"How can people be so cruel?"
"Hatred . . . insanity . . . I don't know."
-Hotel Rwanda
When I was in Africa three years ago I spent a month traveling in Tanzania and at one point found myself only a couple hundred kilometers from the Rwandan border. Riding a local minibus one day, I saw a beggar on the side of the street. He had no legs, and he had no arms. Foolishly I asked the guy next to me if that was from a disease. He paused, and then uncomfortably responded "No. He is, I think, a Tutsi."
I will never forget that.
This time, the first sign that I was nearing Rwanda came from the UNHCR refugee tents a few kilometers from the border in Uganda. They had been recently put there so it was evident that these particular refugees came not from Rwanda but from the recent fighting within the Congo; but being from the Congo these refugees are part of a conflict that has tied the two contries together since the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.
The genocide is a picture-perfect example of the failure of humanity. In 100 days Rwandans managed to murder between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus (think of that - there is a 100,000 plus-or-minus sign in front of the killings) by way of machete, gun, knife, gang-rape, and a variety of other methods. The West did nothing to stop the genocide and the African Union, which for some reason has escaped criticism for doing the same, sat by idly and afterward blamed the West for what had happened in their own backyard. It's important to point out that the genocide didn't stop because Rwandans suddenly and inexplicably came to their senses, or the rest of Africa decided to finally accept responsibility for their neighbors, or the West decided it would have taken only a few thousand troops to stop what was happening. No, nobody cared enough to stop what was going down even after almost a million murders. It was the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the Tutsi rebel group based out of Uganda and led by current president Paul Kagame, who finally succeeded in driving the Interahamwe, the Hutu extremists who were committing the killings, out of Rwanda. So the Interahamwe, flanked by a couple million or so Hutu civilians who understandably assumed that the incoming RPF might want a little revenge after a million of their family members had just been raped and murdered, fled into the vastness of Zaire. More specifically, the mineral-rich, uncontrolled, forested sections of the North and South Kivu regions of Zaire.
Zaire, Rwanda's giant neighbor to the west, was in it's last days under the kleptocratic Mobutu Sese Seko who led from the other side of the country in Kinshasa. He was too busy trying to hold together his crumbling country in the west to worry about what was happeneing in the east.
From the east the Hutu extremists remained a tremendous thorn in the side of Rwanda's rebuilding efforts and a devastating presence to the Congolese civilians, whose government had neither the will or the resources to drive them out. Eventually Rwanda grew weary of waiting for Zaire to act and launched an invasion on its giant neighbor and actually managed to gain control of the entire country. Later, when Rwanda again became tired of the Rwandan-installed leader Laurent Kabila, they invaded the Zaire again, now remaned The Democratic Republic of Congo. This set off what people call the "African Civil War" and is still continuing to this day, primarily in the Congo, but having involved at one time or another a dozen African nations and having claimed five and a half million lives.
But even with both of these invasions the Rwandans failed to take out the highly militarized Hutu Interahamwe, now acting as an insurgency rebel force in the Congo and forever plotting to come back into power someday in Rwanda. So today there is pure chaos in the North and South Kivu regions of the Congo. The mineral resources of the region compound the matter even further.
The obvious rhetorical question that has to flow through every visitor to Rwanda is "How in the hell can something like this happen?" I say rhetorical because there is no satisfactory answer. An easy answer that a lot of people give is that the rigid hierarchical system in Rwanda was to blame because it allowed those at the top to dictate the genocide and those underneath had to carry it through.
Personally, I find this to be the biggest bullshit answer I've ever heard. My Italian relatives who got their heads bashed in with rifle butts on their farm by some Nazis in World War II died as a result of "following orders." Same with my Croatian relatives who were shot point-blank by an asshole Serbian. The "I was just following orders" defense makes me despise whoever says it because the speaker assumes a complete lack of humanity and allows themselves to be painted as victims in their own light. "Well, yes, it was wrong, but I was told to do it, so what choice did I have?" Jesus Christ! If you're told to force your neighbor to rape his own daughter before setting the entire family on fire how could you think that it is acceptable simply because you're following orders? How do you not turn your gun on your superior instead?
I doubt anyone can find a real reason behind the killings. They happened for whatever reasons, because people in mass groups can be stupid and led to do horrible things. In this case, a country raped, mutilated, and murdered a tenth of its population.
Crossing into Rwanda from Uganda, I spent the first couple days in the city of Ruhengeri, a starting point for gorilla tours and exploration of the surrounding Virunga mountains. While I decided it was best to leave the gorilla tours for another time, the fertile, black Virunga Mountains have been a point of fascination for me since I was eleven years old. So I spent two days trampling around the base of the mountains, just wandering from village to village and trying as best I could to ignore the ever-present crowd of children who followed me. Besides those kids, I had a great time in the forest and really enjoyed just generally spending time in the gorgeous Virunga forest.
From Ruhengeri I traveled to the resort town of Gisenyi, which lies on the north shore and right across from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a mess of a country that is the sexiest Pandora's Box I've ever wanted to travel to. I chilled here for a couple days and contemplated crossing into the Congo but ultimately decided that because of a relative lack of money and rumors of troops movements I would come back some other time and really knock the hell out of the place. For now though, I was already starting to feel pretty bummed about being in Rwanda and wanted to exit as soon as possible.
