The Universal Language Of Beer

DAY 164: I've discovered that waiting around for my safari to start in Windhoek during the rainy season for a couple of days isn't so bad -- there's always beer.

Just outside Windhoek are the Namibian Breweries, the fairly new beer-making factory built in 1987. This newer brewery replaces the former one in town and produces ten beers -- including Windhoek Lager, Windhoek Special and Tafel Lager -- all under strict German purity standards, using ingredients imported from Germany. With these strict German beer-making laws in place, Namibian Breweries also produces the German Beck's and the Dutch Heineken. They also produce and bottle schnapps, tonics and beverages of Pepsico.

MY TRANSPORT, ORGANIZED BY OUTSIDE ADVENTURES, was driven by Ephram, a middle-aged Windhoek native who sometimes referred to himself in the third person. He told me about the segregated times in Namibia's past -- before a black man could go on such a tour of a brewery.

"It was terrible," he said. "Luckily, Ephram was not shot."

During the turbulent years, Ephram was a sort of modern day male Rosa Parks, entering "whites only" establishments, knowing that men are men and money is money, no matter what colors they are.

"I tell them, if the whites use different money than the black people, then fine, but the black people use the same money as the whites." The money, he continued, was produced and printed by blacks and even the buildings of the establishments were constructed all by blacks -- so why wouldn't they be allowed to use them?

Things have changed in Windhoek since then -- although a lot of prejudice still exists today in one way or another. At any rate, Ephram's anecdotes and history lesson passed the time until we arrived at the parking lot of the beer plant.

THE NAMIBIAN BREWERIES PLANT was a beautifully landscaped factory on the outside, with freshly cut lawns and gardens. Inside the modern office building, which was as sterile as a hospital, I was greeted by Loureen the Namibian Breweries tour guide. I thought it was just going to be the two of us until we were joined by a big school group of about twenty late-teens and a teacher.

Loureen led us around the plant, from the big mixing tanks and hoses to the filtration room to the big fermentation silos outside. From there, we saw the motorized assembly line (picture above) where beverages were bottled by machines like in the introduction to Laverne & Shirley -- if it wasn't so much security, I would have tried to stick a glove on a bottle.

I was sort of the outsider of the group since everyone else spoke to each other in either Afrikaans or some other tribal dialect. I figured they might have taken me for a lone Japanese tourist since I didn't say much and just shot away with my little Japanese digital camera. One girl was suspicious of me and asked if I was one of the tour guides or on tour like they were. I told her I was just a tourist.

WHILE THE PROCESSES OF BEER-MAKING ARE INTERESTING, they are not more interesting than the processes of beer-drinking. When the factory tour ended, Loureen brought us to the bierkeller, the company bar, which was out of place in the modern building; it had an old-fashioned wooden German motif. Loureen transformed from tour guide to bartender so that we could sample the fruits of the breweries' labor. While the students gathered around the bar, Loureen asked me first what I wanted to try.

"Well, what do you recommend?" I asked, revealing my American accent to the class. Eyes lit up. "I've tried the Windhoek and the Tafel, what else is there?"

"I can give you the Hansa draught."

"Sure."

"A big glass or a small one?"

"Uh," I started, feining the hestitation. "A big one."

"A big one!" I heard from across the bar. One of the African guys was in full agreement with me. His mates smiled. As I sat at the end of the bar like Norm Peterson on Cheers with my big glass of Hansa draught, the curiosities of the others grew.

"Where are you from?" the professor asked me for the class.

"New York," I answered.

The class was in awe. One guy -- a really effeminate one -- introduced himself as a singer and dancer as if I was some big New York talent scout. (There was nothing I could do for him, although if you are reading this Blog Mr. Simon Cowell, come on down.)

BEER IS A GREAT ICE BREAKER because the more we "sampled" drinks, the more we broke down the cold barriers of prejudice. I thought they might have mistook me for Japanese, but in fact, some of them thought I was one of the locals in the "coloureds" race. I thought they were so young they were probably underage high school students, but they were actually college students of legal drinking age.

Eventually everyone got a taster -- and by taster I mean a full-sized drink in the first of several rounds of beer -- on class time too nonetheless! While I sampled different beers (Windhoek Special is my favorite, with Hansa draught in a close second) I chatted with Tulongwe, Lizel and some other Namibian girls who told me the whole story of the class. Although each of them had come from different areas of Namibia, Angola and Zambia, they were all students in an international university based out of Windhoek to learn the business of tourism. Tourism in Namibia, like in most developing nations, is a major industry that brings millions of needed foreign money into the country. Being in the program had its perks, one of them being field trips to Cape Town, France, Germany and local breweries. (It was Lizel's brilliant idea to go to the brewery for "research.")

"We should do this more often," Tulongwe said to her classmates. I was told this was the first time the class actually went out together in a social way. Beer not only broke the ice for me to meet the class, it also brought them together amongst themselves.

"ANYTHING MORE?" Loureen asked me from behind the bar.

"Everything more!"

She served me another "taster."

In the end, what had started out as a somewhat boring tour about tanks and fermentation turned out to be the start of new friendships. The secret? Beer! Lizel invited me to their class' benefit party that Friday -- inconvienently when I would be on safari already. We swapped e-mails and cell phone numbers and I told them I'd contact them the following week when I got back to Windhoek to see if anything was going on. Perhaps it'd be the next time they'd hang out socially again. Perhaps it was just another excuse to drink more beer.

Ephram came to pick me up so I bid farewell to my new Namibian, Angolan and Zambian friends at the bar. Ephram drove me back to the backpackers where I stumbled back through the gate. Needless to say, I was pretty drunk from all the "tasting" -- and all before noon too.

THE REST OF THE DAY I watched some more videos and partook in the nighttime braai of kudu steaks and boerewors (sausage). I'd go into detail about it, but I don't quite remember for some reason...

Making Tracks

DAY 165: There wasn't a cloud in the sky when I woke up that morning in Windhoek, so I called up Simon at Outside Adventures to organize a ride to the nearby Daan Viljoen Game Park. With all the free eggs I'd been eating, I really needed the exercise -- it was better than another day of vegging out in front of the television watching movies yet another day. Simon told me he'd send Ephram the driver by mid-morning.

Jackie, manager of Chameleon Backpackers, came over to reception. She said the clouds were coming in and it might rain.

"Is there really going to be rain?" I asked. "I've already booked a day trip to the reserve."

"Well the reserve is on higher ground," she answered. "Maybe you'll be lucky."

EPHRAM CAME IN THE MINI-VAN and took me the 25 km. away to the Khomas Highlands northeast of the city. I registered at the entrance gate stop and then Ephram continued through the park to drop me off near the main office and trail heads. On the way, we saw an ostrich on one hill and a family of four giraffes on another, way in the distace. Ephram said I was lucky to see them; the giraffes were rarely spotted in the park.

"If you want to closer look, follow the dirt road from the waterhole at the end of the trail," he told me. He said that the giraffes probably wouldn't move from the spot we saw them.

DAAN VILJOEN GAME PARK IS A VAST AREA of desert hills and valley and inside its fences are wildebeests, springbok, warthogs and birds -- no big predator cats, making it safe for campers and daytrippers like myself to roam around freely, or so they said at least.

I started down the 1.5 km. trail towards the waterhole and bumped into a fortysomething(?) Canadian woman named Judith. She and her husband had been living and working in Windhoek for the past couple of years and she knew the wildlife of the game reserve quite well. Alongside her were her parents visiting from Windsor, Canada.

I tagged along the three Canadians along the trail that followed a dried up riverbed and eventually brought us to two waterholes, where dams were constructed to control the flow of the water. Amongst the dozen kinds of bugs crawling, flying, chirping and flapping around us where the armored crickets, which where, for the lack of a better term, creepy. About 3-4 inches big, the spider-on-steroids-looking-things (picture above) were just about everywhere on the trail and I was wary not to step on any of them. Luckily they were more afraid of us and ran away when they felt the vibrations of our footsteps on the ground.

Judith was a great wildlife guide for someone who didn't do it for a living. She spotted a lone wildebeest that the rest of us didn't find right away and pointed out the francolin and hornbill birds. She ended her "tour" at the waterhole to go back the way it came. I told her I was going to continue beyond the marked trail to find the family of giraffes.

"Should we be on the lookout for snakes?" Judith's mother asked.

"They're usually pretty timid," I answered. "They stay clear of big traffic areas."

"You know there are two snakes that don't go away when you get near them," Judith said. "The puff adder and the spitting cobra."

"Oh, so just the two poisonous ones."

"Yeah," Judith answered. "But we have friends who have been here for twenty years and can count the amount of times they've seen a snake with their fingers."

The Canadian trio went on their way back and I bid them farewell.

"Good luck," Judith wished me. "Hope you see cool stuff."

"Yes, except for a snakes," I replied. "But I'll be counting them with my fingers."

"When you get to ten, start taking it easy."

"Oh, but I'll be dead."

I CONTINUED ALONE beyond the waterhole, following the dried up riverbed which led me to the dirt road Ephram mentioned -- it was used by the park rangers. I noticed there were several different kinds of footpirnts, mostly of antelope hooves on their way to and from the water. But I noticed another kind of tracks: paw prints with sharp claw marks dug right into the dirt. But I thought this was supposed to be a predator-free park?

Alone and vulnerable, I went up the road in hopes of finding the giraffes. Halfway up a hill, I noticed a sleeping wildebeest about 100 ft. ahead of me -- which woke up startled when it heard me. It stood up, sneered and just stared at me. With its horns on its head -- and the powerful ramming force behind it -- I just heeded Judith's advice to leave alone any animal that's just looks cranky.

"Okaay... leaving now."

I turned back the way I came, avoiding getting lost in the unmarked zone by following my own tracks. I hoped the animal with the claws didn't take notice of me.

AFTER A FRIED CHICKEN LUNCH AT THE PARK'S RESTAURANT, I ventured alone to the longer Rooibos Trail for as long as time alotted. Going solo, my adrenaline was up, especially when I saw the big spiders setting up webs over and between the designated trail. In addition to the creepy armored crickets, there were half-inch thick milipedes around, which curled into spirals when they felt threatened by me.

I hiked up the trail -- avoiding the low rock bundles and hollow trees where snakes are known to hide in -- until I was up on a hill where I lost all the trail markers. I stood at the top for the view and eventually found my way. Disoriented, I started going the wrong way on the trail but finally came to my senses before Ephram picked me up.

After paying my fees (after the fact) to the park office clerk who thought I was Namibian at first glance, I was back in the mini-van with Ephram. He took me back through the park where, on the way we saw a family of wildebeests on the side of the road.

I told Ephram about the paw prints with the claws that I had discovered.

"You are the second person who's told me that," he said. He told me that lately there were rumors that cheetahs had gotten into the park.

It was no matter, I was already on my way out.

THE WEATHER HAD HELD THE WHOLE DAY -- at least in the reserve, which was good news for me. In town it rained for a quick bit -- just long enough to produce a spectacular full-arched rainbow over the city. It was quite an awesome sight and a nice end to a good day outdoors. Any day where you survive possible snake, wildebeest and cheetah attacks is a good one.

South With Samora

DAY 166: I woke up in the wrong side of the bed that morning. I was cranky that I didn't have an extra bag to keep things in storage, plus I realized that my fleece jacket was missing. Whether it was taken by accident, intention or just my own fault I didn't know, but I didn't have time to look or replace it; I was to leave on safari by eight in the morning.

I was also a little cranky thinking about the news from home that Blogreaders markyt and wheat had been friskied by "New York's finest," simply for "fitting the description of a terrorist." For I knew, like them, I didn't physically look like the "typical American" in some people's eyes and that it probably would have happened to me.

"DO YOU UNDERSTAND?" Samora the Namibian safari guide/driver/cook asked me as he was explaining the 7-day itinerary of southern Namibia to me and two other clients on a wall map at the Chameleon Safaris office. His initial impression of me wasn't that of a "typical American" and he wasn't sure if I spoke English.

"He's American," Jackie his boss told him. Samora continued his briefing in English and afterwards we packed up the trailer hitch behind one of the Chameleon 4x4 trucks.

"I need a co-driver," Samora said, asking for a volunteer to sit up front with him.

"I'll go," I answered. I walked down to the right-side front door -- forgetting it was the driver's side in Namibia.

"Are you going to drive?" Jackie called out to me.

"Oops," I said. "I'm American, remember?"

I DIDN'T BLAME SAMORA for not thinking I was American. He was from the Herero tribe of the east -- the same tribe that rebelled against the German invasion in 1904 -- and hadn't had much exposure to the many races of the U.S.A.

"How come Americans are not travelling?" he asked me as we head down the highway southbound.

"Most are scared to travel, I guess," I answered. "How many do you get here?"

"One, maybe every five to six months."

"So only two a year?"

"Yes." He told me I was the first American to go on safari with him in 2004. Mostly he gets big groups of Germans and Australians. And speaking of Aussies, the only other two travelers on this particular safari were Ben and Karen, a ten-month-married couple from Cairns. Karen was a doctor and her husband was an avid birdwatcher and tour guide who was branching off his current employer to start his own business. It was only the four of us in the truck suited to fit up to twelve. (It was still the low season.)

THE LANDSCAPE GRADUALLY TURNED from green rolling hills to flat yellow grasslands the more we headed south. It was a sunny day until we drove in and out of a rainstorm that was headed north towards the capital. It was unusual for the rainy season to run so late in the year, but in a country mostly covered by desert, one didn't complain.

We made a pitstop in the town of Rehoboth, originally established as a bastard community. When the white Europeans men arrived in the nineteenth century and forced their "seeds" into black African women, a whole generation of mulatto bastards were born without any real place in society. Like the coloureds of more recent day, they didn't exactly fit in with whites nor the blacks and only had each other to turn to.

"The people here are good at two things," Samora said, referring to the now mixture of coloureds and blacks. "Building houses and drinking red wine." The houses were evident in the brightly-painted European-styled houses surrounding us. The red wine consumption was evident in the drunk unemployed people wandering the streets looking for work or spare change from tourists.

AFTER STOCKING UP ON SOME SUPPLIES, we continued southbound, over the Tropic of Capricorn (denoted by a sign on the side of the road) and deeper into the desert. I discovered that one of the advantages of going with Chameleon Safaris (rather than trying to drive independently as a "non-typical American") was getting passed police checkpoints really easily. While the car ahead of us was searched, we got by with just a smile.

"That guy [the cop] was my classmate," Samora said in his African accent.

Passing former ostrich ranches and desert railroad tracks, we arrived in the small town of Mariental for a water and beverage supply stop -- or as Karen put it, "the African supermarket experience." From there, we drove through the desert and stopped at a random shaded picnic table, seemlingly in the middle of nowhere for a cold cut sandwich lunch. No longer hungry, we packed up and continued on until we arrived at our destination and accommodations for the night, Garas Park, a private campground in Quivertree Forest.

QUIVERTREES, OR KOKERBOOMS, scientifically known as aloe dichotoma didn't quiver or boom like their common names suggest. The indigenous people turned to the wood of the quivertree for hunting arrows, or quivers, hence the name. Quivertree Forest was just one of two places in all of Namibia with such a dense population of the tree. This was due to the support of brick-like dolerite boulders created naturally by volcanic activity millions of years ago. The naturally-made boulders were juxtaposed to man-made sculptures of people in vehicles made from dead wood and old junk. It gave Garas Park a sort of 1930s Grapes of Wrath feel to it.

After a hike around the scenery, I helped Samora cut vegetables as he made our dinner of boerewors and kudu steaks on a grill. Ben and Karen joined up after their afternoon birdwatch and we dined our our meat, vegetables and potatoes with brandy and Cokes until sunset (picture above). A huge and spectacular lightning storm was approaching in the distance, which entertained us until an early bedtime of about 8:30. (With no electricity, what else was there to do?)

The storm came over us through the night and the winds picked up and would have blown our tents away if we had not been in them to weigh them down. Alone in my tent I felt the thunder vibrate my entire body. I saw the bright flashes of light through the pores of my tent and felt like I might have been in the actual eye of the storm.

As scary as it was, it sure beat being frisked by a New York police officer.

A River Runs Through It

DAY 167: Water is precious in Namibia; most areas only get enough water in the rainy season to last the rest of the year. In fact, there were "Save Water" signs all over the backpackers in Windhoek -- draught is a pretty common thing. However, with an unusually long and wet rainy season in 2004, water flowed more than the country had seen in years. While this was good news for farmers, it wasn't necessarily good news for tourists unless they have a 4x4.

AFTER BREAKFAST AT SUNRISE, we packed up the tents, jumped in the 4x4 and headed off to the town of Keetmanshoop, populated mostly by the Nama people. It was here we experienced the "Nama supermarket experience" by buying the necessarily items we'd need for the next two days: fresh bread, Coca-Cola, brandy and lollipops. The lollipops, called Fizz Pops, are awesome in Namibia; you lick off a top layer and reveal a little crack in the pop, where you can suck out the sugary powder in the center. I had two in a row right away.

"The farmers must be happy," Samora said as we cruised southwest of Keetmanshoop on dirt roads to the Naute Dam in the middle of the desert. The dam was overflowing from the abundance of rain. Along with mining, tourism and fishing, farming was a major industry in Namibia -- an industry Samora was planning to go to after a couple more years in tourism. Whether or not the rains would be good in the future, we didn't know.

One tributary of the Fish River was overflowing with rainwater and had risen higher than normal -- inconveniently over one of the roads. Even in our 4x4 truck with a trailer hitch, the river crossing was questionable. Ben walked out to test the depth while other drivers on the other side did the same. It was a spectacle for the locals living nearby, who came to observe the highlight of the day. A little dog jumped in the river to paddle but was swept away by the current. Luckily a man saved it.

Samora turned the four-wheel-drive on and slowly crossed the river, which was about two-feet deep. Two cars on the other side decided not to risk it and went to look for a detour. Our driver told us it was probably just as bad at the other crossing and they'd probably have to wait a week before the water settled down.

WHILE THE TOURISTS CROSSING THE RIVER was the highlight of the day for locals, the highlight for us tourists was the local Fish River Canyon (picture above) where the Fish River also run through at an unseasonably high water level. At 27 km. wide, 160 km. long and 550 meters deep, it is the second largest canyon in the world after the Grand Canyon. We hiked the three kilometers along the rim to a lookout point where the trail head for the 85-km. hiking trail was, which was closed until the African winter. Hiking it requires a permit and medical certification anyway.

Ben and Karen took their time to look at the birds while I walked along with Samora, talking about American politics, McDonald's, and Samora's favorite contribution of American cuisine, Kentucky Fried Chicken. Amongst his favorite films in all of American cinema, he raved about Eddie Murphy's remake of The Nutty Professor. I told him he should check out Coming to America.

"What is there to see in America?" Samora asked me.

"Hmmm... there's the Grand Canyon," I said.

"If you ask a Namibian to see a canyon, they say, 'Why you want to show me a hole in the ground?'" he said. I suppose seeing Fish River Canyon almost weekly turns you away from big holes in the ground.

"Is New York a nice place to visit?" he asked me.

"Sure, New York's great."

Samora was happy he had finally met a young American on his tour that he could possibly visit one day. He knew if he visited the elderly Amercians he had met before, he'd probalby just get a tour of their house. I told him I'd probably be back in New York in March 2005 and that we should keep in contact via e-mail.

SPEAKING OF AMERICA, a hiker named Peter showed up to admire the view of the canyon at the lookout point. Originally from the suburbs of Albany, New York, he was studying abroad at the University of Stellenbosch outside of Cape Town, living in a big house with other Americans, Brits and Germans. I might have met him sooner if I hitched a ride with the two German girls I met during my first week in Cape Town; they were crashing at that house as well.

After a picnic lunch overlooking the grand Fish River Hole-In-The-Ground, the Chameleon quartet continued the way it came along the dirt road that led out of the national park. We stopped for fuel at a guesthouse in the middle of nowhere where we bumped into Peter again. In the rental car with him were some of his classmates from Stellenbosch, including Nina and Sarah, who were just waiting around until they saw me and my lollipop.

"Are you a guide?" Sarah asked.

"No, it's just a coincidence I'm wearing the same color shirt as the company," I answered wearing the dark green Windhoek Lager shirt I got free with my Namibian Breweries tour. (It was the same color as Samora's shirt.) I offered each of them a lollipop and soon we were all on our separate ways.

Our way ws inhibited by another river crossing, this one more difficult than the one that morning. With an appearance of being wider, deeper and stronger, we parked by the bank while Ben went to investigate. He was already thigh-deep in the muddy, coffee-colored waters even before reaching the middle with its stronger-looking current.

We debated on what to do. While the truck would have been heavy and powerful enough to weather the current, the trailer hitch behind wasn't. Samora went to go investigate himself, although very reluctantly -- he was a total hydrophobe that didn't know how to swim. The only way he would go was if Ben held his hand (literally) in the river. To keep his shorts dry, Ben simply stripped down to his underwear and led Samora into the river. Karen snapped a photo from the truck.

"That's one to show my mother."

THE ONLY WAY AROUND THE RIVER CROSSING was to literally go around it -- on a detour that would take one hour to get to the otherside. During that hour and a few others, I passed the time with my hand out the window making waves with the airstream.

After a stop in the town of Aus, the former German outpost in a unique geographic location that can experience the weather of all four seasons including snow, we pulled into our accommodations for the night, the nearby Klein-Aus Vista. This campground/lodging facility was nestled in the mountains where the British used the higher ground to fight the Germans in a territory battle during WWI. It was here that the British kept a prison camp where hundreds of German POWs were held. In the end, the British won the then South West African territory and handed it over to the South Africans.

