Here’s the complete set of Mikumi photos
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Full set of Zanzibar photos here Zanzibar’s Stone Town is like a good blend of spices. Its narrow twisting streets have been influenced by Indians, Arabs and of course mainland Africa but the result is something different to all these cultures. Black Africans have become Muslim and blended with Indian influence, notably the food, to give the place a unique feel. It is not a multicultural paradise. The Arabs were long involved in the slave trade, including illegally once it was outlawed, and continued to pay black workers a pittance until a revolt against the Sultanate in 1964. The best way to get to Zanzibar is on the Australian-made fast ferry from Dar es Salaam which takes under two hours. The water is a startling blue colour as you slip past small islands with glistening white beaches and bandas with woven palm leaf roofs. As you reach Zanzibar the water takes on an unnatural turquoise hue in the shallows. It’s a stunning location.
In Zanzibar Town the old town is called Stone Town. Despite the name it is not made from blocks of stone stacked on top of each other like a Byzantine ruin, they simply used a lot of coral and limestone in their buildings. The small area of Stone Town is contained within the larger Zanzibar Town. Although there are plenty of tourists, it is full of local life with old men drinking coffee on old stone benches, cats wandering by, worshippers at mosques, women in burkas, local markets and kids chanting their timestables in school – all of which is made much more atmospheric by the narrow lanes in which scooters are the only mechanical noise to break the sound of footsteps. It’s a great place for wandering aimlessly. Even when you get hopelessly lost the old town is bordered on all sides by major roads and the sea, so in this small area it’s impossible to be lost for long. We were in town to see the Sauti za Busara festival (which means sound or voices of wisdom). It is a festival of African music focussed on Swahili culture. It is held every year in the old fort in the evening of four days and is a lovely place to catch the evening sea breezes while listening to some drumming – well, quite a lot of drumming actually. It will come as no surprise to learn that the drum is central to African music. They came in all shapes and sizes and were slapped and bashed with abandon. This got on my nerves a little bit on the Friday night when there was a good three hours in a row of drumming and dancing. I reached my drumming threshold and was in dire need of any other form of musical sound to break it up. In general the acts were really good with a lot of traditional Tanzanian performances and some excellent acts from other countries including Nneka from Nigeria and Tumi and the Volume from South Africa, both of which are well worth looking up if you haven’t come across them before. Also good was Bi Kudude, still rockin’ it Zanzibar style in her 90s. Other entertainment at the festival included two accidental fires. One night as we strolled out of the fort to get some dinner we heard an explosion come from the harbour. One of the ships anchored there had exploded for reasons unknown and was now burning in the distance as the crowd on the shore cheered. We found out later that people had been on the boat but managed to jump to safety. No-one seemed to know the cause. It made a nice backdrop as we sucked down a fresh cane juice. The other fire happened early one afternoon inside the fort. The first I noticed of it was a bunch of people rushing towards one of the stalls selling ethically-made trinkets. It was unusual to see people rushing towards this stall. It was only then that I saw a merry fire blazing away which people were busily pouring water onto and covering with dampened slabs of cardboard. I’m not sure the band on stage appreciated it. The small crowd at the start of the day was apathetic enough in the afternoon heat without being given another distraction. The night before the festival we went to a free sideshow being held in a small madrassa school. We met with the other attendees outside the old fort and milled around until a young lady took charge of the group and led us on a night time excursion through the streets of Stone Town and across the boundary of Creek Road into Zanzibar town proper, which in this case was just as maze-like but featured ugly modern one storey constructions. The performance was incredible. The audience sat on straw mats on the floor of a small classroom while on the other side an Islamic group sang with accompanying beautiful movements in a hypnotic rhythm. It was an enchanting experience which I’m sure had religious meaning but I prefer to take the beauty of humankind as the lesson. We also went on a free tour associated with the festival which focussed mainly on the doors of Stone Town. This is not as absurd as it sounds. Zanzibar is famous for its ornately carved wooden doors which reveal a lot about the culture. By examining the doors you can see Hindi influence or Arab designs that make up the cultural mix of the place. Some doors have rounded metal spikes on them which apparently prevent elephants from knocking them down. The tour guide was a local historian with a regular TV and radio slot about Zanzibar. He didn’t have great English and talked too fast when over-excited, which was often. It was a strange tour, 70% of which went right over my head, anywhere it seems but into my ears and via that conduit into my brain where it could be converted to comprehensible thoughts. It was also too hot to think straight. Given a chance to be anywhere in the world in February to escape the worst time of year in Sydney, we managed to end up in a place which is hotter. No matter. We sheltered from the fierce midday heat in coffee houses imbued with incense and ate delicious somasas and the best passionfruit juice ever. Almost everywhere sold amazing passionfruit juice, fresh and sweet with a sour tang. The food in general was fantastic, especially after the culinary desert we experienced in most of Africa. Coconut curries, fresh tuna burgers, carrot and bean salads and beautiful fresh seafood. We had two especially memorable dinners. The first was at a place called Two Tables. We got lost trying to find the place and had to be led by a kind gentlemen to the door, which was lucky because we never would have found it ourselves. We clambered through a construction site to the door of a two-storey family home. An old man opened the door and asked us to wait downstairs for a moment as he was expecting another guest and wanted to wait for them. The high-ceilinged reception was filled with a jumble of objects you normally associate with a shed: piles of tools and nails, bits of old clocks scattered around, dress-up jewellery and photos. We were joined by the owner’s young grandchildren, two girls who were fascinated by Sarah’s freckles and the bandage on her elbow which was covering the wound received from falling over while jogging through the millet field in Mikumi. The older girl settled down with a pen and paper to practice writing the English alphabet with Sarah’s guidance. The younger granddaughter was a wild child. She picked up a screwdriver and experimented with what happened when she poked it hard into her forearm. When Sarah exclaimed the granddaughter showed Sarah the pointy end of the screwdriver, and by show I mean thrust it vigorously towards Sarah’s eyeball. Sarah chuckled nervously and suggested the little girl find something less malicious to pass her time with. Over to the table she went and rummaged around, eventually coming back with a mean-looking pair of pliers. Later on she found a pin and was busy assessing what it felt like to poke this into her own skin in between leaping from chair to chair and dancing. We were eventually rescued by the grandfather and led upstairs, through the living room and onto the enclosed verandah where it turned out we were the only patrons. Cuba had trained us