 |
| Burundi--all the photos in this post are from there |
I got a new passport while I was in Khartoum. I don’t know
if I mentioned it before anywhere, but I got it. I got the extra-large size
passport because – of course I did. This is
the second passport I’ve gotten on my own from an Embassy (not counting the
two temporary ones I had). All other passports in my life have come through the
Parents, and I really think they should have kept my old expired passports for
memory’s sake and because I now want them for my collection. But they didn’t
because they are people who move around to different cities and countries and
those people don’t keep extraneous objects—though that may be because they keep
all the framed paintings and drawings that the artistic people in the family do
and so they don’t have room for travel memories. Don’t even ask—none of the
framed paintings or drawings came from me. My art was strictly ‘refrigerator
art’ that is sent to the trashcan after an acceptable amount of time has passed
and/or someone else needs the refrigerator space.
 |
| Lake Tanganyika with Congo mountains in the back |
The first passport I got on my own was in China. It had
‘replacement for a stolen passport’ in the back because my old passport was in
the bag that was ripped off my shoulder by two motorcyclists when I was walking
home late at night from the bus stop after coming back from a trip to Hong Kong
to visit an old college friend. I was not happy, but honestly, walking home
late at night to avoid taking a taxi whose driver refused to give me a fair
price wasn’t my brightest idea. I was trying to make a point—to the taxi
driver, but it back-fired on me. On the
bright side, though, I know all the procedures for replacing a stolen passport,
and the American Consulate in Guang Zhou is the only US Foreign Service
establishment I’ve ever entered where the people working were charming, nice,
and extremely helpful. For real, I’ve never felt so patriotic. This is not a
feeling I have had in any other embassy around the world. I may have said this
before, but I’m pretty sure they go out of their way at American Citizen
Services to make you wish you were from somewhere like Denmark. Their embassy called Johanne every day
while we were in Yemen and things around us were blowing up, begging her to
come home. They were on a first name basis by the end of it all, asking about
each other’s respective colds and checking up on mutual family members--ok,
maybe they weren’t related, but the point is—he loved helping her. Whenever I
try to get to American Citizen Services, I’m told that they’re only open by appointment,
if possible, on alternate Tuesdays from 8:47am until 10:43am, and don’t even
bother coming if it’s a Bulgarian national holiday because they always must
take time off to celebrate Bulgaria.
So, first passport acquired with great fanfare and patriotism,
second passport acquired through much finagling and payment of money and time
spent sitting in a waiting room reading old Reader’s Digest magazines. But the
thing about having a new passport is that, while I’m excited that I finally
have a photo that does not make me look like I’m both on drugs and trafficking
in them, and I love how shiny and crispy the cover is, I don’t like the
emptiness of the pages. Though, I should mention that I feel gipped because I
bought the 52-page version, which is marketed as this massive travel doc, but
the first 7 pages and the very last 52nd page are taken up by
blather about getting vaccinations before you travel and not violating foreign
laws. That’s not cool. I need those 8 pages.
But right now my empty passport looks sad, so I knew that I
needed to spice it up by a quick trip to Burundi after I saw that I would be
stuck in Uganda for a week due to MAF
slackers not flying every day into Mundri and the fact that I needed cash from
Ugandan ATMs. Another bonus from this trip is that I memorized all my new
passport info so that I can go back to filling in entrance cards while standing
in the line for immigration without having to dig out my passport to check
numbers.
 |
| My attempt at a panorama--how did I miss the lake entirely? |
Getting out of Mundri was the first problem. We were at the
airstrip a few minutes before the ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival,
FYI For Your Information), but it started pouring rain
about that time—thunder, lightning, torrents and torrents. Apparently God was
answering my prayer for a storm in His time, which I didn’t appreciate because
I SPECIFICALLY asked for a storm at night to stop the loud music. Well this
storm stopped the MAF flight. And what is up with that? I thought these pilots
were supposed to be tough guys, landing in the bush in all kinds of weather.
Nope. But our pilot teased us by buzzing the airstrip and then flying off. He
told us the next day that he did it because the runway was too muddy to land
on. We didn’t know at the time and waited for another 30 minutes or so, hoping
he’d come back.
