louiseinsenegal

Hostile Environment Training

2012-01-20T06:49:00.001-08:00

My new boss felt quite strongly that our department had not received the security training that we need to operate safely in the various places we visit in our work, so decided that we should all attend a three-day hostile environment and first aid training course.

The East and West Africa teams decided to hold ours in Kenya following a regional meeting there, so I packed old clothes as instructed and early last Wednesday was waiting with colleagues in Nairobi for transport to a ranch somewhere south of the city. We had the itinerary - but it did not really prepare us for the three days of gunfire, explosions, rebel checkpoints and moaning accident victims needing first aid that was ahead of us.

Unfortunately, when faced with face-painted, bandana'd rebels in camouflage gear touting AK47s and an empty gin bottle at an unexpected checkpoint on the road you cannot start taking photos - so I can't show you quite how realistic the role-play situations were. But I now know far more about how to react to gunfire (whether from a pistol or an assault rifle), to kidnappers, to rioting crowds and to checkpoints, not to mention having received a well-needed refresher on emergency first aid (CPR, bleeding wounds, etc).

An added bonus was the location of the course, so a mock evacuation under rebel fire was done with a herd of zebra on the airstrip and an ostrich wandering about just behind us. Not the kind of distractions I would face in West Africa, but I remembered my UK-based colleagues doing the same course somewhere in southern England (wind, rain - sleet, perhaps? certainy no zebras...) and was grateful to be living in Africa!

I returned from the course to a week-long meeting with fellow managers in Nairobi. Staying at an Israeli-owned hotel and wondering if the recent UK government warnings about terrorist threats in Nairobi would be realised - would I get to practice my new skills? But no, all went off safely, thankfully.

While there, however, I had several interruptions by phone and email from Senegal. Alerts. Both the Embassy and the office warning me about the growing tensions in Senegal in view of (a) repeated protests about rising fuel prices and (b) the forthcoming election. The Embassy told me I need to keep a "grab bag" ready containing such items as ID and travel documents, cash, clothes, medicines, torch, etc, and have enough food and water at home to survive on for 4 days should the protests escalate. Then an email followed from the office telling me to keep enough for 7+ days. & to keep my mobile phone on at all times, and my radio tuned in. Then another email, telling me that the Dakar office was closing for the afternoon for security reasons (planned demonstrations likely to turn violent) and advising vigilence over the weekend.

I fly home tomorrow and wonder if I shall get to put any of my new skills into practice. Almost certainly not, but I am glad that we covered crowd situations in the training - not that I will be going out of my way to get into the thick of the action, in fact I shall be doing my best to avoid it - but I do feel better prepared after the course. Between now and the 26 February election there is certain to be plenty of trouble, and as my house is near the University, the private house of the president and the headquarters of his party, there is a reasonable chance of trouble near home. Indeed I recently found out that some of what I have assumed to be firework noises was in fact the sound of stun grenades being thrown in my little suburb to disperse protestors.

Senegal is the only country in West Africa not to have experienced a coup in the 50 years since its independence, it has a free (and vocal) press, and it has already had two peaceful transfers of power from one president to another. But the incumbent president has followed recent African tradition by seeking a third term in office even though the constitution restricts him to two, and I've heard that one of the main opposition candidates is planning to allege electoral fraud should Wade get back in... It will be a sad day for West Africa if the situation in Senegal deteriorates into the sort of violence we've seen elsewhere in the continent.

The Bou El Mogdad

2012-01-13T02:06:00.000-08:00

Every second Saturday an old ship moored in St Louis fills up with passengers, and starts a six-day cruise up the River Senegal to Podor. A couple of years ago I looked up enviously at the passengers sitting around the wood-panelled bar listening to a jazz band playing on the deck, and decided that one day I would take that cruise.

So this year, on Christmas Eve, I joined some thirty other people on board the Bou el Mogdad in St Louis. I’d gone for the basic cabin, so no en-suite bathroom, but it was comfortable and well-appointed, and I changed into the smartest clothes I had packed ready for a special dinner, as the French have their main Christmas celebration on the evening of the 24th. It didn’t disappoint: a free cocktail to start, followed by foie gras and then a plate full of langoustine and giant prawns…

Most of the other passengers were, as I’d expected, tourists from France, but there were also a few Germans and a Pole who all spoke good English, so thankfully I didn’t have to spend the whole week struggling to make myself understood in French.

It was a leisurely week. There are not too many tourist sites in this part of the country, but there were excursions to the Djoudj bird sanctuary with its enormous colony of nesting pelicans, to the sugar refinery at Richard Toll, to a couple of traditional villages and to the old fort at Podor. Much of the time we just sat around on the boat reading, chatting, drinking, looking out at the passing scenery – Senegal on one bank, Mauritania on the other – and trying to find shelter from the cold wind blowing off the desert to the north (I think this cruise would be better outside of the cold months of December and January).

After disembarking in Podor the other passengers went back to St Louis but I had decided to carry on, to see what I could of this little-visited corner of Senegal before going back to work in the New Year. Luckily one of the other passengers – the Polish guy – wanted to do the same, so I had company.

We started off touring the Ile a Morphil, a long windswept peninsula in the River Senegal once full of elephants but now noted for a number of old Sudanic style mosques and the remnants of a village destroyed by a sudden flood 15-odd years ago. From there we continued to Matam, and finally on to Bakel with its wonderful old French fort on a rocky promontory overlooking the river.

The plan was then to return to Dakar, but we managed only the first stage to Ouro Sogui before we were stopped in our tracks by a national transport strike.

Ouro Sogui is a small crossroads town some 890km from Dakar, with a couple of small hotels, a couple of petrol stations, and not much else. But so far from the capital and tourist centres, the local people are friendly and hospitable, and we were soon offered a place to wait in a local house. We spent a relaxed few hours there starting with a big shared tiep-bou-djen lunch (the rice, fish and vegetable mix which is generally considered to be the national dish of Senegal), followed by a few glasses of delicious Mauritanian-style mint tea, and then a reading of the cowrie shells by the old next-door-neighbour. The shells are thrown, together with a token monetary donation, and the initiated can read in them something of your situation and future. Apparently.

In my case, the man 'reading' the shells wanted to say something about my son, but when I explained that I don’t have one he told me that I will have – and a daughter too. When he found out that I also don’t have any cattle, or any goats, he was quite surprised and told me that I should get some as they would bring me happiness. I’m not sure that my landlady would be so keen on that idea... He also read in the shells that I had recently seen a big snake. When I recalled that I had seen a small snake in Chad in October he beamed with satisfaction – “see how the cowries can see everything!” Unfortunately they could not see when the strike would end.

Back at our hotel, having declined the offer of a room for the night (my travel companion not being too keen on their outside village-style toilet) we were told that there was a rumour the strike would end at 8am the next day. So we set our alarms and were up and packed ready the next morning, but there was nothing again except for horses and carts.

Finally, however, a man told our hotel manager that a van driver was going to Richard Toll (halfway to Dakar) and was prepared to take us for a – reasonable – fee. We jumped in and seven squashed hours later, during which he had managed to kill both a pigeon and a dog on the road, we arrived in Richard Toll. Just in time for a pizza and a couple of martinis in the roadside fast-food restaurant, then a night’s sleep before getting up to a fully-functional transport system the next morning. & finally, around 8pm the next evening, I was home.

A regular Sunday

2011-11-21T03:52:00.000-08:00

I realise I should do more posts about my everyday life, or there is a danger that my readers think I spend my whole time looking at Bissauan islands, Chadian deserts and Congolese rivers… Some of you probably also think I live in a big villa with a swimming pool, which is equally far from the truth.

In fact I work pretty hard. I’m drafting this on a Sunday afternoon and have already done three hours of work today. So OK, as today is probably a fairly typical non-travelling Sunday, I will share it with you.

As usual I woke early, as the first call to prayer comes before 6am. The nearest mosque is a few blocks away, but they all broadcast their prayers pretty loudly and can’t really be escaped if you live in town. I could also hear my guard saying his prayers outside the window, and then just after 7am I heard him lock the gate behind him as he finished his shift; I persuaded the office long ago that I can do without daytime guards at the weekend.

Unable to go back to sleep I got up and showered and dressed. Trousers as usual, as some protection against stray mosquitoes in the house. Breakfast was porridge with a chopped up banana stirred in. Porridge brought back from my last trip to the UK – oats are not grown at this latitude so they are imported and therefore expensive here, also they are not part of the typical French diet and so a bit hard to track down. A banana because it’s about the only affordable fruit here that goes with porridge. In summer/autumn I get very nostalgic about the plums/peaches/nectarines/berries of the UK – they are sometimes available here, but expensive and always disappointing. I think they pick them before they are ripe in order to get them here undamaged, as they never seem to have any flavour – I’ve given up wasting money on them.

I had a glass of fruit juice with it too. Another thing that is not that easy to buy here, as the Senegalese tend to like sugar added to their fruit juice – even those labelled as ‘100% natural’ often have sugar lurking in them.

After three hours or so of work, I noticed it was after midday, which is when the sun comes round to the little enclosed area beside my house. Most Sundays I lie in the sun, sometimes for a couple of hours until the shade moves round, but often the heat drives me back indoors first. Even today, with a strong gusty wind, there was only an occasional light breeze that made it around the corner to my little suntrap.
But the rest of my garden/yard is overlooked, and it wouldn’t be acceptable in this conservative Moslem country to lie out in a bikini in view of the neighbours, so I have to make do with this airless bit of concrete between the washing machine and the guards’ toilet.

I listened to my iPod while I was out there – on the old stuff today, starting with Donna Summer, then Elvis Costello and finally a bit of the Doors. I mostly listen to African music (I have an enormous collection of it) but wanted a change today.

Lunch was a jam sandwich! Sometimes I have a salad, but often make do with the quick and easy sandwich. Not an English-style sandwich though – here the bread comes in baguettes, and the jam was made from mangoes that had fallen from my trees more quickly than I could eat them.

After doing nothing much for an hour or so while my lunch went down I went for a swim at the Olympic Pool. It’s ten minutes’ walk from my house, and only a $4 entrance fee, so a great amenity to live near, although being olympic-sized the water can get quite cool (too cold for me) as we get into the Senegalese ‘winter’. Today it was still warm enough, just an initial gasp as I got in. The wind made the water quite choppy, and probably was the reason why there were only seven of us there: me, two American women, three Chinese men and a Frenchman. The Senegalese stop going once the water temperature falls below about 30°C.

I did twenty lengths, then stood in the sun (and wind) for a few minutes to dry off before putting clothes back on over my bikini – the changing rooms are badly lit and smell of urine – and wandering home feeling virtuous!

Another hour’s work, then some personal ‘admin’: editing a few photos, adding a couple of CDs to my iTunes library, and now drafting this post. Dinner will be a mix of onion, garlic, cumin, tomatoes, pumpkin and rice, all stewed up together, with a few stoned black olives thrown in. I don’t eat meat at home, and rarely even eat fish, as there tend to be so few vegetables or salads available when I’m travelling that I usually come home with a craving for them. There’s an element of laziness in there too, as I find vegetable dishes (or at least the type I eat) generally quicker and easier to cook than meat. I may have a glass of sangria with it – they sell it by the litre carton here and it’s easier to store than wine, which sometimes goes off in the heat.

Finally I’ll either listen to the BBC World Service or read a chapter or two of a book – probably the one I’ve started on my Kindle, as with the little reading light I have in the cover I find it more convenient than a physical book, easier to find a comfortable perch somewhere (whether in bed or lying on the settee) without worrying about getting enough light to read by.

You will have noticed the solitude. I spoke to the cashier at the pool, and said good evening to my guard when he turned up at 7pm, but otherwise saw no-one all day. & that is how I like my Sundays.

The Chadian desert

2011-11-02T14:15:00.000-07:00

Our guide had focussed our attention on the chance of seeing the Saharan nile crocodile in the pool at the end of our two hour scramble through the gorge - a pretty special sighting as there are only 7 or 8 of this specialised type of nile crocodile left alive in the world, now confined to this small pool.

However after seeing one of the crocs I turned my head to look down the gorge to my left, and found myself almost speechless as I gazed on one of the most beautiful views I have ever seen in my life. We were at the Guelta d'Archeï in Chad, one of the very few places in the whole of the Ennedi Massif (a region of eroded sandstone mountains covering an area the size of Switzerland) where there is a guaranteed year-round supply of water. In this year of low rainfall for Chad, it meant that camel owners came from far and wide to water their animals and as I looked down the Guelta from a ledge high in the mountain-side I could see and hear some 120 camels happily splashing about in the water.

I was with a party of 11 other tourists in this difficult and little-visited country. I say 'difficult' in terms of permits, etc, but also in terms of the lack of infrastructure. Only a few hundred kilometres of the 3,300 we covered in our trip were paved; mostly we were driving through sand, stone and rocks. When we made it to one of the few small towns there was virtually nothing to buy, so our breakfasts consisted of rock-hard dried up bread with jam, with milk powder in the tea or coffee. We were camping so toilets were open-air behind bushes or rocks (or on occasion just sufficiently far from the rest of the group for some privacy), and our daily ablutions were from one small bowl of water.

But lying on my mattress at night looking up at all the stars, listening to the eerie sound of the jackals calling, felt very special even when the wind was blowing desert dust and sand into my sleeping bag.

As well as the stunning Guelta d'Archeï we saw many other wonderful desert vistas (eroded pillars, camel trains on the dunes, etc) and the region is famous for its many rock arches as well as it's 3,000-year-old cave paintings of horses, camels, people and cattle, which seemed to be everywhere.

Encounters with people were difficult, as the nomadic Tubu tribe do not like visitors. When we went to look at a salt pan we were approached by three Tubu men with knives in their hands - they were only checking up on why we were there but it is the usual way in which they approach strangers. We were repeatedly warned, though, that they can be quick to use their knives, particularly if they see that they are being photographed.

We saw a surprising amount of wildlife, ranging from an amazing Saharan spiny-tailed lizard to my favourite, the beautiful little fennec foxes, as well as patas monkeys, baboons, dorcas gazelles, jackals, a sand viper and all kinds of impressive-looking insects. We saw quite a number of birds too, including nubian bustards, various storks and the national bird of Chad, the black crowned crane.

But that view down the Guelta d'Archeï, with the sound of all those bellowing camels echoing around the gorge, is one of those that I tried to burn into my brain, so I can close my eyes and imagine it again whenever I find myself in a stressful situation. I would say it is in the top three views that I have seen in the whole world.

The land that time forgot

2011-10-04T10:28:00.000-07:00

From the excitement and adventure of the Congo, my next trip was so different: the peace and tranquility of Guinea Bissau. One of my favourite countries, I always try to take the opportunity to add on a little personal time after business trips here.

This time it was just a long weekend, but that was enough to visit the island of Bolama. To get there I had to take a “canoa” – one of the traditional wooden boats that transport people and goods between the islands – some 30m long, and I’d guess about 150 of us passengers. Pretty packed, but not dangerously so, and to my surprise on the way there they handed out life jackets, although admittedly only enough for about half the people on board. The trip was very pleasant as I’d found space to sit on the side of the boat so I spent a relaxing three hours watching the sea, the pelicans and the mangroves.

The town of Bolama was the capital of Guinea Bissau from 1879 to 1941. Consequently it has quite a few grand old colonial buildings as well as such luxuries as pavements, street lights, parks and even a public swimming pool. Except that the buildings have lost their roofs and have trees growing out of the walls, the street lights don’t work, many of the streets have long since disappeared beneath the bush and even those that remain are now rutted dirt tracks, the parks are overgrown and of course the swimming pool is empty. The place is dripping with atmosphere but really is fighting a losing battle with nature, as there is no money to maintain anything there. In fact a local told me that when the president visited the island a few years ago, some money was found to buy fuel for the electricity generating station and all the street lights came on – it must have been quite a sight.

Very few of the old buildings are locked or boarded up, so you can wander around them at will. I went inside the old colonnaded town hall and the tiled floors are largely undamaged although covered in bird and bat droppings, but the shutters are hanging off, most of the windows are broken and in a couple of places you can see the sky through the holes in the ceiling and roof. Piles of broken tiles lie on the back veranda. I find it very strange that the town isn’t UNESCO listed and protected from further damage. If I had the money I would love to buy and restore one of the old buildings, set up a little museum of the history (photos of Bolama as it was in its heyday, something about the Portuguese slave trade, maybe also something on the local religion as I saw a fetish outside one house so clearly the traditional beliefs have not been totally eclipsed by Catholicism), perhaps with a little café attached (I saw oranges and mangoes on sale, but there is nowhere to buy a fruit juice). It wouldn’t make money but would provide a job or two for the locals, and maybe generate a little more pride in the history so that in time it would be possible to organise a group of volunteers to clear the bush away from one of the parks…

I don’t know how many tourists visit Bolama. As we are at the tail end of the rains it is not yet the tourist season, and I was the only foreigner in town. The only proper hotel (also with a restaurant attached) was still closed but thankfully the budget accommodation – mattress and bucket shower in the cement block rooms – was open so I was able to stay there. Eating meant buying something (bread and a tin of sardines) from the small market as there were no restaurants open, although with the help of some locals and a torch I did find one bar on the edge of the town that was cooking up chunks of goat meat for my first evening.

The island apparently has three rather good beaches – white sand, coconut palms and clear turquoise water – but all are many kilometres away from the town so I opted instead just to go out walking. A long trail goes along the spine of the 22km-long island, and I walked for many hours passing just two hamlets, an empty school (with two barn owls roosting inside!), and just a handful of local people passing on bicycles or motorbikes. The locals mostly leave you in peace, especially when your Portuguese is limited to “good day” and “fine thank you”, although an irritating minority of those who can speak some English or French are hard to shake off. Four different men told me they loved me within the space of one day despite my assurances that I was happily married. That was though the only negative aspect to my stay there. I continue to wonder what can be done to publicise this country as a tourist destination as it really is a wonderful place – and the people badly need the revenue.

Last post on the Congo

2011-09-14T06:03:00.000-07:00

I think I could keep on doing more and more posts on the Congo, I just enjoyed my time in that country so much. However I will limit myself to this one further post, writing not about my adventures but about the (admittedly few) ‘sights’ there were to see on my trip.

Firstly, in Mbandaka, is the rock and plaque marking the equator. Well, more accurately a rock with a flat surface where there was once a plaque (since stolen by someone to cover a hole in their roof?), and a sign, now graffitied, marking “Here passes the equator line, Equator town 1883, near the geographic equator 0.18°”. In other words, someone once thought the equator passed through there (probably H M Stanley); now with more sophisticated equipment we know that it is in fact a few kilometres away, but the sign remains. As does an official sat nearby, checking IDs and demanding money from any visitors. So – where else but in the Congo – you pay a corrupt official to allow you to take a photo of a graffitied sign marking a spot that isn’t actually on the equator at all…

The second ‘sight’ was in Lisala, the birthplace of former president Mobutu. The commemorative plaque in the main square gives not his original name (Joseph Désiré Mobutu) but the name he awarded himself: Mobutu Sese Seko Kuko Ngbendu Wa Za Banga. This apparently means something like ‘the all-powerful warrior who goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake’. I don’t know about the fire, but he certainly left in his wake a country depleted of all the assets left to them at independence (working electricity and water supplies, industries, etc). More interestingly, there was still the shell of a house of his in this town. Looted of anything of value when Mobutu fell (apart from the marble that rebels couldn’t remove), you could still see that the house would have been lovely in its day, with lots of open terraces and balconies and a wonderful setting on a hill overlooking the river. Now it is used as a makeshift school, but I hope one day someone can restore its grandeur and turn it into a hotel.

Finally, I had a bonus at the end of my trip, as the enforced delay in waiting for rearranged international flights gave me the opportunity to visit the bonobo sanctuary outside Kinshasa, which rescues and rehabilitates orphaned bonobos. Bonobos (sometimes known as pigmy chimps) are man’s closest relative. Watching one female breast-feeding and playing with her baby, the veins and wrinkles clearly visible on her hairless arms, only the face reminded you that she was not a human being. According to the information posted they are the only animals besides humans to kiss using their tongues, although I have to admit I didn't see any of them kissing. They are interesting animals though and I spent an enjoyable few hours at the sanctuary.

The babies are much hairier but very cute.
As you can see, apart from the great river itself, there are not actually that many tourist sights in the Congo. Tourists are extremely rare, and in most villages we visited the people did not understand what we meant when we said we were tourists. "Why have you come here?" To see the country. "Yes, but why? What do you want here? Have you come for our diamonds?" was not atypical. One day we wanted permission to walk around in the forest behind a village, so asked the chief's permission as is customary. As he could not comprehend the concept of tourism our guide ended up telling him that we were kind of ambassadors for our countries - that we wanted to see whether the Congo was now a safe place to invest in. We got permission for our walk, but were accompanied by a party of village elders (so no chance of my stopping to look at birds) and I felt quite guilty that they thought our visit might lead to some kind of investment.

Notwithstanding that local people didn't understand the purpose of our visit, and that they nearly all asked us for donations (food, money, clothes - or in one case a man asked me for my watch), they were friendly and welcoming. & they are truly poor. For those in paid employment, $360 a year is a typical salary (for example for a junior teacher or civil servant), whilst it costs $120 a year to send one child to school. So I suppose their asking these visitors in their nice clothes, with their cameras, and their generator on their obviously comfortable boat, for a handout of some kind is not unreasonable. Not that many of them even knew what a camera was.

Further into the heart of darkness

2011-09-07T02:22:00.000-07:00

By midnight on 30 August I was supposed to be back home asleep in Dakar, but in fact I was sat on a blue plastic chair wedged into a wooden pirogue, motoring up the River Congo from Lisala to Bumba. We’d woken up on the Sunday to hear that our flight back to Kinshasa had been cancelled. I wasn’t too pleased as this meant missing my subsequent flights, Kinshasa-Nairobi and Nairobi-Dakar, but of course there was nothing at all I could do. There was no flight due the next day, either, but it seemed that there would be one on the Tuesday. We heard from the airline that there would be enough people for it to run, the director of Lisala airport confirmed it was on his flight plan, and the travel agency sold us tickets. So we contacted Kinshasa and confirmed amended dates for the international flights.

So on the Tuesday morning I packed up my stuff ready and went in to breakfast – only to be told that the airline had decided that morning to use the plane to fly somewhere else instead, somewhere with more waiting passengers so they could make more money.

But there was a solution. The next day there was a cargo flight due to go to Kinshasa from the town of Bumba, only 120km upriver from Lisala. So the guide negotiated the hire of another engine, we packed our stuff into the pirogue, and set off for Bumba (with the guide’s poor wife by now suffering from a bout of malaria). It was a long ride, and unnerving to travel in a pirogue in a dark, moonless night, but eventually at 1:30 the next morning we arrived in Bumba – cold, hungry and tired. Miraculously there were no officials in sight but it took over an hour to find a hotel in the dark, and we finally got to bed after 3am, hoping that this time the flight would materialise.

It did, and what an experience! An old Russian Antonov plane with Russian pilots, packed with assorted cargo: a 4WD car, a set of plastic chairs, sacks of maize and cassava, bunches of plantains, a frightened pig, a goat, and crates and baskets containing at least 100 very noisy grey parrots! Plus six passengers wedged between it all.

So we finally got back to Kinshasa, then spent a frustrating day in and out of airline company offices and internet cafés trying to rearrange our international flights. The day was livened up a little though by a peaceful march of people demanding more transparency in the registrations for November’s presidential election, followed by riot police firing tear gas (it is the opposition apparently wanting more transparency), stones thrown at the police and more tear gas. Several passers-by ran into the internet café to escape, with their eyes red and streaming from the tear gas, but inside we felt only a slight prickle for a moment or two, thankfully.

& finally, $320 down, I had rearranged flights to get me home from Kinshasa, with just enough time to go out for a beer and fried termites to celebrate.

Travelling through the Congo

2011-09-06T13:07:00.000-07:00

It all started when Hewa Bora airlines crashed on landing in Kisangani in July, so were grounded by the authorities. Or was is when Filair crashed in Bandundu last year, the plane unbalanced when all the passengers rushed to the front supposedly to avoid a crocodile that had escaped from someone’s bag? Either way, the result was a shortage of domestic flights within the DRC, meaning that neither passenger nor cargo flights were now guaranteed to operate even when scheduled and confirmed.

So the spare engine for our boat the “Go Congo” was stuck in Kinshasa for lack of a cargo flight to get it to where it was needed, and we started our trip along the river with just the one 55hp engine.

It should have been enough. But on our third day we encountered a boat in trouble – a tug towing four barges packed with people and cargo was floating out of control in the middle of the river with its engine broken down. There was only limited help we could give as the boat was probably eight times our size, but left in the river like that it would have been at the mercy of the current until it eventually hit a sandbank, where it could have been stuck for months until the river levels rise during the rainy season. By this time many passengers would have run out of food and money and might even have died – that is the way things are in the Congo.

So we came up alongside and pushed them, slowly, to the riverbank. At least that way they could moor and people could get off to hunt meat or seek alternative means of getting somewhere.

But it was a good deed we came to regret as our own engine was damaged by the strain, and packed up completely the next afternoon. & we had no spare. Thankfully with our smaller boat it was not too difficult for some passing fishermen in their pirogues to tow us to the bank (for a fee, of course). But then what were we to do?

Well the first thing was to deal with the officials. So far we had encountered various officials (soldiers, marines, police, civil guards, immigration, customs, intelligence…) at every village we had pulled in to. They were drawn to us – a boat with three white people on it – like moths to a flame. Often drunk, their sole intent was to extort money out of us. Thankfully the guide, a Belgian who has lived in the Congo for 18 years, knew how to deal with them – when to crack jokes, when to shout and argue and when to get them a round of beers – and he always managed to get the payment down to a reasonable level.

We hadn’t been moored for long when some naval officers found us. These guys were not drunk, but it turned out they had been using gunpowder (removing it from their bullets and snorting it) to get high. So the Aussie and I quietly ignored them whilst the guide began the ‘negotiations’. They are not dangerous (so we were told) if you are white and reasonably confident, as they know we are more likely than the locals to make official complaints about any abuse, but it can still be a bit hair-raising to those of us not used to the situation.

By the evening there were seven armed officers roaming the boat, and at times the negotiations turned into a shouting match between them and the guide, but eventually he got them down from their initial $300 demand to a more reasonable $12 plus dinner, and all in return for their agreeing to guard our boat from bandits during the night.

Meanwhile negotiations with another visitor to the boat had got us the loan of a 15hp engine, enough for us to take our pirogue (attached to the back of our boat) to the nearby town of Mankanza where there was a good chance of being able to hire two 25hp engines to power the boat. Mankanza was some 3-4 hours away, they told us. So we set off around nine the next morning. Around 2pm it began raining so we took shelter in a village. How far was it to Mankanza, we asked? They all agreed that it was 40km away, but as estimates of when we might arrive ranged from 1pm (?) to 10pm, we pressed them further. Then it transpired that Mankanza was not 40km away from where we were, but 40km away from somewhere else. Of course. 40km from the village of Bolombo, which we might expect to arrive at by around 5pm.

Amazingly we did indeed arrive at 5pm, having negotiated en route in a village the loan of one 25hp engine. We set up our tents in the village and had some dinner (fish, cassava and greens) whilst the owner of the 15hp engine and one of our crew set off back to the boat with the 25hp engine – they were to catch us up in Mankanza the next day.

We had a nice stay in the village (despite all the rats in the toilet), and with a lift from a village pirogue, arrived in Mankanza the next day, around midday. Our boat didn’t arrive that day, however, nor the next day. One aspect of life in the Congo is the lack of any means of communication, with no mobile phone coverage and of course no internet (and indeed no electricity to power phones or computers in any case), so we could only sit and wait.

But on the third day they came. We were told that they had been held up because naval officers had stopped them on the way back to our boat, demanding money to buy twenty crates of beer (they knew they had come from our boat so assumed they must have money on them). When they did not get what they wanted they held a gun to our crew member’s head, forced him to crouch down and whipped him across his back. He was quite a timid character and our guide explained that this can happen to Congolese who do not stand up to the officials. Quite shocking that people should have to take such treatment!