well for the experience of eating at a home restaurant but luckily the food here far surpassed the standard of Cuban food. Mainly Indian in flavour, we had several small courses, vegetable soup with freshly made flat bread, daal soup with a slightly sweet bread accompaniment, kingfish croquettes with coconut relish, and for the main course a mound of rice and fresh tuna coconut curry with lime juice and chilli. It was all very tasty and we wandered home well satisfied but lost again. We got so lost that we had to circle back around to the starting point by which time our restaurant hosts were on their way to the hospital to donate some food and jauntily mocked our walking speed. The other memorable meal was at Emerson Spice, possibly the fanciest restaurant in town and I think the only time we’ve eaten in the top-rated restaurant on Trip Advisor, but at only US$25 per head for a five course degustation it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up. After some early confusion over the fact that they thought we had booked a table for two adults and two children, and overlooking the worst fresh passionfruit juice in Zanzibar, the rest of the meal was amazing. The restaurant is located on the roof of a tall Stone Town building with seating for about twenty people. You climb up four flights of wooden stairs around an inner courtyard, overhanging with plants, from which you can hear a faint trinkling of water as it falls into the small pool below. Emerging on the roof you are greeted with a graceful breeze and a fantastic view of the harbour and other rooftops of the city. The food was fantastic, each dish using local fresh ingredients in clever ways. It could not be faulted. We even got an impromptu drag queen show from a couple of the guests which would have gone down a treat at the Sydney Mardi Gras: some Edith Piaf style songs and a quick strip tease which the local staff seemed to enjoy, although it’s hard to tell whether they knew it was a guy stripping to his lacy underwear. One of the highlights of Zanzibar for me was the spice tour. The plants are not native but were imported from India or Indonesia. They thrive here to the point that cloves have long been Zanzibar’s biggest export. For the tour they take you to a special tourist plantation where they grow all the varieties together. Much as we have become removed from meat production and the butchering process, it is easy to view spices as a product in little glass bottles in a supermarket rack without understanding where the spice comes from or what the plants look like. We were given a sample ‘container’ made of palm leaves which was quickly filled up by a lad cutting and digging spices from the jungle as a guide explained everything on our thirty minute walk. We nibbled on fresh pepper which grows as a vine on other plants. Different colour peppercorns all come from the same plant but are harvested at different times. Vanilla is also a vine. We saw the green vanilla stems which would be harvested in a month and then dried. Nutmeg, as the name implies, is a nut growing on a tree. The kernel is nutmeg but around the outside you get mace. Fresh nutmeg when sliced reveals a cross-section of white flesh streaked with light brown. Turmeric and ginger were dug out of the ground and sliced open for us. The bark of the cinnamon tree was peeled off and smells fantastic, much more lightly perfumed when fresh but somehow all the more delicious for it. You can imagine fresh cinnamon bark infused with cream tasting amazing. Despite not being clove season we were shown the clove tree and an over-ripe clove seed which when dried becomes the black stud we’re familiar with. There was the plant that is used to give the bright red Hindi tilaka mark on the forehead. A small fruit with soft spiky red spines contains seeds which, when crushed, instantly create a fantastically red pigment which can be smeared at will.
Fresh jackfruit was sliced up for us. It looks a little like durian but tastes like a combination of banana and pineapple. It has a dry flesh to it. We also tasted the leaf of the quinine plant which has a strong bitterness that you could overlook if overcome with malarial fever. Nothing a bit of gin can’t solve. One of Sarah’s favourite parts of Zanzibar were the beaches. They are truly spectacular and coming from an Aussie that is saying something. The beach at Matemwe has incredibly fine sand and I speak from wedding cake making experience when I say that a footprint left in the sand at this startlingly white beach leaves a texture identical to running a finger through a block of marzipan. At the end of the day brushing your feet is like running flour through a sifter. Unfortunately for Matemwe we were there when the tide was at its lowest, behind the reef, which just left a shallow pool filled with seaweed being harvested by local women. It was deep enough to lie in, but only just. Poor us, we had to content ourselves with swimming at beaches on other days that burst from brochures of tropical paradise straight into our reality. After the spice tour we were taken to Mangapwani, which is described as “small and unremarkable” by the guide. Perhaps this is so when compared to the other beaches but I’ll take crystal clear turquoise waters with matching white sands any day of the week. Sarah also took a trip up to Kendwa beach in the north which left too early in the morning for my festival-ravaged sleeping pattern, so she enjoyed that tropical paradise on her own. The good effects of the beach were somewhat undone by the transport options. Taxis were too expensive so going to Matemwe we crammed in with the locals in a dalla dalla, the Tanzanian equivalent of tro-tros and bush taxis. The Zanzibar version of this is a formerly open-roof light truck which has had a metal frame and canvass roof bolted on as well as wooden benches running down each side, made especially short to fit a seated person inside. Our dalla dalla could comfortably hold six people down each side and one sitting with their back to the cabin, so of course a lot more than this were crammed in. There were nine people on my side and seven on Sarah’s side with an additional three with their backs to the cabin. It was literally impossible to move. I had to keep jiggling my feet to stop them going to sleep. Even when someone jumped off there was always another person waiting at the side of the road to jump on. At two hours each way we were not exactly refreshed by the experience. As you walk along the streets of Stone Town people greet you in pidgin Swahili with “Jambo”. You then reply “Jambo” if you’re a honky to show that you don’t know any Swahili so any future conversation should be conducted in English. Walking back from the festival one night after midnight we went past the shop where they sell watching football. They have about five TVs tuned to different games and a games console setup to play virtual football as well. This was shut for the night but people were gathered around a TV out on the street watching a current affairs program. We said “Jambo” in passing and got the reply “Jambo, do you want to book a tour for tomorrow?” They’re keen, I’ll give them that. As if that wasn’t enough action for one week we also went on a tour to Prison Island. The island is like the Port Arthur of Zanzibar, where slaves who refused to work were sent. Once on the island they were generally tortured to death and thrown into the ocean. The slave trade was controlled by the Arabs who ran it for four hundred years, even trading in secret once the practice had been banned. Like Port Arthur, Prison Island is a beautiful spot with crystal blue waters behind the former slave prison which has now been turned into a restaurant. The main attraction of Prison Island today are the Giant Tortoises, a gift from the Seychelles government. We arrived just after feeding time so they were in a slow-motion feeding frenzy, plodding over to the piles of cabbage and steadily chomping it down. There was not much chewing, just a slow and steady chomp and