African Plumbing

Now we have left sub-Saharan Africa so I though I should provide a bit of list highlighting some of the more amusing moments with African plumbing. It was a constant source of amusement to us, mostly centering around showering. So here are some of them:

• My first amusing African plumbing experience was while having a shower at our campsite near Kuger NP in South Africa. This shower when turned on, would spray horizontally directly onto the wall, so the only way I could wash myself was to hold the shower head and let the water dibble down my arm.
• There was a shower at White Mountain in the Drakensberg Mountains in South Africa that was designed for midgets, as the shower head only came up to shoulder height. Too bad if you wanted to wash your hair. The shower head was also broken on this one so to prevent the water from flowing down the wall again, I had to prop the shower head up with my soap container.
• Orange River, on the boarder between South Africa and Namibia provided an interesting showering experience, the walls were made of straw and only came up to your armpits, so while showering you could watch people playing volleyball just outside...not that anybody was at the time.
• During my shower at Fish River Canyon in Namibia, the water stopped dead as the lady next to me ran her bath water.
• At the place we stayed at in Swakopmund, Namibia, the water prefered to drain into the living room/kitchen area than down the drain in the bathroom.
• At Seronga in the Okavango Delta, Botwanna the mens and womens showers were labelled in Setswanna so we had no idea what was what...only one shower provided hot water here so it was just pot luck if you got on.
• We stayed on a houseboat on the Delta and for some reason we could only have a shower during daylight hours??
• At one particular campsite in Namibia there were showers that gave a mild electric shock when turning the taps on or off.
• In Kasane in the Chobe NP, the hot and cold water taps were placed the other way around, so I had a freezing cold shower thinking there was no hot water at all.
• At Zambezi Breezers in Zambia there was no water all due to power cuts.
• At a placed called Kuomboka in Lusaka, Zambia, we had to use the dorm room showers (as our one was broken)...these showers were basically like a telephone booth, with nowhere to hang your stuff, so all your clothes had to placed on the outside of the shower. Unfortunately some had hot water and some didn't. I of course picked the one that didn't.
• At a place called Deans Hill camp in Zambia, I finally managed to find myself a hot shower (the first for a long time), this however was so hot that it almost burnt my skin and there were more power cuts so this was done in the dark.
• Getting to the showers in the Flat Dogs campsite in South Luangwa NP was an extreme sport of dodge the elephant...I had a frog join me on one occasion.
• On our train trip from Zambia to Tanzania, the shower was basically just a hose dribbling cold water from the roof....better than nothing though.
• Manch Lodge in Zanzibar was the absolute African plumbing highlight for us though. This was were Nick decided to shave off his beard. During this process he managed to snap the tap off and had water spurting everywhere. We had to hand over the room key and wondered Stone Town while Nick sported some very interesting amusing facial hair as they fixed this problem. Then as Nick continued he blocked the sink! The rasta, looking after the place was too busy milling around doing nothing to bother fixing this for some time, but eventually it was fixed. W found out a few days later that the lodge actually had hot water, the rasta guy had just forgot to turn it back on after fixing the blocked sink. At this place we also failed to see how the water was supposed to drain away as there was no actual drain. It just seeped through a crack behind the toilet.
• At Aberge La Caverne in Rwanda you pick between having water pressure or hot water, you couldn't have both.
• Kinigi Guest House near where we went gorilla tracking provided us with our number 2 African plumbing moment. After staff forgot to turn the water on for whatever reason, some time was needed to heat the water....so after dinner we decided it was about time for a shower as we had climbed Mt Bisoke that day and were feeling very smelly and dirty. I made Nick go first due to my bad luck with showers. After turning on the hot water tap the only thing that came out was a lot of gurgling noise, so loud it made the pipes rattle. Nick tried the cold water tap thinking this may get the water flowing, but no luck there just more gurgling noises. Nick then managed to break the tap off this shower too and while fixing it with his trusty leatherman tool the water decided to cough and spurt out. At this point it was now or never so we made the most of the just above freezing water.
• I had a shower in Jinja, Uganda that had a hole in the hot water pipe, so occasionally I would get a burning sensation on my calf as the hot water sprayed out sideways.

So with all this experince I am thinking about writing a coffee table book on the best showers in Africa.

I should mention that I have had some good showers in Africa. The best was in a place called Sipi River Lodge Near Mt Elgon in Uganda and the other was at Arusha Backpackers, Tanzania....so 2 showers in 3 1/2 months isn't bad. Hehe.

Mountain Gorilla's, Uganda and Kenya

Last blog I think I left off in Kigali Rwanda. Since then we have travelled through Uganda and Kenya and just arrived in Cairo. So I need to catch up.

