18

Allah Ibariq
Emmanuel
Jesus LORD
Mash Allah
Blood of Jesus
Allah kaleta
God is Great
Power of God
Hugo Cheves
Kantate domino
Haadha min fadhli rabbi
Shalom
Mafia Mob
Happy Nation
Scarface
Mary Mommy
King of Kings
Allahu Akbar
Gift from God
Life is War
My god bless us
One more chance
Allah Karin
Jealous people never win
Bismillah
Love thy neighbour

-- slogans on the windscreens of minibuses and trucks from Kilimanjaro to Dar Es Salaam

I'm quite taken with Zanzibar, despite my torn ear, cut and bruised cheek, chipped tooth and mild concussion. But more on that later.[20]

We left our campsite at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro for a 14 hour race to Dar Es Salaam.

Driving on East African roads is not difficult but it is challenging. Perpetual road construction involves peripatetic parabolic travel on rutted detour roads carved out of the landscape. Trucks have to stop at periodic weigh stations but it is clear that having bald tires is not a hindrance to haulage. 

And it feels great.

I mean, I love my social safety net and consumer health protections but, after a couple of days here, Canada (the UK, France, take your pick) just feels so stifling. My city of Vancouver is increasingly akin to a retirement home where we are simply making it more and more comfortable to die.[21] Not so much a nanny state as a geriatric nurse state: 'now, Mr. Guernsey, you know smoking is bad for you, tut tut, and you know you can't just start a business without clearing it with administration, and you can have chickens in your backyard but not the front, and don't you DARE put your grandchild in a car without a special seat, and food carts have to be vetted for nutritional standards and how dare you drive with someone in the bed of your pickup truck and and and ...' and we've taken your children away for their own good and here are your nuts in a drawer and you can't trust your own judgment.

Horseshit. Simple horseshit. We've let ourselves get sucked into a world where we have to consult 'professionals' for everything. Bring on the revolution, I say. The only way to get rid of the so-called experts who parse and peck at the language we use is to overthrow the grammar.[22]

I like a place where a person can sell their produce in their front yard, where a shop can get up and running before having to go through the Möbius strip of governmental red tape, where lawyers are the last resort not the first, and where people respect their government but don't trust it implicitly.

(Tho not in my backyard)

So I'm not really a 'good' Canadian. And I've never really seen the point of hockey, do not think Tim Horton's is a national institution, and didn't hear of poutine until I was 18.

Mind, I'm not suggesting that Tanzania is that Erewhon or Utopia or New Hampshire of lore. Just musing.

Funny thing about Tanzania (tan-za-NEE-ah or Tan-ZAYN-ee-ah? If you know the answer please inform the locals because they don't) is the name. I assumed that the name Tanzania was a revision of the older Tanganyika. It's only since arriving that I cared enough to learn that Tanzania came into existence as a merger between TANganyika and ZANzibar and the union was named to reflect that. Panzanzibari[23] separatists are still not happy about that union, by the way.

But I digress from my digression. That happens. I'm rolling down the highways of Tanganyika in a beast of a truck and thinking too much.

Did I mention all the trucks with bald tires?

And the terrain turns from dust to greenery and the greenery thickens as we head to the coast. First are the sisal farms whence those great thick freighter ropes, then some terraced hills, more banana and mango trees, etc etc etc. The people are changing as well: women are wearing more colours, wraps and skirts, and carrying platters of food, bags of produce, or enormous carboys of water on their heads. The land is definedly carved up (though many plots are squats) and cultivated. The humidity grows. 

All of the oil/gas companies are unfamiliar to me. No Esso here. Arabian companies, African, Indian perhaps. I lie: I just saw a Total. But otherwise it is LakeOil, Engen, Oryx, Camel Oil, Oilcom, Woco Oil, and others. Trucks are Tatas out of India or Yutono or Scania or CNHTC. Cars are Toyotas for the most part. Gasoline is often sold in pop bottles by the side of the road. Small roadside shops are dominated by adverts for cellular telephony. In front of them are stands selling fruit, people selling Salvation-Army-rejected clothing heaped on blankets, men selling bags of cashews. Big bananas, small bananas, red bananas, no lack of bananas. Our companions generally prefer red bananas but I think the little yellow ones are tastiest: very citrus-y.

Minivans everywhere. Licensed to hold 15 passengers but spilling over. Each window has a person's head, shoulders and sometimes torso sticking out. People are two, sometimes three to a seat. Parcels in the back. This included a baby goat on top of the luggage in one case.

And the highway continues to the ocean and Dar Es Salaam is intimated at rather than arrived at. Housing thickens up, shops are cement, not wood and tin (great slabs of cement like they arrive preformed and are leaned up against each other), the commerce seems more needy, less incidental. Cement ditches line the roadsides, the dust and refuse increase, industry appears in the form of gas tanks and industrial parks and then come buildings fronted with reflective glass and I know the city has arrived.

Dar. D'Salaam, Dar Es Salaam. Five million people and the UN estimates that 70% of those are squatting. The government draws big Xs on those buildings that are informal, reminding inhabitants that they are tolerated but are subject to removal if the government requires that land. This isn't just houses; some major gas stations have been marked as well.

We had hit the road at 4:45am to try to reach Dar at the best time for traffic but the best time is still not a good time because there are no good times for traffic here. The ring road is a perpetual traffic jam. It is a divided highway, a dual carriageway, but drivers will not hesitate to drive on the wrong side (i.e. into oncoming traffic) if they see an advantage. When they come face to face with another vehicle there is a standoff that can last hours. There's also a separated road for bicycles, carts and pedestrians. We saw a line of cars take advantage of a side road to swerve into that bicycle lane and shoot ahead, bypassing us and the rest of the suckers. Half a kilometre ahead we saw them all stuck because a broken down lorry had been pushed into that lane. With shops to the left and a deep drainage ditch to the right those cars were stuck until a tow truck could make it to the spot. Suckers!

The Jam is permanent. People prowl the lanes selling goods, snacks, newspapers. Drivers stretch their legs and socialize, wander off to buy dinner. Police direct traffic at the intersections, smiling benevolently at the few who try to sneak through. This is loud, dangerous and maddening but it is also routine, and the entrepreneurial infrastructure (an entrepreneurial exoskeleton?) has grown up around it.

Gotta be careful, though, enterprising souls will steal anything you've got, even sliding under your vehicle to pull off whatever they can. An oil pan fetches a few shillings. 

And then we are off the ring road and wending our way through the outskirts to our beach camp, a welcome respite from the road dust with a warm Indian Ocean, a meal, a cold beer and the chance to scribble these thoughts into my iPod.

Maasai warriors patrol the camp because the world outside the fences can be brutal. Showers are salt water but there are oil drums of fresh water for rinsing. Our tent can stand some airing so we open it up and then run into the ocean, chatting with the locals who are splashing in the Friday afternoon sunset. The world seems OK.

[20] I do milk this excessively. Guilty as charged.

[21] In fact, while we were away, Vancouver city council passed a bylaw making it illegal for new buildings—private or public—to have round doorknobs. I see their point. I hate that I see their point.

[22] Both figuratively and literally. But that’s a rant to be elaborated upon another day. 

[23] If we overthrow the grammar, let’s keep this bit of the vocabulary. It’s a cool word. 

October 19

The Zanzibar Archipelago: spices, slaves and sunshine. Unless you fly in I suppose you have to go through Dar. That's an experience. We left most of our gear in camp and hired tuk-tuks to take us to the ferry terminal. This involved hooning through the suburbs down to a smaller ferry that would take us into Dar proper. It's a ten minute ferry ride on the sort of ferry that makes international headlines when it sinks. First passengers race onto it, then it is a vehicular free-for-all. Then more passengers rush in to fill up all the gaps on the car deck. The ferry has a 2,000 passenger capacity and it was carrying at least double that. And this is an ordinary commute. We stayed in the tuk-tuk as humanity swarmed us and then we were off again, rocking and weaving our way through Dar to the ferry terminal. Just enough time to check in, reprovision, and then we boarded the catamaran. This involves funneling towards a gate with the rest of the known world and getting churned into butter before popping through the gate relieved, robbed, and sexually spent. There's nothing quite like it. 

This is Africa. We had First class seats but the ships were switched at the last moment. This ship had Premium class and Economy class. So all the First class passengers were forced to sit on the outer decks while the Economy and few Premium passengers reclined in air conditioned luxury. Two hours, but we were in shade and the breeze was nice and then the sea mottled into patches of deep blue and turquoise and dhows appeared as did islands and we came into sight of Zanzibar's old Stone Town.

Though part of Tanzania, Zanzibar jealously maintains its own immigration controls. We presented passports, proved we had yellow fever jabs, and there we were. In Zanzibar. Stone town. With the gorgeous waters, dhows, Arab fort it was like Lamu with cleaner streets, charm, and lots more whiteys. And shops. And no donkeys. 

And hotel rooms! With blessed solitude, spacious en suite, glorious hot water, freezing a/c, it was difficult to get back out and have a look around the old town. But we did. Because we were exhausted and not in our right minds. We had a guide—Ali by name—who spoke the most wonderful English that he appears to have learned from a book. He must speak Italian and Spanish as well because some of his idioms and sentence fragments, interchanges of adjectives and adverbs, and downright archaisms were charmingly obscure among the old streets. 

Ali took us to the old slave chambers that are beneath the Anglican Church (deliberately built upon them after the Brits prevailed upon the sultanate to abolish slavery. Dr. Livingstone, I presume), and the RC church that used to be Anglican in which there is a cross made from wood of the tree that grew/grows on the spot where Livingstone's heart is buried. Then the markets for another whiff of flyblown meat and fish and the scent of blood drying and rotting under the equatorial sun. And the warren of streets, the old colonial buildings, a taste of the sultanate's past and finally, upon Ali's departure, drinks on the balcony of Africa House as the Indian Ocean rolled up the orange sun. 

It was a Saturday night and the conjunction of the full moon party ravers, the end of Eid, and the night market meant that the waterfront heaved with the entirety of old and new towns. The press was indescribable so we sat down on a curb beside some children and watched the world sway by. The Indian influence is strong here, so the Arabic/Islamic dress (for women) is tempered by a riot of colour, much more so than further north in Lamu. A very friendly look. And lots of henna. A hot night with the steam and smoke of the food vendors obscuring the old fort on the one side and the waterfront sails on the other. And no drunks. No apparent drunks at any rate. Just lots of babies and children and teens and adults and everyone mixing and sitting and eating and chatting until 11pm. Except us. We were luxuriating in our newfound luxury and I was snoring by 9:30. 

October 20-21

I like Zanzibar. A lot. It's a very relaxed place. Island life[24]. Yes, there's the tourist touts but a friendly chat and refusal sees them off with their final words being 'Karibu Zanzibar' (welcome to Zanzibar). Road traffic is lawless but not vicious and the road north to Nungwi was shared with overloaded bicycles, children driving ox carts, minibuses and taxivans. 

We endured the inevitable spice farm tour which consisted of tramping through the steamy plantation while our companions took picture after picture of plants (cloves, cinnamon, lemongrass, ylang-ylang, allspice, nutmeg, cardamom etc. etc.) that they will struggle unsuccessfully to identify to politely bored friends and family upon return home, watching a young Pavarotti type climb a coconut palm while serenading us, getting funny palm frond hat, eating a variety of fresh fruits and avoiding the little shop of spices and soaps. I say we endured it, but it was quite fun, though I wouldn't recommend it when you're concussed and bits of you are turning purple. But more on that later.[25]

I don't have to say much about Nungwi. The inevitable white sand beaches, exotic seashells, dhows on the horizon, warm waters, swimming pool, cold tasty beverages, and fabulous food (next door). In fact, the place we were staying (Amaan Bungalows) was quite nice provided you went south to get your drinks and north to a restaurant called Langi Langi to get your food. We ordered the same dish both nights, we enjoyed it so much: kingfish mchichi with zanzibar spiced potatoes. Mchichi is a spinach-like green and they prepare it wonderfully with the kingfish in a sort of curry. But not curry. A whatchamacallit. Food. 

The admirable group of young ladies I'm travelling with were great fun to lounge poolside with as they lined up for pedicures, henna, and massages. We chilled for two sunsets. No green flashes.[26] But it is pretty spectacular nonetheless to enjoy the sun flattening out into a molten puddle on the water and then slip away. We are 6 degrees south of the equator so the days are predictable 12 hours: 6 to 6. I think I would miss long summer nights. 

I was fascinated to witness a sort of sex tourism that I'd only read about: that of European women, usually of a certain age, travelling to Zanzibar and other African resorts to ... encounter ... young African men. It's a subset of sex tourism that doesn't get as much attention as the male equivalent but it exists and there's obviously a lot of it about. What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, I suppose, but ... but ... anyway, sex tourism is all rather icky in any of its forms. To put it mildly. And mildly is not how I would describe how the ladies were canoodling with their paramours among the deep shadows of the pilings.

[24] Am I influenced by having grown up on an island? I seem to prefer ocean-bounded countries. I suppose I’m like Wild Bill Hickok sitting with his back to the wall (until he didn’t. Oops.) That is probably the only way I’m like Wild Bill Hickok. 

[25] Squirt, squirt. Moo. 

[26] I’m obsessed with seeing the green flash of sunset. Tediously so, for my companions. 

October 22

The inevitable departure. Woke. Got out of bed. Dragged a comb across my head. As the song goes. We sped down rich dirt roads to Stone Town, skipped out on any number of tours of monkey farms, prison islands, city streets in favour of just wandering and browsing. And eating.

Oh, but we did stop in at a mosque with some companions and our old guide Ali. Mosque tourism is not a thing in Zanzibar nor, indeed, more generally in Africa. There are few richly historical mosques, I suppose and the one we got permission to enter was a standard Friday mosque (i.e. large enough to hold the requisite 40+ people for Friday prayers) and madrassa. The imam spoke with us through Ali (who for some reason insisted that we all present ourselves as Eastern European: somewhere close to Turkey) and two rows of schoolchildren (boys in front, girls in back) just sat and watched before singing to our departure with their version of the ABC song. 

And that was it for cultural education. The rest was wandering. M and I split up for a spell and I was not hassled at all by touts because I fired up the old briar and puffed my way along just as I had before. The Zanzibaris all remembered me and called greetings: "Jambo, Mr. Kiku" (Hello, Mr. Pipe). They knew I had been there before and wasn't buying, just strolling and snapping the odd photo. Affectations have their uses.

A hot day, a cool drink, a lovely group meal in the same Indian restaurant M and I had dined in the first night, and then prep for an earlyish departure back to the mainland, to Dar, the traffic jam and the overland scramble to Malawi. 

Membership in the first world has its privileges.

8) Going inland: Tanganyika to Nyasaland

October 23 

God, there's a hell of a lot of seminaries in Africa. And orphanages. And AIDS. I doubt there's any question about which gets the most funding from the First World. My money is on religion. We fat contented western types dearly love to save souls at the expense of lives. Anyway, it's a convenient cycle: lack of condoms produces AIDS which produces orphans who become priests who prevent condom distribution. 'Money for the pagan babies? God bless your charitable soul!'

I'm with Kurt Weill: food is the first thing; morals follow after.[27]

I'm not concussed, by the way. Just took a tumble, landed on a curb on my ear, bounced off my cheekbone, and somewhere in there chipped the inside of one of my teeth. Strange, that. Was out for a short while is all. Inside my pink and shell-like looks like a black hole and the swelling has made it difficult for my ear to equalize with the altitude change as we drive inland. Miracle salve from Baja Botanicals has taken care of the rest.

So no great tale of derring-do. To increase the indignity, it all happened in a washroom. My cheekbone or tooth took out a chunk of tile, so I had my revenge.

But, anyway, religion. It ain't all bad, of course. I love me a nice fuzzy helpful pastor/priest/rabbi/lama. The only irritating ones are those who whose righteousness is self-righteousness. They're also the ones who get the most indignant about not getting sufficient respect or their faith being the butt of jokes. So, screw 'em. Ignorant buffoons, all of them. 

Finally got a chance to see the purple-assed baboons I so often refer to. You can thank William Burroughs for that.[28] Obscene little tarts. I love them. Lounging by the roadside exposing their bottoms to the passers-by. Like to set a few of them loose in a Holy Roller church or an Opus Dei wine tasting.

But I suppose people who live in mud houses shouldn't cast stones. And there's lots of mud houses here. The simplest are rectangles made out of sticks and mud. The mud is packed in around the wooden rebar, then the family has a big fire inside the structure to bake and harden the clay mud. An A-frame roof is added, either with an acacia frame and rushes or milled wood and tin. Others use bricks cut out of the clay on the property, stacked into a ziggurat or squat pyramid and fired in a like manner. The bricks are then used like any other. 

As we get deeper into the countryside there's fewer concrete houses. Leaving the city we pass through the rich wet lands and into a more stereotypically African landscape: sere and flat and hot. Subsistence living? Or is a family member working in a city? Houses are clumped together and so too are their stalls selling tomatoes. Who buys all these tomatoes? Is it just wishful thinking? 

The land always seems healthier when there's no human interference but that's an illusion as we see when we pass through a national park (Mizuni?[29] I'll have to correct all my locations later) where it is forbidden to stop. The wardens actively fire the lands to ensure plenty of green shoots for the animals during the rains. We see giraffes and zebras, baboons and impalas. Fines for hitting an animal range from a few hundreds of US dollars to 18,000 USD for an elephant or giraffe. Interestingly, given the prohibition on stopping, there's a disproportionate number of lorries broken down. I suspect poaching but it could just be all the speed bumps.

