Goodbye and good luck - The Africa List

In fitting style, after waiting for a boat that sailed six hours late, I have left Africa. During the eight and a half months I was there, almost getting from one end to the other overland, I have been constantly surprised, astonished and amazed by the people and their way of life, and the landscape and the animals that populate it. What stands out are the people - my motto for Africa is great people, terrible government - the list of friendly people that I have met goes on for pages. The thing about Africa is that despite there being almost no reason for it you get infected with a sense of the joy of life and feel hopeful about the future. Perhaps when you have had your hopes dashed so many times you have to revel in the small things and when things are so bad life is a grind you have to have hope that it will improve. So I am a little sad to leave but I can console myself with some great stories and photos as well.

A little list of the highs and lows:

GENERAL
Best country: Rwanda, Rwanda, Rwanda
Best local insight: Rwanda, Godwin the journalist
Biggest achievement: Tanzania, surviving Kilimanjaro in the Volleys
Most awesome experience: Rwanda, spending an hour with mountain gorillas
Coolest cat: Felix, Zambia, the guide who took us to Angel's Chair above Victoria Falls
Worst touts: Tanzania, Zanzibar, you blokes can keep your bloody island
Strangest question: Kenya, Do you want warm or cold beer ?
Best alcohol innovation: Zambia, spirit sachets (AKA Headache in a bag), cheap and nasty, the way alcohol should be
Most colonial moment: Mozambique, Tofinho, sitting on the balcony drinking a GT whilst the boy cleaned the house
Best market: Zambia, Livingstone, it's not what you buy but who you buy it from
Best backpackers: Zambia, Livingstone, Jollyboys, nice space, nice view, nice pool, nice people
Best view: Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, looking down from above the clouds on the roof of Africa
Most impressive monument: Egypt, the Pyramids, they are big and they just sit there but sometimes that is enough
Worst room: nameless hotel , Ruhengeri, Rwanda - dank room with no window, a bed that fell apart, music all night and you had to ask for the key to go to the toilet - which was a smelly hole in the ground - and it was expensive !!1

TRAVEL
Most crowded vehicle: Mozambique, 31 people (and various animals) in a Toyota Hiace
Longest waiting period for shortest ride: Uganda, Masindi to the chimps, 6 hours waiting for 2 hour ride
Worst road: Kenya, north of Archers Rest to the border with Ethiopia, more corrugations than bandits
Worst driving experience: Malawi, on the sinuous Lilongwe-Nkhata Bay road at 110km/h
Most dangerous trip: Kenya, Marsabit to Moyale on the top of truck, through bandit country
Best free ride: Tanzania, Overland truck from Malawi to Arusha
Biggest wait: Kenya, Maralal, Four days to get a truck to Lake Turkana, never arrived
Strangest driving system: Egypt, make up the rules as they go along
Skankiest toilet: Megab, Ethiopia, it still makes me queasy thinking about it


WILDLIFE SECTION:
Best Free Experience: Zambia, Watching an elephant swim across the river
Best Too Close to the Wildlife Experience: Zambia, Leopard almost jumping in the back of open jeep
Best animal on destruction: Tanzania, Ngorogoro Crater, the elephant that tore apart the water tank
Most unforgettable moment: Tanzania, Watching cheetahs and a gazelle starting the dance of death
Best is this really happening moment: Tanzania, the Serengeti, despite all the hype and the people, three lions decided to lie down in front of our car
Most underrated animal: Uganda, the hippo, they are bit, fat and waddle, like a big wombat in water

CULINARY SECTION
Best bit of meat: Mozambique, Parrot Fish - who would have thought the beak would be so tasty
Best Coffee: Ethiopia, Yabelo - my first coffee ceremony
Best Indian Meal: Uganda, Masala Chat House, Kampala - northern and southern thalis
Best soup: Zanzibar, Spicy Broth
Best fast food invention: Tie between Uganda, The Rolex and South Africa, Bunny Chow
Most enjoyable staple: Egypt, koshari, cheap, filling and delicious
Most boring staple: Tie between Zambia, Malawi, Uganda, Kenya, Nsima or Ugali
Best Vegetarian: Ethiopia, no meat for a whole month just fantastic vego food, almost got religion back in my good book

Pictorial tour of Egypt - Part II (Luxor)

Karnak temple, Luxor. The area covered by these pillars, shaped like papyrus reeds is big enough to fit in St Peter's Basilica twice (and up to 150 buses of sunburned tourists from the coast at a time) This is just one of several gates - stretching inland from the Nile. When everybody left around midday and it was silent it was awe inspiring

Just a simple boy from Dandy

How can I resist ?
Even Dandy gets gentrified, then exported.
Is nothing sacred ?
Notice the moccos in the front window !!

Half way around the world to learn what my brother had already taught me

Perhaps the only food that isn't fried in Egypt is koshari, most aptly described as creative leftovers. I was introduced to koshari four years ago when Dan used to cook it up for us to feast on after yet another near loss (in the lowest grade) by the Brothers Renkin basketball team, without realising that it would one day sustain me through six weeks in Egypt.

In Egypt koshari is served in huge bowls in which pasta, noodles, rice, lentils and chickpeas are combined and then covered in a thin, savoury tomato sauce, topped with fried shallots. You then season this with a garlic vinegar and hot chilli oil to you preference. The servings are gigantic, one large plate is enough food for the entire day - even for someone with a bottomless pit stomach like myself. And the cost for this filling gourmet delight - a measly one dollar - and I had a few Egyptians tells me about how the prices have jumped a lot in the recent months. Every little town has a koshari place, and they are easily identifiable by huge silver pots in the windows. Egyptians really do treat this left-over special as gourmet - argument rages over which is the best koshari place in Cairo. I don't know about its gourmet status but I ate it almost every day I was in Egypt and I can testify to its ability to keep a stomach full for the whole day and give you enough energy to ride around on a bicycle for 10hours in forty degree heat.

So for those of you who lament not being able to experience the joys of loitering across the globe and sniffing out meat free comestibles along rubbish strewn streets in restaurants of questionable hygiene,
give Dan a call - he is probably whipping up a batch of koshari as you read this - I heard it is Aegean's favourite.

A day at the beach in Egpyt

After spending so long in the hot, hot desert in the south of Egypt I was dying for a swim, and so ended up going to the beach near Alexandria. At first we went to a private beach, which front a private park about 10 kilometres to the East of town. After paying to get in to the park you then have to pay again to get in to a beach (which were all more crowded than the nearby public beaches we had gone past in the bus), but all the best - and most empty beaches - are private private - you can't even pay to get in. (We asked one nice security guard who wandered off and asked the owner who was sitting fifty metres away. The owner took one look and shook his head !!!) So I wandered out on to the point where some guys were fishing, after the security guard caught us wandering on to a private beach after jumping the wall, and when the security guard wasn't looking I slipped in to my swimmers, ran to the edge of the rocks and jumped in. Of course, all hell broke loose - as soon as the security guard saw me in the water he started blowing his whistle, ran over and screamed (mainly with his hands) for me to return. The subsequent conversation, captured in the photo, centred around how he would be taken off in handcuffs if his boss caught him with me in the water.



Not to be deterred we walked out of the park and along to the nearest public beach, just past the Hilton beach, which cost a measly $20 to get in to. The municipal beach instead cost a solitary dollar - for which we got access to the beach and an umbrella - we scrimped on the chairs and table - meaning we only got the second row, behind the umbrella line. As the photo shows, paying to get in to a beach doesn't put anyone off, we had the pleasure of sharing the beach with half of Cairo. Everyone was packed in a single row on the shoreline under their umbrellas as far as the eye could see. Coming from a city of twenty million, all packed on top of each other in dense forest of concrete towers they call home, I guess what I experienced as a can of sardines was in fact for most locals wide open expanses. When I swam out to the depths and turned back to look at the coast line for as far as I could see the entire sweep of the bay - at least 10 kilometres back to Alexandria - was filled with the same line of umbrellas and swarms of people.



The beach itself was quite nice, however it was littered with rubbish, mainly plastic bags and food containers. Likewise the water was filled with rubbish from about the first five metres from the shore, and then the deeper you swam the more sporadic the appearance of rubbish became. Most Egyptians seem to have selective blindness when it comes to rubbish. They appear content to sit in it, walk through it and swim in it as if it weren't there.

A day at the beach for Egyptians has little do with either the beach or the water and more to do with bringing as much as you can to the beach and consuming likewise. Sitting on the beach not more then a minute passed without somebody coming past to sell something - beach clothes, inflatable swimming aids, photos of you and your loved ones, nuts, drinks, fresh fish, shampoo, newspapers, food, flip-flops, ordinary clothes, chocolate bars, board games and on and on and on. Surprisingly I witnessed quite a few sales. There was plenty of eating going on, a fair few people smoking sheesha - the hubbly bubbly water pipe, a few people strolling up and down the beach, but only the kids got in the water. As soon as we got in the water we were surrounded by people, somehow the water seemed to break the ice, and we faced a machine gun round of the same questions over and over - what is your name ? where are you from ? what is your name? Fortunately most people couldn't swim that well so heading for the depths provided for a bit of solitude.
Most people were content to sit on the beach, and with most women who ventured in to the water completely covered, or at least in jeans and a long sleeved shirt, you can see why. Wouldn't be much fun if this was your swimming costume !!!

Foot fetish

Despite the gigantic size of some of the temples and statutes in Egypt everything was carved out with the finest detail and has stood the test of time. There is no better example of this than feet. Check out the work on these:

Pictorial tour of Egypt - Part I (Cairo)

The sun sets on Cairo, obscured by the ever resent smog, to the accompaniment of about seven thousand mosques, all with loud speakers, calling the faithful to prayer














Cairo's current architectural style is described as concretism - started in the 1950's and not looking like it is going to stop anytime soon.










