Putting the ‘D’ in ‘DRC’ (by Karen)

It didn’t get much, if any, coverage in the English-language or even, as far as we could tell, the French-language press, but in January of this year, the DRC had an interesting episode. Of course, it was just one of a series, and so hardly worth mentioning, I guess – but we’ll mention it here.

A little context: The current president of the DRC is Joseph Kabila, who came to office in 2001 after his father, Laurent-Desiré Kabila, was assassinated. L-D, or Kabila père, had overthrown Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997, at which point Kabila fils went from driving a tourist taxi in Tanzania (whence Kabila père  had spent several decades waging  guerrilla war against Mobutu – though Che Guevara came over in 1965 to help the cause and was unimpressed) to being a Very Important Person. L-D was shot in 2001 by one of his own bodyguards, but who was actually behind the plot has not yet been determined, and no one has been brought to justice. In any case, Kabila fils – Joseph Kabila; we can call him JoKa for short – was hastily put into the presidency (according to Tim Butcher in Blood River, with the help of a US mining company). JoKa was only 29 at the time.

In 2006, a new constitution was passed, which stipulated that the president could have only two 5-year terms. Elections were held that year, and JoKa won, though not as handily as he would have liked. He got 45% of the vote in the initial election, and in the run-off, 58%, though there were large regional differences. In 2009, he “set up a commission to determine whether the term of presidential office should not be extended from five years to seven and whether the constitutional limit of two mandates should not be scrapped” (David van Reybrouck in Congo: An Epic History of a People). Those efforts were thwarted. In 2011, JoKa won again, in an election widely criticized as fraudulent.

So, JoKa’s term should be up at the end of 2016 (the first five years he was in power, before the advent of the Third Republic in 2006, don’t enter the official count). Elections are slated for next year. But there are those who still sense a certain reluctance on the part of the head of state to step down as mandated. So, back to January of this year: the government proposed a law that would condition elections on completion of a census.

Now, it’s true that DRC badly needs a census. The last one was in, I believe, 1984, and it’s hard to run a country when you don’t know how many people are in it and how they’re distributed. From a public health standpoint, having an updated census (or, better yet, a functioning civil and vital registration system) would be a huge plus. And, of course, to run elections, it’s helpful to know how many people are living in which political districts. But to conduct a census in a country this big, with infrastructure that’s so poor, could take three or four years, easy. So opposition leaders smelled something fishy and called for a protest in the capital Kinshasa when the law was up for a vote.

Protests began on Monday, January 19^th in Kinshasa and Goma, with confrontations between police and protesters. The opposition was using social media and SMS messaging to show the state’s repressive response and to call on people to join in the protests. Shortly after midnight, in the early hours of Tuesday, all internet and SMS across the country was cut off. No email, no Facebook ... no PubMed for my students or online ethics training for my research team. No text messages, no WhatsApp, for anyone, anywhere.

After a few days, the government realized that industry was paralyzed – nothing could get in at the ports, banks couldn’t do any transactions, business couldn’t go on – and that it couldn’t pay its employees their (meager) salaries. Investors were scared off. So internet access was restored on fixed connections – but the vast majority of the small minority of Congolese who use the internet access it on mobile devices, either phones or portable modems, and these remained out of commission for 19 days. Likewise, all SMS communication was suspended for 19 days – only voice calls (which burn more phone credit than text messages) could get through. When internet access was finally restored on mobile devices, social media sites were still blocked for several weeks. Opposition members said their phones were blocked as well.

This response to the protests was strikingly disproportionate.  Government forces killed protesters, with the government putting the death toll at 12, but human rights organizations putting it at 42. The controversial conditioning of elections on completion of a census was removed from the bill before it was passed, but the opposition is still on the lookout for other tricks; the recent debacle in Burundi sets a bad precedent. Some people anticipate more trouble in 2016.

And that, my friends, is how they put the 'D' in 'DRC'!

