2300km down, 2300 km to go!

My first trip to Southern Africa, I spent a month living here. I had my hair cut, I bought underwear, I ate whole foods, went shopping, and lead a pretty domestic, sedentary life with our South African friends.

This trip is virtually the opposite -- we are combing across the surface of four countries, a road trip the distance of about half the length of Africa.

Driving is not the only skill we have mastered along the way though. We are also learning how to:
-Charm border guards out of paying heavy registration fees to enter their country
-Name that road kill -- we have identified an elephant, donkeys (although it was difficult to identify underneath a dozen vultures), eagles, something that looked like a baby gorilla, and then the usual dogs and cats.
-Dodge livestock -and- elephants -- we have also shared the road with a giraffe, dozens of baboons, and other exotic mammals.
-BYO-Hotel -- sleeping in the car when we can't find reasonably priced accomodation.
-Have lively filling station conversations -- our most interesting conversations have mostly been with gas station attendees and chats with various Zimbabwean hawkers at filling stations.
-Distinguish between reality and our dreams -- as usual, our anti-malarials are giving us unimaginably vivid dreams to enjoy.
-Entertain eachother -- I think we will have covered every topic of conversation known to man before we reach Cape Town!

Tomorrow we say farewell to Botswana after a week of traversing this vast, barely populated country of really chill people, and a short trip to Zimbabwe to see the absolutely monumental, majestic, and massive Victoria Falls. Tomorrow we head to Windhoek in Namibia, where we will begin our descent through the Namib dunes to the Western Cape of South Africa, exhausting our one CD of Batswana music along the way.

Re-thinking xmas.

Normally this time of year, I send a mass email of alternative holiday gift ideas, but nowadays so many other people do a better job.

There are 59 alternative gift ideas here >>
More resources here >>
And plenty of goats here >>

Car-Culture Shock.

I have been busy moving into my new apartment, traveling virtually every weekend, and working much harder than I'm legally allowed to during the holy month of Ramadan. As such, I haven't had much time to write. So I thought, in the mean time, I'd at least share some of my email responses to questions people have been posing me...

How is it going over there? You arrived in Abu Dhabi the same time as Christopher arrived from Sierre Leone to Toronto, so I'm going to time your culture shock together! Has it began yet?
I think our experiences of culture shock may vary slightly...I work and socialise almost exclusively with Montrealers and Vancouverites. Even my two non-Canadian friends both lived in Canada for awhile. Plus the fact that I've been on the road for so long, I'm kind of instantly adaptable these days. The biggest cultural difference is that I'm adjusting to car culture.

What's it like?
Well, I've had it really easy here. I got hooked up with an apartment with a really cool Aussie girl my workmate met on the street, in the building 3 of my work colleagues live in. So I have a fab place, fully stocked with furniture and dishes and the like, and my workmates seem happy enough to drive me everywhere. I basically haven't lifted a finger. I'm so stocked up that when it was time to have a potluck amongst the crew, I hosted it because I have the most dinning space and dishes. I even have a guest room with a double bed all set-up.

Abu Dhabi is a place that's very difficult to characterise, and my experience here revolves around my job, my weekend travels, and my workmates who live in my building. I feel like I could make more definitive statements about Oman than I could about Abu Dhabi, because I don't feel like I've remotely scratched the surface of AD yet. I feel like I'm combing the surface with a car, but I'm not even the one behind the wheel.

What's work like?
Work has been fine, but new staff is always arriving, and change is the only constant, so things might not always be as good as they've been for me at work. I anticipate that any cool projects I've been given to manage will be re-allocated to new staff members just when they start to get cool.
How do you get exercise with the not going outside part? Are you swimming there?
We have a pool and a gym on the roof of our building, so I go to the gym about twice a week and I swim a couple times a week too. But not so much as exercise -- it's still too hot in the pool and outside to swim for exercise. One night I went swimming in the Persian Gulf at 4am, and even then the water was still a couple degrees hotter than the air -- maybe 35 degrees at 4am.

But this week it has finally cooled down, and being outdoors is actually beginning to be enjoyable. As autumn ensues, I'll be able to comfortably explore my environment from outside of the car and actually penetrate my environment enough to have some actual culture shock.

Thank God It’s – Thursday?

Some Q&A about my first week in the United Arab Emirates.

TGIF has a whole new meaning in the UAE – people are literally thanking God on Fridays as they go to the mosque for mid-day prayer after a long Sunday to Thursday workweek. Though I doubt the TGI Friday restaurant chain had that much forethought when they opened up shop in Dubai.

Isn’t Abu Dhabi where Garfield would send Nermal?
Yes, Abu Dhabi is where Garfield would send Nermal – and sometimes Odie – by airmail. It is also the capital of the United Arab Emirates, a country composed of 7 Emirates including Abu Dhabi’s famous cousin, Dubai. His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan is President of the UAE and Ruler of Abu Dhabi, and Abu Dhabi is governed by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.

Where is the UAE?
The UAE is located on the northeast corner of the Arabian Peninsula and is bordered by Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the Persian Gulf. Other neighbouring countries on the Arabian Peninsula include Yemen, along the Persian Gulf are Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Iraq, and just across the Gulf is Iran.

How far is Dubai?
I went to Dubai this weekend, and it took about an hour to drive there. Though the UAE is one country, each Emirate enjoys a great deal of autonomy. While Dubai has invested heavily in tourism and has deregulated real estate such that foreigners can own property in the Emirate, Abu Dhabi is more government and industry focused, where only Emiratis can own land. Dubai is a collision of new meets old, east meets west, where the “locals” are filthy rich and are the last people you find on the streets. Scattered “downtowns” of new developments compete along the highway with few pedestrian and road connections between them where social life is concentrated in the towers, while the fantastic older city is centred along the creek, with a great number of ferry and pedestrian connections between the various souks and other centres of migrant worker street-life. We arrived at mid-day on a Friday – prime prayer time – and it was thrilling to see the streets of Dubai at their most social hour.

Do you have to wear a headscarf?
The UAE is a very liberal country, and I have felt even less threatened here than I did in Turkey and Morocco – also very liberal Islamic countries. The UAE is composed of 80% foreign nationals, and women’s style of dress reflects this – women dress in anything from a head-to-toe black Burqa, to very tight clothing with a headscarf, to knee-length skirts and a tank top, and Indian women where saris. Emirati men all seem to wear their traditional white Arabian draped clothing with a white head piece.

Where do you live?
I’m staying at a hotel until I sufficiently furnish and move in to an apartment that I’ll be sharing with an American woman in a downtown district. The other three planners all live in the same building about 20 minutes away from my future home. The hood I’m moving into is very Pakistani, and everyone is super friendly. As Aaron says, in the absence of a communal language, the currency here is sweetness.

What’s work like?
The working week is Sunday through Thursday, with Friday and Saturday being our weekends. Our office is a new branch of the government that is still being defined, named, and housed. There are three bosses in our office [two Emirati, and one Australian], four planners [2 Canadians, an American, and an Aussie], and about a dozen managerial, administrative and support staff members, including local, Lebanese, and Bangladeshi nationals, with about as many women as men. We also have a team of consultants from Boston working in our office for the next year, three of whom are permanently based in our office in AD and are staying at the same hotel is me. Lunch is the major meal of the day in the UAE, and we eat lunch communally in the afternoons together, usually Lebanese food. If my name wasn’t difficult enough, I share an office with an Australian planner of Greek origin.

What’s daily life like for you?
Everything feels familiar and normal for me here, but in reality, it’s far too soon for me to accurately describe daily life here. I have described the city as a paved Morocco, while others have described it as Texas meets Tehran. There is no alcohol in the UAE, except at hotels [that said, we still managed to find a 2-for-1 margarita happy hour this weekend at a Tex Mex restaurant on the ground floor of a hotel in Dubai]. It’s very very hot, generally 40-50 degrees Celsius with 40-80% humidity. Before our epic walking tour around Dubai yesterday, I hadn’t spent more than 15 minutes outside in the heat at a time, and my colleagues with whom I was travelling with seemed to concur. I estimate that yesterday was the most consecutive hours I’d ever spent in sweltering heat in my lifetime – in Japan, I’d duck into a convenience store for 10 minutes just before reaching the threshold of being desperately overheated. Yesterday, I surpassed that threshold pretty quickly, and spent most of the day almost numb, wondering how there could be any more liquids inside me left to sweat. But it was absolutely worth it – a Friday to thank God for.