swallow. Everything a Giant Tortoise does is slow and steady. To be fair they are weighed down by a massive shell. Sadly there is a sign up warning people that it is not allowed to ride on their backs which is one experience I was really looking forward to. Instead Sarah got in the enclosure, which no-one has a problem with, and after navigating through the giant piles of poo gave one tortoise a neck massage as shown by our guide. Sarah obviously has a knack for rubbing leathery skin (it really does feel like an old leather sofa) because the 102-year old tortoise that she was showing some attention to then went over to a female for some slow-motion jiggy-jiggy. It sounded like a huge effort and I guess it was for an animal passed the century mark. It was kind of inspirational. We then went over to the baby pen where they keep the young animals to stop them getting accidentally crushed by amorous adults. The three-year old was hefty already. We went snorkelling afterwards in choppy water just off the island and saw a few fish but mainly just got a bit seasick. Our transport was a dhow-like boat with a canvas roof rather than a sail. It rocked and rolled on the way back through the currents. Waves going faster than the boat passed underneath us,and I think it’s this motion that really did us in. We just kept looking at the horizon and hanging on until we reached the shore. We virtually kissed the sand, landlubbers that we are, then sat at a beachside cafe until the rocking wore off. Zanzibar was brilliant. With the great food, music, beaches and ocean we could have spent a lot longer here. The island is very relaxed as has such an interesting culture that just wandering around is an interesting experience. We flew from Kigali to Dar es Salaam which we had not heard positive things about. Whenever we hear this it makes us think it will be like Accra in Ghana which was polluted, crowded and not a great place to hang out. It was a nice surprise to discover that Dar es Salaam (literally ‘haven of peace’) lives up to its name in comparison and is a reasonably pleasant place to spend some time, if not remarkable or outstanding. We stayed in a cheap hotel called Jambo Inn. Jambo is pidgin Swahili for hello and is used to greet foreigners. The hotel was run down but functional in every important way and located above their own very decent Indian restaurant. The downside was the air conditioner that sounded like a jackhammer which left as lying on the bed in a pool of sweat. But we weren’t in Tanzania to hang out in a port city and eat Indian food. The animals beckoned, we could hear them calling to us from over the horizon. We only had a few days before going to Zanzibar so we headed to the closest safari park to Dar es Salaam, Mikumi, on the bus. There is a huge safari industry in Tanzania charging through the nose for what I’m sure are very good safaris but completely beyond the budget of travellers like us. When a room at a lodge comes with its own butler you know you’re talking serious money. Instead we got the bus for $9 each and stayed at a fantastic hotel for $50 a night which is 2 kilometres outside the park. We were dropped off at the door by the bus and organised for the hotel truck to take us around the park the next day.
The bus was an adventure in itself. You drive through beautiful mountains covered in thick grass for five hours before entering the national park itself. The guy sitting behind us was wildlife vet who lowered our expectations by saying that it was low season, the grass was high, there was plenty of water, so it might be difficult to see animals. Right after he said that, as we zoomed along in the bus, we saw a group of giraffes sheltering under a tree. There is a thrill about seeing an African animal in the wild that wells up from childhood and burbles through your body. This thrill did not seem to be shared by our fellow passengers. The locals were about as excited by the wildlife as an Australian would be by seeing a herd of kangaroos. The guy in front of us just pulled the curtain across the window and tried to sleep. We then saw a herd of horny impala with their delicate black markings on the rear of their thigh and ankles. Then we saw a few elephants ambling along, then some more giraffes and zebra. It was the best bus ride ever. The next day we jumped in the back of the safari truck and headed back in to the park with Hellman our driver and Doreen our guide. Doreen didn’t speak great English but she was pleasant and enthusiastic and definitely knew her animals. We got overexcited on the highway when we saw some giraffes and wanted the driver to back up to get a better view but his attitude was “trust me, you’re going to see a lot of giraffes today, so let’s just get to the park.” He wasn’t wrong. The first group of animals we saw were the buffalo swanning around on a mud path. They very sensibly stay in the mud all day, although there must be some kind of rotation system to let all the buffalo have a go. Their horns look like 1930s parted hair which gives them a debonair look but in reality they are stupid and smelly and aggressive. Our camera picked a really bad day to play silly buggers. For some reason none of the photos where we use the zoom could focus properly. We had to ditch a lot of photos but still have a good selection where the animals were close enough not to need a zoom at all. I think Sarah wanted to throw the camera out of the window. We lost a few photos from the next herd we saw, a massive bunch of impalas, zebra and giraffes who were just hanging out together. The collective noise of grass being ripped up and chomped was startlingly loud. We then saw a huge herd of zebra with their eye-bending stripes and little foals flicking the manes and tails happily. Warthogs raced up and down in the distance, their thin tails ramrod straight like the antenna on a remote controlled car as they chased each other back and forth through the long grass. All we needed now was for something to be eaten to make our nature documentary complete. We spotted a vulture picking at something 100 metres off the road. In no time vultures were flying in from everywhere like planes coming in to land at the airport. Soon there was a feeding frenzy happening with the vultures swarming over the top of whatever dead creature lay underneath. We drove up for a closer view and saw that it was a dead impala being torn apart beneath the writing vultures. Then the original owners of the carcass turned up, a couple of small foxes who chased the entire group of vultures away with their sharp little fangs and proceeded to rip the impala apart themselves with furtive looks on their faces. You have to feel a bit sorry for the impala which seem to be the main food source for all the carnivores here, but it was amazing to see nature in action so close up. A stork came along and stick his big bill into the action but the foxes chased it off as well. The bird life in the park makes me see how you could be a twitcher. All the birds had iridescent reds, blues or greens which was like a splash of paint on the landscape. We couldn’t believe how close we were to all the animals. We thought we might see a few animals in the distance but here we were driving right through herds of wildebeest with their light brown offspring, camels and zebra. We had seen a few herds of elephant in the distance but finally rounded a bend to see three elephants munching grass at a furious rate. They raised their trunks and greeting and seemed pretty pleased with the world. And why wouldn’t you if you were an elephant. There’s nothing to eat you and your only worry are poachers and getting the 200 litres of water you need to drink every day. I think elephants are more ‘king of the jungle’ worthy than lions, although given that they have a matriarchal society perhaps they can have the ‘queen of the jungle’ title. I think there is a carnivore bias going on in awarding such titles but most of the really big animals just eat grass: giraffe, elephant, hippopotamus, warthog, buffalo. Hordes