JT's Travel Blog

Africa for beginners...

2011-09-23T19:48:00.002+01:00

"Ah, Namibia... Africa for beginners" said Oddvar when I told him we were heading there on the next break. "Will be easy for you guys, but you'll love it." He was right. It is 'Africa for beginners' and we did love it. It's an easy and fun place to travel. For starters, the roads are brilliant - even the dirt roads are regularly graded and

have views to inspire any photographer.

Top that off with big skies,

great roads,

highly trained medical practitioners who are skilled in a variety of ailments,

great campsites dotted all over the countryside,

with brilliant views,

not to mention, magnificent deserts,

and heaps of wildlife,

which turn up everywhere.

And the signs don't lie...

Luckily the heffalumps are friendly and have a mission (eat everything in sight) which keeps them too busy to bother with us mere humans.

One of the highlights was a two hour flight a couple of hundred feet above the Sossusvlei (a salt and clay pan surrounded by high red dunes) located in the Namib-Naukluft National Park.

The Namib Naukluft abuts the dunes of the Skeleton Coast and you can see how that piece of coastline got it's name.

If you were a shipwrecked sailor here who couldn't walk 100km of sand-dunes and desert, your chances of survival were slim.

For the more fortunate among us (ie. NOT shipwrecked sailors), the Skeleton Coast is perfect for sand boarding and photography,

scenic flights over amazing dunes,

and four wheel drive camping.

Basically, we picked up a 4WD at the airport, then spent 11 days four-wheel-driving, hiking, lazing and camping. In between that we did some white water rafting, paddling inflatable canoes down a crocodile infested river,

camping under the stars, and coming eyeball to eyeball with elephants.

Two weeks in Namibia just wasn't long enough and it's official! Namibia is now our favourite African country by a long shot.

Etosha National Park is also the favourite national park (so far) not just for the animals but for the quality of the campsites and value for money. Serengeti and Ngorogo were great but if you are thinking of visiting a national park in Africa, Etosha in Namibia is definitely the place. Not only do they have wildlife and plains to rival the Serengeti

but you get it to yourself

and the campsites are resort quality. Great places to chill by the pool after the dawn patrol.

If, after a few beers by the pool, you can't be bothered going out at dusk, they have been kind enough to put the campsites beside waterholes where you can simply sit and watch the animals come to you.

It looks pretty remote but basically, the waterholes are simply great places for the rhinos, leopards, deer and their mates, to take turns watching us humans have a glass of wine at sundown...

As for the rest of Namibia, the infrastructure is simply grand, with great facilities and zebra crossings scattered everywhere.

Usually the zebras are pretty laid back

but best you don't try to jump in front of them at a queue as they can be a bit cantankerous...

Who'd have thought they'd bite?

Even the lions don't seem as aggressive and will bring the entire family to be photographed at the sight of a camera (bloody attention seekers that they are).

It's hard to describe just how special the place is. Pictures can't do it justice. Suffice to say, a return visit for 3 or 4 weeks next year is being planned!

Ikabulu School...

2011-08-30T15:27:00.001+01:00

Although our reason for being here is exploration, we're mindful that we are just guests in the local community and the company as well as staff like to contribute where we can. There are limits of course, but we take on activities which a) are supported by the local community and b) don't rely on perpetual ongoing support.

For example, we run a first aid clinic three days a week for the local community, have transported a number of critically ill patients to hospitals, paid medical bills for a number of people, train up a lot of the locals in skills such as driving, mechanical skills, computers, etc and help out the local schools where we can. The company supports this and pays for all of the above activities although most of us have chipped in funds along the way as well.

Last weekends project for example is in the pictures below.

If you'd like to help by volunteering out here or help with cash, please let us know. We're also looking to provide shoes for the local kids who attend school at least 30 times in the next two months and raise funding to build accommodation for a Community Nurse or Doctor at Lubalisi village not far from here. The local community have agreed to contribute a lot of labor and just need some cash to purchase the building materials. Will keep you posted on this.

Mountain biking in the footsteps of Livingstone...

2011-08-19T17:29:00.001+01:00

Tanzania is mountain bikers paradise! You can find single-track, bicycle track, no track and dual track (aka 4WD wheel ruts) for social riders. There are even heaps of great serious downhill section – perfect if you want to add extra spice to life by being at least 10 hours from a hospital. Oh, and you need to bring your own bike… The nearest mountain bike shop is in Johannesburg, 2,500 km south of here.

Lynne and I have just come back from two days in the bush outside Mahale National Park. It’s not far from Lake Tanganyika – a mere 5 days hike across the Mahale Mountains. That is to say, it’s basically in the middle of nowhere…

The drive to the start point is worth a story in itself. Suffice though that it's seriously tough 4WD country (even for an ex-Pilbara boy). It took 5 hours to drive, crawl and bounce the Landcruiser 70km down off the escarpment where we camped for the night on the banks of a secluded river. The next morning we set off early, bouncing the 4WD a few km to the tiny village of Ungalaba where we left the car and headed off on mountain bikes.

The purpose of the visit was to traverse the network of local bicycle tracks and find a route that would let us take 4WD’s into the region to do some soil sampling. Easier said than done. Even armed with topo maps and the trusty Garmin Oregon 550 (which is a superb piece of kit btw), it’s still easier said than done. The topography varies from impossibly steep and gullied to near flat open country but the bicycle tracks meander with a rhythm known only to the locals. On second thoughts, I suspect even the locals don’t really know why the tracks meander as they do. Farms come and go, entire villages move and cattle farmers stop/start using tracks depending on the rainfall and grasses.

We only had 20km to traverse as the crow flies but that day we managed to cover about 40km and still end up 6km short of the target. Along the way we managed to end up completely off track, hauling the bikes over and through bamboo thickets, up the side of gullies and through dried out marshland. Luckily it’s the dry season and we could mostly navigate through burned out patches of bush which we could often cycle without a track. But mostly we meandered down cycle tracks, flipped coins at junctions, crossed sadly dried river beds and stopped to chat with local farmers who seemed to have nothing better to do than wait for two crazy mzungu’s to appear at their farm on mountain bikes.

After seven hours we made our way back to the Landcruiser for the four hour drive back up the escarpment. We were hot, sweaty, covered in cuts, eaten by tetse-flies, filthy and exhausted… But we were wearing smiles from ear to ear, had found a way into Ngalamuso and...

... we had mountain biked where no mzungu has been since Livingstone. :-)

Winter holidays in Africa...

2011-07-31T20:25:00.090+01:00

Just back from 2 weeks of very lazy beach time on the African coast. We'd planned a host of adventure activities for our 2 week break including diving with great white sharks off Cape Horn, visiting friends in Capetown and beach fun in Mozambique. In the end though, after 70 days without a day off, we decided that itinerary with it's 6 days in airports with mid-winter diving in the southern oceans wasn't the best idea we'd ever had.

In the end, 2 weeks on the Pangani coast of Tanzania, chillaxing by the sea was a perfect recipe for recuperation. For anyone who is reading this and thinking of a beach holiday in Tanzania, read on. In a diversion from usual practice, I've included a few tips for beach holidays at Pangani. Without a bit of insider information, planning a beach holiday in Tanzania can take a research so here 'tis.

For the rest of you unfortunate souls not planning a beach holiday anytime soon... Time to go back to surfing the web, skip back to the previous blog entry or check out some highlights inspired by the road trip to Pangani. Hiring a car to drive up to the beach was a relatively cheap and easy affair. Driving on Tanzanian roads on the other hand is a thrill a minute affair. Don't quite need the concentration levels of a formula one race, but plenty of examples along the way of drivers who lost concentration momentarily...

Beaches in Tanzania.
Skip Zanzibar unless the mystique of the name is enough drawcard, or you're happy with touristy party places. Great beaches but very touristy and not the best value for money you'll find.

Head instead for Tanga, then Pangani and in particular Ushomo Bay... We spent 5 days at Peponi Beach Resort and liked the place a lot.

Beach is so-so but overall good value for money. USD$85/night for 2 people in a banda (cabin) including brekky & dinner. Even better value is the camping at $5/night. Bargain! And friendly owners as well, although to be fair, I'd have to say that the owners and managers at every place we checked out or stayed at were some of the nicest people you could hope to meet. Must be something about people who choose to live/work at a beach resort. Peponi meanwhile is rustic but relaxing and it has an abundance of hammocks.

Capricorn next door to Peponi is even nicer and has 3 self-catering bandas with a deli where you can buy the food. It’s also the only place along the coast where you can get capuccino/espresso coffee. More expensive than Peponi but then again nicer also.

We had a look at Tulia, Emayani, Tides and Beach Crab at Ushomo bay. Ushomo is definitely a much nicer beach. Lots of seaweed last week due to some storms offshore but apparently October/November is the best time of the year for water clarity and lack of seaweed. Beach Crab is about the same price as Peponi but didn’t have an empty banda and their ‘tents’ didn’t appeal. Although nice, it felt to us a bit like “we’re in Lonely Planet now and always full, so we don’t have to try too hard” feel about it. Maybe that's just us, but first impressions and all that.

Tulia is next to Emayani and owned by the same people. It's nice and reasonably priced but basic, and the bandas (huts) only had single beds. Tides is nicest place around and not as expensive as the website suggests but it's still the most expensive place around. If you fancy a splurge though, the Tides is very, very pleasant and not bad value if you ask for local rates. It probably also has the best beach in the area, right in front of it.

We ended up staying at Emayani for 5 days where the beach is not bad, the bandas are nice and (sad for the owners but good for us) we were the only people there for most of the 5 days, so had the run of the place. USD$145/night for half board for 2 people (residents rates) so it was a bit of a splurge but well worth it. There’s a dive shop on site and you can hire kayaks. Managers name is Jan, Diveshop couple are Wym and Kirstin. All nice folk.

Overall, Peponi and Beachcrab are where most people head and they are roughly as nice as each other. Peponi is nicer place but lesser beach and Beach Crab vice versa. Capricorn, Emayani and Tides at double the price are still good value though if you’re looking for somewhere nicer.

Best lazy holiday for ages... Read 12 books between us and still had time to eat, sleep, chillax and even do a couple of dives. Next break in September is looking like being slightly more active: probably dirtbiking in Ethiopia, Namibia or the like but stay tuned.

Back in Africa...

2011-07-27T06:48:00.000+01:00

Been back in Africa since the beginning of May and it's good to be back in the warmth. Always a pleasantly disorienting experience to go from a wintery but orderly place like the US, to the heat and chaos of Africa. Must be something about me that likes the chaos over order.

That being said, I'm not a fan of dusty Dar Es Salaam, the chief port and former capital of Tanzania. Its Arabic name means “haven of peace” but it would have to be a candidate for 'most inappropriately named city in the world'. Despite a population estimated at a 'mere' 1.4 million people, the traffic congestion is on a par with a city of 20 million. To be fair, the complete lack of maintenance and anything approximating a motorway, contributes to this but each individual driver seems relentlessly committed to creating their own mini-gridlock (and their own mini trail of mayhem). Dar and the countries roads in general, would be worth a dedicated blog entry, but that's for another day.

Meanwhile, other than the three weeks in Dar buying supplies, and five days convoy drive out to camp, we spend most of our time out bush and it's a great place to be. The first few weeks were spent repairing wet season damage, rewiring the electrical systems at camp, conducting driver training (a mission in itself - perhaps another blog, one day...), inventorying what remained from some wet season mayhem and generally getting set up to go exploring.

Along the way we rebuilt a few tracks, parted way with a few wayward staff, been bogged/de-bogged/re-bogged and generally managed to pass hours, days and weeks in a blur of activity.

We've even had a yippie-shoot delivering weapons refresher training to the security staff, which is a great excuse to go out and make loud but otherwise pointless noises and accompanying holes in tin-cans.

Not that we needed them that day (in hindsight, perhaps as much good luck, as anything else) but medical facilities out here are few and far between. We operate the best stocked first aid clinic in the area and provide free treatment or free transport to the nearest hospital for the local communities. It's only a drop in the ocean but at least it's something. 90+% of our treatments fit into one of four categories so we don't actually need to keep that much stuff in stock. It's almost always one or more of the following:

Intestinal parasites
Malaria
Respiratory tract infection
Fungal infection

Four of us have basic to advanced first aid and medical skills, but when in doubt, our 'bible' out here is "Where There Is No Doctor", a handbook for village medical care in remote locations. And when all else fails, a lift to the nearest hospital (a days drive away) is the next option. Local medical clinics (a mere day's walk away in either direction) are so poorly equipped that typhoid patients often sit in corridors on concrete or dirt floors waiting for IV solutions that simply aren't available. We regularly end up donating medical supplies to typhoid or malaria sufferers. It's a fine line of course, as we won't be here forever so we walk the line of supporting, not supplanting their medical care.

We've been conducing actual exploration and collecting soil samples now from far and wide for about a month (which is after all the reason we're here) but along the way, we've been riding dirtbikes and mountain bikes, hiking and four-wheel-driving all in the cause. The dirtbikes and mountain bikes actually have a business use - many of our geological targets are only accessible via bicycle trails. To really get in and sample an area, we need to build 4WD tracks and set up a flycamp in the area for a few weeks. Figuring out which bicycle tracks can be converted to a 4WD track (and indeed whether or not the prospective area is er, worth prospecting) means we need to get in to have a look. Hence, we've finally figured out a way to be paid to ride enduro bikes and mountain bikes - without having to actually be good enough to turn pro.

We've done a couple of mammoth trips lately to open up areas including an overnight 4WD camp that needed mountain bikes to get us into the target area the next day. A great excuse for Lynne, Pete and I to go camping in lion and elephant country. OK, perhaps I exaggerate... (so what's new). We didn't see any lions, rhino's or elephants at all and never came closer than 10km to Mahale National Park boundary where the animals allegedly reside. 'Twas still great fun camping in a bamboo thicket by the river then mountain biking the next day. Pete and I have also done a couple of day long dirtbike rides down some of the gnarliest trails we've ridden for a long, long time. Bouncing over logs on the edge of precipices and hauling them, wheels spinning through boot-sucking mud creeks probably doesn't sound like fun to most people... But it does to us :-)

Don't tell the boss, but despite the crazy times, remote supply lines and sometimes near overwhelming frustrations, I still can't quite believe I'm getting paid to do this stuff...

How to get your dog to annoy you...

2011-07-26T13:04:00.003+01:00

Out at the camp we have a veritable menagerie comprising about 50 chickens, 3 goats, a dog and the usual population of African bugs, lizards and bitey things.

Our favourite though is the camp dog. His name is Tunza, which is Swahili for 'to keep' or 'to protect'. We found him on a beach at Tunza Lodge on Lake Victoria amongst a litter of flea bitten but otherwise lovable pups. The camp needed the security beefed up at the time (at least that's the excuse we used) and the dog's owners were only too happy to get rid of at least one pup to a good home. We picked Tunza by a rigorous selection and analysis process of walking up to the litter and saying 'BOO'.

The one that stood his ground long enough to realise that all his litter-mates had scarpered was Tunza (the chosen one).

Hence the five week old flea-bag made his way by private charter flight to his own little paradise (Tunzatown).

His first challenge was passing security at Mwanza International Airport (a large shed with a couple of metal detectors and xray machines). Because he was in a carry bag (it wasn't plastic so don't bother ringing the SPCA), the ever-diligent (well, sometimes not sleeping) security officers there wanted to put him through the X-ray machine. The resulting (verbal) battle of wits between security and his feisty Scottish 'mum' lasted about 15 minutes but 3 burly security officers were no match for the pocket rocket. He was eventually carried through the metal detector safely in her arms (sans the empty bag which had to be x-rayed).

At camp however, we have people coming and going all season, including a range of local staff, consulting geologists and local villagers. Not many people in that group have trained dogs before so his first year of meeting strange people on a near daily basis have taught him to cope with uncertainty. The biggest challenge has been teaching his 'pack' (ie. the people in Tunzatown) to be consistent with him. We recently came up with a cunning plan to offer them some tongue-in-cheek guidance. Hopefully you might find the following amusing or even useful if you're having similar issues with dogs, kids, spouses, visitors, etc.

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Ten tips on how to get Tunza to annoy you (and us)....

Tunza is mostly well behaved and spends a lot of his day lying unnoticed in companionable silence, but he’s still young and silly, so if you want him to annoy you and the rest of us, here are some tips.

1. Train him to jump up on people. He’s a big, powerful dog and loves to be face to face with you, but doesn’t instinctively know to jump up. Best to make it a game and encourage him with high pitched squeals and arm waving. Whatever you do, don’t knee him in the chest. As mentioned, he learns quickly and this will stop him from jumping up in no time. As per point 5, being inconsistent is OK though, as that not only confuses the heck out of him but also teaches him to behave unpredictably.

2. Train him that it’s OK to bite people. Most young dogs go through a long teething phase. Tunza has lots of things to chew on around here but the best way to make him annoying is to encourage him to play-bite us or to mock fight with him. He loves this. If you get him really revved up, you could probably get him to draw blood by accident which would not only be inconvenient to those of us who have to dress your wounds but could even get infected which would earn you a gold-star for ‘annoying’. Two gold stars if he bites someone else as a result of your training.

3. Encourage him to hump your leg. This will ensure that he does it to all of us and will teach him to come running up behind you to do it.

4. Teach him to beg for food. It’s really endearing to have him beg at the table and push his nose into our crotches while we’re eating, but he won’t do this unless you actively sneak him food at the table. It doesn’t take much effort – just a tidbit once a week. He’s very trainable and even a small amount occasionally will ensure he keeps harassing us at the dinner table. The worst thing you can do is to ignore him – he’ll get bored and go away to lie down quietly somewhere if you do this.

5. Squeal and wave your arms around whenever he does something you don’t like. He’ll think you’re inviting him to play and he loves to play. You’ll have him jumping on you and play-biting in no time.

6. Get him revved up by playing roughly with him. Once he’s in full mode, all you have to do is stop suddenly when you get bored. This will really confuse him and ensure he’ll keep on doing it after you stop. With luck, he’ll also annoy the rest of us.

7. Be inconsistent. This is the best way to get him to misbehave. Some suggestions:

Use different words for the same command. Eg: Instead of saying “No”, try saying “Toka hapa”, “Bad dog”, “Stop that!”
Play with him roughly one day then scold him when he plays roughly with you the next day.
Use his name when you’re scolding him. “Tunza NO!” sounds really similar to “Tunza come!”, etc so you’ll confuse the heck out of him in no time.
Chicken chasing. Encourage him to chase the chickens or goats out of the pantry, then yell and scream at him to stop when he actually catches one.

8. Use the same tone of voice all the time. Dog’s don’t understand many words but they are really good at interpreting your tone of voice, so if you keep the same tone of voice when playing, speaking, scolding him, calling him, etc he’ll quickly learn to ignore you and will keep on doing whatever he wants.

9. Teach him that being underfoot is fun. Pat him whenever he is in your hut, the workshop or generally just in the way, and he’ll keep coming back. Sadly, being ignored is no fun for Tunza, so if you just ignore him, he’ll will stop coming back and will go find someone else to play with.

10. Feed him outside meal times. Preferably at random times, in different locations by random people. It will not only make him fat but helps him to see every piece of food in the pantry or the kitchen table as being rightfully his.

Tunza doesn’t belong to anyone in particular here. He is a member of the camp and it’s up to all of us to treat him as such. If you don’t want him to be here, you’ve got two choices: find him (or yourself) another home or; confuse him so that he starts behaving unpredictably, annoys everyone, gets in the way and if you’re really successful, becomes aggressive towards strangers so that he has to be put down.

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Meanwhile, I think we've figured out why the goats don't want to play with him...

"It wasn't me... He was like that when I found him - honest."

"I don't care if you goats don't want to play, I've a new friend just like me..."

Talbot's top ten tips for building the most dangerous roads in the world...

2011-07-24T19:22:00.002+01:00

Years of travel in Asia, Africa and various parts of the world have helped me gain an insight into the minds of the people who build roads there. At first I was appalled by the traffic carnage, but very quickly, I learned to love the thrill a minute chaos that keeps you appreciating a life lived on the edge.

Lately though, I've seen another perspective. If you wanted to build a road system to throttle commerce and increase fatalities, there are some well established design principles to help you do so.

Change the meaning of VCP's from Vehicle Check Points into Vehicle Cash Points. It's simple really. Just pay your police so little that they need to take bribes to feed their family. It makes it much cheaper for road users to pay off a police officer than say, fix a bald tyre, get a drivers license or repair a broken headlight.
Don't do any road maintenance. Let's face it, that's just dead money that could be used to send your kids to university in the US - after you siphon it of by awarding a maintenance contract to your brother-in-laws road construction company (you know, the one that doesn't own any road construction machinery or have any employees). Don't forget to do some roadworks in the weeks leading up to the next election but other than that, best to let those potholes grow and the road surface wash away until at least three vehicles have had fatal accidents on that bend. Fixing these 'death zones' will win you votes and for sure, there's no cheaper way to do targeted maintenance.
Get your roads built by foreign aid. When the donor country awards the project to one of their own major corporations, who then come in and build it by awarding it to the lowest bidder, the road will deteriorate within a couple of years and you'll get to ask for more aid to rebuild it all over again. Just think of the employment that will create.
Remember to build roads that suit vehicles that you don't have many of. For example, if most of your people travel by bicycle, be sure to build major highways that are barely wide enough for two trucks to pass and never, ever, put in cycle paths or extra space that might allow a bicycle to travel with some relative safely by day, much less at night.
Encourage a culture of risk taking. Be sure to build major highways with blind corners, minor roads entering from behind bushes. Be sure to never fine drivers who break the law (don't forget though to put in place some relevant legislation so that you meet the requirements of aid donors and the World Bank loans officers). The police will in any case, provide some percentage of errant drivers with an on the spot fine, but it will be self-limiting because a) they will stop when they have enough money to buy lunch and b) you haven't given them any speed cameras or vehicles to actually enforce the law.
Don't whatever you do, regulate signage beside the road. It's best if drivers are regularly distracted by oversize garish advertising signs. Better yet if those signs obscure their vision when pulling out into traffic. It teaches them to be more vigilant in life anyway. The only exception to this rule... you should make road safety signs as small as possible and preferably use cheap paint so that they fade quickly.
Make sure there are plenty of unemployed youth to become touts and roadside sellers. While they are weaving through traffic or jogging beside a moving bus, trying to sell oranges to the passengers, at least they are getting good cardio exercise and are too busy to be out robbing your house. Those few who slip under the wheels will be quickly replaced and let's face it, they didn't have a real job anyway.
Do your best to mingle pedestrians, motorcycles, bicycles, animals, hand-carts, tuk-tuks, cars and heavy trucks - preferably in multiple directions. Everyone will love you for providing them with complete freedom of movement and to be honest, dodging traffic helps to keep the populace fit.
Driver testing - don't do it. Consult with a few friends to design a system that allows people to bribe officials to be issued a drivers license without sitting a test. Let's face it your roads are so congested by now that it would take four hours to do a 5 mile driving test anyway.
Last but not least, you'll need bureaucracy. Keep the paperwork for registration, insurance and drivers licenses so complex that it takes forever to become compliant. And when most people are in compliance, introduce new measures such as fire safety inspections for vehicles (at the very least, it will help fund your already bankrupt fire brigade - particularly when they get to pull up vehicles and levy their own 'on the spot fines'). Be creative - after all, it could be your job that is saved by needing huge public service organizations. Best example I've seen yet for creative bureaucracy was getting a drivers license when I had to go to three different locations on three opposite corners of a congested city to get a) a police clearance, b) a license application form, c) eyesight test and then head back to a) for the driving test, then return to b) to have the license issued. Lucky for me the ever helpful public servants at a) and b) accepted cash so I didn't have to go past point b) to have my license issued on the spot. Counting the time taken to drive from the office to their offices and back, this business model of relative efficiency took a mere four hours to negotiate the gridlocked city.