We had managed to hire a second 25hp engine in Mankanza, so once another round of ‘negotiations’ was concluded with all concerned, we were on our way. It was now Wednesday afternoon and we still had 220km to do to get to our destination, Lisala, by Saturday evening as we were flying out of there back to Kinshasa on the Sunday.

It was nice to be back on the big boat again, with space to walk around, a toilet and bucket shower on the back, and a more reliable source of cold beer for my fellow traveller. It was also a good vantage point from which to observe the life of the local people, as they raced their pirogues up to our boat to try to sell us fresh fish/dried fish/bananas/beetle larvae/tree squirrels/dried monkeys/small crocodiles - or in one case a sitatunga (large antelope) they had just killed while out hunting with their dogs. We bought and ate their fish, bananas and even beetle larvae but refused the bushmeat as it is now illegal to eat it following pressure on the Congo to put an end to hunting of its wildlife (and I must say I saw no wildlife on this trip other than birds and squirrels).

Our progress, without the big engine, was slow, even though we slept on the boat to save the time of setting up camp in a village each night. Concerned about getting to Lisala in time for our flight we even kept going right through the night on the Friday, but we were still 120km away on Saturday morning so we transferred our luggage to the faster little pirogue and set off at speed – finally arriving around 8pm for a night in the Catholic Mission before our flight the next morning.

From Mombasa to Kinshasa

2011-09-05T03:46:00.000-07:00

I spent a few days in Kenya visiting my Mum, taking her and her husband Chapati to dinner to celebrate her 70th birthday. Yes, 70th!! She doesn’t look it, doesn’t act it and says she doesn’t feel it. Maybe perpetual youth is one of the benefits that comes from being with a younger man…

They still seem as happy as ever together, and although the money is tight and Mum has had malaria now eight times, she would not be anywhere else.

Our few days together were quickly over though, and I flew on to Kinshasa, and from there to the town of Mbandaka a further 700km up the River Congo, for the start of a holiday in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I was more excited than I’ve been about a holiday for a long time, as I have wanted to travel on this river for years. Originally I expected to take one of the public barges between Kinshasa and Kisangani, but given their irregularity and their propensity to break down or get stuck on sandbanks for weeks/months, it was something I was never able to arrange. Then I spotted this organised trip on a traditional-style Congolese longboat, ten days cruising between Mbandaka and Lisala (the middle third of the river between Kinshasa and Kisangani), camping in small villages and fishing camps on the banks each night, and decided this was the way to do it.

To my surprise there was only one other tourist on the trip, a laid-back Australian guy, and with us were the owner/guide, his wife the cook, his son and the crew. We settled in, ordered a beer and sat back to watch the life on the river.

Cruising in the Arctic Circle

2011-08-01T05:06:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it was a reaction to over four years living and working in a hot climate that made me finally book that trip to the Svalbard Archipelago that had been on my “To do one day” list for so long. The Archipelago, part of Norway but hundreds of kilometres away from its mainland, is better known to some people by the name of its main island, Spitsbergen. Formerly dominated by coal-mining, and before that by whaling, it now makes most of its money from tourism, from people like me going to see the polar bears before they’re all gone. 2,400 of them living in the Archipelago at present!

The walruses were also an attraction, as were the reindeer and a small but interesting variety of birds. So I booked myself onto a cruise – triple share, to keep the costs down - and begged and borrowed a collection of warm winter clothes from friends and acquaintances in London.

The first shock though, before I’d even registered the cold, was the 24-hour daylight. Of course I knew to expect it – in theory – but I was still not prepared to arrive at my hotel to check in for the first night at 1:30am with the sun shining! It continued to surprise me and other guests on the ship for the whole cruise, as we sat round talking in the bar, or watching for seals and whales from the bridge, only to be reminded by someone that it was already well after midnight and that breakfast, as usual, was at 7:30. It’s rather nice but does take some discipline to ensure you get to bed at a reasonable hour!

In fact the light was the main thing I enjoyed about the tour. Many afternoons there was a kind of ‘sunset’ period, when there were orange, pink and purple tinges to the sky, and the sunlight often seemed more silver than its usual golden colour – more like a strong moonlight. Perhaps it was all the water and ice that made it look like that, and perhaps more noticeable to me than those from more northerly latitudes as it was such a contrast to the strong, bright African sun. But it was really beautiful.

One of the first wildlife sightings was of a big pod of beluga whales, all around our little zodiacs. These whales are totally white – very strange. Apparently when the whalers started visiting the area a few hundred years ago there were so many whales there that they had to force the ship through them the same way they would through ice! Almost impossible to believe that now, when there are so few whales left there. & what was diplomatically left unsaid by the guides was that Norway still allows whaling today – as evidenced by the whale on the menu in the Radisson Hotel on the island.

Later the same day, just as we were setting out on a walk to search for some tundra birds, came the call to get back to the zodiacs – QUICKLY – as a polar bear had been spotted. It was a couple of kilometres away, but by the time we had got our life jackets on and were all in the zodiacs the bear was half way towards us. They can run faster than humans but even when apparently just ambling along they actually cover distances surprisingly quickly.

The bear made its way towards the beach we had been on, as we cruised along in the zodiacs, cameras snapping away. Having missed the chance of lunch there, it stepped into the sea and swam – again quite quickly – at least a kilometre across a channel between two islands. We now understood why we always had to be accompanied by someone with a gun!

We had two more polar bear sightings during the week, another lone male and also a female with two cubs. Despite their dangerous reputation, they are of course very attractive animals. I’m still trying to decide which of my 48 polar bear photos I can delete…

I think most people’s next favourite animal, mine included, was the walrus. They are actually quite unpleasant when on land – fat and ungainly, constantly scratching themselves, and absolutely foul-smelling – but when they drag themselves into the water they are suddenly transformed into powerful, agile and even graceful creatures.

We also saw seals (ringed, bearded and hooded – and for those still up at 3am a large group of harp seals), and reindeer, though sadly no arctic fox. Our planned trip to the base of some cliffs of nesting birds where foxes often patrol was thwarted by a load of pack ice which our ship couldn’t break through. The birds were nice too, including puffins, the beautiful sabine’s gull and a red-throated diver on its nest. Back on the island the day the cruise ended three of us also managed to see ptarmigan.

Some of the passengers on the ship were quite interesting too. The sixth best twitcher in the world (8,383 species of birds seen including his first ever little auk on this trip), a world traveller with only eight countries still left to visit, and one man rich enough to take a family of six on the trip and to drink champagne with dinners on several days – I googled his name when I got back to find he is in the Sunday Times Rich List and worth some $300m! & thankfully my room mate (only one, luckily, as the triple share would have been horribly cramped with three people) was nice enough.

For those interested, the cruise took us almost to 81°N, which I think is some 5-600km from the North Pole. One afternoon we all landed on the sea ice somewhere north of the 80° line and drank a celebratory hot chocolate with Baileys! As for the weather, well we had a couple of cold days, particularly when that icy wind was blowing, although with three layers of clothes on my legs and six layers on my upper body I didn’t find it too bad. The main problem was how to keep nose and cheeks warm. We also had some fairly warm days - 12°C on one day!

My overriding memory of it all though is that wonderful silvery light.

(borrowed a colleague's laptop - seems the problems with the photos is specific to my laptop)

A few weeks in England 2

2011-07-28T06:23:00.000-07:00

I don't know exactly why blogger (google) would not let me attach a photo to my post on my few weeks in England, nor can I attach it (or any other photo) to this separate post. I get the following error message (following on from the Internet Explorer message that it cannot display the required web page):

"BlogID: required field must not be blank"

Which field? Any techie readers out there who can help me?

A few weeks in England

2011-07-16T02:10:00.000-07:00

As ever, a trip back to the UK stirred very mixed feelings.

A conference, a training workshop and visits to family and friends over a period of several weeks has meant that I have got to many different parts of the country. I had some lovely walks along the white cliffs of Dover and the undercliff on the Isle of Wight, amongst the colleges of Oxford and deep into the Yorkshire dales. It reminded me how beautiful the country is, though also how cold and wet it can be even in the heart of summer.

I had less time than I would have liked to enjoy the culture – I managed a superb concert at the Barbican (Konono No. 1 and Kasai Allstars in a “Congotronics v Rockers” evening) but didn’t manage the Afghanistan treasures exhibition at the British Museum, Viva Riva at the cinema or Richard III at the Old Vic. Shopping was also curtailed, this time by a lack of space to carry any purchases home, although I did find room for a Kindle and the time to load on over 100 free books (from The Iliad and Zen Buddhism to A Tale of Two Cities and The Communist Manifesto).

I was struck this time by the effects of the recession. Several well-known names went under whilst I was here (including Habitat and Jane Norman), Oddbins had already gone, and others such as Thorntons and HMV seem to be struggling. There were less people out shopping, and those who were out must be spending less judging by the predominance of Primark bags. & in a way I can’t quite explain, the place seemed quite shabby. Shabby morals (the News International phone hacking scandal following on from last year’s revelations on MPs’ expenses), shabby manners (too many people pushing their way onto the tube while others were still trying to get off) and lots of things of low quality. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that the megabus turned up 45 minutes late and had a toilet that didn’t flush given the £2.50 return fare from London to Leeds.

& worst of all, so many of the British population seem to be addicted to their mobile phones, frantically tapping away into them and oblivious to the real world around them.

I say all of this with the personal backdrop of wondering where I am going to go next, when my contract in Senegal ends, and where I am going to end up settling down. I love London in so many ways, and of course it is easier administratively to live in your own country than overseas, and so whenever I come “home” I have that question in the back of my mind as to whether or not I could live here again. I continue to miss London’s amazing cultural output, and I’m sure I will always feel a core of Britishness (a pride in our history and our inventiveness as a people) but apart from that there is less and less that draws me back. The problem may come down to whether I can find anywhere else to take its place.

A regular Sunday

2011-06-03T06:46:00.000-07:00

I had a little telling off recently from one of my readers, reminding me that bloggers are not supposed to just go quiet, not posting for over a month, leaving their readers wondering what has happened to them. The trouble is, when you get to your fifth year of living and travelling in the same places there is far less to write about. Things that once seemed strange become routine, and none of you want to read about the routine parts of my life, do you?

But as there has been nothing interesting happening over the last month or so I will oblige my readers by telling you about last Sunday.

I woke up in a hotel room in Monrovia. I got up, showered and dressed, with the CNN news on in the background, and finished packing my stuff into my suitcase, then went down to breakfast. This hotel has a little open terrace attached to its restaurant, so unusually no need to take a cardigan to protect me from the air conditioning. I collected a bowl of papaya and mango, a yoghurt and some rolls with butter and jam and sat down out on the terrace. Ignoring the foreground buildings, there was a nice view – a few trees, a small lagoon and beyond that a sandy ridge and then the ocean. I thought sadly how I’d not had time to walk down there, the usual story when I’m away on these visits. I’d been working during all the daylight hours all week (plus a few late nights), with just a couple of hours off the previous afternoon but at that time there was a major storm, with thunder and lightning and heavy rain. The rainy season has already started in Liberia and we’d had many impressive storms during the week.

Breakfast over, I took my suitcase down to reception to check out, five minutes before the driver was due to collect me for the long drive to the airport. But someone had changed the password on the hotel computer, so the receptionists couldn’t get into the system to retrieve my bill. I waited whilst they made several phone calls in an attempt to track down the password, as several more guests came down to check out. Meanwhile no driver had appeared from my organisation, but I overheard a couple of other guests asking if the hotel-airport shuttle bus was on its way, so I slid my case over next to theirs – one problem solved!

Finally, half an hour later, the receptionists got our bills printed, we all paid and I got into the bus (apologising to the other occupants who’d had the foresight to pay their bills the night before).

Check in at the airport was uneventful, the flight was on time (which makes a nice change), and we arrived in Accra at around 12:30. Kotoka International Airport in Accra is not set up for transit passengers, but I already knew where to stand and wait for the man who deals with transit passengers. Normally the first step is for him to laboriously write all our details into a big register, before ushering us past passport control to collect our luggage, but today there was one man with only twenty minutes to make his connection, so we were all taken with him straight through a side door and along innumerable passageways to finally arrive in the departure hall, where the man at the Emirates check-in desk confirmed that his flight was already closed. At this point the rest of us pointed out that none of us yet had our luggage. “Do you know the way back to the luggage hall – the regular way?” we were asked.

Yes, we did – outside, across the road, down the slip road into the car park, under the tunnel and into the arrivals area. Surprisingly only one person stopped us to ask why we were going through customs, etc in the wrong direction, and so we collected our luggage and made the same journey back to the departure hall.

By this time it was after 1pm, but the Nigeria Airways check-in didn’t open until 6pm so there were still five hours to kill, with no lounge to wait in and no real point in spending money going into Accra as I had my luggage to deal with. Besides, I didn’t have a valid Ghanaian visa, so strictly shouldn’t be leaving the airport although there was nothing in practice, apart from my luggage, to stop me doing so.

So I found myself a seat and settled down to wait. I had a book with me, and had sat near a TV showing Super Sport 3 (one advantage this airport has above others in the region), so managed to entertain myself reading the book from cover to cover and watching a repeat of Gary Neville’s testimonial match from the previous week.

Eventually it got to 6pm, so I went through the check-in process. First to customs who took a quick look in my case before putting their chalk marks on it, then to the weighing machine where I collected my little hand-written slip of paper showing that I had one suitcase weighing 9kg, and finally to the check-in desk. Where I was told there was something wrong with my ticket so I would have to go to the Nigeria Airways office to get it sorted out. I did so, back to check in, then up the stairs to passport control.

Here when I got near the front of the queue my passport and boarding pass was examined to ensure I had all I needed to pass to one of the desks. I explained that I didn’t have an exit form because I was in transit. “What time did you get here?” the official asked me. I told him, and to my surprise he asked to see my visa. I explained that I didn’t have a visa, that I hadn’t left the airport but had been in transit there all day. He got quite cross with me and told me that a transit visa was needed by anyone with more than five hours between their flights – but that he would let me off this time.

(I checked later and he was right, I should have had a transit visa)

Of course as I went through the x-ray bit they called me over to search my bag – thoroughly too. Apparently an old lipstick at the bottom looked suspicious on the x-ray machine.

Through all of the formalities, I went to the small bar to get something to eat and drink, and as I sat there I looked down at my boarding pass for the first time. It said that my destination was Banjul, not Dakar, and my heart sank for a moment – but fortunately my luggage tag said Dakar. I knew my ticket was for Dakar (the next stop after Banjul) so I figured that the check-in clerk had probably just written Banjul by mistake, but in any case, once I was on the flight, no-one would realise I was supposed to get off in Banjul…

Nobody said anything at Banjul, and I finally got out of the airport in Dakar at 1.30am, brushed off the hustlers trying to sell me phone cards or change money, and argued over the price of a taxi. I got home at about 2am and went quickly to bed knowing that I had to be up again in six hours to go to the office.

So now you see how some parts of my life out here can be pretty uninteresting!

The morning after

2011-04-16T03:17:00.000-07:00

Checked out the damage in the hotel lobby this morning - not much of it, but it seems that the soldiers did fire shots inside the lobby:

Also thinking how lucky I am that they didn't smash my little camera, as this is what they did to the CCTV camera at reception:

Anyway, you'll be pleased to hear that I'm off to the airport now, out of harm's way.

Soldiers that loot hotels in the night

2011-04-15T16:16:00.001-07:00

I posted the last blog rather too soon. Just a few minutes later I heard gunfire. I looked out the window but saw nothing, but then it came again, really loud this time. I assumed they must be in the street outside the front of the hotel, so I grabbed my camera and raced for the stairs, thinking that I might get a sneaky photo through the front doors of the hotel, or perhaps through the window of the bar. I was on the phone as I went down, as a colleague had called me to ask if I had heard the shots.

As I got to the lobby, I realised there was no-one there (maybe the staff were out the front of the hotel watching what was going on?), but I saw a spent cartridge on the floor which looked like a good souvenir. I picked it up, then as I stood back up a soldier came out of the hotel's office! I ran back towards the stairs, crying out to my colleague on the phone that they had come into the hotel, but of course the soldier had seen and heard me and came charging after me. It didn't seem like a good idea to run from a fit young soldier carrying a machine gun so I stopped, put my hands up and turned towards him. He grabbed the camera, and I initially resisted but then realised that was also not a good idea so I let him take it but asked, begged, him to please give it back.

He beckoned me to follow him then when we got back to the lobby he said "Wait!". I stood there, waiting, until a different soldier came in and I explained that I was waiting to get my camera back from his colleague - that it had little value to them but much to me. He motioned towards the chairs so I went and sat down, and continued to wait while the soldiers ransacked the office area and the till area in the adjoining bar. One of them saw I was watching and snapped at me to look away. My heart was thudding and it occurred to me to give up on the camera and quietly leave when they were not watching and make my way back to the stairs, but that wasn't without risk and I had the feeling they were not going to hurt me so I waited.

Eventually - well, it probably wasn't long but it felt like an age - I sensed the soldiers walking up behind me. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to turn round to them at this stage, so started to turn slowly, but then realised that one of them was holding the camera towards me. I took it, smiled and thanked them, and walked away slowly, back to my room, heart still pounding.

Well I wanted adventure but perhaps that was just a little too close for comfort!

Soldiers that pass in the night

2011-04-15T11:40:00.000-07:00

Soldiers in the Presidential Guard mutinied here in Ouagadougou last night. In the centre of town I think the gunfire was heard early on, but at my hotel out in the distant suburbs it wasn’t until one in the morning when the noise woke me. I got up and went to the window, and there driving slowly along the street beside the hotel was a 4x4 army pick-up with soldiers in the back firing their guns repeatedly into the air.

Two weeks earlier there had been trouble in the capital, so I guessed the grievances had resurfaced and things had sparked off in the night. But the soldiers drove off and the sound of their gunfire faded away. I opened the window and leaned out to see if there was anything else going on, but there was nothing other than a fairly strong smell of what I guess must have been gunpowder. So I went back to bed.

Then in the morning, waiting and waiting for the office car to turn up at the hotel, I asked someone at reception what was going on. “No problem, Madame, don’t worry, all is calm” was the only response I could get. Impossible to get across that I wasn’t in the slightest bit worried (except at being late to a meeting), I just wanted to know what was going on. Eventually I got hold of a colleague to find that the office was closed (and the meeting was off) as it was deemed too dangerous for people to travel. She had heard lots of gunfire and spent most of the night on the floor of her hotel room in case soldiers fired at the hotel windows!

I turned my phone on and there was a missed call from the security officer. When I got through to him he told me about gunfire throughout the night, the president having fled the capital and soldiers looting shops and stealing cars in the centre of town. We were to stay in the hotel until further notice.

It all sounded very exciting, but in fact has been very dreary. Our hotel is far out of town, and there is no action here at all. Wouldn’t you expect to hear more gunfire, people rushing about and lots and lots of sirens as emergency vehicles speed past? Well there’s nothing. Just silence, broken by the odd local trundling past the hotel on their bicycle – like being out in the streets in the UK on Christmas Day, only it’s in the mid-40s centigrade here.

So I shall go to bed tonight with my camera left out just in case … probably unable to sleep through fear of missing something, when in fact nothing whatsoever will happen. & meanwhile wondering what on earth to do about the report we were supposed to finish today (after three weeks’ work) in collaboration with the country team, knowing that my team all fly home tomorrow.

A day in Rabat

2011-03-28T12:38:00.000-07:00

Getting around West Africa is a pain. After my last assignment in Guinea, a colleague had to return to his home in Burkina Faso. Look up Conakry and Ouagadougou on a map – they are not far apart. But to fly from one to the other? The best route available was Conakry (Guinea) – Bamako (Mali) – Abidjan (Ivory Coast) – Lome (Togo) – Niamey (Niger) – Ouagadougou (Burkina). A week later I had to fly from Dakar to Yaoundé in Cameroon. My trip wasn’t as complicated, but I had to choose between an overnight flight to Nairobi, that is from the far west coast of the continent to the far east coast, and from there back to Yaoundé, or an early morning flight to Casablanca, an 11-hour wait and then a night flight arriving at Yaoundé at 04:30 in the morning. I chose the latter, it being slightly cheaper.

This had the advantage however that the 11-hour wait in Casablanca enabled me to leave the airport and get on the train to Rabat, the Moroccan capital. A two-hour train ride away, but well worth it.

Rabat is a wonderful city. I started my whirlwind tour at the oldest part, the Roman ruins at the site of Chellah, where there are also remains of an Islamic minaret and necropolis from many centuries later, all surrounded by a thick, turreted wall. Another attraction there is the collection of white stork nests in the trees and on the tops of the minaret and other ruins.
It is mating season right now, and there was a constant soundtrack of clacking bills of the mating stork couples. I saw them do this whilst in the act of mating, but also noticed that when a stork returned to its partner at the nest, both would throw their heads right back and make this clacking sound.

From Chellah I wandered through the immaculate administrative quarter of the city to Tour Hassan. This is the stump of a minaret – intended to have been the tallest in the world but never finished as Yacoub al-Mansour died in 1199 before completing it. The adjacent mosque was destroyed in the 1755 earthquake but the minaret stump remains, together with a forest of ruined columns and a beautiful marble mausoleum alongside it for Mohammed V.

From there through the old souk, rushing a bit as time was moving on but I had to stop to eat, some delicious fresh sardines with aubergine and tasty bread, followed by some juice and mint tea in a café beside the river, from where I could gaze at the fortifications of the old kasbah. I’d intended to visit the Andalusian gardens and the museum inside the royal palace, but in the end just had time for a quick ten minute walk around the streets of the kasbah, all painted blue and white and immaculately maintained, before rushing back to the train station for the two hour ride back to the airport.

You often hear stories of hassle in Morocco (although I must say I don’t remember much of that from a holiday there 15 years ago) but there was none at all in Rabat. Just smiles and a few officials saying “welcome to Morocco”. I have to hope that this rather inconvenient route is still the cheapest when I go back to Cameroon next year, as want to go back for another day in Rabat.

Street protests

2011-03-18T06:08:00.000-07:00

It never felt very likely that the unrest in the Arab countries would spread to sub-Saharan Africa, although I’ve heard many wishing for it. However the authorities are clearly nervous.

There are to be a number of demonstrations here in Dakar tomorrow, one to mark the 11th anniversary of the election of the current president, and others by various opposition groups, but demonstrations are not that unusual here. However, I was surprised to see on TV the other night a broadcast, like an advert, clearly addressing those planning to attend the demonstrations. “Stop violence” it started, with pictures of peaceful demonstrators behind the message. Then it went on to demand respect for the law, protection of the country’s stability and the need to keep the peace, ending finally with a demand to “Say no to violence”. The whole thing lasted for at least two minutes.

It’s true that there are many problems facing people here in addition to the ongoing issues that go with underdevelopment. As in the rest of the world, food prices keep rising - I guess this is the issue hurting people most at present. Unemployment is very high, particularly in the capital. & adding to the frustrations are the power cuts. We are used to having a couple of months with sporadic power cuts during the rainy season, but now we have power only around 50% of the day and this has been going on since last summer. It started with the purchase by the national electricity company of some dodgy fuel which damaged the generating plant, but subsequent audits have revealed delapidated machinery resulting from years of inadequate maintenance, plus a financial structure which means they are losing some $300,000 per day (as the electricity costs more to generate than they are selling it for – and it would not be a good time to put the price up!). No-one really knows when the issues will be resolved.

However, the Senegalese do not suffer from the political and social repression of many Arab countries. There is a free (and very vocal) press here, there is a real democracy, which the next elections due in 2012. & there is free association – people have the right to march, to demonstrate. Unfortunately though when the people are frustrated and angry, as they are now, demonstrations that start off peacefully can turn a bit nasty. We’ve had plenty of tires burnt in previous marches (why do people burn tires?), windows smashed, and even recently a bus was burnt in a protest about the energy situation (why a bus? how does that hurt the electricity company?). The police often get out the tear gas.

So whilst I don’t fear a full-scale revolt a la Libya, I think I may be staying indoors tomorrow.

Update since I drafted this last night: an email from the British Embassy warning us to avoid crowds and demonstrations because of potential violence.

After the five years

2011-03-12T11:32:00.000-08:00

I know that some of you are aware that my time out here - the five year contract that seemed like forever - is due to finish in less than six months. So I thought I should let you know that we have just agreed to extend my contract here for a further year. Another year after that might also be possible but seven years is the maximum time they allow in one location.

In the meantime though if colleagues in Panama or Nairobi should decide to move on, I would certainly apply for the vacancy. I have enjoyed living and travelling here, and would miss the region dreadfully if I moved, but at the same time I would like to see some new countries and cultures, so South America or East Africa would be good. & I do have to think of my future - another five year contract would be nice!

But anyway, for now I am due to remain here in Senegal until the end of August 2012, which at least gives me a bit of stability in the short term. More time in which to think about what I am going to do in the longer term. In some ways, a couple of years backpacking sounds very tempting ... but I'm a bit worried about what happens afterwards.

Suggestions/comments on a postcard please!

Reading Graham Greene

2011-02-23T10:34:00.000-08:00

I’ve been reading Greene’s “Journey Without Maps” as a companion to my current trip. He travelled from Freetown to Kailahun (in Sierra Leone) and across the border at Foya to Liberia, from there into Guinea and finally back into Liberia and down to the coast. For most of the four-week trip he was trekking through the forest with a retinue of porters.

He writes of the villages and the forest, of the rats and cockroaches in the former and the ants and boredom in the latter. He writes about the "devils" and the secret societies, but above all about the feeling of being a European in Africa. About the fear and the exhilaration that come, at the same time, from the absence of the European culture. Of the feeling I know so well that the heat, the unavoidable presence of the natural world, above all perhaps the rhythms (both in the sense of the natural rhythms of day and night, of sleeping and waking, but also of the rhythm of the drums) somehow bring us back to our origins. Of the supernatural that seems to be everywhere in Africa, the belief in witches and devils and good and bad spirits that you cannot get away from.

& I felt as though I was experiencing so much of the same, some 80 years later. I had travelled from Freetown to the Gola Forest on the borders of Liberia, to trek for three days in the forest, with porters carrying my tent and luggage. After the forest came a journey to Kailahun, and from there across the border at Foya into Liberia, and up into Guinea.

We had passed a masked devil parading through a village as we drove towards the forest, on his way with his attendants towards an initiation ceremony. & as I read about the rats running round at night in Greene's hut, I thought of the rat I discovered in my bedroom in Dakar last month (I turned my bedside light on to see what was making a noise and found myself staring at a rat), and like Greene I had felt somehow safe from it when I tucked my mosquito net in around me. I even found myself, as we drove past a steep-sided rocky hill in Guinea, being told by my guide the same tale that Greene had been told when he visited a high waterfall in Liberia - the tale of how humans used to be sacrificed there until the day when the person being sacrificed, as they were being pushed off the top, grabbed hold of the robe of the chief standing beside them and pulled the chief to his death too.

Of course Greene's situation was very different from mine. He had never been to Africa before yet set off on foot into the heart of a region where there was hardly any hint of European civilisation or culture to be found. I had the benefit of guide books and maps, and did the first part (the time off in the forest) with a well-known local guide and the second part (the journey up-country into Guinea) in a nice 4x4 with a driver from my NGO.

Times have changed too - I did not have to go and give presents to a chief every time we drove through a village. But the feeling of Africa to a European, at least to this one, remains the same. Whether "Heart of Darkness" or "Journey without Maps" it is still to travel to the origins of mankind, to the place where we come closest to our roots in the natural world. It is what I love about Africa.

River No 2 Beach

2011-02-23T10:31:00.000-08:00

My colleague got up earlier than the rest of us and walked along the beach to the spot where the fishermen come in. He examined the catch and chose three plump fish which he purchased for our lunch, before he joined us on the little terrace for breakfast: fresh mango, scrambled eggs and toast with coffee.

Then two of us decided to take the boat trip up the river. The boat was moored where the river joins the beach, where it twists and turns through the white sand, watched by herons and flocks of royal terns resting on the sandbars. We stepped gingerly into the boat, and the boatman started to row us upstream, firmly and rhythmically, the paddle first one side of the boat then the other, so we glided smoothly through the water. The white sand quickly gave way to mangroves, and the terns were replaced by blue-cheeked bee-eaters hunting insects over the river.

