Final Post

In this final blog post I am going to recommend a book that I did not actually read on the trip. I read The Letters of Yonatan Netanyahu when I was in high school, which is a collection of actual letters between Yonatan (Yoni) Netanyahu and his various family members over the course of his lifetime. For those that don't know, Yoni Netanyahu led the rescue operation by Israeli commandos in what is now the old airport in Entebbe, Uganda to free over 100 Israelis taken hostage by terrorists when they're plane was hijacked. The operation was considered an enormous success, but in the last moments Yoni was shot and later died, one of the only casualties amongst the Israelis. The reason I'm talking about Yoni and the book is because before I flew back to Israel, from Entebbe, I was able to visit the old airport site where the rescue took place. (Pictures are in the album named Kampala and Entebbe)

When I arrived at the new airport I asked some of the airport security officers if it would be possible to visit the site of the hostage rescue. The first guy I asked said no, but the second one was more than happy to take me. I got a airport security badge and went off across the runway to the old airport site. The old airport site has had a new building added on in recent years and is the location of a massive UN logistics camp, which I'm told is the largest in East Africa. The original building is still there, and has barely been touched since the raid in 1976. All the bullet holes are still there, and the only real difference is the addition of a plaque commemorating the raid and honoring Yoni Netanyahu put up just last year. I was extremely moved just being at the site itself, let alone driving down the same runway the Israeli C-130's landed on, and seeing the far end of the airport where Yoni was shot during the last moments. I think it was a good of an end to my trip as I could have asked for. The Letters of Yonatan Netanyahu is an extraordinary book, and while you won't learn about the Entebbe raid in it, but there are no shortage of books on that subject, you will gain insight into a remarkable human being.

I'm back in Tel Aviv now, and I've got to re-start my life in here in a lot of ways, but I'm very excited about it. I'm less excited about the oppressive heat and humidity, but I got through the last few summers, I can manage this one too...I hope. After some time in Africa you kind of forget what a "developed" country looks like and while it wasn't a big shock to see the big buildings of Tel Aviv, its a little weird. Tel Aviv might have a bigger economy than entire countries I've visited. The economic gap is astounding between Burundi and Malawi, for example, and Israel, let alone the US.

Last night my friend David and Alexandra were married in Jerusalem, and it was a very nice wedding. They did not know that I'd be showing up, still thinking I was in Africa, clearly not readers of my blog:-), and it was a nice surprise for them. The wedding was a lot of fun, and a great event to have upon returning to Israel. Mazal Tov to Dave and Alex.

While this blog is complete with this final post, I've very much enjoyed the whole blogging process, and have been thrilled with the amazingly positive response I've recieved from y'all over the blog. I'm going to keep blogging on the issue of the genocide in the Congo, Darfur, and mass violence in general in Africa, which overall continues to be underreported throughout the world. Not quite sure what the direction of the blog will be, but if you're interested in viewing the blog, the address is: violenceinafrica.blogspot.com. I would also like to start a blog updating the status of the beloved Mr. Chocolate, although I think he deserves a website devoted to him. I have to figure out how to do that now too.

Anyways, to end the blog on a completely un-Africa related note, I just saw the first two episodes of The Office that I had missed while abroad, and the show is the funniest thing that's ever been made. Actually...I just realized this is not an entirely un-Africa comment, since one of my favorite conversation topics with other mzungus in Africa was The Office. I've discovered you can laugh just as hard recounting the Beninhana Christmas Special episode the first time in Malawi as you can for the tenth time, several months later in Uganda.

Lehitraot, ate logo y que les vaya bien, Ben

Butiaba

The latest book I've finished is Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and its incredible. Its like reading a horrible nightmare, but its so well written you don't want to stop. I've read some really good books on this trip, and this is definitly one of the best. Cormac McCarthy is the author of No Country for Old Men, which the movie based on the book just won the best picture oscar. When I got the chance to exchange one of the books I've read for it, I was really excited, and the book did not let me down.

Yesterday I went to a small fishing village on Lake Albert called Butiaba. Someone told me Ernest Hemingway crashed a plane there, but I haven't tried to verify that, so that may be completely inaccurate. I was told it was a really pretty village, and I wanted to see more of Lake Albert and the rift valley one last time. The road down from the valley escarpment down to the lake is very impressive, and when you get to the valley floor there are a gazillion baboons running around. The time in the village was nice, I just walked around the beach, had lunch, and had tons of kids come up and try to jump on me. Not the most exciting of destinations, but I enjoyed seeing one of the rift valley lakes for a final time. I put a few pictures in the Murchison Falls album, so if you click on that link the last few pictures in the album will be from yesterday. They're nothing special, just to kind of show what the area is like.

Whether its been on hikes or strolls in Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania, Rwanda, or here in Uganda the kids have always been the best part. The landscapes are breathtaking, but when you have a four year old just walk out of his house, and take your hand to walk with you along the footpaths its the highlight of the hike. Soon after one kid joins you a larger group always comes curious to see what this mzungu is up to. Some poke at your skin, most just try to grab on to your hand somewhere, and its quite charming. Eventually some adult comes to get them, but it can take a couple of kilometers some times.

These walks have been my favorite thing in Africa, and going between villages on their footpaths is as interesting and beautiful as the national parks I've visited. I love walking through the small farms of banana, coffee, beans, yams, maize(although I hate that they eat so much maize in Africa), peas, sorghum, millet, mangos, etc... You can often hear women singing in their homes, and a few times I've even come across some drumming sessions going on. It's not all idealic, though. Several times in the morning I've gone into a small pub to get some water only to see several men quite drunk. You rarely see men working in the fields, it almost always the women and children. I'm sure health problems are rampant, but I cant' get a good feel for this just walking through. Still, these walks have been the highlight of my trip, and you don't have to pay any national park fee to do it.

Today is my last full day in Africa, and tomorrow I'll be off to the airport in Entebbe for my evening flight. On the way I'm going to try to see the old airport where the Israeli hostage rescue took place in 1976. From what I understand its closed off to the public, but I've heard of people being able to talk their way into a small peek.

As for the blog...my folks keep asking me to do a one final entry returning to Israel, and I suppose I will. The blog has been one of my favorite things about the trip, and the response has been incredible. I want to thank Shara for this, because without her nagging me, there would be no blog. While this blog will end with that final entry, I do intend to start another blog, on a different subject. I plan to start a blog where I'll post links to articles and other information on the horrific situation in the eastern DRC. I'm doing it for my benefit, but anyone that would like can check back periodically can read any of the articles if they like. I guess I'll try to set up at least the site name before the last blog entry, and I'll post the link on the this blog. Well, hope everyone's doing well and have fun.

tchau, Ben

Encephalartos whitelockii

First off I want to say mazal tov to Rachel and Ben Oh, who were married yesterday on Mt. Hood. I haven't heard from anyone how it went, but I can imagine it was an awesome wedding. I made sure that everyone in Africa is wishing you both only the best.

Second, I only read today that fifteen hostages of the FARC were released a few days ago, including the high profile hostage, Ingrid Betancourt. Very, very happy to hear that they were rescued and I only hope the prisoner exchange with Hizbullah continues so Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, dead or alive, can come back to Israel. And of course hoping that Gilad Shalit will come back as soon as possible too.

So...Encephalartos whitelockii is the scientific name for the type of cycad plant that is found only in Mpanga gorge, a small gorge a few kilometers west of Lake George in western Uganda. What's even more unique about this plant is that the species has been in existence for 300 million years! Somehow the plant is still around, and yesterday I saw it, which was very, very cool. To get to the gorge takes some patience, considering almost no one living in the closest town, 20 kilometers away, had even heard of the gorge, let alone the cycad plant. I had read a dam is being built near the gorge, so luckily I decided to have a boda-boda take mae there, and only after arriving at the dam construction site did the workers confirm this was in fact the right place to see the cycad plant. The dam won't destroy most of the habitat of the cycads, but they have bulldozed some down a little upstream from the gorge. Still, its tough to know what might happen in the future and while they've been around for 300 million years they might be nearing the end of species' existence. Seems like a waste, considering the Mpanga river is pretty small, the cycad is so unique and rare, and there are enormous chunks of the Nile that could have a damn built that would bring in quite a bit more electricity. I'm not a fan of dams, but if they're going to be built, you'd hope there would be some attempt to do reasonable planning.

Anyways, the gorge is really pretty and it overlooks Lake George which is basically a runoff from Lake Elizabeth, which I visited in early June while going through Queen Elizabeth National Park. There is a pretty waterfall, Mpanga falls, which I saw from the top only, and all around are these cycad plants. Their trunks look like a palm tree, and the leaves are kind of palmish, kind of tree-fernish. In the middle of some of them are fairly large cones, and while they're not the beautiful plant/tree in existence it's pretty cool to see anything that has continued to exist for 300 million years. I'll put up pictures sometime this weekend.

Tomorrow I'm invited to an ultimate frisbee bbq 4th of July something or other with lots of Uganda peacecorp folk, but I may go for a day trip up to Lake Albert. I'll decide tomorrow morning. Finally, congratulations again to Rachel and Ben Oh.

Boda-Boda

So I'm off on one final mini-excursion for a few days, but I plan to be back in Kampala for the weekend. I've met a really nice group of peacecorp folk here, and I've been invited to a fourth of july weekend ultimate frisbee bbq extravaganza. I'll write again after the trip and bbq, but I wanted to do a blog entry on what is by far my favorite method of transportation, the boda-boda. A boda-boda can be either a bicycle or a motorcycle that you hop on the back of. In Kampala there are almost no bicycles so boda-boda means just the motorcycle. Kampala's traffic is so bad that you can pay almost nothing to get on a minibus, but you will not arrive at your destination for at least a few hours. The only way to get around, the way I see it, is to get on a motorcycle which weaves its way, quite dangerously at times, through the city. I think the peacecorp is overreacting a little, but they deem the boda-bodas dangerous enough to ban their volunteers from using them with an automatic punishment of being sent home if caught.