of baboons wandered around, crossing the road in packs. It was mating season which you could tell by the red bums. When not available for jiggy-jiggy their bums are blue. You could also tell it was mating season by all the mating going on. There was not much foreplay, barely a break in stride. Some of the baboons sat on a stump like it was a stool and watched us go by as if they were curious old men at a cafe. We ate lunch ourself at the lodge located within the park, which I assume is hideously expensive to stay in but did a pretty nice vege pancake which we ate outside under a huge tree while watching elephants graze in the distance. It was hot and sleepy weather but idyllic. After lunch we jumped back in the open-air truck and lathered ourselves in sunscreen. We drove across the highway to the other side of the park where Doreen our guide said that there were far fewer animals. We saw a group of warthogs but after a while driving around with the sun beating down and nowhere near as many animals as the area we had been in earlier I was starting to wonder why we were wasting time in this part of the park. At that point Doreen squealed and got the truck to backup. Lurking in a small gully next to the road was a leopard staring sullenly at us. It is a rare sighting so good on Doreen. It’s coat was beautiful but it didn’t hang around long enough for us to admire it for long. That sighting successfully achieved we headed back to the other side of the highway and drove through hordes of giraffe. At one count we could see almost forty in one go, loping along with their funny yet graceful run and appearing as improbable as an animal can. One can only imagine what the Ming dynasty rulers in China made of the giraffe when it was brought back to the imperial court by their famous voyage of discovery. Apparently the giraffe is the spitting image of a mythical Chinese creature, which is a bit like finding a new country that has unicorns in it. Our last stop was the hippopotamus pool which is not as exciting as it sounds. Hippos spend the vast majority of their time underwater. Their sensitive skin can’t stand the African sun so they only come out in the darkening light. When we got there it looked like they were just starting to rouse themselves. There was some yawning and farting when they bobbed up to the surface to take a breath, but for the most part they were just a pair of nostrils and the glimpse of a broad back. We said goodbye to the animals as the sun pierced the storm clouds casting a glorious golden light all around. It was an amazing day. The following day we took much needed day off. Our one major activity was to go for a run through the millet fields near the hotel. The millet plants (a plant a bit like wheat) We caught the bus back to Dar es Salaam the following day. It was sprinkling rain in the morning, one of the rare rainy moment on our trip. We were waiting on the other side of the highway from the hotel where the bus was due to pull up. We saw it coming in the distance. It did a swerve when it got close to us and locked the wheels up in an attempt to stop, sliding across the slick surface, luckily in a straight line down the road. It stopped right in front of us and we were hustled on. This bus was on a tight schedule. We careened back to Dar es Salaam overtaking anything going at less than warp speed. The driver held the steering wheel with one hand and his prayer beads in the other. We wouldn’t be killed while overtaking, god willing. The only time he dropped the prayer beads was for changing gear or a particularly hairy overtaking manoeuvre that required two hands on the wheel. At one point the driver lifted both arms off the wheel to give them a bit of a stretch as we drifted slowly into the other lane. In the end we made it past the corrupt police road blocks, the ‘slower than slow’ trucks and the market towns in one piece and went for a lie down out of the noon heat. The list of animals we saw, for the record:
This post is about the Rwandan genocide. It is grim reading in parts and parental discretion is advised. If you don’t want these disturbing images in your head you might want to skip this one. The church at the small town of Nyamata, 30 kilometres south of Kigali, has pews covered in piles of the blood-stained clothes of those who were massacred here. It has a glass cabinet in the basement that a school might use to showcase their trophies. Here it is filled with 150 human skulls, almost all with fractures or holes where the bone has been crushed. Stacked above the skulls are femurs and hip bones. In a decorated coffin underneath the skulls lies the body of a Rwandan women who was raped by 29 men before being impaled on a stake from her groin to her head with another running through her pregnant stomach. She was put on display outside the church while Hutu militia systematically killed 10,000 people here. This is not a story of long-distant medieval barbarity. This happened in the first half of 1994 in what could almost be described as three months of collective madness if it had not been so well planned. Calling it madness lets the perpetrators off too lightly.
The Rwandan genocide is impossible to totally comprehend. There are reasons but no excuses for the death of 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus. I can’t pretend to be able to totally unpick the reasons one group of Rwandans decided it was a good idea to wipe out another group, but here is some background to what happened. While there had been clans in Rwanda in pre-colonial times, it was the Belgians who ramped up the divisions between these groups and decided that there would be three ethnic groups in Rwanda, the Tutsis who are generally taller, fair-skinned and cattle ranchers, the Hutus who are generally shorter, darker and farmers, and the Twa who are pygmies and the original inhabitants of the land. Ethnicity was decided by such colonial methods as measuring the width of noses and calling anyone a Tutsi if they owned more than 10 cows. Ethnicity is now given as 84% Hutu, 15% Tutsi and 1% Twa. With this division in place the Belgians then decided to favour Tutsis with greater education and the majority of the powerful positions in society as they felt they were the superior race. This obviously led to resentment from the Hutus. When the Tutsis began calls for independence, as was becoming common across Africa in the first half of the 20th century, Belgium switched allegiances to the Hutu majority. There was a struggle between these two groups as to what kind of independence should be implemented. The Tutsis wanted a fast transition to keep the existing power structure in place which favoured them. The Hutu majority wanted a switch to democratic elections which would obviously favour them with their much larger population. This struggle for power seems to lie at the heart of the conflict. From the 1950s on there were massacres on both sides. When the Hutu government came to power in the late 50s many Tutsis left the country in fear. The current president, Paul Kagame, grew up in a refugee camp in Uganda. A Tutsi rebel movement called the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) developed from these exiles and threatened to invade the country in the early 90s. In the lead-up to the genocide a peace deal was brokered between Hutus and Tutsis which would lead to Tutsis being integrated with the Hutu dominated army and a power sharing agreement. Flying back from talks to settle this agreement, the plane carrying the Hutu president as well as the president of Burundi (the small country to the south of Rwanda with a similar ethnic make-up and divisions) was shot down. For a long time it was not clear whether this was done by Tutsi rebels or Hutu extremists unhappy with the peace deal. The week we arrived the latest investigation into the downing of the plane, conducted by French judges (as French crewmen were also killed in the crash), concluded that the missile was fired from a base held by loyalist forces from the Hutu president’s