Life as a Mzungu

Post by Josh.

Wherever we have traveled, we have constantly been marked as foreigners by our skin color, language, and backpacks, which instantly makes us objects of social attention. Shopkeepers and souvenir hawkers try to get us into their shops, young adults try to practice their English on us and crowds of small children come to us to stare in amazement or to ask for money. How we are approached has varied per region. In Southeast Asia, we were called Mister. In Turkey and Egypt, it was always a warm "Hello my friend!". Zanzibar has continued then trend, with many people calling us 'Rafiki,' or friend in Swahili. Most places tended to treat us as curiosities or treated us as part of the tourist destinations that they found us in.

Most African countries have so far proved more direct; in Ethiopia we were Ferengies, the Amharic word for foreigner (also a alien race in Star Trek), while in Kenya and Tanzania we have been Mzungu, a Swahili word meaning to spin in place dizzily, or to wander aimlessly. It was originally applied to the European explorers and colonisers who spun circuitous paths around the continent in the 1800s and has stuck to all foreigners, particularly white ones. We hear it slip in conversation around us, or as "Hey Mzungu" when the conductor on a shared taxi wants to direct us. It is our identity. We are not individuals or even nationalities, but simply one of The Other - a foreigner, a Ferengi, a Mzungu.

Because all foreigners do stuff like this, obviously.

This made me think about what equivalent term we have in the US, but I don't think we have a good cognate. Visually, anyone could be an American - we have no definite racial or facial cast - so cannot immediately label people like that. Only after we know a bit about the people around us can we tell if they are locals, traveling Americans, new immigrants, or actual foreigners or tourists. The mixed nature of our social makeup has forced us to be more circumspect in drawing the line between 'us' and 'the other.'  Having been on the 'other' side of that line for a few months now, I am starting to look forward to being back where it is less distinct.

Monkey see, monkey do

I.  Monkey see

Meet Dinkinesh.  She lives in the Ethiopian national museum.  In the English world, we call her "Lucy," but who knows what name she actually went by.  It was so long ago, and all we have are these bones.

In truth, the upright skeleton is a best guess!  The actual bones we have are displayed flat on a shelf, and there are not a lot.  When I look at them scattered out like that, I can't believe this is the most famous hominid skeleton ever found.  There are other skulls in this museum far more haunting, showing human-like skulls with really big canine teeth, and the early stone tools they used.

Visiting these fossils and seeing how many different species of monkey-human type things there are, and in how many different places they have been found, I was more confused than ever.  What happened to the Asian homo erectus?  How do we draw any straight family lines through all these potential ancestors, and whose interests do these narratives serve?  There is a lot more digging to do.

II.  Monkey do

Nairobi, Kenya, has a bad reputation in tourist guide books as a dangerous place with not much to see.  I beg to differ.  True, you can be stuck in traffic and surrounded by chaotic crowds for a long time.  But our friend Jeff suggested a nice little refuge in the city. "Let's go the monkey park," he said.  I was expecting a little zoo full of monkeys.  But no:  It is a public park, with a little lawn, and monkeys are crawling all over the grass like squirrels waiting for people to feed them.  So we went and bought peanuts from a cart stationed there. 

"Hold out only one at a time," Jeff said, making a fist shape, "or they will try to snatch all of them."

"Are they going to bite me?" I asked, holding out an outstretched hand, palm up.  I was going to put a nut in the center and bend down to feed the fuzzy little guys.  One of them was a protective mother with her child clutching her tight around the middle.  They looked at me with big eyes, backing away slowly.

"They don't bite," Jeff laughed. 

And so I watched Josh put one nut in his fingertips and hold it out to the monkeys.  Before he had time to bend down, those little mammals had jumped onto his back, climbed onto his shoulder, and grabbed the nut from his hand. 

Others then did the same to me, and I was not even holding any nuts!  I got a bit freaked out at the sudden monkey onslaught.  Those little monkey feet are really grabby, almost ticklish, and I was just a ladder for them.  They made me open my fist and then gave up.

Eventually, one took a liking to Josh and sat on his shoulder for a good while.  Clearly, Josh is a more confident monkey ladder than me.  But the last laugh is mine, because while I still look somewhat respectable, his shirt is now covered with tiny footprints!  It looks like he's been mud wrestling with kindergartners.

Inadvertent Ecotourists

Post by Josh.

I love nature and hiking. Several of our trips in the US were to the National Parks to camp, hike, and climb mountains, and a few of the destinations on our wander around the world were set up to explore distant natural settings. Thailand was the first of those - we went on a three-day trek in the northern hill country around Chaing Mai. I was expecting to be traipsing through ancient jungles, far from the influence of modern man. Instead, we spent most of our time threading our way through the dense network of trails that connected the fields, farms, and villages of the Thai hill tribes. These groups maintain their political and cultural separation from mainstream Thai society, but their motorbikes, cell phones, and modern clothing made them seem pretty similar to what I had seen in other towns. The nature that I saw during our walk was highly cultivated - nothing that could really be called wilderness.

In Ethiopia, I figured we would try the whole 'wilderness adventure' thing again. The Simien Mountains, in the north of the country, were advertised as a playground of dramatic volcanic ridges, twisted into fanciful shapes by erosion and blanketed by one of the richest ecosystems in the country. The park was also divided into a cultural reserve, with traditional villages and farms, and a separate nature reserve which allowed us to focus on uninhabited nature. I was pumped to explore the place. Until we found out that you are required to hire an armed guard, and a guide, and probably pack horses and a horse handler and a cook to enter the park, and that they expect you to stay there for five or more days while we only had three. Guidebooks, however, also mentioned another mountain park in the south of the country - the Bale Mountains - where you did not need a guard and where you could hike between a network of camp lodges set up by a German NGO.  Reassured, we headed south.