Speed bumps. Speed bumps, humps, sleeping policemen. The highways are full of them and I'm inclined to suggest Canada go the same route in high accident areas. Where the speed limit slows to thirty on a narrow highway curve a bump in the road will enforce the code better than a sign. 

And the road goes on forever and the party never ends
-- Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson 

The road glitters prettily. M points out that the glitter comprises little fragments of metal, nuts, screws, etc. from accidents. The soft hot asphalt (tarmacadam?)[30] takes them all to heart.

And we get to camp despite the Dar Jam and the endless lines of lorries queuing for the weigh bridges and the humps and all. 

And the camp is full of guinea fowl which are lucky they are a tough bird because they are lunch on two legs: tiny turkey head, tiny twig legs and a roly poly big fat body. It would be like killing and eating Danny DeVito. 

And geese and dogs and the cocks will crow us awake in the morning.

[27] Yes, this is an incorrect attribution. I deal with that later.

[28] My tedious references to them, not the chance to see them in the flesh. 

[29] Mikumi.

[30] Tarmac (short for tarmacadam, or tar-penetration macadam) is a type of road surfacing material patented by Edgar Purnell Hooley in 1901. The term is also used, with varying degrees of correctness, for a variety of other materials, including tar-groutedmacadam, bituminous surface treatments, and even modern asphalt concrete. Source: Wikipedia. Bless it. 

October 24

A word about equipment. We're traveling light and that's for the best. I could even rid myself of about a third of my clothes. Not using everything. Brought unnatural fibres, for the most part: quick drying. Old running clothes that I can leave behind or trade for trinkets. Zip away trousers and threadbare linen long-sleeve shirts. A floppy wide brimmed hat. 

The piece-de-resistance is my vest. Not any old vest, a technological marvel called the ScottEVest. Most pockets are on the inside and are designed to maintain a minimal profile. I can stuff 15lbs of gear in here and only look slightly[31] well fed, smug and self-satisfied. It is designed for technology as well, so wires can be threaded throughout, two inner breast pockets are touchscreen-friendly, and a camelback water system can sit in the small of your back and be threaded up to your parched lips. 

For writing, an iPod Touch and a wireless travel keyboard. In the vest. My cameras are holstered on a belt that also provides loops for carabiners to hold all sorts. Backpacks and shoulder bags hate my lower back so this setup takes care of most of my needs. Airport security is a breeze: remove the vest and belt and walk through. 

Also picked up a cervical collar at the medical supply store because travel pillows are too small for my giraffe neck. Works like a charm on airplanes. I practically fall asleep while standing up. But whenever I take it off M puts it on her head like a wimple and runs up and down the aisles to shrieks of laughter. Comfort has its detractors.

Traveling companions: beyond the indefatigable and redoubtable M, this leg sees us traveling with two perhaps three charming Aussies (one is struggling with malaria she picked up while volunteering in Ghana), a Dutch couple of good humour and a thirst to learn Swahili, a pair of San Diego hairdressers, an older couple from St Catherine's, Ontario (an insatiably curious lioness and her Air Canada pilot husband), a pair of Western Canadian women, six Austrians and three Germans. So we always leave on time or ahead of schedule. A good group but comme d'habitude I go through a period of liking each, then loathing their idiosyncrasies, then ignoring and finally tolerating them. Right now I'm squinting maliciously at the San Diego women who stole our tent last night under the misapprehension that they are merely reclaiming what was theirs on the first night 10 days ago. Cuckoo! We didn't bother arguing the point as they'd already erected and moved into it, I'm only bothered because we'd kept it clean and dry and now have a funky damp sand-strewn lump of canvas to contend with. May they feel the wrath of my squint!

Leading us is a young South African couple who are very pleasant. I gravitate to them quite often because they share my vices. The rest of our fellows are clean-living, fresh-faced types. Kids! None of them would understand WC Fields's lament: 'we were stranded in the Sahara desert. It was horrible. We had to live on nothing but food and water for ten days!'

On the road again. Climbing up to 2600 metres. 

As always the roads are generally bumpy as hell. Poor Pumba (Warthog) our truck just jolts along, rattling away and farting[32] out its black exhaust.

We come across some men working to sort out their broken down lorry in the heat. James, the South African driver tosses them a gratefully received bottle of water.

Changing landscape again as we crawl uphill behind a chain of trucks. I watch an oil tanker move into the oncoming lane before a blind curve to pass another similarly flammable hauler. He makes it. Just. This is typical African driving, it seems. 

Houses no longer sell tomatoes but big bags of beautiful charcoal. Not nasty compressed briquettes of burnt sawdust, but black lengths of branches that burn up beautifully under your chicken or steaks, giving amazing flavour.

We're climbing up alongside the Ruaha river which disappears as we wind further up the valleys and we travel alongside rivers of yellow boulders and I'm suddenly feeling like we're in the world of John Mandeville and I am charmed to an extreme. For those unfamiliar with medieval travel literature, the Travels of Sir John Mandeville is among the least reliable guides to the Near and Far East ever published. And among the best selling. From a reasonably inaccurate portrayal of the route to Jerusalem he descends into a Hieronymus Boschian depiction of the route past India to the kingdom of Prester John, itself the product of an earlier Crusade-inspiring hoax (a focus of Umberto Eco's Baudolino if you are interested)[33]. At one point they have to cross a river of moving boulders, which is why the streams we are driving by brought it to mind: there is no river bed, just a lines of yellow boulders winding down the green mountain. No dog-headed men or people with one leg and giant foot they hop on and use as an umbrella when it rains, or people with their faces in their chests but there could be because this is Africa and it wouldn't feel out of place.

And it would not feel out of place, in part, because of the Baobab trees. There's eight variants of Baobab: one in Australia, six in Madagascar, and one in Africa. At Creation it was the most beautiful tree in the world but it was too boastful, so God flipped it upside down. It has a big barrel of a trunk and its branches resemble a root system. We pass through a valley of baobabs that owe their survival to their general uselessness. They do provide a fruit that is like cardboard laced with Vitamin C and their roots are used to heal all sorts of aches and pains but they are soft pulpy wood that can't be used for construction or fires. So they remain, some for thousands of years and if they die naturally they either just crumble rapidly into a heap of sawdust or spontaneously combust. My kind of tree.

Oh, the orange earth of Mother Africa. Scrub brush festooned with scraps of black plastic bags. We drive through patches like this and then clear patches. Then we come to wetter lands with more people and houses selling, this time, buckets of onions. Big red onions.

We stop in at one village for reasons of biology and I grab a few pieces of roasted goat to which I add salt and chili sauce. I crack down hard on a bone shard. No one cuts bones at joints here. They just whack away at the chicken or goat or whatnot with a cleaver until it is in small chunks. Thus, another chipped tooth.

How, one wonders, do the Maasai herders we see charge their cellphones? Well, they walk to the nearest village where there's usually a shop with a solar panel offering charging services for a few shillings. The Maasai don't have energy-draining smartphones, just older Nokia phones that can last a week between charges.

And now we're back in the high country and pulling into camp, an old working farm that is tidy, clean and smells no more than a warm biscuit. M and I forego the canvas for a night take a room in a converted stable. Brick walls and thatched roof. Duvets (with a guinea fowl pattern) because it gets cool here at night. It is cute as a button and although we still have to share the outdoor showers and the long drops (outhouses), we are comfortable and happy and the afternoon sun is drying our laundry, steaks are on the braai (BBQ/grill/firepit), we've done a walk with the Austrians along the farm roads and we could be in Ontario or Sweden given the scenery, and after dinner we venture to the bar which incorporates a couple of old mud houses and is cozy and glows in the lamplight and we drink the local firewater which is like a sweet light gin and we wander back marveling at the Milky Way and the unfamiliar constellations and we come up with our own constellations (my sole contribution being the constellation Lite Brite) and to bed and a 4:30am alarm because Lake Malawi awaits and that's a good 10 hours of driving and border crossing.

[31] I should have written “slightly more.”

[32] I often anthropomorphize things this way. Farting and belching. Odd, given I’m not generally taken with the sort of humour that indulges in those emissions. The words just seem appropriate. 

[33] This feels pretentiously forced and pseud to me but it was actually what came to mind, so I wrote it and I will keep it. 

October 25

...and all that road going ...
-- J Kerouac, on the road

More of the same. Following the black ink of a railway line now. More onions and the earth and bricks are yellowish.

An overturned lorry, a man directing traffic with a green Sprite bottle on a stick and a red rag. Life does not have to be complicated.

The towns and hamlets are generally quite tidy, at least around the houses. Common areas are less so. Much of that debris comes from drivers throwing rubbish out the windows: "It is fine. In the Serengeti or Kilimanjaro no, but here is OK."

Here too the fields are burning before the rains. Roadside ditches are being burnt free of debris so they'll drain better, I suppose. Ash is good for the fallow fields. It also clears brush so the cattle can get at the rich new grass when the rains come. 

There's some farming on a larger scale as we climb towards the border still some 2 hours away. Tidy quilt patches of seedlings. Lots of maize and potatoes and sweet potato and sugar. 

And tea. Tea! Camellia sinensis or, to be correct, camellia sinensis v. assamica. Africa grows a hearty robust tea, mainly used in blends though we've been drinking it straight with pleasure[34]. I am refraining from discoursing on this to my coffee-loving companions. It is tough. Tough. Tough. Tea! I love tea. And this is my first time seeing plantations of the lovely stuff with their acacia umbrellas swinging the shade around evenly and lines of pickers keeping things tidy,

So the road out of Tanzania goes through some of the loveliest country. High hill country, lush and fruitful. Too bad about the pine and eucalyptus plantations. Disastrous for the ecology I reckon. But it was the style of the time. Eucalyptus for the mine shaft rafters and pine for ... Who knows? Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

And then the border and we stop just outside town so a money changer can board and exchange our shillings and dollars for kwacha. Whence to town. Hell, border towns are border towns the world over. They stink of fear, arbitrage, thievery and mercenary love. We're rolling into queue and we'll all troop in and go through the motions of leaving Tanzania and I'm about to enter my 32nd country. M has even more notches in her passport. But there's places remaining in the world that will be new to both of us. 

Passports. Details. Yellow Fever jab certificate.

And we are healthy and happy. Though at the long drop last night I settled in to urge my colon on to glory and I'm sure a tsetse fly flew up my butt. Bit worried about that.[35]

So it goes. Soon enough we will be entering Malawi. This is routine red tape. Just show no fear and never ever use the toilets. 

N.

[34] This runs counter to my later assertion that all the tea we drank was rubbish. So be it. 

[35] Didn’t I just mention in a footnote that I don’t go in for toilet humour? 

9) From the bottom of the world league tables: Malawi

Malawi.

I'm sort of rambly here. Can't really seem to get into a groove. The thing is that I like Malawi. A lot. Damn it, the country is beautiful, the people are proud and handsome, and the feel is just right. 

A couple of housekeeping items: Of course I misattributed a Bertolt Brecht quote to Kurt Weill. That's the sort of thing I'm likely to do. Thank you, D. 

It was also pointed out by R. that my admiration for the taste of real charcoal is far too romantic and that Africa has massive deforestation issues. True, true, but I hardly think I can be blamed for that. I am merely droolingly literate about the taste and the smell. Of course Africa should not be stripped of its trees, of course, more efficient ovens should be promoted, of course reforestation is key; however, none of that alters the fact that food cooked on charcoal briquettes tastes like crotch and food cooked on real charcoal tastes heavenly. Of course, I am partially saved by the fact that Malawi's indigenous trees are largely eradicated and most of the charcoal is coming from horribly invasive species like eucalyptus. Live ethically, my friends, live ethically. 

But enough…

October 25

Crossing into Malawi was definitive. Getting closer to its border we saw that the land was getting a bit tidier that elsewhere in Tanzania, but the eventual and overall contrast between the countries was stark. It's not just that we've switched over from Swahili to Chichichichichsomething[36] but the land in Malawi is more neatly managed, the houses slightly tidier with gargoyles on the roofs, and the people less aggressive. There is very little advertising for things beyond rehydration salts and the odd telecom company. Shops are just shops. Very beautiful people. The women still wear lots of patterns but the colours aren't as jarringly bright. 

I suppose one key reason for why there isn't so much crap on the sides of the road in Malawi is that there aren't a lot of cars. Roads are well maintained but are primarily used by cyclists and pedestrians. Many of the cars we see don't have regular licence plates: it looks like the government ran out of yellow plates and started issuing yellow tape on which the licence number is written in black magic marker. Contrast that to Kenya where the car licence number is etched into every window, side mirror, or other stealable part. 

Malawi begins with rice paddies, but the drought this year has been bad so they missed some rains and a harvest and are waiting for the main November rains. The paddies are dry and yellow and it looks like nothing could grow in them. In one month though they'll be lush and green, as will this whole country. 

This looks like a fertile country and there's plenty of water for daily use. The dominant feature of the country is Lake Malawi which is enormous. The water table is reasonably stable and there are wells and pumps everywhere. Livingstone called Lake Malawi the Lake of Stars because at night the fishermen are out in their dugout canoes and their lights sparkle on the water. They still (over)fish that way. The average fish caught looks to be smaller than two of my fingers and the largest is little bigger than the palm of my hand. These are spread out on acres of drying racks along the side of the lake. Five hundred species of fish in this lake and this is what it is reduced to. I'm not sure how many are endangered species but with Malawi, Tanzania and Mozambique sharing this lake there will likely be a lot more soon. 

Our camp is right on the lake and we are desperate to run in and splash around, bilharzia be damned. The water is not stagnant, so what the hell. But first, we get out of a night's tenting and upgrade to a room, but not just any room: the Love Boat. The owner's pet project for a number of years, the Love Boat is a ... lovingly ... crafted little boat with a small cabin and we can't resist. It is on huge springs, so the boat rocks with every movement, although we can use large wedges to stabilize it if we wish. 

Just outside the gate to the camp is a market for wood carvings. The vendors have amusing pseudonyms: Mr. Cheap, Kennedy, Junior Robert, Vin Desil (sic), Mr. Go To, and Dr Frank. This is a feature throughout Malawi, one I'd only really seen with the dhow captains in Kenya and Tanzania who all seemed to go by 'Jack Sparrow.'

More birthdays, more campfire-cooked chocolate cake. It's not all grits and tapioca on this trip.

[36] I’m a pig. Wikipedia: Chewa, also known as Nyanja, is a language of the Bantu language family. The gender prefix chi- is used for languages,[3] so the language is also known as Chichewa and Chinyanja (spelled Cinyanja in Zambia), and locally Nyasa in Mozambique.

October 26

Road travel with the reward of a two night stay at Kande Beach. For us monied foreigners, that is. 

Dokomo Grocery
Mr. Music Photo Shop
Zamala-Zawala Music Hall
Naudelemawakale Grocery
Zinyengo Grocery
Simwakiho Investiment (sic)
Watiti Funeral Services
Skiffs Barber
We Fix, God Heals Clinic
Kwalangana Tuck Shop
Mtendere Butchery
No Harry Grocery Store (sic)
Magic Hands Electronic Pawn
Mphatso Coffin Shop
Bulunga Mini Shop
Ekwendeni Community Maize Mill
When Nothing Works Anything Goes Shopping Mall
-- Shops along the drive down Lake Malawi

We wend our way up the mountain and inland to continue south to our next lake stop. Country roads along hill ridges are lush and the roads are often canopied by trees. Lots of rubber plantations here, mats with pounded cassava out drying in the sun. Deep red earth that shifts to yellow as we come down and approach the lake again, the terrain flattening out and drying out at the same time. The bricks change colour with the earth so the houses are camouflaged at all times. It's the time of housebuilding (just before the rains) so bundles of thatch are stacked up ready to go on new roofs or to repair old ones and men are putting up the walls

We drive down a dirt road to our campsite. Cassava, cassava everywhere and children start to appear with distended bellies from a starch-high diet. Cassava in the ground, drying in the sun, being pounded into flour, being dried in the sun, turned into grits. 

Kande Beach. We're in a room like half a hut with the dirtiest en suite I've seen for a while. The communal facilities are only slightly worse. Good sized cockroaches too. The beach is good but I'm not sure about the bed sheets. Out the window is a man clad only in shorts with crazy eyes. Murderous 'I drink baby blood for breakfast' eyes. Flat mouth. Psycho cell mate rapist pyromaniac from Central Casting. I think he is chief of security.

Lake Malawi is warm, shallow for a long ways out and warm. Possibly stewing with bilharzia but we'll get a good deworming when we get home and that should take care of any nasties.[37] Yum. We're not there for three minutes before a man named CheeseonToast is on site to sell us “his” paintings.

Getting tired of the constant pleasantries and the sales pitches. 

We had a dress up party tonight, having drawn names from a hat and then picked up clothes in a market en route. I'm saddled with a one-piece made out of La Senza pajama bottoms (black with white pin stripe) and a rayon tiger pattern top that I can only button up to just above my navel. The lethal punch our guide has made takes care of inhibitions and, as usual, M and I close out the bar. Well, I crashed about half an hour before she did. She was DJing so stayed to the very end. I think she has an open invite to come back any time. 

Early hours alcohol sugar burning in my soul. When will I outgrow this?

[36] I’m a pig. Wikipedia: Chewa, also known as Nyanja, is a language of the Bantu language family. The gender prefix chi- is used for languages,[3] so the language is also known as Chichewa and Chinyanja (spelled Cinyanja in Zambia), and locally Nyasa in Mozambique.

[37] No. No it won’t. 

October 27

We rose early to take a tour of the local village with our guide Banjo. Banjo Paterson is his nom-de-plume[38] and I probably couldn't pronounce, let alone spell, his real name. 

