Common Sense and Whiskey

Two New Things to Read

One's on the web, the other's a book.

Enjoy Where is Cuba Going? by John Jeremiah Sullivan, in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. It's long and meandering, in a good way. Sullivan is as flummoxed by the Florida Cuban community and the embargo as everybody else is, except the Florida Cuban community and anybody who has to navigate through them toward election.

Just one thing - he writes:

"Barack Obama was going to open things up, and he did tinker with the rules regarding travel, but now they say that when you try to follow these rules, you get caught up in all kinds of forms and tape."

Since his wife is Cuban, he can enter Havana under rules that are different from the ones we used on our visit a few months back, so he wouldn't have any experience with the new rules. For the record, there is a little more paperwork than, say, flying to Paris, akin to the kinds of things you have to file to visit, say, Belarus.But it's no big deal.

And staring down the epic Cuban Embargo had us anxious and alert re-entering Miami, but immigration couldn't have been more bored to see us. We might as well have brought along those Cuban cigars I left behind.

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I've also just been reading, and recommend Chasing the Devil: A Journey Through Sub-Saharan Africa in the Footsteps of Graham Greene by Tim Butcher. Tim Butcher is a former British newspaper reporter and war correspondent now living in South Africa, who has that knack for travel in places you probably don't want to visit.

His previous book, Blood River: The Terrifying Journey Through The World's Most Dangerous Country, in which he retraced Henry Morton Stanley's 1870 trek, was harrowing. In the new book Butcher sets out to cross Sierra Leone and Liberia. There's a particularly frightening section, and touching tribute, to two friends killed while reporting in Sierra Leone in 2000.

It's good stuff. Both Butcher books are worth a read.

Congolese Border Tales

Whenever I read a story with news like this:

"Rebels in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have taken a major border post after clashes with government troops...."

I think about a visit to a safari camp in Uganda a few years back, just near the border with Congo. It was small, only ten tents and the proprietor, a stereotypical grizzled white African character I'll call Dave, said he'd take out three of the tents and only have seven if he had his way but he was only working for the man, just like everybody else.

This place was down along a river, nice location. Oil had been discovered in the ground nearby, but recently enough that not a lot had been done yet; They were still mobilizing to get at it. Just over a ridge was the Congo border.

A four-wheeler drove up and Dave went to see. Came back after a while and told us it was the head of military intelligence for this sector. Said he drops by to buy a beer now and then, but of course the beer's on the house. The military man makes every visit a "family visit" (Dave sticks quotes up in the air). This time he brought his wife, last time his sister.

I give them some beers, maybe a bite, and we visit a half hour, Dave says. Even though you have to do it, it's not a bad idea. I mean, it's calm over there now (thumb in the direction of the DRC), but it only takes them three or four days to cook up a civil war.

Not that this isn't the safest place you can be, right here. Because it is, he thinks. They've got all the oil guys here. They've doubled the military presence. Never be the same. Still, it's good to have a phone number for the head of military intelligence.

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More photos in the Uganda Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Another Election, Nobody Wins

Evocative description of Goma (photo above, from Gisenyi, Rwanda, across Lake Kivu), Democratic Republic of Congo, on the eve of another election with depressing prospects.

Africa: Couple of Things

Along the lines of the previous post, once you've used the Global Rich List to see how you're doing, consider:

We once met a Canadian man in Johannesburg. He had been contributing to the cause, working with the U.N. in southern Congo and now he meant to earn it back, in private business in the Copper Belt around Lubumbashi, in Katanga Province near Zambia. He was bringing his wife to approve the deal, and he promised they would live well, right on a golf course.

This Reuters article suggests he was right. It says that some 50 million of Congo's 67 million people live on less than two dollars a day, but in Lubumbashi,

"Membership at the governor's new gym costs $300 (193 pounds) a month, the gastronomic menu at the new $350-a-night hotel is going down a treat and traffic guided by lemon yellow-uniformed police runs smoothly under sunny skies."

*****

And just a quick note - spend a few minutes with the wildlife portfolio of Tobias Seiderer. Some outstanding stuff. This photo of one of the tree climbing lions in the Ishasha Wilderness in Uganda, is from EarthPhotos.com's Uganda, Animals & Wildlife and HDR Galleries, but Tobi's been there too. Here's his Flickr Photostream.

 

Adding Insult to Injury (from Crocodiles)

This photo, from the Rwandan border town of Gisenyi, is as close as we got to the UN/NGO-dominated town of Goma, Dem. Rep. Congo. U.N. charters flew in almost constantly. Click the photo for a larger version you can actually see.

 

To and from Gisenyi, long haul trucks from the Indian Ocean ports of Mombasa and Dar es-Salaam brought goods to supply eastern Congo. Congo itself, mind you, fronts the Atlantic Ocean. But the state of its infrastructure is so dismal as to require the eastern half of the country to be supplied from the other side of the continent.

So it's no real surprise to see this article from the AP: Wildebeest roadblock? Highway planned in Serengeti. Along with the crocodiles in the Mara River, it's one more obstacle the wildebeests really don't need.

*****

Right now the annual wildebeest migration across the Masai Mara is in full swing. Here are a couple of sites tracking wildebeest movement:

Annual Wildebeest Migration
The Great Migration

Wednesday HDR - Gorillas Mull Extinction

A damp fog blankets the clear-cut hills outside Parc National des Volcans in southeast Rwanda as we trek in, two of a group of eight, with an additional crew of guides and porters. We come upon a family of gorillas, but one male remains solitary, arms crossed across his chest. Pensive, it would seem.

If you're going to trek to see the mountain gorillas of Uganda, Rwanda and Congo, time to get a move on.

This week's HDR photo, below, in which our hero seems to fulminate on the encroachment of those demanding humans, visible just on the next ridge, is a perfect illustration of the perils this dwindling community of 800 or so gorillas faces. A report just issued by the U.N. titled "The Last Stand of the Gorilla - Environmental Crime and Conflict in the Congo Basin" suggests that "Gorillas may disappear across much of the Congo Basin by the mid 2020s." Download the report, or read a story about it.

Click the photo for a much larger, higher-res version. And continue below the jump for tech details on the HDR photo itself.

A Most Unlikely Construction Project

Another one of those artificial islands they seem to create every few months in the Persian Gulf?

Ah, no. Welcome to La Cité du Fleuve, building the future of Kinshasa right out in the River Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo.

Watch a movie about its construction.

Where to Go Next: Rwanda?

Where's the next cool place?

It's standard travel magazine fodder. Over time, Travel & Leisure has variously decided it's Montenegro, Mongolia or maybe Minneapolis, and most recently that I can find, they say it's back to the Bahamas.

Cool Travel Guide has a compilation of 2009 lists (from Buenos Aires to Beirut to Bangladesh, it's pretty much anywhere you're already thinking about going). There's even a site called wheretogonext.com.

Our prediction as a destination you'll be hearing more about: Rwanda.

We're about halfway through the fifteen year anniversary of the 100 days of Rwandan genocide that began on 6 April 1994 when the then Rwandan president's plane was brought down, and resulted in as many as 800,000 deaths. Today the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center, opened five years ago on the tenth anniversary, tells the tale from a perch overlooking the capital city.

The standard press at fifteen years mostly talks about reconciliation. The travel press is much farther down the road. Much of the travel infrastructure is so new that it's been built responsibly and eco-wise. And the numbers are up, with over a million arrivals last year.

On our own visit to Rwanda, nine months ago, we found a desperately poor country where people queue in villages, even in the shadow of the capital, to collect drinking water in jerry cans. But that vague, uneasy sense of danger (you'll know it if you've felt it) just didn't exist. And, as often in poverty, we found some of the nicest people you'll meet anywhere on the planet.

And then there's the big draw, the Virunga Mountain Gorillas, by far and away worth making the trip by themselves. We've written a lot about the Rwanda and the gorillas, but that was back before we began listing everything on CS&W in a handy index, so here are links to some posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Top photo: The cool, verdant Virunga mountains, where Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo come together. Next photo: The Kigali Memorial Centre. Next: People queue for drinking water outside Kigali. Below: Virunga gorilla.

(See the Mountain Gorillas Gallery and the Rwanda Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Eastern Congo in Pictures

Boston.com put some tremendous photojournalism up last Friday: Portraits from the Congo by Canadian journalist Finbarr O'Reilly.

Photojournalism in Congo Conflict

T J Kirkpatrick, who's a photojournalist working in Congo has posted some interesting photos from the village of Bangadi, Congo, near the Sudanese border, where villagers are fighting back against the Lord's Resistance Army.

We found that post via a list of African bloggers posted by Glenna Gordon, a photojournalist in Liberia, on her blog  The Scarlet Lion. See also our interview with Glenna.