Travel[B]log

Scottish Parliamentary Pictures

On assignment in my home country recently, I spent a couple of days with pretty much free run of the new Scottish Parliament building. Now here's a paradox: at one level, we have history repeating itself - the original union of the Parliaments was brought about through Scotland's determinedly bankrupting its Exchequer over the ill-fated Panama colony - a project that went uncontrollably over-budget and which failed to deliver any benefit to the country that had invested so heavily in it. So what's the first thing Scotland does on regaining a measure of independence after two hundred years? Yep - pour a large proportion of the national budget into a project that's gone uncontrollably over budget, to very little apparent benefit to the country…

]]> Now that's the cynics view. Here's my reality: It's done, it's there and the money is spent, so whatever we look at is from this time forth and for the future. And that's where the Parliament, as a space for the hopes of a nation revenant, works wonderfully well. This is a complex and inspirational building, one that works both as a focal point for the governance of a country and as a meeting place of the people, though a network of open spaces, closed rooms and the elegance of the debating chamber.

Cameras for Travellers, Part I: The Need

As a photographer, I lurk somewhere around the diffuse boundary between committed amateur and the semi-pro: My photography has, on occasion, been known to pay for itself, with some assistance from random scribblings, but isn't my primary source of income (and if anyone spots one of those wandering around and looking in need of a home, do let me know). Much of my work comes from my travels, taken in places ranging from extremely predictable to predictably extreme and, at times, downright dodgy (Eastern Congo and East LA being two that spring to mind here), but always involving a deal of moving around. So, when I come to choosing camera gear, it's with a slightly different eye and expectation to that of the local or studio-based snapper.

Current projects include a couple of books, working with my long-time collaborator, Sri, which each call for a deal of expeditionary travel – for one, much wandering around Central Africa by jeep, bus and bicycle and, for the other, a forthcoming extended hurtle around Australia on a motorcycle. Both set similar criteria for choosing and using cameras, starting with one basic principle: that the best photograph is the one that gets taken. And then used. There's a corollary to that: the best camera is the one that works, and which keeps on working. That's with a side order of it being the one you can hang on to in most situations – stealth is very often the best friend of the travelling photographer.

Which of course raises something of a contradiction – I need all the power and flexibility of an SLR system, but at times need the discreetness and portability of a compact camera. The answer of course is both – rather than carrying a brace of SLR bodies in the grand film tradition, it's better for the itinerant photographer to combine a single SLR body with a supplemental compact. But right now, I'm choosing the SLR part of the equation, so am asking myself what really works for me. And I'm being a little anal about it – after all, I change my main system about once every quarter century. The good news there is that I'm not constrained by my existing lens and accessory collection – my current stuff is less legacy than archaeology.

]]> I've always been a film buff - the whole 'strips-of-celluloid-and-strange-smells-in-darkened-rooms' bit, and an accompanying passion for the quality of the emulsion'd image. That's been since my best ever Christmas present, a second-hand Exa IIb, in 1968. And that's scary in itself, because not only can I remember the when, but also the 'b' bit of the model designation – clearly the proto-geek at work. Since 1996 though, I've carried compact digital cameras as adjuncts to my film systems, starting with the very grotty (Apple Quicktake 100) and moving on through a succession of Canons until my most recent, the G3. In the meantime, I've stayed resolutely true to my extensive 35mm system - a brace of the great old classic (pre-autofocus) Canon T90s – compact and utterly reliable with near-telepathic ergonomics, and none of this new-fangled autofocus stuff. But, at long last, it's time to change, to take the deep breath and move the last remaining analogue part of my life into the digital domain.

One other thing: the idea of the camera as a piece of precision engineering. I have a firm believe that, if the tool you're using is inspiring to hold and use, you produce better results. Simple as that. So I'm not a fan of the 'camera-as-consumer-electronics' school of product design and much more into that whole 'precision instrument' thing. My early Canons definitely qualified there, as does my 1980s Olympus OM-2n, assorted Nikons and any film Leica you care to name.

So here's what matters to me in looking for a digital SLR system:

Image quality: Obvious really, but I do want the best possible real-world images. And here the pixel count is but one factor of many – hold that thought for the moment.
Responsiveness: Low shutter-to-shot and shot-to-shot times are crucial to capture a moment – until recently the banes of digital cameras.
Robustness and reliability: I'm often in places where there is not only no service centre nearby but, quite possibly, not on the same continent.
Sealing: It must be able to withstand dust, water, vibration and shock: however well packed, jeeps, buses, bicycles, motorcycles, sandstorms, blizzards and tropical downpours are hard on equipment. And many of the finest photographic opportunities happen in the worst conditions (Harris's Universal Axiom #33)
Best possible battery life: I may be out of range of a reliable power supply for fairly extended periods.
Portability is important, and not just for comfort – the ability to leg it at less than no notice is greatly aided when all your gear can be easily carried without the aid of a press-ganged yak. It's not just a question of the size and weight of the camera, but of the whole system and the number of bits and pieces you need to carry. For me, lack of bulk is more important than low weight, but I'm a fairly large object myself, so the odd few hundred grammes here or there really don't signify.

Now we move on to the specs and scope of my needs, plus features that are in the –useful but not essential– category:

Lenses: at a minimum, I need to cover a range of approximately 24-300mm or thereabouts (35mm equivalence). That gives me decent wide-angle through to medium telephoto, hopefully without requiring too many separate lenses – I'm quite happy with fixed focal length lenses for the extremes, but prefer zooms for the core range (28-200mm). And as fast as possible, please – I'd always rather have a fast lens available than bump the ISO up.
Resolution: I started this process with a minimum requirement for a 6MP sensor, but soon discovered that raw pixellage is about as useful a guide to image quality as the clock speed on a computer processor. Which is to say, –Not very–. The bottom line is that I can shoot or reasonably interpolate to print-quality A4 – that le's me shoot for fairly large format publication, with some scope for cropping.
Modality: Having discovered the joys of RAW mode shooting with my Canon G3, being able to shoot and then effectively manipulate RAW mode images is vital. This is a combination of the camera being designed to function fully in RAW sensor mode (sorry Leica, this is where you lost out) and the software that can process the images quickly and cleanly.
Workflow: It isn't just the camera any more, but the availability and effectiveness of software (generic and specific) to process the captured images – the best camera in the world is no damn good to me if it requires the use of proprietary software that crawls along like a moribund sloth and with an interface that is either unfathomable or cheerfully patronising.
Fast connectivity: the practice of putting a USB 1.1 interface onto cameras that can generate 10MB+ image files is insane: give me Firewire or USB 2.0, puhlease.
Continuous shooting: useful for action shooting but, for me, not desperately vital – absolutely consistent shot-to-shot times are more important.
Flash: I'm not a huge fan of built-in flashes on SLRs - they're very useful for fill-in, but I still prefer the flexibility of an external flash, along with the fact that they're further away from the lens axis, reducing the 'party vampire' effect and any shading from the lens barrel

So, if you recognise your own priorities in all this, then you might want to read the next part, in which I get up close and personal with the candidates. Read on–

Demonstration, from a cafe in Primrose Hill

Sent, with graphic attachment, by e-mail from a Palm Tungsten T via GPRS...

Voice Message

This is a UM ver. 2.0 message.

Photographing Mountain Gorillas

So you're off to Rwanda, Uganda or Congo to see the gorillas? You'll be taking a camera, then. You are also about to take photographs of one of the trickier wildlife subjects around: it's not a simply matter of getting close to the subject, but of actually getting sharp and clear photographs of something dark and hairy that lives in a fairly dark and hairy environment. So this is a short note, derived from my own experience and mistakes, purely aimed at helping you decide what to take and what to do when you get there.

]]> First off then, let's have a think about equipment:

Cameras & Lenses:

Unlike much African wildlife you are unlikely to need long lenses to get a decent shot – when you meet Gorillas, you’ll be close and it’ll be fairly to moderately dull. Park regulations say not to get closer than 7m to the beasts, to minimise the possibility of disease transmission from us primates to them. Even at 7m, you’ll fill the frame with (say) a 70-210 or so zoom lens (or digital equivalent). Carrying supertelephotos around to photograph gorillas is a pointless exercise in masochism and guilt generation (the guides will usually take pity and offer to carry stuff for you when you collapse wheezing from the altitude and rough going). It’s also worth a carrying a wide angle for grabbing the wonderful panoramas of the Virungas. If you’re using an ordinary zoom compact camera, you’ll still have the chance of getting some good pictures – you may not be able to switch off the autofocus (see below), but as long as you use a reasonably fast film, there are good shots to be had.

Digital:

If you can, shoot at the highest resolution your camera will support (RAW mode if you have it – helps keep the hairy bits looking sharp) and either carry plenty of memory cards or use a Microdrive. Although the gorillas don’t seem to be bothered about a bit of noise, it seems only courteous to switch off the assorted synthetic beeps, clicks and whirrs that a digital camera can make. Having a digitised cock crow for the shutter release is right out. If you can change the sensitivity of your camera’s sensor (asa equivalent), then set up to something usefully fast – 200-400asa or greater, remembering that, as with film, the faster you set it, the more digital “noise” will appear in the final picture.

For the geek amongst you, I got some good results shooting on a four-megapixel Canon G3 at 200/400asa, in RAW and Superfine JPEG modes, with extra saturation, sharpness and edge enhancement switched off – the last of these particularly can cause strange artefacts with hairy subjects – I’d rather do any post-processing in Photoshop.

Accessories:

One above all – a monopod. Don’t even think about carrying a large tripod. In fact, think as much as you can about not carrying very much at all – it bulks you out, slows you down and loses photographs while you’re working out which camera/lens/film/lipstick combo to use. This from the man who did his first gorilla trip carrying: digital camera; telephoto lens for same; tripod (small); monopod (large); multiple films, batteries and filters; SLR, 70-210 zoom; 28-85mm zoom; 24mm wide-angle. Now remember that you’ll spend a lot of time bent double, ducking under branches and swinging around trees – I got quite impressively wedged on a couple of occasions. Oh yeah, remember to take something waterproof to store everything in – my telephoto lens has yet to dry out from my last trip. My second trip consisted of my compact digital, filters, lens hood and monopod. I’d like to say that I’d learnt my lesson, but I was travelling by bicycle and had perforce to leave the heavy stuff behind.

Film:

I used Fuji Provia 100asa transparency film, pushed by one stop to 200asa. I was using a monopod to support the camera, but could still have done with 400asa for a little more flexibility. 800 and 1600asa films can also prove useful, but I’d rather carry and use a monopod with slower film than accept the quality trade-offs of the very, very fast films. It’s a personal thang, though…

Now for some thoughts on technique:

Autofocus:

This does not, by and large, work well when photographing Gorillas, for two reasons, one obvious and one strange. The obvious reason is that the Gorillas hang around in thick foliage, and autofocus systems will cheerfully lock onto and provide beautifully sharp images of foreground twigs, leaves and branches, while the dark fuzzy blur in the background could be anything vaguely mammalian. The strange reason appears to be that the Gorilla is a stealth animal – autofocus relies on contrast differences and sharp edges to work out what to lock on to – a Gorilla is low contrast and fuzzy of edge: Once again, a random blurred shape that may or may not be of this planet. Moral: where possible, go manual.

Flash:

This is not allowed when photographing the gorillas – so if your camera will not allow you to disable the flash, don’t use it. Simple as that.

Exposure:

If you are photographing a general forest scene that happens to include a gorilla (such as those cropped images included here), your camera’s built-in metering system should cope tolerably well. It gets a little trickier if you’re completely filling the frame with pure, unadulterated gorilla though – in case you hadn’t noticed, they’re pretty damned dark in colour, and this can sometimes trick camera light meters into thinking that the scene is actually in worse light than is the case, and over-exposing the photo, I played safe and was finding that 2/3 of a stop of underexposure was adequate – keeping detail in the gorilla without washing out the background. For anything where the beastie only occupied part frame, I was shooting with uncorrected exposure.

There’s one last thing here – you’re going to see some of the most astonishing creatures on the planet – don’t spend all your time taking pics and, above all, don’t have all your memories framed through the viewfinder of a camera. Get some shots, get a few more, then by all means switch the technology off, put it away and just spend time looking, and thinking. They’ll be doing the same.

I hope this helps: please however don’t let my ramblings override your own judgement and experience!

Richard

Download Gorilla Photography in PDF format

Dark and Continent: Fit the Entirely Unexpected

Hi all,
Thought/hoped you'd heard the last from this particular source? Me too. Except… …I get back, spend a day or two waking up, then walk into the DFGF HQ in Chalk Farm. At which point Jo collars me – "We've just had someone drop out of the fund-raising cycle ride across Uganda - know anyone who is available at v short notice, cycles and can sort their visas and vaccinations in five days?”. That’ll be me, then. So I’m leaving Thursday, cycling through Uganda with a bunch of like-minded nutters and ending up back in the Muhabura hotel in Ruhengeri for another gorilla-viewing trip. Tough. I am however going light on the technology this time – just the one camera, Palm rather than Powerbook, and of course my bicycle.

I will be whimpering and blustering at people to raise sponsorship money for the trip’s cause: Mountain Gorilla conservation – so any and all individual and/or corporate offerings will be very much appreciated. Used notes though, please, or by transfer to the usual offshore accounts... As however it’s six days heavy cycling at altitude and that my entire training has consisted of sitting around in Congo, drinking beer and eating chips, I’ll only collect if, as and when I make it back…

all the best
Lance Armstrong (yeah, right).

Dark and Continent: Fit the Eighth: Kenya by Otter

Hi all,

And here’s the closing chapter in my travels, for the moment at least: A couple of days hanging around in Nairobi, meeting up with Greg and Jillian of the DFGF and I’m about ready to head off for a bit of the rough stuff – camping in the Maasai Mara and doing the game-spotting bit. In the meantime, I’ve given myself a taste of what’s to come, by spending a pre-breakfast morning in the Nairobi National Park, just on the outskirts of Nairobi itself. The park gives me a good sight of lion, zebra, giraffe, black rhino and rock hyrax, all set against the backdrop of Nairobi rush-hour smog.

This last is spotted basking on a rock – about the size of a tubby normal mog, it is in fact the closest living relative to the elephant. While I’m lining up a shot, a random tourist bod wanders up, looks over my shoulder and exclaims, “Whaat’s thaat? A rat?”. My reply of, “No, an elephant”, did not play well, especially when I insisted.

I’d originally been looking for a cheapo truck’n’tent trip, until I started phoning around the posh travel companies to see what sort of deal they’d do, given the fall-off in tourism following recent events. After a bit of negotiation, I still end up on a camping trip, albeit in a camp with fixed tents, four-poster beds and, er, a personal butler. Roughing it never sounded so good.

]]>

Before heading off, and as a fitting set-up for a safari, I head off with Greg and Jillian to Africa’s most famous restaurant, Carnivore. Rather than catering for vegetarians, it tends to serve them: gazelle, antelope, ostrich, zebra, eland, crocodile, all lovingly skewered and barbecued on Danté’s own barbecue. I eat much too much. The following morning, I’m relieved to see that the plane for Olkiombo is an utterly robust and reliable Twin Otter – mainstay of bush aviation worldwide. With its two engines it ought to be able to carry me and my bag. Just. But it doesn’t have an on-board toilet. This may require concentration – weeks spent trolling about the wastelands of rural Central Africa and I get a stomach bug only when I get back to Nairobi. Bleedin' typical.

With the change of mode as I move from traveller/worker to tourist, this is in danger of turning into a what-I-did-on-my-holidays drivel. So I’m going to keep it as short as reasonably possible (for me) and incite boredom and homicidal envy later with the photos – all I’m doing here is the standard camping safari in the deepest reaches of the fabled Maasai Mara. No big.

Having been bounced into and out of different airstrips on an exotic airborne bus ride into the Maasai Mara (too literally, “the shrubbery of the Maasai”), I arrive by land rover at the Mara Intrepids camp, artfully concealed in the forest on a bend of the Talek river. Gorgeous place, with five-star catering and a bar which overlooks the river and the setting sun. Looking good so far. The format is three game drives in the Landies each day, the first being at 6am. There’s also the chance to go walkabout with some of the local Maasai guides. It takes me a while to accept that all of this is real, not a theme park – everything is just too damn well choreographed – Central Casting is obviously right on form. “Places, everybody – and, 3-2-1, go with the Impala for ten minutes, then roll the lions stage right”. The cast then back off for a while, clearly to build the dramatic tension, and then, “Wait for it, wait for it – and... ...cue hyaenas and elephants – and tell that ostrich to put the damn cigar out – want to spoil the image?”.

The only thing missing was the great herds of Wildebeeste sweeping majestically across the plain – I'm a couple of months too late for that. Normally, after the Wildebeeste have been through, there's no grass left – just scorched earth that doesn't give much of the game a living. And makes lurking successfully a major pain for the predators – ever seen a leopard trying to hide behind a thistle? This year however, there's been unseasonal rain, the grass has shot up again, the game are out, browsing and nervous and the leopards, cheetahs and lions are lurking happily. Although I did spot my first lion by seeing four dirty great yellow paws sticking straight up out of a patch of grass – so much for the mighty hunter of the plains bit. So enough of the narrative and on with the list:

Dik-dik: Tiny antelope: one per cocktail stick; Bat-Eared Foxes (family of); Spotted Hyenas; Topi: overwrought Russian/Israeli actor; Hartebeeste: like Wildebeeste, but rustle; Thomson's Gazelle (snack food); Impala; Common Zebra (bums of); Elephant; Waterbuck: apparently not favoured as hors d’oeuvres, as they give lions hairballs; Lion; Secretary Bird: improbable bird-of-prey – walks everywhere, kicks snakes to death; Black-Shouldered Kite; Something which sat in a bush and went "Gleep", very loudly. Ostrich; Cape Buffalo (grumpy); Maasai Giraffe; Bushbaby: ridiculously cute, natural habitat apparently rafters of restaurant; lives on stolen bread rolls and marmalade (mine); Grant's Gazelle: larger snack. Lots more boids; Wildebeeste (one, confused); Ugly white people; Hippo: They sink, they walk along the bottom. You can tell where they are by the row of bubbles. These are not coming from the snout end; Cheetah: I’m very happy now; Leopard: At night, up tree that gets baited with dead thing; Olive Baboons; Dwarf Mongoose; Banded Mongooses – family of, swinging from my tent ropes; The Kenya Express: the ever-running warthog, who’s always in a panic about something, often about the fact that he’s forgotten what he’s panicking about. So he stops to work it out, at which point the lion is just... ...there. The only thought that a warthog therefore needs to hold is that he should never stop panicking, and sod the reason. Disney hardly had to caricature these things for the Lion King. Apart from the Noo Joisey accent, that is.

Four days later, and I’m bouncing through the sky on my way back to Nairobi and a return to cold, soggy old England. Now here's the second great coincidence of the trip: Turns out my brother is landing in Kenya on the same day I fly out. He lives 30km from me, I haven't seen him in eight months and neither he nor I have ever been to Kenya before in our lives. It does however appear that we'll probably miss by a few hours (we did) – I fly back into Nairobi after he's arrived and headed off to wherever he's going.

There's yet a third: while sorting out the safari booking, I'd seen an article by an outfit called Friends of Conservation, who've set up a code of conduct for tour operators, to help ensure that the resident wildlife isn't stressed or overhassled by tour groups. Cheetahs especially suffer, being daytime hunters reliant on cunning, eyesight and speed – a lifestyle that is not helped by being continually circled by vultures in minibus form. So I send a quick note to the e-mail address given, to ask if the bunch I'm planning to go with are OK. The reply is very helpful. It also ends, "…probably just a coincidence, but you wouldn't happen to be the Richard Harris who used to advise the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund?". It's signed by a friend of mine, whom I haven't seen for several years – the last time being in Café Pacifico in Covent Garden. I'd no idea which continent she was now on, let alone what she was doing. Unfortunately I only get the reply in the cybercafe at the departure gate on my way back to London. So a beer will have to await the next trip.

And I'm sure that there will be one. Maybe to different places and doing different things but, in case you hadn't already worked it out, I'm just a bit hooked on Africa. And that, for now is that. And if anyone has got this far without simply binning the whole tedious epistle, please accept both my congratulations and my advice that, whatever you're on, perhaps you should up the dosage. Or come off it altogether.

Thank you and goodnight from 36,000 feet over Libya. Libya? Now there’s a thought...

love to all
Richard

Dark and Continent: Fit the Seventh: Rwanda by Okapi

A slightly belated hi from Goma...

My meetings and training in Goma – the Masterclass in the Mist – taking people from the basics of computers to digital video editing in three days – over, and I'm due to head back to Kigali early Saturday morning, with an early start needed, to get the low morning light for photos of the town and to do some hard bargaining in the market. This is the place to get real, proper, authentic, no-nonsense Congolese tribal masks, hopefully separated from their original owners in a dignified manner. Mission successful, so you and yours can look forward to being frightened in assorted dark corners of my house at some point.

An early start? Means that a heavy evening on the town the night before is a absolute inevitability. This time it's with Henry (local DFGF chef-de-bureau) and John, an accountant pygmy. I think that's right – if he were a pygmy accountant, he'd probably be rather too specialised. The evening starts with a local celebration at the hotel, and they've laid on the local Ballet Culturelle – regional dancers, exuberantly and brilliantly showing off their tribal culture, costumes, co-ordination and quite astonishing grins. Then it's time to hit the town – and Henry is determined that I'm going to have some good stories to take back, so we bypass the slightly Western-sanitised compounds of Bobongo (Henry's take: Politicians, NGOs and mass murderers) and Coco Jambo (Henry: drugs and debauchery; Me: So why aren't we there?), bump up onto the steaming lava wasteland that was once downtown Goma, weave through an assortment of back alleys, where the half-collapsed upper stories of stone buildings protrude from the glistening black volcanic clinker, between the twisted mechano-spaghetti of melted steel roof beams and arrive at a gaudy blue lean-to that fills the gap between two not-quite collapsed buildings – I'm not quite sure which part of the ensemble is holding the others up. There's a bunch of vehicles and random hangers-on gathered around the rope-curtained door, beneath a whitewashed sign which sayeth, "Cap Sud". So this is it – the real Goma nightlife. It's crowded, loud and the dance floor is packed to the point of overflowing, personal space being a largely irrelevant concept. We grab a vacant table, introductions are made to various friends, relations and a large bottle of Primus. Look around: The ruins have a half-canopy of woven banana leaves, and tables of various shapes, sizes and degrees of decrepitude have been dropped in, not entirely at random. There is however a carefully laid dance floor, where that of the rest of the establishment is a layer of ash (volcanic – very few people seem to smoke here). The lights are well done and the sound system would seriously embarrass many London clubs.]]> Relaxing in my seat, my hand brushes the ground – it's warm to the touch. Glancing skywards, I see the tropical constellations parading directly overhead, fading into a red glow to the East. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I realise that what I'm seeing is the glowing cone of Nyiragongo, spitting red sparks into the night air. Pause for recalibration of reality – this really is life under the volcano. I feel very much alive, possibly temporarily. No photos though – carrying a camera into a Congolese night club frequented by various military and paramilitary factions is not a survival tactic – we could drop the ‘possibly’ from the last sentence.

And I find myself discussing life, the universe and everything with a guy whose nose only just appears above the opposite side of the table – I'm irresistibly reminded of the old Kilroy cartoons. John also appears to know most of the women in the club, all of whom rush over to greet and hug him, and then be introduced to his mzungo mate – John proving a great social icebreaker – every party should have one.

One thing I’ve noticed about this trip – the soundtrack has always matched both the place and the mood of the moment: While trogging around Kigali, Vince’s taste in internationalised World music very much fitted the cosmopolitan, but very African, mood of Kigali; moving to Ruhengeri, we had abundant tapes of laid-back local musicians playing distortedly in the jeep; and in Goma, the high-energy Wild West town to beat ‘em all, the background was a relentless and utterly appropriate beat of hard-core techno anthems.

And, some time later, I learn about the lake: This came when, flying back to Nairobi from Kigali, the person sitting next to me turned out to be with UNHCR – she has an interesting job – drawing up the contingency plan for the evacuation of the entire Kivu region in the event of the lake getting stroppy. Come again? OK – the whole region's volcanic, innit? That includes the bit under the lake, into and under which, many volcanic gases are trapped, including vast deposits of Methane and Carbon Dioxide. In fact, the lake itself does not support many species of fish for a body of water its size, the principle reason being that it is just a bit toxic. Certain areas you're warned against swimming in, especially in the morning, as a layer of gas can, and does, hang invisible over the water and suffocate innocent swimmers-by.

I'd known about this, but had it figured as a localised and transient phenomenon. What I hadn't realised is that the worst case scenario, in the event of another eruption disturbing the precarious balance of forces, is what's called an inversion where, as implied, the lake essentially turns upside down and releases all the trapped Methane and CO2 in one massive planetary fart. There are two immediate problems with planning for this eventuality – firstly, over two million people live on the shores of Lake Kivu and, secondly, the vulcanologists reckon that the best warning they could give would be all of, ah, eight minutes. Tricky. There's also a third – the Ihusi, the hotel in Goma most favoured by NGO staff (and self) is of course beautifully set on the shores of Lake Kivu. I wondered why they didn't have candles on the table at dinner. Anyone wandering down by the lakeshore for an after dinner smoke could be in for a very nasty shock. Reminds me of that otherwise largely forgettable movie Dantés Peak – where Pierce Brosnan et al attempt to cross a volcanically acid lake in a rapidly dissolving aluminium boat. Trivial stuff in comparison. Actually the 'otherwise' there is that it also stars Linda Hamilton – Terminator gal. Sigh.

Now consider my earlier snide aside about the gorillas choosing an evolutionarily, um, disadvantaged place to live? They got nothing on human beings. I mentioned all of this to an American tourist I was talking to in Kenya the other day – he thought the whole idea of living in such a region was quite insane and demonstrated a thoroughgoing recklessness on the part of people and government. He was heading rapidly for the 'but life is cheap in such places so why should we help them" argument, so I asked him where he came from: San Francisco. Thank you, the god of irony.

Henry was going to drive me back to Kigali, in the DFGF Congo car. Nice theory, but what we didn't know was that the Rwandan and Congolese authorities had changed the rules on us: not only did one insurance no longer apply to both places but a different number plate is required to pass from one to the other. This being despite the same government running both places, the Rwandan army having annexed the historically claimed Kivu province in the name of national security a few years ago. This new ruling came in on 31 January. This was now 1 February. So we ended up in the slightly unsatisfactory position of having ourselves cheerfully waved through into Rwanda, just as long as we left the car behind. It's a bloody long walk to Kigali – and I'm carrying multiple computers, cameras, rucksack and enough tribal carvings to restock the British Museum. I tell a lie – I'm failing to carry this lot, lacking sufficient limbs to hang 'em off. We stagger to the local bus depot, where we board an Okapi – less an antelope, more the dreaded minibus service between towns. These things leave when full then, as previously noted, drive like there's an erupting volcano behind them. There is? Ah... On the descent from the mountains into Ruhengeri, the driver thoughtfully passes out black plastic bags to all and sundry – use obvious. I have a slight sense of humour failure, which soon passes in the name of experience. Or something. At Ruhengeri though, we manage to secure the services of Moses, a good local taxi bloke I'd used a couple of times before. A quick and nostalgic reprise lunch at the Muhabura, then back to Kigali in time for tea, then beer, rather more beer, then some more after that in Addis, the local Ethiopian bar & restaurant. This is where I have a concept failure: an Ethiopian restaurant? – Surely the ultimate extension of nouvelle cuisine – an empty plate with a single grain of UN-donated rice in the middle?

More or less fell out of bed with a rotten hangover, straight into brilliant early-morning Kigali sunlight. Ouch. Airport beckoned, with some little doubt as to whether my flight booking had been cancelled (it had). Just real tough if I'd have to stay a few days more in Rwanda – I've been less and less looking forward to returning to Nairobi – big soulless scary, tourist-ridden city and all that sort of thing. To be strictly honest, the thing I'm really scared of is changing myself, from worker/traveller to tourist, as I head off on safari in the Masai Mara as a coda to the whole trip. Not an entirely comfortable transition, and one which puts an immediate barrier of purpose between self and environment.

Of course, Nairobi turns out to be scary enough now that there are almost no tourists and BA appear to have cancelled all flights – apparently 2" of subversive terrorist snow have attacked and paralysed England, so it looks like me and assorted other fundamentalists and loons will have the place pretty much to ourselves. Cool. Oh, and the Fairview hotel is next to the Israeli embassy. Target paranoia aside, it's another hit – five acres of gardens, just a couple of km from the city centre – took a few laps of the place to work out layout and whereness of various garden bars, terraces and the pool. Then relax in sun to fresh orange, iced latte (real milk at last – apparently the mark of a hopeless Africa case is when you prefer the powdered stuff to the real thing. So I'm safe, for a while at least). And why, when Rwanda is a major coffee producer, is it damn near impossible to get a good cup of the stuff there? Still, I managed to buy a large bag of beans at the airport, so my baggage and hotel room are now splendidly aromatic.

And no, I haven't misnumbered this ramble – there was a sixth. It was about the genocide, and the genocide memorials. Having met, worked and made friends with a good many people over the last few weeks, I've found every single one of them to have a story of fear, pain and continuing loss. Of how they and their family hid in a water tank, a cave, a sewer. Of families and friendships decimated and lost. I lack morbid curiosity, but after getting to know these people, it did seem to be only respectful to find out more. And that is what I tried to describe, but ran out of words – we all know what happened, if not entirely why. We know the raw numbers. Beyond that, no description is sufficient. There can only be experience.

Richard

Dark and Continent: Fit the Fifth: Heart of Darkness

Hi all,

I have really, really been looking forward to using this title, but it had to wait until I got to Congo, although I suspect that Kurtz' despairing final cry of "The horror, the horror" would nowadays be something like, “les croissants, les croissants!”. That, at least, is what I thought before I got here. My flippancy has done Conrad a great disservice (and if anyone points out that he was writing about what is now Congo Brazzaville, rather than Congo Zaire, I’ll get very upset – so please don’t bugger up a half-decent narrative hook) – this is very much Frontiersville, Afrique: Goma is a town on the edge of everything, not least oblivion: much of it still under a cooling lava flow from last year’s eruption of Nyiragongo; there’s a cannibal rebel army advancing 400km to the North (and there I really wish I were joking) and the town is on a stage 2 volcano alert. After ‘safe’ – always a relative term hereabouts – the stages are, in loose translation:

be slightly afraid
be very afraid
run away, very fast
if you’re reading this you’re too close. About 100km too close...

The air is noticeably sulphurous – eyes stinging and a yellow-orange tint to the sunset. The streams of vapour that were wafting from the main crater of Nyiragongo as we drove down this afternoon have given way to billowing clouds of salmon-pink and green-tinged grey, lending a surreal and darkling overcast to the whole sky. As part of the reason I’m here is to help set up the new DFGF research centre, to replace the one that’s now under 10m or so of lava, I can see that there could be some regular work here. I’ve had less interesting consultancy gigs. I’ve also had far worse times in my life – I think that, like a good contrarian, I’ve done the heart of darkness bit on another continent, and there’s space here to rediscover a little perspective and priority, where Conrad found only spiritual decay and spiraling madness. This, in case you hadn’t gathered, is a tough place to live: practically every possible human and natural disaster has been or is being visited on this place, and yet there’s life above simple grinding existence, there’s real humour and there’s a getting on with whatever it takes to rebuild life and home, under any circumstance.]]>

In some strange parallel world, I’m sitting on my private balcony in the spanking new Ihusi hotel on the edge of Lake Kivu, surely one of the world’s most beautiful shorelines, sipping (quaffing comes later) a large bottle of Mutzig Hein-a-like, while CNN chunters away in the background, so not all is lost (other than having to listen to CNN). That surreality is however never far away here – here’s an interesting exercise in tipping etiquette: how much to tip the guy who’s standing outside my room with the Kalashnikov?

And do I tip him less than his mate from earlier in the day, who was set up with a full machine gun? Leaving gun-totin’ militia aside, the Nile Perch in two-mushroom sauce is truly excellent – especially when eaten to the strains of Chuck Berry’s seminal rendition of Johnny B Good. This experience is now heading rapidly beyond the merely surreal and straight into Apocalypse Now territory.

If the road from Kigali to Ruhengeri was one to have me thinking of the best racing lines to take, that from Ruhengeri to Goma via Gisenyi was one to excite a serious interest and joy in the mere continuance of life – the road has only a passing acquaintance with tarmac, and a much closer one to precipices, landslides, lava flows and mudholes. Much of the downhill traffic encountered belonged to the local kamikaze squad – bicycle mounted loons, descending a rutted alpine track at velocities limited only by gravity or impact, while carrying massive sacks of maize, bunches of bananas and/or twenty or so 10 litre water containers. On such vehicles, a wide-eyed faith in God’s grace is only marginally less effective as a survival ploy than a rapidly melting flip-flop planted on the ground. Local bicycles, like local motorcycles, do not appear to do brakes.

And I got myself arrested. But not very. At the border crossing in Gisenyi, while Vince was sorting out the car’s carnet for Congo, I’d wandered along the lakeshore to take a few pics – pointedly away from the Douane and the actual crossing barrier. This did not stop a local uniformed jobsworth telling me that I’d broken at least a dozen laws and that I’d have to hand over my film. Interesting concept with a digital camera. He was of course after a little ‘doucement’ – a couple of bucks from the gullible mzungo. Yeah, right – I told him I was a Scotsman, and therefore culturally bound not to spend money, but he wasn’t having any. By the time Vince emerged with the carnet though, there was nothing to see – I’d managed to sidestep M le sponger, duck into the Douane commandant’s office and ask, in semi-fluent French (amazing what stress can do), if it was OK to take photos du lac, and would he like to see that I hadn’t taken anything else? Pas de problem...

And something catches my eye to the right – hell, there’s lightning flickering over the volcano. Could be an amusing week. I wonder if the restaurant does hot rocks?

Kurtz

Extended postscript:

A day or two later, nature has chilled out a little – there’s sun in the sky – still on a stage 2 alert, but the eruption has gone the other way from the crater – down into the park on the far side of the range. Doesn’t help much long-term though – Nyiragongo normally fills up with magma on a roughly twenty-year cycle; after last year’s eruption, it took no more than six months to half-fill the magma chamber. There’s a bunch of Japanese vulcanologists on permanent watch though – even a couple of hours warning will make all the difference. Gives a certain frisson to daily life here. And a postscript to the whole Net access business here – have now found friendly UN bunch with satcoms (remember my sarcastic comments about over-equipped posey landcruisers? I take it all back...) and also an enterprising local Internet Café using another satellite link.

So I'm now sitting in the lakeside garden, having a beer and watching the hotel’s colony of Crowned Cranes strut around the lawns. I did however miss the sight of the hotel’s young cat stalking the things in a fit of suicidal optimism – these things are about 1.5m tall, with a kick that’s just like that of a tall thing with very long legs. Tiredness is a feature of the day, which isn't overly surprising after being taken clubbing last night – for a town on the edge of obliteration (or possibly because of being so), there’s a very lively nightlife – dinner was giant Tilapia at VIP (that’s the name) restaurant (pygmy not on the menu – sorry, with the events to the North, there’s a whole array of incredibly bad taste jokes going around), followed by a visit to Coco Jambo, Goma’s #2 night spot.

That proved a little dead, so we moved on to the #1, Bobongo (just park on a handy lava flow) – although, as a party of eight blokes, we weren’t exactly in social balance with ourselves, let alone anyone else. Good music though – Zouk – a sort of double beat combo of Congolese trad with drum’n’bass, with a little jazz-funk-fusion-latino thrown in. Excellent stuff. Spent most of the evening people-watching and having small bets with Vince over his (to my mind) overly cynical interpretation of people’s motives , specifically the interactions between the array of stunningly gorgeous women propped up at the bar and the lesser number of pasty male euro-ex-pats present. Judged on the basis of observation rather than participation (honest), I lost, every time. Clearly an innocent abroad. I was even boggled by the motto on the Primus beermats – “Suka ya sekela”. See what I mean?

As we turned into the hotel this evening, one of the minibus taxis turned out. Like many such, it had an aspirational name plastered across its front in florid hand-painted lettering. I’m used to seeing “Cadillac”, “Mercedes” or even “God and Jesus” on the front of some battered Toyota Hi-Ace, but this one clearly belonged to a local inverted snob: it proudly displayed “Lada Samara”, lovingly rendered across it’s dented snout. Honesty in advertising continues – a kiosk in the local market is advertising itself as “Best Pirated Music”. And now, out of respect to the brave Japanese on volcano watch, Sayonara...

Dark and Continent: FIt the Fourth: Crouching Gorilla, Hidden Leopard

So this is it: time to go see a gorilla or two. Before we get onto the main event, there’s something to confess: I have problem with Gorillas. Or with any species that hasn’t got the hang of evolving somewhere sustainable – here we have a species that has chosen to not only hang out in but to concentrate its entire gene pool into a single area that is chronically ecologically, politically, militarily and geologically unstable. And I’m here to help them? Give ‘em all Swiss citizenship I say – at least they’ll then simply die out through boredom. OK, so given that we’ll allow them a measure of mischance in their choice of ecosystem, I suppose I might as well take a wander along to see how they’re doing.

This involves a 7am start at the ORTPN office – fortunately less than 100m from the Hotel, so even I make it on time. Not that I’d have had the choice, as Emmanuel was hammering on my door at 6:15 – I had to pretend that I’d had my shower and was engaged in meditative Zen snoring exercises to clear my mind for the day. Or whatever. ORTPN only allow a maximum of 6/8 people per day in to see each group, the main concerns being disruption of their normal behaviour patterns (those of the Gorillas, that is) and the accidental transmission of human diseases to the beasties. To judge from the appearance of the assembled company of gorilla wannabes, sartorial taste is excluded from the ‘bad influence’ section of the trekking agreement. It’s therefore fortunate that everyone else gets shovelled off to one or other of the other groups, whilst Emmanuel and myself are the sole supplicants to group 13 (being with DFGF has to have the odd perk or two). Along, that is, with three guides, two soldiers and an officer of the self-important, walkie-talkie toting type. All v friendly and helpful, but taking pics of the army guys politely refused – probably more on image touristique grounds than securité national.

]]>

It’s a half-hour by bouncing pickup to the Park HQ, where we pick up our permits, then another joint-rattling ride to a suitable parking point on the track up to the Park boundary proper. We’re already at 2400m by this stage, accounting for much wheezing later in the day. This is where the trekking proper starts: a couple of km over cultivated land, all arranged on a contour-following ridge and furrow system, where the ridges are of course just too far apart to allow me to step from one to t’other. The main crop here is the Pyrethrum Chrysanthemum, so fields of white flowers ripple a moiré pattern in the morning breeze – like Provençal lavender crops, only not purple.

After a while, and another couple of hundred metres vertical, we reach the ruined low wall of the Park boundary proper, where we make radio contact with the rangers who’ve been tracking the group overnight. The good news: group 13 isn’t far away; The bad news: they’re on a part of the flanks of Mt Sabyinyo that has never been visited before and therefore has no paths. Aha – real explorer stuff – excellent. Or not – the climb doesn’t start too badly, as we fragrantly stomp through a forest of giant mint, goes slightly prickly pear-shaped when we hit the belt of giant thistles (4m+ tall, with spines like machetes) and then goes seriously and metaphorically downhill while going vertically upwards, when we reach the bamboo forest. Insert here any vision you like of haunting melodies and inscrutable Orientals bouncing around lightfoot with swords.

The actual soundtrack de jour was that of a darkly muttering Harris who was both 10cm or so taller than everyone else and broadly encumbered with much camera gear, making the whole bending to fit through macheted gaps something of a problem. And now I know why those same Eastern types hang around in the treetops – the ground below is a complete bastard to navigate – tripping over all those ground creepers at every step would screw the martial arts image in seconds.

By the time we get to 2700m, we can hear a distant laboured grunting. And it’s not (just) me. I duck under a cluster of bamboo stalks, straighten up, half-turn and there he is: a massive, solid, shaggy and completely unconcerned Silverback Mountain Gorilla. He’s about 5m away and bothered not one whit by the strangely coloured and bedecked humans who’ve just materialised on his territory. I swear he raises one eyebrow at me, before casually reaching up – a long way up – to tear a branch off a tree and start stripping the leaves from it. I’m so completely enrapt in what I’m seeing that it’s a good thirty seconds before I remember to lift a camera.

The next hour becomes a series of careful movements through the undergrowth, following the Silverback as he shepherds the females and young up the mountainside. At one point he does get a little pointed with us and mock-charges our group, veering off when he’s about a metre-and-a-half away. I feel very small indeed at this point.

This shepherding of the group is rather unusual behaviour, indicating that he is a new Silverback and unsure about whether the females will follow him – the usual pattern, apparently, is to stomp off ahead of everyone, with blithe confidence that the girls will dutifully follow. Now look, this is behavioural evolution in another species, right? Mere observation and description neither condones nor admires, OK?

We then spend a good half-hour with one of the females and her very young offspring, during which I mostly switch my cameras off and just watch them watch me. I wasn't bored, they probably were. Eventually and reluctantly, we back off, to allow them to wander off and out of the presence of the strange bipeds who’ve been lurking around them and making random clicking and bleeping noises.

After that, it’s another sweaty, cursing stagger, plummet and crash down the mountain, sustained by the thought of a large cold beer in the new Gorilla’s Nest guest house in Kinigi. Thereafter, it’s back to the Muhabura, a looong bath and a couple of hours flat out to recover.

And the leopard? – that’s another story for another time. This one belongs to the Gorillas.

Richard, l’Attenborough Absolument Amateur

And there’s a bit of a London Bus scenario here: nothing for ages, then three postings come along at once – I'd had absolutely no Net access in Congo due to the local phone exchange having, ah, melted.

Dark and Continent: Fit the Third: The Luck of 13

G’day, Rwanda is a compact bijou countryette by European standards, let alone those of Africa. Its total land area is only about 26k km2 – much of it vertical. I think that makes it smaller than Scotland. Whatever, it shouldn’t take more than about three hours to drive, as the crow flies, from any one side of the country to another. An African crow however, is a bird of a very different sort, so let’s allow a day or two if not traveling along one of the major arterial routes. Which we were, so it's only about 96km from Kigali to Ruhengeri, including a climb over a fairly respectable mountain range. The going time for the journey is an hour-and-a-halfish, which is Formula One pace by African standards. Vince is regarded as a ‘pace’ driver by the locals, both ex-pat and Rwandese, which is a little worrying. Turns out that he’s no more than mildly insane, just hates stopping. And guess who kept wanting to take photographs of the latest vista? In case you hadn’t already gathered, this is a stunningly beautiful country.

Oh, and there’s a fuel crisis in most of Central Africa – the main pipeline from Mombasa, feeding S Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda & Burundi has fractured. So we’re into kilometre-long queues at filling stations, which makes the trip look increasingly unlikely. That’s until we discover that diesel is unaffected, and the Pajero drinks the stuff. Except that the only way to get to the diesel pumps is through the queues... So a local colleague is bribed to join the dawn chorus of the gasoline-dispossessed and turns up a while later with a full tank. And a full boot – he’s had the very good idea of also filling up a 20 litre jerrycan and sticking it in the back. That was until the top came off on the dirt road up to Vince’s. Now it’s bad enough following a smelly diesel – being sat inside a car that’s had it’s carpets saturated with the stuff promises to be a breakfast-bouncing experience. Nearly, but not quite – a housekeeper with Omo and determination is a wonderful thing – we simply had our nostrils reamed out by industrial detergent fumes. An improvement, at least.]]> Whatever expectations I had of the road, this wasn’t it – an immaculately surfaced ribbon of smooth tarmac, twisting and turning through curve after bend after recursive hairpin into the mountains. This would definitely qualify as one of the world’s great biking roads, were it not for hazards that include the massively overloaded local minibus taxis, which save on tyre wear by cornering on their door handles, while doing something that should be deeply disturbing to Newton’s ghost. (I did originally mistype ‘goat’ there, which would have neatly covered another local road obstruction/incipient kebab). Then there’s the semi-synchronised bus-overtaking-petrol-tanker-overtaking-lorry-overtaking-bicycle-overtaking-cow-overtaking-ant scenario, often happening in both directions simultaneously. The semi- bit simply means that it usually works. Usually. I’m also being slightly economical with the observation on the road surface – it’s an 80:20 thing, the 20% being the non-existent bit, with it frequently passing between the two states several times in the course of one hairpin bend. Most impressive are the parts where the road has collapsed, been landslid upon or blown up, where it simply zigs onto a compacted bit of whatever the local landscape offers. At such times, brakes are for wusses.

I do however keep fantasising about blagging a bike for an expedition – possibly time for a “Dear Ducati…” letter. Then I remember that the Gorilla Fund have in fact bought a motorcycle for the Virunga Wildlife Clubs staff. OK, a brakeless Yamaha 125 ain’t quite the same, but hey – there’s one in Ruhengeri. And how do I know it’s brakeless? Right.

As we chug up into the mountains, we pass through a complete textbook of plants at altitude –

heavy forest and maize crops low down, giving way to the ubiquitous curse of the introduced eucalyptus, banana and tea plantations, copses of strange yellow wobbly things that appear to be clumping together for mutual protection and then some rather splendid Norwegian-style pine forests. Cresting the mountains, we drop down a few hundred metres onto the lava plain of Northern Rwanda, and pretty much straight into Ruhengeri.

Ruhengeri is the largest town in this part of the world, and hangs around in the middle of a fertile lava plain on the very edge of the Virunga mountains. I’m going there to set up new computers at the DFGF office there and at the Virunga Wildlife Clubs HQ, then to teach people (using my best Franglais, with translation into French, Kinarwanda and, occasionally, English) how to use the things, starting with basic computer skills and working up to digital video editing. In three days. Fortunately, they’re keen. One other thing: Ruhengeri is the jumping off point for trekking into the Virungas to see the Mountain Gorillas, something on the upside of desirable.

A couple of words about the scenery: Serious stuff. These volcanoes lurk, big time. Let's get this in perspective: the Alps top out, rather unimpressively in my humble wossname, at about 4500m, with Mont Blanc. Outside of the Himalaya, the Andes and a couple of bits of the Rockies, there's little pointy scenery in the world that exceeds 4-5000m. The highest peak in the Virungas reaches 4700m, so the scenery here is very very pointy indeed. It’s not just a question of being in the shadow of one dominating and smugly ostentatious photogenic mountain (cue Zermatt), but of sitting in the middle of a flat lava plain, encircled on three sides (of a circle? Hey, you know what I mean, already!) by no less than six 3000m+ peaks, these being, clockwise from the West, Karisimbi, Mikeno, Bisoke, Sabyinyo and Gahinga and Muhabura. All volcanoes, and all resembling child’s drawings of the Platonic prototype.

That’s except for Sabyinyo, which looks like a whole bunch of such drawings, all crumpled up and carelessly dropped in a heap. There’s some world-class trekking and scrambling there. Rather, there once was, and is just now starting up again, but it’s not the easiest of jobs for the mine clearance teams. For the moment, anywhere off-piste would be a case of “trekking roulette” So following the local guides is strongly recommended – a wisdom I shall, for once, heed...

Karisoke, Dian Fossey’s original research station and the spot where she’s buried, sits somewhere on the saddle between Karisimbi and Bisoke. It’s still operated by the US branch of DFGF, despite having been through several derelictions, burn-downs and blow-ups over the years – assorted guerrilla groups (the less evolved sort) tend to pass through every so often, nick the computers, then throw them away when they discover that they can’t receive CNN or The Disney Channel.

Having discovered that our preferred hotel, the Muhabura, was full for the first night, we ended up at a brand new guest house attached to the local Episcopal mission. All very well, but a 10pm curfew and no beer made for a early and sober evening. We made up for that after moving to the Muhabura the following morning. A remarkably early morning too – I was woken at about 6am by loud and repetitive noises, remarkably reminiscent of a large number of people slowly hitting rocks with other rocks. Curiosity got the better of me and I opened the curtains. To see a large number of people sitting around outside, slowly hitting rocks with other rocks. Turns out that they’re extending the mission, and when you live on a lava plain, job number one is to break up the local scenery to both clear the ground and provide the building materials. There’s clearly an ecclesiastical arms race going on locally – Ruhengeri sports a very shiny, very new and extremely large Catholic Cathedral. So the Anglicans are now building a larger one just down the road. To what end, precisely?

The hotel of preference in town, the Muhabura, is an oldish place, with a splendid row of fairly recent bullet holes across the rather naff palm’n’beach mural on the dining room wall. I also discovered that my bed sported a fine line in 101 Dalmation sheets – tasteful. And a very large cast iron bath, with a plentiful supply of hot water. Bliss.
That morning was spent not having a hangover and visiting a couple of the development projects that DFGF sponsors: a training centre in Imbaraga, where local farmers are being taught sustainable agriculture and how to market their produce and then a Batwa (pygmy) village in Kinigi.

These are the area’s original inhabitants, with unrivalled knowledge of the vegetation, terrain and animals of the area, yet they were forcibly dispossessed of their ancestral lands when the Virunga park was created in 1925. Since then, they’ve survived (just) on the edge of society, without land, status or opportunity. The DFGF project has bought them land and helped them get started on growing income-generating crops. In this case it’s maize, which, as it grows to about 3m high, immediately and with desperate lack of correctness brings to mind the very, very old joke about the Fukawi tribe. And if you want that one explained, you a) missed out on the basics of childhood humour and b) now have all the information you need to work it out.

Now for Mountain Gorillas. Big things, eat shoots and leaves. Not many left. And unfortunately absent – I’d been planning to go see Group 13, one of the 4 family groups that are habituated to human presence – group 13 also being the one that contains Amy (Akago), the gorilla featured on the DFGF posters and their adoption scheme. Good stuff, except that the week I’d arrived, they’d gone walkabout with their new Silverback, somewhere in the direction of Congo. In gorilla tracking history, two other groups, 9 and 11, have previously vanished into the uncharted depths of the Congo side of the Virungas, so it was a mere extension of the arithmetic sequence when 13 disappeared in a similar direction. The fact that they were the group I was scheduled to go see was a mere detail in the cosmic scheme of things. It did however completely bugger up the schedule, to the point that, as I was going to be in Congo next week anyway, there was a plot afoot to talk to the local army commander (without being entirely sure which army-de-jour happens to be in control) and go into the Virungas from the Congo side with a military patrol in search of Amy & Co. Less a needle in a haystack, more a gorilla in a forest the size of Scotland. But with fewer bagpipes and more guns (probably an improvement as regards the Geneva Conventions). That was as of this afternoon (Friday).

Sitting with Emmanuel (the Ruhengeri DFGF manager) and François in the bar of the Muhabura Hotel the same evening, I ran into John, one of the local employees of Volcanoes Safaris and asked him, more in the spirit of depressed irony than anything else, whether there was any news of Group 13. Straight answer: "D’accord – they reappeared this afternoon". Cue frantic telephonic contact with everyone from the ORTPN (Office Rwandese de Tourisme et des Parcs National) to the Pope. I now think – that's "think" – I'm back on for Sunday.

Emmanuël and François are taking me out on the town in Ruhengeri this evening – no idea what to expect...

...Several hours later: that was fun: A small group of us ended up in a pleasant and characterful local bar – bamboo walled courtyard, lighting more subtle than the usual fluorescent strips & Zouk music – serving beer (cold or hot, according to demand) and Irish Potatoes: enormous and excellent (non-famine) spuds, halved and fried – the ultimate potato wedges, served in a huge shared bowl, with many flame-grilled joints of levre (hare), napalm-strength Burundian chilli sauce and the compulsory Mutzig (I’m staying off the Primus). This is owned, and brewed locally, I discover, by Heineken. There goes the romance of travel and discovery. So bring on the gourd-brewed banana beer, now please. Whatever else, this trip has convinced me of the rôle of beer as a universal cultural lubricant, transcending all cultural and linguistic barriers, largely by allowing us to cheerfully make complete, utter and (most importantly) mutual fools of ourselves in the pursuit of shared understanding. There seem to be far too many po-faced socio-academics who regard it as noise rather than aid. They should get out more. Faustin, one of the people I was with, runs MEA, a local sculpture project supported by DFGF – he’s got almost no English, but my improving French did enough to get us started – common interests and arm-waving kept the conversation going. That’s when I discovered that he’s a Masters in Fine Arts and spent seven years living in Kiev, at the conservatoire there. That’s a few more assumptions kicked into touch... I also had to explain a major news event on the day, relayed on satellite TV to the football-crazed Rwandese: the Arsenal streaker. This was something quite beyond their comprehension – far beneath the dignity of the Africans and the Belgie-Franco-Africaines. I had to agree.

It’s the following morning, and I’m finishing this off as I’m having breakfast on the terrace of the Muhabura – the sun is burning the early mist off the mountains and the hotel’s creaky old music system is blasting opera across the town – nothing simple or easy, you understand – sounds like Strauss’s Elektra, not yer average easy-listening-best-of stuff. I’m instantly reminded of Fitzcarraldo – the Herzog/Kinski film where a crazed German is trying to build an opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle – part of his mission involves hauling a substantial cruise boat over a mountain, for no apparently good reason. At this point Praveen, boss of Volcanoes Safaris, wanders onto the terrace. He pauses to take in the music, turns around and says, “My God, this is such a Fitzcarraldo moment”… We talk over breakfast and he describes the scene a couple of years previously, when they’d been building one of their camps in the Virungas and were having to haul truckloads of mud for the bricks up from the plains – wrong type of mud in the mountains, apparently. Trouble was, it was El Niño weather – pouring down, and the battle was to get the mud up the mountain, dumped and then used, before rain and gravity took it all the way back down again. Now that is what I’d call a Fitzcarraldo moment.

Now, dilemma time – do I send this now, or wait until I’ve been gorillaing? On balance, I think now – if I see the group, it’ll deserve a ramble all to itself and, if I don’t, I’ll be a grumpy bastard for days. And please excuse temporal inconsistency and inexactitude – I tend to type notes as they occur to me, with but a cursory pass for consistency before sending, so you’ll find that the ‘might do’, the ‘am doing’ and the ‘did’ become just a tad confused – our language really hasn’t evolved for this sort of thing. Having excused myself on tense, I’ll now do likewise for time – please ignore computer clock insanity and go by episodic title – out here on the edge of far forever, strange things happen to space and time. Alternatively, I screwed up the clock setting on my Mac after the battery got bounced out.

Next instalment: Gorillas. Or sulky silence. You should be so lucky.
R

Dark and Continent: Fit the Second: Green, Pleasant and Landed

Bonjour tout le monde!

Mais je crois que c'etait une pays Francophone et les gens ris en plus quand l'Harris s'atttempte a parler Français. Maintenant, je retourner a l'Anglais... Gawd, that was too much like hard work – fortunately most people here speak English at some level or other, particularly the Swedes, Germans, Danes and the other entirely unsuited pale Northern types who seem to make up an unfeasibly large proportion of the population of Kigali. Which goes a long way towards describing a country that is being almost entirely (re)built with the blood money of a guilty global community, which having entirely failed to intervene and prevent the internecine slaughter of a million people and the displacement of many more, is attempting to salve its conscience by sending a million-and-one NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations) in to do whatever it is they do: generate acronyms for the most part – UNHCR, UNESCO, ICT, WHO, FAO, ICRC, MSF, AFACOD, POPOF, AIMPO, WI... And when the Rural Agriculture pour Protection de l’Environment came to town with their be-logo’d vehicles, they were nearly lynched before Vince was able to have a word in their collective ear.

Having literally run into my DFGF colleague Dan (minor bruising only) at Nairobi airport, we were picked up at Kigali by Vince, the DFGF Field Director. Fortunately he’s just done a good deal with a Danish supplier for a brand new Mitsubishi Pajero 4WD, so rather than being rattled through the countryside in some superannuated rustbucket, we’re trolling around in smugly air-conditioned comfort. Makes a change to see the things working for a living, rather than just tackling the rigors of the Surrey school run. About half the vehicles on the road seem to be in ubiquitous UN/NGO white, and there’s clearly a hierarchy of machismo going on – from the Danish human rights bods in their cheap Toyota pick-ups (really bad haircuts, guys...), to the UNHCR and MSF with their Landcruisers bristling with satcomms aerials, wombat bars (I haven’t the heart to tell them...) and river-crossing gear. As in Surrey, these huge vehicles are suspiciously clean and unscarred. Scurrilous gossip has it that most of the fighting in town is now between the dozen or so competing and frantically self-justifying NGOs that descend like harpies on anything vaguely resembling a cause.]]> Kigali itself shows little superficial sign of bleakness, trauma or depression – it’s a busily self-important town of (I guess) something over half-a-million people (excluding NGO employees), whose overall size is hard to grasp, as it rolls across a stunningly beautiful range of lush green hills. I am now in serious danger of overusing the word ‘lush’, both as adjective and noun. Well, that’s upland Africa. Actually upland by 1127m, according to my GPS, thereby geekly settling a long argument that’s been raging amongst a whole bunch of locals. This is a good thing (the altitude, not the argument), as it makes for a climate that is pleasantly warm without being excessively humid, except for just before the obligatory mid-afternoon thunderstorm. Daytime temperature is running at around 29-32c – even this cold-climate mammal finds it almost perfect, and we’re just into the dry season, so the dust ain’t too bad and all the flowers are out and preening themselves for the camera.

Kigali is a strange mix: A modern and attractive airport (no photos – getting self shot on day one not part of master plan), where an assortment of sleek modern corporate jets sit alongside evil-looking Russian gunships, a brand-new tarmac highway into town, which dives into a sculpture-laden roundabout (this being an ex-French colony, the rule is Priorité a droite, which makes driving even more deeply scary than the African norm), followed by a left turn then immediate loss of fillings, composure and possibly lunch as the car plummets into a deeply gullied red earth track that laughingly claims to be a major local road. Or it would if all the signs hadn’t been torn down in the last round of fighting.

I got talking to a French lawyer on the plane (well, we were both using Macs, so it seemed churlish not to) – turned out she’s a defence lawyer with the ICT (International Criminal Tribunal), based in Arusha in Tanzania – defending some of the more notorious of the 100,000+ detainees from the genocide investigation. A job I can admire her for doing, while not even remotely beginning to envy her the work. This is where we get into the business of pink uniforms and beautiful people: driving through Kigali yesterday we passed a large French-colonial red-brick fortress. Behind the open gates of this building was a large square, in which were milling around a large number of people in rather fetching pink pajamas. Vince answered our raised eyebrows, “It’s the Kigali prison, and the ones in pink are genocide prisoners”. Remember, the gates were open. “Oh, they all know that if they stepped outside, they’d be killed in seconds by the townspeople”. There was some quiet time after that. What’s also causing concern now is the government’s attitude towards truth and reconciliation – the whole justice process is such a drain on government resources that they’ve started allowing any prisoner who claims remorse and can get a victim’s relative to express a level of forgiveness to go free, but without any job, training or support of any kind. And these are people who, whatever the original crime, have been traumatised for years in what are apparently about the worst prison conditions in the world and who have come out with nothing more than an almost certainly HIV+ souvenir of their time inside. Unsurprisingly, this is worrying no small number of the townsfolk, of all backgrounds. Of which a little: the two main races here and in the surrounding areas are the Tutsi and the Hutu, both now mixing unconcernedly in the daily life of Kigali. While the Hutu are, like the majority of us, cheerfully variable and generally tending to the mesomorph, many of the Tutsi are amongst the most beautiful and elegant people of both sexes I’ve ever seen (recipients of this e-mail excepted, naturally. No, that didn’t work, did it?). Drop Naomi Campbell into the middle of this lot and she’d vanish without trace. Now there’s a thought.

Accommodation in Kigali is in Vince’s large bungalow on one of the posher hills (a better class of road gully), but any thoughts of missing the service at one of the two major hotels in town were soon dispelled by the presence of cook, housekeeper and guard/gardener. Then there’s the two dogs – one an amiable lunatic with the disposition of Piglet and the co-ordination of a Red Setter, and then there’s the other. I’d wondered why the central cubby on the car’s dashboard contained most of a loaf of bread. “It’s for the dog.”. Uh-huh... Apparently the dog gets v upset if Vince has visitors and tends to attack him at such times. The bread is for pacification and distraction. The couple of times when there’s been a forgetting of the bread and an absence of guard to tie up the dog have nearly led to a night spent in the car. I just got growled at, more I felt for form’s sake than anything else. I growled back, also for form’s sake, and all is now peace and light between us. His dogs are uncommon, simply through presence rather than behaviour, as apparently nearly all the dogs in Rwanda were killed during and after the genocide.

Having settled in and used the phone line for local dial-up a few times (maxing out at 14,400bps for anyonewhogivesadamn – about the speed of forgotten and curdled mayonnaise dripping off a spoon. And don’t ask me how I know that.), I found that there were certain times of day when the connection would drop for no other good reason than it was raining. This got me curious, so I followed the telephone line, to discover a box, and a small dish – turns out that the most reliable phone lines are by line-of-sight microwave links across the town. Trouble is that microwave links degrade in rain, and it does that a lot here. Put that lot together with the need to save bandwidth and we soon arrive at e-mails relatively heavy on the wittering and light on the pics. That’s my excuse etc. etc...

Having arrived on the Saturday evening, we had Sunday lunch poolside at the Umbongo (no, really! – or v similar) Hotel. Very smart place, with views over the hills of Kigali, the hotel gardens and the huge bottle of Primus, the local Sorghum millet beer, that’s just been placed in front of me. That’s all very well when there’s not too much too do for the afternoon, but this is a lunch that requires full and constant vigilance, lest we suffer the depredations of the hotel’s infamous Central African Cheeseburger Kite. According to my bird book, this specimen is in fact a Black Kite, albeit with a specialised diet – anything it can snaffle from diners’ tables, with a virtuoso display of speed, dexterity and massive disregard for its cholesterol levels.

Makes lunch into something of a combat game, with an unpleasant parallel to paintball... It does look like my blithe assumption that I’d go to Africa and, by the mere fact, lose weight was naïve in the extreme – not only have I spent rather too much time in hotels, bars and restaurants that range from the simply decent to the rather splendid, but Vince’s cook takes visitors as his cue to show off his skill with carbohydrates, at least twice a day. And this in a country where people drive everywhere, usually for good reason.

The last couple of days have been spent at the DFGF Europe offices in central Kigali, sorting comms and shiny new computers out – won’t bore you any further with the details, but we’re feeling quite proud about the effective sophistication (as opposed to gratuitous technocracy) we’ve achieved. That done, it’s time for a change – by the time I get around to another vague rambling, I’ll have spent a few days up in the volcanoes around Ruhengeri, setting up computers, cameras and comms there, then training the staff there in the delights of the digital lifestyle. They can then train me in the art of survival in the presence of Sorghum beer. That’s followed at the weekend by a trek into the Virungas themselves, in search of Guhonda, the Silverback of the Sabyinyo Group and his extended family of relations and friends (the boundaries blur rather in gorilla society). I shall come back with my camera or on it. Or something like that. More anon. And Vince has just opened a bottle of Congolese wine – greyish, with pink highlights, so I’d best take cover.

See y’all soon – Richard ‘Stanley’ Harris.

Dark and Continent: Fit the First: Ugandan Discussions

So this is it: It's a cold, wet Wednesday in January and I've packed my bag, having forcibly reminded myself not to pack thermals and fleeces, but go large on t-shirts, sun screen and Lomotil. And as long as I haven't mixed a random cat into it, I'm ready to go – a month in East and Central Africa beckons, so I reckon I'll just have to grin'n'bear it.

For those I haven't already bored to oblivion (hello, anyone out there?), the theory is that I'm going to do information agey things for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, to take a few pics and – lest I could forget – go play the very amateur Attenborough with some mountain gorillas. For the primate pedants amongst us, that's Gorilla gorilla berengei – the 600-strong remnant population of the Mountain Gorilla, the centenary of whose discovery by Europeans was commemorated last year. That's commemorated rather than celebrated, given that Capt. Rupert Berenger's approach to animal identification was very much of its time – he cheerfully shot a couple of them and had them dragged home for investigation over a cuppa. We don't do that any more – I hope.

First stop is Kampala for a few days, via Nairobi: to find out about the rollout of various telecoms services across Uganda and neighbouring states – the gorillas, bless 'em, hang around on the borderland between S Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire), so anything that improves comms between different DFGF offices, field staff when mobile, the London HQ and the rest of the world can only be a good thing. It does look like Bwindi might get DSL before Hindhead. Amazing coincidence number 1: I discover that my friend Isabel is going to be out in Kampala on the same dates, running a workshop for local communications companies and regulators – everyone I need to talk to in one room at exactly the right time. And someone to go see the Kampala nightlife with. Which we did – I think – everything did get a little hazy...

]]> First though, I had to get there: If Heathrow check-in was a breeze, once I'd left a corner of my big bag on the trolley so that it came under the weight limit, then security was a hurricane: the conveyor belt stopped, went forward, went back, then spat out my baglette. The staff looked politely confused, took ALL my toys out, looked more confused, then asked me what they were. This took some time: camera was reasonably obvious, Palm easy enough – GPS, iPod, Microdrive, folding tripod, WaveLAN card and Bluetooth adapters less so. And, "What's that?". "My watch – can't you tell?". That was before we got onto my rucksack with laptop and more cameras. And I used to think I had Wednesdays sorted.

Kenya Airways left on time, landed early and have since repeated the process multiple times. No complaints there. A minor Frank Spencer moment of mine on the Nairobi leg left my and the fortunately empty seat next to me well saturated with gin, tonic and little cheesy biscuits (soggy remains of). A slightly damp and sleepless night on the aircraft came to a spectacular end with a breathtakingly gorgeous ribbon-of-fire dawn along the coast of Kenya, just about the point we crossed the equator – a first for me. I was slightly relieved that no-one threw me overboard then forcibly shaved me (or whatever is PC these days for crossing the line) – maybe they decided I'd made my own gesture with the gin. A quick change of planes in Nairobi, an hour or so's flight across Lake Victoria (lake? they call this a lake?!) and we're descending through the morning haze into the green lushness of Entebbe. It's about 40km from Kampala, so there's ample time to get reacquainted with the generic developing world attitude towards the combination of life, death and the internal combustion engine. Cultivation of a certain Zen fatalism is required, and rapidly.

I've been booked into the Speke Hotel – not large, but apparently the centre of life in Kampala. This is a good thing – beautiful wood floors, four or five outdoor restaurants, a club in the grounds and a ready supply of hot & cold running cocktails. I also soon discover the local early evening entertainment: Pick table and order cold beer of choice. Then wait, having made sure that large areas of the adjacent pavement have been dug (or blown) up, and that a few storm drain covers have been tactically removed. At some point someone is bound to wander along, camera in hand, doing the full Fotherington-Thomas bit: "Hello trees, hello flowers, hello sodding great vulture in the tree". Attention definitely elsewhere – the rest being inevitable, with style marks awarded at the discretion of onlookers. Yes, of course I bloody did – and there's nothing like a befeathered heap of interested lurking menace over your shoulder as an incentive to get off the ground quickly. Pah.

The comms workshop was held at the Nile Hotel, just up the road (pavements permitting) – a fine venue, with just one obvious problem: the week-long fundamentalist revival meeting going on in a huge tent in the grounds. Nothing gently ecumenical about this lot – hellfire, brimstone and damnation at 110 decibels is one thing; having it from 7am every day is something else entirely. And when they get onto, "righteously smiting the ungodly", I start to take it personally. All the bodies gathered together did however do one thing – create a huge thermal above the gathering, so I felt that the sight of dozens of non-denominational vultures circling above the event had a certain fundamental rightness to it.

First night, first meal: The Ethnic Frontier restaurant at the Speke just had to be done: great, great Indian food, with just one crisp, green succulent chilli sitting there on my plate, radiating Carrollian temptation. First taste was good – v light and flavoursome, with just a piquant overtone of the horror to come. Then, like a good wine, it developed: "I'm getting gooseberries... ...no... a little hint of petrol... ...and someone's just ignited the petrol..." It all became a bit of a blur at that point. I'm writing this at breakfast (on the terrace, naturellement), and it's still letting me know that it didn't give up without a fight. And the local banana-based gin is Waragi – not, please note Isabel, Wasabi, although after drinking a few glasses, I'm not so sure she wasn't right. An aromatic little number, which comes in plastic sachets, presumably because it would etch the glass of a bottle.

Friday was meetings in the morning with some of the most hospitable and helpful people I've ever had the fortune to meet – from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Eritrea and other points South. The Ugandan Communications Commissioner wound the meeting up for lunchtime, and I then blagged onto a coach trip to the Kasubi tombs of the Kings of Buganda (Uganda is apparently an Edwardian spelling mistake) where, with the greatest care and respect, I entirely failed to observe protocol: I stood up when I should have sat down; I sat down when I should have stood up; I got confused by a translation from Kiswahili and promptly stepped into the area of the building reserved for the royal wives. Unfortunately, they were still around. The shrine is both a huge version of the trad East African clan hut and a party venue for the current king and his 84 wives, who live in the smaller huts around the compound. I'm not at all sure about all this inviting of the ancestors to one's parties – it's bad enough when your parents are around.

Friday night was time to head downtown with Is and Bill, an entertaining bloke who's a telecoms regulation consultant working with the CTO. Sam's restaurant did great steak, good wine and cost two-thirds of not very much. Enlivened by some localish merlot-a-like, we then hit the town, ending up at the club in the grounds of the Speke. We'd met the DJ earlier and he'd suggested we come along – having a bop was an option for all of 10 seconds – one look at the quality of the dancing and, observing that the one white guy on the dance floor was making a complete prat of himself, we grabbed a table and became mere observers of the spectacle. Walking back between hotels at 3am showed that the local tourist authority is obviously concerned that all its visitors are enjoying themselves – at least I assume it's they who employ all the solicitous young women who wait around on the corners in the evenings to make sure that everyone is "having a good time" and who offer to show visitors around. Very considerate and public-spirited of them.

More seriously, although Uganda has been one of Africa's success stories economically for the last decade, the combination of the fallout on tourism and foreign investment from 9/11 and the rising toll of HIV-related deaths destroying families is making it harder and harder for anyone to make a living – while the international trade will, eventually, recover, it's very hard to see what's going to happen to those countries where HIV/AIDS has effectively decimated the working-age population – we're sufficiently concerned about an aging demographic in the UK and the provision being made for them: now imagine a developing country where that shift is happening almost overnight, without there being any national infrastructure to cushion the blow. If anyone deserves to get through this, it's the Ugandans – I don't however see how, as the only obvious beneficiaries of the whole thing appear to be the many delegates attending multiple HIV conferences and colloquia at posh hotels in Kampala.

Now, after a night like that, whose idea was it to arrange a pickup at 7:30 am to go visit Jinja, Uganda's second city? Ouch. Jinja is about an hour-and-a-half from Kampala and is at the point where Speke stood on a bluff overlooking Lake Victoria and realised that the river he was watching cascade out of the lake was, in fact, the source of the Nile. It's also the point where we staggered into the Jinja Sailing Club and refused to do anything until several pots of tea had kicked us into something approximating life. We then hired a boat from the club and wobbled off across the lake to do the Nile thing. Stunning light over the lake and more bird life than I've ever seen outside of Sri Lanka. Then came the mad rush back to Kampala, thence to Entebbe, Nairobi and now onwards to Kigali, capital of Rwanda. Of which, much more later.

And apologies for sending this out as a circular – outgoing bandwidth is a little limited and slow here, so if it's all tooo boring, please do just bin it.
all the v best
Richard

Dark and Continent: Introduction

A series of illuminated e-mail epistles delivered to the philistines during the course of wandering and working around Central and East Africa, January and February 2003. To be taken, for the most part, lightly. In the event of any digression between observed reality and the contents, please allow reality the final word.

The author takes no responsibility for the consequences should any person rely on this as any form of guide to travel or behaviour in the region, up to and including the contraction of embarrassing diseases, famine, war, hangover, imprisonment and/or deportation.