Mud & Rocks

There were points where I just stopped and thought 

“I can’t possibility do this,” 

swiftly followed by the realization 

“But I have to. I have no choice.”

I’m at our farthest sites, four-hours away from home driving in good conditions any direction. It’s pouring rain. The roads are only going to get worse. My co-pilot doesn’t know how to drive. So it’s up to me to get us home. To navigate through the mud. And it’s not just any mud...

It’s that dark clay mud refuses to let your tires grab hold. The kind that sends you sliding from one side of the road to the other, that occasionally tries to turn you completely around. The kind that leaves you leaning on your horn, praying the children with get the heck out of your way because you really can’t control where this car is going and trying to break is pointless. The kind that tests your arm speed – just how quickly can you correct and recorrect your direction? The kind that would be fun to drive in if you weren’t terrified that you’ll slide too far to one side and end up sideways in a ditch. 

And they you end up in one of those gullys on the side of the road. Not a huge one, thank God. You’re still upright. But you’re stuck. And your non-driving co-pilot tells you that you need to get over to the right. You look and him and look at your steering wheel. The wheel is turned as far to the right as mechanically possible and we’re not moving anywhere close to the right. You get out. You get in. You pass your mud-coated loafers to your co-pilot and slip your bare foot back on the pedal. You throw it into the lowest gear, give it a bit of gas, and pray as the car finally crawls to the right… and now you’re playing this game of correcting and sliding once again, trying to balance the car between the ditches on either side of  you. The ditches that are getting steeper and steeper – the kind of ditches that you don’t have a prayer of getting out of.

And just as you start to think you can handle this, you come up to that spot. You new it was coming. It’s tough when the weather is good. It’s one of those “I can’t possibly do this” points. Where the road narrows to the point that a car can just barely keep two wheels on the ground. And half of that road is in a ditch about 2 feet deep, filled with water. And the other side is a cliff. So you’ve gotta go slow enough not to slide even an inch. And fast enough so you don’t get stuck in the mud. So you look. You breathe. You realize “But I have to. I have no choice.” And you go. But you don’t get the balance of speed quite right. You err on the side of going to slow and now you’re stuck… in the mud… with mere inches on each side of your tires. And you breathe. And you check that, yup, you’re already in the lowest gear and the 4WD has kicked in. And you rock. And you pray. And by the grace of God, you climb out of the mud and up the next hill. And you feel like an absolute champ. Until some guy who was watching (not helping) you this whole time, calls through the window, not to congratulate you, but to ask you for money. Sigh.

But it’s not all bad. The stretches of mud are occasionally interrupted by slopes of boulder fields. It’s kindda like a game of chess, where you have to think 10 steps ahead to figure out how you are going to get down without hearing that terrible sound of metal crunching against rock. Where once again you have to find the balance in speed – slow enough to avoid bottoming out against some boulder beneath you but fast enough to get over the boulder in front of you. Of course, you inevitability get it wrong. And you hear the crunch. And you get stuck. And you try to rock uphill and once again you pray, pray that that crunch wasn’t the fuel tank. And you watch the fuel gauge. Steady. Steady. One boulder field down. Seven more to go. Back to the mud.

Four maybe five hours later, after the road has turned into a river, after the wheels start to rattle with mud, after you’ve visited all your sites, after you admit to your co-pilot that you’ve never really driven in mud before (at least not this kind of mud), you arrive home. Alive. Exhausted. Exhilarated. Spiritually awakened (there was no way you did this without a troupe of driving angels!).

When do we go back to the field? Tomorrow?

 Mbuzi taking the rocks on a GOOD day.

Back to Mbita

Back to the idyllic views of the lake

Back to smells of sun dried sardines

Back to swarms of lake flies

Back to cooking in my own kitchen

Back to burning pots of beans

Back to bugs in the rice

Back to my little group of friends

Back to calls of “mzungu mzungu”

Back to nights spent on skype

Back to our private local gym

Back to duct taped dumbbells

Back to gazing up at spiders

Back to the routine of work

Back to fixing my car’s bumps and bruises

Back to todays built on “tomorrow’s”

Back to working

Back to waiting

Back to living

Back to laughing

I am happy to be back to Mbita

Traveling

It’s strange to be on the road

Not sure where you will sleep

Or if you will get a shower

Who knows who you’ll meet

Who knows what you’ll eat

But you find the next place

And pose for your snaps

Amongst ruins and castles

You imagine the battles

And the prison chain rattles

You point at the menus

Sending up a small prayer

Not sure what you’re eating

But you chew and you smile

At the red and brown piles

Sharing stories with strangers

In pantomimed prose

You connect for a second

But then travel along

To find the next person

And mime the next song

It’s lovely to be on the road

With so many stories untold

Ethiopian Adventures

Ethiopian Adventure

Ah, yes, the end of a multi-week adventure ends in the daunting task of writing what happened. The lists of places that you saw, the people that you met, the fiascos you encountered and overcame. A rambling list that, after the fact, is often not very entertaining to anyone who wasn’t there (and often not even to those who were there).

Here’s the cliffnotes on the “where and what we did”:

Take Off: Woon Cho and Joelle meet in Nairobi and travel to Addis where they are set to meet a couchsurfing host who has bought their tickets for their next flight (leaving at 7:30am). But Joelle wrote down his phone number wrong, so they are stranded 10 meters from his house at 2am w/o phone or internet. Somehow it all works out.

Lalibela: Christmas Eve and Christmas morning spent at a super sacred site for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. 11 churches carved out of these giant rocks in the 14^th century? How’d they do it? The angels did it. Ya know, I think I actually believe that one. You’ve also gotta be blessed if you can make it through a service from 6am til 3pm in a hot, claustraphobic church without eating and trying to get time with the priests’ rattles (I swear there is no pattern!). Yup, Joelle nearly fainted and nearly threw up on a pilgrim after just an hour in there!

Gonder: Do you have hot showers? Yes. We’ll take it. Um… where’s the water? Maybe tomorrow. Right. Castles and Kitfo (raw ground meat that we have sent back twice to be cooked more thoroughly as we imagine our brains spotted with tapeworm cysts).

Bahir Dar: We did the obligatory Lake Tana Monasteries, taking in the Byzantine depictions of the Madonna and Child, John the Baptist suckling from a goat, and various Ethiopian priests leaning on their staffs or chillin’ under umbrellas (this culture is in love with parasols!). Then we make it out for a night of traditional dancing where we make friends with some girls who collectively speak about 20 words of English, grab a tuktuk to a second club and in the process lose (and find) one of the girl’s shoes in the middle of the road, and eventually end up with Joelle getting dance lessons and being scolded for shaking her hips and not her shoulders. And then, we caved, leaving the cultural experiences behind in favor of gin and tonics on the lakefront and massages at the spa. Love Bahir Dar.

Addis Ababa: After her shoulder-dancing lessons, Joelle now thinks she’s a professional dancer and tries turning two potential pickpockets at the Mercato* into friends by grabbing their hands and forcing them to dance with her when Gangham Style comes up on someone’s phone. (She miraculously makes it out of the market with all her stuff!)

*Mercato: Arguably the largest open air market in Africa, selling everything from clothes to curios, spices to spare parts, and notorious for pickpockets.

Korea (via Addis): The Korean cultural experience then comes into full swing as pile into Tim and Laura Love’s LoveBug (yes, these two have the last name Love and have a rocking 1970’s VW bug) for a dinner of Korean deliciousness. This is of course followed the next morning by visiting the swanky Korean mission hospital in Addis with Tim, complete with authentic Korean classroom chairs, cafeteria food, etc. Too many cultures coming at me at once!

Back to Ethiopian Addis: We finish off with a cooking class since both Woon Cho and Joelle like to eat themselves sick on Ethiopian food and dread going back to the bland diets of Rwanda and Kenya. The sweet spice of berbere and shiro fills the kitchen as do tales of Haile Selassie, the self-unproclaimed  Rastafarian second coming of Christ. (So I’m told…Haile Selassie actually went to Jamaica and told the Rasta’s that he was sorry to disappoint, but he was not their next Savior – they didn’t believe him.) And then comes the coffee… roasted, ground, and brewed in slow delicious ceremony – even the adamantly non-coffee drinker (Joelle) cannot resist the deep chocolately flavor.

Dodola:  Going off of about 30 minutes of sleep apiece (Joelle b/c she went out on New Years Eve and Woon Cho because she tried unsuccessfully to meet a friend on a layover at 3:30am at the airport), the Bobsy twins make their way to catch an illegal minibus heading towards Dodola. Looping the city for an hour, with a stinky rag-cloaked fake minibus conductor and a fake passenger watching Asian porn on his stupid phone (shining oh so bright in the night), we nearly cheer when our two least favorite people finally disembark the minibus just as we are starting to pull away… chased by a motorcycle cop. We careen down the street, “safely” losing ourselves in the early morning city traffic. Seven hours and a few more twists and turns later, we make it to Dodola, a one street town and our launch point for the Bale Mountains.

Bale Mountains: Community-based ecotourism on a horse – for shizzle! Four days riding through mountains on a horse – have I died and gone to heaven? Ok, so sure it’s freezing cold some nights, but we’re at 3800meters and looking down over a sea of spectacularness! Sure, I’m dirty as stink, but we climbed 17km one day, dodging all number of tree branches and made it! Sure our guide tries to trick us that the white wolf (pointing to a domestic cat) only eats white people, but we saw two red wolves for reals! Sure, my butt and thighs and shins and everything is SORE, but we got to gallop for 3.5 hours like freakin’ cowgirls! Best. Trip. Ever. When can we do it again?

Merry Christmas: The Ethiopian calendar is very much confused. In Ethiopia, it’s currently 2005 (yes, you are seven years younger when you visit there). And New Years is in September. And Christmas is January 7^th. And 1AM is really 7AM. You can see how this gets tricky. But not tricky enough for us to miss Christmas! Gathered around the Love table (again, that’s Tim and Laura Love), we dined in true Ethiopian style with a freshly slaughtered goat, shiro, doro wot, and of course finished off with an Ethiopian coffee ceremony. Merry Christmas everyone!