11.20.08
Posted in africa 2008, travel, photos, personal at 2:22 am by wingerz
I wake up early to take a short walk along the beach. I find a few ghost crabs that scurry back into their holes and venture out when they think I’m gone.
In our guidebook I’ve found a nearby aquarium (the Mnarani Natural Aquarium). Bob, Abhinav, and Sim agree to accompany me. We walk along the beach. A young boy sells us shells by the seashore (for about $8 each), and a group of local villagers walk their blue net out to deeper waters.
A few things worry us when we reach the aquarium - a $2500 Tsh entrance fee (the book said it was $1000 Tsh, about $1 USD), a pile of turtle skeletons, and a rickety ticket stand next to a rickety wooden fence. I am going in regardless of how shady it looks and the others decide to follow. As we enter, we see buckets of young turtles lining the inside of the fence. They unsuccessfully struggle to escape. The main enclosure is a natural lagoon. Several large turtles swim by slowly, and our host grabs a pile of seaweed to feed them. He drops several pieces in, and the turtles come to the surface, chomping voraciously at the floating seaweed. As they eat, water is propelled from their nostrils in small spouts. Their shells, covered with geometric designs, are incredibly beautiful. They flap gracefully through the water.
The turtles start out as fish-eating creatures but later switch to eating seaweed when they become less mobile - too sluggish to catch fish. In the wild, only 2% of the young turtles survive. We hold some of the baby turtles. Abhinav tries to convert them to vegetarianism before they are ready.
Our host also feeds the kingfish living in the lagoon. He chucks a small piece of fish up into the air. A fish zips along the surface to snatch it as it lands in the water. He does it several more times.
The aquarium is a very pleasant surprise, well worth the cost of admission.
* * *
The trip is coming to an end, but that doesn’t mean that we’re in the clear. We run into a little misunderstanding at the airport (fortunately all of us make it back to Dar) and another at our hotel. Turns out there aren’t enough rooms for us. Arrangements are made for us to stay in another hotel which is nicer, but a bit further away. We don’t mind so much because they agree to throw in a couple vans to take us to dinner and the airport in the morning.
For our last dinner we dine at the Moevenpick Hotel. The seafood buffet is amazing in its variety and quality. The highlight is the raw fish stand - you pick your seafood then they grill or steam it. I eat three incredibly succulent crabs (2 grilled, 1 in curry sauce). I also sample just about everything else - shrimp, calamari, barracuda (very tasty). There’s lots of other delicious stuff as well, and we all eat until we can’t eat anymore.
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11.19.08
Posted in africa 2008, travel, photos, personal at 12:54 am by wingerz
Day 14: 3/28, Stone Town
Zanzibar is known for its spices, so we visit a spice “plantation.” It turns out to be kind of a tourist trap, but it’s still good fun. Our guide takes us around the grounds, where he unearths roots and cuts leaves and barks for us to taste and smell. He’s amazed by our collective knowledge as we identify many of the spices on our own. We’re trailed by three boys who cut, fold, and weave leaves into accessories for us to wear. The fresh coconuts and fruits (especially the pineapple) are very good. I pick up a few packets of saffron (which have made it into our new kitchen).
We eat pilau (spiced rice) for lunch at a local restaurant in Stone Town. The meal is fast, cheap, authentic, and tasty. Not much more you can ask for. Bob falls to sleeping sickness after eating.
We spend the afternoon touring Stone Town, the main town in Zanzibar. Starting from an old slave marketplace (including the dark, oppressive holding area), we wander through the twisted, narrow streets to the market and over to some of the other landmarks. Some of the doors are intricately carved, signifying the wealth of their owners. Colorful shutters open above street level. Stone Town is a great place to walk around; it feels completely exotic, and right as you feel yourself getting hopelessly lost you find your way back to one of the main streets. We shop for a while and watch the sunset from the roof of the Africa House Hotel before heading to Mercury’s for dinner. We have a decent meal outdoors at the highly Americanized restaurant.
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11.18.08
Posted in africa 2008, travel, photos, personal at 1:08 am by wingerz
Day 13: 3/27, Nungwi
After we return from snorkeling, we head out on a relaxing sunset cruise. There is tons of goofiness, undoubtedly fueled by a cooler full of beer. We take turns jumping off the top deck, and since the boat is moving so quickly we grab onto a line and pull ourselves back into the boat. Once the light starts to fade, the sail acts as a great reflector of light.
