KENYA TRIP - MARCH 21-26, AND MAY 28 AND 29, 2016

KENYA

Nairobi and Masai Mara

March 21 to March 26, 2016

Bob Francescone

 

None of these travels would be possible without the patience, flexibility, support and companionship of my partner, Dennis Bowman. I wrote these musings, but we both lived the adventure.

MARCH 21 AND 22, 2016: TAMPA TO NAIROBI

Penzance and its pirates are way below, along our first landfall in Europe. Up here, 7 hours into our flight to Frankfort, folded into steerage on this Lufthansa silver suppository, I stare down at my ‘special meal’, Hindu vegetarian, garbanzos rolling around in a sea of dispirited spinach. To my right is a South Asian family, bound for Bangalore, mama in jeans and tee shirt, Grand mama wrapped in yards of bright flowers flowing over her sari. They are Hindu, but clearly not vegetarian.  My drooling and covetous glances at their bacon and eggs are not returned.

They are busy, bacon and eggs making a perilous arabesque journey to the moving target of a hyperactive 2-year-old. He is cute, big eyed and wide smiled, with cappuccino skin and eye lashes worthy of a mature giraffe. His Olympian lungs and megaphonic vocal cords suggest that aspirations to the opera stage, or hog calling, may be in his future. He has been practicing his operatic aria of discontent much of the night. Still, cuteness counts, and he wins my vote.

The flight over the Atlantic has been worthy of Bette Davis: ‘fasten your seat belts, it’s gonna be a bumpy night’.  And it is...In two languages. Frankfort airport however is smooth, but complex and long going, up, down, and around, on terrazzo floors, escalators, a tram and through super vigilant security. I wince in sympathy as a most polite Herr Efficiency confiscates â bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label from the disbelieving guy in front of me and pours it away. Our two-hour connection time, with no checked luggage to reclaim, is enough. Just

Frankfort Airport is a connection hub for the world, a Star Wars speakeasy of variety. A tall Middle Eastern man lopes by in full floor length robe, and accessorized with the universals of the young: backpack, and baseball cap, brim to the back. There are many women with head scarves. Are these refugees from the torment raging to the south and east? A suited man in his seventies gently drapes a fake fur coat and a thick towel over his prone wife, spread over several chairs, gently arranges a pillow on her purse for her head and pats her shoulder before walking off. She pulls her red head scarf over her eyes.  Their Aldi supermarket carry on bag says ‘it’s all about saving green’. She sleeps. 

Improbably dressed travelers, often twanging in the accents of our side of The Pond, flap by in  various versions of Fashions by Trump: loud, vulgar, rude, tasteless, insensitive.  

There are a few Black African faces waiting for Nairobi. The soft cadence and rippling consonants of Africa’s contributions to the sounds of English are aural massages softening the visual cacophony. I am so ready for Africa.

Flying over Dubrovnik with Tirana, Albania ahead. I wonder if Albanians know that their most famous export, Mother Theresa, is now a saint? Is she Saint Mother, Saint Theresa…of which there are several already cluttering up the pantheon-- -or Saint Whatever Her Birth Name Was? The burdens of beatification are many. 

Special Hindu Vegetarian lunch, SHVL on the aluminum foil cover, is anything but S, verging on the awful, skirting indigestibility, messy to manage with the arms-tight-to-the-sides gymnastics required on this anorexic and ancient tunnel, Lufthansa flight 0590. It has been eons since I last flew between continents in seats arranged in 2 narrow rows of three. My padded perch on the aisle is cramped and a bit dangerous. Overhanging left arms are helpless targets for the food and beverage behemoths plying the string like aisles. There’s no relief to my right.  Wedged in the middle seat is an expansive testimony to the power of a Beer, Broth und Bratwurst diet and to protoplasm’s ability to flow outward. He’s nice but he does balloon. And snore.

I constrict, cover my eyes and sleep. I awake with 1700 miles to go. On the screen is a landscape devoid of landmarks: southern Egypt from 37,000 feet. We cross the Nile and Lake Nasser. I remember sailing silently for days on these green swaths through the buff sand. Two days ago I made my final crossing of the stage as a guard of pharaohs in Verdi’s fictional Egypt. Now I’m 7 miles above the real thing. 

Later, we’re over Sudan and I see the great ‘S’ where the Nile curves back on itself. Somewhere down there is Napata, a crucial spot in Verdi’s melodic version of Egypt. That may have been true in fact as well. If so, its importance has been diminished by the millennia. We camped there 3 years ago, near stone pillars asleep, like us, in the sands.

Now, we’re above Khartoum, Sudan. The label on the screen is unnecessary. You can’t miss the spot where the White Nile, flowing northward from Its source in Uganda meets the Blue Nile rushing northwestward and downward from its source in the mountains of Ethiopia. We’ve been to both birthplaces and to their meeting in Khartoum, swirls of currents mixing water of two colors (shades of muddy, neither being white or blue) into the one Nile. That day we saw a man draw a great fish into his log canoe from just at the very spot where the Nile is born. I doubt he cared whether the fish was spawned in Uganda or Ethiopia. 

Most of the fertile silt that the Nile deposits in Egypt, and which has made life in Egypt’s desert possible for millennia, comes from the Blue Nile as its scours the mountains of Ethiopia. And, therein lie the roots of a serious geopolitical problem. Ethiopia wants to dam the Blue Nile to extract hydroelectric power. Dams prevent the silt from reaching Egypt. Stalemate.

Ethiopia, quite possibly the birthplace of humankind 6 million years ago, is also the birthplace of Egypt. We will return there in 5 days. 

A view from 7 miles above suffices for now. We’re skirting Ethiopia’s western border. Green is overtaking dust. It rains here. Sometimes.  For the first time Ethiopian place names are on the screen. Lake Tana, source of the Blue Nile is a smudge on the screen’s horizon. 

Africa is huge. We’ve been flying for 7 hours, most of it over Africa. Nairobi is an hour and a half and 800 miles to the south. Several hours beyond that is South Africa, and beyond that, Cape of Good Hope, where Africa dips its toes into the southern oceans. 

Dry sands reappear, conquering the green, then we see the blue of one of Africa ’s sublime immense lakes, water-filled rents of the Rift Valley.

As we drop closer to Nairobi and the dreaded festivities associated with entry procedures in Africa, my elegant Lufthansa plastic water cup cracks as I drink. There’s hardly enough space for water to flow in this plane, but flow it does, down into my shirt, over my passport and 3 of the 4 forms required to enter Kenya. The passport shrugs. The forms shrivel. Fortunately, no one collects them and we pass muster at the visa counter. Fifty dollars poorer, we walk into Africa.

Our driver is not there, but we expect to wait. Nairobi traffic is horrendous. We chat with a young guy from Tampa here to do some volunteer work with his doctor girlfriend. In due time our driver arrives.  The delicate and soft spoken Joseph was of course caught in traffic and then in the parking mess common here. He charms us with a radiant smile and a gentle welcome. Karibu, welcome, he says, and one of my few Swahili words surfaces: asante, thank you. 

We are in Africa. 

Asante.

MARCH 23, 2016: TO MASAI MARA

 ‘That’s a Masai village and that’s the school where I teach. I teach English. Will you come to my shop, please, and look?’ 

The shy, well dressed, middle-aged man points first into hazy landscape thousands of feet below us and off in the distance, then to a shack draped with tourist goodies a dozen yards to our left. There are 3 here all selling the same stuff, no buyers in any of them. It’s the low season, there are few tourists, and he has no income. We politely refuse his invitation. He smiles sadly, shrugs a bit and turns away. Our policy is to buy, if we buy at all, directly from the craftspeople, hoping to put the money where it can do the most good. 

Still, I don’t feel good. This man ekes out a living perched on a ledge overlooking one of the most stupendous views on the planet: Africa’s Great Rift Valley. People spend more than he earns in a year for a few days living in this view. Color us guilty.

We stop here for milky tea and a warm breakfast chapatti on our 6-hour bumpy ride (‘African massage’) to the Masai Mara, home to the red-draped Masai people. The Mara contains one of the planet’s greatest concentrations of large animals, and is one of the iconically beautiful spots in Africa. We go for all of that, and to breathe again in the edenic perfection of Africa. 

To get there we leave the tourist shacks and snake down the vertical face of the Great Escarpment, the eastern edge of the Great Rift Valley, the immense 6000-mile rupture in the Earth that is splitting Africa in two. In some places water has filled its cracks, thus the Red Sea, and Africa’s great lakes, Victoria among them. In others, sere and inhospitable, erosion of the walls of the Rift has washed away eons and gifted us with the fossils of our most ancient ancestors, hardened into rock here in humankind’s cradle. 

We’ve been in the Rift before, in Ethiopia, where the bottom sinks into the Danakil Depression, 225 feet below sea level, lowest spot in Africa and the hottest place on the planet, unearthly in its raw geology. Here in Kenya the flat bottom of the Rift is almost a mile above sea level, the climate mild, the landscape verdant and spacious, grazed by large animals more abundant and diverse than anywhere else on the planet.

We will be here 4 days, in good hands. 

