The Adventure Sister has done it again. Jumped off the edge of the earth into a new and different adventure. She left has husband (not LEFT him, just left him behind and with his total support) and beloved cats and country behind and leaped off to Costa Rica to immerse herself in Spanish. This has been a long-time dream and now, at the age of 60, she has decided it's now or never. Now has come. Time to LIVE in a country, not visit it. Be resident, not a tourist. Speak to neighbors in their language and have friends in this country. I'm in an Apartotel in Heredia, Costa Rica, attending a language school 5 days a week, 4 hours a day, all alone, and I know NOBODY here!! Except for the strangers at the school. The school encourages homestay where you live with a local family so you eat their food, speak Spanish all the time and, the theory is, learn faster. Couldn’t see myself being surrounded all the time by people. I need my privacy. So this is the introduction to my two months in Costa Rica and my intention (if I can make my lazy ass do it with any kind of discipline) is to keep the blog going, sharing my experiences, fears, fun, homesickness, adventures, discoveries, etc etc etc. I’ll add links to photos. More later. Or, mas luego. Hasta manaña.
February 07, 2009
August 02, 2008
Bagamoyo in the Rear View Mirror
My traveling partner (we’ll call him the The Bwana) and I were “doing” Tanzania the hard way—backpacks, tents or the cheapest of hotels, street food, local transportation. On this day, we were off to Bagamoyo from Dar-es-Salaam on a bus. Bagamoyo is the former capitol of German East Africa, 40 miles up the coast from Dar as the crow flies and three hours as a bus careens. At first glance, as we boarded, hey, not so bad—almost time to leave Dar and there was plenty of room to spread out. Might even be able to keep our gear with us instead of having some miscellaneous person tie it to the top of the bus with the dead goats, bags of potatoes, people. Silly me. Did I make it sound like there was actually a “schedule”? Well, actually there was. The silly part was making it seem like it mattered to anybody but us. Not so fast. As we continued to sit in the hot bus as the driver sat in the shade of a tree and smoked, we realized that we were going nowhere fast. The driver was going to cool his jets until he could pack this sucker to the max. We weren’t going anywhere until the bus was full—and “full” takes on a whole new meaning in Tanazanian transportation. No problem, we had a seat to ourselves. Hah! Long before we reached our destination, we were sharing our seat with two Tanzanians.
A Dar bus, like a Kenyan matatu or Tanzanian dala-dala (both “shared taxis”), invariably has room for more. All the way to Bagamoyo, any time somebody stood by the road looking hungry for a ride, we lurched to a stop. Humanity joined us on our journey until people were literally hanging from the rafters, windows, and doors, and sitting atop the bus. Few Africans have cars so buses and dala-dalas are it for them. It was a case of elbows and armpits. Pity the short people. When passengers gave some invisible signal, we dropped them off.
African drivers are, through necessity, extremely skilled and offensive drivers. The biggest hazard is each other. There's the urgency to always lead the pack. Bus drivers are no different. Never mind that we'll stop within the next 50 feet to pick up or drop off passengers and the passed vehicle will regain the lead. The only saving grace is the scarcity of traffic once you leave the city .
The buses are truly amazing experiences. The driver, or his assistant hanging on the back, takes the money as he can. It's incredible how he always knows who has paid, how much a passenger owes for the portion of the trip he's going on, how much change he's owed, even if it's a half hour later before he's gathered enough change from loading passengers, and ten people have come and gone, and even if there are 100 people on the bus. Nobody escapes paying. They may argue with the agent, but the agent always wins. On this occasion, we were on a 50-passenger bus with at least 150 people on it, and growing. We gave the "driver's assistant" 200 Tanzanian shillings (about 45 cents) for the 150 shilling fare, truly never expecting to see our change and not really caring--what would it be, about a nickel? People were coming and going constantly. Halfway into the three-hour, 40-mile trip, our exact change came floating up to the front of the bus, through at least 50 hands, to where we sat.
According to The Bwana, the road to Bagamoyo had improved since his last visit. Improved? Dear Gussie, what was it like before it was improved? Maybe the craters in the dirt road were once the size of Volkswagens instead of tanks. The ride is hairjarring. It's hair-raising. In short order, we were covered in a coating of fine sand borne by the wind through the open windows, which increased to a windstorm each time the bus stopped. And there were many stops. The ride was long and uncomfortable, but we had seats. Many didn’t.