With World War I long gone, the owners of Klein-Aus Vista handed over one of their guesthouses to us for a two-night rental. Secluded from the other houses and the campground via a dirt road, our house had beds, running water and solar-powered lamps, and it was a comfortable place to veg out for the night with pasta and brandy and Cokes. It might have not turned out to be as pleasant a night as it did; later we learned that it was fortunate for us we took the hour-long detour -- two vehicles had been swept away by the current.

Sleepy Head, Sleepy Town

DAY 168: I was so sleepy for most of the day that I managed to take a nap every chance I could in between the highlights of the day.

To be fair, we were up before sunrise at 5:30 to get ready by 6:30 to drive the ninety minutes to the coastal town of Lüderitz, for a boat cruise to the penguin colonies of Halifax Island. However when we got there we were informed that overnight in Namibia, we were supposed to set the clocks back an hour in occordance with Daylight Savings Time -- which meant I had been awake since 4:30. Luckily for me I slept the entire way to Lüderitz.

With an hour to kill, Samora drove us to a nearby lagoon to spot flamingos. However, there was only one there and it didn't matter to me because I pretty much just slept in the car the whole time.

My drowsiness was also due to the fact that I popped a motion-sickness preventative pill at breakfast as a precaution on the upcoing boat ride. At the real 8:00 a.m., that boat ride finally started as we were on the Sedina, a touring schooner which embarked from Lüderitz's newly developed waterfront. Hydrophobic Samora stayed behind; just walking on the pier with the water underneath made him look terrified.

Along with some British and German tourists, the three of us Chameleon clients journeyed along the coast -- the same coast that Portuguese explorer Bartholomieu Dias cruised in the 15th century as the first European explorer to sail the southern coasts of Africa. On shore, a cross was erected in his name.

The two and a half hour tour took us to Halifax Island, where African penguins had a colony amongst the oyster catchers, sea gulls and other marine birds. Nearby, African fur seals waved their flippers at us from under the water, and -- speaking of flippers -- schools of dolphins swam alongside the ship, jumping in and out of the ocean like they were in a show.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE CRUISE, Samora picked us up and rushed us the 6 km. to the nearby ghost town of Kolmanskop to catch the tail-end of the 10 a.m. walking tour -- the only one on a Sunday. We managed to hear about the food storage building and the entertainment hall where people used to bowl. The tour was over just ten minutes after we had gotten there, leaving everyone to explore the empty buildings in the town at his/her own leisure.

Without any historical background, the ghost town was merely just a bunch of old dilapidated buildings in the middle of the desert (picture above) that don't mean anything. Knowing this I was sort of upset that the timing of the cruise and the timing of the Kolmanskop history tour didn't jive well, but luckily I got a lot of background information from the captain of the Sedina who knew our situation. (I couldn't turn to my Lonely Planet Shoestring Guide to Africa, because it's too abridged.)

IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, during the discovery of diamonds in South Africa, no one thought to look in then South West Africa because of the absence of the minerals that produce diamonds. That all changed in 1908 when a black railroad worker named Zacharias Lewala retrieved the precious gem -- by accident and unbeknownst to him. His boss August Stauch did know what it was and took it from him, and began harvesting the diamonds in the southwestern region in secrecy. Word got out though and a year later in 1909, the southwestern corner of then South West Africa was declared the Spergebiet, an area restricted to the public and only permissible to the diamond industry. Nine companies mined the diamond-rich area, most employees living in nearby Kolmanskop, which developed into a full-functioning outpost town with library and hospital.

The hey day of Kolmanskop and the diamond mining industry fell apart during the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II. Most residents of Kolmanskop left in the 1940s and by 1956 the town was completely deserted, leaving it a ghost town of old buildings where people scavenged for building materials. Mining came back over time by the Consolidated Diamond Mining corporation, and eventually became NamDeb, which still mines for diamonds today.

The Spergebiet, the restricted diamond area, still exists today; it is clearly marked on any road map of Namibia so there is no mistaking its boundaries. Even if you enter the zone without taking any diamonds, you are subject to a fine of 6000 dollars -- that's Namibian dollars -- and/or six months in prison -- that's Namibian prison, and who knows what happens when you drop the soap in there? With that said, there went Karen's hopes of her husband sacrificing a little time for a little gem.

Kolmanskop also still exists today, now as a tourist attraction. In the 1980s, each building was restored -- not to its former glory, but to a safer dilapidated condition so people could wander around at their own risk. Safe or unsafe, being in a building had a sort of eerie feel to it; where people once lived, sand had taken over. The frankenhaus (hospital) had a creepy supernatural vibe to it and was reminiscent of the hotel in The Shining.

"It's funny that you say that because I was doing 'red rum, red rum,' and these guys got freaked out," said Sarah, one of the American girls from Stellenbosch that I bumped into the day before and gave a lollipop to. She was wandereing around the ghost town with Peter and Nina and I tagged along with them for a little bit, visiting the old library, the big old mining carts and the broken walls of former residences. I eventually split up with them and rejoined Samora, Ben and Karen at the truck.

Samora drove us back to Lüderitz, the former German harbor town which was a step into an old-fashioned Bavarian town in the middle of Namibia, with its old school architecture. Lüderitz in modern day exists as an important town for the fishing and tourism industries; however on a Sunday, nothing was open except for a couple of coffee shops. Despite a late-morning cup o' joe, I went right back to sleep in the truck.

WHEN I AWOKE, we were at Dias Point, the site of the Dias Cross erected in honor of the Portuguese explorer. After admiring the powerful ocean waves crashing into the rocks, forming foamy white water fireworks, we had a picnic lunch cooked out of the back of the truck. With all of our coastal activities completed by mid-day, we headed back towards our rental house, picking up a local hitchhiker on the way.

I went to sleep again.

DESERT HORSES TROTTED IN THE DISTANCE when my eyes opened again. We had arrived in Garub where wild horses congregated at a man-made watering hole. These "wild horses" were actually feral horses, formerly domesticated horses now living in the wild. By 2000, ninety horses lived in the area protected by the Ministry of Tourism and Environment and arrived conveniently at the waterhole for when tourists arrived. Ben theorized that perhaps the truck ran over a switch that triggered the release of water, but Samora said it was just a coincidence -- water was released on a timer.

After yet another nap, we were back at our house in Klein-Aus Vista. For our final day and night here, Ben and I climbed up one of the mountains to watch and photograph the sunset over beers. Without a proper filter on my little spy cam, one photo looked like we were watching a nuclear bomb test in the middle of the desert instead.

Immediately after the sun set, a full moon rose in the east, which illuminated the desert brightly enough that we didn't need flashlights hiking back down to the house. After dinner, Ben, a naturalist-at-heart traveling with a telescope, set his equipment up to observe the constellations, four moons of Jupiter and the craters on Earth's moon.

"Well, it's been a long, but great day," Ben said, sipping on a brandy and Coke.

"Yeah, I know," I said, definitely agreeing with the 'long' part. "It started at 4:30."

I went to bed shortly thereafter.

Desert Run-Ins

DAY 169: I've learned that traveling in Africa so far is a lot different than traveling in South America. Despite the language barrier, South America is easier for the solo traveler; public transport is the way locals get around and there are plenty of little towns to service. Buses leave at least once a day to whatever town you might want to go to on any one of several bus companies. In addition to public transportation being fairly straight-forward, meeting peole to travel along with is easier because you sort of just gravitate to anyone just as confused to Spanish and/or Portuguese as you are.

Africa (at least in South Africa and Namibia so far) is different; most people get around by car. Mass transit isn't a common mode of transport, even for the locals. This lack of a transit infrastructure transcends to the independent traveler, which is why the preferred mode of getting around is by rental car -- especially in Namibia. Most travelers arrive in pre-established groups from home with a pre-determined plan to split costs or go on a big four-week long overland tour.

Without the common bond of "Hey, we both don't speak the same language of the locals" in English-speaking Namibia, it was hard for me to find a fellow solo traveler with the same limited time schedule I had, and thus I simply joined a tour for a week-long safari of southern Namibia.

Whether you have your own means of transportation or are in a guided tour, there's one common fact: getting from place to place involved long stretches of road through vast deserts and countryside. At times you feel you are all alone; sometimes you don't see another vehicle for hours. I swear we only saw less than ten cars on the road per day as we made our way, place to place in southern Namibia. Having said that, it was pretty amazing when -- in the same day -- I ran into three different familiar faces that I met at three different times, just by coincidence.

AFTER RISING AT SIX O'CLOCK, when the sun was already up in the new Daylight Savings Time, we packed up the house and left the Klein-Aus Vista. We traveled by dirt road at about 130 km/hr, passing herds of oryx and the occasional group of ostriches, down a straight road that stretched 30 kilometers through the desert. Ben, a very serious birdwatcher, had Samora stop the car for bird sightings -- grouses, eagles, sparrows. One highlight of our morning journey for him was when we stopped at one of the several sociable weaver nests where dozens of the little birds lived as nestmates.

THE FIRST OF MY COINCIDENTAL DESERT RUN-INS happened around 10:30 when at a crossroads seemingly in the middle of nowhere, we droved passesd two motorcyclists parked on the side of the road.

"Hey, I know those guys!" I said. Samora stopped the truck. "Hunter!" I called.

It was Hunter and Miles, two guys I met in the backpackers in Windhoek. Last I heard from them, they were getting their motorcycles tuned up for a long cruise around Africa. Coincidentally, out of all of the African continent, they happened to stop on the same road we were driving on.

We warned them about the river crossings in the south near Fish River Canyon -- Samora showed them on a map -- and also about the hour-back time zone change.

"Really?" Hunter said. "Oh, so we didn't get a late start after all Milesy."

Hunter's battery was low so he couldn't shut his engine off, which meant he and Miles didn't have much time to talk. "I bet you cruising around in this thing is better than being in that truck," he said, making smooth bouncing motions on his bike and spastic moves to symbolize the truck. He and Miles went on their way to Fish River Canyon while we went off to the town of Sesriem at 130 km/hr on a bumpy dirt road -- with minimal spastic motions.

SESRIEM IS THE DESERT OUTPOST near the world famous red sand dunes, Namibia's "number one attraction" according to my Lonely Planet. Here, any traveler on a budget ends up at the modern campground facility, which is where we pulled into. After setting up camp under the shade of a tree in a semi-enclosed area by a two-and-a-half-foot stone wall, we had a tuna salad lunch as little finches landed in for a visit. Nearby were three desert groundsquirrels, which Ben glanced at through his binoculars.

"Wow, his scrotum is massive!"

It was almost as exciting as spotting a new species of bird for him. Almost.

THE SECOND COINCIDENTAL DESERT RUN-IN happened in the afternoon at the swimming pool near the centralized bar.

"Erik!" a voice called out to me. I looked over and saw a familiar face from Cape Town: Eve, the French girl (from Reunion Island) that worked at The Backpack backpackers. It was her that helped me get my act together the night I got mugged at knifepoint.

"Eve! What are you doing here?" I asked.

"I'm here with Nomad [Overland Tours]."

"Right, right. You said you were going to Vic Falls in two weeks, two weeks ago."

"How is it going?" Eve asked me.

"Good," I answered. "I haven't been mugged yet."

I chilled out in the pool with two of the other Nomad girls until they all collectively got their belongings to leave; they were leaving the camp that afternoon for Swakopmund.

"Bye, Erik," Eve said.

"Bye again," I replied. "How long will you be in Swakopmund? I'll be there in two days."

"Three days."

"See you there then."

SHORTLY AFTER EVE'S NOMAD OVERLAND TOURS TRUCK LEFT CAMP, a big Chameleon Safaris one came in with eleven people from the same company. I went over to say hello and to see if -- by any other chance -- I recognized someone, but it was just a truck full of old Dutch folks. I said hello and introduced myself to their guide Chico, who turned out to be Samora's mentor. Another Chameleon mini-van came shortly thereafter, bringing in a younger crowd, some on a four-day tour. Again, no one I knew, but I introduced myself anyway.

The sunset excursion of the day was to nearby Elim's Dune, three kilometers away from camp. Samora dropped Ben, Karen and myself off for one of two options: hike back to camp and catch the sunset on the way; or climb Elim's Dune at a height of 75 meters. I opted for the latter.

Seventy-five meters doesn't seem like a lot; the peak of Elim's dune seemed reachable in fifteen minutes from afar, not factoring the sand dune part. I found out quickly that the hardest thing about hiking up sand dunes is that every step forward, the sand takes you half a step back. Plus, it's all uphill.

Ben and Karen walked up the first part of the dune but then head back through the desert, leaving me alone with Elim and his dune. The peak up the dune seemed farther and farther away as I made my way up the ebb and flow of the dunes. False peaks teased me but I kept on going, taking photos of the beautiful ripples in the sand formed by the winds and the green tufts of grass amidst a sea of red sand. I was climbing up another false peak when I heard a voice behind me. "You there!"

It was one of the travelers from the younger new Chameleon mini-van group that I met before. She was Emily, a Brit on holiday from her job in Angola. Nearby was another, Martin, from Bern, Switzerland, and the three of us made the dash for the final leg up the peak to see the other side. Emily stopped mid-way on the ridge on one of the higher dunes (picture above), but Martin and I continued to the highest one for the sake of accomplishment. "Well, we got this far already," I said.

The sun set fast and the three of us regrouped after the obligatory photos and headed back down the dunes the way we came. It was a lot easier coming down, even though it involved a lot more sand entering our shoes.

"I think I have enough sand in my boots to make another sand dune," Emily said.

THE FULL MOON ROSE IN THE EAST almost immediately after the sun set in the west. With the sun's rays reflecting off the surface of the moon, the entire desert was illuminated by what felt like a big natural street lamp and I saw a lone jackal raid the garbage bin in our Campsite 19.

After a spaghetti dinner, I joined others in the bar to close the night. Before the night was over, I bumped into yet another familiar face: Sarah, the University of Stellenbosch student I met by Fish River Canyon and Kolmanskop. Her and her classmates' beat-up rental Mercedes Benz had a blown tire, and she and her Dutch classmate used their girly charms to ask Samora and Chico for a lift in the morning to sunrise on the dunes. The guides welcomed them aboard and made the plan for the next morning.

AS I WENT TO SLEEP IN MY TENT, listening to the gecko calls in the desert, I marveled at the fact that although a lone traveler, it wasn't so lonesome. Because in a country like Namibia, with a population of two million people, you're bound to bump into someone you know sooner or later.

Three Dunes and A Canyon

DAY 170: Sossusvlei (pronounced sue-zoo-flay), which I call "The Big Soufflé," is not a big poofy pastry that deflates at the sound of loud crash in a classic MGM cartoon. It is a huge picturesque 75-meter red sand dune, the most accessible via 4x4 amidst a red sand sea of dunes as high as almost 300 meters tall. Sossusvlei is quite a celebrity, appearing in numerous commercials and films worldwide. Chances are if you've seen a shot of a sand dune from Namibia, you've seen Sossusvlei.

This big famous sandy soufflé is one of the reasons to go out to the middle of the Namib Desert, particularly at sunrise -- which is why most of the Sesriem campground was awake by 4 a.m. Sossusvlei lies 65 km. away in the Namib-Naukluft National Park, whose gates opened at 4:30. Between 4:00 and 4:20, our Chameleon Safaris team of four got ready for departure. We picked up the two Stellenbosch girls who asked for a ride the night before. With them was a third: Nina, the first-generation Afrikaans-American Colorado State student from Mt. Kisco, NY that was studying abroad at the University of Stellenbosch for six months. The three of them sat in the back of our big 4x4 truck in the darkness as we approached the gate guard. Samora only had a permit for the original four of us.

"If you are quiet, this will be a lot faster," he told the girls in the back. It also helped that Samora and the guard shared the same tribal language. After small talk that ended in some sort of a joke, he and the guard shared a laugh. As we drove through the gateway, the rest of us laughed along; we had successfully smuggled in the three girls.

"Put your seatbelts on. There are many potholes here," Samora instructed the passengers. With our American and Dutch contraband in the back, we raced down the 45-km. tarred road which did in fact have many potholes. At times it was just easier to cruise on the dirt and gravel shoulder. There were several vehicles ahead of us, but Samora, like a rally sport racecar driver, sped across the Namib desert at 130 km/hr, eventually bringing us in second position, right after his mentor Chico in the big Chameleon overlander truck about one kilometer ahead. The mentor held the pole position until the 45-km. mark, where we both stopped. At the parking area at the 45-km. mark was the first accessible dune for vehicles that didn't have four-wheel drive. This dune at the 45-km. mark, simply named Dune 45, was where the Stellenbosch girls got off -- minus Nina who would come with us to Sossusvlei.

There were twenty kilometers to go and time was running out. If there was anything I'd learned about sunsets, it was that the moon rose immediately afterwards -- the opposite must be true as well. The moon was setting fast, giving us less than an hour before the coming of the sun.

At the 60-km. mark, the tarred road ended, forcing those without a 4x4 to park and hike the last five kilometers to Sossusvlei. Samora kicked on the four-wheel drive and we made it over the sand to the base of the big famous dune.

"Ah, The Big Soufflé," I proclaimed. We were the first team to arrive.

The sky was starting to lighten with the coming of dawn and we head on foot up the 75-meter-high dune. With the exception of Karen and her dodgy knee, we made it to the top after huffing and puffing, and sat on top before the first ray of sun gleemed over the horizon. As Earth's closest star continued to wake up to start a new day, the colors of the dunes shifted from pink to orange. Nina forgot her camera in the early morning dash, so I took photos for the two of us -- before the hordes of oncoming tourists ruined the mood.

A SAFARI TRADITION WITH SAMORA is when you are atop a dune, you are to roll something down the side of the hill and race it down. That something this morning was Nina's water bottle, which was released by Samora with a head start. The four of us ran down like racing ostriches on the moon, each step lower and feeling lighter than the one before. Samora beat the water bottle to the bottom.

After a picnic breakfast of yogurt, bread and "Eet Sum Mor"-brand biscuits, we drove to Dead Vlei, the site of trees that have been dead for centuries (picture above), standing in another dried up pan of calcium deposits. Dead Vlei is flanked by a huge 285-meter-tall sand dune, which Samora said was called simply, "Crazy Dune" because you'd be absolutely crazy to climb it.

"Is it really called Crazy Dune?" I asked Samora, hoping to get a more historically or geologically-significant name for it.

"Some call it 'Big Daddy,'" he replied. "Either Crazy Dune or Big Daddy."

"Big Daddy" was over three time the size of "The Big Soufflé" and was the highest dune in the area. Looking at it, it really would take a crazy person to scale it.

Enter Erik R. Trinidad.

"How about this?" Samora started a proposition. "You go up that way and up the ridge to the top. We [he and Nina] will take a short-cut [walking the flat plan before going uphill] that way. We will see who gets there first."

"You down?" Nina egged me on.

"Alright."

I started my approach up the ridge of a smaller dune -- let's call it "Small Daddy" -- which connected to the bigger one if I just walked up the dune ridge. The other two started their leisurely walk across the pan.

Getting to the top of "Small Daddy" was short and sweet since I had footsteps to follow in that packed the sand it like a staircase. Hiking the ridge wasn't as easy though; sand kept sliding, making it no walk in the park, or the pan for that matter. I learned the easiest way to hike it was by stepping sideways so more surface of your sole packs in the ridge. Plus, it helped to lean towards the darker side of the dune; the sunny side was heating up with the sun, making the sand looser, causing sand slides. Not that any of these techniques helped the occassional grasshopper I'd find on the ridge.

By the time I got to the dip which morphed Small Daddy with Big Daddy, Samora and Nina had crossed the pan, ascended a small dune and stopped. Later I found out that Nina simply couldn't go any farther and they just sat to see just how crazy I could be.

Hiking up the ridge of Crazy Dune was hard work; every step up took me half a step back. Using a breathing technique I learned from marathon-runner Irish Sean in Cape Town (two short nasal inhales and two short oral exhales), I managed to keep my endruance withouth getting winded. Good thing too because as soon as the sun crossed the other side of the sky, both sides of the dune would have become unstable.

Alone, I managed to make it to the peak in about an hour -- meaning if there was a LensCrafters there and i called ahead, my glasses would have been done upon arrival. At the top, I looked around and just enjoyed the view. Without people or even a slight breeze, I enjoyed the moment of pure silence -- it really sounds like absolutely nothing.

With the natural endorphin rush from the feeling of accomplishment up there, I noticed that not too far away from me was an even higher peak not visible from the base. After walking over, I found a loose branch and brought it over to the visible peak to plant in the sand like an explorer at the end of his conquest. I heard Nina and Samora applauding from below and later I found out that Ben saw the whole thing through his binoculars.

WHAT GOES UP MUST COME DOWN and going down was definitely the more fun of the two. Without a sandboard, food tray or garbage can lid, I had nothing to slide down so I had no choice but to just run down. It took me about a minute to rush down what took me about an hour to climb. I zoomed down the slope, a slave of gravity, making big "S"-curves in the sand at such a great acceleration that when I got to the bottom, on-lookers thought that I was sandboarding from afar.

After taking photos of the dead camelthorn trees of Dead Vlei (1 2 3 hi-res photos at 1632x1224), we hopped back in the 4x4 and headed back to Dune 45 to say we were there and take a group photo of our Chameleon quartet. Tired of dune climbing, I wasn't planning on doing Dune 45, but rather than wait around for Nina to go up and down, I just joined her.

"Crazy tourists," Samora said to me before saying his trite quote that he got from the 1980s comedy mockumentary The Gods Must Be Crazy: "Aiyaiyaiyaiyaii..."

Dune 45 was a much easier climb since the footprints of the big sunrise crowd packed in the sand pretty good. Nina and I made it to the top in about twenty minutes, took the obligatory "I did it" photos and head back down.

Nina was still separated from her Stellenbosch crew and joined us back at Campsite 19 for lunch while waiting. Her schoolmates came about an hour later. "Thanks for your hospitality," she wished us before going on her way.

