mon ami

kayes, mali

money is a stronger barrier than the berlin wall. if you didn't know the economic hierarchy of the global order, you would learn fast upon arrival to africa. seems like everyone wants to be your friend, help you out, or just be in your presence in the hopes that you'll make it rain. this results in the ultimate big-man-on-campus feeling, which can be annoying if not downright aggravating if you're having one of those wrong-side-of-the-bed days.

perhaps that's why my experience in toubab dialao got extended from 2 to 5 days. i seem to have found a kindred spirit in the form of an illiterate djembe drummer from the congo (brazzaville) by the name of samba. i couldn't explain it or do it justice, but we somehow found a way to connect through more than our broken french conversations. maybe it was because we were both away from home or maybe because neither of us ressembled the caricature of what a traveler or local should be like. basically, while toubab dialao is a tranquil fishing village, it also caters to certain types of foreigners. let's just say that i saw enough mulletted, paunchy french men with massive surgical scars paired off with beautiful senegalese women, and the same with female tourists, to be able to put two and two together. so maybe it's as simple as that ageless bond between two people: laughing at sex tourists.

for whatever reason we became friends, it never ceased to amaze me how much samba went out of his way to help me, even when not necessary. he made two trips (2 hours each way) to negotiate fares for my trip east and help me manage the bustle of the hideous gare-routière. he took me on a sweat-inducing four hour walk to a nearby village where he said there was the best view, even if he could have avoided the soleil on the veranda. he scolded the small children who called me toubab (means white person, but is not perjorative) and told them to call me john (i think it's funny and kinda enjoy it). he even took the cell phone number of the passenger next to me and called hours after i left, just to make sure that i arrived safely.

for all this, he never asked anything of me, except for a little money when we departed in dakar so that he could make it back to the village. i gave him the biggest bill, not so much as a payment for services rendered or some payment to get out of my space (which many people do), but just a gift to a friend who can now either visit the dentist (had some molar issues over the weekend) or start buying djembes to markup for sale to tourists.

this is why i travel. for everything i wrote earlier about how massive the world is, there are those opportunities where you form bon connaissance that transcend borders, cultures, and poorly spoken languages. so while there is certainly still the great monetary divider that keeps me seul in many legs of this trip, i did learn that you find the warmest of hearts in some of the poorest of places.

perdu en traduction

toubab dialo, senegal

a plan in africa stands as much chance as a fart in a hurricane: even if it's well-executed, there are so many external variables to contend with that the whole act becomes captive to chance. such was yesterday's 7-hour trip to the bank.

the first part of the plan went seamlessly: get taxi to rufisque, arrive, withdraw money. check. but my new ami samba wanted to do some investigation into prices for an upcoming journey i have to make towards the malian border. we went from chauffeur to chauffeur, inquiring into prices for the journey that should be in the cfa 5000-10000 range. each offer included an extra zero and i helped samba by either laughing or grimacing at each offer. yet have no fear, samba assured me, we would get better prices la-bàs.

la-bàs didn't turn out to be so much la-bàs as it did dakar. specifially, the gare-routière. picture a square kilometer of cars, buses, and vans that would receive shudders on any american highway with the attendant smells of various petrol products. sprinkle on top of that a mélange of aggressive touts, indifferent chauffeurs, peddlers of fake watches, duffel bags, cigarrettes, oranges, and knock-off q-tips. not to be left out, bien sûr, would be an oppressive sun, swarms of flies, and the occasional pour soul missing a limb and just looking for a little change. that's right: i took a monday field trip to the seventh circle of hell.

to make matters worse, we negotiated a reasonable fair and i handed the money over to an indifferent man wearing a conical vietnamese hat with the expectation that i had just arranged a pick-up for wednesday. to make this long-rendition of a short story shorter, this was not the arrangement that had been made. we had just booked an immediate passage to tambacounda.

we explained the situation to the man and we would get our refund-so soon as two more people arrived to take our place. this meant an hour of sitting/standing in the soleil while i shot the hatted-man viscious looks and recited the panoply of english curse words not entirely under my breath. two more passengers eventually arrived, we got our money and left, only to take the slowest, most crowded bus possible back towards rufisque.

at one point, after the hour wait through dakar traffic, the chauffeur and attendant had gone awol for a good 20 minutes while we all waited impatiently and sweated profusely. it turns out that the gendarmes had told the chauffeur that his permit was invalid and demanded a bribe to clear things up. such is africa: just when you can't imagine your own discomfort any greater, you see someone who loses a days meager wages because of the whim of a hungry official.