Rwandan Armed Forces. This was the incident that triggered the genocide. It is clear that the genocide had been planned by the Hutu extremist leaders for some time. They had trained a militia called the Interhamwe with the express intention of killing as many Tutsis as possible. Propaganda had been running for some time in newspapers and radio de-humanising the Tutsis by calling them cockroaches and snakes and by stoking the fear that the invading Tutsi rebels would massacre Hutus, so the Hutus should get in first and try to wipe out the Tutsis. For example, the ‘Hutu Ten Commandments‘ issued by one of the leaders provided that Hutus who married, befriended, employed or did business with Tutsis would be branded a traitor; and that the Hutus must ‘stop having mercy on the Tutsis’. Land pressure was also a factor in one of the most densely populated countries in Africa. Killing Tutsis meant that their land could be stolen as well. Within hours of the plane being shot down road blocks were being set up across the country and the killing began. Lists of names of Tutsis had been compiled and the Interhamwe went from house to house armed with machetes and clubs where they massacred men, women and children with the aim of wiping Tutsis off the face of the earth. Moderate Hutus, including the female Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, were also killed where they might have stood in the way of the killings. The genocide continued for three hellish months during which the country completely broke down. The UN had a bare-bones peacekeeping force in place led by the Canadian Lt-Gen Romeo Dallaire (whose book Shake Hands with the Devil is well worth a read on this subject). They did not have enough resources to prevent the killing and since the “black hawk down” incident in Somalia the US and UN were much more cautious about intervening in Africa. Romeo Dallaire pleaded for extra troops and thinks that with 5000 extra he could have saved many people, but none of the countries in the international community capable of providing the needed support did so. Rwanda was abandoned to its fate. Women were raped by HIV+ men and kept as sex slaves. Children were murdered in front of their parents to wipe out the future generation of Tutsis. They were hacked to death with machetes or clubbed to death, shot or dropped into septic tanks where they were crushed with rocks or simply suffocated under the mass of bodies. People sheltered in churches hoping for safety but were simply murdered here instead. Some clergy collaborated in the killing with one priest ordering that his church be bulldozed with Tutsis still sheltering inside. Bodies were dumped in the rivers and were swept downstream to Uganda in massive numbers giving the crocodiles a feast. Two different witnesses talk about seeing babies trying to drink milk from their dead mothers. Romeo Dallaire talks about being surrounded by dead bodies in a village and seeing a child’s body move. He picked it up hoping the child was alive but the movement was because the body was riddled with maggots. His impulse was to throw the child from him but he somehow regained his composure and placed the child back on the ground. This is a fraction of the horror the people of Rwanda were subjected to. It’s estimated that 800,000 people were killed in the most savage manner possible by their neighbours. The killing only ended when the Tutsi RPF rebels invaded the country, driving the Hutu militia into the Congo. It’s estimated that two million people fled the country and in one of the great ironies the UN set up refugee camps for the displaced killers and this became the face of the conflict that many in the international community focussed on. The aid supplied in these camps was often sold by the Hutu rebels and stoked the conflict longer than necessary. With the Tutsis in control of Rwanda they systematically hunted down many Hutu rebels in the Congo over the ensuing years. We visited the genocide memorial in Kigali where 250,000 are buried in mass graves under anonymous concrete slabs. Inside the memorial the leadup to the genocide is explained but it never gets to the root of how one set of Rwandans could be so brutal to another group. Maybe that is impossible to answer. The genocide is lying just below the surface here. It’s miraculous that the country is functioning as well as it does. In the newspaper the fortnight we were there there was a report of a woman committing suicide after ongoing depression since the genocide. The manager of the hairdressers that Sarah went to had his entire family murdered and is now living with his Uncle whose family was also murdered. In theory they could both meet in the street the person who murdered their families. They seemed to have moved on. If you didn’t you would probably go insane.
It was impossible for the new government to jail everyone who committed crimes during this period without crippling the country. Leaders of the genocide are tried before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, established by the UN Security Council in November 1994 with judges from a range of African and European countries, in Arusha, Tanzania (we hope to see it in action when we’re there). Other perpetrators are tried before community courts (Gacaca) in the villages based on traditional justice systems. These require perpetrators to front the community, name all those who participated with them, identify where bodies were put, confront the victims’ families and serve any sentence imposed (from community service to life imprisonment). Whether this process has been enough to heal all the wounds in the long run, only time will tell. It’s hard to imagine that people can simply forgive and forget the atrocities but it says a lot about the character of the Rwandan people that they have rebuilt their country as well as they apparently have, in under two decades since this terrible time. More photos from the Genocide memorials can be found in the Kigali and Nyamata sets View the full set of Lake Kivu photos Lake Kivu is a common spot for people to unwind after the gorilla trek and for good reason. The green, hilly lake foreshore is so relaxed and pretty that doing anything strenuous seems pointless. We stayed in a presbyterian guesthouse which was ridiculously cheap with an even cheaper vegetarian dinner. We took the money we saved from this and splurged (relatively) on lunch at the expensive lakeside hotel which had umbrellas and chairs setup on the grass. It was fantastically serene and peaceful. Lake Kivu is among the twenty most voluminous lakes in the world but this impressive claim is difficult to judge with the naked eye, lake depth being intangible to the shoreside observer. In the hazy distance towards the middle of the lake is a test methane gas extraction plant which they are hoping will power a large part of the town of Gisenyi in the future. At the moment Gisenyi is mainly wood powered which becomes suffocating during chill, windless nights when the smoke settles. We went for a walk along the lake on our first afternoon there and ended up at the Congolese border which we didn’t realise was so close. It’s not hard to get to the edge of Rwanda, it’s so small. The lake foreshore is full of colourful tropical flowers and equally colourful small birds probing them. It is so far from the mental image of Rwandan genocide as to make it seem improbable, until you start visiting the genocide memorials near Kigali. View the full set of Kinigi photos They call Rwanda the land of a thousand hills. There is room in the country for precisely these thousand. It is all hill. Leaving Kigali you immediately climb into a landscape not dissimilar to the Great Dividing Range in Australia, even down to the masses of gum trees lining the road. In fact, the major difference in scenery are the people walking everywhere. No matter where you are in the country there are people walking along the road. There are nearly 11 million people crammed into a country less than a third the size of Tasmania.