Only Wonder of the Ancient World still standing, a bloody lot of large stones cut precisely, put together even more precisely and after three thousand years still impressive. Sadly can't climb 'em like in the good old days.



Left: Even before they were finished there were tourists and the next day there was guys with camels insisting you take a ride.


Right: It is smaller than you think (that's what they say about the Mona Lisa as well) but it is all about location, location, location.

One place or another ?

Everywhere I look around in Cairo I see Mexico, there are so many striking similarities it is a little unnerving. The people look almost identical, the same olive to dark skin tone, short and squat, many well on their way to obesity.Lots of boys are in their muscle tops, and the girls seem to be having a competition to see who can get away with the tightest pants almost revelling in the muffin tops they have going.
Like Mexico almost all of the food is fried, and really a falafel is a rolled up taco. And naturally every meal has to be washed down with a soft drink to make sure that Type 2 diabetes really gets going !!! They even cook their meat the same way here - the large, round and shallow frying tops with an indentation in the middle to make sure no fat is lost - meat and fat bubbling away.

The skyline of down town Cairo, actually all of Cairo, is filled with a forest of bland concrete towers, and it looks like nothing has been built or maintained since 1968, despite the historic age of the city - everything is made of cement. (Except of course in the new, ritzy neighbourhoods where they use glass) From ground level you can see determine the age of the buildings, despite the thick covering of black soot, by how much the cement has crumbled.

Like Mexico, the city is over run by chaotic traffic, and it appears at first glance there are no road rules at all - other than the pedestrian as the smallest object must give way to everything, but somehow the traffic manages to sort itself out. The age of most cars and the thermal inversion means that everything, including your feet, ends up being covered in black soot and the air is filled with smog 24 hours a day - it makes for impressive sunsets but terrible respiratory health.

Both societies have the veneer of being deeply religious - churches and mosques everywhere, but people are more than willing to break all the rules, (have a mistress or two, have a few beers at a bar, run a drug cartel, pinch foreign women on the bum, blow up infidels) and still go to the church or mosque once a week in a public show of faith.
Both also have a certain affection for the kitsch, fluorescent colours, 1960's style polyester suits, moustaches, way to much make up, shiny black SUVs in urban areas - the list goes on and on

Signs of Egypt

Egyptians love writing signs in English, from street names to restaurants to driving directions, everything gets a go in English, sometimes with very entertaining results.
Can't really argue with The Safety First !!

President Cool

Can you get any cooler than this ?
President Mubarak, some very big shades, and some building or other with its pet in the background.
Perhaps when he retires he could start up a Presidential Makeover show.

Alexandria photo highlights

I arrived back in Africa from Yemen in Alexandria, an incredibly historic city, perched on the edge of Africa in a beautiful setting looking out over the Mediterranean. A couple of years ago they rebuilt the famous library - which once held a copy of all books known to be in print. Now the building is more impressive than the collection !!!

