The Agrinautica

   To break from the narrative again, presently I'm taking a creative writing class at the local community college. Or at least trying to. So far I haven't been able to actually sign up for it officially, because WR 11 "Writing Short Fiction," has a prerequisite, and unlike real college where you could ignore prereqs at will, the system won't let me register without taking WR 201 "Intro to College Writing." And what's more, I can't sign up for THAT either, because THAT hasa prereq: WR 301 "Intro to Writing." And furthermore, THAT has a prereq: RD 370 "Reading for Success," which has a corequisite, RD 371 "Reading Lab." ... are you freaking kidding me?? That sounds like a kindergarten class! I sent an email to admissions politely asking if since I have a bachelor of arts degree I can be excused from "intro to college writing" and everything prerequisite to that. I'd think at most they'd maybe want confirmation that I have the degree, nope, they want me to have my transcript sent to them with the classes that meet the requisite requirements highlighted. But even if I didn't have that to go on, are you kidding me they want people to successfully pass four dumb classes before they'll be allowed to try writing short fiction?

   But that's not the rant I meant to write right now. Actually I wanted to share something I'd written for class. The teacher has obligingly allowed me to fully participate while we try to figure out if I can be excused from fingerpainting "reading for success."



   The following is for an assignment where we were to describe a character by their actions rather than extensive physical description. It's not actually fiction but shhhhh. Takes place during the Guinea project six months ago:


There’s an App For That
   We’re sitting on the porch in the dark, just watching the rain and the constant lightning that flashes silently over the corrugated metal roofs of the other cottages in the village, when an idea strikes me. I take a little notepad out of my pocket and write the word “stolid” in it. Within 24 hours my only pen would be lost, and this would be the only word in the notepad two weeks later. It was the appropriate word to describe Baro.
   The long warbling call to prayer suddenly breaks out, from Baro’s phone.
   “Come, let’s break fast.” He says to me with a smile on his stolid face. Other people are already coming by, someone hands us umbrellas, and we step onto the volcanic gravel of the village paths, while the rain pours down around us in big fat cold drops. Baro hobbles along with a pronounced limp in his left leg, we make a little informal procession under the umbrellas, around some cottages, between tall stalks of corn, past some round thatched huts.

Tea By Moonlight
   Most days, if it wasn’t too wet, Baro would spend the hours after the breaking of the fast tending a teakettle over a little fire of coals, squatting just off the porch for hours. He made it from loose leaf tea, repeatedly pouring it from the kettle into a tin cup and back into the kettle. He’d spend an hour or two at this, like a long slow ritual, as the moon slowly rose overhead. With no electricity, you become acutely aware of the phase of the moon, especially since Ramadan and fasting wouldn’t be over until the moon finished its cycle.
   With nothing but the light from the moon and the stars, and the orange glow of the coals under the kettle, I would think about how very much like his nomadic ancestors Baro looked at this moment.

Venn Diagrams
   Later, when we’d gotten a generator that growled away under a nearby tree, Baro gave a presentation on business planning, standing in front of the room in slacks and a collared shirt, pointing with a pointer at diagrams he’d drawn on a giant flip-pad of paper as he explained them in French to the attentive audience. Flow charts, cluster-diagrams, key words, it would have fit in just fine in any board-room.
   As he hobbled out of the building his eye caught an herb he recognized in a thicket by the path. He slowly bent down and plucked a sprig, holding up, with a broad smile on his rounded face,
   “This is very good for blood pressure!”
   “This is very good for digestion!” he’d say later about a different herb.
   “This is very good for achy joints” he’d say still later, proudly holding another sprig of foliage. And then he acquired some aloe vera, somewhere, and attributed all of the above and more to it. Thereafter every day after the breaking of the fast he’d carefully, lovingly, ritualistically, slice off a sliver of his tapered aloe vera blade and eat it like it was the sacred wafer.

Connections
   One of his proudest possessions was a book sized solar panel, with which he could charge his phone. He’d prop it up on the ground when the sun was shining and collect enough energy to make a phone call. Once a day he called his family, back in Mali. Born in Timbuktu, he’d recently migrated to Guinea to avoid the instability back home. I wondered how long it had been since he’d seen them. I also wondered if we’d be able to get out of Guinea ourselves, with the burgeoning ebola outbreak in the capitol, Mali could become our only way out. He offered me some aloe vera, but I still got sick, and ended my stay lying in bed in the capitol, coughing, listening to the rain and the long warbling call to prayer.

Oops I guess he wasn't wearing western business attire at the time. Ah well, there's your fiction.

Wednesday, November 26th, Addis Ababa - The plan this day was to catch a flight to Mek'ele in the northern highlands of Ethiopia. As luck would have it, this was not to be.

   We had a nice breakfast in the Dessie Hotel's restaurant. On the television, as had been the case on all the televisions in the airports the day before, are scenes of burning cars in the United States -- the Ferguson verdict had just come out. It reminded me of how misleading the news can be, just like an alarming number of people in the States seem to think ebola is all over Africa because of what they see on the news , to see the news in Africa you could easy get the impression that the entirety of the United States was filled with burning cars and riots at the time.

   Around noon we checked out of the hotel, and loaded our stuff into the hotel's car. They had courtesy survice to and from the airport, which was nice because it was way across town. In this case, they obligingly agreed even to take us on our planned adventure of visiting the Ethiopian Airlines office downtown and then meeting some friends of mine for lunch before continuing on to the airport. All for no charge!

   Driving through the city of Addis one definitely gets the impression of a lesser level of development than Nairobi. I was told that Addis is trying to set itself up as a regional capitol for all of Africa, and they do have the African Union headquarters (a distinctive tall clean modern building not far from our hotel), but Nairobi is going to give them tough competition. Traffic's certainly better than Nairobi -- there can still be traffic on the main thoroughfares in the city but everywhere outside of Addis there seemed to be a downright sparce number of vehicles on the road. I'm told cars are outrageously expensive, even compared to developed countries, due to both the cost of importing them and a tax on them somewhere in the range of 100%. One might get the false impression the roads in the capitol are all dirt, but that's just because they seem to perpetually have about an inch of mud over the asphalt. The whole city seemed like a giant construction yard, with seemingly every fifth lot being under construction. Another fifth of all lots seemed to be a bank for some reason. I guess the government is trying to heavily encourage investment by mandating a large number of physical banking locations, which seems to be a heavy handed and misguided development strategy sadly typical of the government.
   One interesting thing I saw more than once at these construction sites -- women, wearing hard hats, caked in dried mud, operating cement mixers and other construction equipment .. wearing dresses.



   The Ethiopian Airlines office downtown turned out to be very crowded and busy. We took a number and it took about twenty minutes before it came up. We'd reserved our flight to Mek'ele through a travel agent friend of our friend Simon way back in Moshi, so we anticipated this just being a matter of paying for the ticket and physically receiving it. As it turns out flights for the next day would cost half as much (around $150 round trip vs $300), I forget if this was higher than what we'd been told back in Moshi or if the next day was just cheaper than we'd been aware of. While we were at it we booked the rest of our Ethiopian flights -- I'd be leaving Mek'ele earlier than Doug to fly to Bahir Dar, spending one full day there, and then returning to Addis, and then to Nairobi one day earlier than Doug. While our flights home from Nairobi were both on the 7th of December, mine was 20 minutes after midnight on that date (ie really the night of the 6th) and his was the evening of the 7th, and he'd decided he hated Nairobi and didn't want to spend one more minute there than he needed to. It took us about forty minutes to make these plans, and they only had one chair for the two of us, and I had to lean over the counter to hear the agent, so it was all kind of tedious. Also, these plans would of course later change. But my flights came out to less than $200, which was nice.

   Next we proceeded to meet my friend by the piassa. When I'd been in Ethiopia in 2012 my friend my interpreter in Nigeria (Dayo) had put me in contact with a girl (Etfwork) he for some reason knew in Ethiopia, but we'd never managed to meet. Still though we'd been facebook friends ever since, which, you know, makes us practically related. When you meet up with an Ethiopian girl, it seems they invariably show up with a friend. Usuaully they don't warn you ahead of time but on this occasion she advised me she was bringing her sister Rahel, which was great because I'd have Doug with me as well.
   The Piasso area seemed a little more of an upscale shopping area than the rest of town, not that the road wasn't still covered in mud, but fashionably dressed girls with glittery purses were strolling about. My phone plan didn't work in Ethiopia so we had to depend on a time set hours before and a general location "by the cinema by the piassa." We had our driver drop us off and then find somewhere nearby to hang out while we went looking for the girls. I wasn't sure exactly how we were to get ahold of him again either as we disappeared into the crowd. I was really worried we'd never find them but a few minutes later a girl was hailing us through the crowd, it was Eftwork! A few minutes later her sister joined us and we all sat down in a cafe for a quick cup of coffee.
   Both girls, as it happens, were gorgeous. Eftwork very extroverted, with an explosion of curly brown hair; Rahel was much more introverted, her black glossy hair fell in cascades over jangly gold earrings, and she was very quiet, especially at first. She had recently graduated from Bahir Dar University, and also earned a lot of points with me when I asked what her favorite movie was and she said she prefers to read. Their family was originally from Eritrea, but when war broke out between Ethiopia and Eritrea in the 90s they were permanently separated from that country.

   A quick word about Ethiopian names, Rahel seems to be the most common girls name, with Samrawit a close second in my highly informal polling. Among the guys it seems to be Daniel and Girmay. Haven't met any other Etfworks. An occasionally-encountered girls name I think is pretty cool is Tsion.

