Truthiness

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.

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...

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Polite Notice

Main Post Office, Kampala

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!

Ugandan factoids, most of which are omitted from the guidebooks with good reason.

1. 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.
   
2. Terence Trent D’Arby gets a lot of airtime on local radio. Woo.
   
3. ‘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.
4. Recently, the 1,020th species of Ugandan bird was spotted. Not by me, I might add.
   
5. Layout artists have a rollicking sense of humour.
   
6. Doctors who work with ebola patients get a special extra daily loading of USH30000, about AU$20.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. (This is for the Googlers:) Maestro and Cirrus cards work at Stanbic ATMs all over Uganda and Tanzania.
11. 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.

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?

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.

Denied

A very small number of people will be as disappointed as I was that the Blue Mango has closed its doors in Kampala. Once, it was a thriving, budget-ish lodge and bar, highly recommended by all manner of pundits, a place which attracted once-fashionable adjectives like lush and succulent and sprawling. Now that I gather the vocabulary and see it before me, it strikes me that these were all euphemisms and that it was probably a brothel. At any rate, it's shut and the website, bizarrely, has been taken over by a bunch of health scientists.

Poems, anyone?

Sorry, this whole post was an in-joke.

The heart of the matter

I’m in Arusha, the heart of Africa, equidistant from Cairo and Capetown, if not from the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. The Rwanda Genocide Commission is located here and if it miraculously takes me less than eight hours to book a plane ticket and a bus ticket and change some money, I understand that I am welcome to witness the proceedings unfold. It’s about ten degrees cooler than it was in Dar Es Salaam, Mount Meru looms in an unimposing fashion and most of the ATMs in town are out of cash.

I wasn’t 100% certain that I was onto a winner when I emailed the Everest Chinese Restaurant and Inn in Arusha to see if they had a room. Happily, the Everest is a gem, half-polished, tis true, but a gem nonetheless. I don’t believe I’ve stayed in an inn on this trip but I am obviously in favour of the concept of food and lodging, particularly of the cheap and charming variety. The spry proprietor dashes around in loud waistcoats and his daughters chat on the sly. And the restaurant, the restaurant is an honest-to-goodness Chinese restaurant! The closest I’ve come to Chinese food since leaving Australia is the raviolis grillés in Paris.

(Sidenote. Raviolis grillés are fried dumplings available at the millions of traiteurs chinois in Paris. They all taste the same, full of pork and ginger and shallots, they’re all served with the same iridescent red chilli sauce, they’re generally heavy, reheated and a bit gluggy but they are WONDERFUL, an unsung guilty junkfood pleasure of the City of Lights and an antidote to any amount of pastis, vin rouge or Cointreau.)

So yes, Chinese food. It has been too long. You might be reading this with easy access to sizzling chicken with ginger and chilli and so not be able to share the excitement that a just replenished scarcity induces.
This is not the best Chinese food I’ve eaten – no BBQ King (Sigh. Same décor though.), no Billy Kwong, no Marigold, no Fu Manchu, no Shanghai Dreams – but, even with the in my view highly unorthodox addition of cucumber to the hotplate, still pretty damn sizzling good. I dreamed of yum cha and handmade noodles and Peking duck and steamed oysters with ginger and shallots and black vinegar. I’m still debating the rights and wrongs of an all-dumpling dinner tonight. There’s great, cheap seafood on the coast and lots of lifesaving Indian restaurants around but otherwise, Tanzanian food hasn’t really knocked my socks off. As a result, I have begun to develop some quite specific cravings, including:

1. Very, very cold champagne, sauvignon blanc and/or cocktails and the right people to drink them with.
2. Bread and cheese. Same old, same old. Soft white baguette with Camembert, a ripe Tome or a randy, rindy goat (St Maur?) or a dark rye with Roquefort would be a nice start.
3. Non-threatening salad with non-radioactive dressing.
4. Olives that haven’t been chemically treated.
5. Sashimi. Lots of sashimi. Again, sashimi of the non-gastroenterologically threatening variety.
   

Obviously, this is an abridged list. I am not confident that any of these desires will be fulfilled in the short term. What’s a fulfilled desire but a force expended anyway? Tomorrow I’ll board a big air-conditioned coffin of a bus and quit Arusha for Kampala. I’m still not entirely sure how long the bus trip will last. Recent advice is hedged between seventeen and twenty five hours. Hello, swollen ankles and woozy brain. As I’m leaving Tanzania so soon, now is the time to append the following...

Lesser known facts about Tanzania!

1. Food is universally under-salted.
2. Table salt shakers are invariably blocked and require a fork-driven intervention in order to remedy #1.
3. Tanzania’s roads are better than Kenya’s.
4. Mexican soaps dubbed into English are really popular telly fare.
5. The African Queen was shot in Tanzania.
6. The trees are full of nests and the skies full of birds.

Lunar retreat

I caught a boat from Zanzibar to Dar Es Salaam, planning to fiddle with some flights there before starting the slow haul to Kampala. The boat arrived four hours later than expected and the travel agent had closed for the weekend. There was no way that I was going to stay indoors in dodgy Dar as the full moon rose so I decided to hot-foot it up the coast to Bagamoyo, the nineteenth century capital of Tanzania, a dhow building centre, an old Swahili town and certified sleepy beach precinct.