Those hands have been arranged by Kikwetu Cultural Adventures.  Earlier this morning, Kenneth Kikwetu, energy flowing from every pore, with a smile almost as broad as Africa itself, pummels my hand and jerks us out of jet-lagged zombie hood. ‘Jambo’. ‘Kuribu’. ‘Hello’. ‘Welcome’. His driver and cook will be in charge of us for the next 4 days. He lays the gift I’ve brought him against his arm and his smile broadens, reaches both coasts of the continent. The black and white plaid shirt is perfect. So are the lime green tee shirts he gives us with the logo of his safari company in brilliant white. We meet our crew: Jacob, a young and muscular wraith, tightly skinned in stove pipe, waist hugging jeans, and tee shirt, is my bet for our driver, and Peter, all traditional build, a shoe in as cook. Wrong.  Jacob learned to cook from his father, (who cooked for the British), and ‘is living his dream’ cooking for tourists. Peter has been a driver for 18 years.  Good hands, indeed.

Eight hours later, thoroughly massaged--- ‘for free’--- laughs Peter, as he covers the last bumps through the trees into Mwangaza Mara, our camp for the next 3 nights.  Laughing Jacinta, well on her way to a ‘traditional’ build, abundant hips swaying a great mass of pink cloth, leads us through the trees to our ‘tent’, a roomy house interpreted in canvas, and up the few steps that keep the wooden floor off the ground. She bends, unzips the door and bubbles her instructions. The huge washroom and shower are a second room through another canvas door, dramatically unzipped with a delicious flourish. The lady has style in spades. Hot water? Turn the tap, wait 10 minutes. Electricity and lights? 7 to 10 at night. 6 to 7:30 in the morning. Need help? Just ask. Then she exits with a smile, a wave, and a swirl of pink. We miss her immediately.

We spread out on two single beds and a double, roll up the canvas walls to let air and light in through the screening that keeps the bugs out. And are home. 

In 15 minutes we head out for a sunset drive in paradise. Gnus, Thompson’s Gazelles, Cape Buffalo, Impala graze and ignore us. Alert black-backed Jackals do not. Yes, we see lions, lounging, as they seem programmed to, and greeting us with a bored yawn, quintessentially cat. The Masai Mara is stunning, worth every bumpy mile.  Tomorrow and the next day it will have many hours to seep into us.

Jacob creates a delicious dinner, the water is hot in 5 minutes, not 10, we are asleep in a nanosecond. 

In a canvas house. 

In the Masai Mara. 

In the Great Rift Valley. 

In Africa. 

Halfway through the night I awake. Hyenas are calling in the dark. 

Kuribu.

MARCH 24 AND 25, 2016: THE MASAI MARA

Our two full days on safari begin early. We bounce at 7:30 into a burnished landscape, renaissance gold in early sunlight. 

Our first sighting is of Wildebeests, aka Gnus, in the nursery of new gnus right near camp. Gnus never seem to be alone, but congregate in great snuffling herds. During the Great Migrations these herds number in the millions and turn the landscape black. 

Famously considered dim (probably erroneously, because they out breed and outnumber and out survive all the other big guys in the Mara), they are the poster child for unattractive antelopes with their Nicholas Cage hangdog faces and odd shape, wrapped in unimaginative basic black. Yet…the soft slanting light of morning shimmers on to their coats and beauty erupts.  The basic gnu color now becomes the color of burnished antique silver, throwing highlights back at the sun. Draped over their shoulders are pennants of a darker metal, perhaps polished iron. In the right light, the gnu is glorious. Attention paid is attention rewarded, Gnu-wise. 

The gnu is the big cousin in a family of antelopes that share that basic face and physique. But, evolution has been at work here. It has eschewed the dark subtle stripes of the gnu when conjuring up the elegant Hartebeest, and gone in for large haunch and shoulder patches of gun metal grey on pure copper. And then done a nose job and gone pure unadulterated copper for the handsome Topi. 

We drive past the newly reassessed gnus, pay our fees and pass into Masai Mara.

Slight nighttime rains, early tastes of the rainy season have washed the air into diamante clarity. The Mara is a limitless landscape of golden grasses, blue sky, posies of dark green tree, and, far, far away, smoky blue smudges of the cliffs of the Rift Valley. The grasses are like linen dyed with the soft gold colors of yellow onion peel, soft on the eye, rich to the touch. 

Animals are everywhere, though sometimes hard to spot. Even elephants can be mere black dots on horizon, pointillist pachyderms. 

Our catalogue of favorites grows:

Impalas, the males magisterial and elegant in great twists of horned grace. And the females! Hornless, angelic, glorious in profile, Nefertitis of antelope kind.

Blackbacked Jackals, all furtive scurry. 

Banded Mongoose (geese, gooses?), rippling in waves through the grass. 

Immense Elands, giants of the antelopes, brahma bull ungraceful, elusive, shy, rarely. Seen. We see 3 up close. 

Thompson’s Gazelles, russet, black and white perfection, the puppies of the Mara, terminally cute, tails wagging nonstop. 

Topi, slender gnu-cousins, polished Italian leather in motion, and their charming habit of posing atop any mound of earth, statue-still for hours. 

Ostriches, silliest birds in creation, eternally frozen in my mind’s eye as the myopic ballerinas of Fantasia, but in fact majestic, 2nd in height only to elephants, both dwarfed by batiked towers of undulating giraffes. 

Cheetahs are wire-sprung whiplashes, gorgeously mascara-ed up close, sinuous grace from afar. We see them both ways, charmed.

And the elephants! Again! Elephants are masses of grey shadow flowing slowly through the grass then disappearing behind the wispiest of trees, masterful Houdinis. 

It is run up to the rainy season. We could be awash, but luck is with us…and other tourists are not, wary of downpours and dirt roads turned into jeep-trapping sumps. We see few vehicles.  Peter rescues two of them, mired in muck, one filled with a large unhappy local South Asian family, parents frowning, ebony haired kiddies into the adventure.

Our days start under cloudless skies. By noon’s picnic lunch and nap I’m looking up at puff clouds, spotting the blue. By 3 pm they have grown into an armada of white gaseous galleons sailing to a rendezvous on the horizon, their bottoms darkened with their wet burden. By late afternoon they have crashed into the horizon and piled into massive rain clouds. The Rainy Season has arrived. In theory. No rain falls. We stay dry. Add continue to drive thru the gold.

At the park gate, Masai women hawk the beaded jewelry they wear with such style and grace against their luminous black skin, draping arms full through the windows. I negotiate for a key fob, beads surrounding a small shell. It hangs perfectly in the knot of my bandana.

Back at the lodge, Laughing Jacinta and her ever-smiling helpmate, Daniel, corral us for a photo session. She grabs my hat, puts Dennis’ on Daniel. He adopts my eyeglasses and we shoot away, print the photos, and laugh a lot. L J is indeed a force of nature…a kind and jovial nature, rich and welcoming, Kenyan.

MARCH 26, 2016: BACK TO NAIROBI, PART ONE, OF TWO

Octopussy Kingozi has a store off a dusty road on the outskirts of Nabok (Dirty River), Kenya. I’ll never know what she sells behind that lurid chartreuse sign that announces her name. I will, however, borrow her name and give her a story. 

I collect names for characters to use in novels and short stories I’ll never write. Octopussy Kingozi joins a crowd of never-to-be literary sisters, names offered by friends, or my own imagining, living in story lines of my own invention. Here are some of my favorites.

Aurora B. Umlaut, night owl Inuit detective with a talent for languages and mania for orthographic accuracy, name courtesy of my dorm head in college 55 years ago.

Turallurah Goldfarb, waitress and finger nail model, faux fur enthusiast, with aspirations as a singer, and designs on the hard body of her policeman neighbor, name courtesy of old and sorely missed friend, Ron Boccieri, 48 years ago.

Miss Redosier Dogwood and Miss Peacock Flabellum, spinster cohabitants of a decayed ante bellum mansion in a bayou-sodden backwater, with a nose for crime, a taste for bourbon laced mint juleps (light on the mint and julep, please, bless your heart) and difficulty staying sober, names courtesy of a tree in my pasture 30 years ago and a prop I carried in Aida a few weeks ago. 

Octopussy has unseated my previous Number One, Queenzabeth Ruwenzori, who has reigned unchallenged for 5 years, a retired Ugandan beauty queen (Miss Banana Recipes, Cream Pie Division 2003, Miss Gorilla Trek, 2004), semi-successful tour operator, terrible cook, mini-clairvoyant, unwilling crime solver. 

Kenya is country rich in imagination-catching names. I watch roadside stands slide by for hours as we drive back from Masai Mara to Nairobi. But, not even Lobster Kimz, Purveyor of Electric Supplies, can unseat her. Octopussy Kingozi reigns unchallenged. She will reveal her story to me in time.

Spiffy names, soft consonants and soothing rhythms aren’t the only enrichments Africa has gifted to English. There are tasty turns of phrase spicing the linguistic scene all along the road. ‘Ready food’ (aka a buffet), and ‘self-contained rooms’ (aka bathroom included) are two of my new favorites. Don’t look for self-contained rooms at a tiny establishments living under signs offering ‘Butchery and Hotel’. These invite you to purchase cut up animals and/or stop a bit in the attached snack shop for a spot of tea. Your choice, but no bed or bath are available.  If you want a hotel look for a sign offering ‘lodge’ or a ‘guest house’. But, hold on: a big building with a sign saying ‘hotel’ probably is a hotel. A tiny one isn’t. Clear?

