(It should really be Zam-Zim because we traveled from Zambia to Zimbabwe, but Zim-Zam sounds better.)
Last October we got an invitation from an old friend of Karen's to go hiking in Zimbabwe in April, so we've been planning on this practically since we arrived. We went overland through Zambia to Livingstone with A, Karen's colleague from the University of Lubumbashi. On the way, we stopped overnight at the Chikuni Mission, where Seattle University has a connection. After a couple days in Livingstone, Karen and I flew to Harare for the hike, while A returned to Lubumbashi overland. The trip was about two weeks in all.
Our primary taxi driver, R, was having car trouble, so at 6:30 am on the Saturday before Easter our "understudy" taxi driver, M, came to get us and A to take us to Kasumbalesa – the town at the border between Zambia and the DRC, about an hour away. We had gotten our visas before we left, so it was pretty straightforward to walk through the border crossing and pick up another taxi on the other side. We went to Kitwe where we bought bus tickets for Lusaka. This was our first time in Zambia, and during the ride we quickly noticed the similarities and differences between Zambia and the DRC.
Overall, things were pretty similar: the cars were similar, but in Zambia the cars drive on the left and have the steering wheels on the right while in the DRC, the cars drive on the right with the steering wheels on the right, which just isn't optimal [Karen: not safe!]. The buildings were pretty much the same and in the same basic condition, but the roads were more consistently paved in Zambia. The agricultural sector in Zambia seemed to be more robust, with lots of produce available along the roads. We saw huge pallets of tomatoes on trucks in the town across the border – probably for importing into the DRC.
The bus to Lusaka was fairly modern. After 7 hours, we arrived in Lusaka, the capitol, after dark. Most of the way the bus played some choral music sung in either Bemba or Nyanja. Just like French is the official language for the whole DRC – while individual Congolese mostly speak their local language at home and with friends – in Zambia, English is the official language for the whole country, but a number of local languages are spoken in different regions. This linguistic compromise between unity, diversity, and European languages was made by many African countries. For example, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Kenya all use English and the traditional languages. One notable exception, Tanzania, unified the country by standardizing on just Swahili. We hear this did reduce tribal/regional differences, but it also may have made economic development more difficult vis-à-vis the West.
The hotel was only a few blocks from the bus station, which was the reason I chose it, but we were reluctant to walk there in the dark, so we paid too much for a 5-minute taxi ride. For dinner, we just walked across the parking lot to the food court at a shopping mall – not something you see in Lubumbashi!
On Sunday the three of us walked to the Zambian national museum and then took a cab to the Sunday Crafts market. The museum was kind of lame, but the craft market was pretty nice – like the similar "thieves market" in Kinshasa but without the hard-sell we felt there. [Karen: since we were traveling ultra-light with just one daypack apiece, it was easy – or necessary – to avoid temptation and resist buying the granite birdbath with a hippo's ears and eyes peeking up from the bottom, or the carved traditional-style stools or chairs. Eric bought a small piece of malachite, though, which probably came from the area around Lubumbashi but cost a fraction of what it would go for in L'shi.]
Our hotel was a corporate hotel situated next to a shopping mall, and that allowed us to watch a movie in a theater for the first time since we arrived in Africa: Danny Collins, with Al Pacino. After the film ended, we left the theater suffering from culture whiplash.
Monday we took the bus from Lusaka to Monze, where we were getting picked up by someone from the Chikuni Mission. Karen is planning to write more about our visit to the mission, but I'll give an overview from my perspective. The Chikuni Mission was founded in 1905 and currently has primary and secondary schools, a radio station, clinics, and a health center that was upgraded to a first level hospital by the Zambian government in August 2014. Karen's colleague A was interested in seeing a top-notch health center in Zambia because, unlike the US or Europe, Zambia's health system is only a bit better than the DRC's and so the clinic at Chikuni provided an example of realistic improvements over what is currently available.
I'll mention one more detail about our visit: we also learned about the home-based HIV/AIDS care program the mission runs, and in connection with that we visited the rural home of a patient. For me, it was interesting because it reminded me of visiting the home of a coffee farmer in Nicaragua. Both houses were small, poor, rural, actual homes used by people working the land, but it was also clear that Nicaragua was a bit more developed.
Tuesday, we were driven back to Monze and made it just in time to catch the bus to Livingstone, which is the town on the Zambian side of Victoria Falls. This time, the bus played some videos and I discovered that the choral music we had heard before was actually the Zambian army chorus and the songs were either religious or patriotic. They also showed Wes Craven's film, "The Breed," which was a stellar example of American cultural imperialism. [Karen: I just thought it was a stellar example of a ridiculous horror film, but several cuts above the over-sexual B-movies I used to be subjected to on bus rides in Egypt.]
In Livingstone, we stayed at a nice, affordable place called Chanter's Lodge. We arrived early in the afternoon and immediately got a taxi to take us the few miles to the falls. Ponchos and rain slickers were available, for a price, and we (foolishly?) opted out.
Satellite view of Victoria Falls; the white line is the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe
The right side of this photo is Zambia, and there is a metal walkway that runs along a ridge line to the point of land you can see across from the falls on the right. We got absolutely soaked walking across it. The water was mostly falling straight down, so I was convinced that it had started raining very hard, but it was just the spray from the falls. Very impressive. Karen discovered her rain jacket wasn't waterproof. We also walked down the to river, sort of below the bridge, to a place called the boiling pot and we also walked along the upper part around to about where the bridge is, too. There were many baboons along the path here and I was a little nervous getting too close to them. We did enjoy watching the young baboons wrestle and chase each other. We returned to Chanter's and had a disappointing dinner there.
