South India: Ayuverdic Massages, Tea Plantations and Tigers

India!  Where do I begin?  In the South. A Land of head bopping Hindus, the ubiquitous cows twining through the streets eating chiapati, and beautiful powdered and adorned elephants.  Here are some of the highlights of Southern India.

Ayuverdic Massages and Panchakarma

I remember when I first got to India and people were talking about Ayuverdic medecine.  I had never heard of it, and could never remember the name, Aya....??  Well, this is my new mantra.   After one ayuverdic massage, I proceeded to have one a week.  The first I heard of these, I was strolling through Kochi with my travelmate, Jana, and we decided to treat ourselves to a nice massage.  From the menu, I picked the ``relaxing massage``, and when the guy at the desk told us there was only one female masseuse, would one of us mind having a male masseuse, I shrugged and said sure.  As soon as I got into the room, the masseuse guy handed me two rectangular strips of hospital gown cloth and asked me to take my clothes off.  [What now?]  I laughed and said, ``Yeah, I´ll be keeping my underwear on, thanks.``  He gave me a suit-yourself look and said, ``Okay, but you clothes get dirty when I pour on the hot oil on your body.``[What now?] This did in fact prove to be the case.  He gestured to this wooden coffin box, no padding, where I had to hop inside and sure enough he poured the oil all over me and proceeded to marinate and karate chop my entire body.  I don´t remember any of this from the brochure and called over the wall to Jana to see how she was proceeding with her massage.   I had to declare a few ´no go zones´ but his hands were frottering so fast from head to toe, that your whole body basically gets treated as one cut of beef, so to speak.  After this dubious massage, which in fact felt incredibly good, I moved to the shower room, where I had the female masseuse, thank God!  She sat me on a stool and soaped me up and down, shampooing me vigourously, before towelling me off like a recalcitrant toddler and then braiding my hair.  The whole experience was disconcertingly odd yet so rejuvenating that I ended up in the massage parlour (with women) five more times.  [I once had an ayuverdic massage where the woman put me in a steam coffin and had me breathe through a mentholatum humidifier.  Magnificent!  Sauteed and steamed!]

When we got back to our hotel, I was explaining the whole thing to my roommate Francis, who had already spent 10 days in India, and she nonchalently proceeded to explain that yes, this is how it´s done, only she had had her ayuverdic massage at a friend´s wedding, so in lieu of the massage coffin, she was massaged by [wait for it] one of the bride´s male relatives, who was suspended from the roof of a garden shed by a rope, and used his earth-trodden bare feet to massage her body.  So, as it happens, my massage was relatively tame!  Many women in the Lonely Plant report being ´´molested´´ by their masseuses, and I wonder if this is actually true, or if they just had the same massages we had and don´t understand them.  I later asked Ravi, our tour leader, ``Why is it prohibitive to touch women, even wives and girlfriends, in public, yet a male masseuse can give a woman a massage like that?``  Ravi´s response:  ``Because it´s science.`` 
Which brings us to the next topic:  Panchakarma!  (Same, same but different to Ayuverdic Massages)
So basically, Panchakarma is another, ``enhanced`` way to purify the body and eradicate the toxins and bad ``doshas`´ (humours) from the body.  The way they do this is through:  nasal therapy (Nasya), enforced vomiting (Vamana), purging (Virechana), therapeutic enema (Vasti) [Is this not an oxymoron?], and (I´ve saved the best for last) -- bloodletting!  Since I was having an intense nasal congestion situation while I was in India (this actually was in Northern India), whereby I felt like someone had removed half of my brain and replaced it with a giant phlegmball, I asked our Trip Leader, Veerendra, to take me to the Panchakarma Master.  Though I told him, ``Just for the Nasal Therapy!  No enemas or bloodletting.  Me be on vacay!``  Also, I kind of had the bloodletting in the South when we went on the Jungle Walk, and Ravi said, ``Oh, you don´t need leech socks!`` and I ended the walk with a bloody anklet of leeches.

Getting to the Panchakarma site involved a very nefarious motorcycle trip through the cobbly, cow-entwined backstreets of Udaipur (Rajasthan), dodging auto and motor rickshaws, bicycles and pedestrians.  I was imagining some kind of Frankensteinian nasal drip, but really it involved some acrid nasal drops, a dehumidifier and a very vigourous metholatum chest massage.  And repeat.  I have no idea what kind of magic was involved in all this, but that night I felt like my head had been used in a gong show, and could eat only tomato soup.  But the next day, pow, my sinuses completely cleared.  It was insane. I am a total convert to the mysteries of Ayuverdia.

Yogis and Ashrams

After reading about India, I was thinking I would like to go to an Ashram, but after visiting the Auroville Ashram outside of Pondicherry, I changed my mind.  This Ashram was like a cult, with pictures of ``The Mother`` everywhere (very 1984/Big Brother), a huge kaleidoscopic gold orb in the middle of nowhere, and video loops with scrolling words and a haunting narrative inviting you to relinquish all religion and worldly possessions to join ranks with the Natural Ones.  Looking around, I couldn´t fathom what these people were doing with their time.  How many hours can you actually meditate, as an Everyman?  I asked Ravi, our tour leader, what he thought of these blonde gringas wearing saris and bindi dots, with dreadlocks and journals. He just rolled his eyes and said, ``No comment.``  He told us about an accomplished friend of his who renounced all his worldly goods, and left his job to enter one of these ashrams.  He ´went missing´ and his parents were imploring Ravi and other friends to find him.  They found him in an Ashram where the leader was keeping all the passports hostage was.  They ended up having to threaten the guy with baseball bats to free their friend.  So, yeah, no interest in ashrams.  But I did participate in quite a few yoga classes.  Let me tell you.  Yoga classes in India; yoga classes at Goodlife...different.

One class I went to at 6 am ended up being a private lesson with the yogi outside the pool.  The first thing I learned was that I breathe all wrong and have been doing so for my entire life.  The yogi was absolutely apalled that I would ever breathe through my mouth.  He chastised me beligerantly:  ``No!!! Why would you do this?  The mouth should only be used as an escape hatch!  Why would you use it for normal breathing, then we abuse the escape hatch!``  I still can only breathe using my nose exclusively for about five minutes, before I feel like I´m suffocating softly, despite his teachings.  The yogi taught me how to use wooden blocks to support the various poses and had me contort my spine, cobra-esque, into all kinds of positions, culminating in a shoulder lift at the very end.  I remember the days when I used to think yoga was liquid and soft.  My butt muscles, which I don´t even remember using, were sore for three days.

I did another yoga class with the houseowner of our homestay in the Backwaters of Kerala. His class involved a lot of breathing too, but he was modelling how to breathe by snorting the evil doshas out of your nose, the way a horse would eject a bothersome fly from a nostril.  I couldn´t really manage it, diplomatically. He also had me do the shoulder stand and then uncoil from it, vertebrae by vertebrae.  This didn´t work either as I invariably came crashing down like a piece of scaffolding.  Most of his class was dedicated to breathing rather than poses, and though 60, this man could ripple his stomach like a belly dancer, concave, convex, concave, convex.

In the North, my travelmate Matt and I did a dawn yoga class on the rooftop of our hotel, overlooking the multitudinous palaces of Udaipur.  This yogi was all about the poses.  He would tell us things like:  ``Put your feet into Lotus position.  Now press soles of the feet together and flatten thighs to ground.  Wrap your arms around your back and press them to your feet.`` [What now?]  Matt and I just took pictures of him doing the various contortions.  For posterity.  We did manage to do a few backbends.  I forgot how much strength and flexibility it takes to hold your own body weight like that.

Cows and Beggars

One of the most endearingly frustrating things about India are all the cows.  Of course, you hear about them, but there is something about seeing this proliferation of stray cows wandering about the streets that discombobulates you.  They are like stray dogs, but they are huge.  And clueless.  And sometimes irascible. I was trying to enter a pharmacy one day and two cows, (one a bull!) were blocking the entrance.  I asked a passerby, in Hindinglish, if I could pass through.  He laughed and said sure.  I asked if they would spear me and he found that very amusing.  (Clearly he has not attended the Pampleonada in Mexico!)  The other thing is that these cows are not vegetarians.  I was eating at a restaurant one day and was about to ask the waiter to wrap up my stuffed pepper, as I was going to give it to a beggar.  He had already absconded it, so I chided him and told him that I didn´t want to waste food, when I could give it to someone.  He looked at me incredulously and said, ``Not wasted!  We feed it to the cows!``  That night, the cows were eating buttered chicken, massala, stuffed peppers and chiapati.  Which explains the rampant diarrhea street cows have, further contributing to the nastiness of the streets.  One day I saw a cow happily munching apples off a fruit stand, while the cow down the road was eating sewer garbage (he hadn´t cottoned on yet.)

Beggars are everywhere.  One of the saddest sights I saw were all the huddled families around bonfires by the side of the road outside of Delhi, dirty, emaciated, and desperate.  It´s a hard sight to see, but as Ravi has explained to us, there is a mafia of begging here, whereby the Pimp gets all the spoils of the begging, while children are maimed or babies rented to elicit more sympathy from the foreigners.  You are often approached by women with nicotine-stained teeth, addicted to beetlejuice, who pirate their rented babies in front of your face, pretending the money will go to feed the mouths of babes.  You also can´t give sealed food to the beggars as they then resell it for money which fuels into the whole mafia of begging.  At times, I have given open bags of food to beggars.  One woman and her bare bottomed son were sitting cross legged on the railway platform to go to Chennai, and I gave them an open bag of crisps.  They were elated.  Jana had a sweater she was tired of and gave it to the woman, and she wrapped the boy in it, waving happily as she boarded the train.  That said, in the North, at the Ajmer train station, we encountered a high density of beggars.  One boy had an infected toe which he had put salve on, but being barefoot, had nothing to cover his toe. I rummaged inside my first aid kit for a bandaid to give to him, but the other teenage boys must have thought I was going inside my purse for cash, and descended on me in a writhing mass of scratching arms and pushing hands.  It was like something out of Alfred Hitchcock´s ``The Birds``.  For the first time, I seriously understood how someone can get trampled to death in a crowd.

One day, outside the Hindi Temple in Pushcar, a charming boy with a flute was shadowboxing me down the road, begging not for money, but ``just for chiapati to eat.  One for me, one for you,`` he added solicitously.  I acceded to his request with a smile, thinking we were going to a stand to buy one chiapati, but no, he took me to a grocery store where instead of paying 2 rupee for a hot chiapati, I paid 20 rupee for a box of Chiapati mix! Gotta respect the entrepreneurship though.

