Uploading chickens onto the bus roof in Burkina Faso
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Tag Archives: africa
Kono mosque at dusk (looking from the balcony of my guesthouse)
along a market street, Freetown – Sierra Leone, 2007
I was on an early morning bus – that departed 2 hours late so we got caught up in the market rush of this main street, as the music of Lucy Dube played on the bus stereo.
NOTE: this rant is only one brief moment of the journey and doesn’t reflect my feelings towards Senegal, Africa, etc, but rather to show that not everyday on the road is great – sometimes things go wrong and also to show my own personal madness and being the honest egg that I am I have included it here …
Here I am enjoying yet again the ambience of another grotty, overpriced hotel room bombarded by traffic from the front and bleeping goats from the back. Non-stop is the noise. Scooters, trucks, taxi, all battered and some really banged up and most bleeching smoke and horns. The clip clop of donkey carts the only soothing sound amid this miracle of noise and smoke.
On a main road; and if I was not here then it’s just mud and puddle, trash and stench and broken sewers, swarms of demented flies and street junk amid people that claims to be the route typical of this town. The place is a fuckin’ mess – like so much of the modern urban world. My guidebook says it’s worth a couple to days to soak up the urban charm – like fuck, more like inhale the hell of filth and hopelessness; having seen a huge chunk of the world I can said that is just another shit-hole equal in elegance to any fucked mess in India or Africa or elsewhere.
Unlike other towns in Senegal - like the mega-friendly holy city of Touba - here the people barely notice you: the lone white face; they seem happy to sleep or sit by the side of the road bored as fuck, watching another day pass.
I mean, as I entered the town I saw a completely naked black man standing in the street with a large limp penis and nobody even looked at him !!! – so what chance do I stand? I swear: I felt black, anonymous. I wonder would nakedness have worked for me? Maybe if I was juggling an elephant – maybe 7 elephants, then all eyes would’ve said - Hi white man.
I chose this cheap hotel cos there was little choice … and at $17 you could do worse – like last night – but here the prices are largely for doubles and thus as I travel solo I could travel cheaper as two: anyone care to join me in a tour of West Africa’s worse hotels? I didn’t think so; so long, MRP, ya sucker.
The bottom line is this: French West Africa is overpriced, uses a currency called the CFA, supported by France, that makes the country for a backpacker often close to European prices at mucher lower standards …
This $20 room here will cost you $5 – 7 in SE Asia; and it will have a fan – it’s hot and humid, a very simple bathroom attached, maybe … or usually a shared squat bog where the other guests are so lazy as not to flush it but leave turds for the next to disperse. Off course, constant noise is included in the price. And for sure – mosquitoes and flies past as the local wildlife (but one look out the window at the traffic will verify much more wild-life as scooters zip and weave endlessly and if your wondering why I’m not describing the scenes outside it’s cos I’ve chained and padlocked the balcony doors close as they don’t lock and the “closed” door now offers a little noise reduction; otherwise you could swear I’m sleeping on the street). Often the water stops when you most want a shower – luckily a bucket of water can be found by the management. So far in Senegal there have been no power outages …
Coming from orderly and clean (sometimes dirty-air) Seoul – Korea recently, it had taken a while to get used to urban Africa again, and I’d forgotten how smelly, wretched and filthy African urban centers can be – mostly the sprawling chaotic suburbs but Mauritania takes all the awards including highest rubbish mounds in streets and more wrecked cars than street lamps awards … But don’t get me wrong: I love Africa.
This is my third time here, and remember I come from New Zealand and so the crap that I spew here now about the state around me is the truth of this small moment: the price I pay to travel, to get local, to see and experience urban Africa as it really is; besides I can’t afford $50 – 100 rooms to lock myself away. This is it; take it, inhale deeply, glad to be here! Will you join me?
Hours later, after a siesta & a meal in a fly-blown bar – fuckers on my face, in my beer – with kitsch painted pics of hip boys and hot chicks, of tribal bare-breasts in jungle and a true African hunting his dinner, I ate chicken shwarma that has now forced itself out prematurely … another rush to the loo and hell, this one tasted so good, well, obviously not that great, that I ate another for dinner at the same place, and had a few of beers.
I get home to this room along the dusty, dirty, hectic streets and a few people finally notice that I’m juggling elephants and say, Hi white man. Bonjour, Cava?
Inside my festering suite I undress before the sweats hit in and enter the bathroom to slip savagely on the floor coming cracking down on elbow and ribs and think fuck, I’m okay, what a fall, ouch; lucky I’ve had a few beers to ease the fall. The fall in a puddle without drain; the room a humid, relentless squeal and shit I think maybe it would been best to stay longer at the bar … the hooker in the wheelchair was cute - and she waved to me: will you join me?