Even though I had been preparing myself for the country ever since I got to Africa, that preparation wasn't enough. The history of the Rwanda was a huge weight wherever I was. Even in the Virunga mountains I had a difficult time escaping it. The writing in this post already seems dry to me, and I think it's because writing about Rwanda in a non-genocide context is just hard. It's difficult to look at anything else besides the killings and its consequences, and even writing about that is damn difficult as well. I've got so much that I think about the killings and aftermath, but besides a bit more on the issue I'll leave it to you to read up on your own. I truly recommend doing so in order to at least partially understand the horror that the country exposed itself to. If you're interested there are a few books I can suggest. Besides being my choice picks, these are also probably the most well-read in the USA so they shouldn't be difficult to track down.
"We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed Along With Our Families" by Philip Gourevitch would be the best one to start out with. Besides a couple historical inaccuracies it's a great book and will give you a decent picture of Rwanda with a specific focus on 1994. "Shake Hands With the Devil" by Romeo Dallaire, the UN Commander in Rwanda whose hands were tied by the Western powers during the killings, is a good book as well. Dallaire has a lot to get off his chest about the genocide; obvious torment in the writing aside, the shear volume of his book makes it clear he has a lot to say. And "Left to Tell" by Immaculee Ilibagiza is a well-written first-hand account from a Tusti women who survived the genocide by hiding with seven other women in the bathroom of a Hutu pastor. Of course there is the movie "Hotel Rwanda," the recounting of how a Hutu hotel manager of the Mille Collines in Kigali housed more than a thousand Tustis and moderate Hutus during the genocide and used every contact he had to ensure their safety. The manager, Paul Rusesabagina, also came out with a book detailing his account, "An Ordinary Man" that is worth a read.
From Ruhengeri I went to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. My first stop was at the Genocide Memorial Museum, a location that had a mass grave with the bodies of some 250,000 of those murdered as well as a museum dedicated to the events before, during, and after the genocide. Inside were rooms with pictures, writing, and interactive videos which gave a detailed look into what happened. On one of the walls I was surprised to see a picture of the church I was staying at in Kigali; upon reading further, I learned that the church priest had betrayed his parishioners during the genocide and led the Interahamwe killers to a large number of them who were hiding. All were killed. Reading that, the thought briefly crossed my mind - were any of them hiding in the room I was staying in?
The center area of the museum had a large room with individual sections that were stacked with skulls, leg bones, clothing, kids toys, and pictures of the dead. This inside area was a tough look; there isn't any mentally preparation you can do for it, and the images stay solidly locked in your memory. I left quickly but haven't been able to get over it. Outside, the mass graves were surrounded by a well-kept garden and covered with huge cement slabs, along with the occasional poignant sign reading "Please Do Not Step on the Mass Graves."
"Please do not step on the mass graves." My God, what a telling phrase. Something I know will stay with me until I die.
I happened to be in Rwanda on not only the 15th Anniversary of the killings, but was also there during their Genocide Memorial Week. The most important day in the week, for reasons unclear to me, was the Tuesday. That day I took a bus to the city of Nyamata, some forty kilometers south of Kigali. Nyamata was the site of a church were some 2,500 Tutsis had gathered to seek protection from the Interahamwe. The Interahamwe still attacked the church regardless, however, with grenades and guns and all inside were killed. The bodies had been left where they laid in and around the Church as a memorial, the same as with another nearby church where the same thing had occurred with 5,000 who had taken shelter.
There was to be a memorial service that day in Nyamata and I was planning to attend, but as soon as I stepped off the bus I felt out of place. I was surrounded by a sea of Rwandans that actually had a place here; no doubt many of them had lost relatives and friends here or elsewhere. Some might have even helped with the killings. But I had no place; I was just a tourist who was sick to his stomach by this whole place.
Exactly then, as I was going though my thoughts, the realization flooded through me that I had finally hit in straight on - I wasn't just horrified by the genocide, I was horrified by Rwanda. That realization was profound for me. I guess under different circumstances I might not have felt that way, but the timing of my trip made it difficult to get away from the genocide. In reality, Rwanda has built itself up nicely since 1994 with the help of foreign aid and is not the back-water country you may think. It has well-kept, efficient roads, crystal-clean high-rise buildings, beautiful gardens, and is largely free from the corruption so prevalent in surrounding nations. There are countless activities for those traveling though it, and really has done a terrific job of presenting itself as a tourist destination. If you were visiting it without any awareness of its history you would consider it a jewel of a country, a complete surprise in the middle of Central Africa.
But when you're there during a day like that Tuesday when the streets are deserted and literally every shop and building is closed down while an entire country looks into its soul and finds machetes and blood, you don't think about the roads and the gardens. You think about the killings.
I decided right then that I didn't care to see any more into the the mind of Rwanda. Every person . . . every country has their inner-demons, I suppose. But I don't want even one more glimpse into those of Rwanda.
So I left Nyamata. I got right back on the bus maybe thirty seconds after I got off and spent the ride back to Kigali sitting in disgust and revulsion knowing that this act - GENOCIDE - is still, even in these times, allowed to happen. Knowing that it will happen again. Knowing that despite the proclamations of politicians, military generals and aid agencies across the world of "NEVER AGAIN" after every genocide, it will indeed happen again.
Saying "NEVER AGAIN" might make the powers who stood idly by feel once again righteous, but the blood of the women, men, and children slain by machete remains on the Rwandan dirt. Every one of the 800,000 murderes was a human being with loves and hopes and emotions. Every one of them felt a feeling of horror in the moments before their death knowing that the end was upon them.
The world should be too ashamed to even apologize to Rwanda. Rwanda should be too ashamed to apologize to itself.
I stayed another day in Kigali but in my unhappiness and disouragement I didn't even leave my room. There was nothing there for me I cared to see. The day after I took a bus into Burundi, unhappy with my stay in Rwanda and even more so with my feelings toward humanity.
---------------------------------------------------------------
As a footnote, I should add that I feel no need to reconcile myself with what I think of my time there. Sometimes there is no answer, there is no right thing to say, and there is no need to make yourself feel better about something that happened or how you feel. For me, this stop in my trip was one of those times.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Uganda
His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.
-Idi Amin's Self-Given Title
Despite how awesome I knew Uganda was going to be, my semi-limited time meant that I only ended up spending about a week and a half in the country. That was a shame because there is a whole lot for the wandering backpacker there.
The first stop for me was in Jinja, a popular backpacker stop and the starting point of the Nile (Unless, of course, you could Burundi's spot on Lake Tanganyika, which the Ugandans do not.) Besides that claim-to-fame, the river provides some fabulous rapids for kayakers and rafters and a number of tourist companies have chimed in to offer "adrenaline" activities such as mountain biking in the surrounding hills and bungee jumping over the river. Personally, I find self-proclaimed adrenaline activities to frequently be over-rated, so I limited myself to a day of rafting a few more days of exploring the area.
I stayed in a lodge/camp site a few kilometers outside of town that was on a bluff overlooking the beginning stretch of the Nile, and luck was on my side when I set up my tent and I got a spot on a ledge near the water. The site had an outdoor shower, inexplicably utilized very little, that I used every day. It offered a beautiful view of the water as it started its course towards Egypt. The shower was closed on three sides and completely open on the fourth, so I had to be careful not to get soap in my eyes or I could slip and plunge down the embankment. Totally worth the risk though.
The rafting, for any pooh-pawing I may have done, was a very great time. There were a total of six rapids throughout the day and we flipped on two of them. The last set of rapids, and the second flip, kept me under initially just long enough to feel a beautiful surge of panic. Then, as rapids do, it tossed me up long enough for a brief gulp of air before taking me under again. This continued for maybe forty seconds (that seemed more like four minutes) until eventually I was able to make my way to a shoreline and get picked up by a rescue kayak. If we weren't feeling it before, we all certainly felt the adrenaline at that point.
For anyone in the region, I would recommend rafting or kayaking these. Do it soon though, because a dam that is scheduled to be complete at the end of this year is going to wipe out half of the rapids I took. Bummer.
As I briefly alluded to in my last post, my schedule when traveling is comfortably vacant and I can spend hours doing what in normal times should only take minutes. Case in point was one day in Jinja when I had a craving for a pineapple. (Okay, three pineapples.) The hawkers outside my camp site were selling them at twice the normal price under the assumption that we wouldn't know enough or care enough to go and get normal priced ones from a nearby village. But I've found that walking just a couple kilometers from popular tourist destinations puts you in a different world where the locals are as surprised to see a tourist as if you're hundreds of miles from a tourist hot-spot. You talk to people you wouldn't normally talk to, you see gardens, rivers, waterfalls, and houses you would miss, and you buy food at the local rates. The "local rate" issue might not sound like a big deal, but having to barter with every person you purchase food from for months on end is mind-numbing, so having someone just naturally charge you the correct price is an uplifting experience every time.
On this occasion, the road I was walking looked vaguely familiar and I got a sense of deja vu, but I chalked that up to the fact that I've walked on a whole lot of red-dust roads lined with banana trees. I didn't find any pineapples until I was about six kilometers from my camp site, and when I got there the stall owner was so surprised to see me that she insisted I stay for some banana wine.
By that time I ready to leave it was starting to get dark so I stuck out my thumb at the first vehicle that came by. It turned out that it a bus filled with kids from a local school that were coming back from a soccer match. In the front were a pair of cute Australian teachers who looked to be about my age and were happy to give me advice on good places to hang out, local prices for various foods and tell me about their volunteer work. After a few minutes one of them said "Oh yeah. This road? It's the one in "The Last King of Scotland."
I snapped my fingers - that's where the deja vu had come from! The dropped my off outside my site with a gratifying "no charge!" and I was left thinking about "The Last Kind of Scotland" and Idi Amin.
Of the African "Strong Men" that came out of the Independence period in the 1960s and 1970s, Idi Amin may not have been the worst, but I wager he was the craziest. Besides being an avowed anti-Semite, tossing the Indian population out of Uganda, threatening war with Kenya and actually going to war with Tanzania, killing between 300,000 and 500,000 of his people, destroying Uganda's reputation as a popular tourist destination, allowing his soldiers to kill most of Uganda's big game, and killing a number of his ministers and cohorts, Amin was also rumored to be a cannibal who ate the organs fresh from the bodies of his enemies. The movie, in opinion, hardly does his insanity justice.