Welcome to Egypt

After a five hour wait in the rather otherworldly airport in United Arab Emirate of Sharjah, I finally got on the plane bound for Alexandria in Egypt. The three hour flight was relatively uneventful, which in this region basically means no bombs went off, but the excitement started before we touched terra firma.
As we descended in to Alexandria, the "Fasten Seatbelts" light having been switched on ten minutes earlier, the plane did a few tight circles around the city and out over the Mediterranean sea, and about halfway through the second loop, almost close enough to the ground to reach out the window and touch the tops of the trees one passenger decided that he need to go to the toilet, so he stood up and started walking down the aisle. He almost made it to the toilet before the hostesses, who were strapped in to their seats noticed that he was wandering about and immediately started yelling at him, in person and over the loud hailer, to immediately return to his seat - you didn't have to speak Arabic to understand what they were saying.
Not long after we touched down, and about five seconds after we rolling on the plane's wheels rather then flying, still moving at quite a speed, three or four passengers stood up and started getting their luggage out of the overhead lockers, as if we were sitting still on the tarmac waiting to taxi on to the runway for take-off, when in fact we were hurtling along at high speed straining to slow down in time to not run off the end of the runway. The hostess again yelled them down, and eventually after a bit of back and forth everyone sat down. However this champing at the bit to get the jump over everyone else and be the first off the plane, caused a repeat of these events twice more before we actually came to a stop - by which time the hostess had pretty much given up their efforts, people were wandering about and even the Egyptian guy sitting next to me was shaking his head in dismay at the rather risky behaviour of our fellow passengers.
The complete stupidity of standing up on a fast moving plane was only underscored by the events that followed next - not only did all of the passengers have to wait for the transfer buses to fill up before anybody made it any where near the terminal, once inside it took at least an hour to make it through immigration. The arrivals hall was a linoleum floored, fluorescent lit room not much bigger than a class room, into which three aeroplanes worth of people crammed into, in what suspiciously looked like queues but functioned more like an NGO donating food to the starving operation. Whilst the majority of people accepted their status as equals and waited in lines, quite a number of people simply wandered past the queues along the side, thinking no doubt they were more important than anyone else, and then tried to insinuate their way in front by either catching the eye of some one they knew amongst the myriad of uniformed people who had something to do with immigration, surreptitiously drifting in to the front of the queue, or simply waving their passport around and asserting their importance. As I watched people for twenty minutes or show I saw the complete lack of any sense of order in the waiting, people would wander out of the queue, end up in arguments when they tried to sneak in closer to the front, be sent in to exile at the side for a while then rejoin at the back of the line. Despite the raised voices, lack of clean air, the early hours and lack of sleep, everyone seemed to be in relatively polite and good humoured. I got the feeling that this sort of queuing, chaos and inefficiency was common rather than exceptional.
Meanwhile the three narrow wooden booths which actually housed the immigration officials were completely surrounded in what can only be described as a shamozel. For some reason the process required that you hand your passport to the guy through the front window, then walk past the booth and wait around until your name was called out whereupon you fought through the waiting throng, collected your passport, had it checked by the guard on the door, and then got to collect your luggage. All this occurred in a classroom sized room, now filled with cigarette smoke and most men had lit up a fag and felt free to blow smoke in anyone's face.
I had managed to avoid the queue because as I walked in the door I was accosted by the waiting health officials who asked me whether I had any flu like symptoms, then took down my name and hotel details just in case. I had then waited for the Bank de Eigypt counter to open to purchase my visa for twenty minutes or so, but to no avail. I then had to push my way through the queue, just to get around the back of immigration officials, surrender my passport to the door man, walk across the luggage hall to the bank/exchange counter on the other side, purchase my visa sticker (which uniquely in my experience they let me stick in to my passport myself) return through the door, collecting my passport on the way, push my way through the throng to the back to start waiting again.
Somehow I managed to finally make it to the front of queue before everybody made it through, although there was probably only a quarter of the people left from the peak surge. Reassuringly I noticed that there were still quite a few people from my flight waiting. When I made it to the window the guy behind me actually waved me ahead of him, and I handed over my passport without a hassle and went to wait with the others.
And as a reminder that even waiting in a stuffy queue for an hour and a half at 2.30 in the morning can have a happy ending, I had the pleasure of meeting, Michele, a great Italian bloke who was at the beginning of his adventure, riding his bicycle across the middle east. Misery certainly does breed company, and the arrivals hall was a great introduction to the pleasures of Egypt.

Power up

Okay so now everyone in Africa has mobile phones but unfortunately universal supply of electricity is still a pipe (or should that be cable) dream.

So what do enterprising shop owners do - offer to charge peoples' phones. And if you are going to do one, why not do 15. One can just imagine Prince Phillip walking past commenting on the "darky wiring job" or Poppa Smurf having a heart attack at the risk this poses to world peace.

This photo comes from a small town on the Uganda Rwanda border.

Breaking all the rules - inadvertently

In my brief time in Eritrea it seems I have inadvertently managed to set a record in the number of rules I have broken in a short space of time. All of the following are in some way prohibited by the mass of laws, rules and regulations which seems to ensnare most people in Eritrea which ever way they turn -

1. I crossed the border in to Eritrea from Sudan, supposedly the border is closed but there were plenty of locals passing through.
2. I was allowed in to Eritrea despite having a Ethiopian visa and entry and exit stamps in my passport. (The two countries were at war for thirty years, and then some more)
   
3. I never received a currency declaration form through which the government attempts to strictly regulate the exchange of foreign currency to its fixed rate of exchange.
4. I stayed the night in the border town of Tesseney, where foreigners are supposedly not allowed to go and are never given travel permits
5. I travelled in Eritrea without a travel permit - I made it from Tesseney to Barentu (another town that is out of bounds for foreigners) before the military police realised I didn't have a permit and took me off the bus. I was then escorted in to town to the Security Police and issued a piece of paper which authorised my travel to Asmara.

Massawa is sleeping

I finally had enough of waiting in Asmara and decided to head down to the coast at Massawa.

On the bus on the way down we stop halfway and some Cubanas join us on the bus - standing for the second half of the journey. I overhear them speaking in Spanish and so I start up a conversation. They are here for their compulsory service - you have to go and work overseas before you can practice as a doctor in Cuba. They are not the thinnest woman in the world and are suffering from the heat, one of them says to me "I leave in September and I will be happy if I never think of Africa again". (I suddenly think of a global pecking order - Cuba is poor but Eritrea is even lower on the list) Somehow despite their measly salaries and the complete lack of food they have somehow managed to maintain their voluptuous figures which fill out the tight trackies and jeans they have on in true Latina style.

