an even better article

http://www.thenationonlineng.net/2011/index.php/news-update/40357-panic-in-rivers-as-beggar-%E2%80%98steals%E2%80%99-four-men%E2%80%99s-genitals.html

Yes.  The article is about missing genitals.  Please read the whole thing.  Thank you this is my life.

yesterday's fun

I'm borrowing this link from my friend's blog.

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/03/gunmen-attack-american-embassy-in-abuja/

Joey's version of events is a little different...

cleanse

My employment contract expired on Friday.  My new contract was supposed to begin yesterday, but it's all tied up in red tape, which means I am taking an indefinite staycation.

This staycation perfectly coincided with the arrival of my new juicer and impending vacation to Eastern Europe (where all those bitches have legs a mile long and an inch thick), so I finally started a cleanse.  I've been trying to plan this cleanse since my January edition of Whole Living magazine arrived in February, but organizing all of the components isn't easy when you live in Nigeria.

I believe the editors of Whole Living intended for the cleanse to jump-start the new year.  My edition arrived significantly later, not by any fault of the people at Martha Stewart publications.  Then I had to order a juicer.  Then I had to wait three weeks for said juicer to arrive.  Then I could start compiling the foods needed for this cleanse, because obviously those things need to be consumed fresh.  One would think that living in a tropical climate would afford accessibility to a large variety of fruits and vegetables, but I think I would have had an easier time finding all of the ingredients in Iowa in January.  Maybe that was the point...I guess there aren't a lot of Whole Living subscribers in sub-Saharan Africa...

Anyway, the vegetable delivery man came on Saturday and Joey bought all the items he could find on my list.  Then yesterday we went to the market to buy more vegetables and today M. is going to the supermarket to hopefully find the rest.  I think the only thing we may not find is kale, but there is another vegetable delivery man coming on Friday and he said he might have Swiss Chard.

Did I mention I'm starving?

Anyway, by last night we had amassed enough ingredients, and so this morning I began my cleanse.  Nothing but fruits and vegetables for 1 week.  Three hours in and I'm already starving.  My breakfast of grapefruit, carrot and ginger juice kept me full for about one whole hour and I've been sucking down water and tea to try to get me through the next two.  In fifteen minutes I get to eat four dates stuffed with pistachios.  Oh yay.

So we'll see how this thing goes.  My other option is to sit at home and eat all day long, so I figure the cleanse route is worth a try.

Only 9 more minutes until my dates...

safari day 1

Monday morning a representative from our safari company rescued us from our hotel and whisked us away from Moshi in his white minivan.  The clouds impeding our view of Mt. Kilimanjaro the day before had dissolved, rewarding us with majestic views of the tallest mountain in Africa for much of our drive to Arusha.

Joey's cousin, Angela, and her husband, Steve, flew over 30 hours and almost 10,000 miles from Seattle to meet us in Arusha.  We couldn't decide whether we were more excited to see Angela and Steve or to begin our long-awaited safari.  Luckily we didn't have to, because no sooner were we reunited than we were loaded into the Toyota Landcruiser in which the four of us would have many, many hours over the next week to reconnect.

About two hours through the Tanzanian countryside and a snack of red bananas later, we reached our first safari destination: Lake Manyara National Park, where we were greeted by a blue monkey before even passing the gate.  Once inside, our driver and guide, Ibrahim, popped the vehicle's roof hatch so we were able to stand while he drove through the park.

Standing in the back of the car.  See the giraffes in the background?

As we made our way through the forest, we saw baboons, more blue monkeys, black-faced velvet monkeys and impalas before lunch.  We stopped in a clearing with several picnic tables and Ibrahim doled out our lunch boxes.  Lunch was fairly meager, but fortunately for always-hungry Joey we still had some of the bananas purchased along the way from the women on the side of the road.

After lunch we headed into the bush and over the next several hours spotted wildebeest (which Ibrahim pronounced as "wild beast"), giraffes, elephants, teeny tiny little impalas called Kirk's Dik-Dik, an Egyptian lizard, warthogs, zebras, hippos, and numerous species of birds!  With the aid of Ibrahim and my journal, we counted 23 different animals and we still had four more days to go!

Pink flamingos, giraffes and wildebeest

This giant turkey vulture looking thing is called a Southern Ground Hornbill

We left the park and about an hour later arrived at the Bougainvillea Safari Lodge, a welcome respite from our accommodations the previous night.  We had our own cottage, with a four-poster bed draped in mosquito netting, a fireplace and large walk-in shower, which I employed immediately.


Feeling much fresher, Joey and I met Angela and Steve for dinner in the lodge.  Many glasses of really bad boxed wine (actually, the first glass was the only really bad one; Angela said she saw them tipping the box to get all the wine out) and many good laughs later, we finally retired to our romantic little cottage.

Click here for the rest of my pictures from our first day of safari

about that hotel

For our honeymoon, Joey and I took a Mediterranean cruise. We docked one day in Montenegro, where we bought a bottle of wine at the local market for two euro. A few hours later, bound for our next destination, we brought our wine to the ship's dining room. Although we had our own romantic table for two, we really enjoyed the large table of octogenarians next to ours, and we joined them that night for dinner. We offered to share our wine but no one was interested. One dining companion offered us a pearl of wisdom for our new married life: two euro wine in Europe is usually a lot like a two dollar wine in the US: not very good. While I have had more than a few good, cheap bottles of wine in Italy and France, his advice absolutely held true for that Montenegran wine.

So maybe I should have listened to his voice in my head when I booked the Twiga Home in Moshi for $20.

Beside the filthy floors and walls, cobwebs and bugs inside the broken wardrobe, suspect-looking towels (one each), ant infestation and dirty sink, the shower consisted of a faucet slightly over the toilet attached to a live wire with zip ties. We were given the option of A/C, which broke, on, after the staff had left for the night, and since the only bedding available was a thin sheet over the rubber mattress, we actually froze.

I don't know what I was thinking when I booked this place. I'm pretty sure the reviews on Trip Advisor were okay. For a hostel. And truth be told, I've never actually stayed at a hostel before. Had I realized this place was a hostel, I probably wouldn't have booked it because hostels are for college kids who can drink enough they don't care where they're sleeping. But Twiga doesn't call itself a hostel. It calls itself a home. So I canceled my perfectly good reservation at the Protea, a perfectly good South African chain, to save $125, apparently believing it was just a good deal. I'm so smart. And when did I become such a big spender?

So in addition to my moratorium on drinking bad wine, I have instituted a new moratorium on booking bad hotels by establishing a lower limit. Unless that cheap hotel room is sold by Costco or Trader Joes (because everybody knows you can get good, cheap wine there).

mt. kilimanjaro coffee tour

Upon landing at Mt. Kilimanjaro airport (whose peak was sadly concealed by thick cloud cover), we found the hotel hostle hovel shuttle and settled in for the 45 minute ride to Moshi and our room for the night.

I think I will write a separate post about how much I loved where we stayed.

Anyway, months earlier we'd signed up for a tour of a local coffee plantation.  Since our flight landed after noon, we only had a few hours of daylight and needed to hustle.  We got out of the shuttle at the um, place, dropped off our bags in our room and got in a different car headed toward the mountain.

Our young taxi driver took us through Moshi, the town from where most Kilimanjaro climbers begin their ascent, and wound his way up the base of the mountain and deeper into the bush. About five minutes past my comfort zone (which has arguably expanded significantly over the last 14 months), we finally pulled into what appeared to be an empty farm and were greeted by who was apparently our tour guide.

"Enjoy coffee tour"

He took us to a cabana, where he gave us an overview of what we'd see on the tour and asked if we'd like to have our traditional lunch now or after the tour.  We were both starving (weird), and asked if we could eat first.  So, naturally, that's when the cook began to prepare our lunch (I mean, it's not like we reserved the tour months ago and arranged what time we'd be there or anything.  Oh wait...).  As we sat and conversed awkwardly with our guide for the next hour, I couldn't help but wonder why we'd rushed to get here (I really should know better at this point).