   From there we went to buy a new piece of luggage for me, since my tiny piece of luggage could no longer hold all the sweet loot I'd accumulated (I just had a little 5kg sports bag). Bought a bigger piece of wheeled luggage from a roadside vendor as it began to drizzle (had been dreary all day). Then we returned to our hotel to check back in, since we were no longer leaving that day. Our driver seemed a bit miffed that we weren't going to the airport as planned, and I felt a bit like we'd accidentally taken advantage of the hotel's free airport shuttle to just go around town, but we tipped the driver very well and this more than satisfied him. Had lunch at the hotel restaurant:



   We then took a taxi back downtown and the girls showed us around. One sight that left a particularly strong impression was the "Red Terror Museum." In the early eighties the monarchy under Emperor Haile Salassie was overthrown by a communist regime called the Derg (which just sounds evil in my opinion), and it was, predictably, tyrannical and oppressive. The Red Terror museum had many exhibits pertaining to this, among other things a room with shelves and shelves and shelves of human skulls recovered from a mass grave. That was.. very sobering. The docent was a very dignified and well spoken man in maybe his forties, but completely bald. He told us how he was arrested when he was 15 for no reason, and spent the next eight years being tortured and in captivity. Specifically I remember he said they pulled his toenails out. Even when he was finally released, he didn't know what to do, he'd spent his formative years in the depths of a dungeon and he was still watched and persecuted by the government, had no friends, no family left, people were afraid to help him because they knew the government was watching him. In particular he seemed to get a bit emotional when he talked about how the leaders of that cruel regime had had their sentences pardoned and lived free to this day.

   I've always studiously avoided being out in an African city after dark but as the sky darkened the girls seemed unworried, and I figured if they felt safe I probably shouldn't worry. Doug wanted to visit an Ethiopian church so we went to the one right downtown. Ethiopian churches aren't mainly buildings, like most churches, so much as an enclosure with a building in the middle -- the priest preaches from the porch of the building to congregants around it. The enclosure if full of trees. So even in the city, the enclosure of the church is a refuge of shady trees. In this case it was some sort of holiday, so from the moment we entered the enclosure gate there were crowds of people with candles. A long walkway led up a slope to the church grounds, and htis was lined by people with candles. When we reached the top there was a small ocean of candles, no light but the thousands of candles. A very gentle rain was falling in slow fat drops, just enough to seem mystical. It was beautiful.

   After this, Doug went back to the hotel, not being much of a night owl. Leaving me alone with two gorgeous Ethiopian girls, that devil! ::shakes fist!::
   We took a local taxi bus -- mini-busses that go around set routes and are packed with people, to the Bole neighborhood near the airport to a traditional dance hall. I was kind of expecting it to be all touristy but nearly everyone else there was local. Apparently its a Thing, and the locals actually go to these things, wherein traditional dancers perform on a stage while the audience sits around tables eating traditional food (which they also eat every day so I guess its just "food" to them), and every now and then the dancers come down and dance with people in the audience or even kidnap them on to the stage. Amusement is had by all. Here's a super short clip of one of the dances:

   On the morning of Thursday, November 20th, our fourth day in Moshi, a funny thing happened while Doug and I were walking through town. A tout tried speaking to talk to me about buying some beaded bracelets he had allegedly made. He was a rastifarian looking fellow, and his red-green-and-yellow beaded bracelets looking extremely unexceptional. I wasn't interested, and as a rule I've found it's better to avoid entirely engaging in conversation with the touts because if you talk to them at all they'll never leave you alone. Doug was talking to someone else nearby though so I was stuck in his vicinity for a few minutes. It feels less rude to feign not to speak English than to ignore them completely, so I said
   "No espeakay englitz!"
   "What language then?" he asked, "espagnole? francaise? italiano?"
   "Svenska" I said, "jag prata ingenting men Svenska" -- I speak nothing but Swedish.
   "Hey. Yag heter John." he said putting out his hand. A passable pronunciation of "Hi, my name is John" in Swedish.
   "Du kan prater Svenska??" I asked in shock -- "you can speak Swedish?"
   He explained, in clumsy Swedish, that he'd had a Swedish friend who taught him some Swedish. His pronunciation was just good enough to be understandable, but I was really impressed. So I deigned to converse with him -- but only in Swedish.
   What's funny is that since everybody who can speak Swedish can also speak English the only use he could really get from it would be from other Swedish speaking people feigning not to speak English!

   In the later morning Simon came by to pick us up in his olive green land-rover. We filled the back with about a hundred saplings and headed up the mountain. Soon we were at the edge of the forest where the road ended in the decrepit remains of a bridge. Waiting for us were about a dozen of Simon's staff. Holes had already been dug all around the hillside. The plan was to plant the trees all over, but in particular along the embankment of the stream to prevent erosion.

   We busied ourselves hurrying up and down the trail like ants carrying the trees to their holes and burying them, carefully crossing the the flimsy bridge with our precious cargo. Presently everything all the trees were planted, our bare hands were covered in dirt, and everyone felt very accomplished. Our departure was delayed, however, by the discovery that our vehicle had a flat tire. While this was changed out Doug exchanged shirts with one of Simon's hard-working employees whose own shirt was very torn and dirty.

   Then we had to hurry down the mountain because Shimon and the French intern both had to get to Kiliminjaro International Airport (about 30 miles out of town) that day to depart.



   That evening Simon invited us to a speaking event at the international school on the history of the Indian population of Moshi. It was very interesting. One tends to think of all non-ethnically-native-people's as recent immigrants into the area but as the presenter pointed out (a local Indian of course), Indians traders had been visiting the area of Tanzania for hundreds of years, with some Indian families becoming established in town before the turn of the 20th century, typically running retail shops but also engaging in a wide variety of other trades. During the colonial era more Indians immigrated in and were brought in to work on the railroads. By the independence of Tanzania in 1957 there were about 5000 Indians living in Moshi. However the government subsequently went through a communist period during which many businesses and even houses were nationalized. Many of the Indians had invested in property and found themselves now forced to pay rent for what they'd built themselves. Many left and now only about 500 remain in the city, a 90% reduction in fifty years.



   The next morning, Friday, November 21st, fifth day in Moshi, Doug had made plans to play table tennis at some club in town that he'd found out has a table tennis table. He has an extreme love for table tennis and travels about with his paddle and a table tennis ball. I wasn't overwhelmingly interested in this, but a German couple who was staying in our guest house had invited me to visit a coffee plantation on the mountain with them so I did that instead. The youngish German couple consisted of a woman who was a doctor, had previously worked in Namibia if I recall correctly as some sort of foreign service requirement of her university and had that pixie haircut that for some reason seems to be extremely popular in Europe, Despite the haircut she was rather cute. Her husband was a photographer and runs an advertising agency in Germany. He has previously spent a large chunk of time in continuous travel around the world, which he documented on his website www.outtabavaria.com.
   Our first order of business / adventure was to find money since I was out and I think so was at least Katja. There were several banks in town, which is fortunate because I think we visited five of them that morning. First one the ATM was out of money, second one the ATM just didn't like my card, third one wouldn't accept my five digit ATM pin code. Finally found one that would work, as a parade marched by on the street behind me.
   "What's that all about?" I asked the driver.
   "Oh it's the police"
   "Why are they marching?" I asked, to which he just shrugged.
   Then we were once again up the mountain, this time to a different location high on the slopes than we'd been to before. In a quaint little open air meeting area with a thatched canopy over it, like a large hut without walls, we met with Jehosephat, who would be our guide for the day. He explained how the coffee cooperative worked, and how the tours were also run by the cooperative. The small family run plantations rotated through being visited on the tours so that the money could be shared out evenly. Coffee was grown on small family plots, collected by the cooperative who gave them a set price, and then sold at auction in town by the cooperative. I think if the coffee was sold for more than expected the excess profits were rolled back into the cooperative. One thing that I found interesting was the fair trade coffee. Being a highly cynical person I've always been suspicious that "fair trade" coffee was some kind of feel good scam used by starbucks to sell coffee at a higher price and that it wasn't all it's cracked up to be, and have long wished to visit the actual fair trade growers on the ground. Well, as it turns out, here they were! Basically, some of their coffee was sold as fair trade and some of it wasn't. In this case there was no difference between the coffee sold as fair trade and the coffee not sold as fair trade, though they get a better price for the fair trade coffee ... which is rolled back in to the cooperative. In order to sell coffee as fair trade they have to meet certain conditions, which they do, but presumably there's other coffee growers which don't meet them and can't get in on this. So despite finally meeting the fair trade growers on the ground I still can't make real determination as to relevant the distinction really is. After visiting the cooperative building where bags of coffee beans were being weighed, we walked down the road a short distance, through a local market (pictured above) where women in beautiful local patterns were conducting their daily business down to the coffee farm that we'd be visiting that day.
   Being eternally cynical, I was also prepared to be bored, after all, "I've been to Ethoipia!," what can any other place possibly show me about coffee that will impress me? Well. Those gosh darn Ethiopians, you know, they had hornswaggled me by serving me such delicious delicious coffee that I overlooked the fact that they never actually showed me how they harvested the beans. So on this occasion I had a walk through of the entire process, from plucking ripe berries from the tree, running it through a shiny brass rind remover, pretending to let the beans soak overnight (we put the berries we had just rinded into a bucket of water and continued following along with some beans that had just done that), putting the beans out on a drying rack, grinding them (just enough to remove the outer layer of chaff at this point) and tossing them to remove the chaff, roasting them, grinding them (this time into a powder), and finally, brewed into fresh fresh coffee:



   After this we were served a delicious lunch of local foods back by the cooperative building (some kind of stew, some sort of mashed potatoes, and of course the ever present spinach), and then we headed back down the mountain.