Zanzibar

My son Isaac came to Africa to visit us and we started with a grand vacation in Eastern Congo: both Virunga park outside of Goma and Kahuzi-Biéga park outside of Bukavu. However, that trip will require a long blog post and so I wrote up our trip to Zanzibar first!

After a few days of downtime in Lubumbashi, Isaac and I left Karen behind and flew to Zanzibar. Zanzibar is made up of 2 large islands, Unguja and Pemba, and is a “semi-autonomous” part of Tanzania. I’m not sure what that means, exactly. The southern island, Unguja is usually called Zanzibar Island and has most of the people, industry, etc. It appears small here, but is 85km by 39km.

Zanzibar between Mombasa, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Zanzibar always had a real exotic sound to me, even before I knew anything about it. But a few months ago I researched Zanzibar and it sounded like an interesting combination of Arabic and African cultures, and I was also impressed by the visible architectural history. I considered visiting during the Zanzibar International Film Festival that includes music and other arts from the “Swahili Coast” (also called the Dhow festival), but July was very poor timing for us and I read that it was packed with European tourists, which didn’t seem too interesting. We had the opposite experience: we arrived at the end of the rainy season, and everything was very quiet. Some restaurants were still closed for the off-season.

We stayed at the Mizingani Seafront Hotel right in Stone Town. It was a fully renovated older building with great architecture and details, like the famed hand-carved wooden doors, arches, and courtyards. The hotel was located just across the road from the beach at Stone Town, and just farther along was the ferry terminal and the shipping port. This was not a sun-bathing beach, but a working beach.

Where we had breakfast and afternoon tea at the Mizingani Seafront.

We spent many hours our first day walking around Stone Town, much of it with a self-recruited guide, Rashid, who took us to the many markets in Stone Town – meat, fish, produce, spices, clothing, etc., and we ended at a cheap, local restaurant with so-so food. We also visited the old slave market and saw the exhibits about slavery. Zanzibar was one of the largest ports for the Indian Ocean slave trade with slavery occurring as early as the ninth century. The slave trade was halted in 1873 under the threat of a British naval bombardment. I noticed that the exhibit focused on the trade to the Americas and minimized the longer-lasting trade to the Middle East.

Zanzibar definitely has an Arabic feel – the architecture is much different than all of the places we have visited so far in Africa. The dress, too, was different: probably 90% of the women we saw wore head scarves (and a good proportion of girls, too), and it seemed that just as many women went without scarves as those who went fully encapsulated, with only the eyes showing. Men, too, frequently wore a small cylindrical hat – kofia – and occasionally wore the traditional long robe – thawb or jalabiyyah. The old, whitewashed stone buildings, the mosques, and the different styles of dress definitely gave Stone Town an Arabic feel. In my experience, this was not true outside of Stone Town.

The next day we hired a boat to take us to Changuu, also called Prison Island because the British bought the island and had a prison built on it with the plan to house criminals from the mainland. However, before it was used as a prison it was converted to a quarantine hospital, primarily for yellow fever. We visited Changuu for the snorkeling, which was good, but discovered that the island also shelters a couple hundred giant tortoises. In 1919 the British governor of Seychelles sent a gift of four Aldabra giant tortoises to Changuu from the island of Aldabra. They multiplied rapidly but became victims of poachers until about 20 years ago when the enclosure was built. The small, young tortoises are especially protected because they are easy to carry. The adults weigh 500 lbs. The males had their age painted on their shells (the oldest was 151 years old), but the females' shells were blank because the males rubbed the paint off during mating. At least that's what we were told.
     The snorkeling was good – colorful coral & fish – but the water seemed a bit dirty and the bright sun, which really highlights the color of the sea life, was frequently obscured by clouds. The most interesting thing we saw was probably the large, active sea slugs.
     After snorkeling, we went back to the hotel, showered, and drank spiced tea and played cards for a bit.

The next day we visited a spice farm and the Jozani Forest Reserve, home of the Zanzibar Red Colobus monkey, which is endangered, and only found in Zanzibar.