They say that a third of the global poor are in India and that 25% of India´s population survives on less than 20 rupees a day.  That´s less than five dollars a day.  220 million people are living below the poverty line and I read somewhere that for every 2 million people there are 17 public washrooms.  Which would explain the onmipresent scent of urine and the multitudes of people peeing against buildings and pooing into the railway tracks.  Our tour leader was telling us about a woman who lost her diamond engagement ring down the train urinal...not a ring I would ever want to put back on my finger.  I don´t understand these women I see travelling with their engagement and wedding rings on, in developing countries.  That is just an invitation to disaster.  As I´m writing this, I´m in Salvador, Brazil, and you just don´t bring anything on the street with you.  The crack kids will get it.  A girl at my hostel had a gold bracelet on (Why?) and a crack kid stole it from her, ran down the street with her in hot pursuit (Why?) and when confronted by the Tourist Police, swallowed it.

But, back to India.  One day, I saw a woman wearing a beautiful magenta sari, with her gorgeous black hair twined in a braid down her back, peeing down the side of her leg into the road.  India is filled with oxymoronic sights like this.  The beauty of this country defies the poverty and desperation.  One thing I found hard to get used to was going barefoot.  Because we were in Kerala State during Pongal, the Harvest Festival, there were a lot of celebrations in Temples.  It´s not proper to wear shoes in the temple because it´s perceived as irreverant (cow hide) and unclean.  However, I get nervous leaving my awesome South African sandals in the shoe box (remember that episode of ``Sex in the City`` where Carrie had her Manolo Blaniks stolen at the Bridal Shower), and am repulsed by the idea of trodding barefoot through the urine-soaked streets frequented by the cows afflicted by diarrhea.  We visited a Hindu Temple in Madurai during Pongal and the streets were so congested with people on Pilgrammage that our Tour Leader had us retreat and go again the next morning.  Four people had been trampled and killed in one of these pilgrammages in Kerala four days prior, and he didn´t want to take any chances.  The sheer volume of people here is astounding.  Similiar to the situation with the beggar boys, I could see how people could be trampled to death in the outbreak of emotion and impatience.

Head bopping and Bollywood

One really endearing thing about the South is the head bopping.  People have this way of letting you know they are listening to you, by weaving their heads in a type of figure eight pattern, while entertaining you with this type of bemused expression on their faces.  At first I thought it meant yes, until one day I ordered a banana lassi and was waiting half an hour for it.  It always reminds me of those dolls with the bopping heads on coiled springs.  I asked our tour leader, Ravi, one day why he doesn´t have that idiosyncracy and he told me he used to do it, but that people made fun of him, so he trained himself out of it.  I think that´s too bad because it´s such a cool characteristic of the South.  The saris here are also striking.  The colour combinations are beautiful and you see vibrant swatches of magenta and orange and pink like match strikes against the verdant green of the rice paddy fields. Because people adore gold jewelry, you also see flashes of gold twinkling in the fields.  I love seeing so much colour every day.  It is such a contrast to the monochromatic sandpaper colour of Jordan. 

I also fell in love with the Bollywood movies.  I met this European traveller, Cristophe, at my hostel in Mumbai, and one night we took a tuk-tuk to the movie theatre to see a Bollywood film.  Though it was a very  simple movie theatre (full of pre-feature advertisements about noise pollution [don´t honk your car horns!!] and anti-corruption) with hard seats and 2 rupee samosas, we watched a 3 hour Hindi movie with no subtitles in complete rapture!  I was completely drawn into the colours, costumes, singing and dancing, despite the fact that I couldn´t understand a word.  This movie had the most intensely wound kissing scene I´ve seen in any movie, and I could not stop staring at the costumes.  I actually had a green velvet smoking jacket with a purple silk lining tailor made for myself in Udaipur, modelled after a jacket the main protagonist wore in the movie.  I had to laugh though, when I saw this Bollywood movie in the Pink Cinema in Jaipur.  To ``exoticize`` it, they had a scene set in suburban Vancouver, showing a Punjabi man married to a Canadian woman.  She was this Playboy Peroxide Jenny McCarthy type, very ditzy, speaking very bad Hindi.  I had to put in a disclaimer to the group about Canadian women.  Not a good representation!  My travelmate Matt and I liked the music from the movie so much that we hunted down the CD in Pushkar.

Religion

During our trip, we were able to visit many Hindu Temples and one Sikh Gudwara, in the North.  They believe in community service, so we were able to help the women make chiapatis for the people coming to worship.  One thing Veerendra, our Northern Tour Leader, told us which I found really surprising was the fact that the Sikh people won a contentious court battle in India, allowing them to carry the kirpan (dagger) on board airplanes as it is one of the five K´s baptised Sikhs are bound to wear:  (uncut hair [kes], small comb [kagha], iron bracelet [kaa], special undergarment [kaccha], and the dagger [kirpan]).  One can only hope the Sikh people I am travelling with are all well-adjusted individuals!  I find it ironic since anti-terrorist measures are so tight here.   I had to present my passport just to use the internet and pass a screening process more exigent than the visa-screening process to be able to activate my Indian SIM card.

The Hindu temples are amazing, especially the Sri Meenakshi temple in Madurai.  It´s so exceptionally elaborate, perhaps a bit gaudy, that you wouldn´t be able to take in the detail even if you were to spend a month examining it.  The Hindu temples used to offer the only form of sex education to children, so there are Kama Sutra-esque carvings along the outside of the temples.  I definitely learned a few things! Sadly, they have chained elephants, decorated with pastel designs and flowers, inside the temples.  From what I´ve learned about elephants in Africa, one day that elephant will realize he ain´t diggy being chained to a pillar and will trample them all! 

It´s interesting seeing the genesis of a culture through the looking glass of the temples, because the depictions of unveiled buxom women draped provocatively in harems pre-dating the Mughal invasions challenges the notion of women in burquas, heavily draped despite the weather.  What I find interesting is that woman can bare their midrifs without censure, but the breasts, bottom, shoulders and knees must be covered.  [As I am typing this, I´m in Brazil, at 8:30 at night, sweltering like I´m in a sauna, wearing a tank top and skirt.  I positively cannot imagine how women in India withstand a heat of 40 degrees, wearing saris.]  We visited some mosques in our travels as well, though the South is mainly Hindu.  They are peaceful places, and you are invited to rest inside, but our guide told us we could only visit each mosque or temple for 20 minutes max, due to the risk of terrorist bombings.

One other fascinating thing about India was the overt displays of affection between men.  Though men and women are not allowed to touch publicly, you often see men with fingers intertwined, strolling along the boardwalk or locked in an embrace.  I asked Ravi if that meant that it was easier for homosexual men to go undercover, but he said absolutely not, because although the culture is ostensibly open to it (gay marriage is legal) society still considers it perverse and supposedly people can ´tell´ if the look goes on too long, or the embrace is too intimate.  Again, I am noticing such a contrast in Brazil and Argentina, as people make out here publicly all the time.  My friend and I got flashed by a twelve-year-old in the Pelorinho yesterday, who then wanted money from us!  Like a tip!  That said, in India, as in Egypt, there is a lot of ass-grabbing and ass-slapping going on.  And then they run into the temples!  Very santimonious!  As well, they have women-only cars on the metro.  I´m beginning to wonder if Canada is one of the few countries that doesn´t have this.

Tea Plantations and Tigers

Continuing my cat hunt from Africa, I spotted two tigers on my trip.  I must have honed my spotting skills in Africa, as I was able to catch a glimpse of tiger butt and tiger tail, where others missed it.  It was exciting, but since it was just a glimpse and I was exposed to such sites in Africa (it´s hard to top the Lion At The Campfire) I wasn´t incredibly excited.  What I found funny was that there was a convoy of jeeps full of elementary kids on a school trip, despite all the disclaimers of being eaten by a tiger.  I can´t imagine that school trip going through in Canada;)  Speaking of school trips, we were staying in the mountain village of Ooty and some school kids were on a field trip.  They had booked out most of the hotel and were having an insanely loud bonfire in the parking lot.  I figured ´If you can´t beat them, join them´ and went down to participate.   They were absolutely hilarious.  They had me dance in the centre of the circle (a little too close to the bonfire if you ask me) and had me lead the ´´catwalk fashion show´´.  School kids here are hilarious.  Or people in general.  They always want to do a photo shoot with you.  My friend Christophe and I went to the museum in Mumbai, and barely saw a thing, we were so busy doing photo shoots with the kids on their school trips.

In Ootacamund (Ooty) we also travelled by toy train, preceding a tour of a tea plantation where we were exposed to all kinds of teas:  red, green, white and black, my favorite being chocalate tea, of which I sent a kilogram back to my Mom and Dad in Canada, in lieu of apres-ski hot chocolate.

Such was the South, land of rice paddies, tea plantations, saris and head-bobbing....J.

Egyptian Adventures!

My ambivalence towards Cairo aside, I love, love, loved Egypt on the whole.  It is a fiesty and intriguing culture.  Here are some of the highlights!

Red Sea Beach Camp:  This was our first stop in Egypt after disembarking in the cacophanous harbour of Nuweiba (coming across from Aqaba in Jordan).  If someone were to paint a mural of the Nuweiba port, it would show pairs and triads of mustachio´d men having heated arguments over boxes, and loading, hauling and cargo´ing said boxes with attitudes of menace.  So going straight to the Red Sea Beach Camp was very chill.  We lounged on cushions, drank wine and beer, ordered banana pancakes, snorkeled, and then lounged on other, different cushions.  The Coral Reefs extend out forever and there are tons of fish to be seen.  Sandia and I saw 2-banded clownfish, glassfish, masked butterfly fish, and blackspotted sweetlips! 

Sometimes there were tough decisions to be made.  Should I lounge in the hut, or on the beach?  Or in the tent?  Wine? Or beer?  We celebrated Grahamses´ birthday here on a table out on the beach, and I will never forget the frosting on his cake.  It tasted like those hard Halloween candies made from melted scraps of all the other leftover Halloween candies.  Yum!  On  a side note, I was looking everywhere in Jordan and in Egypt for an Arabic birthday card, since we had four birthdays to celebrate on the trip, but couldn´t find anything.  For my birthday, Beishan just made her own.  I know extremists don´t celebrate birthdays, but it´s becoming a part of pop culture, so I guess Arabic birthday cards are just not a big hit.

Mt Sinai
We first went to the Greek Orthodox monastery of St Katherine to see the burning bush (not the original obviously, because, as the eponymous name suggests: it burned, baby!) but a bush nonetheless.  Much like the promised land, it seemed fairly mundane to me, but I´m not religious, so maybe other people assigned it more import.  Climbing Mount Sinai was much cooler as you felt a sense of accomplishment during the climb.  Ian and I were originally going to climb the 3750 ´´Steps of Repentance" but Ian decided he´d rather see the real route, and it isn´t advisable to climb those steps alone, so we joined the others for the 3 hour hike.  Some people wind up on camels while others climb, and you see the chilling sparsity of the desert with the sunset backlighting the panorama.  It´s a bit hard to concentrate on the image of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments with the call-and-response catcalls of ¨Tea?  Cafe?  Cho-co-late? Tea?  Cafe?  Cho-co-late?¨, but I have to say that the hot chocolate I drank on Sinai, on top of that rock wall overlooking the sunset, was the best I´ve ever tasted.  Served in a Styrofoam cup. (Actually, I´m in Argentina now, so the submarino hot chocolates are almost on par.)