Hopefully these tips will help you, gentle reader, in the event that you should ever become the ruler of a small (or large) near bankrupt nation where over-population is a significant problem.

On a serious note... Sadly, I find all of the above and more systemic issues in way too many places. Sometimes it really does seem as if the nations leaders set out from scratch to create the most dangerous road system in the world. OK, I know it's not easy running a country and I can safely say that I haven't had to try it. It's still a sobering exercise to think about the root causes of the millions of deaths annually on the worlds roads.

A year by any other name

2011-03-05T19:40:00.000Z

If 2010 was my year for living in the flow and being true to my inner voice then I figured I should think about a new moniker for 2011. I could call it '2011' but that's not exactly a unique idea. It's already also been named the "International Year of Forests" and is the 'Year of the Rabbit' but somehow neither of those really grab me at a personal level.

Anyway, for want of a better name I called 2010 the year of being 'authentic'. Maybe that sounds a bit new age but basically it was about doing what I wanted to do and being who I wanted to be (Authentic: “an emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive, and responsible mode of human life”). And I'd say it worked out pretty darn well. I've never had a better year, done more, seen more or travelled further. So all in all, I thought I might try and figure out what I'd work on this year.

Normally my New Years Eve resolution is simply "bigger, better, faster, more..." and I haven't left that behind. Still liking that idea a lot and keeping it as the basis for living but this year can also be the year for learning to listen to my gut.

You know how sometimes we can 'be in two minds about things'. It can be hard to listen to the inner voice of wisdom and really know what you want or who you are. Biologists describe our brain as a triune brain. Their version is basically the mammalian, limbic/reptilian and central nervous system brains. I have a different triune: Head, heart & guts. (Logic, feeling & intuition. AKA: Neocortex, reptilian brain & subconscious). Above all I trust my intuition (when I’m smart enough to listen to it), then logic and lastly feelings.

Not saying feelings aren’t valuable of course or that I completely disregard them (they are terrific for alerting you to an issue or an idea) but I’ve learnt not to make decisions based on them. Logic meanwhile is great at gathering/analyzing data but at the end of the day, the subconscious can process SO much more info than the conscious mind. So... (at the risk of waffling) I am learning to listen to my guts/intuition and have the courage to act on it. All goes well when I do. Things not so well when I don’t listen to my gut. Lots of examples but I'm sure we all have them. The telltale is that 'after the fact' thought that "I knew I shouldn't have done that". That's also where feelings come in. Sometimes you feel bad about something you did (or didn't do) and usually that's the indicator that I didn't listen to my guts. A classic example that too many of us can share is finding your car broken into and thinking to yourself "I knew this dark street wasn't a good place to park but I was in a hurry to...". This year, I'd like to learn to listen to my guts more often BEFORE I park the car in a dark street again lol.

Lessons abound in life - I just need to listen to them. Last years lessons went really well. The more true to myself (authentic) I was, the better life has become :-). This year can be the year of being more in tune or more intuitive (Intuition: "the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning". Methinks this year will be possibly be more challenging because I’ll have to not only tune in to my instincts (hard enough sometimes) but also to actually act on them (the harder bit).

Learning to snowboard...

2011-03-05T18:38:00.000Z

I'm still here in the snowfields of Colorado but the original plan of learning to snowboard this season has bitten the dust. Sadly, I managed with customary grace, to break my ankle in the process. Not so badly that I can claim a medal but still badly enough that I’ll be on crutches for four weeks. On the good side I won't need surgery and it should stimulate my writing - if at the cost of my snowboarding. Still... if this is the worst thing that happens this year it will be a good year.

I'd originally thought it was simply sprained but after four weeks and still limping I got some x-rays done. They were all clear so I continued limping for another two weeks until I got bored with that and did some googling on ankle injuries. Only to find out about a type of ankle fracture that almost never shows up on x-rays but is so prevalent among snowboarders that it is called 'snowboarders ankle'. Turns out that it accounts for less than 1% of reported ankle injuries but in snowboarders, these fractures account for 15% of all ankle injuries... (Clearly I'm not exactly a trendsetter with this one lol).

So off I trotted to get a CT Scan. The CT scan produced over 300 cool images and the fracture is visible in only 3 of them. At least it turns out that I wasn't just malingering. I now know that I have a "fracture involving the medial aspect of the talus". So, the moral of the story is: 'If you have a badly sprained ankle that is taking ages to heal, get a CT scan'.

On a brighter note, I did at least manage to get the basics of snowboarding sorted before I did my ankle. And whilst thinking that my ankle was only sprained I managed to limp around and spend 2 weeks kayaking in Belize, go indoor skydiving and get back into pistol shooting again so I can’t really complain. Meanwhile in between the odd outing to lectures about Shackleton or watching Chinese acrobats do things that I couldn't do with or without ankle injury, I at least have a view out over Lake Dillon and the mountains beyond while I write. A tad frustrating for an outdoor sort of a guy but what can you say...A few weeks on crutches and I should be fine to dance again. Actually I couldn't dance before but you get the general idea...

Luckily the apartment has fabulous central heating – a must for a warm weather guy like me :-)

Another day at Fight Club...

2011-01-11T00:53:00.000Z

Every muscle is aching and the limbs are stiff. Today is unusually cold - it's minus 17 Celsius or about 0 degrees in the old money. The wind-chill on the mountain is taking another 10 to 20 degrees off that. It’s also snowing and the clouds have descended on the misty mountain tops like a dog on a forbidden sofa. Strangely enough through a window, it actually looks like you could walk out in jeans and a long sleeve shirt – until you actually try it that is… Cheeks, noses and tips of ears are all fair game for instant popsicles. As a result, I’m happily sitting indoors today doing some writing instead of being on the mountain.

My aching muscles have nothing to do with the cold though. After 1 gym session, 2 Pilates classes and three days snowboarding in the past few days, I’m feeling pretty good but the muscles unaccustomed of late to so much attention are letting me know about it. Another Pilates class tonight and a snowboarding lesson tomorrow will be great. I’m enjoying getting back to some focus on fitness and health.

To misquote one of my favourite movies: "A guy who came to (Colorado) for the first time, his ass was a wad of cookie dough. After (four months), he was carved out of wood." Looking forward to that carved out of wood end result by the end of four months of this. J

A quick update on an even quicker 10 weeks...

2011-01-10T23:53:00.000Z

I'm in Dillon, Colorado as I write this. After 6 months of planning, capped off by 10 weeks living out of a backpack, I've seen lots of the world but am happy to stop here for 4 months of snowboarding and writing.

Spending Christmas day in a Buddhist country was a pleasant change from the commercial feeding frenzy that goes in in Australia for most of November and December. It was a business day as usual for the Khmer while for us expats a time to catch up quietly with friends in cafes for lunch and evening drinks overlooking the lights of Sisovath Quay.

That pleasantly relaxing Christmas day also made for a nice contrast to the hectic 3 weeks preceding it as I got some dental and medical work done, packed up the apartment, put stuff into storage, spent a day photographing rocks at Angkor Wat and attended a friends engagement to a local khmer lass in Siem Reap.

26DEC10 was cheap airfare day and a good day to fly to Seatlle where we spent 2 days looking around as a bit of a pause before flying into Denver. Landing at Denver airport at 3pm we did what every tourist would do and took a taxi to a used car dealer. After kicking tyres for about an hour we bought a 1993 Jeep Grand Cherokee (Jasper the Jeep) for the princely sum of $3,000 and made Jasper’s maiden voyage to a friends place for the night where we picked up about 200kg of pushbikes and snowboarding kit courtesy of ebay shopping from Tanzania. The sheer quantity of ebay-tastic bargain parcels taking up their spare room would have been embarrassing if I hadn’t had my embarrassment gland surgically removed some years ago. Luckily he's a good friend with a very understanding wife.

The next evening involved driving 5 hours through a blizzard, in the dark, stopping only to buy new windscreen wipers so that I could actually see the road instead of driving by braille. There are, it seems, some mighty HIGH passes, BIG mountains and ICY roads in this part of the world so the investment in a full-time 4WD was definitely worth it. We spent a pleasant 3 nights up at a B&B in Redstone where a friends family gather each year for NYE so with little if any arm-twisting we had a very social time sledding, snowshoe trekking, eating, drinking, laughing and playing games.

On 01JAN11 we headed off to a lakeside apartment which will be basecamp for the next 4 months. A mighty pleasant spot in a small town amongst 3 snowfields with have a view over the lake to snow capped mountains so all is well with the world.

Best of all the heating is included in the rental so even when it goes down to minus 20 outside (as it occasionally does), indoor is toasty warm.

"Don't drive out here at night" he said to the guys - then proceeded to do just that...

2010-11-17T07:09:00.000Z

It's 01:45 in the morning here in Tanzania and I'm sitting in a wooden hut in front of the glow of a laptop. I'm covered in mud and sticky with sweat after a 90 minute conference call. It wasn't the conference call that got me in this state. I was in fact 30 minutes late for this conference call after a 3.5 hour 4WD trip down to the lake that involved roughly 2 hours of de-bogging, winching and digging plus around 1.5 hours driving of actually driving. Conference call was good but the drive was even better. :-)

Today the last charter flight brought in the wet season caretaker so that we can head off on Friday on a 5 day 4WD trip to Dar Es Salaam and eventually Zanzibar for some diving. A couple of hours after Nic got here we had a request to help a women who was in distress during labor and needed a lift down to the medical clinic 20km away by the lake for a helicopter medevac to the nearest hospital. I suggested that Nic go down to the lake to see it before the roads get cut off.

Four hours later at 9pm we'd had dinner and they still weren't back. Pete & I had a bottle of wine under our belt but there's no RBT here and you can't do more than 15km/h anyway so we grabbed the keys to a Landcruiser, the med kit, satphone and a bottle of water. We figured they'd probably got bogged, had a flat or just slid off the road... A great intro to Africa for Nic lol but at least it would convince him of the futility of trying to drive in the wet season. We ended up all the way to Mgambazi down by the lake and that place is dark by night! It's a village of probably 1,000 people but you could scarcely find the glow of a fire at 10 o'clock at night. With nobody around to ask for directions, we got onto the satphone and rang camp. Turns out the vehicle had got bogged on the way down to the lake and decided to go back to camp by another little used track - the logic of leaving a known track for an unknown track that we hadn't used before on a dark and wet night escapes me but either way, that's what they did.

They'd arrived at camp about 20 minutes after we left so two of the guys grabbed the pickup to drive down and let us know. This was nice gesture but no way were they going to catch us and we'd left instructions to come get us if we weren't back by 2330. As it turned out, if they hadn't come for us I would have been back an hour before my conference call (rather than 30 minutes late). Simple stuff but when I had to reverse out of a bog to have another run at it, Valerian (our senior technician) had the landcruiser pickup right up our clacker and proceeded to reverse sideways and get stuck. Long story and 5 or 6 winching/digging attempts later we managed to slip/slide/drive up the by now very chewed up hillside, that the first vehicle had given up on. Just another day of boys own adventure in Africa :-). Can't believe I get paid to do this. Perhaps one day I'll grow up - but I doubt it...

More importantly though, no-one was hurt and although we haven't heard how the mother and baby are doing yet, at least she got to the clinic before sunset, in time to be evacuated to Kigoma by helicopter. Her home is a farm near our camp where in May this year, her husband hanged himself so hopefully her luck has changed and things will be working out well for her in hospital. We'll find out how soon enough via the bush telegraph and are all keen to have things go well for her.

From Machete madness to spotless streets - a complex land...

2010-10-22T06:29:00.002+01:00

I look up from my typing every so often to enjoy the most amazing views. The little Toyota Coaster bus swerves from side to side as it hurtles round hairpin bends, with enough g-force to rotate the screen and keyboard on my iPad. A good reminder if I needed one to stop typing and enjoy the view over this land of a thousand hills. I'm looking out on a green valley surrounded by mountain peaks of massive scale, all impossibly lush. It's hard to believe that only 16 years ago the friendly folk farming the terraces of these steep hillsides were busy chopping each other up with panga's and axes. Reconciliation seems genuine here and they are all getting on with life but the scars must run deep. The war crimes tribunal is still running across the border in Tanzania and many of the perpetrators have fled to other surrounding nations yet I can't help but reflect that many of the people I meet, buy my meals from, or just pass in the street are probably guilty of murder or worse. I struggle to understand how people can behave like that, especially en masse. Frankly I don't want to know, but somehow we need to know and understand such things if we are to be able to act before propaganda, fear and power-mongering repeat such acts in the future.

The Rwandan folk are incredibly friendly, which is not so unique in Africa but what is remarkable is how well the whole country seems to run. Unusually for this part of the world, the place is really well organized. The gorilla trekking, guides and management of Volcanoes National Park were truly world class and that seems to be a reflection of the whole country. In Rwanda, streets are clean. Corruption is low to non-existent. Busses run on time. Infrastructure is in good shape. It's an amazing contrast after 6 months in Tanzania. One of the really cool things that I love about the place is probably summed up in why the streets are so noticeably spotless. The leadership decided early on that even if they had no money for infrastructure, one of the things they could achieve at zero cost was to keep the place clean. So, one Sunday of every month, the people from the President on down, including mayors, farmers, business people and kids all get out and pick up rubbish. What a great thing to do! So simple yet it makes a huge difference to not only the appearance of the place but I'm sure also the culture.

It's been great to have a chance to visit Rwanda, not to mention to enjoy the fresh food and great cafes of Kigali but more adventures await. We're back on a plane again tomorrow back to Tanzania for a bit of a hike to the 'roof of Africa'. Kilimanjaro here we come...

In the hall of the mountain king...

2010-10-21T20:49:00.002+01:00

My pulse is racing, I'm sweating profusely, oblivious to the hitherto lung busting altitude and in an altered state of complete euphoria. My face muscles will ache later from the huge fixed grin that has been there virtually nonstop for the past 30 minutes. No, I'm not stoned in the Himalayas. I'm...

Right now I'm sitting on a bus in Rwanda catching up on emails and doing a spot of reading (did I mention how great the iPad is for traveling with?) and I still have that huge smile but now it's from my memories of yesterday. We're on the bus back to Kigali after visiting the Susa family in northern Rwanda. The Susa family are no ordinary Rwandan family. They are the largest clan of mountain gorillas in the region a visit with them is quite an experience. Its difficult to describe how emotional an experience it is. I mean, really, they are just big apes right and we've all seen them on television many times. But somehow being in the wild alongside these massive (really massive) but gentle and friendly primates is a very moving experience. It's a rare treat to see them at all, let alone see 20 in as many metres and get within arms length of them. Between the three of us we rattled off 1,000 photos and short videos in an all too short 60 minutes.

If you'd like to see a few of those 1,000+ photos then here is the place to go. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW7E4Fijxww

It's been a day to remember and one where we were definitely 'living in the flow'. Everything fell into place far better than we could have planned it. Even the torrential tropical thunderstorm held off until we were back in our hotel. The day started at dawn when our hired car picked us up from the hotel to take us up the mountain to check in at the ranger station at 0630 for a well organized briefing and cuppa before the trek. We'd been told by friends to ask to visit the Susa family because they are the biggest, most active and interesting, hence are the best experience for the hour that you get. The Susa group however live the highest up the mountain - often around the 4,000m mark which puts them 4 solid hours trek through the jungle. There is no formal mechanism for applying to get into this group and the guides just pick the people who look fittest and most experienced for the long hike. We figured out that our worn hiking boots and an air of prepared quiet confidence would help us get into that group but in the absence of any other guidance we were sweating on getting picked for this group. Really, really wanted to visit this family. I'm sure we would have had a great time with any family but everyone raves about Mr Susa and his clan. Unbeknownst to us until later that morning, it's the drivers who recommend people to the park guides. The selection had been made 30 minutes before we had agonized over cup re how to wangle a way into the Susa group. So while we were looking around at the many unfit, ill prepared, overweight or jeans with muffin top youngsters and eyeing off our competition amongst the the fit and well equipped, the drivers were in a huddle with the head ranger round the back. Now, we hadn't told our driver that we wanted to see the Susa family so when Fabian grabbed us quietly by the arms and said in a conspiratorial whisper, "I believe you would like to see the Susa family" we were gobsmacked but wasted no time with our equally conspiratorial and barely restrained nods. He then lead us away to where we joined a Canadian/Aussie couple and waited for three people to make up the eight. We still don't know how Fabian knew we wanted to see the Susa's but never felt the need to ask him. Needless to say we did later feel the need to tip him generously.

By this point we had all the proof we cared for that we were in the flow but just in case we were in any doubt, we found out at the pre-trek briefing that once a year the gorillas come down the mountain to eat the fresh bamboo shoots. Apparently the shoots are alcoholic so not only is it their happy, active time of year but they are only an hours hike from the nearest vehicle parking area. We came prepared for 8 hours of hard hiking above 3,000m but in the end after a 40 minute drive and 60 minutes rapid climb from 2,500m to 3,200m that left us gasping in the thin air, we were in the jungle and gasping with joy at the sheer magnificence of these 300kg mammals. Stuart was the first to see a gorilla hidden in the dense undergrowth and Lynne snapped a great shot of his face with an expression that clearly said "WOW" and then it was my turn to walk past this dark hairy mass in the lush undergrowth. We could have watched transfixed for ages as the gorilla just 2m away ignored us and continued eating but Dee, our guide was in radio contact with the trackers and had other ideas. With another minute hiking under the trees, scrambling between vines and bamboo, brushing past stinging nettles and slipping on leaf covered lichen, we emerged into a clearing where 20 gorillas were playing, feeding, grooming, lazing, picking their nose, scratching and generally just doing their thing. They seemed barely interested in us and certainly unfazed. Fromtheir perspective I guess we were just another daily visit and an event that the young ones have never known life without. The big Silverback kept a lazy eye on us to make sure we weren't overstepping our welcome but he was clearly king of the roost and not at all concerned by us. This park borders Uganda and the Congo and where we visit is in the area where Diane Fossey did her research and conservation until she was murdered but her work has gone on with only a couple of years break during the genocide. Its a slick well oiled machine now and a credit to the Rwandan people not to mention a life saver for the last of the mountain gorillas.

We were treated to all sorts of antics as he gorillas went about their day, largely ignoring our presence other than our quiet conversation and regular "wow"s the main noise was from the guide who has a few words of gorilla which he calls out to them to let them know we are coming or to reassure them. You are supposed to stay at least 7m away but it is ok if they come to you. Most of the time we were only 2 or 3m from the nearest and when one of the young males did a mock charge to within a meter it was very cool. Behind us we watched a male build a nest by progressively breaking branches in a cluster of small trees until he had a platform about 3 meters in the air. His raw strength was amazing, as was his casual air as he effortlessly knitted them together. After about 20 minutes of lying in it and posing for the cameras he either got bored and rolled to the edge or decided to come down. I'm still not sure which but with a mighty crash he rolled off and somersaulted backwards, landing with q thud on the grass where we had been standing two minutes earlier. A bit of a shake of his head and he was off into the midst of the grooming, sleeping, playing, scratching clan to feed on the young shoots. We could have watched them for days.

All in all, yesterday was one of my top ten lifetime experiences and a contender for number one (if i could ever pick a number one :-).

Busy times by the lake…

2010-09-26T14:39:00.000+01:00

I’ve been a tad remiss in blog updates lately so (much like the main character in the film Memento) the blog is missing bits of history and being written like a series of short adventures, not necessarily in chronological order. But hey, that’s how my memory works anyway. My tardiness is due to a mixture of work, fun, friends visiting and adventures being had, but after the Serengeti trip then a few big weeks back in camp I’ve found time to scratch myself again - and even to blog a bit.

Meanwhile... Life is going well here in Tanzania. I’m still feeling like I’m herding cats some days but also still living in a ‘boys own adventure’ novel. Lynne is out here now along with a couple of Aussie mates from Cambodia and a team of consulting geos so it’s all very social. Rob & Stu (my mates) are out here to do some metal detecting, gold prospecting and general adventuring. They’ve been out digging up rusty nails left and right but no nuggets yet. There’s definitely lots of gold around though and a couple of areas out here are unknown to the big companies but teeming with artisanal miners. We visited a local prospector/miner who has been raking it in for about seven years. He showed us his mine (complete with 20m shaft, ball mill & sluice) and a few ounces of his gold so we’ve seen lots of gold already (albeit sadly not ours lol).

In the spirit of getting paid to play and the excuse of providing an area induction for a new geologist, we went down to Mgombazi on Lake Tanganyika one Sunday not so long ago. Lynne cycled down while most of the crew travelled by Landcruiser. I took the XR400 which was an absolutely brilliant way to spend an afternoon. Rob, a very experienced offroad driver, came back with the biggest grin after driving there and back, saying “now I can see why you like it here so much”… It’s only 25km but it’s a rough old track which takes 90 mins in a 4WD - or 30 mins on the XR - and all the local guys seemed to think it was too far for a mzungu - especially a mzungu woman! – but Lynne loved the trip down and had a blast despite nearly coming a cropper on a rocky downhill section. With no protection other than a t-shirt and shorts, it would have been a long trip to A&E.

As for Lake Tanganyika - It’s bloody enormous! Longest lake in the world, second deepest and largest by volume of water. Basically you’d be better off thinking of it as a freshwater ocean than a lake and it generates its own weather. The trip turned out to be a great day out, not least of all because we found a bulldozer parked down there which had just cut a new road from Kigoma, the biggest port on the lake and a relative metropolis.

Our Sunday trip and conversations with the locals inspired us to see if the road was actually drivable so the following Friday we set off back down to Mgombazi but kept going north to Kigoma. It’s election year here so a bulldozer has been busy upgrading what used to be a bicycle path for most of its length into a dirt road. It used to take 5 days walk but is now 5 hours drive and it traverses an amazingly beautiful bit of decent coastal track.

We were lucky enough to pull into one village on a hill with perfect timing just as the ferry, a former WW1 German destroyer called MV Liembe was picking up passengers in a bay. A unique boat and quite spectacular - you’ll have seen it if you’ve seen the boat that played the German destroyer in ‘African Queen’.

