Kebabs on a bed of friendship

Travelling is like food in many ways. In my experience, both can be either improvised or carefully planned. They can be kept simple or extremely elaborate. Food, like travel, can leave you deeply satisfied or with the bitterest of after-tastes, swearing NEVER EVER to try that again owing. Food and travel, through the the multi-faceted experience they offer, have the magical ability to transport one through space and time, kicking imagination into overdrive and springing memories out of the dustier recesses of the mind. And when the whole experience is shared with someone, it is magnified, it's not food anymore, it's a meal; it's not a trip anymore, it's a voyage of discovery.

Some smells and tastes catapult me back into childhood whenever I encounter them, encasing me into a loving, safe homely cocoon. Succulent sweet fried plantain(Muzuzu, a cousin of mine can potentially inflict GBH over the smallest piece), Chicken Moambe stewed in palm fruit juice a la Congolaise, homemade mayonnaise with crispy frites, vanilla pudding, Dad’s succulent cotelettes de porc.....I could go on for hours.

It isn’t just the food it’s the experience of sharing the meal  I can still hear their kind admonishments whenever I made a mess -
Dad: “Non, mais...est ce que tu dois toujours manger comme un cochon?” which loosely translates as “Sharing a table with you is like watching a pig eat!”- or for non-observance of Mum’s rather strict table etiquette;
Mum: “Space for a cat between you and the back of the chair, sit up straight, no slouching, no elbows on the table and the metallic things either side of the plate are cutlery, not toys, not weapons, not useless decorations but CUTELRY And finish your food, tu as toujours les yeux plus gros que le ventre....do you know how many little kids are starving out there?”

My sister rather intelligently asked why we couldn’t take it to them. I remember my siblings’ sneaky attempts to get the last piece of plantain from one another’s plate.
Lazy sunday afternoon babercues, potlucks at uni, I remember the food because I remember the meal and the people.

My travel experiences are forever imprinted because I have had the blessing of sharing them with extremely interesting and kind individuals, and I say interesting and kind because I have come across individuals with the personality of a depressed amoeba and dangling icicles for a heart. Of the good ones, some I have known for years, others I met on the road and a good number have hosted me; opening the doors to their homes and making me part of their families, sharing their countries and cultures. Most of them, I will know for as long as we both live. The most amazing sights I have beheld carry heavier meaning because a travelling companion made an insightful- or phenomenally funny-remark that has cemented that moment into my head.

Which brings me to an amazing journey and the amazing people who I shared it with. In the winter of 2008, I was in Pakistan . Not bustling Karachi, not sleek Islamabad, but Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province, a mere ten kilometres from the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan. We are talking about a place that is competing with Mogadishu, some back alley in a drug-cartel-owned neighbourhood of Mexico and a small mosque in Sarah-Palin-vote-country, for the title of “Most dangerous place on Earth ever EVER EVER”. . Two friends of mine, Qash and Yaqub, took me around Peshawar, Islamabad and the Indus Valley in Pakistan. Qash is a big gangly guy who looks much younger than his twenty three years while Yaqub is a shorter sort with a thin wiry body and the face mischief would have if it had one.

My work allowed free afternoons every second day and I spent them walking with them in the old city, a network of narrow alleys where they pointed out medieval parapets, lattice work, ancient doors and other architectural features in the same tone as they would shrapnel scarred walls, signs of the all too frequent suicide bombings.

Peshawar is a beautiful city in a sense that there is a profusion of old and new. Shopping with them in ultra modern shopping malls with Calvin Klein and Louis Vuitton imitations was really cool. We took rides in the extremely garrishly addorned buses(entire volumes have been written about them), we took walks in the grounds of the University of Peshawar, a venerable instution that looks like an imperial palace complete with courtyards and towers.

They offered to go into the hills and shoot an RPG (Rocket Propelled Grenade-I’m sure you knew that) for about ten dollars and should I add five dollars, they’d throw in a goat to aim at. There is not a joke within a mile of this. I declined the offer and remembered not to comment on the poor goat( imagine it being led into a meadow, where it would proced to graze unsuspecting of its fate) I did not say anything because that would have just been GAY.

Pakistan, and the entire Indian sub-continent I was told, is crazy about food and I soon caught the bug. I pigged out continuously, never refusing a parcel I was offered and occasionally stealing it when it wasn’t offered. It was that good. Food is what naturally happens in Pakistan after a handshake. I visited their families, ate the best lamb kebabs in this solar system, big flat spicy patties of lamb mince that you have with Naan bread and an assortment of vegetables. I am drooling copiously on the keyboard as I write this.