Large sections of the country, including its tourism sector are still recovering from his eight year rule that ended in 1979 and his name is synonymous in my mind with the phrase "completely and utterly bat-shit crazy." But maybe that's just me.
The next day I crashed for the first time since being in Ethiopia. I call days like these me "Why-the-hell-am-I-here-when-I-could-be-at-home-with-ice-in-my-glass?" days, and they're typically when a few things go wrong one-after-another. They're days when I'm just tired of it all; tired of moving from bed to bed and city to city in cramped buses, of everyone trying to rip me off, constant power cuts, and tired of having to make new friends every few days.
This was compounded by Jinja's popularity among the backpacker crowd. It's not easy to explain, but I rarely relish be surrounded by large amounts of travelers. It's not a turf issue, as meeting one or two in the middle of the bush is always a thrill and we typically hook up as travel partners for a few days. But being surrounded by them in a city or lodge is disheartening to me for some reason. This was the biggest popular backpacker hang-out since I was in Egypt, and it came as a shock to me to see so many muzungus ("foreigner" in Swahili) in one area. They were all nice enough, but I have gotten used to being by myself or with maybe a couple other muzungus. 50 others all stumbling drunk around my tent at 3 A.M. is something I forgot happened in Africa.
The next day was a complete 180 and my spirits shot up just in time for me to leave the city. This was partially due to a sudden downpour, my first rain since Jerusalem, that was so heavy it cut visibility to just a few feet and signified an end to my stay in drought-regions. I took off on a bus through Kampala and to the city of Rukungiri, home to my friend Megan who is staying there for peace corp. Not only did her place offer the first semblance of a "home" I had slept in on this trip, but she also bluntly told me that I should wash my clothes. The water shortages from Addis all the way to Uganda had meant little extra water for washing, so everything I had was absolutely filled with dust and dirt. We must had gotten seven pounds out of my stuff by the time we were done. So, thank you Megan. Seriously.
Before leaving Uganda I traveled to Lake Bunyoni, a meandering Rift Valley lake that is the second deepest on the continent and travels for 25 kilometers near the Rwandan border. More rain slightly dampened (har!) my mood, but soon I was on my way to Rwanda.
-Idi Amin's Self-Given Title
Despite how awesome I knew Uganda was going to be, my semi-limited time meant that I only ended up spending about a week and a half in the country. That was a shame because there is a whole lot for the wandering backpacker there.
The first stop for me was in Jinja, a popular backpacker stop and the starting point of the Nile (Unless, of course, you could Burundi's spot on Lake Tanganyika, which the Ugandans do not.) Besides that claim-to-fame, the river provides some fabulous rapids for kayakers and rafters and a number of tourist companies have chimed in to offer "adrenaline" activities such as mountain biking in the surrounding hills and bungee jumping over the river. Personally, I find self-proclaimed adrenaline activities to frequently be over-rated, so I limited myself to a day of rafting a few more days of exploring the area.
I stayed in a lodge/camp site a few kilometers outside of town that was on a bluff overlooking the beginning stretch of the Nile, and luck was on my side when I set up my tent and I got a spot on a ledge near the water. The site had an outdoor shower, inexplicably utilized very little, that I used every day. It offered a beautiful view of the water as it started its course towards Egypt. The shower was closed on three sides and completely open on the fourth, so I had to be careful not to get soap in my eyes or I could slip and plunge down the embankment. Totally worth the risk though.
The rafting, for any pooh-pawing I may have done, was a very great time. There were a total of six rapids throughout the day and we flipped on two of them. The last set of rapids, and the second flip, kept me under initially just long enough to feel a beautiful surge of panic. Then, as rapids do, it tossed me up long enough for a brief gulp of air before taking me under again. This continued for maybe forty seconds (that seemed more like four minutes) until eventually I was able to make my way to a shoreline and get picked up by a rescue kayak. If we weren't feeling it before, we all certainly felt the adrenaline at that point.
For anyone in the region, I would recommend rafting or kayaking these. Do it soon though, because a dam that is scheduled to be complete at the end of this year is going to wipe out half of the rapids I took. Bummer.
As I briefly alluded to in my last post, my schedule when traveling is comfortably vacant and I can spend hours doing what in normal times should only take minutes. Case in point was one day in Jinja when I had a craving for a pineapple. (Okay, three pineapples.) The hawkers outside my camp site were selling them at twice the normal price under the assumption that we wouldn't know enough or care enough to go and get normal priced ones from a nearby village. But I've found that walking just a couple kilometers from popular tourist destinations puts you in a different world where the locals are as surprised to see a tourist as if you're hundreds of miles from a tourist hot-spot. You talk to people you wouldn't normally talk to, you see gardens, rivers, waterfalls, and houses you would miss, and you buy food at the local rates. The "local rate" issue might not sound like a big deal, but having to barter with every person you purchase food from for months on end is mind-numbing, so having someone just naturally charge you the correct price is an uplifting experience every time.