The countryside is very traditional, tropical, and beautiful, the road lined with palm trees and thatched huts and people clad in flip-flops and traditional dress. Women wore veils and Indian-style sarongs, men wore either white Muslim gowns or western wear. Once again, I wondered, "How do they keep their gowns so white in this land of red earth, dirty water, and hand laundry?"
Bagamoyo is a barren little village on the beautiful Indian Ocean. Its historical signi
ficance lies in the fact that it was the last African land seen by many captives about to board a slave ship to the New World. If the slaves tried to avoid their fate, they were hanged. A monument stands in the village center where the hanging tree once grew. Sad legacy for a tragic part of history.
Right now, though, and very important, the Bwana had told me about Bagamoyo’s Badeco Beach Resort (the term "resort" used extremely loosely, with its ten rooms, all sharing a common shower and toilet), where we would be assured cold beers. Now THAT sounded superb.
We retired to the charming pavilions of the Badeco and managed to get quite trashed on COLD Tanzanian Pillsner--the coldest beer I've had in Africa. 
After three weeks in Kenya and Tanzania, a cold beer was a treasure more precious than gold. When he regaled me with stories of muggers and untrustworthy inhabitants of Bagamoyo (he enjoyed any fear he could engender and thus dependence on him - - -), any interest I may have had in spending the night evaporated. A sign over the resort’s compound portal gravely warns visitors not to leave the compound because of thieves. The resort is basic to say the least, but the locale is captivating and only $6 for a double room. And hey, I've stayed at the Bottoms Up Guest House in Zanzibar's Stone Town. Need I say more?
The beers sufficiently emboldened me for the bus ride back to Dar. The ensuing events seemed to be a bid by a mischievous Lady Fate to show us how plain vanilla that morning's trip to Bagamoyo had been. By the time we got on the bus, it was already jammed. We crowded into the front of the bus, forced to stand, and held firm to our position--refusing to move to the back as others boarded. Had we been locals, we would have been forced by the surly driver to move back but I was happy to take advantage of the his tendency to favor Americans. I just didn't think I could bear to be buried in that mass of humanity for the coming three-hour spin.
As we hurtled down the road, when everybody was trying to return home on this, a Sunday afternoon, "ridiculous" reached a new height. I, seeking the only way I could preserve my determination not to move back as new passengers boarded, asked the overworked and stressed-out driver's permission to perch on the gear box next to him. My request was conducted in charades, hand signals, and limited Swahili as the driver harriedly tried to simultaneously keep the bus on the road, circumvent potholes, retain his place in front of the vehicular pack, and maintain his breakneck speed. I was actually breaking one of my hard rules about local travel in Africa—never sit so I could see out the windshield. You don’t want to know what’s coming. It’s just too terrifying. But there I was, perched Yoga-style with the windshield in my face. The Bwana hung on for dear life on the step by the door, his sheer size likely protecting him against encroachment, but also exposing him to the real possibility he'd be shoved off the bus while we charged at breakneck speed down the hill, swerving from side to side in a valiant attempt to miss and overtake people, bikes, cars, and craters. More than once, I glanced at The Bwana and sarcastically mouthed, "Thank You ". He mouthed back "You're welcome".
On this day in history, I actually saw an African bus driver refuse to let anybody else on. I witnessed an African driver recognizing the concept of "full". We had reached a point where it was physically impossible to add another body to the interior or exterior of the bus. The top-heavy and overcrowded bus, during its Daytona 500 maneuvers, leaned at 45 degree angles, jeopardizing the already shaky stability of the humanity and produce and animals and who knows what else. Surely we would fall into the ditch or just fall over. Particularly since we were going 60 mph on a road that could only be safely driven at 10 mph, assuming no other vehicles, loaded with approximately 150 people on a bus meant for 50. No embellishment of facts here. I would have dearly loved to close my eyes and not see the extremes, but I above all I had to maintain my dignity. Never let 'em see you sweat.