I had tried to find out about transport to Bagamoyo online but alas, my searches were fruitless. So, for the benefit of the next poor fool who keys the words ‘getting from Dar Es Salaam to Bagamoyo’ into the Google search box, here’s what you need to know. Dala dalas (which are little private vans, think family mover…) and mini-buses to Bagamoyo leave from Mwenge terminal. Dala dalas for Mwenge leave all the time from the Old Posta stand near the port; the trip costs 250 shillings (25 cents! Bargain!) and takes about half an hour. Mwenge is a dustbowl interchange point heaving with dala dalas and minibuses. Anyone can point you to the Bagamoyo departure point. Here, things get a little crazy. You can, like me, allow yourself to be rushed into the nearest dala dala by a charming gent who smilingly shouts ‘Bagamoyo? Bagamoyo!’ at you and whisks away your pack before you have time to demur, grateful only that you’ve got to approximately the right point in the hot throng of whirring vehicles without losing your foot under a wheel. Then you’d be stuck in the heat with nineteen other passengers in a van that seats ten for a bit over an hour. You’d start to think about the tens of thousands of shillings you’d pay to get out of a van that it only cost you 1500 shillings to board. Were I to make the trip again, I’d smile graciously at Mr Charisma-tout and sail over to the larger mini-buses with Bagamoyo emblazoned over the windscreen, possibly cop a 3000 shilling fare and a twenty minute wait, and enjoy a whole cracked vinyl seat to myself.

Bagamoyo and Dar are only seventy kilometres apart but the journey felt a whole lot longer. It transpired that there was no room for my pack in the back of the van so I was squashed in bearing the entire weight of my pack on my knees. When the back door of the dala dala swung open mid-trip and someone else’s bags tumbled out onto the highway, it seemed like half a blessing. For a while, maybe for ten minutes, I entertained myself trying to find the right sitting position such that I could sit up straight, lean into an embrace with my pack and somehow find a point of gravity to balance me. Then the van braked suddenly and I wound up on my knees on the floor. Somehow, I heaved myself back into the seat and the whole balancing game rapidly ran out of steam, mainly because my knees and ankles were beginning to ache. I remembered my mother telling me that a snapped Achilles tendon is one of the most painful injuries one can endure and became certain that the combination of strange angles and pack pressure was going to snap the back of my legs in two. This passed the time for a while.

Knowing that Bagamoyo was a Swahili town, I had taken the precaution of wearing long sleeves for the trip. This turned out to be a wise move. The van was full of robed Swahili men, none of whom looked particularly thrilled at my infidel presence. As I was squashed in, I became extremely conscious of the brazen, conspicuous bareness of my legs from knee to toe. As soon as I was plonked next to him, the man on my left started to pray, whether for himself or for me, I could not tell.

Happily, I made it, knees ahoy, ankles unsnapped, bag intact. I needed a cup of coffee to recuperate, and this is what I got.
A thermos, a jug of hot milk, a tin of instant coffee (containing half a teaspoon of coffee), some sugar, a cup, and a pile of spoons.

All said, Bagamoyo is delivering solidly on the sleepy, undercaffeinated promise. There’s almost no one here so I have made friends with two very charming, hopefully non-rabid dogs. I’ll watch the full moon rise over the Indian Ocean tonight and I won’t know about the outcome of the election until tomorrow. Has the Rodent scurried through again? Should I tear up my passport? Will November’s full moon signal a new celestial era for the Antipodean Federation? Will Australia ever again be lead by a man with the temerity to refer to his country as ‘the arse end of the universe’? Yikes!

The Honeymoon Crasher

November 2007 will stand as the month I crashed not one, but two honeymoons. As a follow-up to Sharath and Sorcha’s safari bonanza, I met two lovely fellows from London who had just tied the knot. We hung out at Kendwa Rocks and, until their departure the day before mine, my new friends shielded me from an influx of proposals involving cattle, life planning, and large families. As a result of this meeting, my life has moved one step closer to some kind of completion (or, alternatively, aesthetic entropy). Life experience #492: Part immersion of self in turquoise waters at sunset whilst wearing a loud bikini and large sunglasses and drinking the daggiest drink in the cocktail manual, a pina colada, complete with paper umbrella and redundant fruit slices.
Yeah yeah, I know, enough already with the sunsets. I was directed to Kendwa, a beach village on the north of Zanzibar, by a Zanzibar old-hand, an American lass whose judgment I uncharacteristically decided to trust on the briefest of encounters. I caught a dala dala along bumpy back roads from Stonetown through concrete block villages and wondered whether I’d been lead up the garden path. No, it was stupidly beautiful there, an impossible convergence of turquoise, aquamarine and out further, darker, deeper blues captured in the sea.