Been there, but have I really "done" that?

-You saw Hadrian’s Arch in Rome?
-Umm…yes. That’s the arch next to the Colloseum right? There are so many…
-Wow – what an incredible experience. I mean, I’ve never been there, but I took a course in Roman History, and wrote a paper about Hadrian. Did you know he built that arch after [blah blah blah]? But, what do I know. I’ve never been there.
-Well I’d “been” to Rome 4 times before this particular trip. I did a degree in Archaeology and didn’t want to go to Rome before I had the chance to really research the place and dedicate a lot of time and effort to do the experience justice. But eventually, I realised I’m never going to have the time to do the experience justice, so on the fifth trip, I finally dove in and saw Rome. But really, there are a lot of places I’ve been where I honestly believe someone who has read a book about the place has “been” there more than I have.

My last trip to Italy was a two-week holiday with my mother as her retirement wish. When she met me in London to depart for Italy, I was in a sorry mental and physical shape – I was recovering from living in Ghana where I was constantly sick, a month in South Africa where I was in chronic pain from some of my medications, and was experiencing quite a bit of culture shock from re-entering the Western World. Despite all of this, our trip was one of the most enriching trips I’d ever had in Italy. Not so much because of places, but more because of the Italian lifestyle, and getting to share the experience with my excellent, and ever-deserving mother.

When travelling, many of our experiences are defined by how hungry/thirsty we are, by the company of people we find ourselves in, by our mental state, and by how friendly people were our first hour in a country. Perspective is important when trying to mitigate these internal and external effects on our travelling experiences, but really, what is travel if not being internally and externally affected by environmental circumstances?

I’ve written before about how travel and living abroad can be vastly different experiences, largely depending on depth of experience [see “Aspiring to be a piece of meat”]. The more places you tackle in a shorter time, the shallower the layers of the experience can be. In one’s lifetime, they can see a thin version of the entire world, a deeper experience of some few key places, or a profound experience of one place. All these experiences are worth having, as long as we keep the objective of our discoveries in mind: vacation, holidays, travels, or cultural immersion?

All inclusive packages. North Americans work very hard, and when we go on vacation, we want a vacation. Travelling means constant decision-making, and it can be far more relaxing to have someone [presumably] in-the-know make all those decisions for you. Plus it’s often cheaper to get the package than the plane tickets alone. While for me a vacation means going “home”, I can entirely appreciate why some people would want to go to Cuba to have the experience of being in a hot Canada, rather than the experience of Cuba. Mingling with locals, gauging expectations, and being a model citizen while travelling is exhausting work, and often requires a recovery period afterwards – a real vacation. Sit, relax, drink daiquiris from filtered water ice cubes, and be served. Just make sure you say “thank you”, try to patronise more sustainable resorts with proper environmental and labour policies, and remember that you are on vacation – you are not travelling Cuba.

Backpacking. Above anything, backpackers are about hanging out with other backpackers, and can be a hugely entertaining way to see the world. Within minutes of meeting these people from all over the world, you will find you have days worth of things to talk about because, regardless of your geographic origins, you all studied social sciences and come from middle-class families in former British or Spanish colonies. You can spot the rookies by conversations about accents or different words we use in Canada vs. the US vs. Australia vs. England. The Aussies will poke fun at the English, the Kiwis at the Aussies, and the Canadians will swear we don’t sound anything like Americans and promise we can tell the difference.

Some of the best laughs I’ve had in my life was with a group of 6 backpackers – 2 from England, 3 from Australia, and me – whom I had the pleasure of spending 24 hours in relentless company with in Lithuania. I had been to Lithuania 3 times before, but as a Lithuanian where my family picked me up from the airport, toured me around, and dropped me off at the airport. I had never experienced Lithuania as a tourist, and wanted to see how my homeland compared with other European cities I had travelled to.

With these backpackers in Vilnius, we cooked a communal feast together for dinner, toured the city together, everyone offering fun anecdotes about how this place reminded them of ____ in ____, and where to go in ____. We drank beer on a creek side terrasse, got shushed by the locals during a Lithuanian poetry reading that none of us could understand, and we will all remember what a good time we had in Lithuania.

This experience can be repeated all over the world, and if stuck to exclusively can become very tiresome. I swore I’d never backpack again after I saw Indian Dreamcatchers being sold in Thailand, China, Vancouver, Venice, and Paris -- all within a 3-month period. But in smaller doses, backpacking is yet another excellent way to enjoy the world.

Travelling alone. The loneliest birthday of my life was spent in the French Alps in 2002. I was an archaeologist in central France, but took the afternoon off of work to spend the weekend in Annecy – a picturesque ski village about 45 minutes south of Geneva, complete with medieval canals and stone buildings. When I arrived, it was already dark, the hostel staff wasn’t answering their phone, and I didn’t have the address of the hostel. I hitch hiked into town and found a cheap hotel room in an empty building in an empty neighbourhood, and didn’t see another soul for the rest of the evening. Sometimes you just need bodies around you, even if they’re unfamiliar.

The next day, the hostel staff managed to answer their phone, and after a long day of walking around town, I spent the afternoon chatting with the hostel bartender. He and some of the hostel staff were going out that night to celebrate a friend’s birthday that lived on the other side of Lac Annecy, and there was an extra seat in the car. This ended up being one of my most enjoyable evenings while travelling, and would have never been possible if I weren’t travelling alone. I have similar stories about walking from Greece to Macedonia alone, travelling to the Sahara desert alone, and a fun coach to Istanbul alone.

Travelling with friends. I have lot of friends who I don’t think would be very fun to travel with, but I have also had company who have made the best of some pretty dodgy situations. Despite constant obstacles and sickness in Peru, I most remember all the clever banter with Sarah. In Latvia, poor hostel organisation and roommates with grossly different personal boundaries turned out to be a platform for Anastasia’s excellently delivered comedic reactions, even after having to share a bed with a drunk Spanish boy who climbed in with her for 3 hours.

Friends who you meet while travelling alone are great because you instantly have something in common, but equally important are friends with whom you have history. While I have bonded with all sorts of people all over the world, often very quickly because of obvious common interests and personality traits, but there is no substitution time-tested friendships, regardless of how irrelevant you are to each other in contemporary contexts. Human relations are about filling roles, and when we travel we meet people who mutually need someone to fill those familiar roles for the duration of that particular, however temporary, context. Having a lot in common with someone is also really important in friendships and has an important role in terms of familiarity and feeling understood, but old friends have the familiarity of resilience and the comfort of knowing that they can overcome obstacles.

Travelling as a couple. It can be exhausting trying to maintain emotional health by keeping in touch with familiar people back home while building new communities of people along the way. Bringing a partner with you really helps with emotional issues, allows you to share something profound with your partner, and, as a woman, travelling with a man can really help with some of the daily discomforts of being approached by opportunistic men. It’s like you can have your life and travel too. However, travelling with your partner can easily limit how deep your experience is locally, because you don’t need to seek comfort from your environment, and so it’s easier to turn to each other instead. Plus, the only people who want to talk to you are other travelling couples.

Particular knowledge. I live around the world and have friends who live around the world, and visiting them is my favourite introduction to a new place. They understand local customs and some language, can hold your hand through the initial discomforts, tell you the good places to go, and are often excited to use you as a partner in adventure for things they can’t do with their local friends. The benefit of growing up in Canada is that many of my friends are first-generation and have family to visit in other parts of the world. I also enjoy theme travelling -- microbrewery road trips around Cascadia, wine tasting in South Africa, archaeology in the former Roman empire, wildlife viewing – these are activities enriched by developing a particular expertise about one common layer. Or by travelling with someone who holds that particular knowledge.