Anyways, the main reason I like taking the boda-boda has nothing to do with it being faster than a minibus, but rather the boda-boda drivers. They congregate in herds throughout the city, and I really think there needs to be a doctoral thesis on the sociology of these folks. Anytime you get near a group they start yelling at you to choose them, and many times a few will even start up the motorcycle and go towards you with the apparent belief that running you over will make you want to choose them for your ride.

Once you've succeeded in getting rid of all the drivers but the one you want to talk to it gets even more fun. I'll ask them if they know where the place I want to go is, and more often than not you get a glassy blank stare, several seconds of silence, and than the following response "you come on, we go". "So how do you get there?" I'll follow up, to which I get a pleading "you sit down, we go". Before I knew that most of the guys had no clue where they were going I'd get lost quite a bit. Often in the middle of the ride I would ask them if they knew were they were going, and after a pause they'd always say "yes". But a few moments later we would conveniently stop for the guy to buy a cigarette. While I can't hear the transaction going I always find it curious that the guy selling the cigarette would always be pointing in a direction and his body language always seemed to indicate that he was in fact giving directions and not selling cigarettes. Eventually you make it to your destination, but its always a process. These guys are so desperate for any business they'll do whatever they can, including just driving off in a direction with no clue how to get where I want to, hoping that somehow the problem will resolve itself.

Agreeing on a price is not a simple affair either. There's the initial bargain, and as a mzungu I'm always charged more. You have to dictate the price from the beginning to get anything close to the local price. It doesn't end there though. Sometimes in the middle of the ride the guy will say "its very far, you give me more money". They're not actually expecting you to agree to increase the price, but they're trying, and well, I can't blame them. If you don't get the plea in the middle of the ride it will definitly come at the end. As you're getting off the boda-boda and getting the money out you usually hear the following "eh, the price of petrol is so high, you give me more money" I've heard it so many times now I usually start laughing. The other comical thing about it to me is the tone of their voice. The "eh" is so high pitched some soprano opera singers would be impressed, and the rest of the sentence is not much lower in the tone, and it's all quite an impassioned plea. At the end of it all most folks give you a big smile and thank you once they get the amount you originally agreed upon, and go off looking for their next customer.

I got an amazing insight into the world of the boda-bodas a week or so ago in Mbale after I had finished the Mt. Elgon hike. I was having dinner with Nico, the guy I climbed part of it with, when a Dutch guy and and a Ugandan woman that Nico knew came into the restaurant. So we had dinner with them too, and soon enough the conversation switched to the Boda-Bodas. The Ugandan woman was from Gulu, up in the north of Uganda, but now lives in Kampala. She was saying that the Boda-Boda price is not two tiered: Ugandan and Mzungu. Because she is not Buganda, the local tribe in the Kampala area, and does not speak Luganda, the main language of Kampala, she is charged more than Bugandans speaking Luganda. The Boda-Boda people size you up based on your dress, skin color, and once you open your mouth your language as well. This stuff is extremely complex as y'all can see, so mostly I just walk.

What Bob Barker should have said

Last night I saw, what I thought, was a ridiculous program on the National Geographic channel about a center for rehabilitating stray and behaviorially challenged dogs. There is an enormous dog center, called Dogtown, in Arizona. The medical facilities are the nicest I've seen anywhere for any kind of animal, humans included, and I was just in shock about the excesses put into this center. I had a thought in the middle of the ridiculous program people in the US probably care more about dogs than folks in Africa. While this is a very unfair general statement to make, there's probably some truth in it. My next thought was what if Bob Barker changed his famous last line of every show of The Price is Right. Instead of saying something like "remember to get your dog spayed or neutered" he changed it to "every day in Africa a 10 year old girl is raped and murdered" or "last year in Africa two million people died from AIDS" and followed it up with "do your part by doing x,y,z to help change this". Probably would have had little effect, if any, but who knows.

You can't visit this continent and not be affected by some of the horrific problems here. For me, ironically, I think I've been more impacted by the problems going on in a country I have not even officially visited, the Democractic Republic of Congo. You can see on the map of the trip that I have literally been next to half of the country's southern border and almost the entire eastern border. I've looked north and west for months now and seen the landscape of the DRC. In the last two decades over five and half million have died in the conflicts, primarily resulting from the Rwandan genocidaires fleeing into the eastern DRC. More and more, people have an idea that something has happened and is going on in the DRC, but I'll be 9 out of 10 people worldwide couldn't tell you a single detail about it.

Here's one detail about the war. The genocidal hutu militias and other rebel groups support themselves financially in large part through the mining of tin. The DRC has one third of the global reserves of tin, and its located in the eastern DRC in a region called the Kivus, where the militias pretty much run the show. Tin is used now in cellphones, computers, and quite a few different electronic devices because its replacing lead, which is more harmful to the consumer than tin. Tin is even being praised as allowing such devices to be more "eco-friendly". The militias control the mining and smuggle it out of other countries, such as Rwanda and the Republic of Congo(different country. yes, it's confusing), where it gains so called legitimacy for export to the world market.

This means that when you're buying your eco-friendly cellphone because it has tin, coltan, casserite, or other minerals from the eastern DRC which are supposedly better for the environment than lead you are in fact doing the following:
Unknowingly supporting groups responsible for five million deaths in the past twenty years. Groups that use sexual violence as a weapon of intimidation and genocide through the spread of HIV. In the three eastern DRC provinces of South Kivu, North Kivu, and Ituri its estimated that 75% of the women have been raped! Unfortunately, from what I've heard, simple rape is uncommon. Its usually gang rapes for days or months at a time. Women as young as you can imagine are regularly raped. Fathers are often forced to rape their daughters or see them killed. Sometimes they have to rape their daughters and than shoot them or be forced to watch the militia members rape their daughters and than hack to death with machetes. These groups are funding themselves through rich mining resources of the DRC, and the world is turning a blind eye. That the average world citizen does not know about this is an indictment of the world governments which know full well where they are buying their raw tin resources from, but choose to look the other way.

When I was in Gisenyi, Rwanda I was a few meters away from Goma, DRC. The two towns share the northern end of Lake Kivu, and from Gisenyi you can see planes taking off all the time from Goma. Its supposed to be a very poor city, and I couldn't figure out who the heck was flying in to the town every half hour to hour. Well, I just found out from Patrick, an American I met while rafting in Jinja who is working in Goma. He works for a non-profit airline that provides at cost flights to humanitarian groups around the world, and Goma is one of their biggest locations. I asked him about the flights, and he said there are constant flights from the mining regions to Goma and from Goma to several different places taking the raw ores out for processing and export. He said some of the flights actually go straight to Gisenyi, and that the Rwandan govt is seeing a nice middleman cut on the trade. The DRC can't really be considered one country by any sense of the imagination. The "central" govt. in Kinshasa has little control over events in the eastern DRC, and how could it? The country is half the size of the western US has only a few hundred miles of roads in the entire country. Most of the country is the rainforest, has huge mountains, and geographically is one of the most difficult places to move around in the world.

The geography of the region is definitly preventing any end to the ongoing violence, but the rest of the world's complacence is criminal. I recently read a Nicholas Kristof editorial in the NY Times which talked about the ongoing sexual violence and how the US was bringing up the issue at a special session of the UN. If the UN was serious about doing something they could have asked each nation to ban the import of tin from the DRC or the neighboring African countries which usually export it on behalf of the militia groups. There would be a black market trade, for sure, but it might make a dent in the groups finances. The decrease in funds wouldn't have a negative effect on the local communities who have been forced to work in the mines for non-existent wages, in the meantime their crops are neglected and people are hungrier with the mines than they were before. The only people making money are the militia groups and corrupt middlemen.

Ultimately, to sell something these days you need cheap resources and having an "eco-friendly" label is a great marketing tool. So its unlikely anything regarding the militia led mining in eastern DRC will change. Women will continue to be raped on a massive scale, more people will be killed, and our cellphones and computers will be cheap and "good" for the environment.

Pictures

Hi all, here are some links to the latest picture albums

Murchison Falls National Park
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2105955&l=5f861&id=2606069

Mt. Elgon - Pt. 1
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2105944&l=6d251&id=2606069

Mt. Elgon - Pt. 2
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2105953&l=a5ab8&id=2606069

Ramogi
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2105954&l=ff111&id=2606069

Kampala
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2105958&l=54faf&id=2606069

Mbale, Ramogi, and Jinja

Hi all, hope everyone's doing fine. So I'm going to backtrack a little in time to my trip from Kampala to Mbale, before I did the Mt. Elgon climb. I can't remember if I mentioned this in an earlier post, but even if I did, it's worth going over again. The Kampala bus park/station/field of chaos is the craziest thing I've seen of its kind in Africa. It's one big fenced in area with one exit and one entry. Inside are several hundred minibuses in no discernible order of any kind. All the buses look the same, so you can ask someone where a bus to Mbale is and they'll point across a sea of buses that all look the same, and all you can do is try to not cry and hope to eventually get on the right one. Once you do find the right bus you'll be on it at least an hour just trying to get out. There are no lanes for buses to go on to get out, so it takes yelling, honking, and mostly enormous amounts of time waiting just to get out of the bus park. After this you have another hour of going through the horrible Kampala traffic to get out of the city before you can start moving at reasonable speed to your destination. Since all the drivers are nuts and once they have an open road they go 140km/hour, so very quickly you almost wish you were stuck in traffic going 1km/hour, but at least not going to die in a high speed collision.

Alright, so I'm going to Mbale and I see another mzungu on my minibus. The mzungu, Wes, turns out to be a peacecorp volunteer based just a few kilometers outside of Mbale, and I heard all sorts of interesting things about his health projects, Uganda, and just life as a volunteer in general. That night he was meeting some other volunteers in Mbale for someone's bday, and he invited me to join them all. His group of peacecorp folks were very nice, and I had a great time hanging out with them that night. They came in from all over the country and I might go visit some others around Kampala in a few days.

After the Mt. Elgon hike I pretty much passed out, but the next day I went an hour north of Mbale to Sipi falls, which I had heard amazing things about for several weeks now. One person even told me they thought it was the prettiest place in Uganda. Well it ain't. It's a very pretty falls, but I had just done a three day hike with some of the most amazing scenery I had ever seen. So I was not overly impressed, and I've seen some pretty amazing waterfalls in my life, including on this trip, so while it's a nice place, it's quite overhyped.

