All the people that say we can't do it. (Third Week of January 2006)

Several of Dean's friends, some of whom work in road construction, and many of the people who we ask for directions along the way have told us that our car will not make it to Congo or thru Congo. A Congolese man at the embassy of DRC was more encouraging and informative; he instructed us to completely change our route into Congo-requiring that we backtrack for nearly four hundred miles-and to drive through a section of his country where the Michelin map does not recognize so much as an unimproved track. This is the first time that we will be completely off of the map.

We have just completed a huge backwards loop through Gabon in order to arrive at its southeasterly border town in the vicinity of Franceville, region of Bongo. The region between the main north south highway and this presedentially favored town does not reflect Gabon's prosperity. A resident of Mbondou, a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, referred to this area as Gabon's "neglected provinces." Just prior to the last round of elections there was a flurry of road construction in the area; as soon as the president finagled his way into seven more years of authority, this construction stopped, long before it was finished. I would wager that four or five of the wood plank bridges that we crossed will become impassible within the month. We had to build ramps, straddle deep holes over running water that were just inches smaller than our wheel base, shovel obstacles clear and physically push and pull the Stingray through awful sections of mud nearly forty meters long-at one point it was necessary to engage the assistance of a dozen village women, a large truck, three tow ropes and our now indispensable hand winch.

People in this region have watched Bongo govern their country since the mid 1960's and they have nothing to show for it. These villages have no electricity and they do not have food available around breakfast or lunchtime for travelers passing through. This lead to some adaptations in our diet. We came to view the carcasses dangling in the roadside wind from prominent wooden poles as essential little blessings.

In the last three days we have eaten porcupine, which is fun to order because you ask for "Porky Pig", smoked "gazelle" which looks more like ratalope and tastes like tender stewed beef (dinner with pasta, breakfast with chili powder, lunch in a sandwich), and something people are calling Pangolay, which was brought to us in its final hours by a nighttime hunter who set it down by its two foot tail to crawl in a wheezing wounded circle. This creature has scales, fur and stumpy little legs. It looks like the lovechild of a diminutive stegosaurus and a badger. It has a foot long tongue and a stomach full of ants; but it is not the ant-eater that anyone I know has ever seen. It cost six dollars and is now soup. We are learning about the animals of the rainforest by eating them.

Only now do we all realize how many culinary opportunities we missed in the countries behind us. I was certain that the smashed flat, brown charred, skewered smoked rodent carcasses waved at our car by small boys were amongst the most nasty things on which someone could chew. But I was wrong. My initial revulsion at street side meat has been overcome by my taste buds every single time, with one exception. That exception would be the jungle maggot kebabs that we accidentally bought at a toll booth in Cameroon. Those things were nasty as hell. I tried to act like they were good so that Tuuli would eat them; but it didn't work because I couldn't smile or act happy and not barf at the same time. All I did was eat all four of the ones on my stick, crunching on their little black heads and working hard to swallow their chewy, toe-nail colored, bitter worm bodies, which ranged in size from cockroach to small turd and were all cooked flat. Somehow, Sean devoured four sticks with genuine pleasure. We kept around Tuuli's unfinished stick to offer to the policemen who pulled us over to ask for money. They were visibly disgusted and let us go much more quickly than usual. We will have to resort to this strategy in the future.
* posted by Nathaniel at 12:30 PM  —  5 comments

Libreville Extended. (Mid January 2006)

The embassy of Angola disappointed us early Monday morning with the news that they would be processing our visas for a full week. There was no way, official or otherwise, to accelerate this process. The embassy of DRC was also going to take a minimum of three days to issue our visas so we were suddenly confronted with two full weeks in Libreville as compared to our expected six days in Gabon. There is nothing to be done in such situations. We hung around our neighborhood, occasionally cooked our own food, caught up with the internet, and looked around for people doing work on HIV/AIDS.

