araptirop

An extended backpacking jaunt around Ethiopia.

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Location: Washington, DC, United States

I lead a rich inner life, appreciate a good marshmallow, and have been known to indulge in the occasional Wednesday afternoon tryst underneath the linden tree. I am currently between extended trips to East Africa; this is my story.

30 March 2007

We Rafiki Three & Lake Bunyonyi

We awoke early, terribly early, and took a taxi to the Post Office. In Uganda, the Post Bus is perhaps the only mode of transportation reliably short on near-death experiences. One regularly plied the road to Kabale, our drop-off point for a jaunt to Lake Bunyonyi. We were excited; the lake was purportedly free of bilharzia and situated in a cool climes. After three months of siphoning Ethiopia’s Biblical suffering, the quiet lapping of a high-altitude tarn sounded deliciously inviting.

We sat around in a maze of paint-chipped P.O. boxes as the city’s sallow haze lifted and the sun peered over the skyline. When the time came, someone would ostensibly direct us to the bus. As I sat nodding off on the belly of my backpack, a middle-aged man with a curly shock of whitening hair climbed out of a taxi. We began to chew the fat. He was going to Gulu to work on some species of academic work.

“I used to study African History at Madison,” I offered.
“Oh, and who are you,” he crooned.
He asked the question with such a nauseatingly cloying intonation that I had to check my gag reflex. I glanced at Lauren and Beth, seeing both of them shudder. What did he expect me to say? “I am Dr. Wanker McShithead,” passed through my mind, but instead I said, “My name is Dallas. I’m nobody.”

He quickly lost interest after oozing out his name, first and last, and turned to Lauren and Beth. “And what about you?” Lauren gave him a short, standoffish bio. Beth told him she was going to law school. “Mmmm,” he purred, “and what school are you going to?”

“Harvard.”
“Oh.”

That shut him up. His school was a few ratchets down the academic totem pole. I attempted to make further conversation, but once I admitted that I was unfamiliar with his work, his face, which had the self-conscious mold of somebody perpetually peeking in a mirror, began to tune out. We had some mutual acquaintances, and just as I began to talk of my professor who specialized in pre-colonial Buganda, he turned away from me mid-sentence.

A slender man dressed incongruously, for Africa, in an effeminately striped form-clinging shirt and jet black tapering trousers sashayed over to Dr. Wanker and initiated a ritual of schmooze. He sported a ruthlessly manicured mustache set off against the cadaverous white of his upper lip, an eyelash-thin strip of wispy fuzz that he caressed lewdly as he talked. He was a bizarre sight for this part of the world. All in all, he looked like a hybrid of Eurotrash and professional pederast. He extolled Dr. Wanker on the strength of a recent paper. The academic hero’s head grooved smugly to the tune of his deification. It was appalling; the whole thing reminded me of the gay bar pick-up scene in Traffic.

We split ways, I absolutely thrilled at my abysmal failure in the hallowed halls of academia. It helped me remember why I was always so depressed at University. I was glad that I would never have to act as if I held either of them in esteem.

We were misdirected until we finally happened upon the bus to Kabale and pulled out of the lot. I can’t give much in the way of scenery because my only moments of consciousness involved the splashing of drool on my hand and one embarrassing jolt during a nightmare about insects. My entire spasm was watched with bemused detachment by Beth.

“Sorry, I thought I was covered with bugs.”
“It’s okay,” she returned. “After three months in Ethiopia, I can only imagine there would be bugs in your dream world.” (Not verbatim--Ed.)

After seven hours of drooling and several stops wherein roadside hawkers jabbed spears of rancid nyama choma through the window, the bus finally trundled into a rain-soaked Kabale. We disembarked to the raucous solicitations of sundry taxi drivers. The girls had reserved a car through Byoona Amagara that was supposed to convey us to the boat launch. Unfortunately, for us, every driver claimed that he was Dennis the driver, not one of the half-dozen impostors. To make matters worse, each claimed that he had come to pick up ‘Monica.’

“You are Monica?” one of the men asked me.
“Yes, despite appearances, I am a full-blooded woman inside.”
“Who sent you?” Lauren countered.
“I sent myself!”
Wrong answer.