Still, there was a nice place to get pancakes overlooking the falls so I spent half a day reading, eating, and resting my sore body from the hike. The other reason I went over there was because this was the exit point for Nico, the guy I met halfway through the hike. We planned to meet there to figure out rafting on the nile a few days later. Met up with him and we set up the rafting for yesterday.

Before the rafting I made a quick visit to a small village called Ramogi. A group from the synagogue I grew up in Portland had volunteered in this village several months ago building a school building for the village. The town is just outside of Tororo, very close to the Kenyan border, and about an hour from Mbale. I went to the office of the group that organized the project in Tororo and introduced myself. The director was very happy to see me, and immediately had two of his workers take me out to the site in their truck. I saw the building they worked on, and the village in general, but most of the people were outside the village at a local soccer/football match. Still, there were a group of schoolgirls that came up to me almost right away and asked to sing for me. So I got a very nice mini-concert from the very nice group of kids, and every person I met in the village was very kind. The area is poor, and its drier than the west of the country and the area immediately surrounding Mt. Elgon. Still, they have some decent agriculture going on and they have a plan to have tourists visit the area and profit a little from that. You can see Mt. Elgon in the distance and its a pretty area in general. So I had a quick visit, but it was nice to see the site, and afterwards I headed to west for the rafting trip the following day.

The rafting takes place on the Victoria Nile, just north of Jinja, one of Uganda's larger cities. There are a few dams on the outskirts of the city that provide most of the electricity for the country. They're building another, which will flood most of the rapids I went on yesterday, so that'll be a shame. The rafting is considered to be some of the best in the world with four class five rapids, and the day was a blast. We flipped our raft a few times, I jumped in a few others, and had a great time. We were a pretty small group, only five of us, but good folks. Nico, from Mt. Elgon, myself, two older volunteers from the UK, and an american who is working as a pilot for NGO workers in Goma, DRC.

Today I was considering heading back in the direction of Mbale to visit the Ugandan Jews. I don't know the entire story, but there is a group of several hundred Jews living just outside of Mbale. They're completely Ugandan, but some time ago adopted Judaism, and while they're not recognized by the rabbinate in Israel, they practice the religion. I was too tired to get on a bus again today, but maybe next Friday or Saturday I'll make it out there. So instead of going there I went fishing today on the nile. The rafting hostel has some fishing poles and I spent my morning doing that, and caught a grand total of zero fish. Still, it was a nice time. I think I'll go take a nap now, and tomorrow lazily make my way back to Kampala. Tengo algunas cosas to take care of on Monday, and than I don't know what I'll do. There's no lack of things to do in Uganda, but I just have to decide.

On Monday or maybe even Sunday evening I'll be posting pictures from Murchison Falls and Mt. Elgon(which are really good) and I'll have those links on the blog. Hope everyone is having a nice weekend, and I'll post again soon. I need to write about the boda-boda(motorcycle taxi) drivers, who provide me with a constant source of entertainment. Anyways, que les vaya bien. B

Mt. Elgon

On the second day of my hike two of the armed rangers shot and killed a poacher right in front of me. Got your attention? Well, you'll have to read until Day 2 to find out what happened.

First, a little background. Mt. Elgon is the 8th highest peak in Africa making it the Mt. Manaslu or Mt. Fridtjof Nansen of Africa. Its located on the eastern border of Uganda, the mountain is shared with Kenya, which has about half of it. The peak is in Uganda, though. It has the largest base of any freestanding volcano in the world, and is thought to have been much higher than Kilimanjaro. About 20 million years ago it erupted leaving an enormous caldera, which the park service in Uganda claims is the largest in the world. Even if its not, and I don't really trust the Ugandan authorities on this, it's pretty big. There are several different hiking routes and I chose one that is supposed to be done in five days, but looking at the route it was pretty clear to me it could be done in four. After a little haggling with the park rangers they agreed to let me do it in four and arranged the guides and rangers. The next day I started the hike and...

Day 1:
The hike started at about 2000 meters and since I got a late start we decided only to go to the first camp which is about 11k from the park entrance, but has a good 1000 meter elevation gain. I passed through really beautiful, almost temperate rainforest looking, forest initially before passing through the bamboo forest range, which is at a higher elevation. We reached the campsite, Tutum cave, which was very, very pretty. The campsite is an enormous cave with a waterfall going over in front of the cave. Horsetail falls like, but the cave is bigger while the falls is smaller than at horsetail. The other cool thing about the cave is it has thousands and thousands of bats that at dusk all flew out to go have dinner. Well, I set up my tent in the cave, and went to sleep eventually only to be woken up by the guards. They said they heard something in the cave, and there had been reports of a leopard living in the cave not too long ago. So...I moved out of the area I was in to be next to the guards and the fire they had going constantly throughout the night. No leopard sightings that night, and I'm not convinced there was one, but I guess it was best I moved the tent.

Day 2:
Since we started late on the first day and only got to the first campsite we had a really long day head of us on the second. We had to cover about 43k alltoghether to get to the camp which is the base for going to the summit. Still in the bamboo forest we started walking further up the mountain, but eventually leveled off in an area above the forest. The vegetation started getting pretty weird and its a vegetation zone that only exists on alpine mountains in Africa. Eventually, probably another week, I'll get pictures uploaded and you can see it there. So...I'm not going to try to describe it, but its really, really, really cool looking stuff. There were a few tough climbs, but for the most part it was fairly level ground.

The hike was beautiful, and it was an otherwise uneventful day until we reached an area where the landscape opened up and you could descend down to Kenya if you wanted, and the vegetation was less dense. All of a sudden we see this guy run only about 15 meters in front of us, and the two rangers take off after him. He was a poacher, and while many apparently have guns, it was very clear to me, that he only had a machete on him. The rangers yelled at him to stop or they would shoot (that's what they translated to me later). He didn't stop, and they started shooting. They missed him badly at first, but after a minute they hit him a few times and he went down. I was pretty upset over the whole thing primarily because they never tried to shoot low and his legs, stopping him, but not necessarily killing him. I had taken along some Israeli army bandages and had a lot of first aid stuff in my pack. I ran over to see if he was still alive and if it was possible to do anything, but one of the bullets got him in the head, and he was clearly dead. Don't worry, I put on latex gloves first, but I checked for a pulse, and there was none.

I was pissed at the rangers for not shooting low, but they than claimed they saw two other poachers in the distance, but running away from us. I never saw the other two, but irregardless, it seemed a little dangerous to stay there. We had another two hours of light, and it was another hour to our camp. We were also in an exposed area, and we'd be easy targets if the poacher's friends decided to come back and attack us. Basically, after contacting the park headquarters we ran across the open area to the other side of the valley to where there was thick vegetation and than made our way quickly to the camp. First a side note - the whole hike we were moving very quickly, but I was sure my guides could do faster. I saw how much faster they could do on the way back to our camp after the shooting. After just a few minutes one of them was almost a kilometer ahead of me, and I was blown away by how much faster the local folks are than mzungus like myself who are in pretty good shape.

That night a few more park rangers came to the camp as a precaution, and the next morning they went out to get the body. Poaching is apparently not a huge problem in the area, but I wouldn't have known it from my hike. The poachers will kill anything, but buffalo is the most lucrative animal. Its illegal to serve it, but apparently some high end hotels will buy it illegally for clientelle that want buffalo meat. After being assured that the hike to the summit was far away from the areas where poachers go I decided to go on with the hike.

Day 3:
Very late, the previous night, a mzungu and his guide and ranger entourage also arrived from a different route to summit the following day. So all of us made out for the summit, called Wagagai, which is 4,321 meters. The other mzungu, Nico from London, is a very cool guy, and it was a nice hike to the summit. While it was still cold, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, and we spent a bit of time up there. At that point Nico and his crew continued the way I had come from the previous day, despite the poaching incident, and my crew and I summitted what is called Jackson's peak. While a few hundred meters lower than Wagagai it is a more impressive peak and I thought the view was better as well. From both summits you can see well into the Kenyan side and its just a gorgeous afro-alpine caldera landscape all around. Again, you'll see it in pictures eventually so I won't try to describe it too much.

We got back to the camp where we spent the night around noon. After a quick lunch we started going down the mountain to a camp not too far from the park boundary. We reached that camp earlier than expected and at that point it made sense just to head all the way to the bottom. So what was supposed to be an easy day, compared to the distance covered in Day 2, turned into a 40k day as well, but I made it back to Mbale, the largest town in the area, by night.

The hike down the mountain was similar to the hike up, even though its a different area of the mountain. Bamboo forest leads into temperate looking forest, and its all very, very pretty. The last section of the hike goes through a rural agricultural area that encompasses the base of the mountain. Its the prettiest farm, rural area I've seen in Africa. Lots of coffee, bananas, lettuce, maize, beans, nicely kept homes, streams going throughout the area, and I was blown away. That part was almost my favorite of the entire hike, but the weird high alpine vegetation was the best.

That was my hike, which was one of the best I've ever done, and incredibly memorable, even if not always for the best reasons. Oh, if you're curious what will happen on the whole legal side of the poaching incident. In short, nothing. An investigation will happen, but from what I was told since the guy was a poacher it doesn't matter that he wasn't armed or that the rangers never tried to shoot low. He's a poacher, and he deserves to die is the basic mindset around the whole thing.

I'm going to be in the Mbale area for the next few days, primarily resting my sore body, and on Friday I plan on rafting in the Nile river with Nico, the guy I met on the Elgon hike. The rafting leaves from a town just an hour east of Kampala, called Jinja, and the rafting is supposed to some of the best in the world, and only the Zambezi, below Victoria Falls, is supposed to better in Africa.

That's all for now, although this has to be one of my longest posts. Hope everyone is doing well, and have fun.

tchau, B

Delayed Murchison Falls, Pt. 2

I forgot to tell y'all about the most interesting thing that happened at Murchison Falls. During the second night, around 4am, the other guy in my tent woke up trying to tell me there was something outside the tent. The campsite we were in has something of tame resident family of warthogs that eat grass and if you leave food in the open get at it too. Half asleep I told him it was probably the warthogs and they'd go away. To this he responded "Ben, I think it's a whole lot bigger than a warthog". Well, we opened up the fly to the tent and about a half meter away from us was a pretty large sized hippo just munching away on the grass outside the tent. Fully awake now, I closed up the tent and we just waited for a good hour before the hippo moved on. Hippos kill more people than any other mammal in Africa, but unless you disturb it they won't harm you. So it was a little intense having this several ton mammoth animal a meter away from us for an hour, but pretty cool at the same time.

Murchison Falls and Kampala

Hi all, hope everyone's doing well. First off, congrats to the Celtics on beating the Lakers. I'm just happy to see the Lakers lose. Second, I read an article that kind of upset me by an espn.com columnist. He wrote that Tiger Woods winning the US Open saved sports. I'm sorry, but wealthy white men do not realize that most people on this planet or even in the US don't care too much about golf, if at all, and as amazing an athlete as Tiger Woods is, he cannot save sports. Its amazing to me how much golfers think the sport is infinitely more popular than it is or will ever be. I wasn't aware that sports needed saving, but even if it did or does a golfer or golf will not save it. Ok...back to Africa.

I got back from my trip to Murchison Falls National Park, which was very nice. I was with a group of 16 mzungus, and there were several very nice folks there, which made it a very pleasant trip. Like I wrote before the park marks the northernmost extension of the western rift valley and lies at the northern tip of Lake Albert where the Victoria Nile empties into the lake from the east, and the Albert Nile starts out of the northern end of the lake. It was my first time seeing the Nile, so that was cool, although I will see it again in a week or so, I think. The park is named after a waterfall where the Nile is pushed into a narrow gorge creating a very impressive falls. There are also a gazillion animals, and I did a game drive yesterday that was amazing.

The first thing our group did was a boat trip up the Nile to the base of Murchison Falls, and along the way you see elephants, crocs, buffalo, etc... Similar to the boat trip I did in Queen Elizabeth NP, but this time there was a waterfall at the end of it. Than in the afternoon we went on the game drive across the savannah landscape of the Victoria Nile delta as it empties into Lake Albert. Saw lots o' animals, but the coolest were giraffes. I don't know what it is about them, but I loved seeing the giraffes. The following morning we drove to the top of Murchison Falls where you can actually see a second impressive fall that is not visible from the boat trip. When I post the pictures, maybe tomorrow, y'all can see what I'm talking about.

So that was the trip the park. Three days, and really only the three sections to it, but it was very nice, and I'm glad to have now seen pretty much the entire western rift valley from Lake Malawi to Lake Albert. Tomorrow I'm going east of Kampala to a town called Mbale, which is the base to climb Mt. Elgon. Mt. Elgon is one of volcanoes of the eastern rift valley, and has the widest base of any volcano in the world, indicating that it was at one point taller than Kilimanjaro, but today it tops out at around 4300 meters. I'm really, really looking forward to this hike, which should last around 4 days. The plantlife up near the summit is supposed to be really unique.

Before the trip to Murchison I was in Kampala for several days, and had a pretty good time. There's not much to see sightseeing wise, but its a bit city that offers a bit to do. I went to the world cup qualifying match between Uganda and Angola, in which I expected Angola to win easily, but it was Uganda who beat Angola 3-1. The atmosphere was great, although the stadium was only half full, which was a little disappointing to see. There was a street arts festival I went to one day too that was various booths of artists as well as a few projects the public could participate in the closed off section of the street it took place on. It was put on by the German embassy, and at least half the people there were German. Their embassy paid for a very nice get together for the german expat population of Kampala. I saw a percussion show, relaxed,and read a bit too. The latest book I've read is also one of the best, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. It takes place over several decades, primarily in the Belgian Congo and later Zaire. Its a fictitious story, but the historical events that occur were true. Its an amazing book, and I could go on for quite a while about it, but I think y'all should just read it and see for yourselves.

Entonces...I hope everyone is doing well, and I'll post again probably in another week when I'm down from Mt. Elgon.

tchau, B

Picture Links

I added a link to the blog if anyone wants to view it. Its a website with good links to websites about the East African Rift Valley for anyone interested.

...and here are quite a few picture albums I've just uploaded

Burundi
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2104007&l=ebf7f&id=2606069

Rwanda
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2102342&l=b6edf&id=2606069

Lake Bunyoni
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2104009&l=6ca40&id=2606069

Semiliki
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2104013&l=1ec04&id=2606069

QENP
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2104014&l=a54df&id=2606069

Kasenda Crater Lakes and Kibale Forest NP

Chimps hate me no more

Hi all, I'm writing this post from Kampala, the capital of Uganda. I haven't been in Kampala more than a few hours, so I have nothing to write about the city as of yet, but I did have a nice last few days in western Uganda and I finally saw some chimpanzees.

After coming back to Fort Portal from Queen Elizabeth park I went just a few kilometers south of Fort Portal to an area known as the Kasenda crater lakes area. There are several dozen small crater lakes formed during the whole western rift valley geological upheavel madness that created pretty much everything else I've seen on this trip since Lake Malawi. I stayed at a nice reserve overlooking one of the lakes, and from there I did a few days hikes. I went to some nice waterfalls, walked through banana plantations, saw lots and lots of lakes, and walked a ton. In the three days I was in this area I probably walked no less than 20k a day. In general, ever since arriving in Uganda I've been walking an enormous amount, and I'm in very good shape now because of it. However, I'm a bit tired, and I'm going to do very little physical activity, comparitively, over the next few days in Kampala and the region. Y'all can see the pictures of the region in the albums, which are currently uploading and should be done shortly.

The lakes area is right next to another national park, called Kibale forest, that has chimpanzees. After having failed on three attempts to see them I decided to give it one last chance. So yesterday morning very early I got to the park and went out, not optimistically, trying to see these damned animals. Well I did see them, and I saw a ton of them. The guide said we saw more chimps than anything other group he's taken out in the last several months. He estimates we saw around 40-50, and we were chasing after them too. First, we heard them as they were screaming to eachother about locations of food, supposedly. After following the screams for half an hour we finally came across the group. We found the dominant male of the group, which is why we saw so many, because he travels with an entourage. They were moving all over the place, so over the next two hours we almost ran trying to stay with them. They stopped at times to do nothing, or climb trees to eat fruits or do nothing up in the trees, but mostly they moved. So it was very tiring, but well, well worth it and I can say I finally saw a chimp in the wild.

Almost as memorable as seeing chimps and hiking through beautiful areas full of lakes and waterfalls, was watching the Euro 2008 games in the nearby town to the lake reserve where I was staying. The town, called Rwaihamba, has market days on Monday and Thursday. Por lo tanto, the people of this village must be a lost tribe of Israel and still have the tradition of market days on those specific days due to the reading of the Torah. I found no proof of this while I was there, but I'm probably right. Anyways, there is a liquor made from fermented banana juice here in Uganda and its vile. The alcohol percentage is upwards of 75-80% and its just awful. The folks watching the game were drinking lots of it and they were absolutely out of control. Really, really drunk folks, and while it was lots of fun to watch with them, I feel for their families after the game when they went home. I had a shot, but it's so vile you can't have more than that.

So I'm in Kampala now, and I'll be here until Wednesday when I go northwest to Murchison Falls National Park. The park lies on the northern edge of Lake Albert, which is the northern end of the Western Rift Valley. The Western Rift Valley goes from Lake Albert to Lake Malawi, and I have done all of it except this section, so it will be quite cool to get there. The park is named after some apparently impressive falls, where the Nile goes through a tight gorge. The falls are the main attraction, along with the lake, but there's lots of animals too in the area. I'm going on an organized trip, the first time I'll be doing that, but there's a hostel in Kampala that does it cheaper than you could on your own. So I'll be there for three days with seven other people, and it should be a really nice time.

In the meantime I'm just going to do some errand type stuff and see Kampala over the next few days. Tomorrow is a world cup qualifier between Uganda and Angola, so I'll definitily go to that too. Angola is a much better team than Uganda, so I'm not sure it will be the best atmosphere, as Angola should win, but who knows. I might go to Entebbe too for a day. Well that's all for this post. I'll probably write again after Murchison Falls in a week from now. Picture links will go up shortly for everything since Burundi until now, and the map is updated too.

ate mais, B

Chimps hate me, Pt. 2

I forgot to write about two things relating to Semiliki NP in the last entry.

1. In December there was an outbreak of the ebola virus in the area. I didn't find this out until I was already there, and you can imagine how comforting this was to discover. It's contained, apparently, but if my internal organs start hemorrhaging than I will not hesitate to seek medical attention.

2. The Semiliki area is home to one of Uganda's two groups of pygmies. The other group is around the Rwanda, DRC, Uganda border area, and while they're ethnically similar, the two groups are apparently quite different culturally. The group I visited are basically part of a Congolese group in its easternmost extension. I'd heard that its quite weird, somewhat depressing to visit them, but I was in the area and my curiosity got the best of me. I had not wanted to visit them because I think visiting them is kind of like treating them as freaks, and you have to pay, and I don't like the idea of having to pay to see someone. Paying, in my opinion, adds to the feeling that you're at a circus show. In the end my curiosity got the best of me, and supposedly the money does help the communities.

