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I think I've done it

2010-10-03T00:32:00.000-07:00

Well folks, after 9 months, 22,000+ miles, and 18 countries, I'm writing this post from Cape Town, South Africa. I think I've actually made it.

There were a lot of great things and a lot of difficult things about the trip. Probably the hardest was dragging mom back from the pub at 2 a.m. each night, but that's just what a good son has to do. (She's surprisingly strong after a few whiskeys.)

Seriously, this isn't a long, philosophical wrap up post. The trip has been too big, too intense, and too diverse for me to even begin trying to make sense of it. Rather, this is just a simple "I'm relaxing in Cape Town, and my mom made it safely to the airport" post. I also loaded my Land Cruiser into a shipping container today, so it will soon be on its way back to England. (It was actually quite a feat to load the Cruiser, as I had to take everything off the roof rack except the tent, and even then I had to deflate the tires to less than half their normal pressure to fit the thing inside a container.)

It's been a long road, so I'm going to head out to the little seaside town of Hermanus for a bit of quiet time with the whales.

My best to everyone back home.

From Zambia

2010-09-05T00:30:00.000-07:00

I’ve done a bit of time travel since my last post. Specifically, I went all the way back to the 1980’s… to a time before the internet! With the exception of Nairobi, internet has been non-existent or dial up from Ethiopia south, until now. But now I’m in Lusaka, Zambia, and from here south it shouldn’t be difficult to get online. (I’ve taken advantage of the internet to post many more photos in addition to this blog post.)

As the old Johnny Cash song says, since my last post “I’ve been everywhere, man.” Well, not really everywhere, but I’ve been through Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and most of Zambia. I’m not exactly sure how many miles I’ve covered since Nairobi, but it’s somewhere around five or six thousand. (So far I’ve logged about 19,000 miles on the trip.) And many of them have been hard miles on really rough roads. Sometimes “drivable trails” might come closer to the mark. (Or maybe even “semi-drivable trails.”)

I’ve seen a lot in these last two months. My favorite place was the Serengeti ecosystem in Tanzania and Kenya. (The park is Serengeti in Tanzania and Masai Mara in Kenya, but it’s really the same place, just separated by an invisible border.) It’s a beautiful place of dry forests, hippo and croc filled rivers, and especially, of endless golden grassland. And in terms of animal watching, it lives up to its billing as one of the premier wildlife destinations in the world. There are so many herbivores and birds that it seems almost artificial (though of course it’s not, it’s just prolific). And it’s also a huge place; crossing from the west gate of Serengeti to the east gate of (adjacent) Ngorongoro is something like the distance from Visalia to L.A. or the bay area. Only instead of orange groves, Ford trucks, and farmers, you’ve got acacia forests, elephants, and Masai herders. Plus wildebeest by the millions, gazelle, impala, zebra, giraffe, hippos, crocodiles, lions, cheetahs, etc., etc. Anyway, it’s a pretty special place.

Kenya’s other parks were also pretty amazing. Amboseli features huge herds of elephants under the massive Kilimanjaro; Lake Nakuru has rhinos and more flamingoes that you can imagine; and lovely Kakamega forest is a tiny bit of equatorial rainforest full of birds, monkeys, and all sorts of interesting tiny critters.

By the way, if you’ve never seen Weebl’s-Stuff’s Kenya video, do check it out. It’s fantastic:

http://www.weebls-stuff.com/songs/kenya/

But back to blogging. Uganda definitely lived up to its reputation as “the Pearl of Africa.” It’s a beautiful country that sits right at the junction of east and west Africa, with features of both. You can see savannah animals in some parks, then drive for a few hours and hike in Congolese rainforest or spend some time in the forest with any number of our primate cousins (including gorillas, chimps, and many species of monkey). Uganda also has very friendly people and (one of my favorite surprises) great Indian food! If you haven’t tried Indian food, go out tonight and get yourself some garlic naan and a plate of chicken tikka masala, a dish that makes a great intro to the cuisine.

Anyway, I managed to drive, hike, and eat my way through Uganda for two and a half or three weeks before turning south. From Fort Portal in western Uganda to Lusaka, Zambia is something like 1,500 miles, which is a long way on African roads. Along the way I spent a day and a half in Kigali, Rwanda, which is a surprisingly organized and developed place. And while I was there, I visited the genocide museum, which was just gutwrenching and powerful. There’s not much reason to visit Rwanda (it’s a small country with fewer attractions than its neighbors), but if you are ever there, the museum is a must-see.

After Rwanda, I drove something like 600 miles through Western Tanzania across terrible roads, and through some very isolated places. It was tough stretch, through fortunately I came through it with only one flat tire and a now pathological aversion to dirt roads.

Needless to say, I was pretty relieved when I finally made it to Zambia, as the road from the Tanzania border all the way to Lusaka is paved. Granted, it has some potholes the size of lunar craters, but most of it is fine and very welcome after the “roads” of Western Tanzania.

In Zambia I visited a former colonial estate (Shiwa Ng’andu), which was quite a lovely place, as well as some wetlands (which didn’t turn out to be such a great experience). I then drove the last few hundred miles to Lusaka, which is where I’m posting from today.

So I’m definitely not doing justice to the places I’ve visited and the things I’ve seen, but that will have to do for now.

The next portion of my trip will be very different. For one thing, Southern Africa is a very different place than East Africa – environmentally, culturally, and economically. But the bigger thing is that my mom will be arriving in a little over 36 hours to join me on safari. I’m glad I’ll finally have someone else to do the driving…

My First Birthday in Africa

2010-06-21T07:24:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone,

I’m writing from beautiful Nairobi, Kenya. And it really is beautiful… at least where I’m sitting right now. I’m splurging on a nice hotel (the Fairview – thankfully no connection to my elementary school of the same name) to celebrate my birthday and reward myself for making it this far. So right now I’m sitting in the leafy courtyard of this historic old hotel, enjoying a Guinness in the late afternoon light, and finally catching up on my blog.

I haven’t been able to post anything for quite a while, as Ethiopia’s internet was either unavailable or too slow to access my blog. So I’ll try to cover the events of the past month or so in this post.

Sudan

(Quickly excerpted from an earlier entry I was never able to post.)

Sudan was a strange, difficult experience, but not for the reasons you’d think.

It wasn’t difficult because of banditry, crazed militias, or anything of the sort. There was never any danger, and in fact, the people in Sudan were among the friendliest I’ve ever encountered. Everyone was polite, hundreds of people waved to me and yelled greetings as I drove by, and as far as hospitality goes, let’s just say they’re tough to beat (more on that later in this post). The people really were the best part of the country.

So how does one reconcile that with the Sudan of Darfur, the long civil war, etc.? Frankly, that’s too big a subject for a little blog like this. Perhaps for now I’ll just say that it would be a mistake to equate a people with the actions of their government, perhaps doubly so in Africa, and I’ll leave it at that.

As for the strange and difficult part, you can basically divide my trip across Sudan into three stages. The first was the ferry across Lake Nasser, from Aswan to Wadi Halfa. The short version of the ferry experience went something like this. On the first day, I arrived at the ferry port at 9am, and it took all day to complete the emigration procedures for Egypt, load the Land Cruiser to a separate barge, and board. It also took this long to load the other passengers, but more so, the incredible quantity and diversity of stuff they were bringing with them. I think this is the only way to get from Egypt to Sudan (if you’re not flying), so people brought as much stuff as could physically be stuffed onto the ship, everything from full size refrigerators to mountains of personal effects. And since everything was transported and loaded by hand, with no plan other than “get it on the ship,” it was a long, messy business.

Which is not to say that it was completely unpleasant. I’m finding that if I just go with the flow of whatever country I’m in, things get done in the local way, in their own good time.

Loading the Land Cruiser to the barge was an experience, though. A potentially dangerous one (but one that fortunately turned out fine). To get onto the barge, you had to navigate a path through the stuff waiting to be loaded to the ship, make a sharp turn, then immediately drive up two rickety ramps that were barely attached to anything. And you had to get up those ramps quickly enough that they didn’t shift, collapse, etc., but not so quickly that you shot off the other side of the barge, which was just barely wider than the Land Cruiser was long. It was a slightly harrowing experience, but everything turned out okay. It also helped that I met a nice Belgian couple also driving across Africa, so I had some company and folks to share the difficulty with.