Expats. There are technical differences between expats and sojourners, but I will combine the two here. Expats are like backpackers who graduated to the next level. Expats vary greatly – in most ex-pat communities, people are some combination of: (1) the expats who only hang out with other expats, whose definition of a good place is based on having cool expats there, who transport their world to different geographical locations around the world; (2) the expats who will have nothing to do with other expats. They do not greet the only other white person in town, they can’t remember the last time they spoke English, they write in their day planners in the local language and only eat non-Western foods; and (3) the expats who have local and expat friends, but whose expat friends are actually enriching their local experience rather than solely being a source of escaping it [also necessary at times].

When I lived in Ghana, there were only really 2 white people who lived in town: Kathryn and me. Kathryn and I didn’t meet until she had been there 4 months, and I had been there 2 months. Kathryn lived with a family, had to learn Twi to get by, worked in a small office where no one drank alcohol, and was living on a much tighter budget than me and therefore ate a lot of street food. I lived with a young Ghanaian woman, my friends were constantly speaking in really fast Twi, I worked in a huge office with all sorts of politicians, private consultants, technocrats, bureaucrats, Community-NGOs, and general members of the public, where the big men would scoff at the idea of street food, but I could cook vegetables at home. I learned more Twi from Kathryn than from any of my Ghanaian friends, learned about taboo subjects like family life and the treatment of children, and ate street food all over Ghana because of her. Kathryn learned about young Ghanaian social life, how Ghanaians drink, how Ghanaians settle a bill, the politics of Ghanaian marriages, and how to tell stories in colourful English to a Ghanaian audience. Our friendship was a necessary escape, but also an enrichment of the Ghanaian experience.

Nomads. I’ve written about nomads a lot. Nomads are everywhere, and yet nowhere, can feel at home anywhere, yet nowhere. Nomads don’t compare how many countries they’ve been to or how long they’ve been on the road. They do normal things in extraordinary settings, have a wide range of insatiable interests, and have gotten really good at letting themselves be in the hands of others. They like to have guest rooms whenever they are temporarily settled, and they know another nomad when they see them.

There are limitless ways of experiencing the world, and while some classify them as being a greyscale of shallow to deep, I think of them more as different axes across a landscape. Depending on an individual’s interests and objectives, they are all experiences worth having, none being necessarily more important than another. While my journey seems to be profoundly geographic, others chose to understand a variety of contexts in one place, or concentrate on their relationships with their partners, or study something like meditation, or yoga. If I didn’t travel so much, I think I’d be a much deeper person.

Revisiting Ghana...via YouTube.

As I prepare to depart for the Persian Gulf, my thoughts are of...Africa? Visiting colleagues from Ghana in Canada, retrieving my Ghanaian music collection, and watching 'Blood Diamonds' has set a tone, I think. Blood Diamonds had some insightful one-liners and introduced the audience to a lot of issues about white people in Africa. But it is still a film intended for a Hollywood audience, and many sacrifices had to me made to cater to the objective of making the film accessible.

My experience in Ghana was nothing like the film's depiction of Sierre Leone -- even when under military dictatorship, Ghana was quite peaceful, and Ghana has been a model democracy for the last 8 years. Though tribalism occurs in Ghana just like everywhere else in Africa, the dominance of the Ashanti, the limited role of colonialism in Ghana at playing tribes against each other [that statement is very debateable], and the cultural priority of having a good time first [though this seems to be a pan-West African cultural trait], seems to have kept Ghanaians loving each other over the last 50 years of independence, unlike most of their neighbours.

Some clips I found on YouTube that help illustrate some of my experiences in Ghana...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st13lz8EmAUhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi_sxqlwRNY
Kumasi's Kejetia station/market. Kumasi's the capital of the Ashanti Kingdom, and Ghana's second largest city, but much older than Accra and therefore actual feels like a city rather than an extended village.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FZj2hoI1f4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyRumEg2_og
These clips belong in my "Cultural Lesson: Taking public transit" post. The first is a shot of being on a tro-tro stuck in traffic, I'm assuming as a result of a car accident. Hawkers quickly fill every crevasse with goods to be sold -- their entrepreneurial spirit never fails to amaze me. Very similar to the experience of waiting for the tro-tro to fill, or of any tro-tro station in Ghana for that matter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bCeBCy0Bm4
A typical Sunday at church. Sometimes these events would go until 4am -- piercing voices over amplifiers and speakers set 5 notches louder than they [or my ears] could stand. Outfits 5 notches too bright for my eyes, and food 5 times too spicy to be enjoyable. But GOD DO I MISS IT!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s07oBh007Jw
Very typical of streets in Accra. The kiosks on the side of the road selling phone units, the concrete 'drinking spots', the drains/open sewers lining the roads, about one third of the buildings being under construction [it seems to take at least 10 years to finish a building] and dust, dust, dust. Though there's a serious lack of laughing in this video -- a key feature of Ghanaian life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBgQO5-VN6Q
Aaah, Accra's busy Kaneshie Market, right next to Accra's largest tro-tro station, Circle. This place was Cheryl [a fellow CIDA intern in Accra]'s idea of hell. Very lively, very claustrophobic.
http://www.ghana50.gov.gh/
The official website of Ghana@50 - the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence. Includes a video of Kwame Nkrumah's famous speech "The battle has ended. And Ghana, your beloved country is free forever". Still looking for the Ghana@50 theme song though...

Prairie Skies.

I have often said that Dave and I became close friends over a pint of beer, and Nancy and I became close friends over a bottle of rum.

A week or two after I moved to Matsuyama, Ehime on Japan’s Shikoku Island, a strong off-shore earthquake hit halfway between Matsuyama and Hiroshima. After I restored our dishes to their original shelf locations from the floor of our apartment, I went to the liquor store where they were having a sale on all the liquor bottles that were soaked in liquor from neighbouring bottles that had broke during the earthquake. Having not yet acquired a taste for non-girlie drinks yet [I didn’t start drinking beer until I was 23], and not recognising the kanji for vodka, wine coolers, or fruit liqueurs, I picked up a huge bottle Meyers’ Extra Dark Rum, remembering that I had loved the rum balls my sister had made for me the month before when I was in Montreal.

In our building lived the four Canadian English teachers who worked at Aiko Kindergarten: from the mountainous coastal city of Vancouver were me, my brother, and Ando; and from the Prairies in Medicine, Alberta, was Nancy. I was already good friends with Ando and my brother, but hadn’t really had the chance to get to know Nancy yet.

- I have a huge bottle of Meyer’s Dark Rum that I don’t exactly know what to do with.
- I love rum. I spent several years with a Chilean man, and we went to Cuba together one year and spent the whole visit drinking Cuban rum.
- I’ve always wanted to go to Cuba, Morocco, and India. Why don’t you swing by the apartment sometime this weekend while everyone’s in Kyoto and we’ll drink rum and you can tell me about Cuba.

By the end of the weekend, my imagination was filled with thoughts of Cuba, stories of growing up in a small town outside of Medicine Hat under the prairie skies, and a headache from all the rum.

Nancy is probably my most free-spirited of free-spirited friends, having her own unique definition of success for herself, who is care-free to societal life checklists. I met Nancy when I had first begun my [apparently ceaseless] world travelling, when I was a soul-searching 21 year-old exploring the world in an effort to understand my most useful role in it. Later on in these formative years, I learned to size people up very quickly, judging whether or not we would have anything in common, and pursuing friendships according to my initial impressions. When you live as a nomad, you have to make meaningful friendships very quickly and not waste too much time with people who you think you won’t have anything in common with, because you are often put into situations where you are forced to be friends with people you wouldn’t normally befriend because of geographical circumstances.