Being poor does not mean someone is impoverished. Or am I just messing with language? We see kids playing basketball with hoops made out of old car parts - what are they? rims? the round bit the tire sits in, I think; naked boys playing soccer with a bundle of rags on the beach, their silhouettes that characteristic shape from all the pictures you've ever seen with the lithe long legs, rounded buttocks, curved spine and protruding belly and the defined shaved head; children with toy cars and lorries constructed from what look like milk cartons but are actually beer cartons, beer with the unlikely name 'milk shake' with bottle caps for wheels; dolls made out of the rags leftover from better rags; smiles all the wider on thin faces: thin faces that are happy but also some that are wan and drawn, with eyes yellow from bouts of malaria, eyes red and bloody where they should be white, eyes listless as flies crawl on the rims of the eyelids, eyes like pissholes in the snow, encrusted and dirty in a body patchy with white dustiness instead of a glistening sheen; children in clean school uniforms: uniforms, we are told, that are compulsory because not only do they provide social equalization in class but help to identify children that are hit by cars or otherwise suffer accidents, uniforms that cost $13, 13 US dollars that families often don't have; children in tattered smocks made from the cast-off costumes that tour groups leave behind: all glitter and sparkles and rayons in animal prints; and, almost breaking my heart, a young boy in a worn and holed Timbits Baseball shirt, one of those peewee team shirts with a 'proudly sponsored by your local Tim Hortons franchise' on the back that brought all my intellectualizing crashing down because that shirt could have come from Winnipeg or Moose Jaw or Vancouver or Comebychance and made its way to a Value Village or the Salvation Army and never got sold there so ended up on a freighter for Africa, destined to be sold and resold before showing up in a market in Malawi where someone paid a few kwacha to clothe her child. 

Poverty. 

But every house has an outhouse, there are many wells: round wells, pumps, square wells, wells with drainage areas to do dishes, and houses are generally neat. Crops are in tidy rows and shops have nice hand-painted signs. 

The walk turned into an extended money grab. I suppose I can't blame anyone but ... arrghh! From the minute we left the campsite we were swarmed by young men. Divide and conquer. Two grabbed me and a few grabbed M. They'd disappear periodically when it came time for us to stop but at that point the wee children would latch on with grips of steel. At least they (the children) weren't hinting that they needed money and had things to sell us and so avoid beggary. The village was poor but tidy. The head teacher of the school pleaded for money for books and uniforms for the children, the hospital staff were at church but it was obvious we missed a plea for money for malaria nets and medication for the infants. The maternity ward was tight with seven beds about a foot apart from each other. 

Something felt wrong, though. The school library we sat in had a planning schedule on the board but the dates were 2008. The hospital has a similar wall with dates from 2011. Banjo's grandmother's house had a thick layer of dust on everything. I kept feeling that in another building there was a gleaming new computer lab for the children or a whirring MRI or Banjo's grandmother lounging like Barbara Cartland eating bonbons and dictating her memoirs. I'm sure that it was all above board but ... but ... but ... I get these niggling feelings and they eat at me. 

Three hours of walking through the hot fields left us drenched and easy prey for the boys who wanted our money as well. The two with me were Gift and Ebo, Ebo's handle being Spiderman. I thought that I might buy a small painting from them as they had provided informative during the walk but they started with a price of $45US. I couldn't even begin to bargain with that opener because similar paintings went for $3-4 elsewhere in Africa. I'm not averse to paying a premium but that's ludicrous. I know, I know, I can afford it. But. The economics of the area must be totally askew due to the presence of the camps. So I refused to buy and then they resorted to begging. Only after I got inside and cooled down did I realize that I shouldn't feel too guilty. I hadn't enjoyed the village walk much because they were constantly peppering me with questions and trivia when I just wanted to soak things in. None of that changes the fact that Malawi is my favourite country so far on this trip. I'm a rich white man in a poor black country and some things are just to be expected. Next time I'll begin by saying 'you can walk with me but I'll tell you that I'm not buying anything' but I doubt that'll help. The guilt economy is entrenched around the little enclaves where overlanders stay and Gift would probably ask for a donation so he can pursue his teaching studies and Ebo so he can become a mechanic. 

On the plus side, we roasted a goat on a spit ... on charcoal ... and had real sweet potatoes, not yams, with butter and apricot jam. The goat was even better the next day in a sandwich with avocado. We eat well.

[38] And I loved him for it. God bless him. 

October 28

Hit the road Jack
And don't you come back
no more
--Percy Mayfield

Once more in Pumba and I'm struck by how much I love the brickworks. Brickworks everywhere. I got a close look at some in the walk yesterday. The villages often make enormous ones for general maintenance but every time someone renovates or builds a house the make one on site. They cut out the clay, press it in a mould, let the bricks dry, then stack them in these great pyramids with slots in the bottom to build the fire. They coat the pyramid with mud and fire these all night, only to have a ready supply of bricks in the morning. I am just entranced by it. It's like the bell casting sequence in Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev.[39] It's ancient and pure and simple and effective and so why do we want to ship them prefabricated walls for their housing? 

And the fields are burning as we drive. We can feel the need for rain, the time is right, everything is getting ready for it. It is dry. 

Not everywhere. M points out some large scale irrigation and we are driving into sugarcane country. We're also seeing a greater Muslim influence again. I suspect Riyadh. The style doesn't fit here, Saudi Islam is like the McDonalds of religion these days. Like Ronald the clown the Saudis get all over the world.[40]

The houses are changing as well, more plaster on top of brick. Some round huts appearing but they may be storage buildings because they seem to lack the ventilation of the main houses. Those have little porches now and a greater overhang from the rush roofs.

It is a Monday so schoolchildren are in class, many of which are being conducted under the shade of great trees in the schoolyards. The uniforms for each school are distinct and the children look neat as pins. 

Jumbled thoughts, road thoughts. I brought a music player but I don't play it much. I prefer to be left with my thoughts or to share the ride with M, taking turns at the window with the camera, discussing what we are seeing, what our plans are for the night. 

We love the signs, the painted signs, and as we drive further south we see more tea rooms appear. Just like any other building but with ‘tea room’ written on the side. We are constantly amazed at women doing all the work at the pump while the men lounge in the shade talking about the bicycles or football or the price of seed, I suppose. Women with bundles on their heads, basins filled with washing, a hod of bricks, one with a sewing machine balanced on her head. Bicycles as well[41], loaded upwards and sideways with goods: ten foot long lumber, water jugs, tied bundles. A man walking along with a 12 foot long two-man saw on his shoulder, the handles bouncing jauntily fore and aft. 

And we get more into church territory here. I'm surprised at how relieved I feel because I may be a good Anglican boy but I know, intellectually I know, that Christians are just as likely to slit your throat to please THE LORD or to save your soul as any other bunch of true believers but I think it's because everything is so different here that it is relaxing to lessen the difference by one degree. OK, I feel: I know these people. They may be evangelical clap-happy types but I know what they are about in my bones. I’m relaxing. 

So I'm a bigot, by God. 

But then the churches give way to mosques again and that's life. We're all children of Abraham, even if this group is misguided, that group is right, and the other group is a bunch of apostates. And just after we pass the home of Malawi's parachute battalion, we get to Sun Bird Livingstonia beach and I really really relax because it is small and sweet and tidy and empty. I really didn't like Kande Beach. Just seems to have stopped trying. This place is the sort where you can pitch your tent and splash in the surf, watch the pibes (cormorants) on their guano-thick rocks, wander over to the hotel to send an email (my last update), get a half-litre of the local Carlsberg-brewed beer, Kuche Kuche which is a thirst quenching 3.7%, so doesn't get you smashed.

M spots the baboons first. Little buggers are coming in force to raid us for food. The guards chase them away and then sit guard against the incursion for a few hours.

All places have guards. It is a fact of life here, sort of how in Vancouver we have security now in every bank and forget that they are even there. It's a necessity and one that I feel uncomfortable with because it is a constant reminder of the fragility of our relative wealth and security in this world. We have crowds bitching about the rich 1% but forget that on a global scale we're pretty much all in that bracket. 

M and I relax at the nearby hotel to beat the heat of the early afternoon then come back to dash into the water. A group of Malawi teachers have bussed in on holiday and we're all throwing a couple of balls around and having a great time as the shadows lengthen and the air turns thicker and the light takes on softer tones. 

I liked the security manager, Baxter. We traded observations on superpowers[42] as we watched the fishermen prepare for the night's fishing. An older man with a lined face and a happy demeanor.

A hot shower. God, that feels good and I'm sitting at the bar right now with a Kuche Kuche, clacking away on my keyboard and marveling at the enormous, truly enormous black ants that are crawling on the bar and on my keyboard. 

Kylie, an Australian comes over to order a beer and she points out an animal: an Mbila, I think I understand the bartender to call it, a sort of large groundhog the size of a good hare (a rock hyrax, I later discover) and I turn to look just in time to see two security guard come up and bash at it with a truncheon, then stomp on it. 

'What are they doing?'
'Getting a cheap dinner.' I surmise, and I am right but I wish I wasn't because these bastards with their truncheons can't seem to kill this poor beast. They walk away with it squirming, then whack at it a few times, then more, then it wriggles out of their grasp and hits the ground and one runs up and stomps on it and I turn away because I don't really need to see what has turned from provisioning into sport. 

And they are starting a fire and will roast it up tonight and my beer is done, save a mouthful, and dinner is soon, and the sun has gone but the breeze is warm and I'm putting my keyboard away. 

[39] Really. This isn’t just pretentious name dropping.  

[40] I may be completely off the mark here.

[41] Not on their heads. 

[42] Global superpowers, not comic book super powers. 

October 29

And we leave Malawi, driving out west, watching the transition between communities, tribal groups, regions. Smaller houses with flatter roofs become false front plaster shops the closer we get to the border. They all have tin verandah roofs propped up with less-than-straight poles. 

Cyclists with bundles of loaves, sticks, passengers become cars as we approach the capital Lilongwe. Industry appears: tobacco factories, silos. The border approaches like all borders and we slew around some roadblocks for no good reason and begin to queue to leave Malawi and enter Zambia. A sign on one desk in the customs shed has a thick wooden name plate that reads: "fiscal police" and that feels right. It's the third world and everyone wants to tell it what to do. Sort of like my job. People - well-meaning people - want to give aid, clothing, medicine and, worst of all, advice. And advice is never free. At its root it always comes clothed in jackboots and breeches. 

Be good.

10) It's Wednesday, this must be Lusaka

October 29

The border duties past we head off to Chitimba, stunned to again be in a world of cars, of credit cards and of ATMs. 

Chitimba, like Livingstone, is created for tourists. Otherwise this part of Zambia appears to be little else than plains and plains and random small villages, flame trees, plains, and a thin strip of asphalt.

Oh, to feel cold again! We stay at a camp with a mildly chilled pool and few choose to go in. I cannonball in and stay until I'm cold and I can get out into the 38 degree heat and shiver. Then the Austrians braid my hair, M DJs and we have a birthday party for Jess. Uninvited is this weird big cross between a tarantula and a scorpion that flits in and out of the cushions we are sitting on. Or were sitting on.

October 30

Driving, driving into the west. Getting tired of African highways. They are supposed to get better further south but we aren't going south. Weary travel thoughts. All this travel is good for the soul, I suppose, but someone who is not Lou Reed once wrote that Rollins it was Henry Rollins I'm thinking of who said or wrote that he is never lonely when he is by himself; that the loneliest he has felt in his life was in a roomful of people. Travel is sort of like that. There's plenty of time for self-reflection and meditation and if you aren't comfortable with yourself you will have to fill that time with music or chatter or misery. Long road travel is not really good therapy for the sociable. Worse for the insecure.

Rolling hillsides now in Zambia. A fire swept through here a year or so ago perhaps three and you can see the definition in the land under the grey trees. It's a pretty sight. 

But if you are comfortable with silence you can spend days just looking out the window. Like Pascal or some other Frenchman who declared he could never be bored, even in a bare room. Just have to avoid introspection. Wonder at the world but not at yourself because if you do go all solipsistic you'll drive yourself mad with it. Just float on frothy waves of self-pity and doubt, don't try to swim. It's like quicksand that way. Travel is not a holiday, it is tedium punctuated with moments of happiness. But maybe that describes everything in life. We're all just passing through to the other side and whether you do that by working extra hours for The Man, or living in a stick hut, or traveling, you are no further ahead or behind. Unless you get eaten by an anaconda. But there's varying levels of comfort.

Let's face it, I'm not too keen to take the Greyhound bus across Canada but I'll jump at the chance to hurtle myself 5000km in a cramped truck down potholed African roads while wondering if that hot feeling in my bowels means that I'd better wrap a bungee cord around my ass. Rarely is passing gas such an adventure in probability theory. And why? To see animals and plants and terrain and people I can better see on a BBC program with David Attenborough?

To have stories to tell? Bah, I can probably get more mileage out of a hot shower, a poached egg on toast and a cup of tea than all the touristed spots in Africa. Bukowski talked about writing better on a steak and a glass of good wine than as a hungry factotum. Margaret Visor wrote a book about a simple dinner than trumps most travel narratives.

To become a better, more rounded person? Piffle. I already know how to do that but am too lazy to make the effort.

To kill time before I die? 

No. Don't believe the hype or detractors and definitely don't accept anything I scribble as truth. The Neil who writes this is a lazy bastard living in a safari suit. The only reason to travel is to travel. Look no deeper and expect nothing more. It's not a virtue, it's an impending hemorrhoid and dubious bragging rights for the insecure and emotionally stunted.

And this is all mind/body interaction. I know myself so I know that I've probably got a bug or some impending squirtiness. I always get most bilious (faeculous, perhaps?) just before physical collapse. Nonetheless, these thoughts are damaging and obligatory at this point in our overlanding. All we who are partakers in this sensual soup are floating loosely in our own thoughts at this point in the trip: M is designing more efficient housing, I've thoughts of putting pistons under all our seats on these bumpy roads to generate power, others are asleep or listening to music or looking miserable in the 40+ degree heat. 

Dry heat. Not that coastal muck. Good TB-healing, arthritis-loosening heat. Love it. But it is doing odd things to my digestion.

Houses hereabouts in Zambia are rudimentary squares or circles with grass roofs extending overhangingly on all sides charmingly propped up with crooked sticks. Red painted plaster, simple knee-level designs on some.

This is a long road of emptiness punctuated at intervals by truck stop whistle stop bars, run down oases offering dust and dates of dubious affection. All much the same: a line of brick rectangular Wild West buildings along the road, in the rear, housing of roundness with thatch roofs behind stockades.

Oh will this road never end? Always the same pattern with change: bliss, resistance, acceptance and toleration. Hell is a vast empty equatorial plain. M C Escher must have got his inspiration on such a trip.

October 31

Why travel? Giraffes. Just spotted a couple and squealed happily. Flora and fauna, architecture, and food. Those are reasons to travel.

Lusaka yesterday looked like it had been constructed from the napkin scribblings at a third-rate architects convention. Possibly heavily influenced by the late Mohammar Qaddafi. Full of paramilitary groups as well. 

We overnighted in a campground overrun by zebras, impalas, other antelope and a trio of giraffes. Have I mentioned that giraffes are my favourite? I just get happy when I see them.

With the big go the small. A species of perfect little beetles are in heat and the showers and sinks and toilets are full of the golden-sugar-brown buggers. This is Africa, T.I.A. as K'Naan sings.

The ground gets wetter and greener. It's a good day for driving because the sky feels heavy as lead and looms greyly. More commerce, different breeds of cattle including very pretty Brahmans. Painted advertising is all for seeds and chicks ('less feed, more meat!'). airtel has a lock on this place: every grocery is painted red with the name up top in white ('Joseph's Grocery,' 'Ibrahim's Grocery') and the airtel logo around waist level also in white. Sometimes the shops have a mobile phone number as well. Once mobiles came in, Zambia gave up on land based telephony. The government is, however, embarking on a project to give everyone in the country an address and a postal code. M would love to manage that, I would prefer to just photograph giraffes.[43]

Civilization ensures that around Lusaka, at least, bricks are out of favour and Chinese manufactured concrete blocks are in. But it all changes back as we continue and, as my head nods in time with the truck's bumps, gets drier and changes into flat grasslands and acacia trees, similar to the Serengeti but with more trees and monkeys and we finally arrive at our overland tour's end in Livingstone, the home of Victoria Falls.

Our final campsite on continental Africa, alongside The Mighty Zambezi river, and the cicadas rise and fall in volume above and around us, at times sounding like a field of crickets but rising in volume at other times to be as loud as a jet engine. That doesn't describe it adequately. It's a sound that surrounds us and thins our blood. It is like having your hair trimmed by a weed whacker, like a surround sound theatre system cranked to 11 and just blasting white noise from a TV set, like a dentist's drill whining and reverberating through your skull, like all of those analogies at once. 

And competing with this is a massive generator because T.I.A. and the power is out. The generator is needed because how else can they ensure that we are all forced into watching a crappy video of all the activities we can book through their agent (white water rafting, safaris on elephant backs, playing with lion cubs, golf, bungee jumping, gorge swings, nature walks, volunteering (yes, that costs too)) and we just want to book our activities and then jump in the pool because we are past wilting in the heat and noise, we are like old baobabs, not certain whether we will crumble into dust or spontaneously combust but, no, we have to keep watching sunburned white people clink glasses and scream in their jet boat, and scream on their swings and clink glasses and peer out of helicopters with shit-eating grins and abseil and clink glasses and where in all of this do they show the Falls themselves? Just a glimpse in the distance as the worst sort of people, the kind you'd hate to be stuck with at a cocktail party, clink glasses and gaze vacuously into each other's eyes.

