The Agrinautica

I've once again been too crazy busy to post the next installment of this even though it was already written. My intention had been to post all of the chapter in weekly sections in the hope that the reader here might have at least some semblance of context-within-the-chapter. Ah well. Most recent distraction on top of my other things was teaching an advanced beekeeping class in Ghana via (zoom) (google equivalent but I like to use zoom as the generic because Microsoft "teams" and google "meet" really don't clearly convey the concept). I don't think I ever thought to appreciate that putting together a top of the line teaching curriculum is for the teacher even more involved than simply having to write a paper as a student. Not only do I need to double check and flesh out the background information on every fact I intend to cover I also need to find appropriate visual aids and strategize the delivery all out. Anyway I digress. Here is the next section, including a few paragraphs that I posted last time but I'm including them again because I think they're important to the context of the whole, I'll indicate where the new material begins if one wants to skip to it.

   I always wanted to go to Cappadocia in the center of Turkey, so I decide to head there. I catch a small bus on a nearby corner, and it winds through the narrow streets of the old city collecting passengers from various stops. Eventually, the main terminal looms ahead, a vast windowless tomb-like edifice, that swallows us as we drive down a ramp right into its dark gullet. Stepping out from the shuttlebus I find myself in a cavernous parking garage with whole freestanding ticket offices whose roofs don’t touch the dripping concrete ceiling above. Buses lumber out of the darkness like mythical beasts. Crowds of people wait in the eternal night, like some dystopian underground city. The people here are almost entirely Turks — this isn’t how tourists get around. Kebab carts vent greasy smoke into the black abyss, surrounded by plastic chairs and tables, as if on a grassy lawn rather than underground oily pavement. I ping-pong through with a few well-placed questions to people who look like they know their way around — “Pegasus? Pegasus?” I ask, and they point off into the darkness. I splash through puddles in the gloom and find the office and buses of the Pegasus line.
   I climb the steps into the bus and enter a bubble of light and civilization in the gritty darkness. Soon we roll out of the catacombs, back into the gathering twilight of summer evening. Onto the highway, and soon we are rumbling through the purpling dusk, from Europe to Asia across the Bosporus Bridge, with sweeping suspension spans like the Golden Gate.
   We fly down the highway through the night, and I’m mostly able to sleep on this comfortable bus, interrupted twice by rest stops during which most of the passengers exit to stand about in the cold night air gasping out acrid cigarette smoke — not quite the fire breathing chimera Bellerophon sought when he rode the original Pegasus in legend. The sun rises over undulating hills and occasional blocky villages of small apartment buildings.
   Suddenly, around a bend, a town comes into view that looks like it was hewn right out of the face of the hill — stone houses project from the cliff face, but the windows continue up the rockface itself! Rock spires rear up above the buildings, dwarfing the man-made minarets. We are in Cappadocia!

[this is where last installment ended]



   I step out into the fresh morning air of what vaguely resembles a quiet modern hippodrome – the bus turnaround is an oblong oval cobblestone loop with the glass sided bus shelter in middle. Surrounding it rising upward on the slopes like the semi-circular seating of an amphitheatre rise the stone buildings, minarets and spires of Goreme. The bus trundles off with a puff of black exhaust smoke leaving me alone in the crisp morning light.
   I check into one of the many cave hotels, choosing a ten bed hostel-style cave room, in hopes of making some friends but there’s just two Scottish girls packing their stuff to leave. The room had been carved into the soft sandstone of the cliffs. Thick Turkish rugs carpet the floor, like dark-red warm soft squishy moss.
   Next on the agenda: breakfast. I find a restaurant with nice rooftop seating and order menemen, a delicious dish Deniz’s dad had made, a stewy mix of tomatoes and peppers and a few fried eggs. But the dish the restaurant makes is a pale limpid comparison to her dad’s cooking – less the sumptuous flavorful dish he had made and more a plate of flaccid stewed tomato. I gaze off at the Dr Seussian rock pinnacles -- at least Turkish coffee is dependable.
   Normally when it appears one has been broken up with, one tries not to dwell on it. One goes to work, absorbs oneself in the mundane day to day. But normally one hasn’t found oneself marooned halfway around the world as a result of the fight. It’s hard to ignore that as a result of the disagreement, one is now living in a cave in central Turkey. It's always hardest laying in bed at night, thinking about how you used to run your hand through Her hair – dark chestnut brown that falls in curls like a turbulent current, that glows fiery red when the light hits it just right.



   I generally avoid package tours but it’s the only practical way to see the main thing I’d wanted to see: one of Cappadocia’s underground cities. I sign up for one and the next day a small van picks me and a dozen other tourists up from various cave hotels. The guide explains that the name “Cappadocia” comes from the wild white horses that used to live here “but today there aren’t any any more” of course. We go on a short hike through a nearby canyon, it’s deep and twisting with ample foliage in its narrow base. Dovecots have been carved into the cliff wall, and around a corner we find a vendor selling cold drinks out of a cave. At the end there is an abandoned town of stone houses hewn out of the sandstone slope, an old Greek town whose residents had been resettled in Greece after the Turkish revolution in 1923.
   For lunch we are taken to a tourist canteen in the nearby town of Üçhisar, dominated by a castle-like rock of sandstone pitted with windows. The canteen is full of the sad ghosts of the real Turkish cuisine I had enjoyed with Deniz. Köfte that aren’t the delicious giant juicy meatballs I’m used to, but dry and flavorless; dolma that has just been haphazardly thrown together –memories of Deniz in her mom’s kitchen, only half-lit by the light from the refrigerator, explaining that the grape leaves need to be sprinkled with lemon-juice and put in the refrigerator overnight; mantı that is just cheap ravioli in cheaper yogurt, no garlic, no meat – memories of having a delicious bowl of mantı with Deniz at an open air restaurant at the seaside near Bursa, her eyes shining, while nearby children launched candle paper-bag lantern-balloons into the air to the accompaniment of the gentle sound of the surf lapping against stone. To the metallic clatter of a hundred tourist’s silverware I pick at the food which is now my lot.
   The underground city itself, is as impressive as I had hoped. We go to Kaymaklı, the second largest of around 200 ancient underground cities in the area. This one has four underground floors open to tourists, though it has at least eight, the deepest at a depth of 85 meters. In its heyday it housed 3,000 residents, living underground for the stable cool temperatures and safety. A lifelong fan of the Tolkien books, the narrow labyrinthine tunnels remind me of a goblin city.



July 15th, 2013 – The gravelly slope gives way beneath my feet — a cascade of sand, a hiss like waves running back to the sea, scrabbling fruitlessly for traction I fall slithering down into the canyon. The slope curves into a hump like a ski jump halfway down. Sliding helplessly towards this unintentional launch, I desperately spread my arms and legs, flattening myself against the rough slope in a frantic attempt to maximize friction and avoid being launched into the airy void. Pebbles continue to skitter past as I come to a stop. Standing up, I wipe sweat from my brow, and look across the rugged canyon: manila colored sandstone — more sand than stone, the sides a sheer drop in most places. Thick tower-like rock formations rise above the jumbled slopes, jutting into the blue cloudless sky. The sun reflects mercilessly off the buttresses of rock, and I gaze longingly down into the bottom of the canyon, green with waves of tufty grass and scraggly shrubs. I look back up the slope I just slipped down and realize there’ll be no getting back up. Below me, the steep slope is a tumult of boulders and crevices. There’s only one way to go now, down there, somehow.
That morning, in a quest for more authentic food I had gone to the corner of town where there seemed to be the highest concentration of locals. Old men sat at tables under shade trees playing backgammon, ah this is classic Turkey. After having a much more authentic meal I asked the young man working at the little café where a good place to go hiking was and he drew me a rough map on the back of a piece of scrap paper, indicating the way to “Love Valley.” “You can’t miss it!” he exhorted.
   Well, I missed it, Finding myself on a sunbaked ridge looking down into a narrow valley full of lush foliage, bounded by rugged slopes and punctuated with more of those surreal pinnacles. Down there was where I wanted to be, not up here on the shadeless heights surrounded by chasms. I bet there’s another cave selling beverages down there I thought to myself. I thought I’d venture down just a bit of a slope to see if there was a path down the rugged sandy side here. Just as I was concluding there was not, I had involuntarily commenced this slide.
   It’s not any kind of route I’d have taken if I had any other option, but I don’t, so I carefully descend through a series of narrow chutes in the soft sandstone, sometimes essentially rock-climbing down the crumbly surface. I imagine if I fall and seriously injure myself, no one knows I’m here and might not find me in this obscure corner until I’m nothing but bleached bones. With great relief I finally reach the level ground and tall bushes of the valley floor.
   I wander along the dry wash in the center of the valley floor, up towards the back end of the valley because I have an idea the trail should be that way. But there’s no trail, and no friendly Turk selling fresh orange juice from a cave. I’ve long since finished my bottle of water. Sweat runs down my forehead and my throat feels very very dry. I begin to contemplate the possibility of my untimely demise again.
   But wait, is that movement up ahead? People? I excitedly round the next corner only to startle a white horse, who looks at me and darts quickly into the shrubbery. Damn. But on the plus side here’s a wild grapevine draped over a low scrubby tree like a heavy cloak, thick bundles of plump grapes hang down from its branches. I grab grapes by the handful and stuff them in my mouth without bothering to dust them off. They are delicious and refreshing. I eat as many as I can stomach and then take a large sprig of them with me as I continue up the gorge.
   The valley narrows, but, fortunately, the sides are also more traversable at the deep back end, the slippery gravel held together with coarse grass. I’m able to ascend the back slope on a steep narrow goat path. I finally emerge over the rim of the valley, dusty and tired, to see the great rock of Üçhisar close in front of me, surrounded by its haphazard brood of houses, hotels, and cafes. Some Italian tourists are standing near a turquoise jewelry shop I happen to emerge beside, they stare wide-eyed as I climb from the canyon rim, and with surprise I realize I had met them in the tour group the day before.
   “Where’d you come from??” they ask.
   “Um, I don’t even know.” exhausted, I gesture vaguely.
   And then I wander into Üçhisar to search for authentic food among the fantastical tooth-like rocks.