A good shot of the red pelt and the 4-finger hand. Photo by Isaac.

Zanzibar has been known for spice plantations for over 200 years. In particular, the islands produce cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and black pepper. Besides these, the farm we visited also had vanilla beans, ginger, turmeric, cardamon, and lemon grass, but I'm not sure how many of these were produced for export. The farm had larger fields a little ways away from the demonstration plants that we inspected. Although most of these weren't in season, it was pretty cool to see the actual plants and smell the leaves, bark, or roots.

We visited Jazani forest mostly to see the monkeys – both the Red Colobus and the Sykes monkey. The visit included a tour guide and a walk along a path to see the larger trees, and then through the smaller trees where the monkeys are found, and then, after a short drive, a boardwalk through a mangrove swamp. The mangrove swamp was interesting because the tide was coming in and we could see the water gradually cover all of the ground in the swamp.

The last day we decided to see a renowned beach of Zanzibar. There are too many spectacular beaches to see them all, so we chose to visit the eastern side of the island at the town of Paje. A coral reef protects much of the eastern coast of Zanzibar, so the waves reaching the island are quite tame and the water is shallow. We heard that it is possible to learn kite-surfing in Zanzibar ("Zero to Hero in 10 Days") because the warm, calm water and the consistent wind makes it more predictable. I was tempted, but we didn't have 10 days, so... next time!

We walked a bit on the beach and saw some interesting shells. I only took some cowrie shells home, though. The beaches were a fine, white, coral sand and we saw almost no garbage of any type, which was unexpected and appreciated. We developed an appreciation for the previous days' cloud cover and learned that near the equator, at sea level, the sun is very hot.

At the end of the trip, Isaac and I both flew to Nairobi, at which point we split up and he returned to Seattle via Abu Dhabi and Amsterdam.  It was great hanging out with Isaac in Zanzibar, drinking spiced tea, playing cards, hearing about his year at college, and seeing the sights. I returned "home" to Lubumbashi.

We've visited 5 African countries south of the Equator (DRC, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa) but Zanzibar had a different, Arabic identity. It was also somewhat more developed than the Congo. I joked that there were more miles of paved roads on the island of Zanzibar than in the entire DRC. This is probably an exaggeration. I wonder if Tanzania's socialist government can take credit for the development or just for the nasty cement apartment blocks built with East Germany in the 1970s.

Kilwa (by Karen)

The first place we rented here, from mid-October through December, was on Boulevard de Kilwa. We didn’t much care for the owner, and didn’t much trust the staff (housekeeper, gardener, guards).

It was easy to find, since there were ostriches painted on the gate.

Villa Kilwa

At the time, the name “Kilwa” didn’t mean anything to us, but eventually we realized that, like most of the street names in Lubumbashi, it was the name of a town in the province of Katanga.

My first (and, given that I’ll be leaving before long, perhaps only) major foray from Lubumbashi for work was to Kilwa. I rode there from Lubumbashi in the back of an NGO jeep with a doctoral student from the School of Public Health. Our mission: to conduct a vaccine coverage survey on the heels of the NGO’s mass vaccination campaign, which it carried out in response to a large and continuing measles outbreak.

I was surprised that the road from Lubumbashi all the way to Kasomeno was paved and pothole-free. According to my student, who grew up in Kilwa, it’s been paved since 2007 (though news articles suggest it was 2009). The road from Kasomeno to Kilwa is a well-graded dirt road, wide enough for two passenger cars, but a little tight if there’s a truck or bus coming your way. It even has occasional signage – names of villages, speed limits, curve ahead, and a sign signaling a storage depot for China Jianxi, the company apparently responsible for the construction and upkeep of the road. It took us only five hours, at speeds on the paved road of up to 110 kph (66 mph), and we arrived covered in red dust – it’s the dry season. My student normally travels between Lubumbashi and Kilwa in a modern bus for 12,500 FC (about $14).