this perspective pacified my frustration and the bush taxi we took back to town seemed to be a reward for an unpleasant day: an endless expanse of baobab's against the pink hue of the day's last hour of light and the warm breeze coming off the atlantic. samba and i walked back down towards the beach, less like returned passengers than disheveled seafarers. somewhere during this odyssey i decided to stay an extra day doing nothing more than swimming, reading, and eating delicious seafood. tomorrow: the gare-routière and tambacounda, bien sûr.

chez nabou

toubab dialo, senegal

guide books are excellent places to start, but terrible places to finish. without the wisdom of the advanced scout team at lonely planet, i don't know how i could have possibly discovered the beautiful hostel of sobo bade or this pristine fishing village of toubab dialo. the description was enough to get me to haul my bag and negotiate dakar's unfriendly gare routière to come here. but had i entrusted myself completely to the advice of those three tiny paragraphs, who knows if i would have ventured beyond those walls.

but i did. hunger conspired with frugality to send me beyond the confines of sobo bade's kitchen yesterday, where i found a quaint local eatery in restaurant le rocher: chez nabou. nabou herself is a big, vibrantly dressed african mama straight out of central casting. she prepared my poulet and then gave me the traditional café touba. i don't know how exactly it happened, but a slow lunch turned into about five hours of sitting on their veranda, watching the waves hit la plage and lending minimal percussive support to my new friend samba, a djembe drummer.

when i returned for dinner a few hours later, i received an offer i couldn't refuse: a room with a full-sized bed and all three meals for cfa 9000 per night ($20). i accepted and am glad i did. while i slept well up the hill last night in the dorm across from a random french dude named diego, i don't think it'll hold a head lamp to the experience of getting to dine with real senegalese people and laying my head down to the soundtrack provided by the atlantic. the drawbacks may include no toilet (but there is a hole-and it's porcelain too!) and the fact that i have to bucket bathe (for retaining readership, there will be no youtube clips of yours truly engaging in this), but i say that if it's good enough for nabou and samba, then it's good enough for me.

a plus tard, mes amis.

cher dakar

île de gorée, senegal

dear dakar,

listen, i think you're great, i really do. it's just....sorry, i'm not really accustomed to doing this.

i mean, we both knew when i came that it would just be for a few days and that we weren't going to make such a big deal of whatever happened. this was never going to be long-term. i just think that it's time we go our separate ways. what? all of a sudden that's not good enough for you? fine.

okay, for one: you don't make me feel special. there, i said it. i knew i wasn't the first westerner and that i wouldn't be the last, but you don't really acknowledge me. i know that you're seeing other westerners (and i don't think you should let them treat you the way they do, but that's beside the point), but you only pay attention to me if need a fare or are trying to sell me sunglasses. have you ever thought about how that makes me feel?

what? you need another reason? fine. you never finish anything; it's almost as if you can't commit. i know, i know: you have the tax credit for building so that it is more economically viable to always be in construction. but still, you've hardly finished your infrastructure and it's not making you look good. i need someone who can go the distance.

you also haven't shown me that you're ready to have me in your life. your streets are too narrow and the sidewalks are non-existent: you know i'm a pedestrian. you make me crawl over that barrier every day in yoff and your bus service is too infrequent. this doesn't allow me to get to know you: the real dakar.

and you know i don't date smokers. your air pollution makes los angeles look like a new age oxygen bar. the sun is always hiding and i can barely see your cliffs, your best feature. why don't you show me your cliffs?

i know what you're going to say, and, yes, you do have your charms. i will definitely miss the breeze off the atlantic and how you cater to so many of my needs: the diversity in cuisine, banking, the abundance of telecentres, the fact that you have a malian embassy. but don't even think for a minute that you can take credit for the tranquility of yoff or the beauty of île de gorée: they are separate entities. you are frenetic urban energy, for all its good and bad, and cannot claim otherwise.

i'm sorry. i really didn't want it to end this way. i really did have a nice time, it's just that you're not my type. let's just give ourselves this one last night, one more sundowner, one more echo of the call to prayer, and i'll be gone. so let's put the past behind us, let bygones be bygones, and just try to enjoy ourselves.

ne pensez pas deux fois, ce n'est pas grave.

c'est l'afrique

yoff, senegal

traveling to africa must be something like playing in the world cup. you can dream about it, you can plan for it, but there is nothing you can do to be truly prepared for when you step off that plane (or to step onto the pitch). my flight arrived after 3 in the morning and following the passport stamp i was greeted by about 30 taxi drivers beckoning to every potential passenger. i had prearranged a pickup through my hostel and was fortunate to see my misspelled name right away.