Rwanda immediately felt more prosperous than West Africa. Whether this is from money pouring in from international donors, good planning or good luck is hard to tell, but it feels much more modern. For instance, in West Africa you are very unlikely to see a peleton of lyra-clad African cyclists training in the hills. That said, along the very same roads you will see people gathered with jerry cans filling up with water trickling down the side of the cliff face. Rwanda is a largely rural country and luckily has fertile land to plough but you don’t have to travel far off the well-built main roads to see small, poor villages and roads impassable without a 4WD. Push bikes are more common here, piled high with goods to transport or to act as cheap taxis. When we arrived in Kinigi, the town used as a base for the gorilla treks, we went for a walk and immediately attracted a crowd of kids who decided to walk with us. One guy looked like Arnold from Different Strokes with a No. 1 haircut. His deep voice boomed out his small frame as he asked quite perceptive questions about our homeland. His English was great for his age. Rwanda has made English one of the official languages and there is a big push to learn it, illustrated by the eagerness of the kids to have a chat. The countryside we were walking through, along an excellent Chinese-built tarmac road, could have been in regional Victoria if not for the huge volcanic mountains on the horizon. Most of the land is devoted to farming. The fields even stretch to the top of the steep hills in a parody of the flat English countryside it most resembles. Lying on the grass in the sun with insects buzzing around you could mistake it for a warm English spring day. Word must have leaked that there were English speakers wandering along the road because we were exuberantly greeted on the way back to the hotel by a young guy who claimed to be the best English speaker in the village. We got the same questions again: What is your name? Where are you going? Where are you from? Are you married? Do you have children? Talk soon drifted into how the kids needed an English dictionary to better perfect their speaking and could we spare any money for this. It wasn’t clear whether this was a scam or not but by the fifth time we were asked it seemed clear. Still, they were pleasant about it and asked interesting questions so it was hard to get annoyed about it. In the end it just got frustrating to not be able to go for a walk without attracting a crowd of people asking the same questions over and over again. The hotel organised a group of dancers, drummers and singers, just local kids by the look of it but dressed in the traditional dance outfit, a flowing straw headdress that looks like a lions mane and bells jangling on their ankles. The dancers leapt around with abandon but one little kid kept doing a freaky laugh with eyes opened wide. They dragged me into a dance, which is an impressive achievement in itself, and seemed to genuinely enjoy what they were doing. Either that or they are very good actors. I was hit with a slight fever after the gorilla trek so took it easy for a day while Sarah fetched food for me, bless her. Sarah managed to pack in a full day without me, going to see the golden monkeys in the morning and a pygmy village in the afternoon. The golden monkeys are not some kind of statue made from precious metal, they are a colourful breed of monkey who, judging by the footage, do very little other than sit in a bamboo grove and eat shoots. The leader is judged on weight and in this case is a fat bastard who proves that the tensile strength of bamboo is very high. The pygmy village is inhabited by the minority Twa, although in Rwanda today people are very keen not to mention ethnic divisions and refer to themselves as Rwandan if asked with they are Hutu or Tutsi. Despite everyone being Rwandan the Twa, who make up about 1% of the population, get a rough deal. Their land was taken for the national park or large farms and they get paid a pittance to work on either of them. They live in dirt floor shacks and only recently got new corrugated iron roofs. In fact half the country seems to have a gleaming new roof twinkling in the sunshine. Whether this is to replace houses burned down during the genocide, I don’t know. The Twa are just thankful not to have to dodge leaks when it rains and say that rain on their new iron roof sounds like music. View the full set of Kinigi photos When doing research for these travels I came across a blog describing Cotonou as the worst city they had ever visited. We can think of many worse places (Accra for a start, and Sarah doesn’t have good things to say about Guatamala City). Perhaps our standards had been successfully lowered. I’m sure coming to Cotonou directly after London would have provoked a similar culture shock bad impression. As it was we took it easy, had a couple of good meals of Chinese and Moroccan, no mean feat in West Africa, and generally found it an easy going place. True, you can list the attractions of the city on one hand and we didn’t even bother looking at the beach but it came at the right time to relax a little before our overnight flight to Kigali. One of the attractions was the Foundation Zinzou gallery, a surprisingly modern space which was showing a series of photos of traditional Beninese hunters from the north of the country. There were about thirty photos taken by a Belgian photographer, the hunter crouched down in front of the jungle with his antique gun and talismans. The photos had the hunters in colour with their amazing traditional fabrics and the jungle background in black and white which really made them leap out. Our guide knew the name and age of each of the hunters, some of whom he claimed were over 90. They didn’t look anywhere near this age which our guide put down to all the healthy plants they were eating but I point down to the slim chances they actually know what year they were born in. We took a bush taxi 45 minutes up the road to the smaller capital city of Porto Novo, lured by the description in Lonely Planet of leafy streets and colonial architecture. I guess in Africa colonial architecture can be from the 1950s and not all that special. Porto Novo didn’t have anything remarkable about it in the slightest but we at least discovered an Internet cafe that was functioning after the recent nationwide net shutdown. That was really the highlight of the journey.  We stayed at Le Chant D’Ouiseu in Cotonou, accommodation attached to a nunnery in a big four-storey block with high walls around the inner courtyard to keep the riff-raff out. Religious hotels are spartan but clean and well run and luckily do not require a religious test before giving you a room. It was pleasant to wake up on Sunday morning with the sound of church singing drifting up from beneath us. The quiet time in Cotonou was to prepare ourselves for the horrors of an overnight flight in Africa. Sarah had been bricking it about this flight practically since we planned the trip, and not without reason. Africa doesn’t have the best air safety record and looking at the state of everything else in the country doesn’t inspire confidence. On the road to the airport there was a van with “Air maintenance” for one of the local airlines stencilled on the side. It had a flat tyre two days in a row. Cotonou airport was even less confidence inspiring. It is one of the smaller airports I have been in and the technology dated from the 70s. There were no flight information boards, just a guard who told us to line up and wait before we could even get into the terminal. We waited for about an hour then were waved through to the security check which was a cursory manual check of our bags. I suspect that the x-ray scanner was broken. Our flight path was Cotonou to Nairobi via Ouagadougou then a change of planes before flying Nairobi to Kigali via Burundi. If this sounds like a tiring overnight flight you are right on the money. It’s a very African way to organise a flight schedule, picking up people in round trips to fill the plane up. I guess we should have been grateful that there was a flight with Kenya Airways at all but it didn’t feel like a blessing at the time. Thankfully the service was good, the planes are modern and the flights went smoothly. It was quite cool coming into Ouagadougou and seeing the burning off fires across the landscape. We made it through the rest of the travels in our zombified state with no complaints and found ourselves in the hilly and pleasantly temperate capital of Rwanda, Kigali. View the full set of gorilla photos Seeing the gorillas was an amazing experience. You hike up through alpine meadows where the farmers grow a flower that looks like a daisy which they dry and then make into a natural insecticide (pyretheum). It is a lovely temperate temperature and the hilly farmland is as pretty as a picture with steep volcanic mountains looming behind the mist on the horizon. We were walking part of the way up one of these mountains to pay a visit to the Umubano group of gorillas. We were guided by Patrick and Francois. Francois had started out as a porter on gorilla treks, including working with Dianne Fosey but over thirty years he managed to teach himself English and became a guide in his own right. He has become part-gorilla through prolonged exposure. He took us through some gorilla grunting and dancing, ate some eucalyptus leaves, stripped bark off a gum tree with his teeth to show us the liquid underneath and chewed the stem of a plant to show how much water it contains (the gorillas don’t drink fresh water as they get enough from all the plants that they eat). The other guide, Patrick – in his fourth year as a guide – muttered behind us that Francois has a formidable stomach as the plants he was eating are very bitter.