   I spent at least an hour editing an article someone had submitted for the magazine the other day, saved it as a word file, and thereafter I haven't been able to open it (all programs claim its not a word file, but it's not anything else??). This reminded me that it was that kind of shenanigans which had driven me to edit documents in the browser on google docs already years ago. Well, right now I'm trying to make some simple edits to the most recent section of I'm about to post of my Apinautica story and it will let me spend five to ten minutes making edits before telling me it failed to save, and then when I reload there's a nightmarish mix of some but not all of my edits creating half words and mangled sentences. Argh. Am I going to have to retreat to using pen and paper?? ... or learn to use the Apple computer I've been provided with as the official work computer? Hmmm pen and paper sounds more appealing ajajaja.

   Anyway, I guess I'll make my edits HERE and hopefully be able to go back and re-integrate them to the master file on google docs some time when it's not being insanely loopy.

   (My computer has been doing this insane thing where the mouse loses the ability to click on buttons or tabs, but it fixes itself when I ctrl-alt-delete and open task manager (not actually resetting my computer, just opening task manager). I mentioned it to my IT friend but he must have been busy with something cause he was just like "huh that's odd." Similarly this google docs problem is... presumably a problem somewhere between my computer and google docs, like, I assume the latter isn't broken, but if my computer's memory had gotten bovine spongiform encephalitis again you'd think it wouldn't effect inputting things into google docs. I dunno, it's probably cursed.

June 23rd, 2013, Turkey – Sometimes, on a random Tuesday in June, you decide you really need to go see a beautiful young woman in Turkey, so you buy a ticket for four days hence.

   When I had arrived in Turkey for the first time in 2009, it had seemed so exotic, “third world” even. The plumbing hadn’t worked well in one of our hotels! The strange and alien call to prayer warbled out throughout the town several times a day! This time I have the perspective to laugh at my earlier self – Turkey is just another place with its own rich culture, and when we had finally mentioned the plumbing problem to the hotel proprietor asked in surprise why we hadn’t reported it earlier.

   In 2009 my friends and I had taken a taxi from Ataturk Airport, getting mired in traffic and slowly navigating the narrow roads of old town before arriving at our hotel in the center of the historic city in Sultanahmet.
   This time I discover what an unnecessarily tedious adventure that had been, when Deniz meets me at the airport and leads me down the escalator from the terminal directly to a station on the highly effective and easy-to-navigate city light rail system. We ride it to the waterfront and board a ferry to cross the Bosporus, the channel that separates Europe from Asia, and walk a few blocks to her apartment. The roads are narrow, steep and cobbled. We pass a random ancient fountain that has probably seen empires rise and fall around its gently burbling water. Perhaps my namesake, Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, had paused beside this very fountain. He was martyred right here in this district (then the town of Chalcedon) in 251 AD – first tempted by two beautiful women and then beheaded, so the hagiographies go.
   We arrive at Deniz’ narrow apartment. Rather to my surprise, it is filled with “Route 66” sign, saguaro cactus knicknacks, and posters of famous landmarks in the States. Well this is more Americana than I expected to find here, but I can’t believe how fortunate I am, this incredibly cute, fiercely strong young woman I had initially had a vague “internet crush” on has welcomed me into her heart and life, me, scrawny itinerate agricultural laborer that I am. I hope I don’t fuck this up!
   She’s taking some classes at the nearby maritime academy so in the mornings she departs in her crisp white uniform with gold epaullets, and I usually explore the city with her brother, who lives nearby. Sometimes sitting in her apartment I hear someone playing a concertina or accordion, the Old-World-y music beautifully funneling up through the acoustics of the stone walls and cobbled streets and fading away again as the player continued their inexplicable musical journey. Some evenings the acrid sinister aroma of tear gas floats faintly on the breeze from the ongoing protests at Taksim Square across the water. We avoid that area but even in our neighborhood giant police water-cannon trucks drive by occasionally, and young men in black tactical police uniforms can be seen having coffee in a cafe, as if “dystopian storm trooper” is just a normal job.
   After a few days in Istanbul we set off by the efficient local buses to travel around a bit. We visit her father in the town of Izmit on the coast. He’s a retired naval officer and (jokingly?) maintains that given all my travels, he thinks I’m a spy. Deniz describes living through the 1999 Izmit earthquake which killed nearly 20,000 people – her parents had been out of town, they rushed back as soon as the earthquake happened, but her dad stopped just behind the last ridge before the city would come into sight and walked to the top so he could discover if the building containing his two children was still standing while not driving in the car with their mom. Deniz had awoken to the shaking, jumped over an opening crack in the floor, grabbed her little brother and ran out of the building. She says you could smell the dead buried under the rubble for weeks afterwords.
We continue down the coast of the Sea of Marmara to Bursa to spend a few days with her mom before returning to Istanbul.
   For the past two weeks it has been smooth sailing, her brown gazelle eyes sparkling; but, turbulent like the sea, we have an argument and lightning flashes in eyes that aren’t used to not getting their way. If I love her, she argues, I would marry her next Tuesday. I look around at the Americana on her walls and feel this is all a bit fast. Things escalate, she suddenly feels I am distracting her from her studies and should immediately cast off from her place. And so out I go with my seabag over my shoulder, suddenly cast adrift in Turkey.
   I head across the Bosporus again, on a mostly-empty evening ferry, towards a sky pink with sunset behind the city’s many minarets. The lonely call to prayer warbles out as I wend my way up the streets towards a hostel in Sultanahmet.



   For weeks there’d been daily protests at Taksim Square. Deniz as a reasonable person wanted nothing to do with it, but, like a moth to a candle, I longed to see this political turbulence first hand, and now I can at least do that.
   I descend from Sultanahmet hill. By the waterfront, in front of New Mosque (founded 1665), there’s a big demonstration against the toppling of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, the culmination of the tension that had been there when Deniz and I had met. I edge past the Egyptian-flag-waving throng and cross the low bridge across the inlet known as the Golden Horn heading up the steep Galata hill on the far side, towards Taksim.
   On the broad pedestrian-only boulevard leading to Taksim, crowds go about their shopping as usual, contrasting strongly with the young men in black police uniforms standing around. In their ominous dark uniforms and combat boots they joke with each other, like twenty-year-old boys do the world over, and they chat with passers-by like normal people, and they sit at cafes and play backgammon with old men, passing the time until they’ll go into action. About fifty young people are doing a sit-in in honor of people killed in the protests, holding nearly two dozen pictures of people from all walks of life. Several squads of riot police stand off to the side, awkward and motiveless until the command will come which will cause them to suddenly move like coordinated marionettes, linking shields and following orders. Finally I come to the broad open space of Taksim Square. On one side a huge red Turkish flag flutters fitfully in the wind in front of a government building. A huge picture of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk gazes sternly over the square from the wall of the building, with steely blue eyes, a stately handlebar mustache, and a cylindrical astrakhan hat on his head. He’s not Big Brother, he’s the father of the nation, the hero of Gallipoli, and he gazes on the police and the protestors equally.
   The concrete of the square is pockmarked with little craters from the violence of the recent encounters. Armoured water cannon trucks rest in the shadows to the side, looking like weaponized zambonis. Beside the square is the grassy and tree-filled Gezi Park, the proposed demolition of which sparked the protests, and ironically it is here that during the day more than a hundred riot police lounge in the grass, looking for all the world like a resting Roman army from the future – plastic shields and black helmets lying around them, armoured shin guards on their legs, some are napping in the grass, some sit as if on a picnic.
   I walk around the park, it is very lovely. Children gambol about and couples stroll. Next to some playground equipment covered with frolicking children, a concrete wall has recently been knocked over in places by the violence. I sit on a bench for awhile and enjoy the park. I’m hoping at any moment for a conciliatory message from her on my phone but none comes as the afternoon drifts towards evening. The policemen are getting up and stretching. Having seen Taksim Square, I don’t really feel the need to be there in the evening when it becomes a combat zone -- I walk back to the hostel.