TIA. Poli Poli. Slowly, slowly. Then it is over and the fellow takes us to the room where we can book our activities and thank The Lord M and I are second in line because there is a roomful of agents but TIA so we are not allowed to talk to any of them, only this guy, and one-by-one he tells us 'all full' or 'no more spots' or 'maybe next week?' because TIA and he doesn't see how many people want to do a particular activity first, instead he talks to the first person, then phones the company and books a spot (or not) then hangs up, processes payment, then begins again from the beginning with the next person. What's the point of the video if activities are already fully subscribed?

TIA. We manage to book our microflights but not a chance to swim in the Devil's Pool right on the lip of the falls and then I jump into a foetid malarial swimming pool before being informed that there is a clean and nice pool over by the bar because TIA and I'm too exhausted with heat and driving and the noise to care that I've probably just snorted up a snootful of schistosomiasis.

But M is a saint and has overcome my whimpering frowningness and we embark on a sunset cruise along the Zambezi with all inclusive drinks and dinner which I grumbled was going to be hokey as hell with contemptible companions and thank heavens she did because it was the best cruise our guides had seen (good karma for having such a pleasant group) with yawning hippos right beside the boat and, rarity of rarities, a whole whack of elephants swimming from shore to an island, feeding, fighting, fornicating (well, a half-hearted, rebuked attempt) and defecating huge tablets like the segment of a marble column, and then swimming back using their trucks as snorkels before ponderously pulling their bulk up the steep embankment and disappearing into the park.

Oh, too much gin. I tried, I tried to go non-alcoholic but TIA. Campfire party until the wee hours of 10pm. I'm writing all this at 5:30am and the cicadas are rising and falling in volume and the monkeys are hopping from tree to tree. Baby monkeys clinging to mothers, bigger males leaping onto tents. Nothing left outside is safe. So this is now

November 1

and we are halfway through our travels and tomorrow we fly to Madagascar so I have a load of laundry to do, then we'll see Victoria Falls and head into town for supplies and some shopping.

Victoria Falls. Victoria Falls is not. Falling, I mean. Bone dry for the most part. Over on the Zimbabwe side there's mist and thundering cascades but here we are looking into a grand canyon. I don't mind. I think it is more interesting this way but I've also the advantage of having seen lots of waterfalls. The Dutch may be more disappointed. I am also used to water that falls down to where I am; these falls are on the flat and disappear beneath us like the water is falling into the dark places of the world.

We were mugged by a honking great baboon but I have to let M tell that story because she tells it so much better than I can.

Livingstone itself has some interesting architecture from the 1930s and thenabouts. Also taxis, touts, and tourist crap. We tried. We tried to buy curios and mementos and souvenirs but we don't have it in us. It's just so much stuff. So much mediocrity in the world. The odd interesting piece but it all makes me want to live in a stark cool monastic cell. 

Tonight is the farewell dinner for the group and I've snuck away to write in our tent. I dislike drawn out goodbyes. It is time to leave. Don't belabour the point, squeeze out tears, smile out the false bonhomie. We'll meet again or we won't. Until now it has been all about newness and excitement. Spending a final night reminiscing or pretending we'll stay in touch is like being stuck on the tarmac[44] in an airplane some thirty metres from the gate. I feel my life slipping away. Life is too short to relive past glories. Talk about killing time. Torturing time, too.

Closure? Are these rituals important? Am I missing something? Or is it just melancholy, the black dog that chews at me around my birthday?

Introspection. Travel can be shit for your soul if you are a skewed narcissist with self-mutilating tendencies. Lucky that doesn't describe me.

For years I wanted to be a John Stuart Mill, famously the last man to know everything. I realized late that I wouldn't make it but that isn't an excuse to stop trying. Keep learning, keep doing, keep looking forward or you'll die years before your body fails. So if I believe that, why am I sitting here writing in a dark tent? Someone at the bar may know the square root of -1 or the meaning of life or why mosquitoes spend so much time buzzing around my ears when they are only ever interested in my ankles. 

[43] Or, better yet, write about photographing giraffes. 

[44] Asphalt?

November 2

Rain in the night. The cicadas or sun beetles or whatever they are called stayed quiet. The weather cleared up for our microlight flights over the falls. A microlight is like a hang glider with a lawnmower motor attached.

Brilliant. My pilot has the improbably wonderful name of Kevin Haggis MacCuish. His Scottish sensibilities were on show when he pointed out Vic Fall, 'named uftair uhn English queen.'

I'll let the pictures explain that flight but we also got my last sight of giraffes with their long shadows in the 7am sunlight, along with hippos and crocs and buffalo and impalas and elephants.

So now is breakfast, Jess's final meal for us under the canopy of shrieking defecating cicadas, and we pack for the airport and our trip to that oddity of Gondwanaland, MADAGASCAR. 

N.

11) Songs from the wrong road: South Africa, by mistake.

November 2

Be a man. Get circumcised. Protect yourself.
Circumcision + condom = safer sex
-- Billboard in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa

And wouldn't that just piss off the anti-circumcision brigade in Vancouver? Men who weep piteously on television as they describe their attempts to stretch penile skin into an artificial foreskin so as to regain the incremental pleasure stripped from them by their parents and an uncaring Canadian medical establishment. Of course, I'm not counting those who were essentially eunuched by botched procedures, just those who sneak sidelong glances in the YMCA shower in sorrow that their hedonism is potentially bounded by something other than purely natural limitations. 

The call in South Africa is for grown men to go under the knife in order to save lives and I'll bet they wish they'd had the procedure as babies. 

First world problems v. Third world problems. And Johannesburg is tricky because it looks clean and bright and a damn sight more prosperous than, say, a Vancouver. 

We're sidetracked. We're not in Madagascar as per our original intent but are stuck for two days in Johannesburg due to the fragility of computer systems in Livingstone and the futility of attempting to make the bureaucracy in Joburg work for us. I could detail the systems failure at Livingstone airport, the loss of our baggage, the disavowal of any responsibility by all of the three airlines involved, the Kafkaesque and Gilliamesque bouncing from one person to the next and back again over the two days, the loss of any information of our existence, the saint who persevered in helping us despite encountering the same troubles from her own colleagues, and the woman who finally found our bags despite her colleagues insisting they had left the country when they were sitting in the basement where, it appears, a person or persons unknown attempted to break the locks. But I won't. 

November 3

And we persevered in ensuring that South African Airways put us up for the two days in a reasonable hotel with reasonable food. Buffets three times a day. Complimentary wine in the afternoon. And we've even managed to escape the 500 metre radius from the airport that has circumscribed our lives and take a drive through this massively sprawling city.

It sprawls and it looks good. This surprises M and me because South Africa is supposed to look like a hellhole of black poverty and white privilege even after 20 years of post-Apartheid politics. In fact, it looks reasonably livable. Lovely infrastructure. Including the FNB 94,000-seater stadium that looks like a flocky old Scottish tam.

Of course we are deceived because a minority of whites has a standard of living equivalent to Spain while the black majority - 75% - live similarly to the Republic of Congo. According to an article I've torn out of the newspaper, at any rate. 

But you wouldn't know it to glance at Joburg. And a glance is all you probably want: it is not a pretty city although M and I could spend weeks photographing its plateaus of gold mine slag heaps, painted signs, painted women, street life. Yes, there is a lot of crime, but the 'bad' downtown neighbourhood looked miles better than the downtown east side in Vancouver. 

And they have healing in the form of a Pastor 'Big' who has blocks-long queues around his church in an old synagogue. They come for healing and our driver solemnly informs us of the veracity of his powers, though he knows not whence came they.

Our driver is Meshach. As in Shadrach and Abednego. Many other people sport biblical or virtuous names: Beauty, Glory, Confidence, Lucky, are some.

Meshach is defensive about the crime situation in Joburg. In the same breath he says that he never sees it, that it is overstated, and that it is only to be expected due to the poverty and Zimbabwean immigrants.

So we head over to Soweto. Soweto. According to Wikipedia, its name is an English syllabic abbreviation for South Western Townships. Odd syllables but, ex cathedra, wikis are infallible. Based on the only news I've ever heard out of Joburg I thought we would have to drive in under an armed escort or risk having old tires filled with gasoline set fire around our necks. Certainly there are favelas and 'informal settlements' but the matchbox houses of fame looked, to our eyes, quite respectable. In fact, they resemble old British council housing, which either says a lot about Apartheid or a lot about post-war Britain.[45]

Like Thatcher, Mandela got out of the state housing rental market; in his case, he gave the houses to their occupants. And home ownership cleaned up a lot of Soweto. People had to get rid of the asbestos roofs the Apartheid government had kindly provided but along with that has come remodeling, renovation and pride.

But unemployment is high. 40%? Who knows? It isn't getting any better under President Jacob Zuma, Africa's answer to Toronto mayor Rob Ford. But the government is advocating for people to conduct small-scale businesses out of their homes. And there appears to be some success. Thankfully for me, because I keep surreptitiously advocating for that in Canada but we seem determined to give people big expensive government that increases economic dependency, not self-sufficiency. To be clear, I'm in no way commenting on my job nor on the policies of current or past federal governments.[46]

A fellow cutting hair under a tarp on his front lawn. Small-scale off-licences and tuck shops, mechanics working on the curb, alley-based markets.

New White Powder for Whiter Results
-- massive billboard sign over Soweto

Here too, as in whiter suburbs, houses are largely behind fences and gates. The few without seem oddly defiant.

Vilakazi Street is a pilgrimage point and like with most such shrines there is no shortage of food, drink and tourist crap. It is a short street, too short to have given the world two Nobel Peace Prize winners, yet it has. It contains the former home of Madiba, Nelson Mandela, and the still occupied home of the Arch, Desmond Tutu. I doubt the latter spends too much time there despite having recently renovated, given that the neighbouring houses are now very busy restaurants.

One cafe just opened on Saturday, and the upper floor is still under construction with no guardrails and an easy drop onto concrete. Very nice establishment. Having left it, suitably caffeinated with the best coffee this side of 49th Parallel, we encountered the 'owner,' a white fellow who hastened to correct himself and reassure us that he was the financial partner, that he had a co-owner ('the blick wimmin behoind the counter') and this was in the nature of economic empowerment (M heard 'black empowerment' and is usually right), lest, I assume, we think him a profiteer.

Matchbox houses have triangular or sloped roofs. Elephant houses have rounded roofs. There, I've written it down so I can forget it. You do realize that is the point of these ravings and drivellings and snivellings, hmm? So I can forget all this and keep my brain from getting too cluttered. It also means I won't have to answer any questions when we get back.

So that's it for South Africa. The airport, the Southern Sun airport hotel and a pricey city tour with a few other people including a young man with an odd understanding of the world (e.g. thinking that Apartheid was when they were selling slaves to America, and expressing indignation that the Syrians killed the Bosnians in the 90s). As someone who was possibly Hannah Arendt should have said: 'people who don't study the past are condemned to bore me.'[47]

[45] Or very little about both. 

[46] No way, no how. 

[47] More appropriate, I am condemned to being bored by them. But eternity in my company wouldn’t be paradise for them, either. 

November 4

And I write all this on an Airlink flight to Madagascar. We are somewhere over the Mozambique Channel and the world is blue below, blue above, puffily white to the horizon.

I trust election fever will be under control in Madagascar. I read this morning that the first presidential '... vote was peaceful, but the EU observer mission said the lack of a cap on campaign spending had led to "flagrant inequalities" between candidates. It also noted that a "not negligible percentage" of voters were left off the voter list.' Well, well, that could just as easily describe the US presidential elections and that's a perfectly safe place to travel. 

And so it goes.

Cordially yours,

N.

12) Definitely not vanilla -- Madagascar, the oldest/oddest island on Earth

November 4

I'm going to demand a thorough deworming when we return home. I keep eating rare zebu steak and the like. The parasitologists of Vancouver should clear space in their calendars now.

Yes, we got to Madagascar. And I see now why we didn't before. We're in a world of airports where you need to bus from terminals to aircraft. Add at least an hour to any planned stopover. That'll teach us stop using a cruise-focused travel agent to book adventure travel. 

Is it really an adventure? What is required to qualify?[48]

The coast looked grand from 22,000 ft. Just hundreds of kms of pure beach. Then denuded red landscapes like enormous coral brains with vast muddy rivers morphing into green highlands and then Tana itself all green and red. Deforestation. 2000 years of it. About 90% of the island.

Antananarivo. Sort of Marseilles meets Bangkok in Cuba. There hasn't been this much bruising of one person's senses since Leda wandered into the wrong part of Swansea. The airport is of 1940s meets North Korean design, but it is small and reasonably efficient, disgorging us out into rice paddies and the 45 minute drive into Tana proper. Rice paddies, clapped-out Citroens and Renaults and other oddly-angled bangers, children swimming and fishing in the canals. The architecture is sort of decrepit French Provençal (redundant?), and the pavement gives way to cobblestones as we climb and wind our way around and through Tana's hills.

Perhaps Rome is a better analog for this place because Tana is built on let's-say-seven hills with no grid system. But not modern Rome. Pre-Octavian Rome, before the marble and the prettiness. When it was a brick city. Narrow dirty twisted streets overflowing with life and death. Streets where you daren't walk at night without a bodyguard or, in our case, taxis.

I love it. I'm scared to death of it. I'm ecstatic to be here. I want to hide in my hotel room. And the Hotel Sakamanga is the sort of place you could arrive at and never leave. It is a warrenous agglomeration of corridors, houses, and buildings, full of curios and antiques and housing a phenomenal restaurant and a pool in a picture-perfect courtyard. Outside the doors is beautiful chaos, inside is chaotic beauty.

Affordable luxury. Antananarivo is a city with Michelin-star food for McDonalds prices. We had a pate de foie gras with mangosteen, I had a grilled Zebu steak while M had fish, and we finished with Bananas Suzette and chocolate mousse with local cocoa. With rum drinks, about $30. Odd intestinal parasites on the house. 

No. I'm sure the zebu steak was fine.

[48] Travel isn’t an adventure unless it involves cruel French archaeologists, rooftop chases, or secret underwater lairs.  

November 5

Things take time. This remains Africa. We can't convert our substantial quantities of Zambian kwacha into the local ariary and it only took 2 hours to figure that out. We then talked with a local travel company and interviewed a driver. We've sorted out a week driving south down Route Nationale 7 to Toliar via the Ranomafana, Andringitra, and Isola national parks. Then a week in the north going from Diego Suarez via the Parcs Nationales Montagne d'Ambre and Ankarana to Hell-ville on Nosy Be. Where they immolate foreigners. But only rarely. If recently. Lemurs and baobabs, here we come.

We took dinner at another restaurant: Le Petit Verdot. No dessert tonight because the starter was foie gras again, this time the perfect livers themselves flash fried and served in a litchi sauce. Like oysters melting in my mouth. Fatty fatty cruelty never tasted so good. This, followed by a Malagasy dish of anguille et porc with rice.

En français, le terme anguille est un nom vernaculaire ambigu désignant plusieurs espèces de poissons serpentiformes ...
-- Wikipedia.fr

Serpentiforme. Sometimes French is a wonderful language. I'm loving the chance to speak it again. Makes everything so much more interesting and foreign. And I can plead ignorance when necessary. 

Le Petit Verdot required taxis and Antananarivo taxis put you in the centre of an Eric Ambler Cold War thriller: rain-slick cobble streets that wind and twist, homeless children and prostitutes under the infrequent city lights, vintage taxis with no comfort and less furnishing, and the jerky juddering of a transmission soldered together with tools cribbed from an EasyBake oven.

November 6

It may strike the reader that I haven't described Antananarivo in any great detail and that's right. We haven't seen much of the place. Most of our time has been spent within a few blocks. But it's a spectacularly uneasy place to see. There's few sites of great interest and those are far between and up and down a variety of steep and winding streets. 

We did venture out today with the grand plan of doing a walking tour but we pretty much just managed to get our hair cut at Coiffure Eugenie before we needed a swim. So back to the hotel. And that was less than two blocks round trip.

After that we said, OK, let's head out for lunch. The train station has recently been converted into a nice space with a restaurant (ununiquely named 'cafe de gare') and some boutique shops. Unfortunately, we had to go down the grand boulevard, the Avenue of Independence which, from pictures in the train station, in its heyday was a lovely place to promenade or take a horse. Now it is lined with decrepit building, shops, loungers, beggars and thieves. Sometimes all at once. We were nearing the train station when a group of young men swarmed us, taking off their baseball caps and holding them out, begging. Nice trick. They push the hat against your body and underneath it their grubby little hands unzip, unsnap, unclip, unburden, and otherwise undermine your entire sense of safety and self-confidence. Luckily, Marie is too wily to have pockets and my ScottEVest foiled them, although it was a close thing. I was karate-chopping at hands[49], one of which was on my wallet which was in an outside breast pocket of my vest. Little bugger almost had it but I pushed him under a car. It wasn't moving. Traffic here is like that.

Unnerving. Hard to think how to get out of that sort of situation. It was a little mob that separated and surrounded us. We'd been warned about that Avenue but ... wow. 

We had to provision so never did manage the walking tour. We also found some neat shops selling various herbal remedies, my favourite of which are preparations involving lots of rum. We picked up a litchi-infused rum which set us up nicely for a dinner at KuDeTa which some feel is an uncaring name given recent history (assorted coups d'etat) and other guides describe as pompously French (again, redundant?). It would only be a ten minute walk away but again, after dark, a taxi is required for safety. 

No foie gras this time, though the menu had it in a few preparations. We shared croquettes of some fish, a fricassee de prawns in vin blanc, and "le quinte," five small chocolate desserts: a mousse, cake, ice cream, pudding, and something divinely dastardly delish like a wafer of rich moist cake in a thick cocoa sauce, but not a wafer, more lusciously melty like the foie gras from the night before. 