It didn’t take all that long (not as long as I would have liked) for us to reach the waterfall. Or rather, the jumble of rocks that separates the fresh water river from the salty tidal lower reaches. Only for a few months, during the height of the rainy season, is it a true waterfall.
But we moored the boat and scrambled up the rocks, to the deep, clear pool at the top. A giant monitor lizard that had been sunning itself lumbered off into the forest, and we were keeping our eyes peeled for the monkeys that sometimes go to that area to fish, apparently using their tails as bait. We saw a couple eventually, on the way back, but they were not, unfortunately, fishing.

As soon as I could after we got back to the mouth of the river I was in the water. The tide was going out which meant that the river water was flowing quickly towards the sea. I floated on the surface, with the current pulling me along, around a couple of meanders and into the slightly turbulent bit where the water is so shallow that it bubbles around between the sandy humps on the bottom, turning me 360° before I continued my journey towards the sea. Finally I stood up (the water only up to my knees) and waded out and up the bank so as to go back for another go.

I know I've written about this place before (Beaches and Islands, 8/4/10), but it is good enough to write about twice. There really are not many things in life that beat drifting down River No. 2 in Sierra Leone, between the white sand banks, with the waves breaking onto the beach in one direction and the lush green jungle-covered hills in the other.

A vibrant music scene

2011-01-05T08:37:00.000-08:00

One of the attractions of West Africa for me is the music. It is true that many of the best musicians can be seen frequently in London, but still there is something to be said for seeing them perform on their home turf, with a crowd that understands the words and the sentiments behind those words.

In December when I was in Mali I saw Djelimady Tounkara put on a great performance at the French Cultural Centre, but I was particularly looking forward to getting back to Dakar for the Third Global Black Arts Festival. The music part of the schedule looked fantastic with well known black artists from around the world coming to do free shows in Dakar. However it must be said that the organisation (or the schedule writing) left something to be desired as few evenings delivered exactly what they promised.

First I went to see Angelique Kidjo – to be faced with some mediocre band from Martinique. With, bizarrely, Angelique Kidjo dancing at the side of the stage. Perhaps she’d lost her voice? There was no explanation, either from the compère or on the website. After that I’d planned to attend an evening of Gnawa music with Orchestre National de Barbes, until I rechecked the schedule before going and found the latter group had disappeared from it.

I faced a dilemma then with Tiken Jah Fakoly and Salif Keita scheduled for 29 December and King Sunny Ade for the 30th. All big names that I really wanted to see, but they fell in the middle of a two-week period when I had planned to be in the Gambia. Was it worth returning to Dakar for concerts that were just as likely to not happen?

Well I decided to take the chance that at least one of them would play and travelled back to Dakar on the 29th for Tiken Jah Fakoly and Salif Keita.

I got to the square early (twenty minutes before the scheduled 19:00 start) to get a good place at the front. Around 20:15 the compère appeared; “tonight we are going to welcome Youssou N’Dour … and Tiken Jah Fakoly!” he announced. I was disappointed, not just by the absence of Salif Keita but also by the addition of Youssou N’Dour to the bill. I don’t like his voice and had no interest in standing through two hours of him on stage, but worse, I know how popular he is with the Senegalese and feared how many people might turn up as word got out.

Sure enough, more and more people came, and the square got more and more packed in with people. I was being pulled to and fro by the crowd, and could also feel myself being pushed gradually forward towards the railings. I didn’t feel totally safe there, so decided to move further back. Meanwhile the compère appeared again, to remind us that we were waiting for Youssou N’Dour and Tiken Jah Fakoly – and for Salif Keita! Great news!

Finally, at 21:15, Youssou N’Dour came on. The crowd continued to build up as he sang, and I realised I was now a lone female amongst pushing, shoving Senegalese men of mostly six foot plus. I felt less and less comfortable, it was getting hot and hard to breathe, and I’d felt a couple of attempts to grope me. I tried to get out of the crowd but couldn’t push my way through – and the next thing I knew I was being half led and half carried out by someone, having apparently fainted. The kind man behind me who’d caught me as I fell, pushed his way through the crowd for me (getting abuse from some people) and also got me some water when we got out.

I found a place to sit and recover, and bought a chicken sandwich for energy – I realised that having been travelling all the day back from the Gambia I had not eaten since breakfast, no wonder I hadn't had the strength to push through the crowd.

Finally Tiken Jah Fakoly came on, and I went back into the crowd – but only to the edge, just close enough to get a view of the stage. He was superb, made it worth the effort to be there. He finished at 2am (so I’d been on my feet there for seven hours!), and there was no sign of Salif Keita afterwards – and, as with Angelique Kidjo, no explanation from anyone as to why not.

So the next night I gathered my strength – relieved to be assured by people that it was only the presence of Youssou N’Dour who could draw the enormous crowd of the night before.

The compère appeared. “Tonight”, he said, “we will welcome Idrissa Diop, 2 Faces and Vivian N’Dour!”. So no King Sunny Ade, which was very disappointing although hardly a surprise. But I was there, I had a good place at the front, so I decided to stay. Idrissa Diop wasn’t bad, but 2 Faces was awful, although clearly adored by the screaming girls around me. If you can’t sing, just keep shouting “I love you Senegal” and the crowd will be happy, it seems.

But then a big surprise – Salif Keita! I don’t like all of his recorded music but had heard he is great live, and he was. Finally then the highlight for many Senegalese that evening, Vivian N’Dour, who actually put on a superb show although I’m not a great fan of mbalax. But I still couldn’t help wondering whatever had happened to King Sunny Ade.

Christmas Day 2010

2010-12-31T04:51:00.000-08:00

I woke shortly before 7am, for an early morning walk when the forest and the birds were just waking up. The mist was clearing from the river and a pair of Verreaux’s eagle owls sat in a baobab tree grunting at the group of tourists admiring them from below.

Finally back to the camp for breakfast, then a lazy morning reading a novel, with the occasional swim in the pool to cool off. In the afternoon the camp owner suggested a fishing trip on the river. Arriving at a suitable spot, we (well, those who knew what they were doing) attached the lures to the fishing rods and we made slow circles around the river, waiting for the fish to bite. They didn’t, but who cared? We enjoyed watching the African harrier hawks hunting over the water, and the red colobus monkeys moving about the trees on the bank.

Finally back to camp for a shower before dinner. The owner had moved the table and chairs out onto the little wooden fishing jetty so that we could dine under the stars, and one of the other four tourists there produced a bottle of champagne for us all to share. It wasn’t exactly a traditional Christmas meal – we had spaghetti bolognese followed by flambed bananas – but it was one of the most enjoyable I have had.

My fellow tourists were contemplating their flights home, hoping that Europe’s snow had begun to clear. I had a long, uncomfortable shared taxi ride back home to Dakar, but with the knowledge that blue skies and warm sunshine would continue for me until the rains come next July.

Oh, where was I? In The Gambia, at the Bird Safari Camp on Jangjangbureh Island, taking a short break. A beautiful place although I’d be giving too one-sided a picture if I didn’t mention the voracious mosquitoes that have left me with dozens of red and itching bites as my souvenir.

South Africa part two

2010-12-14T23:56:00.001-08:00

Finally we reached Cape Town. A surprisingly small place, easy to walk around and relatively safe too. We did the usual stuff – Robben Island, cable car up Table Mountain, Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, and a day trip down around the Cape of Good Hope and Seal Island. It was all very nice, a very pretty part of the world although a little spoilt by the strong winds that can seemingly appear from nowhere at any time.

We had booked onto the Premier Classe train for the journey back to Johannesburg, but were getting a little panicky by the morning before the trip, when the money for the tickets had still not made its way to the travel agent from my UK bank (after three weeks of trying), meaning that our reservation was still not confirmed. However we’d had several near misses with transport and none had ultimately derailed the trip so we kept our fingers crossed. & luck was on our side as the money arrived that afternoon and our tickets were confirmed.

So the next morning we made our way to the Premier Lounge for check-in and a cup of coffee before boarding the train at nine. The welcome meeting was mostly a list of the meals to come (morning coffee, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner…), and was accompanied by champagne and a piece of cake. Then we made our way to our private cabin where I unpacked a dress and hung it up so the creases would fall out before dinner. It was 26 hours of – well, not luxury, as the air conditioning in the restaurant car broke down, and the ride was not smooth enough to allow anyone to get much sleep – but comfort certainly, and a chance to relax and watch the scenery unfold as we trundled along through the semi-desert of the fringes of the Karoo.

The journey passed quite quickly and soon we were in Johannesburg, with just a couple of days of the holiday left. To be honest, these were only scheduled because the train timetable prevented us from arriving the day of our flights home, as Johannesburg doesn’t have the kind of reputation that makes you want to hang around there. But, to our surprise, we really enjoyed our time there, thanks mainly to a very good guide.

It wasn’t as safe as Cape Town, certainly. We stayed in the suburb of Melville which was very genteel, full of trees and flowers, and a “strip” of restaurants and bars, and even there we were warned not to walk after dark, not even the five minutes between the guest house and the closest restaurant. But we took a tour around Soweto, mostly walking, and I was really surprised at how clean, friendly and relatively developed this notorious township actually is. Cleaner than Dakar, certainly, and with the roads and pavements in a much better condition. & with a great system enabling people to move up the ladder economically. Those who can afford it buy/build a house on a plot of land. Those who can’t, rent a small parcel of land in the ‘garden’ area of such a house, and build themselves a shack on it. These shacks vary, from very basic corrugated iron structures housing too many people for their size and sharing bathroom facilities with other shacks, to some with all the facilities you could want – I saw a modern fitted kitchen in one that put my kitchen in Dakar to shame. Some of the houses are in fact very smart large villas, and what was remarkable was that none of these had high walls or electric fences around them, unlike the villas in Melville. Of course there will be unsafe parts (Soweto has a population of some two million, so there are bound to be less salubrious quarters) but it definitely doesn’t deserve the reputation it has.

We took a tour of the main city too, learning all about the history and seeing the remnants of the gold mining industry, also walking around the central business district and going to the top of the Carlton Centre. This is the tallest building in Africa, and from the observation deck on the top (50th) floor you have panoramic views across the city. Most interesting for me was the sight of little shacks and even gardens on top of all the older skyscrapers. These date from the apartheid era when the corporations wished to employ low-paid (ie black) caretakers for their buildings, but this was a white zone where the blacks were not allowed to live. They got around the problem by defining this rule as relating to the land, and accommodating their black workers on the rooftops which were not ‘land’. A pragmatic solution which amazingly still sees people living in these rooftop shacks today.

Finally, on our last morning, we took a trip out to a Lion and Rhino park, where a lot of game roams free but where there are also lions and rhinos in smaller enclosures and visitors are able to pet a lion cub. Of course we couldn’t resist this opportunity! The ‘cub’ we stroked was pretty big, at eleven months old. I asked for how long it was safe to be with them like this, and they told me up to eleven months – apparently this one was to be let out into a bigger enclosure with the pride within a day or two. It was a nice end to our trip.

A holiday in South Africa

2010-11-30T10:38:00.000-08:00

Where else to go on a holiday with a friend who lives in Australia? Well, South Africa, of course, being pretty much halfway between Australia and Senegal! I wondered if this was actually going to work out though as I got to the transit desk in Nairobi, part-way there, to be told, “I’m sorry madam, but that flight you’re booked on to doesn’t exist any more”. We were due to meet at Johannesburg airport, our flights getting in within an hour of each other, and now that perfect planning looked to be in jeopardy.

However, there was another flight from Nairobi to Johannesburg, departing three hours earlier, and I was transferred onto that. What would happen to my luggage, I asked – already checked through to Johannesburg on a flight that no longer existed. They assured me that it would be there, and I had no option but to accept their assurances. So it was with a huge sigh of relief that I saw my little rucksack squeezed between the suitcases on the carousel in Johannesburg.

After a night in a guest house in the suburbs of Johannesburg, we started our holiday with a four-day trip to the Kruger, travelling there along the “Panorama route” with our driver/guide. This was one part of the trip where I really had to compromise, as I wanted to use the time bird-watching but was aware that my friend would be bored rigid if I did. So we spent our time watching elephants, rhinos, zebras, etc (plus a lion replete from a meal from a freshly-killed giraffe, a greater spotted genet and a couple of well-hidden leopards), and only when I saw a bird that I thought was big or colourful enough to be of general interest (a bustard, a tawny eagle, a saddle-billed stork) did I ask the guide to stop. I still enjoyed it there, although it was incredibly frustrating to see so many birds flitting about and not be able to stop to watch and identify them. The bird highlight for me though was the crested barbet, a bird I desperately wanted to see but had not expected to land on my breakfast table to finish off the scraps of toast!

Our next main stop was a farm outside the town of Oudtshoorn. This is the home of the so-called “meerkat man”, who spends his time studying meerkats and trying to promote interest in them and their conservation. We were not lucky with the weather in this place, meaning tours out into meerkat territory involved my wearing five layers of clothes and still being absolutely freezing cold. It turns out that meerkats are rather partial to warm sunny weather too, and they wisely spent their time down in their burrows keeping warm whilst we were out there looking for them. Still, it was nice to spend a couple of days on a farm.

From Oudtshoorn to Wilderness, a small town on the garden route with some nice walking trails. We spent a superb day hiking up a trail to a waterfall, and even my non-birder friend was quite impressed by the Knysna turaco we saw there. This walk was followed by the best meal of the trip too, in a little Italian restaurant some thirty minutes’ walk from our hostel, with wonderful pasta and one of the nicest red wines I’ve drank in a while, all the better for costing only $10!

After Wilderness we visited Hermanus. I really wanted to dive with the great white sharks, and correctly predicted that my friend would be happy to spend her time whale-watching while I was with the sharks. In fact “dive” is a bit of a misnomer. We donned our thick, thick wetsuits (the water temperature that day being 10°C) and our masks, and climbed into a metal cage tethered to the side of the boat. Floating in there with our heads above the water we waited for the spotter to shout warnings: “left, left!” then took a deep breath and ducked underwater to watch a real life Jaws just a few feet away.

The sharks are in the area because of a large seal colony, but to attract them close to the boat the operators use tuna (they are not allowed to use seal meat as bait, oddly), which they throw into the water on the end of a line and then drag along the surface to get the sharks to attack it. The sharks come incredibly close to the cage, so close that you feel you could touch them if only it were safe to poke your hands through the bars. Amazing looking creatures, I only wish I had had an underwater camera to capture it all as the photos from the boat just don’t do it justice.

& this is getting too long – so part two to come later

Second impressions

2010-11-23T12:15:00.000-08:00

Despite the restrictions imposed by my employer (a ban on travelling anywhere other than in one of my NGO’s vehicles), I’ve seen enough to really like Haiti. I’m leaving today feeling really quite envious of the people working here on six-month to two-year contracts.

Sure, we had to move out of our hotel because of the violent demonstrations in the square outside, we heard gunfire as we left the office one evening, and the cholera epidemic was starting to get out of hand (dead bodies left in the streets in some towns, as everyone was too afraid to touch them). But Port au Prince remains a beautiful city in terms of its steep hills and its greenery, the atmosphere is at the same time both laid back and lively, and the people are so friendly. There are actually some really nice residential areas to the city too, like the enormous private estate of Belvil with its big villas – and nothing in this district fell down in the earthquake of course.

I did manage to get out on the Saturday evening. To my astonishment, the Ivorian band Magic System were playing a live concert, and enough people from work wanted to go that we were granted permission to extend the usual weekend curfew to 2am provided we travelled in convoy. I was so surprised that people in Haiti would have heard of a West African band, but was told that Magic System have made it big throughout the French-speaking world.

They performed outdoors, on a stage set up within a restaurant-museum complex on the site of an old sugar cane plantation, and the audience was a real mix of locals and expats. There seem to be loads of West Africans working in Haiti, as I met people from Guinea, from Sierra Leone, from Burkina Faso and from Cameroon – together with the music, the climate and the French language it really made me feel at home!

I have to admit too that I do enjoy the excitement of being in a place with a bit of danger. & I guess I’m not alone in that, as many of the expats I spoke to there had previous experience in Darfur, Afghanistan, Gaza and DR Congo. I rather wish I could be content in a 9-5 job somewhere suburban, with a husband, a television and 2.4 kids, but travelling/working in places like Sierra Leone or Haiti make me feel, what? More alive, I suppose. Or maybe it’s just the change of scene that does that?

First Impressions of Haiti

2010-11-09T11:49:00.000-08:00

Ever since I started my job I have had my eye on a trip to Haiti. Partly because the country’s strong cultural connection with parts of West Africa has interested me (same people, language, voodoo culture, etc), and partly just that it is a place that is hard to visit as a tourist (because of the level of violence that has plagued it for so long) and so I wanted to take advantage of the ability to see the place through the protection of my employer.

However when they turned to me last month and said they needed me to take part in an assignment there, it was not the same Haiti that I had been thinking of before. The violence is still there but now there is all the devastation and hardship that has resulted from the earthquake, and as my trip approached also a growing cholera epidemic and even the threat of a hurricane.

Well I arrived yesterday, and the place has made a strong impression on me. Perhaps partly because I was a little tired and perhaps disoriented from my travel (I left Johannesburg Friday night and after flying via Nairobi, Dakar, Washington DC and Miami I finally arrived in Port au Prince some 67 hours later), but it is certainly true that this place is unlike any other I have visited.

The city has a beautiful location, set on a number of hills, with higher hills behind and the Caribbean Sea on one side. It is also very green, with tropical vegetation filling whatever space it can find. But of course the earthquake damage is so visible. There are many damaged buildings around, some just with one wall missing and cracks in what remains, some pushed over at crazy angles and some completely collapsed, where the walls obviously gave way and the floors of the building fell in upon one another. I suppose many of these must have skeletons amongst the remains – family members and friends of those who still remain. There are also piles of rubble everywhere – and amazingly, a few very beautiful traditional old wooden houses that survived the quake.

Around these damaged buildings and piles of rubble people get on with life, setting up little stalls and making new pathways between them. However there is still a big danger of further earthquakes (there was apparently a tremor just three days ago) and the buildings that remain, already damaged, are now very vulnerable. We’ve been told that the usual earthquake response, when indoors, is to remain inside and shelter under a table, but that given the fragility of the buildings here we should try to get outside as quickly as possible.

There are also the big tent cities of the homeless. The first tents you see are right outside the airport, and there are many other camps around the city.

Taking photos of all this is difficult. In common with most other INGOs, expat staff are not allowed to walk anywhere (even just to cross the road from the hotel). The gang violence that used to plague this country has returned, with robberies, kidnaps (89 reported so far this year) and shootings quite common. White people are obvious targets for muggings. In addition there is an election due in three weeks’ time, which has always led to violence here. So far there has not been much – two shooting incidents, one involving one of the candidates who was the one with the gun! – but it is expected to build up over the next week. Our hotel, the only one with space, is on one side of what was the main square (now a massive tent city), and this is where the biggest demonstrations and riots are expected to occur. We’ve been told that in such a situation we remain inside the hotel if already here, or spend the night somewhere else if it happens when we are at work. There are many weapons in the country (the gangs, some of whom are behind certain presidential candidates, even have AK47s) so anything that turns violent is to be avoided.

The hurricane largely missed the island, thank goodness, although it did cause flooding in some areas. That flooding, however, is likely to increase the risk that the cholera epidemic spreads to the capital, and if that happens it would be disastrous as so few people here have access to the kind of sanitation and cooking facilities needed to avoid it. We do have a limited supply of tinned and packet food with us just in case!

My overall impression at the moment really is of chaos, and I do wonder what on earth I am doing here…

Socialising in Dakar

2010-10-05T04:16:00.000-07:00

A quick post here to correct an erroneous impression I have probably given about the difficulties of finding friends in Dakar.

For the first time, I think, since I moved to Senegal, I have been in the country for a continuous period of just over two months. And I made some friends! Or at least, before my travel schedule started again, I began the process of making some friends.

I had time to contact the couple of people I do know and make an effort to spend some time with them. As a result I heard about a new expat group starting up here, and I attended their opening drinks evening. During the evening I exchanged numbers with a few people, and one of those exchanges led to a party invitation. At the party I met three more nice people who asked for my contact details. One of my initial contacts also invited me to a yoga group, and told me about an English language book club, and I attended the September book club meeting (and enjoyed reading the book) and people told me to come along to another one.

And that is how one develops a circle of friends, isn’t it? Step-by-step. Meeting people you feel you might like. Reinforcing that feeling at a second meeting, at which point they start to turn into friends. Socialising with them and through them meeting more people you might like. And so it goes on.

Except that I can’t join the yoga group because they require regular attendance. And the next expat event, when I might have the opportunity to consolidate a couple of those initial exchanges, is in two weeks’ time when I will be at a conference in the UK. For the book club, I now have their schedule right through until next June but when I compared it to my travel schedule, this is what I found:

Meeting date - My whereabouts on that date
11 October - London
8 November - Haiti
13 December - Mali
10 January - Kenya
14 February - Sierra Leone
21 March - Cameroon
11 April - Burkina Faso
9 May - Guinea Bissau
6 June - Senegal!

So finally, for the last meeting of their year, by which time they will all have forgotten me, I will be available to attend for a second time.

So it is not that Dakar is “a difficult place to make friends” as I have told so many people. Nor is it that I have somehow turned into a person that nobody likes. It is all related to the travel schedule that comes with my job. My apologies to the city of Dakar and its inhabitants for misrepresenting them so badly.

Dinner with a Senegalese friend

2010-09-07T12:19:00.000-07:00

I went round to visit a friend the other evening, and as I was sitting there waiting for him to come back from some errand, gazing around the room, I was reminded of how different life is for many Senegalese city-dwellers from our life in UK cities.

His home is a single room, about 8 feet square, with a lockable metal door and one window. The window does not have glass – that is only for the wealthy – but is a square hole quite high up in the wall, with a metal ‘door’ that can be swung open to let in light and fresh air. A flimsy floor-length curtain (of a kind of cheap chiffon-like material) hangs across the wall where the door and window are. This gives some privacy when they are open, and helps to keep out dust, mosquitoes and flies. Unusually the walls are painted white – more commonly they would be turquoise. The floor is bare concrete.

Inside this room, most space is taken up by a mattress on the floor, covered with a kind of furry blanket (in green, yellow and purple…), with a pillow in one corner. This serves as settee as well as bed. There is no mosquito net. Next to the mattress is a big plastic bag stuffed with folded clothes, and beside that a neat row of six pairs of shoes (rather more than most men here have, I think).

Against another wall is a small collection of containers – one I can see contains body lotion (which all Africans use, men as well as women, or their skin dries up and flakes), the others look empty – and a tray full of upside-down glasses. These will be used for serving tea: the West African way, which is black, very strong, and sweet. There is also a small gas burner with a teapot perched on top. Then the prize possession, I imagine – a stereo system (radio, cassette and CD player, with speakers), although I don’t see any cassettes or CDs in the room. At the moment the radio is on.

Finally, in the corner next to the door is a water container (maybe 40 litre capacity?), a small plastic cup in a metal bowl, and a plastic water container with a spout – shaped like an old-fashioned kettle, in purple and yellow stripes. This water will be for drinking and hand-washing

Bathroom facilities are communal (I didn’t visit but will typically be a hole-in-the–ground toilet, with the ubiquitous stripy plastic kettle-shaped container floating in a stripy bucket of water for cleaning oneself afterwards).

This room is one of a row of five, with the same number facing across a small courtyard (the latter used for socialising and some cooking), the whole compound being walled in with one lockable metal door. Many single people live in such accommodation, costing about $60 a month to rent, as it is all they can afford.

In family compounds the rooms of adult family members are often similar to this – and often shared, with two brothers or sisters, or mother and daughter, sharing a double mattress.

We had dinner sitting on the floor. Well, I perched on the side of the mattress, he sat on the concrete. The food was bought on the street, and eaten with the right hand from a communal aluminium bowl. We had fried fish in a sauce (probably made from onion, stock, tomato paste and various local seasonings such as netetou which have no English name – and on this occasion no chilli or hot pepper at my request) served over white rice, with a few pieces of baguette on the side. The Senegalese love their rice.

I find eating with my hand quite messy, as I’m forever dropping bits of food, but the locals seem to drop a lot too so I guess that’s just a part of the process. Only they never seem to drop it on their clothes like I do. I also find the fish difficult, as they are never filleted – you just get the whole fish, with the head, tail, etc – not too difficult with a knife and fork but with one hand, when covered with sauce, I struggle. The locals don’t have a problem as they just put big chunks in their mouths and then spit out the bones, but I’ll never learn to do that; fish bones in my mouth make me gag.

We shared a half bottle of red wine with the meal, local Senegalese wine at $3 a bottle (always served cold), that gives me a headache the next day. Many Senegalese, being Muslims, don’t drink alcohol, so would have something sweet and fizzy (like Coke or Sprite) instead.

Not an exciting event to post about, then, but it occurred to me as I sat there that such things that I take for granted now are outside of the experiences of most of you reading this.

In fact I remember the first time I ever shared a bowl of food the West African way – in Mali in 2000 – and how little I knew of local customs at the time. As a female guest I was invited to start, and the bowl of hand-washing water, with a cake of soap, was passed to me. I was so conscious of all that I had read about not using the left hand that I made this convoluted attempt to wash my right hand only, keeping the left hand well out of the water. Everyone sat there very politely, saying nothing, but when I passed the water to my neighbour, he proceeded to wash his hands – both hands – in the normal way. They must have wondered what on earth was wrong with me; I still feel embarrassed when I think about it today.

Storms

2010-08-18T10:34:00.000-07:00

I remember watching thunderstorms in the UK when I was young, and counting how many seconds elapsed between a flash of lightning and the clap of thunder that followed, to work out how many miles away the storm was. Here you can’t do that. I laid in bed in the early hours of this morning as a thunderstorm passed through, but the lightning was flickering constantly, and the thunder rolled and rumbled and crashed without a break for a good twenty minutes. Just a pity that I am in a bungalow with a ten foot high wall around it – how I would have loved to have watched that storm from a fifth floor window.

Before I came here to live I had the idea from somewhere that a storm would somehow “clear the air” leaving it cool and fresh. However what actually happens is that as soon as the sun comes back out and its rays hit the water lying on the ground, that water is evaporated back upwards, with the effect that you are in a steambath for the next few hours. & so it was today, so I gave in and put on the air conditioning, shutting up all the windows and doors to keep in the cool air.

During the storm last night I nearly jumped out of bed with fright as there was an enormously loud clattering, crashing sound from within the bedroom. At first I could only think that the house had been struck by lightning, but in fact it turned out that my curtain pole and curtains had fallen off the wall. They’ve been there three years so in fact this is about par for the course. There are two equally likely causes: bad workmanship (put up by the same highly recommended joiner who made my coffee table with its cracks and bowed legs that developed as the wood dried out after delivery), or rough treatment by my maid.

Gloria, my maid, is probably little different from other women here, to be fair. She’s certainly not the only Senegalese woman I have seen trying to remove dust from a table top by flicking a tea towel at it – which not only allows the dust to fall back onto the table but also risks breaking any nearby ornaments. A while back she broke my newly purchased metal sieve by whacking it against a cockroach (which no doubt trotted away unharmed). She also doesn’t really ‘see’ things in the way I do – books are taken out to be dusted and put back on the shelf upside down (no, she can’t read the English writing on the cover but she can see if a picture is upside-down), and an Indian miniature which I bought on a holiday in Rajasthan, hand-painted on camel bone, now has smudged paint where she has clearly picked it up with wet fingers.

Last week she presented me with one of my favourite shirts with a tear across the shoulder. I try not to be bothered when she damages things, to tell her not to worry, that ‘accidents happen’, because I know how bad she feels about it. But this time she could see I was upset, especially as it was the second shirt she had torn through her rough handwashing in just a few months. She offered to take it to a tailor for repair and I let her do so. I have a washing machine, and I’ve told her so many times that I prefer things washed in there, but like most Senegalese women she doesn’t think machines get things really clean, also she can’t bear to let dirty washing accumulate until there’s enough for a machine load, so she continues to ignore my pleas and washes everything by hand.

I suppose I should put my foot down and instruct her to use the machine rather than pleading with her, but I’ll never be comfortable treating a maid like a servant, the way the Africans here do. So she continues to run my house the way she wants to.

But to end on a positive note, I am happy to report that the power cuts I wrote about last month have reduced substantially.

