nairobi >
One of the first things one notices about Nairobi is the prevalence of nice cars. There are definitely a few Tatas and many Daewoos and Skodas on the road, but I don’t think I’ve seen as many new Beemers and Benzes even in Manhattan, and the flash of the cars is even more apparent when considering the almost universally terrible condition of roads and traffic in the city. I hear Lagos is worse - Nigeria is always reported to be worse and the origin of everything terrible in the continent due to a deep love/hate for its overshadowing existence - but as we inch along in traffic and take a rough dirt bypass to reach the office by nine every morning, I can’t help but think of paradoxical contrasts and a Kenyan Gini ratio (income inequality) that hovers in the mid-forties, somewhere between China and Brazil. The juxtaposition is very, very stark when seeing the beggars, often women with children or disabled people, that sit in the medians or directly by the side of intersections, hoping to attract alms from the traffic. I’m going to try to formulate my thoughts on this more in another post, in part because it would be enormously inappropriate to casually tie this to text themed with the above title, and moreso because it is a complex as well as deeply disturbing phenomenon that I need to think about more thoughtfully.
Anyway, they drive on the British side of the road here as well, but that doesn’t really matter much personally since there is no way in hell I could ever drive here. Besides potholes leading sadly by mythical flyover highways that may/may not be constructed shortly by “top global Chinese contractor[s]”, the margins of error are insanely small and our drivers here do crazy things like pass trucks despite uncoming traffic less than 200m away and merge into a gap between two lanes of traffic to force an impossible third space. On that note, I think our drivers here do pretty well if we are counting quasi-hazard pay as a pricing lever. The main contact for ADP’s transportation needs in Nairobi is a guy named Peter who supplies a varied fleet of mid-90s white Corollas for his team and his own slick seven-seater when driving personally. He has to invest some CapEx upfront in reinforcing the suspension with stronger springs whenever he gets a vehicle, but through this business, he has three kids in boarding school after missing out on a full education when he was growing up, so I guess it works out.
As a modifier of the below note that I didn’t get to see many predators while on official safari, I should mention that a trio of us did a very fun half-day tour of the wildlife centers around Nairobi. In terms of above the board activities, we visited the elephant orphanage and giraffe center in the Karen area, which was absolutely marvelous. The former involved giant baby bottles and a soccer ball and hideously weak-kneed anthropomorphizing glee from me (think squeals of delight, at even greater magnitudes than what I usually emit in the presence of parakeets, sigh) and with the latter, giant sloppy kisses and incredible necking, assuredly all in very teenage innocence with our tall, gawky companions. If I speak a bit about things slightly under the table, we also got to actually hold a lion cub at the Nairobi animal orphanage. This was perhaps facilitated by an informal funds transfer that was not part of the original entrance fee, but maybe my Kantian sensibilities about the value of good governance and the serious nature of “anti-corruption” advertisements all over here have slipped a bit relativist. Jeremy et al - you must have some more fun bribery stories, some of them involving transnational visa magic, I’m sure. In any case, I was relieved to learn that the caged doves by the lion pen were not meant as hunting quarry, and I was delighted to have a very fidgety, very sinewy Simba look-alike go straight for my jugular. Life is all about brushes with death and taxes, kids!
amboseli >
The ADP Kenya team offers us a couple of spots in their weekend safari to a game park with a view of Kilimanjaro, and we rush to accept. A battered white jeep arrives to pick us up outside our apartment at 07:30 on Saturday and takes us the four hours or so toward the Tanzanian border for the weekend, tracking a distinctly increasing goats-to-vehicles ratio as we leave the urban sphere of the capital. It occurs to me that the same reason that goats are fantastically adaptable livestock is probably the same reason they taste kind of weird - they will eat pretty much anything, including plastic bags lying in a ditch. At some point we stop for petrol and an idling truck in the lot proudly displays “MEAT ???” across its siding. Yes, I couldn’t agree more.
Amboseli’s safari camp is overly luxurious and clearly made for mzungus (Europeans/ foreigners) who want to play at roughing it. Besides elaborate rainfall showers in our “tents”, there is a pool where a trio of very flappable, very vocal bullfrogs make a sort of bachelor pad. There’s electricity, but it turns off at 23:00, and before then we minimize time spent under our pseudo-hotel canopies. Among other salient sensory experiences, the smell of Amboseli is unmistakable. It’s a dry clay base that sticks in your nostrils and sends off layers of animal musk, as if to remind you of the prehistory saturating every square inch of the land. It certainly sticks in your clothing with a red film, and it suddenly becomes intuitive to me why the pastoral Maasai that live in Amboseli and other areas of southern Kenya favor bright scarlet for their clothes.