At length, we decided on the most insistent Dennis who quoted the same price that the girls had been emailed. He was an affable enough fellow, and the months of travel had deranged me enough that I deemed myself capable of gallant violence should he try to hold us for ransom or whatever people worry strangers will do to them in Africa. We dragged our bags into the car and began lurching through pot-hole puddles.

I had noticed a couple words of Swahili in the hubbub of and decided to bounce some sentences off Dennis.

“Unasema Kiswahili?”
“Yes!”
“Kuna majira ya mvua sasa? It’s the rainy season now?”
“Yes! I must pick up some pineapples!”
The girls snickered at the non sequitur. I fell silent.

We pulled into a sorely pockmarked road where we indeed picked up some pineapples and moved on.

“We have very bad drought here,” Dennis said motioning toward the farmland. Was he out of his mind? The congestion of vegetation was spilling from leafy hillsides onto the road. An Ethiopian drought and Ugandan drought were evidently two very different things. Uganda, so far, had been eminently more arable than Ethiopia where gray dust was the general farming medium. Here, banana trees flourished in eruptions of green propellers, avocados hung heavily from trees, and rich red mounds of soil teemed with young vegetables. Plus it was raining.

We pulled up to pier where we were greeted by a phalanx of dock workers. I ducked into a drop toilet whose previous users were apparently unfamiliar with the concept of aiming. When I returned to the launch, a dopey-faced madman in raggedy wardrobe appeared ex nihilo and performed a sad, bow-legged dance without the benefit of rhythm. He then asked me for a cigarette. I made the mistake of giving him one. This launched another inscrutable series of dancing movements punctuated by the aimless jabs of his walking stick. After his second disquieting performance, he rattled on about how much he loved to dance.

“I am dancing! I am dancing!”

Then, of course, he asked me for money. I denied him remuneration for the spectacle of debasement. He grew quiet and sidled up to me conspiratorially, nodding toward an African woman standing a couple of feet away.

“You want?” he asked brandishing his walking stick.
“What?”
“You can!” he yelled as he began to pantomime beating the woman with the stick.
“You beat her? You shouldn’t beat her.”
“No, no, no!” he returned indignantly. “But you…” and he recommenced his stick-beating charade.
“You think I should beat her?” He nodded eagerly.
“Why would I want to beat her? Besides, it was International Women’s Day two days ago. I don’t think it’s really in the spirit of the holiday.”
He gave up this course and began pursuing another, again in reference to the hapless African woman. He put his fist to his mouth and made the universal fellatio sign in a display much more graphic than it needed to be.
“No,” I said to his slurping. “I don’t need that.”
He looked dejected. Then he asked, “You have friend?”
“Yes, I have two friends,” I said pointing to the girls. They had detached themselves from the pageant as soon as it began.
“Hawa ni rafiki zangu.”
“Rafiki?” he said salaciously.
“Ndiyo, rafiki wa tatu, sote.” Three friends, all of us.
“Rafiki?” he muttered in amazement.
Lauren looked over to him and said, “Yes, all of us rafiki.”
At this the madman burst into a teary-eyed joy, his arms outstretched in triumph. “All three of you rafiking!”
“Yes,” Beth replied, “we are rafiki.”
“F--ing! You three f--ing!” he blurted out.
“Yes, we are rafiki…” I began with hesitation. “Are you saying rafiki or…”

But it was too late. He slapped me on the back, waved his arms in the air, and capered around the launch point in a state of euphoric delirium. I turned to the girls, both of whom were averse to idea on some pretty intransigent principles, and sighed,

“I think rafiki became f------g.”

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25 March 2007

News Flash!

My traveling companions of one week are writing about our experiences on their blog! It's weird to see me detached from my own keyboard. Anyway, you can see how much hyperbole is involved in my writing by cross-checking it with theirs.

Girlsgoneworldwide.com (click it)

(not to be confused with GirlsGoneWild)

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From Ethiopia to Uganda...By Air!

Coming from Ethiopia, Uganda looked green—obscenely green. The watercourses of Southern Ethiopia were parched dry. From the airplane above, I could see only the claw marks of sunken waters, riverbeds without rivers. This began to change when we entered Ugandan air space. Immediately, a handful of forested mountains rose from the lowlands. As we grew closer to Kampala, neatly terraced hillsides popped up, growing in frequency until they outnumbered the patches of scrub. By the time we circled around Entebbe National Airport, the world below had matured into a rich carpet of red soil and luminous verdure.

