I've never been entirely comfortable with absolutes. Truth, it's all relative, yeah? Constructs, fluid principles, floating signifiers. Are we or are we not particles animated by economic forces? Truth: all ideology, surely, etc., etc., etc.
Whatever your philosophical to the truth, I've been bending it flagrantly over the last few months. The readership of this blog may become my confessoriat. I have lied about the following recently.
1. My name.
It's far easier to throw off an insistent new friend when they are calling you Rebecca or Jennifer than if they are addressing you by your real name. I also got sick of the rejoinder, 'Ah, the hurricane!'
2. My marital status.
This has already been dealt with. I acquired an absent mate named Heck to help fend off the incessant wave of marital queries coming my way.
3. My religious beliefs.
Atheism doesn't cut the mustard out of the secular west. Claiming to be a Protestant (or, fudging it and saying you were baptised as such) is almost as bad but not quite as irredeemable as the Truth.
4. My literary tastes.
There are whole swathes of the bookshop that I would willingly consign to the pulpers. Adorno and I, we'd march through and get rid of most of the books with embossed covers and metallic lettering in the interests of aesthetic and social revolution. Why then, have I not batted an eyelid as people have told me that I must read Danielle Steel, NOW, that Sidney Sheldon is the greatest writer alive, that Dan Brown is intellectually demanding, but vital? I have uncharacteristically silent on occasions like this, restraining truth in favour of politeness. For my sins, I stumbled across the most extraordinary collections of remaindered books in Addis. Granta, Virago, Serpent's Tail paperbacks from the early nineties at 5 birr (60 cents) a pop. I've done penance with the marvellous Jenny Diski.
5. My interest in cricket.
I've arrived in India and chipped away at yet another foundation stone of my persona in the name of easy living. It's well known that I am not an avid fan of sporting events. There are exceptions - the very name Lance Armstrong brings a tear to my eye, under the right circumstances (which fall once every 24 months), I can watch a tennis match - but generally, I go out of my way to avoid watching large scale sporting events. Cricket and football I find entirely uninteresting. I arrive in India on a day when Australia and India are grappling in a test match, and what happens? I feign an interest in cricket! The words, 'Yes, I admire Ricky Ponting' actually left my mouth this morning. Jetlag alone can't account for it. I'm shocked and alarmed.
Many people come to India in search of truth. The cricketing lapse this morning showed how far I have strayed from the path. As of now, I too am a pilgrim, seeking the means adequately and bravely to express the reality of the inner and outer world.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Habesha tucker
All of the photos I took of Ethiopian food look pretty unappetising: piles of oily stodge splotched onto a sheet of grey-ish carbohydrate. I mean, on appearances, and without recommendation, would anybody in their right mind really want to eat this?
The pancake-like rolls are injera, a kind of bread made from the grain tef, the only harvested seed which houses a naturally occuring yeast. Injera is thus like a combination between a crepe and a slice of sourdough bread. It's great stuff. My friend Myriam - the Eritrean posing as an Ethiopian expat - told me the marriageability of women is judged on the quality of their injera, how thin it is and the frequency of the little crumpetty bubbles on the surface. The tef is usually bought unground at markets like this one in Lalibella. Everyone goes to a local grindery to get their tef and coffee ground up. 
The sauces are just piled in the middle of the communal dish of injera. Standard are tibs, pieces of lamb fried up in butter with green pepper, garlic and onion. My favourite was the shiro, a stodgy paste made from ground up chickpeas and berberi and butter, with or without meat and lamb juices as befitted the fasting season. Not a particularly visually appealing dish, but very very good. The ground meat in this photo is cooked kitfo, mince which is rubbed through with spices, cooked and served with a local spinachy vegetable and curds. I vastly prefered the raw kitfo, spiced diced meat served with a little bowl of dipping spices, although this option, it must be said, was one which diced a little too intimately with gastrological (as opposed to gastronomical) catastrophe.
This vast plate of food served three people. All eating is performed cutlery free, using the right hand to tear off bits of injera and scoop up the sauces. Once you've ordered shiro, in particular, you've tapped into an unending supply. If the injera stocks are low, new rolls will appear on the plate. If the shiro is drying up, ladlefuls will be dolloped onto your plate. It's a system which worked for me. And as a bonus, Ethiopian coffee is fabulous, not just the beans, but the coffee itself. The Italians only occupied Ethiopia for a brutal five years but they left loads of coffee machines as part of their legacy. Shots of sharp dark espresso with or without leche were available everywhere, a very good thing, in my opinion.
On my encounter, Ethiopian food does have the variety that characterises other faabuous cuisines. There's a stock of about ten dishes which appear on every menu with, at least in my experience, not a whole lot of regional variation. The palette of ingredients is pretty limited but this constraint produces extremely good food. If I hadn't just arrived in the land of a thousand spices, I'd be a bit sad to have left Ethiopian food behind.
Is there an Ethiopian restaurant in Sydney? And can one eat Shan food in Sydney? Just wondering...
The pancake-like rolls are injera, a kind of bread made from the grain tef, the only harvested seed which houses a naturally occuring yeast. Injera is thus like a combination between a crepe and a slice of sourdough bread. It's great stuff. My friend Myriam - the Eritrean posing as an Ethiopian expat - told me the marriageability of women is judged on the quality of their injera, how thin it is and the frequency of the little crumpetty bubbles on the surface. The tef is usually bought unground at markets like this one in Lalibella. Everyone goes to a local grindery to get their tef and coffee ground up. 
The sauces are just piled in the middle of the communal dish of injera. Standard are tibs, pieces of lamb fried up in butter with green pepper, garlic and onion. My favourite was the shiro, a stodgy paste made from ground up chickpeas and berberi and butter, with or without meat and lamb juices as befitted the fasting season. Not a particularly visually appealing dish, but very very good. The ground meat in this photo is cooked kitfo, mince which is rubbed through with spices, cooked and served with a local spinachy vegetable and curds. I vastly prefered the raw kitfo, spiced diced meat served with a little bowl of dipping spices, although this option, it must be said, was one which diced a little too intimately with gastrological (as opposed to gastronomical) catastrophe.
