The Rift Valley

We crossed the Kenya-Tanzania border on yet another nine hour bus journey, but with our previous experience we made sure we had the front seats with plenty of leg room and no other people around us. Entering Tanzania from the north, we could see yet more improvement in the road quality, vegetation and housing and had high expectations of the next place on our hit list. Arusha is a small city and is used by most travellers as a base for expeditions around the northern circuit of safaris and mountain treks. We weren’t planning on making any exception to this rule as we were all worked out and really needed some good time off.

Stepping off the bus we were welcomed to a sea of touts all shouting and grabbing us trying to offer a taxi ride, place to stay or safari trip, as if we wanted to go to his office straight after a nine hour bus journey and negotiate a good deal anyway! One guy said “just take my card”, so I did. He then proceeded to ask me where we were going to stay and that we should go with him to his office to talk about his safari packages. I politely thanked him, explained we were very tired and would get in touch with him via his company card if we were interested. He then aggressively said “give me my card back then if you’re not going to come to my office”. That’s how it started and has followed to be quite a common trait of a lot of the natives here; unfriendly and rude, unless they are getting some sort of financial gain from you, and even then it’s not a given. We ended up finding the budget but good value for money Arusha Tourist Centre Inn.

On the streets of Arusha we saw more of what we had seen lots of all around Kenya; odes to Obama. T-shirts, mugs, pens, flags, bus logos, street art- anything that has the potential to be written on had his name on it and it was great to see. His election has given so many of these people a role model better than the average G-unit dope head, and boy are they proud of it. I feel reading his autobiography just before coming out to Africa and actually being here has really given me good insight into his character and motivations and I respect him all the more for it.

We managed to get ourselves onto a last minute discounted safari to the world’s most famous and arguably best safari destinations; the Serengti National Park, Ngorongoro crater and Lake Manyara. We met our safari buddies- two ice cool Hungarian chaps and an extremely annoying and thick as two short planks American girl, who became quite difficult to put up with towards the end. We headed straight for the Serengeti through a variety of terrains ranging from rolling plains of savannah to colourful greenery with our guide and ranger, Cyprian and our personal Chef, Freddie. There we saw all the animals we had seen at Tsavo and more and at a much closer distance. The real gems were the lions stalking a pack of wilderbeast in front of our jeep and a leopard lazing in a sausage tree, with an impala carcass hanging down from an adjacent branch. We camped out in the bush with magnificent lush green landscapes around with giraffes, baboons and impalas grazing in the distance. There was no electricity and whilst in our tents at night, armed with only a pocket torch and trusty Victorinox pen knife, we could hear the sounds of lions and hyenas only meters away. Each early morning Freddie would fix us up some scrumptious fried eggs and fresh tomatoes for the boys with fresh fruit and coffee as a reward for not being eaten by the lions, before heading out on another game drive. On our way to the 20 km wide Ngorongoro crater we stopped off at its rim which offered one of the most spectacular and breath-taking views I have seen in a long time. There we saw many more animals including the endangered black rhino and cheetah and made our way to the often under-rated Lake Manyara, where we saw tree climbing lions and had a very close encounter with a herd of bathing elephants.

On the way back to Arusha, we stopped off at a small Maasai village. The Maasai culture centres around their cattle, which are considered to be sacred, and which provides many of their needs. This includes milk, blood and meat for their diet, and hides and skins for clothing. These people believe that their creator, Ngai has entrusted them with his sacred cattle to own and defend. Therefore they believe they have the right to any cattle they please, whether they ‘belong’ to someone else or not, making it a case of who can defend their cattle best. I guess it is for this reason we found them to be quite hostile and aggressive, but it was interesting to experience their dances, houses and schools.

After returning back to Arusha for a days rest, we set out to do a one day trek a third of the way up Mount Kilimanjaro through forest and moorland. Due to cloudy weather, we only got to see a small part of its famous snow-capped peak but the trek was tiring and rewarding nonetheless.

After all our budget bus journeys we thought we’d splash out a bit and take a luxury coach from Arusha to Dar Es Salaam. It started off very nice with air conditioning and soft reclining seats. I wasn’t feeling too well from the previous night’s episodes of nausea and vomiting and eventually settled myself into a comfortable sleep three hours into our eleven hour journey. I feel Hiba’s hand tap me on the shoulder and I begin to wake up. I here her say “Hubi, I feel sick”. Before both my eyes have fully opened she proceeded to vomit last night’s dinner and breakfast all over me and my seat! I shouted “Does anyone have a plastic bag?!?” to be met with stone cold and confused faces as if I was talking a different language. Oh wait, I was! So in a panic I said “A7had enda kees?” which brought even more confusion when I realised I was speaking Arabic! While all this was going on, poor old Hiba was continuing to vomit half her insides out onto my seat until I finally managed to get her a bag and some tissues, when she managed to stop vomiting, look up at me with a smile a say “I feel much better now”. Having to wait fifteen minutes drenched from head to toe in vomit until we got to the next service station, we quickly got cleaned up and fully changed into clean clothes before making our way back onto the cleaned bus to continue our remaining eight hours to Dar Es Salaam.