Walking through the colourful markets with them was an enlightening experience as I managed to be pulled in the back of every second shop, to sit on a carpet with seven or so other bearded men( bearing an uncanny resemblance to the stereotypical Taliban) who would poor me tea , nudge me to drink it and have a few samosas with. It’s a sign of respect to the guest, owing to the sacred custom of hospitality and sanctuary. And I tell you I was a hit. At the end of one particularly full day at the market, my pee had the distinct and unmistakable whiff and tinge of Jasmine green tea.

Sadly for me, The North West frontier Province is one of the few places on earth where alcohol is expressly forbidden.

To acquire some legally, one must first register with the local authorities for a permit by providing proof that one is not a Muslim. The permit takes upwards of three months to get (“Shrill scream” to use another friend’s expression). They must have noticed the trembling of my lip and the tears welling in my eyes because they quickly told me that there were “ways” wink-wink. That same evening I was generously plied with smuggled vodka (that tasted like paint stripper but hey...who am I to refuse a gift) and cold, battered and bent Heineken cans that had been brought in on camel back from Russia. You just have to know people who know people.

Strongly regimented societies need outlets, valves to let the pressure out, and I was lucky to witness one such instance by going to a party. Think of an apartment at the top of a building in the business quarter of the city, packed to the brim with mostly young men and the odd group of shy-looking but extremely outspoken young women and a sprinkling of visiting arty types from Karachi and Islamabad. The discussion went from fashion to gossip (I knew no one concerned, but I tell you it was sizzling), to politics. The whole thing happened in a very relaxed way, with a respectful observance of etiquette between the men and the women, but I could see some romances blossoming on the couches(still a good metre distance between the two , bashful eyes, very awkward and really sweet- it was courtship the Romeo and Juliet way).The blaring music (from Britney Spears to Pakistan’s top ten of the week) and a sea of cheap booze moved things along and soon after I got there everyone was dancing. I almost envied them, this double life they lived, this juncture of world they lived in and their deep awareness of the moment. I remember at some point being in the middle of a circle of dancers throwing back my nth shot of liquid fire and thinking that I was partaking in a privileged, exclusive and rare experience, much like a once in three hundred years alignment of stars. Drinking in the moment, literally.

Three weeks into my visit, we went to the Indus Valley, at a spot where the Indus and the Kabul River meet into a gigantic Y shaped formation. It was in the full of winter so the water levels were low and we stood in this expanse of huge shiny pebbles, waves upon wave of smooth rocks in colours ranging from jet-black to a translucent white with all the hues and nuances in-between. We let our minds wander for a while taking it all in. I imagined how many people had sat here throughout the ages, in this legendary valley. And we talked about world perspectives, life expectations, country, family, and love.

The both of them were expecting their families to choose brides for them and they explained the rationale behind what is widely viewed in the west as backwards and devoid of love. First of all, their parents and their parents’ parents had had their marriages arranged and fared quite well in them, viewing the marriage less as a thing of love and more like a stable partnership whose primary aims were the prosperity of the family, the flourishing of good relationships between two clans as well as the upholding of millennia old traditions that make up their culture. They also believes tht love grows, it doesn’t just happen. An approach that carries more sense and sensibility than “the bachelorette”, what with its hire/fire, marriage for morons(albeit with perfect teeth and heaving bosom) . When they said marriage they meant “business” and if love happened in the mix they would be really happy.

We talked world and we talked country. They were enamoured with their torn land, in love with what it could be and they expressed their views on the fundamentalists- they were sad at the fact that most of them were born and bred in such poverty that undiscerning fundamentalism was the only thing that gave them purpose. They could understand that but all the same they spoke of them with palpable disgust, as the people who robbed them continuously of their lives, family members, their religion and their future.

We took a trip to Islamabad, a beautiful artificial city that is laid in an uncompromising grid of confusingly similar streets. It’s wooded and very cosmopolitan, a mere few hours from Peshawar, there were women with no veils on in the streets, fewer burqas and all manner of things western. After a mosey around the main sights, Feisal mosque (Incredible place), we went up the Margalla hills to a place called Daman-e-Koh, a popular-if not generic looking- picnic spot for the well heeled locals with an array of restaurants. The view was unbelievable, the city literally laid to your feet.