In many ways, Nancy and I have very opposite personalities, and I may have judged our potential to have a friendship differently if I had met her now. Nancy approaches the world as a prairie sky -- a blank canvas where she can trust that everything always works out in the end, and not needing to force time commitments on incremental stages of career-relationship-home ownership-retirement in some overall life plan of 25-30-65 years old. I am much more goal-oriented, climbing peaks to get the best view, organising my time around known boundaries, dividing time into manageable stages towards some imagined goal, only filling the spaces between these planned edges with spontaneity and impulse.

An illustration of Nancy and my calculated boundaries vs. prairie sky approaches:
- I have far too many interests, always wanting to explore every crevasse, every peak. Constantly un-satiated by what I can see, wondering what’s beyond the next corner, around the next mountain, across the sea. I’d hate to put my children through this some day, so I should marry someone who knows exactly what they want all the time, always satisfied that they can already see everything they need to, so that our children end up as normal people.
- I always figured your genes know: if you have good chemistry with someone, you’ll probably produce good babies.

I caught a lift from Vancouver to Calgary last week to catch up with Nancy and her little Zachary en route back home from the Canmore Folk Festival, but we missed each other in Calgary and so I rented a car and drove across the prairies to Medicine Hat instead. On my three hour drive to Medicine Hat, I was annoyed by how boring the road was, by the country music playing on the radio, by the ineptitude of the Canadian Tire staff not being able to find me an iPod converter so that I didn’t have to listen to the country music playing on the radio, and by the fact that Nancy and I hadn't met up in Calgary as planned. I love scenic drives and had just spent 10 hours in the car on the Coquihalla, one of the most beautiful highways in the world that dangerously stretches from BC’s coastal mountains to the Rockies, ooo-ing and awww-ing the whole way at one of nature’s most obvious efforts at sensational beauty. The three hour drive across the prairies was feeling much longer than the ten hour drive through the mountains, mostly because of my perceived monotony of the landscape.

One laugh from my little Zach, and one hug from Nancy, and my annoyance had melted away. I spent the next few days in Medicine Hat with the two of them, peeling off layers of anxiety and stress from my schedule of being in so many cities for the last three months. I was enjoying every minute of my conversion to the prairie lifestyle, however short it was. We accomplished nothing, we never looked at a clock, never had to be anywhere at any time, our day revealing itself as we went along.

Contrary to my journey to Medicine Hat, on the return journey to Calgary I was almost overwhelmed by how beautiful the prairies were. Maybe not beautiful in an exciting and glamorous way, like the Rockies or the Coastal Mountains, but in a more under-stated, subtle but profound way. You could almost see the curve of the globe, the land and sky were so vast, un-interrupted.

Nancy's open-skies attitude and influence have once again defeated my judgmentalism and taught me something about expectations. I rely heavily on my judgments, but sometimes too heavily, and it's always refreshing to be proven wrong and learn something in the process. Thank you Nancy -- you've taught me even more than just an appreciation for rum.

How to keep one’s self entertained while unemployed.

Mastering the art of enjoying being un-employed is an important lesson in life. The most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do in life is figure out what to do with my life. We distract ourselves from this Herculean feat by constructing life plans such as university-marriage-work-kids-retirement. We work for retirement, filling our lives with distractions and then reach retirement only to realise we’re running out of time. In fact, many people die within a year of retirement because they’ve lost purpose, forgetting the original point of working in the first place. Retirement is when we can’t avoid it any longer, we’re finally staring in the face of the original question we were trying to avoid in the first place when we first graduated: what do I really want to do with my life?

When you’re unemployed, you’re facing this same dilemma on a basic, daily, unavoidable level: what do I really want to do with my life – TODAY?

-It’s so great to have you in town to go on bike rides with. I can’t remember the last time I had the time to do something like this.
-Well, I have all the time in the world.
-If I had all the time in the world, there are so many things I’d like to work on for my portfolio. So many creative projects I wish I had the time to flesh out.
-I know. I have so much material to write about – like when that Spanish boy climbed into bed with Taser while we were asleep in Latvia. But I feel like I’ve been too busy to write. But really, what the hell do I do with my time?
-When we have the time, we don’t know what to do with it.
-And when we don't have the time, we're inspired to dream of what we'd do with it. I think I’d rather have the inspiration, and feel I don’t have time to fully realise my creativity than lose my inspiration. I’d rather be inspired than have a lot of time.

I’m used to being very very busy, and get annoyed when people claim they don’t know what to do with their free time. If I had free time I’d: learn Spanish; cook more; take an art class, probably pottery or glass blowing; sign up for a dance class; practice more piano; garden; cycle downtown every day, organise all my old photos; do my taxes; the list goes on…

Lists are good. They help us break up our days into manageable pieces. Just before I graduated from my first degree when I was 2o years old, I had such a heavy course load yet I could barely force myself to concentrate on my studies because I was too busy planning what I wanted to do with my life once I was "free". I made a list of things I wanted to do in my lifetime -- a list of over 8o adventures -- and I still have the list, somewhere. Maybe that's one to add to my list: amalgamate all my existing lists.

Fast forward a few months and I was facing graduation. I’ve often said that the most paralysed I’ve ever felt in my life was when I graduated from SFU in December 2ooo. I had a degree, I sold all my possessions so I had money, and I had the whole world available to me to start my adventures. Yet I was paralysed as to where I should start. I knew how to push boundaries, but without any boundaries to push, I was lost. I felt the same about being creative – in high school when we had creative writing classes, sometime Ms. Morgan would put a blank sheet in front of us, give us a pencil, and say: “write!” I never knew where to start. Other times she would say “write about this ball of paper, in the style of James Joyce”, and I could be the most creative person ever.

As with anything in life, it’s all about perspective, and having a tentative plan to move to the United Arab Emirates has certainly helped me keep a healthy perspective on my employment situation. Travelling around the world also helps.

I’ve been very quiet and mysterious since I got back to Canada, not purposefully, but mostly because I am just as in the dark about my immediate future as everyone else is.

I’m someone who likes to think I’m very consistent with what I say I’m going to do. For the last two months, I’ve had vague plans to accept a job in the United Arab Emirates, but until I have a plane ticket in my hand, I’ve been reluctant to make some bold announcement detailing my imminent move.

Where will you live?
For how long will you be in the UAE?
When do you leave?
What will you be doing?

All I know is that I have been offered the position of “Planning Analyst” with the Planning Department of the government of Abu Dhabi, that I’ve accepted my terms of employment for an initial contract of 3 months, and that I’ve requested to leave on 17 August 2007. I hope to stay at least 9 months to 1 year, but we’ll see how/if it goes. I promise – that’s all I know.

-You’re moving to the UAE? That’s so exciting.
-Honestly, I have the most boring life ever.
-Don’t you dare say that. We all live vicariously through you.
-No, I’m the one who literally lives through you. What have I been doing the last 4 months? Basically, I don’t have a life of my own, and so I fly to other parts of the world and live the lives of my friends for a week at a time. I need to get my own bloody life.
-But your life’s so interesting.
-Really. Honestly. It’s so boring. You have a life, and in your life you look forward to things like travel. So travel for you is exciting. It’s you at your best, and it’s something you can always look forward to, something to aspire to. I travel all the time, everyday I’m doing what most people aspire to do. And it becomes a chore. So everyday I’m faced with the philosophical dilemma of having to re-establish what inspires me, what I look forward to. Because I don’t have a trip on the horizon, my life is a trip. While everyone has this easy answer of what they would do with their vacation time, I’m actually having to live that day, every day, and try to find new ways of making it fresh.
-But that’s so depressing.
-Exactly. It’s much easier to be distracted from thinking about your own purposelessness when you have a trip to look forward to. Or maybe granite counter tops, or renovations on your house. Those activities which deviate from the norm of what we do. So I have to listen to everyone tell me how exciting my life is when really I just wish I had granite counter tops to distract myself from thinking about life. I really can’t complain – I have a super awesome life, with super awesome people in it, and I wouldn’t change it for a second – but it’s not as easy as everyone thinks.