On this occasion, the road I was walking looked vaguely familiar and I got a sense of deja vu, but I chalked that up to the fact that I've walked on a whole lot of red-dust roads lined with banana trees. I didn't find any pineapples until I was about six kilometers from my camp site, and when I got there the stall owner was so surprised to see me that she insisted I stay for some banana wine.
By that time I ready to leave it was starting to get dark so I stuck out my thumb at the first vehicle that came by. It turned out that it a bus filled with kids from a local school that were coming back from a soccer match. In the front were a pair of cute Australian teachers who looked to be about my age and were happy to give me advice on good places to hang out, local prices for various foods and tell me about their volunteer work. After a few minutes one of them said "Oh yeah. This road? It's the one in "The Last King of Scotland."
I snapped my fingers - that's where the deja vu had come from! The dropped my off outside my site with a gratifying "no charge!" and I was left thinking about "The Last Kind of Scotland" and Idi Amin.
Of the African "Strong Men" that came out of the Independence period in the 1960s and 1970s, Idi Amin may not have been the worst, but I wager he was the craziest. Besides being an avowed anti-Semite, tossing the Indian population out of Uganda, threatening war with Kenya and actually going to war with Tanzania, killing between 300,000 and 500,000 of his people, destroying Uganda's reputation as a popular tourist destination, allowing his soldiers to kill most of Uganda's big game, and killing a number of his ministers and cohorts, Amin was also rumored to be a cannibal who ate the organs fresh from the bodies of his enemies. The movie, in opinion, hardly does his insanity justice.
Large sections of the country, including its tourism sector are still recovering from his eight year rule that ended in 1979 and his name is synonymous in my mind with the phrase "completely and utterly bat-shit crazy." But maybe that's just me.
The next day I crashed for the first time since being in Ethiopia. I call days like these me "Why-the-hell-am-I-here-when-I-could-be-at-home-with-ice-in-my-glass?" days, and they're typically when a few things go wrong one-after-another. They're days when I'm just tired of it all; tired of moving from bed to bed and city to city in cramped buses, of everyone trying to rip me off, constant power cuts, and tired of having to make new friends every few days.
This was compounded by Jinja's popularity among the backpacker crowd. It's not easy to explain, but I rarely relish be surrounded by large amounts of travelers. It's not a turf issue, as meeting one or two in the middle of the bush is always a thrill and we typically hook up as travel partners for a few days. But being surrounded by them in a city or lodge is disheartening to me for some reason. This was the biggest popular backpacker hang-out since I was in Egypt, and it came as a shock to me to see so many muzungus ("foreigner" in Swahili) in one area. They were all nice enough, but I have gotten used to being by myself or with maybe a couple other muzungus. 50 others all stumbling drunk around my tent at 3 A.M. is something I forgot happened in Africa.
The next day was a complete 180 and my spirits shot up just in time for me to leave the city. This was partially due to a sudden downpour, my first rain since Jerusalem, that was so heavy it cut visibility to just a few feet and signified an end to my stay in drought-regions. I took off on a bus through Kampala and to the city of Rukungiri, home to my friend Megan who is staying there for peace corp. Not only did her place offer the first semblance of a "home" I had slept in on this trip, but she also bluntly told me that I should wash my clothes. The water shortages from Addis all the way to Uganda had meant little extra water for washing, so everything I had was absolutely filled with dust and dirt. We must had gotten seven pounds out of my stuff by the time we were done. So, thank you Megan. Seriously.
Before leaving Uganda I traveled to Lake Bunyoni, a meandering Rift Valley lake that is the second deepest on the continent and travels for 25 kilometers near the Rwandan border. More rain slightly dampened (har!) my mood, but soon I was on my way to Rwanda.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Kenya
President Obama, President Mubarak of Egypt, and President Kibaki of Kenya are all flying in together to a conference. But soon it gets very cloudy and the pilot gets lost. So President Obama says "No problem, I got this" and he walks over to a window, opens it up, and starts feeling around. After a minute he pulled his arm back in, closes the window, and says "We're in New York." The other two are amazed; they ask "How did you know that?" Obama answers "I felt the Statue of Liberty."
A little later they're still lost and the pilot wants to know where they are again, so Mubarak says "I'll give this a shot," opens a window, feels around, pulls his hand back in, and says "We're over Cairo, now." "How'd you know that?" the other two ask. "I felt the Sphinx," he says.
Yet later they're still lost. So Kibaki decides that he'll give it a try and so he opens a window to feel around for a few seconds. He pulls it back in, takes a quick look, and says "Yep, we're over Nairobi right now." "Why do you say that?" the others ask him. He says "Someone just stole my watch."
After Djibouti decided to be incredibly lame and not allow me entrance I decided to skip Yemen because of difficulties in crossing the Gulf of Aden. Instead I spent my time back-tracking through Ethiopia and chilling out in Addis Ababa. This was a small problem in that my timeline, for the first time on the trip, was beginning to get a little crunched. Unfortunately, Addis Ababa had a bit of a hold on me.