We passed from farmland into the jungle and walked up a steep hill. In no time we found the gorilla group. This is not down to luck. There are trackers hired to keep an eye on the location of the gorillas who sleep in a different place each night. These trackers hike into the jungle at 5am, follow the gorillas all day, and only leave at 6pm when they’ve seen where the gorillas are bedding down for the night. It sounds like a gruelling day. That said we were lucky to be assigned such a close group. Other people we talked to had a six hour day walking up an almost vertical incline. It’s just luck of the draw which group you are assigned to. We came upon a female gorilla sitting on the path, just like that. Soon another female joined her and they had a play fight about two metres in front of us. During the briefing they say you should keep seven metres from the gorillas but that goes out the window when the gorillas start moving around. We were just hustled out of the way by Francois when appropriate, and he made friendly gorilla sounds the whole time (meaning ‘I’m here, it’s ok’). The No. 1 silverback came along to check us out soon after the females. His name is Charles and he is 24 years old. He is a big bastard and very intimidating. It was rare to see them on a path like this, out in the open. Usually they are sitting amongst the shrubbery eating their vegan diet. Charles was accompanied by a couple of his wives (he has four in total) and some of his children. Natalia, a Ukrainian girl in our group, was crouching on the path in front of Charles for a photo, encouraged to do so by the guides. As the gorillas came towards us along the path, we all backed away instinctively, but Francois and Patrick told Natalia to stay there, ‘no problem’. She was facing away from the gorillas with only our anxious faces to tell her what was going on. The guides continued to make gorilla-calming sounds, the photo was snapped, and then we all backed off down the slope. We were perched in steep jungle when Charles started beating his chest and staring us down like a boxer about to start a fight. This was a very different experience from the zoo. We were about two metres from a wild silverback in territorial mode. If he charges you, running is a bad idea – you are supposed to hold your ground, crouch down, and not look at him. This is probably easier said than done. Luckily for us he didn’t charge and having established his dominance he wandered off down the slope. In his wake one of his wives and kids thumped the ground in imitation. Meanwhile one of the trackers spotted the No. 2 silverback. This poor bastard is so insignificant in the scheme of things that I don’t even know his name. He is sixteen and the understudy to Charles. Eventually he will break off from this group and start his own, but in the meantime he has to grab some ‘jiggy-jiggy’, as Francois referred to it, with the females in his group whenever he gets a chance. This is a highly risky business. If the No. 1 silverback finds out about it they will have a fight, and the No. 1 silverback is much bigger. There was visible evidence of No. 2 silverback’s dalliances. He had a scar on his neck as the result of a fight and looked down in the dumps. He picked at a few leaves, hugged himself with his big arms, picked his scab and ate it, yawned widely with a big black tongue and big black teeth. We learned that a new wife had joined this group recently but had not gotten off to a good start. She tried to grab another female’s baby and in the resulting tug-of-war the lower half of the baby’s leg got ripped off (if I’m interpreting the guides sign language correctly – perhaps it was just really badly dislocated.) The baby is still limping. Luckily for the gorillas they have a vet on standby who comes along and treats their maladies, just one of the benefits of having rich tourists come along for an hour a day to stare at you. For our next hour we followed either the No. 1 or No. 2 silverback as they wandered through the undergrowth, getting incredibly close to them. The babies headed way off down the hill pulling down trees. The silverback made a mating call at one point, a low grunting which made his flanks shiver. None of his wives were in the mood and who can blame them with all these people standing around looking at them? I can replicate the gorilla grunt quite well but I didn’t try it up there, not wanting to antagonise a 220kg animal who was already giving me the evil eye as if I was personally wrecking his prospects for romance that morning. The gorillas are habituated to humans which means that they don’t run when they hear us coming. They stare back at us with curious eyes and I guess for an hour a day they get to stare at another species themselves. For us humans it’s an amazing experience to be that close to a wild animal who could literally tear you limb from limb and yet most of the time is quiet and contemplative, chewing on a leaf or having a play fight. That they are brushing past you to get where they are going is an incredible feeling and the experience is sure to stay with us for a long time yet. The gorilla trek seems addictive and if not for the US$500 per person price tag I’m sure many people would be repeating it a lot more. One of the guys at the guest house we stayed at had done the trek 49 times over seven years. The trek also seems to attract the high end of town. At dinner we had two surgeons from Canada, two doctors from Florida and a Lufthansa first officer. Lowly budget travellers like ourselves do it once and cut the daily budget for the rest of our trip. Still, it was worth seeing such a rare animal in such a unique way – it is something that will stay with us forever. Definitely recommended. View the full set of gorilla photos Click here for more Abomey photos Across West Africa there are couples wearing matching outfits, all with colours as bright as bright can be. You can see bolts of cloth for sale all over the place, so once a fabric has been purchased it must be used to tailor outfits for the whole family. You will see Mum, Dad and five kids all dressed in the same fabric. Ladies will fashion elaborate headdresses from the same material. It looks snazzy so don’t be surprised if Sarah and I turn up for your next function in colourful matching clothes.