The hardest thing in my life is saying goodbye to a community of friends. The second hardest thing in my life is grappling with constant philosophical dilemmas around meaning, purpose, inspiration, and life in general. I once got in an argument with a friend of mine in Africa about it:

-You white people have everything, and yet you’re always complaining.
-No, you people in Africa always have purpose, and yet you’re always complaining about not having enough stuff! Japanese people have one of the highest standards of living in the world, and they live longer than people in any other country. Yet they have the highest suicide rate in the world. Africans aren’t killing themselves!

So I continue to do exactly as I please, everyday waking up, choosing to just go with the flow, or attempting to tackle one of my lists: my list of things to do; my list of activities I love doing; my list of foods I want to learn to cook; my list of microbrewed beers I want to taste; my list of places I can cycle to from my house; my playlists of songs I like to rollerblade to; songs I want to download; things I want to write; great literature I want to read; films I want to see; friends I want to visit; organisations I want to research; etc. As with life in general, once time starts to become scarce, I’ll realise I don’t have enough of it to accomplish all that I need to do before my departure [or in my immediate case, my departure for the UAE]. This exercise of the last few months of being un-employed and relatively un-distracted may prove to be a prism through which to examine the larger task of constructing one’s life. If I can master this on a daily level now, maybe I’ll avoid a mid-life crisis in the future?

Am I actually complaining about this?
If this is my biggest worry, than my life must be pretty good...

Reflections of a Nomad.

This is my third trip to Toronto where I have attempted to move out of my beautiful home on Brunswick and College. Once in May 2006, once in September 2006, and now in July 2007. Each time I take out another load of my stuff, either shipping it to my parents’ house in Vancouver, or spreading the burden to new households across Toronto.

I've been travelling around the world visiting old friends for over four months now. It certainly takes the bite out of being unemployed [and plants it squarely on the wallet].

Constantly visiting dear friends has finally gotten me used to answering questions about myself. Going to my High School reunion, a mini-elementary school reunion, and having a facebook reunion with people I grew up with in summer swimming has given me a lot of practice. It's been lovely seeing everyone -- everyone looks the exact same and it all feels very ordinary and familiar to me. Yet everyone I've reunited with -- especially at my High School reunion -- has been struck by how surreal it is to see each other, and how different everyone looks.

-So, do you still live in Burnaby?
-Um. I don’t really live anywhere.
-What do you mean?
-Well, I just came back from living in Africa and am probably moving to the Middle East.
-How long are you in town then?
-I don’t really know.
-What do you do?
-I’m an urban planner.
-Where do you work?
-Um, well I do contracts, so I'm sort of a freelancer.
-Ok, so your last contract was as an urban planner, working for whom?
-My last job was in international development, and my job before that was as a researcher.
-But before that you were an urban planner?
-No.

My facebook reunion asked the question more simply: what are you all doing now? I replied as such:

Story #1 - I'm unemployed, unmarried, and stay at my parents' house in Burnaby.
Story #2 - I'm an international woman of mystery who, since ending her swim coaching career in 2000, works half the year abroad as an archaeologist/teacher/waitress/urban planner, and spends the other half jet-setting around the globe.
Story #3 - I secretly married a spy back in 1997 in Scotland.

The life of a nomad can be a balancing act sometimes. Having pockets of possessions dotted around the world can leave one feeling stretched out and un-gathered. But removing all your stuff from a place makes one feel like there’s nothing left there to go back to – the final slamming of the door behind you. The symbolic gesture of having wine glasses, chopsticks, a duvet, and a carpet leave the door open slightly ajar for a possible return.

Stuff.
Place.
Self.
Friends.
Heart.
Head.

They’re rarely all in the same space. The luxury/burden of being spread out across the world. Always everywhere, yet never anywhere.

Whenever I leave a place, I can safely say that I’ll probably see that community of friends again. After living in Japan in 2001, I went back to enjoy my Japanese community in 2003 and 2004. I have had several reunions – in Toronto, Vancouver, and Cape Town – with my Istanbul community. I revisited my Austrian community of France in 2002 when I went to Sicily in 2003. And the list continues. It’s a comforting thing to know that leaving a place is more of an “Aurevoir” than a “Goodbye”.

I have become a bit of a chameleon – immediately adjusting to whatever environment I find myself in, and effortlessly revisiting the facets of myself that surface from familiar friends, no matter how much time has passed since I last saw them. “Every time I see you, it’s as if no time has passed!” It’s like I live neither geographically nor chronologically, actually forgetting all the various time-space experiences that have passed since I last said “aurevoir” to any given community.

If that wasn't confusing enough, I also have a whole community of people whom I only see abroad. We meet under very temporal and contextual circumstances, yet we seem to be one of the few consistent things in each other’s lives. The few people we can really count on seeing are each other, because we literally could be anywhere [and therefore everywhere]. Experiences which seem surreal to others are common for us, and what’s common for others is surreal for us.

Sometimes it can be difficult to explain to people exactly what I do, and it can be a lot easier to be mysterious than to give direct answers. Direct answers always result in the same direct question: how do you afford to do what you do?

I hate to burst everyone’s bubbles, but I am none of the following: an heiress; the beneficiary of a rich Japanese business man; secretly on a CSIS salary; multilingual; have unknowing husbands all over the world writing cheques for me; nor do I take some sort of miracle pill that enables me to do what I do.

I wouldn’t change my life for a minute, but I do what I do because I made sacrifices [and because I have very understanding friends and family who are fabulous and share their lives and stuff with me so I don’t have to transport my own of everything, everywhere I go].

We are constantly making priorities in our life, adjusting and re-prioritising elements of our lives in the face of changes to our own definitions of self-success. No one has all of everything. It’s like you have a pool with all sorts of toys you can fit inside, but the size of everyone’s pools are pretty much the same. I’ve filled mine with traveling and learning, and made sacrifices in the home-ownership and marriage departments. Most people do a better job at balancing which departments they fill their lives with. Whenever people are like “you have the coolest life” I say “but I don’t have anything except pictures and memories. I don’t even actually own my suitcases – I borrowed them from my mother.”

Just when we nomads think we’ve got it all under control, floating around the globe with only our blogs knowing exactly where to find us, it’s when we are packing that it all catches up with us [or when we’re trying to find someone to insure us!]. It can be deeply scary packing everything into a suitcase or two, putting it in a corner by the door. Like THERE IT IS. All you have to show for your life fits into a small corner. But it also fits onto your back, so you can take it anywhere!

I pack the wine glasses and decanter Paul gave me for my birthday when I first moved to Toronto. I’ll donate them to Danielle and Andrea. My duvet that was my grandmas and I brought out east my first winter in Montreal six years ago is at Chrisa’s. My sushi dishes from Japan in 2001, my chopsticks my brother gave me in 1999. They really are nice wine glasses. The kind I would love to have in my own place someday.

The only thing I can’t seem to find are my speakers. How much joy did those speakers bring to my life! I don’t have my phone numbers with me, so I can’t call my Brunswick roommates to ask where I left them. What a convenient lack of organisation on my part -- I guess the door is still open for a return some day. I flick the glass of wine and listen to the long ring that persists, pour some wine in it, and toast to myself a final glass before I give the set to Danielle. I smile and realise I'm not going to find my speakers -- despite three moves, I'm still managing to leave some trace of myself at my beautiful Brunswick and College home after all.

"Landed"

I was in the car with Stefan on the way to London Heathrow. I hate London Heathrow. This must have been the 5th or 6th time I was in the car with Stefan on my way to or from a London airport. Thank GOD for Stefy!

The "June 2nd" date that had been scheduled since last July as my return to Vancouver had finally arrived. I had had that date imprinted in my brain for nearly a year. When I booked my plane ticket last summer, the travel agent needed to know two things: when did I need to arrive? And when did I need to return? Clueless as to what my needs would be an entire year away, I calculated my answers based on what I knew:

I finish work in Ghana at the end of February.
I don't want to go all the way to Africa without seeing some of the continent, but judgeing from my experience in Turkey, I'll probably be really ready to leave after 6 months.
Ando's in Morocco, but it's probably cheaper for me to fly there from London than from Accra.
Leanne may be in South Africa, but she's about as easy to keep track of as I am.
My mum wants to go to Italy.
Mary and Adam are getting married in Ireland at the end of May.
Paul's at Cambridge, Sandy's in Wales, Stefan and Amy are in Watford.
Anastasia's going to be in Sweden March-June.
It might be easier for me to find summer work in the UK than in Canada.

With all of this, I took my first step back into the unknown and booked a return from Heathrow to Vancouver for 2 June 2007, completely unsure as to how my year would transpire, not knowing where I'd actually be, who I'd be with, or even if I could afford any of this.

Plans started revealing themselves easily, and with little effort on my behalf, I accidently stumbled upon the best way ever to travel: all the comforts and stability of having the familiarity of close friends and family, with all the excitement of having new experiences and seeing new places.

In Ghana, I was constantly surrounded by the love and affection of my Ghanaian friends. Over the three months of travel since I left, I think I was away from old friends and family for only maybe 2 weeks in total, and even then, I usually met fantastic people along the way to enjoy some laughs [and beer!] with. I cannot imagine a better way to see the world -- innaugurating friends' guest bedrooms from South Africa to Morocco to Barcelona to London, with more friends and family flying across the world to join in the adventure.

But this wasn't just any plane today -- this was the plane. The plane that was going to take me "home". The plane that I didn't have another plane to connect with afterwards. The plane that would put all my suitcases and most of my possessions into one common city -- except a few items I have scattered around Toronto.

London Heathrow is a huge airport, and Terminal 4, where all the cross-Atlantic flights depart from and arrive to, is very far from all the other terminals. As we approached T4, Stefan saw a sign on the highway reading "As of June 1st, 2007, all British Airways Flights to Vancouver Leave from Terminal 1". What were the chances? There are two daily flights to Vancouver on British Airways. If they really wanted to make a dent in air traffic at Terminal 4, why not re-route all flights to...say...New York? Or Chicago? Why go to all this effort to re-route 2 bleeding flights per day???

But there it was, the writing was on the wall:
"Flights to Vancouver"
And it finally started to sink in: I'm going "home"!

What I completely forgot to factor in though, is that without a clear idea of exactly what I'm doing in Vancouver, not having any imminent employment opportunities there, plus a pending trip I'm making back east to de-brief with my boss and visit my TO and MTL crews, there will definitely be more flights and more packing. Etching return dates into my brain, breaking up my life into beginning-of-the-trip, and end-of-the-trip travel dates, is all just a game I'm playing with my head.

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE MORE FLIGHTS AND MORE PACKING.

Needing a vacation from being on holidays.

I've been in Morocco, Spain, England, and Latvia in the last week, and am off to Lithuania tomorrow.

Caught some Italian opera...in Latvia...where I've met up with a friend whom I met in France 6 years ago...who's from Oregon...while trying to coordinate my next means of employment with people in Canada and the Middle East...while I'm in Africa and Europe.

It was so difficult trying to explain to the expats in Morocco that tourism was #4 on my list of things to do in Morocco. #1 - look for gainful employment; #2 - re-connect with my friends and family in preparation for landing; #3 - relax and enjoy some sort of lifestyle while my bags were firmly in one place; and #4 - see some of Morocco.

Unfortunately, Morocco is a tourist's heaven with its rich culture, starkly varying landscapes, history, and cuisine. But I just wanted a vacation from being a tourist. I wanted to sit at a desk, do mundane tasks, not go outside and enjoy the sun, and not see anything new and exciting.

Luckily here in Latvia, Anastasia and I seem to be on the same page and have spent most of our time here passively soaking in Latvian culture via meals, drinks, strolls through medieval city centres, and bathing on beautiful Baltic beaches.

And while I feel like I could stay in the Baltics forever, I'm also looking forward to an extended vacation from being on holidays when I land back in Canada in a few weeks. Excitement is always what deviates from the norm of one's usual existence.

[De]Evolution of a Tan.

I associate excessive doses of sun and perpetual summer with having a tan. I have been in summer since I went to Peru in February 2006, after all. I think sun=tan is a reasonable association, and yet contrary to popular belief, I am not very tanned. Every time I see someone I know I seem to get the same reaction.

-Wow. You really aren’t very tanned. Haven't you been in Africa the last 7 months?

1. GHANA. I worked as a Community Development Planner for 6 months in Ghana. Half of my time at work was spent in my office, a quarter of my time was spent at workshops, in meetings, or at public sensitization events, and the last quarter of my time was spent in the field monitoring and evaluating projects. Ghana is extremely hot, and Koforidua is the capital of the most humid part of the country. And no swimming pools to quell the heat. I'd manage to get most of my desk work done in the mornings, when my office was cool enough to think. After lunch, it was too hot to sit at a desk, and I'd usually retire to one of the two air conditioned offices in my building and socialise for the rest of the day. In the late evenings, hours after the 6pm sunset, it’s hot enough that basic un-animated conversation provides enough activity to sweat profusely. Fanning oneself produces more exercise and heat than the cooling effects of the mild breeze your producing. When on site visits, I wore a hat, sunglasses, sunscreen, and covered my skin with something to protect it from the burning sun, and still never lasted more than a few minutes before having to head for the shade. It’s HOT. Not in a nice warm blanketing way, but in a painful, retina-burning, planning-what-to-wear-such-that-you-don’t-sweat-through-your-outfit, hammering down on you, kind of way. I always wore a hat outside and drank copious amounts of [yuk!] water, and still had heat stroke twice. In fact, the darkest my hair has ever been in my life as a blonde was at the tail end of my time in Ghana.

2. SOUTH AFRICA. My Ghanaian friends had told me that the reason there are so many whites in SA was because the climate was just like in Europe. I arrived in Jo’burg in late summer with very high expectations, and was very very excited to wear long trousers for the first time in 7 months. My friends in Ghana had never seen me wear trousers before. I spent a whole day at the poolside – not just 10 minutes of sun before having to retire to the shade – and then off to Cape Town. The Cape Peninsula had some of the most beautiful and inviting beaches I’d seen before, and the strong breezes made even the hottest of days feel very mild.

Inland in the wine country, the air was dry and the heat soothing, and it was finally possible to hit a terrasse in the sun. Finally I was going to get the tan I needed before my return to the temperate world. I didn’t have any freckles, but my cheeks were pink...then darker pink...then red. Was I burning? Should I put on my hat? No, it’s just the South African red wine we were enjoying -- enjoying enough that you could read it on our cheeks.

SA’s most famous beaches surround Durban, but floods in Mozambique and along SA’s east coast pre-empted any beach ambitions we may have had. Instead, we headed for the hills – the Drakensburg, to be exact, where we climbed up to 3200 metres. This was the closest I’d been to the sun in a long time – although I lived in the “mountainous” region of Ghana, none of those “mountains” even compared to Burnaby Mountain, which we Simon Fraser alumni always referred to as “the hill”. SA’s mountains, on the other hand, were very impressive, and we returned from our expedition up the Drakensburg with a respectable shade of skin for someone who claimed to have been living in Africa for 7 months. After spending 4 hours out to sea great white shark cage diving, parasailing on the Garden Route, climbing the Drakensburg, and going on a 5-day camping safari in Kruger National Park, I was finally exhibiting the 7 months I had spent in Africa.

3. ENGLAND. When I left Canada in August, I packed for 7 months in Africa. I knew I’d be in Europe too, but figured I’d cross that bridge when I got there. And besides, how cold could it be? It was April.

-If you need to borrow any of my coats, help yourself. Oh. And I have an extra pair of gloves for you too.

Gloves? I had bought no less than FOUR scarves/shawls in Ethiopia, anticipating the European cold. I had lost my hat somewhere in the Indian Ocean, a sacrifice to the Gods of shark cage diving, and all I had was a thin safari jacket and four scarves/shawls. I had entirely forgotten about gloves. And I suffered for my thoughtlessness.