So, the visit was short, and while I don't regret it, I don't think it was meaningful in any sort of way. They all want you to buy their handicrafts, and if you pay even more they'll do a dance for you. The pygmies are small, but not dwarf small, you'll see in my pictures when I post them. Traditionally they lived in the rainforest and hunted the animals, but since the creation of the national park they've been kicked off this land and forced into a govt. built village. Until an agreement was made that gave a certain percentage of park revenue to the community there was quite a bit of tension as you can imagine. Today they are allowed to hunt again in the forest, although not the chimps, elephants, or buffalo. The King of the village showed me his home and his stash of opium, which he was quite proud to show me. They are also allowed to legally grow marijuana, and smoking it is part of their cultural traditions. Not sure about opium, but I doubt they smoke it legally, but I sincerely doubt there's any enforcement of the law in this community. All they wanted was for me to give them money, so after a little bit of walking around I decided it was enough and headed out. The pygmies are discriminated against, often robbed by neighboring communities, their women are often sexually assaulted by neighboring communities' men. In fact the large number of rapes, and subsequent pregnancies in some cases has meant that genetically the pygmies are becoming more and more mixed with non-pygmies, with implications regarding the future of the community. It's small in any case, no more than a few hundred. So their situation is not great, and they'll probably continue to struggle in a last of ways for the foreseeable future.


ate logo, B

Chimpanzees hate me

Hi all, hope everyone's doing well. I'm writing again from Fort Portal, in western Uganda. I've spent the last several days visiting a few national parks in the area. First off, I hate speed bumps. As my parents will attest, I've said for years that if I was ever dictator of the world the first thing I would do is outlaw speed bumps. Uganda is speed bump crazy. You get sets of five in a row, separated by only a foot, and than sometimes they add an enormous one that makes you come to a complete stop. They're everywhere, and I detest them with an exceptionally strong passion. The other thing I'd like to complain about to start out this post is how dangerous the minibus drivers are. On my way back to Fort Portal from one of the national parks I felt so unsafe that I just tapped on the ceiling, the signal to stop and let someone out, in the middle of nowhere about 30k away from Fort Portal. I really thought I might die if I stayed in the bus, and although it took me over an hour before I was able to stop someone to take me to Fort Portal, it was well worth it.
Having said my piece on the drivers and speed bumps I would like to state that I think if Herzl had visited Uganda (did he? I really have no clue, but I'm assuming he didn't) he would not have turned it to down as a Jewish homeland. The country is beautiful, has huge amounts of water, and has really friendly people. Having said that its neighbors, Sudan, DRC, and Rwanda, amongst others are maybe not that good of a trade off from Israel's current ones, and I'm not sure how friendly the Ugandans would be if they lived in a Jewish state. Regardless, I've only been here for a week and half, but the country has made a strong impression on me already.
So, the first national park I visited is called Semiliki NP, and it encompasses the only true tropical rainforest in Uganda, which is also the easternmost stretch of the Congo rainforest. It's technically part of the Ituri rainforest, but that rainforest is just an extension of the Congo. The park is between the Semiliki river, which is also the border with the DRC, and the Rwenzori mountains in the east, which can reach 5k meters in height. The views going there are amazing, and there are some cool geysers and hot springs in the park. It's too hot to go in the water, upwards of 100 celcius, but you can get right to the edge. I just went hiking there for a long day, and although there are forest elephants, forest buffalo, chimps, lions, leopards, etc... I didn't see a thing. It's not expected that anyone on a casual hike will as the foliage is pretty dense.
After Semiliki I spent two days at Queen Elizabeth National Park, which is a few hours south of Fort Portal. It's a savannah landscape, and one of the best places to see animals in Uganda. On the drive into the park I saw buffalo, a big group of elephants, and other antelope, small game stuff. The park is bordered also by the Rwenzori mountains, and through the middle of the park are Lake Edward and George, connected by the Kazinga channel. Lake Edward is also the border with DRC in this area, and where the Semiliki river starts. The channel between the two lakes is where you can take a boat trip to see the gazillions of buffalo, hippos, crocs, birds and other small game along the shore. I also saw a few elephants and a hyeena. It's cool to see these animals, but I still prefer plants. At night in the park its pretty cool though because you hear the hippos going nuts and other birds, and there's just a ton of noise in general. The next day I tried again to see chimps in a small gorge in the park where there is a habituated group. Again, I spent hours going through the forest, but saw no chimps. The guide thinks they had left the gorge and went on to the savannah to find fruit. I seem to be particularly bad at seeing chimpanzees. I've got some good pictures, and when I get to Kampala I'll upload them to some albums.
Before I head to Kampala I'm going to spend a few days in an area with some crater lakes, which is supposed to be nice. The hiking is supposed to be great, and you just wander from lake to lake and pass villages on the way. My favorite hikes are the ones where you just wander through rural areas with small farms and villages, and where the kids love to come out and see the mzungu. So it should be some nice hikes around the lakes, and I'll probably stick around there until the end of the week when I'll head east to Kampala.
The place I'm staying at in Fort Portal is really an NGO helping AIDS orphans and children with AIDS, and they run the hostel to support the organization. The women in charge is originally from Maui, and has been exceptionally nice to me. She's given me all sorts of advice and helped me get to these parks without paying a fortune. She also has this amazing library, and I've been reading quite a bit. She had another Elechi Amadi book, The Great Ponds, which is very good. He's a Nigerian author who I randomly bought one of his books in Zambia and really enjoyed it. I also read Chinua Achebe's Anthills on the Savannah, which is excellent. I ready his most famous book Things Fall Apart in high school, which is very, very good. I read The Hours, which is an amazing book, and when I get back to Israel I'll have to get the movie on DVD, and finally I read a book called We wish to inform you that tomorrow you will be killed with you families. It's a book about the Rwandan genocide, and its very difficult to read, but its very, very, very well written. I highly recommend it if you want to learn about the genocide. He also goes into the aftermath of the genocide as it affected the DRC, which is the part of the story that nobody really knows a thing about. I would try to finish a different book tonight before I leave the place, but there are two really good soccer matches on tonight in the Euro 2008 tournament.

Well, I'll post again once I'm in Kampala, when I hope to have links to picture albums available as well.


tchau, B

Health Spa in Uganda

I'm writing from Fort Portal in western Uganda. For the first time on this trip I'm in the Northern Hemisphere too. After Kigali I went to a beautiful lake just over the border in Uganda called Lake Bunyoni. I had heard about this place from other folks even in Mozambique, and its reputation is well deserved. It was formed when a volcano rose up, blocked a river, and the flooded valleys now form the lake. Because its basically a damned river there are lots of inlets and its shape is quite weird. There are dozen or so islands in the lake too, and I stayed several days on one of them.
I stayed on Nature's Prime Island and I basically was in a de facto health spa for three days. The food is super healthy and very good. Other than chicken, its vegetarian, and even the rice is brown rice. Lots of vegetables, fruits, and I ate really well. Since they had almost no guests they put me in their nice cabins for the price of the tents, so I had this great queen size bed with a hard mattress. It's probably the best bed I've slept on since I've been here, and my back greatly appreciated it. Today's bus ride has taken away any of those benefits, I'm sure, but for a few days it was nice. There's basically nothing to do on the lake, but you can take out dugout canoes as long as you want, and there's great hiking. There's no real forest, everything is developed farmland, but you can walk between farms and villages as much as you want. The hikes are tough, as they go up and down valleys, but the views are spectacular. So I went hiking and canoeing for three days and got some really good workouts out of it. The canoeing is really not easy for someone not used to it, because these are not fiberglass stable canoes most of us are used to. It takes all your stomach muscle power just to stay balanced, and its a good challenge. I did a little canoeing while on lake malawi, which has even less stable canoes, and also in Zambia, so I'm starting to get the hang of these things now. So for three days I ate super healthy, slept on a great mattress, and hiked and canoed all day. Outside of having a masseuse I don't know what else a health spa would have. Lake Bunyoni is considerably cheaper than a spa too, so I think I got a good deal out of it. I had some of the best days of my trip on the lake, and I'm pretty sure I'll come back for a few more days before I leave as well.
I also met a few cool folks on the lake, include one guy who is an aid worker for CARE International in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). I basically heard some of the most disturbing things a human being could ever imagine, and got rid of any desire I might have had to the Congo. The whole area I'm in now borders the DRC and its stunning, and the parks on the Congolese side are massive and not visited at all. But, there's no way I'm going over there now. It's a shame, because the tourism potential in that country is really strong, and maybe one day they'll see a good amount of folks.
So, the place I'm in now is a good base to see the surrounding national parks. The whole region is marked by huge volcanoes and mountains, many of which are over 15k feet and snow covered. There are tons of animals, hot springs, cloud forests, and great hiking. Tomorrow the owner of the hostel I'm staying at is going to help me organize visiting the various parks over the next week+ without paying the rich mzungu prices. It should be some of the coolest stuff I see on the trip.
One thing I will not be able to see are the mountain gorillas, which occupy four parks in the world. Two are in Uganda, one in Rwanda, and one in DRC. Interestingly enough I've seen advertisements for the park in Rwanda saying they have half of the gorillas left, and each park in Uganda also claims to have half the population left. The one in the Congo probably says something similar, leaving a few mathematical problems to be resolved somewhere. To see the gorillas you have to get a permit, which cost 500 dollars. The demand is extraordinary, and there's a waiting list to get a permit. They could double the price and still get plenty of folks. In general, Africa is catered to very rich tourists. Part of this is due to a lack of basic infrastructure. Its not easy to get from place to place due to horrible roads, bad public transportation, and a lack of mid priced accommodation. So people spend huge amounts of money to be driven around in private jeeps and stay at really, really high end lodges in remote places. This is why it costs 80 dollars to be in Mahale Mountain park for every 24 hours, and in general seeing wildlife becomes a very costly experience. Until the general infrastructure improves many places in Africa will probably continue to go in the direction of high end tourism only. It's unfortunate, but not surprising.
Internet is not that fast, and I understand only Kampala and that area has fast internet, so it'll probably be another week or two weeks before I post pictures, but you'll get plenty at that point. Hope everyone's doing well, and I'll try to write again soon.

tchau, B

Mazal Tov!

Today is Ela Gruber's first birthday, and I want to wish her a very happy birthday.

a big birthday hug, Ben

Rwanda

Hi all, hope everyone is well. Happy birthday to Shara, Shani, and Andi. Also, Jodie, you're an absolute angel for the videos you made. Thank you so much for doing it, and thanks to everyone in them as well.

Also, if you notice in the top right of the blog is a link to a google map. I've made a map showing my route so far with a few placemarks for some notable locations. The link stays the same, and I'll update it with each blog post, at least in theory.

So, its late here in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, and the nice rececptionist at my hostel is letting me use their internet for free right now. She's currently fascinated watching Fear Factor dubbed in French. I've spent the last week here in Rwanda, and I've had a very good time, but I haven't been blown away as I have been in other places. When you see places like Lake Tanganyika, Lake Malawi, remote corners of Zambia, its tough to be super impressed with everything you see. Having said that Rwanda is a very pretty country, and its history and its present are very interesting too.