Felucca
Our group travelled by felucca, a wooden sailboat with broad canvas sails, from Aswan to Luxor.  It was an incredible experience.  And far more relaxing than the night train from Cairo to Aswan which was patrolled by soldiers with guns.  As Grahamses put it, ``Did I get up to use the toilet?  No, once the guy with the shotgun passed me, I didn´t get up at all.``  The felucca´s deck was laid over with cushions placed end to end, and we lounged on these cushions (a practise we had perfected at the Red Sea Beach Camp), reading, chatting, and drinking copious amounts of Stella.  I think I have a disproportionate sense of how much I can drink.  We had to place orders for the boat, and afraid of getting dehydrated, (recalling my ´black tongue incident´ in Mexico), I ordered two bottles of water and four juice bottles to offset my six Stellas.  Well, I could only drink one beer, because there is no W/C on the boat and I had to keep asking the Nubian guide to stop. He was getting annoyed with all the pitstops along the shore, so I got Latifah to ask for the next stop, but he clearly knew I was behind it and was giving me the evil eye. Graham kept chiding me on my lack of inebriation and urged me to drink more, but I couldn´t keep up. I had to ask for three washroom stops based on one Stella alone! We zigzagged along the Nile the full day, stopping only to jump in the river (like swimming in ice cubes with a really strong current! No Bilhazia here!)  We passed the hotel where Agatha Christie wrote ``Death on the Nile``.  At meal times we spread a tablecloth over the cushions and ate Eish Masri (pita breads) with dip, and at night we banked on shore, where Grahamses (a.k.a Ali) was commissioned to dig out the toilet tent.  Really, I should have been the one to dig that out since I probably used it the most.  I had five beers left to finish! but "Ali" had to earn his keep as an honourary Egyptian.  We built a campfire and sang songs with the Nubians, before thrusting all our supplies below-deck (pirates) and rocking to sleep on the felucca in harbour.

Temples in Luxor
Exploring the temples with my travelmate Beishan in Luxor was a real treat, especially since we did it by bicycle.  Mine was a bright pink bicycle that screeched like a broken parrot every time I rode it, replete with basket, and of course, no helmet.  There is no respect for bikes in Aswan, so you just have to chance it and hope for the best.  We hefted our bikes onto the morning ferry to the West Bank, glimpsing the sunrise of Luxor, and on the way back, we completed the cycle with  a sunset ferry ride.  Landing on the West Bank we biked past the two giant Colossi of Memnon, guarding the entryway to the famous Valley of the Kings and Queens, where they started burying the Pharoahs after the pyramids were looted a few too many times.  Beishan and I spent the day exploring, getting lost, and promising marriage proposals and baksheesh to avoid getting our bicycles stolen.

The tombs are decorated in dilapidated murals depicting stories of the gods.  You have to love the Egyptian stories and Gods:   Seth is jealous of Osiris for being King.  Makes him a custom-made "Cinderella" coffin and sends him off down the Nile.  Wife, Isis, freaks out and recovers the coffin to give husband a proper burial.  Seth reacts and dismembers Osiris, for finality. Isis recovers individual body parts and uses dismembered penis to impregnate herself.

The murals painted in the tombs all depict stories like this and since everyone was marrying their brothers and sisters and killing one another, there are lots of stories to be told.  Some are dilapidated and faded, but the ones protected by glass leave the paintings in vivid and clear detail.  As a group, we were cautioned against buying a separate ticket to view King Tut´s Tomb, as there is "nothing much to see" and it´s "expensive" (20 bucks), but having studied Ancient Civ. with my Grade Five class, and having talked about King Tut ad nauseum, I felt I had to see the real deal.  You descend down a ramp into the tomb, which isn´t very big, only about four metres wide, and there on one side you see King Tut, encased in glass, a tiny shrivelled up cadaver of a teenager. He looks incredibly small, and crusty, like a mummified raisin. As the Tour Guides say, the only memorable thing King Tut did was die.  Still it´s amazing to know that King Tut died in 1346 BC and is still there for the world to see.  Granted, most of his burial treasures are at the Antiquities Museum in Cairo (since looted in the Mubarek riots), but it´s eerie to see the place that Howard Carter unearthed, unleashing the hex that befell him and his men.

There are tons of touts in the Valley of the Kings, all chasing you for baksheesh. Everyone´s got a story, and after awhile the stories recycle themselves through the same prologue-to-sale.  One guy I met, said, "Ah, you are from Canada?  Canada Dry!  Never die!"  (I happen to like this one.  So much more original than, "Hello!  You dropped something!  It´s my heart!")
 "You are from English side or French side?  (Everyone asks this as though Canada had a big red line down the middle.)Yes, I can parler francais aussi, I used to live in Montreal!"
I said, "Oh really? Which street?  I know Montreal quite well."
"Ah, well, it was a long time ago.  I don´t really know."
"Oh, mais vous parlez Francais. C´est marveilleux!"
"My French isn´t that good. But hablo español."
"Really?  Good. My Spanish is better than my French.  ¿Como apprendiste Español?"
Then, exasperated he said, "You buy my book, Valley of the Kings, good price!"
Ah, yes, now we have it.  The crux of the matter.  This goes on outside every tomb, every valley, with an entourage of vendors trying to sell you books, flashlights, scarves, jewelry, and memory cards.

We also saw the Mortuary of Hatshepsut.  She is my favorite Pharoah by far, a female Pharaoh who kicked butt in the world of business while maintaining a salacious affair with her courier, Senenmut.  She always portrayed herself in the guise of a man and convinced the people to follow her by telling them the Sun God, Amun had assumed the form of a bird and impregnated her mother, giving Hatshepsut a holy lineage.  She was married to her half brother, or step brother, Tuthmosis the Second (hence the need for a salacious affair) who later had a child with Isis:  her evil stepson, Tuthmosis the Third.  At the Temple of Karnak, you can see the obelisks she had erected, which her jealous stepson Tuthmosis the Third had scratched off to expunge any record of her.  He was jealous of her 22 year reign and hated her so much that when she later disappeared, he was suspected of having murdered her. (Though our Tour Guide told us that the Antiquities Commission just found new information to suggest that she actually died in her 50s of bone cancer.) Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis the Third had a strange relationship because she was his Step-Mom, his aunt, and I think his Mother-in-Law, all-in-one.  Gotta love the Ancient Egyptians!

The Pyramids
The Pyramids were of course, amazing, though it´s really the history and execution that you marvel at (and the fact that these people invested more time as the architects of their afterlives, than of their current realities), because when you see the Pyramids they are after all, just big triangular rocks.  We were told that going inside the Great Pyramid of Giza (the biggest pyramid-Pyramid of Khufu) was a waste of money, when you can go inside the Pyramid of Menkaura, the third Pyramid, for a lot less.  But, again, having just taught Ancient Civ. as part of the Grade Five curriculum, I felt compelled to go inside the biggest and the best and do the ´Real Deal´. So, as with King Tut, I paid my 100 Egyptian pounds and in I went.  The Great Pyramid is 139 metres tall and weighs about  5.9 million tons and they say it took about 20 years to build it.

True to tale, there isn´t much to see inside other than a great chamber, but I waited until there were no tourists other than me inside (that took awhile) and climbed inside the sarcophagus in the King´s Chamber, and just laid down inside, imagining what the Ancient Egyptians must have thought their Afterlives would have included.  Then, to document the occasion, I texted my friend Sandy, back in Canada:  I´m inside the sarcophagus inside the Great Pyramid!  (though I couldn´t send it of course.  No SMS reception in the AfterLife!)  So I just chilled for a bit inside until I heard the footsteps of the next group of tourists. [Side note:  When I was lying in that sarcophagus, I was wondering if that was going to bring me good luck or bad luck. I am now in Brazil writing this, and I just met a fantastic guy at a Salvadorenan salsa club called ``Sarcophagus``. Coincidence?  I think not!]

Camel Riding
What would Egypt be without a camel ride?  Technically, I missed my opportunity for this by not going when I was at Mt. Sinai, but Mohamed, our group leader, went to bat for me since I was dying to ride a camel for my birthday, and some of the others hadn´t yet had a chance to ride either.  Usually when you do the camel thing it is very touristy and you are lead by a Camel Boy, however our guide meant business.  He taught us how to actually guide and steer our own camels, because he thinks this business of the camel boys is a bunch of touristic bull roar.  It´s kind of like riding a horse, except that the camels do what they want, and aren´t in a hurry to do it.  My camel was in a bit of a depression from a miscarriage, so the guide attached a baby camel to mine, to give her the sense that she did have a child.  Camel psychology.  Camels also give kisses.  If you say ``bosa`` (the Arabic word for ´´kiss´´), the camel twists its rubbery lips against your cheek!

The Desert
For my birthday, I had the incredible experience of being in the middle of the White Desert.  We explored the White and Black deserts by 4WD, at 200 km an hour!!  And we did not have the Americans in our jeep, so no speed control.  The natural rock formations created by wind erosion are incredible, and we had fun doing photo shoots in the desert.  We had had a couple of birthday celebrations on the trip already, and Mohamed pulled me aside and said, ``Listen, Jennifer, I can´t do this for your birthday, because we are gonna be in the middle of the desert and there´s nothing there, I mean nothing!`` I was happy just being in the desert, and getting a homemade Arabic card signed by everyone and random presents from my travelmates.  So you can imagine my suprise when, after an amazing Bedouin dinner cooked over the campfire, (the best roasted chicken!), they came out with this cake and candles!  I was so touched.  Mo and the guys had to bring all the ingredients out to the desert separately (since we were speeding around the sand at 200 km an hour) and then put it all together in the camp, fashioned from 3 walls of vehicles parked in a U shape with carpets pegged against them to make a cozy little enclave.  That said, sleeping the night there was subterraneally cold.  I wore my Silver Space Suit and my travelmates were wondering if the Mother Ship was coming to reclaim me for my 37th birthday.

The Desert Oases we went to were unforgettable. In the Siwa Oasis, a town of salt and clay buildings with palm tree thickets and hot springs, the women are dressed in Black Burquas whose only openings are eye slits bound by an elastic.  The Laws of the Land there are very strict and even to swim we had to wear clothes, which float around you like lily pads and really inhibit the sleek feeling of swimming.  It reminded me of an Indian Womens´ Lit course I took in Uni where one book spoke of women drowning in their Burquas, the cloth caught in drains or on logs.  I was dying for a massage and Grahamses found something in the Lonely Planet to indicate that there was a Thai woman living in Siwa giving Thai massages.  However, when I went to investigate, it was in fact a Siwan man.  I asked Mohamed what he thought about that, as Vicky, Jiwon, Fiona and I were all keen to get massages.  His response:  ``Jennifer, these are men who never see a woman.  Then a man from Siwa makes a massage parlour for tourists...I think you better wait to get the massage in Alexandria.``  At night, Jiwon and I went to a hot springs designed for tourists, so you could actually wear a bathing suit.  We twisted Jan´s arm to come with us, so we would at least have a guy as backup.  It was divine, but true to form, infiltrated by Siwan onlookers who are desperate for a glimpse of skin.  Poor guys there,  very repressed.  This one Siwan guy asked if he could swim, but then took off his bathing suit in the hot springs.  And we couldn´t see his hands...so even though we had a guy with us, we had to evacuate!