This vast plate of food served three people. All eating is performed cutlery free, using the right hand to tear off bits of injera and scoop up the sauces. Once you've ordered shiro, in particular, you've tapped into an unending supply. If the injera stocks are low, new rolls will appear on the plate. If the shiro is drying up, ladlefuls will be dolloped onto your plate. It's a system which worked for me. And as a bonus, Ethiopian coffee is fabulous, not just the beans, but the coffee itself. The Italians only occupied Ethiopia for a brutal five years but they left loads of coffee machines as part of their legacy. Shots of sharp dark espresso with or without leche were available everywhere, a very good thing, in my opinion.
On my encounter, Ethiopian food does have the variety that characterises other faabuous cuisines. There's a stock of about ten dishes which appear on every menu with, at least in my experience, not a whole lot of regional variation. The palette of ingredients is pretty limited but this constraint produces extremely good food. If I hadn't just arrived in the land of a thousand spices, I'd be a bit sad to have left Ethiopian food behind.
Is there an Ethiopian restaurant in Sydney? And can one eat Shan food in Sydney? Just wondering...
Kafka over the Red Sea
I arrived in Delhi this morning on a plane full of drunken Chinese businessmen on the way to Beijing. Their antics included that old chestnut, 'No! I won't wear my seatbelt, miss' and a whole series of steal-the-wine-from-the-trolley hi-jinks. It was all so exciting, I was just clean unable to sleep.
This aside, arriving in India was no problem at all. I'd filled in all the visa forms in Addis and had my passport stamped for a six month stay. 'No, you don't need an onward ticket,' said the lady at the embassy. 'You just need to show you have the means to leave the country. A credit card will do.' It has been my experience that the onward ticket requirement to enter many countries is treated with some flexibility. So I arrived at Bole Airport in Addis all set to check in and sort through shawls and faux-Lalibella crosses at the airport.
All of a sudden, bureaucratic insanity descended upon me, retribution for all of my oversights, inconsistencies and misrepresentations on forms. It transpired that whilst the Indian Embassy (conveniently closed at the late-night conflict hour) was happy for me to enter India without an onwards ticket, Ethiopian Airlines wasn't. No ticket, no fly, that was that. Indian immigration is tough and they would suffer as much as I did if I was refused entry. Business is business. A ticket operator had to be summonsed in order to sell me a ticket out of India. I was far from thrilled with this development and indeed gave a pretty good performance of over-tired, slightly hysterical, demanding and selfish foreigner. I placed my problem right at the centre of everyone's concerns, hands on hips, and stamped my feet so that everybody knew how unhappy I was to be about to fork out US$800 for a ticket out of India. I'm sorry to say a small number of tears, a bit of shouting, and a lot of flouncing were concerned.
When the travel agent man finally showed up, it took a while before we understood each other. The lack of English language speaking staff wasn't making anything any easier. All of a sudden, he gave me a ticket from Delhi to Bangkok and refused all payment. I was confused. 'It's not a real ticket,' he said. 'I know you don't want to buy a ticket and this reservation will be enough for them. Just show it to immigration and the forget about it.' It is a Pyrrhic victory, using meaningless bits of paper to satisfy projections of non-existent bureaucratic strictures.
And of course, when I arrived in Delhi, no one even so much as asked for a glimpse at my onward ticket.
The raise in blood pressure this little episode produced might also have had something to do with my sleepless journey. So now, a wee bit delirious, I'm waiting for the arrival of the troops from the airport and hoping very much that I can find an opportunity to eat another bowlful of the tomato and coriander soup I had for lunch. Indian food. Indian food! For weeks and weeks!
This aside, arriving in India was no problem at all. I'd filled in all the visa forms in Addis and had my passport stamped for a six month stay. 'No, you don't need an onward ticket,' said the lady at the embassy. 'You just need to show you have the means to leave the country. A credit card will do.' It has been my experience that the onward ticket requirement to enter many countries is treated with some flexibility. So I arrived at Bole Airport in Addis all set to check in and sort through shawls and faux-Lalibella crosses at the airport.
All of a sudden, bureaucratic insanity descended upon me, retribution for all of my oversights, inconsistencies and misrepresentations on forms. It transpired that whilst the Indian Embassy (conveniently closed at the late-night conflict hour) was happy for me to enter India without an onwards ticket, Ethiopian Airlines wasn't. No ticket, no fly, that was that. Indian immigration is tough and they would suffer as much as I did if I was refused entry. Business is business. A ticket operator had to be summonsed in order to sell me a ticket out of India. I was far from thrilled with this development and indeed gave a pretty good performance of over-tired, slightly hysterical, demanding and selfish foreigner. I placed my problem right at the centre of everyone's concerns, hands on hips, and stamped my feet so that everybody knew how unhappy I was to be about to fork out US$800 for a ticket out of India. I'm sorry to say a small number of tears, a bit of shouting, and a lot of flouncing were concerned.
When the travel agent man finally showed up, it took a while before we understood each other. The lack of English language speaking staff wasn't making anything any easier. All of a sudden, he gave me a ticket from Delhi to Bangkok and refused all payment. I was confused. 'It's not a real ticket,' he said. 'I know you don't want to buy a ticket and this reservation will be enough for them. Just show it to immigration and the forget about it.' It is a Pyrrhic victory, using meaningless bits of paper to satisfy projections of non-existent bureaucratic strictures.
And of course, when I arrived in Delhi, no one even so much as asked for a glimpse at my onward ticket.
The raise in blood pressure this little episode produced might also have had something to do with my sleepless journey. So now, a wee bit delirious, I'm waiting for the arrival of the troops from the airport and hoping very much that I can find an opportunity to eat another bowlful of the tomato and coriander soup I had for lunch. Indian food. Indian food! For weeks and weeks!