I had been informed by a Ugandan sitting next to me that, compared to Ethiopia, Uganda was unencumbered by bureaucracy. I rejoiced at the prospect. The bureaucratic morass in Ethiopia had been truly unbelievable. You can’t give a birr to a beggar without having to wait for a receipt. My parting memory of the country was an abortive attempt to get a police report for my stolen camera. I went to the Mercato police station where I was shifted between four different offices and mistakenly taken to jail. There an unusually jubilant mob of prisoners greeted me with hoots and howls. Everyone wanted my mobile number.

After an hour or so of acquainting myself with every inch of the station, an English-speaking policeman wrote down everything I told him in Amharic. Then he did this again on a more ‘official’ form. After two hours of this, he informed me that it was forbidden for him to write in English and explained that I had to go to the main station near St. George’s Church. There, he said, I would be given a form to take to the U.S. Embassy where I would receive another form to return to the police station. Then, apparently, something would happen. He estimated the entire process would take three days. In any case, the form for the main station took another hour to write up. I left Ethiopia with about one-eighth of the undertaking complete.

My Ugandan visa took no more than two minutes; my Ethiopian one had taken no less than one hundred. Perhaps what I heard through the grapevine was true: Uganda is an easy country to travel in. I walked out of the terminal in high spirits. Having mastered fidel, the Ethiopian alphabet, and perfected the pronunciation of Amharic’s glottal consonants only to run into a brick wall when it came to verb conjugation, I was anxious to flex some of my Swahili. I encountered a taxi driver as I exited the terminal and decided to start right away.

“Hujambo bwana?”

He looked at me like I was retarded. I learned quickly that Kampalans, for the most part, eschewed Swahili in favor of Luganda. They also drove at speeds unfathomable for Ethiopia. As the taxi hummed along at 120 km an hour past bicycles and purring motorcycles, Entebbe gave way to Kampala. During three days in Uganda’s capital city, I noticed several tangible differences from my beloved Addis Abeba.

First of all, the cityfolk didn’t convulse into abject hysteria at the sight of an mzungu. I felt a bit let down at the lack of throngs and screaming children. Indeed, I felt like I had gone from being Brad Pitt to Dallas Lillich in a matter of hours. Secondly, Kampalans were glaringly free of disease. They seemed, on the whole, in much better shape than Ethiopians, many of whom suffer from creepy eye diseases and ringworm issues. Moreover, I didn’t see a single leper or unfortunate on the verge of starvation. But despite these happy absences, I found Kampala to be a much less walkable city than Addis. My difficulty in getting around probably owed as much to my tenderfoot status as it did to the hill density; less ambiguous was the constant stream of screaming cars at every intersection where I invariably waited for five minutes before hurtling myself kamikaze-style into traffic. At least, it seemed, Kampalans were aware that walking obliviously in the road was insalubrious.

I checked into the Red Chilli Hideaway which had been recommended to me by a number of people. They only had self-contained cabins available for $30. I had some extra money from leeching off of Hannah Maryam for two months, and I desired something like comfort—a condition I couldn’t find in Ethiopia in the $20-$30 range. (The ‘nice’ hotels I stayed in when I was sick always seemed to have a throbbing club scene directly underneath my room and a major surplus of gap-toothed whores.) I was dead-tired from staying up all night eating chat with Meki and wanted to sleep, so I committed myself to the expense.

The amiable guy at the desk walked me to the room. We chatted in Swahili on the way. I ended up completely confounding him because half the words came out in Amharic. As we neared the cabin, it looked preposterously large. “This is all mine?” I asked. He nodded, opening the door.

At first sight I was completely awestruck. I had in my possession not a mere room, but a fully functional babe lair. There were three overstuffed couches, a mahogany dinner table with candelabrum (and candles), silky curtains rippling from capacious windows, a double bed, bathtub and en-suite bathroom with—gasp—toilet paper! “Are you sure this is 60,000 shillings?” He told me it was and left. I walked around the cabin akimbo a couple of times and then passed out face down.

I awoke submerged in a tremendous puddle of drool. I rolled over, disentangled myself form the mosquito net, and walked to the on-site restaurant and bar in search of recruits for the babe lair. Upon entering the premises, the guy at the desk told me that a girl by the name of Lauren had noticed my name in the guestbook. “She knows you,” he said. “She went to the same school as you!” I neglected to remember that I’d signed my address as ‘University of Wisconsin-Madison’ and began entertaining thoughts of a pulchritudinous secret admirer. Perhaps she knew me from my band Johnny and the Church Camp Rebels and was trembling in the presence of a bona fide lady-killer. The name Lauren rang sonorously in my mind conjuring up unlikely visions of an exotic beauty wholly devoted to my every whim. I suppose I was pretty lonely. In this way I sat around drinking until I noticed a comely young woman with a wireless card sticking out of her laptop.

“Excuse me,” I said suavely as she passed by. “Do they have wireless here?” “No,” she said wistfully and a conversation was born. Before long she told me that Lauren, her girlfriend, had seen that I was from Madison where she had gotten her B.A. And so, as is often the case with me, the spider had not caught a fly but instead idiotically entwined itself in its own web.

This ended up being just fine, as I made two fascinating new friends whom I bored with my endless blathering about the ex-girlfriend who I clearly hadn’t sweated out of my system. They also had with them a large supply of Tanzanian swill, a resource that I exploited into extinction. Lauren was a documentary filmmaker with a history of NGO work; Beth was a young New Yorker politico on her way to Harvard Law. They were traveling around the world for a year before returning to their sure-fire, power-couple existence on the eastern seaboard. They moved into the babe lair with me for two nights wherein the most erotically-charged moment ended up being my early-morning sighting of Beth’s bare back.

We got our plans together for an excursion to Lake Bunyonyi and had some excellent conversations in which Lauren gleaned a number of regrettable quotes from me for their website’s exhaustive ‘Quotes’ section. I seem to remember saying something alone the lines of “The Qu’ran isn’t very chill.” (See girlsgoneworldwide.com for the incriminating evidence.) We spent a couple of days in Kampala before boarding a bus to Kabale en route to four days of easygoing eating, reading and sleeping on Itambira island.

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08 March 2007

Ethiopia Whirlwind



Some highlights from a couple months in Ethiopia.

 

I am starting to look crazy

 

03 March 2007

Update Uganda

Wow.

The outpouring of comments from that last entry has lit a fire underneath my chapped backside. I would feel guilty if I didn't tell all a yall what changes I'm making to my plans. I didn't think anyone even read this old thing.

Some species of parasite has amorous feelings for me. I can't kick it. After finishing the antibiotics, I started strutting around like the cat's pajamas. I was flexing in the mirror, ruminating on chat, high-fiving everyone. Then, one night, that surly brown foe began roaring in my entrails again. The last three days have been a lesson in aiming a shower head's flow of sewage into the meager opening of Meki's drop toilet. So, even if I haven't left the homestead for a couple days, I've been pretty occupied.

Anyway, given my advanced decrepitude, I've decided that Northern Kenya isn't the best idea. I can't imagine traveling through such harsh territory with total gut rot. I hear great things about Uganda all around, so I'm going to try to take a flight to Kampala and see the 'Pearl of Africa.' I'll meander around, perhaps breach the border with Rwanda. It all depends on whether I can, in fact, recover.

After that, I'm planning on returning to Ethiopia and opening up an antiquities venture with Meki. It's too good an opportunity too pass up--roving the bush, having a permanent base camp in Africa, traveling the globe with my web catalog of goods--not to mention bedding jewel-eyed maidens the world over. I'll keep people posted on how that comes along.

For now, I have a treasury of photos from Northern Ethiopia that I'll upload as soon as I have them organized on my laptop and can find something approaching broadband (a word with an utterly different connotation in Ethiopia). This Flickr/Blogger slide show hybrid is pretty cumbersome, so the photos might end up linking to a .Mac page gallery. To those of you who have mentioned publishing, I have been working on what could only be called an experimental travel novel set in Africa. It has to be just about the weirdest travel literature I've ever read. The first three chapters are in development; the first one I've nearly finished--bizarre. Sort of like a Mevillean invocation of the muse. It's coming along, maybe I'll put some of the chapters on here.

I'll keep working on this blog. If nobody objects, I'll start posting entries without regard to chronology. Thanks for the support, everybody. It really does mean something over here. Keep putting up comments and I'll keep posting.

I have to go to the bathroom.

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