Another ferry that we found along the way which was less appealing but had to use was the MV Iladala – a floating wreck of a river ferry on the one major river crossing. It was hard to believe it was only 5 years old but the official plaque of commissioning by a local dignitary was dated 2005. As usual, we had to wait for it to zig-zag it’s way across the river to pick us up then for the ragtag crew to position some logs in place of where they had torn off the tip of the loading ramp. The logs weren’t even necessary for us in the Landcruiser but still we had to wait for them to faff around. When the engine started we realised why it zig-zagged across the river… The engine on one side had failed so they navigated by using a mixture of forward and reverse movement on one side. It seemed like the crew had long since become used to this as standard operating practice but even so the landings at each side were hardly a magnificent feat of seamanship.

After a bit of a navigation exercise for the last bit we got into Kigoma and checked out a couple of mzungu hotels which were pretty boring but have now found our favourite accommodation in Tanzania. A guest house with private cottage and camping sites with two private beaches on the crystal clear waters of Lake Tanganyika. We BBQ’d a sunset dinner with cold beer on an huge deck on the hill overlooking a pristine ocean (aka Lake Tanganyika) watching the fishing boats coming out to dot lights across the horizon. All this for $15/person. Beats the $100/night at the mzungu hotels hands down!

The next morning after a late start caused by a lingering brekky on the same deck, we spent a few hours shopping (always an experience of ‘no hurry in Africa’) then drove back to Mibango. The trip with 5 hours of great scenery sure beats the 7 hours drive over bone jarring roads to dusty old Mpanda, which used to be our main supply town (until we discovered this new road to Kigoma). Bonus that there are also commercial flights from Dar so it has potential to cut our travel costs dramatically – at least so we thought that day.

The road was so good in fact that it looked like we would have a new supply town and easy access to flights to Dar Es Salaam. But nothing is that easy in Africa... We had to drive back to Kigoma 6 days later to pick up a technician and equipment that had missed a charter flight only to find that a tiny amount of rain down the track had washed away some of the creek crossings.

We managed to 4WD around 3 massive washaways (just) but had to dig/build/adapt 5 of them including 2 that would have been big enough to swallow the landcruiser, never to be seen again. Luckily there’s always abundant affordable labour at hand but even so two of the washaways took half a dozen of us about 40 minutes eahc to refill with logs and loose dirt enough to make for some interesting 4WD'ing.
If you'd like to see what I mean by interesting 4WD'ing, have a look at this link.

In the end although it was great to get to Kigoma again and to swim in the waters of Lake Tanganyika, I foresee that was our last trip this year.

Herding Cats...

2010-06-07T09:34:00.000+01:00

Two trucks, 4 Landcruisers, 10 Tanzanians and 1 Talbot notionally in charge of this rock show of a 6 day convoy across Tanzanian. Breakdowns, bribes, bad fuel, bad food, bad police, bad roads and big fun… But first before we get to that I’ve been a bit tardy with my blog entries but I’m happy to report that is isn’t lack of adventures to write about. On the contrary, it’s due to being too busy doing stuff worth blogging about to have time to actually blog it but here are a few highlights of a :

A month in Cambodia catching up with good friends including a few who dropped in from Australia including few days in Siem Reap and wandering (also wondering) about Angkor Wat. It’s an enormous, enormous complex that had a million residents when London was a town of 50,000. Mind bogglingly big and fascinating to visit
Also had a pleasant few days in Sihanoukville on the coast and got out to my favourite beach resort to laze in hammocks and swim on a private beach of an island paradise
Shopping and driving the length of the UK to visit relatives in Somerset, dropping into Surrey to start a company in Gibraltar and picnicking at sunset at Lands End
Seven days hiking the Rob Roy Way in Scotland. The original plan was to give a presentation at a conference in Lisbon then hike a few days on the coast of Portugal but the volcanic ash cloud put paid to that idea. RRW was a great alternative though. Stayed at pubs and B&B’s along the way and Scottish pubs would have to be some of the best in the world

As for Tanzania and the convoy to Mibango… Frankly it was like herding cats most days. Sometimes very frustrating but a wonderful adventure. You do your best to make things work out and the military experience definitely helped but most of the time you just have to keep your cool and roll with the punches. Valerian had the quotable quote of the journey when we were chatting about the lack of progress in yet another long queue for yet another accident when he said “If you want progress in Tanzania – you’ll just get hypertension...” So true. After 6 days on the road I’ve learned all sorts of things about myself, life, Tanzania and things that I’d do differently (mostly send someone else lol – just kidding). Long, long days though with 16, 11, 15, 12, 11 and 6 hours on the road respectively including driving through till midnight a couple of times. Not that we’d planned to drive after dark – just the opposite. The first day took till 4pm to get a truck loaded and then 8 hours to cover 200km (don’t ask – the blog isn’t long enough to cover the events and laughs of that day but trust me - if you don’t own a large chunk of patience you’ll find one or burst in Tanzania lol).

And as for the roads… They just got worse & worse every day. Starting with Dar traffic (diabolical) at 15km/h average and ending with 4WD tracks (bone jarring but fun) at 15km/h average speed… In between, Tanzanian roads are dangerous places and especially so at night. Overtaking on blind corners is the standard practice and every km or so there is a pushbike or vehicle without lights popping up out of the darkness as yet another semi-trailer speeds towards you with lights on high beam. In the first 15 hours we saw the remains of 7 truck accidents that wer so recent the wreckage was still fresh. The first was typical - 2 large trucks, 1 car: 5 fatalities. Very messy. It had happened only a minute or two before we arrived on the scene and we waited for 3 hours before we finally drove out past the oncoming queue which was over 10km long and occupying both lanes of a 2 lane highway. It’s a crazy place. Tanzanian traffic is crazy dangerous. Not as chaotic as Cambodia but far more dangerous. I drove the entire 6 days as I trust my driving above most others but it absolutely pays to keep your wits about you. Absolutely. The highways are good in eastern Tanzania but life is cheap and driver training obviously expensive.

Our truck drivers were a law unto themselves - or at least so they thought. A complete pain in the arse frankly. We hired two trucks to transport 5,000 litres of fuel plus startup supplies for the season. One driver in particular always whinging for more money. Too many tales of woe from that eedyit to bore you but no matter how generous we were with him he still wanted more... And more... And more... Trucks were also slow and police cash-points (they call them ‘check points’ - aye... Checking your wallet!) were ridiculously common. Had problems with fuel from Franko the friendly Oilcom man again in Mpanda. I shouldn’t have been surprised really - 3 out of last 3 refuels there have been contaminated, hence why we brought in 5,000 litres of diesel and petrol all the way from Dar. On top of flat tyres, recalcitrant truck drivers, corrupt police and accidents, after filling up on Franko’s fuel, we had to stop every 30 minutes to clean out blocked fuel filters which meant that it took us 9 hours (instead of the usual 3) to drive from Mpanda to Mwese.

We arrived at sunset in time to spend 2 hours unloading which made us waaaaay too late to drive the 4WD tracks to Mibango. They are tough in the daylight but in the dark – not even worth thinking about. Valerian pulled some rabbits out of hats though and we were all housed and fed by 930 that night. Mwese is up high at 1,400m ASL and the skies are crystal clear. So many stars that I was transfixed looking at them. If it wouldn’t have given offence to the homeowner who had generously offered a bedroom, I would have slept outside under their canopy in the cool clear air.

I bought myself an XR400R (dirtbike) from a mate in northern Tanzania and we travelled with it on the back of a pickup for 5 days as far as Mwese. At Mwese we’d already been on dirt roads for 2 days but the track gets even worse so we happily waved goodbye to our whinging truck drivers and their helpers (albeit with their usual demands for more money). We took the bike off the pickup and loaded stuff from one of the trucks in it’s place as well as onto the back of another landcruiser pickup that met us from camp. Making room on the truck was my justification to ride the last 53km through some great tracks with all sorts of terrain. Hills, rocks, mud, ruts, sand, river crossing and fast open sections – you name it, our main supply route has all of it. Took it slowly (at least relatively so) as I wasn’t wearing any armor or bike boots plus had to keep stopping for the convoy and have a 14 minute nap on the track every 15 minutes while waiting for the convoy to catch up lol. We’d already had lots of work done on the tracks so they were in much better condition than the last time I drove them in the wet season but it still took an hour longer than the usual 3 hours it takes.

I had a hoot on the bike though. Took it through one river which was up to the tank and we handled it fine. The last river just a few km from our camp was chest deep though and in full flood. Normally it’s knee deep and placid but at the tall end of the wet season – not so. Hence we loaded the bike onto the local ferry (a dugout canoe) but after 10 minutes of trying to balance it across the canoe, the whole thing looked likely to end in tears if the canoe actually left the bank. Eventually we decided the smart move was to unload a pickup at camp and send it back to ferry the bike across the river on the back of the 4WD. About 10 of the locals & staff came back from camp with the pickup to say hi and to watch the spectacle - and to help, so it turned into the usual gaggle of good clean fun. I rode the last 5km to camp from the river and gave it a good fang which was fun, fun, fun :-) Took it for another wee blat the following day to check the airstrip and am loving every minute on it. I’ll find an excuse every day to get on it including mapping some tracks and doing my visits to the flycamps.

Last Sunday I took the bike down to Lake Tanganyika (about 25km away). Some of the guys wanted to go down to pick up some fresh fish so we had 2 4WD’s and the new expat geo came along on the camp’s XL125. He’d just spent a year motorbiking India so was good company for a fellow bike nut and we had a ball. There was even actually a work related reason for the trip. We went down to buy some fish for the camp, check and the repair the track and do some driver training as well as area familiarization for our newcomers. Lokoma is out nearest point on Lake Tanganyika and is a stopping point for the MV Liembe ferry which is (among other places) the quickest way to Kigoma, the capital of our district. The catch is that the ferry only runs once per fortnight and is often chartered for weeks at a time by the UN to run refugees across the lake from whichever neighbouring country is most in need. Apparently it’s a great trip to do and in a past life it was a World War I German warship. The Germans carted it in pieces, rebuilt it and then sunk it at the end the war. The British refloated it and it’s been basically in service ever since. Michael Palin reckoned it was a highlight so that’s good enough for me even if I don’t have a film crew to carry my bags lol.

We’ve decided that every second Sunday will be ‘adventurous training’ as a kind of ‘day off’ but also to practice casevac, winching, mapping, driving, etc, etc. Us expats are gradually learning Swahili as well and basically living the dream in boys own adventure land :-)

Just as an aside, after I bought the bike I got our local fix-it man in Dar to transfer the rego but the hilarious part is that the Tanzanian Revenue Authority need me to have 3 names. I only have two. So Gerald took the initiative and gave them three names for their records. The bike is now registered in the name of “Julian Talbot Tim” lol lol. Just gotta laugh sometimes.

Picking the bike up from the truck that brought it down to Dar was also another great yarn. The nearest that the semi trailer could get to our offices was a few km away so I had to go collect it from a service station at an interchange. John, the guy who escorted it down for my mate almost wiped out a crowd of bystanders in spectacular fashion that morning before I’d even ridden it. It’s probably not really funny but no one got hurt and I’m still cracking myself laughing at the memory of it. I brought our medic with me to drive the car back from Ubungo but he seemed a bit averse to driving and said he’d prefer to ride the bike so I thought to myself “why not?” When he got on the bike though and had to say “so this is the clutch?” and “is this the brake?” the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. Bear in mind that the XR400 is an absolute beast of an enduro bike. Big, powerful and fast. When Bernard had stalled it 3 times just trying to get 20m to the fuel bowser I decided that I’d be riding the bike and he’d be driving no matter how he felt nor how bad he was at driving. Meanwhile John had jumped on to restart the bike and decided to ride it over to the bowser. Well....... He let the clutch out with a bang and promptly endo’d the bike in spectacular fashion, landed it upside down, clipping a couple of the bystanders who’d gathered to watch the mzungu and 2 locals faffing with the bike. Another 15 of us leapt for our lives as he managed to keep hold of the handlebars and with it still running, bounced the back tyre off a huge metal sign which sent a few more people flying for cover as he did a perfect 360 donut before he pulled the clutch in and brought it to a halt. Quite spectacular really and very impressive if he’d meant to do it. Lol lol. Anyway, no-one was hurt and the bike is fine. I think he was a bit shaken but kept it together well. The crowd loved it anyway.

Meanwhile we're sitting in the senior mess as I write this. We've just finished dinner and I’m writing this as the sounds of the night and the quiet hum of the generator provide background to animated discussion at the table. I’m being rude and finishing this blog so my colleague Tim Sharp (senior geo) piped up that I should write that he “thinks MapInfo is a piece of shit and is about to put a geologists hammer through his laptop” so just for you Tim – as requested. Tim’s actually a pretty placid guy and he said it with a laugh. Just one more thing that takes longer than you’d otherwise expect. TIA (This Is Africa) after all. Tim is typically more interested in looking at rocks of sampling fine red wine than messing with IT stuff but he’s spent the afternoon wrestling with a (still unresolved) ‘undocumented feature’ of MapInfo so perhaps some residual frustration from the day on the computer showing through. Good glass of red cured that pretty quick though.

Matthias who was our cook last year is now a geo-technician this season so we’ve got a new cook (Laurencia) who used to cook at Mahale National Park and she’s a fundi for cooking mzungu food. Peter the new geo is expecting an email from his mother any day now with her best banana cake recipe so the great food is probably only going to get better. Pete is a pom (a good bloke though so we don’t hold that against him) and has been going crazy this afternoon trying to set up the pay-for-view satellite television system so that we (he especially) can watch the World Cup when it starts tomorrow – but it’s no simple task and I could write a blog entry about his escapades today alone. Hilarious and frustrating. A comedy of errors and his ‘helpers’ have been helping him to make the job harder lol.
Setting up the camp has been an all consuming task for most of us and 5 of us have been down with malaria this week, myself included. It’s no fun but luckily 3 days of tablets and some long nights sleep has sorted it out. We’ve also been doing lots of training including first aid and driver training especially. I’ve been labelled a fundi camba (rope expert) for my knot tying lessons just for showing the guys the figure 8 and truckies knot. Basic stuff but lots of fun. They freaked out at first when I got them to tie the knots blindfold but we had a good laugh and everyone managed to do them blindfold – just as well coz late at night in the African bush on the side of a hill having to tighten down a loose load without a torch is not that far fetched a scenario. Doing river crossings and handbrake starts on a steep hill near camp was another fun day so despite the long hours and challenging training we’re having fun.

We’re off on Tuesday to scout out some flycamp locations nearby which will mean a night out camping in the scrub which we’re all looking forward to. Fireside chats and jaffles for dinner after a long day hiking up and down hills ‘kicking rocks’ (a technical term for what geologists do), scouting tracks and picking a location for a 2 month flycamp base for soil sampling later this month. Should be another fun day out…

Lot’s more to write in due course but I have to save some stuff to write for later.

Travelling light and... buying the right pack

2010-03-30T08:02:00.000+01:00

I bought a North Face pack here in Phnom Penh last year. It’s not a ‘real’ North Face of course but it’s a pretty decent copy with lots of features and the latest aircell frame for ventilation. It worked well and I’m still using it but by the end of 4 months in Africa the frame was poking out through the seams. Despite getting it sewn up at the local tailor back here in Phnom Penh, the writing is on the wall and the tear is still slowly getting worse. Can't say I blame it as I’ve lugged it through some tough going and to be fair, it was only $10.

In the end though, you get what you pay for. I was using my 25 year old Karrimor pack the other day to carry groceries back from the supermarket and reflected on the value of buying quality. This pack is looking a bit tired now and is a bit frayed around the edges so not really up to 24/7 travel usage but is still going strong for day to day stuff. It has a tiny tear at the strap seams which I put on there last year when I used it for a month as my only bag and loaded it up with 15kg to travel for a month through Asia, US and Australia. The tear is probably my fault because I prefer travelling with only carry-on luggage so was swinging it around ultra-casually in front of the airline check-in clerks to make it look like it weighed more like 7 kg than the 17kg it actually weighed. I used to wonder about the strength of the overhead lockers in planes but now I know – they are plenty strong lol.

You may be wondering how I manage to avoid having the bag weighed and having to put it into the hold... Well, I did get caught out many years ago but since then I have perfected the craft with a sentence. "You're welcome to weigh the bag but most of the contents are going to be handed over to a friend who is meeting me here a the airport." And if in transit in the secure area "I'm meeting a colleague on flight XYZ to give him back his laptop and some documents" (having glanced at the arrivals board on the way to the transit desk). They know you're lying of course but not much that they can do about it (but shhhhh... don't tell anyone else this trick OK?).

At any rate, it’s become apparent from comparing my original Karrimor to my North Face pack from the Russian Markets in Phnom Penh that spending $100 on a pack that lasts 25 years is better value than $10 on a pack that lasts 6 months. Hence I’ve going searching for a replacement quality day pack to use as my primary travel bag. And I think I’ve found it. The Osprey Atmos 35.
http://www.outdoorsmagic.com/product-reviews/osprey-atmos-35---first-look/3088.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcWliHvL1no

I’ve been a fan of Osprey packs for a while now and my number one hiking pack is an Osprey Aether that I bought new on eBay a few years ago. There are a number (a small number) of companies that make truly high quality packs but none better (IMHO) than Osprey. Hence when the time came to go looking for a travel pack I went back to eBay. I woke up this morning to find that I’d been the highest bidder on a secondhand one in mint condition. GBP70 delivered which is about 20 quid cheaper than I could get one delivered new from the US or UK so I’m pretty happy with that. I’ll report back later with a field report when I’ve had a chance to load it with 20kg and put it into an overhead locker somewhere.

The Atmos is a worthy successor to the Karrimor but in many respects they are chalk and cheese. The Osprey is a state of the art lightweight daypack with a fabulous frame and lots of features. The Karrimor is an ultralight nylon sack with 3 outside pockets and two basic shoulder straps. Years ago I replaced the original frame by cutting down and folding over a foam sleeping pad which made for a great backing and gave me an insulated sleeping mat in emergencies. I love how simple and light the Karrimor is but I can also appreciate the benefits of a decent harness and some extra features.

In terms of travelling light, I think I can pretty much claim to have got the hang of it. I can travel now indefinitely with just carry on luggage and in any climates. The blue bag in the second picture is my Karrimor in Bangkok airport at the end of a month of travel. Even with laptop, camera, business suit and four changes of clothes that was all I carried for the month. The camera case is there beside it for comparison. The size of bag is pretty typical of how it was for most of the trip with the camera case inside but when the picture was taken I’d stocked up on nuts and seeds to bring back to Cambodia so although it fitted inside OK, I was was carrying the camera separately.

So what do I carry in a bag that size?

Toiletries in a plastic ziplock bag including sample size toothpaste tube which I refill and a 20ml bottle of shaving oil (which works better than shave cream and only needs 2 or 3 drops
Business suit
2 x business shirts
2 x ties
Columbia zip off trousers (‘Titanium’ range - perfect for travel as it dries in hotel bathroom overnight)
Columbia longsleeve shirt (Titanium)
Shorts
hat
Walking sandals or running shoes
2 x polo shirts
thermal t-shirt
thermal pants
thermal longsleeve t-shirt
ultralight down jacket
Goretex paclite raincoat
15” Macbook, cables, powersupply, gadets, ipod etc
Canon 5D MkII camera
4 x socks
Book(s)

Jeans, cotton business shirt and black elastic sided riding boots (which go with suit or jeans) are the standard travel attire. If I left out the suit, laptop and DSLR camera the load comes down to well under 10kg but frankly I’d rather leave spare clothes behind than travel without the MacBook & the 5D.
I often carry less than that and could write more on this but a guy called Tynan has already done a great job. His list isn’t exactly how I’d go but it’s got some great ideas http://tynan.net/the-gear-of-life-nomadic

The suit I happily leave behind whenever I can. In fact, I usually avoid ‘urban camouflage’ at all costs. Not that they are uncomfortable – on the contrary they are very comfy but all that dry cleaning and pressing is not for us nomads. I was at Phnom Penh airport recently waiting for friends to disembark and watching businessmen getting off the plane wearing suits into 35 degrees and 100% humidity. It could be just my biases and maybe they are happy as Larry but I felt sorry for them. Frankly, if you had any other option at all, would you choose to fly into Phnom Penh in a suit? Perhaps they had good reason but in any case I somehow had to wonder if they were trapped by their jobs or even just their own lack of imagination. A bit like me thinking that I need to wear suits to give a presentation eh? I guess I just need to work on my limiting beliefs a little more :-)

Back in the Penh...

2010-03-10T01:41:00.000Z

The sun’s coming up over a Phnom Penh skyline and the sounds of the city are starting to stir. Soon the noise of beeping horns and traffic will become constant background but in the early morning light the air is cool, clean and relatively quiet. It’s my favourite time of day and somehow restful to gaze out over the skyline from my bedroom window. I scratch and yawn with arms outstretched as I look down on a few passing pushbikes and a scooter crossing the intersection down the street. Other than a security guard outside a building site and an old woman sweeping in front of her shop, the street is deserted. That's not uncommon at this time of day but is such a contrast to what I know is coming.

I walked for miles yesterday just exploring some new streets on the way to a couple of coffee shops that friends had recommended. I like working from coffee shops and luckily for me, Phnom Penh has an abundance to choose from. My local is only 150m from my apartment but peregrinating is my favourite way to traverse this bustling but relatively small Asian city. The search for great coffee and new places to do some writing is my pretext to explore and get a bit of exercise. With only 2 million people, the streets of Phnom Penh are busy but unlike Bangkok and Jakarta with 20 million occupants, this place is still pedestrian friendly. Not that you’d want to take anything for granted here. The traffic comes at you from all directions and is probably the most chaotic, least organised and self-regulated I've come across anywhere.

Motos, bicycles, cars and rickshaws move in both directions on both sides of the road. And I mean that literally. For all intents and purposes there are no road rules. Most traffic drives on the left hand side of the road but by no means all of it. You drive on whichever side of the road suits your purpose at the time. Stepping off the pavement to cross a road or get around the frequent obstructions requires looking in both direction before you put so much as a single foot into the road. Failure to do so has a high likelihood of leading directly to a hospital visit.

So far as I can tell after my months in the Penh, there are only two rules for driving or walking in this city. Rule number one: maintain situational awareness and eternal vigilance whether driving or on foot. Rule number two is probably the most important rule however: be predictable.   You could (I suspect) walk blindfold in complete safety throughout the streets of this city crossing roads at random so long as you follow rule number two. If you step out in a predictable steady fashion and don’t make any sudden changes in speed or direction, the traffic will adjust and flow around you. As simple as that.