Eventually, though, we were served our lunch of Pilau rice, bananas and a little bit of meat.  And banana soup.  None of it was particularly bad, just bland.  We finished our meal and sat, awkwardly, a little longer, as it began to sprinkle and the time ticked closer and closer to sunset.  Our guide finally decided he was ready to start the tour, and he led us into the bush.

We walked for at least ten minutes until the guide said anything.  At this point, I was fairly convinced the Tanzanian interpretation of tour meant, "we'll hike your ass all over this plantation," but eventually he began his spiel and we (Joey) made our own cup of coffee starting with the plant to the brew.

Step 1: Pick ripe, red beans from coffee tree.

Step 2: Peel red skin from coffee bean, leaving slimy residue.

Step 3: Use above contraption to rinse slime from coffee bean.

Step 4: Leave cleaned coffee beans out to dry

Step 5: Remove second skin from dried coffee bean using large mortar and pestle.

Step 6: Roast beans

Step 7: Grind roasted beans

Step 8: Add ground coffee beans to boiling water

Step 9: Strain grounds from coffee

Step 10: Enjoy your very fresh cup of coffee in a mud hut.

We also learned about all the different kinds of bananas grown in Tanzania, most notably, the kind they make into beer.  Naturally, the highlight of Joey's coffee tour was this liter of home-brewed banana beer.  He said it tasted something like flour and nothing like beer.

As delicious as that looked (and as convinced I was by the tour guide's reassurances that everything had been prepared hygienically), I decided to pass on the opportunity to drink bush beer.  I watched Joey get dysentery in Mexico and I was fairly certain I was watching him get it again.

But despite all my paranoia, Joey survived the beer and we survived the drive back to Moshi, and even arriving as the sun set.  Now all we had to do was survive the night at our hotel.

Click here for all of my pictures from our coffee tour.

the ugly american

2.26.12  9:30am (Two hours later)

Just encountered the most annoying traveler on our way to Mt. Kilimanjaro: the ugly American.  This diva is clearly headed on a fashion safari, replete with her olive cargo shirt stuffed with her muffin-top into matching olive, skinny cargo pants that are tucked into her shiny, gold platform tennis shoes and accessorized with a dusty pink purse.  But don't worry, lest you think this woman's outfit might be too drab.  She dressed it up with not one, but three rhinestone barrettes.

And wouldn't you guess that after this consummate annoying safari-farer had loaded her six duffle bags on the security conveyor belt, she insisted her floral bag be returned from the other side of the X-ray so she could retrieve her SOCKS.  To put over the socks she was already wearing in order to walk through the metal detector.  Which beeped repeatedly because of those fancy, sparkly additions to her fabulously bad, black dye job (and Mallory, I know you get mad when I call it a dye job, but please trust me, no color specialist had been near her head).  When the security attendant asked her, kindly, to please take out her barrettes, the diva only exclaimed, repeatedly, "IT'S MY WIRE BRA!"

Oh.  God.

Are you serious, lady? In case you haven't noticed, you're in a domestic airport in Africa, and those guys with AK-47s are not a joke.  Meanwhile, the entire line has stalled and the United States of America has just been denigrated by one of its finest citizens.

I bit my tongue for as long as possible.  But the hotel shuttle had dropped us off at the wrong terminal, where we went through that security line before realizing we'd need to leave that building and run the quarter mile to the domestic terminal (which makes total sense since we're flying from Ethiopia to Tanzania) to make our flight and now we're stuck behind this prima donna.  I finally turned to her and said something about the line (I'm sure I was very tactful).  We eventually got around her as she was taking off her second pair of socks.

We made it to the departure area just as the plane was starting to board, and upon sighting the second round of security screening giggled with the relief that we wouldn't have to witness that spectacle again.