Burundi and Other Last Minute Traveling

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 52^nd 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!