Rule number two is what enables traffic to flow in this city, and flow is the operative word. If you study an intersection for any length of time, you’ll see the vehicles flowing around each other like leaves floating around rocks in a river. Effortlessly and with rare pause. Not that this is a silver bullet for survival here. Rule number one is important also. I’ve seen more than a few accidents, bingles and injuries on the road. Occasionally scooter vs scooter or scooter vs pedestrian but more typically scooter vs car. Sometimes, as happened to a friend who forgot rule 1 recently, you’ll be unseen by a car driver (who can more safely disregard rules 1 & 2) until they hit you. In my friends case, the driver was either wealthy or well-connected enough to not feel the need to get out of the car after knocking her off her scooter. The driver did at least drive around her rather than over her but such is the absence of rules 3 or higher including details such as stopping at the scene of an accident...

Cambodia isn't all motor traffic accidents and great cafe's though. Life is pretty easy here for an expat. In the first 24 hours I caught up with 3 friends, made up for lack of sleep after 27 hours in airports and planes, and revisited some favourite haunts. Last night was a pleasantly and typically relaxing evening after churning through some emails and taxation matters during the day at Gasolina cafe. 'Hurt Locker' DVD: USD$1.60, vegetable thali delivered to my door: USD$3.50, 2 glasses of Penfolds CabSav: $4.50. Quiet evening at home: Priceless... :-)

A great town called Glasgow...

2010-02-23T20:31:00.000Z

I’m sitting in a great little café in Glasgow called ‘Where the Monkey Sleeps’. It’s an appropriate name given the brass monkey weather outside and I’m enjoying a respite from the chill (cold today even by Glasgow standards) wind outside with a great coffee to the tune of classic Led Zeppelin pumping out nice and LOUD. I’m listening at the moment to “When the Levy Breaks” and it’s reminding me how much I love and miss LedZep. This basement café comprises an eclectic but welcoming mix of nooks, crannies, armchairs and vivid album art wall coverings. Grace Jones, Parliament, Talking Heads, Iron Maiden and a hundred other record jackets stare down at me like reminders of a bygone era, asking why we have forsaken the great music of the LP era.

It’s such a contrast from last week in 35 degrees in Dar Es Salaam. Scotland is having an unusually cold winter and although I’ve missed the worst of the snow and sleet, the hills around are still snow capped and it struggles to push much past zero degrees each day. Fortunately it’s mostly sunny which makes the chill surrounds quite beautiful and I’ve enjoyed a bit of hiking in the hills near Perth and the coastline of Carnoustie so far. Scotland is such a mix of urban sprawl, rolling hills, farmlets and ancient villages that it defies summary. The urban sprawl has it’s own problems and is hardly beautiful but you can’t help but fall in love with the countryside and hamlets here. It’s especially seductive on a sunny day but I’m not fooled into thinking (however much I might like to) that it is always like this.

I’ve been meaning to write about my 5 days in Serengeti, Ngorogoro Crater and Lake Manyara but it’s been OBE’d (Overtaken By Events). Suffice to say it was brilliant! I spent 5 days in a modified Landcruiser Troopcarrier standing up through holes in the roof like the turret of a tank. I had been thinking of just driving through the parks myself but you see and understand so much more with a professional guide. African Scenic Safaris (www.africanscenicsafaris.com) were great and I’d give them a big thumbs up if you’re looking for a great way to see the Serengeti. It can be pretty full on experience though. Who would think it could be exhausting each day just sitting in a 4WD but the 5 of us (plus driver/guide and cook) managed to collapse into our tents exhausted each night after our pre-dawn starts and sunset finishes. The entire trip was great but highlights in particular included:

dawn balloon ride spotting animals from the air drifting 50 feet above the vast, vast plains of the Serengeti
sunset over the Serengeti and sunrise over Ngorogoro
seeing the sheer abundance, density and diversity of animal life in the region
watching Wildebeest being born
being mesmerized for ages just watching lions and cheetah hunting
seeing lion cubs suckling beside our vehicle

Biggest highlight for me though was being alone on foot with a 5 tonne bull elephant at the Ngorogoro Crater campsite. After watching him skirt the campsite for a while, eating his way through a swath of vegetation just outside the campground I wandered down about 40m past where the sensible people had propped to photograph him and positioned myself where he’d have to walk by. He ambled along to about 20m away and we held eye contact for 5 minutes or more which was amazing! One of those moments like motorcycling or abseiling. Words fail me but the feeling is something like being suddenly reminded of what it means to be truly alive and present in the moment.

Elephants I’m told will tell you when they don’t want you any closer. Apparently the body language starts with ear flapping, goes on to trunk raising, moves through trumpeting and a 45 km/h gallop, before ending (should you still be stupid enough to be within range) with you being trampled into pink squishy mush. As you can imagine, I was paying particular attention to the body language of my newfound friend but to be honest it was pure conjecture on my part. I’ve learned in life though to trust my instincts and they were saying that I could have gotten much closer, perhaps to 5m even. I was sorely tempted to do so and the internal debate raged. In the end I reflected that if Anton Turner, a professional guide, armed with 15 years experience and a high velocity rifle, could be tragically killed by a bull elephant the week before I was due to meet him then it would be a good risk management decision for this unarmed biped with precisely zero experience to exercise caution. Hence, after 10 minutes I moved back to our campsite with a huge, huge grin, some amazing photos and a determination to learn more about elephants in order to do it again. It was a rush that left me feeling very tranquil but also very alive! A special moment in life and my personal highlight of many highlights.

Since then I’ve spent a few days in Dar, swimming and planning for next season in Tanzania. I managed to get pulled over and ticketed by police for the first time in Tanzania just a few hours before the end of my 6 day drive. Strangely enough, I was pulled over again for the second time in Tanzania about 10 minutes later. The fee for not having a registration certificate with me was 20,000 TSH (~USD$15) for which I demanded a receipt and duly received one. The second time I was stopped, I was offered the choice of paying 40,000 TSH “with receipt” or “20,000 without receipt”. Seems like you can in fact negotiate it down to 10,000 and a bag of cashews if you don’t need a receipt though. So it goes in Tanzania and much of the world I guess. When in Rome...

I’ve been in Scotland for 5 days now and the cold weather is a huge difference but the least of the differences from my past few months in Tanzania. One of the things that I love about travel is that vague confusion that comes from frequent changes of location - waking up in the morning to different lands, environments, accents, languages, weather, cuisine, culture and more. The slight disorientation, vague and subtle though it is, somehow pleasantly frees you to see the world (and yourself) anew again. Eventually it fades as you get used to your surroundings but I’m enjoying it while it lasts. In a moment I'll savour the experience of soaking in the sights and sounds of Glasgow as I head back to the train station along the darkening streets at sunset.

A night in Moshi...

2010-02-06T10:44:00.000Z

It’s 1130 am and I’ve just finished breakfast in the rather pleasant Kili-Java coffee house after getting back to the hotel around 0300. I made short work of the rather tasty omelet but am still enjoying the coffee while I write this.

Yesterday was an altogether busy but social and serendipitous day. Serendipity ( the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way) is fast becoming one of my favorite words and definitely a preferred lifestyle choice. Synchronicity is another favorite word (the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection) and my life seems to be increasingly one of serendipitous, synchronous peregrinations. This is after all, what I wanted from life so I’m more than happy to live such a life. Living ‘in the flow’ is perhaps how the Taoists would put it.

I started out yesterday with best intentions of doing some work on my book and getting the front end on the Landcruiser looked at (it still has a nasty vibration in the 50 to 60km/h range) but somehow got sidetracked. Did some meditation and exercise in the morning which is always a good way to start the day then drove the 10 mins into town for a café breakfast in the garden courtyard out behind “The Coffee Shop”. I actually did a bunch of writing and emails (albeit unsent as there is no wireless there) before I got talking with a pommy guy who’d just come back from hiking Kilimanjaro and his local mate. He’s ex-navy and makes his living as a photographer so apart from the connection there, I also picked his brains about Kili. He’s set himself the goal to do the seven summits, something which I have to admit is of more than passing interest to me. Heck I’ve already bagged one summit – Mt Kosciusko in Australia. I’m chuckling at this because in case you didn’t know, Kosi is a day walk and despite being the highest summit in Australia it is a mere hill at 2,200m and not at all in the same league as Mt Kilimanjaro which at 5,900m is a week long trek – and I might add, probably the easiest of the summits after Kosciusko. He was off to do Mt Meru in a few days and it sounds like it’s an even nicer trek than Kili as it has lots of wildlife. It also sounds like the perfect way to get some altitude acclimation before Kili so I might build that into the Kili itinerary as a precursor in October. Stay tuned.

As we were chatting another mate turned up. I say, mate, but we’d never met till yesterday. He’s an Aussie guy working in Moshi and is a friend of a friend so we’d swapped a couple of emails and were going to meet up that evening for a drink at the local waterhole. He’d just walked into the Coffee Shop for a spot of lunch and picked me straightaway. He reckoned that he can pick an Aussie a mile away but I’m somehow thinking it may have had something to do with my picture being on my website. Anyway the three of us (the local guy had headed off by then) had a longish chat about pretty much everything, not least of all motorcycles as we all own bikes and the topic can be extended into hours of entertaining chat for us addicts.

Eventually we all headed off and I downloaded/uploaded emails in the internet shop next door. I had planned to go catch up with a couple of American Jehovah’s Witnesses in another café where they were meeting some people at 3pm. I’d been chatting with them in the Kili-Java the day before. Yep, I’ll chat to anyone - and clearly so will they. Apparently despite large numbers of mzungus in Moshi, there are no decent bookshops here for English language books and I’d asked them what they did for light reading as they’ve been here for seven months. Turns out they had plenty of spares and one of the lasses offered to bring a couple along to meeting they were going to in another café the next day if I wanted to drop by. Sadly, I got there a bit late when an article I was emailing to a mate took forever to complete and they were gone. Moshi is a small place though so perhaps I’ll run into them again but either way it’s just another example of the kindnesses of strangers.

I did some more writing, had a haircut, wandered around the tarmac streets of Moshi (definitely not used to tarmac anymore – 298 out of the last 300 towns I’ve been through recently have been more like sets from Deadwood than anything else) and then headed off to ‘The Waterhole’ at 6 to meet my Aussie friend-of-a-friend. We’ll call him Bruce in order to protect the guilty (everyone knows all Aussies are called Bruce anyway). ‘The Waterhole’ is a great pub and his directions were spot on but you’d never find the place without directions. It’s about 2 km out of town on the highway then down a dirt road and is surrounded by 8 foot high masonry perimeter fence that seems to run for a couple of hundred metres. The only ‘signs’ are blue lights on the gate posts. Following Bruce’s directions I pull up at the gate. No-one comes out so I honk the horn. A bloke soon turns up and not recognizing me, comes out to see what I wanted. About this time, I’m wondering if I’ve got the directions wrong and have pulled up at a bikie-den, prison or drug-dealers hangout but no, turns out that yes it is ‘The Waterhole’ and yes, it does sell beer. Perhaps it’s an illegal speakeasy that sells beer without licensed or they’ve had troubles with armed holdups? Too late to back out now and the watchman opens a pair of gates that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Dracula movie and I ‘park to the left’. I’m the first one here but it’s a great place to chill on the verandah with the river babbling below about 20 feet down the slope. I order a beer and pull out my laptop to do some writing but have hardly started when Bruce, his Canadian wife and infant son arrive. Over the evening a few more of their friends arrive and I learn more and more about Tanzania, Africa and generally have fun chatting to a bunch of expats and locals. It’s the 40th birthday of the guy who runs the place and I end up talking with him for a while also. He’s an interesting chap. Born here from a Tanzanian mum and German father, he grew up in a village and now runs the waterhole, safari tours, dirtbike trips and hunting trips. The Waterhole is incognito because he wants to keep it a bit exclusive at least in terms of being family friendly and not having the vibe shaped by obnoxious drunks or bar-girls as is common at many bars in Africa.

I get talking to him about his other businesses including the big-game hunting. I enjoy shooting targets as a skill but wouldn’t shoot animals unless I needed to eat them. I just don’t get the need that some people have to come to Africa and put a bullet into buffalo, elephants or lions but already know enough about the setup in Tanzania to realise that the hunting benefits the place enormously. Companies with hunting licenses pay huge bounties to the government for annual permits with specific numbers of specific animals which they can cull each year and I’ve been surprised to find out that the more I find out about this business the more I support it. Shoshi tells me a bit more about how it works. He’s well used to hearing complaints from urban dwelling tree-huggers about his killing animals but tells me that over the years he has come to the conclusion that without the hunting, there would be far less animals. Each hunting operation is required to provide anti-poaching patrols and a government ranger goes out with them to make the arrests. It’s dangerous work and most of his vehicles have been machine-gunned or at least shot up at some point or another. The poachers can net about $4,000 from the meat of a single giraffe and in a country where the daily wage is about $3 to $10, that is a big, big incentive. Apparently poaching is every bit as big a business as you’d expect and the benefit from someone who flies out to pay between $5,000 and $50,000 to shoot an animal is far reaching. One of the things that I’m learning to realise is that companies such as his operation not only protect the bulk of the wildlife but invest heavily in community support and wildlife conservation. In many respects being more effective than the government and a lot of NGO’s. On a recent project for example, they spent $42,000 to build a school for a village. Hunting big-game is only an ethical dilemma for about 10 seconds when you consider that if a couple of already aged animals have to die to provide education, jobs and infrastructure to help the community and protect the rest of the wildlife it is overall a good thing.

I also get chatting to an American couple out here for a few months. He is a Landrover fundi and she is a dermatologist so by and by, I tell her about Shela, teh lass we sent to Dar to get treated for a skin condition. The doctors there don’t seem to have any real idea so I loosely organise to send Shela up to Moshi if we can wangle it. Finding a US trained dermatologist in Africa is a rare and serendipitous thing so an opportunity not to be ignored. Her hubby and the bar owner meanwhile give me the heads up on the best tyres and shock absorbers available in Tanzania. The landcruiser needs a full service including tyres and shocks next week so meeting them is another happy accident.

It’s getting on and people are starting to leave. By now I’m chatting with a bunch of people including some locally born Pakistanis and Indians. They are a hoot and some great conversations flow. I get persuaded to relocate with the group to another place called the ‘Glacier Café’. Waterhole is apparently unusually quiet tonight with only about 15 people there so when half of us leave it must have become a very quiet place. Glacier is the opposite. It’s a big outdoor garden pub closer to town and there are about 100 people there. I didn’t meet any in person but at the Glacier Café, Bruce pointed out a group of about 20 people sitting in a circle in plastic chairs like a séance circle who have all paid to come volunteer in Africa. They pay $4,000 each to come out to Moshi to do volunteer stuff for a month(?). Interesting concept and apparently it’s quite common. I don’t think it would work for me. They pay $4,000 and still have an 11pm curfew every night – which means they must be getting ready to leave not long after we arrive. From what I hear there is also a local mafia of people and businesses skimming that $4,000. Not sure if it is extra or included but apparently the volunteers (is it still volunteering if you are paying for the privilege?) are paying 22 Euros per night to share a 4 person dorm room (even in Moshi the going rate should be about 5 Euros for a dorm bed). I only have this on hearsay and will check out my facts but am not surprised at all if it’s true. My thinking, personally is that anyone who really, really wanted to make a difference in Africa should take that $4,000 to a remote village and put in a bore, small solar power system and some educational materials. There are probably 20,000 little villages in Tanzania which have none of those things. Moshi by contrast is a veritable New York in terms of infrastructure and education. Still, to each their own and better that they come than not at all. As in Cambodia, there seem to be 2 stratas of aid workers. Starry-eyed 22 year olds who have all the answer and are going to change the world in 6 months. If they are still around in a few years, they inevitably turn into the other type. This latter group of people still work hard to make a difference but accept that the system is immensely flawed, that they may make only a tiny difference and have no illusions about the issues but overall somehow manage to retain their sense of humor, do their best and manage to keep their sanity while living and working in some of the toughest conditions for years on end.

More arm twisting starts happening and around midnight I’m convinced by the main ringleader (a jovial and pleasantly dodgy Pakistani guy) that we should all go to “The Pub”. There are no road rules regarding drink driving, much less seatbelts or passengers in the back of the tray but by this time, I’m drinking water. More talking, laughing and even some dancing ensues with lots’ of laughs and some interesting insights into Tanzanian culture at the pub. Each place is even more ‘local’ in character and by this time there are perhaps 5 mzungus and 90 locals scattered throughout the 3 or 4 areas of the pub. The music is pretty dreadful 90’s hip-hop club music but everyone’s having fun and it’s just background noise really. Moshi is well cemented by now as my favourite town in Tanzania. It’s a pretty happy sort of place by day and by night.

I’m lugging my backpack around all night and couple of people suggest leaving it at the bar but I explain that it has laptop, camera, passport and credit cards in there. They not unreasonably ask me “why did I bring them out at 2am?” and I can only answer that I’d been to the bank, been doing some writing and taking photos during the day. My Aussie mate, said we’d be out for a drink at the waterhole at 6pm then it would be an early night as he had a young son. His wife, did in fact head off with his son at 7:30 and he headed off around 11:30 but as I’m learning, you need to stay flexible in Africa...

Bush days and Mibango nights...

2010-02-04T10:38:00.000Z

Well, I’m out of Mibango now and upon reflecting on my three months there, can say it was challenging sometimes but overall a great experience. Although it was a bit isolated and even lonely at times, that in itself was character building and good for me in lots of ways, not least of all to get to know myself a bit better. I did lots of writing and although mostly on Skype, I also started a couple of books and am 3/4 of the way through to final draft on the main one. Having complete control over my day (apart from breakdown repairs to gensets, pumps or internet) I got into a regular exercise routine plus did a bit of a detox program with January being free of alcohol, caffeine, sugar and anything remotely junky. I was making great vegie and bean soups and curries, plus enjoying breakfasts of one of the best muesli’s that I’ve come across in a long time. It did get a bit monotonous, inventing different meals based on the same ingredients every day and it’s not the perfect diet I’d have to add as I’m cooking tinned food in aluminum saucepans over a kerosene stove but all in all, not bad. Definitely no pollution from traffic, off-gassing plastics or air-conditioned recycled air, etc that we accept as part of in our lives normally so on balance a good detox. And I brought my belt in two notches which is a good thing plus toned up in general so all in all, a darn good place to go for a fitness camp experience.

I’ve also read some great biographies about Africa from the small library there plus some fiction and technical risk books (research for my books). Between writing, reading, watching occasional movies on my laptop, and troubleshooting the electrical or mechanical stuff here the 95 or so days passed pretty quickly.

I’ve also become a fan of www.ted.com (“ideas worth spreading”) which has great 10 minute presentations which I often watch while preparing or eating dinners. Can’t wait to get to some decent bandwidth internet where I’ll be able to watch them in real time rather than keep pausing them…

Also had lot’s of 'boys own adventure' hiking, 4WD’ing and even playing a little on the mighty XL125 dirtbike. The wet season was pretty limiting in terms of how far you could go really and I can see why the pushbike is the preferred form of transport. Early on in the piece I went on a ‘shopping trip’ to see if we could buy some fresh produce (eggs, mangoes, bananas etc). In the dry season there are 25 of us here and the locals come to the gate twice a week to sell their home grown vegies etc. With only 4 of us here during the wet season their visits become more random events, unpredictable in both timing and selection. And I can understand why. In the wet season, it is a 4 hour round trip walk plus a canoe ferry across the river to sell a bucket full of goods to 4 people. Their produce can be a bit erratic at this time of year and it’s rare to have enough eggs, mangoes, spinach, etc all available at the one time to make it worth the round trip.

At one point, after 9 days without a visitation from the local farmers, I decided to head out with an esky and some Tanzanian Shillings to see what I could find. I took along Kauga the security team leader as translator but in the end having a translator made no difference. I can understand body language and 'humna' (nothing) when they respond to my basic questions for Embe, Ndizi, Mayai, etc. The river is impassable except by dugout canoe ferry so that meant most of the farms weren’t accessible without at least an hours hike on the other side. After we visited all 3 farms on this side of the river we decided not to bother with the hour’s hike as no-one on this side had any produce to sell – not so much as a spare egg. They are truly subsistence farmers here and other than an occasional surplus which they sell to buy things they can’t grow such as cooking oil or dagaa (dried fish from Lake Tanganyika), their farms produce just enough to keep them alive - and that’s about it. It was a good social interlude but that was about it. That is at least, until we tried to get back.

We got back covered in mud, soaked through with sweat and pretty much knackered after getting stuck on a hillside on the way back. Erosion and mud made the track basically impassable and after sliding down the camber into the washaway we spent 2 hours digging with tyre levers and panga (machete) then jacking and winching to get up the hill we call ‘the obstacle’. Yes, that’s the same one that Valerian got stuck on at the start of the wet season. The rain turned a couple of small holes into washaways big enough to swallow a Wildebeest (OK, a small Wildebeest I'll admit…). In the dry the track is easy enough but in the wet… We slid into one of those holes like an eight ball finding the corner pocket till the Landcruiser was resting on its undercarriage with a calm dignity and poise which we couldn’t match. All good fun though and we got it out in the end but at one stage it was looking like a walk home… A few weeks later, six of us spent half an hour with mattocks and spades rebuilding that track to the point where you could get up it - so long as it hasn’t rained in the past 12 hours - but that’s about as good as it gets.

In a typical AWA (Africa Wins Again) experience, we got a short notice call that the aviation inspector needed to inspect Mwese airstrip to recertify it. That meant we had to pay for his charter flight so we decided to fly in another small genset as the only one still running used too much fuel. Valerian had brought in another small one after it was ‘repaired’ but it was the worlds worst repair job with the casing screws stripped or missing, case held together by wire and burning engine oil like a 2-stroke (it’s a 4-stroke motor). Needless to say it failed by day 4 back at Mibango. In any case, after much last minute rush, Tim sourced a genset in Dar and Valerian managed to cajole the locals to slash the strip in Mwese in record time. Mibango strip however was so overgrown that we had no choice but to hire everyone who was available in the area. In the end 20 locals managed to slash the 70cm grass on the 1,500m strip in 5 days and paint the markers just 48 hours before the inspector was due to land. We should have guessed it was going too smoothly. The inspector rang at 9:30pm the day before to postpone his visit till 28FEB – by which time it will need slashing all over again. So it goes… AWA.

Anyway, I’m in a surprisingly nice guest house in Nzega now on the way to Dar via the Serengeti and Valerian is in Mibango with the security guys for the next three months. In a weeks handover we had some good laughs together and I taught him how to ride the motorcycle in case he needs to get to Mwese or the lake a bit faster than pushbike. You forget how tricky motorcycles are to ride in the dirt and mud when you’ve been riding as long as I have but his learning experience reminded me how much I take for granted. He’s a fast learner though and doing fine with it. Plus he has a great sense of humour which will stand him in good stead for the inevitable falls and stalls. I also showed him how to troubleshoot the internet connection, send attachments with emails etc but most challenges will be more mundane than that. In any case, he is a local boy so Mibango is like home for him and barring meteorite strike he’ll do just fine I think.

On the road again...