Eventually, have several phone calls between MAF in Uganda
and ourselves, we realized that they were not coming back. They said they
wouldn’t even guarantee that they’d land there the next day either. “But if you
drive to Maridi, we can pick you up from there before 4:00pm.” Sadly, it was
already 12 and the drive to Maridi is nearly 5 hours. But we negotiated and
said if they promised to pick us up from Maridi the next day, we’d drive down
right away and stay over night there. They agreed. We threw our bags in the car
and the khawaja guys grabbed pillows
to sit on, but Repent and I are tough, and we didn’t need them.
The drive took us 4 and a half hours, but we had to pass by
Repent’s mother’s house, so we got out to say ‘hi.’ His niece and nephew pounced on me
immediately and asked me if they could play with the iPad. It reminded me of my
nieces and nephews…
We made it to Maridi, stopping for a nice dinner in town
that the khawajas claimed to like and
only ate tiny bits of (more for me and
Repent, who came with us to help the driver). Then we went to go sleep at the
diocese guest house because Episcopalians help each other out. It was a
super-nice guest house with electricity! But guess what followed us there that
night? The Music. I can’t get away from it. Seriously. I’m starting to be a bit
terrified that I will never ever sleep at night in South Sudan no matter where
I am.
 |
| The view from the Stanley-Livingstone Monument |
The next day we made it to the airstrip bright and early on
a beautiful sunshiney day. We immediately saw how that airstrip is way better
than ours and a flight could easily land there no matter what the weather. The
pilot popped out and we found that he had been stuck in Yambio because of the
weather too, and so I felt a little nicer towards him. But I did tease him a tiny bit about being a pansy who was
afraid of a little rain and mud. He defended himself vigorously, because like
most MAF pilots, his sense of humor is buried deeply under his perfect white
uniform.
There were a couple of elderly Kenyans on the plane who had
been trying to get to Mundri the previous day for a conference. I’d spoken to
Carol (MAF Uganda contact person) about them driving back to Mundri with our
driver. Carol was sincerely grateful to us for inviting them to ride along, and
I had hoped to use her gratefulness to our advantage in the future, but the
Kenyan couple refused our car. Instead, they asked the pilot to try to fly them
to Mundri…(Here is where I sighed and rolled my eyes to the Heavens because
REALLY, GOD?!). He agreed to try, without promising to land (I think my teasing struck a nerve).
“I’ll make a pass over to check the conditions of the
airstrip, and if I think it’s too dangerous, I won’t land. Then I will just
have to take you back to Uganda,” he said.
And they agreed to risk it.
 |
| The port on the Lake--you can sail to Tanzania from here |
And guess what? It was a beautiful sunny day and he landed
the damn plane. Once again, I was really
annoyed to witness someone else’s good fortune. I was only slightly mollified
when the pilot told me that we had made the right decision to go to Maridi the
night before because there was no guarantee that we could have landed in
Mundri. But still, we drove 5 hours to catch a plane that flew us right back
to our original destination in less than 30 minutes. That’s like going to the store to buy a jar of
extra-hot salsa, only to come home and find there were already 3 opened jars of
it in your grandmother’s refrigerator, they were just buried behind 4 open
grape jelly jars and 2 cartons of milk, and 6 jars of pickles (something like
this may or may not have happened to me in one of my grandmothers’ houses…If you
are wondering which one, it was NOT the proper English one who has a specific
place to put cups that can be used in the microwave and another place for cups
that cannot. She will also be one of those horrified at the adjective I used to
describe the plane in the first sentence of this paragraph, but I try to always
use the most fitting word, and, seriously, that plane was from the devil--or I was being oppressed by the devil or something, but there was some fire and brimstone involved).
Anyway, fast-forward: eventually we made it to Uganda,
blahblahblah and I decided that I was going to go to Burundi the next day
because, to get back to talking about passports, which was what I started out
with in the first place, my passport looked too empty, Burundi was just sitting
around waiting for me to visit, Burundi has nice lake beaches, and I had time
that I was going to be sitting around, so why not go sit around some place I’ve
never been and use up some passport pages? And the next day I found myself in
Burundi at a lovely little hotel on the shore of Lake Tanganyika.