IF YOU'VE NOTICED THE TITLE OF THIS ENTRY, that's three dunes down, one canyon to go. That canyon was the nearby Sesriem Canyon, a 30-meter deep canyon carved out by flood waters and the Ice Age. Hiking through it with one of the other Chameleon groups, we saw the caves, waterpools, trees and impressive rock formations of the canyon -- it looked like something out of the planet Tatooine in the Star Wars movies.

After joking about a nest-like bundle of sticks high above our heads formed by flood waters that Samora said was an ostrich nest ("Didn't you know they could fly?"), he left us there in the canyon for sunset beers while he went to camp to start making our lamb curry dinner. Ben and Karen stayed put to birdwatch while I went hiking towards the other side of the canyon, wary of horned adder snakes and scorpions. I didn't make it to the end before heading back the other way since it was getting dark and my beer was getting warm.

After dinner I was exhausted and just passed out by nine o'clock. Having conquered three dunes and a canyon, I thought it was well-deserved.

Need For Speed

DAY 171: I have come to the realization on The Global Trip 2004 so far that the things I've done that I've called "one of the best things I've done" involve going really fast. My latest need for speed was satisfied by going quadbiking (driving a 4-wheel ATV) through the Namib Desert near the touristy coastal town of Swakopmund, Namibia.

WE DIDN'T ARRIVE IN SWAKOPMUND until the afternoon and getting there involved high speeds as well. We left Sesriem by 7 a.m. on the dot and Samora drove through the long desert dirt and gravel roads at his usual high speed of 130 km/hr. Others going that fast weren't so fortunate; a truck from Gaylards Safaris (Samora's former employer) suffered two flat tires along the way. We stopped both times to help out using what Ben called "the bushman's jack": a technique to raise the truck by simply driving the inner wheel over a bag of firewood.

After a stop in the town of Solitaire -- Karen realized the definition of a "town" in those parts need only be a collection of one or two buildings -- Samora sped all the way towards the coast. He was getting a bit rusty though; for the first time since we left Windhoek, another truck had overtaken us.

ALTHOUGH WALVIS BAY, OUR NEXT STOP, is centrally located on Namibia's western coast with the Atlantic, it wasn't until Independence Day in 1994 that it became a part of Namibia. Before that time, it was technically a part of South Africa and a former British base. Since Independence, it became Namibia's biggest harbor and the main base of the fishing industry. Other than that, there wasn't much to it but a lagoon of flamingos and a big sea salt-processing plant. All the fun and adrenalin activities were based out of former German colony Swakopmund, named after the nearby Swakop River, 30 km. away from Walvis Bay.

After meeting up with the Chameleon mini-van headed by a woman named Carol and her trainee named Blessing, we checked into identical, triangular cookie-cutter bungalows at Swakopmund Rest Camp. I shared a big six-bed, two-story house with just two others: Martin, the Swiss guy from Bern that I met at the top of Elim's Dune; and Jaodino, a Filipino on vacation from his job at the Red Cross in Angola. We had lunch and then went our own ways for the afternoon. Everyone went into town to wander, while I went to the nearby dunes of the Namib Desert for my occasional fix of velocity.

During my transport to the dunes with the Adventure Centre company, I met Jennifer and Marc, a young American and Austrian (respectively) couple on vacation from their lives in Frankfurt, Germany. They had fulfilled a need for speed earlier tha morning going sandboarding and were off to the quadbikes for more. The three of us put on our helmets, goggles and mounted our quadbikes with automatic transmission (the only type left) amidst the other quadbikers from three different overland tour groups, some on automatics, some on manuals. All of us sat on the bikes while a guide in front briefed us on hand signals and what to do in case an engine cut out. I didn't pay much attention since I was too excited revving up my engine.

In an orderly fashion, we drove down a paved pathway that led to the dunes and then splilt up into groups. My group of five automatics was led by Ernst, a native Namibian that had been quadbike guiding for two years. He led us around the dunes like characters in Nintendo's Super Mario Cart, hugging the curves carved out by the winds, letting the power of man-made ingenuity take us up and the power of gravity take us down -- still with the man-made ingenuity at full throttle (picture above). With my thumb constantly pushing the throttle at its fullest amount, I reached up to 65 km/hr -- enough speed to catch some air on a steep dune that Ernst led us up. The jump came at a surprise, and I couldn't help but laugh and smile when the four wheels of my bike temporarily lost contact with the ground.

"I see that you like it very much," Ernst said to me at our mid-way break in the middle of the desert, sponsored by Pepsi. Marc was all smiles too but Jennifer wasn't so thrilled.

"I'm terrified," she told us. Apparently there was no more need for speed in her mind.

"Is it the speed or the fear of falling off?" I asked her.

"I think that it's the combination of the two. The speed and the falling off," she said. "I was thinking the whole time, are we in the right group?" Groups were formed by speed and transmission classification.

"We are in the slow group," Marc said, citing that we were in the automatic group. The manual quadbikes could go twice as fast, at speeds of up to 120 km/hr.

Hearing this and still scared for her life, Jennifer took one of the guide's advice to just ride in the back of his bike for the rest of the tour.

UP AND DOWN, LEFT AND RIGHT WE WENT AGAIN on the desert roller-coaster, this time off of two more steep dunes to catch some air. We sped through the big Namibian desert, playing with the dunes like kids in a sandbox. On one steep downhill turn, my engine cut out causing me to think, "Um, yeah... I guess I should have listened to the briefing. What do I do?" While the vehicle was in motion, I shifted to neutral, re-did the ignition and gave it a little gas. The engine rattled a little bit but then cut back to its original revved up ways. Polly, one of the girls from one of the overland tour groups, had another problem: on a sharp turn, she actually tipped her quadbike over and fell. Later she told me how confused she was when it happened because "these things aren't supposed to do that." She was fine and got up after her crash without a scratch -- just more sand in her pockets.

All the groups met up by the ocean for a champagne toast at sunset. There wasn't much of a sunset because of the overcast skies but it was a relaxing moment nonetheless after a thrill of a ride. Jennifer had no regrets piggybacking a guide's bike, and Marc had no regrets continuing to push his quadbike full throttle. "I think I could do this all day," he said.

We toasted our drinks. "Cool, now we can drive drunk!" I joked.

While the quarter cup of sparkling wine didn't even create a mild buzz, the rounds of drinking after quadbiking did. Swakopmund is known as Namibia's coastal party town, at least that's what I had heard. Despite the fact that most shops closed by six, Swakopmund's nightlife was scattered throughout the town at different pubs and bars.

I was caught in the familiar situation of having invites to three different places at the same time at seven o'clock: one to go back to the bungalows for dinner and wine with the Chameleon people; another to go to the bar Gruder Krantz to watch the just-edited quadbiking video; and another to go to Fagin's Pub to meet new friends Jennifer and Marc at their sandboarding video screening. While figuring out what to do, I went to Rafter's Pub to get my complimentary beer that came with my quadbike package.

I managed to hit all three places, just not at the same time, and then some. I went early to Fagin's Pub and drank with some locals while WWE Smackdown! was on before meeting Jennifer and Marc for a quickie. I had dinner back at the Swakopmund Rest Camp and toasted cups of wine. I went with the Chameleon guys to Gruder Krantz, where I bumped into Eve from The Backpack in Cape Town, but left them for a bit to meet back up with Jennifer and Marc at another pub called Kücki's. I closed the night back at Gruder Krantz with Jaodino, Blessing and Grace from the Chameleon minivan group.

That night I realized that while the need for beer can be as fun as the need for speed, it's the latter that I cherish -- and remember -- more.

Fast Forward Through The Sand

DAY 172: "How long have you been doing this?" I asked Beth at the top of one of the Namib Desert's many dunes. Nearby was her sandboard with a sticker on it that read, "Chicks Kick Ass."

"Eight years," she answered, which meant she had been in the sandboarding tour business since 1996.

"So you were here when The Amazing Race was here?"

"Yup, that was us," Beth answered proudly. "I'm amazed at how many Americans, Canadians and Australians saw that and came here to Namibia."

What the Emmy-Award winning reality program The Amazing Race did was put Swakopmund and it's sport of sandboarding on the map. Sandboarding (picture above) was the reason I came to Namibia in the first place. However, that morning it seemed like I might not be able to fit it in my Chameleon Safaris' schedule since Samora didn't call for my reservation early enough, and it was really bumming me out. Well, that and the fact that I woke up with one of the worst hangovers I'd had in months.

WITH THE LONG EASTER WEEKEND, most South Africans and Namibians were on holiday and with the popularity of sandboarding, Alter Action Sandboarding (the only sandboarding company in town) was fully booked. Carol, the tour guide of the Chameleon mini-van, told me she was good friends with Beth and could pull some strings. However when she called her, Beth couldn't manage to squeeze in another person for safety reasons -- a short while ago, a girl broke her neck sandboarding. My only hope was for a cancellation, and with all the tours in town, it looked grim for me. My safari was to return to Windhoek that afternoon.

As an avid snowboarder, I was so keen on riding the world famous site for sandboarding and was willing to stay an extra day in Swakopmund at my own lodging and transportation expense. But staying an extra day would mess up my plans to leave Windhoek the next day on a bus to Zambia and the next bus wasn't until three days after. I was really frustrated at the situation; I might not have to front my own cash if only Samora called earlier. Didn't he know it was Easter weekend? Everything would have fallen into place if only he used his cell phone and called earlier. But he told me he never had any problems in the past, calling just right before.

Now, with the bungalow check-out time at 10 a.m., what determined whether or not I was staying another day was up in the air and dependent on a cancellation. Still hungover, I sat grumpy as the Chameleon staff packed up the trucks and waited like a stand-by passenger for a flight. Hopefully there was someone else even more hungover than I was and couldn't bear to ride the dunes.

Around nine, Beth called Carol with the good news for me: I was a go. Everything fell into place.

WHILE JAODINO WENT QUADBIKING, Ben and Karen went on a dolphin and birdwatching cruise, and others just roamed around town, I waited around for my transport to the dunes with two new Chameleon clients, Malin and Lisa from Sweden. We talked about their fear of falling on the dunes and our mutual love for Ikea furniture. We were the first van to arrive at the sandy slopes and waited around for others while the guides got the snowboards-turned-sandboards, boots and bindings out of the truck. When the others arrived, I met Polly again, the girl who fell off her quadbike the day before.

Beth divided us into three groups: lie-down boarders, novice sandboarders and my group, experienced snowboarders. After a hike up to the top of the dune and a manatory board waxing, Beth briefed us on how to apply the techniques of snowboarding in the sand -- it was very similar, just some more leaning on the back leg -- and let us alone to go down and up at our leisure while she taught the newbies.

As fun as sandboarding was, it did nothing for my hangover. Unlike sandboarding outside of Ica, Peru where someone drives you to the top of the mound with a sand buggy, here you had to hike up the dune after each run, which was an arduous task when you felt like your head was up your ass. I debated whether or not to dig a hole to vomit in, but just took it easy. Eventually it passed.

Good thing too because sandboarding that morning was, as they say, awesome. Unlike snowboarding, you didn't have to bundle up in a whole bunch of gear. Plus, when you land (or fall), it's nice and soft, not hard and sometimes icy. The one time that I did fall on the dunes was when I attempted to go off one of the ramps; my approach was sloppy and I flew off the edge the wrong way. The one disadvantage of sandboarding over its snowy counterpart was that if and when you fall, you end up with tons of sand in your pockets -- even the ones that you've zipped up -- and crunch sand in your teeth no matter how much you tried to prevent it.

I thought I got completely sandy during my wipe out, but that was nothing compared to when I tried out the lie-down boards. With helmet on, I was pushed off the top of the dune, holding the front of a pressboard the whole way down to keep it from catching the sand and flipping me over. At speeds of up to 80 km/hr, flipping over wouldn't be a good thing. However, the big downhill led to a steep uphill, sending me flying into the air gracefully, only to land like a sandbag -- in a perfect videographic opp for the nearby videographer.

SAND STUCK ALL OVER MY SWEATY BODY after all that and when I eventually regrouped with the other Chameleon clients for a picnic lunch near the National Aquarium in Swakopmund, there was no need to tell them how it was. The red sand all over my clothes, hair and face said it all.

"How was it?" Karen asked me.

Ben answered for me, "Look at him, he's covered in sand!"

I bid Samora and the Aussies farewell -- trying to get transfer too much sand onto them -- as they were going up north to Etosha National Park with Malin, Lisa and other Chameleon clients for the continuation of their 12-day tour. I hopped in the mini-van with Martin and Jaodino. Carol and Blessing drove us the four hours back to Windhoek, passed the dozens of cars headed towards the shore for the long weekend.

BACK AT CHAMELEON BACKPACKERS IN WINDHOEK, I sorted myself out and started my Blog catch-up. Sand still stuck to me in places I didn't even know sand could cling to. After two showers, I was still digging the sand out of my ears.

Worrywart

DAY 173: In order to make up time for the week I "lost" in Cape Town sorting out my post-mugging red tape, I needed to minimize veg-out days in other cities if I was still to make it to Spain for the San Fermin Festival in early July. This meant that rather than hang around Windhoek for three more days -- possibly with people I met at the Namibian Breweries -- and leave on a bus the Monday after Easter, I'd have to leave straight away on the only available northeast bound bus, one that afternoon at 5 p.m. When I woke up that morning around 6 a.m., I didn't have a ticket yet, and I got a little worried because it was up in the air if I would make it.

Booking a ticket to Victoria Falls seemed easy enough; Chameleon Backpackers could do it for you with a couple of phone calls -- except when it's Good Friday and their middle-man tour agency was closed. I had to get an Intercape ticket myself, which would have been an easy enough task if only they had an office downtown. No, the Intercape office was located in a shady industrial area, the kind with barbed wire and warehouses.

I try not to blame the Chameleon morning staff from being somewhat useless; none of them could tell me exactly where the Intercape office was, only the general location on the map in the South Industrial neighborhood. Windhoek wasn't a big taxi town and so I went there on foot, through the residential area to South Industrial (picture above) in a kind of place where bad guys always seemed to hide out in the movies. I was on guard. Hardly anyone was around, which made me more edgy. Any person that did show up, although probably completely innocent, just became a sketchy bad guy in my mind.

Walking the set of Bad Guy Land went on longer than expected. With Chameleon's vague directions and the vague directions of gas station attendants, I still couldn't find Intercape. I ended up going in circles. Time was running out too because I was racing the clock for checkout time at 10 a.m. -- I hadn't packed yet.

Another guy at another Engen gas station gave me better vague directions and I managed to find the Intercape hull. Luckily for me there was a space available on the bus for Victoria Falls and I paid for it in cash. I had a good forty minutes before checkout time and while I was in South Industrial, I went looking for Coastal Couriers, the overnight shipping company that I was told would have my sandboarding video CD -- but only between 8 and 10 in the morning.

With directions from an Intercape employee, I managed to find the place, a 20-minute walk away through the warehouse district. The guy there told me the truck hadn't arrived yet and to come back in an hour, but no later since it was Good Friday. In fact, if it wasn't a public holiday, I wouldn't have to collect the package myself.

I walked the twenty minutes back to Chameleon Backpackers in time to pack up my things before checkout time. I kept my bags in the common room and waited for the sole internet connection to be freed. I may have had an Intercape ticket, but I needed a visa into Zambia. You can either go to the embassy and get it (no time left), or be invited by a Zambian company. With 24-hour advance notice, one can e-mail the Jolly Boys Backpackers in Livingstone, Zambia and they, a Zambian company, can invite you in as their guest.

Simple enough if you'd just get off the internet, buddy!

"I just need to read my e-mail really quick."

"Okay."

I waited and waited until the internet lost connection and just I went back to Coastal Couriers to get my video CD before they closed for the day. When I got back from South Industrial, the computer hadn't been freed yet and my 24-hour advance window was closing fast. I worried I might not get my visa in time, but luckily the German couple that piggybacked turns on the machine finished within the hour of my noonish deadline.

Jackie, the manager of Chameleon, told me that I simply had to e-mail Jolly Boys to the address on their flyer on the wall with all my passport information and itinerary. Although Jackie told me "just tell them you'll be on the Intercape bus and they'll know [which border you're crossing]," I e-mailed them specifics from my ticket just in case. Later I discovered that was probably not a good idea; the details I gave them told them I'd arrive at the Zimbabwean/Zambian border -- not the direct Botswanan/Zambian one -- which would cost me an additional $30 for entry into Zimbabwe, and only in U.S. or South African cash currency. I had access to neither in the time I had allotted and all my U.S. cash was lost after the incident in Cape Town. I cursed out "Blog" for occupying all my time before my bus departed; if my day was Blog-free, I might have found out earlier and had time to do something about it.

Luckily for me, I was travelling with Juliana, an American from Washington state who, like Hunter, had just finished her two-year term in the Peace Corps. She was headed back to Zambia and knew that the usual thing was to get off at Kasane, Botswana, cross into Zambia from there, and complete the journey to Victoria Falls on the Zambian side to avoid Zimbabwe altogether.

AVOIDING ZIMBABWE WAS RECOMMENDED TO ME FROM OTHERS -- especially since I had some sort of credibility as a writer -- since dictatorial President Robert Mugabe shunned foreign press reporting news from in his country. Blogreader Ria told me they might confiscate my laptop, and a British photojournalist I met in Windhoek was concerned and tried to avoid Zimbabwe as well on her way to Victoria Falls.

The way to Victoria Falls without entering Zimbabwe utilizes a geographic loophole; Botswana actually shares a tiny border with Zambia. At only 750 meters wide, it is the world's smallest international border -- wide enough to get a ferry across the river directly without having to set foot in Zimbabwe and pay its steep $30 USD fee ($65 if you are British). My only hope at the time was that perhaps Jolly Boys' request for a guest visa appeared at both crossings, or if only one, the Botswanan/Zambian one. I tried not to worry, but it was hard not to. What if Jolly Boys sent my visa/invitation at the wrong border? Could I warn them? It seemed that every pay phone on the way was either busy or didn't work with my phone card.

Juliana said I'd be fine. In her two years of living in Africa, she told me that she learned that, "In Africa, everything just seems to work out in the end." I recalled in my mind something Carol said in Swakopmund when I was worried I might miss out on sandboarding: "In Namibia, there's a saying: 'Don't worry until you have to.'"

I calmed myself down; the worst case scenario if I went to the Botswanan/Zambian border and my visa wasn't there was that I could buy it on the spot -- but if only I found a way to get a hold of American or South African currency on the way, or contacted them via phone to tell them where I was coming from. There was nothing I could do about it riding the bus in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, so I just tried to stop worrying for a while -- that is, until I realized my NY Yankees baseball cap was missing.

Oh my God! Where is that thing? I searched my bag, each compartment three times, my plastic bag, inside the sleeves of my sweater. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Oh man, that was one of the things I really wanted to complete my global trip with! My personal modern day version of Indiana Jones' trademark fedora! The cap that I bought on that one great day in 1999 when wheat and I played hooky from work to see the Yankees' World Series champion ticker-tape parade in downtown Manhattan! The hat that had been with me to Africa, South America and Antarctica even before The Global Trip 2004 began! That hat! The baseball cap with the beat-up look and the blood stain on it from when it cushioned the blow when I got slammed in the head by a falling sign in Brazil! My hat, my precious goddam New York Yankees vintage baseball cap!

I was sitting on it the whole time.

Hakuna Matata

DAY 174: The Swahili phrase "Hakuna matata," made popular by Disney's The Lion King, is such a wonderful phrase. Hakuna matata ain't no passing phase. It means "no worries," for the rest of your days. It's a problem-free philosophy. Hakuna matata!

(Try reading that without singing; it's near impossible.)

As teenage Simba (voiced my Matthew Broderick) explains Hakuna matata in the acclaimed Disney film, "Sometimes bad things happen, and there's nothing you can do about it, so why worry?"

HAKUNA MATATA WAS MY MANTRA THAT MORNING despite the fact that I continued to worry about how to deal with my upcoming border crossing. When I woke up on the bus around 6 a.m. after a restless night of uncontinuous sleep, I knew I had just six hours left to figure out a plan. Taking Simba's quote in mind, what if there was something I could do about it? My options remained: try to get a call to Jolly Boys and tell them I would cross at Kasane, Botswana, or come up with $25 in American cash. Both seemed impossible since I was venturing away from European settlements and towards the wild, undeveloped grasslands that, according to Phillip, a seasoned traveller I met on the bus, was "the real Africa." (picture below)

Every bus stop I tried to do either option, but being the Saturday of a holiday weekend, it was near impossible. Phones didn't work, and when they did, they only worked with specific phone cards that could be purchased at the gas station shop -- if only it was open. And don't even mention trying to get American or South Africa money from a machine anywhere in Namibia. During a 40-minute stop in Katima Mulilo, I tried to cash my remaining $70 in travelers' checks, but the nearby money exchange was closed. So I bought a phone card at a nearby gas station, but the phone was busy until the bus was about to leave.

Realizing that there was nothing I could do in the remaining time, I just didn't worry and read two more chapters in Zadie Smith's White Teeth. I clung to Juliana's words of wisdom: In Africa, everything seems to just work out in the end.

THE INTERCAPE BUS CROSSED from Namibia into the small section of northeastern Botswana that bordered with both Zambia and Zimbabwe. The immigration offices there were painless; both Namibia and Botswana are countries well-off enough with tourism and diamond-mining that there were no visa fees. The bus rode through a section of Chobe National Park and then the town of Kasane, where I saw familiar buildings and roads of the time I was there in 2000. Over those four years, it didn't look like much had changed at all.

Intercape dropped Juliana and I off on a road about a mile away from the border. We hiked this road with all our gear, passed the dozens of eighteen-wheelers in line waiting to clear customs. From the looks of things, it looked like it might take days.