I love the French.

You may notice my focus on food here. That's because I can't think of much else to recommend Tana at the moment. That's not right. I love this place, I love it from a taxi. Its winding cobbled roads, the dogs and children sleeping in the dust in the road, the men squatting in the road playing some Malagasy checkers-type game, the cars parked on the dirt sidewalks, the way pedestrians have to walk amongst the cars in the street, the men pulling carts through it all, the impromptu markets everywhere, the way we interrupted Eugenie in her family lunch and she chopped at my hair and trimmed M's bangs with the dexterity certified by the Paris Institut as evidenced by the dusty certificates on her walls, the jacarandas in bloom, the complete lack of anything resembling law and order on the streets that otherwise anarchically function reasonably well, the way the Hotel Sakamanga rescues us from all this and flops us into a lovely large room or cool pool or flower-shaded cafe or fabulous restaurant, the lack of tourists and the disregard locals have for us, the burning garbage piles, the peeks and pokes of vistas every once in a while where we see between two buildings, past their razorwire and crumbling brick steps, across a valley to another hill that looks all colourfully cute and ancient and ramshackle and quaint and altogether inaccessible, and the vehicular archaeology in which fossilized shells and parts of old French cars can be found under decades of grime and dirt and mud and exhaust. 

If you ever come here, go four- to five-star because three-star might as well be one-star, two-star doesn't exist, and you can do remarkably well on a few bucks. Getting here is the rub. As M pointed out to me, those with the money to travel to this place are those least able to engage with it on its own (impoverished) level.

So we have failed as cheapskate backpackers. But, to be honest, I never wanted to be the backpacker exulting that I travelled around Madagascar on $15/day because how does that help anybody? We don't buy lots of tourist crap so the least I can do is spend money on receptionists, chambermaids, security guards, taxi drivers, chauffeurs, waiters, cleaning staff.[50]

Trickle down economics only works when you spend money locally.

But don't flaunt that shit in Tana because they'll rob you blind and also take your eye sockets for egg cups. No cameras, no watches, no jewellery, nothing. Keep it behind closed doors like spouse-swapping and incest. And that's sort of what travelling in the bottom third of the third world seems like. 

[49] In a blind, fearful panic, I don’t mind telling you. 

[50] Did I really write this? I can’t tell if it is soullessly right-wing and patronizing or idealistically left-wing and praiseworthy. 

November 7

So our chauffeur showed up in a shiny Mercedes. Style. 

Then the muffler fell out about 150km from Tana. 

This is Africa. 

But who needs a muffler? Right? Dany, our driver, is a bluff, hearty fellow with a Mercedes Benz and a family somewhere in Tana. He picked us up at 8 after our petit dejeuner (in which I discovered the joy of a banane seche, a dried banana, stuffed into a pain au chocolat) which largely consisted of tea and Malagasy rice porridge which has all sorts of lovely unidentifiable meats and spices in it, a fantastic mélange of tastes and taste sensations. I'm trying to cut down on bread and beer. Tho I snuck an extra croissant when M wasn't looking. Because a man must have standards to fall down by and I may die on the road or in the air or anytime in the next decade and who wants to die thin?

Who was it said nothing tastes better than being thin? Wallis Simpson? I'll tell you what tastes better than being thin: a sweet sticky black dried banana inside a pain au chocolat. 

So adieu to the Hotel Sakamanga until the 21st of the month, or perhaps I should say veloom, the Malagasy equivalent. Off through the streets and the rice paddies of the suburbs and the city buses which are minivans the back doors of which connect to the roof with string so the conductor can pull a runner up into the van then yank the cord down, swinging the door sort of closed. And onto Route Nationale 7.

The highway is marked with those headstone markers you see in France that tell you the distance to the next minor and major town. You don't need them though because it is pretty much the only paved road around and it passes through the prettiest countryside you can imagine. Actually, try to imagine every Sunday drive you've ever taken and jumble that all together and that's pretty much what the road from Tana to Antisirabe is like. Rice paddies, rolling hillsides, terraced hills, washing stretched out on grassy hillsides to dry, pine forests, little hilltop villages, etc. etc. etc. Everything is done by hand here. Everything. The same brickworks we saw on continental Africa are here, the fields are worked by hand (and zebu), the houses are constructed by hand with rickety scaffolding of branches lashed together, beams are hewn and shaped by hand by the side of the road, stone work is chipped by children and adults by the side of the road, men walk or run pulling cart, competing with the zebu-yoked carts in colour and speed, the villages have their specialties: the raffia village where I regret not spending the $3 on a lovely little item, the aluminum pot village where we watched men melt, mold, pour aluminum without gloves, shoes or masks as infants wandered among the fires and pitchers of molten metal, the wooden truck village where old men carve trucks and paint them with the logos of the companies they see passing on Nationale 7, the tobacco fields, the vegetable fields, the patchwork fields, the every kind of coloured field imaginable. 

This is the area of the Merina people who essentially conquered the country before the French took it away from them. They continue to dominate public life. Malayo-Polynesian, they were the first tribe to have skills in metallurgy and architecture.

And the housing. Narrow and tall, like Romanesque churches. Few windows, and taller than wide. Like upended shoeboxes. The tradition here in the hauts plateaux is for three floors: the first (ground) floor is for animals, the second is for the family, the third is for cooking. Most houses are now two stories but three story houses persist, many with inwardly slanting walls because they are made not with brick but with mud that isn't even fired, just dried and you can see where bits of the wall have slowly dissolved away, and the walls need to be thinner at the top because that's physics and Einstein may have proven Newton wrong but Newton's work was good enough to get us to the moon and back and likewise these people know how to make a solid mud wall.

And balconies everywhere, ramshackle wooden balconies to accompany the ramshackle wooden shops/shacks/hovels in which bicycle repairmen work, vendors sell mobile telephones, bags of grains provide settling ground for the flies, butchers hang joints yellowed with fat and speckled with flies, people sit and watch and idly wave away flies and and and. 

And a loud noise and our muffler fell off. Luckily I carry a Swiss Army Knife. The muffler joined our bags in the trunk and we continued on our way to Antsirabe, our stop for lunch, for the afternoon and for the night. 

Antsirabe. It has some charms but let me pause and stop this romantic BS. It's a third world town in a third world country. You're not likely to find some amazing little boite or a cute little boutique. No. There a lovely old station and some churches, some interesting old houses but there's also the smoke from garbage burning (and garbage here is just that, there ain't NOTHING worth salvaging from what ends up on the pile and it smells it), the markets that sell old crap to people who have moved up in the world from wearing older crap, the stall of pirated DVDs, and a whole whack of pleasant looking people going about their pleasant days. Many, in the town of Antsirabe, going about their days in rickshaws. This is a town of rickshaws (pousse-pousses). If you ever want your fat-fed first world buttocks to be hauled around potholed streets by thin barefoot young men many of whom look like emaciated barefoot old men, this is your place. 

Oh, I'm doing it a disservice. Probably psychically hung over from watching two small boys try to push a cart laden with water jugs up the hill along the highway. It's a decent enough place. Still dangerous at night, but so what? The pousse-pousse just happens to be the transportation of choice so although I felt horribly out of place being trotted about by one of these Malagasy Johnnies I was able to tip him a dollar to buy a beer. But he didn't want the tip. Seems it is as hard for him to exchange US dollars as it is for us to exchange kwacha. So I offered him all I had in ariary, about 35c worth, and he opted for the dollar bill. Ungraciously. But why should I expect grace? He didn't eat an extra croissant this AM but he had to haul it around nonetheless. 

November 8

Why bother staying in higher-class establishments? TIA. Fat soft little brown worms kept falling from the rafters onto the bed last night. That wouldn't have happened in the tent. Oh, the difficulties of maintaining a lifestyle to which one has become accustomed.

The morning rose well. Banana jam on bread and mango and tea. And then back onto National 7. 

It's a crowded country along this highway. Every little dip in the land, whether in town or out, is used as a rice paddy. And despite the vaunted biodiversity the majority of the land is terraformed and dealing with invasive species like South African grasses and Australian eucalyptus. And the rest is being burned away. But as the locals would say, give me an alternative. Life is complex and eating lemurs as you burn their terrain to grow rice for your family seems like a good idea when your country has gone to shit. 

Oh but before we leave there's the obligatory visit to the guys who make car and bicycle miniatures out of pop cans, the embroiderers, and the ones who make things out of zebu horn. There's a small but established tourist circuit and think twice before you contradict your driver about going there. 

Zebu. I’m fond of zebu. 

The zebu has an intelligent look in its eyes. 
For a cow.
With its goiter-like fatty hump on its back
it produces a gamey smoky milk, 
and meat that is probably best for stewing.
Though it might disagree with that assessment.

Periodically we pass by police roadblocks that look at papers proving that the road tax has been paid and make sure we have a fire extinguisher, and a toolkit. I don't see why we are waved down at one and not another but I don't live here. 

Patchwork blankets of green rice.

I don't feel like writing. So here's my raw notes instead:

Stopped at roadside house or three. Woman working on a loom with shuttle. Young woman wanders over with a child. Child screams and cries when I wave at it. Young woman hops away with child and I see that she has two green leaves stuck to side of left foot. Home remedy?

Les hauts plateaux. Mountains to go through. Some cultivated, some green, some just Welsh-like vertical fields of rocks tossed and tumbled about. Rock garden of the gods.

Best hilltop views are commanded by tombs. Blue and white brick affairs with crosses on top. Whole families. Every seven years people come and replace the shrouds around the bodies/bones/dust.[51] Hell of a party. 

Scrawny chicken country. No wonder so many wander into the street. Write about le suicide d'un poulet. 

Wish I knew more botany and entomology and etc. so I could actually appreciate this vaunted biodiversity, wealth of endemic species. 

Families by side of road with stones and hammers making construction stone, decorative stone, gravel, a mess. 

Ambositra feels more like a place where people live and work not where they come hopeful but hopelessly to find jobs. 

Zebu humps make me feel queasy. Nothing healthy should be that deformed and lumpy. 

Hilltop pine country now. Winding and twisting. Haven't see a straight line or a right angle for ages. 

Greyer houses, greyer people now. Lots of woodcarving. Get filtered through Chez Gerard where the marquetry is mediocre and the prices inflated. One fascinating observation: the wire they use for cutting the wood is extracted from tires. Nothing wasted except lives. 

Island is mad for Guanomad. Cartoon bat everywhere advertising fertilizer: rich rich Guanomad. 

Hats. This country loves hats and I love it. Everyone has a hat. Baseball cap, trilby, woven, grass, flat cap, hats that look like overturned baskets, hats like the ridiculous square ones RC cardinals have to wear. Dirty, clean, torn, frayed, colourful, dingy. 

Worried that old woman who ran at us looking for money when the muffler fell off yesterday cursed us. She knelt down and scratched marks on the asphalt with a piece of charcoal. Looked like a chicken foot. 

Mustn't forget the duo at Hotel in Tana by the pool: Discovery Channel filmers. Show called ... Alone and Afraid? Something like that. The one was so American and ebullient with headscarf and ballcap. The other so Montreal: aloof, smoking and dressed in four layers of distressed chic travel clothes. 

Roadside instrument vendors: guitars and the like dangling from trees like so much fruit. 

Descending into wetter New Zealand-type country. Seeing the flora change. 

Every pothole, children gather to shout for money. From truckers as well as us. 

Gendarme who just pulled us over had a Government of Canada whistle on his belt. 

Heading off RN 7 to Ranomafana. Really getting into endemic country. Not Africa not Aust not NZ. Real mix. Deciduous craziness. 

Finger-like ferns thin and poking at the car as we drive by. 

Tree ferns! Forgot how much I missed those lovelies. 

A shrub that is ... it's a lily pad pond on a shrub.

Pink flowering trees.

Mercedes is driving with its emergency warning light illuminated. Dials don't work either. On twisting roads the front seats are rattling loose. 

Roadside fishmongers, straight from the river below. Fish. Crayfish. Children selling baby fish.

Spider web. OVER THE RIVER! Web itself was bigger than my torso and twice as wide. Long spider cables stretching across to the two banks. What beast makes that?[52]

Hillside on fire in various spots. 

Gecko. Green. Vivid. With orange spots. Pure white gecko. Lizard or skink. Orchids everywhere. Big sultry wet-lipped come-hither orchids. 

Hotel overlooking the village, the sound of children playing, the sight of nunchuck-wielding security guards.

[51] The death rituals of the Malagasy are worthy of a read. The life of the survivors is integral to the afterlives of the dead. No euphemistic bullshit about “passing” and watery “memorial teas.”

[52] An what the hell are they hoping to catch? Pterodactyls?

November 9

Notes:

Boa constrictor on side of road. Just a small one. Maybe ... four feet long? Seemed unperturbed by and uninterested in my foot. 

Ranomofana guide is Vololona. Wee woman with good smile. 

Damn parasitic plants. Why am I so weirded out by plants that strangle their hosts?[53]

Everything looks like a leaf. Moth wings that have serrated leaf edges. Fingernail frog with serrated edges.

Giraffe-necked weevil! I can't die happy but I can die vaguely less discontented. Didn't think it would be so tiny, though. 

Cute red snake. Soft in hand. Why didn't I get an identification book? Oh. Because I don't really care. Until I do.

First lemur and it's a doozy! Rare golden bamboo lemur. Amazing how guides just yank us off the path and we crash up hills and crumple down hills, whacking the bush in pursuit of a view. Didn't anticipate so much off-roading. Sweating like a Cardiff tart on St Davy's Day. Think of better analogy. 

Long long tails on those lemurs.

Leeches! Chironomid-looking tree-dwelling leeches on my face and on my shirt. 

Red belly lemur. Three of them. Four. Family? We found them and a forest full of old French people grumblingly trying to beat each other to the best photo op. 

Photos are tough in here. Rain forest, Bright grey sky above. Just watch. Enjoy in 3D. Long legs. Grooming. Eating. Leaping. 

Sifakas! More racing and tramping up and down steep thorny slopes. Biggest buggers in the forest. One about ten feet in front of me. 

Guides excited, taking pictures. It's a stellar viewing day.

Knee just gave out. Two valleys to cross to get back.

Remember: overtip guides. Want guiding to be more lucrative than killing. 

Knee solution: downhill Lead with Left, uphill Rise with Right.

Rain forests do not produce useful walking staffs.

Men with cart loaded with lumber. Sitting on cart as it rolls downhill, using pole to jam left rear tire as brake. 

Lunch at Chez Tantely et Claire. Chicken broth with ginger, Chicken and rice. We are star attraction for passers by.

Wandered over to thermal baths. Old bridge taken out by cyclone? Rickety new wood bridge in five parts. Very WWII Burma. Bathers, washers, fishers in river. Women selling boiled crayfish and fried goodies. Again we are stars of attention in baths. Only vazahy[54] in sight.

Boy with long stick with one plastic wheel on the end of it. 

Good Malagasy food at Tantely again. Pork with manioc leaves and rice. Music by Tiggery or Tigoly (pron.) Give me simple Malagasy fare over fancy French muck any day.

Tantely resto is sort of place that would look hippy tacky cheap and nasty in Vancouver. 

Carrying around one collapsible cup, two t-shirts, one pair of underpants and two pairs of socks too much. Haven't used mosquito net yet either. Should have traded all that in Malawi. 

Hello: Salaam-uh
Goodbye: Veloom-uh
Thank you: Mee zow tr
How are you: Ee-nuhn voh voh?
How much: ow-teen?

Jesus big spiders! In trees and shrubs overhead. Enormous webs, enormous spiders. Like that bad Shatner film about the spiders taking over the world. Kingdom of the Spiders?

[53] And here is the root (pun originally unintended) of my philosophizing about humans as imperfect parasites. It started with my revulsion at the Ratas of New Zealand. 

[54] Vazahy: Malagasy for foreigner. 

[55] Yes.

November 10

Back to RN 7 and the drive down south out of the hauts plateaux. It's only 600km from Tana to Toliar down the 7 but at best it takes 18 hours to drive. Touristically, two to three weeks is best. This is a rich country. 

It wasn't always seen that way. Up until 1941 Nazi Germany planned to make Madagascar the solution to its 'Jewish Problem,' reckoning that the harsh conditions would lead to the extinction of the Jews. Or perhaps they just wanted to do their extermination far from home. Either way, they didn't much consider the people living here for the last 2000 years. Or the resilience of the Israelites in harsh terrain. 

These people are the Betsileo who are the acknowledged masters of rice cultivation in Madagascar. They manage three harvests a year out of their gorgeous terraces and proudly wander about in battered old trilbys with blankets slung over their shoulders.

Coming south, I see that the kids have a new tactic. Instead of waiting for cars to slow at potholes (or enlarging potholes for the same effect) in order to demand 'pourboires!' or 'bon-bons,' the children here fill in the potholes, being careful to always ensure the dirt looks fresh, and ask drivers to pay them for their civic largesse. It seems to work better. 

We're getting into monolithic territory. Huge granite escarpments, massifs, mountains. As if taking their cue from that, the local Malagasy make the largest brickworks we've seen to date. Nebuchadnezzars, all of them. Sunday seems to be the day for firing the bricks because many of these are smoking away merrily. Twenty feet high, forty wide, twenty deep. No end of bricks. 

And then outside Fianarantsoa the Mercedes starts leaking petrol.

The stink is ferocious and the best Dany can offer is to stop by a river where kids are selling water they've hauled up the bank and get them to wash down the back of the car. 