I arrive in the mainland part of Massawa and then take a mini-van across the causeways, past the tank monument, to Massawa proper. It is hard to believe that during the 1930's the Italians turned the port in to the busiest in East Africa, building on a rich and mixed architectural heritage from the various peoples who have lived and traded here, including Egyptian, Turkish, Arabs and Portuguese. Sadly during Eritrea's fight for independence the Ethiopians bombed Massawa to bits (as revenge for the rebels seizing control of the town from the Ethiopians) and this is what you see today. Many buildings lie in ruins - huge holes in their roofs, bulging walls sometimes more horizontal then vertical and piles of concrete rubble strewn all about. During the short period of peace after independence some big shiny hotels were built on the shore but they are now all closed as the restarting of hostilities has almost killed all tourism in Eritrea.

I wandered about in the ruins and managed to find a hotel that had a room - the building was a huge three storey 1930's construction, which at its peak must have had thirty or forty rooms - it now had three. All the rest were boarded up, the roof have caved in across a couple, a stairway had fallen down, and everything is covered in a think layer of dust. The owner has managed to salvage a few rooms with the creative use of plywood, but even these are barely habitable. The other three hotels I have seen are all exactly the same, once grand but now falling down, a few others are completely closed.

I finally manage to get in the water and go for a swim. The water is incredibly refreshing, as it washes away the sweat that 40 degree plus temperatures have generated. There is no beach, and their is no one swimming. The water is clear but stays shallow for as far as I can swim out. It starts to get late and the hills in the background start glowing a soft red, hence the Red Sea.

On my way back from the swim I am walking along the street and a car slows and the window slowly slides down and I fill a rush of cold, air-conditioned air.
The driver asks me if I want a ride and I explain I am just walking around. He is surprised that I am a tourist in Eritrea, and clearly wants to talk. I tell him,
"It is very quiet here, Massawa is sleeping"
"It is because of the war", he replies
"The war is finished", I say
"No, no. War with fighting is good, it finishes. War with words is bad, it never finishes", he corrects me.
I ask him where can I find something to eat and he tells me where the best (only ?) fish in town is served before biding me farewell and driving off.

When I return to my hotel I find that it is full with guests, about 10 or 15 high school students from Dekemhare have showed up for the long weekend. They are finishing school in the next week and preparing themselves for what most call hell by drinking as much as they can over the weekend. All students who want to study after high school in Eritrea are sent away to a huge camp in the desert where they all live together for a year being brainwashed. It is hot, conditions are harsh and by all reports it is very hellish. Those who don't want to or can't study are sent to an even worse place for their education. The look in the eyes of these young people, a mixture of fear, dread, frustration and dire need to squeeze some small enjoyment out of life was very disturbing. They stay up all night drinking, listening to loud music and dancing - I can't begrudge their last chance at a little enjoyment. They are still going at six am when I get up to go for a swim. Again, I swim alone.

I spend two more days in Massawa and don't see another tourist. A few other students are in town but for a long weekend it is very very quiet. I wonder what it is like during the week. My dream of taking a boat across to Yemen is completely dashed, I can't imagine the last time a boat sailed out of this harbour.

I head back to the mainland to the bus station which is easy to find because next to it sits a huge Andronov cargo plane. I imagine that the Ethiopians left town so quickly that they didn't have a chance to get this behemoth off the ground. It has been turned it to a restaurant, but in a country with very little food there was no sign of even a menu let alone a meal. I get on the bus to leave Massawa feeling like I am leaving the twilight zone.

Sudan - first impressions

In the first six hours in Sudan I have already had four or five experiences which have already started defining the place for me

Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop

Sudan seems to have a schizophrenic attitude to tourists. In some Sudanese embassies it is almost impossible to get a visa, whereas in Addis Abbaba, once I had coughed up the US$100, I had mine the next day. Then when you enter the country you are subjected to varying degrees of interrogation at a collection of different inspection posts - immigration, customs, police, security police and some guy in an office who really insisted I sign a piece of paper the contents of which I had no idea. However I am an old hand at border crossings, so despite the hot sun bearing down like it wanted to tear holes through me, and the hot wind that sucked the moisture from me whilst filling the air with a sandy mist, I summoned all the patience I had left and slowly trudged from one place to the next. After receiving the appropriate permission to travel, which required me to donate another photo of myself to the Sudanese government, the minibus filled up, drove around town a couple of times, visited immigration and customs with a passenger list and then the security police again (they did a final bag search) , we motored off out of town.
About two minutes down the road, at the end of town was the first checkpoint - customs and immigration and security police all had a look inside, and requested my papers. I then had to get out, get my bag down from the roof and watch them go through it again - it wasn't just me they were doing this for all the passengers. I watched the guy who pulled up next to us in a ute, be approached by four different sets of officials in four different coloured uniforms.


We then drove another one minute and stopped at the army checkpoint - three small thatched huts, a concrete building in the middle, a radio antenna, and five or six very bored looking soldiers languorously draped over anything they could find in the shade. Behind the buildings was a four wheel drive ute with a machine gun mounted on the back. (Yep, just like you see on the news about Darfur !!)