Arabic
If I had more time, I would love to learn Arabic.  The script winds across the page like the footprints of a snake and the sounds of Arabic are succulent.  Even learning small bits and pieces of phrases was like a key to chambers of the culture.  My favorite expressions are ``A la tool!`` (straight ahead) and ``moutachefer``, which means hospital.  I just imagine all these cartoon men with handlebar moustaches having a fair on the hospital grounds.  In Siwa, we saw a man running pell mell down the street, chased by another man.  Two minutes later another man came in hot pursuit.  Beishan and I screamed ``A la tool!  A la tool!`` pointing in the direction the other man had fled.  And ``beautiful camel`` is ``gamel gameela``.

Alexandria
As a city, I adored Alexandria.  Far more than Cairo. It was built in 331 BC, honoring Alexander the Great, and has a winding boardwalk along the water, decadent cake and chocolate shops, and fruit stands with bobbles and necklaces of hanging fresh fruit in the millions of fruiterias.  Sadly, on New Year´s Eve there was a bombing outside one of the churches.  80 people leaving the candlelit vigil were killed. They say it was retaliation by Islamic militants but who knows.  We stayed in a colonial period hotel, with balconies overlooking the sea, and here we planned a surprise party for Mohammed who was born on New Year´s Day.  We all went out to dinner  and then Sue and Joe detained Mohamed to buy a special kind of map while the rest of us went back to the lobby to blow up balloons and get out the cake which we´d bought at the infamous Trianon restaurant.  Mohamed was actually surprised since we´d gone to a coffee shop the night before and ordered a slice of cake for him with a candle, and smoked cherry sheesha while watching Lebanese music videos.  So he didn´t actually anticipate a celebration.

My trip ended back in Cairo, and though of course I had no sense of the chaos that would soon erupt against Mubarek, I still felt restless to leave Cairo, the oppressive patriarchal streets crammed with Mom and Pop auto parts shops and cell phone stalls, the Nile fetid and stale, and the corrugation of impatient traffic and horns.  But, like I said, Cairo aside, I love, love, loved Egypt and am happy that the youth have won their battle and are carving out a new Egypt.

Exploring Egypt: Pre Mubarak uprising!

Writing this travelogue long after the apocryphal anti-Mubarak uprising feels very strange indeed.  I was just chatting online to one of my contacts at the Canadian Embassy in Cairo and he was talking about how still now there are tanks on the streets, a curfew from midnight to six a.m. and a strong military presence to protect vulnerable places such as Embassies and TV stations.  They are just now beginning to re-instate vacated Embassy families back in Cairo. When people ask me if there were whispers of dissension in the weeks prior, what springs to mind is the portentous crazy woman giving me directions to a hotel I was searching for, clutching my arm and steering me through traffic with one hand and buying me roasted corn and fresh strawberries in the other, while simultaneously ushering me through a church, lighting candles, muttering on about Corinthians 11 and stopping various people on the street to proclaim urgent missives about Osama Bin Laden in Arabic.

I remember the guy I asked for directions to the nearest Egypt Air office who ended up helping me balloon shop for our Tour Leader Mohamed's birthday, in a gun shop.  After convincing the agents in the Egypt Air office to open up for me after hours, Husseain  lead me through the shopping district to look for balloons.  The first shop he took me to had a display of guns and machetes.  I whispered, sotto voce, ""Are those real guns?" To which he replied, "Yes."  I whispered, "Why would there be balloons here?"  At which point he gestured to the back wall where there was a display of toy guns. How's that for father/son one stop shopping?  I imagine this store being looted during the uprising.

So, what was Egypt like before all the chaos?  Chaos. Ttrains and planes ran, and you could get cash from the ATMs (albeit while getting stalked), but Egypt is still Egypt.  Here is a quick glimpse.

Egypt is one of those enigmatic cities full of oxymorons.  There are women in full burquas with only their eyes showing through the slits, and calls to prayer six times a day, yet you're avoiding the 'grab and grope' by men on the street, and are treated to belly dancing on special occasions.  There's the Nile snaking through Upper and Lower Egypt, where you can drift idyllically on a felucca, but then to the West is the great desert, vast and empty.  Alcohol is forbidden, yet on every street corner you can see people happily blowing smoke clouds from their sheesha pipes.  Scaffolding signs announce "Safetety Fitst" while whitewashers dangle precariously from tire swings, leaning back against the buildings with their dripping brushes.

Egypt is passionate and daring, but also shy and demure. It is also a place where the price differs not only from city to city, suburb to suburb, but also street corner to street corner.  Haggling is a full-time job, and you can get into a fiery debate with a shop vendor before nine in the morning.  They also have this system of baksheesh, which is tantamount to tipping, but unlike tipping which we tend to think of as extra money paid for a service well-rendered, baksheesh goes something like this.

Baksheesh
Baksheesh is money demanded by anyone in Egypt providing you with any kind of service (be it a demanded service, implied service or invented service.)  If someone helps you cross a traffic nest of vehicles, they might demand baksheesh.  If someone gives you directions, they might demand baksheesh.  If someone carries your bag or hands you a bottle of water, they might demand baksheesh.  Sometimes, they do nothing at all and still demand it.  One day, Beishan and I were bicycling through Luxor, visiting the tombs and temples in the Valleys of the Kings and Queens.  Once in a while a security guard would follow you into the tomb and shine his flashlight on some of the motifs:  Horus.  Anubis.  Osiris.  Nothing we didn't already know after 2 weeks of tomb raiding, but at least they were trying.  However, after visiting one of the tombs, the security guards asked us as we exited:  "You like the temple?  Beautiful, no?"  They then held out their hands, with a meaningful eyebrow raise. "Baksheesh."  When I get back to Toronto, I'm going to stand outside the CN Tower, and ask people if they liked it when they come out.  Then I'm going to hold out my hand and demand a loonie.

Of course, the thing with the baksheesh is you never quite know how much to give or what's an insulting price.  Case in point, Beishan and I had to leave our bicycles outside the temples while we went inside.  We'd heard that the guards sometimes damage your bikes if you don't leave enough baksheesh bribe for them.  At the same time, it was early in the morning and we had a lot of temples to visit, so we gave 50 piaster as "now money", and promised 50 piaster later.  However, when we came out and started cycling to the Valley of the Queens, the chain came off my bike.  Twice.  We ended up going to the police station, where some random guy took off with my bicycle, ostensibly in search of a wrench, to go fix it.  Which cost me 5 pounds, ten times the price of the original bribe.  As a result, the next place we went to, we upped the baksheesh, but then the guard became flustered, brushed us off in Arabic and wouldn't take it.  Nobody wanted the responsibility of watching the bikes.  At the Tombs the guy refused any money but joked that he wanted a marriage proposal and then wasn"t even there when we came to collect our bikes.  So who the hell knows how it all works, but one thing is consistent:  everyone wants something for nothing. Or at least for very little.  That said, one of our Tour Guides told us that the average government employee makes about 300 pounds a month while rent is 600.  So you can see how people would count on it to survive.

Haggling
The other thing is the haggling.  Right off the bat, I lose at that game, because I pay the White Price.  The best I can do is use some Arabic, and try to pass myself off as an ex-pat, but even then it doesn't always work.  Grahamses, my Canadian travelmate, looks Egyptian (we nicknamed him 'Ali', and with his Lawrence of Arabia headscarf, and an Arabic newspaper tucked under his arm, he could get any price.  As long as he didn't open his mouth.)  Sometimes we would get him to just stand near us as we haggled in the markets.  All he had to do was raise an eyebrow and the price would go down, though one day a vendor commented to Latifah, "Your tour guide's an asshole!"  You really have to hound to the ground to get a decent price and some days it is just not worth the emotional trauma.

One day I desperately needed breakfast before a 13 hour train ride and the guy was trying to sell me an Chocolate Hershey drink and some yogurt for 30 pounds, which amounts to about 6 dollars.  I gave him a pointed look and said  "Katir owi!" (too expensive; most useful Arabic phrase, though my favorite is still "A la tool" [straight ahead]).  I put the Chocolate Hershey drink to the side, and showed him two local drinks with Arabic writing, indicating that I wanted a lesser price for local goods.  After ten minutes of arguing and telling me he didn't have change (while displaying a full cash register of change when ringing up a local woman's goods), he finally gave me the drinks for 13 pounds, but he told me off in Arabic, thrust his fingers under his chin at me, in that rude Italian-esque way, and started yabbering at the Muslim woman next to me, wildly gesticulating at me as though to say, "This one! Ai!"  And he still probably got double the price he would have gotten from an Egyptian.  Beishan's response to my lament, "Sometimes I just want to buy something.  But without the drama!"  was "And you can.  You just have to pay six times the price."

Near as I can figure it, the price hierarchy goes something like this:  There's:
the Foreigner Price (about six times the Egyptian Price)
the Expat Price (about double)
the Egyptian Price (normal)
and the price Beishan pays.
Beishan can haggle even the Egyptians down to piasters, something I didn't even know existed until I met Beishan, my Chinese-UK travelmate.  Here I was thinking a pound was the lowest currency (one sixth of a dollar) but Beishan was buying fruit for 50 piaster!  My roommate Sandia took the Egyptians to task too.  One day a street vendor charged her a couple of pounds more than Latifah for oranges, and she gave him a piece of her mind.  I don't know if it's the Asian influence or the accounting background, but these ladies are my haggling heroes.

Meanwhile, I was buying fruit with Sandia one day on the streets of Cairo and was in the middle of a fiesty fruit argument with the vendor, when some random guy came up behind me in true grab-and-grope style, and squeezed my butt really hard, before running away smirking.  I yelled after him, but the Fruit Vendor was so incensed over my price that he showed no sympathy at all, so I got no fruit and a sore ass for my troubles.

The price can even change from minute to minute.  At the washrooms outside the Pyramids of Giza, it was a one pound charge.  I left my bag with Fiona and marched to the washrooms with my one pound coin, but then the guy was demanding two, in a sudden price-heist.  I joked around with him and managed to slip by him because he saw I didn't have a bag, but anyone with a purse got shadowboxed and detained until they procured more money.  Even to check the balance on my SIM card  it would fluctuate from 1 piaster to 10 piasters, back and forth, back and forth .

Traffic
Crossing the road in Egypt, especially Cairo, is an adrenaline sport.  Everyone jaywalks here as there are no traffic lights.  Actually, that's not true.  Occasionally you see one, but it's more of an adornment, with the countdown signifying nothing. Cairenes seem to cross effortlessly, weaving between crowded buses, cars, taxis and motorbikes, on their cell phones the whole time.  I even saw a man in a wheelchair happily jaywalking across five lanes of traffic and exit ramps.  That said, I did meet an Alexandrian guy who managed to cross in front of two lanes of traffic only to get pummelled by the third.  They brought him to hospital unconscious, though he is recovered now.

Security
One thing that made me chuckle were the extra security efforts afforded to our Tour Group, compliments of the US government.  It went something like this.  Sadly, a few days after our Tour Group travelled to Abu Simbel (a four hour ride from Aswan, which necessitates an early start of 3 am to reach the temples), another tour group met with an accident en route. Because everyone is anxious to get to the temples before sunrise and because visibility is poor in the dark, accidents are inevitable. This accident was particularly gruesome as the driver was speeding, collided with a sand truck parked on the shoulder, and sheared off the entire side of the bus, killing eight Americans and wounding 21 tourists.  Because the accident in part was due to speeding, it was decreed by the American government/embassy that all American tourists should be accompanied by 'bodyguards' who would help the drivers moderate their speed.  Since we had three Americans in our Tour Group, we got a bodyguard!  They would joke about how now everyone wants the Americans on board.  In addition to this added security measure, on our way into the desert, we had to pass through a million check points, armed by teenagers in camouflage and vagrant dogs.  At one point as we waited mindlessly by the side of the road, sipping water bottles and scuffing sand, we had Egyptian truck drivers pausing to take pictures of us!  Later, when we were four wheel driving through the desert at mock speed (I was with my fellow Canadian Graham, and my three Asian friends.  Graham joked that we were his harem and that after his divorce to me he developed an Asian fetish), we were slightly wishing we had an American in our jeep as the jeep was spinning off the sand drifts and grasshoppering through the dunes at 200 km an hour!  Egyptian driving.  Nothing compares.  I am in Argentina now and was commenting to my brother how the first time I came to Buenos Aires I thought the traffic situation here was insane.  But now, it seems extremely well-organized and consistent. It's all context.  Pure and simple.

Anyway, that is only a small window into some of the idiosyncracies of the interesting conundrum that is Egypt.  More to come on Egyptian Adventures.

Jenn in Jordan: Waylaid Donkeys, Petra by Night, Olive Oil Concierges and Lawrence of Arabia

Jordan was one of those countries I didn’t have too many expectations about to begin with, and thus was an unexpected delight, like unearthing a prize in the bottom of a cereal box that doesn’t have prizes.  In fact, low to non-existant expectations could quite possibly be one of the key elements to finding true happiness.

Amman is an oxymoronic city with belly-dancing outfits dangling next to shops beside sidewalks peopled by women in burquas.  The cityscape looks as though a child has cut out a village from sandpaper and posted it monochromatically across the hills.  Everything, as far as the eye can see, is sand-coloured.  At one point I saw some bright white buildings, but my driver Nidal informed me that all the buildings were in fact this colour originally, but metamorphosized into the same sand colour, having been windwhipped by the constantly churning gusts of wind.

I was quite shocked to discover the exchange rate at the airport was 1.5:1 with the Jordanian Dinar whipping the Canadian dollar’s butt.  However, this boded well for me after my experiences in Nairobbery, as everyone in Jordan has their own money.  So no one is lasciviously coveting mine!  I was picked up at the airport by this comical man called Nidal. He was quite a character.  At first, I asked him what my name was, and he shrugged and said, “Caroline?”  I laughed and asked him for some identification to prove he actually worked at the Hotel Caravan.  He didn’t have any, and when I called the Hotel to ask them what their driver’s name was and what he looked like, he found this entirely humourous.  “Okay, okay, I get it,” he said, “You are strong woman. Very good, very good.”  When he asked how old I was, he quickly adjusted his age to ‘40’ though I’m quite sure he is in his sixties.  I ended up touring around with him the entire weekend as he was quite honest, and talkative and funny.  He was married for twenty years to an American expat who is the dean of a Southern University, but is now divorced.  He shrugged this off.  “Hard to live with woman.  This is why many people in Jordan marry the cousin.  Then you know the family very well, and what you get.”

The Jordanian weekend is Friday, Saturday, so when I arrived it was a ghost town.  It was blissfully easy to cross the street, and I spent time just weaving between wind gusts, cats, cobbledly-broken staircases, furniture stores and coffee shops with men in their Lawrence of Arabia headscarves smoking mottled glass argile (hookah, water pipe, sheesha, hubble bubble).  Nidal took me to see Jerash, this vast columned ancient Roman city with singing columns and rocking columns that wobble with movement but don’t collapse (specially designed to ‘take a bullet’).  I saw a Roman chariot race (simulated, granted) with the Roman warriors trembling from the cold, and went to Madaba, a cozy little town with Ottoman-style houses, Byzantine-era mosques and very intricately detailed hanging mosaics.  The artisans use natural stone chips, and glue them into a pre-drawn template using tweezers and paste.

The men here are quite something.  I was shopping in one of the curio shops in Madaba for a salsa purse, and one of the artisans struck up a conversation with me.  He was quite amiable, and salsa dances himself  (or so he said),  so invited me to go salsa dancing with him that night at the Regency Hotel.  I said I would see, as I was meeting my fellow travelmates from my Intrepid Tour that night, and wasn’t sure what the plan was.  I also indicated that I would go if it was somewhere I could arrive to and fro conveniently by taxi.  But I agreed to send him an SMS either way.  However, as it happened, my cell phone from Kenya wasn’t roaming properly on my Zain credit, and I couldn’t find a SIM card.  I got distracted meeting everyone from my travel group, and tour leader, and then we all went out for supper and to a funky little coffee shop where Graham, my fellow Canadian, and I shared a cherry argile, as an early birthday celebration.  So, I ended up getting back to this guy, Maximus Zaid, quite late, as I had to borrow my tour leader, Husam’s cellphone.  I had asked Nidal, my driver, what he knew about this guy and though he agreed the artisan was honest and respectful, he also shrugged and said, ‘But he is man. He know you only five minutes.  What do you think he want to invite you out dancing for?’  Since that wasn’t the most reassuring recommendation, I also asked Husam what he thought, and he said, “Well…it’s a Sunday, which is the first day of the working week for Jordanians.  And it’s a sandstorm and possible snowstorm, so no one in this kind of weather goes out.  So I think it won’t be so many people going out.  Maybe, if you like, I can go with you, so it’s better.”

I thought this was a brilliant plan, so I called Zaid Maximus.  He, however, was not so diggy with the plan.  He became quite flustery and blustery and burst out with, “What are you talking about?  I invite you to go dancing.  I want to talk to you!  Maybe in Italian, maybe in French, maybe in Spanish [I’m not sure where this came from].  Who is this other man!?!”  I explained to him that this ‘other man’ was my tour guide and that there was no reason the three of us couldn’t go out and have a coffee, and that he needed to understand my perspective.  I said, “Look Zaid Maximus, I’m traveling alone in a country where I don’t speak the language, I don’t know the culture, and all the signs are in Arabic.  So I would just feel safer if my Tour Leader went with us, since I don’t actually know you.”  Which spurned a whole vitriolic diatribe on how I was insulting him, Nidal Alehrebat [my driver?!] if not in fact, all of Jordan!
I said, “Be that as it may, Zaid, this is how it’s going to happen.  We go together, the three of us…or we don’t go at all.  Now, which will it be?”  He sulkily chose ‘not at all’ and then sputtered, in a 2010-blow-off-way, “We will not go out!  Not this way!  This is not normal!  But you can SMS me all your details and we can become very good Facebook Friends!” 

So, I ended up having a drink with Husam at the Regency, beautifully decorated in a nautical style, warding off the chill of an impending snowstorm.  It was just as well, as we hit it off and had a great time.  The next morning, I received several texts from Zaid Maximus, with enigmatic messages such as:  Jonavar, I feel very shay to myself.  I hope the Desert Highway is closed once more so we can have another chance!  [It wasn’t.  We didn’t.]

Another strange experience I had was in Petra, with one of my travelmates, Lindsay. Petra is this ancient Nebataean city hewn out of rose-coloured rock, along the Incense Route.  It was discovered in 1812, and is a World Heritage Site and one of the new Seven Wonders of the World.  You walk through this narrow, winding Siq with imposing cliff faces shadowing either side, and colourful caravans racing past, until you get to the Treasury, an impressively carved cliff face that looms, rose-coloured, up to the sky.  Our group had climbed up the 800 steps to the Monastery and were admiring the view when Lindsay and I decided to take a donkey ride from the base of the Monastery to the Place of High Sacrifice (featured in one of the Indiana Jones movies…Raiders of the Lost Ark, I think).  Quick flashback:  I had made the acquaintance of this Bedouin guide, aptly named ‘Casanova Mohamed’ while walking up to the Monastery.  He was comical, and full-of-character, ambling alongside me as I walked up the stone staircase, since I had lost Daniel and Lindsay for a bit.  We stopped to have a tea, and I watched while he and an artisan named Rosy lined each others’ eyes in kohl, and had a smoke.  I have to say, the men here wear kohl, and it looks stunning, with their long sooty eyelashes and dark eyes.  I may have moved to the pro-mens’ makeup camp.  Anyway, as he shadowboxed me up the mountain, calling out to tourists in Japanese, Korean and French, I had to clarify that he was simply accompanying me up the mountain, but not ‘portering’ and thus expecting a tip at the top.  He was quite offended by this, but I said that if my friends agreed to the donkey ride, we would give him our business. 

Daniel opted out of the donkey riding business (smart guy) but Lindsay and I agreed to pay 7 JD each to ride to the Place of High Sacrifice.  The donkey ride was great at first; we met Casanova’s family, had tea with them, saw the caves where many Bedouins still live… but as we reached the Place of High Sacrifice, the sun was rapidly starting to set.  I tried to diplomatically point out that we should be heading back, when Casanova flew into a ‘Don’t you think I know what I’m doing?  I am the Guide!  You want to be the Guide?  Fine, show the donkey where to go then!’type of mood.  He had also become recalcitrant, and surly because (and this I found out only after 30 minutes of prying) I had chided him by saying, “You’re bad” (as a joke) when he had the donkey cross a high place on the mountain, instead of having me hop off.  He interpreted this as me saying he was a 'bad Bedouin' reinforcing the stereotype that they are no-gooders who drug tourists' tea before carting them off to mountain-cave hideaways.  He became sulky and moody thereafter, and it sucked all my chi trying to get him back in a good mood so he didn't tantrum off and leave us stuck in the mountains.  Lindsay’s guide, at least, was normal, but as we started heading back to the Visitors’ Centre by the “short cut” to arrive before dark, he admitted to Lindsay, “I don’t really know where we’re going.  I don’t know this way.  But we’ll just follow the donkey.  The donkey knows.”  [The donkeys knew shit.]  In fact, the only thing the donkeys knew was that they are afraid of heights.  Lindsay’s almost bucked her off, and mine kept jumping at the sight of his own shadow.  Casanova explained that the donkey was simply jumpy at seeing his own shadow and I asked if that would not in fact be happening a lot more often now that is was nighttime.
The donkey wasn't listening to him at all, despite his snarling 'Heroin! Heroin!" and whipping the donkey repeatedly.  I'm not sure if the donkey's name was 'Heroine' or 'Heroin' but I'm inclined to go with the latter given the donkey's irreverent mood swings and crazy break-aways.

Anyway, when all was said and done, we had the chance to see what many tourists never do (and aren't allowed to): Petra by night, on donkeyback.  To their credit, our guides did not try to charge us more than the original rate at the end of our trails, where we saw a sign warning visitors that the only sanctioned guides are the ones commissioned directly from the Visitors' Centre and they will not be held responsible for the actions of any 'outside guides'.  When we finally did reach the Visitors' Centre (four hours later), I was late for my Turkish massage and rushed off to find Sue, Vicky and Fiona.  I gambled on the wrong Hamman (50/50) and ended up in a bath run exclusively by men, though they tried to reassure me by saying, "The masseuse is a medical doctor".  I booted it out of there to the one down the street, where I found the ladies and spent a blissful hour in the steamroom, on the steamslab, being soaped and massaged by a woman singing in Arabic and combing my hair.

Speaking of hammams and massages, the hotel we stayed at was quaint, but freezing, and when I asked the desk clerk if we could get some heat, he gave me a puzzled look, and said, "You have roommate, yes?"  I concurred with that, and he handed me a bottle of olive oil and said, "Just, you give each other massage to stay warm."  I thought he was joking, but no, that was his serious strategy. He was getting tired of everyone complaining about the lack of heat.  I told him I had only just met my roommate that day and didn't see that happening, and the next day he procured a black wool sweater for me!

These characters aside though, all Jordanians I met were politic, kind, helpful, and normal. And my travelmates were fantastic too:  Lindsay, a funky lawyer from L.A. (who I'm staying with when I go to California) and my donkey-partner-in-crime, Ian, an accountant from Jersey with the Travel Bug.  He's the first one to volunteer for everything, be it jumping in the Red Sea, or climbing the Steps of Penitence in Mount Sinai. Graham, is my fellow Canadian, an army guy with a crackerjack sense of humour.  He earned the nickname of 'Grahamses the First' once we got into Egypt and starting getting to know all the Ramses.  Daniel, a cool dude from Switzerland with an incredible smile; we became each others' photographers during the trip.  Sue and Joe, a fun-loving couple from Australia who brought along these fuzzy koalas to give to people they met during the course of their travels. My roomie, Sandia, an Aussie accountant who's been travelling and working for the last year and has the travel bug as well.  Vicky and Fionia, two funky, artsy Aussies who always had cool surprises for us like Santa Claus keychains at Christmas or a Koala Bear pen for a birthday, and Sheri and Ethan, a couple who are Aerospace Engineers and do research for months at a time in the South Pole (showers are 2 minutes long, and only once a week!) 

In addition to the magnificant Petra,and Madaba, we saw the Promised Land (though, to be honest it looked pretty stark and desolate.  I think if I'd been hiking around for 40 years, I'd expect something a little more like the Costa Rican rainforest, but as Husam pointed out, "Of course, they didn't reach the Promised Land in wintertime) and spent hours Four Wheel Driving and playing in Wadi Rum, following the footsteps of Lawrence of Arabia!  We hiked up the lunar rock formations, did photo shoots in and among the rocks, dune-trekked to the tops of the drifts and then raced each other down, taking huge goblin steps to free our feet from the sand clenches.  We traversed steep rock bridges and ambled back down like crabs, and in the evening, we slept in a Desert Camp with the Bedouins.  Being that it was quite cold, I got to break out my silver safety suit (a la Canadian Tire).  The Bedouins thought I was from outer space and my travelmates got a kick out of me crackling by them everytime I moved.  The Bedouins made this amazing supper in an earthern below-ground oven:  chicken, potatoes and warm bread with hot tea.  They led us in campfire songs and chants, and we had two bonfires going, one inside the caravan tent, one outside, where they read Arabic newspapers, held lively discussions, sang and sipped tea with us.  We slept on carpets in sleeping bags under the stars, and you couldn't even begin to put a dent in your counting if you spent the whole night doing it. The sky was so completely speckled and freckled with millions of stars.

Jordan was, and continues to be an enchanting place for me, a truly remarkable transition place between Sub-Saharan Africa and Egypt.  As I write this, I'm in India, so very behind on the Travel Blog/Logs.  But more coming soon...on Egypt....

Nairobbery

Ah, Nairobbery.  The name isn't arbitrary.  Well, it's all been a little dramatic since arriving in the 'City of the Sun'.  First of all, I decided to save a little cash by staying at the Nairobi Youth Hostel, a converted YWCA, which charges 600 Kenyan shillings (roughly 8 bucks).  You get what you pay for.  Toilets:  nasty.  Sharing with 17 other girls, but I figured I could tough it out for one or two nights after staying at the oh-so-opulent Kivi for a couple of nights of decadence when I first arrived.

I had just nodded off to sleep after seeing the latest Denzel Washington movie ("Unstoppable'.  Is that the latest?  Or six months old?), when I was awakened to the sound of a man shouting, 'Fire, fire!'  Luckily, I was sleeping in my hoody with my wallet zipped into the pocket for safekeeping, so I quickly grabbed my cosmetic bag (only because my contact lenses were in there and I needed to see) and hightailed it outside to the main road, where I could see the huge lick of flames biting the skyline (very reminiscent of Namibia, except that this was night.)  I was imagining my passport and credit cards going up in flames in the safe when the other girls from my dorm trickled towards the road coughing in the acrid smoke, commenting on how fast I had left the dorm and how I was the first one out.  I had to laugh because they had all their luggage with them! (to the chagrin of a 'tsk'ing security guard).  I was wondering where the Fire Department was, especially since the security guards were yelling, "Everybody! Please come and assist!" but I did not leave the main road.  It's one thing in Namibia where there's no fire department, but quite another in the big city; I leave that to the pros.  Eventually, with the aid of the 'First Response Team', and Security Guards, and eight massive fire extinguishers, they were able to put out the fire.  I was told the fire engine had been caught in traffic (believeable, since there was a huge holdup on O'Campo the other day and it took people four hours to drive in from the airport, as opposed to thirty minutes) but when I chatted up the security guard, he told me:  "No we do not call the fire department.  Because we are men.  We fight by ourselves."
I said, "But, what if you can't put it out by yourselves?"
"Then we call the fire department."
"But why wouldn't you call the fire department first?  Just in case? Because by the time you realize you can't put it out, it's too late."
Shaking my arm, "Ah, this is Africa, you have to be strong!"
Following this infallible logic was the manager, ushering everyone back inside (also there was a madman gesticulating wildly out in the street and shouting, so we were now inside the gates).  "Come back in.  The fire is out.  These are mistakes caused by man, and they must be solved by man.  Go back to your rooms and relax!" Hah!  Not to mention the fact that I found out that the fire was caused by a live wire meeting a petrol leak in the already-closed kitchen.

I went reluctantly back to my room, where the other girls and I dubiously inspected the fire escape (a long metal ladder made of cylindrical iron bars that cut into sock feet...I can barely manage the ladder to my top bunk!)  I tried to reach my cab driver (loud party music) and my previous hotel (no answer) so reluctantly took out my contacts and climbed back into bed.  No sooner was I drifting off when all the power suddenly cut.  I rocketed out of bed again, popped in my contacts and went to investigate.  Well, wouldn't you know it, things were sparking up again, so they had to cut the power.  Yet another reason to call in the experts.  This time, I packed up all my stuff and headed straight to the Kivi to see if there was room at the Inn.

The next morning, I decided to head for town in one of the matatus.  Now, the matatus are not the recommended form of transport for Nairobi.  They're crowded, loud, jostly, and play loud Jesus music at top volume.  Which is why I wanted to travel in one.  Since I'd travelled in what are basically matatus all over South Africa, I didn't really see it being a problem.  I had my small changepurse with small bills and change for the matatu and my day pack.  I popped my memory card out of my camera for safekeeping, and tucked my memory card, my wallet and my phone into my zippered pocket, thinking it would be safer there.  I thought if anything, they would go for my bag.  Fuelled by my memories of hotels-on-fire and armed-robberies-at-camp, and knowing I would need to get a ticket to Mombasa that day I had more on me that usual. I took a Visa and a Mastercard because sometimes one works and the other doesn't, and kept some stuff locked up in the hotel, thinking it would be safer on me, because I wasn't about to let myself get pickpocketed...Ha!  Ten minutes later...

So I get in the matatu, and the only seat is in the back, I have to cram through loads of people, but it's cool.  The music is jamming, there's lots of people-watching to be had. I'm sitting next to a clean-cut, well-groomed professional guy, immaculate crisp white shirt, pressed and collared, vested, carrying a large manila portfolio. (My immediate thought was, this guy's a professional, no way he could keep a shirt that white otherwise.  I know, because I've tried.  All my white clothes are grey despite numerous washings.  Of course, as my taxi driver, Francis, comments, "Ai, but muzungu, the money he took from you buys his next white shirt!)  In hindsight, he was moving in a weird way, but I thought that was because he was trying not to get his portfolio crushed by the throngs of people, as I imagined him on his way to an important presentation.

Then, the mkanga (conductor dude) was telling me to get off, I was arguing, because we were in the middle of traffic, he was talking to the guy next to me in his language, people were getting off, I was crushed anew, the mkanga was getting aggressive with me... so more concerned with my own personal safety and the confluence of traffic, trying not to get killed, I missed that Mr. Clean-Cut swiped my pocket.  The second I was on the sidewalk it kicked in, but by then the matatu was gone, along with everything in my pocket.  Hence the term pickpocket.

As Shiundu later told me, "You wanted your local experience?  You got it."  Whenever I tell people I was robbed in a matatu, they all say, "Guy in a suit with a newspaper, right?"  Close enough.  But it does seem that everyone, locals included has been robbed in a matatu at least once.  The good thing is I had all my photos backed up, extra cards at the hotel, and not much cash.  And no passport.  But the hassle.

I grabbed the first nice person I saw, this unassuming college lecturer, as I later found out, to ask where the nearest police station was.  Thinking about it now, I think I must have overwhelmed the poor guy because he's very unassuming and politic and I was swearing a blue streak, like a beached sailor, not watching my language at all, I was so mad.  Though, I guess I had it coming.  I know better than to carry stuff, but then sometimes after travelling for so long, you get exhausted from being so safe all the time.  I carry the Mastercard, I only find machines that take Visa.  I take the Visa card, I only find machines that take Mastercard.  You leave the memory card in the camera, they take it.  You take it out, they take it.  You leave everything at the hotel, you miss the perfect shot.  You know that runners are the best, but sometimes you just want to wear a skirt and flipflops.  Then that's the day you need to run.  So, anyway, I should've travelled lighter but didn't and you have to give the guy credit:  He identified a market niche, got his target audience, applied a strategy, went in and got his revenue.  Merry Christmas.

Steven was awesome, though.  I really just wanted to know where the police station was, but he took me there himself, lent me his phone, went with me to the Embassy and waited while I used their phonelines and internet to cancel my cards and get emergency ones shipped, and accompanied me back to my hotel.  The hotel staff were amazing too because they pulled strings so I could stay there until my departure (I'd been planning to go to Mombasa and the hotel was fully booked) and seriously discounted my nightly rate.  Shiundu was awesome too as he lent me emergency cash and took me to buy a new phone for 20 bucks, which probably would not have been the price if I had gone alone, but which is probably the price Guy-Fry got for my phone on the street.

The police were substantially less helpful.  It would seem that Muzungu robberies are their source of entertainment and the guy who wrote my report just chortled away as he wrote.  Granted, looking back, some of my suggestions were preposterous, like should I check the garbage cans along Kenyatta and Uhuru for my stuff.  Shiundu called my phone to tell them to just dump the cards somewhere, but of course they could care less.  Anyway, that's why they call the city 'Nairobbery' and I am now a patchwork piece in that quilt.

I've placed myself under house arrest at the Kivi (never warmed to the idea of being a prisoner of Paradise, but sometimes Destiny leads you in strange directions.)  Of course, it's that time of year when up go the fairy lights.  They are strung all over the bushes here.  I just shake my head.  Let me tell you, I did a recon. of the entire hotel and now have mapped the position of every fire extinguisher and fire exit and know exactly how to operate all fire-propellent devices.  I've got a 'snatch bag' beside my bed with all important items tucked inside, and tie the sleeves of my jerseys together just in case I need to go over the balcony (which I try to make sure is on the first or second floor, and over the pool.)

I have to say that being under house arrest for a couple of days gave me an interesting insight into some Kenyan TV programs.  Do you know there's a program called "Fun and Fortune" which consists entirely of a woman making people guess a word hidden in an envelope and call their answer in for cash?  The other day, the topic was "Countries in Africa".  The entire show was a monologue of:  "A country in Africa...but which country is it?  Which country is written on this piece of paper?  53 countries in Africa.  Find an open line and call it in...Zambia?  No, it's not Zambia, but you still win 5000 shillings just for calling in...what about you?  South Africa...not it's not South Africa, but you still win 5000 shillings.  Who will win the grand prize of 100, 000 shillings!"  And this went on for an hour!  An hour!  Still, I couldn't shut it off.  I was so convinced it was Senegal.  The first clue went up:  S.  Second clue:  E.  (It was Seychelles).  At least I didn't waste my airtime calling though.

One good thing about being robbed though was that I met some great and sympathetic people.  Steven was my guardian angel, and guardian, showing me the sights and scnes of Nairobi that I wouldn't have otherwise seen.  We grooved to some local tunes and he was my bodyguard through the crazy streets where traffic is a constant on-flow regardless of the colour of the robot.  I also met a businessman lunching at my hotel one day, Simon, who took me around Nairobi and introduced me to the Westlands club scene.  A couple of days after meeting Stephen, he invited me to accompany him out to the countryside to visit his mom in Kitua.  Being a little gun-shy still from the matatu incident, I was debating the wisdom of doing a road trip with some guy I'd only known a couple of days.  Of course, later I find out that his gram (who he also went to visit) is 125 years old!  And Steven brings this up in casual conversation as though it's no big deal. "Yes, she is aged," he says.  At first I thought that must be an estimation or a San Bushman'esque situation where the person is unsure of their age...but the math adds up and it seems she might actually be that old.  Steven told me she's wrinkly and stooped and wants a dress for Christmas and a long bar of Sunlight detergent soap that she can cut off in sections like Christmas bark for the neighbors who do her wash.  Four years ago, she was walking along the road and encountered a cow, tied to the post by the road.  The tether was long and granny was close.  Cow headbutted gran and then proceeded to stamp her, but one of her grandsons rescued her and brought her to hospital, bruised but not broken.  And I could have met her!  I HATE playing it safe!

Anyway, Kenya concludes my final chapter in Africa and I am now off to the Middle East...Jordan!!
Jenn









 

 

Mr.Cheese-on-Toast and the Malawi Wowi

Now, that I've finished my first Intrepid Trip (I now know why rock stars need rehab after they go on the road), I thought I'd sit back and recap some of the hilights.  I did the teaser last time about Mr. Cheese-on-Toast and the Pink Tam, so thought I'd lead with that one.

The Beach Boys
On Lake Malawi, there are plenty of beach boys.  They've named themselves with such monikers as "Donald Duck", "Destiny", "Mel Gibson", "Sugar Daddy" and "Big No No".  Generally, when you leave your camp compound to go on a village tour, they attach themselves to you like barnacle guides, two to a tourist, coaxing you to buy batiks, hand-carved key chains, bao games, and maps.  My two guys, hopping along like the devil and angel, one on each shoulder, were Gift (being that he was the first boy to arrive in a long line of girls) and Cheese-on-Toast (he claims his mama gave him that name).  Cheese-on-Toast had a very cool tam, black with green and red stripes that I coveted. I asked if he had any for sale, but the ones for sale were 'same, same but different' and I wanted 'the one off his head', so I paid far too much for a wood-carved bao game and got it tossed in.  The next day, at another camp on Lake Malawi I spotted another tam that I coveted on the head of a beach boy floating in Lake Malawi.   I think they just look extra good on dreaded hair and cocoa skin;  I never covet the tams I see in the shops!  This one belonged to Mr. Bob.  In retrospect, it looked awesome against his dark skin, but it kind of makes me look like an ice-cream cone.  Still, I love it.  Now, there's a special something, home-grown and medicinal in Malawi that they like to call "Malawi Wowi" and our boy was high-strung on.  He would float implaccably in the lake and then spout random sayings like, "Fantastic.  Mr.  Bomb-bastic."  or (my personal favorite) "Lover's Nest" a propos of nothing.  I tried to get a conversation going, asking if he could trade me his tam for something, but he'd bust out with, "I hate you...no...I love you.  No bilhazia here.  Other side."  Eventually, we wrangled a deal wherein I gave him a Canadian tee-shirt and doo rag for his hat.  And 500 Kwacha.  ("For yarn for the next one".)  So, even stoned, he landed that deal.  But there you go. I got my tam.  The beach boys are also infamous for their illicit beach bonfires, 'offside, man, offside', which the security guards bemusedly tolerate.  However, I left Shiundu snore-dozing off in their company one night, while I took a walk aways down the beach with the restaurant cook and Acacia girl and he later said, "What were you thinking, leaving me with the beach boys!  I could have been robbed blind!  Next time, wake me up!"

The Delta
I think the Okavanga Delta is one of my favorite places on the trip.  You cruise into the delta in mokoros, these dug-out canoes (formerly made from hollowed-out trees, but these days made from plexi-glass), poled by river guides.  They actually teach you how to pole them if you want. Let me tell you, it looks easy, poguing down the river like a New Orleanian in the bayou, but testing it is another story.  Those things are wobbly as hell and you have to balance in them, standing up.  My river guide, John, was coaching me:  "Deep left!  Close right!" but eventually I just had to go by instinct.  I found this way of doing a bastardized J-stroke, sticking out my bum and asked John if I could just do it that way.  He said absolutely not, but then later modified it to:  "You know what?  Somehow it works for you.  Go with it."  Then, I made him incorporate it into his poling on the way back.  We poled through the Delta to a little enclave where we jumped out to go swimming, and then poled out further where the hippos cluster together like stepping stones, opening their huge maws in angry threat displays.  You have to make a lot of noise to put them on high alert, as some of the guides have had the nasty experience of poling on top of a hippo and having their mokoro promptly split in two, rocketing them into the air.  Hippos have been 'Disneyfied' as indolent, slothful, chubby cartoons, but in reality they are responsible for more tourist deaths than any other animal.  They rival Usain Bolt on speed and their acceleration rate (they are standing up in the water, contrary to common belief) is fierce.  One night, I was heading from my tent to the ablution blocks and I heard a hippo roar like that.  That's your first warning.  I couldn't tell if he was in the Delta or not, but I hightailed it like never before back to my tent.  Shiundu's right.  If it's a short call, pee outside the tent.  The next morning, I was awoken by gunfire.  It was a security guard firing a warning shot to an elephant who'd encroached the borders of the camp.  Actually, a girl from one of the Acacia Overland trucks was showing me pictures of some elephants who'd trashed their campsite after draining the swimming pool of water and trying to get at the pipes where they could still smell water underneath.  They subsequently trashed the restaurant and rondavel of the camp as well.  You don't mess with elephants.  In the evening, we poled the mokoros into the Delta to watch the sunset.  Rhonda was with us on that leg of the trip and she's a raw foodist (vegetarian for the purposes of the trip) who found some kind of plant floating in the Delta.  She asked if it was okay to eat, and I'm not fully sure she got the okay on that in retrospect, but started munching it right out of the water, and brought back a handful as a side salad for us at dinner that night.  Rhonda was notorious for collecting up bits and pieces of nature.  During one of the many pit stops on the truck for a bush pee (you know, you start the trip all high-maintenance with pocket tissue and hand sanatizer, brushing your teeth with bottled water, applying Deet like it's holy water, and by the end of the trip it all goes "Lord of the Flies"); anyway, Rhonda scampered back onto the truck after her "short call" never so happy as to have discovered some elephant dung by the side of the road.  Back in Swakopmund (the German town where we never saw any people.  Ever.), Rhonda and I had visited a healer on one of the village tours, who was extolling the virtues of elephant dung as a homeopathic medicinal cure-all.  Because elephants are such picky-eaters (unlike baboons) pretty much everything that goes through them is pure and natural.  Thus, their dung is pure and natural also, but having gone through the digestive process, has now been 'treated' in the natural lab that is their stomachs.  So elephant dung is like gold.  As such, Rhonda picked it up and housed it in a plastic baggy in a locker for the rest of the trip, spawning such jokes as, "Make sure you take all your shit with you when you leave, Rhonda.  How are you gonna get that shit on the plane?  Don't forget your shit!"  Ah, it never gets dull.  I learned a lot of cool endeavors from Rhonda, like walking down a path with my eyes closed and being completely aware of my body in space and trusting its movement, or walking without ever looking down at my feet.  (We do that a lot, subconsciously.)  One thing that made me chuckle though was in Livingstone when I was itching to go for a run.  We'd been warned by Shiundu not to go for any walks or runs outside of the campsite as it was notorious for elephant tramplings and bandits.  In fact, one girl from the Acacia truck attempted this, and was promptly robbed by two machete'd bandits.  When she didn't cough up the goods right away, but instead decided to defend herself (she was a former Army cadet) they sliced her open until her intestines popped out (urban exaggeration, maybe but she ended up in hospital and as Shiundu likes to finish off his horror stories to us, "That was the end of her trip."  It always makes me laugh because I picture Harold Van Buuren, the coloured judge on 'So You Think You Can Dance South Africa' saying in his Afrikaaners accent to the dancers who don't make it:  "This is the end of your journey." 
Anyway, suffice it to say I had no intentions of jogging at that camp.  But then Rhonda, who is very spiritual and surrounded by orbs and guardian angels that the rest of us lack, piped in with, "Why don't you just take a little walk about 500 metres, where the village paths branch off?" 
I said, "But what about the wild elephants and bandits?"
She responded with:  "Just surround yourself with a white light.  That's what I did." 
All jokes aside though, I think Rhonda must have telecast me with a white light when I saw that lion, so it didn't eat me!  And I so miss the way she turned her tent into the massage tent and gave everyone massages with all these creams and lotions she'd bought.  She had us on a timed list, all the clients, crew and Okavanga Delta guides!