Rain'll do that too. But no rain right now. Though the geologists figure that in three million years Madagascar will be eroded down to sea level. Take that, archaeologists of the future! 

So we leave a fine spread of gasoline drops down the highway to Ambalavao where we stop in to let a nice pool of gas gather where Dany is smoking his cigarette. We've been hustled into the, I mean THE, place where flower-imprinted paper is made in Madagascar. It also, conveniently, serves lunch, providing free lunches for drivers who bring their clients (or so I assume). We've arrived long enough after the busload of French elderly types that our service isn't impeded. I was scared, though, seeing endless plates of spaghetti bolognese and chips, chicken and chips, beer and chips, but my fears were allayed. There was a Plat Malagasy so I got my fix of pork and greens and rice and a dish of diced tomatoes and spring onions and some fiery sauce. 

That done, we spent a few minutes on the streets of Ambalavao to soak up some heat, sun and local flavour. Decayed grandeur, is probably how the guidebooks would describe it. Lovely large colonial houses run to seed, dust blowing up like a Wild West movie set. Pousse-pousse drivers sleeping in their rickshaws, the once-grand cathedral framed by detritus. Haunting to some, ugly to others. It is what it is. 

Then we abandoned the Mercedes temporarily for a 4x4 to take us to Andringitra National Park. We saw a couple of nice ones go by and then we heard a racket and we looked at each other and knew, just knew, that this would be ours. And it was. 

Imagine, if you will, rust that has accumulated a fine patina of paint, dents, and scratches. The driver, Richard, had to work a nut off a bolt to open the back for our bags. The rear right door didn't work, so I got in the left. To close the door, Richard had to reach into the hinges and flick some strips of metal and essentially hang the door into place. I could not open it from the inside which was good because there was no door handle save something that resembled a metal wishbone. It had blood on it from the last person who tried to open the door, I suppose.[56] There was no handle to roll down the window, again just a screw and a nut. 

M had the passenger seat. She had an open side window through which she could see, which was good because the windscreen was so fogged with scratches and discoloration that it barely classified as glass. 

The gearshift worked. When Richard didn't stall it. Which was good because none of his dials worked. Even the speedometer needle was broken off halfway. How does a speedometer needle break? The odometer needle had disappeared entirely.

And it reeked of leaking gasoline the whole way, too. 

After about half an hour on the road I figured out that the truck was a Peugeot 504. I didn't even know they made 4x4s. Obviously the basic design works because there was nothing left that wasn't basic. Even the air vents were largely missing. And the springs. 

Seat belts? Take a wild guess. My seat was pitched forward so my forehead was against the back of the driver's seat and my knees were in his lumbar region. What padding Peugeot had put into the seats had largely disintegrated and I would get a snootful of the remnant dust out of Richard's seat every time we jolted.[57] Which was a lot. 

But he had a fire extinguisher. And a toolkit. And I'll bet he paid the road tax.

And it drove. And we broke through a barrier of bare rock, smooth peaks, desolate, fortress-like peaks, into rolling Scottish highland hills, denuded by generations past, paddies left abandoned, just the odd house or cluster of few houses in the distance, hilltop tombs marking the miles. 

We were somewhere between Besoa and Ankaramena when the drugs began to take hold, which was good because we turned off onto a rutted, washed-out red dirt road. The sort of road you think of when you say "she has a face like 20 miles of bad road." In this case, 'she' is probably missing a few teeth and half an ear as well. A great road because it again felt like we were on an adventure, not just rolling down the highway in a Mercedes-Benz waving regally at children. Now we were bouncing off the roof, biting our tongues and cheeks, bruising our tailbones and waving regally at dirtier, snottier-nosed children. 

20 kms. Eighty minutes. Not bad. Faster than running. Just. I'd have been 10 minutes behind. But I'd have had to contend on my own with the children and toll points and the zebus with their knowing, taunting eyes. 

A brief light spatter of rain and the smell of the dampness of the hot earth. Beautiful smell. Petricor, I think it's called.[58]

Going east on a road like a riverbed. The mountains rise up like dragon teeth. New Zealand may be calling itself Middle Earth but Madagascar is where hobbits and elves would set their own fantasy novels. New Zealand is a snaggle-toothed overworked Japanese salaryman (all grey, spectral and anonymous) compared to Madagascar. We come to our camp in the Tsaranoro Valley between (possibly: guidebooks are ambiguous on this point) the Gates to the South (Pic Bory and Pic Dondy) that separate the Bara and Betsileo tribal regions, which is a rock climber's dream. If you know Squamish, think of granite monoliths half again the size of the Chief. Then think of six of them. If you don't know Squamish, think of massive smooth vertical rock faces. And rice paddies and forest and ring-tailed lemurs and neon-red dragonflies and orange ants and fat lizards and orchids and skulls falling out of hilltop tombs. 

And then think of a Canadian woman whom I shall call Large Marge. Large Marge is an Ottawa Canadian who won't shut up with her plaints. There was a frog in the shower. Protein isn't included in her breakfast package and she needs protein for breakfast. Wah wah. Hey, whole armies marched without protein for breakfast. You can manage the trek from the restaurant to your room without whining. Of the 1200 people a year who come here how did she wind up in this place? God, Canadians are the least worldly, most pain-in-the-ass, stingiest flag-wavingly-obnoxious travelers. Until they aren't. And even then we're smugly second-rate.

Hey, life can't be perfect. As M kept whispering to me: Don't Make Eye Contact and we'll be fine. 

Although our South African guides on the continent did say that in all their years of guiding it was the Canadians and the Irish they never had problems with. So I'm content to be wrong.

In the high plateaus, a man pays his wife to marry him. In the south, he gives her zebu. In the north, he goes to a market and leases her for a set number of years (she is the lessor) and she returns to the market afterwards where he can arrange another lease. Or not. Large Marge and her muu-muu would ... well, I'm being bitchy.[59]

Another tidbit: In the plateaus, the deceased's property is divided among all children. In the south, a man's cattle are slaughtered for a village feast and the children get nothing. Around here they burn down his house.

[56] No. It didn’t. 

[57] No. I didn’t. The rest is all true. 

[58] I got this one mostly right: petrichor. 

[59] Funnily enough, or not really, Large Marge showed up again in Nosy Be. 

November 11

Lest we forget. 

2000 Malagasy died in WWI. 

And let us not forget that the French were ensconced here when WWII broke out. Pro-Vichy. The port of Diego Suarez was vital for command of the Western Indian Ocean so the Brits came in with Operation Ironclad. They took Madagascar but the campaign lasted six months and a day before the French command agreed to a surrender. Probably not coincidentally, six months is the minimum time French troops would have to fight before they could qualify for a medal and an increased state pension. I fully support those pecuniary motives, if indeed they played a factor. If you're a good commander you take care of the troops under your command. The Brits got a graveyard and three VCs. The French got a more comfortable retirement and, via the Free French under De Gaulle, all of Madagascar back. For a while. De Gaulle never said Vive Le Madigasikar Libre. He shot 80,000 of the sunzabitches in 1947 when they demanded independence.

This isn't French bashing; I could have written the same about Kenya or the Rhodesias, but everyone knows about those. Madagascar is stupendously ignored. I like countries that are off the radar. 

On a different note, there are over 200,000 species on this island. Eight whole plant families only exist here, as do 1000 orchids, hundreds each of frogs, insects, reptiles, and mammals. Five families of birds. 165 kinds of palms exist here and nowhere else. And I couldn't identify any of them to save my life. Still, I have other virtues. Or so the deliciously sweet M tells me from time to time. 

But I have now seen the ring-tailed lemur! A whole family of them. Cavorting and gamboling and eating and jumping in their trees with babies on their backs. And M practically had one in her arms, she was that close. Lemurs are cool. 

And we took a hike through a sacred forest full of tombs and lemurs and up along the side of a mountain called Cameleon (there is a formation at the top that closely resembles the pyramidical shapes of the chameleon) and through rice paddies and some villages, stopping in at the blacksmith and the clinic and then back to Camp Catta for a swim in the Piscine Biologique: water from a mountain spring filters through a settling pond of plants and pumice-type stone before cascading into the swimming pool and then out down the mountain to some fields. No chlorine. Just us with the masses of Karambony and Tsaranoro behind and a view for miles across the valley to Dondy and the ragged sawtooth peaks leading to Pic Boby-Imarivolanitra and Pic Bory. There's a week's worth of trekking to cross those mountains. 

Some climbers stay here for a month or more. There's a couple from Squamish here; this is her climbing dream and he's exhausted. 

Just like yesterday we've had hot sunny weather and at 4:30pm the thunder sounds and we get a light rainfall. I'm sitting in a shack eating the best peanuts of my life (and I usually hate peanuts), drinking a Three Horses Beer, and listening to the guides argue and chatter in Malagasy. 

Richard has now reappeared with his 4x4 Peugeot 504 which I notice had a Kenyan-registered windscreen. I think it had a previous career as a taxi-brousse. If it delivers us safely tomorrow I will christen it OB/GYN. Or Zebu. 

November 12

In Malagasy, any word ending in a vowel leaves that vowel unpronounced. Except when it doesn't. 

In Kenya the coffee was instant. Throughout these tea producing countries a tea bag is provided along with a thermos of tepid water. 

There may be good reasons for these things

And for the bits of wire poking out of the back of Richard's seat. Thank Science for tetanus shots.

A taxi-brousse (bush taxi) is any vehicle that can be filled to 175% capacity, can transport goods on the roof and plies its trade between cities. Usually an old Mitsubishi or Mazda or Toyota van it careers down the highways picking up and dropping off. On a good day passengers sit two to a seat. Cheap. That's its virtue. The sole form of intercity travel if you don't have a car, that's its advantage. They don't leave according to schedule but only according to maximum capacity. Richard's vehicle, I've read, is the sort of ancient workhorse that cripples itself on back road runs. But it is his and it functions, mostly, and the morning light is spectacular as we drive out of the valley and back to RN7, Dany, and the Mercedes and the grasslands ahead, the foothills behind.

Time and distance. Infrastructure changes everything. I think nothing of driving 400km before breakfast to see my folks. Here, as in most places on this world that's an unfathomable distance for that timeframe. Herders walk their cattle that and farther, selling them along the way. I imagine they taxi-brousse back but it still takes a couple of days.

Everyone walks and everyone carries things. Hell, why they can't put saddlebags on a zebu is beyond me. Some men have Huck Finn style poles and sacks, women carry improbably angled bundles layered on top of their heads (women in the valley have long plaited hair because they can afford the water[60]), pails of taro, field tools on shoulders, bottles or jugs of water. Yokes are handmade, as are ploughs, yet one sees the odd solar panel and many cellphones.

Maize hanging in the second floor eaves of the more colourful, larger houses.

Coming out of the foothills we see houses like we saw on the continent. Simple rectangles of mud with grass roofs. Migrants from the south who settled here because the land is good for manioc. Vast fields of manioc. Grasslands and the odd mango tree. Up in the midst of this is a sacred mountain that looks like the profile of a classic UFO with a sheer sheer rock face. When the Merina were 'unifying' the country some thousands of soldiers threw themselves off this cliff rather than surrender. It would be a long fall with plenty of time for contemplation of the infinite. The mountain is called Chapeau de l'eveque. If the story is embellished, I approve.

Half the population of Madagascar is animist with ancestor worship thrown in. Most of the rest are Christian, divided between RC and evangelical churches. They are pretty animist and ancestrist as well. Or maybe 90% of the pop'n is Christian. Reliable info is hard to come by here.

And then it empties out on the way to Ihosy with scrubby land and anthills. Oh, in the parks we saw ants that build their nests in trees. How cool is that!? This is apocalyptic country but luckily it ends and trees thicken and fields appear as do grey mud homes, we left the rich red earth behind at the sacred mountain, and Zazafotsy is the great name of this place that pretty much marks the end of the hauts plateaux and we enter the narrow Plaine de Ranotsara that separates us from Ihosy, 40km distant. 

And Ihosy itself, the old village and the new city that looks old, a road stop of some few hundred thousand dealing in cattle and then up up up we're onto the Horombe Plateau and the home of the Bara. This is zebu land and cattle herding is less important than cattle rustling.[61] A woman won't marry a man unless he has spent time in jail for stealing zebu. Polygamy is still the norm here and women are traditionally inferior. Very different from the looser sexual mores of the northern tribes where women are much bolder and forward in their looks. It's partly those freer mores that have put Madagascar on the sex tourism map but, as posters around the country warn tourists, a child is not a souvenir. I'm not sure how well-enforced those laws are compared to, say, those banning the export of elephant bird eggshells. 

It's a strange world we have created.

Lunch included a pot of hot rice water, the national drink, water boiled in the pot that holds the burnt remnants of the meal's rice. It tastes about the same as the tea this AM. Lunch also included a comic routine of the staff trying to find the key to the outhouse and failing miserably.

I'm getting more comfortable with my French, thinking more quickly in it and engaging in (bad) wordplay: les pneus sont nus was one such example that collapsed because the Malagasy use a different French word for bare. And because it was a feeble attempt. And describing the Québécois as marooned in a “'mer' of English, or perhaps a 'merde' of English.” So witty. Otherwise I'm like some comic stereotype: “if you please, I have to make some water. It is not grave at this moment but maybe in some minutes we can stop the car.”

And the plateau is a vast sea of grass and walking through it are a hundred people in their finery, coming back from a funeral at some hidden cave, a practice of the Bara.

And so we continue through the mad dog midday to the slowly appearing far-distant Massif ruineforme[62] d'Isalo, and the Parc Nationale that is our destination. Like a great solid wall across the south-west it bulks squatly in our way as if to say to the zebu and their herdsmen: thus far and no farther. But, damn, it's the sort of thing I'd expect a youngster to look at every day and say: what's there? And eventually leave home to see.

And up close, at the Isalo Ranch, our hut looks out on rockforms like those you'd find in Monument Valley. An eroded sandstone mountain range. And the zebu are calling and the birds are calling and again we are struck by how everything looks both familiar and askew, like a dreamscape's perplexicaciousness. 

And dinner is over and the stars are out with Venus high in the sky and it is time for bed.

[60] Elsewhere, women (mostly) keep their hair short. 

[61] These days, cattle rustling has become big business for organized crime and it is a murderous plague on the country. Be glad you live in an economically stable country. 

[62] Another brilliant French word.

November 13

Libertalia. Now that's a good beer. Libertalia was a dream. A free Republic. I think. I can't recall if it was set up by some of the thousands of pirates who camped out here or was a religious thing or humanist or what. Likely a hoax.[63] Anyway, it is a tasty beer that resembles a witbier. And like the original Libertalia it isn't lasting long.

It's a fabulous thing to dream. The world can be much better when we allow ourselves to filter reality through our dreams. Especially here. A fluorescent lime green little fly just landed on my hand. This would be annoying at any other time but because I am writing about the mysteries and oddities of this place it has more meaning and potency. All of this could be the Libertalia talking. 

Isalo. Isalo is like a Ford western because it has bits of Monument Valley, like a spaghetti western because it has bits of dry dry Spain, like an Indiana Jones adventure because it has tombs and gorges with staircases and waterfalls, like a Merchant-Ivory production because it is interminably wearying and at times you just want to get up and leave it behind unfinished.

With those thoughts, it is a much more layered place than if one walks through it with just the sense that it is a lot of rocks, heat, bugs, and sun. At other times in history this could have evoked Greek myths, Bible stories, Navajo songs. I'm just rocking with the new global mythology. To the amusement of the guide, Sozoly.

It's the little things in Isalo that count. The terrestrial orchids, the elephant plants, the stick insects that ... resemble sticks, the rose coloured bugs that line up like seeds for camouflage, the falcons and the white-breasted crows, the highly toxic plants and the gorgeous blue and orange and red flying insect that is one of the two most poisonous creatures on the island (the other being a large but shy millipede). We hiked up past cave tombs to a viewpoint high on a rotted mountain and looked down into a ... valley ... like a volcanic crater because it was ringed with stone, then down to a gorge fed by a spring that leads to a lovely natural swimming hole with a waterfall on end and overhanging rocks covered in the oddest ferns, ferns with leaves like fir trees, tree ferns, fern like moss. A dip and then continuing back up to what was a long, fastpaced crossing of that Central Valley in which I kept thinking of the Sun's Anvil in Lawrence of Arabia. Gnawing at the orange yellow fruit of the tapir tree for the sugar inside then spitting the fruit out for the termites and tiny, tiny, tiny ants. Sighting of my first chameleon! with its oppositely rotating eyes and its changing of colours. Such a lovely looking animal; my new favourite (among the smaller species). A descent again into a wet gorge full of palms, pandanus trees, bamboo and a sighting of the sweetest nicest little sifaka imaginable. She hung from the trees not three feet in front of us, regarded us solemnly, swung to other trees, swung back, groomed and just went about her business. Glorious glorious sifaka, one of the largest of the lemur family. Then a hike along a wet pathway of steps and ledges high above the stream to the spectacularly calm and wonderful Cascade des nymphes, in which the waterfall is largely hidden by the cliff walls but, because we were there at the right time of day, the sun shines down into the tight canyon walls, illuminating the flow, the green of the deep pool, and reflecting back up in a weblike pattern on the rock walls. 

And from there to the piscine bleu and the piscine noir, which were the only places we were disturbed by other tourists, for a bite of lunch but not a swim, just a dunk of the head. 

Oh, now the sun is setting beyond the pool and behind the ridge in the far distance. Somewhere children are crying in a world where they let the children cry. I'm sitting beside a full, luscious mango tree (at least I assume they are mangoes and not giant insect eggs), and M is appearing all radiant and sun tanned and bringing me another Libertalia and herself a glass of rhum pok-pok, bless her pure white soul. 