4. ITALY. I used to have freckles when I was a kid, but hadn’t had freckles since 2003 when I lived in Turkey, a summer where I spent 16 weeks in persistent, unyielding sunshine. I assumed I had outgrown freckles and was old. It was just another reminder that life peaks at 27, wasn’t it?

-Actually, freckles represent damage from the sun, so it’s probably a good sign that you haven’t had any freckles since 2003.

The temperature in Italy was excellent – it was the perfect temperature to walk around all day without needing to bring an extra bag just to put all your excess clothes into. Montreal springs are always like that – you need to pack for everything between +28 and -15, sweating underneath your spring jacket while the sun is up, and then catching the flu in the evening as the temperature drops by 5 degrees per hour, every hour after sunset. The same day I remarked about my lack of freckles since 2003, I came back to the hotel after a long day of siteseeing and noticed the appearance of freckles on my nose and cheeks! It was a lose-lose battle – sun-damaged skin, or feeling past my prime?

Italy was perfect – cool enough to be comfortable wearing proper walking shoes, but warm enough to eat gelato every evening for dinner. The sun was soft and embracing, not stinging and hammering, and just the right temperature to enjoy my daily half litre of wine on a sunny terrasse in the late afternoons.

5. MOROCCO. I arrived in Morocco dawning blonde hair, freckles, and a respectable tan – or as respectable a tan my Northern European self can get. I couldn’t pass as a local, but I clearly wasn’t some fresh-off-the-boat European tourist, inexperienced in the ways of Africa. Or maybe it was my permanent aura of un-approachability I exude when travelling in pushy countries. I spent 3 days in the Sahara desert and in the Atlas mountains, under patchy clouds perfect for photography. I thought I was going to the big sand dunes, but was instead at Zagora where the dunes were barely high enough to act as toilet camouflage.

I arrived at Ando’s apartment in Casablanca exhausted and lethargic. In fact, I think Ando’s quite disgusted by just how little I can manage to do in a day, but still feel good about myself. In 4 days in Casa, I hadn’t left more than a 3 block radius from Ando’s pad, and my bronze was fading.

Finally, she managed to drag me out for a day on the town – we went to the medina, I bought two tapis, and we went to the market and bought camel meat from a meat store that had a freshly slaughtered camel head hanging from it [yes, of course we took shameless pictures of ourselves standing behind the camel head, which conveniently hung at my shoulder length]. We found someone to grill our kilo of camel meat for us on the side of the road, went to the beach, and then we finally went to the hammam.

At the hammam, you sit in the steam room for an hour painting yourself with a seed ingested and defecated by a goat, and then a woman comes and scrapes all your dead skin cells off. She actually stopped halfway and showed me just how much grime was peeling off me. All I could do was shrug, conveying the international sentiment of "what are you gonna do?" -- passive acceptance of one's own disgustingness.

I emerged from the hammam satisfied that I had finally managed to get myself clean since taking that 6 hour tro-tro to Bui National Park last January [see blog entry “Ando can officially sleep anywhere”], realizing that maybe I had had a tan underneath all the layers of dust afterall. If only I could get my clothes as clean! [I really just want a box of chemicals and a machine to wash my clothes at this point]

In any case, along with the layers of dust, she had certainly managed to scrape off whatever progress I had made in my plight to actually look like I had been in Africa for 8 months now. I didn’t see any women at the beach wearing swimsuits, and I’ve been pretty careful about not exposing myself too much while I’m in Morocco, so I don't know how much sun my skin will actually see while I'm here. I guess I’ll just have to wait until I get to Spain and Latvia before I can have my African tan!

[In Casablanca on 1 May, post-camel lunch, but pre-hammam]

La Dolce Vita.

What an art of living the Italians have mastered. We had such an enjoyable time in Italy, eating and drinking our way from Milan to Rome. I think I must have spent every afternoon for 2 weeks drinking a glass of wine on a terrasse, eating a gelato for dinner, a two course lunch, and -- at times -- even enjoying a room with a view.

This picture was taken from our balcony in Sienna, on the eve of St. Catherine of Sienna's day. Each of Sienna's 17 boroughs mark the occasion with a procession, and the next day they gather in the square where the annual horse race is held.

When we first arrived in Sienna, another Tuscan hill town which has declined in influence since its height in the Renaissance period, we were a little Tuscan-hill-towned-out. But accidentally spilling onto this procession literally re-ignited our love of Tuscany.

We had seen lots of crowds in Italy already -- the 2 hour queue at the Uffizi in Florence, the millions of tourists blocking any genuine experience of Venice on Good Friday, spending more time letting tourists pass rather than hiking the Cinque Terre on Easter Monday, 80 000 people per day at the Vatican museum -- but this time the queue of people were NOT the tourists, and we, the tourists, got to be the ones to blissfully watch from outside the mass of people.

La Dolce Vita? Sometimes it's watching, rather than participating.

Domestification.

People seem to imagine I lead this glamorous life of nomadic globe-trotting, never knowing what corner of the world I shall find myself in next. This statement is true in all but the term glamourous – there is a fine line between excitement and fear, and glamour generally refers to that which differs from the norm of one’s existence. Anything done consistently begins to feel like a chore, and current activities that excite me include things that are associated with longer stays in a place: buying spices, decorating apartments, hanging art, buying crafts that don’t fit into a suitcase, reading the globe & mail, and having enough plates and cutlery to throw a dinner party for more than one guest.

On Saturday night Leanne and Guillaume threw a house-warming party to celebrate their arrival in their new home. Leanne is a dear friend of mine who was my flatmate when I lived in Istanbul in 2003, and has been one of only a handful of people I know around the world who could really sympathise with the lifestyle of living out of a suitcase for the last six years. We came to Cape Town 5 days ago and have been staying with Leanne and Guillaume, buying things for the house, eating breakfast on the veranda, watching BBC on digital satelite television, cooking with appropriate utensils, reading books in the garden under a tree, and letting the experience of Cape Town slowly trickle into our lives rather than actively pursuing it. At the house-warming party, people kept asking us where we’d been in Cape Town, and mostly we could only name some restaurants, bars, a hairdresser, and some shops we’d been to, plus one spontaneous detour up Table Mountain to watch the sunset while we were dropping off some friends at their hotel.

Travel is hundreds of decisions being made hourly – are we hungry? Thirsty? When should we book a tour of Kruger National Park? Rodden Island? Which towns to stop along the Garden Route? What day should we leave Cape Town? Constantly sizing up the potential worthiness of a place and re-aligning our priorities based on this blind assessment. Pressure to see it all while still giving ourselves enough time to ourselves in order to make it enjoyable – balancing this equation is a full time job.

-So, what do you do?
-I’m a municipal planner. I’ve been in Ghana for the last six months working as a community development planner. Basically, I’ve been working in international development.
-And when do you go home?

Home. Where do I even start? Are strangers allowed to ask such deep and exposing questions? WHEN is difficult enough to answer, but HOME? Ouch. When living out of a suitcase, one clings to anything familiar. Leanne and Guillaume are familiar, and home seems to be more of an essence than a place. Being domestic in their beautiful new home in this beautiful city is more glamourous to me than the backpacking I’ll be doing next week.

-I figure around the end of April I’ll have some time to start looking for my next means of employment, and that will dictate where my home will be. Either that, or I’ll just go to Vancouver to see my family and let my health recover for a few months. Get my teeth cleaned, see some doctors, and the like.
-Ooh. What a glamourous life you lead!

Re-entry.

Water. Glasses and glasses of cold ice water. I drink one glass, it’s not enough. I need more. I drink two more glasses and feel the cold water going down my throat and into my arms, legs, and stomach. Romantic images of water cascading down ice, bubbles from the impact, an unquenchable thirst.

I wake up, open my eyes and try to figure out where I am. I’m in a sleeping bag, on an air mattress, in a room with *hard wood floors and *soft sunshine pouring in from floor to ceiling *windows. The sunlight isn’t hot blinding yellow, the windows aren’t tiny with bars across them, the floors are wood, not concrete. In the corner are a suitcase, two backpacks, and an army bag I recognize.