It wasn't until our first night in the lodges that I realized that we weren't even in the Park itself, but instead in a protected area of the mountains set asides for tourism. We had again become unwitting EcoTourists and spent the next three days wandering amongst the hillside farming communities of the local Oromo peoples.

Maybe Thailand had tempered my expectations, but I actually wasn't let down by this. Maybe it was because of the incredibly rich landscape, which felt like a bizarre tropical Eden and filled my head with all sorts of emerald green Ethiopian pastoralist fantasies. It still feels fresh and exotic to see horses grazing in mossy fields lined with banks of tropical flowers, or to encounter herds of goats amongst thyme and juniper bushes at treeline. We saw a cave and waterfalls, a colony of Colobus monkeys, and got to hear the whimsical cry of the endemic Abyssinian Catbird. At every turn, local farm children were there to wave at us from over rustic fences or offer us shy hellos as we passed them on the herding trails. The forest felt as though it had been shaped by generations of farmers and herdsmen in gradual and subtle ways, so while it never felt wild to me, it always felt rich and coherent.

We ended up sharing the lodges with a group of four French people who introduced us to the card game 'Bang!' and two Germans, Hans and Joerg, who worked in a local town and offered to host us the night after we left the mountains. Joerg runs an example farm, trying to promote the mechanization of Ethiopian agriculture, and offered to show us his fields before we left. Perched above the edge of the Great Rift Valley, his farm gave us the animal sighting experience that the settled mountain hike had not - we saw bounding antelope, brilliant blue, yellow, and lime green birds, and a pod of about 16 baboons wrestling and foraging in a fallow field. It was a surprising end to our hiking adventure, but demonstrated again that we don't have to find 'wilderness' to experience the awesome animals and environment of an area.

Tea thyme

Winter is coming...

In the southern hemisphere, that is.  We are not south of the equator yet, but are already experiencing the seasonal shift.  Here in the Bale mountains of southern Ethiopia, it is getting colder.  The rainy season has just begun and some beautiful plants are blooming.

This thing is the Red-hot Poker and it is now one of my favorite flowers.  You cannot eat it but it is used as medicine.  I like how it stands out so strongly against the vivid green moss and grass.

And another local bloomer here is thyme.  When we asked for tea at the first rest stop on this two-night trek, they gave us water steeped with dried plant stalks, sweetened.  We had no idea what we were drinking but we knew it was amazing.  Then as we climbed higher in altitude to the African alpine forest, we saw the wild thyme growing everywhere, and recognized it as the tea we had been drinking.

We got here from Addis Ababa via a couple of minibuses to the small town of Dodola.  In Dodola, a shopkeeper befriended us and showed us a good place for lunch.  We had berberi, which turned out to be injerra with lots of tangy sauces, veggies, and cheese.  We ate it with our hands, except hose two bites that our host put directly into our mouths with his hand.  How could we refuse?  He said it was a sign of great friendship.  After, he took us on a walk to see some waterfalls, and Josh took the opportunity to have fun with some local kids.  He pulled his shirt tails over his head and acted like a leaping monster.  Needless to say, they loved it.

But like I said, we are not in the southern hemisphere yet.  I have never been there but will cross that frontier on Tuesday when we reach our next stop: Nairobi!

See Less, Live more

Post by Josh

I grew up obsessed with the ancient world, building castles and cathedrals out of whatever I could and taking classes on Greece and Rome and Harappan India whenever I could. When we were setting up this trip, Hammad and I laid out several anchor destinations and built our route around them - Angkor Wat, India, Istanbul, Rome, Egypt, Machu Picchu, and Aztec Central America - all places with famous ancient cultures and impressive ruins. This is what gave our blog its title of Ancient Roads. And we are now a bit more than halfway through the route of our travels, having seen more than half of our anchors, and they were all pretty cool. The most recent, Egypt, lived up to its awesome reputation and was chock full of ancient roads.

These places, however, have not been the coolest part of the trip. Sites with lots of tourist hawkers, entrance fees, overloaded infrastructure, and sketchy guides have been the most aggravating things we have seen. And even if an ancient site is standing in pristine condition, all it is is mute stone. It may be a beautiful place, but it does not have much meaning without the stories and histories that let us know why it was built and who lived there. It is impossible to understand what is important in what we see without outside information. Guidebooks and signs help, but only if you already have some background information.

What is most interesting is dealing with actual, living people. And they don't even need to be in a mythic ancient site. We had more fun and learned more hanging out with the Östlunds in their Stockholm living room than wandering through the breathtaking but impassive fields of Bagan in Myanmar, where nobody could answer the 'why' questions we asked. Our time in Budapest was made by the wily Brazilian and Telluride friends we had there more than the gorgeously preserved architecture and excellent museums. And in Egypt, our experience with the Pyramids was frustrating and lame compared to touring a much less impressive temple in Luxor with a good guide we met through CouchSurfing.

We've been using CouchSurfing consistently in Africa, and it has made a world of difference. It makes it harder to set our own agendas and see all the sites recommended in the guide books, but instead we get taken out to the Mediterranean coast of Egypt for a weekend or invited to an Ethiopian wedding - things that we would never get a chance to do if we were still staying in hostels and trying to figure everything out on our own. We get to live with and like locals, which is much more the point of travel. See fewer tourist destinations but see them with more explanation  so they can truly come alive, and spend the rest of the time in an Addis Ababa cafe, full of expressive Ethiopians and Kenyans as Liverpool tries to regain the lead from Chelsea. Now this is real and quite unexpected cultural experience.