My experience of Pakistan will always be through the lens of the friends I made, a friendship that transcended a lot of race, religious and location obstacles. I’m still in touch with them and I still miss a land that is troubled, misunderstood and beautiful. From the organic chaos of Peshawar to glitzy-and somewhat clinical - Islamabad, I met the people whose voice I hear whispering “try a bit harder “whenever I have a guest. With them I learnt to appreciate the extent of the problems their country is facing and the courage it takes to live there and still believe tomorrow will be better.


Incidentally, two of the places I had meals in, The Marriot in Islamabad and the Pearl Oriental in Peshawar were the targets of terrorist attacks which claimed the lives of dozens of people.

The day before I left, Qash and Yakub came over and brought the last round of booze along with some gifts, one of them a huge cake made with dates and cinnamon. We spent two hours talking and eating and making plans about the time they would come and visit Africa. We parted tipsy- a tad bit teary too- but armed with the certitude that we shall meet again.

The next day at the airport, I was coldly informed at the PIA check-in(the things I wish them are in the BLEEP category) that I had excess luggage and had to lose some of the ballast. After a few moments of careful consideration I parted with about three kilos of books and –shriller scream- the date cake. It had to be done-although dates and cakes even when not together trigger a sweeping tide of guilt . I calm myself by chanting “it’s not the food, it’s the people that matter.”

To my two brothers from another mother, Qash and Yakub and to their beautiful country, Pakistan.

A calendar, my father, three uncles and my brother

On the first of March 1896, a historical battle took place in the North of Ethiopia, a locality known as Aduwa.

The battle pitted against one another the then kingdom of Italy; a late comer to the scramble for Africa, eager to make a name for itself in what was the game of the day, and the Ethiopian Empire, the oldest African Christian state entity and the seat of a dynasty that claimed descent from the love child of Solomon of Israel and Makeda, Queen of Sheba.

Picture this for a moment; in the last un-colonized African chunk of land, in an empire famed for its gold, silver and history, a barren flat land surrounded by jagged hills. Advancing in the valley , 18,000 Italians, arrogant and drunk on the belief that Africa is a place destined to be subjugated, seeing Ethiopia the missing piece to join the concert of colonizing, civilizing nations.
On the hills, an 80,000 strong force of Abyssinians, battalions commandeered by Emperor Menelik, Empress Taytu and the best commanders the nobility had to offer, fighting for their freedom, their survival and the continuity of life as they knew it. Although the Italians had the technological advantage, a combination of sketchy military intelligence, poor leadership and gross inequality between the forces sizes (the Ethiopians outnumbered the Italians 7 to one) led to a defeat so shameful, so scalding, forty years later, Musollini still tried to avenge it, a defeat that shaped the lens through which Ethiopia would be viewed by the rest of the world from that day on.

Ethiopia became a Reality. To Europe, Ethiopia became unattainable, mysterious, fierce and free, a respected, recognised entity, an empire of Africans in Africa, a place where a stand had been made against European colonisation. To Africa it became a shinning beacon, a reminder of what we had been at some point and what we must strive to become.

Ethiopia became a brand name for virginal, fierce, beautiful, HUMAN Africa, a special place.

Growing up, I built an image of Ethiopia in my mind, a collage obtained from three special places: a calendar, a conversation with my Dad and the lasting impressions three of my uncles and my brother have left on me.

When I was about eight years old, my mother, a travel agent then, brought home an Ethiopian Airlines calendar. Watercolour prints of scenes from rural Ethiopia picturing the inevitable goat-herder standing on one leg, the diaphanous veiled doe eyed Russian icon-like beauties of women, the aloof chiselled staggeringly handsome faces of their men, medieval Gondar, the architectural feat of Lalibella and the Gellada baboons, part-baboon, part-dogs-part-lion from the red Simien Mountains. I remember taking the calendar down and trying to reproduce these images of intense, impeccable beauty, I remember, as a boy, literally being transported into another world. I can remember, then, that I promised myself that I would visit Ethiopia "Quand je serais grand"-When I grow up.

At about the same time, “We are the world” was becoming the anthem it is today. The opening lines and the chorus are probably the first English words that I ever attempted to string together and understand. When I asked my father what “We are the world-Nous sommes le monde” meant (a very confusing literal translation), he patiently told me about the song’s meaning and purpose, about the Ethiopian famine and about solidarity as a responsibility, a debt of the haves towards the have-nots.