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Double exposure
I’m sorry, I’ve got wireless and I’ve got cable and Tyra Banks features on both. I’ve been off the pop-culture radar for such a long time, I am sincerely and genuinely astonished by the Tyra Banks Show. It’s utterly compelling. I really have no idea: Is this the best thing ever or the worst thing ever? I honestly do not know. Is she on medication? Does she need medication?
I mean, I’m as committed to responsible skincare as the next supermodel.
‘I’m not a victim. I grow from it and I learn.’ Yeah. Me too.
I waste plenty of time on youtube but honestly, Sarah Silverman and Stephen Colbert and Chris Lilley and old Haile Selaisse speeches and clips from Bogart films I’ve already seen, they don’t compare. Perhaps my travels are agitating a deep internal need for network television and fly-by tabloid magazines.
What would Adorno say? This will be my Vespers meditation.
I mean, I’m as committed to responsible skincare as the next supermodel.
‘I’m not a victim. I grow from it and I learn.’ Yeah. Me too.
I waste plenty of time on youtube but honestly, Sarah Silverman and Stephen Colbert and Chris Lilley and old Haile Selaisse speeches and clips from Bogart films I’ve already seen, they don’t compare. Perhaps my travels are agitating a deep internal need for network television and fly-by tabloid magazines.
What would Adorno say? This will be my Vespers meditation.
Snapshots
In the excitement of actually being able to post things online, a few highlights of Ethiopia.
Amharic, an alphabet that looks like dancing.
St George, the best beer in Ethiopia.
Ancient treasures - eight hundred year old books on goatskin, triptychs, crosses - kept in a filing cabinet in a dripping cave monastery in the mountains near Lalibella.
St George's. A church just dug out of the rocks at Lalibella.
And then? Every stretch of the Nile. Shiro. The Gonder archives. All of the Lalibella crosses. Honey wine. Lunatic French tourists. The Solomonic dynasty which ended with Haile Selaisse: the offspring of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. Honey wine. Outstanding coffee. The whole deal. Crazy airport delays. My awesome bartering skills. And then some.
Amharic, an alphabet that looks like dancing.
St George, the best beer in Ethiopia.
Ancient treasures - eight hundred year old books on goatskin, triptychs, crosses - kept in a filing cabinet in a dripping cave monastery in the mountains near Lalibella.
St George's. A church just dug out of the rocks at Lalibella.
And then? Every stretch of the Nile. Shiro. The Gonder archives. All of the Lalibella crosses. Honey wine. Lunatic French tourists. The Solomonic dynasty which ended with Haile Selaisse: the offspring of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. Honey wine. Outstanding coffee. The whole deal. Crazy airport delays. My awesome bartering skills. And then some.
Back on the wires in Addis
Thus far, it's been impossible for me to upload any posts in Ethiopia. So I've been deprived of the opportunity to rave about the food, the mountains, the churches, the history, the utter incomprehensibility, the unexpectedness of this country. I am, however, intact. A little afflicted by the dust, moderately overwhelmed by it all, but intact.
The Queen of Sheba hotel in Addis provides me with the opportunity not only to speedily get online and watch Z-grade television but to display fabulous Ethiopian hot water technology.
This was the closest I got to a hot shower in a couple of weeks. The chap at reception at the guesthouse in Bahir Dar insisted on turning the boiler on and off. There were wires, you see. Hearing crackles when you wash you hair is no fun.
Hang on, I'm forgetting something. It's Christmas Day! Merry Merry! Ethiopia is a deeply religious country, with Orthodox Christians and Muslims co-existing reasonably happily. It seems that it doesn't matter what faith you are, as long as you have a faith. I have been quizzed as to my religious beliefs as frequently as I have been interrogated on my marital status. Just as I've learnt to lie about my handsome husband, I've had to gild the lily as far as my godliness is concerned. The label atheist just doesn't cut the mustard and indeed provokes a wave of hostility. The few times I tried it, people fell deadly silent. I've been telling people I was baptised a Protestant (it's true) and averting my gaze. They think it's because I'm ashamed that I'm not a real Christian (ie Catholic or Orthodox) but obviously I'm afflicted with the bad conscience of one acting in bad faith. Ho hum. Or should I say, ho ho ho! I wish an abundance of festive merriment to the lot of you!
It's not actually Christmas Day in Addis - the Ethiopians skipped on the Gregorian calendar so Christmas doesn't fall until mid-January - so I'm basking in a tinsel free zone. In fact, the most festive occurrence of this so called festive day has been nattering with my family via the fastest internet connection I've yet encountered in Africa. Otherwise, I've self-administered a hearty dose of rotwein (really rot) and am looking forward to watching Dr Phil's Christmas special. Tomorrow I fly to meet a parade of familiars in Delhi! Hurrah! There is a strong possibility that I'll be catching another flight to verify the status of the rest of the antipodean familiars soon. Hurrah again!
Merry Christmas!
The Queen of Sheba hotel in Addis provides me with the opportunity not only to speedily get online and watch Z-grade television but to display fabulous Ethiopian hot water technology.
This was the closest I got to a hot shower in a couple of weeks. The chap at reception at the guesthouse in Bahir Dar insisted on turning the boiler on and off. There were wires, you see. Hearing crackles when you wash you hair is no fun.
Hang on, I'm forgetting something. It's Christmas Day! Merry Merry! Ethiopia is a deeply religious country, with Orthodox Christians and Muslims co-existing reasonably happily. It seems that it doesn't matter what faith you are, as long as you have a faith. I have been quizzed as to my religious beliefs as frequently as I have been interrogated on my marital status. Just as I've learnt to lie about my handsome husband, I've had to gild the lily as far as my godliness is concerned. The label atheist just doesn't cut the mustard and indeed provokes a wave of hostility. The few times I tried it, people fell deadly silent. I've been telling people I was baptised a Protestant (it's true) and averting my gaze. They think it's because I'm ashamed that I'm not a real Christian (ie Catholic or Orthodox) but obviously I'm afflicted with the bad conscience of one acting in bad faith. Ho hum. Or should I say, ho ho ho! I wish an abundance of festive merriment to the lot of you!