For my first border crossing in "real Africa" -- a land where I suddenly rediscovered that I would no longer blend in as a coloured, but stand out as a Japanese tourist -- I kept the faith. The exit out of Botswana was easy; submit a form, get an exit stamp, find a way over the 750-meter stretch of the Zambezi River which separates Botswana with Zambia. Crossing over required a 10,000 Zambian Kwacha fee (about two American bucks) for a zippy motorboat; or ZK1,000 fee for the cargo ferry. Using the Nyanja language she learned in the Peace Corps, Juliana led the way amidst the crowd of locals who all marveled and smiled when she spoke a familiar dialect.

No one was at the motorboat and the ferry was just arriving, so we just took that. Juliana spotted me the cash. The cruise of locals, cars and cargo took less than ten minutes. Juliana used her Nyanja to get a ride for us from a local guy to the Zambian immigration entry office. It was Judgement Time.

"Here we go, Moment of Truth," I said.

Thoughts raced through my mind. Did Jolly Boys alert this office of my arrival at this crossing, and if not, how easy would it be for them to contact the other office? (There were no telephones or computers in sight.) Would they take a travelers' check if I did have to pay after all, and if not, did Juliana magically have any U.S. currency on her? (Why would she? She was a Zambian resident of two years.)

I got on the line with my entry form and eventually got to the desk to sign the registry. I gave the officer my passport.

"My visa is being arranged by my backpackers."

"Don't say anything, they might not charge you anyway," Juliana said under her breath. But it was too late; I had spoken too soon.

"Which backpackers?" the officer asked me.

"Jolly Boys in Livingstone."

"Okay." The officer made no fuss and just stamped my form, its duplicate and a page in my passport in three quick motions. Pound, pound, pound. Done.

"That was surprisingly easy," I told Juliana.

"I knew you didn't have to pay here."

ALTHOUGH JULIANA USUALLY GOT AROUND ZAMBIA BY HITCHING -- a common and perfectly safe way to get around, even as a woman, so she said -- we took a shared minivan taxi at ZK10,000 each (she spot me again) for the long and hot hour-long drive to Livingstone, the Zambian border town at Victoria Falls. Juliana kept light conversation with the local men in the back and continued to entertain them with her Nyanja words.

"I'll be surprised if I get off the bus without a marriage proposal," she told me. It was a common thing for her.

Two police checkpoints and three hitchhikers later, we arrived on the main road of Livingstone. I walked Juliana to her backpackers, Fawlty Towers, but left her there to find the Jolly Boys since I had a credit card reservation with them. It was about seven blocks away in a new location than the one in my Lonely Planet map, and it was there I was greeted by Kim from Ottawa, Canada working the reception desk.

"I crossed at Kasane but I didn't have to pay," I told her.

"Oh, I put your name on the manifest there."

"Really? My e-mail sounded like I was coming in from Zimbabwe."

"Didn't you get my e-mail?"

"No, I had no time before my bus left."

As Juliana said, In Africa, everything seems to just work out in the end.

I CHECKED INTO JOLLY BOYS at the same time as Shelle, an American from Georgia living and working in a clinic in the Zambian capital of Lusaka, and her visiting friend from North Carlolina, Deann. For Shelle, a trip to Victoria Falls and Botswana's Chobe National Park was a much needed vacation on her long weekend; for Deann, it was a much needed vacation from her job as an eighth grade history and science teacher -- and her first time abroad from North America for that matter.

The three of us got our beds in the spacious dorm room with its own shower. While the two girls settled in, I went out on the town to get some cash. Kim directed me to two ATMs on the main strip of Livingstone, but when I went to both, they were Visa/Plus/Electron network only -- and my Citibank ATM card was only accessible on the Mastercard/Cirrus/Maestro system. I asked around for other ATMs but the only other one was Visa-based too. Visa really is everywhere you want to be.

All bank tellers wouldn't be open for any other transaction until after the Easter weekend, which included Easter Monday, an extra public holiday in Zambia.

I wasn't bothered. After the events of the past two days, I took the two mottos to heart: Don't worry until you have to. In Africa, everything seems to just work out in the end.

Suddenly I realized that the emergency credit card of my parents (in my name) was a Visa. I had Kim send out an e-mail home in hopes someone could call me back with a PIN. In the meantime, Kim said I could charge my lodging and that I could start a tab at the bar if I left my passport as a deposit. My $25 (USD) package deal with Jolly Boys not only got me a free visa invitation into the country, but a beer voucher and two meal vouchers. With that and my spare cans of tuna, food was covered. My water bottle had a built-in purifier, so I was covered on drinking water.

I sat out by the pool at sunset with my new friends Shelle and Deann and explained them my whole situation.

"Don't you listen to the [Visa] commercials?" Deann joked.

Shelle, a Zambian resident from America, knew just what I was going through; she was in the same shoes as I was earlier on. She told me that out of all of Zambia, there was only one ATM that would take a Mastercard-based ATM card and it was in Lusaka. Kate and Sarah, two American Peace Corp volunteers that I met at the Jolly Boys Easter Saturday Braai (I used a meal voucher) told me it was the same situation in my next destination, Malawi.

Until the Tuesday after Easter weekend, I'd have to scrimp and get by on credit and goodwill and not waste money on the internet.

"You can always borrow money from me if you need," Shelle kindly offered.

Don't worry until you have to. In Africa, everything seems to just work out in the end. Hakuna matata.

Once In A Lifetime, Again

DAY 175: When you visit a place like Victoria Falls, you treasure every moment of it, taking in the beauty of its sights with your eyes and the monstrous roar of its waters through your ears. The mist seeps through your pores and into your soul. After all, it is, as they say, a "once-in-a-lifetime" experience. This is how I felt in 2000 when I first visited -- in fact, the first photograph in the "Would You?" slideshow is Victoria Falls -- but there I was again, at Victoria Falls again, arguably one of the Seven Natural Wonders of The World again. (For the full effect, say this like Forrest Gump when he talks about visiting the President of the United States over and over.)

Originally, it wasn't my intention to see Victoria Falls a second time, but with the mugging in Cape Town, which ultimately led to flight cancellations between Windhoek, Namibia and Lilongwe, Malawi, I was now going overland -- Victoria Falls being one of the main stops on the way. To differ things a bit this time around, at least I was on the Zambian side, which I hadn't seen the first time. So far the main difference from my vantage point was that Livingstone, the Zambian Vic Falls town, wasn't as developed as Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe -- although Shelle told me that that town went downhill fast in recent years under the dictatorial regime of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.

THE PHONE AT THE BAR RANG AROUND FOUR IN THE MORNING Zambian Time and luckily the late night revelers of the Easter Braai were still awake and drunk for the bartender to still be around to answer it. I was sleeping at the time when the barman came to the dorm and called out my name. My time zone calculations were wrong and markyt was calling me three hours earlier than I anticipated. (I am six ahead of NYC time, not nine like I thought with all the Daylight Savings rules.) I told markyt to call our parents and have them call me. (I would have had e-mailed them directly if only I had the cash and an open internet cafe the night before to access their address in my Yahoo! address book, since Jolly Boys had company e-mail and nothing more.) Ten minutes later my parents were on the phone.

"Happy Easter!" I wished them. They were happy that I called and that I hadn't been mugged again. I asked if they had the PIN for the emergency Visa card I had from them. Love,Mom told me that it might be one of two numbers and that I should try them both. Visa wouldn't release a PIN over the phone, only mail one out.

Neither of the PINs worked when I went to the ATMs later that morning. Luckily I found a single open money exchange that wouldn't change travelers' checks, but my extra 180 Namibian dollars into 115,000 Zambian kwacha (about thirty five American bucks).

I used 7,500 of that cash to get the "budget breakfast" and a coffee from the Jolly Boys bar and ate it at a picnic table with Deann, Shelle and another one from our dorm room Joyce, a German on holiday from her job in Pretoria, South Africa. After breakfast, we all got ready for the Jolly Boys free 10 a.m. shuttle to the falls.

BEFORE THE ARRIVAL OF BRITISH EXPLORER DAVID LIVINGSTONE, the enormous waterfalls of the Zambezi River were known by the indigenous people as Mosi-ao-Tunya, which means "the smoke that thunders." When Livingstone discovered the falls to the Western World in 1885, he christianed them Victoria Falls after the queen and for some reason -- let's say, hmmm... violent imperial conquest -- the name stuck. The original African name is still retained in the Zambian national park which holds them, the Mosi-ao-Tunya National Park, whose entry gate is next to a gift shop appropriately called "The Shop That Thunders." It was near here that the Jolly Boys bus dropped us off. I used ZK49,000 (almost half of my available cash) to get in.

The falls were just as spectacular as I remembered, this time with a lot more water and mist from the unusually heavy rainy season. I, along with Joyce, Shelle, Deann and many other tourists from around the world, walked the trails of the park, stopping by every lookout point for a photo (additional picture above). The main trail led over the slippery Knife Edge Bridge, which took hikers on a drenching walk, whether or not they opted for the $1 (USD) raincoat rental near the start.

"It's just water," I said, saving the cash -- and without my raincoat either, which I bought in Puno, Peru and might have misplaced in Windhoek, Namibia. "People pay money in amusement parks for this." Deann agreed.

I regretted my decision when, at the other side, I had to wring out my shirt like wet dishrag. "Smoke that thunders" my ass; it was more like "Smoke that gets your pants so wet, people can see what kind of underwear you are wearing." Luckily the sun was out in full blast and dried all four of us in no time.

AFTER VISITING THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF right before where the Zambezi waters plummeted below, we took a hike along the lesser-visited path designated "Best Photography Shot" -- most people probably just wanted to get wet instead of a good shot. Hungry, we walked over to the nearby Zambezi Sun Resort, passed the baboons dining on guavas, to get some Easter Brunch. Shelle spotted me for the fancy buffet of beef curry, Cape Malay fish and other tasty African dishes, which we got at a lower price after negotiating with the waiter -- we weren't even staying at the resort. With the confidence of a non-resort guest, Shelle asked the waiter if we could get a golf-cart transport to the nearby area where hippos might be seen. He gave us instructions on what to do, until we changed our minds; having seen participants from afar, Deann wanted to bungie jump off the Victoria Falls Bridge.

"Excuse me sir. Um, there aren't exactly any hippos here. Could ya take us to the bridge instead?" I joked.

Instead of a golf cart or even a taxi, we just walked to the bridge as it wasn't that far at all.

I HAD ALREADY DONE THE BUNGIE JUMP off the 111-meter-high Victoria Falls Bridge in 2000 (I have the cheesy certificate to prove it), and just being at Victoria Falls again in 2004, one repeated once-in-a-lifetime event was enough. That didn't stop me from egging on Deann from doing the jump, i.e. "You know, the only way to dry your shirt is to jump off a bridge." In all fairness, she was thinking of doing the jump anyway.

"If everyone was jumping off a bridge, would you do it too?" Shelle joked.

After simply clearing immigration at the Zambian exit -- the jump site is conveniently on the border between in Zambia and Zimbabwe in "No Man's Land," so no government could be blamed for accidental death and/or dismemberment -- we walked along the bridge over the mighty Zambezi River. Being there again brought it all back to me when I was there four years prior, but I suppose every time you visit a place a second time, it's a little different because you yourself are different -- and in my case, this time with a new set of people.

"How long have you known them?" Joyce asked me as we walked towards the jump site. She was referring to Shelle and Deann ahead of us.

"Just yesterday," I told her. "We checked in at the same time."

Joyce thought we had been friends for years; I suppose we just had that American bond thing going for us and it showed. "Isn't that the great thing about backpacking?" Joyce commented.

A crowd of people were watching the willing participants crazy enough for the Vic Falls Bungie Experience. The familiar countdown of "Five four three two one BUNGIE!" was heard every so often, right before another one fell off the side with a string of rubber wrapped around his/her ankles. Joyce's and Shelle's hearts raced every single time, even just as spectators.

"There's no way I could do it," Joyce said. Deann was a little skeptical on jumping herself until she saw a 14-year-old kid gearing up to jump off the platform.

"If a fourteen-year-old can do it, I can do it!" she proclaimed.

I went with her to the registration office on the Zambia side.

AFTER PAYING, GETTING WEIGHED AND NUMBERED and ditching a somewhat aggressive street vendor trying to sell copper bracelets, Deann was back at the jump site at the middle of the bridge in No Man's Land. Because of the Easter crowd, there were over fifty jumpers that day, so Deann had to wait a while. We watched as an entire South African family jumped one at a time -- except two young girls who went tandem -- along with other spectators, including some guy with a Hawaiian shirt with a print of Saddam Hussein. The more people jumped, the more Shelle got more nervous for her friend. "I'll feel a lot better when this is all over," she told me.

Finaly it was Deann's turn to harness up, wearing the Boli's Pizzeria t-shirt she had so that she could get a photo on the North Carolinan eatery's wall with really impressive bragging rights. There was some sort of discrepancy with the cords or something and I saw the guy at the platform start arguing something in an African dialect to the support team below.

"Uh oh, they're arguing," I told Shelle. Meanwhile, Deann was out of earshot and busy saying her final words to the videographer: "You all think I'm crazy and this'll prove it!"

The crew was switching things around for I didn't know what reason. They were removing the clasps or something and changing the bungie cord.

"What's wrong with the other one?!" Shelle frantically asked to the guy. "People went and came back with that one just fine! Why do they have to change it?!" She was more hysterical than Deann, and from my vantage point it was just funny. Joyce was at the fence with her camera, ready to document the jump.

"Don't worry, it's safe," the guy told us. Easy for him to say. One African saying goes, "Don't worry until you have to," but another one on a sign in our backpackers went, "If first you don't succeed, bungie jumping is not for you."

Deann hopped to the ledge with her two legs strapped together like a prisoner in shackles. The only thing keeping her attached to the rest of her life were very rudimentary: two towels, a nylon strap looped around the way you hook a strap to a camera, and a long piece of rubber. She was instructed to put her toes off the edge, look out into the distance and jump as far out as she could at the end of the countdown which came immediately, giving her no time for second thoughts:

"Five four three two one BUNGIE!"

Deann leaped off. Joyce and I shot photos. Shelle feared for the life of her friend. The elastic cord stretched. Deann bounced back up and gave us double peace fingers with her two hands to assure she was okay. When Deann was raised up to the catwalk beneath us, Shelle could breathe again.

Us three spectators greeted her at the top, congratulated her and went to the office to see the photos and video, tritely scored to Tom Petty's "Freefalling."

THAT NIGHT, THE FOUR OF US WENT OUT FOR DINNER at the Funky Munky Pizzeria, a long walk away on a dark and, for me, nerve-racking road. Apparently I wasn't over my shadowy knifepoint mugging just yet, and its after effects were still with me. But we made it to the pizzeria safely, only to have to wait almost an hour for our food to arrive. At least we had some Coca-colas, which I've learned is the most refreshing thing to drink when you're abroad for some reason. Shelle agreed. "It's the nectar of the gods," she said.

While waiting for our food to arrive, Deann recalled her big once-in-a-lifetime bungie jump experience at Victoria Falls. She said it was just like how I had described it to her: so terrifying the first couple of seconds of freefall that you yell a yell you didn't know you had, but after you feel the tension of the cord attached to you, it's pretty fun. She said she would do a bungie jump again, just maybe not at Victoria Falls. Like me, she probably wanted to keep that experience a once-in-a-lifetime one.

EARLIER THAT AFTERNOON, Joyce asked me why I decided to come to Victoria Falls again. I explained to her that it was just an overland stopover between Namibia and Malawi since my flights got messed up after being mugged in Cape Town, but that, "Hey, I got to meet you guys!"

Perhaps meeting them was one of the positive after effects of the mugging. When travelers on the road transform from just passing bodies to actual friends, it's a great thing. And that's something I really wouldn't mind doing all over again.

Not-So Manic Monday

DAY 176: After so much that had happened since the last Blog entry posting, I seriously needed a day to catch up. And since most stores and banks in Zambia were closed for Easter Monday, it was the perfect day to do so.

That morning at sunrise, I kept the fort. Joyce left early in the morning for a morning walking safari. She was to come back at noon in order to get a flight out of Livingstone, so I kept an eye on her bags in the meantime since the reception desk and baggage storage wasn't open yet. Shelle and Deann were off to go on an overnight safari in Chobe National Park in Botswana, and so I held their bags until storage opened. I bid them farewell for the meantime and went back to sleep.

I WOKE UP ABOUT AN HOUR LATER and did a handwash. Then all morning I was in front of my computer, sorting out photos, typing up entries that I had handwritten before. I took a break about half-way when I saw the bulletin by reception that some money exchanges would be open until noon on Easter Monday, but when I went out, it was only the one I found the day before, the one that wouldn't do travelers' checks. With limited money, I went out to the ShopRite supermarket to get some food. I only had enough to get a box of juice and either ramen noodles or crackers for my cans of tuna. Ramen or crackers? Crackers or ramen? What was I in college again?

Yes; I opted for the ramen. (Later, I realized I made the right decision; there was no can opener in the kitchen.)

After my starchy lunch of powdered chicken flavor goodness, I sat outside on the lawn and continued to handwrite the past couple of days in a lounge chair by the pool (picture above). I took a break about half-way for a dip, dried myself off, and continued writing. I used my last meal voucher ticket for the roast beef dinner at the bar, and then vegged back on my bed with my iBook again.

If I didn't have Blog obligations that day, it might have been a pretty relaxing day of just doing nothing by the pool -- the one-more-day extension of a five-day public Easter holiday since Holy Thursday. If only America could extend Easter weekend with "Easter Monday" as well... "Real Africa" may not have a lot of things, but at least they get the Monday after Easter off.

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

DAY 177: Exchange rates are a funny thing for the US Dollar. Unless you are transferring money into British pounds -- after of which the Brits will make fun of you for "how embarrassingly low the dollar is these days" -- exchanging good ol' American greenbacks into other currencies can be a somewhat gratifying experience, particularly in a country like Zambia. With the rate of $1 USD = ZK4765, for just about $210, yes you too can be a millionaire! (Please don't share this secret with Publishers' Clearing House.)

THE FIVE-DAY EASTER WEEKEND WAS FINALLY OVER and by 7:45 a.m. the banks in town were finally open with teller service -- good news for Zambian trying to make their usual transactions, and even better news for tourists with Mastercard-based ATM cards that had been stuck all weekend with little to no cash.

After waiting on line about ten minutes, I had a teller at the local Barclay's Bank charge $300 USD off my Mastercard credit card, so that I could get cash for it in the local Zambian kwacha. After waiting about an hour for telephone approvals, I finally got the local currency in cash in a nice wad that looked like Monopoly money with animals on it (picture above). Total amount: ZK1,420,500.

I was suddenly a millionaire.

MY FIRST ORDER OF BUSINESS with my new financial status was paying off old debts. I walked over to Fawlty Towers Backpackers to pay my ZK11,000 debt off to Juliana for paying my transports from the border to Livingstone. (I left a note for her the day I left her that I'd pay her when the banks opened.) However, when I asked for her in reception, the guy said she had already left the day before with her friends.

Oh well, I thought. She must not have cared too much about the payback because she was probably a millionaire too. And really, what's a measly 11,000?

I went on my way and finally got some internet time in since I finally had some cash to pay for it. After that I skipped the Jolly Boys' "budget breakfast" and splurged at a place called the Insomnia Club, just off the main strip. Despite having the name that implies coffee shop, it was a nightclub/lounge; people were mopping up from the night before. The barman served me an egg breakfast though and I ate it while watching an MTV video marathon of fellow millionaire P. Diddy.

FOR MOST OF THE DAY, this millionaire finished catching up on Blog duties on his Apple iBook, editing stories, sorting out photos. Shelle and Deann came back from their safari in Botswana that morning, and Shelle was scolding herself for spending money on wooden sculptures that she really didn't want -- she couldn't resist a poor street vendor.

"I have money to pay you back now," I told her. "How much do I owe you?"

Shelle looked up in mid-thought, the way one does when doing math in one's head. The ballpark figure was around 70,000-80,000.

"How about I give you a hundred thousand?"

Her eyes lit up. "Okay!"

I passed over two 50,000 kwacha notes. Really, what's 100,000 amongst friends?

SHELLE AND DEANN BROUGHT ME TO THE BUS TICKET OFFICE so I could get on the next morning bus to Lusaka with them, and after we walked down the main strip to the curio (souvenir) shops. Shelle bought a ceramic hippo soap dish holder and Deann bought some homemade postcards from a kid on the street. After a brief internet session -- I discovered internet cafes, like most stores in Zambia, close at sundown -- the three of us went to Ocean Basket, the South African seafood chain restaurant, a fairly upscale sort of place for the budget backpacker, unless of course, one of them is a millionaire.

Indecisive on what to get, I just got it all: a seafood platter with a little bit of everything, all for just ZK75,000! The staff must have caught the bling bling vibe off of us because when Deann asked to have cake and ice cream as a starter, they didn't give the usual "Ha ha ha, that's funny, but what do you really want?" -- instead, they just gave her what she wanted as eccentric as it was. In fact, not once, not twice, but four times they came over to ask the obligatory, "How is everything?"

THAT NIGHT BACK AT JOLLY BOYS, I paid off my lodging package with a measly ZK175,000. When I looked over my remaining money, I realized that I had spent so much local currency that I was now under the million kwacha mark. I was no longer a millionaire, but at least it was fun until it lasted.

Acronyms and Flea Shampoo

DAY 178: Nowhere on Earth is the AIDS epidemic more widespread than on the African continent. In fact, according to Lonely Planet, "the U.S. Census Bureau predicts that AIDS-related deaths will mean that, by 2010, sub-Saharan Africa will have 71 million fewer people than it would otherwise." With the lack of proper governmental and healthcare infrastructure to deal with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, this rate might not see any sight of being lowered.