Famine-“Amapfa” in Kirundi, my mother tongue, can be translated loosely and litteraly as “the bringer of death”, and for people of my father’s generation it still represents a reality they faced as children when a bad-crop year, cattle disease, the colonial taxes or instability lead to shortages acute enough to see some days go past without food. “La disette”- lean times, a spectre he had known, still feared in a way so strong that it drove him every morning to work harder to build a world of plenty for us, his family. Dad's way of describing ugliness was " Asa n'urwamaze inka- The face of the cattle plague", so ingrained was the memory of hideous hunger and its effects in his psyche and the collective consciousness of his generation.
I understood Ethiopia that day, through my father’s almost contagious disgust and horror of famine, as a place of tragedy so intense the world had to mobilise to attempt and stop it. To stop that horrible thing that robs your body and your mind of all abilities, the slow death, hunger. I think I felt, empathised, for the tragedy of Ethiopia a long time before I had similar feelings for my own country.

A third strong influence of my mental construct of Ethiopia came from close in the family. Three of my uncles are Rastafarians and I suspect my brother to be a closet Rastafarian. I love them, I adore them, I worship their socks. My uncles G(who sports knee length dreadlocks), M and B, are respectively a writer, a journalist and a human rights activist/ political analyst. They are men of immense presence and calm, lean, noble who speak with kind, serious voices that can hardly be told apart on the phone. They have stratospheric IQs and matching inquisitiveness and openness to the world and knowledge. They also have a great reverence for the frail little man who once was the Emperor of Ethiopia.

My brother, the consummate Bohemian bourgeois is an aficionado of all things Reggae and Roots, the Rasta philosophy, the respect for life and the idealistic nature of Rastafarianism. They together represent an Africa I have come to love; educated, conscious of its roles and responsibilities, full of ideals and action. And they have a role model, one of many, one they recognise to have been full of flaws, but full of grace too. One whose idea of Africa was an orderly, united, powerful and respected continent. The Emperor Ras Tafari Makonnen Haile Selassie the 1st.

Their reverence rubbed onto me, an irrational respect and adulation for the last of the great kings.

These were the thoughts coursing through my mind as the Emirates flight made its final descent on Bole, Addis Ababba’s international airport over a patchwork of different hues of green, dark brown and hay, a land with every inch tilled and prepared. And right infront and below me lay a great city with a towering dark block of mountains at one end of it, Addis Ababba, the New Flower....(to be continued.)

Travel quotes addendum

As promised, this is the next instalment. Funny but on the website they count them down backwards, like the second bit of every journey, homebound...Enjoy


http://www.bravenewtraveler.com/2008/08/01/the-next-50-most-inspiring-travel-quotes-of-all-time/

50. Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas, take your next trip in kilometers.” – George Carlin

49. “Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels.” – Nikos Kazantzakis

48. “Our Nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.” – Blaise Pascal

47. “It is a strange thing to come home. While yet on the journey, you cannot at all realize how strange it will be.” – Selma Lagerlöf

46. “Remember that happiness is a way of travel – not a destination.” – Roy M. Goodman

45. “Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover / Breath’s aware that will not keep. / Up, lad: when the journey’s over there’ll be time enough to sleep.” – A. E. Housman

44. “As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.” – Margaret Mead

43. “Too often. . .I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.” – Louis L’Amour

42. “Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey.” – Fitzhugh Mullan

41. “One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.” – Alfred North Whitehead

40. “The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.” – William Least Heat Moon

39. “Travel only with thy equals or thy betters; if there are none, travel alone.” – The Dhammapada
38. “Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.” – George Eliot
37. “Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.” – Samuel Johnson, on the Giant’s Causeway

36. “An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.” Iain Sinclair

35. “Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, ‘I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.’” – Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

34. “Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.” – Alan Keightley

33. “Half the fun of the travel is the aesthetic of lostness.” – Ray Bradbury

32. “Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.” – Kurt Vonnegut

31. “We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.” – Hilaire Belloc

30. “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” – Susan Sontag

29. “I should like to spend the whole of my life in traveling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.” – William Hazlitt

27. “A child on a farm sees a plane fly overhead and dreams of a faraway place. A traveler on the plane sees the farmhouse… and thinks of home.” – Carl Burns.

28. “I love to travel, but hate to arrive.” – Albert Einstein

26. “Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled.” – Mohammed

25. “One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind.” – Charles Dickens

24. “When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.” – Edward Dahlberg

23. “Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.” – Frank Herbert

22. “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did now know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.” – Italo Calvino

21. “He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.” – Sinclair Lewis, on sightseeing.

20. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance.” – Bumper sticker

19. “Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travelers… seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns.” – Paul Fussell

18. “Most of my treasured memories of travel are recollections of sitting.” – Robert Thomas Allen

17. “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” – Mary Anne Radmacher Hershey

16. “Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.” – John Muir

15. “When you’re traveling, ask the traveler for advice / not someone whose lameness keeps him in one place.” – Rumi

14. “There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.” – Orson Welles

13. “To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions.” – Sam Keen

12. “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” – G. K. Chesterton

11. “When you are everywhere, you are nowhere / When you are somewhere, you are everywhere.” – Rumi

10. “When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.” – Susan Heller

9. “The autumn leaves are falling like rain / Although my neighbors are all barbarians / And you, you are a thousand miles away / There are always two cups at my table.” – T’ang dynasty poem

8. “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” – Herman Melville

7. “People don’t take trips – trips take people.” – John Steinbeck

6. “We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

5. “It’s a battered old suitcase and a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal.” – Tom Waits

4. “The map is not the territory.” – Alfred Korzybski

3. “It is solved by walking.” – Algerian proverb

2. “He who would travel happily must travel light.” – Antoine de Saint Exupéry
1. “What am I doing here?” – Arthur Rimbaud, writing home from Ethiopia

Travel quotes yet again...

A friend of mine checked out the blog and pointed out that the link to the quotes was dead. So here they are again, as a link, full text and with an addendum. Enjoy.


http://www.bravenewtraveler.com/2008/03/07/50-most-inspiring-travel-quotes-of-all-time/



1. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain

2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine

3. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

4. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” – Samuel Johnson

5. “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” – Paul Fussell

6. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac

7. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” – Moorish proverb

8. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes

9. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck

10. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” – Lin Yutang

11. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” – Aldous Huxley

12. “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” – Samuel Johnson

13. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

14. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese

15. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

16″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” – Moslih Eddin Saadi

17. “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence

18. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark

19. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

20. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard

21. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber

22. “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” – Jawaharial Nehru

23. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux

24. “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson

25. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

26. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost

27. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

28. “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” – Charles Dudley Warner

29. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu

30. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener

31. “The journey not the arrival matters.” – T. S. Eliot

32. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill

33. “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” – Mark Twain

34. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” – Pat Conroy

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

35. “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien

36. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” – Benjamin Disraeli

37. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” – Maya Angelou

38. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” – Elizabeth Drew

39. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France

40. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca

41. “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” – William Least Heat Moon

42. “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” – Lillian Smith

43. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley

44. “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” – Freya Stark

45. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” – Rudyard Kipling

46. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux

47. “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G. K. Chesterton

48. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” – Clifton Fadiman

49. “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” – Carlo Goldoni

50. “Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” – Mark Jenkins

The flight of the crows

So I was sitting at the hotel bar having a cold beer at the end of a long stifling hot work day. Across the road, over the roofs and the multitude of coconut palms, a huge flock of birds rose and swirled in the air, perhaps a hundred of them. They flew in that beautiful way that fish swim, erratically then all of a sudden, like a computer engineered move, all, heading the same way. I wanted that very moment affixed forever in my mind, a sign from above and beyond that against all appearances, everything is and will work out just as it should.


Now let me say that again.

The birds were big scary crows, flying over a slum, it was 33 degrees C and a fly was swimming in my beer.

I am in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, staying in a hotel off the airport road, a long stretch of tarmac running along waste land, industrial buildings and big shiny glass fronted nouveau-riche leatherette emporiums selling Malaysian furniture. Then past the airport, an explosion of noise, colour, smell and demographics as you hit one of the most congested crossroads of the continent. Serious. If such a study was conducted over the number of meters covered per hour at given crossroads in Africa, this would take at least bronze, close behind Kampala’s taxi Park area and Kinshasa’s bush meat and sorcery centre (just a wild stab in the heart of darkness..).

I’m not even driving but I can feel the belligerence, the traffic bitch, build up. Then I look out the window and meet eyes with the passenger of the incredibly colourful, gaudy, tasselled, red velvet upholstered and sardine packed affair of a bus, dala dala they’re called, next to the car I’m in. He has, as does everyone else on the bus, the defeated look of someone that can’t tell his own sweat from that of the other five people next to him. Guilt and immense gratefulness for my own air conditioned, IPod fuelled, chauffeured selfish lot.

Past the static traffic horror spot, you drive past a prison and two cemeteries; yummy...no doubt a reminder that they will get you this life or the next, and then get to where I am staying. The hotel in itself holds an unbeatable advantage over the neighbourhood, it has AIR-CON.