It's not actually Christmas Day in Addis - the Ethiopians skipped on the Gregorian calendar so Christmas doesn't fall until mid-January - so I'm basking in a tinsel free zone. In fact, the most festive occurrence of this so called festive day has been nattering with my family via the fastest internet connection I've yet encountered in Africa. Otherwise, I've self-administered a hearty dose of rotwein (really rot) and am looking forward to watching Dr Phil's Christmas special. Tomorrow I fly to meet a parade of familiars in Delhi! Hurrah! There is a strong possibility that I'll be catching another flight to verify the status of the rest of the antipodean familiars soon. Hurrah again!
Merry Christmas!
Friday, December 14, 2007
Abyssinia Samoa*
Wow, I wrote the below a fortnight ago when I arrived in Addis. I wasn't able to post it and it's been languishing in the draft box since. The locals I met in Addis turned out to be charlatans looking to find a Western wife for their friend. I almost saw a Teddy Afro show in Bahir Dar but the King cancelled. I didn't get sick of injera and only got halfway sick eating local food. I've been astonished by the churches and monasteries of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. I've sat on lots of buses. I've read loads and loads of books. I've travelled with some fascinating folks. The chronology of this blog has been entirely convoluted but I nonetheless make the gesture of posting a photo of the 'valley that leads to the Blue Nile,' one of the first spectacular Ethio-vistas I saw.
And so it begins.
*
No sooner had I arrived in Addis Ababa than I was sitting in a living room in Bole, being indoctrinated into the church of Teddy Afro, the king of contemporary Ethiopian music, and being quizzed on my itinerary. Even with the case of mistaken identity which led to this hospitality had been cleared up, I was a welcome guest. Fitsum, the guy who picked me up from the airport, has this friend called Anteneh. Anteneh knows everyone in Addis, including and Australian guy called Jeff. Jeff had heard that a 30 year old Australian woman was arriving in Addis to teach English and thought it could be me. Jeff, of course, is a Sydneysider and the hyperactive tendrils of this grapevine reminded me of sunny Sydney. So there I sat, bags in hand, drinking St George's beer and getting a crash course in Ethio pop culture. Friendly city.
(Later. This is the church of Tekle Haymanot, built in the sixties but on a site which has housed a monastery since the thirteenth century. Little about the service has changed since then.)
And so it begins.*
No sooner had I arrived in Addis Ababa than I was sitting in a living room in Bole, being indoctrinated into the church of Teddy Afro, the king of contemporary Ethiopian music, and being quizzed on my itinerary. Even with the case of mistaken identity which led to this hospitality had been cleared up, I was a welcome guest. Fitsum, the guy who picked me up from the airport, has this friend called Anteneh. Anteneh knows everyone in Addis, including and Australian guy called Jeff. Jeff had heard that a 30 year old Australian woman was arriving in Addis to teach English and thought it could be me. Jeff, of course, is a Sydneysider and the hyperactive tendrils of this grapevine reminded me of sunny Sydney. So there I sat, bags in hand, drinking St George's beer and getting a crash course in Ethio pop culture. Friendly city.
Somehow, I got twisted up and carried away by the grapevine. Before I knew it, I was hours out of Addis in a spectacular rocky valley at an Ethiopian Orthodox monastery dedicated to St Tekle Haymanot, one of the most sacred saints of the Ethiopian church. In the thirteenth century, St Tekle Haymanot prayed standing up in a cave for 22 years before he lost a leg. Angels interceded and provided him with six wings in order to stay upright and he stayed in prayer in the cave for a further 7 years. Sainthood seems to go cheaper these days. Not only did I see his tomb, I stood in the cave, desperately trying to hide my impiety and ignorance from the pilgrims thronging around. My guide had studied for the Ethiopian Orthodox priesthood for 12 years before turning to the path of Rastafarianism and my travel companion was a devout Orthodox woman who attended Catholic mass everyday. Somehow, trying to keep my balance walking up a hill slippery with holy water dripping from Tekle Haymanot's cave, I found myself becoming the mouthpiece and defender of both Buddhism and Protestantism, atheism being far too risque a doctrine for anyone to mention, let alone propound. Talk about interpollation. This was just one of the intensely odd moments which peppered my day.
(Later. This is the church of Tekle Haymanot, built in the sixties but on a site which has housed a monastery since the thirteenth century. Little about the service has changed since then.)I've been in Ethiopia for less than 48 hours and am completely sold on the food. Without question it is the best food I've eaten in Africa, leaving the Swahili masalas about which I was trying so hard to enthuse far behind. Ethiopian food is spicy and buttery and uses loads of garlic, ginger and chilli: of course I'm a fan. Because of the complicated fasting rules of the Orthodox church which, amongst many other things, forbid eating animal products before mass on certain days of the week and during the fasting season, there is loads of fantastic veggie food on offer too. The carb which staples the Ethio diet to the table is called injera, a very light, slightly sour, yeasty pancake made from ground tef, a supergrain which grows only in Ethiopia. Every dish gets served on top of a pile of injera which is then torn apart and used to scoop up the sauces. Everyone at the table eats from the same dish and extra injera magically arrives as soon as supplies run low. Even though it resembles grey dirty dishcloths at first glance, I am completely prepared to eat injera with every meal until I leave.
Apart from the fact that I won't be able to post any bright and shiny photos, all bodes tremendously well for the next few weeks here in Ethiopia. I'm traveling to Bahir Dar, the source of the Blue Nile, Gonder, Lalibella and maybe Axum. Hundreds of kilometres of dusty road stretch out before me, starting at 3.30am tomorrow morning. I've got Murakami and Trollope and Kundera in my pockets: things are looking good.