After we left Kigali we travelled to Musanze for some mountain gorilla tracking and we climbed Mt Bisoke, an extinct volcano apparently on the boarder of Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC (Domocratic Republic of Congo) at the top. It was right near where Diane Fossey lived and studyed the gorillas and where she is now buried with her mate digit.

Tracking the gorillas was an amasing experience. They are so big and powerful and intriguing to watch. We saw the Amahoro family group (Amahoro group were named after the genocide and means peace).
I naively thought we would turn up on the edge of the group and observe them from the side as they sat there in the grass and did their thing, but it wasn't like that at all. For a start we were in bamboo and really thick vegetation. As we came across the first big black ball of fluff and watched for a while we soon realised that we were actually surrounded by them as we could hear all the crunching sounds of vegetation around us. It really got my heart racing hearing and seeing these huge creatures come crashing though the bamboo around us. It was such a great experience though. We were supposed to keep a distance of 7 m at all times, but in practise this was difficult, not because we were approaching them, but because they kept approaching us, and walking backwards up a slippery steep slope in thick vegetation was hard. We got to see some babies in the group, one very small one with it's mother and another one a little older and more curious. This one actually approached us, a little unnerving as the dominant silverback was right near by. I really didn't want to annoy that one....it was huge!!! Unfortunatley the 2nd dominant male had lost his hand from a snare...very sad. As we watched I could see him struggle to scrtach his other arm, the rangers told us he was coping very well though. You can only stay for an hour to prevent stressing the animals. Just as we were about to leave 2 boisterous males burst right through the midle of the group and stopped to touch the ranger on the leg...it was an exciting way to end the experience.

After our time in Rwanda we got a bus to Kampala in Uganda and spent a few days at Murchison Falls for a safari, a boat cruise up that part of the Nile and a hike around the falls. Then we went and hired mountain bikes in Jinja, the source of the Nile River and camped by Bunjagali Falls. After that we spent a few days camping and hiking next to Sipi Falls near Mt Elgon on the Ugandan side. That was a beatuful spot!

We spent the last week in Sub-Saharan Africa in Kenya, travelling from Western Kenya to Nairobi through Eldoret and Nukuru. We hired an old series 3 Land Rover and camped in Lake Bogoria NP. We got the campsite all to ourselves. It was a bit scary hearing all the baboons screeching around us in the dark though...but they kept their distance, until the morning when they pooed all over the tent! Luckily it was wet season so the rain washed most of it off. At Nukuru we took the Landie through Nakuru NP to do our last African safari and got a fair bit of animal spotting in, which was nice.

We arrived in Cairo Yesterday and are so far loving Egypt....now I'm excited to experience Northern Africa.

Rwanda and Genocide

As I mentioned in the last blog arriving in Rwanda was a breath of fresh air compared to Tanzania and my favourite place so far.

Kigali was very different than I was expecting. It seems like quite a prosperous city with huge mansions springing up all over the place, the government is in the process of tearing down the city slums and providing houses for the locals with plumbing and electricity, where they have up to 40 years to pay off and own these homes, if they wish. There are very professional looking business men and women wondering about the city and very cosmopolitan places to eat out. There is more of a middle class here than we have seen for a while too. It was also much bigger than I expected, our lonely planet guide, being 4 years out of date, said the population was only 300, 000, but it was clearly much bigger than that! It's now closer to 1, 000, 000. My guess is an influx of Rwandan refugee's returning to Rwanda now things seem much more stable from their troubled past. There is a really good vibe in Rwanda and there is an optimistic feel as the people here look to the future and move on from bad times.

Rwanda is a really clean place, especially compared with other African countries. There is no rubbish anywhere. Every last Saturday of the month Rwandans spend their mornings cleaning up and planting trees etc. They also have no plastic bags here.

The landscape is stunning! The land of a thousand hills....and most of them cultivated with banana's and various crops.

The roads here are good, something we really appreciated after our experiences in Tanzania. Plus transport is well regulated, so everyone gets a seat and it's super cheap.

While in Kigali we did a city tour where we went to the genocide museum among other things. It was such a moving experience. There was a section of the memorial/museum that had some poster sized photo's of children and under the photo some info. Here is an example:

Name: Michael
Age: 7
Favourite drink: Tea
Favourite food: Ice-cream
Best Friend: His mum
Attached to death by machete

I couldn't read all of them it was too hard. It still brings tears to my eye just writing about it.
It's hard to comprehend how such atrocities could have happened. How even neighbours turned on one another...men, women and children were hacked to death within their own communities.
In April of 94 approx 1, 000, 000 Rwandans were killed within about 6 weeks..that's close to 1 in 20 Australians!

I think there is probably the misconception that the 2 tribes of Rwanda (the Hutu and the Tutsi) have been fighting amongst themselves for centuries, but the Hutu and Tutsi have lived in Rwanda happily living side by side and in inter tribe relationships for a long time. Tensions started between them during colonial rule when the Belgium's and their European obsession with classification introduced identity cards to separate them in a bit of a random way.

During Belgium rule they took a preference to the Tutsi and gave them more privileges and more positions of power. This obviously lead to worsening conditions for the Hutu and a feeling of inferiority. There were some uprisings and subsequent murders that followed back and forth.

By 1962 Rwanda was granted independence like most other African nations during that time. Belgium placed a Hutu Prime Minister to power. The Belgium influences meant politics split down ethnic lines....not so good for the Tutsi who were the minority. So it followed then that the conditions worsened for the Tutsi and many fled into the neighbouring countries.

In the 70's, a General, who was a Hutu extremist seized power and ruled Rwanda like a dictatorship, allowing anti-Tutsi propaganda on the radio and in the media.
Meanwhile a group of exiled Tutsi formed a group called the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) .
Tensions continued between the Rwandan army under Hutu rule and the RPF until the 90's.
In the 90's an even more extremist group formed within the Generals government called the Interhamwe militia and it was this group that planned and carried out the genocide of the Tutsi and any Hutu holding liberal views.
The Generals plane was shot down upon landing at Kigali airport after peace talks with the RPF in Tanzania, within minutes the killings started. All Hutu were encouraged to kill their Tutsi neighbours. Reading about the way the people were killed was disturbing and I won't repeat it. I just can't understand how someone can have that much hate inside them. I guess a few decades of propaganda helps!

As I walked through the streets of Rwanda it was hard to comprehend what these people have been through. Anyone over the age of 14 had lived through this. Most have lost numerous family and have mostly friends these days. I'm sure it's something Rwandans can't forget and the scares both physically and emotionally still remain.

Real African Bus Travel

We are in Rwanda at the moment, getting here by bus was a mission, here is an entry from my diary from Mwanzw to Kigali.

We got up at 3:30am, got ready and made our way downstairs to find ourselves locked in the hotel, luckily the security guard quickly let us out and our taxi driver was waiting for outside asleep in his car. We got to the bus station at 4:30am then had to wait around as usual for the bus to turn up. Eventually the bus arrived at the bus station and due to the 20 or so other buses already in the bus station it struggled to find a place to park. After following it around the bus station with our packs on and all it finally decided on a place to stop. Somehow the bus already seemed full and their were lot's of people still needing to board, us included. I don't know where all the other people boarded since the bus started in journey in Mwanza.

A guy looking a little bit more like a conductor than the rest of the people on the bus hopped off, we showed him our tickets and he gave a new seat allocation n1 and n2...bugger! That was on the back seat. We had the back seat on our journey from Arusha to Mwanza a 12 hours bus trip where we spent most of the time with our butts airborne than on the seats. Anyway I prepared myself to be rattled around again. I was a little concerned that the conductor wasn't interested in our backpacks at that point, but we soon realised we just needed to sqeeze on, packs and all...not that there was room. For some stupid reason some people decided getting off the bus at the point when other are trying to get on is a good idea so climbing up the stairs was slow and hard work.

There were already lots of bags and people crammed into the isle and I could barely get up the stairs let alone stand in the isle. I just had to hang off the ralings or seats to could manage to grab with my pack still on as there was no room to put it down.

Nick got very assertive at that point and asked everyone to move down a little, which worked and I eventually has some room to take my heavy pack off. A relief I can tell you! At that point I thought we would have to stand, but we soon realised the conductor had cleared our designated seated on the back seat. Nick picked up his bag and successfully naviagted it around the small boy crammed in the isle, but I struggled to lift it over his head and got sone help. Our packs were wedged into the isle and we took our seats.

Anyway, after a hour and a bit late, a policemen got on the bus ranted and raved about the overcrowding, all the people in the isle got off and we were on our way. We drove out of the bus station, round the corner and stopped to pick up all the people that had gotten off after the policemen had his say.

We drove for a short distance and had to get off to catch a ferry over Lake Victoria. It was already a welcome break from the bus. On the other side we hopped back into the bus literally climbing over the seat rests and piles of bags in the isle to cram ourselves into the back seat again.

We stopped in most of the small villages we drove past where more people were waiting to board the bus! It seemed very random, but sometimes they would sqeeze on and sometimes not. In one crazy town we saw another coach that had a lounge suite strapped to the top of the bus...Nick and I thought they should strap it on the rigt way up and charge 1st class rates for fully airconditioned comfortable seats. At this stop a bicycle was strapped to the under side of our bus and Nick noticed that some fish had been tied and were dangling onto the outside of the bus. We were surprised that it made it the wole way...we checked when we hopped off, we were expecting to see some fish heads and some fish bones hanging off, but they were ok...a little dusty and very tenderised from all the flapping on the side of the bus though.

So each time we stopped we managed to somehow squeeze a few more on. There had to be at least 110 or more...it was supposed to fit about 70 only! By the end of our trip there were people standing in the isle, some sitting on the luggage, some sitting on the head rests even, one of the conductors had to climb in our window and sit straddled across the head rests at the back and the other was hanging off the side.

After 8 hours of travelling 380km's (due to the many stops for pick-ups and police check points...where I'm sure they got fines or paid bribes) we reached Benako...the second last stop near the Rwandan boarder. We had no way of exiting by the stairs so our only option was to climb out the window. I went first, my climbing being very rusty I fell and bashed and bruised my arms on the way down. Nick dislodged our packs and lowered them down to me and climbed out too.

We were a little fed up with being packed in like a sardine so we forked out a little extra for a private taxi to the Tanzanian and Rwandan boarder. We got through immagration no worries and walked the 1 km between the countries at Rosumo falls. It's amasing how different places can be due to arbitary lines drawn on a map. Rwanda was instantly much calmer, everything was cleaner and neater, the were all less in your face and very well dressed. The minivan we got on in Rwanda was new and very swish and everyone had there own seats...it was another world away to Tanzania.

We have spent the last 2 weeks in Rwanda and it has been great...my favaurite spot so far. More about that later.

More on the Maasai Tribes

First up I have finally posted some photos of our trip so far, you can view them on the following link:

http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=60248&l=f8823&id=548657385

I also mentioned Nicks blog last time, here is the link:

http://journals.worldnomads.com/nick_earl

Last blog I wrote about what we did in the crater highlands, but I also wanted to write a bit about the Maasai culture we witnessed on our trek.

The Maasai are a very proud tribe and probably the most well known of the African tribes, but they are actually only one of about 130 tribes in Tanzania alone, all with varying traditions and beliefs. Some still live in their traditional ways but lots have lost them after Europeans, Arabs and missionaries settled in their country and asserted their influences. Tanzania gained independence in the early 60's and the first President was very successful at uniting the nation by banning tribal leaders and introducing Kiswahili as the official language. It is the reason why Tanzania is such a stable country when so many others have problems with tribalism....mixing politics with tribal loyalties it not so good for democracy. Tanzanians see themselves as Tanzanian first.
Just for interest sake, at independence, the word Tanzania comes from:

tan from Tanganyika, the name given when the Germans settled there
za from Zanzibar
nia from the Swahili word for hope

Walking through the villages was like taking a step back in time, the Maasai still live as they have for centuries. All we could see was a sea of red, purple and blue blankets with white beaded headpieces, neck pieces, anklets and bracelets, they wear sandals made from old car tyres and live in simple wooden huts. There were donkey's, cattle and goats everywhere, being herded by small children mostly. I would love to have gotten my camera out to take some pics, but they tend to ask for money and we didn't have a lot of cash on us at the time (due to African ATM limits and no credit card facilities).

We wondered through Engeruka (a Maasai village) with Mr Laiser, a Maasai man who is studying English in Arusha to be a guide. He aspires to learn 10 languages! He showed us a sacred site where the Maasai in his village slaughter their cattle for eating and prepare bush medicine. We got to meet many of the Maasai leaders in the village as they made their way to the village for market day, they walk for miles to meet there! You can tell a Maasai leader by the number of sticks he carry's. Typically, a leader will have a spear and 2 sticks....just in case they need to protect themselves from other tribes of course, or the odd lion. We saw numerous Maasai women doing their daily chores. The women and children do all the work in Maasai culture! The men do bugger all! They must have gotten the idea from the lions. We saw a young girl who was about 13 years, at a guess, Mr Laiser told us that she was about the right age to be married and often to men about 40 years old. Just like the Zulu culture the men marry numerous wives....sometimes up to 30 or so. Some men have so many children that they don't know all of their names. The young girl we saw was likely to have been circumcised a few years ago, this is still practiced by the Maasai despite a lot of pressure from the Tanzanian government and WHO to stop these practices. One of the most telling moments while chatting to Mr Laiser was when he asked me how many cows I had, I replied that I had none, then in shock he asked me how many cows my parents had, I replied that they had none and that only a handful of people in Australia had some....I think he felt very sorry for me, which was refreshing as most Africans treat you like you're a cash machine with a never ending supply of money.
It was an interesting experience, I have found it interesting that of the tribes we have seen that still live in their traditional ways, the Zulu and the Maasai, both have many similarities. Both allow men to marry numerous wives, the women do most of the work, they both live in similar set ups with the huts, the men still practice their warrior ways, but don't actually need to use those skills in the modern world, interesting.