In contrast to the rest of the country, Libreville is full of posters and billboards with messages about AIDS. Bongo, the man just "re-elected" to serve his fifth decade as head of state, has his face all over them. That doesn't make them special. Bongo's face is on everything. I would estimate-conservatively-that at any given moment five percent of Gabon's adult population are wearing a Bongo t-shirt, of which there are more than fifteen varieties. Those not wearing his t-shirt might be wearing dresses made of fabric printed with dozens of his smiling faces or even serving up the family's dinner in special Bongo cooking pots. This does not necessarily indicate his level of popularity; very few people living on or below the edge of poverty will refuse a free shirt and fewer will choose to wear something tatty and old when a respectable replacement is on hand.

Bongo likes control. Everybody working on HIV/AIDS is working under the Projet National Lutte Contre le SIDA (PNLS); their materials and promotions conform to his wishes. Details on his PNLS and a fragmentary overview of the state of HIV/AIDS in Gabon will shortly be available on the HIV/AIDS section of the website.

Our first week in Libreville passed quickly. After collecting our passports on Friday morning, we intended to pack the car and drive to Coco Beach where we could spend the weekend camping and spending no money. We got as far as packing the car. During this procedure, a friendly young French woman named Crystal approached us, since she had been informed by the people on her street that we were English speaking travelers. She has lived in Gabon for nearly thirty years and was quick to inform us that Coco Beach is completely unworth visiting. She shared a considerable amount of valuable information with us and learned a bit about our travels. Then she offered to help. She operates a small hotel behind a large French military base and her English husband, Dean, operates the adjacent restaurant-where they make the best pizza I have tasted in Africa. They opened La Catalina to us, essentially giving us free room and board for five days. Their establishment was comfortable and the food was a much needed and delicious departure from boiled cassava and soggy river fish.

They totally removed the financial stress of remaining in Libreville for so much longer than we had planned and we enjoyed the added benefit of getting along excellently with Dean, who moved to Gabon five years ago. Dean is a former paratrooper from Windsor who is also experienced in driving hearses, cleaning up human remains, bouncing for ruckus nightclubs, sculpting with wood and defending himself. He showed us sides of Libreville that we could neither have found nor afforded, brought our knowledge of military history up to date, called me "Custer", let us watch Star Wars 3, played with us on his playstation 2 and woke me up one morning with a flash bang. He and Crystal helped Gabon to become yet another of the countries that I hope to revisit. When we arrived at the embassy of DRC early Monday morning of our second week only to learn that they would be closed for two days to celebrate Cabila's rise to power, I was almost glad. By that point I was enjoying Libreville.
* posted by Nathaniel at 12:28 PM  —  0 comments

Leaving the Pygmy Village and Heading towards Libreville (Second Week of January)

On the first night of our visit, the village witch doctor informed us that the spirit of the forest would only be comfortable with our continued presence if we purchased local manioc alcohol for the villagers. We anticipated this thirst on our second night and further inebriated the spiritual head, who had woken everyone with shouted abuse at 5am drunk the day thru. By 9pm he was explaining to Tuuli that he was in love with her; he asked her with cloudy eyes what he could do with his feelings. As he rose to touch her knee, he toppled into the spent fireplace. Laughing members of the future generation removed him. He managed to repeat this maneuver twice before our guide lead him back to his wife.

The next morning he was up first, drying two cat sized tobacco leaves on corrugate tin that balanced over the intersection of thick slow burning logs. He mixed the leaves before they had browned with a mouse sized nugget of jungle marijuana and then rolled everything up with graphing paper. He sat under the men’s shelter in the company of the others watching the three of us pack up our tents and our rucksacks, watching us dispute about money, smoking his sloppy joint. Then he shook our hands and watched us go.

It took about three hours to row away from the village, hike through the forest, pass through the larger town of Minvoul and find our car, still parked on the Mayor's front lawn. We sent one of the paddlers with a final gift for the chief: a short sleeved, tied died African suit jacket that we have carried around since Gambia for an occasion like this; this jacket, complete with shoulder pads, was the closest thing to a fruit cake that I have ever been given.

We left Minvoul with the intention of bypassing Libreville and dropping straight through Gabon into Congo; but we had misgivings about the possibility of purchasing visas in Congo for the DRC and Angola. We decided to make some expensive phone calls at the next large town. It was Friday afternoon by the time I got thru to the U.S. Embassy in Congo and the only American on hand was the marine doing security duty at the front desk. He couldn't answer any of my questions; but, he was able to call the duty officer, who called me back at a random Gabonese telecenter perhaps fifteen minutes later. She was similarly confounded by my questions about road conditions, ferries around DRC and specialized car documents, so further telephoning ensued. Few hours of daylight remained when we realized that we would need to abandon our aspiration to reach Congo by Sunday and, instead, purchase our visas in Libreville, a city that we were avoiding on the basis of its reputation for being obnoxiously expensive, overly westernized and boring.

We pulled into Libreville on the following afternoon and tried to avoid getting lost by heading directly for the coastal road. The only hotel in our price range was the Catholic mission; but there wasn't anybody around to show us rooms or discuss pricing. This was frustrating; so we decided to look for cheap food. We were fortunate enough to drive straight into the most energetic and restaurant packed of Libreville's quartiers and word of mouth lead us quickly to a reasonable unmarked hotel. This was Saturday.

Gabonese nightlife was much more authentic, enjoyable and affordable than we had been lead to expect and our hotel was situated directly in the middle of it. Our neighborhood, known as "Louis" fills with traffic around 10pm and remains congested until 2 or 3am; it remains lively until you feel like sleeping. Gabonese women of exceptional beauty and other African women able to pay the staggering cost of Gabon's residency permit pack the nightclubs, admire their reflections and hope their gamble will bear fruit. Dancing with the mirror is an ordinary aspect of African club life. There is much less shyness about dancing and there is no shame about being alone. The more expensive the club, the fewer the men; but that is normal too. The people were talkative, unpretentious, ready to dance and seldom clingy. The more affordable gender balanced nightlife was just two streets away; it featured less dancing and more television.
* posted by Nathaniel at 12:22 PM  —  0 comments

The New Year begins in the rainforest of Northern Gabon:

I thought Sean's strong desire to see the "Pygmies" of Northern Gabon was just another manifestation of his unusual ability to be entertained by little people, so I did not go out of my way to make our visit happen. Thankfully, Sean's indomitable urge propelled us to Minvoul on the outskirts of a large rainforest where we were instructed to introduce ourselves to the Mayor and the Prefect. They registered our intention to visit the forest with officials in Libreville and then introduced us to Maturin who could facilitate our plan.

Maturin is developing an organization called Edzengui that promotes ecotourism within this neglected corner of Gabon; Edzengui is the name that the Baka people have given to the protective spirit of the forest and it is the Baka people who make the work of Edzengui possible. They are one of many distinct tribes that have long been referred to as "Pygmies" by cartographers and people who categorize by height.

The oldest Baka village in Gabon dates back just forty years, when it was founded by people who left Cameroon and Congo to flee from more powerful ethnic groups that crowded them and threatened their way of life. The village where we camped for two nights could be accessed from the nearest town after an hour long hike and a twenty minute canoe ride.

I had not understood that something called a rain forest could actually be more like a tree studded lake or a fresh, slow flowing swamp. Transportation is made possible by dug out canoes that take between seven and ten days to carve out of large hard wood trees. They are steered from the front with their prows no more than two inches from the surface of the water and the sterns rise up almost to dryness in response to the weight of the paddler-this fragile balance is possible because there are absolutely no ripples or wavelets; at all times the water, nearly black, perfectly reflects the forest above.

Plant life crowds in from every direction. The boats draw just several inches of water, but they inevitably grind over submerged trees and root systems, sometimes scraping to a halt on extended obstacles. The paddlers have machetes ready for palm fronds that slump across the narrow waterways or for larger trees that have barred the way. Most of the time however, these are ignored if it is possible to lift them temporarily or lay back flat and glide beneath them. Everything that is cut down may clog the narrow streams. Often when the Baka paddler sees an opening that is growing shut, with river grasses or creeping vines, he will deliberately plow the grasses down or slice at the lianas in his perpetual battle for breathing space. Despite the fact that these are forest dwellers, fish is a staple of their diet.