Most Africans are too poor for any sort of treatment, and so the next best thing is education, research and an understanding of the disease and how it spreads. A number of programs have been set up by Western non-profit organizations with goals to do just that, so that the spread of the disease, over time, might decrease. One program, P.S.F. (Project San Francisco) originated in Rwanda in 1986, but that was killed (literally) during the brutal genocides of 1994. (As if the deaths of AIDS wasn't bad enough.) This program resurfaced in Zambia as Z.U.H.R.P. (Zambia UAB [University of Alabama] HIV Research Project), which recently transformed into Z.E.H.R.P. when it became affiliated with Emory College instead. It was at ZEHRP that Shelle was a supervisor.

Shelle, like the rest of the staff, had the Easter holiday off and decided to spend it in tandem with the Easter week-long holiday of her teacher friend Deann. It was on this vacation that their paths crossed mine.

Shelle had the Tuesday after Easter Monday off and wanted to be back to the office in Lusaka by mid-day Wednesday. She, Deann and I woke up in Livingstone, six hours away, in the darkness of 4:30 a.m. to board a bus at 5:15 which departed at six. The ride was filled with sleep, reading and a stop at a roadhouse that impressed me with its clever, water-saving bathroom engineering -- the drain pipe of the sink fed to the floor urinal, flushing it, saving water on what would have been a redundant flush.

"REMEMBER THE TIME YOU LET ME BORROW your long-sleeve shirt?" Shelle joked on the bus in light of the fact that we had only known each other for all of two days.

"Yeah," I said reminiscing, "It seems just like yesterday."

Perhaps the two past days were enough to establish trust because she said, "We have a spare bed at the flat if you want to stay over."

"Is that cool?"

"Yeah, no problem," she said. One of her housemates was away in Rwanda. "Just don't steal anything."

"I'll try not to."

By noon we arrived in Lusaka, Zambia's dusty capital city with just three skyscrapers, dusty roads and modern buildings. From the main bus terminal, we got a taxi to Shelle's house in the Emmasdale neighborhood, a ghetto where many volunteers from overseas lived in secure compounds with guard dogs and 24-hour security guards.

The house, consisting of three flats with three bedrooms each, was operated by Z.E.H.R.P. as living quarters for their employees, just walking distance from the clinics. Inside, it was like walking into a suburban house in New Jersey: bedrooms, bathrooms with running water (sometimes), kitchen, laundry and a big comfy living/dining room with TV, DVD, stereo and a computer workstation with high-speed satellite internet access. On the sofa was one of the housemates, Cristina, a Filipino-American originally from Boston who had been abroad for so long that seeing another Filipino-American walk in the door was quite a surprise. "Wow, I haven't seen a lot of you in a while," she joked.

Shelle, Deann and I settled down our baggage in Shelle's room and then Shelle got on her cell phone to check up on the office. A supervisor, she was hoping it'd be a slow day and that maybe she could take the rest of the day off to entertain us, but from the other end, she got the serious news that there had been a seroconversion in the lab -- someone who had previously tested HIV negative was now testing positive. That someone would have to get the bad news that they had contracted the virus.

"I said everything will be okay today, as long as there isn't a seroconversion," Shelle said. What she feared was now the reality of the day, and with the lack of running water, she forsaked a shower and went right to the office. Deann and I followed behind.

I was expecting it to be like an episode of E.R., where Shelle would come in and walk the halls while people walked with her to give her clipboards and information as she put on her labcoat. I expected to hear a mouthful of acronyms I didn't understand, followed by a proclamation of "STAT!"

However, it wasn't as overly dramatic as a television show. Shelle got the information she needed from her staff and made sure things were in motion with her staff, and then gave Deann and I a quick tour of the facility. ZEHRP's clinic was in a campus of a few buildings, the main one holding the lab where blood was processed and tested for HIV (picture above). I saw the centrifuges and the big freezer were DNA and other things with acronyms I didn't know where stored. We were introduced to many of the staff, which consisted of Zambians and volunteers from overseas, and saw the rooms where people enrolled in the program came for counseling. I have to say that amidst the AIDS epidemic spreading across Africa, seeing ZEHRP gave me an assurance that there was some sort of light at the end of the long, dark tunnel and it was a bit inspiring.

For lunch, Shelle brought us to the staff "cafeteria", which was a big picnic table outside where a woman served chicken and the Zambian staple nshima a pasty side dish that made from maize meal that looked a lot like mashed potatoes. Nearby, three guard dogs waited around for people to throw them their unwanted chicken bones.

Shelle went off to handle some business concerning the seroconversion, leaving Deann and I to loiter the grounds. But with the AIDS epidemic all around me, certainly there was something I could do. An old adage goes, "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." But what could I do? Biology and chemistry were my worst subjects in high school. I can't do math; I went to art school. What was I supposed to do, paint over the top and bottom portions of a plus symbol so that positive results could be negative? If only life could work out that way.

An opportunity for me to "do my part" presented itself when Steven, one of the ZEHRP staff called over the guard dogs for a bath. They needed to be washed and lathered up with flea shampoo so that they could properly guard the facility with an iron paw, keeping the HIV research program on track without a hitch. I volunteered to help wash the dogs, Suki, Tsalvo and Sam, who recently got a blue streak of paint on his side because he unknowingly slept leaning on a freshly-painted wall. Steven and I lathered up the dogs with flea shampoo and hosed them down, and after, each dog shivered the water off to dry. Despite our best efforts, the blue paint was impossible to get out, but I felt accomplished that I at least did something to help the ZEHRP project, as menial as it was.

I MET UP WITH SHELLE AND DEANN IN THE LAB, where the seroconversion situation was still being dealt with amidst other tasks that had to be handled in the office. Deann and I felt that perhaps our presence was a bit intrusive, so we walked back to the house. The electricity was out, which meant watching television or DVDs was out. However, Deann, a television addict, was the next best thing and caught me up on everything that had happened in The Sopranos in their latest season.

Shelle came home from work and took us to Manda Hill, the Westernized strip mall where all the mzungus -- the African term for "foreigner" (like "gringos" in South America) -- could visit a slice of home. (There was even a Subway sandwich shop!) There we went to "The Magical ATM," the one cashpoint supposedly in all of Zambia that would take a MasterCard/Cirrus network ATM card, where I became a multi-millionaire in less than a minute.

From there we went to a local Indian restaurant, a favorite of the ZEHRP volunteers, where I treated myself and the two girls for dinner, wine and coffees with Amarula, the African cream liquor made from local fruit, similar to Bailey's Irish Cream.

"Thanks for dinner," the two of them thanked me.

"No problem. Thanks for picking up a little stray puppy in Vic Falls."

Shelle bought some take-out for her housemates Cristina and her husband Jens, who worked at another research clinic in town, and her "sick" boyfriend George. I put "sick" in quotes because there was a little uncertainty if George was really sick or if he was just weirded out that his girlfriend had suddenly brought home a stray Filipino-American puppy home from Livingstone -- even if he did lather up with flea shampoo earlier that day.

The three of us picked up Cristina and Jens at the ZEHRP house and drove over to George's, where he was in fact, a little out of it. He was in good spirits though and let us crash his pad for a while, as he, Cristina and Jens had dinner. We all sat around talking and joking over bottles of wine and playing with Shelle's and George's cute little (and real) puppy Lelo. For me, it was great to, for a change, feel a little bit like I was home with old friends; it felt like I might have been hanging out with friends at Blogreaders Yvette's and Udz's house in New Jersey -- right in the heart of Africa.

WHILE THE A.I.D.S. EPIDEMIC IN AFRICA MAY NEVER END, it is good-hearted people like Shelle who come overseas to do their part in helping out in any way possible -- and occasionally pick up strays on their Easter vacation. As I lay in the bed of the spare bedroom that night, I knew that at least in my eyes, it was much appreciated.

Giving Good Price

DAY 179: One way to help aid a developing nation like Zambia is to pump foreign money into its economy. And what better way to do so as a tourist than by buying souvenirs and gifts for friends and family back home. By the end of the day, it seemed that Deann bought enough to increase Zambia's Gross National Product tenfold.

WHEN DEANN WOKE UP IN SHELLE'S ROOM and I woke up in the temporary spare room in the ZEHRP flat that morning in Lusaka, Cristina was already on the computer in the living room, working from home, preparing all her reports. It was her last week of working at the project; she had already given her two weeks notice and was taking a job at the U.S. embassy in town. Shelle, who was still contracted at ZEHRP until the end of June, had gone to work, but left her guests a handwritten map and directions to local craft markets.

A TAXI TOOK DEANN AND MYSELF TO THE NORTHMEAD CRAFT MARKET, in the Northmead neighborhood in town, a somewhat touristy area -- well, as touristy as a place like Lusaka can get; it isn't exactly on the top of a traveler's "must-see" list unless they have business there or people to visit. The market was a small "town," consisting of five rows of stalls, many of which sold identical wood carvings and other assorted chotchskies (picture above).

With the similarities in products -- the vendors here are "middle men," buying carvings from similar small villages to sell in the city -- getting the attention of the mzungus was a fierce game, especially on a weekday. Most of them had similar tactics and the same pitches:

"Come in and look. Looking is free."

"I give you discount because you are my first customer."

Of course, this is followed by an opening price by the vendor that is twice what you should pay, if not more. You say, "No, that's too high," and say one-third the price until they come down and you go a little up and they come down again and you say "That's still too high." Then you play the game of collecting multiple items that you may or may not want and quote a collective price for all of it and start over again.

The whole barganing game comes to a close when you make motions to leave, at which point they cave and give you the last price you quoted before you just go to the next stall who has the same exact stuff. Sometimes, it is literally the same exact stuff; they bring the items from one stall to another and have the next guy continue the bargaining if you never sealed the deal.

Deann had one of these collective propositions on the table with one vendor who kept on transferring the goods down the line, stall to stall. It included some wood carvings and a "Zambian silver" bracelet that Deann said, if it was real silver, she would probably pay about twenty bucks for it in The States. The vendors heard this and kept on insisting on around that price. They would come down to a really low price on the other things, provided that she bought the bracelet at ZK100,000 -- which prompted me to advise, "It must not be real silver worth twenty dollars; they're probably coming down low on the carvings knowing they'd make back the money in the bracelet." Deann was headstrong and refused the deal over and over, even though we were pretty much stalked the entire day by someone who just wanted to sell the bracelet.

DEANN AND I WALKED THE ROWS OF VENDORS looking at the different masks, statues, wire sculptures and baskets -- Deann more than me because she was leaving in a couple of days and had a list of people to get things for. Between the two of us, I was the only one with kwacha currency, so she had to keep on "withdrawing" money from me like an ATM, until she just bought some kwacha off of me with dollars during lunch. By the end of the day, she bought enough gifts to complete most of her list -- only when the price was right -- and even had measurements taken for some custom-made dresses and skirts for herself that she was having made by a friendly seamstress that Cristina recommended.

I was a different story; I still had many miles and many months to go, and I knew that buying anything that would weigh me down -- it was bad enough I was lugging a laptop computer around. My money that day went to a haircut I got from a dusty little shack of a barber shop. However, I did play around with the barganing game every now and then, chatting to different vendors who eagerly tried to sell me things, after of which I'd say something like "Thank you. I'm still looking around, but I know you are here."

Other than the wooden chairs and some handmade postcards, one thing that caught my attention was the African board game nsolo, a traditional game that was used to resolve disputes in the villages. Using a wooden board with four rows of eight "cups," two players, transfer rocks from each cup to the next in a counter-clockwise position, grab the contents of the spot they landed in and continue. The rules are too hard and boring to explain here, but long story short: the one with all the stones on his/her side wins.

I learned this all when I hung out with in a vendor's stall as he demonstrated the whole game to me, playing with a little girl. (The girl won.) Of course he capitalized on my interest using a tactic I had not heard before.

"I know you are not a tourist with a lot of money. You are a volunteer here, right?"

"Yes." (Little did he know that the extent of my volunteer work in Africa was washing a couple of dogs.)

"Where do you volunteer?"

"At ZEHRP."

"I know you are good and here to help the Zambian people, so I give you good price." He made me look at him straight in the eye to establish that he was being honest with me. In the end, we went from ZK300,000 to ZK160,000. I really didn't want it -- it's way to heavy for my travels -- but entertained him by telling him that I'd think about it overnight and perhaps just come another day; I was a "volunteer at ZEHRP" and was "living in Lusaka" after all.

Meanwhile, Deann was shopping and still avoiding the stalker that was trying to sell her the silver bracelet, even in the parking lot. We eventually lost him real quick in the maze and got into a taxi before he could catch up with his "good price."

BACK AT THE FLATS THAT NIGHT wasn't nearly as hectic. After a beer run with Cristina at the local convenience store, the night was a chilled out one with beers, delivered pizza pies (including one named "Something Meaty") and The Office and The Simpsons on DVD.

Deann spent some of her time back at the flat sorting out all her purchases of the day, or, as she put it, "doing inventory." While it seemed Deann may have pumped enough money to increase the Gross National Product tenfold, Shelle told me that that was nothing compared to when her sister Stacie came; from what I heard, Stacie probably could have personally funded a legitimate Zambian space program.

Donations to a Country Going to Mars

DAY 180: Being at the ZEHRP house was like entering a bubble back into the familiar life I had back in metro-New York City. Other than watching The Simpsons with fellow fans like Jens the night before, that morning I had Golden Crisp cereal with Deann. (Yes, Sugar Bear was alive and well in the heart of Zambia.) Afterwards, we killed the morning in the little "computer lab" in the next door flat where there were some ZEHRP administrative offices.

Shelle came home from a half day at the clinic with her friend Mwelwa, who ran an organization that helped underprivileged teens. He came over because Shelle mentioned to him that I had some old clothes I wanted to donate -- and lighten the load of my big backpack weighed down with electronics. Deann gave some unwanted clothes and shoes too, but worried that they weren't in like-new condition.

"Really, don't worry about it," Shelle told her. "You should see what these kids have. It's fine."

It was great to see that despite the fact that a slice of American suburbia was surrounded by African poverty, at least there was a little giving back. There was more giving back when we went out to lunch at a nearby restaurant and gave our unfinished food to local man hungover.

AFTER WAITING OUT A DOWNPOUR in the pool room of the nearby Masiye Lodge -- a lodge known for meeting locals and prostitution hook-ups -- we took a taxi across town to the National Museum. The taxi ride was especially interesting because not only was it still raining but there was afternoon bumper-to-bumper rush hour. It was made even more interesting when our taxi (which already had a big dent in the windshield) shut down as it was ascending the first half of an arched bridge. Our crazy taxi driver put the blinkers on and started going in reverse towards incoming traffic, in attempts to pop the clutch. The engine kicked and and we sped up passed the minivans that poked fun of our driver for driving a bunch of mzungus around.

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM IN LUSAKA WAS JUST AS LONELY PLANET DESCRIBED IT: "perfect for a snapshot of past and present Zambia." The two-level building housed a gallery of contemporary paintings and sculpture (picture above) on one floor (complete with price tags in case anyone was interested in buying), and more informative exhibitions on Zambian history, culture and witchcraft on the mezzanine.

While Deann spent most of the time in the gift shop trying to buy some last-minute gifts, Shelle and I wandered the history exhibition, which was in dire need of some good graphic design; the entire historical timeline of history was a series of newspaper clippings arbitrarily taped to bulletin boards. While most of the timeline traced the history of Zambia -- from its pre-colonial tribal era, to its days as British colony Northern Rhodesia, to its independence under the name "Zambia" declared in October 1964 -- only one particular story stuck out in my mind.

From what I gathered, Edward Makuka Nkoloso was a candidate in the mayoral race of capital city Lusaka. He wrote an editorial that was published in a newspaper which stated that if he had been elected mayor in the 1960s, he would have put into effect the space program that he had secretly been building seven miles out of Lusaka. He was convinced that his scientific lab was far more advanced than the Americans or Russians and was all geared up to send a spacegirl, two specially-trained cats and a Christian missionary up to Mars, where they were certain primitive natives were living. And I quote:

"...I have warned the missionary he must not force Christianity on the people in Mars if they do not want it."

The article was so ridiculous it was hilarious -- the whole thing can be read here -- and it was definitely something the history section of my Lonely Planet book overlooked.

THE RAINS OVER LUSAKA HAD STOPPED, which meant the seamstress at the Northmead Craft Market would be around to fit Deann into her new clothes that she had ordered the day before. A friendly (and far-less-crazy) taxi driver named Bruce took us there and waited while the three of us ventured into the alleys of aggressive crafts salesmen. Most of them recognized Shelle from all of her visits there, but one in particular was looking for me: the man I had told I'd be back to buy the nsolo African board game. His face lit up when I returned to "honor my word," and waited for me to walk over.

"Oh you have history here too, huh?" Shelle said to me.

I told the man that I had changed my mind and that I wasn't interested, but he laid this whole guilt trip on me that I probably would have ignored if only I hadn't told him the day before that I would buy it. "Please don't do that," he said, calling out my bluff. He led me to his stall but I was still iffy on the whole thing; even if I did buy the wooden board and all its amethyst game pieces, it'd be too heavy for me to lug around Africa. Sure, I could have it shipped, but that would just add more to a cost that I really didn't feel like paying.

The man laid the guilt trip on me pretty thick, telling me how it had been raining all day so he couldn't make a sale (which was probably true) and then he played The Children Card: "My children have to go to school." Whether or not this was true I didn't know, but I stood there in mid-thought for about ten minutes wondering what to do. For some reason, I was less concerned about him ripping me off with guilt trip, and more concerned with my personal integrity; above all, I always try to be a man of my word, and I had told him yesterday that I'd be back the next day to buy it. Although I was trying to avoid this confrontation by not coming back (out of my integrity's jurisdictdion), there I was again, in his stall, waiting for Deann to get fitted for her clothes. The guy brought the price down to an even ZK150,000 (about $30 USD) and I stood there trying to argue the cost of shipping. He tried to convince me that it wasn't that expensive and even through in some extra amethyst crystal playing pieces. In the end, I caved, justifying the purchase that I would send it to my little cousins in New Jersey for them to have and play together with -- and besides, it's not like I had been paying for lodging during my entire stay in Lusaka thus far.

Ashamed that I had caved on a purchase I really didn't want, I felt a little better when Shelle caved in on a couple of impulse buys she couldn't say "no" to on the way out.

"You buying that makes me feel a lot better," I told her.

"Hey, I haven't even spent a fifth of what you just spent," she joked.

In the end, everything just seemed to work out in the end; Deann offered to ship the nsolo game with her for free on her flight back to The States and would mail it to New Jersey for me as long as I sent her a postcard from Cairo.

BACK IN THE LITTLE AMERICAN SUBURBIAN SUB-CULTURE scattered throughout Lusaka, I went out to dinner with ZEHRP and company, of which we took photos by group: dating couple Shelle and George, married couple Cristina and Jens, visiting travelers Deann and me, friends from the States Deann and Shelle, and the Filipino Connection, Cristina and me. We went out to the Cattleman's Grill, a outdoor patio steakhouse with decent steaks where one of Shelle's favorite local bands was rumored to be playing in. That group wasn't there and was substituted by another which played R&B tunes. The lead singer looked like he was lip-syncing the whole time until we got on the dance floor for a closer look. Upon careful scrutinization, one thing was for sure: the drummer and bass player were totally stoned.

After watching more episodes of The Simpsons season three on DVD with Jens, I just went to bed, happy and content with the day, even with that unintentional craft market purchase I had made. I figured it was just another donation into the poor economy surrounding the American suburbian bubble. For a country that may or may not go to Mars with a spacegirl, two cats and a missionary, they'll need all the help they can get.

Last Day With ZEHRP

DAY 181: "We're going to a bakery if you want to come," Cristina said to me in the ZEHRP living/dining room that morning as I was typing a Blog entry on my iBook at the dining table. I took her up on her offer and hopped in the SUV with her, Jens and Deann, who was also tagging along for the ride since, although it was Saturday, Shelle was at work at the ZEHRP clinic.

The trip to the bakery wasn't a weekly Saturday affair for the married couple; Cristina, whose last day it was working at ZEHRP, wanted to buy cakes and pastries to thank her staff in the data department. Although she wasn't leaving Lusaka -- "There's a something about this place that just sticks with you and you can't leave" -- she was leaving the project she came for. From what I'm told, as noble a project like ZEHRP was, it had all the dysfunctional bureaucratic politics that are present in any organization, for profit or non, and for her, enough was enough. Luckily for her she landed a job at the U.S. Embassy, and would move out of the ZEHRP house to another one closer to the clinic where her husband Jens worked.

AFTER DRIVING THROUGH THE POORER "COMPOUNDS" of Lusaka and onto two bakeries in two Westernized strip malls (the first had no cakes), we had enough cake for her staff to have (and eat it too) and brought it back to the ZEHRP flats. Shelle was there waiting for us; she had managed to get off of work early (the ZEHRP work week is Tuesday to Saturday) to hang out with Deann a couple of more hours before she left. For Deann, it was her last day with ZEHRP too.

Until it was time to bring her to the airport, we just vegged out in Shelle's room while Deann did the final touches to her packing -- she was kind enough to not only lug some of my things back to The States, but some extraneous things of Shelle as well. I spent the morning playing MacGyver, attempting to fix Shelle's digital camera with a paperclip, scissors, tweezers and (of course) some duct tape.

"I just took a picture of you," I announced to Shelle when I got it working after about an hour. She was thrilled. The marvels of duct tape never seem to cease.