   This section had some interesting decisions on how to cover it. Basically, the section that begins right after that is a little mini arc I like a lot, I wrote it first as the final story for a creative writing class, and used roughly the same arc for a series on Medium that was a travelogue of Turkey, drawing parallels between my travels and mythical Bellerophon's travels. In those other contexts the back story was limited to more or less one line ("I got in a fight with my girlfriend") but it needed more here, and while I didn't really want to dwell on the good times, they needed to be here to balance the rest, hence its a bit fastforwardy.
   I had thought about writing more about my initial visit in 2009 but I find I don't really have a lot to say about it because we pretty much just came as tourists and did tourist stuff, any plot arc that could be found, other than oh we were so naive, is no longer relevant I mean there's a plot arc of "and that's why I don't travel with friends any more" but that would be distracting and tedious to fit in. Its a bit ironic because I think even at the time I thought "I'd like to write a travelog some day" but even while I'm doing it I'm not writing about that trip.
   The other decision, was this section actually encompasses two trips -- I had gone to Turkey in June and then returned in August, but I decided to simplify it into one trip. But now all my dates for the latter half are off, oh well.



   In other news I'm currently reading a book I'm really liking, called Adjacent to Argonauts by Julian Blatchley, which I had gotten onto actually after I encountered him being remarkably witty in comments to a post in a facebook group and he quipped about wishing people liked his book as much as his post. The broadest simplest way I unintentionally categorize things I read is "bah I could do better than this" and "fuck I could never write this well." This book falls into the latter category! It's funny it doesn't say anywhere on the blurb or anything but from the first line I picked up on that it took substantial inspiration from Three Men in A Boat, but while I actually felt that classic book came off as trying-too-hard and not as funny everyone makes it out to be, this book succeeds in actually being constantly funny.
   So being in the midst of reading that as I re-read the above section of my own writing I'm like ugh, it's so flat, unfunny and lacking in creative descriptions compared to Blatchley's book! The creative descriptions are something I can aspire to but I really can't think of how I could make almost everything sound as humorous as he does. Anyway, suffice to say I really wholeheartedly recommend his book, especially to the surprising number of you who were fans of Three Men in a Boat

   Monday, April 22nd, 2013 – There’s 500 hives in close rows, arranged in roughly a rectangle, with a loose canopy of palm fronds overhead to provide shade and a slat fence around the the perimeter. The hives are frame hives like we use in the US, raised up on stands so they’re at a comfortable working height, the top of the one brood box at elbow height. And in fact, there’s no more boxes than the one brood box.
   The way we keep bees in the US, the first brood box is just the beginning, the minimum requirements of a hive that they soon outgrow, more boxes then being added on top. Here (I would find this hive to be absolutely typical of the rest of the beekeeping operations I saw in Egypt), if the bees are across all ten frames of the first box, it’s time to split it and have two boxes! Husam cynically explained that “here, the beekeepers would rather be able to brag about the number of hives they have than have fewer stronger hives.” I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, I believe in people’s self interest enough that I hold out hope it’s not so short sighted and maybe the conditions in Egypt actually favor this, but I can’t say for sure. When a hive is smaller than two boxes of bees, the bees spend proportionately more of their time and effort raising brood – they must have 6-11 frames of brood, so these smaller hives are perpetually concentrating on that brood making. When you have 10 frames of brood, six of those frames of bees at least are working on brood. When you have 20 frames of bees (60,000 bees), there’s still only 6-11 frames of bees rearing brood and 9-14 frames of bees out collecting honey.
   And in this case, any frame you try to harvest honey from will also have brood on it. Normally, in The West, I would never harvest a brood frame, but here they just carefully uncap the honey cells but not the brood ones, and run it through the spinner at slow speed so the brood doesn’t et extracted.
   But, and here is maybe a crucial difference, this beekeeper primarily harvests bee venom, and so did a significant number of other beekeepers in Egypt I met. This hasn’t been a major activity among beekeepers I have known in the West (To be honest I’ve never met anyone who said they did this in the US or Australia). They do this by putting bees in a glass tube in which they get electrically shocked, which causes them to sting the glass, the venom is then collected and dehydrated. Bee venom is by far the most valuable commodity that can be harvested from bees per weight (they were getting $60/ounce ($2/gram), about 1000 times the value of honey, though one can only collect less than a gram per hive per harvest). Obviously it can’t just be sold at the corner market but it has medical uses and pharmaceutical companies will pay good money for it. Probably the conditions in Egypt, the relative amount of honey produced, costs of running a hive, price of honey and of venom, make harvesting venom the particularly best remunerative beekeeping activity there. Economic supply and demand curves often explain things like this.
   Another twist on the economics of beekeeping, in many places farmers pay beekeepers for pollination – in Egypt the beekeepers have to pay citrus growers for the privilege of locating their hives near the orchards.
   I have a variety of advice I can share. Such a concentration of hives in one place facilitates the spread of disease (“yes but it’s practical for working them”), bees will be unable to find the correct hives in such grids and rows, they could at least paint the hives different colors (“they find this works okay as it is”), they’d probably get better honey production if they let the hives increase in size rather than constantly splitting them (“they would prefer maximum number of hives”). They had an answer for my every advice, while looking at me expectantly waiting for me to divulge some sort of easy golden bullet they’d never heard before that would revolutionize their production, giving them an advantage over their competitors, without them having to actually change any of their cherished ways. I begin to feel anxious again as to whether I’ll be able to accomplish anything. The owner of the hives shows me the business cards of several other beekeeping experts who had already visited him and said the same things as me, obviously similarly failing to convince them to change anything.
   I learned something myself from them. The hives only had as many frames within them as were occupied by bees. The way I had learned beekeeping, a ten frame box always had ten frames in it even if there were only three frames of bees. In Egypt, unoccupied frames would probably melt in the heat so they only add a new frame when it looks like the bees within are ready to occupy say a 5th or 6th frame, and the rest of the space is left vacant. If one did this and didn’t check your hives for a few weeks in Spring you’d return to find they’d built comb willy-nilly throughout the empty space, which would be a mess to clean up, but labor being very cheap in Egypt the owner had several workers who could ensure each of the 500 hives were checked weekly. Inspired by this, much later in Australia when starting new hives I’d often not put a full complement of frames in a box until a few weeks later so it wouldn’t melt or warp in the heat.
   The workers were in fact just sitting down to lunch when we arrived. The bees were nice enough that they were having their lunch (falafels with a pickled cheese in pita bread, very strong tea brewed up in a kettle over an open flame) in a cleared space in the middle of the apiary. They were very friendly and welcoming, sharing their lunch with me. Afterwords as we were going through the hives we found a scorpion in one – from the way they all jumped back I’m guessing one particularly doesn’t want to get stung by one.



Tuesday, April 23rd – I present to Dr Adel’s apiculture class about comparative beekeeping in the various countries I’ve worked and visited. The students are studious and intelligent. It’s also clear that Dr Adel is thoroughly knowledgeable about apiculture, there’s nothing scientific about beekeeping I can say he doesn’t already thoroughly know. But he’s intrigued by the Australian j-hook hive tool design and takes a tracing of the one I have brought with me. Then we visit an agricultural high school, which has a beekeeping department, and I take questions and answers from the staff there and look at their hives. Like many places, they have folk remedies for the “incurable” bee disease American Foulbrood (it didn’t come from America I promise, we just first discovered it) – in this case something involving cinnamon?



Wednesday, April 24th - I present to the Minya Beekeepers Association, Dr Adel and I sitting at the end of a long table of old beekeepers. Dr Adel acts as my translator. As with the beekeeper earlier, I have plenty of suggestions, but they’ve heard them all before and aren’t interested in the suggested changes, and yet they seem impatient for me to tell them something revolutionary. I tell them the very most up-to-date information on treatment of the bee pest the Varroa mite, but they’ve heard that already too.
   At least Dr Adel is able to often enlarge on my answers. He knows the exact context of what they know and which points need re-enforcing. I am very confident that he thoroughly knows his business and am more than happy for him to do so, it takes a bit of the pressure off me. However, Husam apparently has other ideas and takes Dr Adel aside for chastisement, telling him he is only to repeat me word for word. I feel bad about this, Dr Adel is very nice, an expert in apiculture in his own right and with the academic credentials to prove it, being told he must act as the mere translation device to me must be demeaning. He bears it with dignity, however, and after the meeting with earnest handshakes and good will, we say goodbye.
   This time I’m awake for more of the drive back and I notice often there’s a random pyramid in the distance. Like most people I had only been particularly aware of the three famous “great pyramids” at Giza, but it turns out there’s actually 118 of them all over the place. Once again I’m intrigued to later read about what I see. That slouchy pyramid in the distance? It’s apparently the Meidum Pyramid, the first straight-sided pyramid (as opposed to earlier pyramids with distinctively stepped sides), built between 2613 and 2498 BC. Originally built as a step pyramid at a steep angle, it was finished in the now familiar more or less (nearly) equilateral triangle design, but the angle being too steep it collapsed possibly during construction. The burial chamber is missing the usual inscriptions, with unfinished walls and wooden supports still in place that are usually removed, it seems probable Pharaoh Sneferu gave up on completing it.
   Shortly later I see another oddly shaped pyramid in the distance. The Bent Pyramid was under construction at the same time as Meidum Pyramid, started after they’d decided against steps, but hadn’t figured out yet the steep angle wouldn’t work. After Meidum collapsed they finished this one at a shallower angle. Sneferu may be buried here, or he perhaps went with his third attempt, the Red Pyramid. Sneferu strikes me as a great name for a cat. An indecisive cat.