I’m at Stefan and Amy’s house in London.

Stefan is a dear old friend of mine from archaeology who I always visit when I'm in the UK, and he and his fiance Amy came to visit me in Ghana just before I left for South Africa. Anyone who meets in Ghana becomes instantly close as you will see eachother at your worsts -- not having running water to flush the toilets after all three of us were suffering from e.coli, visits to a Ghanaian hospital that lacked proper toilet facilities to cope with our e.coli infections, being attacked in Accra their first 5 minutes in Ghana -- so people naturally form close bonds when meeting under development conditions. Stefy and Amy picked me on Saturday from heathrow after I had been in transit since Thursday, but I still found it easy to galvanise enough energy to sample some the variety of alcohols available in this great country of pubs.

I don’t actually remember going to bed last night, but I did manage to make it to my bed, even putting on my pjs before falling asleep. What time is it? What time did I go to bed? I notice my finger nails are yellow and remember going to a curry house for dinner. The curry was delicious, and I managed to finish Amy’s plate too. We didn’t mean to drink very much yesterday. I think we started at 4pm at the English pub where we drank beer and they served garlic mayo with their chips. Mmmm, chips!

A thought occurs to me: how is my head going to feel when I sit up? I continue to tally up the total alcohol consumption of our evening. We drank 2 rounds at the pub, came home and Amy made white Russians with soy milk. We had bought *soy milk at a store to make *pancakes, and I’d never had a white Russian before so we thought we’d capitalise on the soy milk and make those as well. Amy and I drank a bottle of red wine, and I think that’s when we went for curry, where we drank more beer, and back to the house for – Tequila! Tequila is my death. Then on to the white wine while we watched Shaun of the Dead.

I sit up and try to size up how I feel. I…think…I’m…fine? How can this be? I never drink more than two drinks in a day or I’m shattered the next morning. But wait – I’m not in Africa anymore!

Other signs that I’m not in Africa anymore come from the kitchen where Stefan and Amy have a *selection of teas. In fact, there are choices everywhere. There’s curry, and actual stores rather than vendors on the sides of roads, and varying temperatures in tap water, and there *is tap water, and electricity, and hair dryers. These are all things I also enjoyed in South Africa, but, most importantly, England is cold. So I can accidentally drink irresponsibly again, and wake the next morning without the pounding reminder of the debauchery of the night before.

Welcome back to the temperate world!

Great White Sharks.

After barely a day in Cape Town, South Africa, Guillaume made the suggestion to join him and his friends Great White Shark cage diving.

-Apparently it’s a major tourist attraction for visitors to SA, and not to be missed.
-I don’t really do the not-to-be-missed-attractions thing when I travel.
-But it should be fun and the weather’s supposed to be great this weekend. Last time we scheduled, it was cancelled due to weather conditions. You should seize the opportunity.
-Sure. Let’s do it. As long as I don’t have to think about it or talk about it before hand.

Everyone has at least one irrational fear. I’ve seen people screech at the thought of a snake, despite never having met a poisonous one in their lives, and other common fears include bees, mice, and cockroaches – creatures infinitely more peaceful and evolved than people.

My one great irrational fear is of Great White Sharks. When I was in kindergarten, I accidentally stumbled upon a National geographic documentary on great white sharks that followed Sesame Street, and for more than two decades since, images of great white sharks swimming from every shadow in my bedroom, leaping from the taps in my bathtub and the drains in the swimming pool where I trained as a competitive swimmer for 12 years plagued me.

I would develop rules: as long as I’m not the last person out of the pool, the great white sharks won’t creep out of the drains and get me; as long as there is someone else on the same floor as me when I’m taking my bath, the great white sharks won’t pour out of the bathroom taps or jump out of the toilet; if I don’t swim in the lane next to the slide, then the great white sharks won’t come tumbling down the slide to get me.

When the time drew near, Jas and I packed the car and drove to Hansbaii to face our fears. But without Guillaume.

-I don’t feel like waking at 5am, and besides, I don’t know how I feel about the ethics of how the sharks are treated. Luring them in for tourists to photograph with under water cameras? Seems kind of inhumane.

Hypocrisy is something one has to deal with constantly while in South Africa, and my Great White Shark cage diving was just another example of my general approach in the country – just experience all that you can of your landscape, and ask questions later. It was a bit embarrassing actually – I’m quite the advocate for sustainable and responsible tourism, and had just spent 6 months in Ghana proposing Community-Based Ecotourism development planning, among other things. So we went with the most ethical of the shark cage diving companies, a company that has taken people the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt for cage diving experiences. True ethical laziness – using Leo and Brad to set your responsible tourism bar.

The experience was extraordinary and extremely exhilarating. But it was not what I had expected. Many tourists whom we met along the way asked us about the experience.

-It’s really worthwhile, and I’d do it again in a second, but mostly it’s 4 hours of misery interspersed with about 10 minutes of excitement. One of the blokes in our group said at one point ‘it’s not unlike watching paint dry’. Everyone’s sea sick, the deck of the boat is freezing from the wind, and the people in the cage are just lasting as long as they can before hypothermia sets in. And that’s in a full wetsuit, which, by the way, smells and is far too small for anyone over 150cm. It took about half an hour after docking the boat before I could feel my feet, and that was about 2 hours after I had gotten out of the water. But, when the sharks come, it’s awe-inspiring. They are truly fascinating creatures.

The cage is oval-shaped and open-topped, and is attached to the side of the boat. In order to last as long as I could in the water, I would sit on the top of the cage, and when the sharks would come, I’d wait till the last second and dive under the water to see them from bellow. This tactic allowed me to spend 45 minutes in the shark cage, though mostly sitting on top with as much of myself out of the water as I could manage.

The first shark, a small female of maybe 3 metres, circled around the cage several times, tugging at the bait as the shark experts pulled the bait towards the cage allowing us a closer view. As the bait was pulled up and over the open-topped cage, we were certainly given a close up of the fantastic creature. This was just the appetizer though.

The second shark was a massive male, 5.5 metres in length. He gave people above and below the water’s surface a show as he lunged out of the water for the bait. One of cage divers grew too cold, and I offered to take the corner cell of the cage so that the new diver could share a cell with his girlfriend, but he declined and took the corner cell instead. As the colossal male great white sped up for his attack on the unsuspecting line of bait, the shark expert pulled the bait towards the cage and we all dove under to witness the event from below.

I saw the enormous beast spring in our direction, and then towards the corner of the cage I had just offered to take. And then the great white did the unimaginable – he lunged over top of the open-topped cage and leapt at the bait, now dangling in the air over the boat, and then dove back under the boat. I stayed underwater as long as I could, seeing nothing but water and bubbles, anticipating the site of blood. When I could no longer hold my breath any longer, I surfaced, half expecting to see only half a diver in the corner of the cage. Instead, he excitedly pulled himself out of the cage, clenching his camera up high, and triumphantly announced

-I GOT IT ALL ON FILM!!!!

I laughed a sigh of relief, and realised that I hadn’t actually been afraid of the shark. It didn’t feel like he would attack us, even if we had still been sitting on the edge of the cage when the bait went over head, rather than under water. In fact, great white sharks don’t like eating humans – they usually only attack surfers, and that’s because they think they’re turtles. Over the next twenty minutes, the massive male circled around a few more times for us, splashing those of us below with bubbles, and those above with water as he stormed off after failed attempts at trapping the bait.

When I finally couldn’t handle the cold a moment longer, the three of us who had endured the cold since we first cast the anchor climbed out. I changed, ate, and tried to warm my feet up enough to walk, draped myself in towels and watched the great white sharks play with the bait from the deck. As I sat there shivering and trying to prevent myself from vomiting along with everyone else, I was quite satisfied that the only inhumanity occurring on this trip was towards the humans, not the sharks.

[pictures from this trip coming soon…]