And from there up and out of the park past a heart-breakingly beautiful bird, a bird of paradise with neon blue-rimmed eyes, dark orange and brown body and long, long white tail feathers.

But this is a dream, a distillation of a 15km walk, of six hours under the beating sun and the heat in the forests and grueling hikes up and down the sides of the decayed mountains, and without the right kind of imagination, without clouded eyes, it would be nothing but a tale of irritation and pained feet and a knee on fire and a wander through grey stone wastelands. 

I recommend it.

[63] Almost definitely a hoax.

November 14

Ny filazana ny razan'i Jesosy Kristy, zanak'i Davida, zanak'i Abrahama.
-- Ny filazantsara nosoratan'i Matio, Testamenta Vaovao

Oh those Gideons. They get everywhere.

A travel day ahead with a 250km drive to the airport in Toliara (a four hour drive, hopefully) and a flight up to Tana. It's a good thing we are leaving because today a bunch of Canadian senators are arriving to see the park. They are here to supervise the elections. And if there's one thing Canadian senators understand it's democracy.

The road continues through the rotted remnants of the range and then flattens out in straight stretches of grassland. Sapphire country. The law is here but there's a lot of money floating around and these are some of the meanest looking buggers going. The town of Ilakaka is the centre and it is a ramshackle wooden town like a Deadwood in the desert. Police, gendarmes, military, they all have roadblocks. Gem dealers from around the world. The stink of theft. These are flat-eyed people, pricks from Thailand, Canada, France, robbing the country blind.

Down here as we continue the deforestation is acute. It's a vast expanse of crappy earth surrounding a couple of protected areas. Coming out of one of those parks we see our first baobabs, immense trees (and I was mistaken, they are thought to live only for up to 500 years. They have no rings, being essentially sponges) that again have been spared solely due to their essential worthlessness, monetarily speaking.

And the tombs grow larger and more frequent. The Maha-something people.[64] Here, tombs are for individuals and the larger the tombs the richer they are. People spend fortunes on these, reasoning that now is fleeting, eternity is forever so forego your house and pimp out your tomb. Literally in some cases. The decorations provide you comfort in the afterlife, so one tomb was painted with pictures of women in halter tops and tight jeans. Another was in the shape of a yacht.

Brush houses and cactuses. Poor. This resembles the driest poorest parts of Malawi. Outside Mahoboboka, boys with foot-long white chameleons shrieked at us to stop and take pictures and give them money. Outside Andoharotsy came cotton farms and sugarcane, with locals distilling rhum artisanal, the alcohol sitting in large wooden canoes for flavouring with fruits before draining into dirty[65] water bottles.

Here it resembles a vast dried seabed, white rocky ground, a blast furnace of heat. It lends itself to moody introspection. A wretched stretch of road. Picture all of the thorny dense prickly brush you've ever encountered crowded into the darkest loneliest corner of your soul and like the Dante of the Divine Comedy your only recourse is to go deeper deeper into the pain and bile and hate in order to break through and finally see the stars on the other side and that's what the last fifty kms to Toliara are like. 

This is the ancestral home of the Sakalava who are distinctly Polynesian. Cattle people again but more matriarchal. Interestingly, they cover their tombs with carvings of sexual acts considered taboo during life. But we don't have time to seek these out (now well hidden from tomb despoilers) as we have a plane to catch. 

And we catch it and are en route right now to Antananarivo for a short night's sleep before an early morning flight to the north.

This has been a long one. Internet is a wishful thought. Thanks for making it to the end. Or not.

[64] Mahafaly.

[65] Probably actually clean but just cloudy and scratched from years of reuse. Everything is reused in this country. 

13) Madagascar is burning: Madagascar North

Air travel is an amazing thing. One of Henning Mankell's characters remarked that Sweden had once been a large country and now it is a small one, because of the airplane. Madagascar exemplifies that. A road trip that took a week and at best would require 18 hours to drive became a 45 minute flight back to Tana.

To most of its inhabitants that counts for little. How far can a zebu cart take you?

In the end, though, Madagascar is a small, poor, sick country. That's not to disparage it, any more than I'd disparage a pauper in a charity ward. Madagascar is a poor, devastated country, and that owes a lot to its politics. Hard to know about its politics, though. This is where Twitter and other forms of social media come into their own. Try searching for any news on Madagascar on standard world media and you'll find nothing. Hell, on our last few days there the army took over control of eight provinces, citing security concerns related to the ongoing election, which is itself a post-coup battle between the forces of the ousted president, a self-made yoghurt manufacturer and the perpetrator of the coup, a self-made radio DJ-cum-businessman. Did it make the news? Not even the local news.

Mr. Yoghurt liberalized the economy and made good decisions except for his decision to lease half the arable land in the country to South Korea. That gave Mr. DJ popular support for his coup. A decade of international sanctions, rapacious gangs of cattle rustlers, predatory mining companies, and corruption in the national parks has seen massive human, environmental and ethical waste. Beside that, how do some scribblings about animals and cultural peculiarities stand up?

And, in the end, who wants what Madagascar can offer? Rice and taro, plant fibre baskets, vanilla and chocolate. Vanilla is probably the main thing other than the gemstones and ebony and other products of theft.

Am I down on Madagascar? No, I love it. I love it but I'm aware that its charms may be dubious for those not interested in oddball flora and fauna, local death rituals, cheap food or inexpensive rented romance. On the vacation side, it is tough to compete with beaches, tinkers' crafts, sunshine, and food when that's what a dozen other countries are offering and some that aren't isolated geographically as well as politically.[66]

Where will it go in the next decade? Hopefully not more of the same. 

[66] The flora and fauna are the main thing. Tourism can ruin a country but I hope Madagascar can actually get some more of it because they ain’t got nothing else they can easily leverage.

November 15

An early morning flight. Porters are sluggish at 4:30, so not so difficult to slap their hands away from our bags. This isn't us being cheap (although small bills are hard to come by here) but prudent. The porters have a habit of grabbing bags from one's hand even three feet from the check-in desk and then loudly demanding extortionate payment. It's a good racket (in all senses).

The north now. 

Antsiranana, formerly and still commonly known as Diego Suarez or just Diego. Oddly, according to some accounts Diego Suarez was a Portuguese who spent a good chunk of time raping, murdering and enslaving the local peoples back in the 16th century. According to others, the city is named after Diego Dias and Fernando Suarez, two early explorers who spent a good chunk of time raping, murdering and enslaving the local peoples back in the 16th century. Arrrrr, those lovable pirates make for good tales. This place also vies with L'Ile Sainte Marie on the east coast as the (fictional?) home of Libertalia, which could just have been a Defoe-esque hoax. Arrrrr, those lovable scribblers make good tales.

That's the thing about this island: there's no truth here, just funkier and wackier things and places and stories. Truth is something only the mortally ill should concern themselves with, and probably not even them.

I've mentioned the deforestation and luckily the government is protecting some lands but from above it can look hopeless. The land could use fifty years without human habitation. It's disheartening to see how poorly we human beings function as parasites. We always end up killing our host and (most of) ourselves. Effective parasites manage a symbiotic relationship with their host and perhaps we need to think that way: not all greeny hippy new age home birthing placenta eating lovey dovey horseshit about how we can all live macrobiotically in Gaia's nourishing bosom, but a firm recognition that we are all tapewormy gross and horrible but we've got to allow the earth to continue limping along if we want our mewling puking hatchlings to survive.

It may work out the same way with either worldview but I'm Old Testament enough to have a less than rosy view of humanity.[67]

Oh, this darkness. I'm not good with air travel. It fucks the hell out of my emotional cortex if indeed I have one. Take now for instance. My now, the time I'm writing this, Two flight days. Zombieing around at 7:45pm on the second day with no ability to deal coherently and civilly with the world. Me want sleep, quiet, down time with nothing going wrong like last night's taps without waters, broken fans, the sad creaks in a down-at-the-heels once quite smart hotel. I'm realizing that I am unable to cope with the world for the rest of the day after an encounter with an airport; in future I may just have to rely on reputable bland airport hotels to save me from my jetlaggy self.

Davis picked us up at the airport, a northern Malagasy vaguely resemblant of Ron Perlman or Tom Waits who has a decent 4x4, square diamond earrings (each with 4 quadrant diamonds), desirable bracelets, a stud in his lower lip and leg tattoos he is doing himself with a machine he has made himself. He races Moto-X (? Like I know how to spell that) for a hobby and loves, among Malagasy and French RnB, rap and hip-hop, Nickelback (like I know how to spell that), Celine Dion, and Bryan Adam's soundtrack to the animated horse film, Spirit (?). This may all be an elaborate joke. But between him and M it promises to be a good few days of road music. He also seems to be an A-1 guide, which is key.

It is humid and hot here. Like living in Sidney Greenstreet's armpit. No, Kermit the frog's armpit. No, a Vogon's armpit. It is green, lush, wet, noisy. Beautiful after a heavy rain the night before. 

Amazingly big bay here. Second largest in the world (after Rio). Lots of pocket bays so it has a circumference of 200 some-odd kilometres. In it is a sugarloaf island, the sacred Nosy Lonja. I didn't catch the rapid (French) explanation as to why it is sacred but it sounded like there were the usual armies involved, refuge, a parting of the waters, etc. but we kept going past the town of into a military zone to go swimming. Les Trois Baies.

Sakalava Bay is empty and gorgeous with fine white sand and plenty of wind for kitesurfing. Baie des Pigeons is empty and gorgeous with fine white sand and windy as hell. Baie des Dunes was fantastically empty and warm, warmer than body temperature and pure in a dream holiday sort of way. Not quite as pure as Manda beach back in Kenya so many weeks ago, but Manda was the sort of beach they can't advertise because even taking a picture of it spoils it. 

The area is still a military zone, with ruined and rotting concrete bunkers and old batteries and soldiers lounging around with even older rifles, it seems. No, actually there are a lot of stripped down AK-47s, missing stocks, trigger guards, etc., but there are guns and an old lighthouse. This is an area that looks like shit but you know that on Friday and Saturday night the whole place is rocking because the town of Diego Suarez heads out here to dance and drink and party like it is Independence Day, 1960. Lots of crappy wooden and grass structures that, like night clubs in the daytime, look like old ashtrays but at night get some of that drunken magic glow. 

Lots of sea shells for sale by children, and clothing for sale by women with painted faces. We saw some of this down in the far south but much more here, women with faces painted with yellow mud, natural cosmetics, natural sunscreen. 

In the little village there we stopped in for grilled fish that almost made me cry. We began with a calamari salad but the fish was stuffed with pepper and butter and parsley and who knows what else and it was perfection and the skeleton was like the perfect cartoon fish skeleton with thick, flat bones. 

The fish was Marguerite, and we ate it at Chez Jeanette, so my grandmother, Margaret Jeanne was in my thoughts because she adores white fish and this would have made her very happy. 

Diego itself, Antsiranana, lingers with its architectural memories of colonial days, but more than that it throbs with its blend of the local Antakarana people, Indian, Chinese, creole and Arab influences under a French and British influence. 

The island was first unified with the help of British weapons and the English missionaries were the first to bring 'education' to the island, the legacy of which lingers in Malagasy words such as 'booky' for book or 'pena' for pen. So Malagasy is a hodgepodge of languages, rather like English, which someone of note once said: 'does not so much borrow from other languages but follows them down a dark alley, hits them over the head and rifles through their pockets.' Salaama for hello, for example speaks to the Arab influence over 18 different dialects (and if I have to hear one more time that there are 18 different ethnicities here I will rid the world of one of them).

Diego is quiet with plenty of siesta time, a feature the north revels in; that is, the closing of business between noon and three. 

Our hotel (Le Suarez) is lovely. Wonderful, with little bungalows climbing a slight hill, great food and service, geckos partout looking out on the pain du sucre island. It highlights the difficulties of maintaining good standards in a place where the climate, the insects, the forces of nature, the culture, the economy work constantly to erode those standards. I've new respect for the managers, the staff, the people who are struggling everyday to learn new languages, perfect their skills, move into higher, better jobs, escape.

[67] Despite being a sucker for schmaltzy Hollywood endings. 

November 16

Now. Now I'm extremely happy. We've seen, and had in our hands, little Brookesia, the smallest chameleon in the world, not much longer than my big thumbnail. How can something so wondrous exist? Brain, eyes, legs, body, all to scale and living in the leaf mould in the Montagne d'Ambre and nowhere else. Wonderfully alive in the palms of our hands.

The Amber Mountain is montane rainforest, isolated by geography so there is a high rate of endemicity and any number of species found nowhere else in the world, like little Brookesia, only catalogued in recent years. We saw elephant-eared chameleons, leaf-tailed chameleons, blue-nosed chameleons and a species I know not the name of, but it has a shovel for a nose. 

And don't think these are subtle variations. Brookesia is an inch long. Leaf-tail is eight has serrated edges and is indistinguishable from the branches without a guide. Blue nosed is ten inches and has a long, blue protuberance on the end of its face. These are wildly different creatures ranging from an ounce in weight to a kilo, from a centimetre to 60.

In this park we also saw the most attractive lemurs, the crowned lemurs with little brown tufted tiaras. They leapt and peed and gamboled with delight. So too, with Sanford's Lemur, a whole family that jumped from tree to tree, and wonder of wonders (dubious thanks to a guide who had not compunctions about disturbing a nest!) the mouse lemur, the world's smallest primate, our dinkiest cousin that has great big eyes and ears and doesn't like the daylight.

Wildly colourful birds and butterflies and massive millipedes and enormous pill bugs. A waterfall, the cascade sacree, where people continue to make offerings of liquor and money (and I notice that somehow the liquor bottles are empty). Tree ferns and weird epiphytic plants like the birds nest fern and the parasitic strangler fig. 

The mongoose! The ring-tailed mongoose cavorting like a raccoon crossed with a squirrel. 

It's all fragments at this point. My brain is fried. I need a washing machine. A decent cup of tea. A cool bedroom. This is all marvelous stuff and it all takes place in French, which adds to the exoticism, but I can no longer sustain a narrative. I'm out of tricks, of literary parodies, of self-aware primitivism. All that I have is point form moments.

And is the fatigue deserved? Across this mountain reserve villagers walk 40km on return trips to the market. I haul my well-fed buttocks out of a 4x4 and walk 7 hours. Then flop at the Litchi Tree, a boutique establishment in an old colonial house in Joffreville (named after another French military type) with a 4 year old daughter who ran us ragged, a place all over-the-top lovely and civilized with a bordello drinking lounge, simple French provincial fare that costs a bomb, and cool breezes in the night.

Joffreville: an old town where the jungle is taking over. Hillside breezes and the place I'd live if I had to live here. Tourist fools go to the beach. Locals try to live higher.

Late afternoon sound of seventh day Adventists singing and heathens playing accordions and dancing with sung laughter.[68]

[68] Obviously not together. Competing sounds on the breezes.

November 17

Breakfast on front terrace looking over to the bay of Diego Suarez. 

Bit fatigued as I write this (some days later). Heat exhaustion combined with a few dozen mosquito bites and lack of sleep. So what do I write, where do I go from here? In the end this is collapsing into a daily chronicling of animals seen, food eaten, weather observed. I'm tiring of it as much as any reader who might have made it this far. But I still have to write about tsingy.

The tsingy. The tsingy are not uniquely Madagascarene, but they are a definite attraction of this place. Tsingy means 'tip-toe' in Malagasy and you'd need to walk on tip-toe to stand any chance of surviving them. They are sharp. Basically, some millennia ago a chunk of what is now Madagascar rose up from the ocean floor. Rain over the intervening years has dissolved some of the calcified beasties and not others. What we are left with is a series of knife-sharp serrated ridges that may only rest a foot off of ground level but between those ridges are canyons and chasms that can descend a hundred metres under ground. The barriers created by the tsingy have meant that less than a few hundred feet from each other, life has evolved differently in pockets. Certain mice, for example, exist only in one small patch of the tsingy and nowhere else in the world. Their neighbours, whom they can never reach, are equally unique. 

Before we get to these, we stop in to see the red tsingy, similarly sculpted by the weather but out of clay. Stunning colours and under constant attack from zebu, it resembles some parts of Arizona but there isn't a Subway sandwich shop in sight.

What do we have? A land of branch huts and shanty shacks, avocados around Anivorano, Manioc as we drive south, the road getting worse again and huts now on stilts and mad with grass mats against wooden frames. 

Then eucalyptus forests on our way to the tsingy. Northern Madagascar is burning and has been razed for firewood and agriculture. The solution has been to plant fast-growing eucalyptus for charcoal. Bamboo for construction. But these are dirty, dirty trees (actually, bamboo may be a grass if I remember correctly)[69] that suck up far too much water in a dry country.  So. So what do you do? Solutions are often worse than the problem. The 'right' thing to do is difficult to figure out. 

Enough bleakness. We arrive at Ankarana National Park where Davis drops us with an exuberant local guide—Juvence—whose French is homegrown and comes tinged with the Italian he has been learning. He took us first to the petits tsingy where we could walk at the top of the formation and in the crevasses. Then to a bat grotto and cave, a monstrous place full of humid guano fumes, large spiders and a variety of bats ranging from larger mouse-eaters to the world's smallest bat, an insect eater the size of a ping pong ball.

Pointing a light up to the roof of the cave found clusters of bats, hundreds and thousands clumped together, their eyes shining back in reflection, the nest of them all looking like a glistening pulpy mass of necrotic flesh heaving and pulsating wetly in the light. Dread Cthulhu Necronomicon moments. 

On the floor of the cave, amidst offerings, bones of ancestors interred in the cave. A skullcap and a femur with old coins and bottles of booze. 

I'd rave about the cave but I was happier to get out of it than to go in. I felt all right inside but finally emerging from it and seeing the trees I realized how anxious I had been in the heat and the confines, and the claustrophobic sepia tones of the place. To emerge at the top of the cave and look down onto the greenery was a slap of refreshment. 

The weirdest thing we saw was a species of ant that was only discovered a few year ago. By discovered I mean catalogued because the locals had always known about them but just hadn't provided them with a scientific name. Science is dismissive of pre-taxonomic knowledge. Anyway, this is only an ant entomologically and etymologically. I'd never have guessed it. It has six legs and a tangled white shrub growing out of its back.

That excursion led us to our accommodation for the next two nights, the Ankarana Lodge, which could have been lovely with other people there but as it was we were the only guests it felt like the horrendous ranch motel in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. Eyes everywhere, people sleeping under the bar, under the table, playing boules. It seemed like the owners/managers were on holiday and the staff were loungingly going through the motions.

I am mistaken. The first night a German couple was also staying there, an odd older couple with googly invading eyes as we swam in a pool murky and milky with the high mineral content of the region. 

We double bolted the door and slept in the tin roof heat expecting a murderous attack at any point. Instead all we got were glimpses of naked staff members rushing past the window on their way back from the stream.

[69] It is. 

November 18

The early morning began with a millipede in the bathroom. 35 cm long, four cm wide,[70] black carapace on scuttling red legs. A perfect opener to our long hot hike to the grands tsingy today. 

The grands tsingy are a necropolis, both here and further south where they stretch out for many miles. Sacred spaces where the dead in white shrouds are placed. Much fady (taboos) here. 

Millipedes, scorpions, serpents, lizards. From above the tsingy look like a seismograph gone wild in three dimension. A relief map of hell. Fall onto them and you will be flayed across different angles. Fall into the gorges and you may bleed to death before anyone can get you out. There are rudimentary walkways and suspension bridges and it is one of the eeriest landscapes, like being in a forest where you are unaware of the life in the overhead canopy but here instead we are unaware of the life below.

Plants here are succulents but the nasty prickly kind. Life is tough. The air hums with the shrieking of cicadas. 

Birds, the Bird of Paradise Flycatcher again! The chameleons and some sportive lemurs including another nocturnal mouse lemur.

The land of the dead and 45 degrees under a shadowless sun.

We welcomed the dusty eeriness of the pool at the lodge. Then we went off with Davis and Juvence, a sack of limes, a jar of cane sugar and half litre of homemade rum. Caipirinhas and sunset over a plain like the Serengeti, with a line of fire where the ground was being cleared.

[70] More like 20cm long, 2 cm wide. 

November 19 to 21

A road day, down through the savannahesque plains, past the families crushing stones with tiny hammers, the women with painted faces, the infants naked and playing at the edge of the Route Nationale 6. Houses on flood plain stilts and masses of sugar canes, clothing out drying on bushes and riverbanks.

Soon we are in a speedboat hitting the waves out to Nosy Be (big island) and then we are there. Hell-ville.

Unsatisfyingly, Hell-ville gets its name from the French Admiral de Hell rather than from any insalubrious qualities. A run-down mélange of African Asian and Indian with Arab influences, it reminded me more of South East Asia than any other place. I can't put my finger on why. Quiet siesta humdrum malaise in patchwork town.

Tourism is slightly more developed here, by which I mean that there's more visible sex tourism, a plague in this part of the world. Or is it? Depends on who you talk to. Most everyone agrees that child exploitation is vile but the jury seems to be out on the bar girl / beach boy phenomena. Michel Houellebecq certainly irritated a chunk of the literary world with his book Platforme which seemed to enthusiastically embrace the development of sex tourism.[71]

I'm struggling with which is worse: a resort-based sex industry or the sapphire trade that is here in the north as well: this time dominated by the Chinese and the Sri Lankans. This kind of mining is old-fashioned labour-intensive digging of mine shafts down 30 metres and then snaking out in all directions, all by hand. Death and pennies for locals, bribes for authorities, profits overseas. 

But the thing with sex tourism is, and Houellebecq manages to grapple with this, that it isn't Harlequin romances and attractive young people having guilt-free orgies; people in general are generally ugly. Ugly as airports: blotchy and blocky and greasy and overflowing and unpleasant to look at even when covered up. Sex tourism is largely about people—the product of generations of poor overly-fatty diets—renting the genitalia of people themselves the product of generations of poor under-nourishing diets. Everyone involved looks rank. Even the rich ones.[72] The men all look like Silvio Berlusconi with longer hair and the rented women all look like smallpox survivors except for the ones who look like they succumbed to smallpox a week ago. Keep your fantasies intact; don't venture into the real thing. 

The news. Still haven't managed to get any info about the two foreigners (French and Italian) who were burnt alive here some weeks ago. The government seems quite happy to call it 'local justice,' with the story being that the men had a prostitute over who got thirsty in the night and went into the freezer in which was the mutilated body of a young boy. She ran out and told the town and that was that.

Can it ever be that simple?

But given the expat community it looks like it could be true, either as sexual mutilation or organ theft. There are a lot of pervy looking men of a certain age, weight, and hair loss regimen. 

Then I realized that that's probably what I'll look like in ten years.

So, Nosy Be. One main street (the Cours de Hell, wonderful), more lemurs, a 100+ year old tortoise with a temper (I didn't comprehend how large they can be), an ocean almost uncomfortably warmer than body temperature, outrigger pirogues coming in and selling their fish to the women who will walk to market to sell them there, baskets on heads, faces painted yellow against the sun. The odd duos of bar girls walking from their villages to the resorts on the next bay, shells on beach, rectangular patchwork rice-sack sails coming in from the horizon, crabs scuttling deep into holes in the earth.

[71] I am a massive fan of Houellebecq’s writings. Perverse and offensive though they may seem to so, they are energizing and gripping in a way very few current writers’ works are.

[72] Particularly the rich ones. No portraits getting old in the attic with these people. 

November 21 to 22

The North is the place to go if you only have a week or two in Madagascar. Variety and better (barely) tourist infrastructure than elsewhere.

The 21st is a transit day to Tana. I'm sick-ish. The afore-mentioned combination of heat exhaustion, lack of sleep and mosquito bites so it all blurs together: the rush packing job because our flight was advanced four hours; the scrambled lack of assigned seating; the tourist attempting to hold onto a two foot model sailing ship as his carry-on; and then it was Tana and the smell of smoke. On the weather app I use it unfailingly lists the weather in Tana's afternoon as 'smoky.' It's Antananarivo, there's always a fire somewhere.

Coming back feels relaxing. I know these streets, I know the score. It doesn't seem so daunting; but it is third world, it's a grimy, grim bit of everything that's wrong with the world and a smattering of all that is right.

And leaving? A long taxi ride out to the airport on a Friday afternoon, the airport where the smoking lounge has its door propped open by a standing ashtray so the smokers can have fresh air. Sitting under a fan on an old, beautiful wooden bench. Composing my thoughts. 

So long we've wanted to come here—in my case since I spun the globe as a boy—and now we are leaving, never to return. I'd like to come back and canoe to the west coast with its marvels and ride the rails and carry the taxis over washed out roads on the east, ending up on the old pirate haven of Ile Sainte Marie, but will we? The globe is smaller than it once was and there's the three Guianas, Antarctica, the Pampas to visit. There's narwhals and muskox and penguins and manatees and whale sharks to see. I may never see Madagascar again and that doesn't quite sit right with me.

... and the plane is boarding and maybe there's a dodo to be discovered in Mauritius and now we've taken off and drinks are being served and the scorched lands of Madagascar are fading into memory.

14) Some people call it Maurice: the pompitus of Mauritius

November 22 to December 1

Going home without my sorrow
Going home some time tomorrow
Going home to where it's better than before
-- Leonard Cohen

This is how the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper. 
-- TS Eliot. 

Amsterdam, Lamu, Nairobi, the Serengeti, Zanzibar, Lake Malawi, Victoria Falls, Johannesburg, Antananarivo, Route Nationale 7, Diego Suarez, RN 6, and Nosy Be. And now Mauritius, a place that Mark Twain suggested God created first and then used as a model for heaven. 

Perhaps. But, sadly, Mauritius reminds me of what WC Fields or Groucho Marx[73] once suggested of Mae West: she's a plumber's idea of Cleopatra. 

We wanted to like this island. Really, we did. It was to be our last stop, our chance to relax on the beach and recharge our batteries. An Indian Ocean island with a spicy mix of Indian, Kreol, Chinese, French, English and African influences. No dodos, to be sure, but green and lush and ...

It was actually a shock to arrive here. From high above, the island glowed with electric lights in the nighttime. We've lived without that for weeks. With its glow the island proudly asserted itself to our incoming flight, and the airport, brand new since this September, punched above its weight. Gleaming plastic and metal and Hugo Boss and Ralph Lauren and duty free diamonds and efficient, structured queues. Then a taxi ride along a crisp dual carriageway, a divided highway that bisects the island under high wattage overhead lights. We'd not travelled this quickly since leaving Vancouver. Then smaller, twistier country roads, weaving through a crowd of people returning home from a community production of Porgy and Bess performed in a soccer field and then our hotel in the north of the country. 

Our hotel. Veranda Paul et Virginie. Like this island itself, blandly inoffensive. But disappointingly lumpish. Like realizing that your child just isn't as bright as you had hoped. Not quite incompetent enough to make you angry, just stupid enough to dismay you. 

Paul et Virginie is a smug little French novel that took the world by storm a hundred and fifty years or two hundred years ago. The eponymous couple are children raised on Mauritius in the idyllic paradise of agrarian life, that is to say: happy negroes and Indians and their white protectors living in harmony with nature. Virginie is whisked off to Europe to be civilized. She returns to Mauritius, purity intact, returns to Paul, only to be shipwrecked off the coast. She dies. And that's it. The end. 

I wouldn't recommend the book. It's the sort of book that I would hurl at the TV at the ambiguous in media res ending of a French film. Speaking of which, it was nostalgically fun to be reminded of what it was like to only have 13 channels of shit on the TV to choose from. There's something quite nice about having B movies served up, things we'd never have volunteered to watch. The Descent, the Descent II, Escape from New York. Evan Almighty.

Meh. 

Oh, hell, I didn't want to be so down on this place. There's nothing wrong with it. It's blandly inoffensive.

They paved paradise and put in a golf course.

There's little here that is unique anymore. The endemic flora and fauna have been destroyed in 97% of the island. Everything but the most inaccessible peaks were planted with sugarcane. A few bits and bobs remain in botanical gardens. Some very pretty little birds pop around. But unless you are a botanist or bird fancier with completist tendencies, you've not going to get much out of this place, environmentally speaking. Rats, cats, the mongoose, deer, pigs and dogs got here first.[74]

For the rest of us, it is green and there's some nicely formed mountains and a warm ocean. The hotels serve digestible foods designed for easily upset northern tummies and you can have beans and bacon for breakfast every day. But you can get that anywhere and probably for cheaper. 

It is unremarkable. Not because it is awful but because it is as beige and stripped down as airline food. There's no sense-memory to really retain. 

But what about the dodo? you ask. The glorious dodo? Well, the dodo is dead. Dead as an ungainly flightless bird with a trusting nature can be. A horrible story, yet the poor fat awkward dodo remains a symbol of this island. Baskets, magnets, bottle openers, t-shirts, plush toys. That's fucked up. Who in their right mind proudly parades the poster child for human mismanagement, greed, and soullessness as their icon? "Come to our country and see what we can't offer you!" The Mauritians do it without a shred of irony, I suppose it's because the island has little new to offer. It's all sugar cane, scruffy dogs and bougainvillea. 

Actually, a kestrel of some descrip is the national bird[75]. But who knows or cares? Death tourism: come to Mauritius to see what the whole world will look like in fifty years if the MBAs and lawyers are allowed to continue.

And the hotel puts down enough pesticide to ensure that we lie awake in the silence wondering if the world has ended. No chance of seeing some of the lovely endemic geckoes that supposedly live here. We're torn. We're happy to no longer sleep with the creepy crawlies but we hate the silence springing up every time we pause to listen. 

So ... a terraformed island not unlike every other island beach paradise you've been to. Let your wallet decide.

No clothes
No home
No money
No problem in Mauritius
-- t shirt in every shop in Mauritius

And that t-shirt is the biggest crock. They won't let you near this island if you don't have a hotel reservation. The government hates backpackers and campers and anyone who isn't prepared to pay inflated prices for the resort buffet. 

But the people, you ask. What about les mauriciens? Obviously they have something to offer. 

Well, true, the island is culturally interesting. A neat mix of people and religions, French, Creole, and English languages, but I squint every time I hear someone proclaim that 'we are all brothers,' with no problems, no strife. I can't believe it but I do groove out on the small Hindu temples and the churches and supposedly there's some mosques in the mix as well. People are a lot of colours and they eat each other's foods and they are almost unfailingly polite. Which makes them about as interesting as Canadians and Belgians, I suppose. Certainly more interesting than the other couples we've attempted to meet here.

Culturally, this place can be a gas. We heard some great creole drumming on the breeze on our first night and we listened to a concert at the Grand Gaube village fete, and we ate a lot of (truthfully, sorta bland) indian/chinese/creole cuisine in small poky restaurants, and we poked through some of the villages and towns and it was all fine. Fine and nice. Nice, fine, and bland. Except parts of the capital, Port Louis. That place has some energy and we'd have liked to see a bit more of that life. 

Is my indifference to this place solely a result of my lingering cough and congestion? Well, that doesn't help. Mauritius's supposed star attraction? A tossup between a botanical garden mostly displaying species from other places and "The Adventure of Sugar," a museum that has a decent history of Mauritius and rounds it off with a (no lie) health display that informs us that sugar is now proven to be good for diabetics and that hypoglycemia is largely a myth, and tooth decay is not a problem because of advances in dentistry. 

That's it. Hell, there's some areas of natural beauty: a waterfall and some coloured sand (whee!) but the locals don't really highlight that; instead they make every effort to get us into factory shops. Armani, Dolce, Lauren. Everything with American flags. 

But they make great model ships here. Beautiful big detailed model ships. In my bachelor days I lauded the model ship, reasoning that every bachelor needs a painting or sketch of a dog's head, a solid decanter, and a model ship on the mantle. I can't remember why those were important but they were.[76]

What else? Oh, everything closes between noon and 3pm. Or 4pm. Or the next day. And no one works on Saturday. And Sunday is a holiday. Actually, that's probably the thing I like best about the island: the relaxed lifestyle. And the model ships. And the pretty little birds.

But that's Mauritius and as nice and inoffensive and milquetoast and blancmange and tapioca as it is I can't think of any good reason for anyone to go out of their way to get there (save the aforementioned completists of the world). It's the sort of place that you'll be content with, though you'll balk at the prices, and at the end you'll leave wondering why people make such a big fuss about climate change and rising sea levels if this is the sort of place that will disappear. You wouldn't say good riddance but you'd fatalistically shrug with benign indifference.[77]

And that's it. That is the trip that was. In two days we will be back at work. 

I've written quite a lot, I suppose. The start of the trip has dimmed in my memory. I'm somewhere over Somalia or Ethiopia right now. It's about 4am, depending on which time zone I use. The earth is fat so the flight from Mauritius to Paris is the longest stretch at just under 12 hours. Then a jump over to Amsterdam and another long stretch back to Vancouver. 28 hours of transit time in total, if all goes well. 

The airplane is dark and quiet. People are sleeping and snoring and farting gently with the pressure change. What a miracle of ingenuity and human achievement it is to be able to shoehorn a couple hundred schmucks into an elongated tube and hurtle us in a Hail Mary pass over the equator and up into Northern Europe. 

But we still can't ensure that children below me don't die from a simple bout of diarrhoea. 

Just a thought.

Loose ends? My favourite animals? The giraffes and chameleons were fantastic. The wee mouse lemur with its enormous quivering eyes. 

Favourite country? Madagascar, hands down. People, food, flora, fauna, funkiness. Not an easy country to navigate, but one that rewards effort. 

Anyway, I needn't go on. We will return home. Face a tedious repetition of questions about the trip and then, within a week, we'll be back at the daily grind as though we'd never left. 

Yes, I've scribbled about 40,000 words. And what to call this? Travels with my Antipathy? 

Thanks for paying attention, if in fact you did. And if you only looked at fragments, well, so did I.

And let's face it, any travel narrative is really just an exploration of the traveler’s neuroses. The world is a funny place. I think the best way to approach it is with a willingness to be surprised and enchanted by the mundane things. That's as true in regular day-to-day life as it is on Antarctica or in an ayahuasca reverie somewhere in the Amazon.

So to answer the question I repeatedly put to myself over the last eight weeks: why travel? No reason, I suppose, except that it beats the hell out of golf. 

As always, I remain

yours,

N.
December 1, 2013

[73] Fields. 

[74] There is actually a pocket of endemic forest that still has 200-300 of Mauritius’s remaining endemic species. I regret not seeking out the dodo tree which I have long been fascinated by – a tree that required the dodo in order to propagate. Scientists figured out that link recently, just before the tree became extinct and they found that turkeys can perform the same function (i.e. eating the tough seeds, breaking them down and defecating them out to germinate. A lovely story, so no wonder other scientists have been pooh-poohing it. Nonetheless, turkeys are still used for germination efforts.

[75] The boringly named Mauritius Kestrel (Falco punctatus). Or is it? Anyway, it is a remarkable survivor, an example of what humanity can do right to right its wrongs. 

[76] Probably due to the Tintin books The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure.  

[77] Exaggeration. I’d hate to see the dodo tree disappear.