We don’t need either kind of hotel, but we do need gas. At the same petrol station we used in the trip up to the Mara 4 days ago, the trinket seller, who offered to trade his beads for my bandana then, runs up to my window, waves an armful of beaded thingies, recognizes me, greets me as an old friend…and surely an old friend can help by buying something.  

Of course, I succumb. It’s no trade.  My bandana is safe, as we haggle and banter over his beads. Two beaded key chains with sea shells and one very worn Kenyan bill---ten times the agreed upon price--- change owners. He gets half of what he asked. I give only slightly more than I counter-offered. Smiles seal the deal. It has taken 30 seconds. He has no change (no one ever seems to), rushes off, returns with a handful of small denomination bills, wrinkled and antiqued, thanks me, smiles, waves us goodbye, and rushes off waving trinket laden arms at new arrivals, offering beads to go. The key fobs settle into their new life as decorations on my hat, carrying memories.

MARCH 26, 2016: Back to Nairobi, Part Two, of two

The morning opens with a visit to a traditional. Masai village near our lodge. To get there we pass through a somber clutter of tin shanties, satellites to a string of bars. The village is a traditional ring of branches enclosing 200 people. ‘All descended from the same grandfather’, red-robed Thomas tells us as he gestures with his long wooden staff and leads us through the branches. 

We much prefer to watch a culture unfold before us than to have it performed, but this is all we have. The young Masai men who jump dance for us seem to enjoy this display of their springy athleticism and our appreciation is genuine. High jumpers have high value in the marriage stakes. Strong legs make strong men, hunters and herdsmen both. Maybe our visit is contributing something after all, even if just a chance to practice jumping.

We watch women weave bead ornaments. Some notice my beaded eyeglass lanyard, and smile politely…but skeptically …when I tell them I made it. Whispered comments and shared glances and giggles follow. Beads are women’s work, as is house building, cooking, child care. Men? ‘We watch the animals.’ 

Thomas has one wife: his father has 6, so has six houses, and many children. Thomas has but one wife. And, therefore, but one house.  We sit in its smoky darkness.  ‘My wife was expensive, cost 10 cows.’ This wife was chosen for him after he proved he was an adult by killing a lion. He will choose future wives. His jumping skill will be a factor.

My obvious fairy tale of a place (the Himalayas) where one woman can have several husbands, usually brothers, gets the response it obviously deserves:  a snort of disbelief. 

Thomas smoothes a thin twig with the sharkskin leaves of the hard sandpiper tree. Then the men create fire by rapidly rotating this stick of the hard wood in a well of softer wood. Friction works. Lesson learned.

We graciously deflect a clumsy attempt to sell us industrially made trinkets at absurdly inflated prices. Thomas tries another ploy, this time successful, and offers to deliver the bag of pens we’ve brought for the local school. I doubt Mr. Lenny, the only teacher there on this holiday weekend, or any of the 800 students at the school, will ever see them. When last seen Thomas was testing the pens on a scrap of paper.

Hours later, African massage road long behind us, we reclimb the Great Escarpment, snaking up from the floor of the Rift Valley, leap frogging through the line of trucks all wheezing fetid black exhaust into the cool air. 

Too soon, we say goodbye to indefatigable Peter and slyly handsome Jacob. They have been fine safari partners, good hands, indeed.

The Nairobi Hilton, free with hotel points from those years on the road, is gorgeous and superbly appointed, but stifling in its generic hotelness. There will be no screen walls, Laughing Jacinta, or hooting hyenas, no endless space, no wildness.

East Africa has done its magic.  Again. I feel my DNA reaching out to the grasses, the sky, the animals. It has been here before, and misses this paradise. I wonder if, even 60 thousand years after my ancestors left Africa, they remembered. this place dimly, as the Garden of Eden, and that leaving and long journey, as punishment. Surely, someone once said ‘who booked this trip anyway’ and ‘uh, tell me again why this was a good idea’. And blamed someone else.

KENYA

Return to Nairobi

May 28 and May 29, 2016

 MAY 28-NAIROBI DAY 1

 ‘Marry me. I can make you very comfortable’.

The laughing buxom lady winks and bounces her bountiful bosomy assets, world-class Dolly parts for sure. We’re in Nairobi’s outdoors weekend crafts market, and she is a charming and crafty flirt… anything to make a deal.

Bosom Lady’s other offerings (kitenge cloth re-thought---beautifully--- as pants and tunics) are more tempting, but we thank her. She chuckles, and bounces a farewell, as we move on. She’s a very pretty woman.

Some of the other goodies spread on tarps or hanging from makeshift frames are hand-crafted, genuinely of, and from, African hands, lovely. Many are shoddy, wham, bam thank you ma’am, pointlessly banal, artless, muzungu tourist schlock, smelling of Chinese mass production.

It’s a colorful, but difficult, world, this market. We browse, not serious buyers. For many, perhaps all, of the sellers it’s a serious place, a lifeline. The prices start stratospheric (and, why not?), can be bargained down to earth (if need be), though not too close to sea-level for muzungu (who have so much money they can fly across the world to get here). Most of the shoppers are locals. They know the ropes to pull the prices lower still.

Many people pay more than they should, rarely more than makes them happy. The sellers know their bottom price. A sale is a market mambo, a dance of the desire of the buyer and the need of the seller, the former cajoled into the dance by a tempting array, an engaging spiel, or bouncing boobies.

Determined to remain wall flowers at this dance, we eventually succumb, perhaps a bit left-footed. The damage is ten dollars, not quite rock bottom, perhaps, but acceptable to us, welcomed by the three women we danced with. Our trophies are two squishable soft toilet paper roll sized baskets, decorated with a few rows of Maasai beads, one beaded eyeglass lanyard, and yet another small fabric bag for my collection, a patchwork of pieces of kitenge cloth, leftovers in a useful, honest, and appreciated, reincarnation. Maybe it will replace my over-experienced passport holder (its zipper no longer cooperative). For this trip, anyway.

Dinner is a dozen tender chunks of teriyaki chicken with spicy fried noodles and veggies, more meat than we’ve eaten in our 68 days on the road. We wash it down with pineapple-mint juice, swampy green, but tasty, tasty, tasty.

Dined, if not wined, we pass once again under the smile of the welcoming security guard in front of the barrier that separates the hotel from the street, empty our pockets for the friendly guards at the door, get beep-beep scanned by one more happy, uniformed security guy, and enter the hotel.

I flopped into bed at about 03:00am this morning after the flight from Rwanda and was awake at 07:00. Coma begins to jelly my legs by 8pm.

Bed.

MAY 29-NAIROBI DAY 2 AND OUR LAST DAY IN AFRICA

‘Where do you come from’?

‘What is your name’?

‘Do you want a safari?

‘How long will you be in Kenya’?

‘Take my card’.

‘Come to my shop’.

‘I give you good price’.

The Nairobi street routines don’t vary much. And they pop out of nowhere every few feet. A polite answer or smile, or nod, is agreement to continue the conversation, a mistake if we want any peace on our walk. Not reacting doesn’t work: ‘Why you don’t like to speak to Africans.’

I hit upon an awful solution. I place my hand on my ear and indicate I can’t hear. That gets me an expression of sympathy, a smile, a wave, and some relief. A few instant street ‘friends’ whip out a pad and pen, ever at the ready. That gets them a laugh. But I walk on alone.

I apologize to all who are genuinely hearing challenged.

I can't resist another pass through the Maasai Market. Once again, I am seduced into the market mambo and dance away with beaded, camel leather sandals, destined to walk the walls of the guest room, not the streets, and, inevitably, another bag, both bought for half the original asking price, so below stratospheric, and perhaps not too far above sea-level.

Life is better in Kenya than in many places in Africa. Muzungu flock here for the herds of large mammals. We are a source of income, famously voracious for services. But, we have to be tapped, and the competition is tough. I have to keep that in focus. And, as is true all over Africa, genial affability is the rule.

Nairobi is notoriously chaotic. Security is tight for a reason. Armed guards scan luggage and bodies every time we enter the hotel. The first level of guards stands at the street. He tells us not to walk to the right. It doesn’t look any different from what we see down to the left, but we do turn left and head for a late breakfast

It’s Sunday and the streets are quiet. Charity, the waitress at our coffee shop, delivers fresh mango juice and delicious cappuccino to both of us, 2 fried eggs to me, and an omelet with toast to Dennis. 1200 Shillings is $12. The other customer chows down on her ‘African Breakfast Special’, lots of carbos, and red beans that smell delicious. The young and smiling owner asks if we like the coffee. We do. He beams.

Nairobi eaters are a varied bunch, with eclectic tastes. On this street, grazers can and do chomp on pizza, fast food chicken, (local or KFC), ‘Japan Teriyaki’, traditional food, and top them with gummy ice cream extravaganzas from Coldstone Creamery, or go healthful with fresh fruit juices (mango, passion fruit, pineapple, mint, or a mix) available at any of them. The local physiques, tending towards the robust and ‘full figured’, suggest business is good.

Traditional dress is rare among the women, tights and short skirts not. Alas. Western dress is expensive for both sexes, but especially for women. Their mothers, aunties, and grannies can wrap head to foot in graceful meters of cloth, both beautiful and affordable. Nairobi’s sophisticates dress in bits and pieces, all expensive. Style costs, fashions change, wardrobes become ‘so last year’. And not every figure is enhanced in tightness.

I’m not sorry that 1.5 days in Nairobi is our last image of Africa. It reminds us of how extraordinary the preceding 66 days have been.

We’re already planning our return.

May 30, 2016

We're home

Folks,

Yes, we're home.

Last night at some time after 11, but not quite midnight, Roger and Greg dropped us home. It had been over 30 hours since we got on the plane in Nairobi and 43 or since we woke up there on May 29.

Thanks for your patience with my daily blabs, er, uh, blogs, yes blogs.

If plans work out there may be more from Africa at the end of the year. It's a big continent, we've only been to 15 of the 50+, and we want to see a few more before our Sell by Date. Our clock is ticking....

Bob and Dennis

 

RWANDA TRIP- May 14, 2016 to May 27, 2016

RWANDA

                    

May 14, 2016 to May 27, 2016

Bob Francescone

MAY 14, 2016: RWANDA DAY 1-ARRIVAL IN PARADISE

It’s 2 am.

Mouhdi greets us at the Murugu Hostel with a continent-wide smile that burns away the brain and body sludge of our 3 plane, 4 take-offs, 4 landings, 4 country aerial yo-yo bounce across East Africa from Djibouti. We don’t notice the mile in elevation we’ve gained, but are just short of geriatric cartwheels over the 35 degrees we’ve lost on the thermometer.

Whatever else Rwanda has to offer during the next two weeks, the climate gets our vote. So does the bed.

We wake up in paradise.

At least here. And now.

In 1994 over a million people, over one tenth of the population, were murdered here in a genocidal rampage. Fueled by a Belgian colonial administration that had emphasized differences over commonalities and then by an egotistical megalomaniac who preached ‘ethnic cleansing’, getting rid of anyone different and making Rwanda pure…and ‘great’…again, the rampage lasted 100 days, the majority Hutu military and civilians attacking their minority Tutsi neighbors. That’s 10,000 men, women, and children a day shot, hacked, incinerated their bodies left to rot in the hot sun. Mass rape of Tutsi women was standard policy.

65 percent of Hutu and Tutsi are Christian, predominantly Catholic. Sectarian differences among Christian groups added fuel. 25 percent are of various tribal religions, some admixed with Christian elements. 10 percent are Muslims.

The rest of the world ignored it after 10 Belgian soldiers were killed.

There’s a monument to the 10, and a memorial museum for the 1,000,000.

The years afterwards were bumpy, including a disastrous war with Uganda, and reabsorbing and resettling the millions of returning refugees who had fled the genocide, but Rwanda is now an impressively safe and secure place.

Reconciliation includes ignoring Hutu and Tutsi identities and creating one Rwandan identity.

The country has an impressive infrastructure, much of it provided by the embarrassed international community. Kigali is recognized as the loveliest, safest and most livable city in East Africa, if not the whole continent. It is certainly lovely, spreading out over green hills into mists, filled with trees and flowers, the air warmish, with a cool edge.

Rwanda is called ‘Le Pays des Milles Collines’, Land of a Thousand Hills, and most of them are rippling away from the porch of our hostel. Getting around town is urban trekking…or so we’ve heard. That’s for tomorrow.

Today we chill, and veg, and get to know Mouhdi, Guy in Charge, and Evode, New Guy, drink cold citron and plan the next two weeks.

MAY 15, 2016-RWANDA DAY 2-GENOCIDE MUSEUM

‘I told the man. You are my neighbor, why are you killing me. He hit me with his machete, then stuck pieces of wood into my face. Then he thought I was dead and went away.’

                                   Boy, age 9

Today we rode as passengers on the backs of motorcycles through the beautiful peaceful streets of Kigali to the Genocide Memorial.

The Memorial gives unbearable details of the bloody apocalypse of April, 1994. Some stick, indelible.

The genocide had deep roots. It festered in the racist policies of the colonial powers, and grew rancid in the stench of the colonial government policies to ‘divide and conquer’ by encouraging antagonism against the educated Tutsi minority.

By the 1990’s, in independent Rwanda, the government’s plan was complete eradication of the Tutsi. Hutu troops were given permission to effect a ‘final solution’ and kill all Tutsi. Ordinary Hutu joined in the blood frenzy, killing their neighbors.

Hutu men who were HIV positive were recruited by the government to gang rape Tutsi women and infect them. Hutu who had married Tutsi, and there were many, were also killed, as were their children. Hutu who protected or hid their Tutsi friends and neighbors were also killed.

There were acts of supreme bravery. The film Hotel Rwanda shows one. There were many others. A Moslem man defied the troops and hid Tutsi in his house. A Hutu man hid neighbors in a trench in his garden and fed them with food he stole.

Many Tutsi took refuge in churches. The government troops locked them in, then torched or bombed the churches.

At the war crimes trials only a handful of convictions were handed down. Two Catholic nuns were found guilty of crimes against humanity.

The genocide killed 1,000,000 of the then 7,000,000 Rwandans. 250,000 are buried at the Memorial. 2,000,000 more became refugees. The killing left 300,000 orphans, most of whom had seen their families hacked to pieces by people they knew. Many of the raped women bore children conceived as their husbands and children were murdered in front of them.

Mouhdi, our sweet, gentle, soft-spoken Go to Guy at the hostel is 26. He was 4 during the genocide. I don’t know if he is Hutu or Tutsi. I will not ask him.

The Genocide Memorial does not ignore other genocides: the Turks against the Armenians, the Germans against the Namibians, the Serbs against the Bosnian Moslems, the Khmer Rouge Cambodians against other Cambodians, the Nazis against the Jew, Poles, gays, Gypsies.

There are others, including the forceful removal of people against their will. I think of what Europeans, then Americans, did to the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere and the Europeans to the Tasmanians, and the slave trade to the Americas, perpetrated by Americans, Europeans, the Arabs, and by Africans against themselves.

No people on our planet are free of that taint. We walk through the Memorial ashamed that our species is capable of such horrors. It seems that we can be lead into atrocity too easily by the call to hate those who are different.

The Rwandans want more than the memory of the hate. The Memorial leads us from horror to reconciliation. Kigali, almost demolished and its streets filled with rotting corpses in April,1994, is today a beautiful, thriving, safe, modern city, its people neither Hutu nor Tutsi, but Rwandans.

The woman speaks into the camera:

‘I spoke to the man who killed my six children. He told me where two of them were buried, so I could bury them. I forgive him because he told me the truth.’

She humbles me.

MAY 16, 2016-RWANDA DAY 3-VOLCANO IN MY MOUTH

The volcano erupts in my mouth. The wad of fuzzy leaves and salt leaches massive floods of saliva from every part of my burning maw. It’s no use. The liquid is lava.

Its target is the collection of microbes keeping my throat ‘iffy’ and my cough always on call.

 ‘This always works’, says David, our charming host at lovely Murugo Hostel, or ‘Doctor David’, dispenser of mouth and throat Armageddon.

He’s right. This is my second treatment and after each I do feel better, to the extent that I feel anything at all. Lava tends to deaden. The same remedy is applied to bleeding wounds, so cauterization might be the active principle here. This is David’s 82-year-old mother’s recipe, and David and his 8 siblings have survived multiple doses, so I figure…what the hell!

My experiment with Rwandan folk medicine adds er, uh, piquancy, yes piquancy to an otherwise flattish, lazy day on the lanai overlooking the hills of Kigali. Surrounded by maps and pages copied from the Lonely Planet guide to Rwanda I’m in charge of figuring out bus, boat, and lodgings for our nine days, self-propelled excursion around Rwanda.

The country is small, with good roads, and good, cheap, busses. Our furthest destination is only a 6-hour trip, though we will have one 9-hour day. All the others are 2 to 3-hour bus rides….and one longer, slow boat trip on Lake Kivu, described as one of the most beautiful places in all Africa. And, yes, African Queen has crossed our minds.

The goal is 4 days of La Dolce Vita in Kibuye, overlooking that beautiful Lake, the 5 smoking Virunga Volcanoes (made famous in the film ‘Gorillas in the Mist’, and the so near, yet so far, cloud wrapped landscapes of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) on the other side of the lake.

We’ll travel through a landscape in part densely populated and farmed and in part the last stretches of unspoiled virgin (except for the intruding road) African forest. It’s a landscape with place names singing the soft consonants of Africa: Musanze, Gisenyi, Kibuye, and my favorite, here, in its euphonious completeness, Cyangugu, Rwanda, the Cy pronounced as ‘Sh’.

But, that starts tomorrow. My third dose of Doctor David’s Lava Leaf Remedy comes first.

Pray for me.

MAY 17, 2016-RWANDA DAY 4-TO CYANGUGU

This is not our year for buses. 30 minutes after leaving Kigali on the 9am Impala Bus for the 6-hour trip to Cyangugu and halfway up a hill near Gihinga and Gacurabwenge the bus pulls over. We look for on-loading passengers. What we see is an off-loading driver, phone in hand, inspecting first one wheel than another. And we know.

A few hours earlier we begin the day with a semi farewell to the guys at the hostel; we’ll see them in 9 days. The motorcycle ride thru morning traffic to the bus station is careening, carefully driven, fun.

