The one with symptoms

Around here, you're supposed to assume that flu-like symptoms are caused by malaria. But sometimes, like in my case, flu-like symptoms are actually caused by flu-like illnesses.

Actually, I think I had neither--Dr Omar thinks I had some sort of bacterial infection. And he may be right--whether it was the antibiotics or just the natural course, I feel much better now. The fever broke, my headache is gone, no sore throat, stomach fine, I have some appetite back, I only napped once today.

So my stay on Zanzibar got extended a bit.

Zanzibar is the Spice Island. (Actually, it's an archipelago, and is apparently not to be confused with the Spice Islands.) Off the coast of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, about an hour and a half by fast ferry--it's not that far from the coast, but it's a bit north of Dar. It's part of Tanzania (in fact, the ZAN part) but I still had to pass through immigration and get my passport stamped when I got here.

The most exciting thing I did is Mr. Mitu's Spice Tour. (Not to be confused with the other Spice tour.) Basically, things that grow where it's really hot and wet grow here. We sampled 11 kinds of citrus and I ate un-ground pepper.

Other than some fruit we ate on the spice tour, the food in Zanzibar has been uniformly bland. And I've tried Zanzibari, Italian, Indian, Chinese, generic Tourist, etc...

I spent my first couple of days, and again after I got sick, in Stone Town, the historic part of Zanzibar City where no one speaks much English, the streets are alleys that do not go straight, and it's dangerous to be walking around alone at prayer time, when everyone but the criminals is in a mosque.

I spent two days in the middle in Nungwi, a theoretically paradisical resort at the northern tip of the main island. It was sorta pretty but nothing fantastic. The surf was really choppy. Lotsa guys wanting to sell you art, sunglasses, jewelery, drugs, all of the above. I was gonna head down to Kendwa, about a 30 minute walk south, which is supposed to be idyllic, but that's when I got sick. And since I got back to Stone Town it's been raining pretty much every day, so today I'm going to head back to the mainland instead of extending my trip even further to head to the beach.

Hey, I used to play Ultimate with some guys who are pretty good. Congrats to Heijman, and Q and Shane and Drew and other Hodags,
sg

The one where I'm dreamy

Yeah I am!

(Though that might be more a side effect of my malarial pills than a judgement about any particular qualities I might have.)

21 May 2007, 12:41 am, Mombasa, Kenya
The Dream:

I'm flying somewhere. The plane has some problems, but I wasn't scared. We come in to land but touch down briefly and take off again. The sign says we'll be landing in 342 minutes. Everyone groans. Changes to 40 minutes. Then 6 minutes.

As we approach again, I overhear the flight attendant ask if we'd lose power again. Sure enough, the power goes off as we hit the landing tunnel. The cockpit disengages, the main body lands fine. I'm immediately in Rik's car on my way into town (though we're actually on the Parkway going the other way past downtown Pittsburgh). We see the cockpit fly past, flip over and crash just ahead of us.

I should call my parents and sister to tell them I'm safely off the plane. Mom first, turns out she and Snu are at dad's office. I tell them to wait there and head to the office. Dad, the only one there, is on the phone, helping arrange a job for me. He asks if I'd be willing to teach temporarily, I tell him I'll try out anything as long as its temporary.

While he's on the phone I wander over to Lewis Taffer's office down the hall, maybe to ask him about a possible job? While waiting outside, 'cause he's in a meeting, I glance out and seek Kristie R smoking on the porch roof. She's wearing gray cords and a burgundy turtleneck, which seem very dowdy.

The door opens, a guy comes out of LT's office. Turns out, the meeting was about a crossword newsletter and competition for July. Lew points out (I hear--I only see the anonymous guy) that the guy should remember to include that there were three perfect scores on puzzle A3, including two from the people that tied for 1st, and a perfect A2 from the 2nd place guy, in the last competition.

I wake up.

Some notes: The last time I actually saw (or had any direct communication with) Lew Taffer, a high school(?) friend of my dad's, was maybe in 1991 when I was in NJ for my cousin's wedding. The office was dad's, though the suite it was in and the smoking area on the roof weren't his. I met Kristie one day last week, and I never saw her smoke and she seemed fairly stylish.