Jean-Hillaire, who piloted my pirogue for several hours toward a village that received two western visitors all last year spends his days fishing. He pointed out a favorite spot of his and boasted of its dependable bounty. I asked him if he was worried that it would run out of fish if he continued to return to that spot with such frequency. He laughed and said it will have many fish forever, "Even if I come here for ten years, there will always be many fish. There are countless fish in the forest." At several points we saw the sudden flop of somewhat surfacing fish; Jean-Hillaire was paying close attention and planned to return. Fishermen leave nets, small traps or baited hooks, marking their spots with fresh chopped palm branches driven into the riverbed that are almost impossible to see against the backdrop of greenery crowding into the black waters.

Our visit coincided with the dry season when the water level is one or two meters below normal. Far fewer paths were open to the navigator and they were more treacherous; Sean's boatman broke an oar while pushing aside resistant underbrush and sprung a leak in his boat while floating over sharper logs. The relative scarcity of water forced us to moor our boats a solid hour's walk from the second far-flung village that we sought. After that point we took our shoes off and waded through thigh deep puddles, sinking to our shins through rotten branches and into soft warm mud; less enjoyably we snared our feet on strings of soggy thorn and stumbled over roots that were obscured by the mud clouds churned up by those who walked in front. The only environment I know that strongly resembles this one is the Degoba system. I emerged with feet scratched red and pierced to gentle bleeding. Thankfully, the doxycycline that I take as a daily prophylaxis against malaria prevents my cuts from becoming infected by rainforest bacteria and other tiny evils.
* posted by Nathaniel at 10:40 AM  —  3 comments

Old Year's Day. Parting shots at Cameroon:

Every year, Transparency International prepares a corruption index of countries and organizations. Just before our arrival in Cameroon, they judged its police force to be the most corrupt organization in the world. There is stiff competition for that dishonor. We were ticketed for eating bread while driving a vehicle. We were told that it was unsafe to have backpacks inside the vehicle. We were told dozens of false and vexing things about our factually unimpeachable documents. We were given an expensive and ludicrous parking ticket and we spent hours talking with the unscrupulous neon jacketed task force for road safety and pre-Christmas bribe collection.

As we walked through Yaounde, Sean asked me, "Do you ever look around and think that one out of every eight people here has AIDS and then try to guess which ones?" I wasn't thinking of that at the time; I was deciding whether or not I should buy a pair of second hand Chuck Taylor's from a roadside vendor. I confessed to guessing, generally, that especially skinny, unwell looking people are HIV+ and not thinking of the unobtrusive ones scattered throughout. The AIDS rate should be climbing by a few percentage points as we cross each new border. I hate remembering the staggering HIV prevalence while out at night with young fun-seeking people. I am also growing tired of hearing them say things like "We are going to die anyway. Nobody is afraid of AIDS" and "You don't eat a banana with the peel on it" in order to bolster a fatal nonchance.

We were looking for an internet café and having little luck. Sean spoke again, "This trip has gone on too long. It was not supposed to become life." Our estimate of six to eight months no longer seems realistic and this extended no-privacy festival can be draining for all of us. It is a credit to the people we meet and the places we visit that we are still making our way forward. We are now fuelled primarily by the friendliness of our hosts, the richness of our experiences with isolated native populations and the expectations and well wishing of our friends and supporters. We have no reliable way of gauging how useful the publicity that we provide has proven to the NGOs that we have attempted to help.

In Cameroon for the first time in more than one hundred and fifty days we stayed at a hotel with a star. It was recognized by a tourism authority; it had an air conditioner and a television. We watched music videos and the BBC for several hours and then slept in unprecedented comfort-the two of us who weren't sleeping on the floor. Naturally, there was no hot water. There is never hot water.
* posted by Nathaniel at 10:33 AM  —  0 comments

Christmastime in Duoala.

Christmas did not loom in Duoala. There were occasional strings of glaring colored light, a few green tinsel strands and numerous well tended streetside piles of donated animals discarded by families in the west. Like leftover clothes and other paraphernalia, they find their way to markets in the developing world where they can be sold more cheaply than locally produced goods. Aside from these random splashes of Christmas the only sign of the season was a version of jingle bells broadcast incessantly on Cameroonian television, the chorus of which sounded like "Big red balls, Big red balls" and, because of that, never got old.

