Genuine African Tourism

Giraffe and Tree

Most of my African tourism has been accidental or on the way to somewhere else. But I finally did a real African tourist activity—I went on safari to Zakouma National Park. But in typical Amanda-fashion, it was a snap decision, based on little to no scheduling information without any input from outside sources. I was also super lazy about finding out anything about the trip. I let Annie run around and do everything because she is a grown up for real often and I mostly just pretend for the sake of societal expectations for women of my age.

In spite of my laissez-faire attitude towards the trip planning part of the program, I made it on the flight! Of course, as it was a friend of mine who was flying the plane, I would have had to be really negligent not to make it. I have the potential to be that negligent, but being raised by Peter Stillman, champion of prompt airport arrival times and Being Organized, has engendered in me a certain respect for airport punctuality that most definitely would not have occurred naturally. In the interest of full disclosure, I was a bit late for Naomi’s pick up from the office, as Joe decided it would be hilarious to make me chase him around the yard instead of getting in the car like a nice dog so I could drop him off at the office where he would spend the next few days. Not wanting him to be eaten by a lion he tried to make friends with, I thought it best to leave him in the big city.

To get to Zakouma National Park from N’djamena you have several options.

Option A) You commit to a very long day of driving, hoping for no break downs, flat tires or impassable road conditions.

Option B) You commit to driving for two days, with a stopover in Bitkine or Mongo probably. You still hope for no  break downs or flat tires, but you have some leeway to deal with those problems. Impassable road conditions are probably going to stop you anyway.

There is a giraffe in the middle of
this photo I took from the plane--
zoom in to see!

Option C) You hire a very expensive private plane to take you. This is kind of what I did. In fact, I jumped on a MAF flight with a MAF pilot and his family, celebrating their last trip to Zakouma before they move on to greener pastures. Literally. They are leaving Chad so pretty much anywhere they go will be greener than here. We were also joined by a South African pilot for a couple of days who was in charge of flying the plane back a bit early to pick up another client from a different town and fly them all over before coming back to pick us up. There was also another South African family who joined us, bringing all their Kruger National Park experience with them. And then there were Annie and Amanda, the tag-a-long ladies, unencumbered by children or husbands. We were also first-time safari ladies. (Note for the Indo people: I shouldn’t count Taman Safari, right? That doesn’t count because it was not real. Though we did have giraffes licking the windows and zebras blocking the road.)

Selfie with giraffes coming out the top of my head

We stayed in the slightly cheaper camp, which was actually quite nice. Annie and I shared a room with an enthusiastically loud fan that would have drowned out the loudest bar musician in the world. I wished I could have taken it home with me, though I sometimes worry about those kind of fans shaking themselves loose from the ceiling and falling on me in the middle of the night, maiming me forever.

Meals were included in the accommodation because there is no where else to buy food there. I know that French cuisine gets lots of accolades, but I’m not a huge fan. There is not enough spice in it and way too many creams and sauces with varying bland tastes and slimy textures. Annie nobly ate all her food, setting a good example for the children, but I was on vacation sort of and I felt free to refuse to eat salads dripping with mayonnaise-based sauces and covered in sardines, aka cat food. I also don’t like hard boiled eggs because they look like an eyeball and smell like a fart. I did say this in front of the children, which probably wasn’t very nice of me, but the youngest child learned how to say a new word (eyeball, not fart—he’ll get that one later as he has an older brother), and it’s always good to expand the vocabulary of young children.  At any rate, they didn’t bring me along because I would be a good influence on the children. That’s why they invited Annie. She is to blame for me. So indirectly it is her fault that I got some children in trouble for throwing rocks into the crocodile pond. No crocodiles were injured in the game. I just wanted to see how the green water would sploosh.

Fellow salad-hating TCK and a baby giraffe carcass

Enough about the accommodations and setting examples for children—we went to see the animals! And we weren’t disappointed. The best time to go to Zakouma is during the dry season. In the rainy season all the bushes and trees and elephant grass are good hiding places and the animals can find more remote sources of water to stay away from the few intrepid tourists that make it all the way out there to see them. February is in the middle of dry season, and usually not supposed to be hot. Hot season came early this year, though, and I’m ok with it.

We piled into an open vehicle and drove around the park several times a day looking for animals. We saw plenty of giraffes, lions, and even several elephants every day. We also saw ostriches, crocodiles, buffalo, baboons, civet cats, genets, mongoose, warthogs, and hyenas. And more, but I can’t remember the names of all the birds because there were a lot of them and they aren’t as exciting to photograph as lions.

This is what our open car looked like.
Lions could have jumped in if they were hungry.
We had snacks. 

It was fun driving around and looking at animals. Everyone was supposed to be really quiet so we didn’t scare them away in spite of the fact that the car was bouncing around. I think it could have been a parental rule so that children had to whisper-yell for their parents to give them snacks.

Annie was a bit perturbed by the nearness of various packs of lions eating their prey. Once when we drove past a lion on her side of the car, she dove into my lap, thinking I could protect her, I guess. I did. She is still alive today. I may have also traumatized her a bit taking her for a walk near our camp to the crocodile pond. We got a bit too close and one jumped out at us. There was screaming. We found an alternative route back to the camp. It turns out, crocodiles can climb rocks, though I’d assured Annie they could not minutes prior to the attack. After that experience she refused to come on the walking tour, though we had a guide with a gun.

Wildlife even in the bathrooms!
I can't get away from bats.

I really enjoyed walking around in the early morning. We never saw as many animals early in the morning as we did in the late afternoon and evening drives, but we did get to walk up to some lions eating a dead baby giraffe. We passed by some on their way to the kill and they weren’t happy to see us. They growled a bit and I noticed that the guide’s hand clutched his gun a bit, but sadly, there were no exciting attacks on the walk either.

In conclusion, you should go visit Zakouma National Park. It’s even better than Kruger National Park, according to the South Africans, because there are no rules! (OK, so they didn’t say that it was better, but they did say that there were more rules at Kruger, including staying on the road at all times and signing up a year in advance for a walking tour.)

Chad=Freedom

 And now please enjoy a selection of terrible photos I took because mostly I let everyone else with fancy cameras take nice photos. Anyway, why do you need nice photos of lions eating baby giraffes? That's why we have the internet!

Buffalos. Apparently one of the Big 5, but kind of boring.

Intrepid Walking Tour Group.

Walking Tour Guide with Gun

We interrupted the lions eating this giraffe carcass
during our walking tour. They left us to photograph
and then came back after we left.
We saw them again later when we were in the car a couple hours later.
It takes a long time to eat a baby giraffe apparently.
Interestingly, they were fine sticking around with their food
when we were in the car, but they left quickly when we were on foot.

Close up.

Hyena

Deer thing. We saw lots of the fancy deer/antelope.
I'm less excited by these various types of exotic cattle.

Giraffes are cool though.

Elephants are always cool

Lion. Ferocious. Violent. Yes.

Back seat selfie

TCKs become friends easily

Eating some South African sausage together. Good stuff.

Two giraffes. We saw a lot of them. They're cool
so your instinct is always to take photos.

Biawak/monitor lizard. Less cool because I've seen these a lot in Indo
and I've eaten them too. They taste gross. But slimy French salad is worse.

Lion under bush. She hates tourists.

Pregnant and cranky and not craving weird stork bird things.

The broken road where I confidently told Annie that crocodiles can't
climb rocks. Did I know this for sure? No. But I really convinced myself that it was true.
Then a crocodile jumped out at us from under the broken bit of road.
Annie doesn't trust me anymore with my Animal Facts.

She's smiling here because we haven't yet been attacked by crocodiles.

I made her take a million photos of me standing in elephant footprints,
which is what I'm doing here, to show the size. 

Here I'm sitting in a footprint

Here is my selfie in an elephant footprint.
You can't tell that I'm in a footprint though,
and that's why I made Annie take all the other photos.
Elephants are big. Sorry my photos are terrible.
Google "Zakouma National Park" and enjoy some photos taken by real photographers.

Dirt and Mangos

I’ve been back in Mundri a week now, and I’m getting used to always being dirty, sweaty, and surrounded by a cloud of bugs. I’ve stopped thinking about my legs as appendages—it’s more accurate to think of them as food for hungry insects. Actually, by not wearing bug spray most of the time, I’m probably doing the most generous act of my time here in Africa by providing food for the hungry. I’m also testing my theory that I’m immune to malaria—so far so good…

And speaking of hungry, I’ve started my garden, which is to say I spent a few hours hacking at grass with my hoe and then raking up all the grass with my rake and realizing that there is STILL a lot of grass I need to hack out, but I now have 25 blisters on my city-girl hands, and muscles I never knew I had (because I really never needed them before) are hurting and suddenly slash-and-burn farming techniques are sounding good to me…And I actually had the thought, “Why am I doing this? Do I really need vegetables? I can get tomatoes and onions in the marketplace. That keeps me in the vitamins. It’s not like I’m growing chocolate or gummy bears or something essential to life.”

Hours or work led to that mashed piece of grass--
seriously, send gummy bears

[NOTE: Somebody send me gummy bears because I’m running out of fruit snacks, which are just gummy bears shaped like fruits to try to help children realize that fruits are good (nice try, suckers!) and also they give you 100% of your daily vitamin C needs. Gummy worms are also acceptable.]

Anyway, it’s bandaid season for me, but that’s why I’m so lucky that my mom keeps my stock of good sticky Indonesian bandaids full at all times. It’s really great to have a mother you can count on (Happy Mother’s Day, Mom—this shout-out equals a card and flowers.)!

Esther knocking mangos out of the tree

Fortunately for my nutrition (otherwise I’d be eating only powerbars left by visitors here that I just realized are mostly expired—or do they taste weird because of fake sugar? Expiration dates are mostly suggestions, right? So is that whole ‘keep in a cool, dry place,’ right? Right? Oh, whatever, you know I'll eat them anyway), I made it back just in time for the end of mango season. When I got in, Repent and Lexon told me, “Too bad, it’s over, there are no more edible mangos on our trees.” While those words were coming out of their mouths, Esther was knocking perfectly edible mangos out of said trees with a long bamboo stick, which just goes to show that women can make things happen that men are too lazy to work on…though I admit that I wasn’t jumping in to help knock mangos down because

            A) we only have one mango stick and

            B) I’m not as tall as everyone else, and you need some height to help the stick reach the best mangos up in the top of the trees.

           C) I do not have good hand-eye coordination. If I were trying to throw a rock at you, I would hit the person next to you, almost inevitably. So if you are sitting around somewhere, minding your own business, and the person next to you gets hit by a rock, start thinking about what it was that you did that made me mad.

Jona and Oguna eating popcorn for the
first time (so they say)-they liked it

But I did redeem myself as a resourceful woman shortly after the mango incident.  I was talking to Baby (his real name is Sylvester, but Bobby is the name everyone calls him. And the correct local pronunciation of ‘Bobby’ sounds like ‘Baby.’ So I just call him that—it makes me feel like Justin Bieber sometimes if I yell it several times in a row), and I had asked him to turn the generator on for me—I can sometimes turn it on, but then sticking in the weird mangled cord to attach to the plug strip is scary.  A few minutes later he came back to me looking for the cord to turn it on—it’s the thing that wraps around a thing you pull to start up the motor. I’m pretty sure that it was taken by the kids who have been hanging out with me over the past few days. It was cute how they were always around, yelling at me to come and play or give them various candies or toys, but now I’m really nervous to change clothes or do other inappropriate things alone in my room, because I suddenly hear giggles and then see a couple of little heads poking up over my window sill, staring at me. I’m assuming it was the kids that stole the cord, because they are the same kids I caught taking stuff out of our trash, and they must be doing that to others because they left some used hypodermic needles outside on my back porch after playing and then had the nerve to come back and ask me to hand them over.  I know kids play with weird things—from about age 6 to age 9 you would never have found me without ten or twenty rubber bands wrapped around my wrists, as they were one of my main sources of childhood entertainment (I can do tricks and twist them into random shapes like stars and bird cages and scissors—shutup, it was awesome. Rubber bands are for cool people).  Also I have a very clear memory of how excited I was when my friend agreed to give me a bendy plastic leg snapped out of some unfortunate Barbie, and how mad I was when I realized I forgot it at her house.  I still remember some of the things I was planning to do with that leg, but you’re already getting creeped out by the fact that I picked up rubber bands off the toxic dirty streets of Indonesia and put them on my hands, so I’ll just leave it and admit to being a strange child (I blame birth order because middle child syndrome is a serious psychological issue. So naturally my sisters should bear some of the blame too. And my Dad, but not Mom because—Mother’s Day). But still, I have a strict policy against giving sharp, used needles to children to play with. They got over it when I gave them a slightly less dangerous toy— balloons I brought from Indonesia last year. But anyway, I’m pretty sure they took that rope thing for the generator to add to their odd collection of toys somewhere. It had a shiny plastic handle on it and was therefore irresistible.

Sweat+dirt+sunburn+crazy kids=I'm back in Mundri!

So Baby comes to me and asks me where the rope thing went. I told him it was outside with the generator. We go back to look with no luck. I realize what its fate probably was and how we will probably never get it back. So naturally, I start thinking about Plan B—where can we find a rope or rope-like thing to wrap around the other thing so that we can start the generator? I offer several suggestions to Baby:

Me: Here, we can cut off some of these ropey things on the mop that is covered with ants and is clearly never used by anyone ever!

Baby: No. They won’t be strong enough.

Me: Here is a hairband thingy I use to keep my bangs out of my eyes when I’m running!

Baby: No. It’s stretchy. It won’t work.

Me: OK—well what are YOUR ideas? Give me something. What can we do?

Baby: Nothing. We can never use the generator again.

At this point I stormed off muttering something about people who quit before they have even tried any of my perfectly good ideas—Baby was still holding my hairband in his hands and staring at it with consternation.

Fortunately, I am not a man who gives up before trying to knock a mango out of the tree to SEE if it has any worms in it because it MIGHT not. I also don’t mind thinking outside of the box. Or in this case, I actually looked in one of the boxes in my room to search for things that might work for wrapping and pulling and turning generators on. I found the bag that my bed/tent came in and it had a handy camping-durable drawstring on it that I easily detached. I brought it to Baby and ignored the ready-stream of reasons why it wouldn’t work and said, “Just TRY it!!!!”

And he did, because he could see that I was beyond reasoning with. And while the little plastic knob that had been used to secure the drawstring around the carry-bag fell off after the first unsuccessful pull, Baby must have been inspired by my creativity and outside-the-box-inside-my-box thinking, and he found a handy woodchip to use as a handle. SUCCESS! And that is why I’m writing this, because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to charge my computer while re-teaching Repent everything I’d taught him in our previous computer classes before I left last year. He is a genius because he actually remembered most of it without my help. I am a mostly useless teacher.

Esther, Baby, and Repent looking at the
new map of South Sudan we just put up

And the moral of this story is that in a country where people keep every disgusting bit of worthless trash that could POSSIBLY be made useful at sometime in the future, and are continuously fishing broken and unsanitary pieces of rubbish out of a careless, Earth-hating foreign girl’s garbage, surely SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE has SOMETHING that can be used to wrap around a thing to pull that thing and start the dang motor. And that someone was my box (tent bag drawstring). And our backyard (woodchip).

So that’s it, South Sudan.  I’m back. I’m sweaty and covered in dirt and bug bites. But it’s all good because I found a few mangos without worms in them. Or Esther did anyway.

P.S. This is a blog, not a letter, but whatever. I saw a hyena the other day, I'm pretty sure.  It was dragging away the dead carcass of a cow from a butcher's stall. Usually there is a group of dogs doing that, but this time there was just one animal, tawny colored face, with lion-type ears. I know it wasn't a lion, but it didn't have those pointy or floppy dog ears, and it was too big to be a cat.  But Repent said, "It couldn't have been a hyena. People are afraid of them, and they would have killed it." I don't know why he thinks he has to ruin my life all the time. I'm teaching him computers--the least he could do is be supportive of my hyena story. 

Anyway, here's proof that I really saw a hyena:

Bloody meat carcasses hanging up and hyena
(CLEARLY that is a hyena--note the rounded ears and ferocious teeth)
dragging off the bones.

Life's Little Adventures

As a general rule, I’ve always preferred wearing pants to a skirt. But here in South Sudan, I was informed by reliable sources that it is more appropriate for me to wear skirts than pants. I acquiesced and, not wanting to bring a lot of extra stuff, I only brought two pairs of pants. Consequently, I haven’t really wanted to mess them up, so usually I just stick to my skirts. On the day I spent 7 hours riding on a motorcycle through the jungle, that was a bad idea. Also remember how I said I was going to buy boots (I think it was one or two posts ago)? I still haven’t managed to do so. This is what my legs looked like half-way through the journey:

There were sadder photos of my leg available, but I'm too vain to show those.

I realized two things after looking at that photo:

1)   Any photos you take of your own legs will always look bad. Therefore, I had Repent take that photo because I needed proof. I like it when people feel sorry for me. They tend to be a lot nicer when they see how I'm suffering in Africa--I give my blood for you, South Sudan!

2)   Photos of blood and gore mean that some kind of story worthy of the blog happened to me.

So here’s the story of Repent’s and my most recent jungle adventure:

We planned our trip to this particular area in coordination with the Commissioner of Mundri West Country—basically the most important government official in the area. So naturally we were feeling important. We were planning to travel in his fancy car. And he called the night before to cancel.

So undeterred we hopped on the bike to head out ourselves. Before leaving we had the following conversation (which I have translated into English for your benefit, you are so lucky):

Repent: Good morning! Are you going to be wearing THAT?

Me: Yeah? What’s your problem with it?

Wait, no, that was a conversation I’ve had many times in the past with my parents…here’s the one with me and Repent:

Repent: Aren’t you going to wear pants today?

Me: Do you think I should change?

Repent: Nah, the roads are probably fine. Don’t bother.

Pointing to the sign to Kulundu

So we left. FYI-these were the least fine of any roads we have traveled to date. Several times I had to get off the bike and wade through deep squelching mud puddles or slosh through slippery sand. A few times Repent and I had to push and pull his motorcycle up and over cliff-like river banks. Once while I was looking for monkeys, Repent had to call upon a nearby solider gentleman to help him because he realized that I was really focused on those monkeys. One time Repent lost control of the bike and we careened off the sandy, almost non-existent trail, and landed, some-how upright, in the tall, thick, sticky elephant grass that had mostly covered said non-existent trail. I credit the grass with holding us up. That is some tough grass.

Kulundu kids had never seen a white person before.
They kept their distance.

The point of our 7-hour motorcycle jungle trip was to have meetings in two locations (neither of which lasted longer than an hour).  Kulundu is one of the poorest areas in Mundri West and that’s why the Commissioner wanted us to go there and see about putting in a bore well. In spite of some very beautiful and healthy-looking farms, no one can get in or out easily to buy and sell there so the people remain quite destitute. Many of the children were not wearing clothes and even the women were mostly only wearing skirts. There didn’t seem to be any other clothing hanging around their homes, inside or out. Also, we saw a few cases of mental illness and several young people who have become blind, probably from being exposed to a disease carried by the tse-tse fly that lives by the river where they are getting their water. Repent says that he saw a whole family of blind people while we were there, but I must have been looking for monkeys again or something because I missed it. I saw plenty of other individual cases though. I’m glad that the Commissioner has seen what a tough place this is and wanting to focus on helping out there. I hope that he will be successful.

Lunch

Dinka hero!

After a quick visit to Kulundu, whose hospitable ladies picked thorns out of my leg and made us a lunch of sorghum blob, termite paste, and honey comb, we decided to take an alternate route to Amadi, where we wanted to go discuss bio-sand filters. Somewhere in the middle of the jungle the road disappeared. We decided to stop and look for it while admiring the large hyena tracks we saw in the dirt following the footprints of the cows that the Dinka peoples herd in that area. We also saw some far off monkeys! Just at the point where I was excitedly planning to camp in the jungle for the night, hoping we could see some hyenas, we noticed a man a short ways away from us, just watching us. We headed over to see him and ask for directions. I would write our conversation, but we really didn’t have one, as he was Dinka and spoke no Arabic or Moru. However, he did kindly point us in the direction of the road and pause a bit for me to take a photo to remember our almost-camping trip before disappearing into the jungle.

Taking a photo of myself laughing at
Repent who just barely made it across the river.
It's so fun to work with me.

Eventually we made it to Amadi, had a 20-minute conversation with the chief about bio-sand filters, found the road out to home, and made it back without any other serious mishaps. So there it is--just a day in the life…a blog-worthy one, of course. For example, today has not been blog-worthy. Today I went to immigration. It wasn’t as bad as the time I went when the officers were all in training. Each man sat at a computer with a helpful young lady at his elbow pointing out all the letters he needed to type into the compter.  She would say, “Amanda—A (the ‘a’ is over there), M (go back to the other side for the ‘m’)…” That went on for a long time. I thought about offering to type for them, but I didn’t want to embarrass them with my Mavis Beacon speed typing. Today I was just supposed to pick up papers so I went upstairs to the room where the papers were supposed to be and waited. Then was told to go downstairs and wait (which I did). Then I was told to go upstairs and wait again. Then I was told to go downstairs again. Finally downstairs I was told that my papers were not yet finished. So I came here to sit in the IAS office, write emails, Skype with my mom, and finish this blog post which has turned out to be about a blog-worthy day and a non-blog-worthy day. Maybe the papers will be done this afternoon, maybe not. Maybe I will be on a bus to Mundri tomorrow, maybe not. Maybe if I get on that bus, I’ll have to wait at the river for the water to go down before we can cross it, but maybe not. Or maybe I’ll be going to Uganda for a couple of days, or maybe not. Maybe I’ll update this blog again in the near future, maybe not.  Life is always more exciting when you don’t know what’s going to happen next.

Bonus photos of hyena footprints for you:

Repent is such a great tracker--
I thought it was just a chubby dog.

Compare and contrast the size with the dog footprint (left)