After we passed through this checkpoint we drove another fifteen minutes before we reached the next one - out comes the passport, the same questions, the rudimentary look through what everyone's luggage and then we are on our way - until the next checkpoint. After another two or three of these stops couldn't help but think about how this is the African special - that is the idea that if enough people do a job enough times in a half arsed way eventually the combined efforts will lead to .... umm, well will lead to something. Perhaps it is law enforcement by tedium - eventually you give up and stop travelling.

Despite the extreme heat, even when I open the window when we are moving at a good speed the air being blown in is hotter than inside the van, I manage to fall asleep. I am woken by stopping at another checkpoint, and I wonder how many I have missed - the van driver now has my passport in a vain attempt to speed the process along. However this time I have to answer the where are you going ? questions myself, and then get to watch as the luggage all gets checked again. Three hundred metres down the road we get stopped again, and everyone's papers are checked.

This went on for the four hours it took to cover the one hundred and fifty kilometres or so - the road was in great condition, the driver drove like a madman and pushed the van to what felt like 150 km/h but it still took over four hours - looking at the map made me worry that I may never make it the other side of Sudan, I don't have that many years to live.

Can I help you ?

The bus from the border drives through a maze of back streets, then comes on to a main street and drops me at what looks like a market. I am flying blind, two hours in a new country, melting from the wilting dry heat, as I don't have a map, any idea of a place to stay or where I can catch a bus to head north to Eritrea, and I understand about three words of Arabic. An older guy, dressed in a white jalabaa - the long sleeved, cover all night gown that is so favoured by Muslims with a jauntily arranged white turban covering his head, standing in front of a shop behind the make shift bus stop, notices my look of complete dismay as I stand there watching the bus drive off without much idea of what I am going to do next. He calls out "Where are you going ?" and I am so surprised by his English I wander over to him. I explain I want to find a place to stay, and we end up having a conversation about how his cousin lives in Sydney.
As darkness begins to settle, and the wind whips up the sand and dust to make a technicolour sunset which obscures the otherwise very plane town, my new friend tells me to
"Take this taxi, pay 40 cents and I will tell him where to drop you." He asks me if I want a hotel or a lokanda (big dormitories for local men, where 15 or 20 beds are spread out in an open area, costing less than a dollar for the night) I choose the cheaper option, at which point others from the crowd that has now formed advise me that I want hotel. (It always strikes me how I must be seen by locals - I was out drinking late last night, I haven't had a shower in a few days, most of my clothes appear to be allergic to soap, I haven't shaved for a month, my hair does really look like rats' tails, and I arrive in some broken arse town in the middle of nowhere in a crappy old minibus, and locals still think I want to stay at the Sheraton.) A discussion ensues as I try to make it clear what I want, and when the taxi finally fills, the old man approaches me as we are about to take off and says, " We Sudanese, our problem is we talk too much"

Where are all the women ?

As I wander around town at twilight, I ask myself where have all the women gone - there are none in the shops, restaurants and out door spaces like Ethiopia. Every once in a while I see a few here and there, and all of those are covered up, dressed completely in black with only their eyes showing. I notice the change immediately as the country seems so much more dour, as though the life and colour has been stripped out of the place.

I keep wandering and everyone is surprised, and happy to see a stranger, calling out hello, and when I stop to speak to people I am inundated with invitations - invited to have tea, then invited to have juice, then dinner, and then invited to have a juice. And of course as I am a guest, I am not allowed to pay for anything - even though some of the people earn less than a couple of dollars a day, they insist, and go on insisting when I try to argue, that they must pay.

I can almost feel the moths starting to breed in my wallet

Don't mention the war

Having dinner outside at a table, and joined by two or three younger guys, all trying to speak to me in varying levels of English. As my plate was still hall full and I was completely full, I turned their invitation to join them around, so they poured what was left of mine in to the communal plate and we ate out of that. Joined by another guy who asked e to speak in English as he wanted to listen. He told me he wanted to leave Sudan because there was no future. When we had finished the guy who had arrived last walked away and then came back and said, Come with me, my friend here wants to talk to you, so we walked inside the restaurant and sat down. The first thing they said to me was, "you know the ICC ?" I thought I was going to be on tricky grounds, so I played dumb, "Ah no, umm, yes, umm"
"We like Ocampo, we think he is right"
Suddenly I felt the mood changing, and they were off
"There is no democracy in Sudan. The President is a criminal, we like O'Campo (the Chief Prosecutor at the ICC) The government in Sudan is not a good government, it keeps the people down. They are criminals, and we want to change them but we can't"
"But you can talk about it, like this" I asked, surprised that they were letting rip in public
"Yes, because everybody in Sudan agrees. Nobody likes him - it is just that people are afraid, and we don't know what to do to change. What should we do to change ?" I was asked earnestly
"Well, I just arrived and..." I stumbled
"Before you came to Sudan you have an idea of what the place is like, what do you think of Sudan ?"
"Well I only arrived today from Ethiopia, I have only been in the country for five hours , and all I saw was police stop, police stop, police stop, police stop" I answered
"Yes, for us it is the same. When we move around in our country we are treated like foreigners, the government tries to stop us from moving around. I tell you in Sudan there are only two classes, the rich and the poor. I want to leave Sudan because there is no future here, people are very poor and nothing will change. How can I leave Sudan ? Can you help me go to Australia?"
After all this I was a little flummoxed - particularly as the night before an Ethiopian had told me that I couldn't talk politics there, and I had only been in Sudan a matter of hours. Before I could answer, the guys thanked me and told me they were leaving. They then paid for my meal on the way out.
After thinking about it for a while, and pondering in particular how indicative of general public opinion they were, I started to think that often we in the West fret about imposing our rights on others, whereas the truth probably is that the people at the bottom of the pile want as much of that imposed as they can get. All that navel gazing and po-mo relativism worry can be thrown out the window, countries should be able to impose moral standards upon governments, and perhaps more importantly, should be able to enforce those standards - particularly when they are grossly violated.
I confess that think Al Bashir is a thug, and that whilst the ICC procedures may do very little to reign him in, they do serve as a good precedent. Now I am also starting to think that maybe the procedures are also supported by the majority of Sudanese, which can only be a good thing - for us and for them. Hopefully we can live up to the trust they place in us.

Last bus trip in Ethiopia

If you are looking for the most genuine Ethiopian experience then you need do no more than get on a bus. I have written previously about the joys of catching a bus in Ethiopia, but the fun really begins once you finally head off. This took longer than usual when I took my last bus ride from Gonder to the border with Sudan, as two large cages of chickens had to be loaded on to the roof of the bus and the rickety cages made this a full hour task, and it looked like it was going to take even longer when one of the porters tried to put the 10ft long cage on his back then climb up the ladder at the back of the bus - for a brief moment it looked like
Finally we hit the road, and it didn't take long before the most important item in the bus was put in to use - the vomit bag. Every Ethiopian bus, probably by law, carries a plastic bag of plastic bags, usually stored near the back door. When the roads get windy the bags get handed out to everyone, but in our case we were on some of the straightest roads in Ethiopia, which means the bus boy has to dash to the back of the bus grab a bag and get it to the ailing passenger before the vomit hits the floor. What the straight roads don't mean though is a vomit free trip, that is something that just doesn't happen. Despite trying hard not to look a few times I couldn't but peep as passenger gave a bag their best, tied it up at the top and threw it out the window (or on to the floor if they were feeling a little lazy) - the suspended solids in a pale yellow liquid glittering in the sun still makes me feel a little queasy. The preponderance of vomit may have a lot to do with the fact that there are about eighty people (two rows of three and two) crammed in to an ordinary bus AND no matter how hot or stuffy it becomes, all of the windows will be closed. Ethiopians believe that air coming in a window brings illness, so if you ever dare to open a window they give you the evil eye, tell you to close the window or come over and do it themselves.
Now, after about an hour on the pass roughly half of the eighty people had vomited, and roughly seventy five percent of these people had used a plastic bag. Meanwhile a good percentage of the passengers are also having a hack or a gob now and then straight on to the floor, which is where anything that anyone no longer wants - i.e. - all of the rubbish ends up. Adding to all of this is the dust that the bus kicks up as it motors along as none of the roads are paved. The piece de resistance of this concoction is the rancid smell that emanates from the women who lather on sheep and goat fat to keep their hair looking shiny.
So as we descended out of the hills in to the heat of the desert plains, and the sun began to cook the bus, the pungent mix human sweat, vomit, rancid animal fat mixing with clouds of dust in the seemingly ever diminishing small space of a bus with no fresh air at all, made me feel quite happy that I was finally leaving Ethiopia and its smelly, get up at 4.30am to catch 'em buses - but there was one small last piece of theatre to go.

As we had driven through the mountains every time we stopped the owner of the chickens would check that his charges were doing all right. As we hit the planes that marked the beginning of the border with Sudan the bus kicked up a few notches with hysterical results. We were careering along on a dusty road when suddenly three or four chickens were spotted out of the back windows of the bus falling from the roof, bouncing off the side of the bus and disappearing in to the cloud of dust that was following us. Eventually after plenty of shouting from all the passengers the driver realised what had happened and slammed on the brakes. When we stopped about half the passengers got out - half of those started chasing the chickens and the other half coached the first half - first on the best method of rounding up the chooks in 40 degree heat in the scrub, and then secondly on how to put the chooks back in the cages and then fix the cages. It kept me in stitches for half an hour, as I enjoyed the relief of breathing some fresh air for a change.
The last hour and a half of the journey was punctuated by two more of these stops, once when a couple of birds escaped and were running around on the roof, and twice more when some felt off the back of the bus. The last time the driver had had enough and didn't even bother stopping - so by now there are probably a whole packs of chickens running around crossing the Ethiopia-Sudan border without the appropriate passports.

Food, glorious food

Somehow I managed to stumble in to Ethiopia during Coptic Lent, during which almost the entire country fasts - abstaining from eating meat for forty days, turning the country in to a vegetarian paradise. I spent the six weeks I was there living off beyenit - fasting food, and was so impressed I even took a photo !!!