   Back in Cairo the guest house is now full. The potato expert is there, now plus a citrus pest management expert and another tomato expert. When I express to them my frustration that the beekeepers I’ve been meeting had already been visited by experts and knew practically everything there was to know, they all said the same – all the operations they visited had been regularly visited by consultants and were better than typical comparative operations in the states. It’s my cynical hypothesis that this is what happens when somewhere at “the top” it is said “Egypt is a strategic ally of ours, we need to give them a large amount of aid money,” And so projects to run consultants through Egypt are constantly put forth regardless of if they’re needed, because the aid projects must happen.



Thursday, April 25th – It’s once again a three-day weekend. It’s almost a relief from the anxiety of trying to teach people who already know everything, though I didn’t come here to play tourist.
   The Organization organizes some tours for us. On Thursday we visit the Great Pyramids at Giza. These are the pyramids everyone thinks about when they think about pyramids. They were built by Sneferu’s son Khufu and avoided the mistakes he had made in his earlier pyramids.
   I had been here before of course, but this time tourism is down 90% due to the political situation. This time there’s no crowds, just the enormous pyramids under the blue dome of sky and a handful of tourists. Even the peddlers and touts are few since these small crowds can’t support a robust tout/peddler(/pickpocket?) ecosystem. And of course, being the youngest of my colleagues they mostly leave me alone.
   From Giza we go to Saqqara, just south of Cairo, where I hadn’t been before. If the Giza pyramids, just visible rising above the city to the north, leave an impression of a singular unrivaled ancient grandeur, Saqqara leaves the impression of an immense amount of grand history. There’s about a dozen pyramids here in various stages of disintegration, for these are among the oldest. Besides the pyramids, there’s ruins of temple complexes. And a lot of holes in the ground from excavations. The three Giza pyramids stand majestically on an empty flat slope, the pyramids of Saqqara are crowded amongst ruins, and in addition to Giza to the north one can see the Bent Pyramid and others to the south.
Djoser’s Step Pyramid is the most impressive here. It is the oldest standing pyramid, built 2670-2650 BC (ie finished about 40 years before the Meidun Pyramid was begun). It has scaffolding along several of the step walls, presumably preservation work going on but it gives it the appearance of still being under construction.



   Friday we go down to the docks on the Nile and for $10 (in total) one of the lateen-rigged felucca sailboats takes us all out to sail around on the Nile for an hour.
   On Saturday we go to the Egyptian Museum, another place I hadn’t been before. It’s absolutely stuffed with fascinating unbelievably ancient artifacts. From 4,000 year old relics of pharaohs to Roman mummies which seem comparatively recent at only 2,000 years old.
   Driving around Cairo we also see “Cemetary City” where people live right among the tombs of the cemetery, and “Garbage City.” Because Christians face substantial discrimination in Cairo, garbage collection is one of the few jobs open to them, so they collect the garbage and process it right in the area of town where they live.
   We also learn a story about the “swine flu” scare in 2010. The government had ordered all pigs killed, which experts say wouldn’t have any beneficial effect on human health but was easy to do politically since only Christians had pigs. But all the Christians just kept their pigs in their apartments for a few months until it blew over. And that they were able to get the pigs through alive was good because the pigs eat a substantial amount of the garbage.
   Three days of tourism are alright but by Saturday night I’m looking forward to getting back to work, though already once again feeling anxious about how I’ll be able to benefit the beekeepers I meet.

Continuing the Apinautica from Dubai

Marooned in Egypt
   Up at 3:30am for the 5am departure to Egypt. After four hours of sitting on the floor by the gate we finally board and take off at 0900. This of course causes us to miss the Cairo to Nigeria flight by several hours, and I find myself sitting on the floor at the Cairo terminal for several more hours, along with the surprisingly large number of other Nigeria-bound passengers effected. A fully stocked concession kiosk stands tauntingly near us, but only accepts Egyptian pounds. None of us have Egyptian pounds, and so we can just gaze hungrily at the snacks we can’t have as we uncomfortably wait for the airline to tell us what they’ll do about us.
   “There’s not another flight until tomorrow, we’ll put you up in a hotel until then, when you hear your name called please come up to the desk” they finally announce.
   “Oh no you don’t!” a British citizen immediately approaches the desk, “I’ve been through this before and don’t want anything to do with it again, give me back my passport, I’ll make my own arrangements!” The rest of us looked at eachother, this is a bit ominous.
   I’m developing a headache and general achey feeling. They take us to a hotel, which actually seems fairly nice. They want to put us two to a room but Nigerians in business suits strenuously object with the battlecry “I am a business owner!” until the hotel relents.
   I fall into my hotel bed and sleep till dinner time, at which point I wake up feeling thoroughly awful but drag myself down to the restaurant not wanting to miss dinner. There’s a buffet but nothing to drink, not even water, is provided. The Nigerian business owners, complaining that their business class tickets entitle them to more than this, refuse to pay for water, but eventually a friendly young Pakistani-Nigerian fellow pays for all their waters. I’m barely able to pick at a fruit salad as raging indigestion has joined my ailments.
   Four hour flight to Abuja, during which I have to get up and go to the lavatory at least every half hour, unfortunately for the two people who had to get up every time to let me outt.
   Arriving in Abuja, my luggage of course does not arrive. At the lost luggage desk it’s like a reunion from Cairo, all of us from the previous day’s missed flight hadn’t had our luggage arrive.


   While traveling internationally one seems to enter a strange dimension where time and date have little meaning – is it the time in the place where I left or the time where I arrive or something in between? When I reorient myself in Abuja it’s April 4th, I had left my house in Australia on Monday morning and now it’s Thursday afternoon, it had taken 70 hours of travel.
   Though I felt too unwell to properly appreciate it at the time, when I arrived in Abuja I had actually completed a circumnavigation of the world, having the been there the previous year, and having since then kept traveling west to the US, west to Australia and west again to arrive back at Abuja.

Chapter VII - Nigeria III - Sakiland
Thursday, April 4th, 2013 – “The King of Saki is looking forward to meeting you! He had heard many good things about your previous project in Ibadan and has been looking forward to your arrival for months!” John from The Organization tells me as we drive from the airport to the hotel. John is the same age as me, 30, and will accompany me on this project. He mentions that he had had to work as a volunteer at Non-Profits for many years before his resume was impressive enough to get this job.

   I feel very flattered that a king should want to see me, and in the mean time, here is the literal princess still working in the hotel lobby. She is looking gorgeous in her elegant clothes, glittering gold jewelry, broad smile of brilliantly white teeth as she greets me and brown eyes sparkling confidently. She remembers me as if it had been just yesterday we’d last met. “We should hang out … maybe when I’m back from Saki” I say, I still feel too unwell to contemplate socializing even with gorgeous princesses. My friend the security guard appears to no longer work here, and the receptionist doesn’t know his number.

   The next day John picks me up to take me to the airport for the domestic flight to Oyo State. He’s running on Nigerian time, which stresses me out but surely he knows his country – we get to the airport at 3:00pm for the 3:00pm flight. Nope the flight has left, and there’s only one a day. But on the bright side, here’s my luggage arrived!
   I’m very frustrated, this project is sandwiched in before a project in Egypt so there were only 9 training days but now that’s been reduced to 7.
   “The King of Saki is really looking forward to your arrival!” Yes well. But there’s a bright side to another evening in Abuja, Princess Nwaji is keen to hang out, though I still feel very unwell. She’s happy to come chill with me in my room and watch a movie, though I still feel like an invalid and still have to keep running to the bathroom. I fear I’m not at my most charismatic.

Saturday, April 6th - We once again arrive at the airport 5 minutes after the flight’s scheduled departure but that’s okay because it doesn’t depart for another hour. From there it takes four hours to travel 100 miles north through Nigerian scrub, zigzagging across the road to avoid the enormous potholes. Finally we arrive in Saki. The guest house is in a quiet government compound surrounded by lots of space and trees. There’s a small welcoming party is waiting outside the guest-house which includes two or three people I had met last year in Ibadan.
   “The King of Saki has been greatly looking forward to meeting you … but he died yesterday.”

   Continuing the travel memoir book I'm working on, with this chapter we're caught up with everything I have currently written. Having just finished the back-to-back Second Nigeria project and Ethiopia:



May 12th, 2012, Istanbul Ataturk Airport – “You’ll have to collect and re-check your luggage in Istanbul” they had told me on check in in Addis Ababa. I clearly remember this, as I watch the baggage conveyor go around and around with ever fewer bags on it, none of them mine. Finally I ask a member of the airport baggage staff.
   “No it would have automatically been transferred”
   Just to make sure I walk to the far end of the airport to find some Delta staff to ask.
   “No there’s no transfer agreement between Delta and Turkish, your luggage definitely didn’t automatically transfer”
   And so, rather than get out of the airport or at least relax during my six hour layover in Istanbul, I spend the entire time getting the runaround around the airport trying to find my luggage, ultimately without success. It will eventually be delivered to me back home in California looking like they used the baggage tractor to back up over it repeatedly, pulverizing everything solid, including three honey jars that had been carefully wrapped and cushioned, spreading their contents over everything not already destroyed.



Many hours later, but still May 12th, New York – After 36 days abroad, and travel through many airports, which usually have put some effort into ensuring you arrive to a spacious, welcoming arrivals area, –a sort of foyer to the country with public art – I find myself emerging into a grimy underground-garage feeling area. Thick unadorned concrete columns support a roadway claustrophobically just above our heads, heavy traffic on the pick-up roadway fills the semi-enclosed space with exhaust fumes and the sound of engines, and the parking garage just across from it completes the enclosed feeling. And I may be back in the states now, but my checked luggage sure enough is nowhere to be seen.
   These are the days before smart phones (I’d get my first one as a birthday present from my parents in a month), so I ask someone for directions … and the answer comes back in a heavy New York or    New Jersey accent more incomprehensible than anything I’ve heard in over a month of travel … but I suspect it was rude.
   I descend into the grimdark depths of the New York subway system, and ride the snorting, shuddering subway carriage to the grand and airy Grand Central Station, and from there it’s two hours by Amtrak through New York suburbs I barely see because I’ve been traveling uncountable hours by now, to Bridgeport, Connecticut.
   I enter the Bridgeport marina and make out a pair of tall masts looming above all the smaller closer boats. As I walk down the dock, the rubber dingy sets off from the schooner Pegasus riding at anchor.
   “Mr Fricke I presume?” Tarragon says with a smile as I carefully step from the dock into the dingy with my backpack.



May 13th, 2012 – The crew of the Pegasus is busy up-rigging the boat. Over winter the sails and many of the lines had been downrigged to protect them from the elements, but now it’s time to get her ready for the sailing season. I try to be helpful but they ‘re very understanding that I’m still very jetlagged and don’t know the boat at all. Tarragon has been given the task of rigging the head-sails on the front of the vessel, and I’m happy to be her assistant.
   The schooner Pegasus normally only sails with an all female crew, conducting leadership programs for girls, but they're willing to put up with me during uprig and the subsequent shakedown cruise.
   It was just not even two years ago, 19 months, that walking down the dock in Olympia, Washington, to welcome passengers to the brigantine Eos, I had first met a bank teller named Tarragon, walking unsteadily on the gently moving dock. Now here she is with a list of sundry pieces of equipment she needs written on her hand and down her arm in sharpie as she competently sets about her complex task, grease stains on her work pants as she concentrates on tying an important knot.



May 14th, 2012 - “Happy birthday!!” Tarragon smiles at me across the table in the mostly empty restaurant. We were lucky to find one that was still open this late –after 9pm– the earliest we were able to get off the boat, what with the long days being spent trying to get her ship-shape.
   The waitress brings us a rich slice of chocolate cake.
   “I got you a present!” says Tarragon excitedly
   “When did you find time to get me a present?” I ask surprised
   She slides a pack of socks and a tube of toothpaste onto the table. I laugh with genuine happiness – with my luggage having been lost I truly appreciate these mundane gifts.
   So here I am, I think to myself, my thirtieth birthday. I’ve just returned from three projects in Africa and am volunteering on a sailing ship – is this where I thought I’d be on my thirtieth birthday? Certainly it’s a lot better than things looked a year ago. I don’t exactly have a career that’s making me rich but, I decide, it’s not a terrible situation, at least it’s interesting. I don’t know what to expect for the decade ahead but I hope it is both interesting and forms some semblance of a career.



May 15th - 22nd – By and by uprigging is complete, we raise the anchor, hoist the sails and set off down the Connecticut coast towards New York City. It’s only about forty nautical miles to the Big Apple, but sailing ships are slow (the world was explored at the speed of smell) and we’re not in a hurry, so it takes us three days to get there. A schooner such as the Pegasus has two broad fore-and-aft sails, which it can swing out on booms to catch the wind, as well as staysails out over the bowsprit and triangular gaff topsails up above the main sails, but not the “square” sails that make a traditional “square rigger” such as my beloved Eos so distinct. Schooners can easily be handled by just a few crew members and are ideal for running in and out of coastal islands and shoals, as we are currently doing. Many of the little islands off the Connecticut coast have historic lighthouses and glimpses of elegant old buildings among the trees.
   We anchor the first night off an island the crew enigmatically refer to as “Tick Island” – we don’t go ashore. Anchor watch is much more peaceful than a watch at sea – one stands watch alone for an hour, alone at night with the stars above and lights of shore shimmering across the gently lapping waves. The metal fairleads on the forestays absent-mindedly tinkle like silver bells. Every fifteen minutes one takes bearing on three points the captain has designated, looking across the binnacle compass at the light and recording the bearing in the log: 130 degrees south-east by east to the beacon that shines nostalgically in the victorian steeple of the historic lighthouse on the nearby island; 240 degrees southwest-by-west to the light that slowly flashes an alternating red and white at the current lighthouse that sticks out of the water like a spark plug about a mile away; 003 degrees north to a light on the mansion on the privately owned “Tavern Island” If the bearing differs by more than an amount the captain has specified, the captain must be woken as that would mean we are drifting. We are not drifting. Once in each crewmember’s hour they descend into the warmth of belowdecks, and as quietly as they can so as not to wake the offwatch crew they proceed to three designated locations where they can lift the deck platings and see how high the water in the bilge is, and record this in the log. The rest of the time, one quietly strolls the deck, alone with their thoughts in the night, until it’s time to wake the next person up.
   The second night we once again anchor off an island with a historic stone lighthouse, surrounded by other islands with private mansions on them. This lighthouse island is rumored to have buried treasuer from the pirate Captain Kidd
   The third night we anchor off Throg’s Neck, the entrance to the East River through New York. Just across the water from us we can see the lawns of King’s Point, where one of my former crewmates attends the Merchant Marine Academy. The next day we sail down the East River, past the infamous prison island of Riker’s Island, and moored to the mainland adjacent there’s a massive cubist hulk of a barge. [obv the book wouldn't have hyperlinks but look at that thing!]
   “What’s that?” I ask a crewmate,
   “Oh that’s a prison barge.”
   It turns out it’s the world’s largest prison barge, the Vernon C Bains. As a history nerd I’d read about the prison hulks used in the 18th century, to find one in current use is disturbingly dystopian.
   We continue our sanding, painting and rust-busting as the endless rows of skyscrapers of Manhattan slide by to our west. After passing under the Brooklyn Bridge, we all look out with great interest as we approach the historic South Street Seaport, eager to see the large clipper ships Peking and Wavertree, along with their smaller consorts. Us tallship sailors always have a great fondness for other historic sailing vessels. The Peking and Wavertree were among the last generation of actual working sailing ships, the latter only retiring from working the tradewinds in 1947.
   We round the south end of Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty holding her torch aloft to our left across the shimmering water, tourist ferries zipping back and forth busily. We continue around up the west side of Manhattan and into the Hudson River, having almost circled the steel-and-glass heart of the metropolis.
   After anchoring overnight near the shore in a broad part of the river we continue up the gently curving river the next day. The sun is bright and warm, and I’m working up near the top of the mast, as on either side the forested banks slide by. Life is good. Having grown up in the urban sprawl of the greater Los Angeles area, I had always assumed the West Coast had entirely filled up with people before California began to – so it’s a marvel to me to see what appears to just be endless forest on either side of the river.
   Around another bend in the river and … it looks like something out of Lord of the Rings on the bank up ahead – A massive citadel of gray stone walls and towers standing straight and proud, stoic and impassive. No one had told me Westpoint Military Academy looks so picturesque.
   As it happens, Westpoint is our destination, and we tie up to a small dock below the stone edifices. It’s not a public dock, but our boat has special permission.
Walking barefoot on the grass field beside the river that evening Tarragon and I marvel at another unfamiliar sight for us – little glowing lights lazily loop around in the gloaming twilight – fireflies! After some fun but unsuccessful attempts at catching them we grow a bit serious, because tomorrow I am leaving. She purses her lips when she’s particularly thoughtful about something.
   “So you’re thinking of going to Australia next?” she asks
   “Well not for a few months, not till the end of summer” I say “the beekeeping seasons are reversed there so when the season is ending here it will be beginning there”
   “And… when will I see you again?”
   “You can come to Australia too?” I ask optimistically
   “And do what?” … “you’re always leaving” she sighs.
   We walk in silence for a moment, holding hands, barefoot on the soft grass, surrounded by the surreal scintillations of fireflies in the gathering darkness.
   “I love you but… I think we should consider ourselves broken up after you leave here – because I have absolutely no idea when I’ll ever see you again,”
   I don’t argue, we’ve been drifting toward this point for awhile.
   The next day she takes me across the river in the smallboat, I’ll catch a train in the town of Garrison across the river. As she casts off from the dock in Garrison, after we’ve said goodbye, she has one last thing to say: “now don’t you get killed in Australia.”

[If you're wondering thats not how the break up happened but over the phone a month or two later isn't as good a scene as among the fireflies, literary license here. Terragon might make one more reappearance in 2017 when I join her for a few days on the ship she is by then first mate of]
[baggage arrives run over would arrive here chronologically but doesn’t really fit]



June 2nd, Southern California – It’s a warm summer evening, and I’m tired from another ten hour day of beekeeping, but you can’t let that stop you from doing other things or you’ll never do anything, because every day is a ten hour day of beekeeping – unless it’s a 12 hour day.
   So sitting at my desk, under the slowly spinning ceiling fan and a pleasant breeze coming in the window, I open my laptop. It was articles in the American Bee Journal that inspired me to go to Africa, maybe I’ll have my hand at writing an article and see if they’ll accept it. My fingers hover over the keyboard, I need a good moment to begin on, something both exciting and representative of the whole experience…
   “Rows of yam mounds and mud-walled little houses fly past us as we speed along the narrow dirt trail...” tap tap tap 3690 words later an article about Ethiopia and Nigeria, with plentiful serious looking citations to the thesis studies of both my Ethiopian interpreters. Reread it again, send it to my mother so she can tell me all the commas I’ve missed, and go to bed.



June 3rd – Sit down under the fan once again and open the computer, read the news. Headline: “Nigerian airliner crashes into ‘Mountain of Fire’ Church, 183 dead.” A Dana Air flight from Abuja to Lagos had crashed, killing all aboard and many on the ground as well. I double checked my ticket stub, yes I had flown that same airline, that same route, just a month earlier. Dana Air only operates four aircraft, there’s a one in four chance it was the aircraft I was on, there’s a one in four chance each and any of the flight crew I saw that day were in it. I feel a bit shaken, this is as close to a plane crash as I have any desire to get.
   After some delay due to being unsettled, re-read my article. Fix all the commas my mother pointed out as missing, make some other tweaks, email it to the editor.

June 4th – “Hello Kris,

Thank you for sending your interesting article on your volunteer beekeeping work in Africa. You are certainly to be commended for your wonderful work in helping beekeepers in Africa! I think many of our readers would find this article and your photos of interest. We have published similar articles from volunteer beekeepers in the past and we always like to highlight these efforts in the hope that it will inspire others to do similar volunteer work.

Please select some photos from the many you have for use with your article. That would help me out a lot. On our present schedule, I hope to print your article in one of our late summer or early fall issues that we are working on now.

Best regards,
Joe”

   I hadn’t actually been terribly optimistic it would be accepted, the ABJ is such as prestigious publication!


   By and by the summer slips by. I apply for and receive a working holiday visa for Australia, which will allow me to live and work there for a year. I book a ticket for September and put feelers out for jobs, though the visa specifically requires one not to have a job lined up beforehand. My article is coming out in September though, which should make it easy to get a job in the industry that month.

[potential scene where I go camping alone in the redwoods for a week before I leave for Australia but I don't think it makes the cut]

MEKELLE

May 4th [2012], Day 28, 0600 – I get up bright and early for my 0900 flight out of Bahir Dar. I find my camera battery had failed to charge the night before which is a frustrating start of the day.

0645 – I’m all packed and waiting in the lobby for my ride. Unfortunately I hadn’t had time to eat breakfast, but my ride should be here now to take me the fifteen minutes to the airport, where I’m supposed to be two hours before my flight.
   Time ticks by with no sign of Beide. I try calling him but get a “this user’s phone is currently shut off” message. I try calling Teferi,
   “Oh you want me to send a driver?” he sounds genuinely surprised.
   “Yes, I thought we discussed this yesterday? Please send him as soon as possible my flight is at nine”
   “Okay he’s on his way.”
   I continue waiting, my stomach growling, but I can’t go eat because I’m expecting the driver at any moment.

0800 – Beide finally arrives. I suspect its not his fault, he seems more dependable than Teferi. Anyway, no point crying over spilt milk, he’s here now. We quickly arrive at the airport and find no rush there, and the plane is not yet on the ground. I say goodbye to Beide, he’s been a good friend throughout my stay here. Unfortunately there is no food for my growling stomach in the tiny terminal.
   I call The Organization’s staff in Addis Ababa, where I’m supposed to be from 1100-1450, and ask them if they can change $300 USD I left with them into birr for me, and then my phone dies because the charger I’ve been provided barely works.

1030 – the plane I was supposed to depart on at 0900 finally arrives.

1200 – finally arrive in Addis Ababa. With only fifty minutes until I need to be here for my next flight it doesn’t really make sense for me to go out into the city, and I’m starving – but unfortunately there is probably someone from The Organization waiting for me outside the airport and I have no working phone to call him.
   I find the driver outside, and he’s all about driving me back to The Organization’s office. When I remind him that I need to be back at the airport in fifty minutes this seems to be news to him. He insists the office isn’t far, and in my vague memory it didn’t seem too far, so deferring to his familiarity with his home city I agree to let him take me to the office.

1240 – we arrive at the office, I’m veritably freaking out because I’m supposed to be at the airport for check-in at 1250, and I’m also deliriously hungry, and want to immediately turn around and go to the airport. They don’t seem stressed about the upcoming flight, and haven’t exchanged my money yet, but invite me to go with them to the bank, which we do.

1420 – finally back in the airport terminal and through security. My flight began boarding five minutes earlier, but I’m out of my mind with hunger having not had a bite to eat all day, so I order a burger at a restaurant in the terminal. It doesn’t come out until 1432 as I’m losing my mind, but I then devour it like a shark having a feeding frenzy and run to the gate just in time to catch my flight.

1630 – Finally arrive at the Mekelle airport. I was expecting a small shack of an airport terminal like there had been in Bahir Dar – Bahir Dar is one of the major tourist destinations of Ethiopia after all. Instead I find a large and modern looking airport building. It reminds me of some grumbling I’d heard, that Tigray exerts a disproportionate amount of influence in the federal government.
   Stepping out of the terminal I see before me a broad valley of pale rocky ground and sparse shrubs. The air is thin, because these are the highlands at 7,400 feet. The sky is broad and blue, and the temperature comfortably in the upper 70s.
   I’m concerned that my driver might once again have forgotten me and my phone isn’t working, but I quickly find a man holding a sign with my name on it. His name is Goru. Middle aged, friendly, full of energy, his skin is covered in jigsaw shapes of pale color – the skin condition known as vitiligo.
   Goru explains the sparse landscape around us as we drive away:
   “No one is allowed to build on this side of the hill around the airport for fear they could fire on the airport.” I quietly wonder to myself if this is a common practice    I just haven’t noticed or a uniquely Ethiopian thing.
   We crest a low ridge and the town spreads out before us in a low valley. It’s a decent sized town of 300,000 with a handful of five story buildings, mostly hotels, a stadium under construction, a monument on a hill looking like a stylized arm holding a ball aloft, and a large concrete plant looming at one end in a tangle of silos, pipes and smoking chimneys. As we descend into the town I’m struck by the ubiquitous use of stone. The roads are smoothly cobbled rather than asphalted, the walls and buildings are made with blocks of stone. Traffic is only very light, but we must stop and wait for a group of camels to cross the road. Goru turns to me:
   “I’ve heard there’s different kinds of camels, are these the same camels you have in America?”
   “Well, actually, we don’t really have camels” I explain.
   “What?? Really?” Goru is incredulous