You how there's nothing particularly appealing about potato chips? Well, you eat one, and it gets a little addictive, so then you just keep on going until all the chips are gone and you're stuck feeling bloated and unhealthy. Well that's how Addis Ababa was for me. It was a nice enough city, and even though there wasn't anything stand-outish for me it was a bit addictive and I spent longer than I should have. After six weeks in Somaliland I was so tired of over-cooked spaghetti and boiled goat that I could scream, and I hadn't gone that long without liquor since I was . . . well, we'll say 21. So Addis Ababa was my place to drink good, cheap beer and eat tasty national food while at the same time gathering myself for the trip south. I had an ambitious plan for crossing into Kenya that I had been working on for close to half a year.
The southwest corner of Ethiopia is called the Omo Valley, located at the confluence of Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Kenya. Because of various wars in the region guns are cheap and easy to get, and the nomads have no problem with offing each other. But it's really isolated and I had gotten wind of a crossing there that involved some 50 kilometers of hiking through the desert until Kenya's Lake Turkana, the largest desert lake in the world. One guy had done the from the south six years ago and I wanted to be the first from the north, but upon arriving in the southern-most city in the region I was met by a policeman who told me 1) I couldn't cross this way 2) It was illegal for me to even be in the town. So I guess that's why nobody has done it from the north side.
I spent a couple days working my way east towards the real crossing, a city called Moyale which has its own reputation among overlanders as being the craziest on the Cairo-to-Cape Town Circuit. Come to think of it, it may be the most infamous in Africa among backpackers.
I say this because it takes two days just to get there from Addis Ababa. Once there, you're in an obnoxious, mosquito-filled town whose only transportation are cattle trucks heading south through the miserable dirt path. Up until only a couple years ago, banditry on the Kenyan side was a real problem and travelers frequently reported getting shot at by shiftas. If you managed to get a spot on a truck and miss the shiftas, you still had to contend with three days of horribly uncomfortable riding until you reached Nairobi.
Paul Theroux wrote about this crossing with great zeal in his cross-continent Dark Star Safari . It was here, he writes that his convoy of trucks were shot at by shiftas and two separate trucks broke down before he was finally able to make it on the third to Nairobi.
While the shiftas were no longer a problem, nomadic fighting is, and word reached me that two days before my crossing some three hundred Borena had been killed in a firefight in the exact area I was crossing. But it's the only overland choice, so after a night in Moyale I took off through Immigration to try my luck.
I happened to meet a pair of Israelis who were also crossing that day into Kenya, and together we looked for a vehicle to take us south. The were both intent on not taking the trucks, as only a few months before a friend of theirs riding on top of one of the trucks died after falling off and breaking his neck. But I didn't see any other option, so I decided I was going to bite the bullet and travel this way. It wasn't until I actually saw the trucks, though, that I realized why so many injuries and deaths actually occur on this road.
These hulking monsters were stuff full of cattle down below and the "top" was only a series of metal bars providing support. A total of 36 hours of riding this precarious perch seemed beyond miserable - it sounded stupid. A huge stroke of luck came my way however when I was lashing my bag to the bars as one of the Israelis showed up and said there was a 4X4 willing to take us south to Marsabit, the first major stop, for only $15 USD each.
I didn't hesitate, and so took an infinitely faster and more comfortable car ride. After only a few hours of riding we finally saw a welcome change of landscape in that the desert began to give way to a green landscape and I decided to spend some time in the city of Marsabit before continuing onward.
After exploring a nearby crater I climbed Mount Marsabit and continued on away from the town for what was to be an afternoon hike. Not far into my walk, however, I stumbled upon a group of surprised Borena herders armed with spears and World War I-era Winchester rifles. While there was no common language between us they responsded to my presence with real interest and after a short discussion gestured with their guns that I was to follow them. (It is times like this that I regret never checking in with the local US embassies to let them know I'm in their respective country.)
The small detachment led me away from the herd and back to their village, about an hour from Mt. Marsabit. The group motioned me towards a tree so I parked it there to observe the goings-on. It appeared they were mostly nomadic, as I didn't notice any permanant buildings in the village, though there were more weapons than any villages I had ever been to previously. That very fact was a bit unnerving given the fact that I didn't know what the hell was going on, but I was treated well enough so I decided not to worry about it.
Sure enough, after no more than a half hour a local ranger pulled into the village and cordially told me that while I was very welcome to explore Kenya, I had been wandering in prime cattle raiding territory and these helpful villagers, while slightly bemused at my appearence, were more concerned for my safety than anything else. He graciously drove me back to Marsabit where I caught a transport to safer regions.
Speaking of safety, I was anxious to avoid Nairobi and decided to bypass that entire part of the country. Instead I headed to the western side of Kenya, criss-crossing the equator and eventually making it to Kisumu. This city is the third-largest in Kenya and lies on the shores of Lake Victoria, the second-largest freshwater lake in the world (What-what Lake Superior!). It is a great climate here and was good fun wandering around the lake.
But entering Kenya meant entering tourist grazing area, and I wasn't impressed with the amount of hawkers that Kisumu presented to me trying to get my money. Not as bad as in other areas of the country, I was told, but still pretty obnoxious. In this part of Africa the hawkers who focus on tourists are called "touts", meaning "ticks" in Swahili, and the name fits them well. Whether or not its true, I think of them all as eager to rip me off and then laugh about it to their cackling tout friends as soon as they have their hands on my money, so I'm typically pretty cold to these guys.