* Important Pike Family Heritage Pun. Possibly to be attributed to the Great Australian Classic, Let Stalk Strine by the ineffable Affbeck Lauder.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Sun shining
When I was sending a box of tricks home from Kenya, Sharath and Sorcha advised me to keep some warm clothes; 'it gets chilly in Addis,' they told me. Chilly in Addis? Addis being in the East Africa that's been slow-cooking me for the last month and a half? And of course, I just checked the temperature in Addis to find that the night cools to below zero. Who would have guessed? Socks and birkenstocks it is.
There's cause to be just a little perky about the weather as good ol' Kevin has finally signed Australia on to Kyoto. Hurrah!
There's cause to be just a little perky about the weather as good ol' Kevin has finally signed Australia on to Kyoto. Hurrah!
Gloves in the time of ebola
Child soldiers in the north, ebola in the west, corruption in the capital…It’s not all white water and safari thrills in the pearl of Africa.
Ebola is big news in Uganda right now. Headlines about new cases, health workers not getting paid danger money, newly infected regions and the rising number of deaths scream out of the newspapers laid out on the cracked footpaths. It’s not only the newspapers making a noise about ebola, signs about symptoms and prevention are posted in coffee shops and restaurants all over Kampala. As far as I know, there’s no ebola (or bubonic plague or cholera or hepatitis or yellow fever) in the capital right now. Still, official injunctions to avoid handshaking make me a little uneasy. Fortunately, President Musuveni has stepped in to clarify the potential social confusion this kind of responsible behaviour might produce: "If I don't shake your hand, it doesn't mean I don't like you." Roger that. There are also some insidious murmurings in the Ugandan press that the ebola outbreak was covered up by officials until the CHOGM circus, complete with Queen, had left town.
And then there’s the plague, the one that wiped out half of Europe seven hundred years ago. Women are most seriously affected by the plague because they sleep on the floor. The fleas which carry the plague can’t jump onto the beds where the blokes sleep. So there is also a public heath campaign to get women back sleeping in beds. Try as I might, I can’t quite come to terms with the kind of living conditions in which ebola and the plague thrive. There’s something quite strange and unreal about spending a relatively short amount of time in a country like Uganda and just passing by such poverty and violence. Driving through slums to get to a waterfall, glimpsing at newspapers sold by war amputees, carrying a bottle of fresh water and watching people collect water from dirty puddles and tanks, wondering what the hell to make of it all. A campaign to get women sleeping in beds and out of reach of the plague fleas sounds to me like an awful, hilarious episode from a Beckett novel.
Happily, I'm not yet sweating blood and there are absolutely no reports of either ebola or the plague in Addis Ababa, my destination on the morrow.
Ebola is big news in Uganda right now. Headlines about new cases, health workers not getting paid danger money, newly infected regions and the rising number of deaths scream out of the newspapers laid out on the cracked footpaths. It’s not only the newspapers making a noise about ebola, signs about symptoms and prevention are posted in coffee shops and restaurants all over Kampala. As far as I know, there’s no ebola (or bubonic plague or cholera or hepatitis or yellow fever) in the capital right now. Still, official injunctions to avoid handshaking make me a little uneasy. Fortunately, President Musuveni has stepped in to clarify the potential social confusion this kind of responsible behaviour might produce: "If I don't shake your hand, it doesn't mean I don't like you." Roger that. There are also some insidious murmurings in the Ugandan press that the ebola outbreak was covered up by officials until the CHOGM circus, complete with Queen, had left town.
And then there’s the plague, the one that wiped out half of Europe seven hundred years ago. Women are most seriously affected by the plague because they sleep on the floor. The fleas which carry the plague can’t jump onto the beds where the blokes sleep. So there is also a public heath campaign to get women back sleeping in beds. Try as I might, I can’t quite come to terms with the kind of living conditions in which ebola and the plague thrive. There’s something quite strange and unreal about spending a relatively short amount of time in a country like Uganda and just passing by such poverty and violence. Driving through slums to get to a waterfall, glimpsing at newspapers sold by war amputees, carrying a bottle of fresh water and watching people collect water from dirty puddles and tanks, wondering what the hell to make of it all. A campaign to get women sleeping in beds and out of reach of the plague fleas sounds to me like an awful, hilarious episode from a Beckett novel.
Happily, I'm not yet sweating blood and there are absolutely no reports of either ebola or the plague in Addis Ababa, my destination on the morrow.
In the Nile
This might look like a simple photograph of me smiling in a scenic place. 
Look closer and it will become apparent that this is actually a photograph of a highly shocked person who has just drained her adrenals dry. I was twitching, barely standing on jelly legs, and giggling like a maniac. If you are medically minded or strongly imaginative, you might be able to pick out the shapes of bumps emerging from the back of my head. I decided to break with habit and instead of sitting myself on a bus or at a table, sat myself in an inflatable raft and allowed myself to be conducted into a series of terrifying rapids. This photo was taken just after clambering to dry land from the rapids below. Yes, I went white water rafting at the source of the Nile. Feel free to skim through this as it will undoubtedly be a fecund source of anecdotage for the rest of my life and will probably get more exciting as time passes.
Liability laws are obviously a bit laxer in Uganda as people like me with no rafting experience can be taken into Grade 5 rapids after a half an hour of training. Seven novices in a raft and one guide in charge of morale, steering and safety. No one asked me whether I could swim! Somehow, the folks at Nile River Explorers have a perfect safety record, due to amazing guides and chaps who hover around the rafts at the rapids in kayaks all set to grab the hapless when the boats flipped.