23 May 2007, 3:15 am, Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania
The Dream:

I need to run home from work 'cause I forgot something. The home: 505 S. Linden, but it's mine. I drive past Sarah and Dave on my way and wonder if they'll ever stop by to see the house. When I get out of the car in the driveway, they're standing there, having passed while walking their dog, who doesn't seem to be around.

I explain that I'd love to show them the house at some point, but I only had a minute and had to rush back to work. Russ walks by. We all talk for a minute. I say I gotta go, but if they wanted to help run my errand they could at least sneak a peek inside: turns out, a bed and mattress for Snu had been delivered and needed to be carried inside. Don grabs the bed, Sarah the mattress, I go to unlock the door, Russ follows along.

Turns out, the front door is unlocked. Sarah looks around, sits at the piano, and comments that the house is in a style called "standard" rather than the "pre-modern" or whatever that I thought I had. I usher them out, but it seems like someone left the radio on in the kitchen. I go in, and the back door is standing wide open. The radio on the wall is BLARING a Monday Night Football game. There's a lot of crowd noise and Al Michaels is giving Dan Marino's stats from the game

I start to leave with Sarah and Dave. Russ seems to have wandered off upstairs, but I'm just gonna leave him wander as I need to get back to work.

I wake up. And as I'm waking up, I think that if George is looking for projects to work on around my actual house to work off some more rent, and if Bridget and TY think that it's a good idea, if he hasn't put in glass block to replace the basement window at the foot of the stairs, when he does that he can also use glass block or something like it to replace the doggie door in the wall of the kitchen.

Some notes: I actually lived in that house, which is in Pittsburgh, from when I was 10 'til I left for college; my parents moved out about 10 years ago. The radio on the wall in the kitchen is the only detail that's different than it actually was. Sarah and Dave are friends from college--in the dream they lived a couple of doors down in the house where I babysat once or twice. They actually do live around the corner from where my parents do now, and I spent some time with them in Sydney in February. Russ is a friend of mine in Minneapolis, a former (and future?) teammate. He doesn't know Sarah or Dave. Snu is my sister. Dan Marino is from Pittsburgh but I don't think we've ever met. He quarterbacked the Miami Dolphins from 1983 'til 1999 and appeared in glove commercials. George and Bridget are living in my house while I'm gone, and TY's helping them decorate it and hopefully avoiding paint fumes.

My other thought as I woke up was that this dream seemed much more innocuous than the first one and that I hope that doesn't lead Susie to give me a much less informative meaning for that one.

Snu, go to town!
sg

The one where I was with Dorothy

Wait Dorothy was in Kansas, not Kenya. Sorry, I was in Kenya, in the Rift Valley.

I left Nairobi and headed west to Nakuru. On the bus, it was 80's Saturday on Classic 105! Jungle Boy (Baltimora), Like a Prayer (Ciccone), Abracadabra (Miller), Together Forever (Astley). But then we left town and they switched to REALLY LOUD NEWS. Spent the night in Nakuru in a suite on the roof of the Mt Sinai Hotel, across the street from a "Subway" restaurant. Note that Dar Es Salaam has actual Subway franchises--can't wait to try the pressed beef sub!

In the morning I got a ride out to the Menegai Crater. It's...a crater. I took some matatus up to Lake Bogoria. I wanted to camp at the Fig Tree Camp. From the map in the guidebook it looked like it'd be about 6 miles. But it's not, and since I didn't think I'd be able to walk the 18 miles to the campsite in the 3 hours left until sundown I wound up heading to the campground at the hot springs. About 8 miles in, past flamingos and ostriches and a coupla zebras and hydraxes and antelopes.

I stayed just one night. My tent pole broke, and I went to borrow some tape from the other people at the campsite--Barbara (Swiss) and Karsten (German) and their dog Mali (Malian) had what looked like a very well stocked van. They volunteered to drive me out. And since they'd take me all the way to my next destination, saving me a 8 mile walk and three different matatu rides, for each of which I might have had to wait some hours, I accepted.

The next night was at the Flamingo Camp at Lake Elmenteita. There was no one else at the Flamingo Camp at Lake Elmenteita. And not many flamingos. But it is beautiful, and the lake was totally reminiscent of the lakes in New Zealand famed for the mountain reflections.