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PS: One week later: Have to say that Senegal has been really great but that my ribs still hurt from the fall to the floor and yes, the electricity went down that night I wrote, with a massive thunderstorm – but anyway I’m now staying in a nice hotel – very nice for $30, to use their in-room internet to upload this story, to have A/C, a real bathroom with hot water and towels!, a good bed and much needed sleep. But mostly I’ve waited out the weekend here in Ziguinchor cos the fuckin’ ATM ate my Visa card yesterday morning and I have to wait til Monday to see if I can retrieve it …
The ups and downs of travel are endless fun … the perfect honeymoon: will you join me?
When I first waved back to him I was cautious. Too many strangers in Dakar had ulterior motives, and this guy from the distance seemed to be another. But this wasn’t Dakar. It was the Island of Goree, 3 km offshore of the monster city.
Approaching historic island of Goree, near Dakar
>>> This post has moved – click here
old fortress town of Essaouira
Am sitting here with aspirations to be a (more) complete bum, waking up late towards midday, having an omelette, orange juice and coffee and then a beer and then lying on upon my bed, staring at the ceiling, daydreaming, drinking red wine and sucking hashish cigarettes across the afternoon and evening and wondering about everything and nothing … Been 5 days of this now – on the desert Atlantic coast in Sidi Ifni, and really the past 3+ weeks have been this haze since arriving in Morocco; only the location has changed, as the blur has been constant.
Has taken a bit of software-reprogramming jumping straight into Morocco since leaving my comfortable, easy, dull existence as an English teacher in Korea, and the only continuum is large consumption of alcohol … mostly to enhance the enjoyment of my new life situation and recently partly cos I’m having writer’s block, or simply I can’t be fucked writing. I start a paragraph, a story with good intentions to blog and within 10 minutes it’s like: Why bother? You really wanna read this shit … ?
Anyway, if you’re still reading coming to the mess, bustle, heat, madness that is Morocco couldn’t be different from the calm, orderly, cyber-tech city of Seoul but I knew what I was in for as I was here in 1991 and experienced much beauty and chaos. Now the experience is quieter, away from the north, the tourist centers, the touts, the carpet sellers, the-Hey-mister, friend-need-something?
What I really needed when I arrived was to fuck … but before that happened I spend a week alone, smoking hash in a traditional room of a family town house in Essaouira, my window overlooking the main market thoroughfare across the old walled, coastal fortress town. All I did was eat grilled meat with salad taken back to my room, and stared out the window, drinking beer & red, and smoking up the whole week wondering where I was? Where I’d been? Where am I going next? I was the prefect zombie – mute, relaxed and not attacking anyone – but I’m sure the locals thought me insane: sitting at his window for 7 days, staring at the world.
Okay, I did get out for a few hours – walked around to take some photos, used the internet, talked alittle, bought food, water, alcohol, hash.
Yet the single craziest – they were a few – thing that happened that week from the view from my window, a few meters above the street was this that I wrote at the time:
An old veiled woman is shrieking outside on the street below, screaming at a smiling young man working within a small-scale building site. He can’t stop smirking; meantime she’s throwing stones from the pile of gravel at him, now in the direction of all the young men. It’s crazy, then over. But within minutes she has returned and now grabs a large rock and heaves it as the boys are laughing but yelling a cautious tone – maybe: careful, careful, no, easy lady – as she spits venom and continues the stone throwing assault as others watch as and walk by. I begin to video this scene. I saw the initial clash and it seems that something stones, sand shoveled, a loose beam narrowly missed the old woman and she I assume, said watch out, or be careful, ya trying to kill me? Off which the youth cheekily replied, what’s it matter – you’re nearly dead! Or as I imagined something to this effect as she went crazy.
And crazy she went further – she returned minutes later below my room where it stands above the covered, narrow alley, with a wine bottle and smashed it against the curb. She began throwing shards of glass at the young men; one perpetually smirking – he couldn’t keep back his grin if his life demanded it. She was eventually coaxed away by a middle-aged male … But later returned again, to throw more stones and shout.
>>> VIDEO: watch this crazy incident here
And now back in Sidi Ifni, I feel that’s enough writing … More wine and hash please, waiter.
>>> ENTER art exhibition here (or click image)
Located in the central Ethiopian Highlands they remain one the least recognised man-made wonders of the world, yet once the Medieval rock-hewn churches of Lalibela were known as “The Jerusalem of Ethiopia.”
Within the compound of the church of Saint George – Lalibela