Abomey is 100km north of the coast but with the state of the road it takes over two hours to make the trip through dusty, sparsely wooded terrain. Abomey is famous for being the seat of the Dahomey empire, a large African tribe that encompassed most of modern Benin. In fact, Benin was only named so in 1972 and many feel that the country should have retained its colonial name of Dahomey instead. The name Benin comes from the Bight of Benin which was named after a Nigerian empire. We arrived at midday and headed straight out for a guided tour which, through some miscommunication, took us to some holes 8km from town that we hadn’t been that keen to see. It’s often hard to communicate when you’re on the back of a scooter and have roughly no idea where you are going. The description of the tourist site is holes that the Dahomey warriors used to hide in. It didin’t quite grab our imagination and the first part of the tour, looking down into extremely large holes was not all that thrilling. They only found this site recently when machinery being used to construct a road in the area collapsed into a huge hole. After a bit of poking around they figured out that the holes had some archaeological significance. The tour picked up when we entered the one reconstructed hole which you climb down into on a wooden ladder. It is pitch black and stuffy inside while the guide explains that warriors used to hide in here and wait for enemies to stumble in. No doubt they got a nasty surprise if they did. Originally there was no ladder so once inside enemy soldiers would have great difficulty getting out. The only way out was to climb on someone’s shoulders to reach the first step out. Once the guide switches the light on you can see that the room is well engineered, carved out of solid rock, with three rooms lower down and off the main entrance rooms. One is for storing rain water and the other two are bedrooms that also act as water overflow if there is a downpour. There are 56 of these holes in the area with thousands more in the region. It is attributed as one of the reasons the Dahomey empire become so successful and dominant. The entrance was also circled by thorny bushes for extra protection. We meant to do a tour of some of the reconstructed palaces in the area but when we got back on the scooters we noticed that one of them had a very flat rear tyre. This being Africa there was a roadside tyre place about 20 metres up the road but it took a good hour or so to get fixed and sucked the wind out of our afternoon. No matter, we got to the museum the next morning, housed in one of the old Dahomey palaces. The palace is constructed of mud with a corrugated iron roof, formerly made of straw. This makes it sound like a shack but the palaces are on a huge scale. They have numerous courtyards and feel a little bit Asian in layout. Eunuchs manned the first entrance to the palace, inside which is a large inner courtyard. Beyond this is another inner courtyard where the King received visitors, and further in still are the living quarters where his wives lived and the King slept. Each time there was a new King they built a new palace next to the old King’s digs. Outside each palace is planted a special tree with a long lifespan to grow along with the new King. They are still there today grandly guarding the entrance. The Dahomey had a brutal side as well. One of the thrones is mounted on the skulls of enemy warriors. Before going to battle the warriors would sacrifice an animal for good fortune but they would have to make a promise to bring back the heads of a certain number of warriors which they nominated themselves. If they fell short of this target they would be killed. I would be lowballing that estimate for sure – under promise and over-deliver. The Dahomey also had fierce female warriors which fascinated the French colonialists who called them the Dahomey Amazons. We were allowed to go into the tomb of one of the Kings. It had a very low metal roof which forced you to bow as you entered but inside were just two small circular rooms. When the King died all of his wives were killed as well. As the King had as many as 50 wives this was especially gruesome. The wives had their own tomb in which they were drugged before being buried alive. The King also has a spirit house where they keep an old bed for his spirit to rest on when it returns from the afterlife. They have an animal sacrifice here every year and they stack the buffalo bones up outside. Our quick to trip to Abomey at an end we hopped on a couple of moto-taxis and were heading to the bush taxi station when we were flagged down by a car heading to Cotonou. We hopped in and started driving around town looking for a couple more passengers to fill the car up. We noticed a mosque with a mobile phone tower built on top of a minaret. Perhaps it is specially designed to receive Allah’s text messages. We filled the car up relatively quickly but Sarah was stuck in the middle of the back seat next to a Nigerian man who dealt in engine parts. He gave a very detailed opinion on marriage and relationships which became incredibly boring. About halfway through the journey his droning was broken up by another passenger being squeezed into the back so now we had physical pain as a substitute. The road was bad. It took over two hours to travel 110 kilometres. At least the bush taxi driver dropped us at our hotel door (for an extra tip of course). Click here for more Abomey photos See more photos from Possotome West African men do an impossibly cool hand shake where they slide their fingers down yours and end by clicking their fingers on your fingertips. Sarah and I are very white and find it impossible to do but just being part of it gives you a relaxed and cool West African vibe. The transport situation is not always relaxed. Arriving at a bus station you can be pounced on by several competing touts offering to take you in a bush taxi. As a consumer it’s great to have competition but it can get heated occasionally. We just shrug and pick whichever car looks the most full. The car only leaves when it is full. Getting out of Ouidah we were stuffed in a car waiting for the last passengers and listening to the guys arguing away about something. We got underway without a problem in the end. You would think it would be too hot for such fierce arguments. We heard rumours of a petrol strike in Nigeria and started to see long queues at the petrol stations. In the country areas they don’t have petrol stations with pumps. Instead there is a woman or young man with a table on which is stacked plastic bottles full of fuel. The advertisement is a big glass jug full of fuel sitting menacingly in the sun. The drivers we were with bought five litres at a time which is poured into the gas tank using a funnel with a filter over the top. We haven’t seen many West Africans smoke but I imagine even fewer would be smoking around these would-be Molotov cocktails.
Apart from huge jugs of petrol used as advertisements for drivers dodging potholes West Africa also features many pictorial signs advertising the nature of a business. This is necessitated by the 40% literacy rate in the area. This is also why showing a Beninese taxi driver a map of where you want to go is near to useless. The signs that catch the eye are for the barbers, painted wooden boards showing the before and after effect of the barbers services, arrows indicating the before and after shot. We headed north from Ouidah via bush taxi and then moto-taxi (scooter) to the town of Possotome on the shores of Lake Aheme. The hotel had a very attractive stilt restaurant sitting over the water but the matching meal of muddy fish and burning spicy mound of paste did not match the surroundings. The lake itself is another shallow and muddy one which seem unfortunately common in this part of Africa. The locals are aware of the problem and are trying to correct the rapid retreat of the lake shores by planting trees and mangroves next to the water, the idea being that the lake is in retreat because of all the sand falling into it. We took a tour here about the local plants and the medicinal properties they have. Our guide was an entertaining guy who acted out the way the plants stopped you having diarrhoea or eased constipation, together with sounds effects. Most of the plants seemed to be used for this purpose, either that or treating malaria and fevers. I guess these are the most common complaints around here. The fruit of one tree, when rubbed on the breast, caused enlargement, although whoever used it had to be careful not to go overboard. Apparently a local man used it on his own appendage but cannot get a wife now because he overdid the treatment. We stopped at a local ladies house which acted like a plant zoo for the guides. She had a plant that appeased the god of thunder and stopped their house being struck be lightning, a plant which stopped snakes entering the house and aloe vera which we all know and love. We also bought a mosquito bite treatment from her, a block of unknown substance which you wet and rub on the bite (it works pretty well) and some caramalised groundnuts which were super tasty.
We were accosted walking along the hot road by a young man who wanted us to meet him later for a tour of his ice factory. This offer didn’t appeal hugely but Sarah agreed to it for some reason. After our plant tour we were really too hot to hang around in town any more and then afternoon slipped into dinner and I advised Sarah to brush the guy off. We asked the hotel to organise a taxi to take us to our next destination the following day and who should turn up at our dinner table to arbitrate this negotiation but the ice factory manager. Sarah quickly blamed me for the missed meeting and the young fellow settled down (after organising the taxi) to tell us all about the NGO he was starting and would we be interested in spreading the word – he was offering free membership in return. To be fair he didn’t give us the hard sell, just asked for our email address so that he could send us more information. Then he booked us in for a quick tour of the ice factory the following morning. So that’s how we found ourselves touring a small factory at 9am the following morning. It was not currently operational but was well built. There was a cool room for storing the ice and a dock for the fishermen to pull up in their boat and collect ice for their fish which could then be shipped off to Europe. As long as the fish stock in the lake doesn’t continue to fall it could be a successful venture. We didn’t ask who the owner was but if it’s like a lot of the hotels we stayed in there would be a European involved. |
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