Wednesday we signed up for the "Rhino Walk" which was pretty much what you would expect: we were picked up at the lodge and drove to the second-smallest game park in Zambia, where we drove through the park, saw some birds and antelope, then parked and walked to where two rhinos were grazing.
Rhino sisters
White rhinos are not aggressive and not particularly endangered. It's the Black rhinos that are nearly extinct. The guide suggested that, although the 2 species are the same color, the wider mouth of the White rhino may have been the source of the name: wide becoming white. These are 2 sisters. The younger was about a year old and the other about 4 years old. The mother died of natural causes a few months ago and at that time the younger joined her sister.
Thursday we said goodbye to Karen's colleague, who headed back to Lubumbashi by bus, and Karen and I crossed over the Victoria Falls Bridge into Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.
The bridge between Zambia and Zimbabwe. Can you see the bungee jumper?
We only had one night in Vic Falls, but on this side we could walk to the falls. The views from the Zimbabwe side were just as stunning as from Zambia, but we only got "rained" on for a short period, so I was able to take some pictures.
Victoria Falls. Karen providing scale.
Although we didn't see any baboons on this side, we did see these affectionate beasts:
Warthog love
More affectionate beasts:
Our honeymoon at Victoria Falls?
Friday we went to the Vic Falls airport and flew the discount airline (FlyAfrica.com) to Harare where we were picked up by Karen's friend S and S's friend J. Karen worked with S in the Philippines many years ago and J is Zimbabwean. They had organized the trip to the Nyanga National Park in the eastern highlands next to Mozambique. The first night we staying in a wonderful rental cottage set in a beautiful location near the park.
The idyllic cabin before the grueling trail
We would have been happy to have stayed there for more than just one night, but the next morning we drove to the main campus of "Far and Wide" which was a large complex of 2-bedroom and dormitory style cabins set up to provide outdoor experiences for students and corporate team building offsites. They even had a ropes course. Besides the cabins, Far and Wide also provides other services including the porters that we used to carry most of our gear. Karen and I have gone backpacking before, including a 9-night trip in Wyoming, but we had never used porters before. [Karen: I did, for a couple of days on Mt. Kenya ...] It felt a little odd to trot along with just a day pack while hiring young guys to carry huge packs. But the senior porter had also built the trail himself and loved backpacking, so I grew a little more comfortable with the arrangement.
From Far and Wide base we left to hike the Turaco Trail that loops through the Pungwe river valley and adjacent ridges. Along the trail we didn't see any larger animals or many birds, but we saw some interesting insects, including this spectacular lavender praying mantis.
A praying mantis disguised as a flower.
Karen also spotted a dwarf chameleon walking across the trail mottled brown, black, and grey like the leaf litter. It was about 4-5 inches long, but I didn't think to take a picture. I also found a porcupine quill, but the dominant feature was the flora: the trees, ferns, and vines seemed exotic to me, having done little hiking outside the northwest! We spent two nights in tents and three days hiking – the last night we spent in one of the cabins at Far and Wide, which was also a treat.
The trail passing underneath a giant tree fern.
It's always interesting visiting other countries and comparing them to what we experience in Lubumbashi. In Zambia, the better roads, cars, and obvious business activity indicated more development. The geography and the emphasis on mining are similar, but, for example, the shopping centers in Lusaka seemed to fall between those we saw in Nairobi and Kinshasa. I imagine the rural hamlet near Chikuni we visited was very similar to what we would find here in the DRC. [Karen: I thought it was more developed -- fruit trees, outbuildings, rabbit hutch, etc. than many rural DRC places would be, at least now that things have gone downhill so much over the last 40-50 years, but I've only been to a few places outside the city and am reluctant to generalize.] I could picture the DRC developing to a similar level within 5-10 years.
Zimbabwe, however, felt different. Being farther from the equator and at 4800', the climate in Harare was much more temperate. The country used to be even more developed, relative to similar African countries; however, as Wikipedia says, "Zimbabwe's economy has consistently shrunk since 2000, in an atmosphere of political turmoil, capital flight and mismanagement." This contributes to the feeling of Zimbabwe being a country going backwards and a pervasive pessimism. I'm hoping to write more about these issues in a later post.
A couple of posts ago, I gave a shout-out to some of the people
and groups who are “paddling upstream” and doing good work here in DRC despite
the many obstacles. One of those was Espoir Pour Tous, a
Kinshasa-based organization run by Luc Lutala. We were (virtually) introduced
to Luc by the director of G-BIACK, a
community-based organization promoting bio-intensive agriculture in Kenya. Luc
has completed G-BIACK’s training, as well as several others; he is a Global Eco-Village Network ambassador for
Africa, and is passionate about working with people to create change and
promote sustainable, just development.
Luc is currently putting together his second Eco-Design
Workshop in Kinshasa. He’s looking for money to support lodging, meals, and
transport for the participants and to buy or rent equipment and supplies for
the 2-week course. Luc has already secured about a quarter of what he needs, but
to help him raise the rest of the money, we've created a crowdsourcing appeal.
This is where you
come in! Please visit the site and pitch in – any amount will help. We need
to raise at least $5000 in the next two weeks (the actual costs of the project
are greater than that, so don’t be discouraged from giving if you see we've
reached that goal). And please circulate this request to anyone and everyone
you know who might be interested in supporting this work – for social,
economic, and environmental change.