I took a bus from Bujumbura straight to Kigali and planned on staying a few days in teh capital, but decided to leave for Lake Kivu the next day. Before leaving for the lake I went to the Kigali Memorial Center, which is the main memorial center for the Rwandan genocide. Its a very well done memorial and museum and very moving. There's a section on genocides in other parts of the world that was very well done too.

I'm not going to go into any details of the genocide, but there is one thing I found fascinating about the aftermath. There were more than half a million prisoners, its a country of just over 9 million, after the genocide. That's clearly too much for the court systems to handle. An international court was set up in Tanzania and it prosecuted the top people responsible for the genocide. What was set up for the rest is quite interesting. The traditional village court is called a Gacaca, pronounced gachacha. It means grassy area, and its basically a tribal elder sitting in an open grassy area, listening to all sides and making his decision. The government decided to let the Gacaca deal with the vast majority of the cases, and they're still going on today, 14 years after the genocide, although they're mostly done at this point. What happens is the prisoner goes before the Gacaca, any surviving victim tells the elder what happened. The prisoner has a chance to defend himself, but mostly they admit to what they did and repent. The elder than decides a punishment, which can range from building someone a house, a monetary settlement, and jail time. However, since there are just too many prisoners for the Rwandan jail system to take, most people don't go to jail.

The system is considered revolutionary as a way of applying traditional justice systems to a national western system. Prisoners can appeal the gacaca sentence to the main system if they choose. Since the village elder is so well respected, it is a way for the victims, Tutsis, to feel that they can continue to live in that village, and that a form of justice has taken place. Its crucial for any kind of reconciliation in the country, and remarkably, reconciliation in Rwanda is considered a success. The country is rebuilding in an impressive fashion from the disaster the country was in after the genocide. There is construction going on everywhere, although most of it is in the capital, and they have a pretty progressive government that is investing heavily into education.

I learned all of this from the memorial center, and meeting my new Rwandan friend Burt. At the lake, while waiting to use the internet, I met Michelle, an American on her honeymoon with her Rwandan husband, Burt. After talking to them for a while they invited me the next day to one of his friends weddings and afterwards to a coffee plantation, which I told them I was interested in seeing while in Rwanda. They're the nicest people, and the next day we went off to this wedding. I went to what's called a State ceremony, which is the official legal ceremony, and the equivalent of going to city hall in the US. Each Thursday you can go to your village justice center, and a govt. member presides over the ceremony. Both the husband and wife have to have one hand on the flag, one hand in the air, towards God, and recite some official vow. If they screw up they have to start over. A few of the people had to start over several times inciting huge laughs from the crowd. Initially, I felt very uncomfortable being there, but it was clear pretty quickly it was more than ok for me to be there, and it was quite an experience. Most people, after the state ceremony, have a traditional wedding ceremony and if they're christian, which most folks are, they have a church ceremony as well.

Lake Kivu is very pretty, quite forested, and I had a nice few days swimming and enjoying the lake. I spent a few days in a town called Kibuye, where I met Michelle and Burt, and than moved up to the more famous resort town of Gisenyi for a day. Gisenyi is full of huge villas, and is quite a bit more developed than Kibuye. It also borders the Congolese city of Goma, which has suffered quite a bit. It was the scene of a lot of fighting in the Congolese war of the past decade, and a few years ago a volcano exploded covering half the town in lava. That same volcano could easily cover Gisenyi too. Lake Kivu is also interesting in that it has a lot of methane coming out of it. People have died when huge amounts came out, and people basically died of CO2 poisoning while swimming in the lake. Its a risk, but not a big one. There is a methane power plant in the lake, the only kind in the world, which converts the methane in the lake into energy.

Well, I came back to Kigali today and went this evening to the Hotel de Milles Collines for a jazz concert. This hotel is better known as Hotel Rwanda, and it was pretty cool to see it. When I was interning at the Carter Center I met Paul Rusesabagina, the person Hotel Rwanda is based on that Don Cheadle played, and so it was fitting that I would finally see the actual hotel. The concert was quite a dissapointment. It was actually just some cover band playing more blues rock than anything jazz. They did one cover of Take 5, but outside that it was blues rock, and not very good either. The place was pretty empty and most people there were older mzungus(white folks), so not quite what I expected.

Tomorrow I go to Uganda, specifically to Lake Bunyoni. Even in Mozambique I heard from other travellers about this lake, and its supposedly one of the most beautiful anywhere. I could stay there a few days, maybe a few weeks. I'll get there and figure it out, and besides getting to the lake I have no other plans. Its just over the border from Rwanda, so I only have a few hours on a bus.

Hope everyone is doing well, and I'll try to write again soon.

ate mais, B

Bujumbura

I'm writing this post from the capital of Burundi, Bujumbura.

First, I wanted to write something I forgot to add in the last post, but it was so long anyways it's probably better I forgot. As I wrote I was on a pretty awful fishing boat for 20+ hours from Mahale Mountain park to Kigoma. Well, there was one memorable experience outside of just being on the damn boat for so long. That night was the Champions League final between Man. United and Chelsea, and a few people had brought along radios just to listen to the game. So for quite a few hours, I think the game ended close to 1am our time, I sat with a few folk moving radio antennas around constantly trying to get a faint signal of the game. Since it was a BBC broadcast in English, and I was the only person on the boat with anything remotely close to decent English it was up to me to let them know when goals were scored by who, when it was half time, the extra times, and finally each penalty result. Most people were Chelsea fans, so they were quite dissapointed with the result. For me it was just cool to listen to the Champions League final from a fishing boat in the middle of Lake Tanganyika.

Well, I spent a few days in Kigoma before making a half days set of bus rides over to Bujumbura. At the border they issued me a visa for three days only, so I have to leave tomorrow for Rwanda, despite wanting to have stayed here for a few more days. Apparently tourists get three days. From Kigoma you have to go a little east up into the mountains to the border, and than you go back down the mountains on the Burundi side to the lake which you than take north all the way to the capital. The ride is absolutely spectactular with some beautiful mountain scenery, especially on the Burundi section and than being on the lake is always amazing.

Burundi is a very poor country, possibly the world's poorest. GDP is estimated at less than 100 dollars per person per year!, and you can tell that it's just really, really poor. The GDP figure is misleading in my opinion, because of Bujumbura, but I'll get to that in a second. Outside of the capital there is pretty much just subsistence agriculture, fishing, and I think most people just feed themselves and make less than the 100 dollars figure. The country is very small, but is densely populated with a population around 9 million. Only Rwanda is more densely population in Africa. It has no mineral resources, has pretty much deforested the entire country for agriculture, which will lead to serious problems, and has no strong infrastructure for anything. It's not in the best shape to put it extremely mildly. Much of this is because since independence from the Belgians in the 60's its been fighting an on again off again civil war. The roots of the conflict are the same that caused Rwandas, ethnic violence between Hutus and Tutsis. Most people know quite a bit about Rwanda's violence, but just in the mid-90's more than 100,000 people were killed in Burundi too, and almost nobody's even heard of the country let alone its ethnic and political violence. The final ceasefire was implemented just in 2006, and there has been occasional attacks, including one about a month ago south of the capital. Things are considered in general to be pretty stable, and people think politically its headed in the right direction.

Alright, so now to Bujumbura. Bujumbura kind of sprawls down the hills to the lake at the northern end of Lake Tanganyika. The hills are beautiful, and across the lake you can see the towering mountains on the Congolese side. It's a very pretty natural setting, and the only thing more I could ask for would be beaches. The coast is very marshy in this area, and you have to go further south for beaches.

Bujumbura, despite being the capital of possibly the poorest country in the world, is by no means cheap. There is no cheap accomodation, I'm paying 30 dollars a night in a fine hotel, but one that is considered on the low end of the spectrum here. In Lusaka, for example, I paid five dollars a night, and Zambia's a much richer country. Apparently, the main reason for this is absolutely insane numbers of foreign aid organizations that have operations in Bujumbura. Kigoma, in Tanzania, I thought was a pretty NGO happy place. Bujumbura is on speed and crack together with the amount of NGO's around here. Every possible UN acronym group is here, and so many other groups from the US and every European country you can imagine too. Basically they've single handidly made the city pretty expensive, especially accomodation. For someone like me, here for only a few days, its no big deal, but for the average Burundian I can't even begin to imagine what its like to live here. All of a sudden you have this pretty large foreign population that can pay ten times for more for all basic services and products, and like any market it reacts and adjusts accordingly, screwing over the poorest folks.

There is also a small population is extraordinarily wealthy Burundians. There are ton of villas in this city, some areas remind me of Beverly Hills, and not all belong to foreign aid workers. The 100 dollar figure is off because you have a population in the capital making millions of dollars, meaning to get to the 100 dollar figure most people make nothing during the year, which would make sense based on the small farms you see most people living on everywhere outside the capital. There is some hope though, and its coffee. Burundi apparently produces some of the finest high end coffee in the world, and its now the biggest export of the country. Hopefully it can bring in enough money to help out some portion of the population. I'm not the most optimistic.

During my time in Buj, I've walked around from the top to the bottom of the city, eaten pretty well, and just relaxed. There's nothing in terms of sights to see at all for the place. No museums, no monuments, nada, but that's fine since I'm not a huge museum and monument person. Healthwise, I'm still trying to get back to where I was before I got malaria, and I'm pretty close, basically 100 percent. I do want to mention how good the food is here. There are bakeries everywhere, lots of tropical fruits, and the food is very influenced by the Belgians. There's also a wide variety of asian restaurants from the small, but culinarily active south asian community in Buj, and what I had heard before coming here was true. The food in Bujumbura is the best I've had in East Africa.

So tomorrow I have a bus to Kigali, Rwanda. I'll spend a few days there before going on to my next rift valley lake, Lake Kivu. I haven't seen another traveller yet, although plenty of aid workers in Kigoma and here in Buj, and will see if this continues in Kigali. I'm pretty sure I'll meet other folks on Lake Kivu though, and while its been cool to be the only traveller in these parts the last few weeks, I'm ready to meet some other folks.