The bus station—Nyabugogo---is pure Africa, ablaze with colors, peddlers, and chaos. The peddlers stop at our bus window offering fruit, drinks, samosas, French magazines, the English version of the current issue of Time Magazine, an English-Swahili phrase book, earphones, phone cables memory chips, hair picks, shampoo, jewelry, underwear. It’s a Drive in, Walk-up Jumble Sale, a Sidewalk Anti-Walmart, strewn with the unpackaged color of Africa.

We are assigned Seats 18 and 19 on the 9am bus. They turn out to be right behind the driver, a spot seemingly nature-made for 1 and 2. Go figure.

The bus is comfortable, one passenger per assigned seat, Laws of Physics observed. We leave promptly at 9, get as far as…here. The spot is lovely. The yellow haze buzzing across the hillside wraps around fields of fluttering banana pendants. It’s made of bushes covered with bright sunflowers, 4 to 5 inches across, baby chick yellow, and equally fuzzy.

Rwanda is all hills and densely populated. The landscape is cultivated and humanized by small plots of different crops, stands of trees, and small houses. Everywhere is green. In places it looks like tropical Costa Rica and Guatemala. In others, the terra cotta barrel tile roofs and earth walled houses remind me of the villages of Taiwan. Farther away, the hilltops with tall columns of trees silhouetted against the clouds, are a stand in for Tuscany. With bananas.

Across the road, a boy about 8 and his mother are harvesting fruit into sacks. He waves and smiles. She picks and packs.

While muzungu (farangi, white people) are not unusual in Kigali, we’re almost certainly a rarity standing on the road near Gihinga. We do our bit to entertain our hosts, but the show is short-lived. Just about 40 minutes from the breakdown of Bus Number 1, an empty Impala bus, Number 2 (so far), pulls up. People still in Number 1 pass our tiny day packs out, and we all take the same numbered seats we had in Number 1 in Number 2. And we’re off. I’m impressed.

We’ve stretched our legs, gotten a taste of the efficiency that makes Rwanda an easy place to visit, and a chance to slow-watch life in the fields. It’s a 40-minute mini-adventure, texture added and appreciated.

At noon we stop for a 15-minute bathroom and food break. The buffet (a common meal solution here) is huge, looks good, and is cheap at about $3, but most people buy take-away sticks of beef kebab. A twenty-five cent cob of roasted sweet corn does me just fine, the slight char on the big kernels crunching into the softer sweetness inside.

The paths along the road fill with uniformed school kids (light blue above, dark blue below is a popular combo), books in hand or back packed. One little boy runs, balancing a 1-liter bottle of water, standing straight up, on his head. Velcro?

We tunnel briefly through a forest of bamboo fingers, all pointing skyward, then into another patch, canopied into shadow by hugely arching, almost linked, leafy arms reaching out from both sides of the road. Then the road opens into wide, cropped tea plantations, bright green and crew-cut for morning brew. Pickers, just torsos and arms and baskets above the tightly tamed shag, are solitary spots of color in the green.

We ascend into the highest mountains, drizzle of the clouds spotting the windshield. Except for the road and signs warning of ‘animals crossing’ (with the logo of a chimpanzee), evidence of human intervention in this landscape is swallowed by the solid, immense silence of the Nyungwe rainforest, primal, untouched Africa, remnant of its morning. There are monkeys by the side of the road and tongues of rock and mud where land has slid from the steep slopes, both reclaiming the landscape wounded by the road.

Tea plantations appear again, matching manicured parentheses to those on the other side of the forest, containing the wildness. And slowly encroaching on it.

The horizon brightens with reflections from Lake Kivu, another deep, wet gift of the process ripping Africa in two. Beyond the lake is the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC to friends, formerly Zaire, beautiful, tempting, but off limits.

Seven hours after leaving Kigali we’re at the end of Rwanda as Bus Number 2 stops briefly in Rusizi. I recover my day pack from my ill neighbor who has been using as a pillow. She nods thanks, leaves. The bus winds down to the lake shore, finally in Cyangugu, ‘la frontière’ with the DRC. Bus greeters point out our hotel, a short walk up the hill behind us.

Rooms at the budget Hotel des Chutes all have balconies overlooking the lake, the bridge across the narrow slip of water to the DRC, and a spectacular mountain landscape. Ours will do. Definitely. Especially when they get the water running.

In the meantime, there are charming and helpful Redemptos (‘it’s Latin, means Redemption’) to welcome us, and slightly sullen, but gorgeous, Olive to bring us cold beers, and the view. We have arrived.

MAY 18, 2016-RWANDA DAY 5-CYANGUGU – GHOSTS 5

Carmen Miranda and Josephine Baker eat your hearts out. Hats of flowers? Fruits? Mere bagatelles!

I see a guy wearing a flock of chickens on his head, barnyard beauties all, perky and facing all around, a beak or two at each hour, him the owner of a 24-hour cluck. One that lays eggs. (Later, Redemptus tells us that chickens are a big seller in Congo, where food is expensive. I take it chickens don’t need a visa. For them, it’s all part of a day’s work. They just cluck in.)

I’m on an early morning walk around Cyangugu, Rwanda’s southwestern last gasp before the landscape belongs to Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, or Congo) or Burundi. The setting is stunning, right on Lake Kivu, and facing the misted green mountains of the Congo. Right here at ‘la frontière’ the watery gap separating the two is a few dozen feet wide.

Inevitably, it’s a border crossing. Everywhere in the world these are odd places. One minute you are ‘home’, a native, in your place, under your rules. The next you are a ‘foreigner’, and under sufferance of a visa stamp. Opposite you in the line are people reversing the process, both of you gaining and losing who you are. Everyone is a kind of ghost, temporary, no one. It’s not a place for smiles, Cyangugu, and there aren’t many, at least not towards a sole wandering muzungu.

The biggest businesses seem to be petrol (gas, to the rest of us) stations, stores selling wildly colored plastic bins (a great profit maker in Congo), money exchanges, and guys on MotoTaxis, extra helmet in hand, ready to putt-putt back up the mountain to the real town, Rusizi. There are several ugly blocky hotels down by the watery frontière, in the thick of things, such as they are. None are so appealing as our Hotel des Chutes sitting up on the hill in the quiet, under its not-yet-in-flower jacarandas and flamingly flowered Red Flowering African Tulip Tree.

Cyangugu is not a pretty place, the setting aside. Depend on the women to add color. If the women of Ethiopia, especially Harar, are geniuses of pattern mixing, the women of Rwanda pick one astounding fabric and use it over and over again from toe to wild head dress. Some simply wrap their hips in it, then top it with a solid colored tee shirt or blouse. Some tailor it into tight floor length skirt and matching blouse.

It’s the head scarves where their genius erupts. The simple ones, Head Scarves 101, are tied, knotted in back, best as a base for a coiled cloth pad for things balanced atop, working gear. The knots grow more complicated by 102 or 103. Folds appear at the junior level. By graduate level the head dresses are millinery masterpieces, sprouting wings, impractical for head work, but heady birds of paradise flown out only for special occasions to be seen and admired.

I hear scratching near my perch on a rock wall, look up from this screen to a smile. She’s a street sweeper and her twig broom is about to sweep my feet. Most roadsides in places we have visited in Africa have hosted a plague of explosions in local plastics factories. Rwanda is litter free. There are no blizzards of plastic bags blowing around heaps of plastic bottles, cans, paper, refuse. On the last Saturday of every month everyone in the country must work on some public project. I don’t know how it is organized or monitored, but street pick up must be involved. Maybe knowing they’ll have to pick it up on that last Saturday inspires people to not litter the rest of the month. Urban or rural, the roadsides are spotless…and we’re three weeks after the last cleanup. The street sweeper cleans the dust path along the road, even of the red flowers of the tulip tree.

Breakfast on the balcony overlooking all the above is luxuriously fruited. Tiny ‘finger bananas’, aptly named, are sweet with a wisp of other fruit, apple maybe. The pineapple is beyond sweet, definitely carrying hints of coconut. The purple-skinned passion fruit comes as seedy fruit and as juice, both delicious, tangy, earthy. The other fruit looks like a yellowish passion cousin, and is new to us. It’s very good. Ditto the omelet with red and green poivre, oignon, and tomate. The coffee is ersatz.

A few minutes after our last sip of that dark brown stuff, loud sheets of rain plummet onto the porch, just missing us. It’s rainy season, food for the deep greenness. We sit on our balcony and watch the hills of the Congo fade behind the liquid scrim. Few people crossing the bridge in either direction have umbrellas. Kids run through the drops. Adults just keep walking. Almost all are balancing something on their heads, bags, baskets, packages. Closer in, the rain seems to wash a brighter red into the flowers of the tulip trees.

Rainy season rains here are like ours in Florida, committed to a soaking downpour, but just passing through and gone within the hour. The clouds sail on and blue returns to the sky, the air cleansed, and the flowers brighter. Clarity does not flatter Cyangugu.

A five-minute walk exhausts downtown and we turn past ‘Salon La Merveille’, Marvelous Salon barber shop, and its saffron front decorated with painted images of a hair clipper and two current hair styles for Cyangugu’s men about town.