Thank you! And we’ll post a regular blog update soon.
Karen (I posted the appeal) and Eric (I compiled the video)
Luc and his colleagues have excellent credentials, a good track record, and high hopes for promoting positive, peaceful change in DR Congo! To pull off this second workshop, they are looking for some outside support -- let them know you stand with them!
Training in Eco-Village Design/6-18 April 2015/Kinshasa, DRC
Eco-village strategies for sustainable development and adaptation to climate change - To work towards the construction of sustainable communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in central Africa.
Goal! To create a model of sustainable development that will contribute to the formation of those who can work for a holistic change in their society (social, economic, environmental, and global vision of the world). Sustainable communities for sustainable development. Agroforestry and permaculture are essential aspects in our center and in our teaching.
- Formation au Design d’Eco-village -
Stratégies Eco villages pour le développement durable et l’adaptation au changement climatique
Pour aider à la construction des communautés durables en République Démocratique du Congo et en Afrique centrale.
Objectif ! créer un modèle de développement durable qui va contribuer à la formation des acteurs pouvant travailler pour un changement holistique de leur société ( social, économique, environnemental et vision globale du monde). Des communautés durables pour le developpement durable. L'agroforesterie, la permaculture sont un des aspects essentiels dans ce centre et dans les enseignements.
It’s strange, because we live in a city. We’re not out in
the bush in grass-thatched mud houses – we’re in the second-largest city of the
DRC, the seat of the mining industry, economic motor of the country, with a
population of about 2 million. We live in a modern-style apartment, with tiled
floors, indoor plumbing, and electricity. Yet the infrastructure is so poor and
services so unreliable that sometimes our dependence on these amenities is a disadvantage; the system does not have resilience built in.
At our
old place, the power would be out almost every day for several hours, which
meant no running water and no way to cook food unless the compound’s generator
was turned on. The lack of water was easy to compensate for after we were
caught short a couple of times: there, as here in our new place, we kept large
buckets and basins of water on hand. If the power went out mid-shower, we could
switch to a bucket bath. The first scoopful was always breathtakingly cold, but
it wasn't so bad after that. For the last several
weeks that we were in our old apartment, we had hot water to the kitchen, but
not to the bathroom, so we routinely took bucket baths – but at least they were
warm! I liked it, but Eric got tired of it fast, and was happy to have “real”
showers when we went to Kenya for vacation.
On the other hand, with the power out, it wasn’t so easy to
compensate for the lack of hotplate and microwave to cook with. Most locals
cook with charcoal fires that are immune to the vagaries of SNEL, the Société
Nationale d’Électricité. The charcoal fires are an important source of air
pollution that contributes to high rates of respiratory disease – one of the
graduate students I work with at the UNILU School of Public Health is
fine-tuning a protocol to study this issue here in Lubumbashi – and the
harvesting of wood to make charcoal contributes to deforestation. In any case,
not having a charcoal brazier at our old place, we were out of luck if the
power went out, especially if we were the only residents home in the middle of
the day. We'd eat cheese sandwiches or cold leftovers while we watched the staff
(guard, driver, gardener, housekeeper) cook up their bukary (fufu) and sombe (manioc leaves) over hot
coals. Sometimes we asked them to turn on the generator for a
little while, long enough to boil water or nuke the previous night’s lentils. Extravagant.
Our old place was in the Golf subdivision, so named for its
proximity to the golf course. That’s the part of town in which many ex-pats and
upper-class Lushois (the adjective for people who live in Lubumbashi) live,
with lots of fancy, big houses with swimming pools and manicured gardens behind
high walls. Being somewhat on the periphery, though, it is notorious for
unstable electricity, and every compound has a large diesel generator. Down the
side streets off the paved road are homes of less-affluent Lushois, who
presumably just make do when the power is out, assuming their homes are even wired
for electricity.
I've made only a few forays into the farther-flung districts
where the bulk of Lubumbashi’s population lives – the “communes” of Kenya, Kamalondo, Kalubwe, and others – but from the little I've seen, it’s
clear that the overall standard of living there is very poor. Only the downtown
roads and a few of the main routes heading out of town are paved, and that only
in the past 6-8 years, we’re told. My impression is that many people live on
barely passable dirt roads in mud-brick houses with tin roofs that may have
electricity wires jerry-rigged to them, but that don’t have running water. I've
heard that the government has a goal of getting running water to the city’s
residents, and we have seen places where the road has been dug up and it looks
like water pipes are being put in. Whether the water is potable or not is
another question; one of my classmates at the Alliance Française works for
REGIDESO , the water authority, and he said that the water leaving the plants
is potable, but that there are so many cracks in the pipes, in some cases from
the pipes having been laid too close to the surface and being subject to too
much pressure from passing traffic, that the water quality at the point of use
can’t be guaranteed. There are periodic
cholera outbreaks in some of the communes. The water here is very hard. Most
ex-pats drink only bottled water, but we drink tap water, disinfected either
with a UV gadget we brought from the States, or by boiling it in an electric
kettle. Lots of scale on the kettle, or even after boiling water to cook pasta.
We know the soil is contaminated with heavy metals from the mining activity, so
the water may be, too.