stepping out of that airport was like stepping through a time portal in my own life. it has been a few years since i was last in africa (malawi), so i definitely have not forgotten the continent. but there are certain sensations that are ephemeral to the traveler: you can keep the imagery in the mind but there is no way to truly access every rich detail of the memory when not here. conversely, resurfacing here opens up a world of emotions and memories that had been locked away, not deleted, from the conscious. i am thousands of miles away from any point in africa i have been, so geographically it would almost be as if i was describing the memories of san diego that come flooding back upon a trip to nova scotia. but here, it makes perfect sense.

there is certainly a smell to the continent. it is not fresh cut daisies and you would never buy it bottled, but its presence becomes comforting and familiar in the same fashion as a tolerably annoying relative during the right occasions. africa certainly has its own sights and sounds, but the most potent sense is definitely the feel. there is a rhythm to everything from the traffic to the way that people walk to the cadence of their speech. some aspects are frenetic (see: traffic), some languid, while others have a certain grace to them. they are disjointed, but they combine to form some sort of syncronization in the same vein as acid jazz.

these impressions are just from the sleepy muslim fishing village of yoff. dakar is a whole 'nother jar of pickels, something i'll get after tomorrow. i figured that after sleep-deprived weeks of finals and hours of endless travel, i can reemerge into this continent at a slower pace.

a plus tard, mes amis. bonsoir et bonne chance

minha mesinha

lisboa, portugal


it looked better on paper than it was in practice, but yours truly will emerge more grateful than regretful for the 14 hour layover in lisboa. in the end, i would highly endorse a visit here and suggest that the centuries-old iberian capital is worth more than a half-day of your time. if, however, you are also forced onto the half-day plan, sleeping the night before would be highly recommended. so with my return to the aeroporto imminent, i thought it might be helpful to the loyal reader if i could share a little bit of what i learned. entaõ, some lessons and concluding thoughts:

i did absolutely no research into lisboa, not even a glimpse at wikipedia. the biggest con to this was that i had no idea what existed and where it would be found. the pros, however, are that i still managed to find enough to keep me occupied and that i not once stopped on a busy street corner to unfold a map or look at a guide book (are we listening, germans?).

galicia does not hold the monopoly on surly iberian waitstaff.

i definitely slept for a good 40 minutes in a green velvet chair on the second floor of a pretty hip cafe. this is either attributable to the pleasant ambience, or the fact that i haven't slept in two days. maybe both.

blanket generalization based on the limited areas i saw: lisboa is more a dense amalgamation of plazas and alleyways than a frenetic metropolis. the labyrinthine streets may be confusing, but this city does not strike me as intimidating in the least.

i do not look like i'm from lisboa.

if brasilian portuguese (as i wrote last year) sounds like russians speaking spanish, then the lisboan dialect sounds more like italians speaking russian, presumably because of greater contact with the french. even if that sentence doesn't make sense, it's still true.

i smell. badly. i have a caravel of empathy for the poor soul sitting next to me on tonight's flight.

favorite graffiti: nadie podem sonhar para ti

exactamente.

c'est un petit monde

brooklyn, ny

while i nod to the underlying notion perpetuated by the overlords at disney, i find myself in disagreement with one of its signature catchphrases. sure, the concept that the world is small is lovely in all its implications for peace and understanding and acknowledgment of our common biology. but it is not a small world, after all. au contraire, it is big. downright massive, come to think of it.

we hear terms such as 'globalization' and phrases like 'the world is flat' which only serve to further mislead us. we can conduct a fantasy baseball draft in jakarta and skype from sudan, but there is no substitution for the sights, sounds, textures, and, of course, smells that come from passing through the various depots of the world. and there never will be. consider this my opportunity to sample some of the sensoral offerings of a few of earth's lesser known corners.

over the next three months, i will set out to create two minor squiggles on the great etch-a-sketch that is this planet. the first will be through west africa, just south of the great sahara, where i will take a circuitous route to see an old friend serving in the peace corps. the second will be through the indian subcontinent, a place that has enchanted me for years and whose sight will be a dream come true for these eyes.

so before i put my recently acquired master's degree to use, before i use the right action verbs on the resume and button my shirts a little higher than i would care, i figure that i deserve an adventure. i'm going to do what vagabonds do best and see two sinewy slices of this wonderful world i was born into.

i hope that some of you can follow along and share your thoughts and, of course, Mom: i will be safe.