May 5th, Day 29 – I’ve just finished a delicious and leisurely breakfast at the pleasant outdoor eating area of the New Axum hotel when Goru shows up again. The day before he had said we were lacking a car to make the drive down to Korem where the training would take place, the usual vehicle being under repair. But now he tells me he has found a car and driver and we’ll leave just as soon as he finds a translator. And he’s off again!
   A few hours later he’s back with a car and translator. I notice that of the cars in the hotel parking lot, several are white UN landcruisers with the international “NO” sign on the back windows with an AK-47 in the circle. Someone has written “I love you” with their finger on the dust on the back window of one of these UN cars.
   During the hours of the drive south, I get to know the translator, Girmay. He is a pleasant beekeeping graduate student at Mekelle University. We drive through empty highlands and flat shallow valleys divided by low jagged hills. The villages look neolithic, rough stone and thatch, and then suddenly around a rise we are driving past the towering bone-white masts of a modern windfarm, and then the landscape is flat and barren again. After an hour, the road begins to weave up into mountains. The landscape becomes greener. Blueish woodsmoke curls above clusters of huts perched on mountain saddles, surrounded by terraced fields of tef, the millet-like grain Ethiopia lives on. As we slow to avoid hitting the wandering chickens and goats of a village, children see me in the car and excitedly shout “Ferengi!” and “China! China!”
   “Ferengi” because it’s the Amharic word for “foreigner,” “China” because usually the only pale skinned people they see are Chinese engineers, and don’t we all just look the same?
   After a very long series of switchbacks up a steep slope we reach a mountain pass.
   “This is Dembeguina Pass” Goru tells me, his eyes glowing with pride, “here during the Italian invasion in 1935 Ethiopian forces surrounded an Italian force and defeated it.” I look around the windswept lonely pass and imagine the tired and slow moving column of troop trucks and tanks being overwhelmed by screaming warriors, and share his pride, for a love of Ethiopia is quickly growing in me.
   We descend down the other side into green valleys, and more hidden little towns. Finally we come to Korem town strung out along the road in a green mountain valley. The hotel we check into here has solid concrete walls with narrow windows and a dark cavernous bunker-like interior, the rooms inside opening to a central – what would be called an atrium except it isn’t open at the top. Getting suspicious I walk around the outside and the building is shaped like a star. Like, perhaps … what one might call a “star fort.” This might very well be the very fortification from which Haile Selassie commanded his troops in the last major battle of the 1935/1936 invasion of Ethiopia – where the brave Ethiopian warriors proved no match for mustard gas bombs dropped by aircraft.



May 6th, Day 30 – I’m not optimistic we’ll be able to start the project today since it’s Sunday. I’ve never seen work proceeding on a Sunday in Africa, and Ethiopia is a particularly religious country. But no all the trainees are gathering in the morning outside our hotel-fort. We take our seats in the narrow banquet hall adjoining the main building. Two of the attendees wearing a sort of white turban stand up and lead the group in some short prayers – we have the priests among us!
   After the morning lecture, Girmay and I walk down the quiet mainstreet –cars are actually rare on this road– to a little restaurant with a nice outdoor eating area overflowing with leafy foliage. While eating our injera based lunch it begins to rain, so we move under the roof overhang. The temperature remains pleasant and the water sparkles as it drops off the many leaves around us.
There’s no internet here, not on my phone, not in the hotel, not even an internet cafe in town. If I can possibly get internet I always find a way but when it’s simply not an option as is the case here, it’s kind of a relief. The noise of the outside world is severed and there is nothing but the here and now, and the here and now is nothing but drinking milky tea after lunch while watching the rain dripping from the plants.
   Back in the lecture hall in the fortress after lunch, lightning flashes outside the windows and thunder rumbles in the distance. The light flickers. This place is like a haunted castle. These beekeepers are among the most experienced I’ve encountered yet, asking in-depth and insightful questions – and unlike some of the participants in the previous two locations they’re not just trying to “show up the Ferengi” but taking the opportunity to learn.
   After our afternoon session is over Girmay and I and three other young men stroll around town again (there is, after all, little else to do). The others with us consist of an accountant from The Organization, and two young men from the Comel honey processing business (the head beekeeper and the director of the honey processing plant). The rain has stopped, though everything is still damp, and the air is imbued with a combination of the smell of fresh rain and wood smoke which hangs, bluish-white, wispily in the air over low parts of the valley.
   We come across what looks like a bar – young fellows are loitering in front drinking something and loud music can be heard reverberating within. Girmay approaches the patrons and asks if the place has tea, but they say the place only has milk. What I had assumed were barflies drinking beer were in fact lads drinking milk.

   Continuing with The Book, recall that last time we had the first two days in Ethiopia, introducing the reader to Ethiopia and establishing the goals here. Let us continue with the third day!


Haile Selassie, looking a bit like Steve Carell here I think?

Tuesday, April 24th, Day 18 – “So what are the best museums in town, and how do I get to them?” I ask Addis the receptionist in the morning.
   “Are you going by yourself, where are your colleagues?”
   “They are busy today, I am just sightseeing by myself.”
   “I get off in an hour, do you want me to show you around the city?”
   “Yes that would be delightful”
   “Okay in an hour meet me about one hundred meters down the road that way” and she points to the left of the front door.”
   “Okay great!”

   Just as I’m beginning to think I’ve gotten her instructions wrong, I see her walking towards me on the sidewalk ahead, looking pretty in a simple green skirt and black top, with her hair in a bun atop her head. We walk a short distance to where the road overlooks the African Union headquarters buildings just a few hundred meters away – one tall narrow highrise attached to a lower building with a metallic dome like a giant silvery hamburger bun. We are close enough that we are able to connect to their wifi, which is good – I have no phone service and want to google something.
   “Excuse me, what’s the password for the Africa Union Wifi?” Addis asks a passing man in a suit.
   “‘We are all Africans!’ Capital W and A, and an exclamation point at the end” the man politely explains before continuing on his way. Clever I think to myself, a password that someone like me can’t honestly type.
   “Hey Addis could you type that for me?”

   Next under Addis’ expert guidance we catch one of the taxi/bus minivans that drive set circuits around the city. I’m not sure how someone not thoroughly familiar with the city would be able to get around. We change vans twice, to get onto vans traveling a connecting circuit, until we finally arrive at the campus of Addis Ababa University. From there we walk a short distance through beautiful gardens and lawns towards a two story building situated regally at the culmination of the lawns and fountains.
   “The Ethnographic Museum is in Haile Selassie’s former palace” Addis explained, “well, one of his palaces anyway.”
   The palace has a grand entrance approached by a set of steps, flanked by statues, with the sort of balcony one would address a crowd from directly above it, but other than that the palace doesn’t look overly grand – mostly bare brick with some sections painted pale yellow or grey, with toothpaste colored trim. [Seriously, I'm trying not to insult Ethiopia's cultural heritage here, but between you and me it looks like a run down apartment building from the 70s to me really]
   Just across the drive from the entrance a freestanding spiral staircase stretches up about a floor and a half to nowhere. Fourteen steps, topped with a gold painted crouching lion.
   “The italians built this stairway during their occupation, one step for each year of the reign of Mussolini. When they were kicked out the Lion of Judah was placed on top, representing the Ethiopian triumph.”
   “I wonder how the Italians had planned to finish it.”
   She smiles and shrugs.



   We stroll through the ornate rooms of the museum, filled with artifacts of Ethiopia’s rich history and culture. I admire the interesting musical instruments and farming tools. There’s even a traditional beehive – a woven cylinder slightly tapering to one end, covered in a plaster of mud, dung and ash. Similar hives are easily recognizable in depictions on ancient tapestries.
   I am fascinated to learn that right up until the 1980s Ethiopia had a feudal society. In lieu of the counts and dukes of Europe they had aristocratic titles like dejazmach or ras. And at the top of it all they had the King of Kings (“Negusa Nagast”), the emperor. As a history nerd who has always been fascinated with medieval Europe and a cynic towards modern society, this intrigues me, but the reality of the institutional inequality I find unenjoyably grim. The tone of the displays about the monarchy seem to balance a pride in the reputation of the last emperor, Haile Selassie, as a globally respected statesman, with an un-nostalgic criticism of the feudal system.

[I wish I could remember more specific details about the exhibits but the fact is I really just remember my general impressions at this point]



   After the Ethnographic Museum, we have lunch in a nearby cafe. I let Addis order for me since the menu is all in amharic and there’s not even an easy translation for most of it, it’s all uniquely Ethiopian. The server sets an earthenware bowl of mouthwatering spicy ground lamb in front of me, as well as a cup of peanut tea and a square dense peace of bread, lacking the big holes I am accustomed to bread having.
   “The bread is made from the ‘ensete,’ the ‘false banana tree’” Addis explains.
   "That’s a tree that grows here?” I ask. “My girlfriend Tarragon would find this so interesting” I continue, feeling a bit guilty for using the old gratuitous-mention-of-significant -other technique to ensure there’s not misunderstandings. Addis doesn’t miss a beat, or perhaps, was that just a fraction of a missed beat?
   “Yes, it looks just like a banana tree but the fruit aren’t edible” I stop mid bite of the ensete bread. She laughs and continues “the bread is made from the root actually.”
   I find myself wondering if Tarragon would ever come here with me. She certainly doesn’t lack for adventurous spirit – she is presently sailing off the US East Coast after all – but sometimes an adventurous spirit is not enough…

[I inserted this lunch scene to try to dial in a reminder to the reader of the current state of things with Tarragon, and/or without this I felt the reader might be wondering "hey I thought the protagonist had a girlfriend why's he's traipsing about with some other girl." How well does this fit / work here?]