GEORGE PICKED US UP at the ZEHRP house at 12:30, and drove the four of us -- and the cute little puppy Lelo -- passed the number of women carrying goods on their heads, to the Lusaka International Airport, about twenty minutes away. The airport wasn't nearly as extravagant as the ones in New York or Paris -- not a duty free shop in sight -- so we just walked Deann to the exit fee desk and then to the security gate where only passengers were allowed beyond that point. It was there Deann said her goodbyes, which were only for the meantime; she knew that she'd at least see Shelle back in the States after her last day with ZEHRP in June.

"Nice meeting you," Deann said to me.

"I'll see you on the internet."

Two days later, she was already posting comments on The Blog.

ARCADES, THE LATEST WESTERNIZED STRIP MALL in the greater Lusaka area catering (non-exclusively) to the ex-patriate community, was on the way home from the airport, and it was there we stopped for lunch at Michaelangelo's. The new pizzeria tried to simulate a rustic, old-fashioned Tuscan experience with exposed brick and cracks in the wall -- simply by painting images of them on a flat wall -- but made up for their lack of building materials with really good pizzas. Over Castle beers, Coca-Colas and coffee drinks mixed with shots of Amarula, we discussed a debate that Shelle had been pondering in her head: if George, a third-generation Zimbabwean, managed to move to the U.S. and acquire U.S. citizenship, would he be able to apply and receive African-American scholarships even though he is of Caucasian descent? (Feel free to send your comments and thoughts on this matter below.)

Whether or not George would move to the U.S. was still in the air, but one thing for sure was, if you wanted to find George in Lusaka, Zambia, chances were you'd find him at Hooligan's, the humble, working-class bar where everyone knew his name. (It was inevitable; a big mural in the parking lot had "GEORGE" in big letters on it.) When George was living temporarily in a flat for two months without refrigeration, it was Hooligan's that he came to everyday for food, drink and company. After lunch, it was Hooligan's (picture above) where we went to kill some time and say hello to the usual barflies, including Lawrence, who joined us for a doubles game of pool. Lawrence, a boilermaker, was my partner, and a far better one at that, and I apologized for, for lack of a better phrase, totally sucking ass. His skill made up for my inability and we beat Shelle and George in a best-out-of-five series.

"YOU FEEL LIKE HAVING THE BEST STEAKS IN THE WORLD?" Cristina asked me.

"You mean better than the ones last night [at Cattleman's Grill]?"

"Yeah."

She was referring to the delectable steaks at Marlin's, a popular and somewhat fancy restaurant of the ex-patriate community -- so popular we had to make reservations -- where, according to the ZEHRP crew, I needn't look past the first page of the menu where all the steaks were. Dinner at Marlin's was originally meant as a Jens' and Cristina's payback to George for hooking up their stove for them in their new house, but it was also probably a good idea for Cristina to wind down with a juicy slab of beef after an emotionally exhausting last day with ZEHRP. Personally, my day was free of emotional exhaustion, but I fully enjoyed the pair of medium-rare porterhouse steaks with a side of creamy mashed potatoes anyway (all at the USD equivalent price of about eight bucks).

"You know I've been eating like a king since I've met you," Shelle said to me, eating her medium-rare rump steak smothered with creamy mushroom sauce.

"Me too," I said. "Until I bumped into you, it was all ramen noodles and cans of tuna."

The tuna and ramen noodles would have to wait, for it wasn't my last day with ZEHRP just yet. I knew that at some point, as the saying goes, all good things come to an end, but in the meantime, I knew that -- with the bakeries, pizzerias, bars and steakhouses I'd visited that day -- living the life of an ex-pat was much tastier than living the life of a backpacker.

The Things People Do On A Sunday

DAY 182: "We have to do something exciting today, so Erik can have something to write about," Shelle told George in the car as we were driving to the market to get fresh vegetables.

"Where should we go?" George asked me.

"It doesn't matter," I said. "I can always just write about The Things People Who Live Here Do On A Sunday."

"A CASTLE AND A MOSI," I ordered at the bar of the Family store, which was part grocery, part cafeteria, part liquor store, part casino if you can imagine that. It was Sunday, but I'm sure anyday was good enough to sit around with a round of cold ones. We were waiting for a guy called Love, who usually sold handmade cards at the nearby Northmead Market, to finish washing George's car for a quick kwacha. It was at the Northmead Market that we had come to buy fresh vegetables for the dinner Shelle and George were going to prepare that night.

This was just one errand in a bunch of errands we ran that morning, which included grocery shopping (I stocked up on tuna and ramen noodles for the inevitable departure from the ZEHRP house); buying my early Tuesday morning bus ticket to Chipata, the Zambian border town with Malawi; eating a familiar tuna sandwich from Subway (once it hit my lips, it was so good!), and withdrawing three times the maximum amount of cash out of The Magical ATM that could accept MasterCard-based bank cards in case I wouldn't find another for a while. If Shelle had her way, the morning of errands would have included going to all the "TO LET" signs around town (that's how they say "FOR RENT"), so she could paint an "I" in the space between the "O" and the "L" -- after of which she'd snicker and giggle like a little schoolgirl.

The Things People Who Live Here Do On A Sunday would have regularly been an entry about hanging out at the Hooligan's bar all day. We were thinking of "going for one," but as anyone knows, "going for one" really means "going for at least five," or in some cases, staying out until 3 a.m. and waking up in a van down by the river! This is why Shelle advised against Hooligan's as fun as it was, since she and George had bought a big angel fish to make for dinner -- people were invited as well.

What turned into an "Off-Sunday" of the people living in Lusaka turned out to be an episode of The Things I Might Have Done On A Sunday Back In My Old Apartment If I Wasn't On This Trip. I realized I could directly connect the ZEHRP ethernet cable into my iBook, and so I sat in a familiar scene, on an easy chair with computer in lap to write, IM and surf the web, all in front of a TV and DVD player. Meanwhile, Shelle did some Tae Bo.

MAKING ANGEL FISH, a delicious fish with the density of turkey, and trimmings was also a part of Shelle's and George's Off-Sunday. It was Shelle's first time baking fish but not George's, so he did most of the cooking. However, Shelle impressed us with her culinary skill with her tomato coconut curry sauce, which accented the fish and rice perfectly.

"We're going to a concert if you want to come," Megan asked us at the dinner table. She and other fellow ZEHRPer Kevin were our dinner guests, along with Cristina and Jens who had finally made the move to their new home and were no longer residents in ZEHRP Flat 2. While Cristina and Jens packed and moved out their room with their final belongings -- so that I could move in since Helen, the occupant of "my room" was coming back the next day -- Shelle, George and I joined Megan and Kevin in yet another Off-Sunday event: going to an orchestral and choral concert in a church. (Were you expecting the Red Hot Chili Peppers or something?)

LUSAKA HAS A FAIR AMOUNT of Muslim residents. In the city center where in a Western city you might find a cathedral, here there was a mosque. In fact, Emmasdale, the neighborhood where ZEHRP was located, was a big Indian muslim community (picture above, taken by Deann) where there was another big mosque. Everyday the prayer chants were broadcasted over loudspeakers for everyone in the area to hear.

Christianity was spread during the colonization of Africa centuries ago -- from what I've seen, mostly sects of Protestantism. Christianity has woven its way into modern society in subtle ways (i.e. the "In God We Trust" grocery store) to really obvious ones, as seen in a billboard campaign seen all over town:

The Cathedral of the Holy Cross, an Anglican church, was where the Lusaka Music Society presented Bach's St. John's Passion and Michael Tippett's Five Negro Spirituals, both parts separated by a twenty-minute intermission. Conductor Paul Kelly led the South African soloists, music society choir and instrumentalists, a mixed group of Africans and mzungus. There was something great about the acoustics in the nave of the cathedral; despite the lack of carols, it felt a little Christmasy in the middle of Africa, and in April too.

IN ONE LAST OFF-SUNDAY ACTIVITY, we went to a pub that wasn't Hooligan's: the "Irish pub" McGarit's in the local Holiday Inn. I put "Irish pub" in quotes because the only thing Irish about it was the Irish blessings and other paraphernalia hanging on the wooden walls -- they didn't even have Guiness on tap.

Drinking Castle beers was about the only usual Thing That People Who Live Here Do On A Sunday, but I'm sure that's an event that could be enjoyed any day of the week.

Orphans

DAY 183: When I was stranded on Easter weekend in Livingstone, a town where only Visa-based ATM cards were accepted, me and my MasterCard-based bank card were lost like a stray puppy. Fortunately for me, a girl named Shelle picked me up, a Filipino-American stray, and took me home to her house in Lusaka. For four days, I lived in her house with her HIV research project pals and experienced the life of an American ex-patriate with all its Western conveniences. I had found a home.

Originally I was going to take the early bus that morning but when we tried to buy a ticket the day before, my options were to: take a later bus, which would require a one-night stayover somewhere between Lusaka and Lilongwe, Malawi; OR spend another day at the ZEHRP flats and take the early bus the next day. Shelle's weekend was Sunday-Monday, and so the latter was my choice. This Filipino-American stray would have a home one more day.

THE EXTRA DAY WAS SPENT visiting other strays, or rather, orphans, at the House of Moses orphanage run by the Christian Alliance for Children of Zambia, where Shelle was a volunteer. It was here that people brought children, newborn to age 2, that they could not care for or afford to feed.

"You can send a lot of diapers and donations but really what these kids need is to be held," she told me.

The understaffed nursery of about ten toddlers cared by two nurses, a television and some toys was where Shelle and I arrived. Puppy-dog eyes of little African children stared back at us with curiosity, a little confusion and, from one little boy named Isaac, funny faces (picture above).

For most of the time there, Shelle and I provided what the children needed: social interaction and a little hands-on TLC. Some babies cried when I held them, but for the most part they laughed when I tickled them in the belly. Isaac continued to make funny faces at me when I tickled him until I picked him up to look out the window. He must have enjoyed the view of the big outside world (i.e. the backyard) too much because he cried when I let him down away from the window.

"You can't cry, you're the funny guy," I told him. He continued to cry for a bit until he just sat there silent without a funny face -- that is, until I tickled him ten minutes later and he was his same old Funny Guy self again.

Catherine, a little girl in a pink dress, was also a ticklish one and she walked with me hand in hand when we went with Shelle -- with a baby strapped on her back in the traditional way -- to a brave new world: outside the nursery, and up the stairs to the infirmary where the newborns were cared for. It was there I walked Catherine around to see the babies, except the ones quarantined with tuberculosis. Catherine found a new favorite toy there, a big old wooden rocking chair that she absolutely loved swaying in. Meanwhile, I held (and tickled) a newborn girl named Helen. I felt a little depressed holding her; she, Catherine, Isaac and others had no parents to care for them and were surviving simply because of the kindness of strangers.

When we got back to the nursery it was naptime for the kids and Shelle's and my cue to leave. I said goodbye to Catherine and "Funny Guy" Isaac, who was in his crib still awake making more funny faces at me.

"I have a puddle on my pants," Shelle told me. (The House of Moses kids weren't exactly potty-trained just yet.)

"Oh, I have one on my shirt."

ON THE WAY HOME, we stopped at the Town Center Market, which was, well, a market in the center of town. (I'm not making this up, folks.) While the Northmead Market was sort of targeted towards tourists with its plethora of wooden handicrafts, the Town Center Market was where Lusakans came for anything and everything (including the kitchen sink) through a maze of old wooden vending stalls organized in rows like a little town. Each neighborhood was like a department in Walmart, from produce to fried foods to clothing to hardware. Most of the vendors seemed pretty surprised to see the likes of us there and kept asking what we were looking for -- first by addressing Shelle as "Madam" or me as "bwana" which translates to "big man."

"We're just looking," I'd say.

"For what are you looking for?"

"Actually, I don't even know."

The last exciting adventure for Shelle and I (at least in Zambia) happened when we left the markets and went back to the Land Cruiser, which we parallel-parked on the street nearby. The Cruiser was owned by ZEHRP and went in rotation with the staff for driving around town. However, it wasn't exactly the most reliable vehicle and it was evident when Shelle couldn't get the engine started. Usually she'd just wait for the clutch to pop and it'd start right up, but this time it didn't work -- and in front of all the curious passers-by. Soon two guys were pushing the car to push start the engine (for a fee of course), but Shelle couldn't get it. Back and forth we went on the shoulder of the road, causing quite a scene. Up to a dozen guys rushed the SUV to "help out," many volunteering to get in the driver's seat to start himself.

Uh, no.

Their grubby hands were reaching in and Shelle, a little scared, didn't know what to do. She turned to me for help but -- having living in the New York City area where no one really drives regularly, let along a manual in the right side of the car on the left side of the road -- I was totally useless.

"I really have no idea what to do," I admit to her.

The grubby hands were still reaching in, all the while the car was in motion because others were still pushing it. Luckily a voice instructed that the gear had to be in second. One pop, two pop, three. The engine started and Shelle was thrilled. She had no small bills to tip with so I held out a couple of ZK1000 notes and a ZK5000 one -- all of which were snatched out of my hand before I could blink.

GEORGE CAME TO THE ZEHRP HOUSE in his not-so-flashy, but more reliable company car. I brought in my clothes that had been hanging out to dry all day after my morning handwash.

"Did you iron your clothes?" Shelle asked.

"No," I said, thinking she was just being funny. (Why would a backpacker need to iron his clothes?) But then she informed me about the putsi fly, which lays eggs into the fibers of damp clothes. Like people leaving their young at the House of Moses, the flies leave their young to develop under the care -- and in this case, under the skin -- of strangers.

"Make sure you iron at least your underwear," George suggested. But the ironing would have to wait until later; we had a rendezvous to attend to: visiting Jens and Cristina at their new condo across town.

THE FLAT, UNFURNISHED WITH STUFF STILL IN BOXES, was a nice place with a security guard in front and a big shared yard and pool in the back. It was in the backyard that George's cute puppy Lelo befriended the neighbor's dog Teito, owned by a Japanese couple next door. With the barking, all the neighbors came around to investigate and meet the new tenants and their guests. For the humans it was just casual introductions, but for Lelo and Teito it looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I spent my last evening in Lusaka hanging out at the back patio table with George and Shelle, Jens and Cristina, over Indian take-out from Premuni's, and the bottle of wine I bought as a housewarming gift. After various conversation topics including one about how my father is an advocate for florescent lighting, we called it a night. I bid farewell to Cristina, my Filipino Connection in the heart of Zambia and her Scandinavian/African/Native American counterpart.

"Have fun storming the castle!" Jens said to me waving, quoting the Billy Crystal line from The Princess Bride.

The faces of the ZEHRP crew that I had encountered had moved on to another stage in life: Cristina with her new job at the U.S. embassy, and with her husband Jens, a new home. Helen, the girl whose room I had been staying in, had come back from her field trip to Rwanda. Even Lelo had a new doggie friend named Teito. And for me, it was time to move on too.

WHILE GEORGE AND SHELLE WENT TO BED, I spent the rest of the night trying to iron out the potential putsi fly eggs out of my clothes. Eggs or not, the putsi flies took their toll on me; the ZEHRP iron was too hot at one point and burned right through one of the only two pairs of Columbia conversion pants I had. The Omni-Dry fabric melted onto the face of the iron and smeared over one of my socks.

There was no use crying over spilled milk (or melted fabric), so I just turned in since I had an early escape out of Lusaka the next day. I would finally leave the comforts of a home away from home and become that Filipino-American stray that Shelle found in Livingstone the week before.

"If you get stuck," Shelle told me earlier at lunch that day, "Make sure you have enough to come back to Lusaka."

The thought that I could find refuge at the House of ZEHRP, like orphans at the House of Moses, was a comforting one -- that is, provided I didn't come back with any putsi flies under my skin.

Traveler Again

DAY 184: Some people travel to escape their boring routine lives at home. Some people, particularly a fair amount of the backpacker set, travel great distances only to travel pub to pub, club to club, and have "generic" experiences they could probably have anywhere -- to each his/her own taste I guess. I, like some other backpackers, travel to leave my comfort zone and experience new cultures.

I'll admit that I was starting to get a little homesick since Namibia, but being in the American suburbian bubble of the ZEHRP house got me over it. I had "recharged" back in the "normal" life the way a person who works in an office "recharges" on vacation. After my "reverse vacation" I was ready to face the world again.

And so, on the 20th of April 2004, the six month anniversary since The Global Trip 2004 started, the seventh month began...

THE ALARM BEEPED AT 4 A.M. and I gathered all my belongings into my two bags, leaving nothing but a thank you gift on the desk for Shelle: a bottle of Amarula and a personalized spare copy of the Hyenas... book that I'm in. Shelle was way too out of it to see me off, so we just said our goodbyes in her room as she was half-asleep. George and the energetic puppy Lelo brought me to the bus terminal by 4:30.

"Thanks for everything," I said, shaking George's hand. He left and I was a lone traveler again.

I WAS BACK IN THE CONFUSION of public transportation; the bus the ticket window guy directed me to was the wrong one, but I managed to find the right one before they ran out of seats. The bus left promptly at 5 a.m. under the still dark sky and out of Lusaka. The ride eastbound was a long one. No video screenings playing bad Jean-Claude Van Damme or Steven Seagal movies like I had in Peru. No A/C. Just a lot of heat and even more B.O. I took a couple of naps, did some writing and read some more of Zadie Smith's White Teeth. There were no food stops on the way, but I got by on a bunch of bananas I bought from a street vendor during a quick pee stop and some boiled peanuts from the nice old African lady sitting next to me.

The "seven hour" bus ride was the usual bumpy ride on dirt roads and paved roads filled with potholes. People came on and off in the little villages (picture above) on the way. I put "seven hour" in quotes because it was more like eight and a half. By 1:30 we reached the Zambian border town of Chipata, 12 km. from the border with Malawi.

PHILLIP, THE SEASONED TRAVELER I HAD MET on the bus going from Windhoek to Zambia, told me a story of the time he was in a shared taxi in Togo. He was sitting in the back of the car, in the middle, sandwiched between local guys who, from what he gathered, were all conspiring to jump him and rob him with a knife at a secluded location the driver was secretly taking them to. Luckily for him, he managed to figure this all out before it was too late and fought back when they finally did attack, keeping his money belt -- and his life -- intact.

This story echoed through my mind as I was in the shared taxi going from the Chipata bus stop to the border post. I was in the back, in the middle, in a car with dark, tinted windows. For some reason, the driver liked to play his bass-boosted stereo really loud, drowning out any noise from in the inside.

When we had enough passengers the car took off, thankfully with all the windows open so that passers-by could look inside. But suddenly the two power windows on the left closed. The driver turned up the volume.

Fuck. Is this a trap? Where are we going?

Why is that guy in front giving me an evil eye? What did the guy with the cell phone just say to the driver in some African dialect? Why is the finger of the guy on my left on the power window button? Why must the driver turn up the volume even more? Sure he has a trusting baby face like Magic Johnson, but so what? Fuck, fuck, fuck!

I was on guard. My eyes scanned the others to see if they were communicating with eye signals. Or were they going to jump me after a specific song played? Mugging alert went to orange. But then I thought to myself, what will being on guard do? I'm outnumbered four to one and who knows if there was a gun in the glove compartment? When the cell phone guy's conversation ended, I reached over and opened the window again and prayed for the best.

THUD, the truck slammed shut after I got my bag out when we arrived at the border post without a scratch.

"Have a safe journey," the driver wished me. Ha, you're telling me!

EXIT FORMALITIES FOR ZAMBIA WERE EASY, but it was another 12 km. to the Malawian entrance post, which meant it was time for another shared taxi. I wasn't as paranoid this time; the windows stuck open (no crank handles) and the radio was soft. The only hitch was when the border guard searched my bag, only to find no problems.

We continued to the Malawian border town Mchinji where the shared taxi dropped us off at a shared minivan that would take us the 120 km. to the capital city, Lilongwe. It was a cramped 80-minute ride, particularly because both my bags were inside with me and the fact that the conductor tried to squeeze in the same number of people inside as the number of bowls of Special K it takes to equal just one bowl of Total.

People came off and on at local villages and I kept on shifting the weight of my bag on my lap, wary of loose hands that might be reaching into my pockets. The crowd was well-behaved though and the only problem came from me -- when the federal police had to search my bag at a checkpoint.

"Are you a volunteer?" he asked me in his camouflage uniform, while everyone else was watching the mzungu holding them up from getting where they wanted to go.

"Yes," I answered assertively. "I did some volunteer work in Lusaka."

"Peace Corps?"

"Actually, it's called ZEHRP. They do HIV research with Emory College in the States."

"Do you have an identification card?"

"No, but I have a passport."

He found the Malawian entry stamp I received just an hour before and let me go. The others entered the mini-van again like clowns into a VW Beetle and soon we were off again.

IT WAS GETTING DARK FAST by the time we arrived in Lilongwe city limits. Despite Malawi's reputation of being "the friendliest country in Africa," my Lonely Planet book warned that this is not necessarily the case in the urban areas. They warned that a taxi driver might take me for a ride to a secluded area and rob me at gunpoint.

Of course I found myself alone in the mini-van with the driver and conductor in a somewhat shady looking area after everyone else had disembarked in an area without taxis. The driver offered to drive me to a taxi area and I supposed I had no choice. The conductor called to his friend who had a taxi -- I met him and he seemed okay -- and I had him drive his car to the dark lot we were parked in.

I struck a conversation with Orvitz the cabbie as he took me to Kiboko Camp, the backpackers I told him to bring me to on the outskirts of the Old Town. I tried to keep the conversation up to distract him from any shady plans he may or may not have had. Despite Lonely Planet's warning, he turned out to be a friendly guy after all.

It was really dark by the time we arrived at the camp entrance gate. A security guard wouldn't let him drive in, so Orvitz just dropped me off there. I paid him the 500 Malawi kwacha and sent him on his way. The guard who escorted me to reception implied that I got totally ripped off.