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11.13.08
Posted in africa 2008, travel, photos, personal at 4:03 am by wingerz
Day 12: 3/26, Tanzanite Resort, Zanzibar
Surrounded by thatch umbrellas and turquoise-blue waters. Getting here was quite an adventure - we took the ferry over from Dar. Not unexpectedly there were many more passengers than seats. Boarding the boat was total chaos. People were everywhere, trying to push their way past our huge backpacks (unsuccessfully, once we coordinated our positioning to block them out). The ferry cabin was air conditioned but I spent most of my time looking out from the back of the boat since I didn’t get a seat. Zanzibar has a very large Muslim population, so we saw a lot of men wearing turbans and women in body-length clothing. On the back deck people tried to find places to sleep. One man with a bag full of snacks kept throwing his wrappers overboard. After the multi-hour ride, we made it off the boat with all of our stuff.
* * *
The boats in the harbor are of all shapes and sizes - a large Chinese cargo ship, distinctive dhows, and small sailboats. The water here is very beautiful. We relax outside for an hour or so before some grey clouds roll in. Looks like we will be here for three nights - hoping to snorkel tomorrow, visit Stone Town the day after.
Sea urchins and jellyfish populate the nearby coastal waters, but that doesn’t stop Abhinav and Sim from swimming. Salamanders run around near lights (in the evening), looking for unsuspecting moths.
The resort consists of several small cottages and a large open dining area with a thatched roof. The daily menu is written on the chalkboard; typically the choice is between fish and pasta. The food is simple but nicely done. Besides our large group, there aren’t many other guests. We’re right on the water, with beaches to both sides of us. We’re happy to spend the last part of our trip in a relaxing, do-nothing setting.
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11.10.08
Posted in africa 2008, travel, photos at 4:06 am by wingerz
Day 11: 3/25, before bedtime
Had a fantastic day in Dar, thanks a lot to Jen and Ellen’s planning. Dar is a lot less intimidating than the first time we passed through. Maybe we are getting more used to the environment. Have noticed the foreign influences on architecture. Overall no trouble from the locals, though some of them look seedy. I really like the idea of negotiating cab fare up front, then you know the driver is incented to get you to your destination quickly. Overall very enjoyable but totally packed day.
The day starts at the local market, selling all sorts of goods, from shovels to scythes to pots to buckets to CRT TVs. The non-perishable goods are in an open 2-storied structure. On the way back we walk through the food market, which is starting to get busy. The smell of dried fish is especially pungent. Tomatoes and peppers are arranged in small pyramids.
Next stop is the National Museum. Highlights include a biology section with humanoid skulls from all over the world (mostly Africa). They also have a women’s art exhibit with some beautiful wood carvings. One of the artists welcomes people into the exhibit, each of her works has a brief explanation of the meanings, which I enjoy reading.
We see a packed carpool as we taxi between locations in the city.
Lunch at Chef’s Pride. Goat stew is excellent. Fast, tasty, and cheap.
We visit BRAC, a microfinance nonprofit based in Bangladesh. They only lend to women running small businesses who make less than 2000Tsh (less than $2USD) per day. Groups of women in the neighborhood work together to hold each other accountable for loan repayment. The focus is on sustainability for the borrowers and low overhead costs for the organization (about 10%).
Stop by a crafts market on the way back. Bombarded by shop owners pushing their wares from the moment we step off the bus. Everywhere we turn - Welcome! Karibu! Is free to look! In the middle of the market, many people are hard at work producing wooden crafts; wary supervisors give us dirty looks. Some workers carve, many sand. Two gentlemen, on separate occasions, ask me for my shoes. One persistent salesman follows us to the bus.
I go up to the 8th floor to take some pictures. People-watch for a bit - the rooftops come alive in the cooler evening. Two women sit on a swing; a mother and two children sit at a plastic table; someone is doing laundry.
Eat dinner at a Thai restaurant, where we celebrate Panos’s birthday. The kitchen staff has a sense of humor, as the phallic banana split demonstrates.
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11.04.08
Posted in africa 2008, travel, photos, personal at 2:36 am by wingerz
Day 10: March 24, morning
We went to two markets today. One was a touristy craft market and the other was a more local market. Picked up some dishes and some fabric for a tablecloth. Didn’t make it out of the fabric section into the rest of the market, but it was a beautiful place to lose ourselves - colorful patterns lined the “walls” all the way up to the top of the high ceiling. Occasionally a shopkeeper on the other side would poke her head through the fabric wall to investigate our transaction. Deeper inside the market the light was dimmer but the fabrics were just as colorful and intricate.
Jen made a last minute stop to pick up a basket.