I highly recommend standing for the open air ride from a pop-top safari jeep. Driving along a dusty road into the park that might as well be pure sand, we bob back and forth as a ship at sea. As we head out, the impresion of a tire track lies on the ground, undulating and ribbed as if the long spine of some ponderous snake had lethargically wound its way through the dirt. Actual bones appear occasionally across the park - delicate ribcages speckled in dirt and impossibly large femurs once belonging to pachyderms. Trees with dangling earrings of weaver birds’ nests line the side of road every so often, but as we move deeper into the park, the landscape dries to vast expanses of caked, blistered dirt and ragged yellow grass, dotted by sudden patches of swampy, smelly green and stands of palm trees drinking from the glacial runoff of Kilimanjaro. We see the big peak itself in the late afternoon or our first day, towering from south and east behind the cloud cover and rays of sunset. It’s pretty f***ing breathaking.
The birds are really cool. Like its better known cousins Serengeti and Masai Mara, Amboseli is home to migratory species traversing Europe to the Cape, as well as endemic flocks that can be found virtually nowhere else in the world. Hilariously, any point at which we notice and watch a smaller bird, the poor thing seems to flit about nervously in utter terror. As one of our party describes it, “Why are you looking at me? No one ever looks at me!” We also glimpse a beautiful eagle in the middle of the path in front of us, as well as a pair of enormously strange-beautiful secretary birds (sacred ibises) casting surreal silhouettes against a field of otherwise forgettable grass. At one point, we stop for boxed lunch at a lookout point and a winged menagerie of guinea fowls, sparrows, and finches appears for scraps. It is duly noted that like their human hosts (guests?), they ignore our oily goat cheese (think haloumi but incredibly bland) and healthier bits of apple, preferring to focus their attention on cookie crumbs and the like. Elsewhere, enormously large but dull members of what I believe to be a crane family are everywhere among the scattered trees in the park just as they are among the billboards of Nairobi, while smallish but absurdly vivid starlings and thrushes hang out among the bushes and paint blue, red, and green explosions in the sky whenever they alight.
In terms of popular selling point, these parks are all about megafauna. We miss some of the big predators except from afar when some of the group spot a lioness and her cubs, but we get to see plenty of guinea fowl, zebra, gazelles, wildebeest, baboons, a few warthogs, a family of hyenas (including some very cute babies per your endorsement, Alix), and dozens and dozens of elephants. The latter are absolutely magnificent, with the baby ones particularly adorable when centered within a sheltering herd of elder matiarchs in standing sleep. At one point we enter a Mexican standoff with a large bull elephant in the middle of the road who refuses to clear the way for any passerby, metal quadriped on wheels or otherwise. While some of the other jeeps turn around, our guide Dixon presses slowly forward, and the light stamping in response is not encouraging. Another guide makes big hand motions at Dixon, and we all look at each other and laugh a little nervously. The bull is now inching toward us and checking us out. Er. Dixon cuts the engine. The elephant stands still. One. Two. Six. Twelve. He lowers his ears from confrontation mode and turns to his side. Score one, parry two. He promptly takes a huge shit in the road, not quite fifty feet in front of us. Well then, we know whose house it is. In the meantime, I’ve got my pictures.
accra + kumasi >
Ghana is the most equatorial locale of our itinerary by far, and at all points during our initial vist, the humidity is positively stifling. I take back my prior comparison of Joburg to Houston, because Accra is clearly the better analogue, and it makes sense why there is such a large Ghanaian-American community in my former Texan home. They’re among the few people in the world (along with a large group of Vietnamese-Americans) that can stand it there. I suspect the climate has something to do with the critters that generously invade my GI tract at some point, resolutely lodging themselves through my two weeks in the country. This is not pleasant at all, but it’s not crippling either. I don’t think any of us care to discuss this too much further, but let this be said: my gut flora were supposed to be made of stronger stuff from a childhood in China, but it is still not OK to drink the tap water in sub-Saharan Africa. Except I didn’t, so I’m at a loss.
To conduct our site visits in Kumasi, I take the shortest flight I have ever flown and probably will ever fly, a twenty-minute skip on a Saab mini-jet into the Ashanti heart of the “rainforest district.” As I’m threading the bits and bobs of this long post together, I think of a quote from my in-flight magazine on the Kenya Airways flight from Nairobi to Accra, which celebrated the carrier’s 737-300 as their own proud “big bird of Kenya”. They have some 787s pending, so that pecking order will change. I don’t know why African airlines are so nationalist, but then I haven’t flown much in Europe or Asia where national flag carriers are also a big deal. Incidentally, Kenya Airways is quasi-blacklisted by the State Department and maybe does not fully meet FAA compliance regulations, although I think this is total bullshit related to some bureaucratic political situation. KLM actually code-shares with them, and it seems like they have a newish fleet and good safety record, except for those two incidents involving disintegration into a jungle swamp. This definitely flashes in my mind as I prepare to board a tiny, tiny jet by an unknown shuttle carrier in a foreign land. In fact, it’s totally fine, and as an added bonus, we don’t even have to take a bus to the plane. This is incredible since on almost all my flight experiences on the continent, this is a required step for passage onto the aircraft given a terminal (n.p.i.) lack of jetway infrastructure combined with a surfeit of runway space. I am expecting someone to one day play an awesomely absurd trick and just tell us our flight is actually a luxury catered road trip, but this never happens. On the other hand, given the issues with gate overcrowding at NYC-area airports, it occurs to me that the busing approach could maybe be a really good practice for some U.S. carriers to adopt.
Although we fly into the true West African tropics, I don’t get up-close to any exotic birds or monkeys or even cocoa pods, which were the staple agricultural product of Ghana until Côte d’Ivoire’s recent (and threatened) dominance in the export trade. Nonetheless, Kumasi proffers a newer sort of native wildlife consisting of goats, chickens, and other livestock wandering the streets. At one point, I am certain I see a bright pink chicken, presumably dyed, running through a ditch by the side of the road. Or it could be delirium from long days of hospital meetings and evenings of analysis, considering no one else saw this. Later in Accra, we will see full-size cattle and horses doing similarly or chilling out by the side of the highway, sometimes while enjoying a toasty evening fire after torrential rainy-season storms. The entire team of two others in the car with me sees this as well as our driver Francis, so unless we were in a collective heat-induced stupor, let it be intersubjective truth that the medians and roadside turf around Accra double as petting zoos.
We took the plane in Ghana because road congestion is on a par with Kenya’s and would’ve cost us four and a half hours in transit. The outdated train infrastructure is even more of a hassle, requiring up to ten hours to traverse the 250km or so from first to second national city. Both Ghanaian metros actually have pretty good roads, which were built by the aforementioned Chinese contractors that mysteriously set up westward before looking to Kenya, but it’s still stop-and-start in terms of actually moving the vehicle. This isn’t helpful when Francis - who is wonderfully nice and easy-going to everyone in every other way - mentions his deep hatred of traffic and expresses such sentiments through a cherished Ghanaian cultural practice, hanging nonstop on the horn while charging into stationary cars. While my colleague Pieter reassures me that honking is considered incredibly rude in South Africa, every motorist in Ghana takes the horn as a natural auditory accessory, to be used for lively vehicular conversation. This slightly obnoxious fact doesn’t necessarily make it feel unsafe, particularly since the traffic in Ghana seems to have a bit less velocity where it really counts. Still, the shared transport vans here - called “tro-tros” vs. “matatus” in Kenya - are much bigger beasts to offend, considering that each one is basically the size of a humvee - rather than the Chinese “bread van” movers of Nairobi - and carries roughly a platoon’s worth of people. The cherry on top of all of this is that many Ghanaians are very religious and in a fairly public manner, so motorists will affix giant lettered slogans like ”Back to Sender” and “JESUS POWER” in their back windows. Delightfully, our own car has two scary-beady eyes emerging from a scaly crest and the epithet “GATORS”. When in Rome… you do what you have to do, of course.
As a parting vignette, I will say that I value open-mindedness and adventurousness very highly in cultural experience, or I would not be here. However, this can in specific instances be a poor belief system, even when in an auspicious place like Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, site of a mythical Excalibur-like sword central to Ashanti kingdom folklore as well as one of the nation’s two comprehensive cancer centres. We had gone through one hour of traffic and six hours of physician interviews and observation by the time of a thirty-minute break at 15:00, and I was damned peckish for lunch. I had heard from a Kenyan sales rep that fufu, a sort of dough made from cassava and other flours to be eaten with soup, was the must-have delicacy in Ghana. Sure enough, when my three-Ghanaian-cedi (~$2.10) bowl of soup came out, the fufu looked like a splendid lump of tasty carbs. Only catch was that the dough was submerged in a fiercely pungent red liquid with unidentifiable animal parts floating in it. Since resuming an interim carnivorism, I am all for eating offal in the interests of not wasting the environmental resources or the sacrifice of life involved in killing an animal for meat. These parts are also often delicious and being Chinese, I have promiscuous textural proclivities on my tongue - think steamed chicken gizzards and beef tripe - as well as exciting flora in my gut. However, I was totally not down with this mystery meat, since it was at a point too far of boiled fermentation over chunky tissue-type mix. It is actually to my relief that I can describe the parts as “unidentifable” now: at one point, I was almost certain that there was a pair of goat testicles and attached appendage floating in my soup. After turning this piece (and my stomach) over a few times and observing something appearing to be smooth viscera along the lines of intestinal tract or maybe peritoneal sac, I was okay again.
Think about that last sentence.
Reader lesson: It is never a good idea to be ”adventurous” with food in hospital canteens, at any time in any place in the world.
The above is in no way saying that the original recommendation was spurious or that Ghanaian food is bad, but rather describes the universal human condition that is hospital food. The coastal cuisine of red red or palaver sauce over fresh-grilled tilapia or snapper is totally great, for example. Fufu with groundnut soup is a fine choice at other establishments, particularly when given more choice on the protein. And the appropriate response to a local agricultural bounty of plantains and coconuts is always great relish and fried, sugary abandon. But none of that was available, alas, at this particularly graphic lunch.
I tried to be game, very conscious that I was enjoying the luxury of a midday meal that many of the patients at the same hospital might not be able to afford. After carving a good half out of the fufu and a fair share of the soup, I downed a chunk of the mutton pseudo-penis.
I did not feel more virile.
{pt. II}