African Renaissance

2010-08-02T03:24:00.000-07:00

I’m not sure how I’ve managed to get to August 2010 without writing about the African Renaissance. This is the name given by the President, Abdoulaye Wade, to the giant statue (apparently higher than the Eiffel Tower) that now looms over the northern suburbs of Dakar. The official opening awaits the completion of the interior (museum in the base and restaurant in the summit) but in the meantime no-one can ignore its presence, not least because of the controversy surrounding it.

The £18m cost has of course been criticised by many living in a country where basic needs like electricity, clean water, health and education have not yet been met. However there are rumours that it was financed by a donation from a businessman grateful that the government had sold him some land at an enormous undervalue.

It was constructed by North Koreans, which might explain the kind of Stalinist feel to it. It seems rather odd that the woman is showing so much leg and breast, in a traditional Muslim society where such displays of flesh, particularly the leg, are totally unacceptable. Local imams have voiced their disapproval.

Local artists have questioned why there was no Senegalese (or at least African) artist involved. The design came from a Hungarian student, the story being that the President ran a competition a few years back, on the internet, for a design for an African statue, with a prize of a few thousand dollars on offer. Neither the competition itself, nor the winning entry, were well publicised. However the winner was never paid his prize money, as a result of which he has never signed the document waiving his rights from any use of his design nor the requirement to maintain confidentiality. All rather unfortunate for M. Wade who has claimed the right to 35% of all takings from entry to the statue on the basis that “I am the designer, the one who conceived it”.

Of course the Senegalese are unhappy about this, but as with other unfairnesses in their lives, they seem to have accepted it. Perhaps this attitude explains why Senegal, alone in the region, has never experienced a coup.

So what is the point of the statue and why ‘African Renaissance’? Apparently M. Wade sees it as a money-making tourist attraction (for Senegal as well as for his retirement fund…), and as representing the hopes and aspirations of the younger generation. In that case I think it is rather unfortunate that it is pointing, not inland towards the great continent of Africa, but across the Atlantic Ocean towards the USA.

Power cuts and protests

2010-07-20T09:25:00.000-07:00

We’re getting into the humid, rainy season now. Not so much rain yet (although it has been pouring down all day today) but the air is thick and sticky, the mosquitoes are out in force and as usual at this time of year the power cuts have started.

This year they are much worse than usual though – two to three cuts a day, each between three and eight hours long. I have a generator, but it uses lots of fuel which on the one hand is very bad for the environment and on the other hand is very expensive (I don’t believe our donors give their contributions thinking they will pay for an expat to have her air-conditioning on) so I use it as little as possible. Last night, thanks to a good laptop battery I held out until 9:30pm, sitting there watching a DVD and listening to music in the dark, until the mosquitoes just got too much and I switched on the generator so as to power the little stand-up fan I have by my chair to keep the mosquitoes away. I will use the generator when I really have to but cannot justify it just to enable me to make a cup of tea or listen to the radio.

This has been going on for two weeks now (the cuts started as soon as the World Cup was over) and it is incredibly frustrating even for someone like me with a generator. My maid says she has to rely on candles – which are expensive – and that many people end up sitting in the street as there is nothing they can do in the house. Of course it also has a terrible impact on many people’s working lives. Dakar’s thousands of self-employed tailors, for example, who cannot earn any money if there is no electricity to power their sewing machines, and those who rely on supplies of ice to keep their produce fresh (such as the women who go to the port each day to buy fish, which they then hawk around the residential areas in little cool boxes).

There have been many demonstrations around the country, an office of Senelec (the national electricity company) ransacked, and last week one protestor was killed in a demonstration that turned violent. Tomorrow a big march is planned to the head office of Senelec, which will probably end in more violence.

I kept asking people why this was happening, and there were no clear answers, but yesterday a statement was released explaining that this resulted from the purchase of some sub-standard fuel which has jammed the generating machinery. I wonder what the reaction would be in the developed world to an answer like that! They also said the problem would be resolved by the end of the month. Tempers are short and patience is wearing thin throughout the country, so I can only hope the end of month comes quickly.

Immigration

2010-06-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

Reading what I could before the recent UK election, I could see that there was clearly an undercurrent of concern about immigration. It was rarely mentioned officially, as it seemed that an open debate on the matter carried too much of a risk that the racists would make their views heard – and no-one wants those aired publicly in the world’s press – but clearly the concern was there.

I couldn’t help but think about the way I am treated here, as an immigrant.

I am doing a job which some would argue could be done by a Senegalese (although it was advertised here, without success) – but no-one has once complained to me about that. Thanks to the generosity of the Senegalese government, I don’t pay any tax here (international staff at our NGO have a special exemption) – and no-one has once complained to me about that either, not even our local staff here who do have to pay tax. I am partly responsible for higher prices for the locals too, as like other people wealthy enough to have a freezer (mostly the foreigners) I stock up on kilos of tomatoes and vegetables in May, freezing them ready for the rainy season when there are none – this causes the price to rise a month earlier than it would without us, but no-one ever complains. Nor does anyone ever suggest, at least not without a twinkle in their eye, that I learn the local language, Wolof.

Then just recently our Regional Finance and Grants Analyst was asked to attend a meeting in our international head office in the UK. She was refused a visa. I heard she was in tears over it, and I felt so embarrassed – and ashamed. To enter Senegal the British do not need visas at all, we just get a stamp in our passports on arrival, at no cost, which gives three months in the country.

Of course I understand that we cannot just open our borders to everyone who wants to come in. But the unfairness of the current system – reflecting the unfairness of the distribution of wealth and power in the world – makes me so sad.

Jazz at St. Louis

2010-05-25T06:02:00.000-07:00

St. Louis is a beautiful, decaying old city in the far north of Senegal, located on an island near the mouth of the River Senegal. It used to be the capital, under the French, but has long since been crumbling away into the sand. It’s partly that the revenue from tourism and fishing is nowhere near enough to fund the maintenance/restoration of the old houses, but a greater problem is the way their ownership has passed down through the generations – not to a favourite son or daughter but to all the offspring equally. Now some are owned by several hundred people, and getting them all to agree to spend money on the house, or to sell it, is a major undertaking. Only when a balcony threatens to collapse onto the people walking below does the government step in, and several buildings look beyond repair. I would imagine the serious threat to this low-lying island of sea level rise doesn’t help.

However the sense of decay does add to the atmosphere of the place. One crumbling warehouse (roofless and windowless) makes an impressive backdrop to a display of old wooden masks and statues, so what would elsewhere be just another tourist shop here becomes a kind of gallery. There are real galleries, too, in the city – of textiles, and of modern African art. & above all there is music. A jazz festival has taken place here every year for the last couple of decades, with a number of big names playing the specially built ‘Quai des Arts’, but a thriving “off festival” (off-Quai?) scene has developed too so that many restaurants and bars host live music during the festival and throughout the year.

I’ve never had the time available to go for the full four days of the festival, and this year was no different, but I decided to go up for the weekend, to catch the last couple of days of Jazz 2010.

So on Saturday even I was in St. Louis, ready to enjoy a selection of trios, quartets and quintets from around the world. On the way, I stopped for some prawns in garlic with a glass of red wine in a local restaurant – and before I had finished my meal three musicians were warming up next to me to play in the restaurant. N’Dar Afro-Jazz. They were so good that I spent three hours enjoying their performance and never made it to the official stage. & when they finished at midnight their leader took me to another venue nearby to watch a selection of local acts playing different types of traditional West African music. I got back to my hotel at 3am.

On Sunday evening however I was determined to get to the main stage to see the final night of the official festival. Three different groups performed, the final one made up of Pharoah Sanders on saxophone and William Henderson on piano, accompanied by some local drummers. My knowledge of jazz is not great (I never forget raving to a colleague about some jazz drummer I’d seen at the Village Vanguard in New York many years ago – “Roy Haines!” he said, “What, THE Roy Haines?!”) but apparently this saxophonist is well-known and has played with greats such as John Coltrane. He was good. Afterwards there was an official jamming session backstage, which I only left – reluctantly – at 3.30 to get my pre-arranged taxi share back to Dakar.

Devils

2010-04-12T04:45:00.000-07:00

Some 90% of Sierra Leoneans are supposedly a member of one of the country’s secret societies. Not that their existence is secret, nor an individual’s membership (I saw a number of men with rows of raised marks on their backs – the scarification that indicates the society and their rank within it), but the content and meaning of the ceremonies and initiation rites must not be revealed to non-initiates on pain of death. The societies are powerful, both in the sense of favouring their own for jobs (rather like the Freemasons) but also in the magic that can be learnt by those who go through many stages of initiation.

One of the few public manifestations of the magic of these societies is on major public holidays – including Easter Monday – when some of the society “devils” appear in the streets.

When I asked about this most people responded by describing the Easter parade. I guess this probably originates from the devils, but is now more like a carnival procession. Although I would have been happy to see it, that wasn’t really what I was looking for. Anyway, killing time in the morning (the parade being late in the afternoon – as it turned out, too late for me to see before I had to leave for my flight) I wandered around the streets of downtown Freetown, an area I hadn’t seen before.

Then, coming towards me along the street, I saw a small group of men. Some in jeans and T-shirts chanting, and playing clangy metal instruments, but quite clearly the three men in front of them were devils. They had bare torsos and wore long grass skirts, with a white cloth wrapped around their middles and another on their heads, and the one at the front also had a red headdress. But what was most striking was that they, and the white cloths, were smeared with what appeared to be blood. I got closer, and then could see that the flesh on the arms and chest of one was pierced with knives and porcupine quills – clearly it was real blood. & the devil at the front appeared to have a large dagger through the middle of his body, the handle sticking out at the base of his back and some eight inches of blade protruding from his stomach. This couldn’t be real – could it?

I looked into his eyes and they were bloodshot and staring into some place where I don’t think I want to go. & I was reminded of a Chinese harvest festival I saw in Malaysia many years ago, where I watched a man slice his tongue in half lengthways while in some kind of religious trance. So I know that it is possible to rise above bodily pain and trauma, and people I’ve described these devils to all assure me that what I saw was real and not a trick.

The Sierra Leoneans ascribe it to magic. I don’t believe in magic (or religion, or anything else that seems to run counter to common sense and evidence), but the belief in magic is so prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa that just occasionally I find myself wondering if perhaps this continent works in a different way from other parts of the world and there is something here beyond what we can see and touch.

Beaches and islands

2010-04-08T09:39:00.000-07:00

On my first weekend in Sierra Leone, a colleague kindly offered to show me a couple of Freetown peninsula’s famous beaches. We went first to Lakka, a crescent of golden sand with a few palm trees, a couple of colourful fishing boats moored in the calm water and a number of simple shacks selling grilled fish, shrimp and lobster. We stopped for a drink at the rocky headland at the end of the beach, and I found myself wondering how much it would cost to buy the little resort of clapperboard houses with shaded verandas that appeared in need of some love and care from a new owner…

Soon (too soon) we were moving on, driving 50km out of Freetown to River No.2 beach, which most people seem to rate as the best of all. This one has white sand, bigger waves, and a stunning backdrop of jungle-clad hills – as well as a small river that meanders across the sand into the sea. You can lie in this river and drift along in the current as the tide comes in or goes out, or even take a boat upstream and watch out for monkeys catching fish, using their tails as bait.

A boat trip wasn’t on the agenda that day, but I walked along the sand, swam in the sea, drifted in the river, drank coconut water and feasted on grilled shrimps with really good chips. It is a beautiful place. I wonder how many years it will be until Europe ‘discovers’ Sierra Leone. Its beaches are as good as any I have seen in the Caribbean, and it’s only a 5-6 hour flight from the UK and in the same time zone.

The next weekend, after my work was finished, was Easter, and I prolonged my stay so as to go into the rainforest. I’d organised this beforehand over the internet as I wasn’t sure how easy it would be logistically to do it independently with only a few days for the trip. So at 6am my guide was there at the hotel to start the 8-hour journey to Tiwai Island. This is a 12km square island in the Moa River, which flows through the Gola Forest in the eastern part of the country. It is known for its pygmy hippos (although they are very hard to find, and we didn’t have any luck with them), its nine species of primate (we saw four and heard three others) and its 135 species of bird (I didn’t count…).

An NGO run by local villagers maintains some basic accommodation on the island – a number of tents set up on concrete platforms, with a dining area, kitchen and toilet/shower block. Alternatively you can wash in the river as I did. I slept well there, and spent long hours walking along some of the many trails in the forest. We didn’t see the white-breasted guinea fowl that my guide was keen to show me, but I was happy enough with the black bee-eaters, great blue turacos and yellow-casqued hornbills, which are all quite stunning birds. The Diana monkeys were also impressive. I did manage to pick up quite a few mosquito and/or ant bites, but that didn’t spoil the experience at all, I just wish I could have spent another couple of days there.

FR ET WN INTER ATIONAL AIRPOR

2010-03-28T12:44:00.000-07:00

The flight from Dakar to Freetown seemed to be full of Sierra Leonean Americans - and what a combination, the loudness of Americans (sorry about the stereotyping) and the exuberance of Sierra Leoneans making it feel like some kind of noisy school trip. As we landed safely at Lungi Airport there was not just applause but whoops of joy and a few shouts of "Praise to the Lord!".

The airport was complete chaos, but not in the intimidating way of some African airports, more that people were more interested in getting home to see their families than in bothering to follow the few rules that seemed to be in place. It wasn't helped by a power cut that left us in complete darkness for about ten minutes.

It took about an hour for our luggage to come out, even though we were the only plane to have landed during that time (you wonder how they would cope with two aeroplanes arriving in quick succession...), and there was a lot of laughter and shouting as people jostled for position by the conveyor belt. However when the luggage came, those at the back would just shout out, "That's mine - the red one" and it would be picked up and passed over peoples' heads towards its owner.

Once through the airport you have various options as to how to get into town. I was taking the helicopter so walked to the 'Helicopter tickets' counter and handed over my $80. My ticket was not given to me but to a young man beside me: "this man will take you to registration" I was told. I refused to let him take my case (I've done this before and remembered that the helicopter office was somewhere very near) but I could only follow behind him as he sped off with my ticket.

In the office he got it stamped, and returned it to me, telling me proudly that he had got me onto the next flight. Then he stood there waiting for a tip. Only ten minutes later the luggage was all carried out and loaded onto a trolley. I followed it, not wanting it out of my sight as it sat unguarded outside. Then one of the luggage handlers turned to me: "I want a tip" he said. I asked why. "Because I looked after your luggage for you". I laughed and told him that it was his job, for which he received a salary. Lungi airport is the worst of any in West Africa for requests for "tips" (excluding Nigeria, of which thankfully I have no experience), but at least it is always done with a smile, and no-one refuses to stamp your passport if you say no. In fact I left the airport for the helicopter with a big smile on my face. Sierra Leone is truly one of the friendliest countries I know.

Travelling to the world of the ancestors

2010-03-16T11:50:00.000-07:00

According to the Senoufou people, there are three worlds: ours, that of the spirits and that of the ancestors.

When someone dies they have to travel to the world of the ancestors, a journey of three months for which some preparation is required. During the first week after a death, therefore, the community help the deceased with the preparations, making sacrifices of chickens, beer, vegetables, grains - all that the deceased might need to sustain them on this journey. The preparations culminate on the seventh day, with final sacrifices and much drumming and dancing as the appropriate funeral masks come out for the send-off.

My primary aim in spending a few days in Burkina Faso after our conference there was to see some masks in action. I see them on every trip in the tourist shops and I have several on the walls in my house, but I had never yet managed to see a real mask dance. They are hard to track down as they are held for events such as funerals and harvests which do not have fixed dates. But I had read that in Burkina Faso they mostly take place from February to April, so I made a point of asking around in every village I went to on my trip.

& finally with some success - there was to be a funerary mask dance in the Senoufou village of Sindou!

I returned on the appointed day, and when the sun began to sink and the air began to cool I went out mask hunting. Eventually I heard distant drumming, and I followed the narrow winding paths through the village until I found the ceremony.

There were two very large ancient-looking drums being beaten with sticks, plus a number of men in procession banging and scraping small metal instruments. Three masked dancers were there, covered head to toe in a brown fabric, including a triangular headdress giving the effect of pointy ears, and long trailing fronds of blonde rafia-like stuff. Apparently they represented cats, and certainly they were prowling around some of the time but also jumping, shaking and swirling to the music.

All this in the middle of a beautiful traditional village, the setting sun turning the mud houses a pinkish shade - and me the only tourist there. Photography was not allowed, unfortunately.

The next day there were further processions around the village with different masks coming out, although I must say none of them were anything like the wooden ones sold in the shops. In some places it is possible to see dances using those masks, put on specially for tourists, and I may seek one out in the future, but I know that such an performance will come nowhere near to the special experience I had of a real mask dance in this remote little Burkina Faso village.

Peaks, domes and painted houses

2010-02-25T11:15:00.001-08:00

Burkina Faso had not exactly been near the top of the list of countries I wanted to spend time in when I moved to West Africa in 2006. However I had been working my way through the more obvious draws of the region and now I had the opportunity to spend a week or so in this “land of upright men” (as the name means!).

So it was quite a surprise to start reading through my Bradt Guide and finding a whole range of attractions, easily enough to keep any visitor busy for a month. But as my work was taking me to Bobo Dioulasso, in the south-west corner of the country, I decided to focus there. Bobo itself is a lovely town, with an old quarter full of artisans making woodcarvings, bronzes, batiks, etc (I spent a couple of hours there watching the production of three batiks), a pretty old mosque and lots of decent eating places.

From there I headed off to the countryside. The Domes of Fabedougou were deserted apart from some stunning red-throated bee-eaters, and nearby were the impressive waterfalls of Karfiguela where I had a swim and watched the wood hoopoes and violet turacos in the trees over the water. I also bumped into an English lady I had eaten dinner with a year or so before in Guinea; what a small world!

The Peaks of Sindou, also deserted, gave me another chance for a bit of exercise, and then further along the increasingly rough dirt track was the village of Niansogoni where I hiked up a hill to visit the remains of mud dwellings and granaries built into the side of a rock face. People had lived there back in the nineteenth century because it was safe from the raids of a neighbouring tribe, and the last inhabitants to leave only moved down to the plains in the 1980s.

It is an area where you can organise treks of many days, sleeping and eating in the villages, but I did not have the time. Mind you, trekking in the 40°C temperatures there would have been quite a challenge.

I also visited the Loropeni ruins. These comprise a mysterious set of big rock-walled enclosures in an area of woodland. Nobody knows when they were built or why, but they are impressive and were recently designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Just about worth the 160km each way along a dirt road on the back of a motorbike, although I’m not sure about the walking in the dark, waiting and final two hours squeezed with four others into the front of a lorry after the motorbike broke down 40km away from the end of the trip…

My final destination was Tiebele, a small village near the Ghanaian border famous for its architecture. Houses were traditionally built in a figure of eight shape, with the entrance only about waist height. This meant anyone entering the house would have to show their head first – which was thus easily chopped off by those inside if they were unwelcome intruders!

Thankfully tourists are not considered unwelcome in the royal palace of Tiebele, nor in a large compound in nearby Tangassoko. We help them to pay to continue painting the houses in the traditional way, with a number of symbols and geometric patterns, representing various important aspects of their lives and history. The “paints”, and the “varnish” which preserves it for three years, are made of natural muds, minerals and plants, but the cost of extracting and transporting these has meant that the tradition is dying out. Some are trying to replace it with a cheaper modern alternative, painting the walls with tar, but it really doesn’t compare.

Finally back to the capital, Ouagadougou, for my early morning flight home. The evening before the flight, however, I admit that I quite enjoyed being chatted up by a charming and good-looking young French man staying at my hotel. Something to raise the spirits – that despite my apparent loss of youth and beauty (see my last post) I still have something left that appeals to someone!

In need of a facelift

2010-02-14T07:28:00.000-08:00

Two days ago I was sitting at the dinner table at my guest house, chatting with the owner. He looked at me for a while. "I can see from your face that you must have been beautiful when you were young" he said.

I smiled uncertainly and kept my composure for long enough to finish my dinner. Later in my room I cried, then laughed, then cried some more. I've been avoiding mirrors for the last year or two as I don't like the evidence that stares back at me, but still hoped at the back of my mind that I was being self-critical, that other people wouldn't have noticed what I could see. Of course I always knew that the years of sunbathing would catch up with me eventually - and now they have. & what I also have to accept is that ageing is not an illness - something I will recover from next week - but that I will NEVER be young and beautiful again in my life.

The guest house owner was not being deliberately cruel. In Africa, the wisdom of age is valued much more than the innocence of youth, and beauty has little value. Any African man would choose a rich woman above a beautiful one, and as I am white I am obviously rich...

However whilst I am sure that I have absorbed some African values during my time here, I have clearly not lost the Western veneration of youth and beauty. If anyone knows a good plastic surgeon, please send me the details.

Northern Cameroon

2010-01-21T07:45:00.001-08:00

Two weeks’ leave in Cameroon and a choice had to be made – the steamy tropical jungles of the south, or the arid mountainous north. I wanted to visit both, but it wasn’t possible in the time.

By the time my plane touched down I’d made a decision to head north. Cameroon is a hugely diverse country, its colonial history a mixture of French, British and German, religiously split between Muslim (20%), Christian (40%) and traditional animist (40%), and with some 279 different languages spoken, and the Far North Province is known for the mix of different traditions of the people of the Mandara Mountains. The area is also known for its scenic beauty, both of the mountains themselves and also of the villages nestling amongst them.

The first hurdle was getting a train ticket. I must admit I had assumed that I would be able to breeze up to the ticket counter and buy a sleeper ticket for that night, but in fact I had to hang around for most of the day just to get my hands on a seat (which someone had reserved but not turned up to pay for), but at least it was a first class seat so my luggage (and I) would be safe.

It was a 15-hour train journey, immediately followed by a 9-hour bus trip, so I was pretty tired when I arrived in Maroua and slept soundly in a cheap little hotel near the bus station. After a good night’s sleep I was met outside my hotel room by a guide touting for business. We discussed itineraries and prices, and I decided to engage his services for the week.

First stop was the village of Tourou, to visit the colourful weekly market. The women of this village wear decorated calabashes on their heads, and pieces of wood or bone sticking out of the side of their nose – neither particularly attractive to my Western eyes, I must admit, but interesting to see.

From Tourou we went to Rhumsiki, the tourist centre of the region. It is in a great setting, with the stumps of ancient volcanoes rising up from the dry, rocky ground, and we went trekking in this area for four days, sleeping in villages at night. Houses here are arranged as a collection of round mud huts with thatched roofs, one for each family member to sleep in plus a few others, eg to store kitchen equipment or grain in and to house guests. A wall joins each hut to the next, so the whole family compound is walled in. Within this space there is an area reserved for cooking (over the fire) and eating, a screened off area for washing, sometimes with a hole-in-the-ground toilet but more usually people go out into the bush for that. The whole place generally has various livestock wandering about (chickens, goats, in one case a donkey) as well as dogs and cats. I would be allocated a hut, usually with a mattress although not always – thankfully I had my thermorest mat with me as well as a silk sheet sleeping bag. My guide carried a supply of food and would prepare all my meals: bread and tea or coffee for breakfast, a salad of avocado, tomato, onion and tinned sardines for lunch, and various different cooked evening meals, all very tasty.

There wasn’t so much to see – a few birds, the occasional village and some nice scenery – but it was great to get out in the countryside walking. & I did get to spend about an hour in Nigeria, as we crossed over the border (the border being an almost dry river bed) for part of the walk.

After the trek we visited some stunning local villages. Firstly the Mafa village of Djinglia, in an area full of rocky outcrops where the houses – slightly different here as the huts, and their thatched roofs, were slimmer and taller – seemed to sprout out of the rocks like little clusters of mushrooms. This was a very undeveloped region. One older local man seemed quite frightened to see me, and my guide explained that these people are pretty much self-sufficient and have little contact with the outside world. The children do not go to school, the houses and utensils are made entirely from natural local materials and the families grow all the food they need. Recently they started wearing clothes (although we saw one old man without any), and for those they need to go to the market and sell the odd goat or other produce, but otherwise they live as they have for many centuries.

From there we went to the Podoko village of Oudjilla. The chief there has fifty wives and 113 children, and I took a tour around his “palace” which has a 400-year-old stone wall enclosing its warren of little mud huts and granaries – each wife having her own sleeping hut, her own granary and her own kitchen hut. It is stunningly set on top of a hill, and I was thrilled to see a pair of short-toed snake eagles gliding past almost at eye level. My guide negotiated for me to spend the night in the palace compound, not in a hut this time but in my tent, which I pitched amongst the little walled fields of millet right on top of the hill. It was a windy night and I didn’t sleep well, but it was worth it as I unzipped my tent in the morning to look out over the valleys below.

Finally we went to Pouss, a Mousgoum village next to the Logon River which forms the border with Chad. There the traditional building style was very different, with larger huts built entirely of mud, including the roof. As the mud (clay mixed with straw and an extract of some local plant) is applied one layer at a time, with one layer having to dry completely before the next is added, these take several months to build and the style (and therefore the building technique) had almost died out. However the UN stepped in and commissioned a typical house – now a museum – and those who built it are being asked to build one or two others for families in the region so hopefully this architectural style has been preserved. The houses are beautiful and it would be sad if they disappeared.

At the end of my trip I visited the beautiful Ngaoundaba Ranch for a couple of days. This is set in many acres of private land, a mosaic of grassland and gallery forest in the hills surrounding two crater lakes. It is actually in the middle of a two-year refurbishment, so is not open to the public, but thanks to the long tentacles of the internet I was able to track down both the owner and the head of the company doing the renovations and get permission to visit, and in fact they not only let me stay there, and fed me, but would not accept any money for doing so!

It was a wonderful opportunity to go walking on my own – hours and hours over the hills, alongside small woodland streams, around one of the crater lakes – without seeing another person. The only life I saw was monkeys, a cane rat, the ranch’s semi-wild cattle and huge numbers of birds. For those who are interested the birds included lots of white-crested turacos (beautiful big green birds with blue wings and tail, a white head and crest, and a bright crimson patch under each wing), Dybowski’s twinspot, oriole warbler and paradise flycatcher.

Then back to Yaounde for a week’s work, via the long overnight train journey again, made even longer as we derailed before we got there so I had to take alternative transport for the last part. We were given the option of waiting on the train for an hour or so before it was put back onto the rails, but departing fellow passengers warned me that I risked attack by bandits if I stayed, so I followed them across the field to the nearby road, to negotiate a place in a very crowded van. Travelling in Africa is never straightforward!

New Year 2010

2010-01-02T03:14:00.000-08:00

Having switched my holiday dates to accommodate the friend who visited me for Christmas, I found myself in Dakar for New Year’s Eve. Only one friend was in town though (well, actually I have only one friend out here as the others I have made have all now left to work in other parts of the world) and she had a do with people from her embassy. My maid Gloria mentioned that there were several concerts going on, but she didn’t say where, and all I could find advertised were over-priced buffet dinner-dances. So I found myself, as many times in the past, deciding that the best thing to do on New Year’s Eve is to go to bed early so as to start the new year refreshed.

I had an early dinner (pasta with a sauce of feta cheese, black olives, cream and herbs de Provence, with a big glass of Sangria – delicious!) and watched a DVD, then went to bed and to sleep. Not for long, however. It seems that the Senegalese celebrate the New Year with fireworks. They were so loud, and some seemingly so close, that I decided the best thing I could do was to get up and get dressed, and go out to watch. There were fireworks everywhere, some distant big spectacular ones, but many small ones going off nearby. I got to the closest road but seeing children setting off fireworks at all angles (aiming at eachother sometimes – where were their parents?!!) decided not to risk walking across. So I came back home, said Happy New Year to my guard and went back to bed.

I’d made a couple of resolutions this year, and not the type you can put off until the 2nd:
- French practice every day for at least an hour
- exercise or stretching every day (to get myself firmer and more supple)

(and actually I think there might have been a third but as I didn’t write them down I have already forgotten what it was…). So before breakfast I did some stretching, and straight after breakfast got out the Rosetta Stone DVD that a friend kindly gave me a few weeks ago and started on Unit 1, lesson 1 of the French.

As I draft this it is 8pm, and apart from taking lunch and packing for my next trip which starts tomorrow, I realise I have been working on the French for the whole day!! I’m wondering now whether I should have added in a New Year motto, something along the lines of “all work and no play…”.

Anyway, Happy New Year to all of you who read this. Perhaps I should put it in the words of my guard, who got someone to translate for him and wrote me a New Year “card” on a piece of scrap paper: “Peace, Health, Happiness, prosperity and many money for you in the new year 2010”.

Christmas Visitor

2009-12-28T05:31:00.000-08:00

I was very happy to learn that a friend had decided to come out to visit me for a week, even though it involved a little rearrangement of my existing calendar. He was due to arrive late on the evening of Saturday 19 December, leaving late on Saturday 26, and his initial suggestion that we hire a car seemed a good indicator that he was keen to get out and about and see something of the country.

I spent a fair amount of time poring over my guide books, trying to work out what would be a suitable programme for a one week visit – a programme that would satisfy my demand to see new bits of the country as well as ensuring that my visitor Robbo would have a good time. I was conscious that even in London he preferred the comfort of his car to the unpredictability of public transport (not just the delays but also the fellow travellers with whom you might not have chosen to share your ride), but with car hire working out far too expensive here there remained the choice of only public transport or privately chartered taxis, the latter costing around ten times as much as the former. I decided we would use a mixture of the two – private taxis for short trips (eg around Dakar) and shared taxis (public transport) for long-distance trips, but even here we could buy three places for the two of us, to give us more space and comfort. Travelling this way would still allow us enough time to get to St. Louis (the 350-year-old former capital, now a wonderfully crumbling and atmospheric World Heritage Site), and from there onto a few old towns and villages along the River Senegal which would be new territory for me.

Things didn’t start well when I received a text on the Saturday morning to say that his flight was going to be delayed by as much as four hours. He seemed satisfied that his connecting flight was to be held, but it would still mean arriving at 02:00. It got worse, however, as his flight was delayed further, ultimately by seven hours (due to snow at Gatwick), and he missed his connection in Tripoli. He didn’t have a visa for Libya so was forced to spend the night in the airport, and his luggage was nowhere to be seen. He phoned me Sunday morning to tell me the next flight from Tripoli to Dakar was not until Monday evening.

On Monday I received another message: there was in fact no flight that day so he would be forced to spend yet another night in Tripoli.

Well, to cut the story a little shorter, he finally got out of Dakar airport at 01:30 on Wednesday morning, and without his luggage. I had a few spare large Tshirts that might see him through the week , but then he listed for me the goodies he had packed in his case for me – mince pies, Christmas cake, cheese, champagne, porridge oats, magazines…

Of course the itinerary I had planned had gone out of the window. I suggested a couple of shorter alternatives, and he opted for a quick trip to St. Louis – travel there Wednesday, enjoy Thursday and Friday morning there, then back to Dakar on the Friday afternoon for a day in Dakar (including Goree Island) before he flew back home. (Right is a picture of a colonial mansion in St. Louis, by the way, not my house, as one reader thought)

Things didn’t go quite so well. The environment I take for granted here in Africa was of course very new to my friend, and not all that welcome at times. On the way up to St. Louis we got stuck in traffic leaving Dakar, so the whole journey took, apparently, some five hours (generally I don’t look at my watch on such days as there doesn’t seem much point when I can’t influence things, but he is used to London efficiency so was monitoring the time). He didn’t like the flies which surrounded us most of the time, particularly when we were trying to eat. He didn’t like the slow, haphazard service we received in most restaurants and bars. Most of all he didn’t like the reaction of our taxi driver on the journey back to Dakar, when a valve broke in the radiator and we were left under a roadside tree whilst the driver stood in the road waiting for “something or someone” to come along to solve the problem.

He expected planning, organisation, initiative – and West Africa, generally, is not like that. I think I’ve mentioned before the “Insh’Allah” attitude; everything is decided by Allah so there is no point trying to make things happen yourself, you are better just waiting for Allah to send down a solution. It is frustrating, but to some extent you get used to it (you have to, as you cannot change it), and in many cases it seems to sort-of work. In this case another car came along with two spaces, and we were put in it – in fact it was a more comfortable car, and the driver took us right to my suburb, a five-minute walk from my house, rather than to the chaotic and dirty main transport hub in town.

I was pretty happy, and sharing with my friend my delight that we had been taken right home like that, when he pointed out that the journey had taken us six hours, and we had effectively ‘lost’ Christmas Day. I hadn’t seen it as lost, as we had been chatting away during the journey (hadn’t he said that his main reason for coming was to see me?), but I am used to the discomforts of travelling in Africa and can fairly easily shut them out. Of course I have to remember that someone who arrived here less than three days earlier (and who rarely uses public transport even in London) would not find it so easy.

Still, there were plenty of good bits, and we were both very happy to have seen eachother. Probably the best of all was the few hours spent at my favourite eating place in Dakar – a casual place with plastic chairs on a floor of seashells, where you can watch the Atlantic waves meet at Africa’s most westerly point whilst you linger over plates full of freshly caught cockles and mussels. We watched the sun set there on Christmas Day and I think it might even have made up for the journey back from St. Louis!

Also that day we got a message to say that some delayed bags had arrived in Dakar – we went to check and there was his case. Only 24 hours left for him to use the clothes, etc, packed there, but 24 hours was enough for him to unload all the goodies he had brought me, and I sit here typing this now with a mince pie and a half-read Independent by my side. Bliss. Thank you Robbo, and next time I promise no journey of more than three hours unless it is in a private, air-conditioned vehicle!

Silent Winter

2009-12-14T04:27:00.000-08:00

With the help of my maid, Gloria, I’ve been battling white fly for more than a year. Tiny little things, they lay their eggs on plants, and the larvae eat the sap from the leaves and stems, drip sap all over the ground beneath, and kill the plants they are feeding from. I’ve replaced dead plants, I’ve paid passing itinerant plant-sprayers, and most of all Gloria and I have spent countless hours with a bucket of soapy water, washing the eggs and larvae off the leaves. But the problem just gets worse.

Some time ago, after I had bought new bougainvillea plants to replace the dead ones, one of my guards (a former gardening assistant at the American Embassy) suggested I buy Lannate that he could treat the plants with. Not knowing what this was or where I could buy it I sort of nodded, and did nothing about it. But last month I found myself walking past a gardening supplies shop, so I went in to ask if they had anything to counter white fly. “Lannate!” cried the assistant, triumphantly, “it’s the only thing that works”. So I bought a packet.

Back home, unwrapping it, I found the back of packet covered with safety warnings. Strong stuff, this Lannate. So I told my maid about the danger, set aside a bucket for mixing the produce which could be thrown away afterwards, and left her money to buy protective face mask, gloves, etc. I told the guard who said he would do the first application that week.

I flew off to Guinea Bissau for work. Back home the next Saturday afternoon, it was clear that Gloria had not been in for a day or so, as there were dead leaves and dust all around, and no milk waiting for me in the fridge. Then I heard a key turn in my door, and a faint voice called my name. Gloria stumbled into my hallway, and asked if she could sit down. In fact she immediately laid down on her side, holding her ribcage as if in pain – clearly she was not at all well.

She had come to bring my milk (and to sweep the leaves but of course I told her not to bother), but told me how ill she had become after my guard applied the Lannate. She had bought mask and gloves for him, but followed him round a metre behind as he sprayed, and having not bought a mask for herself she was breathing in large quantities of this poisonous pesticide. She had not eaten for the three days since the application, was vomiting every time she took a drink, had dreadful pains in her middle somewhere, headaches, double vision, a shortness of breath, aching muscles, cold, clammy skin…

I instructed her to go to the hospital and promised to pay the costs. Then the next morning I flew to Ghana for my next work assignment.

I got back three weeks later. Gloria had slowly got better (although without any hospital assistance), the white fly larvae seem to have gone – and there is no longer any birdsong in my courtyard. I mentioned this silence to her and she said that after the second application of the Lannate she had removed six dead birds from inside the courtyard. Oh, what have I done?

Picathartes

2009-12-03T11:42:00.001-08:00

No, not a Senegalese swear word, but a family of rare African birds. More of them later.

I’ve taken advantage of a couple of recent opportunities to fit in a bit of bird/nature-watching. Firstly, a public holiday falling on a Monday in Senegal gave me a long weekend. A part of me just wanted to laze around, but always fearful that my contract here may end with corners of the region still unexplored, I decided to squeeze in a long weekend in The Gambia.

This meant a very early start – out of the house by 5:30 on the Saturday morning so as to get out of Dakar before the traffic jams built up. It seemed to work well as I was in The Gambia, and south of the river, by 2pm – only 40km away from my destination and a late afternoon/early evening stroll was in sight. However east-west traffic in central Gambia is not that frequent on Saturdays, apparently, and by the time I got to Tendaba Camp it was after 8pm and dark. I could almost have walked there in the time, and I reflected that it would have been worth the cost of hiring a private taxi instead of waiting for the public shared bush taxi if only I had known what a long wait was in store.

But anyway, I was still in time to organise a boat trip in the Baobolong Wetland Reserve for the next morning, which had been the main aim of the weekend. So the next morning I set off at 7:30 with a guide in a little wooden pirogue, crossing the wide, flat River Gambia for the little creeks of the Wetlands.

Even before we had crossed the river, two black crowned cranes had flown overhead, and the whole morning was full of birds. Although as is often the case with such bird-watching trips, it would have been worth it simply for the beauty of the scenery. I’m a water-lover anyway, whether wild, crashing ocean waves or still, calm lakes and creeks, and these creeks had the added bonus of primeval-looking vegetation (ferns, palms and the ghostly white remains of drowned trees) accompanied by a cacophony of bird sounds, including the plaintive cries of the beautiful blue-breasted kingfishers which were all around.
For some reason I didn’t end up with a photo of those – I think I was too caught up in just watching them to think of trying to take photos – but I did get one of a grey-headed kingfisher.

The second opportunity to get out into the wilds came in Ghana. Another public holiday and a few days of leave added on to a business trip there enabled me to organise a tour with a Ghanaian guide and driver, so as to get to some places off the beaten track. We spent most of the time walking through various forests, including a second visit to the canopy walkway in the Kakum Forest. I went there during my week in Ghana last year, but this time my guide was able to negotiate early morning entry which, combined with the use of his telescope, enabled me to get much more out of the visit than I did last year. Lots of birds as well as a small troop of beautiful spot-nosed monkeys.

It’s a pity I cannot show you here the beauty and magnificence of the violet turaco, the African emerald cuckoo or the black-casqued hornbill, but I think it is worth describing the trek to see one particular bird – the yellow-headed picathartes – as there are serious birdwatchers who go to Ghana specifically to see this bizarre creature, and the experience of tracking it down was a highlight of the trip.

This bird is about the size of a chicken, but very slender and with strong legs which it uses to bound between the ground and low branches in the forests where it lives. The underparts are white, and the back, wings and tail a very dark grey, but the head is the strange part – bare of feathers and coloured yellow, with a large raised black patch behind each eye rather like a big black mole. They live deep in the forests of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and were recently discovered to also live in this south-western part of Ghana. Although found only in inaccessible places, they build their mud nests on the sides of over-hanging rocks, and return to the nests every evening to sleep, so once the nesting site of a colony has been located the birds are relatively easy to see.

I say ‘relatively’ because getting to the interior of a forest in West Africa is never all that easy…

In Ghana one of the nesting colonies has been “opened to the public”: an arrangement set up with the local village that guides from the village will show people to the site for a fixed fee, which goes to the village development fund as an incentive for the village to preserve the forest. The other nesting sites are known only to the Ghana Wildlife Society. We drove to the village – itself a long journey down a bumpy dirt track for about an hour. There we located a guide, and I was reminded of the ‘rules’ – that once we got the site we were to make ourselves comfortable so as to wait, silent and motionless, until the birds came home for the night. Usually at about 16:30 but it could be a bit earlier so we had to be in place well before.

We had a 45-minute walk to get there. This started along a track through the farmers’ ‘fields’ of cocoa, banana, cassava, etc (where the forest has been cleared), but quickly took us into the forest itself where the path wound slowly upwards between the trees and vines. The last part was very steep, and I wanted to grab hold of those vines to help haul myself up, and had to keep remembering to check each one first for ants, thorns, etc.

Finally we were there, a rocky outcrop within the forest with a number of mud nests on the side, and we settled down on the rock, just a couple of metres away from the nests, to wait. It was just after 16:00.

16:15. My bottom had started to go numb and sweat tickled maddeningly as it trickled down my cleavage, but I couldn’t move – the birds could be here at any minute. The forest buzzed and hummed around us.

16:25. The minutes were ticking by very slowly.

16:32. What if they didn’t come? If they all decided to spend the night round a friend’s nest?

16:40. Starting to get seriously worried, when suddenly a shadow jumped into a nearby branch – and another – here they were!! Then the village guide’s mobile phone rang…

Ten minutes or so later, thankfully, the birds returned, lurking around the nesting area as they tried to figure out what to do. Clearly they couldn’t get to their nests with us sitting beside them, but they seemed surprisingly unafraid of us as long as we were careful not to make any sudden noises or movements. However we didn’t want to disturb the birds too much, so left once the guide was satisfied that I’d had a good view of them.

This was a special part of this trip of course, as these birds are so rare and so strange that you do feel privileged to get to see them. I also really enjoyed just being immersed in nature – on one day we spent six hours walking along a path in a forest and whilst we saw lots of birds, some squirrels and two snakes, we saw only one other person – but still I am wondering whether to try to see the other member of this bird family, the red-headed picathartes, when I go to Cameroon early next year.

Television

2009-11-11T00:43:00.000-08:00

It was nice, and very surprising, to find that Senegalese TV was showing the Chelsea v Man Utd match on Sunday (although the refereeing decisions left me fuming so perhaps I would have been better off not seeing it).

This is more typical of the TV fare on offer, noted one evening last week:

RTS
Various mid-level Senegalese notables making speeches, watched by rows of women sat in plastic chairs wearing big colourful shiny boubous and too much make-up and jewellery, trying to look interested. In Wolof (the main local language).

RDW
A group of about 12 women in shiny, voluminous, multi-coloured boubous, in front of some palm trees, singing and dancing to some nice plinky-plonky Malian-sounding music. In some local language.

2S
Three women in (yes, you guessed) shiny, voluminous, multi-coloured boubous, artfully lounging in big leather armchairs, smiling and waving their arms around gently, whilst a similarly dressed woman in more jewellery shuffled around the room singing (in a local language). Oh, then cut to the same women, in different boubous, swaying to the same music in front of a backdrop of mud huts.

Africable
Soap opera from Latin America (Mexico?) dubbed into French.

TV5 Monde
Unclear, but involved an African family in a cheap, echoing set of a modern house, speaking French. Seemed to be some sort of soap opera.

SN2
Top-half view of a man in a shiny purple boubou, in front of a plain blue background, eyes closed, singing/wailing in some local language.

Walf TV
African man in quite nice shiny boubou singing what sounded like a North African (Moroccan?) song, with three women behind him in boubous and veils swaying to the music.

You can see why I don't watch TV very often!

However having just arrived in Guinea Bissau I am faced with even stranger TV since this is part of the tiny Lusophone community, that is the former Portuguese colonies. At breakfast this morning they were showing “Bom Dia Africa” with activities taking place in a dry dusty environment that clearly wasn’t Guinea Bissau, which is lush and green. Turned out to be an Angolan TV channel, which then moved on to a programme set in a swimming pool, with lots of bare flesh on show including Brazilian-style thong bikinis. Most bizarre to be watching that from conservative, largely Muslim West Africa, where the showing of any flesh between the waist and the knee is pretty much taboo for local women (at the beach I’ve seen local women go in the water fully clothed). Once again though I am reminded of how much I like Guinea Bissau. It has something of Brazil about it not just in the rhythms of the music and movement of the people but also in the relaxed atmosphere of the place.

Insects and other nasty things

2009-10-02T12:19:00.000-07:00

The rainy season brings out the insects. Not just the mosquitoes, although those are certainly plentiful at the moment, but other things too. This morning I found a centipede on the wall in my hall (OK, not an insect, I know). Thankfully I found out recently, during my Kenya holiday, that these things have a bite/sting so painful that grown men can roll around on the floor screaming in agony, so it was very quickly squashed.

Last weekend I found this nasty-looking insect building its little mud nest in my kitchen (little nests that rapidly grow to enormous nests). I called my maid, Gloria, over and asked her to deal with it, and she smashed the nest into pieces. Before she threw them away however I asked to take a look, wondering if there had been anything inside the little mud tunnels. & this was what I saw.

Ten dead spiders, at least! Plus what I guess was the insect larvae, just under the lime green spider in the front of the picture. I wondered then, given my dislike of spiders, whether I was doing the right thing by discouraging it from nesting in my house. But it did look as though it could give a nasty sting, as I said to Gloria. She replied that they are completely harmless. I felt momentarily guilty, but then again I really wouldn’t feel comfortable with an insect like that hovering around me, despite its wonderful spider-removing capacity.

Flooding in Dakar

2009-09-21T10:06:00.000-07:00

I got home to Dakar to find torrential rain, with thunderstorms several times a day and water rushing down the streets like mini rivers. Thankfully I live in a well-drained area, so apart from the water coming through a leak in the roof, I’m not in too much danger.

But out in the northern suburbs I think close to a million people are affected in one way or another by flooding – and the President has decided to prolong his holiday in France. Mind you, there wouldn’t really be much he could do if he came back. I did a bit of research on this area earlier in the year because I had to do an Open University assignment related to flooding. This is roughly what I found.

Running through the middle of the big northern suburbs of Pikine and Guediawaye where the biggest problems are is the Niayes valley, a low-lying area of dunes and basins where the water table is in places only a couple of metres below the surface. It is effectively a dried-out river bed.

It used to be predominantly a market-gardening area, supplying Dakar with its fruit and vegetables, but with droughts hitting livelihoods in the rural areas, and unsightly shanty towns being cleared from the centre of Dakar, the population grew rapidly in the 1970s and ‘80s. It evolved from a series of villages to a vast urban sprawl of over a million inhabitants (some three-quarters of whom didn’t even acquire a building permit for their houses - there is not much respect for laws here, especially when they are expensive to comply with and when the government does not have the power to enforce them). The government’s 1967 Dakar Urban Plan banned construction in wetland zones such as this, because of the risk of flooding (the droughts were not going to last forever), but this was not properly enforced either.

But all the time the flood risk was worsening. Due to the ‘informal’ nature of the settlement, there were no drainage channels built in. There were no sanitation facilities, and household waste was dumped in the streets, blocking natural drainage channels so there would be nowhere for rainwater to go. So when the rains returned – in 2001, 2005, 2007, 2008 and again this year – thousands of homes were flooded as well as schools and market-places. Some had families elsewhere to look after them, but many had to stay, moving upstairs if they were lucky enough to have one, and building makeshift flood defences out of sand and rubbish. The water table is now so high that even if you pump out the water, more just comes up out of the ground.

In 2008 the government responded to the emergency by directing $650,000 towards pumping water out of submerged neighbourhoods, the International Federation of the Red Cross delivered emergency supplies to families sheltering in schools, and other NGOs such as Islamic Relief delivered food parcels. However the emergency money ran out in a matter of just days, after which the pumps sat idle because there were no funds to buy fuel for them.

In Senegal, very few householders buy insurance. Many don’t know such cover exists, and those that do are unlikely to take it up, given the level of poverty. There is also a pervasive sense of fatalism, encapsulated by the often heard “Insh’allah” meaning “if God wills it”. This particular interpretation of Islam leads the residents to do far less than one might expect to help mitigate the flood risk. No one makes any attempt to clean up the rubbish, for example, that all agree is part of the problem.

What about local government? Well a regional flood management commission was set up, and in 2005 undertook to construct (and then maintain) flood protection and sanitation facilities, at a cost of $8.2m, and to procure equipment such as pumps, at a cost of some $30,000. By August 2008 the only progress was the purchase and installation of a number of pumps. In reality, pumping out floodwater is more or less all the local authorities can afford.

At national government level, an ambitious plan was drawn up following the 2005 floods to build new accommodation for the relocation of 4,000 affected families – the ones with legal land title and building permits. Plan Jaxaay was to cost the government $104 million. But they don’t have the money either. Part of the financing was diverted from a budget originally intended to fund elections (which therefore had to be postponed in the face of substantial opposition), but when officials tried to draw down the funds they found that these had already been spent on something else. A year later when the floods came again, only empty fields marked the Plan Jaxaay site. I’ve heard that only around 1,500 families have been moved so far, and that this year part of that site was flooded too.

So why do people still live there? Well, most of them have no choice. No-one will buy the houses in view of the flooding and the lack of legal papers, and few have the financial means to start over again. Besides, their friends and family are there – it is their home.

I visited Pikine in April this year, and went to a couple of houses, getting to one across a trail of sandbags laid through the green, foul-smelling, mosquito-infested floodwaters that still remained six months after the flooding of October 2008. It is not a pretty place. Even before the floodwaters added to the mess, it was a mixture of cement block houses and piles of rubbish. But of course our Western appreciation of pretty views and nice green space is one borne out of relative luxury. Here the environment is seen as a source of resources to be exploited in the pursuit of survival. And Pikine is cheap - $15 a month to rent a single room, compared with $50+ anywhere else. So people still come, and still build. And pray that “if God wills it” the floods will not return next year.

The holiday bit

2009-09-10T11:24:00.000-07:00

Although my trip to Kenya was really about volunteer work, there were short bursts of holiday in there too. For example the drive to the inland community went through Tsavo West National Park (where I saw giraffes, kudus, elephants and an ostrich), and I spent a weekend visiting Shimba Hills National Park (where I saw buffalo, sable antelope, and more giraffes, as well as a pair of African wood owls). A late afternoon visit to a lodge in Tsavo West also added more elephants, hippos, crocodiles and a zebra to the list.

There’s not much to say about it really, as you all know what elephants, hippos, etc look like, but an excuse to post a couple of photos here (and a nice yellow-billed stork at the end).

I also got to see my Mum, of course, spending a weekend with her when the rest of the volunteers were off getting drunk together. In fact they seemed to spend a lot of their time getting drunk, and swearing, and falling about laughing about farting. Are all young people like that nowadays?? They were nice people, but showed no respect at all for the sensitivities of those around them (Kenyans generally being polite, respectful, well-mannered people who I’m certain will have been horrified by such behaviour) and at times I actually felt embarrassed to be with them.

Finally my five weeks were over however, and GVI drove me to Mombasa airport. I arrived many hours before my flight but decided it wasn’t worth paying $30 to transfer to an earlier one.

Big mistake! Waiting in the departure lounge an hour before scheduled take-off, I was approached by an airline representative to be told the flight had been delayed by three hours to 11pm. Which would mean arriving in Nairobi after midnight. Conscious of the city’s reputation, I asked her if it wasn’t dangerous for me to take a taxi to my hotel at such an hour. She told me it was dangerous, so I asked her what I should do. “Pray” she said.

Finally on the plane, I relayed this conversation to the man sitting next to me. He immediately offered to transfer some credit to my phone so that I could contact my hotel and/or a taxi company, but then also offered to give me a lift to my hotel. I decided that he was lower risk than a random taxi at that time of night, and sure enough he (in fact his driver) took me to my hotel. I didn’t even need the phone credit (which he would not accept payment for). It was very typical Africa – things appear to have gone wrong and you are feeling miserable about it, then something good turns up, usually due to the kindness of African people.

More community work

2009-09-08T03:04:00.000-07:00

I had a second week of community work, this time in a village in the dry, dusty interior near Tsavo West. Former poachers, the community of Mahandakini had been persuaded by the World Society for the Protection of Animals that there were better ways of making a living than hunting giraffes to sell as bushmeat, and GVI was trying to help them develop other ways of making a living.

The community already grow cotton, but as raw cotton prices are so low, they don't really make money from it. GVI (through its volunteers) is trying to raise money to buy spinning machines for the village, and is teaching them to make cotton products to sell to tourist lodges and perhaps to export to "fair trade" shops in the UK. We were there to teach them how to turn woven cotton into cushion covers, as well as advising on the suitability of different designs using locally available natural dyes.

So I found myself measuring, cutting and pinning up cotton, trying to explain how to calculate the amount of material to allow for the overlap (the bit where the cushion goes in) and other things I had known nothing about until this week. I also watched the women turn tree bark into a natural dye (here they are straining the dye through a plastic tea-strainer on the left), and fold and tie the cotton before dying it so as to produce patterns on the material. I hadn't much looked forward to this as I didn't see how I could contribute anything useful, but in fact with some preparation it went well and I enjoyed it. The sample finished product that we managed to prepare during the week was of a surprisingly high quality.

Living conditions there were basic, as we slept in our sleeping bags on the concrete floor of a disused building, cooked over a fire, and got to "wash" only once in the week when we visited a natural spring and all jumped in for a swim.

By the end of the week we (and all of our clothes and sleeping bags) were brown from the dust. I actually found myself looking forward to a "shower" from a bucket of seawater back at base!

Forest and Community work

2009-09-07T09:08:00.001-07:00

Continuing with my volunteer stint in Kenya, I moved over to Shimoni peninsula for a week of work in the forest. The focus was to collect data on the resident Angolan black and white colobus monkeys, but a lot of time was also spent collecting data on the habitat, including on other mammals, on butterflies and birds, and on the vegetation.

We spent long hours walking along transects in the forest – under hanging branches and vines, over fallen logs, and through thorny bushes – and I loved every minute of it, despite the collection of cuts and bruises I accumulated. We saw quite a few colobus as well as Sykes monkeys and olive baboons, bushbabies, tiny suni antelopes, a giant pouched rat, and a few birds.

The best bit was never knowing what you might see next (compared to the marine work where it was dolphins and more dolphins…). The worst bit was seeing the frightening rate of deforestation, as every day we saw or heard people cutting down trees, and one day saw an enormous, newly constructed charcoal pit – illegal, but there is no-one with the resources to enforce the rules.

We also spent a week in Shimoni doing community work. This was supposed to involve teaching English, but as school had not restarted we were allocated to painting a school classroom instead. I have no artistic abilities, but was so relieved to get out of the teaching, having been dreading the thought of standing up in front of a room full of children, that I was happy to be asked to paint pictures to illustrate the numbers 3 – 7!

The marine environment

2009-08-08T01:45:00.000-07:00

is not for me. I had a great couple of weeks assisting with the marine research done by GVI in Kenya – watching (and collecting data on) bottlenose and humpback dolphins, humpback whales and hawksbill turtles. But even here, 4° off the equator, the wind can be cold. Especially when it is raining, and you have just got out of the sea following a 400 metre snorkel as part of the turtle survey. It was as I sat there shivering, clinging on to the edge of the boat as we tossed about on the swell, that it briefly crossed my mind that I would prefer to be, at that moment, sitting in an office working on some report.

I’m just not cut out for this kind of life. You have to have good balance to deal with a constantly moving boat and strong arms to lug all the heavy equipment about, as well as being able to cope with the cold rather better than I do. An earlier dream I had of finding some kind of work in this field has well and truly gone!

I could, however, happily base myself somewhere with a view like the one we had from our camp

Two sides of Bangkok

2009-07-30T04:57:00.000-07:00

Depressed by the volume of traffic, prostitutes and hawkers near my hotel, I was determined to search for some nicer bits of Bangkok at the weekend. I love water, so I started by walking to the klong (canal) nearest to the hotel, where I took a water taxi the whole of its length. Suddenly a different world appeared, as behind the shiny new tower blocks are rickety old wooden houses and shacks, mostly covered with a veritable forest of pot plants, where cats prowl, women are busy cooking and washing, and the men laze around in hammocks watching the world go by.

The water is dirty, and smelly, of course, and the water taxis have plastic “curtains” at the sides to protect the passengers from splashes – so it isn’t the best tourist transport, but nevertheless it is miles better than the traffic jams out on the roads.

Not that I’m complaining about any of it. The choice of restaurants near my hotel in Sukhumvit was superb, with Italian, Japanese – even a Manchester United Restaurant and Bar! But everywhere you look there are these couples – older, unattractive white man (receding hairline, beer belly, etc) with a beautiful, slim young Thai girl on his arm – that really bother me.