I felt like I was channeling Kathleen Turner in Romancing Stone—remember the scene when her bus through the mountains and jungles of Colombia crashes into Michael Douglas’s jeep? There would be nothing so romantic if we crashed and nobody would be yelling “cut!”. At one point, a Chrysler appeared in front of us (where'd a Chrysler come from?) going in the same direction as we were, so Mr Bus Driver must pass him. A man on a bike daringly pedaled ahead of us sort on the shoulder. So wrap your mind around this: A narrow dirt road. A Chrysler doing his best to avoid potholes, just as we were, entailing continuous tacking; a biker coming towards us, hugging the ditch. Our driver begins his passing maneuver and puts pedal to the metal, but the Chrysler refuses the pass. We feint to the right, sideswiping the biker, who regrettably collides with the bus's exterior mirror at 60 mph. At the same time, a toddler comes flying from somewhere in the bus's depths, landing with a thud on the floor next to the driver, frightened, probably bleeding. The driver, losing little speed, determination, or momentum, but very irritated at the whole situation, curses and delivers an unseemly gesture to the biker for bending his mirror, straightens his mirror, yells something unprintable and un-understandable to the hapless kid's mother, and roars on towards Dar. The instructions probably directed the mother to retrieve her kid in short order, to take extreme care that he doesn't bother the driver again, and please get that blood up off the floor. It was over in 10 seconds. The biker picked himself up, shook his head to clear the cobwebs, and wobbled on. The Chrysler took advantage of the victory and gained ground. And our bus hurtled on down the road. Here in the good old US of A, we'd still be parked by the side of the road tied up in paperwork, lawyers would be busily lurking and filing lawsuits on the part of the kid and the biker, and there would be an APB out for the Chrysler for leaving the scene of the accident.
Needless to say, we eventually passed the Chrysler. Who eventually passed us. And the beat goes on.
June 30, 2008
Big and Little Monsters (Camping with Hippos and Mosquitos on the Shores of Lake Naivasha)
Our matutu (shared-with-way-too-many-people-taxi) left Nairobi heading towards Naivasha, the closest town to our destination, Fisherman’s Camp, where we intended to camp on the shore of Lake Naivasha for a couple o
f nights. We were sharing our matatu with as many souls and their gear as it was humanly possible to pack into the van. It was hot, air conditioning was a joke, I was holding my 45 pound backpack in my lap, and giving thanks I didn’t have a stranger in my lap as some of the locals did. This fun was going to last a couple of hours, since the van stopped to pick up anybody standing by the road giving the Kenyan hitchhiking thumb: a palms down up and down gesture. Sorta like in Hotel California, people got on, but nobody got off.
Let’s call my traveling partner, oh, let me see, how about Bwana, to protect the guilty.
Naivasha? My readings had assured me it’s a tourist town of medium size, there were tourist amenities. Hey, this was my first trip to the African continent and I was traveling with somebody with a deep and abiding love of anything Africa. My information, in other words, was skewed by, well, The Bwana. Africa had been suffering from a drought for too many years and Naivasha is on the leeward side of the Rift Valley.
The matatu deposited us in the middle of a dry, hot, dusty little corner of Walk and Don’t Walk on the outskirts of town. No little store to buy a cold beer or cold anything or even a place to sit to meditate on our next move. No signs directing us anywhere. Hello, Naivasha. Bwana, are you REAL sure this is where we want to be? Yep, he said as he looked around us at nothing, and even I, Ms Naïve, knew he was clueless. He was taking a notorious malaria prophylaxis, which I won’t name for fear of libel, and man, he got cranky on that stuff! Since one of the listed side effects is “psychotic episodes”, I should’ve been forewarned. Okay, maybe he didn’t go psychotic but cranky was an understatement for much of this entire trip. But I digress.