Our feet are in reddish black volcanic soil, but we are engulfed by a tunnel of green so intense it wipes out all other colors. On the lakeside the road drops off into banana and irrigated fields then to the lake, its islands, and the mountains of Congo. It’s a spectacular view only slightly marred by angled glimpses of the town. People stop to watch us take pictures of nothing, confirming that muzungu are both entertaining and unfathomable.

Mountainside is an almost vertical wall of green wildness. Thirty feet straight up a house clutches at the vegetation. Four men wave from its narrow porch. ‘Allo’ shouts one as he plummet-walks down to shake our hands. ‘Welcome to Rwanda. I am Alpha. When you pass here again, say hello. I am always here. I have no job.’ We promise and he waves us off on our walk through the green tunnel, now tilting upward to meet the paved road.

The further we get from the ghosts at la frontière, the more people respond to our greetings and smiles. Kids practice their school English, clustering for courage.

Between us and the gate of the hotel is a narrow, steep, muddy, slippery slash in the mountainside. At the bottom a flock of guys with the unmistakable universal stamp of ‘street punk’ watch for a Memorable Muzungu Moment, but we disappoint them, descending without incident…or grace, or style. They seem satisfied with that and to laugh and throw phrases in Swahili in our direction as we wave and pass by them into the gate.

Our walk has given Cyangugu a face. Not everyone here is a ghost.

MAY 19, 2016-RWANDA DAY 6 – TO MUSANZE

On one day in 1994 Hutu troops murdered 50,000 Tutsi in this spot. 50,000. On one day. There’s a memorial, famously graphic, but we continue past in our bus.

Below us, the ruffled valleys of the forest are green-black cups for clouds, released by the morning sunlight and wisping away, their exit undeterred by the red lights of the tulip tree. The heaped ranges of mountains fade into shades of greyed green, leaves sequined by sunlight on dew, behind morning mists, a dappled scrim.

The early morning landscape is so beautiful I want it to deny the possibility of such evil. It cannot and does not. We travel on.

The evil lingers. I look around our bus. Anyone over 22 lived through the genocide. I wonder what they saw. Or did.

The road takes over, as happens on long bus rides. We rise and fall, sway left and right, dip, lurch, beep, pass. There’s a squiggled sign for “curves ahead’. The road is already twisted into paper clip tight curves. More curves just won’t fit, and they don’t. Maybe they just had an extra sign.

Six hours after leaving Cyangugu we unfold from our Omega Express (definitely the very last word in comfort, euphemistically speaking) once again into the chaos of Nyabugogo bus station, and immediately refold into the 1pm Virunga Express to Musanze, 2 hours to the northeast.

Up there are the 5 Virunga Volcanoes. We saw one, the smoking one, briefly from Uganda three years ago when morning clouds blinked open during a trek to visit gorillas. Most people assault the Virunga slopes to visit the Rwanda gorillas (very expensive) or notch their hiking sticks. I just want to see the 5 mountains up close, no hairy relatives, or climbing, involved. Our bank account and my knees agree. If the Cloud Gods are kind, we’ll see them from our ramble around town. If not, …oh well.

 ‘Are you sure you made a reservation?’ is not the question we want to hear after 8 hours on the bus. Neither is its inevitable cadenza: ‘And the guesthouse is full’.

Resourceful and helpful Onesmus suggests a tent on the grass in the yard, and, poof, we have our digs in Musanze.

Our Canvas Condo is tight, the Studio Model, 6 feet by 6 feet, but luxuriously padded and blanketed, comfy…and constructed, furnished, and lighted by Onesmus in 20 minutes while we check our emails. Spotless toilet and hot showers are across the yard. Hot coffee is on the porch.

MAY 20, 2016-RWANDA DAY 7 –PARTS 1 AND 2 - MUSANZE, TENTS, AND PIZZA

The walls of our tiny Canvas Condo muffle and baffle the  morning sounds of Musanze. Trekkers, up early and off to visit---uninvited--- our hairy relatives on the slopes of the Virungas, add chatter and coffee slurps. A hammer pounds on something next door.  Clusters of bird song ride over the occasional mumble of passing motorbikes. 

Under all is the sound of Africa awakening. Mornings in Africa are filled with the sounds of life lived in the open. I love them.

It’s 6 am, well past rise and shine (well, semi-shine) time for us Tent People. The night was well padded, comfortable, warm on the toes, cool on the face, restful. 

 Today we wander Musanze and its markets, hoping for a view of the Virungas above. Grey clouds make that less likely in the morning. No matter. There are closer colors. 

 The cloth market is just beginning to drape its wares over bamboo poles at 10am. Some designs are raw and rampant, others soft and subtle, none meant to be static, but always in motion as skirts, shawls, scarves, wraps on the undulating grace of Rwandan women. 

I have a purpose. This is our second year of looking for two fabrics spotted on women in Cameroon, across the continent. On one, peacock-colored, life sized chickens and roosters fluttered in a deep blue field. Mega-bananas, in singles, doubles, triples handily filled a green garden on the other. They were magnificent, and so far non-existent anywhere else in Africa. Still, we visit every part of the cloth market, hope trampling experience.

Below each soft wall of color, whirring sewing machines are at the ready to nip, tuck, tailor to fit any body shape or aspiration. 

One woman of definite and expansive ‘traditional build’ holds up a huge, raucous pattern that would eat a smaller physique. On her it is a decoration, an enhancement, a mural, not a master of her shape. I imagine her sailing through the streets in that pattern, a spectacular galleon of girth, washing the streets in waves of color. Brava!

Chickens and bananas still elude me, but I make a find. In the used clothing alley of the market, Used Clothes Guy glances at our multi-pocketed travel shirts as we walk by, turns to a 4 foot by 5 foot pile of loose shirts, stacked so only their rumpled collars show, reaches into the middle of the pile  and yanks out my shirt’s first cousin. In the right size. Perfect. 

Friendly haggling, greased with smiles, gets him a price he’ll accept, and me a shirt I want, in better shape than its super-annuated and thinning relative I’ve worn for 4 years of travel. It’s a shirt with a ‘history’, and stories it could tell. 

I wonder who wore it before and where. Maybe some of my Goodwill donations have made a similar roundtrip, and, now well-traveled, tell tales of markets and muzungus. Surely, stuff made of spun yarn has the stuff to spin yarns.

I’ll continue to look for my chickens and bananas in other places. Maybe the Virungas will be less elusive here.

MAY 20-RWANDA DAY 7 PART 2

There’s a messy, democratic ‘us-ness’ to sharing pizzas.

Every urban, semi-urban, or semi-urban wanna be town we have ever been to--- Musanze, Rwanda, is no exception--- has pizza, or some version of it, sometimes misguided, but the ancestry and intent recognizable. Regardless of the execution, pizzas are designed to be messily shared, round wholenesses to be equally divided, everybody with a wide crust end for holding and a narrow pointed end for eating. (Square pizzas with their edge-less middle pieces miss the point of pizza, totally.)

Pizza is food for friends, messy finger, hand-food friends. The day leads up to pizza with Onesmus naturally….

There are no other guests around. The blitzkrieging, frantic, and humorless trekkers zoom off at 6—loud, tightly wound and tight-lipped---to invade the gorillas, the most laid back of primates. There oughtta be a law…

In the quiet afterwards, Onesmus makes us breakfast. It’s not part of the Canvas Condo deal, but he does it anyway.

By the time we get back from ‘town’, he’s ready to chill. We just hang out together, Onesmus and us. We see pictures of his wife and pudgy baby back in Uganda, take and print photos of him to send to his wife. He invites us to share the lunch he cooks (fish stew, white and sweet potatoes, corn meal grits), then leads us on a walk through and up above the town.

We sit on the grass and watch the sun set and the moon rise to the gospel singing of the church behind us and the cartwheeling antics of the kids all around us. He’s delighted when the immense graceful slope of a Virunga slices through the clouds ‘for us’, apologizes that we don’t get The Full Monty.

Dinner seems like the next step. Pizza gets all the votes.

Onesmus and Focus opt for ham and pineapple pizza. We chomp through a ‘regular’ with mushrooms, sharing aromas and blurry edges, if not full tastes. It’s not great pizza. Quality is beside the point. It’s gooey, cheesy, a little salty, and thoroughly fingerlickingly, democratically messy.

It’s a perfect end to a fine day with a fine man.

And, oh yes, we saw the Virungas, 2.6 of them. At sunset. Spectacular. Somehow the pizza party is more memorable.

MAY 21, 2016-RWANDA DAY 8- PARADISE IN A TENT

We’re living in a garden. Flowers crowd around and over our tent, creep up onto our porch. In front of us the view tumbles down to Lake Kivu through orange lilies, white daisies, yellow coreopsis, and the reds, purples, blues of other flowers. This is Africa, just south of the Equator, but lifted up out of the heat into the cool perfection of mountainous Rwanda. Everything can grow here, and does. We thrive.

Our tented paradise is at Inzu Lodge, outside of Gisenyi. It’s a two-hour bus ride from Musanze, a beautiful way to spend a morning. Onesmus walk with us to the bus park and checks that were getting the right bus. It’s unnecessary, but sweet, and kind. Later he emails to check that we’ve arrived safely. It’s what Pizza Pals do.