We were under the priceless care of Francois for the duration of our stay in Duoala. He put us into contact with modest African run NGOs that are doing exemplary and difficult work and he lead us to Duoala's world class grilled fish like only a local could. He and his wife, a regional expert in preventing malaria through specified diet, opened their home to us and fed us a number of complete, nourishing and delicious meals that we sorely needed.

On Christmas Eve he took us to a partially completed entertainment complex that is being designed by one of Cameroon's richest men, Kadji. Kadji is in the early stages of taking Cameroon by storm with a business model that combines very affordable fast food and dirt cheap pints of draught beer, all served over the counter of a small grocery store of useful items-no signs, no labels; his places are painted blue. His entertainment complex occupied dozens of acres and can be accessed for just six dollars per person per day. That entitles the visitor to access a series of swimming pools (one of which boasts a sixty meter water slide), tennis courts, football pitches, bumper cars, an arcarde full of free games (including about ten televisions hooked to well stocked playstation 2s), a room full of trampolines and every possible variety of inflatable circus game. The bowling alley, paintball facilities and go carts are being finalized.

This park was absolutely disorienting. Sean and I wondered from game to game, strapping into harnesses and navigating bouncy obstacle courses under nobody's supervision. Nobody bothered us with concerns about our health and safety and we enjoyed ourselves until we were completely exhausted. We followed this improbable early Christmas gift with grilled calamari so fresh it was not even slightly rubbery, large spicey grilled bass, and skewered prawns the size of a baby's arm. After driving to see the spent lava of Mount Cameroon's latest eruption and a university town a fair distance up the mountain's slopes, we returned to get our pre Christmas sleep.

But I was just pulling out of a mild week long flu that had kept me from seeing Duoala at night time and there was a remarkably loud outdoor party within distracting earshot of our hotel. Tuuli was sleeping and Sean was trying to. I made sure that he could not by stubbornly requesting that he have a Christmas Eve beer with me to celebrate my dawning wellness. Then we started playing poker, then WWF wrestling appeared on the hotel bar's television and distracted us completely with its abject stupidity. Eventually we decided it would be best to visit the nearby party which still sounded massive at 2am. We were disappointed by a dissipating, excessively youthful crowd and the clear signs that the organizers were already cleaning up. We had made the effort to put on sociable clothing and leave the hotel and weren't interested in walking directly back, so we asked the bouncers if they knew where everybody would be going next.

Douala has an exceptionally bad reputation for muggings and nightlife crime; so when the bouncers gave us their recommendation, we drew attention to how lame their party was and invited them to join us. They accepted, thereby becoming our personal security. In the small hours of morning we found ourselves on Joy Street in the company of thousands of celebrating people, discovering that one of our new friends was the weightlifting champion of Cameroon, drank malted vitamin drinks, ate raw eggs and wouldn't tolerate anyone bothering us, which anyone quickly understood.

After a while we emerged from one of the lively clubs and were floored to realize that the sun was thoroughly up. The streets were positively full of people who hadn't slept; they wore glittering hats and ran around yelling "Merry Christmas", which it was. We caroused in their midst for a while longer and then had a delicious riverside breakfast of pounded manioc chew balls in creamy sauce with fish boiled in seasoned broth (eighty cents a plate). We then bid our friends goodbye and returned to the hotel in time to find Tuuli preparing to leave the room and begin preparing traditional Finnish Christmas foods.

Francois was delighted that we were able to get a taste of Duoala's nightlife so he didn't mind that we showed up for Christmas lunch at 3pm. Just in time, as it turned out. Little more than a week remained of our month long Cameroonian visas and we still had to travel to Yaounde and acquire visas for Gabon and Congo. We left the next morning, armed with an indispensable detailed map of our route into Yaounde as rendered by Francois, who is willing to bet his car that we are going to reach Djibouti.
* posted by Nathaniel at 10:28 AM  —  0 comments