2010-02-04T10:28:00.000Z

I’m enjoying being in Moshi (at the base of Kilimanjaro) after three months in camp followed by five bone rattling but wonderful days on the road. Moshi is a great little town and so nice to be enjoying good coffee, smoothies, change of scenery and mzungu company. Not so much that they are mzungu as that it’s been great to converse with native English speakers. The locals are great and super-friendly but away from the towns their English is on average only slightly better than my Swahili which is pretty darn basic. Hence I’ve not had too many in-depth conversations in the past 2 months that didn’t involve electrons lol. As ‘luck’ would have it, the first Mzungu I came across after 2 months was a Frenchman who either didn’t speak English or preferred not to. Judging from the monosyllabic grunt I got in response to my warm hello and barely a glance before returning to photos on his laptop, I suspect it was the latter lol. The next morning though, I met 2 Canucks and a Pom so we had some laughs and long conversation over a leisurely breakfast. The Pom in particular was a serendipitous meeting as he has set up an local NGO to help schools with infrastructure and volunteer teachers, train farmers, teach English to teachers and has set up a training farm. All things that we plan to do next season out at camp albeit on a more modest scale and he was keen to help out with advice and/or trainers. And he’s a great bloke of terrific character. I know this because his name is also Julian lol.

I originally thought a little optimistically as it turned out, that I’d get here in 3 or 4 days. It actually took me 5 days, pausing for a few punctures and repairs on the way but spending about 40 hours behind the wheel to cover around 1,400 km. I’m not sure what the roads would be like in the dry season but in the wet, it’s pretty slow going and the first 600km took me 2.5 days or just over 20 hours behind the wheel, which works out to an average of 30km per hour.

As for Valerian’s first ever trip in a plane and my planned stopover at Mwese strip.... You’re familiar with AWA perhaps? (Africa Wins Again). I was originally going to be stopping at Mwese for a night to put up a windsock with Valerian and meet the aviation inspector for the airstrips annual certification inspection. Valerian would have then flown back to Mibango but the inspector cancelled 3 days before he was due to fly in so I got to leave 2 days early and got Mpanda on Saturday afternoon which was OK with me.
The other good news is that Valerian will still get his flight but now it will be in late February. He’ll ride the motorcycle to Mwese, meet the inspector and then fly back into Mibango. I sometimes think I’m almost as excited for him as he is (and he’s pretty excited!). I still remember my first flight at the age of 7 and all the ones in small planes and helicopters since then. Somehow I think it will be a memorable experience for him to say the least.

It was good to have Mongo Mongo (yes, that’s his real name) and a chap from the Crying Village hitching with me on the first day because we had to stop and repair a couple of creek crossings on the way to Mwese and having 3 of us made for light work. The track is pretty bad in places especially and I needed low range with diff-lock a few times to get through but it’s still passable (just). The elephant grass is higher than the cab of the Landcruiser after 2 months of rain and I was driving by brail in some places trying to feel out the bumps. Luckily the grass between the wheel ruts is slightly lower - only just higher than the bonnet of the Toyota - so you have an idea of where the wheel tracks are or were.

Despite driving theoretically solo, I was rarely alone. In fact, I think of the 40 hours, it was probably less than 4 hours that I didn’t have between 1 and 10 people with me. 10 people was great actually as it meant that the one-tonner with 10ply tyres rode much more smoothly with 800 kg of people in the back. It also helped that with the first puncture I had 5 blokes with me to help. One of the guys looked to be a dead ringer for a young Forest Whittaker. Hard to believe he wasn’t in fact – apart from being probably 20 years younger now. Giving people lifty’s as well as being a good thing to do also helped me practice and learn a bit of Swahili. It reminded of course, just how little Swahili I know but at least left me encouraged that I know a lot more than I did a few months ago. With the second puncture a couple of days later, I had one woman who sat and watched but I guess it was good to have a companion. In any case a Police ‘Special Ops’ patrol stopped by to see if I needed a hand and there were cars or trucks regularly pausing to check if I needed a hand.

After each puncture, we pulled in at the first fundi we could find. I say ‘we’ because usually it was my hitchhikers who could navigate me in the direction of the fundi’s. Few if any businesses have signs in the back blocks. You just need to ask the locals where the fundi or duka (shop) or hoteli or whatever you need is. That being said, I’m getting pretty good at spotting the ‘sign’s now. Tyre repair fundi’s can usually be spotted by the pile of old tyres dumped at the side of their shop or more prominently sometimes, a 1950’s style hand cranked petrol air compressor with a water bottle and rubber hose providing coolant to the compressor motor. Nobody (fundi’s or I) seem to have air pressure gauges to check tyre pressure with. I was asked each time by the tyre fundi’s if I had on (mental note to self to put one in the glove box at first opportunity) so they would simply patch the tube and then use a tyre lever bounced off the tyre as an improvised air pressure gauge. Speaking of improvised tools, it’s amazing to watch how they adapt lumps of metal or old car parts to make bead breakers, tyre levers, and even hammers from scrap. The first puncture was fixed with a side trip off the main track into little village called Uvinza which is worthy of mention. It is a one-horse town by any standards with salt mining seeming to support the community but it rests on the banks of a decent size river and has a certain quiet charm. Worth a stopover for anyone who is cruising slowly through.

All told it took 9 hours driving to Kasulu on that second day and I’m not sure what it was like when Pete and Tim went through there 2 months ago, but I can safely say that Mpanda to Kasulu is only suitable for high clearance 4WD in the wet season. I found a hopelessly noisy hotel at Kasulu where the TV blared in the courtyard below my room till 9 minutes past midnight then came on again at 0555 with a vengeance. At 0630 when I went down to leave, the TV was still screeching with the squeal and static of tortured speakers pounding out a local MTV hit to an audience of… precisely no-one. Not even a staff member in the courtyard. I don’t know what it is about Tanzania but it must be full of former artillery soldiers. Music? TV? “I don’t care what you play SO LONG AS YOU PLAY IT LOUD!!!” Oh how I love the quiet or the birdsong and crickets of Mibango. Almost in some reaction to the quiet of the bush, the rest of Tanzania is noise incarnate. And almost universally the music systems and TV speakers seem to have the squeal and crackle of speakers repeatedly pushed beyond their limits.

I made up for the stay at the clean but noisy Kasulu Highway Hotel the next night though by staying at a surprisingly great guesthouse in Nzega called the Forest Inn Hotel. What a gem. USD$18 for a 2 room suite with hot water showers in a quiet location with a great garden setting. I had a sleep in and leisurely breakfast before seeking out a Fundi (mechanic) for the Landcruiser which had developed a severe wobble above 60km on the way into Nzega. The last 3 hours driving into Nzega at 40km/h wasn’t as bad as it might sound. Despite cruising on a modern tarmac highway of world-class standards, the trip is never so quick. There are villages every few kilometers and the Tanzanian method of controlling speed is to put 2 or 3 or more speed bumps at each village. A few speed bumps are quite benign but most are so severe as to bottom the suspension of any vehicle approaching at more than 30 km/h and even a few so high that I wonder how a regular car could get over them. Coupled with the fact that they seem to have all manner of markings, coloring and signage and sometimes no markings whatsoever, vigilance is required and daydreaming not an option. The worst are the unpainted tarmac ones on tarmac road in a 100km/h speed zone. As a friend is prone to saying, “remain vigilant” is not just a nice idea – it’s a necessity.

After a good nights rest at the Forest Inn, I spent 4 hours the next morning exploring the town and watching the fundi’s work on the Landcruiser. It turned out the front wheels were out of balance and the steering rod damper was shot. I’m not sure if it was it was the final gasp of the steering damper or perhaps high speed running on tarmac threw the lead weights off a front wheel but in any case the fundi’s fixed those problems plus replaced the side mirrors, adjusted the brakes, put the rear number plate back on and a few odd jobs like that before I headed off about 12.

What looked on the map like a short trip to Babati on tarmac took me about 8 hours and I got in about an hour after dark which was challenging as the road from Singida is all dirt (what a surprise lol). All in all, I’ve covered something like 1,000km on dirt roads and 400km on tarmac. The dirt road is tough going as they are rough, rough, rough in a 1 tonner and it’s frustrating watching the 5 door Landcruiser go flying by in comfort about 25 km/h faster than me as I bounce and rattle along. Despite this, it’s still really rewarding and my preference to be travelling on the dirt roads as they wind through the back blocks and dusty villages that make up a fascinating part of Tanzania.

It’s an interesting driving experience in Tanzania. Not for the faint of heart but not that hard either. You just need to get used to some different ways of doing things. Lots of poorly marked and faded boomgate roadblocks, washaways, and near invisible but severe speed bumps. The police seem to have boomgate across the minor roads at regular intervals to inspect the trucks. Regular cars and 4WD’s are just waved through but even so the un-signposted and sometimes unpainted metal poles lowered across the road seem invisible at first but eventually when you know to look for such things under the shadow of trees even in 100km/h speed zones, somehow ones visual acuity becomes critically enhanced.

On day 5 (Wednesday) I hit Moshi at last. A very decent Café Americano (long black in Australia), a biscuit – yes, a biscuit. My first in 2 months. Followed by a mango/banana/yoghurt smoothie then chips and burger for dinner. Yum! The road from Babati was as I’ve come to expect, unpaved and rough as guts. The Landcruiser trayback would have to be perhaps the world’s best production 4WD for the rough off-road stuff. The worlds best in case you’re curious, is IMHO the without peer RFSV (Regional Force Surveillance Vehicle) used the three RSFU’s of the Australian Army. But then again, you’d expect it to be pretty good with 49 distinct modifications from the 110 Landrover you can buy in the shops. In any case, I had been thinking that when the time comes to spend a couple of years driving across Africa, the Landcruiser trayback would be the ideal vehicle but after doing 5 days just covering the distance on mostly dirt roads, in a trayback, I’m leaning towards the Troop Carrier or 5-door for the simple reason that most of Africa is dirt roads rather than hard core 4WD and they are both still pretty darn good in the rough. I’ll keep you posted on how that evolves.

Meanwhile, a few days R&R to chillax here and then 5 days in Serengeti, Ngorogoro Crater and Lake Manyara before I head for Dar next week. Life is tough. Allegedly…

Re-learning how to Peregrinate..

2010-01-16T17:50:00.000Z

Now that the wet season has set in, I’ve had to learn a new way of walking. When weather permits I like to go out hiking with a pack on for some exercise and a change of scenery. With 35kg’s on your back though, it’s hard to correct when you start to slip so I’ve acquired a walk that, although I lack the grace of either, seems a hybrid between a Geisha’s fast but shortened steps and an ice-skaters plant, expecting as it were to have to glide with each step. It probably doesn’t look as funny as it sounds but it has felt weird learning to walk somehow differently.

Regular bushwalking is easy and my desert style is ingrained after many years trekking in the Pilbara and central Australia. Even my ability to walk on ice and snow is pretty good after 7 days trekking the Overland Track in winter last year. This ground out here however is different. Where the tracks aren’t overgrown with grass taller than me, the are slippery with mud or worst of all, the green lichen has created a surface with roughly the same coefficient of friction as ice. Even my Scarpa SL’s – still the most impressive boots I’ve owned and hitherto awesomely reliable – just turn into ice skates.

I also discovered recently while wrestling my way back to vertical, that it’s easy to slip completely over but hard work getting upright again with a heavy pack firmly strapped to you. It makes a good mini workout in itself but much like a turtle trying to right itself, I probably also made an amusing if ungainly sight. Kauga who was walking with me at the time was very polite and somehow managed to refrain from laughing. I’m not sure I could have mustered the same polite restraint had the roles been reversed.

With practice these days, I’m slipping and sliding less often but with the wet season setting in it’s getting more slippery every day – either that or I’m getting less graceful which I hope is not the case, given that I’m coming off a low base already. The first time I slipped over was only two days before the second time so that should give you some idea of the escalating lichen growth.

Apart from the great exercise and a change of scenery, I’ve also been going out hiking to prepare for the possibility that that I might have to hike out of here in February if the airstrip is too wet. At the very least I’ll be looking at a days hike plus a boat ride or perhaps 5 days over the Mahale Mountains if I feel like taking the more interesting way. Initially the Mahale Mountains was sounding pretty good but after witnessing a few days of 50+mm of rain recently that option is looking much less appealing (at least during the wet season). Might have to get out with the panga (machete) and slash the airstrip after all…

Week 11 of 20 weeks away from Cambodia…

2010-01-14T11:09:00.000Z

It's been seven weeks now since the camp shutdown operations and since then it’s just me and the 3 local security guys here. It’s a great part of the world to spend some time but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I'm starting to get cabin fever. With the rainy season settled in, the potential for to get out for hiking or biking trips in the area is severely limited. The grass is now over my head on most of the hiking trails and soaking wet from the daily rain so going anywhere (not that there is anywhere specific to go to now that the river is up) is a wet and muddy affair to be savored less often than I otherwise might.

Christmas and New Years Eve were atypically quiet here. My favourite place to be at that time of year is the Woodford Folk Festival - a brilliant mélange of music by 2,500 artists performing 16 hours a day for 7 days in 18 venues among 300 hectares of pictureeque former dairy land. Being in Australia, it was a little out of my way this year though so I elected to face reality and postpone my visit to 2010. Instead, on Christmas Day here I grabbed a crate of beer and went down to the security guys camp kitchen to celebrate. Turns out none of them drink. What sort of security guys are these? Should I be worried about my safety here? Hopefully they are still good at their job and perhaps it is all just a cultural misunderstanding… Perhaps they in turn are wondering about their safety with a boss who doesn’t drink sodas? Either way, they are a great bunch of guys. Just the sort of easy going people you would want in a remote camp with you for three months and very professional to boot. Luckily for them we had some sodas on had as well, so I had a beer while they had a couple of softies and in a mix of atrociously poor Swahili from me and only slightly better English from them we swapped stories about our home towns and past experiences.

I stayed up long enough to see in the New Years (in Sydney and Perth that is). I’d been hoping for a fireworks display but probably just as well they were canceled this year as the local village is three hours walk away. Must have been budget cuts or some new council ordinance about fireworks in vicinity of grass huts I guess, otherwise for sure they would have had some. Surely? Instead, and in the finest traditions of Hunter S. Thompson, I crafted plans to make up for that by getting drunk on the rest of the beer and firing the shotguns into the air while following up with Molotov cocktail chasers. A great night it would have been I’m sure, but in a (momentary and uncharacteristic) burst of common sense I opened a bottle of red wine and headed for bed at 1030 instead.

Friends keep me posted on life in the outside world and it helps to have the contact but they also love to tell me about the great café or beach or outing that they have just come back from. Cursed swine lol. Still, can’t blame them, I’d be doing the same and having some fun at their expense if I was in there shoes. Some good news that Pete and Tim have shared via Skype though is that Shela, the girl that we organized to get to Dar, is getting good care in hospital there. The Doctors seem to think her skin condition is a reaction to the sunlight. I’m not convinced given that the tiny leopard spots are all over her including places normally covered by clothing but hey, they are the fundi’s so I leave that up to them. In any case, they are still running some tests and are going to do a minor op to remove the growths from her face soon. Apart from becoming a pincushion for blood tests, she now sports a pair of glasses and has gained a little weight from the better diet in Dar Es Salaam plus seemingly gained a lot of confidence along the say. Apparently she’s now running around talking, laughing and very outgoing, much different from the shy, near blind, scarred and spotty girl I last saw in November on her way to Dar. It will be good when they finally figure out what to do about her skin condition but it sounds like the trip to Dar was well worthwhile already. On another good note, as well as the money we chipped in individually, the company has offered to cover the balance of her expenses which will be close to $1,000. It’s always nice to be involved with individuals and companies that have a social conscience. Kind of restores your faith in human beings really.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch… It’s definitely an interesting and character building experience to spend two months here in a place with only three other guys, none of whom speak more than a few words of English. I guess I’ll come out of here with more character built in which sounds like a good thing (although I’m not sure if it will make me more eclectic or less suited to normal society – perhaps both). Either way, I’ll be very glad in three weeks time to get to the cafes of a sleepy, chilled-out town called Moshi in the shadow of Kilimanjaro for a big bowl of social interaction and a change of fresh scenery.

After a couple of days eating an unaccustomed diet of fresh and varied food as well as enjoying conversations that don’t have a 2 second time delay or need to be typed, I’ll be off exploring. First stop will be to the Serengeti, then Ngorongoro Crater and Lake Manyara where I plan to disturb as much of the wildlife as possible with the clicking sounds of my camera. A friend told me when I was leaving for Africa that “you haven’t lived until you’ve seen sunrise over the Serengeti” so I rather intend to remedy that lack of living thus far, with a dawn balloon ride over the Serengeti. After that I’m off to Scotland for a couple of weeks then back to Cams to catch up with friends who are coming to visit. While there I’ll just have to 'take one for the team' and put some time aside to take my sadly neglected XR400 for a few runs in the back blocks of Cambodia. Like the valiant steed that it is, it has been sitting there patiently waiting for me to come home. I won’t be long in Cams however as I’m off to Lisbon in April to present at a conference after which I will no doubt fit in some more hiking in the European spring.

At least I’m being productive while I’m out here. It looks like my next book will be finished this month (a risk management how-to guide) and I’ll be sending it for editing in February then putting it up on www.riskebooks.com in March. Hopefully 2 other books should also be finished by then. Much more planned for the year but that can wait for another blog.

2010 is looking like a very good year already...

Internet crisis...

2010-01-14T08:46:00.000Z

Internet access was down for 2 days. And it was seriously looking like I might have been 2 months sans internet...In many ways that would be fine and many times in life I've wished that emails would cease but.... I'm in the middle of selling a house and finishing a couple of projects such as writing/researching a book plus I quite like being able to speak with someone who speaks more than a few words of English.

It helps you realise though just how much the internet has become a part of our daily lives – for me at least and for the developed nations. Most Africans it seems have never so much as seen a webpage which is a sobering thought when you consider how most of us take it for granted. As for me, well it's one thing to go 3 weeks hiking the Larapinta Trail without email and skype but quite another thing to go 3 months without it in a remote camp.

The router it seems simply decided that it had done it's bit for modern society and shuffled off this mortal coil. When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go and Saturday was the routers last day on this earth. I found another one in an old chest but couldn't tell if it worked (there is lots of ‘stuff’ here, some of which works, some of which is for parts only). Normally it’s easy enough to test such things but with the wireless router I couldn't test it till I got the configuration setup. A simple thing to do if I was in the ‘burbs – one phonecall and job done. Here it took me 3 HF radio calls and 4 satphone calls before I finally had the 3 numbers that I needed. So it goes… Clearly as you can see, I’m back on line now.

Fawlty Towers...

2009-12-12T12:10:00.000Z

There’s a little bit of Fawlty Towers in this place, to be sure. From the fence wire locking out the cutoff switch on the water pump, to the bare wires to make the starter motor kick in on the genset, winches not working on the vehicles (fixed now by us - but incorrectly fitted by the dealer years ago) and the miscellaneous taps melted into the sides of plaster rain tanks, etc, etc. There’s no workshop to take things to here so we make do but somehow though it all seems to work.

We used to joke among ourselves that Ali was a bit like Manuel. Same short of desire to please and bumbling but pleasant style combined with a lack of comprehension of what’s going on around him. Thro win just a pinch of confusion every so often and there you have the recipe.

It used seem like minor but well meaning mishaps followed in his wake and menus were never as predicted. Shirts came back with with holes ironed in them and when Matthias was away our menu got very er, unusual. Potato pizza one day then tuna pasta with a meat sauce the nex. Pancakes one morning would be pancakes as you know it, the next morning they would could best be described as chapatti’s. In fact you never knew what you were going to get for brekky or any other meal really. It was really quite entertaining trying to guess what would turn up next.

I’ve been cooking for myself lately which means a bit of time each day to invent some sort of a meal from whatever ingredients we have in the trunks or whatever fresh foods turn up for sale at the gates at random. but it’s nice to have more control over my nutrition. I cook over an MSR Dragonfly, a multi-fuel stove that burns petrol, diesel, kerosene, Jet A1, white spirit or just about anything really. Very handy in this part of the world. Right now I’m using petrol as it was the first fuel to hand and it does a great job. The only other option for cooking here is a fire which hardly seems worth it when I’m just cooking for me, not to mention being a nuisance if all you want is a cuppa.

Fending for myself now that the cooks have left, has exposed a few more minor but amusing Fawlty Towers type issues. Years of meals being prepared over open fires here means that the miscellaneous collection of pots and pans still remaining have had their handles long since burned or melted away. Not for the first time my Leatherman is coming in handy as a billy lifter. Ditto the camping knife has come in handy. There seems to have been only one knife left here for cutting veggies etc and the security guys are using it. Probably a bit of overkill to be chopping cabbage for dinner with a serrated edged 4” Spyderco Endura but what the heck – it’s not the first time and probably won’t be the last.

I got another good laugh yesterday. We have a gas powered chest freezer half full of the remains of a cow. The previous time the guys bought a cow, they organized for it to be butchered and chopped up to freeze it. Well, they got the cow back chopped it up alright – into six pieces. So this time, we thought we’d ask for it to be butchered properly into small pieces of about 2 kg’s each so that we could just take steaks, chops or bones as we needed from the freezer. Pretty clear you’d think? No. Not so.

Yesterday I went to the freezer for the first time to get a piece out for dinner. I picked what looked to have the least bone and hence best chance of a steak. When it had actually thawed out that afternoon, I had to laugh. It looked like they’d simply taken a panga (machete) to it. Bits of bone, flesh and gristle just panga’d into a piece that would fit into a plastic bag. The rest of the freezer looks to be more full of bone than anything else and certainly no T-Bones or sirloin. Yet another lesson in not taking things for granted I guess… AWA (Africa Wins Again)

I ended up trimming enough bits to make stirfry last night but this morning I went in search of a recipe for beef soup using minimal seasoning (as I just don’t have much to choose from – soy sauce, pepper, garlic, chili sauce is about it). As I write this I have a beef soup simmering on the stove.

But if you could see the view from my kitchen bench and dining room, you’d have to agree it is a pretty nice place to stand and stir a spoon around in pot…

So dark out here...

2009-12-09T10:31:00.000Z

It’s nice waking up to the pre-dawn light each morning. Especially so because I don’t wake to an alarm clock any more which is really, really nice. What wakes me now is the gradual change from total darkness to first light. I know it’s time to at least think about getting up when, for the first time that night, I can sense some grey squares against the black, roughly where I know the windows of my hut to be.

The other thing that is kind of cool is that on a cloudy night, it’s so dark out here that you can’t see your hand in front of my face. Literally. Think: bottom of a coal mine at midnight dark. On a moonlight night or even a starry night enough light gets through the trees so that you can (just) get around the compound OK. On a cloudy night though, it would be easy to walk smack bang into a tree. And I do need to walk around because the compound is a series of one-room huts. One hut for the office, one for each accommodation unit, one for dining hall, etc, etc.