Hope everyone is doing well, and I imagine I'll write again after a few days being at Lake Kivu. Tchau, B

lake tanganyika pictures

here are links to my albums for the lake. also, shara, maybe you can help with this, it would cool if there was a map feature you could add to the blog. some way so you could see with google earth or some other feature where all these places are. if you know how to add this, por favor let me know.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2101189&l=2d334&id=2606069
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2101188&l=fa3de&id=2606069
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2101187&l=307a2&id=2606069
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2101186&l=edc33&id=2606069

Mpulungu, Muslims, Malaria, Mwongozo, Mahale, and More!!!

Hi, I hope you all appreciate the effort that went into this posts title.

Well, its been quite a two weeks to say the least, and this will probably be a long post. I'll just start from where I last ended at Victoria Falls unti I made it this morning to Kigoma, Tanzania.

After a nice few days in southern Zambia in Livingstone and Victoria Falls I took a 24 hour bus ride to the far north of the country to Zambia's port on Lake Tanganyika, Mpulungu. I arrived pretty exhuasted from the bus, but in better shape than I thought I'd be. I assumed there'd be a bank, internet, some someblance of a town there, but I was wrong. It's a pretty small town with just the most basic services, so no bank, no internet, nada. The setting is gorgeous, right on Lake Tangayika, with two islands right off shore. Since I planned on there being a bank, and didn't have enough money for the next part of my trip, two days after arriving I had to take a 5 hour bus(each way!) the nearest town with a bank. I guess that's the price I pay for not checking things out first.

Anyways, I arrived on Sunday and on Friday a big passenger boat was scheduled to depart north towards Tanzania and the chimpanzee park, Mahale Mountain, that I really wanted to visit. Outside of teh bank day I spent my days hiking and canoeing around the lake. First, a little side story.

I found one place in town that served rice, which was great, because I can't stand nsima. There was a big poster of the Dome of the Rock, the Hajj and Medina, so I assumed the owners were muslim. There's a big mosque at the entrance to town as well, and Zambia has an ok sized muslim population, suppsedly. Well, after my second day there in a row the owner came to talk with me in very poor english. Eventually I told him I came from Israel and that I had been to the Dome of the Rock, pointing to the poster on the wall. Well...due to the difficulty in communication it turns out he thought I was a muslim after I told him I was at the mosque. I didn't discover this until the next day when I came back for my rice and vegetables and there were two guys in those perfectly white long dress looking things that you see many arab and muslim men wear. They said hello, they were happy to meet me and quote "you may try to make plans, but only Allah can choose your path". Both were from Malawi originally, I found out, and spoke very good English, unlike the restaurant owner. They than told me that I should stay in Mpulungu start some businesses, but first there are some charitable donations that I should make. They than gave me a list of a few different things from some fellow muslim's medical bills, to mosque repairs, and a donation to their local school.

At this point I'm confused, kind of uncomfortable, but I had figured out at least that they thought I was muslim. At this point I told them that I think there's a misunderstanding. I told them I was not muslim, to which they reacted quite confused. It turns out the misunderstanding was when I pointed to the poster. They all thought you had to be a muslim to be able to go to the Dome of the Rock. They were quite embarrassed after realizing the mistake, but there was no tension. I kept coming back to that place each day I was in mpulungu for rice and vegetables(cabbage only) and the owner was as friendly as you could imagine.

Well, I went on two hikes while I was there waiting for the boat. One was through a road, and footpaths between the closest town to Mpulungu, Mbala, and Mpulungu. Alltogether it was around 35k, so I was pretty tired, but it was an awesome hike. Great views of the lake, nice people and villages along the way, and I got to see a lot of small farms.

The next day I went to Kalambo falls, which is the second highest single drop fall in Africa, whatever that means exactly, at 212 meters. Victoria Falls isn't even the highest falls in its own country. After walking up the rift valley escarpment a few hours I got to the amazing falls. The gorge is stunning, tons of birds flying around, and its a big falls. I'll post pictures so y'all can see. My other days in mpulungu i just rented a small dugout canoe and went to the offshore islands and went swimming. I also read another book, this one by an African author, Elechi Amadi. I read his first book, The Concubine, which was very good, and I highly recommend it. He's Nigerian, and his books are on traditional Nigerian life and his experiences during the civil war there. I'm hoping to find another one of his at some point along the way.

So Friday comes, the boat to Tanzania is supposed to arrive, and I wake up feeling horrible. In the back of my mind I knew immediately what it was, but I didn't want to admit it. The boat hadn't shown up, so I went to the harbor, and they said it was delayed, but would come in the afternoon. Meanwhile, I'm just feeling worse and worse, and I go to the hostel owner and tell him I need to see a doctor. I had aches everywhere, a horrible headache, felt dizzy, all the signs of malaria. A doctor came to the hostel pretty shortly thereafter and gave me this prick on the spot malaria test they do. It came out negative, but they often do when in fact its malaria. In any case he told me to start taking the medications to treat it. I have enough for four or five bouts of Malaria, so that wasn't an issue, and I started on those pills. Well, just after that the hostel owner told me he heard the boat wasn't coming until the next day, which was just as good, because there was no way I was going to be able to get on that boat. For about 24 hours I was competely miserable, and another 24 hours feeling horrible. The boat came in the next morning, and somehow I managed to walk over to the harbor and get on it. It was probably not the best decision to get on the boat for my health, but if I didn't get on the boat than I was stuck in mpulungu with no way of getting to the park and it would have been an enormous hassle.

The boat, normally the Liemba, is supposed to go from its main port of Kigoma, in Tanzania, to Mpulungu and back once a week. Well, the UN has recently started shipping Congolese refugees that fled to Zambia back to the Congo with this boat. For about two months, and for another few months its pretty much just doing the refugee runs. The boat that came, the Mwongozo, usually goes from Kigoma to the capital of Burundi. About once a month now it does the Kigoma to Mpulungu route, and I got really lucky that the week I showed up in Mpulungu it was coming. So if I didn't get on the boat that day I'd really be stuck in Mpulungu.

My first day on the boat I felt horrible still, but it wasn't as bad as the first day, so that was one promising sign at least. I got myself first class cabin, which while not comfortable by any means, at least meant I had a room to myself. This was Saturday, and when I woke up Sunday I felt almost like a new person. Not feeling great, but compared to the previous two days I could not have been happier. Until than I thought there was no way I'd be able to go to Mahale Mountain park, and that I'd have to take the boat all the way to Kigoma. The stop for Mahale Mountain was supposed to be around 3-4am on Monday, so I told myself I keep feeling better all day than I'll still get off.

The boat ride itself is amazing in its own right. The lake is stunning, and there are small villages every few kilometers. The boat stops in the lake at quite a few villages, since there are no docks big enough for it to stop at, and small boats race out to bring it passengers and cargo. Its absolute chaos with boats ramming eachother, cargo falling in the water, fights breaking out, and its quite a scene to witness. I was going to have to get down onto these boats at the Mahale stop, which wasn't the most comforting thought, but I felt better all day and I was set on going to that park. Also, after appearing outside my room, after being holed up teh first day sick, I was something of a celebrity on the boat. The captain invited me to the wheel, radio room, whatever, and everybody wanted to talk to me. I was the only foreigner, and in fact from Mpulungu until I arrived this morning in Kigoma, almost two weeks, I met no other travellers or foreigners at all. I was even given permission to use the officers deck to sit and enjoy the ride. It's the top deck of the boat, and its practically void of people, while the bottom two levels are overflowing with people.

Well, the huge horn that goes off at each stop went off at 4:30am at the stop for Mahale Mountains, I was feeling even better than the day before, and I got off in the middle of the night into the madness of the small fishing boat frenzy. No problems though, and a few minutes later I made it to shore. I may not have had malaria, the test did come out negative, but I'm pretty sure I did. The symptoms were the same, and the fact that after taking the medication I improved so rapidly makes me think it was malaria. Its behind me now though, I feel fine, and I really, really hope I don't get it again. I don't think I can ever donate blood again, which kind of sucks.

Anyways, I got to the park headquarters for Mahale Mountain, and was in for a small shock. The costs for the park, new as of January 1st, are ridiculous. You have to pay 80 US for each 24 hours you stay in the park, you have to pay 50 dollars for the park boat to transport you from their headquarters to the campsite, 20 dollars for every four hours you have a park guide, and you're not allowed to walk without a guide, and finally 30 dollars per night for their accomadations. Even if you bring your own tent, its 30 dollars. In short, you have to pay a fortune to see the park. I had come all this way, so I wasn't not going to go, but I couldn't stay as long as I wanted. The other issue was a boat back to Kigoma. I arrived in the park on Monday, and there was a boat to Kigoma on Wednesday and Saturday. I couldn't afford to pay park fees through Saturday, so I had no choice but to leave on Wednesday, yesterday for Kigoma. The fees, in my opinion, represent how Africa is really a destination more catered for high end tourism only. I'll try to write more about it in a different post, but this one will be way too long as is, so it'll have to wait.

So......after a long argument I got the park people to let me pay 80 dollars one time, enter the park on Monday and leave Wednesday morning. I also got them to agree to let me pay for two guided hikes, but have them be all day and not be timed to the 4 hour bullshit. I had travelled on a boat for two days, planned on going to this park for months, and at this point I was just going to have to bit the bullet and pay a lot of money.

The park is absolutely stunning. The Mahale mountains rise up to 2,500 meters, and go straight into the lake. The water is exceptionally clear in this area and there are stretches of actually white sand from the ground of shells. The forests on the mountains are dense, tropical, and some of the prettiest I have ever seen. The mountains create their own weather system, so the area gets a lot more rain than the surrounding area. The area is also home to around 700 chimpanzees, the largest community left anywhere, and has been the site of a Japanese research project since the 60's.

So I hiked some 12 hours alltogher through thick forest, got stung by nasty flies, ants, and probably some other things, sweated out half my body weight, and I saw.....NO chimpanzees! Writing it just now its still hard for me to grasp, but I saw none. Chimpanzees move along the same trails pretty constantly, and every few days they move high up into the mountains, where there are no hiking trails, for a few days. Well, my guide is pretty convinced that I came during the two days the chimpanzees are up in the mountains. The hiking was absolutely amazing, its beautiful there, but I was, and still am to a lesser degree though, quite dissapointed in not seeing the chimpanzees.