Our tent is an African tent, royalty of that family. Set up as a permanent structure on a stone platform---hence the porch---and covered with a peaked bamboo roof to protect the canvas from sun and rain, it’s roomy and beautiful inside, as big as one of our guestrooms back home. And the walls zip open. With bright fabric curtains, bedspreads, thick mattresses, bamboo furniture, draping mosquito nets, electricity, spectacular, perfect climate, this is definitely a step WAAAYYY up from the Mat Motel in the oven of Djibouti. It costs $33 a night for the two of us, breakfast is $4 extra, each.

The ‘dining room’ is thatched, and open on three sides to the views. Chunks of eggplant, tomato, onion, pepper, neatly skewered and perfectly roasted, crisp edges holding flame flavor, seduce our senses, our view besotted eyes giving way taste-ready noses and tongues. It’s a wonderful lunch, fitting this place, and $4 a skewer, one each enough, and sided with salad and chips, aka French fries.

Hours later, pasta with pesto completes our day. We walk in the dark, through the flowers, up to our tent, our way lit by gas lanterns. White flowers catch the light and glow, just a bit, and catch the light breeze, nodding us to our tent.

We are seriously indulgent, and loving it.

MAY 22, 2016-RWANDA DAY 9 – LAKE KIVU TO KIBUYE ON 'THE AFRICAN QUEEN'

She’s our very own African Queen.

Easily a childhood contemporary of Good Queen Elizabeth (the current one) and quite rumpled around the edges…and everywhere else, except in her semi-plush airline style seats, she rules over the rickety dock outside Gisenyi with pointed prow authority. She calls herself Gloria Express, but allow us our fantasy.

She’ll chug-chug us down to Kibuye for 3 hours on her thrice weekly every other day southward run the length of Lake Kivu. She putt-putts northward on the days in between.

Like true royalty, our Queen has no affectation. She’s not a cruise ship, nor a beauty. She’s a muscular cargo boat, a sort of floating Rosie the Riveter who tolerates people, but prefers sacks of potatoes, and stashes us accordingly.

Her minions issue life jackets as they add our names and citizenship to the manifest, check our IDs, guide us across the bouncing gangplank….and stuff us on board into her window lined cabin. The comfy seats fill the space. Completely. We head for 2 window seats on the shore facing side. We can watch the scenery slide by, but we can’t move, hostages to steerage class. Shimmying and climbing skills are useful for the latecomers, the life jackets orange bumpers in the crowd.

The lake is island-studded and beautiful, deep blue, and just plain deep, one of the deepest in the world. The scenery is early morning emerald, Rwanda in its glory.

At 10:30 we offload at Kibuye and switch places with people on-loading for the trip down to where the lake squeezes into the narrows between Congo and Cyangugu. Our Queen pulls away without a wave. Sic transit Gloria.

We trade chug-chug for vroom-vroom on motorbikes spinning along the coastal road then up high above the lake to our digs at Home St. Jean. The view from the terrace is spectacular, the viewless room much less so. It’s big, clean, efficient, cheap, and

uninteresting.

We don’t bond with St. Jean, but make do…and make plans to catch our Queen the day after tomorrow on her way back north and return to our tent amidst the flowers.

Life is short. We’ll smell the flowers.

MAY 23, 2016-RWANDA DAY 10 – BACK TO PARADISE AT INZU LODGE IN GISENYI

 ‘Nous sommes presque arrivés.’ says the smiling man hanging over the railing. Yes, we’re almost there. The African Queen chug-chugs into Gisenyi, and we’re back in Paradise.

Our return to Gisenyi today is a snap decision. Kibuye IS gorgeous, but Home St. Jean is not home, and we miss our tent and hillside garden at Inzu Lodge only a three-hour chug-chug back up the lake...tomorrow.

At 9:40, the two Dutch sisters we’ve been trading travel tales with tell us there’s a boat back to Gisenyi…today. Yes!! By 10 our packs have been whirlwind stuffed, we’ve bid adieu to St. Jean, and are on our way up the dirt road to find the shortcut down to the lake. By 11 we’re having cold lemon Fanta on a veranda overlooking the lakeshore and the grassy spot where the good Queen will haul in.

And she does, a growing speck on the immense blue lake. Her greyness is washed out, aged, against the voluptuous green of the shore. No matter. At 12:30 we greet and board our African Queen.

The old girl has a big surprise under that greying hull. Young Justin, in charge of the gangplank, recognizes us from the downward trip yesterday, and leads us past the crowded deck we know, turns towards the bow…and into the First Class Salon, lined with plump, comfy, roomy couches. On the downward trip we followed the crowd into steerage and missed this upgrade into comfort. We spread out into it with our Dutch friends, Yolande and Sondra, an elegant young man and his laptop, two guys clearly Off to Have a Good Time, and a young woman being earnestly chatted up by a very determined swain. There’s plenty of room to spread out for our 5000Francs ($6.50). It’s twice the fare for steerage, and my legs thank me.

Fun Guys snap our pictures. We take theirs and then print them. For the next two hours the FC Salon becomes Foto Central. One by one, our sofa mates ask for, pose for, and thank us for their pictures. Computer Guy demurs, too cool by half.

The word spreads out of the FC Salon. We meet and snap crew and passengers.

I have my favorites There’s kind and helpful Justin, who affects a sideway glance, pose and smile that show off his brawny arms, lithe physique and very good looks. His photo just screams ‘For the Girlfriend’, lucky lady.

There’s Smiling Guy, who tries ‘serious’, but gives it up when I make a face at him, and he just beams light at the camera.

Our favorite, by far, for all of us is Noble Man, a dignified septuagenarian who hobbles in on a spectacularly carved wooden cane, his burnished canyon-lined face dark and his grey eyes light under a rakish cowboy hat. He doffs the hat, arranges his stunning purple jacket with black flowers vining all over it, and stands erect, chin up, staring directly into the camera. It is a royal portrait of our African Queen’s King.

At Inzu, Yves greets us with handshakes and smiles. ‘Your tent is ready.’ It’s a few dozen meters up the slope and easily visible through the flowers, but he insists on leading us. Home.

Dinner under thatch and open to the 180-degree view of the lake starts with crunchy tiny fish, perfectly fried, a local specialty recommended by Josh, the other guest. Young, smart, funny, he is in Rwanda from England to help Rwandans further develop their already impressive infrastructure. Like many people we meet he’s confused by, and interested in, America’s gun fetish, our primary and election processes, and the Trump person. We confess to total befuddlement.

A return engagement with the luscious veggie brochette is as successful as the first. Josh wrestles with an immense broiled fish, definitely on our plates next dinner time.

As we chat into the darkness, Inzu wizardry unleashes more magic. Out on the lake, now just a great blackness to us, but rippling life source to the people of the lake, fishermen go to work at their craft. Working in groups of 3 knife slender canoes, wooden slivers low to the black, the middle canoe shines gas lanterns over the water to attract fish to the nets and rods of the two other canoes. From here on the hill with no horizon visible in the dark to tell us where the sky begins, the lights float, suspended in blackness, unblinking fireflies.

They’re belied by the real thing, close-in fireflies rising out of the flowers, Morse coding amorous intents to one another, on off, on off, on off, the dit dot of insect love, but creating magic for us.

The Garden Guys place gas lanterns along the paths leading to the tents. Above us are stars.

In the lake, in the air, on the ground, in the sky spots of light dim the boundaries between earth lake and sky. Suspended, we, too, join the floaters. How could dreams compare?

MAY 24, 2016-RWANDA DAY 11 - GISENYI-INZU LODGE WORKS ITS MAGIC

The fishermen sing the day awake.

They have been working all night. As our day grows and theirs ebbs, they head to shore carrying with them a soft and rhythmic chant. I don’t know if it is a chant to help coordinate pulling on the oars, or pulling in their nets, or to celebrate a good harvest, or soothe an unsuccessful one. Whatever the reason, the chant is one voice, a shared message: we’re in this together. How little of that insight remains in the so called ‘developed’ world?

Gauffres are on the breakfast menu, waffles, à la francais. They’re thick, dense inside, crunchy on the surface, perfect. They are also only an accompaniment to the real star of our petit déjeuner, an immense platter of fresh fruit. On an 18-inch flat straw basket lined with a dew-shined banana leaf is an orchard of orange, banana, and pineapple slices, and seed-rich halves of passion fruit. The oranges and passion fruit are tart. The bananas hint at the flavors of other fruit. The pineapple is drippingly honey-sweet, no relative of those hard, armored things passed off as pineapples outside of the tropics. I manage all the fruit, only half of the gauffres, take two wrapped to go back to the tent, lunch-to-be later on our porch.

Paradise has been invaded. First, two large and loud young stormtroopers clump in, drop their rucksacks and address the reception clerk in the Demanditive Case, barking questions. Then laugh at her when she answers slowly because she is considering how to answer their questions. Charming. Not. (Later, they’re quiet at dinner, and only moderately inoffensive.)

Later in the afternoon, a family comes in with two adorable kids (3 and maybe 2) and a LOUD British sounding mother who addresses the kids megaphonically, as if they are in South America. I think of Henry Higgins line ‘She’ll have a large Wagnerian mother with a voice that shatters glass.’ In Buenos Aires. Her laugh would shred lead. Anywhere.

Her mother, however, is soft-spoken, as is her husband, a gentle Rwandan absolutely besotted by his children, and they adore him. He sings them to sleep, a soft lilting Rwandan song. Later even Megaphone Mama turns it down. She’s quite nice, actually.