   In our little guest house at this point we had Doug and I, the elderly French couple, the German couple, and a Brazilian fellow. And of course in a little house in the back Neema the housekeeper, diminuitive, cute, shy but sassy when pressed, engaged to a policeman in far away Dar Es Salaam, where she's from. And the guard lad who curled up in his maasai robe on the porch every night and I don't think had any other on site accomodations.
   The Brazilian lad had become bored with life in Brazil and determined he wanted to volunteer in Africa. It turns out, according to him, a lot of volunteer organizations want you to actually pay to join them (?!?). Now I think he volunteers with a school, and lives in the guest-house. I think living in the guest-house must be nice on account of meeting all the people who come through it ... though presumably there's cheaper housing options in town (if I recall it was $30 / room / night. For awhile Doug, Shimon and I were sharing a room because we're cheap like that). The Brazilian fella, whose name I don't recall but he's in all my notes as "the Brazilian fella" had a eukelele that he could sometimes be prevailed upon to play for us. Also, he was covered with an interesting variety of tattoos. Toby the German guy, being as I mentioned, a photographer, had him do a sort of formal photo shoot for him that afternoon. This resulted in this photo from Toby's main site.



   Though the Brazilian fellow had other plans that evening, he recommended a local bar/restaurant that would have local musicians that evening, and Doug and I walked down there in the evening with the German couple. Ironically before the band started the televisions inside were blaring a program about American country music, which at least Doug and I both found grated on our ears. Highlights of the evening involved the Germans teaching me you could mix ginger beer with beer to create a good drink, service being reeeeaally slow, and Doug meeting a prostitute outside. We'd found a ginger beer (non-alcoholic) called "stoney tangawizi to be readily available throughout Tanzania, which was a great joy to us both. I have a notable love for ginger and Doug seems to even exceed my love for it ... always ALWAYS having a piece of ginger in his fanny-pack which he'll take out and nibble upon on occasion. And while I for some reason find alcoholic ginger beer tends to be disappointing, mixing the stoney tangawizi with beer actually made for a good drink. Now as to the service, when the three of us, myself and the Germans, ordered our ginger beers, she brought two back, for them. When I tried to order one again she came back with something else, and I tried again also without success. Toby tried ordering one for me but she once again failed. Finally he convinced her HE wanted another one and when it showed up successfully he passed it to me. We had a similar problem with the food, it was really quite strange. It took at least an hour for our food to finally show up, we were just getting ready to get up and leave without it when it finally did show up.
   As for Doug, I've found when sitting with a group in a crowded restaurant in the evening he often gets restless and roves about. It was during one of these rovings that he apparently met the prostitute, who had been hanging out in front of the place. He returned promptly you'll be relieved to know, but reported that he asked her how business and she said it was slow. Now you know!
   The band was disappointingly non-traditional. It was some sort of jazz I suppose, and between you and I I'm not really into jazz. Jazz is like a story with no plot. I don't know where it's going, I can't get into it. After we finally ate our food we walked back up the street back to the guest-house. Exchanged jambos with the maasai guard-lad on the porch and went to bed under our veil-like mosquito nets.




( All Pictures From Nov 20th )
( All Pictures From Nov 21st )

Tuesday, November 18th - Woke up in our lovely guesthouse and had freshly made coffee and pancakes on the porch, all prepared by the dear diminuitive Neema. Enjoyed a nice leisurely morning in this idyllic little guesthouse, sipping coffee by the garden and talking with the older French couple who were also staying there. They were apparently visiting a grand-daughter who was working for an NGO in town. The woman a retired psychologist, now writing a book, and the man a retired engineer, they provided engaging intellectual discussion and Shimon in particular would prove prone to engage in long deep conversations with them.

   Simon came to pick us up late enough in the morning that we were to make our first stop lunch in town. He led us to a little place that was sort of hidden away down an alley, but once we ducked into the unassuming entrance we found ourselves in a very pleasant open air courtyard shaded by trees with comfortable seats and well attended with locals. The food, all local fare, typically cost around a dollar per main dish, and Simon ordered things for all of us. First there was a hearty sort of bean soup, and then a dish of beans and corn that was quite good. It was accompanied, like every meal we'd had in Tanzania, with a helping of spinach. Popeye would like this place.

   From there the five of us (Simon, Shimon, Doug and I, and a cyclist friend of Simon's from Hawaii who happened to be on the tail end of a several-weeks visit) drove about an hour along the base of the mountain until we got to a place where a guy was making concrete hives. Or cement? I'm told there's a difference but they're the same to me. Anyway we pulled into a tree lined drive with just a few buildings nearby, and I remarked that from the looks of things you could think you were in England or Germany or America or anywhere else in the world -- the buildings looked well-built and modern, the tree-lined drive was nice and well maintained. Under an awning around the corner we found a small gaggle of men gathered around, with several hand-made molds strewn about. Hubcaps formed the two ends of the cylinder, and chicken-wire and plastic formed the sides before the cement was slathered in. The man who had invented these and was supervising it was a retired German professor who was the very spitting image of the Doc from Back to the Future. Same wild white hair, same mannerisms and exciteable exuberance for his numerous innovative ideas.

   In addition to the simple face of making cement beehives from molds, he had the additional innovation that the hives would be opened from the bottom rather than the more-normal top. He reasoned that bees prefer to climb upwards when smoked so if you open the bottom and smoke them, the bees will all climb out of your way and you can then inspect the comb from the bottom. He'd also taken to hanging shiney dangly things in front of the hives which would blow in the wind and get bees accustomed to movement and he claimed that hives he had put these near became so easy to work with he didn't even need smoke.
   All this seemed very innovative and he had such enthusiasm I'd be reluctant to rain on his parade, but we collectively had many concerns with his ideas and because promoting good beekeeping practices is what I do I feel I should share what we feel is wrong with these ideas. Firstly we were all concerned about the weight of cement hives and Simon's cyclist friend is a construction contractor and told us from his experience, cement that thin would very very easily break. As for the bottom-opening of the hive, that's great but in order to remove comb you need to cut it off from hte thing it's stuck to, which is always above it. Thus to harvest honey from a bottom-opening hive you need to somehow reach way into it to cut from the top, or "honey badger" it out piecemeal which would make a royal mess. And finally, that dangley thing -- bees see things blowing in the wind all the time. I really can't imagine hanging a glorified wind-chime in front of them would make a lick of difference. But like I said, I solidly admire his spirit.



   Next we traveled up the mountain to a house high up in the lush misty forest just below the national park line. Here a friend of Simon's (pictured above) had 450 stingless beehives. FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY, all lined up on his wall (also, pictured above). Being as stingless bees don't sting, this doesn't create the kind of insane menace having 450 normal beehives in very very close proximity to a house would. I'm not sure what the population of a stingless bee is (there's hundreds of different species, and I don't know which this was either, but I believe it was in the genus Melipona, for those following along at home), but they're much smaller than honeybees and the collective biomass of bees per hive is certainly less. They look like little flies zipping about, and even with 450 of them there it didn't LOOK like there was a lot of flight traffic. The other interesting thing is that stingless bees typically only forage over a 300 meter radius or so (as opposed to honeybees which have a 5,000 meter radius), so it was kind of amazing that the environment could support so many so close together.
   The stingless bees, in addition to not stinging, also never "abscond" or leave the hive (African sub-species of honeybee are notorious for saying "fuck it, we're out of here!" if you annoy them, which can be easy to do), and their honey is worth several times more (because it tastes unpleasantly tart and "medicinal," and is therefore commonly believed to BE medicinal). But they only make a few hundred grams each per year (as opposed to honeybees which, in a traditional hive make about 15-20 kilograms per year). To harvest, they crack it open, and pierce all the honeypots with a toothpick (did I mention, like with bumblebee nests, the honey is stored in honeypots?), and then tilt the hive to let all the honey run down and out a hole in one end. It is poured through a strainer and into a glass or bowl. The honey is much more liquid than honeybee honey, and can be drank from the cup like a liquid.

   Our purpose there, aside from seeing this fascinating operation, was that Simon had a deal with him wherein Simon would make hive boxes, and trade boxes for bees -- he'd give the guy a nice new empty box specially made for his stingless bees, and the guy would give Simon back a hive box full of stingless bees.

   From there we returned back down the mountain to Moshi. A few hours later Simon retrieved us from the guest-house again and we all went to dinner at this really nice Indian restaurant that had just opened in town. In addition to the five of us from earlier in the day we also had Doug's wife in attendance (originally from the United States, currently a professor at a nearby university), as well as the French intern (who was leaving the next day or so). The tables were once again out in the open air, lit by candles and dim lights that might as well have been candles, and with a reflecting pool behind us. Felt once more like far from suffering the hardships of Africa we were living it up better than comparable options in the States.

   Returned to our guesthouse for more intellectual conversations on the veranda. The night watchman, a young man of scarcely twenty, would sit on the edge of the porch wrapped in a his maasai robe. He didn't speak a word of English but he'd exhange enthusiastic "mambo"s with us ("jambo" is swahili for "hello," but after a few days in country someone let us in on the secret that "only tourists say jambo" and the locals usually say "mambo." The correct response to which is "poa," which is an equivalent transaction to saying "how's it going" "good!" apparently), and when the Germans showed up they'd share a companiable cigarette with this fellow we couldn't otherwise speak with. After the last of us went in to go to bed, he would cacoon himself up in his cloak on one of the lounge chairs on the porch.

   Zanzibar!! What's it mean to you? Seriously I want you to write down your answer right now. Okay I suppose you can hold that thought until you can write a comment at the end.

   To me I suppose it was the quintessential far far away strange exotic place. Just that, a word, I think there were times I wasn't even sure it was a real place. I don't think I knew, specifically, that it was in Tanzania until I was looking at a map a month or two ago -- I know I didn't realize until then that it's actually an island (turns out, it's actually an island) (okay, it's actually a town on an island, and the name of the archipelago of islands, but the island is called Unguja).
   Looking at a map, and seeing that it was in Tanzania, where I'd be going for a conference anyway, I resolved to go to Zanzibar based on the famous name alone.