On the second day we came across the Japanese researcher, this was already the end of the day, and upon hearing that I hadn't seen any chimps and that I was leaving the next day because of the costs started pleading with the park rangers to let me stay. I thanked him, but told him it wasn't his fight, and it wouldn't not have done any good. He offered to let me stay at his research station, and he's a really nice guy who's been to Israel too. He's collecting data for some post doctoral research of his, so I wish him lots of good research data and hope his papers get published.

A bit demoralized after everything I had gone through to get to the park and not having seen the chimps I left Mahale mountain yesterday morning for what I thought would be about a 10 hour ride on local fishing boats to Kigoma. When I got on I was told that we'd be arriving the next morning, today. So that just added to my mood, but I think at that point so many things had not gone according to plan that I no longer cared. The boat ride was horribly uncomfortable, but I actually quite enjoyed it. Last night was cold and miserable, and I'll never do anything like it again, but it was a hell of an experience, and I have really experienced this lake.

Now I'm in Kigoma, I've showered, and I'm just starting to take in the last few weeks on this lake. A few things about the lake(no, the post ain't over). Lake Tanganyika is the longest lake in the world and the second deepest. It has the second largest volume too after Lake Baikal in Russia, which is also the worlds deepest. Zambia, Tanzania, Burundi, and Congo border it, and there are almost no roads throughout the entire lake. The only way you get around is some kind of boat or flying, but there are very few airstrips throughout the area as well. You can see the Congo side pretty much everywhere you are, and I can't even begin to imagine what amazing, unknown sites are on that side. If that country ever becomes stable I am going to get to their side of the lake. I'm not done with the lake though on the this trip. I'm going to stay in Kigoma tomorrow, and on Saturday I continue north on the lake to the capital of Burundi, Bujumbura, which lies on the northern tip. I'll be in Burundi for only a day or two on my way to Rwanda. I've talked with people who were there a month ago, the country is stable, so no worries for anyone who has misgivings about Burundi. I've hard Bujumbura, Buj, is a really cool city so I'm looking forward to spending a day or two there. The lake is amazing, I'm in love with the rift valley lakes, and I'm glad I'll have several more days on the lake before I finally leave Bujumbura at the beginning of next week.

I'm absolutely exhausted, I haven't slept well in a long time, but my health is good. The malaria is gone, so there is no need to worry about that, and I'm going to spend the next few days in Kigoma and Bujumbura eating really well and sleeping a lot. I will post pictures tomorrow, the internet is really fast here:-), so I'll post those links when they're ready or just check out my facebook profile.

Hope everyone is doing well, and I'll write more from Bujumbura or Rwanda. Tchau, B

working picture link

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2099358&l=38228&id=2606069

Victoria Falls Post

I've forgotten what number I'm on, so I think I'll start naming the posts.

I'm in Livingstone, which is Zambia's town on Victoria Falls. Zimbabwe's town is named Victoria Falls too. I'm also happy to say that this is the fastest and cheapest internet I've found yet in Africa. I'm currently loading my pictures, and they're loading fast.

I thought I'd be on an overnight bus from Lusaka, but I misjudged, and of course I never thought to ask, how long the bus ride would be. Instead of getting in early morning I came in Livingstone at 2:30am. So I didn't really sleep much a few nights ago, but I found a great hostel to stay at called Fawlty Towers. You can't go wrong with that name. The hostel has a pool, hot water(a luxury in Africa), free pancakes!, a very nice and friendly staff. It's still nowhere near Mayoka village, but I don't think anything ever will be.

The main thing I wanted to do, besides see the falls, was bunjee jump, so I looked into that first thing in the morning. What I discovered is that it's ridiculously overpriced, 110 US, and that advertising it as 111 meters is a bit misleading. The max height from canyon top to bottom of the zambezi in the area is 111 meters. The free fall on the bunjee is just over 70 meters, which is still something. Anyways, there's another activity you can do called a gorge swing. Just down the gorge from falls you can do this swing which is a bunjee jump, but than attached to an apparatus which than swings you across the gorge. The free fall is 65 meters, and the swing is pretty cool too. So I went for this instead of the bunjee, because for 100 dollars you get picked up, all the beers you can drink, lunch, and you can do the gorge swing as much as you want. A much, much better deal than the famous bunjee jump, which really milks the tourists for their money.

For most of the day I was the only person at the site, and I had a great doing the swing a good six times. It wears you out because you have to than walk out of the canyon below, which has a pretty steep climb out. There are also some ziplines across the canyon and some rapelling you can do, so I spent the whole day just jumping, swinging, or falling down canyon faces. It was an enormous amount of fun to say the least. The staff there were very friendly, and one guy, who was a rafting guide for a dozen or so years, had worked in California, and had been to Oregon a few times. It's nice to know that a Zambian has made it to Oregon, or just in general that an African has been a tourist in the US. You feel constant tourist guilt while in thirld world countries, so this made me feel less bad for a few minutes. I also asked him if anybody had ever rafted the Zambezi from the source to where it empties into the Indian Ocean in Mozambique. He said he was pretty sure nobody had, had never thought of doing it, but was going to get working on setting this up as a trip. I hope one day its possible to do this trip, which would be just amazing.

This morning I got up early and saw the falls. The peak water flow is from March to May, right now, and you can tell. The mist from the falls is viewable from Livingtone, some 8k away, and there's so much water right now that the mist prevents you from getting a full view of the falls. The mist is called Mosi o Tunya, which in the local language means Steam of Thunder. So, despite that the water is at its highest, this is not the best time to view the falls, which apparently is around August. Still, they're impressive falls, and very much worth going to if you're anywhere near them. Y'all can see the pictures in the album I'm posting. A lot of people think Victoria Falls is the biggest, widest, something biggest in the world. Well, it's not number one in any category regarding waterfalls. At 106 meters its twice as high as Niagra Falls, but nowhere near the tallest falls in the world. That goes to Angel Falls in Venezuela, which I've been to, and is 1000 meters high. I actually heard there's another falls in the area even higher, but it dries up in the dry season, so it doesn't get any credit. The falls with the highest amount of volume is Iguazu falls on the Argentina/Brazil border at 55 million litres per minute of water. Victoria Falls is around 6 million. I have heard a rumor that there's a falls on the Congo River, in Congo, that has even more water, but I need to do more research on that. And while it's very wide, over a kilometer, Victoria Falls is not the widest either. I found out today there's a waterfall in Laos over 10 kilometers wide. Ariel, Leora, I hope you both go there and take a picture for me. So Victoria Falls is very pretty, I'm sure more impressive when you can it all clearly too without all the mist, but it's not number for anything.

There are a few trails throughout the area, and one hike down into the gorge on the other side of the falls. Down in this gorge there was a local guy who, for a fee of course, will tell you about the geology, plants, nature, etc. of the area. The money goes towards paying for his education, supposedly, and I decided to give him a few bucks to find out some info on the area. While he does know quite a bit, I was more than a bit wary after my first question. On the way down into the gorge I saw a family of big rodent looking animals. I took a picture, and I showed him the picture and asked him what the name of the animal was. He paused for a second and than told me they were Koalas. I said I had seen them five minutes ago on this hike and there was no way they were Koalas. He laughed, and said he thought I was Australian (???), and thought I was showing him a picture of Koalas from Australia. I forget the name of the animal, which he than recognized, but it doesn't matter. I'm renaming them Zambian Koalas. I've posted the picture of them in the new album so y'all can see a family of Zambian Koalas too.

After seeing the falls from up close I went over the bridge spanning the gorge, just south of the falls, that links Zambia and Zimbabwe. The best view of the falls is from there, and I wanted to step over into Zimbabwe for a minute. Again, there is too much mist to get a clear view of the falls, but its cool to be so high over the Zambezi river, and I got to step into Zimbabwe for a minute. On the way out someone approached me about changing currency. I dismissed him, but than realized that I really wanted to see Zimbabwe currency with their insane inflation that's over 150,00% this year. He was holding a stack of 10,000,000 Zimbabwe Schilling notes. I asked him how much I could get for 2,000 Zambian Kwacha, which is about 50 US cents. After a little negotiating I got 100,000,000 Zimbabwe Schillings for 50 US cents. He said he had altogether 5 billion schillings in his stack of money. The quantities are just so unbelievably absurd, and its just sad that Mugabe is putting the country into a complete economic freefall. Livingstone at night is full of Zimbabwean women prostituting themselves just to be able to get some currency that doesn't lose its entire value overnight. Very, very sad what's happening to that country.

Well, that's all for this post. I'm going to go get some free pancakes and just relax for the rest of the day. Tomorrow I get on 24+ hours worth of bus rides going to the far north of the country to Mpulungu, which is Zambia's port city on Lake Tanganyika. I'm really excited to get there, which is the only thing that will help me get through the hellish day of buses, although my ipod helps too. Buses in Africa are infinitly worse than South America. I think one hour on a bus in Africa is equal to four hours on a South American bus. Mozambique has been the worse so far, so at least I'm not doing this ride there.

Oh, before I forget...I wanted to make a comment about Nsima, and this is primarily for Benjie and Tovi, who I know especially dislike the stuff. Nsima is a mash of either maize or cassava, and its the main food in pretty much all of sub saharan Africa. It's called something slightly different everywhere you go, but its the same food everywhere. It's really disgusting. It has no flavor, which makes it all the more surprising on how bad it is. I avoid it as much as possible, but in Zambia there's very little rice, so you have to bite the bullet and eat nsima more than you would like. On my first night in Zambia I had been travelling all the way from Nkhata Bay in Malawi and I was really hungry. Sure enough the only option in the town we were in was nsima. Normally when you're starving, and I remember being quite hungry, anything will taste good. Well nsima puts that theory to waste, as it was still pretty awful food. I've been meaning to write that in one of the blog posts and kept forgetting. Alright, this the real end of this post.

ate mais, Ben

picture link:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2099358&l=38228&id=2606069