Burundi is beautiful, the lake is beautiful, and people are
nice, but it’s a Francophone country, and my French is mostly non-existent. The
Belgian owner of the hotel speaks good English, though, and the first day he
was called upon to be the one to talk to me. He said to me, “You don’t speak
French? So I have to learn English to speak to you because you don’t learn
French?!” This made me feel like a horrible uneducated and ignorant American
who expects the world to know English to cater to my monolingual-ism…but
actually I speak 5 languages fairly well and a smattering of words in a few
other languages, but way to make me feel terrible, French-speaker. And several
other Burundians told me that I really should know French because it is the
most important language in the world. The thing is, I would actually really
like to learn French, but currently I live in South Sudan (a place where the
French language is surprisingly useless) and I’m trying to learn to speak some
Moru to communicate with non-Arabic speakers and some Somali so I can hang out
with the girls in the market near my house. And I don’t have unlimited time or
brain space.
A few minutes after berating me for my deficiency in the
French language, the Belgian owner of the hotel warned me off swimming in the
lake in front of the hotel. There is some sewage that is dumped into the lake
near there (nothing too obvious that I could ever see, though) and there are
“ee-poes.”
“What is that?” I asked.
 |
Attention all crocodiles: people are coming.
Bon appetite! (See-I speak French!) |
“Ee-poes, ee-poes. You know them. They killed a boy just a
few days ago right here.”
You’ve probably already figured it out, but remember, I was
going on two weeks of inadequate sleep. I was wondering if an ‘ee-poe’ was some
kind of eel.
“Ee-poe. You know, Africa’s big 5—lions, elephants,
rhinocerous…”
Oh. And then I got it. And then I really really wanted to
see some ee-poes.
The next day I called a taxi, driven by a very nice man
named Lazaro. He took me to see the hippos in the river that feeds into the
lake. We drove out to a fairly remote location to a place where you pay a guide
to take you to see the hippos. The best would have been to take a boat, but
they were going to charge me $65+ and I couldn’t talk them down and so instead
I paid $9 to walk to the view points with a guide.
 |
| Hippo mom and baby (behind the grass) |
The guide talked non-stop despite a plethora of signs
helpfully nailed into exotic jungle trees telling tourists to “Keep silent.” I
assume the was so that we wouldn’t disturb crocodiles and hippos who might come
and attack us, but we managed to stay safe, in spite of the fact that my guide
threw a rock at a baby hippo and its mother to make them turn around so I could
get a better photo (No, I did NOT tell him to do that). He then said, “We
should probably move on because mother hippos are very dangerous. If they come
to attack us, make sure that you don’t run in a straight line. Go back and
forth. They can’t catch you very well that way.” Noted.
I didn’t go at a prime time to see lots of hippos, but I saw
a few and it was mostly a nice little jaunt. I ended up walking fairly quickly
because being in a remote jungle location with a man who keeps lauding all of
his marriageable qualities, punctuating his remarks by nudging my arm every few
minutes, hippo watching gets less fun. Here were some of his more memorable
remarks:
 |
Even taking my photo, he couldn't bare to be apart-
that's my hippo guide's finger in the frame. |
“I like American girls.”
“I want a woman who will work so that I don’t have to give
her money.”
“If you get fat, your husband will hate you.”
“Don’t marry an African man because they just want to have
sex every day, Monday through Friday” (Though this is a paraphrase, as the
exact term he used is one I prefer not to.)
“Wow. You can walk very fast. You are not tired? Usually
tourists walk very slow.”
At the end of our walk, we were nearing the edge of the
clearing, but not within sight of other human beings yet, he said, “So what do
you think? You want to be wife?”
I said, “Um, are you asking me to marry you?”
He said, “Yes. So will you marry me?”
I said, “You know, I don’t think it’s really the right time
for me to get married yet.” (We were still not out of the jungle yet, so best
to be polite.)
He said, “Well, you can think about it.”
 |
| And that's the story of this photo as promised |
A few seconds later we were out in the open, and I made a
beeline for my sweet, polite, elderly taxi man, and we went on to my next
destination—the Stanley Livingston Monument.
The Stanley Livingstone Monument is basically a rock and
said to be the location where Henry Morton Stanley greeted David Livingstone
with the famous line, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Though, there is supposed
to be somewhere in the Congo that also claims that distinction. At any rate,
it’s a rock, but the view is spectacular!
 |
| The rock |
 |
| Lazaro |
The rest of my trip was spent enjoying the view, swimming in
the Lake, getting sunburnt, eating lots of good Lake fish and Belgian deserts
(Speculoos ice cream! The Stillman sisters love speculoos—and these were
homemade speculoos cookies.), and getting caught up on computer stuff while
sitting in a comfy chair outside on my veranda. It was a really nice break, and
if you go to Bujumbura, stay at the Hotel Restaurant Tanganyika, because it’s
great, but make sure to learn French first or suffer the consequences.