The main hospital doesn't have running water. It’s the tertiary referral hospital for the province, named for Jason Sendwe,
who opposed the secession of Katanga after Congo’s independence and was
assassinated in 1964. Actually, just last year, the hospital did get running water to the OR,
though I’m not sure how consistent it is. In the rest of the hospital, any
water has to be carried in from a pipe outside and up the stairs in buckets. I
haven’t seen the patient wards, but can imagine how difficult basic hygiene,
not to mention infection control, must be (article from 2006 here; things have
improved since then).
School of Public Health Faculty/Staff bathroom
There is no running water at the School of Public Health,
either. My office is on the second floor. There’s a bathroom at the end of the
hall with a big blue plastic drum that the cleaning woman fills by filling the green bucket on the floor in the photo above from the hose outside and carrying it up the stairs on her head. Smaller buckets are on the floor to use for flushing the toilets, and
a bucket fitted with a spigot with a basin underneath it is set up on a stand
with soap for handwashing. The toilet stalls in this bathroom, by the way, are
locked. I don’t have a key of my own and if the folks in the office where the
key is kept are out or gone for the day, I’m out of luck – one reason why I
haven’t been putting in long hours at the office. The TP situation is also unpredictable: occasionally, there is some, but otherwise, it's BYO. Judging from the contents of the wastebasket beside the toilet (no seat or lid on the toilet, by the way), what most people bring is printer paper.
At our old place, we were thrilled to have near-continuous
electricity from a couple of days before Christmas up to the time we left for
our delayed Kenyan holiday on the 28th of December. It wasn't clear whether the power was up in
honor of the return of the governor, Moïse Katumbi, after a 3-month absence, or because of relatively lower demand by mining companies, other businesses, and absent ex-pats, but it felt like quite a luxury.
Our new place is closer to the city center and in a more
established neighborhood. The power is more consistent; it goes off for only
short periods a few times a day. We have access to a shared brazier if we
should need to cook when the power is out, and there is a generator on the
property, though it hasn't been run since we moved in. The apartment is bigger
than and not as streamlined as our old one: there are uneven spots in the
floor, the TV cabinet is warped from past flooding, and the heavy wooden
furniture with brown plaid cushions is reminiscent of a basement rec room circa
1970 (per Eric). There’s no hot water in the kitchen, and no cold water in the
bathroom sink. But we have a 4-burner stove with an oven, and a washing
machine!
Sunday-morning pancakes
Yum!
It’s surprisingly gratifying to be able to wash our clothes
ourselves again. At the old place, we'd hand over our laundry hamper to the housekeeper, and it might be several days or a week before we’d get
our clothes back clean. The delays were mostly linked to the lack of power or
water, but it was frustrating not to know when they’d be back … Of course, most families here wash their clothes by hand. We could hand-wash small things, but had no place
to hang them unless we borrowed a drying rack from the housekeeper. She wasn't
there on Sundays, so if we’d forgotten to ask, we’d have to wait. Small
things, but for we who are accustomed to having control over all the details of
our lives, a lesson in patience.
The washing machine in our new place had some lessons for us, too. It’s a nice machine – a Samsung with a “fuzzy
logic” setting, high-tech. It’s designed to drain from the bottom, but the drainpipe is about
2 feet up. There isn’t a water pump, so there is a gravitational challenge
when it comes time to drain the drum: some user participation is required.
That is, after the wash cycle, the first rinse cycle, and the second rinse
cycle, when we hear the machine stop running because it’s full of water, we have
to take the end of the drain hose out of the drainpipe and run the water into a
bucket. When the bucket’s full, we hook the hose back in the pipe, carry the
bucket to the tub, dump it out, and start over again. The last bits of water
are at pressure so low they won’t drain into the bucket, so we have to coax
them into a basin until the machine is satisfied and moves on to its next
cycle. The first time we did this, we left the hose in the bucket after the
first rinse cycle, confident that we’d hear the water running when it was time
for the next rinse cycle -- we ended up with water all over the floor! We
were quite the sight, the two of us still with sore quads from climbing Mt.
Longonot in Kenya a couple of days before, gingerly lowering down to our hands
and knees and mopping up the water with every towel or rag we could spare.
Eric on washer-draining duty. Note the similarity of the plastic buckets at home and at work -- brightly colored, cheap, imported plastic is everywhere!
First-world problems? In a way. We can observe things with
detachment, even amusement, knowing that whatever happens, we have the
resources to recover and will only be here a short time. As I haul buckets of
water from the washing machine to the tub, I fatuously think, “exercise!
strengthening my core!”. But I remember
all the women – the cleaner at the School of Public Health, R’s wife regardless
of her abdominal surgery – who heft these buckets from the ground up to their
heads and walk distances over rough ground several times each day, and my
perspective shifts. We live in a city, but it’s one rife with inequalities at
every scale. We may think of the
challenges we encounter as amusing anecdotes, but they are tiny eddies at the
edges of the huge river of challenges that washes hopes and agency and
potential away, eroding the human and physical capital of this country. There
are brave souls who paddle upstream*, and signs that the current is slowing in
places, but there is a long way to go.
Update! R found a carpenter who built a table so we could set the machine up high enough to drain on its own. We were pretty pleased with ourselves, until we realized it's a top-loader -- duh. Here I am standing on a night table fishing out clean clothes after running our first self-draining load.
Little frog I found in the bathroom (which has running water and TP) at the Italian Restaurant at the zoo.
Women selling red mushrooms like chanterelles. Pretty tasty, but hard to wash the fine dirt out completely.