I ate a chapatti and egg for breakfast watching phwoar video footage from previous trips, all the while becoming more apprehensive. I doffed a helmet that was worryingly covered in dints and a lifejacket buckled so tightly as to impede comfortable breathing and got into a boat for six hours of high drama. Miraculously, my boat didn’t flip on the first couple of rapids, we just leapt inexplicably over the great heaving waves and carried on down the river. So far, so exciting. Our luck changed, and the boat started to flip in huge, terrifying rapids, the sucking maw of the river swallowing the boat and all passengers again and again. I haven’t been so frightened and exhilarated in a long time. The Nile flushed through my every orifice at great speed; too much of it is still lodged in my system. I did an uncharacteristic amount of yelling. Indeed, I discovered in myself new depths of profanity each time I surfaced, astonished to find myself not only able to breathe but to curse the gods. I really didn’t know that I had it in me. Moses must have bobbed in his basket along a calmer section of the river. That, or divine intervention is very helpful.
I chose not to buy the DVD of my rafting experience so none of you will have to sit through half an hour of thrills and spills. Inevitably, others who went rafting with the same crew did and they uploaded the clips to youtube.
What I did was just like this… but with more carnage. Seriously, this was me.
Even after eating and sitting on dry land for an hour, you will note that the mania hasn’t really calmed. I found myself having to drink quite a lot of Nile Special in order to calm myself.
Anyway, I’m now totally extreme. I am aching all over after being hurled into the water so many times. I have bumps on my head and bruises all over my legs and a whole world of muscular sore. In spite of all this, I rate the day as rather marvellous. There is a dam being built at Bugajili Falls, one of the many rapids I stacked through, so the rapids closest to Lake Victoria will have disappeared in six months. Not so good for the rafters, but probably good for the Ugandans who will have electricity if everything goes to plan.
In other news, I spent an hour inside the largest thatched hut in the world (that housing the Kasubi royal tombs) and saw the first sliding door in Kampala, dating from 1938. The fun never stops, I tell you.
Look closer and it will become apparent that this is actually a photograph of a highly shocked person who has just drained her adrenals dry. I was twitching, barely standing on jelly legs, and giggling like a maniac. If you are medically minded or strongly imaginative, you might be able to pick out the shapes of bumps emerging from the back of my head. I decided to break with habit and instead of sitting myself on a bus or at a table, sat myself in an inflatable raft and allowed myself to be conducted into a series of terrifying rapids. This photo was taken just after clambering to dry land from the rapids below. Yes, I went white water rafting at the source of the Nile. Feel free to skim through this as it will undoubtedly be a fecund source of anecdotage for the rest of my life and will probably get more exciting as time passes.Liability laws are obviously a bit laxer in Uganda as people like me with no rafting experience can be taken into Grade 5 rapids after a half an hour of training. Seven novices in a raft and one guide in charge of morale, steering and safety. No one asked me whether I could swim! Somehow, the folks at Nile River Explorers have a perfect safety record, due to amazing guides and chaps who hover around the rafts at the rapids in kayaks all set to grab the hapless when the boats flipped.
I ate a chapatti and egg for breakfast watching phwoar video footage from previous trips, all the while becoming more apprehensive. I doffed a helmet that was worryingly covered in dints and a lifejacket buckled so tightly as to impede comfortable breathing and got into a boat for six hours of high drama. Miraculously, my boat didn’t flip on the first couple of rapids, we just leapt inexplicably over the great heaving waves and carried on down the river. So far, so exciting. Our luck changed, and the boat started to flip in huge, terrifying rapids, the sucking maw of the river swallowing the boat and all passengers again and again. I haven’t been so frightened and exhilarated in a long time. The Nile flushed through my every orifice at great speed; too much of it is still lodged in my system. I did an uncharacteristic amount of yelling. Indeed, I discovered in myself new depths of profanity each time I surfaced, astonished to find myself not only able to breathe but to curse the gods. I really didn’t know that I had it in me. Moses must have bobbed in his basket along a calmer section of the river. That, or divine intervention is very helpful.
I chose not to buy the DVD of my rafting experience so none of you will have to sit through half an hour of thrills and spills. Inevitably, others who went rafting with the same crew did and they uploaded the clips to youtube.
What I did was just like this… but with more carnage. Seriously, this was me.
Even after eating and sitting on dry land for an hour, you will note that the mania hasn’t really calmed. I found myself having to drink quite a lot of Nile Special in order to calm myself.
Anyway, I’m now totally extreme. I am aching all over after being hurled into the water so many times. I have bumps on my head and bruises all over my legs and a whole world of muscular sore. In spite of all this, I rate the day as rather marvellous. There is a dam being built at Bugajili Falls, one of the many rapids I stacked through, so the rapids closest to Lake Victoria will have disappeared in six months. Not so good for the rafters, but probably good for the Ugandans who will have electricity if everything goes to plan.In other news, I spent an hour inside the largest thatched hut in the world (that housing the Kasubi royal tombs) and saw the first sliding door in Kampala, dating from 1938. The fun never stops, I tell you.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Ugandan starches
I couldn’t honestly say that Uganda offers the first-time visitor a dazzling array of culinary pleasures. It does, however, offer a stomach settling variety of starches to accompany main meals. Indeed, the starches – for to talk of carbs would be misleading – the starches can swamp the main meals, as this bean curry + accompaniments illustrates.
In Masindi, on the way back from Murchison Falls National Park, I had lunch with, inter alia, a Swedish woman and her Tanzanian husband who had been living in Uganda for the last few months. I let them guide me through my two dollar lunch (passion-juice not pictured). To be honest, I had expected less of the bean curry in terms of taste and more in terms of volume. As it happened, the bean curry was the best part of the meal, a faaaabulous success: fresh beans cooked up in the same spicy tomato sauce as the goat curry, the fish curry and the beef curry. It looks like bad baked beans, one of the few things I won’t eat, and tastes, happily, much better. The orangey red stuff is chilli sauce, a lifesaver.
The starches, however, are the object of interest here. Obviously it’s rice sitting in the centre so I’ll start my identification with the gritty greens in the right-hand corner. My local contacts weren’t able to identify the greens, instead choosing to place them as a distant relative of the silverbeet. Distant, yes, but a green vegetable nonetheless and therefore good.