   The following is Part II of the travelogue of this trip. [Part I]


Day 3, Thursday, November 6th - Flight was an hour and forty minutes from Nairobi, arriving at 8:25pm. As it was dark when I arrived I couldn't see much but it was warm and damp, with puddles on the ground seeming to indicate recent rain. A young man in a lab coat at the door to the terminal looked at our yellow fever vaccination cards. We also had to fill out a questionnaire about whether we'd been in Guinea in the last 21 days ... fortunately no one has given me grief yet that I was there three months ago. Getting the visa on arrival was simple. In the passport control booth the three men looked positively cherubic, all round headed and dimpled and smiling.
   A driver from our hotel was waiting for us and it was more than an hour drive through the dark to our hotel, in the village of Nungnwi on the northern tip of the island. Couldn't see anything but I enjoyed the fresh warm tropical air blowing in the windows. In the village cinderblock houses emergerd from the darkness and then suddenly we went through a gate into a nice well-kept tree-lined area -- we were in one of the hotel compounds! Investigation would reveal that several hotels were clustered together here to form a fortified refuge for tourists. Hotel was mostly empty thanks to wildly unfounded ebola fear (not going to Zimbabwe because there's ebola in Guinea is like not going to California because there's ebola in Boston). On strolling about the place we were impressed by how swanky it was, both agreeing that it was too fancy for our usual taste, but hey, it happened to be a good price. Among other signs of swankiness it had a swimming pool just beside the beach.


Day 4, Friday, November 7th - In the morning we found that the raised wooden patio overlooked a beautiful white sand beach and crystal clear turquoise sea beyond, with traditional fishing dhows plying their trade back and forth beyond.

   We signed up for three excursions for that day, "Jozani Forest," the "Spice Farms" and "Stone Town." The hotel manager tried to sell me on the popular "dolphin tour" too but I narrowed my eyes at him and noted that dolphins are a dime a dozen where I come from.
   Osman, who would be our driver for the day, materialized moments later like some kind of genie, and we were on our way. One bit of advice I have for future visiters to Zanzibar -- Nungnwi is lovely but its at the far end of the island, see everything else while based in Zanzibar City and then relocate to Nungwi. Once again we had more than an hour's drive ahead of us, but this time I could see the island. Along most of the way there were cinderblock houses just off the road. While it didn't look so densely populated beyond the road, it seemed like a continuous thin village along the entire length of the road, with people walking back and forth along the side and going about their business. It was lovely though, under the palm trees, everything looked so peaceful. Doug, who was in Jamaica with the Peace Corps, kept commenting on how much it reminded him of Jamaica.

   Jozani Forest is a national park in the middle of the island. Our guide, Khummus (pronounced "Hummus" with a slight gaspiness to the initial H), only had one ear, the other one appearing to have never developed, there wasn't even an ear hole. He was from one of the nine villages that neighbor the national park, as are most of the guides. He was an out-of-work science teacher and worked at the national park as a volunteer. At first he seemed kind of dull and stand-off-ish, but then it became apparent that he was really into biology, being able to tell us the scientific names and numerous facts about all kinds of different plants in the forest. As Doug and I, being beekeepers, are also pretty into that, we soon found we had common ground and he opened up a bit. Then we found out he was actually am member of the Zanzibari Beekeepers Association (Zanba?), which, we'd thus far had no luck trying to discovered evidence of beekeepers on the island so that was a real coup.
   Pretty much as soon as we entered the forest we started hearing monkeys crashing about in the canopy. Zanzibar has two types of monkey: the Zanzibari Red Colobus which is endemic only to Zanzibar, and the Sykes Monkey. Interestingly the two types of monkeys tend to hang out together.
   I also saw an elephant shrew snuffling about in the underbrush, which looked kinda like a red and black opossum. At first I was excited to simply see monkeys at a distance but pretty soon we found a family of them at ground level, and they'd ignore us completely even as one gets within a few feet of them. There were several little adorable baby monkeys. It was definitely more of a monkey experience than I'd hoped for.
   There was also a boardwalk through a mangrove swamp, which was fun.

   Spice Farm - The Zanzibar Archipelago is also known as the "Spice Islands" (not to be confused with the islands in Indonesia known by that same name), and have always been a major producer of cloves, cinnamon, nutmet, cardamon, and many other spices. The Spice Farm the tour goes to isn't so much a working farm I think as a display farm with some examples of each of the spice plants. Again, being interested in biology we were very interested to see the plants all these well known spices come from. It was interesting to note that the bark of the cinnamon tree tastes good and cinnamony right off the tree. I was getting slightly annoyed that the guides seemed to talk primarily to Doug while comparatively ignoring me, presumably because he was older, but that came to be an advantage in this tour, where they at times were kind of pushy about trying to get us to buy their spices but they concentrated their efforts entirely on Doug. In the end we tipped them $10 (after we accidentally BOTH tipped our Safari guide the previous day $20 each, we were now making sure to coordinate our tipping) and the guide looked at it sourly and started to whine about supporting the local community. Doug pointed out that he'd bought $35 worth of spices from them. Khummus, by comparison, at the end of the Jozani Forest tour, hadn't even bothered to look at the $20 we tipped him.



   Stone Town - is the historic old part of Zanzibar City. It is a World Heritage Site. It is full of narrow winding medieval streets. Doug got along very well with our guide, Abdul, it was veritably a bromance. I thought the tour was kind of disappointing though. We saw the market, old slave-holding pens and the church that has been built above them, and a famous door. For me the highlight was probably just an intersection of the winding streets called "Jaws Corner," where old men gather every day to drink coffee and play dominoes or other traditional games. We had coffee there, strong and black in little cups.
   Got to watch the sunset from a beach at the edge of Stone Town, where even at sunset many many young people were frolicking in the water. They appeared to be having a diving competition off a nearby area where deep water directly abutted the promenade, doing flips in the air before hitting the water. A dhow was sailing on a course that would take it across the sunset and I really wanted to get a picture of it directly in front of the sunset but unfortunately Doug and Abdul were anxious to keep moving.
   There was a small castle there but I don't recall Abdul saying anything about it. I think I read it is Portuguese. The tour unfortunately involved nearly no historical information other than that the second-to-last Sultan of Zanzibar had had the market built, some sultan had had the fancy door brought from India to impress his wife, and that Dr Livingstone (I presume) had witnessed the slave trade here (it was a major hub) and subsequently successfully petitioned the British parliament to ban it. By force of arms the British Navy convinced the Sultan of Zanzibar that he ought to build an anglican church over his slave trading pens.
   And then we tipped Abdul ($20 again), and were on our way on the long drive back to Nungnwi again.

   Sitting on the patio late in the evening I watched four drunk young local men stumble by on the beach. Two of them were wearing normal western clothing, and two were wearing the traditional maasai garb, all were exhibiting the culturally universal stumble of someone having a good time on a tropical beach. Then I discovered a floofy cat had curled up under my seat. What an evening.



Day 5, Saturday, November 8th - It had been our plan to visit Pembe Island this day. Pembe is the second of the two big islands of the Zanzibar Archipelago and its main draw for us was that it doesn't have the tourists that Zanzibar does. Originally we had wanted to go there by traditional dhow, and were both very undisuaded by the universal response of "that's very dangerous!!" as if it was practically suicide. What did finally dissuade me was noticing that it was 50 kilometers away, it could easily take ten hours to sail there. To go by motorized vessel we'd have to travel way back down to Zanzibar town again, even though Nungnwi is the closest point to the island. We decided at this point just to cross Pembe off our list and instead just relocate to a more deserted place on the island. Also it being the weekend, the hotel-compound had become inundated with Australians. I don't think I've ever seen so many Aussies in one place, not even in Australia! I thought it was a bit off that they all showed up on the weekend -- who goes to Zanzibar "for the weekend" -- even from Australia its gotta be an 18 hour trip with a layover or two on the way. So we decided to go to Pongwe, halfway down the east coast of the island -- the Lonely Planet guidebook described it as pretty quiet and peaceful (as opposed to Nungnwi which I think is the number one tourist destination on the island).
   But first! We'd go for a walk down the beach since thus far we hadn't really had time to poke around Nungnwi at all.
   The tide was out, WAY out. We could see waves breaking waht looked to be a quarter mile seaward. Many many locals were out in the extensive tidepools gathering seaweed and probably other sea creatures of nutritional or economic value. Traveling down the beach towards the point we found many many traditional dhows left high and dry. Many were being worked on. And there was a steady clink of hammers and drifting smoke from fires used to ... boil pitch?
   Just beside the lighthouse at the point we found a turtle rescue pond. In this natural pond, which is connected to the sea by water percolating through the coral "rock" they collect turtles. When a fisherman accidentally catches a turtle in their net they give him $10 for it (alive). Alternatively if there's any evidence a fisherman caught a turtle and killed it they face heavy fines and/or jail time. Once a year, February 20th for some reason, they release all the turtles they have back into the sea.
   They also had many baby turtles in smaller tubs, and they were adorable. In the main pond they had about a dozen really big leatherback turtles, who had really pretty patterns on their shells. I got to hand feed them some seaweed. In a separate inclosure they had carniverous I-forget-their-name turtles, which weren't quite as big as the huge leatherbacks. They also had some tortoises with an interested sort of hinged shell.

   Walking back towards the hotel we decided just to stay in this village and enjoy it. We trie to go all the way out to the sea but the tide started coming, and was rising surprisingly fast, so we had to angle back towards shore. I became separated from Doug during this retreat, largely because I was easily distracted by good photo opportunities involving dhows.

   Once I reached the beach I decided to try a different tack and go up through the village. The guidebook described it as somewhat ramshackle but they'ive clearly never been to Nigeria if they think this is ramshackle! I thought it seemed like a nice quaint little village. The only thing separating it from the idyllic image of an island village is that the roofs were mostly corrugated metal instead of thatch and mostly cinderblock instead of wattle-and-daub, but there were still some mud walled thatched cottages.