Before leaving Kenya I wanted to make a stop in the village of Kogelo, an hour outside of Kisumu. Kogelo has risen to a position of prominence in recent years as the homestead of the Obama family, so I made it a point to get visit there. Surprisingly, there were no touts there and it seemed every bit as a typically village would here. It was clear that they were hurting a bit because of the late rainy season like the rest of the country, but they sold normal priced soda and beer and were friendly to the white guy who showed up not knowing any of the local language.
Despite the lack of rain for Kenya, which has affected millions, the area is located on the Great Rift Valley and has beautiful, rich soil that supports a variety of greenery and provides a gorgeous background. (This change from the desert and semi-arid land of Northern Kenya, Southern Ethiopia, and Somaliland was refreshing and put me in a lasting good mood that has largely stayed with me.) And Obama's family is very welcoming to outsiders. I was greeted by two of his cousins who introduced me to his grandmother, a woman who appears to have taken her own rise to prominence in stride and conducts herself in an extremely dignified, if somewhat amusing, manner.
The next day, in a minibus heading towards the border, I saw a roadside hut with a keg outside of it. One of the joys of backbacking, of course, is that there's no schedule to keep so I had to driver stop and jumped out with my bags to hike back to the hut for a drink. I found they were selling Senator Beer, named in honor of Obama after his 2006 senatorial victory. It was a bit less than a dollar per liter, so I spent the afternoon with a group of fun locals downing liter after liter in the shade of a banana tree. For any liter I bought them, I was offered an equal amount of liquor in their homemade palm wine, and in short order the lot of us were quite silly.
I stopped counting after six liters but I'm reasonably sure I at least made it to a ten before I called it a day. By the time we were done the busses had long passed for the day but I was in no condition to ride anyway. The fellows I were with were in similar straights and we decided to hit the hay right there, in the hut.
The next morning saw me with a blinding headache dulled only slightly by my typically hangover remedy of alka-seltzer, milk, and electrolytes. But one by one my fellow drinkers from the previous night left and eventually I flagged down a bus heading towards the border. It was in this condition I entered Uganda.
A little later they're still lost and the pilot wants to know where they are again, so Mubarak says "I'll give this a shot," opens a window, feels around, pulls his hand back in, and says "We're over Cairo, now." "How'd you know that?" the other two ask. "I felt the Sphinx," he says.
Yet later they're still lost. So Kibaki decides that he'll give it a try and so he opens a window to feel around for a few seconds. He pulls it back in, takes a quick look, and says "Yep, we're over Nairobi right now." "Why do you say that?" the others ask him. He says "Someone just stole my watch."
After Djibouti decided to be incredibly lame and not allow me entrance I decided to skip Yemen because of difficulties in crossing the Gulf of Aden. Instead I spent my time back-tracking through Ethiopia and chilling out in Addis Ababa. This was a small problem in that my timeline, for the first time on the trip, was beginning to get a little crunched. Unfortunately, Addis Ababa had a bit of a hold on me.
You how there's nothing particularly appealing about potato chips? Well, you eat one, and it gets a little addictive, so then you just keep on going until all the chips are gone and you're stuck feeling bloated and unhealthy. Well that's how Addis Ababa was for me. It was a nice enough city, and even though there wasn't anything stand-outish for me it was a bit addictive and I spent longer than I should have. After six weeks in Somaliland I was so tired of over-cooked spaghetti and boiled goat that I could scream, and I hadn't gone that long without liquor since I was . . . well, we'll say 21. So Addis Ababa was my place to drink good, cheap beer and eat tasty national food while at the same time gathering myself for the trip south. I had an ambitious plan for crossing into Kenya that I had been working on for close to half a year.
The southwest corner of Ethiopia is called the Omo Valley, located at the confluence of Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Kenya. Because of various wars in the region guns are cheap and easy to get, and the nomads have no problem with offing each other. But it's really isolated and I had gotten wind of a crossing there that involved some 50 kilometers of hiking through the desert until Kenya's Lake Turkana, the largest desert lake in the world. One guy had done the from the south six years ago and I wanted to be the first from the north, but upon arriving in the southern-most city in the region I was met by a policeman who told me 1) I couldn't cross this way 2) It was illegal for me to even be in the town. So I guess that's why nobody has done it from the north side.
I spent a couple days working my way east towards the real crossing, a city called Moyale which has its own reputation among overlanders as being the craziest on the Cairo-to-Cape Town Circuit. Come to think of it, it may be the most infamous in Africa among backpackers.
I say this because it takes two days just to get there from Addis Ababa. Once there, you're in an obnoxious, mosquito-filled town whose only transportation are cattle trucks heading south through the miserable dirt path. Up until only a couple years ago, banditry on the Kenyan side was a real problem and travelers frequently reported getting shot at by shiftas. If you managed to get a spot on a truck and miss the shiftas, you still had to contend with three days of horribly uncomfortable riding until you reached Nairobi.
Paul Theroux wrote about this crossing with great zeal in his cross-continent Dark Star Safari . It was here, he writes that his convoy of trucks were shot at by shiftas and two separate trucks broke down before he was finally able to make it on the third to Nairobi.
While the shiftas were no longer a problem, nomadic fighting is, and word reached me that two days before my crossing some three hundred Borena had been killed in a firefight in the exact area I was crossing. But it's the only overland choice, so after a night in Moyale I took off through Immigration to try my luck.