Moving clockwise from the greens we hit the posho first. Posho is stiff porridge-y kinda substance made from ground maize. In Tanzania and Kenya it’s called ugali and in all three countries, it’s a dietary staple. At best, it’s heavy and bland. At worst, it’s the stodge at the centre of every single meal. Posho isn’t offensive to the tastebuds, I suppose, but it’s not a dish for which I’m clamouring to find the recipe.
From posho to the yellow stuff in the corner, matoke, another staple that isn’t exactly inedible, but that you probably wouldn’t eat unless you really had to. Matoke is made from cooked, mashed plantains and is vastly improved by salt and chilli sauce. Lots and lots of beer helps too, I guess.
Jump over the rice and you hit grilled, boiled sweet potato, crumbling all over the plate. Not awful, but avoidable in an ideal world. Boiled cassava, on the other hand, is something that I find pretty awful. Anyone remember Perkin’s Paste? If Perkin’s Paste was a vegetable dish, that dish would be boiled cassava. Better to boil the cassava to buggery and make tapioca from the starch, I say.
It makes me feel like a timid mazungu, but of all the starches gathered hereabove, the most familiar wins the prize.
Rice?
Rice Really is Quite Nice!
Twice?
Rice is Very Very Nice!
In Masindi, on the way back from Murchison Falls National Park, I had lunch with, inter alia, a Swedish woman and her Tanzanian husband who had been living in Uganda for the last few months. I let them guide me through my two dollar lunch (passion-juice not pictured). To be honest, I had expected less of the bean curry in terms of taste and more in terms of volume. As it happened, the bean curry was the best part of the meal, a faaaabulous success: fresh beans cooked up in the same spicy tomato sauce as the goat curry, the fish curry and the beef curry. It looks like bad baked beans, one of the few things I won’t eat, and tastes, happily, much better. The orangey red stuff is chilli sauce, a lifesaver.
The starches, however, are the object of interest here. Obviously it’s rice sitting in the centre so I’ll start my identification with the gritty greens in the right-hand corner. My local contacts weren’t able to identify the greens, instead choosing to place them as a distant relative of the silverbeet. Distant, yes, but a green vegetable nonetheless and therefore good.Moving clockwise from the greens we hit the posho first. Posho is stiff porridge-y kinda substance made from ground maize. In Tanzania and Kenya it’s called ugali and in all three countries, it’s a dietary staple. At best, it’s heavy and bland. At worst, it’s the stodge at the centre of every single meal. Posho isn’t offensive to the tastebuds, I suppose, but it’s not a dish for which I’m clamouring to find the recipe.
From posho to the yellow stuff in the corner, matoke, another staple that isn’t exactly inedible, but that you probably wouldn’t eat unless you really had to. Matoke is made from cooked, mashed plantains and is vastly improved by salt and chilli sauce. Lots and lots of beer helps too, I guess.
Jump over the rice and you hit grilled, boiled sweet potato, crumbling all over the plate. Not awful, but avoidable in an ideal world. Boiled cassava, on the other hand, is something that I find pretty awful. Anyone remember Perkin’s Paste? If Perkin’s Paste was a vegetable dish, that dish would be boiled cassava. Better to boil the cassava to buggery and make tapioca from the starch, I say.
It makes me feel like a timid mazungu, but of all the starches gathered hereabove, the most familiar wins the prize.
Rice?
Rice Really is Quite Nice!
Twice?
Rice is Very Very Nice!
Ugandan factoids, most of which are omitted from the guidebooks with good reason.
- To begin: a list within a list. At the time of posting, there are five epidemics raging in Uganda: the ebola virus, bubonic plague, cholera, meningitis and hepatitis. And loads of HIV and malaria and all that. At the moment, I am only worried about malaria, having been bitten alive in a malarial zone… I wouldn’t be worried had I not met a British nurse who had caught malaria four (4) times in six months whilst on the same medication as me. Currently, I'm modeling my attitude on Gloria Gaynor's.
- Terence Trent D’Arby gets a lot of airtime on local radio. Woo.
- ‘Putting the U in Uganda’ is the slogan of Uganda Telecom, the biggest telco in the country. I approve wholeheartedly of this kind of sloganeering.
- Recently, the 1,020th species of Ugandan bird was spotted. Not by me, I might add.
- Layout artists have a rollicking sense of humour.
- Doctors who work with ebola patients get a special extra daily loading of USH30000, about AU$20.
- If you travel to Uganda, tou’ll head a whole lot about the Monday night jams at the National Theatre in Kampala. You’ll hear less about the Thursday night Ugandan comedy nights at the same venue. There is a reason for this.
- There are baboons in Uganda. The only reason I’m noting this is because I now have a photo of a baboon’s arse in my archives as a standard definition for unsightly. I’m not going to post it now but beware, those who seek to offend me, for I may retaliate and liken you to the red and bare nether regions of the baboon.
- This is actually a pan-African fact, but anyway… more people get killed by hippos in Africa than any other animal.
The people who get killed are those who get between either a hippo and the water or a mama hippo and her foal. An imperially minded chap told me that hippos walk at least five miles every night. I refuse to believe that creatures who rest their heads on the rumps of their friends are malign. - (This is for the Googlers:) Maestro and Cirrus cards work at Stanbic ATMs all over Uganda and Tanzania.
- It was in Kampala that I discovered that the Coen brothers had adapted a Cormac McCarthy novel for the screen. I’m reading The Crossing, a lupine fetishist's delight, at the moment and the knowledge that I won’t see No Country for Old Men for months does nothing to diminish my excitement about either the film or the book. Unfortunately, this information was gleaned after I had paid money to see a Farrelly Bros film in airconditioned comfort. Yep, I'm keepin' it real real this end.