These guys are trying to rock the van out of the hole it drove into. This is near the new HyperPsaro, a huge supermarket that just opened. This isn't the only car we've seen stuck in this hole .. it's finally been cordoned off and it looks like the city may fix it.
Eric trying out his new shirt with a couple of the staff from the tailoring/seamstress shop. We bought this pagne (fabric) back in November, but have only just now had it made up into clothes. The shirt, to our surprise, was finished off with big silver snaps.
Me, modeling the jacket and skirt I had made from the same fabric. Three visits later, the skirt is finally big enough that I can wriggle into it, and the buttonholes on the jacket finally fit around the buttons. The woman in the white shirt is the owner (she and her staff gave us the OK to post their photos).
After four days in Maasai Mara and a day in Nairobi, we headed to Lake Naivasha, which is northwest of Nairobi at 6000ft elevation. We stayed at Bilashaka lodge, a very quiet and very nice spot. The Dutch owners of the lodge grow roses and export over 100,000 stems per day to the Holland flower auctions. The immediate grounds of the lodge were visited by giraffes, baboons, zebra, and hippos while we there there and when we walked to the lake shore we also saw vervet and Colobus monkeys, waterbucks, and dik diks. I was fascinated by a line of safari ants crossing about 5 meters of the forest floor from one tree to another.
Bilashaka also offered a safari vehicle and driver that we used to get to the boats that take people out on the lake. The driver was an experienced birder and we saw many water birds (in addition to a few hippos).
Giraffe wandering the grounds of our quiet lodge at Lake Naivasha.
One of the greenhouses growing roses.
Mount Longonot
Fairly close to Lake Naivasha is the Mount Longonot National Park , where we went with the car and driver. The driver appeared to have little trouble with the hike, but we struggled and were pretty sore the next couple of days since we hadn't walked up any hills since leaving Seattle.
We hiked the trail around the entire crater – about 7km in addition to the 3km hike to rim.
It reminded me of Olomana Ridge on Oahu, but it wasn't nearly as treacherous.
Summit of the mountain. Just above 9100ft.
Whistling-thorn Acacia. Large thorns, black bulbous growths that provide food and shelter for an ant species in exchange for defending the tree.
Back to Nairobi
After the quiet stay at Bilashaka and enjoying the outdoors both by foot and by boat, we headed back to Nairobi for a final night before returning to Lubumbashi. However, there was one last stop on the way back. Karen and I had both done some volunteer work with a group in Seattle called CAGJ that has ties to a bio-intensive farm in this area called G-BIACK, so Karen arranged for us to visit. It is in Thika, a moderately large town northeast of Nairobi, and the drive from Lake Naivasha to Thika was along the "forest road" that passed through beautiful forests and lush fields. Kenya's number one export is tea, and the bright green tea bushes growing on steep hillsides were stunning. We also saw pineapple fields and other crops.
Our driver was pretty concerned about getting caught in Nairobi's notorious rush-hour traffic jams, so we were in a hurry to get back. However, we took the time for a pretty complete tour of the G-BIACK site and test gardens, including some fish farming test ponds
Back to Lubumbashi
We took our early morning flight back to Lubumbashi; R picked us up and drove us to our new apartment. We had moved all of our stuff into the new place, but hadn't actually stayed there before we left.
We've been back for a couple of weeks. This past week has been interesting on the political front. On Monday, the national assembly voted to require a full census before federal
elections could take place, which was seen as a sneaky way to extend
Kabila's second term. Protests engulfed parts of Kinshasa, Goma, Bukavu, and
Mbuji-Mayi, but not Lubumbashi. Today, the senate pruned that clause out
of their bill, but we'll see what the final bill looks like.
The government shut down the internet and SMS texting this week. It's been partly restored now, and we hope that we will have more consistent internet access. The government shut it down to prevent people from posting images or text, but it also had a very negative impact on business!
Nairobi, and Kenya in general, was a breath of fresh air. It
was great to be on a “real” vacation – no laptop! – and to be at cooler, higher
elevations. Though Lubumbashi is pretty high at nearly 4,000 feet, Nairobi is higher,
at 5,500, and Lake Naivasha even higher, at 6,200.
We had a great home base in Nairobi at Margarita House, a
guesthouse tucked away on a back road in the upscale neighborhood of Karen,
where Karen Blixen, the author of Out of Africa, lived for 17 years in
the 1920s and 30s before returning to Denmark after her farm business failed.
"Our" room at Margarita House -- fittingly, the honeymoon suite!
Karen is where many upper-class Kenyans and ex-pats live. It has pretty streets
– even some with sidewalks! – malls, coffee shops, and restaurants, including a
sushi restaurant where we ate one night.
We were ready for some small
indulgences, and the first of these was to walk around. We end up taking the
car (R’s taxi, usually) so much in L’shi that it was a treat to get out on
foot. Not too much traffic, not too hot even in the sunshine: good prep for our
upcoming Mt. Longonot hike! We also had a somewhat eclectic list of consumer
items to hunt down in Nairobi’s malls – yarn for me, a watch, measuring cups
and spoons, new jeans for Eric – and hoped to meet up with a couple of my old
friends. We spent a day there before
heading down to Maasai Mara for our safari and had a day and a half between
Maasai Mara and Lake Naivasha, as well as one final night before flying out
early in the morning.
With most of our errands and a visit with a friend I’d known
when we both lived in Cairo 13-14 years ago completed on our first day, we had
time to be tourists on the in-between day after Maasai Mara. While Nairobi – aka “Nairobbery” – is known for being unsafe everywhere at night and some places even
in the day, Karen is generally acknowledged to be quite safe in the daytime.