   I arrived at the hotel reception expecting to find Doug there but he wasn't. I was just negotiating with them for a room for another night when Doug showed up and said he'd found a better hotel. We got out stuff and went down the beach to a much quieter hotel that wasn't as ostentaciously swanky but had a quiet elegant dignity about it, the room was definitely nicer, and the rates cheaper (this was the Smiles Hotel vs the Amaan Bungalows, for those of you following along at home / planning your trip to Zanzidoozle). The manager was a friendly dutch fellow who didn't look much older than me.
   A fellow dressed in traditional maasai garb who'd been lounging about in the courtyard area came to talk to me in a very friendly manner as I walked through, and though I was friendly back to him I made my escape as fast as I could suspecting he was about to try to sell me something. He never did but later he chased off some others that were trying to bother me while I was trying to relax in a lounge chair on the beach just in front of the hotel, shoeing them off just like a herdsman chastising misbehaving goats, and then later he came to say goodbye because he was off work and leaving, so I guess maybe they employ him as a herder of people.
   Also I finally got some swimming in on this nice lazy afternoon. The water was lovely. Crystal clear and just the right temperature.

   Which brings us up to now, where I'm writing this with candle light at a table by the sea in beautiful tropical Zanzibar. I haven't been to the more "normal" tropical paradises closer to the States so I can't really compare, but this place is pretty lovely. Later on tonight there is a full moon party down the beach a waiter was telling me about so I suppose I'll go down there and see what that is all about.

...

Full Moon Party - Picking up where I left off, on Saturday evening around 22:00 I started down the beach to the left (south) towards where I'd been told the Full Moon Party was. I only made it a short way.
   Coming towards me I saw a group of about half a dozen local young men, obviously drunk. They hailed me as they approached and said that the party here was only a small one and I should ocme with them they were going to drive to a bigger full moon party in another village 10 km away.
   I did some quick calculations -- should I go with a drunk group of local young men, would they just rob me blind and leave me in a thicket? If I went there and lost them how could I possibly travel ten km through an unknown island to get back home? And naturally I decided to go with them.
   A plan to mug me would not begin with a group so jovially traveling down the beach before they saw me, and their good humor seemed impossible to fake. As to the potential of being marooned ten kilometers away, I'd just have to run the risk.
   They all proceeded to bar at sort of rastafarian bungalow "hotel" at the very end of the "strip" just beside the boatyard for some pre-drinking. It turns out they had a Swedish couple with them as well, which made me feel a little better, apparently if it was all a trick I wasn't the only poor sucker they'd tricked into their company.
   Another highlight of the evening was that while none of them were dressed in the traditional Maasai garb, a number of them were ethnically Maasai. You've probably seen the Maasai on the Discovery Channel doing their jumping dance, where they stand straight and try to jump as high as they can with their arms straight down at their sides. Well it turns out when you get Maasai drunk at a bar, Maasai jumping contests break out. I found this very amusing and did much jumping myself.
   While most of the persons present did seem innocently jovial there was this one fellow with an attempt at a mustache (or maybe he just gave up on shaving his upper lip two weeks ago?) who just had a sort of evil look in his eye, despite being outwardly friendly. Long story short, he spent most of the evening trying to weasel money out of me in one way or another.
   The party turned out to be a lot of fun. I am not a big "party scene" person, nor am I much for dancing or clubbing, but hey I was out partying with Maasai tribespersons in Zanzibar!! The full moon party was pretty much an epic dance party that was both indoors and outdoors and we pretty much rocked out.
   I had a major scare when I discovered my phone wasn't in my pocket and spent most of the evening thinking it had been stolen. Mr Mustache weasled some more money off me through some explanation that he could get it back with just a few dollars to the right person, and I was drunk and desperate to get it back.
   Finally when we returned to the car the driver, a Maasai girl named Jessica (!?), found it on the back seat where I'd been sitting. She later mentioned to me confidentially that if the guy with the mustache or his friend had found it first they surely never would have returned it to me, so she had made sure she had a chance to look back there before she unlocked the rest of the car. She was a strong counterpoint to Mr Mustache, being a she (A) didn't have a mustache; and (B) despite being an attractive young lady, and therefore someone who might "legitimately" expect me to buy her drinks, she never tried to finagle a cent out of me.
   Passed out on a couch in the rastifarian bungalow camp.

Day 6, Sunday, November 9th - Roused myself up at 9:30 in case check-out was at 10:00. It was pouring fitfully out (fortunately I was under a thatched canopy), but the sun was shining. As I walked back to my hotel through the pouring rain the beach looked so perfectly white, and the ocean was flat underneath the rain, with damp dhows bobbing at anchor.
   I found Doug having breakfast with two christian missionaries from the states. They were a retired couple, aged approximately 65 and 70, and they seemed nice and I know their hearts were in the right place, but while they were talking about how they had sought out "uncontacted" maasai tribesmen deep in the bush to teach them about Jesus I just kept thinking what a shame it was to purposefully venture out to some of the last people who have had the fortune of being isolated from the modern world and tell them their beliefs are wrong. Local culture, customs and beliefs are a fragile and endangered thing, and to me their mission sounded like seeking out an endangered butterfly just to kill it.

   In our hotel back in Nairobi at least two missionaries had passed through. What is this the land of missionaries? I remember one of them had been going on proudly about how his ministry has 5,000 followers, as evidenced by the number of followers his facebook page has, and he clearly thought this was a veritable mandate from heaven.

   We were going to take the local transit, the "dalla-dalla" back to Stone Town, where we'd spend the night, but Jessica, the driver from the previous night, had mentioned she was driving back there during the day.
   Unfortunately we had to wait until she got up around 2:00pm. But we chilled around the Rastifarian camp. Doug had some fish they all shared, and I later ordered some delicious huge prawns. Finally Jessica was down and along with a friend of hers (a kind of large and overbearinbg girl that I think got on Doug's nerves -- her first words to him were "move your ass!" as she got in the car) and we were off!

   Arriving in Stone Town, Jessica and her friend said they'd meet us at a beachfront bar / restaurant after we checked in to the hotel. Doug got distracted by a bookstore after check in though, and apparently ended up meeting up (Accidentally?) again with Abdul, our erstwhile Stone Town guide, and having dinner with him.
   I found Jessica and her friend at the restaurant indicated, along with a funny rastifarian named Moody, and most surprisingly, the Swedish couple, whom we had not coordinated with at all. We whiled away the early evening over beers and good company at this pleasant outdoor seating area. Feeling perhaps nostalgic already that I was leaving the next morning I contemplated with appreciative wonderment how I'd come to be sitting with five friends I hadn't known 24 hours earlier here at a lovely little place in Zanzibar. Someone walked by on the beach with a little pet monkey on a leash.
   As the sun set I discovered I was not far from where I'd been trying to get the dhow picture earlier in the week, and was finally able to capture it crossing the setting sun.

   Jessica and her friend left to go to Jessica's place (she lives in Zanzibar town. Being as she doesn't appear to work, and has a nicer car than anyone I know, I suspect she may secretly be a Zanzibari princess) her friend mentioned that she was going to "nap for maybe an hour" and I knew right then and there that we'd likely never see them again.
   The other four of us wandered the narrow medieval lanes of Stone Town after dark. There were puddles, there were cats, there were some foul smelling alleys (but most of them just smelled like rain, fortunately), it was all ill-lit, it was incredibly easy to imagine the place looking exactly the same 200 years ago. As the evening wore on we tried to contact Jessica and her friend several times and more than once they assured us they were on their way. We waited in front of the castle, by the night market with its tables piled high with food. Finally around midnight as we were all starting to nod off we decided to call it a night.


Day 7, Monday, November 10th - It was with a heavy heart this morning that I left Zanzibar. Not much of a story there. A typical breakfast at the hotel's rooftop dining area of delicious tropical fruit and an omelette. 15 minute taxi ride to the little airport, and we were gone!
   Stopover in Dar Es Salaam, where we disembarked the plain, went through a little rat-maze in the terminal, put our stuff through two x-ray machines 100 ft apart lest we got up to mischief in the middle, and completed our cirucler route to reboard the same plane that was still waiting in the same spot.
   Now I'm in Arusha deep in the interior of Tanzania, and its hot and dusty and the touts, the people who follow you around the streets saying "my friend, my friend!" are like swarms of flies here, and I miss Zanzibar a lot. But Arusha will be a story for another time, a story that at this moment hasn't happened yet. But Zanzibar, I'll never think of Zanzibar the same way again. It's not just the name of the furthest away place anymore. And to me, it's not the swanky tourist compound it is to the Aussie tourists on their six-month-long vacations. Its the rain on the white sand, the fishermen sailing their dhows into the sunset, the old men playing dominoes in the center of the labyrinth of ancient twisting streets, and grinning Maasai wearing western clothes but jumping like their ancestors, in a rastifarian bar.



[Pictures to be added as soon as I get a chance!! In the mean time please check out the ones I've managed to post to instagram]

   It was strange, really. To go to Australia for a year I packed the morning of my flight. This is only a month, and its not like I haven't done it before, and packed the morning of, but for some reason I developed a deep paranoia I was going to forget something important. I think I was stressing about it for a least a week prior to departure. Even did a large amount of my packing two days before departure.
   And then as I pulled away from the house, and we got on the freeway, when I didn't suddenly remember one more thing. It kind of freaked me out. Got to the airport thinking "this just feels wrong. I must have forgotten something. What is it???" ... the longer it took to realize, the more important I feared it would be.

   I board my flight from "John Wayne," the Orange County airport, to Atlanta. The guy sitting beside me takes out the Wall Street Journal as we taxi away, and on the front cover is a picture of a bomb blast site in Abuja, the capitol of Nigeria -- where I'm usually headed. Guess there was another bomb blast there yesterday. I found that a bit ominous.