Oh well, if getting ripped off a couple of bucks was the worst thing to happen that day, so be it.

THERE WAS A BLACKOUT when I arrived at the reception house but Jennifer the Malawian girl at the desk checked me in anyway. After paying for my stay, I was back in the familiar scene of dorm beds, padlocks and walls covered in flyers trying to attract the tourist dollar. I met a Frenchman named Eric who was the only other guy in my dorm, in Lilongwe on business instead of holiday. He stayed at Kiboko Camp two days a week instead of the lonely bed his company provided for him at the office, so that he could have a little social interaction over the local beer, Kuche Kuche. I joined him in a couple of Kuche Kuches and some Cokes under candlelight until the power came back on.

I pretty much hadn't eaten anything substantial all day and so for dinner I was back to my familiar cans of tuna (this one in curry sauce) right out of the can. I didn't have any utensils, so I ate it with the back of my can opener in true budget style.

Yup, I was a backpacking traveler once again.

Catch Up, Chill Out

DAY 185: For my stayover in Malawi's capital city Lilongwe, I gave myself the day to figure out my plan of attack in the country, a day to just chill out and run the errands that I might not be able to do outside of an urban area.

After catching up on Blog duties on my laptop, I walked to the Nico Shopping Center in the Old Town, about a mile away from Kiboko Camp (picture above). The road there was a walk through what looked like a generic American suburban road with a golf course on the right. In fact, Lilongwe, the "big city" of Malawi, was pretty much like a big sprawling American suburb. Nico Shopping Center was more or less a surburban mini-mall, one of the more modern establishments amidst a neighborhood of old buildings and dirt roads.

THE FIRST ORDER OF BUSINESS was to change my three million Zambian kwacha to about 54,000 Malawian kwacha -- there went my life as a millionaire. Thirty years ago, one Malawian kwacha was about the same value as one US Dollar, but over time it devalued to the value of one US penny. The deflation is one of the reasons why crime has escalated in what was once known as "the friendliest country in Africa."

Most of the afternoon was spent at internet cafes with slow connections -- I swear I spent more time troubleshooting than actually blogging, and at a pretty penny too (over $20!). It was at the first internet cafe that I met a Bohemian-hippie type from South Africa named Catherine, who had been walking her way down Lake Malawi from the northern part of the country. The conveniences of modern life -- traffic lights and internet, even at 56kbps -- were a culture shock for her. Our encounter was brief, but I did manage to get some recommendations about northern Malawi from her.

A visit to a nearby cafe/tour office was where I went to investigate organized tours since I didn't have much time to do things totally independently in Malawi -- I only had a two week visa too. However, all the tours were all out of my price range and so I decided to take Catherine's advice and head north to Nkhata Bay on the shores of Lake Malawi. Seeing the lake in the north was recommended to me because I had heard that the intestinal worm infestation bilharzia was less likely to be contracted there than in the south.

THAT NIGHT AT KIBOKO CAMP, as I was stitching up the conversion pants and swimming trunks that had melted under an iron at the ZEHRP house in Zambia, I befriended Matt and Andy, both from the U.K. but not travelling together. Matt was on holiday from his volunteer job as a math teacher in Zambia, while Andy was on holiday from his job as an overland truck driver for Oasis Overland Tours, which took mostly British kids right out of high school from Nairobi to Cape Town. We had dinner in the Kiboko restaurant over the usual travel talk.

Afterwards I just chatted in the lounge with Andy and laid back in a comfy chair with my feet up, catching up on postcards duties to be sent out to Blog Sponsors. Perhaps I got a little too relaxed and chilled out because I forgot my sandals in the lounge and the next morning they were nowhere to be found -- no one knew where they went either. Oh well, I thought, in a country that may or may not be as friendly as its former reputation, I can only blame myself.

A Long Way From Lilongwe

DAY 186: Lilongwe, Malawi's capital city wasn't the reason why I came to the eastern African nation. While stoners may know Malawi for its "gold," the mainraison d'être is Lake Nyassa -- more commonly known as Lake Malawi -- the lake between Malawi and northern Mozambique so big that when looking at the horizon from shore it looks like an ocean.

There are two popular shore towns where travelers base themselves: Cape McClear at Monkey Bay, a couple of hours by bus from Lilongwe on the southern part of the lake; and Nkhata Bay, about an eight-hour road journey in the north. Nkhata Bay, was my destination of choice since I had to make headway northbound to keep on track with my global itinerary.

A TAXI BROUGHT ME FROM KIBOKO CAMP to the crazy market area where all the buses and shared mini-buses waited for passengers to fill them up -- they won't depart until they exceed the manufacturer's suggested capacity. Conductors fill their vehicles in the most aggressive way possible, by assaulting prospective passengers of arriving taxis, like myself. About half a dozen guys grabbed for my bag when Geofrey the taxi driver opened the trunk, pulling it in all the directions of the compass.

"Hey! Hey! HEY!" I argued back, pulling it in the direction of me. "HOLD UP!"

Geofrey closed the trunk door until I decided which vehicle to go with. "What do you think?" I asked him. He gave me this looked that said "It's your call, man," which I retorted with a "Hell if I know" look. The incessant yelling of the conductor guys continued like barking guard dogs.

"Just go with this one," Geofrey said, pointing to the nearest mini-van. It was my inclination anyway since I heard that since they are smaller, they fill up faster and therefore depart sooner. I went over and had one guy bring my bag over to the mini-van trunk. Once it slammed shut, the dogs stopped barking, although throughout my waiting time, one guy from the other bus kept on calling me over. "My friend!" he'd call me over. "You speak English? It's faster here." I ignored him and simply told him I already had my ticket.

I sat in the scent of that distinct central African B.O. that sort of smells like Campbell's condensed Chicken Noodle soup mixed with coconut gone bad. While waiting for the mini-bus to fill up, walking vendors calling attention with psst!s tried to sell the most random things just in case, on my road journey, I needed any of the following:

• Not-So Random Items: sunglasses, snacks, watches (some with Osama Bin Laden on the face)
  
• Questionably Random Items: toy cell phones, wallets, towels
  
• Really Random Shit: dinner bowls, toothpick packs, cement trowels(?!)
  

For a good two hours the vendors came over and over again like prison guards making rounds, until we finally filled the van to above capacity. The driver took us out of Lilongwe and north towards the city of Mzuzu, yet another one of the ever-present places in a country with cities that begin with two consonants that don't normally go together. As the mini-bus made its way passed the rolling hills, wild grasslands and the occassional rocky knoll, the passengers occupied their time in various ways. A woman in front of me plaited extensions into her hair. The guy to my right pulled pieces of plastic off his grocery bag and chewed on them. Two older guys behind me had an anti-American conversation in English and Tongan. I just kept my mouth shut and read a couple of chapters in Zadie Smith's White Teeth.

FOUR AND A HALF HOURS LATER, after having stopped periodically in little villages along the way for pick-ups and drop-offs (picture above), I arrived in the northern Malawian city of Mzuzu, only to wait another hour for my next mini-bus, just across the way, to fill up. The usual walking vendors came around with their random goodies -- I passed on the cement trowels but couldn't resist three samosas (fried dumplings) and a Coke.

The hour flew by and soon we were off on the hour-long ride to Nkhata Bay. On the way I befriended a travelling mzungu couple: Frank, a Frenchman, and Francesca, an Italian woman. They were in Mzuzu for the day to exchange money and send some e-mails -- Mzuzu was the closest city to do so -- and recommended the place they were staying at, Mayoka Village, a mini-resort secluded from the main part of town on the other side of the bay. When we arrived in Nkhata Bay, I walked with them on the twenty-minute hike through town, over a bridge, up a dirt road hill, and up and down an undulating hiking trail that seemed to go on forever with my heavy bags on me.

Nearby were two other lodges, The Butterfly Lodge (recommended to me by Catherine in Lilongwe) and Njanya Lodge (recommended by Lonely Planet), but it seemed that Mayoka Village turned out to be the place of choice since everyone from other other two places always came over to hang out in its restaurant/bar deck that overlooked the beautiful Lake Malawi -- which was conveniently shimmering with the pink hues of sunset when I arrived. The central bar/restaurant/reception area was just one part of a laid back lakeshore village of private chalets, a dorm house, a library, a patio with a hammock, a mini-beach and free snorkel gear and canoes. Not bad for a place that only cost me about $2.50 per night (in the dorm).

Luka, one of the managers, gave me a tour and, more importantly, a beer. Later on that evening, Gary the owner gave me a free beer and his daughter Morgan gave me some of the homemade ice cream they made earlier. These welcomed and appreciated freebies were interspersed with dinner and a pool competition with some locals -- some with normal names like Phillip and Kenanie, and others that went by nicknames like Special and Gearbox -- and fellow travelers, most coincidentally starting with the letter "E" -- Erik, Ed, Emma, Eddie.

After coming a long way from Lilongwe that day, it was great to find a place to chill out. The atmosphere was so laid back I felt I could have built my own house there, but then again, I never did buy that cement trowel.

The Malawian Feel

DAY 187: Lonely Planet says that people have described the vibe of Nkhata Bay as "Caribbean," yet still retaining a "Malawian feel." What this "feel" was I didn't know about prior to my arrival, but by the end of the day, I felt the gist of it.

AFTER MY TONGUE AND TASTE BUDS FELT THE TEXTURE of the Malawian breakfast dish Shak Shuka, made of poached eggs mixed with tomatoes, onions and spices over toast, I befriended Anel, a nineteen-year-old Mexican girl traveling Europe and Africa in between high school and university, who taught me how to play bao, the Malawian board game that is played on the same kind of Zambian nsolo board, only with different rules. Anel had been "stuck" at Mayoka Village since Easter weekend, having the similar problem I had in Livingstone, Zambia, failing to access funds from a proper ATM. While I got by on the courtesies and kindness of the Jolly Boys and Shelle, Anel got by on the courtesy of Gary, who opened up a tab for her until she could get money wired to her.

Being "stuck" in Mayoka Village can be done effortlessly; it's not exactly a place you'd want to leave, a freshwater paradise (picture above) with its good food, scenic lakeshore views, the relaxing sounds of waves crashing into rocks and its interesting cast of characters -- perhaps it is collectively "the Malawian feel." Anel opted to stay "stuck" in Mayoka for the day when I invited her to go into town to run some errands.

"Hey there," called guys sitting on the side of the road as I arrived in town after walking the hiking trail, the dirt road and across the bridge. I figured they were the usual guys trying to sell me something.

"Hello," I politely said, walking on.

"American, huh?" one said, calling me out on my accent.

"Yeah," I said in mid-stride.

"I want to talk to you."

"That's okay, I'm on my way somewhere."

Another young man used the same tactics, but I was feeling a little generous this time. "Okay, walk with me," I told him. He followed.

His name was Fezelle and he told me about his life as a carver and painter while he followed me all around town like a stray cat. In a way it was nice to have him around to show me where things where because the map I had was pretty vague, and I didn't know exactly where the post office was. On the other hand, I wasn't sure of his ulterior motives.

"Come this way, it's a shortcut," he said, pointing to a stairwell up a hill to a higher and shaded ground.

"No that's okay, I'll stick to the road."

"This way is faster."

"Nah, I like walking near the lake. I mean, look at the view!" I said to keep us in sight of passers-by. I continued the "long" way, which wasn't too long anyway, and Fezelle followed. He even waited the forty or so minutes it took me to stamp twenty-three postcards to be sent out to Blog Sponsors and to package a parcel box of unwanted items back to markyt. Seeing he wouldn't leave me be, I told Fezelle I was looking for the Aqua Africa office (I really was), which was where he took me next.

"I don't know how long I'll be," I told him. "You can go ahead. I know where you'll be."

He left me to speak to the woman at the dive shop about diving, which I ultimately opted not to do since most of the little lake fish were found by simply snorkeling. I enquired about night dives, but they wouldn't do it without me taking a specialization course for $50, and not after I did a $20 day dive with them -- too much in total for a place where I wouldn't see any coral or big things. My trip to the dive shop wasn't a total bust; the woman there informed me that I should take pills to prevent bilharzia because it is found in the northern part of the lake. (If the "Malawian feel" is that of little worms growing inside my digestive system, then I don't want to feel anything!) I took her recommendation and walked over to the nearby clinic, where I bought the proper dosages of pills to prevent and kill the intestinal worms for just about a buck fifty.

After buying a pair of new sandals to replace the ones I lost in Lilongwe, I made my way back to Mayoka Village on the other road that led there, which is how Fezelle found me easily. He led me to his friend's carving stand to try and sell me something; I was feeling generous since he did lead me around town and caved in on a custom hand-painted shirt he would make me for $15. I picked a design and gave him a deposit to get started, wondering if I had just given money for nothing.

"HEY, MY MOM SINGS THIS IN CHURCH," I said to Anel as we had lunch on the deck at Mayoka. The barman Phillip was playing Brenda Fassie's remix CD, where DJs remixed the songs of the award-winning South African pop singer known by some as "the Madonna of the townships" that was once featured in Time magazine. The electronic lounge rendition of "Soon and Very Soon (We Are Going To See The King)" was the only English-language song on the CD.

Anel and I finished listening to the CD after lunch and then decided to take out a canoe, one of the hollowed out log ones that Mayoka Village let its guest use for free.

"Should we take one or two?" Anel asked one of the local who knew the precarious nature of the canoes.

"If you are learning, then two, but if you are good, you can use the one."

"We can do it," I told Anel. "I've been canoeing before."

When we boarded the canoe with our two kayak oars, we soon learned that my previous experience meant nothing; it was impossible keeping the vessel straight and we kept on zig-zagging across the bay. We eventually made it to the other side of the bay having used more energy than probably needed, which was quite a sight for the locals. After swimming and chatting at a lagoon at the other side of the bay, we really gave something the locals to talk about when we both lost concentration looking over to a guy in a passing canoe, we flipped over and capsized the canoe, only to have it fill with water. It was more work to empty it out than just swim it over, so we just lugged the boat the half a kilometer back to base like Roy Schneider and Richard Dreyfuss did to the driftwood at the end of Jaws.

AFTER HANGING OUT AT THE BAR WITH PHILLIP -- where an old man who sold candy always slept in the corner -- it was time for the all-you-can-eat barbecue, a weekly Friday even which brought in locals and guests of the other lodges over. I had dinner with Anel, our dormmate Ed, and two new faces, Maaike, a traveling doctor from Holland, and Yvonne, a former staff travel journalist from Hong Kong. After dining on rump steak kebabs, veggie burgers, barbecued chicken, salads and garlic bread, the pool table was pushed to the side for some after dinner entertainment: an acrobat busking his way through Africa who entertained us with incredible feats of balance and fire eating tricks.

The nighttime Malawian feel was felt when a group of us walked with our flashlights up and down the dark hiking path to town. Escorting us was the ever-friendly Kennedy, a local guy who lived nearby. He led us to the Shenkhani Entertainment Center, a club in town where people rushed over when the loud music of Sean Paul echoed through the streets from inside its walls.

Before we went out I wondered if I should dress up, but I was advised it was unnecessary. When I got there, I saw how true that was; half the guys weren't even wearing shoes. The "club" was hardly a club by New York City standards, or even the standards of Morristown, New Jersey. It was more or less like being at a house party held in a VFW hall with a small bar in the corner and a DJ who simply stopped one CD and played another without any song blending.

Not that there was anything wrong with the standard of quality of the place. It was a good time bugging out with the locals to American hip hop, local reggae and European trance. However, there was a bit of an awkwardness from us heterosexual Western men. In Africa, it isn't taboo for heterosexual men to hold hands while walking in the street, which also translates on the dancefloor. After one guy grabbed my hands to bug out with him, he went over and grabbed Ed's hands to dance with him for a while. Both of us were puzzled, but we learned that if there is a distinct "feel" to Malawian nightlife, it is the feel of another man's hand.

Tummy Aches

DAY 188: If you've kept up with The Blog since the beginning, you know that when I mention issues of the stomach I sometimes feature photos of my own diarrhea. Fans of these photos (as "sick" as they are) may be disappointed at this entry for this day was filled with others having stomach problems, and I didn't exactly follow them to the toilet with a camera.

First thing in the morning, my dormmate Ed rushed to the bathroom feeling sick. Later that day he found out he had the pathogenic cyst giardia, possibly from drinking contaminated water. The stomach sickness kept him in bed all day, away from his NAUI scuba certification class with the Taro, Mari and two other Japanese diving students.

"HEY! IT'S THE GIRL FROM MEXICO!" guys called out to Anel as we and Maaike walked into town via the dirt road to buy some supplies. Fezelle, the guy who followed me around the day before, was waiting for me on the street to tell me he hadn't started making the shirt he said he would make for me; he wanted approval on a beige shirt to paint on since I told him I wanted blue. "It's fine," I told him.

At the markets I was looking for a wide-mouth bottle of sorts so that I could put my little camera inside to waterproof it for canoe trips. No such bottle existed in town -- a Gatorade bottle from home would have been perfect -- so I just wandered the vendors with the Mexican and Dutch girls, who were shopping for a notebook and a blanket.

MOST OF MY EARLY AFTERNOON was a lazy one, sitting out on the lakeshore watching the local fishermen in canoes work collectively with fishing nets. Fezelle did paint me a shirt after all, and politely came over to give it to me. I paid him what I owed him and that was that. I tried to write but fell asleep instead in a wooden lounge chair. When I awoke I was approached by a guy named Benson who was going around trying to sell tours from Chimango Tours, the only tour company in town. I had already enquired at the office in town the day before about bike tours and told Benson to go find me a second person so I could meet the two-person minimum requirement. Anel, who was nearby, was iffy.

I had just finished eating a bunch of crackers with one of my cans of tuna when Luka decided to take a break from his work at the desk and suggested swimming across the bay and back -- a total distance of one kilometer.

"I just ate," Anel argued to Luka.

"Right after eating is when you must do your strongest exercise," Luka retorted.

"It's not good for the stomach," Anel said. "In Mexico, after eating we sleep. The siesta. It's famous."

The two argued back and forth. I told Luka I'd go in an hour.

When the hour was up, Luka and I were out on the lake with fins on. We stopped at the floating platform to pick up any other volunteers -- Maaike and a guy from Mzuzu were up to the challenge. Maaike and I took our time (I still felt the food in my stomach) while the two Malawians had an unofficial race, each representing their respective cities. They did the one kilometer in about ten minutes.

"Anel, she bewitched me," Luka told me back at the bar. He got a tummy ache from all that exertion after eating after all.

AFTER HER MEXICAN SIESTA, Anel was up for Take Two of our canoeing (picture above) across the bay. The day before we zig-zagged across the way and capsized on the way back, having to swim the canoe back to base. This time around we were much more controlled, keeping a straighter path despite the heavier waves caused by the winds. The waves crashed into the rocks on the other end of the bay, making it near impossible to dock, but luckily a lone boy in another canoe who didn't speak any English helped us and led us to a bank where we could keep the canoe without it floating away. He left us to snorkel for a bit, but it was getting dark already so we head back -- only to fall out twice. Fortunately for us, the canoe didn't flip over and fill with water.

ED WAS STILL RECUPERATING from his giardia stomach sickness with pills he got from the clinic when I ran into Maia on the pathway from the dorm.

"Are you trying to do the bike tour tomorrow?" she asked me. "They told me that there was a Japanese guy who didn't have a Japanese accent at Mayoka who was interested. I said, I think I know who it is."

Upon discussing it at dinner, Anel was convinced to go as well.

AFTER ANEL AND I TAUGHT KENNEDY SOME SPANISH, we just hung out at the bar. A group of rowdy guys and their dressed-like-stripper girl friends from Mozambique came to stir things up from the usual chilled out atmosphere -- being loud, obnoxious and rude. One of the Japanese guys put them in their place on the pool table, schooling every one of them. Anel told me the rowdy Mozambiqueans -- the type which she called necos in Mexico -- were at Mayoka a couple of weeks before and were just as disruptive of the vibe then. But buisness is business and you can't just deny someone for being different.

Those guys didn't stay long and went into another bar in town. One of them started a fight with a local guy and stabbed him in the stomach with a broken beer bottle -- which resulted in an open wound so big, people saw the victim's intestines spill out. Now if that didn't take the prize for the worst tummy ache of the day, I don't know what is.

(By the way, the guy was rushed to the hospital and the assailant, who fled, was arrested in Mzuzu.)

More Than Just A Lake

DAY 189: If you look at the cover of any recent Lonely Planet guidebook, you'll see that on the bottom they write a catchy subtitle relative to the destination that is being covered inside. For Malawi, the subtitle reads, "More than just a lake."

With my limited time -- and my affection for cycling -- I signed up with Chimango Tours, the only tour company in Nkhata Bay, for a one-day mountain bike tour around the nearby sights other than Lake Malawi. After sunrise and breakfast, Anel and Maia came along with me and we walked into town to meet our guide Davie at his office, along with his friends and support crew, Martha and Wiseboy.

"WHAT IS AN ARSE?" the Mexican Anel asked. She was reading the book of comments written by previous clients.

"It's British for 'ass,'" I informed her. Apparently many Brits wrote about the sore arse they all got from the bike tour -- but they all seemed to say it was worth it.

THE FIRST PART OF THE BIKE TOUR was definitely worth the pedaling uphill from the market. Although it wasn't a part of the standard tour, Maia, a Brit going for her masters at university in Sweden, thought it'd be cool to check out the church scene since it was Sunday (even though she had been raised atheist). We sat in on a mass that had just begun in the local Presbyterian church, which was something out of a Broadway musical. Voluntary choirs and soloists put their names on a list in order to sing in praise of the Lord, and when it was their turn, they'd start singing in their pews (sometimes away from each other), stand up and walk to the alter and join together like performers onto a stage.