When we arrived in the busy and well developed port of Dar Es Salaam, we decided to indulge in a bit of luxury for all our sufferings and spent a couple of nights in a Penthouse suite overlooking the harbour with a Jacuzzi, WiFi and plasma screen to suit. We might get sick more often!

Our plans are to spend New Year’s on Zanzibar Island before heading out to Malawi for more work.

Have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year

Marwan

Travelling Teacher

Mombasa......what a place. I only have to take a look at a few photographs and the words are racing through my head in competition to get out on paper. This place is like no other; it has an incredible charm and is brimming with things to do. Despite the sub-optimal living conditions in the village (no running water for three days, cold showers, cockroaches, poor mattress and small living space) we’ve found ourselves to be so happy and at peace with the place’s bustling yet laidback nature. The heat was close to unbearable for the first few days with not only the scorching temperatures of 35-40° to deal with but also the immense humidity, which hangs heavy in the air, making it difficult to breathe at times. However despite our claims that the weather seems to have cooled slightly, we’re told by the locals that there’s been no change and it’s simply that we’re getting used to it. It’s not all bad though; whenever the heat is getting to us Khamis is always ready to scurry up a palm tree and throw down some coconuts, crack them open for us and let us sip the cool, refreshing juice of the madafu and then scoop out the soft, sweet inside, Mmmm!

Whilst at the Khadija Centre I have found myself to be useful not only as a dentist but also as a teacher at the school. A few times a week, I would take class six (11-13year olds) and teach them English and Maths in preparation for their end of term exams. When exam time came, I was responsible for marking their English papers and was impressed by both the standard of teaching and the pupils’ motivation and aspirations to learn. It was a very rewarding and eye opening experience and the children welcomed me with a special “Senorita” applause-highly entertaining!

Where there’s sun, there is sure to be sand and that’s certainly true for the beautifully sanded beaches of the Swahili coast. When staying in Mombasa at the weekends there’s only a single string of top end Mazungo-filled beach resorts between us and the sunny shores of the Indian Ocean. It’s a fantastic place to relax and catch the sea breeze.

It’s also not a bad spot for some souvenir shopping and once you’ve shown even just a flicker of interest, you’re bound to buy from them and nothing will come in their way. Even when we had no money on us, we managed to walk away with handfuls of woodwork which we hadn’t paid for-“I’m here till 6pm” the man said, “I trust you”. And so it was, as wrong as it felt, we actually took a load of goods home having agreed on a price but not paid a penny. Perhaps they know how to judge their customers because the guilt couldn’t keep us away for long and we soon went back to pay our debts!

One of the highlights of our trip here has been meeting some wonderful people, in particular the Fazel family who have become amazing friends to us and with whom we’ve shared many wonderful Kenyan experiences. We met them on our first visit to the Khadija Centre since Adel Fazel’s construction company is due to be involved in the expansion of the masjid there. We hit it off with their two young sons Atif and Mazin and accepted their kind invitation to join them for lunch the next weekend. Never had we been greeted by such immense hospitality. They picked us up from the house and took us around with them to stop for drinks, visit the Bombolulu Cultural Centre and workshop, enjoy a Chinese lunch, visit the children’s art display at school including Afreen’s (their daughter) stunning masterpiece of a rural village scene. We spent the afternoon at the impressive historical monument of Fort Jesus, with a guided tour around the grounds saturated with historical facts from the kids and sipped tangfastic lime juice on the fort walls looking out to sea. We then retired to their lovely home for a good old home made Pilau dinner in the garden. The night ended with an artistic take as we all sat round the table drawing and sketching and sharing our creative skills. (It turns out Adel, Asma and the children are all very talented artists). Asma and Adel’s generosity didn’t stop there. They were there for our every call, from DHL shipping enquiries to Safari and hotel bookings; they had a solution to our every query and went out of their way to arrange things for us including the best short stay safari package around! (Thank you Asma)