I happened to meet a pair of Israelis who were also crossing that day into Kenya, and together we looked for a vehicle to take us south. The were both intent on not taking the trucks, as only a few months before a friend of theirs riding on top of one of the trucks died after falling off and breaking his neck. But I didn't see any other option, so I decided I was going to bite the bullet and travel this way. It wasn't until I actually saw the trucks, though, that I realized why so many injuries and deaths actually occur on this road.
These hulking monsters were stuff full of cattle down below and the "top" was only a series of metal bars providing support. A total of 36 hours of riding this precarious perch seemed beyond miserable - it sounded stupid. A huge stroke of luck came my way however when I was lashing my bag to the bars as one of the Israelis showed up and said there was a 4X4 willing to take us south to Marsabit, the first major stop, for only $15 USD each.
I didn't hesitate, and so took an infinitely faster and more comfortable car ride. After only a few hours of riding we finally saw a welcome change of landscape in that the desert began to give way to a green landscape and I decided to spend some time in the city of Marsabit before continuing onward.
After exploring a nearby crater I climbed Mount Marsabit and continued on away from the town for what was to be an afternoon hike. Not far into my walk, however, I stumbled upon a group of surprised Borena herders armed with spears and World War I-era Winchester rifles. While there was no common language between us they responsded to my presence with real interest and after a short discussion gestured with their guns that I was to follow them. (It is times like this that I regret never checking in with the local US embassies to let them know I'm in their respective country.)
The small detachment led me away from the herd and back to their village, about an hour from Mt. Marsabit. The group motioned me towards a tree so I parked it there to observe the goings-on. It appeared they were mostly nomadic, as I didn't notice any permanant buildings in the village, though there were more weapons than any villages I had ever been to previously. That very fact was a bit unnerving given the fact that I didn't know what the hell was going on, but I was treated well enough so I decided not to worry about it.
Sure enough, after no more than a half hour a local ranger pulled into the village and cordially told me that while I was very welcome to explore Kenya, I had been wandering in prime cattle raiding territory and these helpful villagers, while slightly bemused at my appearence, were more concerned for my safety than anything else. He graciously drove me back to Marsabit where I caught a transport to safer regions.
Speaking of safety, I was anxious to avoid Nairobi and decided to bypass that entire part of the country. Instead I headed to the western side of Kenya, criss-crossing the equator and eventually making it to Kisumu. This city is the third-largest in Kenya and lies on the shores of Lake Victoria, the second-largest freshwater lake in the world (What-what Lake Superior!). It is a great climate here and was good fun wandering around the lake.
But entering Kenya meant entering tourist grazing area, and I wasn't impressed with the amount of hawkers that Kisumu presented to me trying to get my money. Not as bad as in other areas of the country, I was told, but still pretty obnoxious. In this part of Africa the hawkers who focus on tourists are called "touts", meaning "ticks" in Swahili, and the name fits them well. Whether or not its true, I think of them all as eager to rip me off and then laugh about it to their cackling tout friends as soon as they have their hands on my money, so I'm typically pretty cold to these guys.
Before leaving Kenya I wanted to make a stop in the village of Kogelo, an hour outside of Kisumu. Kogelo has risen to a position of prominence in recent years as the homestead of the Obama family, so I made it a point to get visit there. Surprisingly, there were no touts there and it seemed every bit as a typically village would here. It was clear that they were hurting a bit because of the late rainy season like the rest of the country, but they sold normal priced soda and beer and were friendly to the white guy who showed up not knowing any of the local language.
Despite the lack of rain for Kenya, which has affected millions, the area is located on the Great Rift Valley and has beautiful, rich soil that supports a variety of greenery and provides a gorgeous background. (This change from the desert and semi-arid land of Northern Kenya, Southern Ethiopia, and Somaliland was refreshing and put me in a lasting good mood that has largely stayed with me.) And Obama's family is very welcoming to outsiders. I was greeted by two of his cousins who introduced me to his grandmother, a woman who appears to have taken her own rise to prominence in stride and conducts herself in an extremely dignified, if somewhat amusing, manner.
The next day, in a minibus heading towards the border, I saw a roadside hut with a keg outside of it. One of the joys of backbacking, of course, is that there's no schedule to keep so I had to driver stop and jumped out with my bags to hike back to the hut for a drink. I found they were selling Senator Beer, named in honor of Obama after his 2006 senatorial victory. It was a bit less than a dollar per liter, so I spent the afternoon with a group of fun locals downing liter after liter in the shade of a banana tree. For any liter I bought them, I was offered an equal amount of liquor in their homemade palm wine, and in short order the lot of us were quite silly.
I stopped counting after six liters but I'm reasonably sure I at least made it to a ten before I called it a day. By the time we were done the busses had long passed for the day but I was in no condition to ride anyway. The fellows I were with were in similar straights and we decided to hit the hay right there, in the hut.
The next morning saw me with a blinding headache dulled only slightly by my typically hangover remedy of alka-seltzer, milk, and electrolytes. But one by one my fellow drinkers from the previous night left and eventually I flagged down a bus heading towards the border. It was in this condition I entered Uganda.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)