Once on board, I was very thankful I had sprung for a first class cabin. You can dismiss any thoughts you have of tuxedoed staff, caviar, art deco staircases, etc. The ferry was ancient, the room and bedding dirty, and my roommate was an old Sudanese fellow who stuffed the cabin with his things. But compared to second and third class, it was paradise. Second class meant that you had no cabin, and you slept on the lower deck in a great mass of sweaty humanity. And third class meant you slept on the top deck wherever you could find space. So I was grateful for air-conditioning and a bed.

The trip across Lake Nasser was pretty uneventful. In addition to the Belgian couple (Bjorn and Nele), I met a German journalist travelling overland to the World Cup, and a funny Irish fellow who made a habit of wearing football jerseys (which actually did seem a lot cooler than my t-shirt). And as for the safety of the ship, one of the crew told me not to worry – if the ship sank, there are no sharks, only small crocodiles!

The ferry arrived the next day in Wadi Halfa, which looks like the Sudanese version of a small Old West town – most of the roads are dirt, and the town is only a few buildings wide on either side of the main street. So after arriving, I spent the next two days waiting, for the truck (the separate barge was delayed by a massive sandstorm that blotted out the stars at night) and for Sudanese bureaucracy to run its course. And while I was waiting, I stayed in possibly the worst hotel on the planet. The room (which I shared with the German and Irish fellows the first night) was basically a concrete box, with the tiniest of windows above the metal door, and the smell of pit toilets periodically wafting into the room. Oh, and it was really, really hot. I could go on, but you get the idea.

So between the ferry and the waiting, it was four days from the time I arrived at the ferry port in Aswan to the time I was free to leave Wadi Halfa.

Now to stage two of Sudan, which was all about covering a lot of ground very quickly. Like 1,000 miles in a touch over 48 hours quickly. I saw a lot of really hot desert (the temperature maxed out at around 120), all during the day (since it’s not safe to drive at night). I drank so much water I started to think I was just breathing it like a fish. Along the way I saw a few interesting things: the pleasant Nile village of Dongola (where I had a great conversation with a university English lit professor), the royal tombs at Meroe (Sudan’s answer to Egypt’s pyramids), and spent one short night in Khartoum (where I had some delicious lamb ribs). And did I mention I did a lot of driving?

The German journalist (Simon) joined me for the last part of the drive, from Khartoum to the Sudan / Ethiopia border. Which brings me to stage three: more waiting. We made great time to the border, saw some prettier countryside (as the Sahara finally made way to the Sahel region), and chatted the hours away. But when we got to the border, we got some bad news: Ethiopia was having an election the next day, and they had closed the border. (I’m still not sure what the connection is between the two.) To make matters worse, the border town really was a just a shanty town, and all the buildings except the government buildings were just random bits of sticks, corrugated metal, and odd fabrics. (And to make matters worse for Simon, he had a flight to catch in Ethiopia, and it wasn’t looking good for him making it.)

Here’s where the Sudanese hospitality really showed itself. The border guards and immigration officials, who are generally not the most polite and compassionate class of people in any country, took Simon and I in and helped us make the best of things. They bought us dinner the first night, brought many rounds of tea, and generally made sure we were as comfortable as the circumstances would allow. They were a really good group of guys, and they helped turn a potentially miserable situation into just a boring one.

After about 36 hours of waiting (and one false alarm where Sudan let us go, but Ethiopia wouldn’t let us enter), we finally made it into Ethiopia. And with that border crossing, I left the Islamic world and entered Sub-Saharan Africa.

Ethiopia

Ethiopia is a place unlike any other. Sometimes it’s gorgeous. Sometimes fascinating. Sometimes frustrating. But it’s never like any other place in the world.

For starters, if you don’t know much about the country (as I didn’t before I arrived), it’s not a desert, it’s not perpetually famine stricken, and it’s not like any other country in Africa (except Eritrea, but I won’t go into that here). Most of the population lives on a very high, mostly mountainous plateau. It’s a green and sunny place (the weather is gorgeous, actually), and even with Ethiopia’s low level of agricultural technology, it produces a lot of food (in most years), enough to support the second largest population in Africa.

It’s also a country that has a much richer history than most people realize. In Roman times, the Axumite kingdom of northern Ethiopia was the trade link between the Mediterranean Roman Empire and both sub-Saharan African and the Indian subcontinent. In the Dark Ages, Ethiopia became a Christian kingdom, and the highlands have remained so ever since (though the country is also home to many Muslims and traditional African religions). And in Medieval times, it was home to several kingdoms. And all of these different time periods have left ruins, paintings, books, etc. throughout the country.

It’s also one of the world’s poorest and least developed countries. The GDP per capita (basically the amount the average person makes in a year) is $700. Something like 80%+ of the population are farmers that live a subsistence existence.

For me, all of this meant that Ethiopia was alternately fascinating and frustrating. It’s a country of really interesting historical treasures, some really beautiful natural places, and extraordinarily diverse cultures. But it’s also a very insular and undeveloped place. Distances are very long, many of the roads are quite bad (bumpy, rutted gravel / rock / dirt), and all of the roads are congested with people, donkeys, carts, rocks, you name it. And while most of the people are kind, there are also many who try to take advantage of you, and in such a poor country it is inevitable that many people ask you for money. Oh, and you can almost literally count the seconds before someone (usually children) shouts at you, “you, you, you, you, you!!!!” The writer of my guidebook calls it “faranji (foreigner) fever.” It sounds sort of funny, but it gets a little tiring after a while. And in the fact that there are relatively few amenities outside of the capital, and it’s not the easiest place to travel.

But while Ethiopia was sometimes difficult, it was also really rewarding. Whether your cup of tea is history, nature, or culture, Ethiopia has you well covered. I started out by seeing the historical sites in the north, including Gondar (the site of several castles), Axum (the site of the ancient Axumite Empire), and Lalibela (home of ancient churches hewn from the rock, sort of the Ethiopian version of Petra). The historical sites were impressive, and the long hours of driving in between them were kept interesting by the constantly changing landscapes and the occasional fantastic bird that would fly by the car. (Really, the birds of Ethiopia are so colorful, so beautiful, that they have no business existing in the real world.)

I also broke up the historical circuit by spending a few days hiking in the Simien Mountains, which look something like a very green version of the Grand Canyon if you were to raise the rim another mile or so. The air was thin, but the vistas were sublime in the old 18^th / 19^th century use of that word – beautiful, terrifying, and humbling. And as if the scenery weren’t good enough, there were also plenty of animals to see, from the Ethiopian wolf to klipspringers to my favorite of all, the gelada (which looks like a baboon but technically isn’t). The geladas look pretty imposing (especially when you see their huge incisors), but they’re completely mellow and harmless. It was great to share the mountain with them for a time.

After the northern loop, I spent a couple of days in the capital, Addis Ababa. It’s not exactly a grand city, but the weather is perfect, the food is really good (and diverse – I went to a German style beer garden, for example), and it’s a fairly relaxed place for a big city. And being in a real city for the first time in a few thousand miles also gave me the chance to give the Land Cruiser a little TLC (just maintenance, but definitely needed before the epic drive south).

From Addis I headed south toward Kenya. But before I got there, I stopped in the beautiful city of Awassa, which sits beside a picture perfect lake in Africa’s Rift Valley. It was gorgeous, positively overflowing with spectacular birds, and had the friendliest locals in all of Ethiopia. I would have loved to have stayed longer.

After Awassa it was time for some high adventure. I drove to the far southwest of Ethiopia, to the Lower Omo Valley and the legendary Lake Turkana. It doesn’t really get any wilder than this, at least not on my trip. Sometimes it felt like a sort of land that time forgot: people in the area still dress in their traditional tribal styles, cattle are the most valuable currency, huts are made of mud or wood (or sometimes cardboard and U.S. Aid food bags), etc. Oh, and many of the men still carried spears, though these have now often been replaced by AK-47’s, which were about as common as smart phones back home. It was really wild country, at once exhausting and rewarding. Unfortunately, I don’t have time right now to fully detail my adventures, but do have a look at the “Omo” pictures to get a sense of what it was like.

From Omo, I headed south to Moyale, the town that straddles the Ethiopian / Kenyan border. On the way I picked up two guys who were heading to Nairobi and agreed to share the cost of gas, and I also had my first mechanical problem of the trip. Dust got into the space between the battery post and clamp and caused a short, which melted about half of the battery post away. But it was nothing Moyale’s mechanics couldn’t handle: they rebuilt the post with solder, attached a new clamp, and the Land Cruiser was as good as new.

Kenya

Travelling to Kenya has been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember. Before I knew better, Kenya was Africa, and even now it holds a special place in my imagination. So I was really on the morning I (along with my two travel companions) crossed the border entered that fabled country.

The first thing I was struck by on entering Kenya was that everything worked. This might not sound important, but after the continual harassment of Egypt, the extremely difficult bureaucracy of Sudan, and the general chaos of Ethiopia, it was quite a relief to be greeted by polite, competent professionals at the border. So from the beginning, Kenya felt right. I was going to like this place.

Well, I was going to like it once I had travelled a few hundred miles south. For about the first 300 miles, the road from the border has a reputation as being one of the worst in Africa, and it lived up to its reputation. (It used to also be one of the most dangerous in Africa, but now that the Somalis are robbing ships instead of cars, that’s no longer the case.) But it was bad. Really bad. How bad? It destroyed two of my tires in the first 150 miles. It rattled pieces off the car of a British couple I met. The washboarding was so bad that I sometimes had trouble keeping the car straight at 20 mph. It rattled me and my passengers to pieces for two straight days, and for good measure, it coated us with dust. It’s one of those crucibles you have to pass if you’re going to make it across Africa.

It was really, really rough, but it wasn’t all bad. The landscapes were as open and wild as any I’ve ever seen, and the hardship of the road was occasionally relieved by the sight of colorfully dressed tribesmen or majestic animals (several species of antelope, baboon, ostrich). I’d never want to drive that road again, but at the same time, the memories of it will stay with me forever.

And once we finally reached paved road, Kenya began to live up to its billing. The landscapes are beautiful, the people are really wonderful, and I have a feeling I’m going to like it very much here.

Somewhat surprisingly, that even goes for Nairobi, which I’ve really enjoyed so far. Statistically, Nairobi (or “Nairobbery,” as it’s sometimes called) is the most dangerous city in Africa, so I was a bit nervous about coming here. But with a few simple precautions, it’s a really wonderful place. It’s a real city, and it’s really African, and the mix of the two is just great. I haven’t felt the least bit worried even once while I’ve been here, but I have met dozens of really nice people.

So this has been something of a haphazard and rambling post, and I haven’t covered half of what I should have, but time is limited, so it will have to do. Tomorrow I drive to the famed Masai Mara National Park, one of the great nature parks in the world, and I have a few preparations to make before then.

Oh, and this old man also has to do a tiny bit of birthday celebrating. So before I leave Nairobi, I’m going to enjoy a nice dinner, a little French wine, and some cake at this beautiful old hotel. I feel like a very lucky man right now.

Quick Update

2010-05-21T21:53:00.000-07:00

Hello Semicolon readers,

This is going to be a very quick post. I'm in Khartoum right now, and just wanted to let you all know that everything is fine. Sudan has been incredibly hot (111 in the city, probably much higher in the desert), and the weather forecast was "widespread dust," but the people have been extremely friendly and kind. I know some of you were worried about me traveling through Sudan, but except for the heat, it really has been pleasant.

I'm leaving Khartoum this morning for the Ethiopian border, and I'll post again once I'm in the (blessedly cool) highlands of Ethiopia.

Exodus

2010-05-15T05:38:00.000-07:00

And afterward Moses and Aaron went in, and told Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness. Exodus 5:1.

So it was with my Hebrew tocayo, and so it is with me. I may not have the gravity of Charlton Heston (or the N.R.A. membership, which I may yet regret), and the toadish Sudanese bureaucrat in Cairo was certainly no Yul Brynner, but nonetheless I have been freed from Egypt at last!

Altogether, it took almost six weeks just to get the permission for my Sudan VISA from Khartoum, plus all manner of additional time to fix all the problems my extended stay in Egypt caused. And just how long did I have to stay in Egypt, you might be wondering? Long enough that I had to become a temporary resident, according to the government! That’s right, I’m officially an Egyptian! (But thankfully a temporary one.)

A lot of time has passed since my last post, but not much happened for most of that time. But once I secured my entry into Sudan, I did drive the length of the Nile to Egypt’s southernmost town (Aswan, from which I’m writing this post). Along the way I saw some of Egypt’s most famous monuments at Luxor and Edfu, and because I drove, I also saw a lot of desert and a fair stretch of the Nile. So here are a few random thoughts about the things that I’ve seen.

First, the desert. I’ve watched quite a few nature documentaries about the Sahara (and other deserts), and the general theme of them is usually something like “in spite of the harsh conditions, life thrives even in the desert.” But I have news for you, gentle readers: that’s a big lie. It is true that there is life in places in the Sahara, but what makes it extraordinary isn’t the life, but the lifelessness. I’ve seen something like 1,300 miles of it now, and outside of the Nile and the odd Oasis, I could probably count the number of trees I’ve seen on one hand. If that. There’s just nothing but rock and sand and sun covering an area the size of the continental U.S.A. And anyone or anything that wanders out into it without the right resources (natural or manmade) will be dead in fairly short order. At least for me, it was quite an amazing and scary moment when I realized that such a huge part of the globe is almost totally inimical to life.

In the midst of this vast wasteland runs the tiny ribbon of the Nile. It’s the world’s longest river, but it’s not especially wide (given its length, that is). It’s like a slender little lifeline slipping through the desert, and all of Egypt depends on it. In fact, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Egypt is the Nile River Valley. It’s rather amazing to emerge from the desert and see the Nile River valley, as long as one can see, but only a few miles wide (at most) for much of its length. And those are very green miles, completely filled with agricultural fields, palm trees, and (in the south) lots of birds. (I’ve seen some gorgeous kingfishers, but I’m afraid there are no photos yet.)

Driving down the Nile, it’s not difficult to see why the world’s first truly great civilization emerged here. (Sorry Sumerians and Babylonians, but you built your pyramids out of dirt.) There’s so little available land that agriculture and social organization are necessities, and the environment must have forced development must faster than in places with abundant land and resources.

And there’s no doubt that ancient Egypt was a great civilization. There’s not much evidence of it in the north (around Cairo), but southern Egypt is full of magnificent temples and tombs, most of which have been well preserved by the dry climate. I’ve added photos from the Luxor area as well as from Edfu, which is a smaller (but still impressive) temple complex south of Luxor.

Those of you who have been in contact with me know that I’m not the biggest fan of modern Egypt, as the hassle factor is off the charts. (I suspect it’s better if you travel as part of a tour group, but it’s still there.) But whereas I’m not sure Cairo is worth the hassle, southern Egypt definitely is. It still wouldn’t be the first destination I’d recommend (in fact, it’s still toward the bottom of the list), but the monuments are pretty amazing.

So now I’m in Aswan, and I’ll be boarding a ferry for Sudan Monday morning. It’s a sad testament to Egyptian and Sudanese politics that in the largest desert on earth, the only way to get from one country to the other is on an artificial lake, but so it is. On Tuesday I’ll arrive in Wadi Halfa, do the obligatory paperwork (border crossing is a joy), and then spend my first night in a town called Wawa. I love Sudanese town names already.

And for those of you who are worried about me travelling through Sudan, don’t be. Africa is an absolutely massive place – for context, my drive from Cairo to Aswan (which will look quite small if you look at it on a map) is almost the same distance as the drive from San Diego to the Oregon border. And Egypt is small compared to Sudan, which is the 10^th largest country on earth. My point is that Sudan is massive, and I’ll be far, far away from the trouble spots. (Hundreds and hundreds of miles away. They lead long distance bicycle tours through the areas I’ll be driving through.) By and large I’ll be travelling through barren desert and small villages, the inhabitants of which have a reputation for being some of the friendliest people on earth. And for what it’s worth, every Sudanese person I’ve met outside the consulate in Cairo has been extraordinarily kind and polite. So I can’t believe I’m writing this, but I can’t wait to get to the Sudan!

Well, except for the heat. It’s really hot there. But I’ve been trying to acclimate in southern Egypt (where the high is 108 today, and will be 116 on Monday). The sun is so intense that you can feel it radiating right through your clothing like some sort of giant microwave. But it’s not bad in the shade (or in the car), and as with all things in life, you get used to it and plan around it.

I think that’s enough for now. I’ll post again once I get to Ethiopia, which should be next weekend. In the meantime, I’ve added new photos to my Cairo set on Flikr, and I’ve also posted my Luxor and Edfu photos. I’ll post my Aswan photos from Sudan or Ethiopia.

It’s good to be on the move again. Until next time…

Toto, I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

2010-04-05T11:04:00.000-07:00

Cairo is a mad city, a rogue’s gallery of characters, a chaos that is only limited by its own grinding inefficiency. So the biggest trouble in writing my first “Toto, I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore” post was just picking from the many possibilities. So I bring you this anecdote from dinner tonight; let me know if you enjoy it.

I had dinner this evening at a cheap local pizza place in the heart of the city, about a block from Cairo’s version of Times Square. It’s a small place with five tables and a staff of two or three, and they serve very thin crust pizza for between $3 and $5. (You can also get these really yummy Egyptian pickled vegetables for around 20 cents.) I had just started to enjoy my pie when a huge tarantula ran across the floor from the kitchen into the small dining area. I happened to be wearing thick hiking shoes, so I just put my feet up on another chair and kept eating.

The server (who was wearing sandals) didn’t quite know what to do. At first he tried to ignore the (now hiding) spider, but he was too nervous to stand bare-toed a couple of yards from a lurking tarantula. So next he tried to nonchalantly amble outside for a little break, but he couldn’t keep that up for long. Fortunately, the spider broke the tension by crawling back out into the open, at which point the server and cashier sprang into action. Well, sort of.

The server tried to crush the spider with a broom, but the handle was very short (only about a foot long), and he was too frightened to get close enough to do the job. Meanwhile, the cashier arrived with a can of RAID and began emptying it on the spider. I now know that it takes a lot of RAID to kill a tarantula.

Maybe more than a can worth, because the chase went on for quite some time. The spider did its best to escape the cloud of poisonous fumes by scurrying around chair legs and under tables, and when it inevitably got cornered, it would turn, raise its front legs in attack posture, and cause the broom-wielding server to recoil in fright. And then it would flee again, still enveloped in RAID.

Sadly, the drama did eventually come to an end. The server gathered his nerve for long enough to momentarily stun the spider, at which point he was able to safely deliver the coup de grace. And with that, the restaurant was safe again.

Between the Sudan VISA situation, a rather trying time out in the Sahara, and the general difficulty of Cairo, I haven’t really laughed much recently. But I couldn’t contain myself tonight, and I was cracking up during the climactic showdown.

Thanks for the entertainment, little tarantula, and R.I.P.

Groundhog's Day

2010-03-27T08:59:00.001-07:00

Today is Groundhog’s Day in Egypt. Not in the sense of the actual holiday – I don’t think there’s enough greenery within a couple hundred miles to keep ol’ Punxsutawney Phil from withering away – but in the sense of the old Bill Murray film. It has been 19 days since my last post, and I’m in Dahab. And I’m waiting for my Sudan VISA. Still.

Not that I haven’t done anything in between. I did a little diving in the Red Sea, was harassed to the breaking point by both people and traffic in Cairo, saw some pyramids, and got my first taste of Sudanese bureaucracy. But almost three weeks later, I’m still waiting (hoping) for that elusive VISA so I’ll be able to continue south. So I’m mostly posting to announce that I’m still alive and well.

So if you know anyone in Khartoum, give them a call and tell them I’m an okay guy, and that I won’t cause any problems if they let me drive through their country. And if you’re religious, please pray to your god / patron saint / the spirit of Richard Petty / Ra / the 1972 Miami Dolphins / NASA / Justin Timberlake / whoever is sacred to you / to move the heart of the Grinchy official in central Sudan who even now is probably burying my application underneath a stack of paperwork from the late 1990’s.

Meanwhile, I’ll just be hiding out in my hotel room, growing my beard, and working on my manifesto. Hope you’re enjoying my photos.

Egypt at Last

2010-03-08T11:51:00.000-08:00

It has been an eventful two weeks. I’m now in Egypt (in Dahab, on the Sinai Peninsula), having traveled through southeastern Turkey, Syria, and Jordan since my last update.

In Turkey, I spent my second full day in Cappadocia visiting two of the region’s underground cities. And they really are cities, or towns at the very least. The cave systems are extensive and contain everything from living quarters to churches, storerooms to stables. The caves were originally built as a refuge in times of trouble, since Cappadocia sits at the crossroads of many historical empires, and has therefore been invaded many times. But the caves are still used today, and almost every house has an underground connection to an underground city. Pretty crazy stuff.

I left Cappadocia after a couple of days and drove across Turkey’s southern mountains to the city of Antakya, the biblical Antioch. There I learned the virtue of patience, as I had to spend an extra day waiting for my carnet de passage (my car’s passport, which was being sent from Canada) so that I could cross into Syria. It seems the hotel made a mistake and turned the delivery person away on the first day, which was the reason for the delay. But in an interesting vignette of 21st century travel, I was able to straighten things out by bringing my laptop downstairs and communicating with the staff via an internet translation program.

From Antakya, I crossed the border into Syria. The border was a bad Arab stereotype – pushy loud men, bureaucratic officials in 1950’s military uniforms, lazy ceiling fans, posters illustrating the Pan-Arab world – but after the border (which was a bit of an ordeal), things got better. The first thing you should know is that Syria was never scary. The people are extraordinarily friendly and kind (I was invited into people’s houses, given free tea, etc., and people were generally very kind to me), and even though it sometimes feels a little like Orwell’s 1984 with all of the posters of Big Brother everywhere, it’s a perfectly safe and fairly easy place to travel. Except for the traffic in the ancient cities, but that’s my fault for driving a giant Land Cruiser.

That said, it was hard to get really excited about Syria. There was a sort of unspoken desperation among the people, a sense that there lives ought to be better than they were. It’s a poor country that feels a little like rural Mexico – friendly people living in rather poor conditions.

There were some neat things to see, however. In Aleppo, Syria’s second city, I went to the world’s biggest and oldest Arab bazaar. It was crazy, overwhelming, and fun, and it was everything you would imagine such a bazaar to be, plus something things you’d never expect. In the space of a few hours, I saw shops selling everything from beautiful wedding fabrics to bulk spices, was invited into a home for tea, was invited to watch the prayer inside a mosque, and among other things, was hit on by a young gay Syrian. You never know what to expect when you travel…

Outside of Aleppo, I visited a crusader castle (the Crac de Chevaliers), a ruined Roman city in the desert (Palmyra), and the ancient city of Damascus. I also got within 100 miles or so of the Iraqi border (but don’t worry mom, it was in the middle of the desert and I just kept moving!).

Speaking of that famed Syrian hospitality, a good illustration would be my first hour in Damascus. I entered the city of 4 million with only a map of the historic center, so finding a hotel was a little tricky. So I followed the signs to the city center, then stopped and asked for directions. And not only did a young man offer to help out, he actually jumped in the car with me, led me to a parking spot, then made it his personal mission to find a hotel for me. And when that was over, he gave me his cell number in case I had any problems while I was in Damascus. Syria’s government really is Orwellian, but the people are fabulous.

Oh, and did I mention that diesel was only $2 a gallon in Syria? Hallelujah!

After a few days in Syria, I crossed the border into Jordan, which has to be the most pleasant country in the Arab world. The border guards joked with me and told me how much easier I was to work with than the locals. My mandatory insurance was sold to me by a polite man in a sweater vest. The entire border crossing took about 20 minutes, which is amazing considering everything involved in bringing a vehicle into the country.

Amman was equally easy – kind locals gave me easy directions, parking wasn’t a problem, and it felt totally safe to walk around at night. There’s not much to see in Amman, but it is a very pleasant, and rather westernized place. The highlight of the city for me was definitely this small shop that sold vintage cameras. They were so cool, and I almost bought an antique large format Mamiya. I also met a nice couple, David (from Italy) and Aeylem (from Sweden) who joined me for the drive south to Petra.

Sadly, while Jordan is a really safe and pleasant country, the first big incident of my trip happened on the drive to Petra. After an afternoon stop to take a dip in the Dead Sea, I was cruising along with my two passengers when we witnessed a horrible, surreal accident. An SUV flew past me and two other cars, then lost control when it tried to pull back into our lane. It skidded, then hit the guard rail and severed a huge section of it in a fireball of sparks, then began toppling end over end. It was such a surreal scene that I wasn’t sure that what I had seen was real.

I stopped the car, very nervous but stay calm and remember the first response training I took last autumn. (The other two cars didn’t stop, so me and my passengers were the only ones on scene.) And when I walked back to where the truck should be, it was nowhere to be seen. Then I realized the awful truth – it was in the bottom of a ravine that led into the sea, and it had landed on its roof.
I clambered down into the ravine and that the driver was still in the car and semi-conscious. He was covered in blood, but considering what had happened, he seemed to be in decent shape. I tried to get him to stay put, then climbed back up the ravine to wave down a passing car.

It wasn’t long before the passing car brought back a small army of soldiers, police, and medical personnel. They had to use the “jaws of life” to extract the driver, and then we had to make a sort of human chain to pull him up the steep side of the ravine. But the good news was that it looked like he was going to make it.
Sadly, the passenger, whose side of the car was so damaged I hadn’t seen him when I was in the ravine, may or may not have survived. He was pulled from the car and ambulanced away, and I don’t know whether he made it or not. But the worst thing was when the driver managed to mumble, “we are three, not two.” There had been a third person in the car. The police thanked me, but then asked me and the crowd of people who had gathered to leave, and as I left they were shining flashlights under the truck and out into the sea in an attempt to find the third person. It was pretty bad stuff and really shook me up.

The accident scene also delayed me so long that when the clouds descended later that night, I had no choice but to stop in the middle of nowhere. But the three of us were taken in by a kindly chicken farmer who gave us all he had – hot tea, sugar cookies, and a place to stay for the night.

Things began to return to normal the next day. After the drive to Petra, I spent the next day and a half touring Petra, which came with a lot of expectations since it was named one of the “New Seven Wonders of the World” in an internet poll from a few years ago. But it didn’t disappoint, well, at least not for two hours. For the last hour of the first day and the first hour or so of the second, I had Petra mostly to myself (myself and the Bedouin, that is). I had to get to the site at 6:30am, but my reward was a beautiful experience as the morning light and the desert sandstone worked magic together. At the beginning and end of the day, Petra is magic.

Unfortunately, during the middle of the day it’s unbelievably crowded, at least on the main thoroughfare. It’s still gorgeous, but if you ever make it to Petra, do make sure to spend some time there at the beginning or end of the day.

After Petra, my passengers and I (for we had become friends by this point) continued together to one more stop, the desert preserve of Wadi Rum. Wadi Rum is a sand desert interspersed by spectacular rocky plateaus and monuments. It’s the place where Lawrence of Arabia once hid out, and it’s part of the great desert of the Arabian Peninsula. There are no roads, and you need a 4x4 to explore it. That said, this is Jordan, so if you get stuck the preserve gives you a phone number you can call, and they’ll come pull you out!

It’s a severe place, but a beautiful place. The three of us spent the night in the desert under a spectacular sky, then toured the preserve on the next day. As the day went on, I became more and more accustomed to offroad driving, and in addition to being a beautiful place, it also turned out to be a great training ground for me. And it was an absolute blast!

At the end of the day I left David and Aeylem in the desert where they would spend the night before returning to civilization the next day.

For my part, I drove to Aqaba, Jordan’s resort city on the Red Sea, where I caught a ferry the next day to Egypt. Egyptian bureaucracy lived up to its reputation, and getting out of the port was a three or four hour adventure, but in the end I got through the administrative labyrinth and drove down the Sinai Peninsula to the resort town of Dahab, famous for hippies and great diving. And that’s where I am now, though I spent the day doing exciting things like changing my fuel filter and greasing my u-joints. I’ll be trying the ocean tomorrow.

I’ll be writing next time from somewhere in the Nile Valley, where my most daunting challenge will be trying to get that elusive Sudan VISA. Wish me luck!

Turkish Delight

2010-02-23T13:44:00.001-08:00

Hello gentle readers,

I’m blogging today from Goreme, which is a lovely small town in the Cappadocia region near the center of Turkey. But before I write about my progress about Turkey, I wanted to point out that I’ve added a new feature to my blog. You can now view photos from my trip by clicking on the text on the right side of the page. Hope you enjoy the photos, which will certainly tell you more about my trip than I can in my blog.

I’ve spent the past week in Turkey, which is a wonderful country that I knew almost nothing about before I arrived. But here are a few quick things that I’ve learned:

· Turkey has a prehistory that extends back to the stone chopper days, and a recorded history that extends way back. (I forget the exact date, but the Hittites had writing, and their civilization got started around 1,300 B.C.) Some of history’s great civilizations have settled in Turkey too: the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, Alexander the Great’s Macedonians, the Romans, the Arabic Ottoman Empire, etc.

· The Turkish people are almost universally warm and friendly, and hospitality really means something here (as it did in Greece). I’ve been really well taken care of. And that fact that the country is almost entirely Muslim (and I’m an American) has meant nothing. Only one person has mentioned politics, and that was an old man in Ankara who was having a bit of fun with me.

· Turkish food is really delicious and diverse. My favorite dish so far was a tomato that had been stuffed with couscous, a bit of meat, and lots of Middle Eastern spices, then baked until it was nice and tender.

· It’s a pretty inexpensive country in general, although gasoline is ridiculous. Diesel is $8 a gallon, premium unleaded $10.

· Sadly, I’m afraid that much like Greenland, the country’s name is nothing but a big p.r. scheme with no truth behind it. I haven’t seen a single turkey here, nor is it on any restaurant menu or grocery store shelf. I wonder what else they’re hiding…

My time in Turkey started with my first real border crossing (since it was the first time I was travelling outside of the European Union), but fortunately it was a pretty easy affair. You can even get your VISA at the border. The funny thing that happened was that when the VISA bureaucrat asked for $15 Euro, I explained that I only had U.S. dollars and Turkish Lire (since I had already converted my Euros), so he just grabbed a $20 bill out of my open wallet and stamped my passport. Now that’s efficiency!

My GPS maps stopped working at the border, but fortunately between Garmin’s GPS capabilities and paper maps, navigating hasn’t been too much trouble. In fact, it’s been very easy outside of the big cities (where chaotic Turkish streets and my giant Land Cruiser make an interesting combination).

I started my trip with 72 hours in Istanbul. It’s a beautiful city with many things to see and do, and compared to the European cities, it’s very inexpensive. While I was there, here are a few of the things I saw and did:

· The Aya Sofia. A huge building built as a cathedral, then converted to a mosque, and finally secularized as a Turkish monument. It’s the grandest building in Turkey, with an impossibly huge central dome, mosaics from Byzantine times, and some Islamic elements as well. It’s the perfect touchstone for Turkey as the bridge between Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam. Oh, and my guilty pleasure was that I got to see Viking graffiti! It seems the Byzantine emperor had Viking bodyguards (because they’re grouchy and tough), and the Vikings used to get bored with all of that Byzantine ritual, so sometimes they’d just carve “Halvdan” or some such thing into the cathedral.

· The Blue Mosque. It’s one of the world’s most important mosques, and it’s beautiful inside. The men who painted the interior were obviously petrified of blank spaces, so every square foot of the interior is covered with Islamic patterns. Sad fact: The mosque is absolutely huge inside, but women are confined to an area about the size of a school classroom. Sorry, ladies!

· Topkapi Palace. This was once the residence of the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, and it’s got everything you need to bring your Arabian Nights dreams to life: marble everywhere, wooden cabinetry inlaid with mother of pearl, elaborately painted domed ceilings, a real harem, a corridor named the “Golden Passage” because the Sultan would sometimes drop gold as he walked down it just for kicks, the most precious bejeweled objects from the Ottoman Empire, etc., etc. Topkapi was also interesting for the people who visited it, especially the tourists from across the Arab world. And finally, Topkapi was bizarrely interesting for its collection of relics. Real relics. Like the mummified arm of the apostle Paul (mostly encased in a kind of golden armor), part of the beard of Mohammed, Noah’s rod, etc. I saw a woman breakdown in tears when she saw a cast of Mohammed’s footprint (and I tried very hard to keep all Bigfoot associations out of my head).

· Cagaloglu Hamami. This is a 300 year old Turkish bath, so old that there are tiny stalactites growing off the marble Corinthian columns in the steam room. It was a really interesting (by which I mean sweaty) experience. You start out in a “hot room” (which is so hot you need a pad to sit on the marble seats), then move to the main chamber where an attendant exfoliates you with a rough glove, and then you can just sort of lounge in the steam room to your heart’s content. Try Googling this place; they have a pretty neat website that lets you see what it looks like. Fun fact: I’m sure this is the only place in the world to have been visited by Ataturk (Turkey’s George Washington), Omar Sharif, and Steve Irwin (the Crocodile Hunter). Among others.

· I also took a cruise up the Bosporus, which is the narrow waterway that divides Istanbul in two (and also Europe from Asia). It’s an amazing natural feature, and the cruise (which is really just the public ferry, not a real cruise) lets you see a lot of Istanbul in a short amount of time. Oh, and it also lets you buy fried mussels on a stick for 67 cents a stick. Mmmm… mussels.

Those are pretty much the highlights of Istanbul. It was a great city, full of warm and friendly people, and the only downside were the very persistent carpet salesmen who hung around the main sights. When I started to get annoyed with them I thought, “who in their right mind would spend more than $1,000 dollars (in some cases, a lot more) on a carpet as an impulse buy?” And then I remembered my days as a Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman…

When my time in Istanbul was up, I drove the 250 or so miles to Ankara, Turkey’s capital. I went there to see the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. Several people told me it was great, and also that it was the only reason to visit Ankara. Both things turned out to be very true. If cosmopolitan Istanbul felt a little like the Arab version of San Francisco, Ankara felt a little like Mexico City. Actually, it felt like Tijuana, but I know there are nicer parts than the area around the museum. Still, the museum was great and totally justified the 16 hours I spent in Ankara (including sleeping time).

I do need to get one thing off my chest. Not only was Ankara ugly, chaotic, and a little scary at night, but the city fathers had also decided to ban YouTube. If you ask me, any city that doesn’t let you watch Top Gear clips in the privacy of your own hotel room is just not right. How can people pray for poor Hammond to make a full recovery if they don’t even know who he is?!

From Ankara I drove another few hours to Cappadocia, which is a region right in the middle of Turkey. I was blessed by some beautiful evening light on the drive, which made it a real pleasure. It’s not a bad thing being a man in a Land Cruiser, driving across Central Turkey in golden post-rain sunshine.

Cappadocia reminds me of Bryce Canyon, as you’ll see in the photos. The big difference is that people carved homes and churches out of the rock here, so it really is a fascinating landscape, a sort of poor man’s Petra. I spend my first day here touring the rock houses and churches, followed by a long hike through the canyons. Tomorrow I’ll tour some of the underground cities for which Cappadocia is famous, and the day after that I’ll drive to Antakya, which is the last big city in Turkey before the Syrian border.

Incidentally, the U.S. State Department just eliminated the travel warning for Syria, so my timing seems to be perfect. I’m sure I’ll be greeted with rose petals or some such thing.

I’ll blog next time from either Syria or Jordan. Until then, hope you enjoy the photos.

Mice and Men

2010-02-15T11:24:00.000-08:00

Hmmm… the old adage about the best laid plans of mice and men comes to mind.

Hello everyone. If there’s still an everyone following this blog, that is. Sorry it’s been so long since my last post. It turns out that travelling across a foreign continent (even the pretty hospitable continent of Europe) while at the same time trying to prepare for an expedition across Africa takes a lot of time! Who would have thought?!

Obviously my plans to update my blog once each week fell through. Part of the problem was that I’ve been really busy, but I also made the mistake of trying to be too ambitious when it comes to my postings and photos, and there just wasn’t time for it. And there probably won’t be, since things are only going to get more challenging from here on out. So I’ve got a new plan, and hopefully this one will work out a little better.

Basically my new plan is to relax and enjoy my trip of a lifetime, and not worry as much about the blog. By which I mean, I’m not going to try to reproduce National Geographic for you. Instead, I’m going to blog once or twice a week, and my posts will be mostly unedited impressions of my experiences. And… this next part is even harder for me… I’m going to post somewhat random and entirely unprocessed photos as well. I’d love to write great prose and post really great pictures for you all, but for better or for worse, my choices are between compromising on quality or not posting at all, so welcome to the new, leaner version of Semicolon.

This also means that I’m going to start with the present moment and blog from this point forward. I’ll try to post some pictures from Europe a little later, but for now I’m just going to concentrate on keeping you up to date on where I’m actually at. Besides, you didn’t really want to read about Europe anyway, right? You’re here for the red meat, for the tightrope walk with no safety net, for a five-wide-through-the-corner NASCAR thrill ride. You want tales of cow’s blood being drunk straight from the jugular vein, not sipping espresso in Italy (which is really good, by the way). So instead of trying to catch up on Europe, I’ll be starting with… Asia!

That’s right, Asia. My trip has taken an unexpected detour, and I’m now in the small Greek town of Alexandroupolis (named for Alexander the Great), preparing to enter Turkey, which is only about 30 miles away. Because a funny thing happened on the way to Egypt. After many months of assurances that I would be granted to access to Libya, my contact in Libya suddenly told me that I would absolutely not be allowed into the country. (Was it something I said?) So instead of crossing from Italy into Tunisia, then driving east across Libya to Egypt, I’ve had to divert my route through Greece, Turkey, Syria, and Jordan before finally entering Egypt. (This was no small change and is another reason I haven’t kept up on my blog.)

So tomorrow I’ll cross into Turkey, and then a couple of days later I’ll drive across the Bosporus into Asia. Or the Middle East, if you prefer. So stay tuned, and I’ll write about Istanbul and points beyond in my next post.

From the Land of Alexander the Great, and Great Philo Dough,

Aaron

Preparation for Africa

2010-01-05T13:52:00.000-08:00

Today I’ll be writing about what it was like to prepare for this trip, and about the many months of hard work that enabled me to be writing this blog at my breakfast table in Stratford-upon-Avon, readying myself for the long drive south.

The idea for this trip first occurred to me last spring, and I am almost embarrassed by how simplistic my thinking was. I had initially thought that preparing for a trans-Africa trip would be something like a larger scale version of my previous vacations, and that I would simply have to buy a car, throw my things into it, move out of my apartment, and off I would go. Actually, I never oversimplified things quite that much, but I really did think it would take less than a week to procure and outfit a vehicle, and buy all of the things needed for the trip. How wrong I was…

My first step in preparing for the trip was to consult good old reliable Lonely Planet, specifically Africa on a Shoestring. 1,000 or so pages later, I had begun to understand the diversity of the continent, as well as something of the scale of my project. But because Lonely Planet is not written for overland travelers, I still had a lot more research to do, and many surprises in front of me.

Next, I began to expand my research. I read Bradt’s Africa Overland and a bevy of small websites, many created by people who had successfully done their own independent trips across Africa. (It was quite surprising to learn that this trip is not at all unheard of in Europe, and in Britain there are several small businesses who are dedicated exclusively to preparing vehicles for trans-Africa trips.) In the midst of this process I stumbled upon the website africa-overland.net, which acts as a kind of nexus for other travelers sites. I took a chance and tried emailing the site for information, and a good fellow named Sam Watson responded and got me off on the right foot (although it was up to me to run the rest of the research marathon). He also recommended a mechanic named Matt Savage, who would figure prominently later in my preparations. (Incidentally, Sam is a member of the Royal Geographical Society, which is an incredible organization based in London.)

As an aside, doing research for a trip like this is not like planning a family trip to Orlando. There’s very little information out there, and when it is out there, it’s hard to find. And sometimes when you do find it, it turns out to be incorrect, or only partially true, or maybe it completely changes your understanding of something else you thought you were 100% sure about. So I won’t go into all of the research in this post, but suffice it to say that it’s exponentially more difficult than any research I have done before, for work, school, or my previous adventure trips. (For one thing, there’s no risk of breaking down in the middle of the Kalahari Desert if you misunderstand what a professor is trying to say about a novel’s hidden subtext.)

In the midst of all this research, I had a simple realization: this trip had the potential to require a lot of money. At first, I had naively assumed that one could buy a used vehicle, load it up with a little gear, and be on your way. And my early research had indicated that used vehicles weren’t that expensive, and of course I could resell it at the end of my trip. But then, over the course of weeks or months, the reality started to sink in. A used vehicle was relatively cheap, but one had to actually acquire one, which is no easy task when you’re not actually in the country you intend to buy the vehicle in. And once you do own a vehicle, you’ve only just begun. At a minimum, the vehicle needs to be inspected from bumper to bumper, any problems need to be fixed, and it is wise to address any potential problems as well. (There’s no “do over” button once you’re in Africa, all of the vehicles weak points need to be fixed in advance.) Next, you need to outfit the vehicle with gear, or “kit” as it is known in the UK. At a minimum, the vehicle’s suspension needs to be upgraded, but there are many other options that can be added to make life safer or more bearable as well. Moreover, this being the U.K., and “kit” being a very specialized area, all of the options are very expensive. (More on this later.) But the biggest surprise of all was the carnet de passage.

What is a carnet de passage, and why does it have such a funny name? I can’t answer the second question, but I can give the first a try. To understand the carnet, you first need to know just a little about import tariffs. Many countries charge an import duty on goods brought into the country. While this is usually a fairly small amount (or a small percentage, at least), countries seem particularly concerned about automobiles, and the import duties are often quite high. It is not at all uncommon for African countries to charge 50% or 100% of the value of a vehicle when it is imported. Now, imagine if one were to buy a relatively new SUV for say $20,000 (not a huge amount of money when one considers that a new Toyota Land Cruiser would cost over $80,000), and then travel through a dozen countries in Africa. The cost of the vehicle and import duties would easily top $150,000, and could exceed a quarter million dollars. Obviously, no normal mortal could afford this, so this is where the carnet comes in.

The carnet is basically a security which guarantees that if you do sell your vehicle in a country, the underwriting bank or agency will pay the import duties. With this assurance, countries can then allow you to temporarily import your vehicle without paying import duties. This is obviously a huge improvement over the $250,000 scenario from the previous paragraph, but it doesn’t remove the problem entirely, since the money for the guarantee has to come from somewhere, and of course that somewhere is me! I need to supply enough money to cover any potential import duties, and while I don’t lose this money (hooray for that!), that cash is tied up until the end of my trip. In my case, the highest import duties of the countries I am visiting are in Egypt, so I would need to supply funds equal to 180% of the value of the vehicle.

This small fact obviously has implications for the vehicle one selects. If I were to buy a $20,000 SUV and then add another $20,000 in “kit,” my now $40,000 vehicle would require another $72,000 for the carnet, for a total outlay of $112,000! (Note that most of this money is not lost, just tied up for the year.) Unfortunately, there is the small matter that I didn’t have $112,000 for a vehicle (or anything like that), so the implication was simple: I would have to buy old and cheap. I soon learned that this is the norm for trans-Africa trips, so I’d be proudly following in the footsteps of every Africa explorer before me.

There were other considerations when selecting a vehicle as well. Obviously, my life could potentially depend upon my vehicle (although smart choices greatly diminish the risk), so buying a 1980’s Chrysler K car was not an option. I needed a really reliable vehicle. Also, my vehicle would have to be a very capable four wheel drive machine, since more than 85% of the roads I’ll be travelling will be unpaved, and many could barely be considered roads at all. (“Trails” might be a better description.) And finally, the vehicle would have to be familiar to African mechanics so that knowledge and parts would be available if (when?) something on the vehicle breaks.

The last factor turns out to the most important. There are many fine 4x4’s in the world, but most of them are totally unknown in Africa. So with the Jeeps and Hummers of the world eliminated for this reason, and with most other SUV’s eliminated because they’ve evolved into little more than tall suburban grocery getters, there were actually only three choices: Land Rover (two vehicles), Toyota (two types of Land Cruiser), and the Nissan Patrol (a monster SUV not sold in the USA). It’s very hard not to go with Land Rover, as their trucks are almost synonymous with African exploration, and parts and knowledgeable mechanics are available everywhere. Unfortunately, Land Rovers routinely have the worst reliability scores of any vehicles in production, and since I’m not a mechanic, I decided that it made more sense to go with a more reliable Japanese vehicle.

In the end, I decided to go with the Land Cruiser (which in the U.K. is known as the “Land Cruiser Amazon” to differentiate it from the smaller “Land Cruiser Colorado” or “Prado,” a very capable 4x4 that is not sold in the U.S.). The key factors in my decision were reliability and resale value. It’s hard to top Toyota’s reliability, of course, and the “Amazon” from the 1990’s is still in high demand, so it would be easy for me to sell the vehicle at the end of my trip, which was an important consideration since the high cost of Britain means that I’ll want to spend as little time as possible selling my vehicle.

Unfortunately, I soon found out that there is a difference between deciding which vehicle I wanted and actually getting my hands on one. This might not have been the case with the “Colorado” or Patrol, but even an older “Amazon” is a highly prized vehicle. So for many weeks I called on classified ads only to have someone tell me some variation of, “Yes, it’s a great vehicle, but unfortunately I just sold it this morning. Sorry, mate. Cheers.” (The time difference, as well as me being on the other side of the world, were both big problems.) It was so difficult that I even turned to eBay, and three times participated in online auctions for vehicles I had never seen. I was ready to give up and go with one of the other options when a funny thing happened.

I was very interested in a 1997 Land Cruiser in very good condition for its age. It was on eBay, and I determined that at most I would pay a little over £6,000 for it. So I got up early one Saturday morning, and with about ten minutes left in the bid, the price had only risen to around £4,000. Then the price started to increase, gradually for about nine minutes, then in increments of several hundred pounds at a time. In the end, it went for almost £8,000, and I walked out of my bedroom depressed to get a cup of coffee.

When I returned to my computer, I compulsively checked eBay again, and to my surprise, another Land Cruiser had appeared. But much more surprising was the fact that it included a “buy it now” price, which meant that I could simply click a button and it would be mine, without the need to compete at auction. I hurriedly emailed the seller for a contact number, and a few minutes later I was talking with a woman in Worcester about the vehicle. She was on her mid-afternoon horse ride, and we concluded the deal then and there. I had my vehicle.

But I’m forgetting an important detail. Since I would not be preparing the vehicle myself, I had to find someone I could hire to do the job for me. There are several companies in the U.K. that do this, and while I was searching for them, I came across the website of an American couple who had worked with a gentleman named Matt Savage (the same fellow that Sam Watson had mentioned at the start of my research). So I talked to Matt, and he seemed like a good guy, the work on his website looked good, and his former customers had nothing but good things to say about him. So Matt was definitely in the running.

It wasn’t long until I was down to just two candidates, Matt and a U.K. company called Footloose 4x4’s run by a fellow named Paul Marsh who is something of a demigod amongst overlanders. He has literally driven his Land Rover around the world, and he has led expeditions with dozens of vehicles. Paul was also a really nice guy, professional, and obviously very knowledgeable. Unfortunately, all of that knowledge and experience doesn’t come cheap, and when Paul told me that it would cost me around $40,000 for a prepared vehicle, I had my man… Matt! (To be fair, all I was really learning is that Matt and Paul have very different market niches. Paul’s clientele is quite affluent, whereas Matt tends to work with poorer stiffs like me.)

If you’re interested, you can check out Matt’s website at www.mattsavage.com.

With my vehicle and mechanic in hand, I now had the somewhat arduous task of deciding how to outfit the vehicle. This would seem like a simple thing, but overland equipment is very expensive, and it also increases the vehicle’s value for purposes of that damn carnet, making is doubly pricey (or more accurately, 180% more pricey). It also proved difficult because this is my first (and probably only) overland trip through Africa, so I don’t really know what the chances are of colliding with a cape buffalo (for which you’d want to install bull bars on the front of the vehicle) or having to cross a four foot deep river (for which you would want a snorkel). So in the end, I made the best decisions I could, and I ended up with the following “kit”:

• Old Man Emu shocks and springs. These are an Australian product favored by overlanders. You simply have to improve your suspension to traverse Africa’s “roads,” so this one was easy.

• A snorkel for crossing deep water.

• A roof tent for sleeping, and for keeping me above the African food chain.

• A roof rack, to hold the tent and other gear.

• A couple of lockable storage boxes to keep my money and valuables safe. One is a rather large metal drawer that Matt installed in the back of the Land Cruiser, while the other replaces the central cubby between driver and passenger.

• A refrigerator. It uses a special type of motor so that it draws very little battery current.

• A water storage tank which contains an electric pump so I can also use it as a shower.

• A cargo barrier, which is sort of like one of those grates that keeps your dog from jumping out of the back of your Volvo station wagon and onto the twins, but is much heavier duty and is bolted to the vehicle. It’s basically there to stop my stuff from crushing me in the event of an accident. I like not being crushed.

• A hidden fuel cut off switch so that the vehicle can’t run when I don’t want it to. Very sneaksome.

• Six additional electrical sockets to power my stuff. (Matt, if you’re reading, I love these things! I can power my GPS, iPod, refrigerator, plasma screen, DVD player, surround sound system, and disco ball all at the same time! It’s like I never left America!)

This isn’t a complete list of all my kit, but I won’t bore you with the rest. In any case, Matt did a fine job of outfitting the Land Cruiser, and you can see how the work progressed (including the finished product) at the following address (which you can just copy and paste into your browser):

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/mattsavage4x4/AaronSLandcruiser#

Of course, I needed a lot more gear that wasn’t directly related to the vehicle as well. From clothing to camera gear, and from camp supplies to medicine and first aid, everything had to be painstakingly researched and considered. In the end, my pack list consisted of almost 250 items, so this was a pretty monumental undertaking. (Okay, I have to confess that about 20% of that was camera gear, but it’s still a lot of stuff.)

Also, even though I already owned some of the 250 items, I still had to purchase a lot of them. And since I needed to save money wherever possible, this meant that I had to look for sales, online discounters, but especially at eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon. At one point I was watching, bidding on, and buying so many things from so many different sources that I had to create an excel spreadsheet to keep track of it all. But in the end it was worth it, as I saved a lot of money with this approach.

My strategy for acquiring things for the trip also had one funny and totally unexpected consequence. About a month before I left for London, I received an email from eBay informing me that they wanted to send a team of people to my apartment to watch how I do eBay! I must have had so much activity that they figured I was worth watching! (I suppose it helps when you buy a Land Cruiser.) So they really did send a team of three people to watch me bid on a Swiss army knife and listen to all of my crazy eBay tricks. And then they paid me for my time. I think it was Goethe who said something about choices leading to outcomes that could not be foreseen when the choice was made…

All of this buying was not done without a detailed plan and budget for the trip, of course, and this was another huge undertaking. Quick, what’s the price of diesel fuel in Uganda? How much does it cost to get a VISA for the Sudan (and can one even get a Sudanese VISA)? And how much does car insurance cost? You get the idea; every line in the plan and budget represented ever more research, as I didn’t know the answer to any of these questions when I started. In fact, I didn’t even know what questions to ask. But in the end, I completed a comprehensive budget and trip plan, and so far, they’ve been fairly accurate. (I’m knocking on wood right now.)

There is a great deal more that went into the trip, but since this post is growing rather long, I’ll just cover a few of the bigger items with a few bullets:

• Putting your life on hold for an extended period of time takes a lot of planning.

• Figuring out how to stay healthy was another big thing to tackle. I had to research (and get) vaccinations, medicines, first aid training, etc.

• VISA’s. Most African countries require a VISA, but the specific requirements vary a lot. For most countries it’s quite straightforward, but for countries that don’t like America so much (i.e. Libya and Sudan), it’s anything but straightforward.

• Figuring out whether I should sell my car or store it, and then actually selling it.

• Moving out of my apartment and putting everything into storage.

• Wrapping up 14 years at MOL, dealing with my 401k, COBRA, etc.

• Putting together a money plan for the trip. Not a budget mind you, but a cash plan for a continent where every country has its own official currency, often an unofficial currency (usually dollars or Euros), spotty ATM availability, and often absurd surcharges for credit cards. This might not seem like a big thing until you realize how much cash Africa forces you to carry. (On the advice of my lawyers, I’ll decline to say just how much that is.)

• And finally, since I’ll probably only have one chance like this, it was important to try to dream as big as I could, and to try to make as many of those dreams happen as possible. So I spent a fair amount of time dreaming big, and we’ll see what comes of it. (Sadly, I only have a few days left in England and still haven’t heard from Iron Maiden, so I think that dream is not to be.)

There’s a ton more that won’t make it into this blog, but if you have made it this far, you deserve to be spared the rest. I trust this post gives some sense of how much goes into an overland expedition like this, and you can trust me not to drag my readers through this again! When next I post it will be describe the first week of my trip here in jolly old England.

Best wishes to you all,
Aaron

2010-01-04T14:48:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Semicolon.

My name is Aaron Groves, and in 2010 I am travelling from England to South Africa. With the exception of three short ferries (across the English Channel, between Southern Italy and Tunisia, and across Lake Nasser from Egypt to Sudan), I will drive the entire trip, traversing more than 15,000 miles of mostly unpaved roads across Earth’s second largest continent. Along the way I hope to experience Africa’s natural beauty, meet many of its peoples, and learn lessons both wonderful and difficult (about both the continent and myself). I also hope to share some of these experiences through words, pictures, and even the occasional video, and I hope you will follow along through this blog, Semicolon.

I am writing this first entry from my hotel room in Stratford-upon-Avon (and it is a frosty winter night here, so it is good to be inside), but before I begin blogging about my experiences on the trip, I think it might be appropriate to briefly address two questions that might enter your mind at some point while you are reading this blog.

First, why did I decide to drive across Africa? Or put another way, if I was having a midlife crisis, wouldn’t it be easier (and perhaps cheaper) to just buy a Corvette? It’s a big question with many answers, but I’ll briefly address the main reasons. For one thing, even though it’s the classic American sports car, can hang with vehicles costing twice as much, and looks better than ever (well, at least better than it has since the 1960’s), I just can’t get past the stigma of driving a Corvette. It’s a great car, but whenever I imagine actually buying one I just keep thinking of Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights and that’s as far as it goes. Because we know how that ended. (If you don’t, it’s definitely worth adding to your Netflix queue.) So if you think about it, it really is more sensible to drive across Africa. Live-fast-die-young porn stars never do that.

More seriously, there are a lot of reasons I decided to make this trip, but the biggest of them is that I dared to ask myself one really big question: If I could do anything in the world, what would it be? And as a supplement to that question: Could I actually pursue that dream? I thought about that question long and hard, and while there are so many things in this world that appeal to me, seeing Africa has long been a dream of mine. As a child, I reveled in the African exploits of Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and the Serengeti documentaries that aired on PBS transported me to a place beyond my simple home on the edge of Visalia to an almost prehistoric world of predator and prey, heartbreakingly beautiful landscapes, and beautiful and exotic tribes of Watusi, Pygmies, and Zulu. Much later, after I graduated college and got my first real job, I remember thinking that I finally had “Africa money” (which spoke as much to the dream as to my lack of financial wherewithal), and I used to spend my lunch hour reading travel books about the continent. Most recently, Africa has been an almost gravitational force, a kind of singularity which has inexorably pulled me closer and closer to its singular wildness by way of increasingly less civilized places: the Peruvian Amazon, Panama’s Darien Gap, the ancient rainforests of Borneo. It is as though my life, or at least one strand of my life, has been leading to this end and no other.

There were other things I considered, of course. I thought about taking time away from work to write fiction full time. I thought about crossing the Amazon in a canoe. And it almost doesn’t need to be said that I considered buying a ‘vette. But in the end, there was nothing that could even begin to challenge Africa for supremacy in my heart and imagination.

As for the related question (“could I actually pursue the dream?”), I am lucky that my financial stars have lined up in such a way that there are no material obstacles to pursuing my dream. I am really, really lucky, and I try to always stay conscious of that fact. (Actually, it is not true that there are no material obstacles, as driving across Africa will entail a lot of material sacrifices, many for financial reasons. But I am blessed to have the resources to do this trip with some careful planning, dutiful budgeting, and a few sacrifices, so I really am a lucky man.)

But there are plenty of obstacles that are not material, and I still had those to contend with. I have not made an easy peace with all of those obstacles – I still sometimes wonder whether I have made the right choice in undertaking this trip – but I have decided to press forward as bravely as I can nonetheless. As the old bluesman once said, we’re a short time alive and a long time dead, so I’ve decided to roll the dice on my dream of seeing Africa. And if I am to have any chance of understanding and appreciating the vastness, diversity, and complexity of that vast place, I must roll the dice a second time and travel overland.

The old bluesman’s aphorism brings me to the second question you might have when encountering this blog: Why is a trip across Africa called “Semicolon” anyway? One answer is that I’m a big literary dork, and literary dorks like to make references to writing even when it would be totally forced or inappropriate. But the answer I prefer has to do with what a semicolon does in a sentence, and how it relates to the way I see my trans-Africa trip.

In writing, a semicolon is sort of halfway between a comma (which is just a pause) and a period (which is a hard stop). You use it to join what would be two separate sentences and show that there’s some connection between them. Also, the separate sentences usually have equal weight.

For example, let’s suppose we have two sentences:

1. Aaron is driving across Africa by himself.

2. Some people think Aaron is crazy.

We could use a semicolon to show a closer connection between the two sentences by writing, “Aaron is driving across Africa by himself; some people think he is crazy.” There are still two separate thoughts, but the semicolon is a kind of long pause between the two equal halves instead of the hard stop signaled by a period.

So how does this relate to my Africa trip? I see this trip as kind of the semicolon in my life, a sort of long pause between the two halves. (If I live a life of average length, I’m almost exactly halfway through.) Moreover, as when a sentence uses a semicolon, there will of course be a relationship between the two halves of my life, but I am guessing that the second half will be a rather different experience than the first. And by choosing such a title for my blog, I am signaling that I hope my second half will be different, that this trip will give me a chance to do some intensive thinking and make some conscious choices about what I do with my the rest of my days.

Also, if you look at the Semicolon logo and sort of squint your eyes, the Land Cruiser and Africa sort of look like a semicolon. At least that’s what I was going for.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks. In my next post I will write a little about the planning and preparation that go into a trip like this, and it should be much more interesting than this first post. Also, I promise not to ramble on about any other punctuation marks next time!

In general, I will try to post to my blog once each week, but I will post a little more frequently during the next week try to get caught up with where I am actually at on the trip.

Best wishes to everyone back home,

Aaron