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10.28.08
Posted in africa 2008, travel, photos, personal at 12:45 am by wingerz
Day 9: March 23, Volcanoes National Park
Our guide, Olivier, stops us at the top of a small hill. The thick vegetation has been cut away to form a small clearing. Moments before, we had taken off our packs because the gorillas were close by. A tracker had been following the family all morning and communicating their location back to us. Suddenly, Olivier makes us step aside as a black creature scurries up the hill past us.
We descend down the slippery slope, trying to find footholds and handholds in the dense vegetation. Mist surrounds us; it has been drizzling all morning. We’ve been hiking for about an hour with our guide and armed guard. Half an hour of it was through the farmland surrounding the park. We reached a 3ft-high stone wall that marked the forest boundary. We climbed over it and spent 25 minutes trekking through the dense forest in search of the Umubano family. The hike has been very difficult - slippery, muddy, and steep. The stinging nettles are plentiful and I feel their painful stings through my pants. Sliding down some of the slopes is sometimes the fastest, most graceful way to get to the bottom.
We finally catch up to the gorillas when they stop to have breakfast. We go off the trail and into the vegetation. Olivier hacks through it with his machete to give all of us (including the gorillas) more room to maneuver. Charles, the huge silverback, plods towards us and Olivier pushes us out of the way. We spend an hour observing the family of eight gorillas. Olivier makes grunting noises to soothe them. They do not feel threatened by us, and we take care to not make any sudden or menacing motions. A young gorilla hangs out under Charles’ watchful eye. They eat methodically. Their faces are striking in their humanity. Our time with them flies by, and they start heading out before the hour is up. A baby hitches a ride on its mother’s back, and we follow them up the hill. We get one last look at them as they disappear into the misty jungle. The young one spins around playfully once, as if to say good-bye.
Later we learn that another group of our travel companions got to see something more exciting - one of the younger males sneaking a quickie in with one of the female gorillas while the silverback was away, a definite no-no in the social structure. The silverback is the leader and protector of the group, and only he is allowed to mate with the females.
* * *
This is where Diane Fossey did her research on mountain gorillas. There are five families that tourists can visit; the other families are for research-only. Eight visitor permits per family are granted each day, each at a cost of $500 (!), and the visits are limited to precisely one hour (though the hike can last quite a bit longer, like four hours each way). Conservation efforts have been well-rewarded; the mountain gorilla population has approximately doubled to 600-700 in the past twenty years. Lately there’s been a lot going on on the Congo side of the jungle.
* * *
This marks the end of the wildlife-focused portion of our trip. This has definitely brought back some old dreams of becoming some sort of biologist. Exhausted beyond belief tonight.
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10.25.08
Posted in africa 2008, travel, photos, personal at 3:46 am by wingerz
Day 8, March 22, Kigali
The Kigali Memorial Center houses powerful exhibits about the Rwandan genocide, along with other genocides of the 20th centruy. We tour the outdoor gardens and mass graves first - they are still being constructed. The first two levels are finished. The remains of over 200,000 people (of an estimated 800,000-1,000,000) will rest here when all of the graves are complete. The mass graves contain coffins, which contain multiple bodies. They are covered by large stone slabs. Colorful flowers brighten the landscape, but do not lighten the heaviness of the atmosphere. There are a few bouquets left to mourn the dead, and a very large black wall with small print to remember the names of the deceased (still in progress).
A lot of the discussions today were about the ingredients for genocide - chief among these in Rwanda was a deep divide between the Hutus and Tutsis. When Belgians colonized the area they distinguished between the two, giving the Tutsis ID cards and preferred treatment. In modern-day history, the distinction is mainly a social one, not a racial one. There was marrying between the groups, and switching was possible. When it was unclear which group a person belonged to, the Belgians made the distinction on the basis of personal wealth, designating the rich as Tutsis. They were given cushy jobs in the government and were expected to control the Hutus, leading to widespread resentment.
The genocide was carefully orchestrated, with propaganda being distributed through print and radio channels in the years before. This was particularly effective due to the low literacy rate. Name lists were assembled to identify targets. When a plane carrying the president of Rwanda was shot down, events were set into motion. Death was dealt by a myriad of gruesome tools - machetes, clubs, spears, and rifles. No one was spared; women were raped and killed, and children were killed since they were the future of the Tutsis.
It’s still impossible to really understand the magnitude of the atrocity. The exhibits inside try to bridge this gap by presenting intensely personal views. They seek to de-desensitize people, who cannot comprehend the numbers because they are so large. Videos of survivor interviews play and color photographs document the events leading up to the genocide, the three-month descent into hell, and the aftermath. Articles of clothing found in mass graves have been retrieved and presented as outfits. Upstairs one orange room (filled with the profiles of children) led to another each with a brief description and horrifying cause of death. Another room featured skulls (some fractured) and bones from victims, along with dark, ghostly images of faces.
It didn’t make much sense to me in high school, and now that I’m more familiar with what happened, it’s still not clear to me how things escalated so quickly and how the world let it continue.
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10.23.08
Posted in africa 2008, travel, photos, personal at 2:48 am by wingerz
[Here we go again - going to try to finish off the Africa blog entries before the end of the year. So far, we’re about halfway through the trip.]
Day 7: March 21, evening
Greeted by pouring rain at the airport. The Kigali airport looks quite modern, as does the city itself. There are a lot of new buildings, a lot funded by post-genocide foreign aid.
Scooters taxi people around - a common sight is two people with green helmets riding on a single scooter. On the corner outside our hotel several men in yellow vests sell phone cards, and they also hold phones that can be used to make international calls. Prices range from $1 minute down to $0.20/minute. Internet cafes are plentiful, but connectivity is not that great - one cafe was out of commission when we went to use it. The one we ended up using had a slow connection, and a man shut down all power to the monitors in the cafe without warning.
Service is not yet a strong suit of the Rwandans. Coffee took over 1/2 hour and we had to leave without being served because we didn’t want to be late to dinner. Dinner at an Italian restaurant took over 2 hours. Ellen’s laundry, promised to be done by 5pm, was not delivered within a half hour of the deadline so she stormed into the laundry room to find out what was going on.
This is now one of the safest cities in Africa, thanks to a very strong stance against petty crime (apparently police can and will shoot thieves). It definitely feels safer here than in other places like Dar and even Karatu, but we don’t stray far from the hotel.
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10.22.08
Posted in wedding, photos, personal at 1:46 am by wingerz
California hasn’t been all that bad so far. In my first week, we had dinner with the in-laws, hung out with my parents, saw Ellen and Will, and attended Joey and Seoyoung’s wedding. Not a bad start.
Joey and Seoyoung were married in a lovely outdoor ceremony at Summit House, in Fullerton, CA. It was pretty much a huge high school reunion with a lot of my favorite people from AHS, some of whom I hadn’t seen in over a decade. The reception was elegant and incredibly fun.
Joey and I go way back to 3rd grade, when he moved to Arcadia. We spent 10 years together in the Arcadia public school system before going separate ways in college. We were reunited in Boston when he came for law school. Over the past 20 years, we’ve seen each other in a lot of different contexts. It would be silly to say that we haven’t changed a bit since then because that obviously isn’t true. The amazing thing is that our lives haven’t taken wildly divergent paths; hanging out feels just as natural as it did two decades ago, when we’d attend each others’ birthday parties (hiking + pizza for mine, sleepover with R-rated movies for his). A few random memories (some borrowed from Wilson’s best man speech):
3rd grade: Joey moves to Arcadia: Not only do we go to school together, we end up on the same soccer team, forming a formidable back line. We both wear huge glasses.
6th grade: Highland Oaks graduation: In the yearbook, Joey says that he’s going to be the first Asian player in the NBA. He continues to play point guard in our pickup games.
7th grade: Foothills Junior HIgh: We all develop a love for Funyuns and the cafeteria’s chocolate chip cookies. Wilson joins our crowd.
10th grade: Bug-collecting: We kill some bugs in an acetone gas chamber and pin them to our box. The next morning, some of them wake up. We also get freaked out by a huge black bumblebee that sends us running away.
11th grade: US History: While working on a class project at my house (in the backyard), Joey gets a phone call. He (unsuccessfully) attempts to run through a screen door.
12th grade: Government Team: It becomes clear that Joey’s going to be a good lawyer some day.
College: We bump into each other occasionally at Berkeley, and always hang out over the holidays. It becomes clear that Joey is becoming way cooler, more eloquent, buffer, and better looking than the rest of us.
2002: Joey comes to Boston for law school. With Wilson nearby in NYC, we get to hang out a good amount on the east coast. We end up at my aunt’s for Thanksgiving, where, inexplicably, the three of us end up sleeping in a single bed.
2004: Joey and Wilson serenade Jen and me at our engagement party.
2005-2008: Joey gets a law degree, new job, new place, new car, and new wife. It’s been an eventful few years for him.
Seoyoung and I don’t go all the way back to 3rd grade, though we were friends in high school. It’s been great to catch up with her over the past year. Hopefully she’ll forgive me for no longer following the Mighty Ducks and the NHL (who does these days, anyway?).
Here’s to their new life together and many more decades of friendship between Joey, me, and our families.
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