Gabon Nostalgia

I'm listening to the news on the coup in Gabon. 

Gabon! Where is Gabon, you may wonder. I would probably wonder too if I hadn't been there in between Cameroon and Congo (Republic of, where I bought Tin Tin carvings). 

I went back to read about it today. Here's an entry, one that gives me a bit of wanderlust.

Where's My Lasso?

This is a little too small for me but would have fit kid Marie in the 1970s...she would have been thrilled to wear it everywhere!

It's Been Ten Years

It's hard for me to look at photos from ten years ago. My plan, made before the pandemic and work promotion, would have put me on the eastern coast of South America today, preparing to board a ship to West Africa. My idea for Marie's World Tour 2021 had been to head by land to Panama, sail around the Darien Gap to Cartagena, then go overland (Venezuela was an X factor) until I got to Brazil. From there, there are ships to West Africa. 

But instead, I'm going to Riverside Drive to sit outside with a friend near the Toluca Lake Farmers Market. Same idea, right?

Here's a photo album from April 4, 2011.

Even more nostalgia--on the first Marie's World Tour, 2001, April 4 was spent on a train from Nanning to Yangshuo. I'd boarded in Hanoi, and headed into my first-ever trip to mainland China. I remember being a bit anxious, but of course that wasn't necessary. I don't remember being anxious on the buses and shared taxes that got me from Sevare, Mali, to Djenne. I remember being tired and irritable, getting off the bus at the crossroads and waiting hours for the share taxi to fill up. 

Marie's World Tour 2021 looks more like some little trips to places within a three-hour time zone radius of Burbank.

Nostalgia

I was reading over my old MariesWorldTour 2011 site, looking for something, and came across this entry, which took me right back to the border between Morocco/Southern Sahara and Mauritania.

* * *

Border Day

Bamba was trying to tell me something. He kept motioning at things. The glove compartment. The dashboard. He wanted me to do...what? He'd speak to me in French, because he'd gotten it in his head that I understood French, though I'd repeatedly said that I did not. Perhaps saying this in perfect French isn't a good strategy.

I fumbled around, trying to help him out. He kept putting one hand to his ear. I dug around in the glove compartment and produced some earbuds.

"No."

He pointed to his ear again.

Spirit Animal

I found a 2005 picture of two giraffes in my photo library and...what if I just...(click click).

The pushmi pullyu has always been my spirit animal. 

Snacks and Avoidance

"I read your book proposal," my colleague said this afternoon.

She is working on a book, and I sent her a few book proposals so she could learn the structure of a book proposal.

I knew which one she meant. She meant the Curse of the Hippo book proposal. The book I haven't written yet. The book I don't know if I'll ever write. The book about the complicated break-up in Uganda, the long recovery across Kuwait and Cairo over two or three years.

I chirped something about hoping she'd sorted out how to write a book proposal, because my assistant was in the room, and she hadn't read the book proposal, and it seemed unfair for us to discuss something my assistant wasn't familiar with.

But really, I was avoiding talking about the topic. What's there left to say? In time, you forget. You lose interest in the other person, his attempts to cover up his digital footprint, his path through life. When you stumble over the photo of him ten years later, you don't wince. You just snicker a bit about aging, something happening to you as well.

I got off the train at Hollywood and Highland tonight, so I could go to the shoe store by the Chinese Theater. When I was trying on Pumas, I suddenly realized I was ravenous. Desperate for food, I quickly walked down Hollywood Boulevard toward home, mentally digging through my larder as I walked.

Cooking would take too long. I'd stop by the Indian carry-out at the bottom of my street.

That's where it hit me again.

In the summer of 2005, H.M. and I would head from Murchison Falls into the nearest town, Masindi. I'd set my laptop up in the Internet cafe, launch Fetch, and start uploading my color files to Marvel or Gemstone. The connection was so slow we'd leave the iBook running and go to the cafe next door for lunch.

The cafe didn't offer much aside from fried eggs and burgers, but they did have samosas. So once a week in the summer of 2005, I'd have samosas while uploading files. And now, I can't look at a samosa without remembering that summer in Uganda, switching back and forth between Murchison Falls National Park and my apartment in Bbunga, near Kabalagala on the Ggaba Road from Kampala.

Tonight, as I ordered the Bombay Plate to go, I thought about Uganda, those samosas (which were too spicy to be honest), and Herr Marlboro, and how time heals nothing, but it dulls it to where you are almost a little embarrassed you ever talked so much about it to your friends.

The cashier at the Indian carry-out interrupted my thoughts. "Anything to drink with that?"

"No," I said. "But do you have a samosa for me tonight?"

"Yes, of course."

He fetched two samosas. Just like in Masindi, you couldn't get one. You had to get two.

I took the samosa home, sat down in front of my laptop, and bit into it.

Too spicy, I thought with a laugh.

Nostalgia

Opposite ends of the Nile here—first is Kampala (2005), second is Cairo (2007). 

I've been at a regular job for a while now, and this week, facing reality without being able to diminish it with an airplane ticket and a rental abroad, I've been nostalgic for the times I could.

Anniversary

It's been ten years, since that lonely day you left me...

That's a lyric from a Jason and the (Nashville) Scorchers line, from back when I cared a great deal about music, in my teens and twenties.

It continues to where the singer shoots his lover, and that has of course nothing to do with me, but that and the last line of the song runs through my head when I hear about the hurricane that hit New Orleans ten years ago.

That's the day Herr Marlboro came tearing into my apartment on the Ggaba Road, back from running errands in Kampala. "Did you hear about New Orleans?" He went straight to the television and put on BBC or CNN (I forget which we got there).

It's also the last vivid memory I have of when things were going well for us. Right after that, his family came to town from Bavaria. We all went to a dinner at an outdoor garden in an Italian restaurant, where I ate something that made me terribly ill. They left in the morning, before I got so sick. He took them off to Murchison Falls while I stayed in Kampala, going to doctors when I wasn't lying on the sofa watching repetitive coverage of Katrina. This is covered in the first chapter of Stalking the Wild Dik-Dik.

Everything went off the rails shortly after, and then we were chased by a hippo. I ended up leaving, getting far, far away in a hurry, and I got very ill in Swakopmund, Namibia.

You can read all about September of 2005 early in this blog. You have to read between the lines a bit, because my book about this time hasn't been written yet. I don't know that it ever will be. I'd like to write it, but it's hard to find the time. I used to not write it because it was hard to revisit. Now I can revisit it without upsetting myself, but time is at a premium.

Everything changed for me in September of 2005, and that's okay. People do change, you know. But I migrated into a zone of a long state of depression, which only responsibility for a dozen employees in Cairo was able to pull me out of, a few years later. What really changed from this time is my outlook, and my inability to trust others. I do sort of, sometimes, I guess, but essentially, at some point in handling all this myself, I become my own mini-kitchen, a self-sufficient package of competency. It's morphed into a zone of familiarity and comfort. It's fine. I know other people have different ways of living, usually involving their own definitions of fun and happiness. This is what works for me, and I don't fight it anymore. It's kind of great, in its own way.

Pray for me, mama. I'm a gypsy now. 

Full Circle

I got an impending-FedEx e-mail notice from Marvel yesterday. This is always a mystery...what will I receive tomorrow? The results are sometimes expected and sometimes out of the blue, since I worked on a lot of books over the years and don't pay close attention to what is being reprinted at any given time.

This reprinted Fantastic Four Marvel Masterworks showed up in my mailbox a few minutes ago.

And took me right back...in 2005, I color-reconstructed six issues of this book from my iBook while alternating living in Murchison Falls, Uganda, with Bunga, near Kabalagala and Kampala.

I fled some unpleasantness to Swakopmund, where I finished the issues in Namibia. I spent every afternoon in the town I-Cafe uploading files. Slowly, slowly. The Internet wasn't so fast back then. I celebrated finishing by going to see an FF movie in the town cinema. I was the only one cackling when Stan Lee was on-screen.

If any of this sounds familiar, that's because we did all this here on the blog. I don't know how many readers from 2005 are still with me...blog readership suffered a precipitous drop once Facebook and Twitter caught on, but here we were, in 2005. Making comic books from our laptop in Africa before heading to Kuwait to make more comics. 

Paper Archive

I finally finished getting my files together for this blog for the year 2005, and submitted it to blurb.com for a hardcover.

It's here...and it looks great. That was an important (if horrible) year in Marie-history, so this book took me longer than the bound books of 2006-2011. But the final product looks good. 

Border Day

Bamba was trying to tell me something. He kept motioning at things. The glove compartment. The dashboard. He wanted me to do...what? He'd speak to me in French, because he'd gotten it in his head that I understood French, though I'd repeatedly said that I did not. Perhaps saying this in perfect French isn't a good strategy.

I fumbled around, trying to help him out. He kept putting one hand to his ear. I dug around in the glove compartment and produced some earbuds.

"No."

He pointed to his ear again.

Oh, there was a rattle! He wanted me to find the rattle. Bamba was deputizing me. Co-driver.

Wasta

I was at the Hotel Sahara at 7:30. But there was no car in front. I walked up the stairs and surprised the guy at the front desk.

"I'm meeting a driver..?" I was hesitant. I didn't have my road legs yet.

He nodded. A minute later, I heard a horn.

I looked out. There was the early nineties Renault mini-van I'd seen the night before. But the man in the gallibya and head wrap thing was gone. This guy wore trousers, a gray hooded coat, and a shirt that buttoned down the front. And he was packing stuff into the vehicle. Including...was that a 32" flatscreen TV box he was piling into the back?

"Is that him?" I had doubts.

"Let me see." The front desk clerk looked out the window. He smiled and waved at the man in trousers.

"Yes, that's him. Go on."

Car or Bus?

My dehydration-illness had vanished in the night, and I approached my morning dose of bread and coffee with enthusiasm, then typed away for several hours in the part of the lobby that the hotel wi-fi reached.

I was working on a new invoice-and-pay system for the job I'd just left. I had been the check signer, and there wasn't anyone else to do it, so I had spent a lot of time gathering up info and sorting out a digital system. It was working out well but taking a lot of time as I made various screw-ups along the way of instituting the new set-up.

Fortunately, I had nothing else to do in Dakhla, which is a dusty Saharan town seemingly at the end of the world. My only real mission was finding onward transport. Not so long ago, tourists were required to travel by military convoy to the border of Mauritania, then recently it was done by private hire, and now, rumor had it that you could just catch a daily CTM bus.

After carefully copying down the French I needed from Google Translate, I walked to the CTM office in early afternoon to inquire about this rumor.

Yes, there is a daily CTM bus from Dakhla to the border. It leaves at 9 a.m. It had been running every day for about two or three months now. It's 160 dirham.

To Dakhla

Four days of tartine in a row. Gah.

Tartine is like toast, but it's baguette bread, not sliced bread. I'm not a big bread-eater, but it's all that's keeping me going these days. Every day, I get tartine and cafe au lait (lots of lait, unfortunately) for breakfast. Ever since I hit the Africa continent, it's been bread, bread, bread for petit dejeuner.

This is not all over Africa, of course, This is purely a French influence thing. I'm pretty damn sick of bread. Though I must thank the French, as at least the bread is, without fail, delicious. And the coffee is generally decent. I didn't bother carrying my own coffee works this time, just put some little packets of instant into my pack. The Nescafe guys were handing out free samples on the street one day, and my tenant gave me a Starbucks sample, so I have at least eight days worth of potential caffeine in my pack.

Essaouira

Couscous. I'm over you. Tagine...you're lovely but please leave me alone. Chicken schwarma? You're pushing your luck. Mint tea? We're still friends.

In the end, I lazed around an extra day in Essaouira. There wasn't much in the way of formal sights. I wandered the ancient medina, walked around the city walls, visited the fish market, bought fresh-squeezed orange juice, and sipped coffee at a little coffee shop beneath the ramparts. My riad was cozy and comfortable. My laundry came back stiff and not particularly clean, reminding me that I needed to start doing my own laundry in the sink. My search for a manicure and the
rumored 200 dirham unlimited data SIM led me outside the medina and into the buzzing modern city which was, with its open storefronts, streetside kebab vendors, and small businesses, a good deal easier to comprehend than the ancient chaotic city of tiny rambling alleyways.

I chose the post office at the center of the medina for mailing home my souvenirs I'd picked up in Marrakesh, thinking they were used to tourists sending home silly crap. They were, and the clerk zealously ushered me through the process, barking orders at a subordinate who was charged with putting my package together. Easy.

One afternoon I wandered down to the pier where the fishermen bring in their catch. I paid 10 dirham to climb up onto a preserved city wall, where I had the view of the Atlantic on one side, and could surreptitiously snap shots of fishermen on the other. My reward was a seagull shitting on my head, so I did get punished for my attempt at photos-without-asking.

And I wandered into the spice market, where a young man tried to sell me perfume in the shape of soap. That seems like a good idea, and it did smell good, but I don't even wear perfume in the shape of perfume. He also presided over pyramids of spices.

"How do you get the spice to make that shape?" I have long wondered how this is possible.

"Magic," he whispered. Then laughed and showed me that the pyramids of spice were window dressing, made of glue and some stuffing covered in spices.

I stayed an extra day in Essaouira, because I was still wrangling the new banking system for the job I just left, and trying to figure out how to pay freelancers remotely, and still processing pages for comic books. And because I'm a little lazy, and I doubted I'd see such a comfortable 20 euro a night hotel again for a long, long time.
And in the end, I bought a coach ticket for Essaouira-Agadir, then connecting Agadir-Dakhla, the southernmost major city before striking out into the desert en route to Mauritania. I'd be traveling for over 24 hours. HELL. But I thought I'd just get it over with instead of breaking it up into shorter legs.

I arrived early at the Supratours bus terminal, where I was able to leave my bag for 5 dirham. And I went to the nearby coffee shop and turned on my Kindle's wireless, and this week's New Yorker magically appeared on my Kindle.

Magic.

Africa Bus Travel Addendum

One of my blog posts that frequently land strangers here is this one, from 2005:

Blueprint for Independent Africa Travel.

The post is not the most exciting, but the information is useful. Or was useful, until I just now read that the most reputable bus line in East Africa—Scandinavia Express—went bust earlier this year.

But the news isn't all bad. I checked the bus schedules on the website for The Eye, a free monthly magazine in Kampala, and found links that led me to this:

Kampala Coach not only services similar routes to the now-defunct Scandinavia, but it goes a step farther and provides, or plans to provide, transportation from Nairobi to to Ethiopia.

A quick Google search indicated a lot of people talking about this bus. Perhaps it is in the works and not yet active. Perhaps it runs once a week. Perhaps it never existed at all. But the map on the Kampala Coach site means...well, your guess is as good as mine, but mine thinks there might actually be a bus here, maybe on Wednesdays when there are not bandits along the road.

The Marsabit to Moyale leg was one of the last puzzle pieces needed for an almost seamless public transport route from Cape Town to Cairo. And by seamless, I mean regularly scheduled and enclosed, with actual seats. This still leaves tough parts in Sudan. But you need to have some fun, right?

A Note from Kampala

I've just read about this book on Anne-Marie's blog, and I must have it. It's not on any US sites yet, so I just ordered it from Amazon.co.uk.

And if you didn't just click on the link to Anne-Marie's blog, please do so. She is living in Kampala, Uganda, and her current blog post has a bit of fascinating information about the "whopper."

Work to Live, Not Live to Work

Anne-Marie is a friend of mine who manages Red Chilli, the top backpackers hostel in Uganda. She (along with her partner) manages the Kampala branch—the main one. I never stayed there—though I visited a few times back in the days when H.M. still had his real name and lived with me instead of hiding out in in an unnamed country (I'll never figure it out :)) under a pseudonym*—and in fact I've never even met Anne-Marie. We're e-pals and near as I can tell, she's awesome. She roamed Africa in a clunker car once, dressed as a Pink Lady from Grease.

Anyway, Anne-Marie needs help. She needs a management couple to run Red Chilli Murchison. That's where I lived at the start of this blog. It would be marvelous. I'm not tempted of course because this is a couple job and I am not a couple. I *am* tempted by her assistant manager job in Kampala. I'm bored out of my skull here, doing the same job I did in my twenties and running through my daily routine as if I were a hamster.

Check out Anne-Marie's job listing on her own blog. I'm still on the "Find a way to exist within normal society" kick or I'd be there myself. (No, I'm not succeeding but I am very stubborn and hate to admit defeat.)

*This makes no sense to me either. What does he think I'm going to do? Show up and yell at him? If I want to yell at an ex, I could do it for the price of a subway fare to Brooklyn instead of airfare to East Africa.

No Mistaking Africa

I ordered a book called Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind, by Curtis Keim. Why? Because my Google Alerts popped it up. I am briefly mentioned in it twice, as the author of Stalking the Wild Dik-Dik which is referenced in two passages.

The book showed up, first opened by my neighbor who took it in along with her own books, but then opened by me.

I'm just starting to read the book, but I find myself absurdly grateful to the author for having written it.

The gist is this:

Africa—and by Africa we mean sub-Saharan—is more than dancing villagers, benevolent aid workers, and safaris. It's more than AIDS and elephants. More than "Aren't the natives adorable and so much more REAL than Americans?"

Thank you, thank you, to Curtis Keim for writing this. It's something I have been assaulted by in book reviews and in interviews. So many people show up wanting to read about the proud native, the beautiful friendly children, and the insights gained through living as a volunteer in a rural village that desperately needs the white man's help. (Baloney.)

Duh. It's a continent. There are cities, rich people, and people living absolutely normal, healthy lives all over sub-Saharan Africa. There are factories and roads and shopping malls and flushing toilets. And if I have to defend myself one more time against someone who is upset that I didn't write a "beautiful native" book, I might well "chuck a spear" myself.

Messages from the Past

I'm en route to Kuwait, sitting in a Holiday Inn in London, near Regent's Park. You can tell by looking at it that this used to be a part of the Forte chain. It looks identical to the Forte Crest that once housed the UKCAC comics convention.

But it's a Holiday Inn now and I got it on Priceline for a song, after studying BiddingforTravel.com carefully.

I spent the evening with old pal Peter Moore and his 5-year-old daughter and nearly fell asleep on the District line on the way back to the hotel.

Then I got my second wind.

And I thought I'd do something I've been meaning to do for a few years. I'm getting all my old SMS text messages from Uganda off of my GSM phone. Things ended so unpleasantly with HM there that I never had the heart to look at them again until a few months ago. I thought I'd store them in a Word doc and shove them deep down into a hard drive and forget about them until I need to refer back to them for a writing project, but since my GSM phone doesn't work in the States, I found myself unable to get the messages off the phone and into my computer.

But since I am in London with a working mobile phone connection, I thought "Now's my chance." And I am SMS-to-emailing the messages onto my MacBook.

Some of them still make me queasy. But others (sent by me) were entertaining.

"A bat in my room! 4got 2 take foto. 2 busy not screaming :)"

"6 poachers forced 2 pull tourist van out of mud!just in masindi taxi."

And the classic, which made Herr Marlboro turn around in his truck and come straight home to see if I was okay.

"Baboon in yard."