Muzungus
'Muzungu' is a Swahili word for white person, and it really makes me laugh when we're on a village tour or something and people call out 'muzungu' really excitedly.  It's like they're on a game drive and we're the elusive leopards. One day in Marangu (or Karatu?), one of these little villages, there was a little boy about two years old, toddling through the mountains in striped pygama bottoms with saucer-wide eyes, and in his loud little voice, he clamoured "MUZUNGU!  MUZUNGU!  Mami, Mami, (tugging insistently on his mom's arm), MUZUNGU!!!"  Sometimes the little kids tell us, "Give me my money."  One day, back in Spitzkoppe, one of the girls was giving a sob story to Bernhard about how she needs money because her dad is an alcoholic and beats her.  Ursula was cautioning him against falling for that violin sonata.  When we returned to the camp and were tipping James, our guide [for those of you from the Intrepid trip reading this:  I know I call everybody 'James' when I can't remember their name, but he really was called James] he made the connection and laughed, "Yeah, that was my daughter."  Some kids were calling out something to us in Swahili on one of these walks and when I asked our guide what it meant, he said, "Oh, they want your empty water bottles.  Then they fill them up with water and pretend they're tourists."

The Big Five and other Animals of Note
During the course of our overlanding, we've been to Etosha National Park in Namibia, Chobe National Park in Botswana and the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania.  We've seen so many, many incredible things.  I can't count the number of animals I've seen (at one point I purchased a book of all the animals in Etosha and was checking them off, but the book has changed hands so many times, I've lost track of it.)  However, some of the highlights were seeing all the animals clustered around the night watering hole in Etosha.  It's amazing to see the watering hole floodlit as a silent auditorium for all the different herds and flocks of animals clustered to drink together.  That said, there is an inherent hierarchy and some of the Alpha animals on the foodchains will cause the minions to scatter in a hurry, but at one point we saw wildebeest, springbok, giraffes, warthogs and zebras all harmoniously drinking together.

Chobe was amazing in that we did an evening river cruise (I think I was on a 'sober day' that day, but the River Guide encouraged us to drink to our heart's content to see twice as many animals as everyone else.) and at one point saw seventeen crocodiles glistening along the river bank (well, Shiundu did.  I spotted seven, and maybe three of those were actually logs).  We also saw a myriad of elephants, and a scene I'll never forget:  A mama elephant giving her baby a mud bath.  Because of the time of evening, the mud shimmered and sparkled and the elephants looked gracefully playful, splashing shining mud on one another, like they were dancing.

The Serengeti was incredible.  Mainly by the toilets of our campsite!  I remember on the game drive I did in South Africa two years ago, I didn't see a single cat!  On this safari, we saw leopards, cheetahs and lions!  Leopards and cheetahs are completely elusive so that was a thrill I didn't expect to have.  When we saw the cheetahs, they were placidly bookending a rock, one posture mirroring the other.  The first time we saw a leopard, we only saw it's tail and bum, queuing down the tree, but the second sighting was full flegded.  I'm reading "The Rainbow Diaries" and it talks of a guide who, after the game drive, propped his back and gun against a tree to have a smoke and was subsequently attacked by a leopard hidden in the tree (as Shiundu says:  "Never trust the bush!").   The clients panicked, hopped in the vehicle and drove it back to camp.  By the time the rangers returned the leopard had devoured the guide's shoulder and back.  Oh, we also saw a zebra carcass, haunting in the fact that it was skeletal aside from its nappy mane and one fully intact striped leg.  We saw two hyenas splitting a kill.  They tore the flank in half and each ran off with their share in their maws.

For me, the most exciting thing (I hadn't seen my campfire lion yet) was creeping our vehicle up close to an entire family of lions, recoiled under a shady tree.  The two cubs were snuggling and Mom and Dad were just reclining nearby.  Also, we saw two lions mate!  During the season, they mate once every 20 minutes, but we actually had to wait 35 minutes.  We were laughing a moment later though, because the whole process took exactly 3 seconds.  A few minutes later, the male lion tried to mount the female again, and she swatted him away.  No wonder.  Poor girl.

In Livingstone, I got to actually interact with the animals. I rode an elephant, went on a walk with lion cubs, where we got to watch them tumble and bumble with each other close up, and could pet them, and rode a horse, bareback into the ocean and swam with it.  That was a surreal experience.  It makes me laugh because every time I go horsebackriding in Africa, it's a bit of a mindspin.  I say I'm 'Intermediate' because I've ridden about twenty times in my life, but there are people in our group sometimes who have never ridden at all.  Then the guides say things like, "Who wants to canter?  Okay?" Meanwhile these riders have no idea what that even is, and even I need a refresher on how to trot and can barely canter.  There are of course, no instructions, just "Let the horse know who's boss" and it's English riding style here anyway, which mixes me up.  There we were in the water, and one of the girls who was quite new to horseback riding and had been traumatically capsized by one as a youngster, was riding bareback up a steep dune on one of the horses and was falling right off the side.  It was comical, yet alarming.  Anyway, she righted herself in the end and we had a good chuckle up at the bar.  TIA.  Still, the experience of riding bareback in water at sunset is like nothing else.  You really have no way of getting purchase on the horse (that I know of, or have been instructed.)  It's a bit like riding a giant caterpillar.

At one point, in the first part of the trip, we had five people (in the second leg, just three, and in the third leg, six), but when we had five people, Shiundu jokingly assigned us each an animal from the Big Five:  Bernhard was the Buffalo because he's like the head of the Bachelor Herd, being the only male, and knows how to bulldoze to get a deal.  We nicknamed Bernhard 'Let's Make a Deal Man' because wherever we were, Bernhard could make the best deal, even where there was no negotiating welcomed.  Free wifi in the rurals?  He could find it.  They offer free upgrades at some of the camps, and Ursula was craving one after a lot of camping on rocks, but Bernhard wasn't seeing the deal in that.  I still had my tent up at that point (I had to save the upgrades for later. Like now, I've been at this luxury hotel 3 days.  Must. Find. Backpackers.)  Bernhard said, "Why isn't Jenn falling for this upgrade stuff?"  Still, he managed to get the upgrade, get a deal, AND get a cooler installed in there with cold beers!  I need him here in Nairobi.  This guy tried to sell me "skim milk" the other day when it clearly said "thick and creamy whole milk" on the side. And he wouldn't let it go.  Ursula was the lion because she's strong and regal and like the den mother looking after us and protecting us, keeping us in line.  Rhonda was the elephant because she collects all the elephant dung! and can walk among the wild elephants, unharmed.  Sandra was the leopard, cool and elusive but swift like the leopard with incisively witting comments.  Then I was the Rhino because apparently I'm independent and like to do my own thing (the girls on this leg of the trip were teasing me because I'm always the last one to finish eating, the last one to get the final picture on the walk or practise Swahili, the last one off the booze cruise (because Ross and I decided to swim back to shore, while the others sailed it.  I blame the Konyagi) but I mix well with the other animals.

The other theme phrase from the trip (in addition to TIA) has been "Go Down".  On the first (second, and third) legs of the trip, the crew (Shiundu, Henry and Lelei) had us all watch this movie on their i-phone called "Mr. Bones".  It's a South African flick, and one of the missives from Mr. Bones is the warning 'Go Down' which he shouts right before imminent danger.  But no one ever listens.  Hence the phrase, "Why must you bleed before you listen!?"  When you think about it, this phrase can be applied to any situation.  The nut hailstorm onto the pool:  Go Down!  Armed robbers entering the campsite:  Go Down! The thatch collapsing under fire, and men still up on the roof with water buckets:  Go Down!  (BTW, since that fire, I've seen far too many ablution blocks with petrol tanks hooked up to the thatch roof for hot showers.)  In additon to the "Go Down" litany, Henry also comes up with his own Henry-phrases.  He's notorious for saying "Tomorrow never dies.  That's why there are seven days in a week, Monday up to Sunday."  Henry always has a smile on his face, even when he's muttering "Bloody Mzee" or telling us to chop smaller.  One day he was stressed out by the clients' food demands and he said, "Somedays you tries your best, but at the end of the day, it's all shit."  But he was still smiling.  He has tutored me now on the breakfast shift and I have graduated from pancake, french toast and fried eggs 101.  He's such a chill, easy guy but after one particularly gruelling day in the Delta we were chatting in the bar hammocks and he chatted about two hours straight. Later, when I went up to the bar to settle my tab, and saw all the tick marks next to Henry's name, I knew why!  Cooking for so many different people from different cultures and backgrounds has got to be a huge challenge.  Also, Lelei, our driver, quit smoking this trip.  I think he's on Day 30 or something of not lighting up.  Also a huge challenge in this line of work.
Nightime is pretty tame in Africa, when darkness hits most people go to bed, but we've had a few good nights beach dancing, midnight swimming, playing Trivial Pursuit, telling campfire stories and songs and watching Californication on Shiundu's laptop.  In Chitimba, the owner rescued two fallen owls and they bopped their heads 360 degrees to the music.

Now that our 45 day Overlanding is over, I'm flying solo in Nairobi, on a bit of a low.  Let me tell you, there are conmen everywhere. If I hear "Where you from? Canada?  Vancouver or Toronto?"  one more time I might scream.  At one point on Day One, I had a bit of a soft spot for one poor guy and bought him some rice for his family.  Then, in the store, he said, "Also, you buy me some cooking oil." I said, "Hey, you're lucky you're getting the rice!"  Now, my soft spots are all gone.  I am off to the beach to chill-ax.  Tonight.  Night Bus.
Jenn