The heat, you see, is hard to imagine. Imagine a hot steamy sex session, next to a brazier only alone clammier, wetter, stickier and without the sex. Hitting the thirties at night is not unheard of. During the day it’s worse, what with the humidity, the moving about and the recurring thought that people pay for this kind of weather...Horrid.

So after a long day’s work, full of extremely satisfyingly smashed targets, a phone call from a dear dear friend(partner in crime, all in one friend, God I miss him- kinda guy) I am sitting with my best friend and colleague, having that beer that feels like a massage to your nerve endings, and I look across the road.

A very busy road, full of trucks ferrying cattle to the slaughter house, dala dalas, bikes, toddlers running across the road, women in kangas, the national printed cloth, water carriers with their carts. Life is teeming here. Oops, S£%t, teeming in my glass too. One of the three hundred flies about me has just dropped into my beer and is doing the dog paddle, or whatever the equivalent for flies, across the foamy surface. I look at the insect slowly drown, slowly, then realize how both cruel of me to let it and how unfair the world is to me, that it should drown in MY BLOODY BEER. So I empty the beer in the potted plant next to me and poor myself the rest of the bottle.

Across the road is the ramshackle one level tin roof, shop front face of so many African slums. Slum by definition( Wikipedia, where else) means “a run-down area of a city characterized by substandard housing and squalor and lacking in tenure security.” And as I look across, I can see some of that. From my high perch, in undoubtedly the most expensive place to stay for miles, I can see squalor alright. I can see poverty. But I can also see so much more. The place is alive.

The water carriers, big, healthy magnificently built men are bantering, one mother is scrubbing clean a five year old in a bucket, the kid is laughing and so is the mother. An old man is asleep in a chair and next to him a dog, in a stupor as deep as its master’s. A young man is chatting up a stunning looking woman, who looks enthralled with the sweet nothings he is proffering. The exhaust fumes are interspersed with the tang of the ocean, which amazingly you can still smell (or am I being overly romantic) and the waft of fried chicken. Over the different shades of rusting tin roofs the palms soar, high, majestic, structural, sleek figures.

Even around me, the hotel staff who all live across the road into that which I have been told by the sheltered Elites of Tanzania to fear, avoid and shun are happy people. They’re great and since realizing that I speak Swahili have been on first name terms with me. So much so that when they were swamped with clients they asked me to help pass some bottles over from where I was....I knew I’d arrived. They’re happy.

Life in all its simplicity, chaos, harshness and immense, oh so immense beauty.

And then the crows flew, a huge cloud of ink birds rising from the mass of houses. The birds were crows. Followers of warring armies, gougers of eyes, winged dark omens, these scavengers half rats, half hyenas that western and African culture alike (so far as I know) have associated with lying, dirt, treachery and death. They were BEAUTIFUL.

The crows flew. Having spent a day eating, battling for every tiny spare scrap with their kin and humans, they flew, responding at some call of nature. From where I was sitting I saw them rise, scatter, then flow back together, heading west into one of those tortured African sunsets. A shot worth the opening and the end of any epic movie.

I was transfixed by the beauty of the moment and I was grateful. Grateful to be alive, for the fly in the beer, the camaraderie of the staff, the rank end of the day smell ( yes...FCUK researchers have a long way to go), my friend infront of me, the fact that I am constantly reminded how lucky I have been and that I still have the naiveté to still enjoy it.....

Wouldn’t want it any other way...

50 inspiring quotes

I am fascinated by quotes and I just came across a bunch that are about meaningful traveling, traveling that involves a bit more than  doing all and only what the lonely planet prescribes....... Enjoy here .

The path trodden...

Over the last few years, I have travelled quite a bit and in the process had and lived some experiences that I feel I want to record. Primarily for myself. We forget quickly the joy we felt facing a sunrise, swimming in the ocean at midnight under a full moon or talking to interesting people in a bar...The second reason is because my ego dictates that I leave something, if I enjoyed it so BLOODY much, it must be of some help, interest or fun to someone out there.


I want to hammer those moments down, find the words to describe them, render them onto the canvas this blog proposes to be and then hang those portraits on a wall so I can remember, always, the beauty of life and never become bitter and ungrateful too quickly...

Rwanda, Uganda, Congo, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Ethiopia, South Africa, The US, The UK, The Emirate of Dubai, Russia, Pakistan, Singapore, the Philippines so far and a few more coming up...I want to talk about the countries, and the people, the experiences, the banalities and the serious stuff, what never mattered and what did.

In the words of Samuel Johnson; “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”

So things as I thought them and as they turned out to be....This is the world as I see it....as honestly as I can....