Why? I don’t disapprove of prostitution, so it’s not that. But I think that those who indulge in prostitution should have the grace to be slightly embarrassed about it, and so to keep it quiet. Here, however the men look like the cat that got the cream, so proud of their ‘conquest’. But surely they must realise that everyone knows they couldn’t attract a girl like that in a million years unless they were paying her? The girls seem to have no shame either.

But anyway, away from that Bangkok has some nice, interesting areas. After my canal trip I went to visit Wat Pho, to see the enormous reclining Buddha as well as all the hundreds of other buddhas in side temples dotted around the complex. There were surprisingly few tourists there (perhaps tricked by the many men in the area who tell you, “It’s closed today, but I can arrange for you to do a good shopping trip instead…”) and the place had a very relaxing atmosphere. I spent three hours there. Although I have to admit that even there the other side of Bangkok intruded briefly. Walking down a little lane between side temples, I looked to my right when I heard someone gasp, and was surprised to see a Thai man standing there masturbating. Not quite the respect for Buddha that you expect inside the grounds of the country’s major Buddhist temple!

Wanting to see more of the water afterwards I took a one-hour tour on a longtail boat of the Thonburi area of the city – a labyrinth of canals lined with wooden houses perched on stilts above the water and a level of peace and tranquillity that couldn’t be imagined from the busy streets.

On Sunday a colleague took me to the famous Chatuchak weekend market. It is enormous, selling everything from camping gear and Buddha statues to orchids and puppies. We wandered its lanes for several hours and I bought Tshirts, sandals and a dress. I resisted the Buddha statues but gazed longingly at a giant painting of a magnolia tree in bloom on strips of old wood. It was the size of one wall of a room, and I could just imagine it looking spectacular on the wall of one of those enormous old London warehouse flats.

But this trip was over far too soon (eight days in total), and I am drafting this whilst waiting for my connecting flight in Nairobi airport. A nine hour flight which will get me back home to Dakar this evening, before I have to turn around again 24 hours later to fly all the way back here again…

Transit in Nairobi

2009-07-30T04:54:00.000-07:00

Just a quick business trip to Thailand, but it’s not the easiest place to get to from Dakar. First a nine-hour overnight flight to Nairobi, then 16 hours in transit in Nairobi, followed by another nine-hour overnight flight to get to Bangkok.

What to do with 16 hours in Nairobi? It’s not a bad airport, with a transit lounge for Kenya Airways passengers, but really 16 hours is too long to spend in an airport.

So I bought myself a transit visa and with my cabin baggage checked through to Bangkok I was able to get the bus into town, and from there a matatu to the Nairobi National Park. I wasn’t going to go into the Park itself, at $50 just for entrance (for foreigners), and at least as much again to hire a car and driver as you are not allowed to walk there. However there is a board-walk along the periphery of the park, with some orphaned and rescued animals on display as well as the possibility of seeing birds, monkeys etc – and this at only $20 entrance.

& I wasn’t disappointed. With Sykes monkeys (I think) in the trees, stunning little purple grenadiers flitting about, and a pair of giant kingfishers easily visible not too far from the path – a bird I have long wanted to see.

It was a good day, although Dakar-Bangkok is still not a journey I would recommend.

Trouble with the staff

2009-07-22T07:45:00.000-07:00

One of my guards told me he wanted to have a word with me before I went on my next trip. He was particularly keen to track me down, even sending me a text at work to be sure that I would be home that evening.

I hoped he wouldn’t ask for another loan. He already owes me money, and although he is always very good at paying me back, this one has been outstanding a little longer than usual. He’s recently been bringing me the odd ‘gift’ – a fresh mango here, something planted in the garden there – I think in lieu of interest as he knows he should have repaid me by now. I guess times are tough, as security guards don’t earn all that much. & I didn’t think this was going to be a repayment, as for that there was no need to ask to speak to me, he could just hand me the money.

So it was with a bit of trepidation that I answered the door to his knock on Friday evening. I did not want to lend him more money until he repaid the previous loan, but also did not relish the prospect of saying “no” to him, as he has been with me since I first moved into my house and is the sweetest, gentlest, most helpful of men.

I invited him in to sit down, and he started by telling me that he hoped what he was going to say would not upset me, that he knew he was risking his job by what he was about to say, but that he could not keep quiet for any longer. I told him to go ahead and tell me whatever it was.

“I’ve fallen in love with you” he said.

Well! That was the LAST thing I expected, and I really didn’t know what to say. He is a lovely person, who would treat a woman really well (the type who would never look at another woman again in his life) – as I said above, a really sweet, gentle and kind man. Reminds me of my Mum’s new husband, in fact.

But not what I would be looking for, even were I looking for a man at all! I really didn’t know what to say to him (nor how to talk about this sort of thing in French…) so had to just tell him I was not interested in him but that I was not upset by what he had told me and that his job was safe. Apparently he has been hiding this feeling for some six months now, and the fact that I was about to be away from Dakar for seven weeks meant he just had to tell me how he felt. He wants me to ‘think about it’ while I am away.

How do you tell someone, gently, that there is absolutely no chance on earth that you will ever get together with them, in a way that is final but does not hurt their feelings?

Wrestling

2009-07-14T04:23:00.000-07:00

Senegal’s national sport, even more popular than football, is wrestling. There is Senegalese wrestling on TV nearly every night of the week, and that is only from the stadia around the country; there are countless smaller arenas and village squares where young men wrestle each other to the ground.

I’ve watched it on TV many times and determined that I had to see it in real life. The actual wrestling bout (a mixture of wrestling, judo, and - at the higher levels where they progress to ‘wrestling with boxing’ - also the odd punch) usually takes just a few minutes but the preparation takes an hour or more with the participants strutting about in little loin cloths with various bits of leather and rope entwined about themselves to hold their gris gris – leather pouches containing protective amulets. Traditionally these would be bits of ground up animal or vegetable matter invested with various powers, but those rejecting animism for Islam might now replace the chicken bone with a Moslem prayer (perhaps coated in ground-up chicken bone just in case…). Their spiritual guide will also have prepared various liquid potions for them, which they bring in plastic bottles to drink, pour all over their bodies or sprinkle over the arena before the fight.

All the time there will be relentless drumming (from an official troupe but also by people in the crowd), and a praise singer calling out the virtues of the fighters. Meanwhile the TV cameramen prowl around, and journalists from various newspapers trail the wrestlers with their cameras and microphones – and really the whole thing seems like that characteristically African organised chaos that I love so much about this place.

Finally this weekend I got to go to a real live wrestling contest in a stadium in the middle of Dakar (sat between the treasurer of the national wrestling federation and the father of the favourite to win the cup so inevitably I was also featured several times on the TV, as I discovered at work the next day…). It was everything I had seen on TV only louder and more confusing, with the ‘sand pit’ in the middle where the fight takes place, a group of drummers and singers up one end, two TV commentators talking away constantly (how I wish I understood the Wolof language), journalists milling about everywhere, the various wrestlers (for the four different fights) preparing themselves and of course the crowd getting worked up. This appears to show some sort of blood-letting as part of the preparations:

I enjoyed it so much that my hosts took me on with them to a second competition, not in a stadium this time but a local arena in a suburb of Dakar. Here there was the same drumming and praise singing, but some thirty plus wrestlers strutting about, whilst two or three wrestling bouts were usually taking place, each with its own referee, in various parts of the sand pit. All this built up to a grand finale for which the winner not only got $2,000 but also the opportunity to move up to the ‘wrestling with boxing’ in a proper stadium with bigger prize money.

A spectator at this second venue explained to me that there are four requirements for a successful fighter: physical power, intelligence, serenity and effective mystical charms (the gris gris and potions). I asked whether the charms weren’t just a show to psyche out the opposition, and was assured that they were real, that they work, and that without them a fighter has no chance – indeed without them to counter the power of his opponent’s charms he may find himself powerless to even move once the fight starts. & I must say in the sultry heat of the rainy season, with the hypnotic drumming going on and on, and semi-naked wrestlers pouring these strange-coloured liquids over themselves, it was almost possible to believe in them.

Certainly when I thought about the headlining fight at the first venue, it was hard to comprehend how the fat guy (below) beat his opponent (with the usual impressive fighter physique) without some kind of supernatural help.

Sun worshipping

2009-07-07T09:24:00.000-07:00

Apparently a statistical analysis showed that there really is a greater likelihood of rain at the weekend than during the working week. This analysis was done in the UK, but I can confirm that it applies here in Senegal too.

All last week I looked out of the window at the sun, waiting for Sunday (no work, no guards and no maid) when I planned to lie there sweating out litres of fluid – as it is now the humid time of year – in the pursuit of that permanent suntan. Sunday came, at last. I opened the curtains, only to see dark grey clouds, and within a couple of hours the rain started, and continued throughout the day.

On Monday, of course, the sky was blue again and the sun back out.

This is the third weekend out of four when my sunbathing has been scuppered by the weather, during which time we have had only one wet weekday. I know it is protecting my skin from further ageing (and how I’ve aged since I’ve been living in Senegal!) but I feel so much better when I’m brown.

Falling apart

2009-06-11T12:11:00.000-07:00

As a break from the usual routine of getting on and off planes, I have had the luxury of a whole month in Senegal.

"Great!" I thought, "I'll finally have time to get to see some Senegalese wrestling, to spend a day with my maid shopping for ingredients and learning how to turn them into the national dish, Thie-bou-dienne (an upmarket fish-and-rice-and vegetable concoction), to go to the gym, to go to the market and buy some African fabrics to get some clothes made..." But no, my employers managed to find two extra projects for me to work on so I have shuttled between home and the office and had time for very little else.

So what I had hoped would be a really upbeat post about some of the great experiences of living in Dakar is not to be. Instead it is yet another sigh of frustration about the fact that everything here always BREAKS or FALLS APART.

For the last week my water heater has been heating away, night and day, acting like a giant radiator (which is not what you need when the average daily temperature now is around 36°C), but I have been too busy to get anyone in to fix it. Gradually though the wall next to the heater warmed up, the floor tiles beneath it warmed up, and finally the plant on the other side of the wall withered and died - so I knew that I would have to call someone today. But I was just too late. I went into the bathroom this morning to find it was not heating - and there was no hot water - and when I went to check that the power switch was on, I found the switch had melted...

Then this afternoon as I walked the hundred metres between offices I thought my shoes felt strange. I examined them when I got in, to find that the heels (of both) had come unstuck from the soles - I doubt I will make it home tonight before they fall off completely.

Oh, and if as the normal falling apart isn't good enough, the ants try to make it worse. They keep erupting into the house through little holes in the cement between the floor tiles. As soon as I pour boiling water down one and cover it with polyfilla they must start digging away again from their nest in the foundations, and sure enough another little hole appears somewhere else and up they come. Thankfully these are not the biting kind of ants, but I still don't like being woken up by one trying to get in my ear, as I was this morning.

Chimpanzees

2009-05-18T06:07:00.000-07:00

At the end of a hectic few weeks of back-to-back assignments I was left with a weekend in Sierra Leone while waiting for the first flight home on Monday afternoon.

There are plenty of national parks in Sierra Leone that I would love to visit, but the absence of any real infrastructure in the country makes it impossible for just a weekend. The previous weekend I had been driven from Monrovia to Freetown – an eight-hour journey, partly on a narrow, pot-holed dirt track carved through the Gola Forest – and this the main road between the neighbouring capital cities!

So I opted instead for a simple local trip, to the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in the hills above Freetown. This is just a twenty minute drive away, although I then had a twenty minute walk on the end of it as my taxi driver refused to drive me right up to the sanctuary gates in case we encountered any animals, as he was afraid...

When I arrived I joined the daily afternoon tour of the facilities, from the quarantine areas for newly rescued chimps, the isolation areas for those recovering from vaccination, the play areas for the younger ones still being introduced to eachother, and finally the areas of natural forest where the established groups roam. It is illegal to hunt chimpanzees in Sierra Leone, or to keep them as pets, but the Tacugama centre is still kept busy. There must be easily 100 animals there. The ultimate aim is to reintroduce the groups to the wild, though I’m not sure whether or not they have yet been able to do this with any groups.

I was staying in a lodge hidden away in the trees – tiny kitchen, and bathroom, as you entered, then up some very steep steps to a bedroom and surrounding balcony, complete with hammock, in the tree canopy. Electricity was supposedly solar powered, but the light it provided was so dim that I still needed my torch just to walk across the room. Perhaps there were too many trees shading the solar panels? So it was dark in the lodge by 7pm. I was tired, having worked until 4am that morning to complete our report, so I went to bed and slept soundly for twelve hours. How wonderful!

Sunday was spent walking. There are several marked trails in the area, and I followed one 7km round trip through a couple of tiny villages to a small waterfall, and one through the forest to a small dam. There was nothing spectacular to see, but it was all very pleasant – and I saw a stunning shining-blue kingfisher, although none of the rare white-necked picathartes that are known to nest in the area.

Again I slept like a log, good preparation for the usual tiring journey home.

Democracy

2009-05-04T13:52:00.000-07:00

I have for many weeks been intending to post something about the local elections which took place in Senegal in March. These were for city mayors, and were preceded for several weeks by floats for the candidates driving around the cities. The floats blare out loud music and are usually surrounded by people in party T-shirts who look too young to vote – I’m not really sure what they achieve but they cost the candidates lots of money.

One of the candidates for the biggest seat of all – mayor of Dakar – was Karim Wade, the son of the country’s president Abdoulaye Wade. The president has been trying to set up his son as his successor for quite some time, placing him into a series of plum jobs at which he never quite seems to succeed, and the Senegalese media are not impressed. This, however, was his chance to demonstrate his support from the people.

He lost.

As did the president’s party in big towns up and down the country. The president said that the people had spoken and he was listening. “A triumph for democracy in Africa”, I thought.

Then this weekend I heard the latest news. Karim has been appointed as a senior minister (a cabinet member) in the government – Minister of State for International Cooperation, Urban and Regional Planning, Air Transport and Infrastructure – the largest ministry in Senegal since independence. Oh dear.

Mexican pigs

2009-04-30T08:03:00.000-07:00

I have just received the third Alert Notice of the day from various parts of my NGO, giving me advice about swine flu. I so want to reply to our head office in the UK, to point out to them that the vast majority of our employees live, work and travel in a different world from them.

Apparently if I develop flu-like symptoms I am supposed to go to my doctor. Well I have news for them. Living where I do I would always visit the doctor if I developed such symptoms, because of the likelihood that it would be malaria - a disease that kills thousands on a daily basis, unlike swine flu which has so far killed less than 100 people.

There. Got that out of my system.

Southern Benin

2009-04-15T10:53:00.000-07:00

Whilst the north has its national parks and the Betammaribe and Peul cultures, the south has the remnants of colonialism, old kingdoms and slavery, villages built on stilts around a lagoon, and the voodoo culture.

The old capital of the former Dan-Homey kingdom, Abomey is a great place to start. Early in the seventeenth century, Gangnihessou established this kingdom. A succession of kings followed, each one building a new palace, until they were finally defeated by the French at the end of nineteenth century. Two of these palaces still remain intact, and vestiges of the others (decaying bits of old mud walls) can be found around town. Those that remain now have UNESCO World Heritage site status and have been turned into a museum, with several quite interesting exhibits such as one of the old king’s thrones (an elaborate wooden stool resting on four human skulls) and the outfit that used to be worn by the Amazones (an elite troop of female warriors).

Also in the region are a large number of subterranean dwellings (excavated by the local people as a way of hiding from intruders and then re-emerging behind enemy lines), the private palaces of the former kings (mostly in the course of being restored, with the help of various NGOs), and lots of evidence of the voodoo religion.

One village near Abomey is populated by the descendants of those who used to carry out all the voodoo ceremonies for the kings, including those before important events such as going into battle. I visited a priest at his home.

By the front gate were two fetishes, both connected with the spirit Legba – the most powerful of the spirits, and always depicted with a big erect penis as apparently virility is the most important power in the protection of homes and communities. Legba can somehow tell if a visitor is coming with bad intentions, and will signal this to the inhabitants.

Inside were many more fetishes, each representing some different spirit. All have to be nourished on a daily basis (with a small offering of maize meal, for example), but if special favours are asked then rather greater offerings are required in return. In the past this could even extend to human sacrifices, but a decision was made some sixty years ago to substitute humans with bulls. Apparently the human victims were obtained from the ranks of prisoners of war, but as there is now peace within Benin there are no longer any prisoners of war available. More common is the sacrifice of chickens. Usually only the blood and certain innards go to the fetish though, the rest of the animal being eaten by those involved in the ceremony. I forgot to ask what used to happen to the bodies of the human sacrifices.

I watched as the priest did his rounds of the fetishes, sprinkling water on each first to ‘wake them up’ (in keeping with the traditional offering of water to a newly arrived guest) and then mumbling incantations at them as he swung a calabash instrument around (partly filled with something so as to make a sound – rather like maracas). He did various other strange things too, at one point holding a horn on his head whilst chanting. I was not only allowed to watch but even to take photos – provided (i) that I showed respect (eg taking off my shoes before visiting the shrine of the earth spirit, where your feet should be in contact with the earth), and (ii) that I promised to send prints of the photos back to the priest.

Voodoo seems to have a pretty poor reputation in the West, I suppose in part because of the human sacrifices, but at least in the Benin context it seems pretty harmless, and to me makes no more or less sense than any other religion. The guide who facilitated my visit told me he was a Catholic, but that of course he still took part in the voodoo ceremonies as it was local culture. I asked how he reconciled the two, and his answer was that it was all the same god, whether the all-powerful Catholic god or one of his manifestations as one of the voodoo spirits. It reminded me of a holiday in Mexico many years ago when I visited a Catholic church in Chiapas where chicken sacrifices are actually done inside the church, somehow having been incorporated into Catholicism by the local people.

I guess this chicken standing next to Legba has not yet had the local culture explained to it.

I suppose in this ‘tour guide’ to southern Benin I should also mention the official capital of Porto Novo, a crumbling little town with some nice museums. Have I managed to persuade you to visit Benin yet? It is an amazing country, one of my favourites in the region.

Northern Benin

2009-04-15T08:16:00.001-07:00

When I think of wildlife it isn’t usually West Africa that comes to mind. However as these pictures show, there are interesting pockets of wildlife remaining in this region.

They were taken in the Parc de Pendjari, a large reserve in the far north of Benin. In just one night’s stay (a late evening visit to a waterhole and a rather more leisurely drive the next morning) I saw hippos, crocodiles, buffaloes, elephants, a lion, baboons, two species of monkey and lots of different species of antelope and gazelle. Not to mention a fair few birds including the beautiful scarlet and turquoise coloured carmine bee-eater.

The journey there took me through the Atacora mountains, a region inhabited by the Betammaribe people. They are known for their unique style of house – a kind of mud fortress, inside which they can keep their animals, their grains and themselves, hiding themselves in there away from the world in times of danger. This style was apparently developed during the time of slave raids from the neighbouring Dahomey people. I visited one (paying a small fee for the privilege) – very cosy although how they stand doing their cooking on a wood fire inside the house I don’t know, the smoke made my eyes smart and I had to escape that room quickly. It partly explains the high number of children in the region who suffer respiratory illnesses.

Until the 1970s these people lived a very traditional lifestyle, with little contact with the outside world. Then they got a blast of publicity in France, by someone who thought they had discovered the ‘real unspoilt Africa’, one result of which was that the authorities pressured them to at least put some clothes on … it seems that they felt some shame at the fact that there were near naked tribesmen living in the country. I can’t see why, personally, as many of these people are living a lifestyle which is far more in tune with their environment than the western lifestyles they are now expected to emulate.

I wonder if they will in time also pressure the people to stop applying the tribal markings that are so prevalent in this country. Outside of the capital, nearly everyone you meet has some kind of scarification on their face, which identifies their tribal origins. I also saw some interesting tattoos. In the north the women from the Peul tribe have lots of little tattoos all over their faces (as well as some fairly distinctive jewellery), and later in the central region I saw an old lady with various lines and dots tattooed over her chest, stomach and back – apparently something to do with her status within the voodoo religion.

Along the Petite Cote

2009-03-11T12:07:00.001-07:00

As I have had some unanticipated time in Senegal I have been able to give myself a long weekend to see a little of Senegal’s “Petite Côte”. The white sand beaches, mostly undeveloped, stretch for some 130km south of Dakar, and last weekend I travelled down to the furthest point. This took eight hours on public transport (partly the queues to leave Dakar and partly the unsurfaced roads), but by the time I arrived I felt as though I was a million miles away from the capital. Outside of Dakar, Senegal is a beautiful country.

I stayed in a nice lodge in Palmarin for two nights, from where I wondered around the nearby fishing village of Djifer, took a pirogue trip amongst the mangrove creeks, and sat on a horse whilst it walked along the beach for an hour or so (during which time my guide and I saw one other person, a local fisherman).

I then travelled up the coast to Mbodiene, a small undeveloped village but with a couple of lodges on its outskirts, nicely positioned on the edge of a coastal lagoon. I was one of three people staying there, along with the owners, a family of three eagle owls that live in one of the baobab trees on the property and a chameleon that lives in the bougainvillia. The prophet’s birthday was being celebrated that night, in typical Senegalese fashion with singing and drumming so I was glad we were quite a distance from the village as I did manage some sleep.

It was not meant to be a serious bird-watching weekend, but of course knowing how prolific Senegal’s birdlife is I did take my binoculars and bird book. There was other wildlife too – I saw a hyena, a jackal, two monitor lizards, the chameleon and an unidentified snake, but also such a great number of birds that I felt compelled to list them. For those without a serious interest in birds, look away now!

Purple heron
Grey heron
Goliath heron
Pink-backed pelican
Great white pelican
Oystercatcher
Avocet
European spoonbill
Redshank
Common ringed plover
Ruddy turnstone
Spurwinged lapwing
Little stint
Sanderling
Bar-tailed godwit
Whimbrel
Curlew
Senegal thick knee
Osprey
Fish eagle
Great egret
Cattle egret
Western reef egret
Pied kingfisher
Black-winged stilt
Beautiful sunbird
Variable sunbird
Abyssinian roller
Little bee-eater
Northern crombec
Yellow-crowned gonolek
Northern grey-headed sparrow
House sparrow
African grey hornbill
Red-billed hornbill
Long-tailed cormorant
Caspian tern
Royal tern
Gull-billed tern
Grey-headed gull
Crowned lark
Yellow wagtail
White wagtail
Village weaver
White-billed buffalo weaver
Long-tailed glossy starling
Namaqua dove
Laughing dove
Red-chested swallow
African palm swift
Tawny-flanked prinia
Black scrub robin
Reed warbler
Senegal coucal
Verreaux’s eagle owl
Red-billed quelea
Black-rumped waxbill
Pied crow
Green wood hoopoe
Grey woodpecker
Double-spurred francolin
Hooded vulture

+ a nightjar (unidentified species) and more waders and gulls than those listed.

Saturday in Casablanca

2009-02-23T12:00:00.000-08:00

I was feeling quite sorry for myself last week. My organisation is anticipating falls in revenue and so is already instigating cost-cutting measures. Out of that I have lost my forthcoming assignment in the UK (so cancel the hairdressers, the dinners with friends...) as well as my much-looked-forward-to assignment in East Timor due for May.

On the face of it those sound sensible, I know, but the exercise wasn't done in a transparent way, so when I see that a colleague from our South America region still has his UK assignment in place (surely his flight back must be more expensive than mine?) I do not feel very happy about losing mine. Also when some of the other changes I have been told to make to my plans for my region involve increasing costs, possibly by enough to have paid for my flight to East Timor...

I know I vowed not to write about work on here, but it really has been a depressing week.

However on Saturday as I was stuck in transit for 13 hours on the way back home from Cameroon, I thought once again about how many good bits there still are to the travel. My transit was in Casablanca, a city I had never visited before, so I took a train from the airport into the city and wondered around the souk and the Hassan II Mosque, and had a lovely lunch of grilled sardines with some local wine. The sky was blue and although cold, the sun was shining - and really the Hassan II Mosque is one of the most amazing buildings I have seen. Too big to really photograph, but the above gives some idea of the style, and here is a picture of some of the decor at one of the side entrances.

Scary Africans

2009-02-12T03:07:00.000-08:00

You know those stories about the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia – the child soldiers wearing outlandish clothes and women’s wigs, brandishing AK47s whilst high on drugs? Well this man was wondering around at the festival in Segou (see previous post) – and I couldn’t help imagining how frightening it would be to see him manning a checkpoint in the middle of a crazy civil war somewhere…

Festival sur le Niger

2009-02-09T03:39:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend prior to my assignment in Mali there was a cultural festival in Segou. I had signed up to this some months ago, filling in the forms on the website indicating my intention to attend the festival, take the free bus there from the capital, stay for three nights in the home of a local family and take a tour to a couple of local villages on the Sunday morning.

The free bus was an hour late, and the Sunday morning tour started two hours late, but otherwise everything worked like clockwork. When we arrived in Segou there was my name on the various lists, and when I had paid for my €100 festival ticket there was the man from my host family with his moped ready to take me back to his house.

In fact the whole festival was well-organised, with a big stage beside the river for the main musical acts with standing and seating areas for the audience arranged up the riverbank, a number of smaller stages for other performances, an art gallery, cafes and restaurants within the grounds and a whole host of market stalls set up just outside the entrances to get the tourists to part with their money.

Thankfully most of the visitors were local, as a dual pricing structure (€5 for Malians) ensured that it was affordable for all. & as Mali is such a culturally rich country, with so many traditions still intact, watching the audience was a part of the pleasure. These old men are dressed in the traditional hunter's outfits.
I suppose the main draw for many was the music, with well-known Malians such as Bassekou Kouyate, Vieux Farka and Oumou Sangare on the bill, as well as invited guests such as the Amazons de Guinée and a dreadful Senegalese woman called Coumba Gawwlo Seck who was very popular with all the youngsters. However this festival also showcases Mali’s still vibrant tradition of mask dances, and there were troupes of Dogon stilt dancers as well as a fantastic performance of Bozo masks/puppets.

The Bozo tribe are fishermen and their mask traditions are water-based. So from the riverbank we watched as various enormous masks (known as puppets) appeared in the water to menace a man seated on a platform who I guess was a chief, as an attendant stood beside him with a spear. First a giant fish swam towards him, but was captured by a fisherman. Then an enormous pelican-like bird came along, and finally a long-haired woman, who hid her giant pink face behind her big pink arms and cautiously approached the chief, who eventually persuaded her to accept a basket of tomatoes, to which all the locals cheered and the supporting singers and drummers did their stuff. Maybe next year they should produce a festival brochure to interpret the performances for ignorant foreigners like me.

On Sunday morning I took my trip to visit some local villages, chosen by the organisers for their significance at the heart of the old Malian empire, but rewarding for me just for their beauty. The traditional mud architecture of this region is astoundingly beautiful, but also functional as it remains cool in the hot weather. It is a shame that many people seem to equate development with concrete, but as a nation Mali is aware, and proud, of its rich history and traditions so hopefully more efforts will be made to preserve them.
We saw in the village of Segoukoro not just a beautiful old (17th century) mosque built of mud (see left) but also a rather stylish newer one, using a modern take on the old mud-building techniques, offset with a lovely old carved door.

Actually in Senegal

2009-02-03T01:06:00.001-08:00

Very unusually, I have spent a whole three weeks in Dakar. Three weeks of ‘normal’ life, going to the same office every day, finding time for visits to the supermarket… Quite mundane, but in a way a nice change.

Within that context, in fact, the visit to the supermarket was a big event, as it is a big new supermarket, with lots of imported food, so there was a bit of a buzz amongst ex-pats about this exciting new development.

It was, indeed, impressive. But in fact I mostly window-shopped, admiring the products but gawping in disbelief at the prices. I don’t miss taramasalata so badly that I would pay £3 for a tub the size of a small yoghurt! Nice to know it is there if you want it though, I suppose.

More basic foodstuffs have been more of an issue for the bulk of the population during the last month. The government announced a number of price reductions in some basic goods – rice, cooking gas, bread, etc. However this was not as generous as it seemed, as they did not offer to fund those price cuts. So the bakeries, finding that they were expected to reduce the price of bread by around 15% whilst the price of the ingredients (basically flour) remained unchanged, went on strike. We had no bread for four days. But the government didn’t back down so the bakers went back to work and reduced their prices – funding it by reducing the amount of flour going into the bread. So a baguette is now 15% cheaper, but also 15% smaller.