Think of a house perhaps, where you need to walk 20 or 50 metres in pitch black among the trees to go from lounge room to toilet to bedroom. On a dark night, the huts themselves are about the only thing that you might have even a chance of seeing before you walk into of them. Even then only as a darker patch of darkness looming above you just before you walk face first into it. I normally have pretty good night vision but out here on a cloudy moonless night without a genset, torch or at least starlight, it’s BLACK. Which is kind of cool.

And mostly (I’m happy to say) I don’t run the genset now that the others have gone. There are lights rigged around the compound but they obviously need the genset. I’ve managed to bodgy up a charger, truck battery, voltage regulator and small inverter to create enough power to run the internet and laptop for a few hours off a charge which makes a blissfully quiet alternative to the noise of the generator. The idea came to me because (being a curious sort of chap) in the process of tidying up the place, I’d noticed most of the necessary bits and pieces lying around. Eventually, the subconscious trickled the idea through that a battery bank might be a good idea. Sadly the one thing I couldn’t find was an inverter. I’d actually given up on finding one last week and was about to google how to make DC stepdown transformers or even an inverter by cannabilising some of the obsolete or broken equipment but… As luck would have it, I was tidying the last of some stuff into a trunk when I noticed faded markings on the lid which showed a list of contents including “2 x inverters”. Now, the trunks came out here several years ago so it was quite likely that both inverters were long since lost, broken or removed. “But still, just maybe” I thought to myself. I turned the place upside down and eventually amongst some scientific test equipment found (as you’ve now doubt gathered) a working inverter. Not that it was immediately obvious that it was an inverter. It looked more like a piece of test equipment and the 240v outlet plug looked like anything but. Sure enough though, written underneath were the magic words “Input: 12V. Output: 240V”. It was like one of those Eureka moments when I finally realized that it was within grasp to have internet and still be able to hear the birds in the trees. I know, I know, but it’s the little things that really count out here…

Starfish stories and a trip to Mpanda

2009-12-08T15:22:00.002Z

Friday and it’s time for Pete and Tim to head back to Dar. They’re taking the VX on a safari drive through some of the nicest parts of Tanzania while I meanwhile get the camp almost to myself for 2 months. Not quite to myself of course as there are 3 security guys here to keep me company but my Swahili is not as good as their English and their English is good enough for the basics so long as body-language and patience are applied. My Skype friends will be my main form of social activity for at least 2 months but I’ll get plenty of time to do some writing which will be great.

Tim and Pete are taking Valerian, Mathias and Ali out with them today as well as about 400kg of soil samples for testing. Two other passengers are also coming along. A young girl about 5 years of age and her father are going with them to Mpanda. She is suffering from a dreadful skin condition that has left warts on her face, swollen her eyes almost shut and left tiny leopard skin spots all over her body. The guys had taken her up to Mpanda before to see a Dr but he’d given her some tests and creams for eczema, none of which had made the slightest difference. I’m no fundi but it didn’t look like exzcema to me. If anything, it looks like a really bad fungal infection but there’s no way of knowing without culturing up a skin scraping and the closest facilities for that are in Dar.

We’ve pondered just how to do it for a few weeks now. The girls father has never been further than 50km from home and is very nervous about getting himself to Dar. There’s just not enough room in the car for everyone and the gear to get to Dar in the VX. Hence we’ve all chipped in some money for a train trip from Mpanda to Dar plus medical tests and Valerian has volunteered to accompany them. The company and some of the other staff in Australia have also offered to chip in as the cost of drugs could be $1,500 or more if it turns out to be one of those rare fungal conditions. Valerian has also organized accommodation with his sister and brother in law (a doctor) in Dar so things are organized.

It’s not really a drop in the ocean when it comes to helping with medical conditions out here but you have to start somewhere. If this girl doesn’t get treatment her quality of life will be minimal at the very, very least. It’s a bit like one of my favourite stories. The ‘Starfish’ story. The story goes like this:

A man is walking along the beach the day after a big storm. The storm has littered the beach as far as the eye can see with debris, seaweed and junk. Looking closer, the man notices that among the debris are starfish. Many, many starfish. As he continues to walk down the beach he spies in the distance a small figure walking towards him. The figure is bending over repeatedly as if picking things up. As the two walk towards each other, the man can see that it is a small boy, picking up starfish and tossing them back into the ocean. Eventually they meet up and the man asks the boy why he is bothering to throw the starfish back in. The boy just shrugs “why not?”. “But there must be thousands of them on the beach. Surely you can’t hope to make a difference here?” to which the boy just shrugs again, picks up another starfish, tosses it back in the ocean and says “I made a difference to that one.”

I guess that’s what we hope will happen with the little girl. That some medical attention will make a difference to at least one human being.

With all the passengers to drop off in Mpanda and the passengers to take, the VX can’t hope to carry it all so my role is to take the 1 tonne trayback loaded up with gear as far as Mpanda. On the morning we leave, Pete kindly jumps in the trayback before I get to it which leaves me to drive the VX on the way there. A nice but unexpected treat as the trayback bounces like a billycart while the VX has much plusher suspension – and Tim’s Ipod collection to listen to. We get to Mpanda in good time taking about 6 ½ hours including a stop to drop Matthias home in Mwese and have lunch of rice and beans in a local ‘café’. The roads are dry as we’ve had 5 days with little or no rain so it’s easy going today and we’re in good spirits.

Mpanda is still the dusty charmless ramshackle town that I remember but for some reason the accommodation is always scarce in this town. Maybe because it’s a Friday night but Mpanda doesn’t seem like the sort of place you come to for Friday night clubbing. Eventually we find accommodation but the 7 of us end up staying in 3 different places. Us three Mzungus end up in one of the flasher places in town, the ‘New Super City Hotel’, a place which is neither new, super nor a city but what the heck, it has a nice outdoor eating area and cold beer so is luxury really. We even have ensuites albeit with squat toilets and showers that seem to work in some rooms but not in others.

We also find 5 other Mzungus staying there. Two Italian guys are driving around Africa in a heavily laden Landcruiser VX turbo. Nice blokes but the language barrier gets a bit challenging so we stand around looking at maps with them and watching while one of the locals changes and repairs a flat tyre for them. Meanwhile, I’m thinking “Sand tyres – they’ll regret that choice soon”… Big wide tyres with limited tread like that are great in the sand but are going to have a bugger of a time in the mud. Even if I thought they would be likely to outlay USD$1,000 on some skinny big treaded mud tyres I don’t have the Italian to express that suggestion so I keep the thought to myself. Hopefully they’ll be OK. Either way getting bogged if it happens, will all be part of their adventure.

Later that evening Tim, Pete and I are sitting chatting over a beer when a rather attractive German girl wanders over to join us. We’re wondering our luck has changed because of course, we’re such a good looking bunch of roosters. Turns out she’s just enquiring if she (and her boyfriend and another German guy) can hitch a lift north to Kigoma. They’re bussing and hitching around Tanzania which would be great experience and an interesting way to do it. Personally though, I’d rather have my own 4WD as it would mean you could see more than just dusty bus stops in Mpanda like towns. I offer them a lift close to a junction which would leave them a 20km walk to Lakoma from where the can catch the ferry to Kigoma. The MV Liemba is a former WW1 warboat that the Germans cut up and brought to Lake Tanganyika in pieces. It is, some say, the longest running ferry boat service in the world. Whether that’s right or not, a trip on Lake Tanganyika would still be one of the great maritime journeys and yes, they’re keen as beans to do it. That was in fact their original plan. It seems that they made a phonecall to the ferry office in Kigoma and sadly it isn’t running this week. The UN have (again) chartered it to ferry refugees. I’m hoping that won’t be the case in February when I want to leave here via the MV Liemba. Still, ‘TIA’ and just another reminder for me to stay flexible (and to phone before I walk down to the jetty myself in January when the time comes to leave). The VX is going past the turnoff to Kigoma but Tim & Pete have weight limitations with all the gear. A few mental calculations later, we decide that it would just be too much weight with three people added. Later that night though we find out that her boyfriend has malaria so they will be staying another day to allow him to recover. The third member of their party (Walther) who had just hooked up with them temporarily is still keen to move on so in the end it works out well with Tim and Pete dropping him off at the junction the next day. Walther is an interesting fellow – as I guess you’d expect of anyone really who makes it to places like Mpanda. He’d have to be in his 50’s now and is a paramedic by trade. He’s been taking his holidays in Africa for decades and just loves the place. This year it’s 3 weeks in Tanzania. He’s married but his wife isn’t into adventure travel so they both do separate holidays each year which seems to work for them (or him at least).

That night at Super City the skies open up and we’re treated to one of the brightest and LOUDEST thunderstorms that I’ve ever seen. One of the lightning strikes looks like it must be just out side my room. And the accompanying thunderburst sounds like it’s IN my room. Awesome. Especially when viewed from the shelter of a dry bed and through a glass window rather than the more usual bars and wooden shutters in this part of the world.

In the morning we dine at the most upmarket café in Mpanda.

The Tanganyika Café has the least flies of any of the café’s in town and the cleanest laminate tables. The waitresses on the other hand seem to have patented a new form of indifference and surliness. At first I wonder if it’s that they don’t like mzungus who can’t speak Swahili but no, they treat all of us and the other tables with the distain that even a battle hardened air-hostess couldn’t match. It’s almost entertaining to have to ask 3 times for coffee before they finally bring over a mug, spoon, thermos of hot water and a tin of ‘Africa Café’. According to the label ‘Africa Café’ is Africa’s finest instant coffee. I hope they’re wrong – it’s amazingly bad. But I drink it anyway. I don’t really feel like the fish-head soup again after last time so I point to the samosa under the glass counter. There’s only one left and the more communicative of the waitresses says “Samosa bad” and shakes her head. I get the message and point to some of the ‘donuts’ beside it and say “Tafadhali mbili” (two please). They’re not donuts as we know them of course – more some sort of fried bread. Tim asks me if they’re sweet or savoury and I answer “yes”. It’s the most accurate answer I can give. They’re both. Or neither. Or somewhere in between. But they’re filling. The rest of the group go for fish soup, chapatti and boiled egg, donuts, coffee and/or chai. This in fact means that as a group we’ve ordered at least one of everything on the menu. Ah, the joyous cuisine of Tanganyika Café. Still, what they have is tasty and filling (and available) so I’m not complaining. Unlike Cambodia where everyone eats out regularly and you can buy a feed on just about any street corner Tanzanians don’t have much of a culture of eating out. Which means in our case, that TC is one of only 2 or 3 options for breakfast.

After breakfast, the time has come to say goodbye to Tim, Pete and Walther. They’re heading off on the road to Kigoma and eventually Dar in about 4 days time. Meanwhile, Valerian and I attempt to buy train tickets for their trip to Dar. After a frustrating 20 minutes at the railway station, it turns out to be 50/50 whether or not they’ll be able to get on the train or not. The railway ‘station’ is more of a warehouse on a siding and although Valerian seems to know where he’s going and what’s going on, the place just looks like friendly chaos to me. I’m sure there’s a method in it all somewhere. Perhaps. In the end he opts to take the others by bus to Dar. It’s not as comfortable and means staying in hotels each night instead of a sleeper car but both trips take about 3 days depending on breakdowns and delays etc.

I say goodbye to the others who will be leaving on tomorrow’s bus then stock up on important things like red wine before leaving. I even swing by the markets on the way through and load up on fresh fruit and veggies. Mangoes are 500 shillings each (50c) which Valerian tells me is way too expensive. We’ve passed a roadside stall on the way in where he tells me that it will be 500 for a bucket full of mangoes. True enough, I later buy the cheapest load of mangoes I’ve ever bought. And quite tasty also. Sadly half of them get bruised on the way back but such is life. Even they make good eating later.

The first half of the road back is easy peasy in the dry conditions and I make great time, with just one stop to wait for roadworks where I have to stop and wait while they nail down the planks again on a log bridge.

It looks like it will take a while so I get out and spend 20 minutes talking with the workers and getting a few pictures of them and their handiwork. It’s hard not to take a great picture in Africa. The guys are a knockabout crew but even with the language barriers we have a few good laughs. I get a few pictures of them and show them on the cameras LCD which gets them all queuing up to be photographed. Thank goodness for digital photos, otherwise I’d have a roll full of happy snaps but instead, I’ve kept just a few interesting portraits.

I give a couple of people a liftie (lift) from Mwese to Ikabulu which is down the steep section of Z Hill. People wave us down regularly for a liftie and whenever we have room, we’re happy to oblige. It’s no extra trouble and can save them hours of walking. Plus it’s a good chance to have a chat and learn some more Swahili or find out more about the area. The kid in the front with me seems to be having a bad day though and has a permanent grump on so we hardly talk even. In contrast, the guy standing in the back (who by rights would have something to grumble about after bouncing down Z Hill) seems to be having a great time and thanks me profusely when I drop him off. The kid meanwhile (atypically of the locals) just wonders off without a thanks. So it goes…

From Ikabulu the road changes when it starts bucketing down. I’ve got the wipers on double speed and still can’t see more than 3 metres in front of me. I seem to spend more time driving sideways than anything else which is lots of fun but I’m driving alone now and the nearest vehicle that could tow me out of a bog is back in Mpanda so I’m keeping it relatively sedate. I’ve got a winch of course which is great – so long as you want to go forwards or sideways. Bit of a fiddle to winch yourself backwards out of a spot with a front mounted winch.

The trip back though is uneventful except for getting up ‘the obstacle’. Yes. The same place where Valerian and I were wedged sideways just a few days earlier. On this occasion, I was giving an old fellow a liftie and when we got to the ‘obstacle’ I pointed out the grab handle on the passenger side for him and suure enough, he needed it. He thought it was great fun and was grinning like a kid again by the time we eventually made it up on the second attempt. Ah yes. All good fun in Kapalagulu. Might be the last time for a few months that vehicle gets up there again though. It’s getting so chewed up and rutted that even the least bit of rain now makes it a challenge. Much more rain and it will be impassable. Even the airstrip hasn’t much longer before it’s closed for the wet season. Being cut off like that might make for some interesting times. Gives me a whole new appreciation for how the locals get by out here year after year living on pretty much only what they can grow or raise. Other than helicopter, the only way in or out of here will soon be on Shank’s pony (i.e. by walking)…

I drove the President today...

2009-12-04T16:40:00.001Z

Wheels spinning, engine racing - we’ve stopped sliding backwards but that’s not a good thing. The VX has gotten crossed up in the ruts and now we’re sliding sideways down the steep and muddy hillside. “Not good, not good” I’m thinking, as the top heavy, 2 tonne vehicle hooks a wheel in another deep hole. It half bounces, half slides out of it but we’re still sliding, sliding, sliding…

Earlier that day, I’d been driving the President of Tanzania in glorious sunshine. We were still bouncing through the ruts on a tiny track but were travelling forwards at the time (as one should by rights be doing). In the rear view mirror he could be seen sitting in statesmanlike grandeur in the back of the VX Landcruiser. The rest of us in the car form his close personal protection (CPP) team of bodyguards. He’s in the back seat flanked by two burly security officers, with a mzungu security professional driving and the security team leader in the passenger seat.

At least that’s the impression we give for about 3 seconds before we burst into laughter again. In fact, the man in the back is Valerian, our senior technician. Our VX is identical to the Tanzanian Presidents vehicle and some kids along the track call out jokingly “The Presidents car”. Valerian translates the joke for me and looking in the mirror I see him wedged between two burly security guards so I come back with “then that would make you Mr President…”. Immediately the five of us puff out chests out to look suitably professional before we burst out laughing after a few seconds. For those few seconds we could have been mistaken us for a Presidential party but right now we look like a load of giggling loons.

We don’t normally travel with a phalanx of security guards. The place isn’t so dangerous that we need CPP team with us. It just happens that we’re transporting our three security guards to Mwese so that they can catch a bus home. They’ve been at camp for about 4 months now and keen to see their families, not to mention to see a change of scenery. The Mzungus and field crews get out and about regularly but the security team spend 99% of their time in camp so the place must feel like Groundhog Day for them. Even the three day bus ride to Mwanza will make for a welcome change.

We’re making good time on the drive today. The rains have softened the roads and made the ride smoother so sections of the road can be travelled at speed. There are boggy bits and potholes that would swallow a wilderbeest where we have to drop back to walking speed but on the good sections we rocket along at up to 70km/h.

Coming in to Mwese in mid afternoon it looks about as busy as it ever does. That is to say not at all. Mwese is a collection of about 100 huts and houses. Its heyday was in the late 90’s when there were about 10,000 Rwandan refugees living there. Now there are only about 11 Rwandan families left with about 1,000 Bantu locals in the area. We’ve nicknamed the random gathering of mudbrick buildings that constitute the town centre ‘Wall Street’. Just behind Wall Street is the central market comprising courtyard of wooden tables and some small shops.

The bus from Mwese to Mpanda takes 12 hours to do what we would normally drive in three hours so it leaves first thing each morning and hence the lucky lads get to spend a night in town. We buy some bus tickets on Wall Street then go looking for accommodation for the guys. The first place we try is full - go figure, must be a convention in town? In the end we find a place which is 400m from wall street. I might add, that I’ve discovered there are at least 3 guesthouses, 3 restaurants, a pharmacy and 2 pubs in Mwese. (I’m using these terms in their broadest possible sense you understand.) None of them would I ever have picked from the outside as being what they turn out to be. The buildings are mudbrick (with a tin roof if the owner is wealthy) and have no signs to identify what they are. It’s all based on local knowledge. And I guess, why not when you’re at the end of the bus line and there is next to zip non-local traffic. At the same time, you have to wonder how a guesthouse makes a living if only the locals know it’s a guesthouse? The only markings on this one suggested a hairdresser.

Sadly for the boys, the local pubs are out of beer so they’ll have to wait for another town to have a drink. In the dry season, trucks run supplies out to Mwese but in the wet, it is only the busses that come through and they are owned by Muslims, who choose to not transport alcohol. That’s their prerogative of course but as you can imagine, it doesn’t endear them to those folk in Mwese who appreciate the odd cleansing ale. Hopefully the guys will have more luck on their 2 overnight stopovers en route to Mwanza. Sooner them than me on that 3 day I’d have to say. Not only are they uncomfortably crowded and missing windows but the safety record for busses here is about as bad as it could be. Makarani is still bears huge scars on his face and head from a bus accident years ago that put him out of action for about four months. Trains run in other parts of the country and are more reliable but bring extra food – they have been known to break down in the middle of nowhere for up to 3 days at a time.

We drop the guys off at their accommodation then head off as we need to get back before dark, at which point the roads become an order of magnitude more difficult. The drive there and back in one day feels like a long drive but it’s a lot of fun if you like big views, amazing sights and 4WD’ing. Much though I enjoy it, I let Valerian drive on the way back though. We don’t have any passengers and the practice will be good for him before his four week drivers course next month. He’s 29 years old but has only been driving for 2 months and all of it out here. As the wet season comes on, it’s getting trickier and trickier. Fortunately his driving is improving daily but going down ‘Z Hill’ I’m shall we say, focused? I’m ready at any moment to jump in with advice (orders really) if he (i.e. we) look like getting into trouble as sliding off some of one of those edges could be bad for the roof of the vehicle.

Valerian does a good job of Z Hill though and we survive unscathed with all going well till we hit the Lubalisi River crossing. The river is up and it’s had a bit of rain on the track which makes the exit slippery and his inexperience shows. I have to ask him to stop as he’s about to enter the river and ask him gently whether he thinks low range would be a good idea? On reflection, he thinks it would be a good idea and changes down. We get across OK but he just hasn’t enough momentum on the way out of the creek and we start to slide on the steep and slippery exit. He slows. I say (loudly) “keep going, don’t stop, just let the tyres bite in” but it’s too late and all momentum is lost. We’re halfway up the bank with the brakes on and he has a couple more goes at getting out but unfortunately hasn’t any experience with hill starts and we end up sideways. The back end of the VX is pointing at an angle to the causeway out to a deep part of the river and it’s clear we’ve only got one more chance to get it right. One more slide backwards and we’re stuck in the river with nothing handy to winch off. I for one don’t feel like digging in the spare tyre for a winching point if I don’t have to. With regret at having to do it to him, I explain we’ve only got one last shot and ask if he’d mind if I have a go. Turns out he’s relieved to let me have a go and almost forgets to put the handbrake on as he just about leaps out of the drivers seat. It takes a bit of doing but I straighten it up and reverse onto the causeway to get a run up. Up on flat ground again I give the drivers seat back to him – but a little prematurely as it turns out…

About 5 minutes down the track and only 5 minutes from camp, we come to ‘the obstacle’. A muddy, slippery, clay, rutted grooved and rather steep hill which in the dry even the worst bit takes perhaps 10 seconds to drive up. Today that section took us and extra 39 minutes and 50 seconds.

Anyone who has been in the same predicament will agree that sliding backwards and/or sideways down a muddy rutted hillside with four wheels spinning is a disconcerting experience. At least it was for me. Even more so when it’s on a tiny track in the middle of the African jungle on sunset. More underwhelming still, when you’re in the passenger seat of a rookie driver. Walking the final 5 km was starting to look like a real option. Rolling onto our roof was equally looking like an option and my suggestions to “keep the revs up” and “steer into it” seemed hilariously doomed to provoke the opposite response from the big Tutsi.

After the river crossing Valerian was obviously feeling cautious and had taken it nice and slow approaching the hill. Too slow. Once into the ruts and with the fresh rain, there is just no traction to be had. I’m pleased to say that we eventually came to rest upright but wedged firmly between the banks on either side of the track. Despite valiant efforts consisting of much engine revving, it was beyond either of us to drive it out. Perhaps I was a bit optimistic letting Valerian drive this section but looking on the bright side, at least he got some great winching experience.

Whether it was a spot of intuition or maybe our military training, Pete and I had tested all the vehicle winches the previous week which was just as well as the winch on this vehicle had been installed incorrectly from new. The plastic wrap was still on the cable drum and it looked just great. Brand spanking new on the outside but as it turned out the electrical contacts hadn’t been connected and clearly no one had thought to test it in the past 2 years. In the end, it took us 4 lengths of cable, 40 minutes and lots of jokes at our own expense as we slipped and tripped in the mud but we got in to Mibango on sunset – just in time to tell our story over the dinner table.

How to double school attendance overnight...

2009-12-02T14:32:00.002Z

Would you like to know how to double attendance in schools? Read on and I’ll tell you how...

A friend asked me recently for some information about education in Tanzania and access to computers for a report she’s writing. The short answer was that it seems there are no computers in public schools in Tanzania. In fact most of the villages in this area have no schools even. They grow up in grass or mudbrick huts where the kids learn how to till the fields, make more huts and make more locals. That's about it in the way of education for the most part.

The nearest school is about 30km away in Lubalisi. It's a basic primary school which looks like it would have about 20 to 40 students and perhaps 500 people living in the catchment area. At Mwese (20km past Lubalisi) is another (bigger) primary school and a secondary school to year 10.