The morning was sunny and clear, perfect for walking. Fresh from the Mara, we
had our eyes peeled for birds. We set off from our hotel to walk to the Karen
Blixen Museum along the well-traveled Karen Road, along which a couple of
matatu and boda-boda (motorcycle taxi) drivers honked to see if we wanted
rides, but we were happy walking.
Kazuri Beads necklaces -- also available in the US
photo from http://www.spurwingkenya.com/kazuri.html
We took a side trip to the Kazuri Bead factory, a project that helps women earn income by making pottery beads, and walked past sweeping driveways that led to large estates. We nodded to a couple of security guards and a trash collector we saw along the way, and at the Kazuri shop, we each picked out a hand-painted coffee mug to bring home to Lubumbashi.
Mug shot.
As we headed back to the Karen Road, we continued to marvel at how green and peaceful it was. I was pretty blissed out, strolling along, just the two of us … though I did point out to Eric the menacing signs advertising security and alarm systems on each of the gates we passed that belied the tranquility. Along this stretch of road, we didn’t see anyone else, until we were about 20 yards from the Karen Road, when a boda-boda turned off the Karen Road and came toward us.
I thought I recognized the motorcycle and the driver as one I’d turned down a ride from earlier. It was odd that his passenger was another guy dressed like a boda-boda driver, also with a faded reflective yellow vest and a helmet, and I was wondering whether the second guy’s bike had broken down or whether he was just a passenger the driver had given extra safety gear to. A few seconds after they passed us, I heard the bike again
behind us, and before I had a chance to turn around or to process that this was
Not Good, it had pulled up in front of us.
"X" marks the spot
As they pulled up, we could see that
there was another unhelmeted guy on the bike between the two I’d seen before. We each thought that it seemed a strange place to drop
off passengers ...
Those of you who are on Facebook know what happened next.
Three Guys, Two Guns,
and One Motorbike
The guy on the back of the bike slid off, taking off his helmet, and
lost his balance for a second. I didn't see him recover, because suddenly the middle guy was in front of me, patting me down, shouting, “money, money,
money!” in heavily accented English. He put his hand on what looked like the
handle of a gun tucked into his waistband – it was covered by his shirt and so
I never actually saw it – and said, “I will kill you!”.
I could see out of the
corner of my eye that the other passenger was patting down Eric, pulling things
out of his pockets. A dark van turned the corner off Karen Road
coming toward us, and stopped beside us briefly. Oh great, I thought, here come
their henchmen. But then the van was gone, and “my” guy was commanding my full
attention. All I had on me was my phone; Eric had the only cash we’d brought. I
had a debit card, which the guy wasn't interested in, and a shoulder bag, which
had only a map and a few other items that weren't valuable, though the guy didn't
know or believe that. I had my hands up and turned to see what had happened to
the van – perhaps not a good move to take my eyes off my attacker, but I was
wondering why, if the driver wasn't a henchman, he wasn't trying to help. I saw
that the van was stopped down the road a ways, and it may be that my attacker
followed my gaze then and saw it, too, because about then, the guys were in a pretty big hurry
to leave. Eric’s guy tried to pull off Eric’s wedding ring, but it wouldn't
go over his knuckle, and my guy kind of tried mine but either decided it wasn't
interesting enough or that it was time to go, because he just pulled my bag off my shoulder and got on the bike.
Then they were gone, and we picked up a few things from the
ground that had been in Eric’s pockets. Eric and I were both most annoyed about losing our non-valuable stuff, i.e., Eric’s wallet with driver’s license and bank cards, and my trusty shoulder bag (AR, if you’re reading this, your grey Overland bag is mine no more).
The morning was still beautiful, the
sun still bright and warm. I still felt blissed out – maybe it was shock? But I
was grateful that this thing that had always sounded so frightening, armed
robbery, had happened to us and we were not much the worse for it. It couldn't
have been more than 90 seconds from when they got off the bike to when they
left, and they had been quite efficient about the whole thing. I wouldn't say gentle, exactly, but they were clearly
after cash and valuables, and, except for the threat of the guns – Eric’s guy
actually showed his, Eric told me later – didn't seem to want to hurt us. We were lucky.
We
continued walking to the Karen Road, and it was just like before, except that
now we had no phone and no way to call anyone, and we had no cash. But we still had our Kazuri mugs!
As we were
walking along the Karen Road, a bit dazed, looking for our things in the hope
that they’d tossed all but the money (we later realized that we were on the
wrong side of the road, since Kenya drives on the left like the UK), a dark van
pulled over next to us. “I’m so sorry that happened to you,” the sweet-faced
driver said, and I realized this must
have been the van I’d seen a few minutes earlier. I told him that his
coming along when he had had probably spooked the robbers off, since they made
no real effort to take our jewelry or to rough us up.
The driver offered to take us to the police post to report the robbery.
“OK,” I said, about to get in, but then thinking better of it. “Um – who are you?” He laughed, and told us his name and the
name of the company he worked for. He had been taking tourists to Hemingway’s
Restaurant when they’d happened on our little scene.
Reassured, Eric and I got
in the van. The driver took us to the Hardy Police Post. He came in with us
and made the initial report; both he and the police were surprised that we'd been held up in Karen in broad daylight.