Listing in the breeze
Birds I saw on Tuesday
Abyssinian Ground Hornbill
African Fish Eagle
Baglaflecht Weaver (1)
Goliath Crane
Grey-Crowned Crane
Grey-Headed Kingfisher (2)
Hadada Ibis
Hamerkop (3)
Helmeted Guinea Fowl
Malachite Kingfisher
Marabou Stork
Palm-Nut Vulture
Pied Kingfisher
Red-Cheeked Cordon Bleu (4)
Red-Throated Bee-Eater (5)
Tambourine Dove
Woodland Kingfisher (6)
Yellow-Billed Oxpecker
Noes
1. Weaver’s nests hang like safe pods from thorntrees so that giraffes and other hungry critters can’t get to them. Unfortunately, even though there are nests hanging from trees from Kampala to Masindi, my pictures are all a little blurred.
2. The courting habits of kingfishers are commendable. The male bird brings food to the female he is courting. Only when her appetite is satisfied does she relent and consider mating rituals.
3. The nest of the Hamerkop, according to our guide, has several compartments, including an entrance chamber.
4. Really, it’s called a Cordon Bleu.
5. Bee-eaters nest in cliffs just the once.
6. Not a woodpecker, an oxpecker. This is a bird which devotes its days to the pecking of oxen.
Abyssinian Ground Hornbill
African Fish Eagle
Baglaflecht Weaver (1)
Goliath Crane
Grey-Crowned Crane
Grey-Headed Kingfisher (2)
Hadada Ibis
Hamerkop (3)
Helmeted Guinea Fowl
Malachite Kingfisher
Marabou Stork
Palm-Nut Vulture
Pied Kingfisher
Red-Cheeked Cordon Bleu (4)
Red-Throated Bee-Eater (5)
Tambourine Dove
Woodland Kingfisher (6)
Yellow-Billed Oxpecker
Noes
1. Weaver’s nests hang like safe pods from thorntrees so that giraffes and other hungry critters can’t get to them. Unfortunately, even though there are nests hanging from trees from Kampala to Masindi, my pictures are all a little blurred.
2. The courting habits of kingfishers are commendable. The male bird brings food to the female he is courting. Only when her appetite is satisfied does she relent and consider mating rituals.
3. The nest of the Hamerkop, according to our guide, has several compartments, including an entrance chamber.
4. Really, it’s called a Cordon Bleu.
5. Bee-eaters nest in cliffs just the once.
6. Not a woodpecker, an oxpecker. This is a bird which devotes its days to the pecking of oxen.
Wartino massive
In my time, I have shared residential premises with creatures of all ilks. At Murchison Falls, I cohabited with warthogs. 
I didn’t see the hippos that Holland’s answer to Steve Irwin promised (just imagine Irwin in a Dutch accent… try the line ‘I hope you’ve got double supplies of prophylactics…and I’m talking malaria, folks, because you people are going into a HARDCORE zone’ in an ocker via Amsterdam accent and weep) but spent a couple of nights in a tent being nudged by warthogs. Warthogs are great. They have tusks and they eat on their knees. They have silly little legs and when they are running scared across the plains, their even sillier tails point straight up at the sun. What more do you need?
I didn’t see the hippos that Holland’s answer to Steve Irwin promised (just imagine Irwin in a Dutch accent… try the line ‘I hope you’ve got double supplies of prophylactics…and I’m talking malaria, folks, because you people are going into a HARDCORE zone’ in an ocker via Amsterdam accent and weep) but spent a couple of nights in a tent being nudged by warthogs. Warthogs are great. They have tusks and they eat on their knees. They have silly little legs and when they are running scared across the plains, their even sillier tails point straight up at the sun. What more do you need?
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Jane Goodall, Diane Fossey, and Me
It took 28 hours of bus travel to get from Arusha to Kampala. 28 hours which oscillated between hot and dusty and freezing and dark. As I was officially welcomed to the 'Pearl of Africa' by the charming immigration officer at the border, I couldn't help but noticing the headlines on the Daily Monitor: 'Ebola Strikes Again.' Great timing. Ebola is another comedy death that I don't want to die. So I won't be doing any baby-kissing in the villages.
Mountain gorillas are one of the great attractions of this part of Africa. You can get up close and personal with our primate nearest and dearest in Uganda and Rwanda, an experience which is reportedly deeply moving. According to my clearly dated guidebook, the cheapest place for a gorilla rush is the Democratic Republic of Congo. Of course, this was the option that I was most keen to pursue. Imagine, a whole lifetime of being able to say, 'Yes, when I was in the Congo...' and 'I think the DRC has changed a whole lot since my day. It was a bit dicey back then.' Alas, the rebels have become too rebellious even for the tourist operators and the DRC gorilla doors are shut to foreigners.
Hoping for a significant evolutionary encounter, I decided to suss out the gorilla options here in Uganda. Gorillas in the mist? More like Grillers of the Fist! It costs US$540 for a one-day permit to see the mountain gorillas, a permit which allows for one hour spent with hairy ones. So I've passed on the Greatest of the Great Apes. I've experienced enough sub-human hairy ape types in my day.
Next stop: Murchison Falls, north west of Kampala and home, possibly, to some chimps.
Mountain gorillas are one of the great attractions of this part of Africa. You can get up close and personal with our primate nearest and dearest in Uganda and Rwanda, an experience which is reportedly deeply moving. According to my clearly dated guidebook, the cheapest place for a gorilla rush is the Democratic Republic of Congo. Of course, this was the option that I was most keen to pursue. Imagine, a whole lifetime of being able to say, 'Yes, when I was in the Congo...' and 'I think the DRC has changed a whole lot since my day. It was a bit dicey back then.' Alas, the rebels have become too rebellious even for the tourist operators and the DRC gorilla doors are shut to foreigners.
Hoping for a significant evolutionary encounter, I decided to suss out the gorilla options here in Uganda. Gorillas in the mist? More like Grillers of the Fist! It costs US$540 for a one-day permit to see the mountain gorillas, a permit which allows for one hour spent with hairy ones. So I've passed on the Greatest of the Great Apes. I've experienced enough sub-human hairy ape types in my day.
Next stop: Murchison Falls, north west of Kampala and home, possibly, to some chimps.
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