The main part of the Ethiopian diet, njera, a huge pancake made from tef, a grain a bit like wheat that only grows at altitude in Ethiopia and Eritrea. The standard (and almost exclusive dish in most places) involves njera as the plate and then a selection of varying goodies - ranging from your bog standard shiro (the paste in the middle made from spiced, lentil flour) , to spicy eggplant, fancy beetroot and a few more lentil dishes.

An unwanted Australian - beyherzaff - the tree from over the sea

Sometimes when you look out over the hills of Ethiopia, and the rest of Africa south of there, you could easily make the mistake of thinking you were in Australia - the hills are covered in that very recognisable green leaves, yellow flowers and white trunks of the eucalyptus tree.

In Ethiopia they are called beyherzaff - bey meaning sea and herzaff meaning branch or tree, and when I tell many locals where I am from they immediately tell me how King Menelik, the first king of united Ethiopia (and the grandfather of the divine Emperor Haile Selassie). Like in most East and Southern African countries they were brought to Africa from Australia at the turn of the century (in the other countries by the new colonists), to replace the rapidly deforested hills. In the perfect conditions of Africa, plenty of sun, water and good soil the eucalyptus grow like wildfire, to mangle a few metaphors. In the absence of any small marsupials to pick on the saplings, the trees grow straight and tall, rushing towards the sky at break neck speed. Since their introduction they have self seeded to cover large swathes of land, crowding out any indigenous trees that have been left, and often because of the more recent high levels of deforestation, they are the only trees that can be seen in many areas.
You would think that any tree is a good tree, but the eucalyptus is not native so it creates problems in its alien environment, deep roots steal the water from other trees and cause the water table to rise. Native animals and birds haven't adapted to use the eucalyptus, so like native trees they are pushed elsewhere by the unwanted Australian interloper.

In some areas, especially in Rwanda, people have wised up, and are now clearing the eucalyptus for firewood and replacing them with native species, but in most areas the antipodean import continues to spread its reach. Maybe they could send a few back to Australia.

Loiterer on a mission

Finally there is a purpose to the loitering - hmm perhaps that may be an oxymoron. Anyway, on a bus ride from Mekele to go to Debre Damo I met Teklab, an Eritrean refugee living in Ethiopia. (For those who don't know Eritrea fought a 3o year war of independence with Ethiopia that ended in 1991, and then they fought another war in 1997) Eritrea is afraid of another war and requires all its male citizens from 18 to 45 to do full time permanent military service, and requires a permit for its citizens to leave the country. Nonetheless, each month about 1000 refugees slip across the border to Ethiopia and 2500 go to Sudan.

Teklab left five years ago, and he is a lucky one, he has a residency permit to live and work in Ethiopia, most refugees end up in camps, where they are not allowed to work, and must remain in the camps, sometimes they are allowed out for a week at a time. When I met up with Teklab him in Shire where he lives, the mere mention of his sister and mother who still live in Eritrea almost killed the conversation - Teklab suddenly became very quiet and I could almost see in his eyes memories of better days flashing past. (Teklab can't return to Eritrea meaning he hasn't seen his sister or his mother since he left, it is not possible to call between the two countries because the lines have been cut, and emails are censored) Teklab became animated again when he got on to talking about freedom, the word Eritreans give for the end of the war and independence. He said "When freedom came in 1991" as if it had simply knocked on the door and had been allowed in, rather than a thirty year war in which Eritrea had no international allies. However for five or six years life was good, travel between the two countries was open to all families were reunited, and their was a post conflict economic boom in Eritrea - its economy grew faster than any other country in Africa. It seemed that the tough sacrifices the Struggle were over, and people in both countries looked forwarded to an even more promising future. Tragically it only lasted six years, before the two leaders launched another war between the two countries, ostensibly about control of some busted arse border town, but more about egos - egos which cost around 70,000 to 100,000 lives, and ruined the economies and lives of millions in both countries.

I met a few other unluckier refugees on a local bus. They had managed to get a two week pass out and had been to Addis, but they were now on their way back to the camp - a five hour bus ride, and then a ten kilometre walk. There is no real chance of escape as anybody travelling in Ethiopia, particularly around the border areas, has their papers checked so often that any refugee on the run would soon be caught. They told me about how Canada had declined to let them migrate so they were now going to try for Australia. They had been in the camp for five years, and spent most of their time doing nothing - they are not allowed to work, including even farming the land inside the camp, or study - people live off handouts from the UNHCR and aid agencies, so they have no income, and very little to do. I later rode on a bus through another camp, about a thousand or so ramshackle huts, distributed across a denuded hillside - black burnt soil and not a tree in sight. As in most places in Ethiopia, everything was covered in a thick layer of dust thrown up by passing cars, and whilst there was no fence, it looked worse than a prison.

Teklab convinced me to visit Eritrea, first by telling me the border was open, and secondly and more importantly by giving me a job - to carry a letter and photo across the border like an illicit postman.