Most buildings along the way were made of local brick; we passed lots of termite mounds and brick kilns (the bricks are made of the clay from the termite mounds), and almost all were roofed with straw, save a few stores and schools with tin roofs. The villages we passed looked relatively prosperous, but as I write that, I ask myself, relative to what? I suppose to the villages we saw last month in North and South Kivu. I saw neat houses, many painted with abstract designs in ochre and black, and families dressed in mostly clean, hole-free clothes, as well as many goats and chickens. Sacks of charcoal for sale by the road in some places. In Kasomeno I got out to buy some food – things that are sold on the street in Lubumbashi, but which I haven’t ever bought there. To share among the 4 of us (me, student, NGO staff, driver) I bought:

5 handful-sized bags of roasted, salted peanuts @ 100 FC apiece

3 hardboiled eggs with salt for 500 FC

4 beignets @ 100 FC apiece

1 hotdog bun-sized loaf of bread @ 100 FC

Total: 1500 FC, or about $1.67.

On the way I saw for the first time a few women riding bicycles loaded with sacks of charcoal or produce. Around Lubumbashi, it’s common to see men with heavily laden bikes. When we were in Bukavu, South Kivu, there were virtually no bikes, presumably because it’s so hilly. Instead, women carried heavy loads that were easily between 100 and 200 pounds – they carry them on their backs, supported by a cloth band that goes around their foreheads. Some of them walk with their hands clasped behind their heads to take some of the strain off their necks.

My digs for the two nights I was in Kilwa were at the church dormitory beside the beautiful blue waters of Lake Moëro (aka Mweru), just across from an island I saw from the plane when we flew back from Bukavu a couple of weeks ago. 

Our Lady of Lake Moëro?

Sunrise over Lake Moëro 

Looking west, the full moon was in the morning sky as the first rays of sun lit the road.

The sunlight also lit this small (shale?) quarry, just in front of the dry-docked boat in the picture above ...

... from which this woman was carrying bucketloads of rocks on her head (here she's going back with empty bucket to get another load).

Lake Moëro divides DRC from northern Zambia. A few months ago, a group from Johns Hopkins stopped in Lubumbashi before flying to Kilwa to set up a malaria study site. Malaria is pretty well controlled in southern Zambia, but not in the north, and the Hopkins group thinks parasites may be hitching rides in people who cross the lake in pirogues, or in mosquitoes that make their way across. There is also a Columbia University-run HIV/AIDS program in Kilwa, which I heard anecdotally is finding 10-15% of pregnant women HIV positive, as opposed to the official figure of 4% (but don't quote that ...). Several other NGOs, including Caritas and a Belgian group with the cheeky name of Médecins sans Vacances (Doctors without Vacation), a clear send-up of Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders), were around, too.

We visited one of the vaccination sites to the north of Kilwa on the road toward Kalemie (a dirt road, national #5, reportedly in good condition as far as Pweto) on the last day of the mass campaign. The little girl in this photo took the vaccination OK, but after her was a 3-year-old who cried all the way through! 

We also did a brief field test of the questionnaire, and the homes we visited for that made me re-think the impression of relative prosperity I’d had from the car. The homes looked square and solid, with well-kept yards and thatch roofs – not as prized as tin roofs, but cooler – but the children looked years younger than their stated ages, their parents had only a few years of primary schooling, and there was very little in the way of material wealth to be seen.

A home in Lusalala, north of Kilwa on the lake.

What would development look like for these communities? Drinking water, electricity, sanitation, for starters. Better roads and transport; I saw a few bicycles and a couple of motorcycles, but no other vehicles along the road except long-distance trucks. Communication – between Kilwa and Lubumbashi I saw at least one cell tower, and in Kilwa itself (population 64,000), there’s (intermittent) cell signal, but elsewhere, there’s none. There are two local radio stations in Kilwa, but I don’t think their range is far, or that many people in the villages outside Kilwa have radios to listen to them. I doubt many have TVs, though I did see one or two dust-covered satellite dishes. A handful of homes, like the one in this picture, which belongs to a village chief, had solar panels powering some small appliances.