Despite the humble concrete building, the acoustics reverberated the harmonies of the sopranos, altos and basses singing in the native Tonga language to African spiritual melodies. It's a shame I didn't have any of the audio recorded; if I were a talent scout, I would have signed one of the groups right up.

AFTER ESCAPING A QUICK PASSING DOWNPOUR in a local shop and a quick stop at some carving stands, the six of us continued on our two-wheelers on the main road, passed the mini-vans and trucks of people driving by, to the Pundu mud baths, the brainchild of Davie when he discovered the local hot springs might be of some interest to tourists -- he knew that some people spend up to $500 on full body mud treatments in the U.K. The baths, literally formed from mud dug up by villagers, was heated naturally by underground hot springs to temperatures so scalding it was impossible to swim across without feeling like you were cooking in some sort of big muddy stew. We spent a good hour there caking ourselves in mud, letting it dry and then rinsing it off in the colder water of nearby fish farm ponds. Davie said the water had been tested by a doctor for diseases and infestations, but I suppose that's something that will be confirmed in time should I catch anything.

With softer skin -- and possibly a parasite or two -- we pedalled on a dirt road through the Kalwe Forest, a rainforest reserved protected by the Malawian government since 1948. The road led us through little villages, passed local villagers going about their day and the kids who'd run up to the side of the road to see us and repeatedly greet us with "Hello! Hello!" We stopped at the Mkondezi Primary School for a toilet break and to buy some bananas to keep our energy going.

WITH A TROPICAL LANDSCAPE WITH FERTILE SOIL, one would think that rice would be a cash crop as it is in other tropical countries. According to Davie, his people, the Tongas, were too lazy to do such a thing and it wasn't until the 1980s that the Malawian government invited the Chinese government to start it up. Rice fields were developed in the areas west of Nkhata Bay, irrigated by the power of a man-made waterfall built by the Chinese in 1985, which distributed water from the Limphasa River, a nearby river where fishermen baited for catfish. It was at this waterfall that the six of us stopped for the cold pasta lunch Davie made for us that morning. Despite the boost of carbs, it didn't prevent Anel from falling down on a hill when we were riding on a narrow path on high ground. Her sudden stop in the flow caused me to fall down the hill too, and it was clear that the two of us just had a habit of falling on bikes as well as canoes.

After encountering the rare sighting of a chameleon and playing with him before he tried to bite our fingers off, we struggled up another hill until we arrived in a rubber plantation, owned and operated by the Vizara company. With 1,600 employees, it is the second largest rubber plantation in Africa and produced tons of first- and second-grade rubber which would eventually be molded into tires, catheters and the rubber balls the kids played with in the streets. As Davie explained rubber extration from the trees, I noticed that the shells of the tree seeds would make good whistles, the way the tops of oak acorns do in the oak forests back home. Wiseboy and Martha were totally amazed at the whistles and grabbed a bunch to practice with. I had a feeling that in a year's time, all the artisans in the craft markets would be selling them. However, I was surprised that when we stopped in a village and we showed the shell whistles off to the children -- they weren't nearly as in awe as the adults. No, they were more impressed and excited with seeing themselves on the screen on my little digital camera after I took their photo (picture above) over and over again.

THE SIX OF US RODE UP another steep hill and arrived at the processing plant where rubber from the trees was formed in rows, mixed with chemicals, sliced, diced and compressed into 35 kg. blocks to be shipped away. Surprisingly the production looked (and smelled) like it was that for mozzarella cheese.

"My arse is hurting," Anel said when she mounted her bicycle seat again. The British term was quickly added to her repertoire of favorite jargon.

"Just get some rubber from here for padding," I joked. But the only thing we got was free rubber samples that were still warm enough to mold into bouncy balls. If we had had the means, we should have molded it into a new rubber inner tube because I got a flat tire on the way home. Wiseboy, Davie and I patched it up while the girls went ahead up the biggest hill of the day. We eventually rode up after fixing my bike and caught up with them at the craft markets. With gravity finally on our side, we zoomed down the paved hill like X-Games racers back into town before the sun set completely under the mountains.

Maia, Anel and I went to the grocery store to get a bottle of wine and brought it back to Mayoka for our dinner while a duo of local musicians played a set in the corner. We ate and drank under candlelight and told our cycling adventures of the day to Maaike. Yes, there existed a Malawi other than the lake, and seeing it by bicycle was definitely worth the pain in the arse.

One Last Lake Day

DAY 190: It was up in the air whether or not I'd leave Nkhata Bay that Monday. What was also in the air was water because overnight and all morning, it poured like there was another lake hidden in the clouds, spilling over and down to earth.

Over the course of the morning storm, Anel, Maia and I eventually decided to stay one last day in the lakeside village, which turned out to be a good thing because the storm cleared out by afternoon, giving us one last time to enjoy the lake. In the interim, I brought my iBook over to Maia's private chalet (picture above) where she had her laptop, and we hooked up ours and Anel's camera to burn CDs in our makeshift computer lab.

We burned a CD for Davie of all of our pictures of the bike tour the day before, and in return he had us over for a home-cooked lunch that he and Martha prepared. While dining on the typical Malawian meal of vegetables and cassava nshima (as opposed to the usual maize meal nshima), I befriended Peter, a Tanzanian from Mbeya who gave me contacts of his friend's tour agency up north. Whether I climb Kilimanjaro with his guy or the guy that Frank and Francesca recommended I didn't know yet, but it was great to get another hook-up.

After a liquor run for our last night celebration later on, I took my last swim and snorkel out on Lake Malawi. Laying out, totally relaxed on the floating platform as the sun set, I knew I'd miss Mayoka Village and Nkhata Bay, but I knew I had to move on to make up time. I knew that one day I'd have to come back and see the other parts of Malawi, including Likoma Island on the Mozambique side of the lake, an island so beautiful, travel magazines have labeled it one of the top five honeymoon destinations in the world.

MY LAST SUPPER IN MALAWI couldn't have been more fitting, as Monday night was Mayoka Village's night of their traditional Malawian buffet, which included rich and savoury dishes including beef curry, rices, mpilu in peanut sauce, okra stew and mashed pumpkin.

"They must mean 'traditional' for big occasions," Maia pointed out. True, most Malawians normally ate what we had for lunch that day; Davie told us meat isn't a regular part of the diet if you are on a budget like he is.

Speaking of the Chimango Tour operator, Davie and company came over to the village for the last celebration of the latest group of Mayoka guests that had become friends in just a few days. Martha, Wiseboy, Benson, Benji, Kennedy and other locals joined the Anel, Ed, Maaike, Maia, Jonathan, Taro, Mari, Frank, Francesca and the other mzungas in the festivities as it was a big farewell -- which as some of you may know, translates to a big night of drinking, and in this particular case, drinking shots. Gary the owner, back from his weekend in Lilongwe, returned just in time to continue his reputation as a party boy binge drinker, and rang the bar bell for free rounds of shots. His free shots of whiskey were actually the tamer ones of the night; harder ones included shots of Power's No. 1, a Malawian liquor that literally smelled like rubbing alcohol so cheap it was simply labeled "dry spirit." The hardest of the shots was a concoction of Davie's, which included brandy, Malawi gin, Power's No. 1, Fanta orange and (the kicker) a lot of hot chili sauce. Perhaps he was victim to his own poison because he, along with Martha, were amongst the first to just pass out in a chair.

I managed not to pass out like the Chimango crew and partied through my last night at Mayoka Village with everyone in attendance, taking photo after photo after photo (all of which are found here for those attendees who asked for them: 1 2 3 4 5 6 78). In a night of "lasts," it was also a night of "firsts;" it was the first time Maaike got so drunk she had to be carried to her room by someone, namely me and Taro.

"SO ARE YOU GLAD YOU STAYED an extra day?" I asked Maia the next morning.

"Yeah," she said with a smile.

Anel couldn't remember most of what had transpired, but she figured she had a pretty good time too.

Racing The Sun To Tanzania

DAY 191: My goal of the day was to make it to the southern Tanzanian city of Mbeya, 120 km. north of the Malawian/Tanzanian border. I questioned whether or not I would make it before the sun went down so that I wouldn't arrive in the uncertainties of darkness. Anel, who had made her way down from the north, said I'd make it to Tanzania's border by nightfall, but not Mbeya. Frank said I'd make it by 7:30 at night, but not to worry because a nice hotel was just across the street from the Mbeya bus terminal and that I wouldn't have to stray too far at night to find it. I supposed that was the worst case scenario, but I still tried to make the effort to get there before the sun beat me to it.

Taro was smart and got a headstart before the sun rose, leaving at 5 a.m. with his Japanese friend to their destination. With my head up my ass from the night before, I didn't get up until my alarm woke me up at 6:30, in hopes of getting a 7 a.m. minibus to Mzuzu. But along with Anel and Maaike, I was way too hungover for any sort of rush. We had a leisurely breakfast around eight o'clock and then bid goodbye to the more-than-friendly staff after one last group photo. Out of our big group, only Ed remained as he was "stuck" another week to make up the scuba class work he missed when he was sick with giardia. The fact that "stuck" is in quotes should be self-explanatory, although I knew that if he remained in the dorm house, he'd still have to deal with the daily morning hairball coughs of the resident cat.

A courteous guy on staff rowed our luggage across the bay so we didn't have to lug them on the trail into town. A courteous dog escorted all the way on our final Mayoka-Nkhata hike, passed the prisoners working in a field, to where our bags were waiting for us in town.

"Thanks for telling me about that place," I told Frank and Francesca as I bid them farewell. The two of them, along with Maaike, were headed off on a ferry southbound that travelled up and down the length of Lake Malawi.

"See you in July," Maaike said to me, reminding me of the invitation to visit her in Holland when I made my way through Europe in the coming summer.

Anel, Maia, Mari and I said our goodbyes to Martha and Benson who escorted us to the mini-buses. Our transport to the closest main terminal in Mzuzu didn't arrive until about 10:30. With the estimated eight more hours of travelling to go, the sun was way ahead of me.

AFTER BIDDING GOODBYES TO THE GIRLS in Mzuzu (they were all headed somewhere else), I hopped on the only next available transport to my next city, Karonga: a mid-sized bus that would take longer to fill -- which meant more waiting before departure. I waited about an hour before we actually took off, squished in between the left side wall and a friendly Tanzanian man in Malawi on business. The northbound journey took us on winding roads through green mountains with wonderful picturesque views of the northern sections of the lake, not to mention the usual police checkpoints and searches.

When we reached Karonga's bus terminal a little over three hours later, I was glad I had made up some time -- Anel told me the ride to Karonga would have taken 5-6 hours. The time I gained I lost again though, when the almost-full mini-bus I was in broke down before leaving and we all had to transfer to a bigger one, only to have more room to fill. I waited about another hour before we actually left (picture above), watching my bag and listening to the peeps of the little chicks someone was transporting in the back.

When the mini-bus got filled to over capacity -- some passengers had to hang out the doorway -- we headed north towards the border. I thought I was making good time against the sun, but we pretty much stopped in every village along the way for pick-ups and drop-offs. At least I got some Malawi kwacha changed for some Tanzanian shillings.

The clouds of an overcast sky kept the status of the sun hidden, but I knew it was approaching sunset anyway. We got to the border area around 5:30, where aggressive locals reached into the mini-bus with their grubby hands not to grab my bag (thankfully) but the big bags of maize cargo that would be sold locally. However, two guys noticed me, the lone traveler, and "escorted" me to the immigration office, trying to get me to exchange money. I brushed them off politely.

Malawi's exit formalities were pretty straightforward, but the immigration officer there told me that the Tanzanian border post might be closing so I better get there quick -- it was still another half-kilometer walk, and an another "hour into the future" with the time zone change.

"Watch out for thieves," a fellow mini-bus passenger warned me as I approached the bridge that separated the two African nations. Left and right, guys followed me to change money, but I insisted I had already done it.

"I have no kwacha left! I have no dollars either!" I'd say, which was a total fib because I still had a wad of kwacha in my big bag and some American greenbacks, $50 of which I used for my entry visa into Tanzania.

AFTER ANOTHER 200 METERS OF WALKING amongst more aggressive hustlers, I boarded my last mini-bus of the day to my final destination, Mbeya, Tanzania. I had beat the sunset to the border like Anel told me, and I had only the inevitable nightfall to look forward to.

The moon and the stars came out pretty quick as we journeyed northbound in a country that I soon realized was The Country With Three Speed Bumps In A Row (Without Commercial Interuption!). The not-so crowded ride was
"fairly pleasant," and I put that in quotes because I had to deal with a grasshopper jumping around inside from passenger to passenger, keep an eye on my bag, and wonder what that continuous warning chime coming from the dashboard meant. As more and more people got off the mini-bus the closer we got to Mbeya I felt a little uneasy. I noticed two guys in an upper row joke in Swahili about how I'd probably get mugged at gunpoint when I got off the bus. Soon they got off the bus, leaving me alone with my bag, defenseless with the driver and the conductor.

"[Where are you going?]" I figured the conductor was trying to ask me in Swahili.

"The New Millenium Hotel. It should be across from the bus terminal." Upon scrutinization, we were no where near anything that resembled a bus terminal or station.

"Two thousand shillings," he asked for, which was what I paid to get from the border to Mbeya, but there was nothing I could do. It was dark outside and there was no way I was going to venture out there with all my gear. (Personal taxi fares are about the same amount as shared fares anyway.)

Luckily for me the driver knew some English and was fairly helpful. I chatted with him to keep the good vibe going as he drove me across town to the terminal. But he picked up his friend there for I don't know what reason, and that friend escorted me into the hotel across the street. He waited there in the lounge for me so that "we could go to the terminal and book a bus ticket." Shady, no?

I took my sweet ass time settling down in my room. The desk attendant came back with my change and I stopped him in the hallway, away from the "friend" to ask him about the status of bus ticket offices. Despite the fact that the desk guy spoke more Swahili than English, I figured he was telling me nothing would be open at that time of night, particularly the Scandinavian bus company that everyone in Nkhata Bay insisted I had to take for its comfort and security.

"I've been waiting for you!" the supposed "friend" said in the lounge, trying to lay a guilt trip on me when I popped my head in. (Lonely Planet calls this "emotional blackmail," which is something I really have to start looking out for.)

"I'm sorry, I went to the bathroom."

"Let's go and book your bus ticket for tomorrow."

"Actually, I think I'm just going to rest here for a couple of days."

"Oh, okay. I will see you tomorrow then," he said, probably thinking, Curses, foiled again by another tourist seeing through my ulterior motives! I was polite and gave him the African handshake -- which I've been doing since I learned it in Lusaka, Zambia, a grab of the thumb, then the forefingers. I overheard the "friend" outside saying something like "...but he knows the African handshake!" Surprise, surprise, I didn't arrive in Africa yesterday bub.

The sun may have beat me to Mbeya, but I was glad that's all that beat me that day.

Mad Dash to Dar

DAY 192: Before the sun was awake, I was awaken around five in the morning by the chants and Muslim prayers coming from two different sets of loudspeakers from what I gathered were in two points of town, one somewhat far away (but still audible) and one right across the street because it was blaring through my window and into my hotel room.

I WASN'T LYING WHEN I TOLD THE SHADY GUY the night before that I was planning to stay in Mbeya for a couple of days. I knew that the Scandinavian bus company was popular for its "Princess Class" service (they served drinks and showed movies), and had to be booked at least a day in advance according to my guidebook. My plan of the day was to spend the day in Mbeya to book my ticket for the next day, catch up on Blog duties, possibly check out a friend of Peter, the Mbeyan I met in Nkhata Bay, and exchange the remainder of my Malawian kwacha since I only had 11,500 Tanzanian shillings left (about $11.50).

Since my agenda for the day wasn't packed with activities, I took my time getting up and out of bed, leisurely taking a shower and a dump in the communal squat toilet. I was ready to leave the hotel by around a quarter to eight, hoping that a bank would be open at the top of the hour so I could get at least the money exchange out of the way. The guy at the hotel told me they wouldn't be open until nine, so I just walked over to the Scandinavian bus office to see what they had to say.

"I need to go to Dar," I told the desk attendant, knowing that the big city Dar-es-Salaam was known locally simply as "Dar."

"There's one leaving in a couple of minutes," he informed me, which was a total shocker.

"Today?! Right now? Can I get on that bus?"

"It's leaving soon."

"My bags are just across the street. I can run over and grab them real quick."

He called over the bus conductor and asked for some advice.

"We'll give you five minutes."

I ran back to the hotel, threw everything in my bag, zipped it up, locked it, left my key at the desk and returned in four in one hurried mad dash.

The desk guy started writing out my ticket while my eyes wandered to a sign behind him: "Mbeya - Dar, TSh 13,500" I thought the guy told me 11,500, but I guess I was mistaken.

"I thought you said eleven five," I said. I laid it out on the table for all to see. "That's all I have." The guy stopped writing the ticket to consult the conductor.

"Can you take kwacha?" I pleaded.

"Dollars?"

"Can you take dollars?"

"How much to do you have?"

I had a ten spot in my wallet. "I can give you ten, and 5000." I took the two bills and gave it to the attendant. "Ten, and 5000. For the courtesy." The extra TSh 1500 wasn't necessary and he just took the ten and TSh 3,500. Everyone seemed happy and I got on the bus, seat number 33, which was in my own row for the entire eleven-hour journey.

IT WAS NO SURPRISE TO ME that the Scandinavian ticket guy didn't take the extra TSh 1,500. Tanzania is a predominantly Muslim country and according to Lonely Planet, was also a fairly law-abiding one. I recalled what someone mentioned to me in Windhoek, Namibia: "They're all Muslim in Tanzania. It's not in their nature to be violent." This was welcome news in my ears amidst the more recent stereotype that all Muslims are violent extremists, for I knew that the teachings of Islam stood for peace. In fact, the predominately Muslim city of Dar-es-Salaam means "Haven of Peace."

It was a good thing I was traveling to the "Haven of Peace" on Scandinavian because they offered occassional free Cokes, cookies and water for their slightly higher fee. This was good news to me because I only had a couple thousand shillings left and I knew I might need them for my arrival in the city. Therefore, to save on cash, I had a pack of dry ramen noodles, which I crushed into bite-sized pieces, sprinkled flavor on them and ate them out of the bag like a snack food. At least this starchy (and really ghetto) meal wasn't as smelly as the hard-boiled eggs the guy in front of me ate; his silent-but-deadly farts attested to this when I could barely breathe.

The bus cruised through the beautiful Tanzanian countryside, passed rolling hills, distant mountains and vast grasslands (picture above). Vendors with good on their heads tried to sell us items through the window at occassional stops. At one point we drove through the Mikumi National Park and rode passed a herd of impala and a pack of baboons.

Meanwhile, inside, the conductor put on a bootleg copy of Saving Private Ryan, which pleased the masses, and later on, Dangerous Liasons which to an African was so boring, he just turned it off when no one was watching. (I wasn't watching either because whoever dubbed it cut out all the nude parts. I just read my book instead.)

RURAL TRANSFORMED INTO SUBURBAN, and suburban turned into urban. As we were within radio range of Dar-es-Salaam about nine and a half hours since departure from Mbeya, I heard the familiar sounds of American hip hop (and the unfamiliar sounds of Swahili-speaking DJs) over the bus' speakers. When you haven't heard it in ages, the music of Beyoncé never sounded better. Meanwhile, outside the window on the outskirts of Dar-es-Salaam was a little shack labeled the "50 Cent Class Cutz Salon."

We arrived at the bus terminal by dusk, and I hopped in a cab to take me the additional 11 km. to the city center. Luckily for me, the taxi driver also took a combination of American money and Tanzanian shillings, otherwise I might have been stuck.

"WHERE ARE YOU FROM?" John the cabbie asked me when I started light conversation with him in the front seat.

I hestitated before saying the usual responses -- "New York" or "The States" -- and said, "Philippines."

"Oh, Filipino? I thought maybe Korean."

Playing the race card worked in my favor because apparently "Philippines" was the right thing to say.

"Philippines, good. America, bad," the mostly-Swahili-speaking taxi driver said in caveman English. "Bush is bad."

"Yeah, I don't know anyone who likes Bush," I told him, citing the opinions of about 98% of the travelers I'd met so far. (Only two people -- one South African, one South African/Australian -- were very pro-Bush.)

I tried to hide my American accent by putting a slight Filipino/South African spin on my words. I knew that for the most part Muslims were a peaceful people, but I also knew we all lived in a crazy and ever-changing world. This wasn't the first anti-American vibe I'd felt on my trip so far. I had seen anti-American stickers as early as Rio de Janiero in February, and I've noticed that as I've headed more north through Africa there was more of an anti-American sentiment, from the Osama bin Laden watches to the numerous Saddam Hussein Hawaiian shirts I've noticed people wearing. Anti-American conversations that I've overheard were more frequent. Whether or not this was contributed to the fact that it was getting more and more Muslim as I headed north I can not say for sure.

THE RIDE INTO THE CITY was longer than anticipated with the rush-hour weekday traffic. I kept the vibe positive between John the cabbie and myself, asking him to teach me useful phrases in Swahili, but the only one I could remember was Asante sana, which means "thank you," probably only because I heard Rafiki say it in The Lion King.

When the taxi rode through a questionably dark alley, I kept my hand on the door handle just in case. It was unnecessary because the alley led back to a main road where the Safari Inn was located, the place mentioned in my Lonely Planet Shoestring Guide as one of the better value places to stay, at TSh 8,400 for a single room with private bathroom, plus breakfast. Luckily for me, they let me forego advance payment since I had no proper cash on me.

After not eating anything substantial all day, I just vegged out in my room with another emergency can of tuna and started the long and arduous duty of catching on Blog duties. I didn't leave my room at all for after a long day of travelling; I had found my little haven of peace in an even bigger one.