   Had some surprisingly good tacos at the food court in the ATL airport, and an overpriced margarita in a plastic cup, which, in wild contrast to California liquor laws, I was freely able to leave the restaurant area holding. Boarded my Air France jet with margarita in hand and settled down to watch the Desolation of Smaug. My seat was in the middle of the middle row.

   As they closed the gates I realized that in an aircraft that looked otherwise almost entirely full, for some reason the seats on either side of me were unoccupied. I could hear angels singing, as a mysterious light from above shone down upon these two empty seats.

Film Review Intermission
Desolation of Smaug - I thought a lot more of it than I'd quite like was cartoonishly cheesy -- the ease with which the protagonists sometimes completely accidentally kill fearsome attacking orcs. That which wasn't cheesy was usually wholly invented parts of the story. So in conclusion it was pretty and what they were trying to do was no doubt well executed but I ultimately felt it didn't do the story real justice. Really the large amount of cheesiness I felt really hurt the story. C+

Lone Survivor - Wow this is a true story right? I haven't bothered to look up how accurate it is, but if so, man, that guy went through some gnarly stuff. There were a few cheesy moments where people took time to say something sappy to eachother at a time when I'm pretty sure they would have been too busy fighting for their lives, but overall I felt it had a high degree of realism, which I noted really helped one get into the story. If you like movies with lots of action and shooting, this is a movie for you. B

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty - This movie was cute and entertaining, and not too cheesy (which you may have gathered is something I loathe and despise in movies). Some scenes shot in some interesting locations such as Iceland and Greenland too. A

End of Film Review Intermission
   Couldn't sleep on the flight. For some reason wasn't even that sleepy. And hadn't had any caffiene since the morning I left.

   Had to go through security in the Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, and let me tell you, they don't know how to do security nearly as efficiently as we've sadly learned to do in the States. People putting their bags on the loading end of hte conveyor and then taking forever to get it all sorted out before tehy're ready to move on, no single file line going through the metal detector. Security check personnel not super professional (or rather, more like ours used to be before the whole tihng got reorganized after 9/11), people shouting at eachother in three different languages. On my third try I made it through the metal detector and got about 15 feet away before it went off and they called me back. WTF.

   Still can't think of what I forgot. Still freaking me out.

   Arrival in Paris CDG was around 8:15, with a scheduled departure around 10:30. Departing flight kept getting delayed until noon. Slept for awhile on some seats that didn't have rails between then, one hand in a death grip on the zipper of my backpack. Woke up and met the other Winrock volunteer, an older woman who's been to Guinea before (circa 2001?), will be working in a different area but we'd be flying in together. I asked her if the food in Guinea was any good and she just started laughing.

   On boarding my flight from Paris to Guinea I was informed I'd been upgraded to first class. Seat 7A turned out to be fully reclining with a big cavity under the seat in front of me for me to extend my legs. They brought us a choice of champagne or banana juice while we waited for all those mere mortals in cattle class to board -- I naturally chose the banana juice.
   Lunch was three or four courses, it was hard to keep track, they kept bringing exciting things over. For a beverage I asked for the red wine and the waiter/flight attendant (with a confidential smile and of course a strong French accente) showed me two different bottles of red wine (full sized bottles, not the small single servings of questionable stuff you get in coach (that is if you're anywhere other than the US, where you can forget about it entirely)). When I shamefully admitted I had no opinion between the two he said with a wink he'd give me both so I could decide. So I had two glasses of wine, not that one wouldn't have magically refilled itself. For what its worth I found I preferred the one from cote d'ore.
   The first course of lunch involved, among other things, little balls of something that tasted vaguely fishy and a little grey-ish pink slab that tasted of liver, and a choice of three different kinds of balsamic viniagrette for the salad (!?). Turns out it was scallops and foie gras, the latter of which I didn't eat more than a nibble. Second course was beef with some tasty sauce. For dessert a creme brulee showed up. I probably haven't had such a fancy meal since, I don't know, high school prom.

The Grand Budapest Hotel - Full of good food and wine I watched The Grand Budapest Hotel, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Maybe it was the wine but I thought it was just SO good. Reminiscent of other Wes Anderson movies such as Royal Tenenbaums, Life Aquatic, that one about a train, but whereas the others had started to seem they had too much in common this felt like a fresh look at the Wes Anderson genre (yes he's made his own genre I do believe), and I thought it was just the right combination of cute, interesting, intriguing, silly, and all around amusing. A+

   Then, feeling fat and content and snug on my back like a happy sea otter I dozed away, barely able to even summon the interest in peering out the window at the coast of Spain down below.




   My first impression of Guinea was the view pictured above. A landscape seemingly devoid of human development, a maze of curving rivers and damp looking foliage. And this just outside the capitol.
   Didn't start seeing buildings until just before landing. The capitol, Canakry, is build on a peninsula, and, I believe, built from the tip (an island off the tip actually) first, so the airport was probably at the "base" of the peninsula. "why don't you google that before you write an entry about it" you might ask. Except my connection is super spotty. "Let me google that for you" is a First World Problem.
   Met a girl who had been sitting the row in front of me. She had come from Phoenix, probably on the same ATL-CDG flight as me as well, she was with the World Health Organization, here in Guinea to fight the ongoing ebola outbreak. Got through customs went super fast, getting my baggage took longer but by and by it all came down the ramp, and we were out the door, met two winrock staffers who drove us across town to our hotel. Total travel time, around 28 hours I believe (its hard to keep track of time while traveling but I think I left OC at UTC 1600, Thursday, and arrived at my hotel in Guinea at UTC 1800 Friday)
   As opposed to other African capitols I've been to, Conakry feels much more like just a really big village. Within a block of the airport there were houses with corrugated metal roofs and alleys that smelled of sewage. The Lonely Planet guidebook had described Conakry as "smelling nausious" in general but the misty rain must have been dampening that effect. My general first impression of Guinea, in a word, would be "damp."



Hotel is decent. Electricity hasn't gone out once yet. Has internet which sometimes works (cue that pyramid of necessities that has wifi on it -- ironically I'd link it here but, yeah, internet), AC works in one of my rooms (I have a suite that by space allocations at least would certainly compare favorable to Motel 6), albeit while making an irritating humming noise that necessitated my turning it off to fall asleep. Shower seems to work just fine (no little bottle of shampoo provided though).
   Edie, the other volunteer, got an even bigger suite on the top floor, but several things were broken or have broken on her, including the shower door which apparently fell and mauled her while she was taking a shower. Africa, its a dangerous place.

   We went walking around looking for a place to eat yesterday evening. Area around the hotel consists of muddy potholed streets, kids playing soccer, "functional squalor." None of the restaurants the hotel staff had told us about seemed to be open so we ended the evening hungry.
   This morning Edie and I had breakfast at the hotel restaurant next door (omelettes, really good croissants). We were going to go to church next but it turns out Edie thought it was Sunday and while I thought it slightly odd, I wasn't certain church wasn't a thing that might be happening on Saturday. I don't go to church in the States but in Africa I do, both so I don't get stoned as some sort of unbeliever, and because its an interesting cultural experience that gets you into the middle of the community. The catholic church has English and local language services, and we're going to try to get to the latter.

   Never did figure out what I forgot. I find this very unnerving. I'd say feels like it must be bad luck not to forget something, but I had remarkably good luck with my flights, seatingwise. Still though, I'm left waiting for the other shoe to drop.

   Okay now I just need a window of internet access to post this.

LJ Idolists don't be alarmed when I reuse this narrative for LJI this week. Maybe I'll even submit this one as a placeholder if I don't have a chance to rework it.

   Having returned from Korem the previous day...



Thursday May 10th - Thursday morning I met up with the president of Comel Enterprises (Daniel). Comel began as an electronics retail company. But then one day Daniel was talking to someone from the Agriculture Department and heard they were distributing 50,000 modern frame hives per year. "So that's going significantly increase the honey production, what's going to happen with all that honey?" he asked. The Ag Department member just shrugged. So Daniel founded a honey processing plant.

   The processing plant was big and new. Had a lot of room for expansion already, and they're planning on building two more buildings. They also had microfilters and homogenizers and all the other fancy equipment you need for some serious honey processing.
   I had a great time touring their facility with them and talking to Daniel and their processing plant manager (who had been in my training class in Korem). I presented them with the refractometer I had brought, with which one measures the water content of honey. They already had one but they greatly appreciated having a second one so now they can send two people out at once to go buy honey from farmers.
   In return they gave me four jars of honey -- one each of four of the five types of honey produced in the region (the fifth wasn't available at the time).



   Later in the day the ACDI/VOCA driver showed up to take me to the airport. The guy in front of me at security had some honey confiscated from him. Foreseeing this kind of problem though I'd put my honey in my checked luggage.
   Security wanted to x-ray my carryon bag again though, and again. And look through it thoroughly, X-ray it again, and then take some things out and x-raw it again. There was a pen showing up on the x-raw, which they wanted to find. Which was a bit odd, since pens aren't usually a forbidden item.
   Kind of reminds me of how they found the hive tool in Addis Ababa but handed it back to me despite it being very weaponizable. Ethiopian security is thorough, and completely random.
   While they were going through my back an older lady also got sidelined to have her bag gone through. She had a hand-held GPS they informed her she couldn't take on the plane. "But I was able to take it on the plane from New York to here!!" she kept insisting, which grated on my ears because it's an entirely fallacious argument.
   Finally a compromise was reached -- she couldn't have it on the plane but security would let her have it on the condition she promise to hand it to a member of the cabin crew, and she'd get it back on arrival in Addis. This agreement was entirely on the honor system, they didn't watch her hand it to anyone. As it happens I did see her hand it to a member of the crew. Ethiopian security is weird.
   After they had emptied EVERYTHING out of my backpack there was still that ghost pen showing up in the x-ray. Finally they handed the empty backpack to me. I asked if they ever found the pen and the lady just smiled, I don't think she did but the backpack was now empty.
   As I was putting my things back in the backpack a hassled-looking American in a suit got sidelined to the inspection table. I welcomed him to the party. As I was leaving a group of australians was coming through (I swear the whole flight was ferringi), and one of them, a big loud fellow with a shaved head, was wearing skimpy running shorts. "Those your security pants?" I had to ask "discourages them from frisking me!" he said with a devilish grin.