At Mpanda, there is also a high school and a technical college. At the technical college they have some sort of basic computer lessons for adults but to the best of my knowledge that is the only computer resource in the area. Mpanda has an ‘Internet Café’ but it has no computers and no internet either. Mwese and Lubalisi don't even have electricity let alone Internet. The only internet in the region is satellite which is prohibitively expensive.

Seems like roughly even numbers of boys and girls going to school. But again, whatever gender, going to school is the exception in this area. There are lots and lots of one or two hut settlements out here and small villages where people never get to go to school unless they walk 20km each way. In short, schooling is a luxury most people don't get to enjoy out here. That being said, it is amazing that there is a school in Lubalisi as it is just a dusty settlement of about 100 huts along the track.

Primary school fees are next to zero but high school is about $300/year I’m told. That’s a lot of money to educate a child in a land where casual labourers earn about USD$2.50 per day and most families have 4 or more kids.

It occurs to me that internet would make a world of difference out here. Mobile phone coverage is amazingly good. Mwese has mobile phone and there is a spot called 'Crying Village' about 5 km from here (48km from Mwese) where you can get mobile phone cover from that tower. When the phones go 3G and have internet, things might change overnight. Solar power and a few laptops plus 3G would transform the place.

As for how to double school attendance… The guys at camp bought a couple of soccer balls and netballs to donate to Lubalisi and Ikabulu schools a while ago. Just the simple act of donating one of each to those schools doubled student attendance overnight because kids could now come to play soccer and/or netball/volleyball. Does that give you some idea of the education challenges here? When even soccer balls are scarce resources, computers are a long, long way from the Tanzanian education system…

About Ali...

2009-11-26T19:30:00.001Z

Ali stands before me today atypically embarrassed. He’s not quite making eye contact and shifts uneasily from foot to foot. Most of the locals have a deferential way towards mzungus but Ali is also the shyest guy in camp. Eventually you find out what a nice bloke he is and to appreciate his cheeky sense of humour - but it takes a while.

Today is different though. The last time he looked so sheepish was when he’d ironed a hole in the collar of my shirt. Such things happen when you’re using a charcoal fired iron. Embarrassed though he was that day, it wasn’t the end of the world for me and after all, it’s hard to be annoyed with someone who works so hard and means so well.

Ali is the assistant cook and the guy who keeps the camp running when Mathias the main cook is away so we have a lot to do with him and he has earned our trust.

Meanwhile, as I’m wondering what’s up today, I’m reminded as if for the first time, just how short Ali is. Valerian has brought him up to the recreation hut where we’ve just finished lunch and the contrast between the big Tutsi and the little Bantu is striking. Ali isn’t a pygmy but he’s short even by Bantu standards at around 150 cm. Standing next to the lean 183cm Valerian the contrast is stark.

Normally they would be here to see Pete. Pete is after all, camp manager till he and Tim leave on Friday. But no, they bypass Pete and come over to me as the three of us stand to greet them. I’m pretty sure it’s not a shirt this time. After the last one, I’ve asked him to not iron my shirts so I’m thinking I’m safe on that count (but you never know… after all, TIA - this is Africa). Valerian has the better English of the two and is more confident as well so he speaks first. Ali continues shuffling from foot to foot looking slightly embarrassed. Turns out that Ali is feeling unwell but doesn’t want to be any bother. Pete used to be the medical fundi but because of my medic background he has been usurped as the local.

Ali doesn’t look unwell. Typical of people here, he is fit and lean in a way that those of us in developed nations only achieve with hours of exercise. But looking fit doesn’t really mean anything here or anywhere else in the world. Of more concern to me is that the locals are a hardy bunch, well used to living with and overcoming illness. As a result they won’t disturb anyone unless they’re feeling really crook so he has my full attention.

Despite me being the “doctor fundi” (according to Valerian) it’s a collective diagnosis with Valerian, Tim, Pete and I standing with Ali on the floorboards of the rec hut. With the big tutsi’s help, Ali explains that he has had chest pain and a cough for four days. Valerian (who is a bit of a medical fundi himself from his experience caring for his cattle) suggests flagyl for the chest and stomach but I’m reluctant to hand out antibiotics without trying other options. Ali’s not coughing at the moment and so a little more questioning reveals that he has been constipated for 4 days and has stomach pain. Tim has some laxatives in his kit so we give a couple to Ali with instructions to come back tomorrow and let us know how he’s feeling.

The next day, the four of us manage at diffeent times to ask him how he’s feeling and he responds “kidogo” (a little) each time, meaning a little better. Turns out he’s been to the toilet and so his stomach is feeling much better. He doesn’t like to be a bother of course so I ask him about his chest and he admits to still having pain there. More questioning (this is like extracting teeth by now…) reveals he’s tired because he’s been coughing all through the night when he lays down. “Hmmmm…” I think to myself “more going on here still” so I take him up to the med hut and put a stethoscope on him. Ali stoically puts up with the cold stethoscope and breathes deep. Sure enough, he’s got fluid rattling in the bottom of both lungs which suggests a chest infection. He’s still getting around OK and the nearest Doctor is a days drive away so I ponder a little more on the best approach. The wait another day and see approach didn’t help. We’re taking him out on Friday which is only a few days away now and can stop at the clinic then if he’s no better, but in the meantime…

Like most remote camps, we have a basic but well equipped medical setup which is designed to deal with most emergencies and tropical illnesses so I root around in the medications box and come up with 4 different flavours of antibiotics. Sadly none of them are the one that I’m really looking for and 2 of them I’m pretty sure are not going to help so I grab the two that look most promising and head back to the office with Ali. I’m only a fundi in training on this stuff but luckily I have an expert close at hand. Google knows all. In the space of a few minutes, I’ve picked the one that looks most effective for a chest infection in this region. Pausing (atypically for me) to read the instructions, side-effects and contraindications, I take them to Ali and start to explain the dosage and side effects. Ali’s responses (nodding, nodding, nodding) help me to decide that this is a flawed plan from the start, so we go over to Valerian to translate. Ali is beaming by now and judging from his posture, the placebo effect is working already. He seems to understand the side-effects etc and promises to tell us if he breaks out in a rash, etc although to be honest he seems to be bemused that we should think that this would ever happen. The expression on his quizzical face seems to say that “what are you worried about. I know you wouldn’t give this to me if it wasn’t going to fix me up in a flash”. I wish I had his faith but I’m not about to disillusion him on this point nor to go into the history of side effects of medications even if I thought he would comprehend what I was getting at.

The next day Ali is only “kidogo” again but clearly has more spring in his step. Sure to be placebo after only 24 hours but hey, I’m a big fan of placebo – and clearly, so is Ali. Looks like the miracles of modern medicine are working for Ali but later that day, Mathias the head cook comes up to me in the office with ‘sore joints, headache, fever’. What’s the story with our cooks???? Is this a kitchen pandemic? I know they’re not after a sickie because neither of them would take a day off without having a death certificate, so seriously do they take their role of keeping the 15 or so of us fed and watered.

As with Ali, I ‘pull a few teeth’ to extract a bit more info and as we’re walking to the med hut, I ask him what he thinks it is. “Malaria” he responds quick as a flash. “Well, why didn’t you just say so” I’m thinking… I ask him a few more questions and turns out he’s had it a few times before. Exactly how many times I have no idea and probably neither has he but like most malaria patients, he knows the signs and symptoms of malaria in his own body. Job done. An easy fix with a couple of malaria tablets and a good lie down. I go through the side-effects etc with him which also bemuses him. So trusting… I choose not to labour the point and he goes away happy.

Ali meanwhile is beaming by day three. Neither of them take so much as an hour off work and continue to work from 6am to 8pm each day but they are both happy as schoolkids with a new bike.

I think I might miss those two next week...

A quiet couple of days at Kapalagulu

2009-11-20T19:10:00.001Z

So what does a quiet 28 hours at Kapalagulu look like? Well, scorpions, snakes, wildlife, 4WD'ing and mountains of unmarked bills are some highlights...

I watch while Macarani loads 5 rounds of 12 gauge into the Mossberg. He does it with the easy skill of someone with years of experience. Fire extinguisher is positioned close at hand and our vehicle is strategically reverse parked to see and be seen. He and I stand in the shade. Waiting… For ten minutes or more we make small talk about life in general and exchange good natured jokes at each others expense...

A few hours earlier I’d been minding my own business, having 4WD fun at ‘the obstacle’ on my way back to camp in the drizzle while rivers of mud ooze down the rutted red clay hillside that we’ve affectionately and accurately named ‘the obstacle’. Third gear, low range, both diffs locked and engine racing as I bounce the landcruiser ungracefully to the top of the hill. The bald tyres alternately bite deep and spin wildly as the trayback bounces and skids from one side of the track to the other while I trade speed for altitude up the hill. We make it, just. Which is the best way to do it after all - no energy wasted on over-revving nor on having to take a second stab at it. I’m on my way back after escorting Pete to the Lubalisi River as a precaution in case the water was too deep and we needed a winch point to pull him back out. When we get there, the water has gone down to about 1.2m so Pete makes it across without any trouble and I head back while he continues to Mwese to collect supplies and pick up Vallerian after his friends funeral.

On the way back, I cruise by the airfield where I come face to face with an elder and his clan. There’s a quiet strength behind those eyes and the grey in his whiskers gives him dignity. He’s confident of his place at the head of his clan but he’s not too sure of me. He stares at me as I stop the car. I stare back and we lock eyes. Eventually I wave. We’re still 20 metres apart and no response from him, other than the slightest tilt of the head. It could mean anything but I take it to mean curiosity and no more. We stare at each other for a minute or more. The rest of the clan have moved behind him and I can’t tell how many there are because they’re mostly out of sight in the bushes. One of the youngsters who has climbed a tree to get a better look at me until a branch bends and they scrabble to avoid falling. Meanwhile, the elder has climbed atop a 1.5m ant hill. He’s partly hidden by foliage now but for the first time we’re eye level with each other. I wave again but no reaction so I dismount but they bolt. It’s the closest I’ve been to the local Baboon troop and they’re a shy bunch. Definitely not like the game park animals who are used to people and that’s probably a good thing. There are no humans out here hunting poachers and it’s a subsistence lifestyle for the locals. Still this short encounter in the morning has made my day already and I’m smiling on the inside as I continue down the airstrip. I’m really here to check out the ant hills that have popped up in the runway and find several that are already 30cm high. The mattock makes short work of them but I know they’ll grow again with every rainy day that passes.

Back at camp, the rain has stopped so I grab a backpack and load it up with 20kg of soil to get some exercise and get in shape for the walk out of here next year. I tell the security guys that I’m walking to the airfield and they look incredulous. “Why not driving?” they ask. “For exercise” I say, then add “Too much computer work is making me fat” and pat my belly which they think is hilarious. I’m sure they think I’m crazy. Nice but crazy. No-one exercises deliberately here. When not doing hard yakka to feed themselves, they do their best to conserve energy. For me it’s the opposite. When not working hard I go out to try and expend energy in the form of recreational exercise, aka exploring the area.

In any case, I’m not going to the airfield and have no idea which track I’ll take, but security have to record our destinations when we head out so I oblige by giving them one. I head off to at a good pace while trying to adjust the pack straps. It’s one of the camp backpacks that the guys use for carrying soil samples and is still in decent condition. I take the first turn to the left which is an old and overgrown 4WD track from the days of drilling here some 3 years ago. The jungle is reclaiming it but it’s pleasant walking under the canopy and much better underfoot than the slippery main tracks. I drag a couple of deadfall logs of the track as I progress, just in case we want to use the track again one day. On about the third one, I bend to grab a log and with fingers an inch above the log, a scorpion crawls out from the spot where my hand was about to grab underneath the log. “Good reminder” I think to myself. The scorpion goes on his way but as a precaution I kick the underside of the log to clear it but I only manage to disturb a colony of fire ants who overrun the log. I laugh and decide that this is one log that can stay right where it is. The walk is uneventful (except to my shoulders which haven’t carried a pack for a while now) but pleasantly full of birds, lizards and sights until after 40 mins I reach a junction where it’s time to turn back to camp.

With perfect timing, I arrive back in time to fire up the generator, start the laptop and find an email to say that Tim’s flight will be 45 minutes early. That after all, was why I was at the airport this morning meeting Baboons, er I mean checking the strip, and indeed why ten minutes later Macarani and I find ourselves on the strip. Soon enough we hear the drone of a plane and see the fly speck in the sky. The plane is a Cessna 4 seater taking a passenger out to Mahale National Park and stops in here to drop Tim (a geo) back at camp after 3 weeks away. Tim flew out on the charter flight that I came in on and he’s brought all sorts of goodies for resupply but most importantly brings my Macbook from Dar where it was being repaired and an MSR Dragonfly stove for cooking on during the wet season. Sadly he was too laden up to bring red wine but such are the hardships of camp life that we have to celebrate his return that night with just local beer.

We set up the MSR stove that evening. Bit of a test really but Pete who gets before the cooks have had time to boil water, has been drinking tepid coffee in the mornings so we create the mandatory fireball while learning how to light the stove. This little miracle of modern technology will burn just about anything. Petrol, diesel, Jet At, kerosene or white spirit are all fair game for it and we have lashings of the first 4 here at camp. The instructions say to light up half a teaspoon of fuel on the wick in a ‘football sized flame’ which preheats the jet to vapourise the rest of the pressurized fuel. We survive the first couple of attempts without burning down the recreation hut and it turns out that it’s pretty easy when you know how (but then again what isn’t?).

The rains bring out the flying ants flocking round the lights that night and they are truly pestilent. They buzz and flap like a World War I dogfight around any and every light that is on. We turn on a light in the next hut and put a candle in the recreation hut which distracts them for the most part but eventually we decide to retreat to the office which is flyscreened. Great idea but we forgot about the gaping sections between the timber planks. In the end we call it an early night after being batted around the head by flying ants a couple of hundred times too many.

I’m awake myself at 5am and out on the verandah just in time to see the glow of the proverbial football across the compound as Pete brews up. I listen for the explosion but am disappointingly rewarded with the quiet hiss of the burner boiling water. Later this morning around first light we can see the ground littered with wings of he flying ants. Job done they drop the wings like tear shaped confetti and start building ant mounds under and around our camp. First light today is a grey affair though. From a starlit night last night, we have an overcast start to the day and then – it rains… I don’t know how much we had but in the hour that it took us to eat our breakfast of pancakes, papaya and plunger coffee the rain gauge overflowed at the maximum 25mm. Perhaps not the ideal choice of rain gauge for this part of the world...

The sun is out at the moment though which is nice. Pete’s just come back from checking the Lubalisi again and it is 1.4m which is 1m up from 10 days ago.

With luck it will come down a bit overnight if the rain holds off and we'll be able to park one of the vehicles in the village on the other side of the river tomorrow. Eventually at some point in each wet season it reaches about 3m and long before that, any chance to get a vehicle across will have faded. At which point, the only way across is by dugout canoe followed by a 50km walk to Mwese, so strong incentive for Tim and Pete to park vehicle on the other side now.

The dappled sunlight stays out for lunch and we enjoy sausage pizza (which tastes better than it sounds) washed down by locally roasted plunger coffee as we gaze out over the valley to the Kapalagulu Intrusion. Life is good.

The rain has flushed out a few critters along the way and the boys in the sample shed kill another snake that crawls into their midst from under a sample bag. We have no idea what it is but the lads tell us that it is lethal. Even without local knowledge, the balance of probability supports their view so I’m inclined to trust them on this.

We spend the afternoon in camp doing emails and odd jobs such as fixing the water pump. The lads manage to break the off switch on our only water pump leaving it permanently off and after 15 minutes of doing their best they admit defeat. Pete and I eventually fix it with a trusty Leatherman and some baling wire but it's a 5 way pow-wow pluss rummaging for chewing gum, o-rings, packing tape and sundry repair options which lasts for 20 minutes before we get it going. I'm reminded that there's 'no hurry in Africa'. Later that afternoon we end up looking like a bunch of African arms dealers as we count out 4,000,000 in low denomination unmarked bills. It’s fun playing with bricks of money but I wouldn’t be racing out here to rob the place just yet. It’s all but gone already in wages, supplies and slashing contracts etc. In any case (30cm pile of cash though it may be) it wouldn’t be enough to pay a charter flight to get here and it's a long walk to anywhere. We've had no problems out here other than some petty theft but even so, it’s a lot of money for this part of the world. Few people have change for $10 - which is why it is mostly in low denominations. For security and common sense reasons, none of the locals know which flights have money on them and which don’t, but you may have guessed by now why the shotgun comes along to meet each and every flight. We’ve never needed the shotgun nor the fire extinguisher and that suits me just fine…

Making sparks fly...

2009-11-19T11:51:00.000Z

Macarani, the security team leader races across the compound with the speed of a thousand startled gazelles. He's heard something worrying... It's the genset coughing and spluttering like a 60 a day smoker. The lights in our office flicker and dim so Pete and I stride across the camp in what we would like to believe is a dignified and purposeful fashion but we're no match for Macarani's speed. We get to the genset just as he finishes topping it up the fuel. Good intentions but as we watch him wiping spilled petrol from the top of the still running genset just above a live 240v outlet, we realize we probably need to do a bit more training with the guys.

In any case we’re hoping fuel can’t be the problem. We reilled it just two hours previously. Macarani is a good guy and he’s troubleshooting the bit that he knows best which is fuel but sadly that’s not the reason it is missing and spluttering. Nothing so simple We tinker and prod as the engine starts running better but not for long. A red light flashes albeit too quickly to tell which one it was then the genset politely but spontaneously shuts down. Macarani stands by wanting to help and is as unsure as we are about the cause, but has enough common sense not to meddle. Pete and I on the other hand, don’t have that particular common sense gene and of course realize that if we don’t fix it no-one else will, so we meddle... Taking covers off here and there, we work out that the problem was low oil. Not a good sign really as it has only been 3 hours since we topped up the oil also. This is the genset that we just got back from the fly camp so we thought it would be a good idea to run this quieter genset at the camp. Our diagnosis is that the rings are shot and poor the little 4 stroke engine is burning oil now like a 2 stroke. With oil topped up, it starts but continues to miss and eventually through a process of elimination we eventually discover that the petrol Macarani added came from a drum that is at least 2 years old. From the look of the petrol in the tank, it’s been pumped out of the drum with the same pump the guys use for diesel and engine oil, neither of which was ever going to be a good idea. Not a good day for the poor little red genset but it soldiers on when we give it some clean fuel.

After 3 weeks here, the generator noise is just part of the background and you don’t even notice it most of the time. In fact, when the quiet one running, even the birds make more noise. We have 3 generators to choose from: small red previously mentioned genset (quiet), medium diesel (loud, Loud, LOUD!), large diesel (quietest) and one of them is running most of the day depending on what we’re doing.

With the red genset back on line now (but for who knows how long) I reflect on how easy it is to take electricity for granted. You flick a switch and miracles happen. Sure, I’ve been without it lots of time when camping etc but that’s different. I’m here for 3 months and I have books to write (not to mention not wanting to disappoint my loyal following of two blokes and a drovers dog waiting anxiously for my daily blog…). I’m liking what electricity gives us out here in particular, and until recently was in danger of taking it for granted. The gensets give us internet and lights. They provide the rest of the staff with television and lights. TV is something that I prefer to avoid but for the local guys on camp it is a real treat. Not just because it keeps them in touch with the rest of the world but because most of them don’t have it at home.

By some estimates, approximately 3 million people live in western Tanzania. I have no real figures for it but can safely say that the majority don’t have electricity. The nearest mains electricity is about 150km away in Mpanda. There is one solar power setup in Mwese 53.3 km away but I doubt there are any other electricity generation setups closer than that. Reflect for a moment on life without electricity. Just think - no cold beer. Ever… Hmmm. Bummer. No electric lights, power tools or appliances either. No fridges or freezers to store food and medicine. No computers in schools and no internet. No google, wikipedia, facebook or skype. No emergency communications to call a Doctor or ambulance (OK so this one is a moot point around here). Not so much as a place to charge a mobile phone even if you’re lucky enough to live in range of a tower. Lot’s of people have transistor radios and some have torches but none have TV outside of the big towns. Many people here are yet to see an electric light bulb. Makes you (or at least me) wonder what they make of it when they come to camp or a place like Mpanda with electric motors, TV, lights, fridges etc. Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction says that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. That works for me. Magic is as good a term as any for the benefits of invisible stuff like electricity. And living out here is only making me more of a believer in magic.

Learning swahili

2009-11-18T08:35:00.000Z

Swahili must be one of the easiest languages to learn. I mean really… any 5 year old here can speak it. So why can’t I? LOL

I’m gradually learning a little Swahili thanks to some phrasebooks and very patient locals who don't mind repeating things 3 times for my mzungu ears. Luckily Swahili uses the Roman alphabet and pronunciation is more or less similar to Italian so it’s easier than Khmer but nonetheless a challenge. Learning as I am at a galloping pace, after 3 weeks, I can say hi (Jambo) and key phrases such as “Mimi zungumza Kiswahili kidogo sana” (I speak very little Swahili). OK, so I know a little (very little) more than that by now and the latter phrase is redundant as it’s blatantly obvious as soon as I open my mouth that my Swahili is close to non-existent but it makes a great icebreaker and always gets a laugh.

Travelling around I’ve had the chance to dabble in a few languages over the years and it’s always fun but equally often frustrating learning a new language (or more typically for me, snippets thereof). Personally I’m still working on English, but the muscles in the brain that get exercised learning another language are a great feeling (so long as you don’t mind a sore head at the end of each day lol). Rewiring synapses this way is a great workout for the brain but the biggest reward, is of course communicating with a whole new group of people. It also seems to me that you can’t really learn too much about a culture without learning at least a little of the language.

I found an interesting post on Facebook yesterday from Antonio Graceffo on Wrestling with the Vietnamse Language. Not sure if you’ll be able to get to it without being on his Facebook friend list but worth a read if, like me, you’re a fan of languages and would like to learn more of them. One of the key messages was about the importance of learning a language by listening instead of the more traditional approach of memorising words and phrases. He argues convincingly that to be truly fluent means you should be able to understand a local no matter how quickly or colloquially they speak. He also suggests that being fluent means you are able to articulate the subtlest complexities of your life rather than just be able to get around, order a double shot latte or survive at the markets. He recommended a learning approach that I hadn’t heard of before which is called ‘Automatic Language Growth’. ALG is interesting in so much as it focuses much more on listening in the initial phases at least than it does on speaking.

This story from Dr. J. Marvin Brown's book, “From the Outside In” reprinted at www.algworld.com pretty much sums up the ALG concept:
“Zambi came from the village of Makui in central Africa a hundred years ago and her parents arranged for her to marry a man in the village of Mujambi, which spoke a completely different language. She arrived there not knowing a word of Mujambi and nobody there knew any Makui-not even her husband. During the day, while her husband was hunting with the other men, the women took Zambi along with them as they did their basket weaving and gardening. At night everybody sat around the fire and listened to stories. Zambi’s daily life could be described as ‘silently tagging along’. After a year of this she understood almost everything that went on around her and could say a few words and phrases. After 2 years she was quite fluent, and after 3 or 4 years she was almost like a native Mujambi villager.”