After that, our day was pretty much shot. We were at the
police post for a while making the report, and then one of the police kindly
directed us to where we could get a matatu to go back to Karen. When we said we
didn't have any money, he was surprised. But of course, we’d just been robbed! We
had only 3 Kenya shillings between us – and it’s been many years since the
matatu fare was actually just mashilingi
matatu (3 shillings) per person. So we waited a little longer, and they gave us a ride to
the nearby shopping mall, where I used my debit card to get cash, we got
another SIM card to put in Eric’s phone which was back at Margarita House, and
we got some lunch. Then we went to the Karen Police Post to give them the
report and the case number from the Hardy Police Post; of course, all this
information was written by hand in ledger books, nothing electronic. At the
Karen Police Post, the deputy seemed to recognize the descriptions that we gave
and told us that they had been losing sleep over these guys – probably part of the same gang described in this news report:
If the van driver hadn't come along, I don’t think it would have occurred to us to report the incident, but I think it's good we did. While we didn't ever expect to see any of our things again, the
response of the Nairobi police was comforting insofar as they were solicitous
and professional and seemed genuinely to want to get these guys.
I can’t say I’m glad to have had this experience, but I’m
glad it wasn't worse. It was all over so fast. Although the attackers used guns to
coerce us, I don’t think either of us -- being older, slower, and fewer than
they -- would have resisted even if they hadn't had guns. We weren't physically
hurt. However, it could just as easily have been different. Just as quickly, we
might have been shot, or beaten, or kidnapped, or sexually assaulted, and I think if we had felt we were in physical danger, we would have tried to fight them off or run, for better or for worse.
I titled this post WWW in Nairobi – “WWW” for “walking while
white”, a play on “DWB”, “driving while black”. By
doing so, I don’t mean to trivialize the systemic and systematic racism to
which Blacks in the US are subjected. I do think there are connections, though,
between the legacies of colonialism and slavery and the racism and inequality
that pervade both Kenyan and US society. These guys might target anyone who’s
upper-class or a tourist, but our whiteness, and the fact that we were walking,
which most upper-class Kenyans of any hue don’t do, made us stand out.
Because
the robbers didn't hurt us, and because we do have resources and privilege, this
turned out to be a relatively minor incident for us. But I'm conscious that this was only a flavor of the daily violations
and violence that some others are subjected to, whether in Kenya, DRC, or anywhere, and grateful that it is not our everday fare.
The second day at Maasai Mara we left before 7:30am and didn't return until after 7:00pm. We spent the whole day in the park, frequently stopping to identify birds or watch other wildlife. We did make it to the river where we saw hippos and Nile crocodiles.
This post is primarily a photo interlude with photos from our guide's facebook, our cellphones, and a few pictures from the web.
Another of James' photos of the Cheetah and her cubs from our first evening at Maasai Mara.
Video I took with my iPhone from the car of the cheetah family on the first evening.
[Karen: watch for the little one who's lagging behind and then comes bounding up! This same cub did this several times, both when we watched the group on the first evening and when we caught up with them on our third day -- interesting.]
Zebra near the road in the park.
Buffalo under an acacia tree.
Elephants
Spotted hyena.
Sleepy hyena cooling off in a puddle. We saw a few hyenas doing this.
Three lion bachelors sleeping.. It must have been a rough night!
Warthogs. We saw a lot of these. Most frequently a single adult with 3 watoto (kids).
[Karen: the Swahili for warthog is "ngiri", uncannily close to "nigiri", a word that sushi-lovers will recognize.]
Topi. One ran alongside us for a while. (from Google Images)
The lioness carrying a topi fetus to her cubs. Yes, we watched this!
Grey-crowned crane. Large with a fuzzy crown à la Dr. Seuss. The national bird of Uganda.
Kenya's national bird: the lilac-brested roller.
The lilac-brested roller in flight.
Acacia tree with black-headed weaver bird nests.
Speke's weaver.
Marabou stork. A very stately carrion eater also known as the undertaker. (from Wikipedia)
There were a lot of things that we saw and don't have pictures for. Here are some of the notes I made of the more interesting things we saw:
A dung beetle creating a dung ball larger than it was.
A hippo baby and mother yawning at each other.
Crocodiles basking alongside the river with their mouths open. They don't have tongues, but still pant like dogs to cool off.
A leopard tortoise seen following after an actual leopard.
A giraffe carrying 20 oxpeckers on its back.
A large, dark blue-violet wasp.
A troop of banded mongoose (mongeese?) playing.
Jackals looking like a cross between a coyote and a fox.
Baboons stalking groups of tourists hoping to mooch some of their lunch
Limping zebra with an obvious, large, red, raw wound.
Dead bright green snake with black patterning
Vultures and marabou stork feasting on a dead topi.
Kneeling marabou storks kneeling with engorged gular sacks, digesting bones?
Bright yellow weaver birds building nests from fresh, green grass.
A hornbill dropping lichen into a large hole in a tree where its mate was nesting.
This is my fourth trip to Kenya, but the first time I've
come as a tourist – I don’t count the couple of days tacked on to the end of my
first trip in 2002, when I made a rushed and half-hearted attempt to hike Mt. Kenya, or
the weekend with colleagues at Shimba Hills the following year.
The Mt. Kenya trip was way more than I could do. After a
month working on the coast, I dropped my bags in Nairobi (how did I get there?
I have a vague memory of riding a matatu from Mombasa, but I might have
imagined that) and rode a matatu up to Nanyuki, elevation 6,000 ft. There, I
rented warm clothes and a pack; guides carried food and other gear.