Friday May 11th - Friday morning found me kind of in limbo. My original flight out had been a week later, and for some reason the Winrock travel agency was saying they couldn't change it from their end anymore. Furthermore the Winrock team in Addis wanted me to go immediately into another project teaching instrumental insemination to the people at the Holleta bee research facility near Addis. But I would much much much rather actually be able to PREPARE for something like that and review my notes on the finer points of amounts of things and stuff. And anyway I'd gotten it into my head that if I left now I'd be able to spend my birthday (the 14th) with Kori in Connecticut, so I was chomping at the bit to get out in the next 24 hours.
   But I was tearing my hair out for awhile trying to even talk to anyone at Delta. The nearest Delta office was in Kenya and wasn't answering its phones. I tried calling Delta in America but that used up all the minutes on my phone in the first 45 seconds, way before I'd gotten anywhere in the phone tree. Finally skype saved me. I "subscribed" to skype so I had some credit with them and was able to call Delta in America through my laptop and make the travel arrangements.
   To get any flight out in the next three days was looking to be like $1600 (the change fee alone, I don't even know what the underlying original flight was), because there were only flights out every two days and they were all booked up. I found this deeply alarming. But then I asked if she could finagle something creative, get me on a flight out to anywhere else that would then have a flight back to the States, and voila with a six hour layover in Istanbul it was on.

   Unfortunately I didn't have time to see any of the museums in Addis (I really wanted to see the Lucy museum), though I was able to do a little souvenir shopping. Normally I hate souvenir shopping but I was determined to find myself a sweet drinking horn after seeing the magnificent horns all the Ethiopian cows sport.
   It turns out making sweet drinking horns is apparently not something they DO though. We stopped in at more than a dozen and a half souvenir shops without any luck. In one the owner called someone who showed up ten minutes later with an old decrepid ugly looking excuse for a drinking horn.
   Finally we once again found a shop where someone knew someone who knew someone who ten minutes later showed up with a selection of three horns for me to choose from. They all looked ancient and uglier than I had hoped (they were all nearly black and covered with leather, which is not what sweet drinking horns look like say when you google the subject). Still though it was better than nothing, even if preposterously overpriced. I haggled him from $50 down to $40 (keep in mind $50 is the average monthly salary of an educated professional in Ethiopia. The farmers seem to make around $12 a month). So, preposterously overpriced, but I was determined to get a drinking horn.



Saturday May 12th - My flight out was at about 1am the night of May 11th. Because Ethiopia follows the much more logical practice of considering the new day not to begin until around sunrise, I can still call this first hour after midnight part of the previous day.
   I had just finished filling out the customs forms when a Russian fellow named Igor tapped me on the shoulder and explained in broken English "you need to help me -- I don't speak English!" (the forms are all in Amharic and English). Fortunately I took five quarters of Russian in college! Unfortunately I quickly discovered I barely remembered a god damn thing!
   Then we got separated going through the emigration but as I was looking for a seat at the gate he waved me over from across the way and we continued trying to have a conversation with our meager bits of eachother's language.

   During the night we flew over some islands in the Mediterranean, the outlines of which you could clearly make out by the twinkling lights, and I would have loved to know what islands specifically they were.

   I still kind of regret not spending at least a day to get into the city. If I'd never been there before I certainly would have but as it is I remembered how far the city was from the airport and like I said, I was chomping at the bit to be home for my birthday.
   As it is, I ended up spending much of my six hours there trying to chase down my luggage. I was bouncing between the "lost luggage" staff, who were telling me it would be automatically transferred to my next flight and to leave them alone, and the Delta airlines staff who were telling me there's no transfer agreement with Turkish and my luggage definitely did not transfer.
   Finally a week later it would be delivered to me back home, appearing to have been run over repeatedly. Of the four jars of honey I'd been given, three of them had been utterly pulverized. Even my deoderant stick, which is not a fragile object, was smashed.

   I did at least get to sit down and have some turkish coffee in the airport. The coffee and a croissant came out to $14. Being accustomed to a meal like that being less than $2 in Ethiopia it gave me a "welcome to Europe!" rude awakening.

   Sitting at the gate for my flight I sat next to a fellow who used the most amusing profanities to describe his disgust with airlines, when it was announced the flight was running an hour late. And then when I boarded my flight I was surprised to find that my assigned seat was in fact right beside him. That coincidence, however, is utterly dwarfed by the coincidental seating occurrence on the last leg of my journey, from Atlanta to OC, but you'll have to read about that one in my next entry ;)

4/30, Monday- Monday morning Teferi, Beide & I drove about two hours to the town of Finot Selam. The road slowly wound through the undulating countryside. Much of the land we passed was being tilled by pairs of oxen pulling wooden plows. There were also large patches of eucalyptus forest.
   Eucalyptus has been imported from Australia as a source of wood and by and large taken over the countryside it seems. People are happy about it because it provides good straight wood for construction as well as firewood, though I feel a bit saddened that it's no doubt heavily displacing the native foliage, and wonder about the ecological consequences such as animals not having their native forage any more.
   We also passed through many villages. Often there were stacks of eucalyptus logs ready to be hauled off (I'm told they're imported to Sudan as well). Smoking piles of dirt signified charcoal production and bags of finished charcoal were stationed near the road for sale. And of course we had to slow to pass many many herds of goats and cows.

   We crossed the Nile a second time (it makes a giant spiral before it leaves the country) and just before we descended from the highlands to lower country, as I was preparing to take a photo of an ox plow, suddenly I found myself looking at the rusting hull of a T-54 main battle tank.
   "It's very old, from the battle with the derg 20 years ago" it was explained. "Have you ever been through a war?" I was asked ("no, America only has it's wars in other countries")

   Finot Selam (or Finot Salami as it's called in my head) turned out to be a small town in which my hotel and the building next to it were the only tall (four story) buildings. Hotel was pretty nice, though my window looked right out onto an open air restaurant and specifically was right next to their television. Unlike the hotel in Lafia, Nigeria, they fortunately had the decency to turn off the TV and try to enforce quietness after 10 or so.
   But before I discovered this, on entering the hotel, when I thought I was being led to my room, I suddenly found myself entering an event hall full of people sitting expectently, and was led to the dias. Apparently Teferi didn't feel like telling me that I'd be starting the training the very moment I got there. I was... somewhat caught off guard by this.


   The Finot Selam group had a lot of very experienced people in it, including four who described themselves as "bee experts" when I asked what they did. I still don't know what exactly that means they do. But the group in general was restless with my coverage of bee behaviour, kept interrupting with questions like "when you smoke a hive, how do you prevent the smoke from drifting to the hive next to it and making those bees angry?" (asked while I was explaining the role of drones in the hive), or "but doesn't smoke kill the bee larvae?" (asked while I was explaining queen cells), as well as many other off-the-current-topic questions, many also pertaining to "tell us how you produce so much in the United States."
   Finally I had to say "look, I could jump to the end right now and tell you right now that we produce so much in the United States by trucking the bees to whatever is blooming all year round and flooding our hives with pesticides, and be done in ten minutes, but we have three days here and I'm pacing myself to give you three days worth of material. The things I'm telling you to look for in the hive and what I'm telling you to do about them is the real way you're going to increase your production."
   Tuesday afternoon we visited one of the beekeeper's beehives and I went through a hive. The next day at the beginning of class the beekeeper and those present expressed to the class how impressed they was with how I went through the hive, and how I did it during the day and without wearing the protective clothing, and the level of respect from the class was palpable.



   As for the bees themselves, the beekeeper had at least ten frame (ie modern box type) hives lined up along two sides of the outside of his house (including the front) and several traditional basket hives (see picture above) hanging from the eaves on the back. Dinner was being cooked on a stove outside not six feet from the nearest hive.
   The sun was still up but it was a cool day and close to sunset and the farmer actually gave me the go-ahead to open a hive ... and even use smoke!
   As usual with African bees I started out fully suited up. Shortly after I got started though I decided I needed to know if they were being stingy since I was in the middle of a village so I took off my left glove. And then when I was in the middle of the inspection and hadn't received any stings yet I took off the veil and other glove. Didn't see any small hive beetles, which had been pervasive in Nigeria. Bees had a major tendency to run off the comb being examined, which is a common trait I've found among African bees. By the time I was done nearly the hole colony was hanging on the outside of the hive.
   After I was done inspecting the hive the beekeeper invited me into his house for some traditional food. We sat on cow skins on the packed-dirt floor and took turns tearing pieces of injera (crepe-like sour material made from the millet-like grain "teff") off a a communal plate and eating the pieces of roasted meat with it. They also poured us each a cup of "local beer." It tasted... like hay. Wasn't carbonated of course. Between washing my hands with local water and this somewhat questionable local beer I was quite certain I'd have some sort of intestinal failure in my near future (again I didn't, god bless my iron stomach!), but went along with it sportingly anyway. And I certainly greatly appreciate the beekeeper's generous hospitality.
   As a thank-you I gave him one of the hive tools the Orange County
Beekeepers Association donated.

   Wednesday, as I said, the class finally seemed to decide I knew what I was talking about. Also Teferi and Beide had stolen away either that morning or the night before without mentioning anything to me. They didn't reappear until the next morning. I didn't really need them for anything but being as they're supposed to be my support on this project and coupled with Teferi not mentioning to me on Monday that I'd be starting lecture immediately, I feel like maybe his communication skills could use a little work.
   Also this day we visited the little honey processing facility in town. They had some interesting comb honey extractors that I was told were specially designed and manufactured in Ethiopia at the instigation of the NGO "SOS Sahel." They didn't appear to have any frame honey extractor, and most of the hives I've seen here have been frame hives, but I'm told there are frame honey extractors around (somewhere?). Though the lack of access to such was cited by several beekeepers as problems.

