Recently in travel Category

I just don't wanna.

When I'm lyin' in my bed at night
I don't wanna grow up
Nothin' ever seems to turn out right
I don't wanna grow up
How do you move in a world of fog
That's always changing things
Makes me wish that I could be a dog
When I see the price that you pay
I don't wanna grow up
I don't ever wanna be that way
I don't wanna grow up

When I see the 5 o'clock news
I don't wanna grow up
Comb their hair and shine their shoes
I don't wanna grow up
Stay around in my old hometown
I don't wanna put no money down
I don't wanna get me a big old loan
Work them fingers to the bone
I don't wanna float a broom
Fall in and get married then boom
How the hell did I get here so soon
I don't wanna grow up

Having had the honor to witness the Great Migration up close and personal this summer in the Masai Mara, I found this bit on MSNBC rather sad:

Wildebeests' migration in danger

This reminds me, though, that I never finished posting my travelogue so I will try to find the time to do that in the next week or so. I mean, no trip to Africa is complete without haggling with vendors over souvenir prices, so I'll see if I can scrawl out an anecdote or two.

Sorry about the lack of postings on the rest of the Africa trip. Affairs of state must take precedence over, uh, affairs of state.

We went to Disney's Animal Kingdom a couple of years ago, and it was funny how many things in the Mara triggered Disney flashbacks. The moused ones definitely did their research. The same open vehicles over bumpy roads, with a radio chattering Swahili as the constant soundtrack. Sketchy stream crossings. The same basic mix of animals, only obviously Africa has like a ginormous number of them.

What you don't get to see at Disney, though, is real un-censored nature in all of its ugly glory. Because Animal Kingdom is a family ride, and family-hour viewing does not allow for either the sight or the smell of disemboweled zebras:

or falling-off-the-bone wildebeast:

although I bet if you put that in a stock pot with some water, mirepoix, and a little red wine you could make a bitchin' stock for your next gumbo.

You also don't really get threatened by the animals. Lions in Orlando do not get annoyed at the little blonde boy sticking his head out the window and they don't make threatening sounds at him enough that the driver hits the gas in a hurry and tells the boy "please, inside, very dangerous!" And even if they did, it would not be while fifteen other lions who had just had their hunt interrupted circled around behind you.

And you most certainly do not get to see lions fucking in Florida. We got to watch these two behind the boy going at it:

and since that is all the sex ed the boy is going to get, he's going to go through life thinking that you're supposed to do it fifty times a day and it only takes about ten seconds each time. Seriously, look it up.

(Like an idiot, I hit the wrong button on the video camera so my lion gonzo porn never actually got rendered in video. Sorry Ashley.)

And lest you think lion love is all fun and games, we found this poor girl about a kilometer up the hill from the lovebirds:

Our guide's theory is that she lost a fight over the male, and the winner of the fight was the one having fun with him downhill from here. Apparently finding a male with mad skillz is as hard there as it is here.

That's your basic guide to lions. Eat, sleep, fuck, sleep some more, and walk around looking cool.

More Africa posts as time permits.

We spent three days on a game drive in the Masai Mara. I don't think I'll ever be able to visit a zoo again without it seeming sad and kind of ridiculous.

The Mara is a large Kenyan game preserve near the Tanzanian border, in the land of the Masaai people. This time of year is the peak of the Great Migration, the migration of 1.6 million wildebeasts and zebras and gazelles, north from the Serengeti in search of food. We saw lots of wildebeasts.

Lots and lots of wildebeasts.

Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of zebras, gazelles, and wildebeasts.

To get to the Mara from Nairobi, you can either make an exhausting six hour drive over shitty roads, or you can take a nice comfortable 45 minute flight in a bush plane to Keekorok Airport. Or rather airstrip. OK, really, it's a dirt road with two shacks where they have to chase away the wildebeasts when a flight approaches, but planes land there so it's an airport, OK? It has a main terminal:

and even a duty-free shop:

Our driver and game guide was David, who was to become our best friend over the next three days. He would carry our bags, take us to our accommodations, take us out looking for animals, arrange picnic lunches, and eventually see us safely back to the airport. Unless we got eaten.

The "camp" we stayed at was rather on the posh side. I have sleep apnea and so I need electricity when I sleep, and once you've found a place with electricity in the "tents", you find that they also have hot and cold running water and flush toilets. In the tents. This was a tent in the "Weasley's tent" sense:

It was easy to forget that you weren't in a tropical resort town, until you thought about leaving the camp and were warned that if you left the camp on foot without a guide, you would likely get eaten by something.

Details on our game drives in the next few posts.

We visited the US Embassy. Sadly, it was too hot to wear my Defend New Orleans shirt, but I got a scowl out of the Marine guard just on general principles. Marines don't like me. I have no idea why.

I'd show you pictures of the embassy because it's a fascinating place, but one of the first things they do there is confiscate any cameras, cell phones, or electronics of any kind. Security is obviously strict since al Qaeda bombed the old embassy back in 1998, killing 12 Americans and over 200 Kenyans. The new embassy facility was completed a few years ago, and unlike the old embassy which was in the city centre on a public street with no setbacks, this one is in the suburbs and far from the public road, and you have to pass through two layers of outdoor security before you can even get near the embassy buildings proper.

According to my brother-in-law, the ambassador at the old embassy had pleaded for years for a new facility, since al Qaeda's presence in Kenya was known and it was impossible to secure the old building from attacks in the city centre. The warnings were laughed off by officials in the Clinton administration. The bombings ended up being somewhat of a career-damper for the ambassador, since the worst thing that can happen to a person working in the federal government is for her to be publicly proven right while her superiors are proven wrong.

Best thing about the embassy: all the Diet Mountain Dew you can drink. Try and find that at the Kenya mall.

The national beer is Tusker. I haven't tried it, but I got a shirt anyway because it looks cool. They have a popular ginger beer here called Stoney. Good stuff. I drink lots, when I'm not drinking Fanta.

Our first night, we went to a touristy meat orgy place similar to a Brazilian churrascaria, but featuring exotic kinds of meat such as boar, camel, crocodile, and ostrich.

The fried crocodile tasted like frog, much more gamey and chickeny than the alligator I've had at home. The camel was tough and unappetizing. Boar tasted like pork (go figure). Ostrich I've had before; it's yummy and juicy. My brother-in-law says that you used to be able to get more game animals like antelope but it's illegal now to reduce poaching.

Outside of that one night, true Kenyan food has been rare. We live in an area that is thick with foreign nationals and so the food around here caters to them. We even had sushi one night. I am told that Kenyan food is nothing to write home about; if you want to go on a foodie trip to Africa, you're better off going to West Africa, and in fact we had West African food one night which was amazing.

The local mall has a great food court. Thai, Chinese, Greek, Persian, Japanese, a German bierstube, a local Starbucks clone calle Dorman's which does espresso drinks and "boozy coffee" drinks if you want something with more kick. They also have a grill where you can get, among other things, an ostrich philly cheese steak.

Everywhere we go is high security. Every restaurant and every mall has gates with guards. When you drive in the guard gives you a little chip, and when you drive out you surrender the chip; this proves that you arrived with a car and so are allowed to leave with a car. While waiting on our driver one day, I idly took a picture of the mall security gate, and discovered the hard way that taking pictures of any security facility is illegal. They didn't take my camera or make me delete the picture though, just delivered a polite warning, so here it is...contraband photo:

The mall clientele are an international mix. Kenyan middle class, a handful of Americans, Euros, and Japanese, and many stylish Arabs and Indians. The teenage mall rats are mostly Indian kids and Kenyan kids, wearing a mix of European and American fashion.

The ghetto booty, I have discovered, is African in origin. Just saying. And tattoos are extremely rare here, enough so that I draw stares. Kenyans who have approached me about my tattoos are apparently completely unfamiliar with them; they want to touch them, they want to know if it will ever wash off, they (naturally) want to know if it hurts.

The part of Nairobi where we're staying, in the Thigiri area, is populated by many ex-pats and embassy staff. It's stunningly beautiful.

It's also hell on my white settler guilt.

We live in a beautiful house in a gated compound, with full-time security guards. We have a cook/housekeeper named Mary, a driver/groundskeeper named Adams, and other staff coming and going. All the properties on this side of Nairobi are gated and have security. Security companies are huge employers of native Kenyans. We only have a simple seven foot stone wall, though; some of the neighbors have razor wire or electric fences. The security is not borne of needless paranoia; crime here is bad, but in the past it has been horrific. This house had two armed home invasions in the early 90's, so even inside there are iron gates that can close one section of the house off from another.

I hate having a domestic staff. At any time of the day I can have food prepared for me by Mary, if I just ask, which means I fix myself cereal and PB&J a lot because I just cannot get past the idea that I am imposing.

We're able to drive ourselves to nearby destinations, but driving is a little intimidating because they drive on the left here, the roads are narrow, there are lots of pedestrians and bicycles, and you have to dodge all these aggressive matatus, which are little minibusses, kind of a cross between public transportation and a group taxi. Like jitneys, I guess. I haven't figured out exactly how they work yet.

The matatus are decorated with stickers and slogans expressing the personality of the driver, kind of like the Latino car clubs do back in Texas, but stranger. The motif is a mix of American hip-hop, reggae, African nationalism, and the odd born-again Christian. My favorite is the "Jesus Peace Biggie Smalls" dude:

The Kenyans also love their Fanta orange. It's more popular than Coke. I love the Fanta billboards, I've been taking pictures of them everywhere we go:

"Stay Bamboocha. Drink da Fanta".

"Stay Bamboocha" is now my favorite phrase. I have no idea what it means, but I say it all the time. And I drink lots of Fanta. Because I want to stay bamboocha.

Sorry if the last post alarmed anyone. We're just out of town for two weeks in a place with sketchy internet.

We're on a trip to Kenya to visit Gina's brother's family (he's a political officer in the US Embassy there). I figure it's worthy of at least a few blog posts, but I've only been able to write them here, not post them, because internet service in Kenya is hella slow and uploading pictures is pretty near impossible. So you're getting these all in a bunch at a later date after I've arrived home. Just like Tivo!

On the trip over, we had a long long layover at Heathrow, and the news there is all flood, all the time. Seems the UK has been experiencing flooding on a historic scale recently, and so the images on the news are all water rescue teams launching from the water's edge, people on cars needing rescue, and historic row houses under six feet of water. Remind you of anything? Wait, it gets better.

The government response to the flood has been inept, and preparations were apparently woefully inadequate. Critics are clamoring for investigation and reform. And new Labour Prime Minister Gordon "Brownie" Brown was quoted thusly:

The prime minister said the flooding had been "an emergency that no-one could have predicted".

"One of the issues that will arise is how co-ordinated the services are between the Highways Agency and the Environment Agency, in this particular instance, where people have been inconvenienced using transport, whether it's the roads or the railways," Mr Brown said.

Tory leader David Cameron said a hardship fund should be set up to help those without insurance who had lost possessions.

"Of course, people should have insurance, but many don't and may be left with nothing, and a hardship fund is one way of helping these people," Mr Cameron said.

The Liberal Democrats claimed the government's response had been slow and uncoordinated.

Environment spokesman Chris Huhne said: "We do not even know the areas at greatest risk, and responsibility is dangerously split between councils and water companies."

I wondered (not seriously) if I could leave the airport during the layover and help with cleanup, since I gots experience, or even a little light search and rescue, since I gots light training, but I didn't have anything dry to change into. Still, it would beat spending thirteen hours sitting around Heathrow.

Anyway, they're stupid for living there.

Thirteen hours at Heathrow is something invented by Dante. We had originally thought about taking the Tube into central London and roaming about for a while, but the Tube system was a commuter nightmare due to so many stops being flooded, so instead we used some of the money we'd saved by choosing such a shitty itinerary and spent it on a room at the Heathrow Hilton. Check-in 9am UTC, check out 4pm. Beats sitting around the terminal all jet-lagged.

The last leg of the trip was a 9 hour flight to Nairobi, then an hour getting bags and figuring out what day it was and where we were going, then an hour-long car ride through rush hour traffic. 2.3 million people in a city with no freeways can make a lot of traffic, even if the vast majority of them walk to work.

We left our house in New Orleans at 8:30 Saturday morning. Arrived at the bro-in-law's house 8:30 Monday morning. Fortunately he lives in white settler splendor.

More Nairobi next post.

My life is like this right now.

Work. School. Kids. Housing. Moving. Staying.

By the end of May there will likely be clarity, but right now there is nothing but fog and nothing I can do but wait for it to dissipate. And I can't blog about any of it until it is decided because there are personal and business risks involved with doing so.

I. Fucking. Hate. This.

In March of 1990, I went to work in Germany for a few weeks, and after work was done, Gina flew over and we travelled for a couple of weeks. And the first place on my list of must-see cities was Berlin. It had been only a few months since the Wall had fallen, the previous November. The Wall was still there, East and West Germany still weren't unified (and the terms and conditions and even the wisdom of reunification were being debated in the news constantly), but you could now travel freely out of Eastern Europe for the first time in decades. It was too exciting to miss.

I was digging through our big crate of photos looking for good stuff to try out on our new scanner, and this was one of the first envelopes I found. It's not all of the photos from the trip, but it's got most of our Wall photos in it.

I put some of the most interesting ones in a flickr set here.

Personally I think this one where Ray takes on the totalitarian state armed with nothing but a hammer and chisel is just badass as hell: