Round the World

Mombasa has always held a kind of pull for me, based, I think, almost solely on the fact that it has long been one of the largest and most important ports in East Africa, and as a non-flyer, such places are always of interest. I think I have always believed that i would, almost inevitably, eventually end up taking a freighter to or from Mombasa. The fact that we came on a coach (and left on a train) hasn't really ended that expectation either, although admittedly some of the Somali pirates are doing a good job to make it harder for me to do so in the reasonably near future.

Fort Jesus

Mombasa was scorching hot, and exotic sounding. The old town was pretty and refreshingly un-touristy, although that of course mean't that the hawkers and homeless people had nobody else to prey on but us. I would happily return and spend a bit longer exploring in depth, and hope to do so soon. But for now, time was rapidly coming to an end, even with a 2week extension on Maaret's flight.

Mombasa Old Town

And so we took whistle stop trip to the beach. Unknown to me – i'm really not a beach person – Mombasa's local environs are apparently home to some of the worlds best beaches, and Maaret had long wished to visit one. Picking a place at random (Tiwi, one of the less developed Southern resorts. We later discovered that Tiwi is not recommended at all by the local industry due to “security concerns”. Hmmm) and because it was somewhere that allegedly had cheap accommodation, we took a tuk-tuk to the Likoni ferry, crossed with the baying hordes and then a matatu south.

To me, Tiwi was not desperately exciting: out of season mean't few people around and so the hawkers had very few targets and whilst it was undeniably pretty, the beach was covered in seaweed and other assorted flotsam and jetsam (I like writing flotsam and jetsam, and this blog entry pretty much serves no purpose except allowing me to write it) so not the pure white sands promised. The same seaweed mean't that even at high tide, swimming was not particularly good, even for those who can actually swim. Add in the fact that it wasn't anywhere near as cheap as we had been led to expect, and you can pretty much conclude that it wasn't one of my life's (or even trip's) highlights.

And with that, and by now feeling even sh1ttier, it was back to Mombasa to find a train.

As with the previous entry, thanks for Maaret for photos as I took even fewer around Mombasa than I had in Zanzibar, so an even higher percentage of these are actually hers. It's useful to travel with a talented photographer who gives you all their photos, isn't it?!

Vladivostok. Karaganda. Pondicherry. Outer Mongolia (I know, I know). Samarkand. Jokkmokk. Yokohama. Timbuktu. Aylesbury*. Zanzibar. Some places have attracted me since I was young for no other reason than I like the sound of the name, which I think sounds so wonderfully exciting and exotic. Though Timbuktu remains the number 1 destination for me on name alone, i have no illusions about how it will actually be should I ever make it there. I expect it to be a veritable dump. Over the years, I have often (but not always) found that places which you hold in such high mental regard sadly fail to live up to expectations, and so I have to admit that my hopes for Zanzibar were not overly high.

Loading the boat in Dar-es-Salaam

So I was pleasantly surprised. Sort of. Six hours on a cargo boat later and we had covered the 35km to Zanzibar Stone Town, and i loved it. Parts of it reminded me of Fes, parts of Qom and parts of another Middle Eastern city that I cannot quite place. Lots of narrow pathways and alleyways heading off in all directions, with brilliantly evocative – though in some places a little bit too neglected – architecture and, especially, doors and doorways throughout. Unlike Fes, for example, most of the alleyways were through passages, and with Stone Town surrounded by water on 2sides of it's roughly triangular shape, it means that it was hard to ever get truly lost (although I accept that getting lost can be one of the best experiences of such places).

We spent a happy few days wandering the town, browsing the shops and stalls, and eating as much seafood as possible, including lots of skewers from the excellent outdoor evening bazaar by the seafront. From there it was up north, past the endless police checkpoints and roadsigns with oddly specific distances (19.3km, for example) to Nungwi, to do something that I rarely feel any great need to do: sit on a beach for a couple of days.

Food in the night bazaar in Zanzibar Stone Town

Sadly time was not on our side, and after a week, we had to leave without getting to the East or South of the island. We also had to leave with my stomach unsatisfied. I had seafood everyday, yet with the exception of a few of the skewers from the bazaar and the last meal I had in Nungwi, I was almost universally disappointed with the seafood that was served. It was all edible, and none of it was bad, but on a small island with a deep fishing history and large amounts of truly fresh fish to use, I was surprised at how average the seafood was. I was also disappointed by the locals: Whilst there were some very friendly and helpful ones, many were not. In Stone Town in particular, it is easy to 'collect' followers (normally younger men, and especially when you have several women in the group) who are near impossible to shake off, believe you are best friends if you have exchanged 3words or asked a simple question/direction, and can then get very abusive when you try and actively get rid of them. People are also actively trying to conn you: short changing you which happened so often that it obviously was not accidental, not fixing – or even causing - problems (like no water in a hotel room) and the inevitable need to haggle for everything – on our return to Stone Town we (5 of us) agreed on 4000 Schillings each for a taxi, but had to promise not to say how much we had paid to 2 others in the taxi who had paid 10usd each, or about 12500 Schillings. I know it happens. I know it's normal. I know you have to fight for a decent price. But it can be tiring, especially when you are already feeling really, really sh1tty.

• No. Not really.

Nungwi, a beach resort on the north of Zanzibar Island, me doing an uncharacteristic not allot (with Fred, of course) and fishermen heading out for the nights fishing

more images from Zanzibar Stone Town

Thanks to Maaret for many of the photos in this entry. For reasons that I have forgotten, I took few photos, and so have since decided to shamelessly steal hers instead

And so to Dar (of the '-es-Salaam' variety). Which I loved. Although i'm not a true big city person like some, I have always enjoyed being in cities: especially those which are proper, lived in, energetic and slightly chaotic. And for someone who has spent the past 7months on a boat, an island (population 4008), in the desert and assorted middle of nowhere places – plus Lusaka which doesn't really count – arriving in Dar, a real city, was wonderful.

I can't say that we actually did that much in Dar: rather, we completed a few chores (woohoo! the parcel has finally been sent) and just spent some time wandering. The old city of Dar is not actually that old, and doesn't even really contain any of the narrow winding streets and alleyways that I love. But what it was was a condensed semi-grid of constant action, bustle, sound and smells. Jamestown it isn't, and I was in city heaven. Such exotic extravagances as shops were viewed, and, inevitably, searches for specific Ice-cream parlours undertaken. We even got the fun of having 2 electricity transformers explode near us: One of which, just outside our hotel around midnight, went on for 30mins in a veritable display of sparks, flashes and big bangs. Not good for those with a nervous disposition.

And perhaps of even more relevance, there was Indian food. Good Indian food. And lots of it.

I almost feel like I am being back in the real world. Then, in a not so good way, that was confirmed to me. A couple of days after we left for the second time, a munitions dump in the city blew up causing all sorts of chaos, and making the city and its inhabitants extremely jittery as it remembered the terrorist attack of 1998.

In my original vague outline of what might one-day have become an idea, I wasn't actually planning on visiting Zambia at this point in my trip at all. But having been told about this mythical ceremony called Kuomboka and being convinced to go, here i was. It was at that point that we accidentally discovered that due to some technical difficulties (the site wasn't ready, someone was drunk, the Zambian president wanted the dates changed. Nobody really knew) the ceremony was being postponed for a week. I'm not sure what the equivalent would be, although I suppose if the Pope suddenly deciding 2weeks before Easter that he had double booked Easter Sunday with a gurneying competition, and thus unilaterally declared that Easter was being delayed for a week, it might be roughly the same.

Which left us with a week, and Lusaka was not the place to spend it. Especially as a certain somebody had a relevant age-related date in the middle (meh. Everybody gets old at some point, and i was already past that point). So we headed to Lake Kariba. Which – ignoring the punctures on the way there – was actually really nice. I can't say that there was actually all that much to do, but that wasn't the point. It was beautiful and relaxed and I really liked it. About the most strenuous thing we did was drink wine, eat from all you can eat freshly BBQ'd buffets and take a boat trip around the lake. Wine, a beautiful Finnish woman, hippos in the water, sunset on the lake and an illegal stop-over on a Zimbabwean island for a few minutes. What more could you ask for? If this is what happens every time I get an unexpected date change, I can't complain.

I'm not exactly sure who designed and built Lusaka, but if i had to guess i would say nobody at all. I would guess that it was designed as some kind of cunning social experiment, as curiously, Lusaka, a populous capital city, notably seems to lack both a centre and anything to do. The 'city centre' if you can call it that is a single main road lined mostly with banks and financial institutions, and pretty much nothing else. By 6pm, it is a ghost town and a no-go area. Admittedly many cities, such as London, have financial and business centres which get quiet at night, but they do at least normally have area where there are people and other stuff as well. To top it off, the city has been built with pretty much no way to travel from anywhere to anywhere else without passing through the small central area, meaning travelers from East to South, HAVE to go via the centre (which pretty much consists of a roundabout at each end of 1km of Cairo Road, the city centre) regardless of if they are using public transport or private car. Which takes time.

The central street is kind of loosely surrounded by 3 big minibus stations and several smaller ones, which are all an absolutely chaotic hive of activity during the day, but again tend to close around sunset. There are also a couple of rough markets fairly close. But nothing else. No real shops to speak of, no restaurants or bars, or really anything else to attract people into the city. Talking to ex-pats in the city, and their general escape of choice and destination for relaxation or amusement are two shopping centres, fairly close together in the North East suburbs and what are at least in a way, white ghetto's. Yup, Zambia is living the Ameican dream: for entertainment, go to the mall. I tend to like 'real' lived in cities, of the sort that other people and tourists rarely like, but even i struggled to warm to central Lusaka. It's a very odd place.

Chawama, on the other hand, I loved.

Maaret had been living in Lusaka for 6months before she came to Namibia, working as a teacher in a vocational school on one compound, and living with a Zambian family in Chawama, another large compound in the south. A compound is pretty much the local name for what in the Western press would be called a slum, and Chawama is one of the largest in Lusaka. Housing maybe 200,000 people (nobody really has the faintest idea), it is a higgeldy assortment of brick, metal and wood shacks and dwellings of varying size and colour, in a maze of dusty, potholed and rubbish filled alleyways and streets. At a rough estimate there were 12 mzungu's (white people) living there. Most residents were poor, pretty darned poor or really, really poor, but at the same time I felt much more comfortable – and safer – wandering around Chawama than I did in the rest of Lusaka, and, heck, parts of most European cities.

It is hard to describe, and for some reason I didn't feel right taking photos of it (even though there would be no problem) so you'll just have to believe that I loved it and try and picture mentally something that you probably can't picture.

But by far the best part of Lusaka was the family, who were stunningly friendly and welcoming, and especially the kids, who adopted me as their latest play-toy and climbing frame with unbridled (and loud) enthusiasm.

Happy parents Purity and Handsen, with 1month old Gracious

The crazy kids: Thabo (left), Prince (back), Malelego and Clare (front)

This is pretty much what I did in Lusaka. Got turned into a kids climbing frame. The inflatable snake is Cedric, though sadly he and Fred did not get on and so he remains with kids in Lusaka