   Thursday we drove back to Bahir Dar. On the way I saw what looked like a black coloured bird with a body about the size of an ostriches, but much shorter legs, and it appeared to have some red plumage on its head. It went by so fast I didn't get a good look at it, and I've been kicking myself ever since that I didn't immediately ask if we could stop so I could get a better look and a picture. It was huge! Beide and Teferi tell me its called a "turkish type" bird or a "jigra," but no combination of those words brought anything up on google. I'm still dying to know what it was. As we sped on from it and immediate regret at not stopping was already settling upon me I asked Beide if we might see another, to which he responded "no, it's quite rare."

   That evening the girls from the hotel invited me out to dinner again. Dinner for three and a bottle of wine? $13. (Needless to say I paid this and last time)


   Friday is already the subject of it's own entry


   And I'll write about my adventures in the Tigray region in a subsequent entry


( Pictures from Monday )
( Pictures from Tuesday )
( Pictures from Wednessday )
( Pictures from Thursday )

   Well this will be a little out of order since I haven't told you much about the last week and a half yet, but allow me to tell you about my day today.

   At 0600 I got up and packed my stuff in preparation to catch a 0900 flight. One is always advised to be at the airport two hours ahead of time here. My camera battery was dead this morning, I'd forgotten to charge it last night. Entirely my fault but that meant I'd be spending a day camera-less.
   By 0645 I was all packed up and signed out of the hotel, sitting in the lobby with my luggage. It only takes about 15 min to get to the airport so I was still on schedule. Regretted not having time to eat at the hotel restaurant but my ride should be there any minute... or so I thought.
   Tried calling the driver but both numbers I had for him gave me a "this user's phone is currently shut off" message. I next called the other ACDI staffmember in town, and he (Teferi) asked "oh you want me to send the driver?" ...which I thought shouldn't have been news to him since we'd discussed it yesterday. Long story short by the time the driver arrived it was around 0800, and I'd been kept in constant expectation of his imminent arrival the whole time so I still hadn't gotten a chance to eat.

   Arrived at the Bahir Dar airport to find no rush there -- plane not yet on the ground. Called the Winrock staff in Addis (where I was headed) and asked them to exchange 300 of the dollars I left with them there for Ethiopian birr. Then my phone died (because the charger I'd been provided with doesn't work).
   And then I waited, and waited, and waited. Airplane finally landed at 10:30. Well after I was supposed to have already arrived in Addis!

   Arrived in Addis Ababa around 1200, with a flight to catch at 1450. Originally, when I was coming in at 1100, it made sense for me to visit the Winrock office in the mean time. But with only an hour before I needed to be back in the hotel I was thinking I could probably better use the time to eat. But there was a driver waiting for me and I had no phone to call him.
   The winrock driver was all about bringing me to the office. When I reminded him I had to be back at one this seemed to be news to him, which concerned me a bit. But he was confident we could make it there and back no problem and I only vaguely remembered it not being terribly far to the office so I went with him.
   1240 we finally arrived at the office with me feeling quite hungry and irritable and anxious to return to the airport immediately. The winrock staff hadn't bothered to exchange the money yet and took me with them down to the bank to do the exchanging. Seemingly not in a terribly hurry. I surmise perhaps the entire reason the airports advise a two hour early arrival is because everyone arrives on "Africa time."

   Arrived in the airport terminal "lounge" area (between the first security check / ticketing area and the second security check + gates area) around 1420. My flight was supposed to begin boarding at 1415 but I was about dying of hungry. Ordered a burger from the little restaurant in this section of the terminal. As of 1432 there was still no sign of my burger. I was just packing up to head to the gate without it when it finally arrived. I devoured it as fast as humanly possible and was off to hope I made it through the second security checkpoint in time to catch my flight. (which I did)

   Touched down in Mek'ele about an hour and a half later. Was impressed by how nice and modern looking the terminal here is. Especially since in Bahir Dar, one of Ethiopia's primary tourist destinations, the airport was kind of a glorified shack. As I headed out of the terminal though it occurred to me that I didn't have a working phone, and both my earlier first arrivals in Ethiopian cities had involved trouble finding the people I was supposed to meet (in Bahir Dar Teferi and Beide hadn't bothered to approach me because they were expecting an ACDI staffmember they'd recognize to be with me, and apparently no one's ever seen a volunteer technical expert as young as me before. So they waited until I was the only person left in front of the terminal before they finally approached me).
   But fortunately this time a fellow from ACDI met me as I exited the terminal, and took me to the hotel here.

   Tomorrow we were SUPPOSED to continue on to the city of Korem, but I've been informed there is no car (the car they had is having problems?).

   AND if we don't get there tomorrow, the following day is Sunday! I have yet to see any work get done on a Sunday in Africa.


   Welcome to the third world!



And here's a cow!

No new pictures today but here's another link to the set.

Wednesday - So Wednesday afternoon Belde and I drove to the Blue Nile Falls. It was about a 30km round trip out of Bahir Dar. When we got there a local (and licensed) guide convinced us to hire him, and I'm glad we did because he was very friendly and full of information. We took a little boat across the Nile and then hiked a few hundred yards to the top of the falls. The falls were impressive and big as it is, but apparently they are only a small fraction of what they once were before most of the water got rerouted to irrigation and hydroelectric (did you know Ethiopia sells electricity to Sudan?). In fact we got lucky on Wednesday that the falls were "turned on" at all because one of the hydroelectric stations was off.



After poking around the waterfall we visited the totally indiana-jones-movie bridge:



And then had coffee under a little thatched awning on the ridge right in front of the waterfall, the picture of which I put up the other day, but here's the coffee roasting and the falls:

Thursday - Was our first day of training session. Unlike other assignments where we visited hives first to see where we were at, this one started right in with lecture. I found my interpreter to be a fellow pursuing his master's degree in apiculture (beekeeping) at the local university. So he knows almost as much as me. ;D

   In the afternoon we finally visited some beehives. The owner of the beeyard hadn't been at the training which I thought might account for him insisting "it is not the appropriate time to open the hives! We must wait for the sun to set!" and forbidding me from using smoke on the hive.
   For those of you unfamiliar with beekeeping, smoke is an essential tool. Applying smoke to beehives prevents the bees from getting all riled up because they can't smell the alarm pheromone (and there's a persist myth it makes them think their hive is on fire so they gorge themself on honey and then can't fly. That myth is dumb).
   Finally I was able to convince him to let me open up one hive, so long as I didn't use any smoke and didn't remove any frames. As a little background, a large part of why I'm here is because the government has been promoting removable-frame hives from on high but not providing training on how to use them. The purpose of removable frames hives is you can remove the frames to inspect them and put them back without damaging the beehive. But in order to do this you need smoke, and you need to, well, remove the frames.
   Even without smoke though I was able to remove my gloves and veil right in front of the hive as soon as I was done, the kind of antics I make a point of doing to try to combat their certainly that their bees are way too mean for management.


Traditional basket hives, a few yellow langstroth-like "zander" hives, and one "swarmin gourd" in the middle (lower rack). The colony in the gourd is supposed to swarm frequently because of the small size of the gourd, and thus give them more colonies.


   After that Jean Reno Belde, Terefe (Belde's boss), Kere (the interpreter) and I went to a hotel that has high quality "tej." Tej is a traditional mead made with hops and olives. Formerly it was widely consumed throughout Ethiopia. Formerly. In more recent times it has become so common to make it with sugar instead of honey (and fermented sugar water is just plain crappy) that people generally stopped drinking it. Similarly the honey market here and in Nigeria is suffering from the fact that there's so much diluted honey being sold that consumer's don't trust most honey any more. In Ethiopia they are ALSO having trouble with beeswax that has been cut with parafin. Welcome to the modern world, where anything worth making is worth making crappy.

Friday (today) - Lecture presentation training in the morning once again. With of course coffee breaks at 10:00 and 3:00. Then a bunch of us went out to visit another bee yard.

   I was hoping yesterday was a fluke, but once AGAIN I was told "no you can't open the hives right now you must wait till it's dark." I managed to finally convince them to once again let me open one hive and I thought we had an understanding that smoke was to be used. These beehives were in an interesting location, you had to go through a shed-like room with a door in it and you came into a beehive enclosure. When I got there I suddenly found that none of the English speaking persons were there with me and the people who were (there were very limited numbers of bee suits) didn't have a smoker. Trying to mime the need for a smoker was getting nowhere. I was strongly inclined not to even both opening the hive without a smoker because it would just make a mess and further convince them that hives can't be opened during the day, and I really should have, but we were already right there and they were expecting to open that hive. So we opened it, didn't remove any frames, but these bees got mad. Not any crazy unusual mad. Nothing worse than I'd expect if I did the same thing to bees in Southern California. But it was regrettable because there were angry bees flying all around the house, the whole group who didn't have bee suits had to hastily retreat, and it didn't do anything to improve the case that hives should be opened during the day.
   Further discussion about smokers ensued when I was reunited with the English-capable members of the party, and they (and now these are people who had been in attendance at the training, AND in particular the person pursuing his graduate degree in apiculture) all firmly adhered to the line that no, smoke will only make the bees angry.
   Smoke DOES THE OPPOSITE OF THAT. And is a critical element of the use of the hives they're all trying to figure out how to use!!! After learning from this discussion just how convinced they all were that smoke would make bees angry I was feeling extremely frustrated.
   If we are able to tomorrow, I want to visit some bees and even if we don't get to open a hive I want to have a chance to blow smoke into a hive and demonstrate that the bees do not become angry from it.