And one last thing—when I got into Burundi, I noticed that
there was an option for a 3 day visa at the cost of $40, as well as a longer
visa (can’t remember how long, but it involved months and multiple entries)
that cost $90. I showed my return ticket to the visa guys and they said, “OK.
Three day visa. Please give $40.” I did. I admired the multi-colored full-page sticker they
put in my passport and left, noticing only later in my hotel that the
expiration date on my visa was 31 May 2014, and I was leaving on 1 June 2014. I
know from experience that immigration people get huffy about these kinds of
things, so I asked the hotel manager. He said, “Well, it’s the weekend and the
police station will be closed. I don’t think it will be a problem since the
visa people told you it would be OK.”
I thought about this on the morning of my departure. I
planned several scenarios in my mind, including being forced to pay a large and
ridiculous fine or sweet-talking my way out of payment or having no one at all
notice the expiration date on the visa. I suddenly realized that if the last
scenario happened, I would be a little disappointed, because it is very
anticlimactic and I kind of wanted to try my hand at the sweet-talking. Well, Burundi is a country where all your
dreams come true, and I couldn’t even get in the airport without a guard
pulling me off to the side to discuss the expiration date.
I went for the head-tilt and the wide-eyed explanation, “I
know! I saw the problem and I wanted to go to the police right away to fix it
but it was the weekend! The visa people told me to get this one! I still only
stayed 3 nights and I was only here for 2 full days and the rest were halves.”
OK, don’t think I used ALL my excuses in one breath, these
were scattered into a back-and-forth conversation, but ultimately the wide eyes
were successful because he said, “I can let you go in and check in to your
flight and then you can pay inside.”
I went in and checked in and was very interested to see what
the immigration people would actually say. I walked over to the immigration
counter and filed through the line where everyone’s passports were being
checked again before immigration, in case something changed in between the
moment we walked into the airport and during the check-in process, I guess.
When it’s finally my turn, who is checking my passport, but helpful guard from
the front door.
“OK. You said you will pay here.”
“But do I really have to pay? I think you should just let me
go. I’m only half a day late! I will never get the wrong visa in Burundi again.
I promise.”
“But I can’t let you go through. You know, unless you pay.”
“Well how much do you think I should pay? It’s only half a
day late!”
“How much money do you have?”
“I have only 20,000 francs left.” (That is about $12.)
“You don’t have anything else?”
“Do you want South Sudanese money? That’s all I can give you
if you want more than that. That’s where I live. In South Sudan. You know
there’s a war there? And cholera. Don’t you think you should just let me go?”
“OK. Just put the 20,000 here on the counter and then you
can walk through.”
I surreptitiously pulled out the bills and laid them on the
counter stealthily as the guards nodded me through. The lady at immigration
smiled and stamped my passport, barely glancing at it long enough to find a
blank place to stamp, which I quickly gathered and headed for the waiting room.
Just before I left, another guard came over and said, “Money. I need you give.”
I took advantage of the language barrier between us and
said, “Sorry, I gave it all to the other guy.” And left—my passport was already
stamped. And no problem—I made it back to Uganda without having to pay anyone
else. AND technically, $12 was a discount because if three days are $40, then 1
day is about $13, and I paid $12. That is some good bargaining, if I do say so
myself.
 |
| The brown is the river, the blue is the lake |
Now I’m done telling stories and I realize that this has
gotten really long. I thought about breaking it up, but it might mess up the
flow of the story-telling. I hate messing up flows. Also, I’m lazy, but now the
people asking me to write a book will see the consequences of my
long-windedness and change their minds. And nobody said you have to read this
whole thing anyway. Unless you are my mother, father, or sisters. Then you have
to. I mean, I read your diaries when
we were kids and it’s not like they were great literature or anything, but I
did it anyway because I cared about you, and I thought it was really funny when
you got mad at me, so the least you can do to repay me for years of reading about the boys you had crushes on (Joanna) or how much you hated certain people who allegedly threw your stuffed animals off the balcony after convincing you that they were real and had feelings (Marian) is to read my
online blog diary, which I didn’t even lock with a breakable tiny pink lock or
hide somewhere up high forgetting that ‘small girls’ can climb.
 |
| Wavy-est lake I ever saw--looks like the seaside! |