As the day wanes, the fishermen go out again, chanting their way into the lake. We just barely make out their oars striking the quiet surface of the lake. Before and aft are long slender poles to beat the water and attract the fish. The boats resemble low-lying attenuated insects, lacking only wings to take flight.

At dark, a lone firefly blinks on and off. Then off. The crickets sing.

MAY 25, 2016-RWANDA DAY 12 - GISENYI-INZU LODGE, AND SOME LESSONS

From way above our tent, from far up the steep green slope, we hear singing. Not the deep masculine, repetitive, pulsing rhythm of the fish-chanters out on the, this is light, air-lifted, higher pitched, and a song, with beginning, middle, and end. It’s probably a hymn in this heavily Protestant country, but with music making life, not quite the life of Gospel singing in the USA, but getting there. And there are drums. The birds have chosen to not compete.

Today is a day of connecting with other travelers. But, first, we take Aline up on her offer to help us buy some kitenge in the central market. Kitenge are the long (4 meters, 13 feet) pieces of cloth that become the graceful wraps, blouses and head scarves that glow on almost every woman in most of Sub-Saharan Africa. My hunt for the flock of fabric chickens and bunch of cotton bananas is fruitless, but we have great fun with Aline. She has just finished her degree in hotel and tourism management and aims for a career in the growing Rwandan tourist industry. Staffing the reception desk at Inzu is step number one on that ladder. Like Yves, her desk partner, and everyone else at Inzu, she ‘has it’, a real feel for helping. Thus, our market walk.

Later we motor taxi to join our Dutch friends, Yolande and Sondra, for chilled Citron on the beach. Still later as we wait for dinner overlooking the lake, the stormtrooping guys of yesterday turn out to be interesting trekkers from South Africa. They revive my interest in a visit to Lesotho and Swaziland and offer to have their car dealer uncle in Johannesburg find a way to get around the ban on renting to Coffin Dodgers over 70 years old. Us.

The Sri Lankan-Canadian beauty spins tales of fresh shrimp and fish on the beaches of Sri Lanka, a Scherezade for sure, seducing us to yet another destination.

The chanting and lights on the lake launch their magic, but we’re doing magic under the thatch with our printer. The staff crowds around watching their photos appear automagically from Dennis’ tiny blue printer. Alone, in pairs, grouped with us, the Magic Muzungus, serious for the camera, wide-smiled for us, charming Alain, his co-workers, and the Chef-Wizard, create some magic for us. 24 years after the genocide, most of them are too young to remember that horror. It must ooze deeply into every family’s story. With people like this, recovery does seem possible. That seems like magic, and a comfort.

In the distance the fishermen chant as they have for generations.

MAY 26, 2016-RWANDA DAY 13 – GINSEYI TO KIGALI, AND RWANDAN KINDNESS SAVES THE DAY

My money belt is gone. And with it all my money. All.

We’re a half hour into the Virunga Bus ride on the 10:00 bus from Gisenyi to Kigali and I can’t find my money belt. We tear the day packs and jackets apart. No dice.

I call Inzu Lodge. Aline is as upset as we are…and then she finds it! We have to go back. A passenger on the bus and the driver work it out and explain it to me: the driver will put us on another Virunga Bus going back to Gisenyi, free of charge. Done. A half hour later we hop off Bus Number 1, into Bus Number 2.

In Gisenyi, I wave Den goodbye at the bus station, hop on a MotoTaxi back to Inzu, get the belt, thank Aline, hop back on, zoom back just in time to catch Bus Number 3, the 1:00 bus to Kigali. The driver of Bus Number 2 has explained it all, and Virunga gives us free passage on Bus Number 3 to Kigali. Bravo Aline! Bravo Virunga! Look for your reviews on Trip Advisor.

The ride is ridge riding, overlooking deep valleys and slopes farmed up to cloud-wrapped summits, the patches of bananas and other crops dripping down the steep sides of the mountains.

We pass a strapping young guy walking along the road while balancing a single running shoe on his head. The latest offering from New Balance?

Rwanda roads are very different from the crowded barnyard of the roads in Ethiopia. We see few cattle (these are farmers, not herders) and few goats. The one we do see keep to the greenery of the fields and off the paved roads, a wise move. There are far fewer walkers, too, wheels replacing legs.

The signs alone are worth the trip. A favorite is one advertising Esperanza Dellavida II. I have no idea what Ms. Dellavida II has on offer and miss the chance to find out. My attention is immediately hijacked by Tango Abitha’s Bar.

At the 15-minute rest stop, sellers crowd the windows with baskets of fruit, drinks munchies.

There are men with no left hand, a stump chopped off at the wrist. They are not old, just old enough to have been children maimed during the genocide. Everywhere there are reminders, but Rwanda is committed to reconciliation. Still, how do you reconcile a missing hand?

By 4:30 we’re home again in Kigali at Murugo Hostel, chilling after all that hopping, with a Citron, also chilled, and catching up on the news with Avode, after the hugs….and ‘Your room is ready’ (and it is, the rucksacks we left behind delivered and waiting for us).

He’s proud of his new name badge, enhanced by one of our automagically printed photos, so he has survived his trial period and has been hired.

The puppy is gone. We suspected she was sick from her labored breathing, heartworm the likely culprit. It’s not a happy diagnosis.

Mouhdi hugs a welcome, then the two guys go back to work. There are 3 other guests.

Whirlwind David spins in, hugs, spins off to help the other guests arrange their stay at…Inzu Lodge. Lucky people.

‘We have hummus today, and it is good’. Avode conjures up a bowl of same, chewy bread, and one bottle of cold beer. We share that and one order of penne pasta with vodka sauce, two plates please. We like this place, the Murugo Lodge, and Avode, Mouhdi, and spinning whirlwind owner David.

We sit as the day fades, feeling lucky. Knowing we are. Tomorrow we leave.

MAY 27, 2016-RWANDA DAY 14 – KIGALI TO NAIROBI-PARADISE TO MAYHEM

 ‘Yes! That one’.

I am close to massive overdose on beauty in the kitenge section of Kimironko market, Kigali’s biggest and best, when I find not one, but two kitenge I cannot leave behind. No, there are no chickens romping or bananas ripening on my kitenge, just wildly colorful and quintessentially African abstract patterns. Four meters of each cost less than $7. They’ll be summer (or maybe fall, or spring, or winter) foliage in the guest room. Or, perhaps not.

‘Lemee see, lemme see’ gushes our whirlwind host. Then he laughs. ‘I have bought the very same fabric to make tablecloths. You are good.’ That’s ‘good’, underlined, and in bold.

And that’s David, delightfully underlined and in bold. He is a hoot. Roundish top to bottom, he floats Big Ideas for Murugo. We’ve spent time discussing his plans for the guesthouse. Last week I suggest swing seats and hammocks for the garden and that sends him over the moon. Today he bubbles over designs for a pergola with a swing seat inside and hammocks hooked to each of the corner posts, with tables in between…and promises to send me pictures of the finished wonder.

Pictures, hugs, goodbyes with Evode and Moudhi happen too fast. David drives us to the airport through the orderly, uncluttered traffic, trees, and cool air, the car dipping into the valleys and climbing the summits of ‘The Country of a Thousand Hills’. The whirlwind is a considerate driver.

Kigali Airport is easy, well run, comfortable. We’re semi-ignored by the Security Dog, our luggage getting a ho-hum sniff before Fido slumps back into his crate. The humans are fussier. Our safety pins (useful many times for on the spot repairs) and batteries (for cameras, water purifier, and head lamps) go into the no-no bin. The Ethiopian hot spice powder? Security Guy asks Dennis to eat some. SG passes it without comment. Unlike Dennis in several hours.

Any pin and battery regrets disappear in the space of our exit row seats. The flight crew is quite definitely Ethiopian. What other country produces such looks, so rampantly? They almost compensate for the food, which is insipid, not bad, just pointless, rampantly so.

But not for the movie. It clutters the tiny screen with young guys who keep flipping greasy hair out of their eyes, falling off cliffs, forgetting their shirts, scoping out one another’s muscles, no, one another’s meaningless tattoos (yeah, right), getting sweaty together, hugging, and surfing humongous waves, skiing vertical Himalayas... and falling off more cliffs.

Of course, it makes no sense. Its Jackass Meets the Endless Summer of Dumb and Dumber. (Perhaps it is a very clever adaptation of Trump meets Palin, Cruz, and Carson, but that would require a sense of humor, seriously lacking in that camp, or chutzpah, ditto among Democrats.) I don’t bother with earphones. I lip read grunts well enough.

The camera work documenting Expendable and Handsome Young Men Doing Stupid Things is astounding, but I lose interest back at the second or third episode of heavy breathing male ‘bonding’ disguised as Macho Man Mayhem. Was this movie funded as a smokescreen by those ‘family values’ Republicans who keep getting caught looking for male ‘bonding’ in public restrooms? (Even their Stepford wives saw through their ‘historical research library’ of torso-rich gladiator films.) Just asking.

We’ve been through Addis Ababa Bole Airport 10 times before. The up escalators have never worked. The 11th time is no charm.  At 11:05 we join the other zombies bound for Nairobi, landing time 01:40, way beyond loss of consciousness.