Admittedly that is a long slow and time consuming way to learn a language but it seems to me that I might become better at languages by spending at least as much time just listening as I do learning words. That is after all, how we learn our native tongue - by tagging along as toddlers and gradually learning by listening. We’re lucky to in that we don’t just have to ‘silently tag along’ anymore. We have audio recordings, YouTube videos and multi-lingual television to help our listening opportunities. I think I’ll resist the temptation to spend my day watching Tanzanian soap operas though. Around here there are no shortage of opportunities to ‘silently tag along’ or to visit a village and enjoy a friendly exchange of English & Swahili monologues sitting in the dust at any of the local villages. Somehow I doubt I’ll be here long enough to become fluent in Swahili but you never know. One day soon I’d like to pause somewhere long enough to become fluent in another language (or three) but for the moment, it’s fun dabbling...

Food for thought... and for eating.

2009-11-17T07:25:00.000Z

“Mosquitoes remind us that we are not as high up on the food chain as we think” said Tom Wilson.

Clearly good food equates to good morale as well as good health as summed up nicely by Hippocrates and Napoleon who said respectively, "Let your food be your medicine" and “An army marches on its stomach”. Luckily we do more than OK out here with good tucker.

Following on from yesterday regarding plastic bowls full of produce balanced gracefully on heads, the local shop comes to us each Tuesday and Saturday when the locals come to the gate with bananas, local spinach (looks like basil but cooks like spinach), chickens, eggs, etc plus a few plants that I still haven’t identified but have enjoyed eating. Our cooks pretty much pick out what they want for the camp but we surprised them when Pete and I went out and bought some corn. Apparently corn isn’t seen as mzungu food. The locals eat corn although mostly dried and ground up as maize flour. They make a kind of polenta meal or porridge out of it called ugali. ‘Ugali & beans’ or ‘rice & beans’ is pretty much the staple diet and let me just say that ugali is just what you’re after if you like your food starchy and uncontaminated by flavour. The other main staple here is Cassava, a starchy carbohydrate laden root vegetable bereft of protein, nutrients or flavour. Just to cap it off, they come pre-packaged with generous amounts of cyanide (and we though flavour enhancers 220 & xyz were bad for us…) which usually takes a few hours of preparation to leach out before you can eat it. Is it just me who wonders who the heck decided that Cassava was OK to eat if you leached it in a river for 5 hours? Bonus points to that man/woman for courage, initiative and above being the first to survive eating it. Gives you some idea though of the limited range of food options out here doesn’t it?

We have 2 local cooks here and although they find it easy to cook for the local guys they still seem to be learning about cooking for mzungus. They are getting he hang of it but so far as we can tell, they are politely but decidedly bemused by our diets. Usually the meals are pretty darn good and they really do try to please but some odd combinations turn up from time to time. Bangers and peas or fish with cabbage being some examples. You just get used to it and remember TIA (this is Africa). We’ve also had a couple of days where all 3 meals were bereft of fruit and veggies yet other days when veggies and fruit are overflowing. This is despite having abundant fruit and veg sitting on the flymesh pantry shelves. It’s like they just forget sometimes. We asked them for bacon and eggs for breakfast the following day to which they nodded and agreed. Cooked to perfection and immaculately presented the following morning we received… chapatti with 2 boiled eggs each. LOL AWA (Africa Wins Again). Have you ever dined at Fawlty Towers? If so, you’d probably adapt well to the dining experience out here. Perhaps the strangest thing though that they’ve prepared is still the meat and salad sandwiches - complete with strawberry jam… Clearly the use of strawberry jam is a black art in Tanzania. I can’t wait for them to top that combination but I’m pretty sure that they will eventually LOL. In any case, in a week or so, the camp shuts down and the cooks go home so I’ll be cooking for myself and much though it is nice to have meals cooked, I think I’ll probably be happier with my own menus.

Out behind the compound and down by the creek are the remains of a veggie patch that the former security captain started as a business on the side. He’s long gone (for having tooooo many businesses on the side and too few hours of security management) but his veggie patch is surprisingly still doing OK. Seems like the local Baboon colony and other wildlife don’t much care for tomatoes or carrots. Great news for me. They are still thriving albeit neglected so I might even tidy that up a bit to supplement the fresh veggie offerings at the gate. Either way, the freezer is full of beef and the sea container has enough condiments, chilli sauce, rice and beans to see us through a long wet.

PS. Despite my opening quote, I’m happy to report that there are no mosquitoes out here. Admittedly there was one about 2 weeks ago but she seems to have moved on. Sad to report though that there are no lions either since decades of refugees flooding through the area ate whatever they could to survive. That does mean however that (at least for the moment) we are still top of the food chain which is probably my preferred place on the tree.

PPS. In case you're curious about what I might cook up during the wet, my favourite meal isn’t even a food... Mark Twain said it best: “Sacred cows make the best hamburger". Makes a great meal for a writer :-)

On the value of things…

2009-11-16T07:24:00.000Z

It’s easy to forget just how good we have it in the developed nations. Sure our lives are complicated (Eg: Bills - ever noticed how long it takes to finalise change of address when you relocate?!?) but our options are many and it takes just a few hours work each week to feed ourselves and a few more hours to buy enough ‘stuff’ to be able to hold that mandatory garage sale every few years. Discretionary income though, is just one of many concepts that I doubt I could adequately explain to the locals. I’ve seen subsistence farming in many places but when you look at the straw and timber or mucbrick houses and crops here then reflect that it is 25 km walk down to the lake to buy fish or cooking oil and then 25 km back up the same steep hills it give you a new insight into just how different my world is from theirs. Just about everything here is either grown, cut from the jungle or carted in on their backs.

So rare in this place are many things that we take for granted that for example, some of the guys here have offered to work 4 days in exchange for an empty 200 litre diesel drum. That’s roughly the equivalent of USD$16 for something that we would discard as useless. To put it in another perspective, 4 days equates to roughly $600 worth of labour back in Australia. Meanwhile… back at the headshed, we’re pondering whether or not to accept this offer. On the one hand we have 20 or 30 empty drums which are surplus to requirements. We have a few main options: swap drums for labour, sell them, leave them to rust, truck them out for disposal (where they’ll end up in the community anyway) or bury them. What’s the most environmentally and safety conscious answer? Who knows? If we accept the offer of 4 days work for a drum we can probably get rid of 10 of them, save 200,000 TZS in labour costs and help the local community. Whether or not they benefit the local community depends of course, on what they do with them. Eg: if they use them for storing water, will carcinogenic residues end up in their bodies?

The question of course is, if they do swallow a load of carcinogens will it kill them before they turn 35??? Thirty five after all, is about average life expectancy here anyway. Will a drum (even with diesel residue) help extend their life because they can boil and store drinking/washing water in large quantities or store crops away from vermin? In point of fact, we have a hot shower here because we use an old diesel drum as a donkey boiler to heat the water so maybe the diesel residue isn’t so bad after all... Who are we in fact, to landfill a drum which could give them reserves of drinking water or even potentially communal hot water. Then again, if they use it for making gongo (local bootleg liquor) will it create social problems here with an overabundance of grog? Probably not, as it’s already easily available but I can't say that for sure. I can say that not many of the locals seem too interested in grog anyway and I can’t say I blame them. Gongo looks like vodka but tastes like unleaded petrol. So that’s our dilemma with the empty drums. Do we let them into the community? If anyone has any tips or suggestions either way, I’d love to hear them.

The drums of course are just one of the many things that the locals value and that we don't. Everything here has value, even the rubbish. They have so little material possessions that a polymesh bag can become a suitcase or backpack, an empty 1.5 litre drink bottle is a valuable commodity for carrying water. And yes, speaking of carrying, those pictures of people carrying stuff on their head as per 1950’s National Geographic are just as true today. A plastic bowl of about 70cm diameter supported by a cloth on the head is the standard way to carry bananas etc to market. Anything up to 40kg seems to be fair game to be carried this way. Great for posture and balance but I can help but wonder what it does to the vertebrae. Pushbikes though are the haulage vehicles of choice here – I’ve seen them hauling loads of probably 100kg comprising any combination of bricks, timber, produce or clothes as a sort of two wheeled push cart over distances of up to 50km. Quite amazing to see how cunningly the frame of a pushbike can be adapted for load carrying…

On Second Thoughts....

2009-11-15T12:19:00.000Z

Well not really second thoughts in the usual sense but more of an update on the ‘First Thoughts re Tanzania’.
It’s pissing down rain here today in the way that only tropical rain can completely fill the air with a wall of water. The sound on the tin roof drowns out even the genset and my own internal musings. Yes, even talking to yourself is all but impossible when the rain is heavy enough lol. Meanwhile water runs through the compound in rivers while mud leaps into the air from the force of the rain and splashes high onto the sides of the huts adding to the 60 cm of rustic red/brown at the base of each building from seasons past.

I might actually get some writing done today as Pete has gone off with the guys to Mwese. There are two hired Landcruiser Troop Carriers with drivers that need to get out before the river comes up otherwise it will be several thousand unnecessary dollars in hire fees while the vehicles sit out the wet season here at camp. There is also a Lancruiser VX (a posh 5 door station sedan model) here which doesn't have a snorkel and hence is somewhat limited in how deep a river it can cross. Pete is taking it to Mwese to leave there until needed in a weeks time for his and Tim's exfil. The hire vehicles will head on to Mwanza which is about 850km away. They’re bombed them up with 180 litres of diesel which is enough for at least 1,000 km (given that most of the trip can be done at 80km/h) but one of the drivers in particular had a good whinge that it wouldn't be enough and that he needed cash to buy fuel along the way. You should have seen his expression when he found out that he wasn’t getting any extra money to buy fuel. Pete and I had done the calculations so we just laid it out with him re fuel consumption and distances albeit not without enduring an extended play version of his ‘you’re so cruel’ and ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about’ expression. Frankly he didn't have a leg to stand on - we’d done the homework and he hadn’t… Why he should be so pained is something gentle reader, that I’ll leave for you to think about. A couple of clues: When I drive a Landcruiser over the same roads it uses about 16 l/100km. His vehicle used about 40 litres/100km on one recent trip. Either he is driving everywhere in low range first gear or… well, here’s another clue - a litre of diesel is worth a days wages here (USD$3.00). Does kind of make you wonder where the ‘missing’ 120 or so litres went? In any case, today is his last day so lesson learned but immediate problem resolved.

Pete and Vallerian will be coming back in one of the traybacks which has a snorkel at roof height so it can basically go through water up to almost 1.8m in theory (so long as it's not too fast flowing). As of yesterday the creek was only 70cm but with all this rain, the snorkel might come in handy They've got HF radio back to here in case they need assistance but my job at 1600 is to either put some beer into the freezer if when they arrive or to jump into the other trayback to help extricate them from a bog. With all the rain, the roads are going to be slippery, Z hill will be dicey and the river will be up but my expectation is to be loading the freezer at 1600hrs and not the trayback.

Would have been a good trip to go on with all the rain but it's no fun coming back in a landcruiser trayback with 3 people shoehorned into the cab. Cramped for everyone and the poor bastard in the middle gets their knees remodeled for 3 hours on the radio, diff lock and miscellaneous metal bits under the dash. Three hours of fun - I don't think so. The other option was to take both traybacks but frankly it seemed like a WOFTAM. We'll be heading out down to the lake tomorrow in any case to map out my hike down to the ferry for exfill next year. In theory, I could probably find my way there using the wiley approximation method of navigation (ie. Taking a wiley guess at each intersection) but apart from the fact that others might find it useful next season, mapping it is (a) a good excuse to get out while we can and (b) if I get delayed on the hike by taking a wrong turn down one of the many jungle paths, the ferry only comes once each week so it could be a long delay...

Valerian has got the bicycle Fundi (fundi is now one of my favourite words – it loosely translates as 'technician' or 'expert') here today working on a couple of the bikes that have been sitting with flat tyres for a while. There are also two badly trashed cheap Chinese mountain bikes here that I’d dug out of a shed yesterday. I think it should be possible to build one good bike out of the two wrecks so I asked the fundi if he could maybe get one MTB going but he shook his head with a mournful look as if to say “sorry mate, this is way beyond anything I’ve worked on to date” so I said not to worry about it. The bikes he's fixing the flats on are the traditional local type bikes with no gears and grandmas style wraparound handbrakes (ala 1949 Britain or 2009 Tanzania). He said he'd have a go at the MTB's and apparently there is another fundi here in the sieving team who knows a bit more but basically it looks like if they are going to work at all it will be up to me.

Anyway, more writing to do (actual book writing for a change) and I might even try and upload some photos to facebook or to the blog today, fingers crossed.

FIrst thoughts re Tanzania

2009-11-14T09:20:00.000Z

I've been writing a bunch of emails lately describing my adventures and someone asked if I had a blog. So I thought... why not? Instead of re-writing or copying and pasting for each email, I thought I may as well just blog what I'm up to. At least that's the theory. This is my first blog so who knows.

I'm currently caretaking a geological exploration camp in remote Tanzania while it is mothballed for the wet season and will probably be here till late Feb. The camp itself is really remote. It's one days 4WD (120km) to the nearest general store at a place called Mpanda which is a dusty backwater town bereft of charm but interesting and full of character nonetheless. Despite being so remote, Google knows all so you can see the camp and airstrip at http://maps.google.com/maps?q=-5.894626+30.085371+%28UTM:%2036M%20%200177241m%20E%20%209347600m%20N%29

The rains haven't started in earnest yet so I've been getting to know the area a bit for when it's just me with a few locals to look after the camp. Not that it will really matter as the roads become impassable but still a good excuse to get out and about enjoying some challenging 4WD terrain.

Had a good road trip last Monday Tuesday. Bit of rain around and the roads were slippery as anything. Good fun :-) Pete (the mate who got me this gig) drove while I mapped the road from Mibango (the camp) to Mwese with GPS. We got there just before dark and had a beer with the locals in what passes for a pub. Picture a rendered mud brick box about 10' x 10' with one door and a window without glass (just wooden shutters when closed). The space includes the bar, barmaid, 2 locals on stools and Pete & I. The locals don't speak English and we don't speak (much) Swahili. But everyone is happy and gets on and laughs. There is no electricity so the beer is warm but who cares. The local market is behind the pub. It's a rectangle of mud brick and painted concrete buildings with tiny shopfronts. The local 'Aldi' equivalent is a crammed box of about 10' x 14' with wooden counter, stuff crammed in everywhere and layered under dust. . In the centre of this 15m x 6m rectangle rectangle of mudbrick shops are some ramshackle bamboo and timber stalls that sell clothes and 'stuff' but most are closed by 6pm when we get there. It's cold up in Mwese at 1700m. Ok, folk in many parts of the world would call it a summers day but in our light shirts and pants at around 18 degrees with the mountain breeze blowing, it is cool indeed. We head off back to the camp which is based at the local priests place because Mathias the cook will have prepared dinner for us. Father Martin is nowhere to be seen as he is off in Lacoma to officiate at a wedding. Not being religious I'm quite OK with being spared hearing about the virtues of his faith for a few hours that night. The field assistants sleep in tents out the back or in some rooms in an outlying building. Pete and I have ensuite rooms in the main house. Sheets are old and with dirt stains that will never wash out and a bit dusty but clean by local standards. The ensuite on the other hand... In 1964 with the first refugee crisis from Rwanda, the UN apparently built this house and the buildings out the back as well as the hall that is now the church. It looks pretty schmick and tidy. Built to western standards and the most impressive buildings in the eclectic mix of thatch, tin, mud and bamboo houses that make up Mwese. Or at least it used to be. Looks like no one has known how to change a tap washer, maintain a head of water for the shower nor (more particularly) even scrub out the bathrooms since 1964. More akin to biological warfare petri dishes than bathrooms, Pete and I have had a shower before leaving camp and we elect to avoid the perils of the showers. We've also cached toilet paper in the vehicle. Just as well as it turns out...

On the plus side, the people are so friendly and welcoming, the vistas so magnificent, the air so clean and the culture so different that even the good Father bio-warfare experiments just become part of the fun. The guys are glad to see us - Pete especially of course and they are a really nice bunch of lads. Slightly dodgy and they get up to some mischief using the vehicles for recreational duties for example but frankly no more dodgy than Pete and I probably did when we were working in similar labouring jobs so we get some good laughs about it all and Pete manages to find a good balance between turning a blind eye and giving an arse kicking when needed. Me, I can afford to relax and just enjoy as I'm not really responsible for anything so I can just help out with all care but no responsibility. With the help of Vallerian and others, we organise more gas bottles to keep the camp freezer running during the wet season, beer, meat for the camp and a few other bits and pieces then head back the following morning, slip sliding all the way, stopping only to give lifts to locals, take a pee at one of the toilets (trees) along the way or more typically to take pictures. The rivers are coming up with the rains and when we get back to camp, it turns out we've had 33mm of rain in the past 24hours. Not surprising then that the river is up. And this isn't even the wet season yet...

That was my second longish trip since I got here 2 weeks ago. The week before our trip to Mwese we did a re-supply run for fuel and groceries. A 3 day trip to cover 150km drive (7 hours drive) on Wednesday to Mpanda which was interesting. Takes 3 hours to do the first 50 km to Mwese which is basically 2 wheel tracks through the forest with creek crossings, wash aways, mud holes etc which is more than enough to keep you wide awake even at 20 km/h. From Mwese to Mpanda is about 90 km of one lane dirt track where you can rocket along at anything up to a blistering 60km/h and over which the local busses hammer along (they are the most dangerous part of the journey and luckily there is only one per day although you never know which blind corner you'll meet them on). This bit of road is much quicker and the river crossings even have wooden bridges (made of logs so not exactly super reliable but I figure that if they hold the busses...). We took 2 Landcruisers on the run and the Exploration manager who was here took the opportunity to fly out from Katavi National Park - the other options are $6,000 charter flight or once per week $900 flight when a flight to Mahale National Park can detour to our strip. Katavi is about 80km (2 hrs) south of Mpanda so 'local' to Mpanda. That just left David and Vallerian (2 local guys) and I to sort out supplies and drive back.. Just as an aside, landcruiser tyres were 270,000 Tanzanian shillings each (about USD$200) but to change all 4 tyres cost only 6,000 TZS or 1,500 each. Just shows the cost of labour versus imported goods...

On Wednesday night there must have been some sort of convention because the first 4 places we looked were all booked up. We managed to find a dodgy little guest house in a back street which had 4 rooms. The fact that it had 4 rooms vacant and all the decent places should have given us a clue about what it was like LOL. But in any case it was adequate and clean enough. I was joking big time about the convention btw. Mpanda is a dusty African town of maybe 5,000 people with no sealed roads (although the main street was closed when we were there and looked like it was being sealed - elections next year you know...). Funny place Africa. Can't really do it justice trying to describe the dusty streets, dusty people, plastic chaired 'cafes' with instant coffee and only 3 things on the menu. Lot's of mobile phones and TV's but power cuts regularly. Paint jobs on the concrete and adobe huts are faded or completely optional. Tin roofs are only for the rich and lots of places even in the big smoke (Mpanda) have grass roofs. Even the main streets are almost 4WD territory with gianormous potholes and rubbish burning in pits beside the road. Happy smiling people though and that counts. I prefer Mibango (the camp) to Mpanda but Africa has a lot of charm. It's great how the kids and adults wave, smile and laugh as you drive through the villages (of which there are plenty). The kids all wave and call out "bye, bye, bye, bye, bye..." thinking that 'Bye' means 'hi' or they call out "Mzungu, Mzungu" (which literally means white person, white person lol) as they laugh and wave.

We moved Thursday night to the 'best' place in town (the Baraka Guesthouse) which is pretty comfortable. Still basic by western standards but more than enough to meet our needs. On Thursday we sorted out visas, new tyres for one vehicle which had the baldest tyres, provisions, gas etc and were all done by 1330 so we knocked off for lunch and a couple of beers and ended up talking about lots of stuff including gold prospecting opportunities here (of which apparently there are plenty). I could tell all sorts of tales about the local shopkeepers and Immigration. Just hilarious. Immigration wanted USD$120 for Pete's visa but Vallerian negotiated it to USD$100 just by pointing out that he'd only paid $100 for the previous one (lol). Then they wanted it in USD$ but offered to accept 140,000 Tanzanian Shillings as we didn't have USD$. 130,000 would be closer to the mark but we figured, we may as well keep them happy so they probably went to the bank and changed it then pocketed the 10,000 (USD$7) extra which would be equivalent to about 2 days wages. Buying diesel is another classic experience. No hurry in Africa. Best part though, is when they manage to fit 230 litres into a 200 litre drum (ROFLMAO). No point arguing - there is no Office of Fair Trade running round with weights and measures here... Just pay the bill and call it the cost of doing business.. Lots of UNHCR vehicles running around town but hard to say what they're actually doing. Equally, so far as I can tell, I was the only Mzungu in town which was also interesting experience especially when walking through the back streets in search of the 'pork place' where they do a mean BBQ pork plate accompanied by warm beers.

Loaded up Friday morning with 1,000 litres of diesel on the back of each Landcruiser then 7 hours drive back . Bit of fun coming down 'Zed Hill' (thus named for the steep, rocky, muddy slippery switchbacks) with a tonne+ on the back of the vehicle but 15 minutes of low range can be great fun :-). Anyway, "no hurry in Africa" :-). Bit of a boys own adventureland here really. Taking more pictures but just no bandwidth to share them via the satellite link we have here. Will try and put some small ones on Facebook soon but who knows how that will work. Amazing place Africa though. You'd expect it to be a bit like Asia but frankly it isn't. Australia is more like Asia than Africa is. Crazy place but as they say when something goes wrong or just plain peculiar things happen... 'TIA' (this is Africa)..

So much more to write. This place is amazing! Once Pete leaves the locals will go home and it will just be me here with a couple of local security guards so plenty of time for exercise, reading and most of all to write a couple of books over the 2 months till I'm relieved by one of the local senior techs. The rivers rise, tracks become impassable quagmires and the airstrip too muddy to use during the wet and it is just starting now. We sat down last week and did some planning for the wet season so I now have a bit of a timetable. Looks like I'm here till January or February and my plan (subject to conditions) is a 25km hike to the Ferry at Lacoma which leaves midnight each Saturday then 30hrs ferry to Kigoma, 2hrs bus to a junction town, 1 hr to Rwanda border, 2 hrs bus to Kigali (Rwandan capital), look around Rwanda, 6 hrs bus to Mwanza in Tanzania then hire a 4WD & driver for 7 days to drive from Mwanza through Serengeti, Ngorongoro crater, Lake Manyara and end up in Arusha then 10 days to hike Kilimanjaro, then fly to Dar... After that who knows?