I lay on the beach, all white sands and palm-fronded umbrellas and my entire genetic being was confused. I am not configured for idyllic beaches but for fens and moors and crags: I have the pink and beige complexion to prove it. What with the sun and the photosensitivity enhancing medication, I’ve gained a whole set of interesting new freckles which may in the future form some meaningful constellations on my shoulders and hips. No doubt a few cells have started to wonder whether they should start to wriggle and twist in a non-conformist, melanoma type fashion. It was stupidly beautiful back there on Kendwa and I’m beginning to suspect that this kind of environment does in fact make you stupid. I certainly feel a whole lot stupider, like my brain has been poached. Sunsmart and pasty as I should be, I’m veering towards tan-dom, for starters.

Forgive all this blathering. I blame Richard Ford – I read The Lay of the Land on the beach. I should, all things being proper, loathe Ford’s WASPy male menopausal meanderings, in the same way that I should have loved Radclyffe Hall’s femo-sappho-Modernist extravanganza, The Well of Loneliness, which I suffered through last week. Oh gosh, modern life is so hard to understand and all of these changes in the social fabric, they’re tough too, and how, oh how, does one go about being a good citizen, a middle-aged man, a father and a husband, under these conditions? Oh me, oh my, blah blah blah. Three days are stretched into seven hundred pages, every incident a trigger to memory and digression, a more sophisticated version of the Sex and the City school of exposition: ‘and that got me to wondering/thinking/remembering…’ The Lay of the Land got under my skin in the same way that Independence Day did, with its expansive, waffly contemplations anchored by a litany of precise and incessant detail. I think it is the wry and bafflingly unironic narrative voice of the rambling, wondering Frank Bascombe, good man/everyman/sad man/just a man, that prevents the unabashed symbolism and allegorical contortions of the narrative from being as annoying as they really should be. It’s a smart, measured and weirdly affecting novel, one that I couldn’t ever quite bring myself to throw into the ocean. That’s praise, surely. Even though I can’t honestly hate Richard Ford, I do, however, hold him almost entirely responsible for the discursive nature of these last few posts. On the other hand, I have also recently read a couple of space opera sci-fi novels (ah, genre fiction, sweet narcotic) and you will note that there haven’t yet been any alien megaships setting down on the beaches.

Juice wars

I was flabbergasted by pomegranate juice in Istanbul. The squeeze didn’t stop there.

a) Seedy
There are many things I am missing about Sydney, well, Australia, at the moment. One of the less obvious is Spring Valley Orange and Passionfruit Juice. It’s worthy of capitalisation, this daily juice, this emergency repair fluid, and has wrenched me out of many a physiological and psychological pit. And then there are the liddle facts.

Anyway, fresh strained passionfruit juice surpasses the SV Orange and Pash by several degrees. It’s usually a combination of yellow and black passionfruit (one of which is sweeter), slightly sweetened and chilled. It’s embarrassingly cheap and divinely wonderful. I attempted to drink my body weight in passion juice (yes, sorry) on Lamu, being concerned that I might never sup the nectar again. Happily I find passion juice to be widely available all the way down the East African coast.
I drank this one at Buni Café in Zanzibar. My Peace Corps contact told me that in many parts of Tanzania, passion juice is the only available fresh juice. It is an excellent substitute for Spring Valley. Now I need to find a stand in for Darrell Lea liquorice.

b) Slimy
I like avocados almost as much as I like passionfruit. My fierce love for fresh avocado with any combination of lemon/lime/Tabasco/garlic/tomato/onion/toast/chilli/wasabi mayonnaise/soy is only undermined by my furious loathing for any kind of cooked or over-processed avocado. The avocado which regularly appears in the vegetable tempura bowl at Don Don on Oxford St is a blight on the good name of that fine institution. I have no hestitation about shifting to the imperative here: Avocados should be cut in half, chopped, or mashed. Avocados shouldn’t be put anywhere near heat and they shouldn’t be put in a juicer.

Avocado juice is advertised on most juice menus I’ve seen since arriving in Africa. I’ve not experienced an iota of curiosity about avocado juice. Avocados shouldn’t be put in a juicer and that’s that.

I’m staying at a guesthouse in Zanzibar which provides breakfast. Breakfast starts with a plate of fruit and a glass of fresh juice. Yesterday a glass of pale green juice was placed before me. Um, what is it, I asked somewhat timorously. Avocado juice with lime, madame. Everything OK? Yes, yes, yes.
On the grounds that any principle worth rattling on about warrants testing, I decided to swallow my doubts and taste the juice. My prudence was possibly addled by the earliness of the hour. Icy crystals of very sweet lime juice baffled my expectations as to the texture of avocado juice. This glassful was very sweet, a little bit slimy, quite creamy, and not particularly flavoursome. If I’d been told that it was soursop or custard apple juice, I might have been able to drink the whole glassful. Somehow though, the knowledge that it was avocado juice acted upon my swallowing reflexes and I barely got through half a glass. I see no reason to vary the dictum: Avocados (wonderful fruit that they are) should never be put in a juicer.

By way of conclusion, to vindicate the triumph of one juice over another, here’s a sunset more passionfruit than avocado.The rubbish on the beach is clearly a reminder that we live in a fallen world, a world in which avocados are put in juicers, a world in which neither fresh passion juice nor Spring Valley juices are universally available.