The Naivasha locals were decidedly not interested in sharing their regional knowledge--they pretty much ignored these two big msungus (non-Africans) who had landed in their midst. As Paul Thereaux correctly stated in his book, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, “ . . . and the more you questioned, the vaguer the people became”. After some amount of the old Don’t Know Don’t Care salute, we secured the services of Edward, taxi driver extraordinaire to transport us to Fisherman’s Camp. In retrospect we should've throttled good old Edward on the spot and put him out of our misery. Later in the trip, our developing matatu experience revealed that matatus go everywhere, including to Fisherman's Camp, and we would've saved a bunch of shillings we gave Edward that he most likely drank up, and a ton of frustration. But that’s another story.[1]
We finally arrived at Fisherman’s Camp and found it to be a lush stretch of green and shade on the shores of the lake in a thorntree and broadleaf grove. After the noise and grime and hullabaloo and pollution of Nairobi and My First Matatu Experience, this was Eden. There at the reception shack was the best gift the gods could bestow: icy Tusker beer. I learned during that trip and subsequent Africa trips that “cold” there is relative. “Cold” could mean the can is sitting in an inch of water in the shade vs full sun. Yea! I'm for an icy beer and a cushy spot on this luxuriant grass to chill out before I do anything about making a tent go up. At that point, I'd have given my first born son for a cold beer. Luckily I didn’t have to. Forty shillings worked just fine (about 60 cents). The Bwana was itchy to get camp set up. It was early. “Go find us a campsite, if you must, Bwana, I’m relaxing”. He billed himself as the authority on sub-tropical Africa so I was pretty sure he wouldn’t take any input from me on what constitutes an acceptable African campsite anyhow. OK, we’ve now set the pace for the Bwana relationship and ego. Another story. Many stories.
Before long I had yet another cold Tusker in my hand, there were multitudes of brilliant blue birds that I couldn't identify, herons, cormorants, fish eagles, spoonbills, egrets, ibis, and black and white water birds hanging around the lake. My Africa travel book swore that over 300 varieties of birds reside here. The lake is surrounded by volcanic mountains, and is only one of two Rift Valley freshwater lakes. This is probably because Lake Nakuru and the other soda lakes don't have outlets, whereas Lakes Naivasha and Baringo have massive underground seepage which amounts to the same thing as rivers draining from them. Thus soda doesn't accumulate. And, thus, there aren’t any flamingos.
When he proudly escorted me to el primo campsite, lo and behold, the Bwana had ensconced us not more than 30 feet from the lake, which, by the way, is marshy along the edges. 
But, Bwana, won't there be zillions of mosquitoes this close to the lake and marsh? “There, there, little lady, I'm the great African explorer. I know what I’m doing”, he protested. The hitch was he truly thought he was qualified to make this statement and this campsite decision. Bless his heart, he did have the courage of his convictions! More to come on this, you betcha. As we wandered around the papyrus-fringed lakeside, the Bwana proudly pointing out his magnificent campsite area I noticed, with some disquiet, indentations the size of small islands
in the black mud of the marsh. We could hear the hippos in the lake and there were signs at the piers warning fisherman and boaters to beware the hippos. I may not have been an intrepid African explorer, but it didn’t take one to figure this out. Hippo footprints.
I’d done my pre-trip reading. Hippos exit water at night to graze on land, so it seemed logical and obvious that we had made camp right there in their exit path. A no-no in African camping. Hippos kill more people in Africa than any other land animal—not to eat, because they’re vegetarians, but because they're ill-tempered and territorial hummers. Generally unfriendly neighbors. And they may look like huge, clumsy houses with tusks, but they’re fast. Thirty mph fast. If one (or many) decided to come out and play that night, our tent wouldn't be in their way at all. They’d shrink-wrap us in tent nylon and never even slow down. Or they’d slow down long enough to chomp, toss us in the air, and have a cigarette in the afterglow. The Bwana chose this moment to regale me with an article he'd read in the Nairobi newspaper about a hippo chasing some guy across a field and killing him. Recently. Charming thought. Honestly, I think sometimes he enjoyed my fears!
"Nah, they won't come out here. There are much bigger exit areas than this one up the lake shore." “OK, great hippo expert, just for grins, what does one do if one finds oneself facing a hippo? You know, just in case they didn’t get the memo." "Put a tree between you.” Made sense. I marked my thorntree. Low branch. Thorns only 3 inches long. Thorns smaller than hippo tusks. Better a few thorns stuck IN me than a 4-ton hippo stuck ON me.
As we sat around and enjoyed the cool evening air, the silence, the tranquility--water birds flying 
around, no mosquitoes, clean air, we wondered what else a couple of intrepid travelers in 
Africa could desire. We had oranges, pineapple, bananas, and those wonderful fried peanuts we’d bought at the market in Naivasha. We’d heat up a gourmet freeze-dried meal, and enjoy our first night camping in Africa. We had each other. We even had some local visitors.