The frame in the yard supports a solar panel that's facing away from us ... if you look closely, you can see a thin wire running from it into the house through a window.

Health care, of course, and good education would be other boons for these communities. Books, films, internet … . I think about our parents’ generation, especially my father, who grew up in rural Idaho, or Eric’s father, who grew up in rural Iowa (those are not the same states, as my father was constantly clarifying to geography-challenged easterners). Both were born at home, in houses without indoor plumbing, on roads that weren’t paved, and in communities that didn’t have electricity. Both were raised on farms and ended up university professors.

The last century has brought a lot of changes to the infrastructure in rural parts of the US, but I believe it will take more than improvements to infrastructure to create a society here in the DRC that enables more people to realize their potential.

In any case, in Kilwa, I stayed just long enough to set my student on track. The NGO is optimistic that coverage in this campaign was high, and I hope that’s what our survey will show. Stay tuned for results!

Resilience (by Karen)

When we moved to our new place in January, we were thrilled to have a full kitchen, complete with stove and oven. But Eric was hankering after a grill to roast eggplants for baba ghanouj, so R got us this little one and a bag of charcoal.

This is what most Congolese use to cook all the time – more about the charcoal economy in another post.

Mmm ... smoky eggplant!

Fresh pita from Nazem, the Lebanese bakery

Tasty baba ghanouj!

We soon realized we weren’t going to use all that charcoal, and since the nights can be cold (even more so now), we let T, our night watchman, use the brasero (the hibachi-type thing) and charcoal to keep warm.

However, when the power goes out here, the generator doesn’t always get turned on, and if it is turned on, it’s only at night, and it’s only strong enough to run the lightbulbs and (yay!) the wifi router. No electric kettle, no stove or oven. So, a few weeks after its eggplant debut, the brasero was called back into service for dinner.

Resilience

We’ve only had one more brasero dinner since then, since this is not Eric’s favorite way to cook, and he’d rather get take-out from the yummy Lebanese KFC (KFC = Katanga Fried Chicken, but we usually get their falafel or shawarma) or from Galito’s.

Over the past month, we’ve had several days with only a few hours of power and nights with none at all. With no reservoir of hot bath water from the electric water heater, we’ve put the brasero to use to heat water for our morning baths and coffee. Too cold these days (or we’ve gotten too soft?) for a cold-water bucket bath!

Weather (by Karen)

We haven't posted much in a while, but I have lots of bits and pieces floating around in my head. So I've started to write them down, and will post them little by little.

Here's the first (from May 10th):

We both sleep under a blanket now, a thick shaggy polyester blanket made in China, and in the early mornings mist rises from the ground inside our compound. It burns off quickly, and the days are blue-sky clear with cotton-wool clouds. It’s warm in the sun, even hot, but the air is cool and dry. Doors that were swollen and needed a sharp push or tug to open or close during the rainy season now slide with less effort in and out of their frames. A couple of months back, the last of the avocados from the tree in the yard plummeted to the ground, then the tree was covered in cream-colored spikes of small flowers, and then baby avocados the size of grapes started falling. The drops are getting progressively bigger; maybe some will be edible by the time we leave at the end of July.

Zim-Zam Addendum: Livingstone Railway Museum

I found some pictures from the Railway Museum in Livingstone. We arrived after it had closed, but we could look at some of the exhibits through the fence. While walking back to town, we saw the working coal-fired steam train that still runs as a tourist attraction go by. The coal smoke really stank. The train crosses the Victoria Falls Bridge, which supports road, rail & foot traffic.

Zambia State Railways.

Obviously, if I had Photoshop, I could try to stitch those together. The engine above and the one visible below were different, but identically painted steam engines. You can read "Rhodesia Railways" on the passenger car. Northern Rhodesia became Zambia in 1964.

One more photo. This was taken this morning in Lubumbashi. Our little friend found itself in a predicament. We released it into the wilds of our backyard. Too cute to flush.

Our Zim-Zam trip (by Eric)

(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.