The lower slopes of Mt. Kenya were lovely. I remember wildflowers and hyrax and
plentiful, hearty food. I wanted to turn
back on the second or third day. The guides were disgusted with me; they insisted they could get me to the top, and said I was the first of their clients ever not
to go all the way. But my heart wasn't in it: I was tired, not acclimated, and
in no shape to hike this 17,000-foot mountain, Africa’s second-highest. Plus, I
had a plane to catch!
The weekend trip to Shimba Hills, a small game park in the
southeast, was my first taste of safari. Elephants came to eat food staff set
out for them, and we watched several adults and a baby from the deck of the lodge. They were
quite close, and stayed for some time. The next day we rode around in a Jeep
and looked for and at animals. My clearest memory is of giraffes, though I know
we saw others. It seemed too quick, maybe even a little perfunctory.
So, I count this as my first trip as a tourist. It was quite
a shock arriving from Lubumbashi to Nairobi a couple of days ago – the extensive paved roads, the
commercial centers, the vibrant activity. Along the Ngong Road, kilometer after
kilometer of furniture workshops with nice-looking wooden and cast-iron bed
frames, dressers, tables, and chairs, locally made (if mass-produced) baskets
and pottery. There are virtually no local handicrafts sold in Lubumbashi that
we've seen. There are some furniture makers, selling mostly wooden bed frames and some metalworking shops where gates are made and sold,
but nothing as nice as those in Kenya,
Nairobi is orders of magnitude more “developed”
(for lack of a better word) than Lubumbashi, or even Kinshasa, for that matter,
which is closer to it in size. Of course there are poor sections of Nairobi,
and Nairobi – especially the upscale Karen neighborhood where we stayed – is
not representative of Kenya as a whole.
But even outside Nairobi, there are good roads, and I was overwhelmed
when we saw all the goods at the supermarket in Narok, the last watering hole
on the way to the Maasai Mara. Somehow Congo’s extreme dysfunction was easier
to accept arriving directly from the US: of course we expected it to be
different from home, and we adjusted to the differences, taking them as much in
stride as we could. But seeing Kenya again 10 years after my last visit, and
even thinking back to the week I spent in Ghana earlier this year, throws
Congo’s scarcity into a different light. Of course, Ghana and Kenya are two of
Africa’s shining lights. Dar es Salaam, where I spent a day after a stint in a small
Tanzanian town in 2006, at that time seemed also quite unfinished.
Not that I think development qua development is always a good thing. The term means different
things to different people and in different contexts. I am not a fan of
consumerism, and don’t think that having more goods to buy necessarily equates
with progress. But I do think strong, local economies (shout out to CAGJ) are important, and I do
think all people should have work that sustains them and their families, and
goods and services that enable safe and healthy living. And education, of
course, and freedom of assembly and expression, and a government that
represents and protects them. Kenya isn't perfect – nowhere is – but being here
feels very different than being in Congo.
Anyhow, I meant for this post to be about the amazing first
day of our Maasai Mara safari. I had a prejudice, maybe from the Shimba Hills
trip, that going on safari was sort of like visiting a theme park, and I wasn't
too keen on it. Already it’s turned out to be much more than that, and we've
only spent a couple of hours in the Reserve!
Because our passports were in Kinshasa awaiting our
residence visas well past the date we were led to, or chose to, believe, our
original plan to fly out of L'shi on the 22nd to join a
“Christmaasai” safari fell through. The safari company owners very kindly
agreed to let us apply our payment to another trip, so we signed on for the New
Year’s safari. The other family that had booked it cancelled, though, and so we
were only able to go by paying extra to cover the transportation costs.
Despite the extra cost, we lucked out! [Eric: because of the extra cost.] Now it’s just the two of us and our very
friendly, very knowledgeable guide. He’s been doing this for 6 years and says
he’s never regretted it for a day – it’s his passion. He drove us down from
Nairobi, we checked into our luxury “tent” around 2 PM, had lunch, and at 4 PM
headed out onto the Mara. Lots of birds – Eric’s a great spotter – including an uncommon migrant Eurasian Roller, and also mongoose, Thomson’s gazelles galore,
zebras, warthogs (they have to kneel to graze!), and wildebeest. I don’t know
why, but I was surprised at how they mingled, unlike in zoos, where most
species are separate.
Eurasian Roller -- from this site; couldn't find the shot we took.
I was glad my Swahili teacher had made us watch “The Lion
King” – a helpful primer to the wildlife. We saw a female lion, and later a
group of 3 immature males bedding down for the night, but the real amazing
sight of the evening for me was a female cheetah and her five month-old cubs.
We had a great view and watched them for at least an hour, past the mandatory
6:30 PM return time. Captivating. We saw the cubs play, nurse, hang out … the
mother didn't move much until just around the time we were leaving. Then she
led the cubs across the plain. Plovers were scolding – they must have had a
nest nearby. A lappet-faced vulture flew low over the group: our guide said it
could easily take one of the cubs.
Mama cheetah with 2 of the cubs. Check out our guide, James Muchina, on Facebook -- he's got tons of amazing photos!
It was wonderful to be able to watch this family of cheetahs
and take as much time as we wanted. This wasn't “Wild Kingdom” or the Discovery
Channel, with dramatic music, cheesy voice-overs, and quick cuts to the action
shots. This was real time, slow time, all-the-time-in-the-world time. Pretty
cool! In a larger group, we wouldn't have had that chance.
Tomorrow, to the river in search of elephants and leopards!