There was the sound of a train in the distance, making its way across Kenya. How romantic..But one thing the awesome Bwana really knew: there’s no train in this part of Kenya. Holy crap, it’s a swarm, no, an out-and-out herd of mosquitos crossing the lake in our direction. Darkening the horizon. One mosquito, no doubt laden with malaria, landed on my arm. Then swarms converged. We dove for the tent, zipping as we dove. The angry, ravenous monster bugs slapped at the tent sides like mini-kamikaze bombers, holding us prisoner for several hours. No dinner, for them or us. Worse, yet, no beer. We’d abandoned everything in our frenzied lunge for the tent.
What if the hippos attacked? What about my escape thorntree? Please don't make me choose between contracting malaria and being hippo cud!
We dozed off. But I only closed one eye. I, you see, knew that the hippos were going to stroll right out of that water and onto us. Footprints don't lie. If I heard even a hint of something outside, I flew to the flap, unzipping a portion smaller than a mosquito, peering out. About 2:00, I woke to the sound of grass being ripped out of the ground. Close. "Bwana, do hippos make a lot of noise leaving the water?" "Well, no, actually they're quite graceful for their size." “ What do they sound like on land?” “Well, my dear, generally you’ll hear them ripping grass out of the ground.” "THEN THERE'S A HIPPO OUT THERE!!!" He vaulted to the door of the tent, unzipped it, looked out, and calmly said, "He's here." "Who's here? The guard? Santa Claus?" "No, the hippo. Get out of the tent. Now." I didn't need a second invitation.
Now, it all goes into slow motion. With me in fast motion. After about three years, my hero got out of my way so I could follow him out the tent. (Whatever happened to women and children first?) When I did get out, the Bwana was out of sight and I found myself staring at a hippo who was halfway between the water and us. A huge hippo the size of a Volkswagen. And moving in our direction. In spite of the fact that my knees were shaking so bad I literally could bearly stand, I moved (NOT in slow motion) towards my tree. It just so happened that my tree was in the direction of the beast.
But, wait, what’s happening? He was no longer charging me—we were now headed in the same direction. The huge beast had literally come off his front legs, pulled a 180 degree turn, and lurched off down the path away from me. How can this be? Who’s chasing whom? Well, that was a relief. That thorntree was going to hurt. As a bonus, I had all my body parts. Later, as we reconstructed events, all we could figure was that from the hippo’s point of view , he saw this wild-haired redhead apparition flapping out of a rock (get it, the brown dome tent -- ) at top speed. The fearsome sight so startled this formidable beast, he could only think of escape. As fast as his big butt could waddle. And the other hippos were in the same panic mode. The Crocodile Hunter would’ve been proud, may he rest in peace.
I knew, however, in my extensive knowledge of hippos (yeah, right!), that where there are a few hippos, there are others--mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, cousins. All enormous. So I stood watch from the my teeny peephole in the flap of the tent, resolved to save at least my own life. Bwana was soon snoring away. I'd wake him up in two hours for watch. I fell asleep in about 10 minutes, oblivious of danger until we were awakened in the early morning by the sound of hippos playing or fighting or making love or whatever--the sound's the same, snorting, thrashing, splashing. They were in the water and they were on the bank. Who knows how many, if any, came around our tent during the night? Maybe the one we startled went back into the water and warned the others that some wild thing in blue pajamas would attack any poor defenseless beast who came out there. When I awoke the next time, our tormentors were back in the lake. And the mosquitoes were still buzzing everytime we touched the side of the tent.
Nature’s call out-trumped fears of malaria. We crawled out and—no mosquitoes? Neither of us had noticed that we hadn’t been plagued by mosquito bites during our crazed flight from hippos—after all, what was a sting compared to a tusk through a kidney? But, what, you may ask, happened to the mosquitos that had tormented us until the hippos grabbed our attention? Let’s just say that if you only hear the little buggers buzz after you smack the side of your tent, give it a check. Turns out a lot of the more unfortunate ones were stuck between the tent’s fly and the tent and our movements startled them into frantic commotion. We had been held prisoner by prisoners. Without food or toity. While our beer got warm. Couldn’t blame this one on the Bwana. At least not totally.
You gotta love adventure travel!
[1] The Matatu Experience (to be posted)