And so the very next weekend we were off to the Tsavo East National Park for a two day safari, eagerly in wait of seeing something far from tame. Having spent the Friday night at the Fazel’s after our dinner with them at Island Barbeque, we enjoyed an early family breakfast before being collected by our empty air conditioned Southern Cross Safari bus which drove us the two and a half hour journey up towards the Tsavo. We met our safari buddies Ruth, an English girl from Melbourne and Gabby, a Dutch travel agent who was on safari as part of work! (Lucky lady) On arriving at the park we were met by the most impressive of the vehicles available, our own open air land rover which took us on the first game drive as we made our way to the tented camps at Satao. It didn’t take long for us to spot our first sighting of some buffalo grazing under a tree only five to ten minutes into the park. And from there it began, the “stop” and “wait” every time “something brown” was spotted across the savannah. From waterbucks to eagles, Thomson gazelles to zebras, ostriches to hartebeests, we managed to see so many of the Tsavo’s inhabitants all on our journey to our new found haven amongst the wilderness. As we pulled up to the camp we were shown the twenty tents and waterhole before being greeted with a glass of fresh watermelon juice. After a quick familiarisation with our tent we reconvened with our buddies under the Tamarind tree for a sumptuous outdoor buffet lunch, before heading out again in the afternoon for a second game drive which was to be the most promising of them all. On this venture we saw everything from hippos to giraffes, elephants and lions; we even managed to spot a cheetah up on a termite mound prying on some hartebeest, which we were told was a very lucky sighting. The sun set as we made our way back to camp for a BBQ lit dinner before getting an early night in preparation for the sunrise game drive the next morning which brought us into closer proximity with some of the animals we’d seen the day before. After breakfast, we made a regretful drive back to the park gates along with Ruth to be met by our bus which sadly brought an end to our magical adventure in the wild as it drove us back to the unfortunate reality of sun, sand and sea!

An Enchanted Island

I write this on the enchanted island of Lamu, my feet dipped in the soft shallow current of the Indian Ocean on a white sandy deserted beach. As I look out the night sky is scattered with shiny shimmering stars on a backdrop of a full moon, lighting the vast ocean that lays before me with wooden dhows slumped in the calm waters like a ghost ship graveyard. All I hear is the sound of the waves slap against the shore and the odd donkey shriek echo down the narrow white stone washed alleyways and bazaars behind. Time has cleaved its way past here, leaving a gap of serenity. A highlight of our trip.

Getting to this slice of paradise was certainly not a heavenly experience. We took the economic option of the bus; an old rusty dirty un-oiled machine, packed full of sweaty smelly people and a conductor who looked like he was certainly not competing to be crowned ‘employee of the month’ in December 2009. The first four hours were spent sat next to a young guy who I was convinced had ants his pants due to the number of times he kept changing his position; but this was bearable. The road for the next two and half hours was not meant to be driven down, especially by a bus. A narrow dirt track with so many pot holes I would regularly be lifted off my seat into the sweaty body of the man sat next to me as the driver pretended he was driving in a rally car race.

Approaching the island on a speed boat felt like something out of a bond movie, giving me the expectation I would be greeted at the other side with a dry martini; shaken, not stirred. As we came closer, our lenses focused past the salty sea water spray to the harbour at the forefront of Lamu. The harbour was a busy place with fisherman bringing in the days catch, seamen unloading cargo and the good-old donkeys peering into the action from the sides, optimistically awaiting a fish to fall loose, some free potatoes or even just a dirty old sack to chew on. We were staying at a lush hotel in Shela, the cleaner and uptown partner to Lamu and had managed to get a great discount from knowing a friend of the owner back in Mombasa. Our days in Shela melted together like one long dream we didn’t want to wake up from, lazing through the narrow alleyways, bazaars and deserted beaches. From our hotel room we could see out onto the sea front and there were lots of tiny private islands dotted around us, so one day we took a boat out to one of them and spent the day on a small stretch of beach with no-one in sight for miles around us. As the tide rose, the island slowly began to disappear until the whole island was totally submerged in the sea and we were left perched on some rocks sticking out of the water, waiting for our boat ride home to come and pick us up! Back on the coast we enjoyed a plethora of fresh seafood delights from crab to lobster to fish and shrimp.

Back in Mombasa, we made a visit to a local drug rehabilitation centre and got to meet some of the patients there. Lots of these guys get into gangs and hard drugs and eventually make their way to prison, hospital or the morgue. The ones who survive and want to reform enter a four month rehabilitation programme with daily timetables of meditation, discussion, sports and household tasks and trained counsellors speak to them on an individual level. It was a real eye opener and great to see the effort being put into helping these guys out. Our work at the Khadija centre finally came to an end and we were sad to say goodbye to all the children and staff we had met and become good friends with. We tried our best to improve the functionality of the medical facility as well as seeing patients at the clinic. There was a large variety of illnesses seen with a few emergency cases and I had to call on Hiba’s wrath to pull some infected teeth out of a few occasions! I’m feeling an immense sense of gratitude for the medical training I’ve had in the UK as it is managing to help me adapt to the differing situations I’m coming across in terms of medical knowledge, teamwork, leadership and most importantly communication.

We wished to spend Eid in Mombasa as we were told it would be very special, starting with Eid prayers at 8am. At 7.55 we got up and rushed to the local mosque to find that they had already prayed at 7am! Unlike our local mosque in Manchester, where they have a second round of prayers for the late comers like ourselves, by 8am they had finished and were going back to work (!). We ended up praying on our own in our house which was a first, but luckily we were invited out to some friends house for dinner.

We head out to Tanzania next week...

Marwan