Turns out, the millions of flamingos are now at Lake Nakuru. But that's in a national park that you can't go into without transportation, so it would have been _really_ expensive to rent a taxi for a day and pay the park fees and such to see them. But at several viewpoints from the road back from the crater and in Nakuru town you can see the pink shores.

Next stop was Fisherman's Camp on Lake Naivasha. Which I visited to go to Hell's Gate National Park, just across the way. I decided not to camp in the park--I figured at night, when the nocturnal animals were active, I'd be huddled in my tent rather than wandering in the dark looking for lions and leopards. I rented a bike and headed off to the park.

Which was really neat. As I entered, some of the park rangers were burning trash, right next to the sign indicating the current fire danger level: EXTREME. There isn't a huge density of animals, but the ones I did see I saw with literally no one else around. No guide, no other park visitors, just me and the mostly antelopes and zebras (and two giraffes, but at a distance). And the animals are used to humans, and there was no engine noise to scare them off. At one point I looked up and there were zebras maybe 25 yards away that I hadn't noticed until then.

The other park attraction is the gorge. The ranger tries to get you to pay $15 so a guide can take you in--"otherwise you can easily get lost." Which is kinda like getting lost in a tunnel, and not the confusing Boston kind of tunnel. You're going in, or coming out, but you're just following the river in one of the directions. As I was eating lunch a Canadian woman walked up, and we decided to walk in together. One of the Maasai guides followed, and we agreed to have him show us the way in return for a tip, but certainly not $15.

We took the 2 hour walk, which took about 30 minutes, ending up at the path to take back to the ranger station and our bikes. We gave the guide a coupla bucks each and decided to continue on to the hot springs, another coupla hours. We went not quite all the way to the hot springs before we came to a section that would have been hard to get through without getting quite wet. And we'd each seen enough hot springs to not need to see these, so we headed back. Biked back out to the road (5 miles to the park entrance, 2 to the main road), I went left, she went right, I headed the 3 more miles back to the camp.

The next day, Thursday, I headed back to Nairobi.

Friday I got a new tent--the pole had broken all the way, it couldn't be fixed until Monday, and I paid about $40 for a much better one than the one I'd had. It'd been used, but pretty lightly. It's much bigger (I think it'll sleep 4) but only weighs a bit more. Gave my old tent to the guard at the campsite in Nairobi, along with explanations about how to get it fixed, which hopefully he can do and then sell it to someone. Or use it, but I'm betting on the former.

Saturday headed to Mombasa, to see somewhere else and break up the bus trip a bit. Mombasa, on the Kenyan coast, is really hot. And a bit disturbing--it's the first place I went where the street beggars are really in-your-face, and I felt a little unsafe for the first time this trip. I stayed a day and then headed down to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

Where I've been for a day and a half. It's supposed to be safer than Nairobi, but still feels more like Mombasa. And, unlike Kenya (and certainly unlike Uganda), most people do _not_ speak English. Finally! Of course, I don't speak muck Kiswahili... In any case, I'm off to catch a ferry to Zanzibar, the Spice Island!

Ta,
sg

The one where Nairobi's nice this time of year

Which is a good thing, as I've been here for a couple of days longer than I'd planned.

I hung out with some Canadians for a bit, spent a day waiting around to meet a friend of a friend who came six hours late and left after 20 minutes, and spent more days than you'd think it would take trying to change my flight.

Now, I've finally changed my flight--I'll head to Greece on July 2, and probably get home in the first week of August--and will leave town this afternoon, heading off to Nakuru. Either today or tomorrow, depending on timing, I'll head out to Lake B?--I forget its name, but its hopefully got millions of flamingos.

For the next week or so I'll be around the B? Lakes, Nakuru, Naivasha and Hell's Gate National Park in the Rift Valley. I'm especially looking forward to Hell's Gate, where you can rent a bike and pedal (or walk) freely through the park--hopefully, the cheetahs and lions and leopards and such are used to such things... Then, back through Nairobi on my way to Dar Es Salaam and Zanzibar!

Flickr (the host of my photos) reports that you can now view slideshows with titles. Haven't tried it, but it might now be easier to view my pictures (and know what you're seeing) of Nairobi. Which include shots from Nairobi and the running, screaming mob I ran into just after arriving, Nairobi National Park, and of me with Laura (including a hopefully not too explicit photo of our first kiss!). And my photos from Sipi Falls in eastern Uganda are up as well.