A tour of the islands of Cape Verde

2009-01-06T10:24:00.001-08:00

A three-hour delay was not the best start to the holiday, but then they offered each of us a free drink, and when finally the flight was called there was no rushing and pushing to be at the front of the queue. This attitude was to be typical of the laid-back, friendly Cape Verdians I met throughout my trip.

Santo Antao

First stop was a night in Mindelo, the capital of Sao Vicente. A pretty place, but with nothing obvious to see or do, and I was happy to take the ferry across to Santo Antao the next morning. This island is filled with steep, craggy mountains – really beautiful when you can see them, though much of the time the top halves seem to be covered in cloud. I did plenty of walking, up and down very steep mountain paths, for many hours, and although all the paths are cobbled and well-maintained I still discovered quite how unfit I am.

I also had the pleasure of an invitation to a Christmas eve dinner, just from a stranger sat next to me in a minibus, as he could not let a visitor to Cape Verde be alone at Christmas! The food was nothing to get excited about, but it was very nice to be with a typical extended Cape Verdian family for this celebration. One back visiting from France, one over from another island, an old couple down from their remote home up in the mountains. Luckily enough of them spoke English or French for it to be a very enjoyable evening.

Sal

This island is universally acknowledged to be barren and windswept. Photos of the tourist resort of Santa Maria make it look quite attractive, with clear blue skies, pretty pastel buildings and smiling Cape Verdians. The reality, at least during my visit, was grey clouds, grey concrete shells of half-built hotels and apartments, and harassed-looking tourists being pursued by immigrant Senegalese street traders. I found it quite dismal. Expensive too (€10 for a plate of pasta in cheese sauce with a glass of water?), and an early morning walk around town revealed several people sleeping in doorways under cardboard, and lots of mangy dogs.

So I escaped the town quickly and took a bus up to the capital and from there to Pedra do Lume, to see the old salt pans. The island of Sal has only salt, rock, sand and wind, and was only colonised for its salt production. Even that has now lost its value and the saltpans fell into disuse in 1985.

But you can still poke around the decaying old machinery that used to transport the salt (25 tonnes an hour at its height) from an old crater to the waiting ships. & the saltpans are still there, some blue, some solid with dirty, white salt and others a deep pink colour as the salt forms around the edges. It was worth seeing for the desolate atmosphere of the place.

From there I walked back - a five hour walk across the island, past rubbish tips and the odd turtle carcass, and through the still-operating saltpans behind Santa Maria. Perhaps when the sun is out this place is more inspiring, but whilst I was there it was too cold and windy to even think about lying on the beach.

Fogo

My next destination was very different. A volcanic island centred around an old crater, half covered with jagged black lumps of lava, and with steam still coming from one of the newer cones. It is a forbidding place, some of the lava fields looking like the end of the world has arrived. The last eruption, in 1995, saw a village destroyed, but the people there refuse to be relocated outside of the crater. They have rebuilt their houses nearby, dug little depressions in the areas of black cinder where they plant tomatoes and vines, and their local musicians get together every evening in a corner of a local convenience store to play the traditional music of the island. It is a strong community.

A welcoming one, too. I was sitting in the corridor of my guest house early on New Year's Eve when someone arrived looking for me. It had been noticed that I was there alone, so someone had been sent to invite me to join a family for the evening.

Like the family I spent Christmas Eve with, this was an extended grouping of loosely related people (I think I may now count as a cousin...), some of them back from overseas to visit their family. One of the traditions of the islands is the "morna", a form of poetry or song which is usually translated as something like "longing". It reflects the longing of emigrant Cape Verdians for their homeland, and the longing of those left behind for their loved ones. I heard it first hand that evening, as Mauricio, back on only his fourth visit from the US (where he lived with an American wife), told us of his love for Fogo, how this little village was the best place in the world he could celebrate the New Year. & it was Mauricio who persuaded the musicians amongst the group to go and get their instruments, so they could accompany him as he sang of his longing for a life in Cape Verde. Like most Cape Verdians, however, that longing is not so strong as to tempt him away from a more materially rewarding life elsewhere...

As well as tramping about over the lava, and up into the 1995 volcanic crater, I also found a guide to take me on a visit into one of the lava tubes discovered on the island. This was not the easiest visit - you can see my guide standing by the steel cable guide-rope near the entrance to the tube (by which time we had already climbed down a steel cable ladder down into the entrance), but if you follow the guide-rope back you will see how steeply the third section of it descends into the tube, and there is no path beneath it, just jagged lumps of lava. By the time I came out my hands and the seat of my trousers were covered with little cuts and rough spots, and I later met someone who had ripped a foot-long hole in his trousers in this tube!

Santiago

My final destination was Santiago, the largest island of the archipelago. Whilst it doesn't have one single spectacular feature like some of the other islands, it has impressive mountains, some ruins remaining from the initial colonisation of the islands 500 years ago, a few pretty little beaches, and the culture in the country's capital city, Praia.

Whilst there I paid a visit to a property development site which I had been reading about beforehand on the internet. The site will have three residential developments and six hotels, and will offer swimming pools, fitness and yoga classes, tennis courts and a cricket pitch, art classes, a cookery school, a diving club, etc, etc. This is the view I would have from my balcony if I were to buy an apartment there: Unfortunately I would not only have to find the money to buy the apartment, but also to support myself whilst living there and pay for the use of all those lovely facilities. But it's nice to dream!

Happy holidays

2008-12-20T10:14:00.000-08:00

Just back from a week in Niamey, uneventful except that the increasingly poor service of Air Senegal has left me feeling as though I haven’t slept all week. The journey there was delayed by eight hours (meaning I arrived at 4am), and the journey back by one and a half hours. Then on arrival back in Dakar at 1:30 this morning I had to wait another one and half hours until the luggage appeared. The excuse given seemed to relate to the arrival of another flight around the same time, although no other luggage arrived whilst we were waiting for ours.

Tomorrow morning I fly to Cape Verde for a two week holiday (much of which might be spent sleeping!), so the blog will be a little quiet.

Someone commented that I seem to get an awful lot of holiday, so I thought I had better explain how this has arisen.

The organisation I work for allows us to take a day’s compensatory leave for every weekend day we spend travelling or working overseas and every public holiday we miss through travel, plus one day for any trip of two weeks or more. It is very generous, although in practice (as it has to be taken within one month of the trip) it is often hard to take it given pressure of work. However this year my travels around Rwanda, Ghana and Guinea Bissau, plus the odd day of other trips, were all taken from compensatory leave.

This is a picture of a Senegal parrot, taken through my office window a couple of weeks ago:

Merry Christmas to everyone, by the way, and best wishes for 2009!

The spectacular Fouta Djalon

2008-12-10T04:39:00.000-08:00

It was obvious that if I were to see any more of Guinea than its taxi stations, I would have to find a different way of travelling. The obvious solution was the "deplacement": charter of an entire taxi. It entailed paying the fare for each place in the vehicle - and even a regular-sized taxi (a normal car) will squeeze in six passengers.

So my money started to go six times as fast, and I finally started to see Guinea.

The first site of real interest was the Case de Palabre in Dalaba. This was constructed to hold certain ceremonies on Guinea's independence 50 years ago. It is built in traditional style (with baked mud) but elaborately decorated on the floor and walls with designs representing the 12 Fula chiefs who were present at the Independence ceremony. Apparently the ceiling had been equally spectacular, made of woven bamboo, but this collapsed a few years ago and has now been replaced with corrugated iron.

Indeed the whole building is crumbling away, as the current regime in Guinea has no interest in funding its maintenance. This is a real tragedy. Africa has very few buildings of historical significance (if one ignores the colonial legacy), and this one is also very beautiful. I shall do what I can (emails to UN, embassies) to try to pressure someone to get it preserved!

I also spent a few days walking in the hills around Dalaba, a pretty area but quite bizarrely featuring groves of pine trees - relics of a French colonial experiment 100 years ago. The scenery was nice and the villages were pretty.

From there I travelled into the heart of the Fouta Djalon, where a guide by the name of Hassan Bah is famous for leading visitors on spectacular treks near the village of Doucki. At first I did wonder if I had made the right decision, as the taxi drove further and further away from civilisation along a rough track up into nowhere. It was a harsh landscape (sometimes the track just bumped along over bare rock), made worse by the local custom of burning off any vegetation left after the rainy season, and I couldn't imagine - even if this guide was around - where one could even sleep or eat, let alone walk.

The taxi driver kept muttering about how far it was, but eventually we saw a little sign saying Doucki, and an even barer track led off to the left. As we arrived someone took my rucksack from me and motioned for me to sit in a wicker chair. Ten minutes later lunch arrived, and a man told me in English that a room was being made up for me and Hassan Bah would be along in a few minutes! He arrived, told me I must be dusty from my trip and that we would therfore go on a nice walk to a waterfall in the afternoon where I could clean up.

In fact we visited a couple of waterfalls, and a whole lot more. It turned out that not so far away from the road, on either side, were cliffs where the land dropped down into spectacular valleys. Also, less obvious, there were little pockets of vegetation here and there, some turning out to be tiny patches of jungle complete with lianas and monkeys, (and one with a grey eagle owl which flew onto a branch nearby, until it was finally chased away by two red-bellied paradise flycatchers), and there were great rock formations all around, including a wonderful slot canyon. The whole area was completely stunning - a truly wild and unspoilt place - and I spent a great couple of days hiking around it. I'm not sure what more to say about it to do it justice, so have attached rather a few more photos than normal. It was hard to photograph because of the strong sun and the haze from burning of vegetation, but hopefully these give some indication of the beauty and variety of the scenery there.
I also saw a big fat black scorpion near my feet whilst eating dinner, but I guess you all know what those look like!

Waiting for a ride

2008-12-06T09:54:00.000-08:00

After finishing my work in Guinea, I took a few days to travel around the country, to see the Fouta Djalon region that people rate so highly. But I had forgotten how difficult it is to travel in this part of Africa, and my itinerary began to look way too optimistic.

On the first day I tried to get to the bus/taxi station early, to get the journey to Kankan, and from there to Dabola, over as quickly as possible. However no-one at my hotel was around, and my bill had to be prepared by hand, so I was late leaving. Then after a half-hour’s walk I finally got to the station a little after 7:30. The early taxi was already full and preparing to depart, and I was the first person in the queue for the next one. For those who have not travelled in this region I should explain that taxis (old Peugeots) usually operate on a fixed route basis, and the driver will not depart until all possible places have been filled. This means two (occasionally three) in the front passenger seat and four in the row behind, and lots of luggage on the roof.

If I have no fixed timetable I am quite good at dealing with this type of situation now. I know that I should choose a seat and put something (a cheap item of clothing) on it to save it, and then go and find a place in the shade to wait. There is no point asking what time the taxi will leave, no point in repeatedly looking at your watch – you just have to be patient.

I don’t tend to get out a book at such times as that would take me away from the place I am trying to experience. Instead I just sit and watch the life around: the women manning little stalls selling coffee, bread, oranges; the wandering salesmen with armfuls of men’s shirts, towels, steering wheel covers, fake perfumes, or whatever else they bought at the market earlier in the morning, hoping to make a small margin from those without the time or energy to go to the market; small children selling tissues, sweets and toothpaste; the occasional blind beggar with an obligatory small child to lead them around while they sing their prayers for alms; and assorted unemployed youths and women with babies on their backs passing through or hanging around. It is very entertaining, particularly if you enjoy looking at the women’s clothes and hairstyles.

Eventually there is movement in the taxi. My little rucksack on the roof is shoved aside to make room for big 50kg sacks of rice and bunches of plantains being loaded. The driver revs the engine and we start to get in. It is a tight fit as we all squeeze up, some of the women having to accommodate babies as well as more bunches of plantains and other packages.

Then the driver gets out and wanders off, followed soon after by most of the passengers. It was just one of those mysterious false starts that happen every so often, that I have never really understood. But it is at least usually the start of the departure process; usually we are gone within the next hour.

About an hour later we do set off. I squeeze my knees back into place and wedge my shirt against a sharp pointy bit in the seat back, to get as comfortable as possible. We back out of our parking place and go around the corner – where we stop. I think we may be getting some air put into the tyres. A couple of passengers wander off again. I get out to stretch my legs (one foot was already going numb), then jump back in quickly as the driver revs the engine and we go again. This time we drive back to our original parking place...

To cut a very long story short, we finally left at 13:00, and a journey that I had been advised should take three hours took six, so by the time I got to the first destination on my schedule it was already dark and therefore too late to actually see the place.

The next morning I was at the station by 6:00, as advised, by the driver didn’t even arrive until 7:00 and we did not reach our full complement of passengers until 11:00. We then had an hour of mechanical work on the car – and the second destination on my schedule went the same way as the first…

Exploring the Bijagos

2008-11-21T08:45:00.000-08:00

I had forgotten what a lovely country Guinea Bissau is. After the hustle, bustle and hassle of Dakar, Bissau is a haven – like a little backwater village, where you can walk along nearly empty streets and no-one bothers you.

This time I went much further beyond the sleepy capital, and spent a week exploring some of the islands offshore. There are more than 80 islands in the Bijagos archipelago, some inhabited and cultivated, some sacred and left wild, and others designated as national parks. I visited six of them, in a hired boat with three other foreigners plus a captain and his mate.

We started on the island of Quere, a tiny dot too small to figure on the maps. It took around seven minutes to walk from one end to the other! A lovely white beach, blue-cheeked bee-eaters wheeling around catching dragonflies and butterflies, and a comfortable lodge serving delicious freshly caught fish (we saw them being pulled from the sea!) – two nights there was not really enough, but there were more islands to visit.

Next was Orango. This is part of one of two national parks in the archipelago, protected because it is home to the only population of hippos in the world which are adapted to tolerate seawater. We duly organised a trip to see the hippos, unfortunately not in the sea this time but in their more usual haunt, deep in a swamp in the middle of the island. It was a bit of an adventure to get there, wading thigh-deep through the mangrove creeks, walking through head-high grass which released itchy seeds onto your skin, then back into water when we got to the swamp.

Suddenly they were there, snorting noisily in front of us, and the guide told us to climb quickly into the trees as they didn’t like people on their territory. I climbed awkwardly into a tree, to find it home to a number of biting ants, and I peered through the leaves at the occasional hippo head being raised out of the water. Eventually we got down and walked back, one member of our group finding a leech on her ankle as she came out of the water, and all of us with ant bites to go with the mosquito bites we already had.

On the way back to our boat we were taken on a long detour, into another swampy area, where we were told we may see crocodiles. I must say I was quite pleased that we didn’t, given that we were in their water! We did, however, see lots of birds – sacred ibis, herons, spoonbills, geese, etc.

After Orango we journeyed to the furthest island in the entire archipelago, in the other national park, this one primarily designed to protect nesting turtles. Poilao is sacred to the Bijagans; no Bijagan women are allowed there, no permanent construction is allowed, and no visiting men are allowed to shed any blood of any creature. For this reason, perhaps, the turtles come there in their thousands – 30,000 laying their eggs there each year.

We were near the end of the season, but still saw six or seven adult females on the beach, laying their eggs and then dragging themselves across the sand and rocks back to the sea. It looks like such hard work for them, but I suppose it is at least over in a couple of hours, unlike the 24 hours + that so many human females go through!

We also saw some of the young hatching. It can take them 3-4 days to climb through the sand out of the nest, and then they face the dangerous journey across the beach to the sea – a lot safer when tourists are there watching as this keeps the predators away.

In addition to the turtles, we saw another impressive creature on Poilao – a great bittern! This type of bird, normally found hiding in reeds, has never before been recorded in Guinea Bissau according to my bird book, so goodness knows what it was doing there. But due to their habit of freezing, rather than running or flying away, when danger is near, it was very easy to get a close look so there was no doubt as to its identity.

By this stage there were no hotels, so we camped on the sand near the beach, eating tinned sardines and rice that we had brought with us, and washing in seawater.

This was followed by another night under canvas (this time with freshly caught fish for dinner!), at the neighbouring island of Meio. Meio is also in the national park, and so is also uninhabited – and was the most beautiful of all the places we visited. I wanted to stay another night (or maybe another week). But the decision was made to move on – so far each island had been more beautiful than the last – and we made our way to Canhabaque.

This was indeed beautiful, with a white sandy beach that seemed to go on for ever, but unfortunately we could not find anywhere suitable to camp, so we moved on to Bubaque. Here there was a great site for camping, but at low tide the beach became an endless series of mudflats, and a number of sting rays lurking in the shallows put me off my swim even when I made it across the mud to the water. It was still lovely to sleep out for another night though, and I was sad to be going back to civilisation the next day (a day earlier than planned as the legislative elections due on our last day were for some reason accompanied by a travel curfew).

So we waved goodbye to our boat and its crew, shook the sand from our tents, and climbed aboard the public ferry back to the mainland. We realised how chilled out we had become in our week away when the boat got stuck on a sandbank half-an-hour outside Bissau. We didn’t worry, we didn’t complain, we just ordered another glass of wine from the bar and danced to the drums being played by some of the other passengers for the four hours it took for the water to rise and float us free.

Mum in Mombasa

2008-11-01T06:55:00.000-07:00

A meeting in Nairobi was a wonderful opportunity to sneak in a quick visit to my Mum in her new home near Mombasa.

She and Chapati married in April, but I hadn't seen them since last year, nor had I seen the house they had built and moved into a few months ago.

I could only manage a short visit, but that was enough to see how happy they are. Isn't it wonderful that someone who reached retirement age thinking that all the good bits of her life were well behind her can, two years later, be blissfully happy in a completely new life. Living in a new country, with a new man (a kind, gentle - and good-looking - young man at that), she has found her little corner of paradise.

Visit to Vienna

2008-10-20T04:46:00.000-07:00

Whilst the saga of the suitcase was still ongoing, I managed a quick trip to Europe. The UK was mostly administrative (dentist, vaccinations, bank, letting agent, etc) although I did get to visit my Dad and his family on the Isle of Wight for a couple of days. After I had arranged the dates (and ordered train tickets) for that trip my current favourite musicians, Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba, decided to announce a concert in London for one of the days I was away. Of course I was not going to cancel a visit to my Dad for a concert, but it was hugely frustrating as I have been trying and failing for two years now to see them play live. However, I was to get my reward as they played in Dakar last week (and were excellent – worth the wait!).

I also had a four-day holiday in Vienna, to visit my friends Janette and Axel. This was my first time in Vienna, and I was very impressed. There is so much interesting architecture, both old and new, classical and modern, as well as a lot of greenery around the outskirts of the city. I spent a lot of time walking – from sites as varied as palaces to vineyards – and also spent an evening at the ballet (a superb performance of Onegin) which was such a treat as there is no such ‘high-end’ culture here in West Africa. I even put on some mascara and lipstick for the occasion, something I haven’t done since I moved out to Senegal!

My favourite sites in Vienna had to be the Hundertwasser buildings. This is a photo of a waste incineration plant he designed. I’m not generally into bright colours, but this just works so well – and his residential buildings are wonderfully curvy and organic, not dissimilar to some of Gaudi’s designs.

Back in Dakar the hot humid weather continues. Everyone is on a short fuse, as shown by the behaviour of the mobs who attacked some of the state electricity company’s offices a couple of weeks ago. The power cuts get worse and worse, not just that they are frequent but also because they are so unpredictable. When the power goes you never know whether it will be off for hours or whether it will be back on again in five minutes – and if it does come back on it could just as likely go again ten minutes later. A day after those attacks the national football team could only draw at home to The Gambia, thus failing to qualify for the next round of some competition – and the result again was a rampaging mob, this time destroying the offices of the national football federation and throwing rocks at passers-by. I will be glad when the winds change, bringing dry weather in off the desert – that should ease tensions a little.

My suitcase, battered but home

2008-10-09T08:33:00.000-07:00

Thankfully the contents appear to be intact.

Another luggage update...

2008-10-08T09:46:00.000-07:00

My suitcase has just, more than a month after going missing, been located (again) - it is still in Conakry! Only apparently it is now damaged, partially crushed by some airport machinery.

I have been told it will be on the Air Senegal flight tonight to Dakar, which means I will need to go to the airport tomorrow (yet again) to see if it has arrived. Air Senegal have confirmed that the damage was their fault and they will offer some compensation. What I don't yet know is whether the case still has any contents left...

Still no luggage

2008-09-23T11:32:00.000-07:00

Just to say that I still don't have my luggage, if you were wondering. According to colleagues in Guinea, it was sent from Conakry to Dakar on Saturday. But I spent two hours in Dakar airport yesterday morning, and it definitely isn't here. & in two hours I am off to London, so will have to decide whether to spend time trying to find replacements there for things that may turn up again in a few weeks' time.

Whatever I decide is bound to be wrong.

More on queueing

2008-09-15T14:53:00.001-07:00

Chaos at the airport this morning!

We were double the usual number for the Air Ivoire flight VU 821, as half of us had been booked on yesterday's cancelled flight. So when someone walked along the length of the queue with luggage tags, and told everyone very clearly exactly what information to write on them, it was clear to me that not all of the luggage - and perhaps not all of the people - were going to get on the plane.

The luggage wasn't a problem for me of course, as I don't have any... however I really needed to get on the flight myself.

I realised then that small groups of people were starting to leave their place in the queue and make their way towards somewhere at the front. I alerted the man next to me, who bustled off to investigate. Soon half the queue had gone to 'investigate', voices were raised, and the whole place descended into chaos as it became clear that people with 'friends' in the airport were queue-jumping.

Sensing problems, Air Ivoire opened a couple of counters, and whilst everyone else continued to shout at eachother I went quietly to the desk and checked in.

None of us were in a good mood by this stage. The previous day we had arrived at the airport at 05:00, but it wasn't until 10:00 that they finally admitted to us that the flight was cancelled due to a technical problem with the plane.

Then they had bussed us to various hotels. Mine was the 'Hotel Barcelone", complete with FC Barcelona sheets on the beds, and bathroom taps in the shape of a bird, the water spouting from the beak. However the room was hot and sticky, with no air conditioning, no window, a TV that didn't work, no electricity in my bathroom (meaning no hot water), lots of mosquitoes, and a cockroach in my bed. To cap it all, after a restless night being bitten by all the mozzies (my insect repellant being in my suitcase somewhere in West Africa but not here...), I braced myself for a cold shower only to find no water at all in the morning.

I was one of the lucky ones today who made it onto the plane. So I got to Abidjan. At that point, the 90% of us on the plane who had missed yesterday's onward connection needed to make new arrangements at the transit desk. Cue another session of pushing, shoving, cajoling and sneaking, in what ended up as an almighty scrum. Whilst I somehow got to the front in quite good time, the pressure of all those shouting people, thrusting their documents under the noses of the Air Ivoire staff, meant that quite a few mistakes were made. I suffered from one of them, as a result of which I am writing this from a hotel in Abidjan, awaiting another opportunity tomorrow afternoon to continue my journey to Ouagadougou.

The more I see of Africa the more attached I become to the British art of queueing. In fact I would go as far as to say that an orderly queue represents the height of civilisation, demonstrating respect both for rules and for fellow human beings. Unfortunately Africa has yet to develop these qualities.

The scourge of corruption

2008-09-13T14:37:00.000-07:00

Corruption is a big issue in Cameroon, and just about everyone I met there complained to me about it. Unfortunately though, it has become so entrenched in ordinary life that even those who complain about it are part of the corrupt system.

Whilst I was enjoying my hedgehog in the hotel restaurant the waiter came along to chat. He raised the usual complaints against corruption but then remembered his job and asked if I was enjoying my meal. He asked if hedgehog was also protected in my country.

Protected?

Yes, apparently I was half-way through eating a protected animal. Horrified, I asked how come I had been served it – was this a farmed hedgehog?

No, it wasn’t. Apparently the hotel sourced their protected animals from hunters in local villages, but it was ‘no problem’, since this was a government-owned hotel so no-one would dare complain.

Everyone, including those who complain about the corruption, will always take any opportunity they can find to ‘beat the system’, as is clearly apparent, in almost all African countries, in the attitude to queuing. A queue is seen as an open invitation to show your strength/power/initiative. Some just brazenly walk to the front, usually either the big women with their voluminous boubous billowing behind them, or the ‘big’ men with their self-important briefcases and designer sunglasses. More commonly people sidle alongside the queue, striking up a random conversation with a stranger near the front, or they just hang around until they can somehow blend into the line.

Even after two years out here I still object strongly to such antics, and no-one jumps in front of me! I use my elbows, I complain loudly, I shuffle along two inches behind the person in front leaving no space for intruders – anything, in fact, to protect my place in the line. Not that it helps, of course, as usually they just go further ahead and push in front of someone more accommodating, but it is a principle that I will not let go. What has surprised me though is that I am usually the only person objecting to such behaviour. To me there is little hope of stopping corruption whilst Africans continue to accept, even admire, such petty rule-breaking.

One guy here in Cameroon told me a great story about corruption. A neighbour of his was travelling east to visit his daughter. She had met a man and fallen in love, and she wanted her father to meet her new man, and perhaps give his permission for the couple to marry. Even in a modern family where the daughters are allowed to move away from home for work, the most important achievement for women is a good marriage and the production of heirs, so the neighbour was trying to hide his excitement and pride – and relief – at this turn of events.

He set off on the long journey, taking with him a bundle of plantains and a big healthy cockerel – the former he feared he may lose on the road, but he was hoping to present both for his daughter to cook a celebratory meal. He was also, like all travellers, carrying a collection of small change. At the various roadblocks he handed over this small change, and then as he had half expected he was asked to submit the plantains for inspection. He handed them over.

At that point the cockerel cried out, and the young man inspecting the plantains looked up with interest. He would have to inspect the cockerel too. This was too much for the father-in-law-to-be, who protested and said it was a gift for his daughter and her young man, that they were to be married and he couldn’t go empty-handed. The ‘negotiations’ went on for quite some time, but it became clear that the cockerel would have to be handed over too.

Sad, angry and rather embarrassed, the neighbour arrived rather later than hoped at his daughter’s home. He apologised profusely for arriving empty-handed and they both lamented their country’s sad decline into the mire of corruption. The prospective son-in-law was also late, but finally they heard a motorbike horn hooting outside the gate, and he drove in.

He had a big smile on his face; he had had a successful day at work. On the back of his bike was a bundle of plantains and a big healthy cockerel…

Still waiting for the luggage

2008-09-10T08:26:00.000-07:00

Well nearly a week has gone by since my suitcase went missing, and once again I phoned the lost luggage office in Abidjan today to ask for news. The response was that they had not found the case and I should try phoning again in a week. I asked whether it was still in Conakry and if so what was the problem, and was told they have no idea if it is in Conakry, they do not even have any phone numbers for anyone in Conakry... Clearly they are simply sitting there in Abidjan (probably still playing computer games as they were last week) waiting for my case to turn up. & as the case has a luggage tag with the destination Conakry there is of course no reason why it should ever turn up in Abidjan.

In despair I have emailed a couple of colleagues in my Dakar office to see if they can make any more progress than I am. I can just envisage my case sitting lonely and dusty in a corner of Conakry airport, by now emptied of all desirable contents. Oh maybe I should not be so negative but the response I have been getting does not encourage hope.

I have purchased the very bare necessities to keep me going (toothbrush, deodorant, shampoo, comb and four cheap Tshirts off the market). No-one here knows that I am still wearing the same socks and underwear but I probably cannot continue with them for another ten days until I go home!

I'm trying to forget about it and focus on my work here but my mind keeps going back to what is in my suitcase. If the case is never found I can do without the fleece and replace the insect repellant, but most of my clothes will not be replaceable, not even the lovely airforce blue linen shirt from Hobbs, nor the bikini from a sale in Brussels airport, both bought in June. In fact most of my clothes are not easily replaceable as they were bought in the UK and such things are not available in Dakar.

I do have a trip back to the UK at the end of this month, but I fear I won't know by that stage whether or not the case is lost, even though some things (such as my Rough Guide to West Africa) will have to be replaced then as I cannot be without one on my travels. It will be frustrating to spend some £20 on a new one if the old one turns up a few days later. But that will be my last time in Europe until next March so I may have to go ahead and shell out on replacements just in case. With very little likelihood, of course, that the cost of any of this loss will be reimbursed.

Meanwhile I suppose I should say that the region of Cameroon that I am in (the Grasslands) is beautiful, and like my last visit to this country the food is 'interesting'. Hedgehog for Sunday's dinner, and yam with lumps of cow skin for lunch today. The cow skin did at least take my mind off my luggage for a while...

Luggage in the sky

2008-09-04T11:58:00.000-07:00

During the period since my last work trip I have spent quite a few hours trying to establish

(a) if it is true that my organisation do not have insurance to cover loss of luggage by international staff (it is)

(b) what I am supposed to do, in that case, if my luggage goes missing (claim against the airline/any personal policies)

(c) what if Air Ivoire/Air Burkina/Slok Air choose not to reimburse me, or if my luggage is stolen from say the back of a taxi (prevail upon the mercy of our HR department)

(d) whether our HR department will pay up (possibly but generally not)

(e) if I can buy a personal policy from any of the UK insurers (no, because I am not UK resident)

Such insurance seems unknown in Senegal, so I set off for the airport this morning clutching my luggage a little more tightly than usual.

At check-in I was asked if I really wanted to be checked through to Douala (Cameroon), or whether I wouldn't prefer to collect my luggage from Air Senegal in Abidjan and then check in again there for the onward leg to Douala with Air Ivoire, as I was less likely to have problems with my luggage this way. Of course I accepted her advice and checked myself through only as far as Abidjan.

So in Abidjan I went to collect my case, ready to go and check in again, and watched the luggage go round and round the carousel. You know how it is, that you eventually just know that your luggage isn't coming? Well it was only at that stage that I took a proper look at the little luggage tag they had stuck to my ticket, and noticed that it said V7 720; I had been on flight V7 740.

Well it turned out that V7 720 was the flight to Guinea Conakry. Of all places. Last time I went there I opened my case when I got to the hotel to find it had already been opened and rifled through en route, though thankfully on that occasion nothing was missing.

So I have filled in all the necessary forms (I now know the French for purple...) and have been told that it should at some stage be forwarded to Douala. I hope so, as I don't want to find out whether or not Air Senegal, or HR, will reimburse me for the loss (I think I already know the answer). Unfortunately however tomorrow morning I am due to leave Douala for the hill town of Bamenda, six hours drive to the north. Colleagues have told me that it is wet and cold at this time of year, so I had packed jumpers, a fleece and a kagool - all now presumably sitting in Conakry. I also need to wash my hair, and clean my teeth, and would rather like to be able to use deodorant tomorrow morning.

I will keep you posted as to whether it arrives, and when.

Frustrations of the season

2008-09-03T10:55:00.000-07:00

This is definitely the worst time of the year to be in Dakar, probably why most people go on holiday at this time. It's not just the rain, but the associated power cuts, and the mosquitoes and ants that are everywhere.

Then you become just a little frazzled, finding yourself with rather less patience than usual to deal with the usual frustrations of life here.

In a much earlier post I wrote a little about my frustrations with the Senegalese banking system, and they continue. My chequebook was nearly finished, and having not received a new one I tore out the little 'demand de chequiers' page, filled it in, and found an envelope; only to realise that there was no address anywhere in the chequebook nor on my bank statements. So I made my way to the bank one Saturday. Of course it was closed, but I had expected to deposit my form through their letter box. Silly girl! Of course there are no letter boxes in Senegal, as there are no postmen to deliver letters (instead you rent a postbox at the post office), so I gave my form to the security guard to deliver for me.

Eight months later, having heard nothing, I finally discovered that Senegalese banks do not mail chequebooks - you have to go to the bank to sign for their receipt. So I sneaked out of work and visited the bank. I queued until it was my turn to go to the counter, to be told that chequebooks were dealt with in an office round the corner. I waited again. It seemed they had long since lost or thrown away the form I had delivered, but they found me a new one and I filled it in. It would take five working days to get a chequebook, so I would have to come back again (more taxi fares) to collect it and sign for receipt.

I went back this afternoon. The bank was shut; it is Ramadan (the Muslim fasting period) when apparently the banks keep different hours. Tomorrow I am travelling again. I begin to wonder whether I will ever get this new chequebook, and reflect that it is the little complications like this - things that are so much easier and quicker to achieve in a developed country - that can make life here so very frustrating.

Spirit in the Sky

2008-08-29T11:23:00.000-07:00

We are deep into the rainy season and it rains at least once most days now. Apparently this is most unusual, and everyone is talking about it. Being English, of course I am used to rain - but not to some of the rain we get here.

Last night I was woken by another thunderstorm. But this one didn't stop, and eventually I got up to stare at it out of the window. For at least an hour and half the lightening flashed, some of it appearing as jagged streaks, but mostly the whole sky just lit up, as if someone was playing with a giant light switch, turning it off and on over and over again. & the thunder was continuous, rumbling around and around overhead but occasionally also coming as deafening crashes, or as a great tearing sound as if the sky was being ripped apart.

It was all quite magnificent, and from the safety of my little house I really enjoyed the spectacle. But then I thought about how I might feel if I were walking along an unlit path between villages in the countryside, and suddenly I understood so clearly how so many of the villagers still believe that the natural world (their world) is inhabited by spirits.

A holiday in Peru

2008-08-18T12:55:00.000-07:00

My holiday effectively started in Spain, where I had ten hours in transit – enough to take the metro into Madrid and take a tour of the Royal Palace followed by a leisurely paella with several glasses of sangria.

The miserable weather in Lima was a bit of a shock. This is the garúa, the effect of the cold air coming in from the Pacific forming clouds over the coastal strip and getting trapped there by the Andes. They stay for nine months of the year, during which time Lima is cold, grey and damp.

Thankfully that was only an overnight stop, after which I travelled south to Paracas National Park for a bit of flamingo-watching and a trip out to the Ballestas Islands. These pinnacles of rock sticking out of the ocean, with their great arches and caves carved out by the waves, are bare of vegetation but covered in birds. Inca terns, three species of cormorant and tens of thousands of Peruvian boobies perch on cliff ledges whilst Humbolt penguins and sea lions lumber about on the rocks below. It is one of those places where mankind has still not taken over from nature.

Also in this region are the famous Nazca Lines, carved out of the desert in pre-Inca times for who-knows-what reason. I took a flight over them in a little aircraft, whose pilot was enjoying banking left and right so all on board could see them clearly – I saw at least one passenger escape afterwards looking decidedly green!

The next stop was the Amazon region, with several days at some comfortable though fairly basic lodges (candlelight only) in Tambopata. Whilst I saw hundreds of amazing birds, a bird-eating spider, a beautiful tree frog, a scorpion, capybara, caiman and six species of monkeys, the highlight was the clay-lick on the banks of the river. This is an exposed stretch of clay on the river bank where birds, mostly parrots, parrokeets and macaws, come each day to eat clay. It is believed that the clay binds with toxins from their fruit diet and thus is vital for their health – presumably the toxins existing only in fruits in this region as it is not known for parrots in other parts of the world (not even in Central America) to indulge in this behaviour.

We had to get there early so as not to disturb the birds – which meant being in place on the opposite river bank by around 6am. Then gradually the parrots started to arrive in the nearby trees. The birds are nervous at the lick, as they are more exposed to predators than normal, so whilst they squawk loudly at this big social gathering they also get frightened easily and take to the sky and fly around until they feel safe enough to land again. Finally the bravest make the journey from the trees to the clay, and the real spectacle begins as hundreds of colourful birds converge on the bright red clay. We counted three species of parakeet, five species of parrot, and finally six species of macaw. This is a photo of just one of the blue-and-yellow macaws at the lick – try to imagine the noise and colour of several hundred (thousand?) such birds!

After Tambopata was another kind of jungle – the cloud forest of Manu – steep-sided hills often swathed in cloud (though thankfully not for much of my visit) where the trees are dripping with mosses and lichens. Again there were monkeys and beautiful birds – more trogons and tanagers, plus a golden-headed quetzal, a highland motmot, a blue-banded toucanet, a lyre-tailed nightjar, an umbrellabird and the bizarre cock-of-the-rocks. The cock-of-the-rock is the national bird of Peru, though there has been some pressure to change it because it is sometimes considered a joke bird. It is pigeon-sized, bright orange coloured with dark wings and tail, with tiny little pale eyes and a large round orange crest which juts forward to the end of its bill. The males gather together everyday in a ‘lek’, which is a display-ground for impressing females. There they produce various croaks and grunts, and jump about with their wings spread and their heads down, so that they look at you over the top of their crests. In other words they look totally ridiculous.

Unfortunately they like to display under the trees where it was too dark for my little point-and-shoot camera, but if the guide remembers to send me a decent photo (as promised) I will add it in here later. I shouldn’t forget to mention another great bird, one I should have got a photo of if I had not always been so captivated by it that I forgot to try – the booted racket-tail. This is a tiny little green hummingbird, with two very long tail feathers that appear to have been stripped of the feathery bits until flaring out again at the end, and with chestnut coloured tufts of fur over their legs like little fluffy legwarmers. Gorgeous little things.

After the jungle I went to the beautiful town of Cusco – what an amazing place and how I wish I had been able to spend more time there, to just wander about taking in the architecture, browsing in the art galleries and trying out a selection of the restaurants. As it was, however, I did at least manage to try both alpaca and guinea pig. The former was pretty uninteresting and the latter surprisingly nice, though with rather too many fiddly little bones.

Finally came the highlight of the trip, I think – a visit to Machu Picchu. It is one of those wonders of the world that does not disappoint. The ruins themselves are quite interesting, but it is the setting that is most impressive. It is perched on top of a steep-sided mountain, surrounded by jagged near-vertical peaks and with snow-covered mountains further back. &, well, I don't know what else to say about it as you have all seen the pictures so many times - but here's another in case you have forgotten.

The Epley Manoeuvre

2008-07-24T08:53:00.000-07:00

This has been a fairly unpleasant week as I woke up Monday morning with a nasty bout of vertigo. For you lucky people who have never suffered from it, the slightest movement of the head seems to cause the whole room to dip and spin horribly until the head is returned to its resting position, and if you try to fight against it and move anyway (for example to get out of bed to get to a toilet) the sensation causes you to vomit. I suppose it is like sea-sickness. Apparently it is caused by little calcium carbonate crystals in the ear breaking loose and floating off to the wrong place and thereby giving your brain the wrong spatial and positional messages.

This is the fourth time now, in four years, that I have woken up feeling like this. Only this time it was different in that it was still there, although in a milder form, the next morning. & the next, and the next. So I have spent this morning on the internet. I vaguely knew that there is some technique you can be taught to manipulate the head in such a way as to get the crystals back into the right place, but my UK doctor had refused to show me how last year as he would have had to induce a vertigo attack in order to do so. I didn’t fancy trying to explain it all to a doctor here, having no idea how to translate Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (the proper name) into French, so decided to find out how on the internet.

& there they were on YouTube, lots of nice little videos of people demonstrating the Epley Manoeuvre. So I shut my office door, cleared off a table, borrowed a towel from the bathroom to support my neck, got onto the table and started turning my head and body as instructed. I’ve done it once so far and already feel a little better, and will be so relieved when I perfect the technique (apparently it takes a little practice to get really good at it) as I was so worried about waking up with this one day at the wrong time and place (eg with a flight to catch).

Thank goodness for the internet. I’ve also used it this morning to book a flight and pay a tax bill as well as my daily check on the world news. What did expats like myself used to do without it?

Yet more about food

2008-07-14T03:14:00.000-07:00

This time last year I was so overwhelmed by mangoes that I was prompted to investigate how to make mango jam. This year, however there have not been nearly so many. Now I know why.

This was taken at nearly 19:00h when the light had started to fade, hence the graininess of the photo, but in fact several of these rose-ringed parakeets now seem to spend most of their day in my mango tree. They squawk extremely loudly, they drop bits of mango all over the ground, and they don't leave enough for me - but I'm not complaining. It is a pleasure to see them there!

It does mean though that I have to walk around the edge of my courtyard, avoiding the area under the mango tree, as currently around four partially eaten mangos crash down onto the ground every day.

I have just discovered a new place to go in Dakar. An urban park, visited by Senegalese mostly for its zoo, but also containing a lake and a large area of swampy woodland all around the edge of the lake. It is full of pelicans, cormorants, herons and kingfishers, and I also saw hornbills and vultures, and a large monitor lizard running through the undergrowth and into the water. I have been there a couple of times now, and this weekend I decided to explore the area near it. The map showed a beach nearby with a picture of a fishing boat, and sure enough when I eventually found a little alleyway heading down to the beach, I started to smell fish.

Several fishing boats had just come in, and the catch was being distributed to the traders at the little fish market there. Suddenly a group of boys rushed in my direction with something large carried above their heads. It was a swordfish! I moved out of their way and found a Senegalese lady grabbing my hand and pulling me along behind them. She was, she told me, Madame Ndiaye (aka Mama Seck), and although she spoke only Wolof it was clear that she was a fish seller and she had identified me as a likely customer.

We followed the fish down another alleyway, where it was slapped onto a big wooden log. A man waiting there cut off the fins, scraped away all the scales with a sickle, gutted and beheaded it. He shook his head when he saw I had taken my camera out, so I smiled and put it back in my bag - but fortunately by then had already sneaked one quick shot.

I had absolutely no idea how much fresh swordfish would cost, so I offered around £5, and he cut off an enormous chunk of fish. Madame Ndiaye took it over to what must have been her stall, and chopped it into pieces for me. So I now have seven swordfish steaks to work out how to cook!

More about food

2008-07-11T08:28:00.000-07:00

After my trip to Cameroon I had to go to the UK for a week, for a conference. We were in the south coast town of Hythe, where I had never been before – a pretty little place with a historic canal (known as the Royal Military Canal, built at the start of the nineteenth century as a defence against Napoleon) and a very windy seafront. We had blue skies and sunshine for the whole week, and I thought it must have given a very good impression of England to my international colleagues.

Not that any of them said anything. Perhaps I am too polite – or just too cowardly – but I never really criticise the countries I am visiting to my hosts, in fact I usually go out of my way to find something good to say. For example I can’t honestly say that I really like the food much in West Africa. Some of it is nice, but overall the impression is of endless meals of rice served with gristly bits of meat and bone, with any flavour obliterated by too much chilli, pepper or salt. But I would never say that if asked. I might go as far as to admit that they don’t eat enough vegetables for my liking – but I would either find some aspect I like or I would be non-committal rather than criticising it.

However observing my African colleagues in the hotel dining room, and at a very nice fish restaurant, there was no such restraint. They turned their noses up, they laughed in disbelief that we could eat ‘such stuff’, they smothered everything with salt, or they just left it uneaten and asked if there was any way they could have some chips, or some ice cream. “You mean the Queen of England eats this?” one of them asked me, about a very nice salmon fishcake.

I was amused though also annoyed, and embarrassed for the poor restaurant staff. Then I wondered whether it is better to tell the truth as they do – perhaps I am just being patronising by always trying to avoid criticising anything from their culture?

Talking of food, I added on a day to the week there so as to have time for some shopping, and the most important part was the trip to Sainsburys. I had heard much about the terrible price rises so was curious to see whether they matched those here in Senegal. In fact I saw no evidence of them at all. Sainsburys Basics pasta was still 19p a packet, the same price as it was when I left the country 18 months ago, whilst here the same size packet has risen from 35p to nearly 90p during that period. I tried to avoid the dairy products as I knew I couldn’t transport them, which is too frustrating when the prices in Senegal are enough to make you cry. £1.78 for a litre of milk!

Still, I was able to fit a couple of packets of pasta in my case, and somehow I also successfully carried back a whole punnet of nectarines and another of wonderfully tasty organic cherry tomatoes. Needless to say, I didn’t share any of it with my African colleagues on my return!

Bushmeat

2008-06-20T02:50:00.000-07:00

What on earth was I thinking about when I wrote the last sentence of my previous post? That's really not the way I look at life at all! I much prefer to live in the present - the Daoist way, I think - so that a moment spent sitting on a wall with the sun on my arms and the breeze in my hair is enjoyed, rather than spoilt by regretting what I didn't do the day before, or worrying about what might happen the day after. So if in the future I cannot remember my African experiences, what does it matter, provided I have enjoyed them while I am here!

Here, by the way, is currently Cameroon. We are based in Yaounde, but I also had the opportunity to visit some of the communities we work with in the east of the country. This meant a long drive through the lush, green forest, spectacularly offset by the dark red soil. Most of the roads are unsurfaced so they are dark red, and the houses are made of a framework of sticks, with mud stuck onto them so they are red too. It really is a beautiful part of the country, particularly now during the rainy season when the colours are at their brightest. I did see lots of logging trucks too though, with tree trunks piled high on them, which was rather upsetting.

I had to visit some of the pygmy communities we work with, which I had been looking forward to for some time. However they were not what I expected. Many of the Africans I meet in the communities are short - often no taller than me - I assume because of poor childhood nutrition, and I was surprised to find that the pygmies I met were no smaller than this. I have to admit to being a little disappointed...

My other experiences here have been about food. I had been told that bushmeat is a big part of the cuisine here and so had hoped to get to try something a little different.

The picture shows a cooking pot full of chunks of boa constrictor. It was nice - nicer than the porcupine, but not as nice as the monitor lizard, the gazelle, the monkey or the pangolin. None of these are protected, by the way, except the pangolin, and in Cameroon that is farmed so as far as I know I was not helping with the destruction of the environment. & I don't (as yet) seem to have picked up any nasty disease from the monkey meat.

Why am I here?

2008-06-08T10:23:00.000-07:00

Once again I have been too busy to write anything here. I’ve been getting on and off of planes, unpacking and repacking my suitcase, working evenings and weekends, and suddenly we are approaching the middle of June. But I thought I had better set aside a few minutes this afternoon (a Sunday, and I’m working in my hotel room) just to let everyone know I am still OK out here.

I did manage to catch the final league games of the English Premiership season, in a windowless, airless “video club” down a little alleyway in Monrovia, where both the Chelsea and Man Utd games were projected onto a wall for the several hundred fans packed in there. Then ten days later I was in Accra for the Champions League final, watching in a hotel bar with a number of Ghanaians mostly supporting Chelsea (or, more accurately, Essien) as my team took the double.

I also managed to visit the National Museum in Ouagadougou, which, although not yet finished, was very impressive, with a well set out collection of masks and an interesting display of archaeological findings from the north of the country. Now I am in Cameroon, where I tried to fit in a couple of museum visits yesterday. However the National Museum is currently a building site, and the private Afhemi Museum, which supposedly contains 2,000 items including tribal artefacts up to 900 years old, was frustratingly elusive. I could not find an address, only the name of the district it is in, but no-one in that district seems to have heard of it. Emails to the address given on the internet bounce back, and the phone numbers I have tracked down are out of service. So it was back to work…

One of the things I had to do during this time was to draw up the work schedule for me and my team for the next year. I have a new recruit starting on 1 July, and another on 1 October, and once they are trained I will finally have a full team. Theoretically, this could mean less work for me – well, less work to do, and more work to manage, I suppose. Much of the management will be better done on location rather than by email, as two of my team will be new, but it means my trips will be shorter. This will give me the chance to take some of the leave I have stacked up (which I will lose if it’s not taken soon), as well as to benefit from some of the public holidays. So what do I do with that time?

When I moved out here, and started this blog, I imagined that during my five years here I would really get an understanding of life in Africa, or at least in Senegal. However I soon realised that the only understanding available to me (if I want it) is of life as an ex-pat in Africa. The rest I am just looking in at from the outside, which only gives me part of the story. I am too different from the Africans – not just in skin colour, though that is the biggest factor, but also in not being married with children, not being part of a big extended family, not being religious, and in having an outlook on life that can only arise from growing up in a wealthy, stable country with a decent social security system. The focus on getting money here, and on conspicuous consumption when you succeed, is an attitude I will never share. I was reminded of it again this morning when I went down to breakfast – in comfortable trousers and Tshirt and a pair of flip flops – and was surrounded by Cameroonian women in gorgeous dresses, high heels and heavy make-up.

So my aim has changed, to one of experiencing as much as I can of the region while I am here – seeing the countryside, eating the food, listening to the music, etc – really just being a tourist but with greater access because of my job. Not such a bad thing I suppose. Which means that my schedule for the next year is jam-packed again, but this time through using my days off and weekends to the full in seeing as much of the countries in the region as I possibly can. Which means that when I do get to spend any time in Dakar, I will be as busy as I have been over the past year. But I promise to find time to keep writing this. After all, if I don't write down what I've done I might forget, and then what's the point?

The remnants of war

2008-05-11T01:39:00.000-07:00

It’s been quite a while since I wrote anything, I know. I’ve had a few days in Lisbon in a meeting (lovely place – with a great Oceanarium), and a bit of time in Dakar when I did nothing worth writing about. I thought I had made a new friend there, someone who invited me to stay at his place down the coast for a weekend, but he behaved much like other Dakarois I have met; Saturday evening we went out to eat, and he spent the entire evening on his mobile, then Sunday he invited friends round and they spent the whole day talking to eachother in Wolof. Not a friendship I shall be pursuing.

But the next day I flew to Liberia, for a two-week assignment in Monrovia. As usual, I read up a little on the history before my trip, and what a fascinating history it is! 300 black families from the US set up the independent republic in 1847. Despite their own descent from slaves, they considered ethnic Liberians to be inferior, fit only for exploitation. In fact as recently as 1931 an international commission found organised slavery in Liberia.

In 1980 the descendants of these settler families were overthrown from power, the indigenous population (95% of the country) rejoiced, and the semi-literate Samuel Doe took power. During the 1980s the economy was the worst performing in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, as real incomes fell by half and unemployment shot up, and there were a series of rebellions, often involving child soldiers high on alcohol or drugs. Some of his soldiers believed that by eating bits of a great soldier’s body could take on some of his greatness, and the leader of a failed coup was apparently cut up and eaten in public.

Finally Doe was overthrown by a rebel group led by Prince Johnson. He was captured, stripped to his underpants and interrogated, and when he didn’t give the right answers, Johnson ordered one of his soldiers to cut off one of Doe’s ears, which Johnson promptly ate in front of him. Our Finance Manager in Liberia currently lives next door to Johnson (now a senator), who has told him that the story of the ear is not true. However a video he took of the whole thing has apparently been seen by many people all around West Africa.

Johnson’s forces only really held Monrovia so fighting continued between his troops and those of Charles Taylor. Both sides indulged in cannibalism, and one group of men fought naked in the belief that this protected them against bullets. During the mid-1990s. No, really, I’m not making all this up…

West African peacekeeping forces also got involved in the mess, while infrastructure was destroyed, women were raped en masse, and half of the country’s population fled their homes. Eventually, after 14 years of civil war, a peace accord was signed and implemented. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was elected president (narrowly beating former World Footballer of the Year, George Weah), 18,000 UN peace-keepers were brought in and the trial of Charles Taylor for war crimes began in The Hague.

A year later, this was where I was headed. Displaced people are returning home and the peace-keepers are still in place, but unemployment is at 85% so armed robbery is common. We were told not to leave the hotel (surrounded by high walls and razor wire) after dark. A WHO survey across the country showed that 75% of women have been raped, mostly gang-raped. Indeed rape was only made a crime in 1993. Everywhere there are posters telling readers where to go if they are raped, how to report crime, and exorting them to give up their weapons and live in peace.

In one of the areas where we have started work the baseline survey shows that there is one toilet per 5,200 inhabitants and one textbook per 27 pupils. I also read that there are only 26 pharmacists in the whole country, all of which are in the capital. Indeed I was warned before I came here that I would have to bring with me any medicines that I might need, such as malaria treatment, as there are virtually none available in the country.

The signs of the war are all around, with plenty of ruined buildings, others covered in bullet holes. There are plenty of amputees around too. But the people are all very friendly and there are no outward signs of the mental traumas they must all have gone through. Everywhere there are UN blue-berets and land-cruisers, as well as dozens of vehicles marked with the logos of the 58 international NGOs who are here trying to help. The Chinese are here too, rebuilding the roads, and the Lebanese opening hotels and restaurants for all the aid workers and hopefully in the future lots of international businessmen. It’s quite a strange place, a bit unreal.

The countryside, meanwhile, is pretty empty. Lots of greenery but very few villages. Not for long, though, as Liberia currently has the highest rate of population growth in the world. I suppose that’s what you do when a long and brutal war has finally ended.

The Gold Coast

2008-04-17T16:00:00.000-07:00

I had a spare week between a meeting in Accra and an assignment in Lomé (three hours’ drive away), so rather than flying back to Dakar in-between, I decided to take some of the compensatory leave I was due (for weekend working and travelling) and spend the time seeing the coast of Ghana.

It is rainy season, and I spent my first evening sitting in a beach-side restaurant watching the most impressive lightning show I have ever seen. It lasted for well over an hour, with jagged streaks zig-zagging down to the water and arcing across the sky between the clouds. It is also lobster season – three halves of grilled lobster with chips for $10…

I had started my trip three hours east of Accra at Cape Coast. This was the British capital of the then Gold Coast for 211 years, until it was moved to Accra in 1876. The castle where the British were based is now a museum. You can visit the former slave dungeons, the tunnel from the dungeons to the “door of no return”, and the cell where misbehaving slaves were thrown – and left, without food, water or light, to die.

Thankfully the guide made no attempt to blame slavery on the Europeans. In fact he gave a very balanced account of the history, referring to slavery as business between two parties, balancing supply (the African middlemen) and demand (the Europeans). When I saw on the news that same day that an escaped slave in Niger was taking her government to court for not implementing laws to outlaw the practice, I even felt some pride in my country’s history as the first to ban slavery.

Whilst in Cape Coast I also did a side trip to Kakum National Park, to experience the famous walkway slung between trees, high up in the forest canopy. It was nice, though more notable for the multitude of insects than anything else. & I don’t mean beautiful, or interesting, insects – just the type that buzz around your ears and keep flying into your eyes.

The journey there though was a slice of real Ghana. My taxi driver had a sticker on his dashboard, reading “I am covered with the blood of Jesus” – the type of slogan that is very common in this highly religious country. He initially turned his radio to some cheerful ‘hi-life’ music, but then re-tuned it, and “Good morning Jesus, good morning love” blasted out. Worse, he then decided to join in, loudly and tunelessly. Everywhere you go there are churches, and people soon ask you about the extent of your religious beliefs. I don’t know whether they were more shocked by my atheism or my childlessness…

Elmina, just along the coast, had an even prettier castle, overlooked by a fort. The castle was built in 1482 by the Portuguese – and Christopher Columbus visited it before he discovered the Americas! The Portuguese were the first Europeans to explore the coast of West Africa, and soon established themselves in the Gold Coast. In fact the Ghanaians couldn’t keep up with the demand of the Portuguese for gold, so between 1485 and 1540 the latter imported some 12,000 slaves, purchased in Benin and sold to Ghanaian and Malian gold merchants to help with work such as porterage. Eventually, with the colonisation in South America, the US and the Caribbean, more labour was needed to work in the plantations established in those places and so the intercontinental slave trade began.

I had a real stroke of luck during my week, meeting up with an English couple who have purchased a 25-year lease on the 17th century Fort Metal Cross in Dixcove. They invited me to stay – thankfully not in one of the dank old slave dungeons, but in a room upstairs where the soldiers used to stay. It was fantastic, with the sound of the waves breaking onto the rocks below, and a cautious walk along the unlit ramparts in the night to find my way to the steps down to the bathroom. Not to mention the luxuries of a hot shower and a full English breakfast!

I later visited the forts at Axim and Beyin too, and took a trip to a stilt village built over the side of a lagoon. I also watched plenty of fishermen hauling in their nets, and mending them between trips, though sadly I also saw a group of them hacking away at an enormous turtle they had just caught. They cut off the limbs first, while the turtle waved its head from side to side - I hope just in some sort of post-death reflex, but I fear the poor thing was still alive and no doubt in a lot of pain. Travelling in Africa can be quite difficult for a nature-lover, as you do see quite a lot of cruelty to animals, as well as a general lack of respect for the environment (people defecating on beautiful beaches, and throwing empty plastic bags into the bushes).

Generally though it was a most relaxing week, and I finally felt that I had beaten that cold/temperature/sore throat that had been hanging around me for so long.