   I want to go to the Red Terror Museum, which was also among the top rated museums in Addis Ababa and Addis concedes with a heavy sigh that it is important. We find it near a broad and dirty concrete square overshadowed by an overpass.
   “You can go in, I’ll wait out here,” says Addis, looking serious. “I’ve been there before and it’s very depressing,” so I go in while she sits on a bench outside and takes out her phone.
   Inside the exhibit once again begins with the feudal system under Haile Selassie, with the same mix of pride and condemnation in the tone of the exhibits. This museum focuses on the end of his reign, and how resentment of the medieval inequality led to a revolution in 1974. A communist dictatorship called the Derg took over and Haile Selassie was arrested and secretly strangled. The Derg then embarked on a repressive campaign to consolidate its power, known as the Red Terror.
   The museum is somber and quiet. The docent, a gentle and dignified man of about fifty with thin grey hair approaches and stands companionably by me as I look at the newspaper headlines, photographs and artifacts. He helpfully elaborates on the context of some of the earlier exhibits, and seeing as I don’t find this unwelcome he continues with me through the galleries explaining the exhibits in the manner of a skilled university professor, neither over explaining nor leaving me confused. Soon he’s telling me of his own experience. He was arrested at the age of 15, for reasons he didn’t understand (“I don’t know why … what had I done??”), and imprisoned and tortured for the next eight years. I try not to look at his fingers, twisted by torture. By the time he was released, his family and friends were all dead and gone, he had missed out on receiving an education, and still no one wanted to hire or befriend him for fear he was still being watched by the government.
   We walk into a dimly lit gallery in which one wall is entirely shelves of skulls exhumed from a mass grave. Next to each skull in its cubicle are a few personal items found with it, shoes, a watch band, a little wooden Ethiopian orthodox cross necklace, a smudged wallet sized photo of a little girl. We stand in silence for a moment.
   Arriving back in the lobby, the docent explains how the civil war finally resulted in the overthrow of the Derg in 1991. For the first time he seems close to tears as he tells how the top leaders of the Derg fled to Zimbabwe where they live free to this day.
   I walk out into the grey afternoon with a lump in my throat, and hug Addis. Grim indeed. As we walk to the nearest taxi stop, she explains, having been born just after the Derg was overthrown, her parents had named her “New World” -- Addis Alem.

   I'm in a constant philosophical battle with the advice of people who say "don't let the truth get in the way of a good story" and my inclination to cleave strictly to what happened exactly how it happened. In this case I've taken an unusually big liberty -- I wanted to front load the Ethiopian chapter with Ethiopian history so I took this visit to the Ethnological museum that actually occurred on a second visit in 2014 and inserted it here in the beginning of the first visit in 2012. But then it's brought with it a string of problems ... because I went with Addis, and so in order to write her in I need to put her and her hotel in here in 2012. Which isn't really a big problem except in 2014 I was single and it was fine if I was cavorting with cute hotel receptionists but in 2012 I was not, so you can see my inserted lunch to try to patch that.
   And then her and her hotel being here in 2012 means they'll be missing from 2014. We'll see how we can fix that problem when we get there I guess.

   I wonder if I can/should insert more about Haile Selassie's life in this section? Such as his title of Ras Tafari giving the name to the Rastafarians who worship him as a god; and his exile from Ethiopia during the Italian occupation in WWII and his subsequent return.

Original post from the day I went museum hopping with Addis.

   And in reality I didn't go to the Red Terror Museum with Addis, though that was also in 2014. I think the local I went with had indeed declined to go in with me though.

   So yeah, the purpose of this section is obviously to insert some Ethiopian history. How well does it do that? Should there be more or less history?


I could have sworn I had a picture of me pretending the lion was biting my hand but I can't find it.

   Alright so my work on the second chapter of the book about my travels had ben kind of stalled out since I started working full time in October. Initially I had had some other projects that took up my time on the evenings and then I'd forgotten the historical source material at a level of useful detail from the book I was most using (The History of Yoruba, published 1901 or so), but recently I finaly got around to rereading the relevant parts and then writing what I intended based on it.


   The overview summary of my goals with the chapter is that it's the story of my first project in Nigeria; trying to keep the narrative inertia going with overarching plot arcs pertaining to my anxiety tha the project succeed. There's also substantial historical fiction. I myself and I assume most Americans had this picture of Africa as more or less an anarchy of huts before colonization, and my goal with the historical fiction parts is to really portray to the reader that there was just as much of a society there before colonization as anywhere in Europe.

   This is my working copy of the first draft, so it still contains a lot of notes to myself. The blue parts will remain but be in a distinctly different font than the rest, the green is mostly notes to beta readers (well technically alpha readers at this point I think?) or myself.

   Some sections of the beginning of this have been posted here before, but I want to put this to readers all at once so they can read it in the context of itself, as it would be in the book. Does it go on too long, fail to hold interest, etc?

   Thanks, here is the link:

Chapter II: 9ja

   So I recently interviewed my (third?) person for writing an article about them, this local elderly fellow who is very artistic and soon will be moving out of our little town, so the community paper wanted me to do an article about him. I walked the few hundred meters across the village to meet him at his lovely little cottage, we sat in his kitchen, we made our preliminary introductions, I asked if I could record and then started the voice recorder.
   "Okay let's start at the beginning, where and when were you born?"
   He answered this without elaboration, as he opened a scrap book, and began telling me about various recent art projects as he turned pages revealing photos of them. Knowing this would be useful I paid attention and asked a few pertinent questions but tried to redirect him back to his life story. Unfortunately he wasn't terribly helpful in this respect ("Do you remember your first artistic project?" "hmm no" "Were you artistic when you were a child?" "probably?"). The details I was able to get together about his life gradually came out in no sort of chronological order, told in a sometimes unintentionally misleading order ("so wait was that the house you lost in bankruptcy or the one you got in exchange for making an award winning garden? Oh it was neither it was, wait when what?").
   This got me thinking about a youtube video I had recently seen about the hidden rules of conversation. I find when I interview people they want to tell me "the story" in the way they think it would or should be put down on paper (in fact the first two people had begun telling me their story as if they were directly following the outline of and paraphrasing articles about them I'd already read, I don't know if that's because the previous writer took it down exactly as told to them or the subject person themself adopted that as "the" story about them), but the way it should be put down in paper IMO should more or less follow those same "hidden rules of conversation" (basically that one thought logically follows another, is relevant to the overall topic, and is neither too much nor too little information). In the case of this most recent interview, I think my interviewee had his own idea of what the story is about (his recent art projects), but wasn't quite appreciative of the fact that if I just started in about these projects without a larger context about them, the reader would struggle to find their relevance.
   Not that I'm just here to say oh this guy was a bad interviewee, and really I should have thoroughly engaged him on the art and been patient to come back to the other points I wanted to get at (as it was, by the time I circled back to the art projects he'd kind of lost steam on them); but moreover my point here is this realization that I think a lot of non-writers struggle even when they have a story because they don't realize that the rules they easily assume in conversation also apply to writing.

   Okay slight change of plans, I'm not gonna keep rushing ahead in a race against myself and time with the memoir thing but take some time to make more tweaks at Chapter II and feel my way into Chapter III / "Intersession I."

   Here's my ideas for foreseeable nextpartness: a short one scene or so "intersession" where I'm back in the States, at first thinking I might not have any more foreign projects or at least not for awhile, and then I get offered two to do the very next month. For this intersession I'm thinking about using the story of the bee named Melissa even though it actually happened three years earlier, but it's a very cute and interesting story I think.
   Then "Chapter III" will be "Nigeria II," which should be much shorter than this original Nigeria one, consisting of only what's remarkable and non-repetitive with the previous. And then, and here's a big editorial decision I had thought about, there iswas a third Nigeria project and I thought about lining up all three Nigeria projects in this memoir, which makes sense if it's primarily about the places I've gone and all. But because I think the driving force of it all is really more of personal journey of myself, it would be counterproductive to do such an extensive rearrangement (Nigeria III comes after Ethiopia I and Australia I and I'm clearly in a bit of a different place in life). So after Chapter III / Nigeria II will come Ethiopia I (they were back to back, same trip to Africa), and similarly I won't try to combine in everything from subsequent Ethiopia trips. And on the return from that trip I return to a ship with "Tarragon" (which I feel nicely bookends having left from a ship for the first project!) and that's as far as I've thought ahead in much detail.

   Already since the Chapter II scenes were posted here I've added more imposter-syndrome type introspections and doubts about the success of the project and probably of future projects to keep the personal arc moving along.



   Anyway, if any of you have successfully followed along with all the scenes I've posted heretofor for this work, thanks so much and please let me know your overall thoughts! (: