Ibn Ibn Battuta

Travel Plans: East Africa 2010

It all started with the World Cup.

Four years ago, I spent the summer in Tanzania, mostly watching the 2006 "football" World Cup in local bars. While sipping Safari, Kilimanjaro, or other domestic beers, my friend Charlie and I rooted, along with the Tanzanians, for the African teams. Each night for a month, they whooped and clapped zealously for Ghana, for Ivory Coast, and for Trinidad & Tobago. Amid this fervor, I witnessed what I'd been missing all along by watching the World Cup in America, and vowed to myself that I would be at the next World Cup - South Africa 2010.

Over the last few years, I've met many who shared the same aspirations, but I knew we wouldn't all make the Cup. South Africa is distant, the event is

The Slow Death of Africa's Greatest Lake

The Spring issue of the Georgetown University Journal of the Environment (Vol. III, pp. 42-47) includes a piece I wrote, entitled "The Slow Death of Africa’s Greatest Lake: The Environmental and Social Impacts of the 'Modernization' of Lake Victoria" (reprinted below).

The paper draws on a lot of the research I did last summer while studying the local ecology in Mwanza, Tanzania, on Lake Victoria's southern shore. 

Please enjoy:

Summary: A Summer of Studies in Tanzania

Georgetown's Office of International Programs asked students who studied abroad this past summer to write about their experiences, for use in some of the university's publications. I have submitted the following piece on my two months in Tanzania:

On a Saturday afternoon when I was in Middle School, I returned home after taking the SAT’s as part of an academic admissions process. "How did it go, son?" my mom eagerly inquired as I walked in the door, dazed. "Ugh, it was impossible – the test was in, like, SWAHILI or something!" I exclaimed. At that moment, the East African language was the most foreign, unintelligible gibberish I could imagine.

Today, after recently completing Georgetown’s Tanzania Summer Program, I can actually speak and understand a reasonable amount of Swahili, and no longer consider the language’s name a synonym for "indecipherable." On our first day of classes at the University of Dar es Salaam, when our professor

MV Liemba: The Floating Circus

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Overburdened from the start, the aged Liemba chugged away from the dock in Kigoma at 5:30 on Wednesday afternoon. The oldest passenger ferry in the world was hardly the "venerable craft" which Lonely Planet's guidebooks dub it, but it floated, and that was enough for me.

While waiting to board, I met Mike and Jenny, a delightful young couple from Colorado who have been on the road for a year, and in that time had traveled overland all the way from Southeast Asia. Extremely jealous of them, I shared several meals and many hours with them over the next two days, exchanging travel stories as we cruised down Lake Tanganyika, though the exchange was hardly even.

Tanzania's Wild, Wild West

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On the road, life is always more interesting, so I probably shouldn't be surprised that this trip has gotten off to such a startlingly bizarre start. Sunday, after returning from Rubondo and frantically completing the final paper for my Ecology class, I went to an ATM to get some cash for the first leg of my trip. This being Tanzania, you would assume that a bank would give you Tanzanian money, regardless of who owns the bank. Well, I assumed so, anyway, and was proved quite wrong. When I asked the (apparently Kenyan) ATM for 40,000 Tanzanian shillings - about US$35 - it instead sputtered out 40,000 Kenyan shillings - around US$500.

It being evening, no exchange bureaus were open, so the following morning at 4:00 AM, my stack of money and I hit the road (shhhh). I'd spent the night packing and hurriedly saying goodbyes to the group, who all optimistically wished me "Good luck... and don't die." Thanks, guys. Back in my room, doom and gloom in mind, I scrutinized my belongings, guessed and second-guessed, packed and re-packed my backpack, and finally declared myself ready in time to catch my cab to the bus station for the 5:00 departure.

The Wild Things of Rubondo Island

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From the minute the boat bumped against the thin strip of white sand beach, it was clear that Rubondo Island is an almost unearthly place. A few paces from the water's edge, a seemingly impenetrable tangle of dark tropical forest began, covering the entirety of the enormous island, which from the water is easy to mistake for the mainland because of its size. We would stay at the ranger's camp along the lakeshore, along with a few other groups of travellers.

Before the painful exercise of pitching our tents (a jumble of mismatched poles and bundled canvas which our guide company was happy to provide us with) at and shortly after dusk, we took a brief walk through the forest. Walking along the trail, peering into the undergrowth, I was reminded of the mornings in my childhood when my sister would wake up and come downstairs, her long hair in a feral tangle, and my mom would order her to "Go comb that rat's nest!" Amidst the roots of the banyan trees, hanging down from high up in the canopy to the forest floor, and the endless squiggles of liana vines entwined around the other vegetation, others recalled Where the Wild Things Are.

A Plan to Laugh at Later

East Africa map

When I purchased my tickets for this trip exactly a week before my departure, the only return flight available was for August 15, two weeks after the program end date. "I'll travel or something," I assumed, and so I booked it, then spent the past six weeks turning plans over in my mind about how I would spend those last precious days in Africa.

Plan One was an overland extravaganza, leaving from Dar es Salaam by perhaps one of the world's longest trains, a three-day marathon to Zambia whose length is likely only bested by the Trans-Siberian Railway. Ultimately, after a few more bus rides, I would arrive in the town of Livingstone, in southern Zambia, at the most famous section of the thundering Zambezi River, Victoria Falls. A slower, more

Reflections from the Serengeti & Ngorongoro Crater

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At a minimum, there is at least one element of Serengeti National Park and the nearby Ngorongoro Crater which no number of IMAX and National Geographic documentaries can convey: the parks are bursting with animal life. Yes, the films show the incredible diversity of the wildlife which used to freely roam this entire region. However, it is only by visiting that one can really sense just how concentrated the animals really are, and how rich the environment which supports them is.

I estimated that in two days we would probably be able to see most of the large mammals which inhabit the parks, but not all, and not very frequently. These

The Women of Adilisha

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One component of our program here in Mwanza is time spent volunteering at a variety of local NGOs. Charlie and I recently spent our first days at Adilisha, a small organization founded in 1999 to promote responsible parenting practices and healthy families. In sub-Saharan Africa, perhaps the greatest threat to the healthy physical and mental development of children is HIV/AIDS. Thus, Adilisha's mission of helping families has, over the past several years, increasingly meant focusing on providing assistance to families affected by this illness.

In Tanzania, such families are numerous, though exactly how numerous is never certain. While the official infection rate is quoted at around 9% (and is, as in many countries of the region, likely much higher than the rates reported by governments) it is known to be even higher within certain groups.

The Birds and the Bees, the Flowers and the Trees

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Our ecology class enjoyed an exciting first week. Each morning a few of us joined Dino on an optional morning walk, which consisted of us walking for an hour or two down one of the dirt roads around the university, pointing to birds, bugs and plants and making Dino tell us the fascinating story of each one.

Early on we spotted red-breasted sunbirds, black kites, pied kingfishers, mousebirds with their long, flowing tails, red-cheeked cordon bleus and numerous other birds.

Later we happened upon a colony of Safari Ants, known as siafu in Swahili, and learned from Dino that this dangerous species has been known to occasionally eat babies, and is even capable of significantly harming adult humans – particularly drunk ones who pass out along the roadside late at night and wake

Mwanza: Back to School in Hyena Country

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Though not the smallest puddlejumper in Africa, the plane we took from Dar es Salaam to Mwanza last Saturday still looked to me like a small-scale model of a real airplane. Nonetheless, it shuttled us from the metropolis of Dar on the Indian Ocean coast to the rock-strewn shores of Lake Victoria without incident. We passed above the plains of central Tanzania and descended toward Mwanza in late afternoon as the sun illuminated the region's unusual, gravity-defying rock formations and corn fields. The lake sparkled, dotted with islands and the day's last fishing boats.

The one-room airport, wholly devoid of any security apparatus, would later prove an apt representation of the laid-back small-town atmosphere of Mwanza, Tanzania's second-largest city after Dar es Salaam - and a distant second to be sure.

Last Days in Dar

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Time has flown by since our return from Mikumi and Morogoro nearly two weeks ago. Swahili class picked up in intensity a good deal, and our teachers finally judged us prepared to go out into the real world for some extracurricular activities after our morning classes. One such trip took us to Kariakoo, Dar es Salaam's chaotic western suburb and main market area, known best among travelers as a petty theft hotspot. When he heard we would be going, Scott Taylor, the Georgetown professor on site, chuckled and muttered something about a "den of thieves."

There, Tanzania's poverty made itself far more visible than ever before, as we stumbled through crowded streets, tripping our way over a pungent mix of discarded food scraps and trash.