And a generic note--Flickr shows photos in the reverse of the order in which they were loaded. So it's kind of a pain to make things coherent for you as I need to load them one-by-one in reverse order so you can see them properly, but it also means that you can always just go to my photo link and easily see my most recent pictures if you've been hankering for some Joy when I'm not obliging.)

ta,
sg

The one where I went east

I went to Sipi Falls in eastern Uganda. It is pretty, but probably isn't worth the trip unless you're in the area anyway.

Which lots of people have reason to be as the falls are right outside Mt Elgon National Park, Mt Elgon being one of the highest mountains in Africa. And, like Kilimanjaro, it can be climbed in a coupla days without any specialized skills or equipment.

I was in the area because I was gonna pass close by on my way to Kenya.

Now I'm in Kenya.

I've started my eastern swing. For the next, I dunno, six to eight weeks I'll be in Kenya (Rift Valley, Kakamega Forest, maybe Masai Mara and a treat for Kristina), Tanzania (Zanzibar/Dar, Kilimanjaro, Karatu/Ngorogoro, Serengeti and Mwanza) and Rwanda (Kigali and maybe a park).

The trip here:
I caught a bus to Nairobi. Which means I'll have to backtrack west quite a bit, but there were no better transportation options. The bus left Mbale, Uganda at around 5:30pm. At about 7:30 we got to the border. We pull up to Ugandan customs. I follow everyone out of the bus and into the office, fill out a form, wait in line, and officially leave Uganda. I went outside and there was no one on the bus (and bicyclists were fighting for my attention) so I figured we were supposed to walk over to Kenya. I did.

Passed a gate with soldiers on each side wearing different uniforms. I guess the border. Crossed a bridge. Walked past a building with what looked like lots of closed offices that should be full of customs agents. Then through a gate.

Wait a minute...I'm in Kenya. Where's the bus? I went back.

I said to the guard at the gate "Do I need to show my passport anywhere?"

"Welcome to Kenya. Jambo!"

I turned to his friend. "Jambo!," said the friend.

Went over to a small building nearby. A guy in a suit said "Jambo!". "Sijambo," says I, "where do I go?"

Apparently, it's around back, behind the original dark building. There are no lights, no signs. He sent someone to show me the way, and we walked through two unlit corridors to get to passport control.

I waited in line, and the bus came by. Good, at least I'm on the right track. My turn at the window. "Hello, I need a visa to enter Kenya."

Man flips through passport. "You do not have a visa." He flips through again. And again. "I need a visa." "You don't have a visa." "I know. I need one."

Finally, he asks me for $50, which is a good sign again because I know that's what it should cost. He takes my money, slides it into a drawer, stamps a page in my passport with like eight different stamps, and writes in yet more details. He proudly shows me the results, turns it several different ways and asks for my opinion. I take back my passport and turn around...to see the bus leave.

I follow it down the road, it stops a bit later, and when I get on my stuff is even there--I'm on the right bus! That's another good sign.

Twenty minutes later, we get stopped at a checkpoint. We all get off, with all of our stuff, and line up by gender. They search lots of bags. When it's my turn I give him my passport, which he doesn't even open. I'm thinking it's gonna take forever to go through my pack as everything inside is also inside a translucent pack liner in case it gets wet. But he asks me what's inside and cuts me off when I say "a sleeping bag, some clothes, some...". I get back on the bus.

At about 1:30am, I think slightly before Nukuru, this happens:



I was awake, trying to shut the window and stop the draft. I'd just put my book away (The Mill on the Floss) and was thinking about going back to sleep. A pretty big bang, but it was obvious pretty quickly that I was fine. Not even sure that the seat belt, which, Mom, I was wearing, stopped me. It probably did, but I know most weren't wearing them and I think no one got hurt.
We climbed out of the only slightly collapsed driver's side and got on other buses as they came past. I got into Nairobi at about 6:30am, by which time it was light, so thanks to the crash I didn't need to wander the streets of "Nairobbery" in the dark with no Kenyan money.

I hung out at the bus station until the currency exchange opened, got a bit of money and took a MUCH needed shower, and headed off for breakfast.

Now, I'm off to Nairobi National Park.

ta,
sg