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Africa, friends, travel, vehicles

Wayne being in prison was an example of a down

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Yes, I watched The Castle again last week with my antipodean friends in Kenya; and yes, it has been a week of ups & downs. Monday saw me out for another ride around the tea-fields & factory. As I was starting to get my bearings in the countryside a bit more, I was able to extend the loop to get a bit more of a work out. As I was making my way back to Brackenhurst (where Adrian & Carmen work) I somehow got a bit away from the tea-fields. As I found my way back, I was particularly pleased to be welcomed by a pack of dogs; I don’t think they were too happy to see me either – thankfully, I escaped with a slight scratch on my thigh (NZO Dobies are so fantastically bombproof), which later bruised up nicely, and no bites.

Somehow, that night I got convinced to tag along to an aerobics class in Limuru at a tiny little gym. Not having been to aerobics class before, a Kenyan one was sure to be an introduction – I think I went for the cultural experience & a good laugh. I think there were about seven of us in a tiny basement room sweating it out (I was soaked after ten minutes & I’m not sure how I survived an hour of it). Of course, they only have one tape & the old Aqua songs provided much amusement. But most of my amusement (& probably Carmen’s) came from my total lack of coordination when things got a little too complicated for my simple brain. Somehow winning a half-hearted sit-up challenge before the session started was not looking like such a great idea half way through the hour as we moved to the mats (it smelt decidedly funky on the ground – urgggh) & we proceeded to do a lot of sit-up-esque exercises. I had previously forgotten that I had muscles lying dormant around my stomach – I was reminded time & time again over the following two days. I sure hope I’m a little fitter after my Kenya trip – what with all the extra riding, the aerobics & eating less.

Tuesday I was off to the slums near the airport again with the volunteers. I spent a few hours at a small medical clinic, but it was a quiet day & they didn’t have a lot for me to do. For the first time in years, my hands were covered in lactose after I spent an hour or two packaging drugs from a bulk container. I think that afternoon Adrian & I went for another of our run/rides around the fields; after the exertions the day before, I was slow again up the hills – but enjoyed blasting down the hills of course. As this was the last night that Jeff & Christina (two of the great volunteers) were in town, most of the volunteers arranged transport in to Limuru for a night at the Beehive – a local bar. Once we at the ACTS house had organised ourselves, we finally made it for a few Tuskers. We weren’t sufficiently organised enough to have had dinner before we left, so had to wait for the cook to light the fire & cook what looked like most of the torso of an unspecified animal (never worked out if it was beef, sheep, goat or something else). Anyway, the Nyama Choma (roast meat) was very good, but very salty.

A great night out, even if we were home relatively early (some of us have to work – not me of course). Just been informed it was goat.

After another sleepless night (all the water before bed didn’t exactly help), we were off with the volunteers again to a feeding program. Thankfully, it was local & the drive was short – if somewhat circuitous due to the rain finally starting up & muddying up the dirt roads (apparently it is one of the rainy seasons at the moment – but the weather has been perfect up until this point; thankfully the rain is becoming a little more frequent). Hundreds of people had turned up for the dispersal of flour, grain, matches, fuel, salt, bottles, & other such things. I couldn’t believe how many people there were & how far some had walked; all very sobering really. I handed out salt all morning, so for the second day in a row I was covered in the product of uni summer jobs. That afternoon, we were back to Makeu – the school & boarding for about thirty disabled children that we had visited last week. It was life-skills lessons, so a couple of volunteers tried to teach the kids how to make beds, brush their teeth, clean the classroom & use the long drop properly (“In the hole!”); I’m such a horrible teacher, but thankfully Kimberly has endless enthusiasm & she did a great job while I defaulted to crowd control.

The much anticipated game of Ultimate Frisbee was on Wednesday night & that when my week got a lot worse. It was a fantastic game, exhausting, but a lot of fun & we were winning (there was not a lot experience – me included).

If it wasn’t such a great game, I may have been a little wiser & realised that my right shoulder clicking & popping was a really bad sign. My poor arms obviously aren’t strong enough & all the jumping & reaching (I think it was this rather than the throwing) was too much & I eventually dislocated my shoulder. It went back in once, but the last time I couldn’t get it back in & it frigging hurt. Thankfully there were a few nurses on hand & Carmen is an OT. None of the nurses were too keen to put it back in; but thankfully Carmen was up for it (with a bit of help from the trusty interweb thingy) & a bit of forced movement later we were both stoked to feel it pop right back in to place. My hero – thanks Carmen. Since then, it’s been pretty good – a few days immobilised in various slings, a little discomfort & with a bit more rest, I hope it never happens again (of course, that is not how such dislocations usually go).
Thursday was a bit of a write off with a gammy arm; but Carmen & I did take a couple of kids from Makeu to the doctor in Limuru. One had a horrible scar from a burn sustained in last year’s post-election violence on his upper arm & another had a horribly infected thumb. There wasn’t much to be done for the scar (I sure was fortunate to escape any permanent scarring from my little altercation with Melter 1); poor John screamed blue murder for ten minutes while all the pus was drained from is thumb (just as well Carmen had gone to get lunch, it was heartbreaking listening), hopefully the necrosis under his thumb nail isn’t too extensive. I wasn’t too displeased to have to miss dance aerobics that night.

Uganda & the Nile beckoned on Friday – Adrian had wonderfully organised ten of us to go up Friday night on the bus (arriving Saturday morning), relax at the camp Saturday & spend Sunday rafting down the river. At the last minute, Adrian had to fly to Kampala for work & unfortunately the bus ride was such an experience he is not likely to be forgiven for a while! I think Akamba must have dragged the last & worst bus in their fleet out for us to take the twelve hour trip through the night to Jinja. It didn’t start off too bad (except we had to retrace our steps through Nairobi traffic) & it was stinking hot in there. However, it quickly became apparent to quite a few of our group that the bus was infested with cockroaches & they were none pleased to have them crawling across their faces & all sorts of other places. I was lucky enough to have an empty seat next to me, but that was quickly filled when Carmen spied the possibility of sleeping against the window. Actually, here is a photo of one of the few times during the whole horrendous trip which Carmen is not actually sleep – just pretending. Being able to sleep while travelling would have been a real bonus – we had three blow outs & associated hour long stops to change tyres – one of the blow outs pushed the border crossing out to an hour and a half over sunrise. I had a week’s worth of Hamish & Andy podcasts to catch up on, so that helped pass the boredom a little. Needless to say, we were all happy to be off the roach-coach at nine on Saturday morning. The Adrift truck picked us up & we spent the rest of Saturday relaxing next to the Nile or next to the pool at the next-door resort.

On first impressions, Uganda is considerably nicer than Kenya – the roads were markedly better, the cars on the road are much nicer & it just looks a lot more orderly. Unfortunately, somewhere on Saturday afternoon I got quite sick & lost my appetite- that only really helped by lessening the blow of being unable to go rafting. That evening we watched the All Blacks beat England with the Nile right next to us – that was a little surreal. I was even quieter than normal that night, so it was with some relief to head off to bed well to early – the bunk room was like being in a submarine with the bunks seeming to be only a foot apart, it made getting in & out of bed difficult with only one good arm.

Five of the group decided to do the bungee on Sunday morning before they headed out rafting. I was keen to give it a go a few days prior, but wasn’t really up for all things considered.

Andree (also sitting out the rafting for medical reasons) & I lazed around the bar while everyone else hit the river. It was a great afternoon reading, chatting, eating & enjoying the view. Later in the afternoon a couple of hundred of the British Army descended on the camp after many weeks in the bush, so we made a hasty exit to meet the rafters at the take-out point thirty kilometres downstream. By all accounts it was a fantastic day & it was really frustrating to hear all the stories; on the upside the food was delicious.

Monday morning, Carmen & Adrian were flying back to Nairobi for work & considering the state of my digestive system & contemplating another hell bus ride, I joined them at 4 am in a taxi to the airport. I managed to get a ticket for the flight & it was very pleasant with great views of Lake Victoria (saw a good sunrise during the taxi ride too); just as well the plane was pretty empty, as the final podcast I had was side-splittingly funny & it would have been even more embarrassing. What is it with small airlines in third world countries leaving before the scheduled departure? Admittedly, this wasn’t as noticeable as Yeti Airlines in Nepal – but it was a little odd.

So home to catch up on sleep & washing; it turns out that the bus ride back was better by orders of magnitude, but I’m still not sure if I would have survived so well. So that was the end of great weekend had by everyone else – I quite enjoyed it, but it was frustrating & disappointing at the same time. But at least my arm hasn’t popped out again.

Africa, bikes, friends, MTB, travel

First few days in Kenya

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I’ve been in Kenya for three days now & it’s been a reasonably relaxing few days, but with a few little things worth talking about. Also, if I do little spurts of story-telling, it won’t be as tedious (for both reader & writer) to read as one big narrative. A reasonable enough nine hour flight straight through to Nairobi – but I don’t particularly recommend Virgin Atlantic (they don’t stop talking over the PA, the check-in is a nightmare, the entertainment is not on-demand [so if you miss the start of the movies every two and a half hours, you have to wait another two and a half hours] & the food is poor – I think I’ve been spoiled by Air NZ). But we did land early & I was through buying a visa, collecting my luggage & convincing customs that my bike was two years old (& therefore of no interest to them & their duty) before Adrian could get to the airport. As it was nine-thirty on a Sunday morning, the traffic driving northeast through Nairobi was sparse – but still the typical crazy one expects from a big third world city.

We stopped off on the way home at quite a western cafe (WiFi if I wanted it) for breakfast & continued the catch up. Adrian has been in Kenya for about a year and a half & is working for an organisation that arranges volunteers to come over & do work on various projects around East Africa (very busy, but by all accounts better than selling automatic sliding doors to shops in Auckland). Thankfully, ACTS is based a bit out of the city & it wasn’t too long before we were at the house where Adrian lives with a workmate & a couple of guys who work for a similar organisation (GC) – the house also has accommodation for some of the volunteers. It’s a good arrangement with the few permanent tenants (ACTS & GC rent it) & a stream of other expats staying for a little while or longer. I haven’t quite worked out the history of the house, but it must be thirty or forty years old & I like to think maybe it was at the centre of a tea plantation. It’s quite a large house (I think the lounge is almost bigger than the flat where I am staying in London) & comes complete with a great staff – there’s always a guard at the gate (three at night), the maid comes in everyday (I’m not really used to my bed being made every day) & a gardener who has got the grounds in immaculate condition. It’s all a little strange & takes a while to get used to. It’s still quite odd that the internet here in Kenya is so much faster than what we had back in NZ.

After meeting a few housemates over (their) lunch at Brackenhurst (the nearby compound where the ACTS offices are), it was back to the house & I somehow got motivated to put my bike together. That afternoon Adrian took me on his running loop (I rode of course) that goes around Brackenhurst & through a lot of tea fields.

Embarrassingly, no sooner had we got out the gate & Adrian veered off around the corner on a dirt track & I followed around on the grass, I put my front wheel in a big unseen hole & went straight over the bars – only damage was to my pride & a bit of a bruise on my thigh. I had never seen tea fields up close & was surprised to see how well established the little bushes were – for some reason I though that tea plants would be ones that are replaced every season or so.

We were riding/running on dirt roads & tracks between the tea fields & it made for some good riding – unfortunately the hills quickly showed me up as being very hungry, tired, jet-lagged & most of all, quite out of shape.

The downhills were a blast though (but one did have to be mindful of people walking up the opposite way) & I worked out that the hundreds of speed bumps everywhere aren’t so bad on a bike – they are pretty horrendous in Adrian’s short wheel base Suzuki (it brings back a lot of memories – it was one of these that I learnt to drive in). Adrian has been introducing his housemates to Flight of the Conchords so a fair few episodes were watched that night before a rather long sleep for me.

I’ve had to run away to the cool inside (thick stone walls & floors do have their advantages) as it’s too hot sitting in the shade on the balcony. Monday was a pretty lazy day for me – nice sleep-in, sorted out my stuff a bit, watched the first half of NZ’s innings in the third ODI against Pakistan, went for another ride around the same loop (knocked twenty minutes off the time) & then went out for dinner to see Inglorious Basterds with Joe & Nick. The roads are little bit easier to handle in long wheel-based Prado.

I was up well too early on Tuesday, as Adrian’s work & house mate Carmen had organised for me to go in to a school in a slum in Nairobi with a couple of their volunteers. Jeff & Christina (from Montreal) had been to the school the previous week & in the meantime bought a whole lot of school supplies to give to the children & teachers. I wasn’t too sure where the slum was, but it turned out to be near the airport as the big jets were coming in to land over the corrugated iron shacks. We had a later than intended start after two flat tyres on the ACTS van, but even so the trip took three times as long through the traffic as it did on Sunday. Naturally, as we got further in to the slum the squalour increased & the roads deteriorated – it was all pretty horrendous & looking out of the van on the drive reminded me of Nepal (except the skin colour is darker & there is a lot more English around).

The head teacher was particularly pleased to have visitors & I was the only new visitor I was paraded through each class; upon our entrance all the students (the classes ranged from about four to eleven years old) would stand & then burst in to a welcome song, the students would introduce themselves in turn & then I would introduce myself.

It was all very cute (they do love to sing). After we had distributed all the gifts & there were an awful lot of speeches & singing & dancing the kids went back to their homes for however much lunch they could get. After lunch I somehow found myself alone in front of a blackboard trying to teach ten year olds how to convert from metres to kilometres and vice versa. As I always suspected, there is a good reason I’m not a teacher – it was just as well the content was pretty easy & they all seemed to know what there were doing. I slowly managed to get hold of writing on the blackboard & avoiding the potholes in the concrete floor without falling over. Hopefully that is the end of my teaching career, as interesting as it was.

Yesterday I finished the book that I had picked up the day previous. It was a well thumbed copy of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, I’m not sure where I had heard of it before, but was pretty certain that I had. It gave a fascinating insight it why America is so disliked around the world. This guy’s job, in a nutshell, was to go to developing countries & provide very inflated & unsubstantiated economic forecasts of what their country could do with new infrastructure, convince them to borrow the money needed to develop the infrastructure from the World Bank or IMF or such-like, spend all the borrowed money on American firms to build the infrastructure & then when the forecasts didn’t prove quite right they are saddled with billions of dollars of debt & in America’s pocket when needed for oil, votes at the UN, military bases & so on. That’s my very quick summary, but it was a very interesting book.

Carmen is taking me to another project this afternoon, but I have no idea what….

around home, bikes, family, friends, London, MTB, UK

Ipswich, Canterbury & the most cyclists I have ever seen at once

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It’s been most of September since I got back from Edinburgh, so I must have a few little trips & events to write about. Hopefully the blog editor behaves itself this time. I’ve now worked out how to work around the annoying changes to Blogger – apologies to those that receive this twice.

A day or so after I got back I was off to Ipswich for a long weekend staying with Te Puke & Palmy friends – Louis & Emma. They have been in the UK for a little over a year & seem to be quite enjoying living in Ipswich. It was great to catch up – & quite like I remember flatting: generally eating, watching sport & a bit of mountain biking. Louis & I loaded the two bikes (it’s good to know bikes can fit in Micras with the seats down) & set off north-east for Thetford forest. My first singletrack in the UK this visit. I see now why Suffolk is known for being flat – we didn’t exactly have a lot of climbing to do. There were four different trails, apparently of varying difficulty, & we did the two “hardest” ones. It was great to be out riding in the forest & there were plenty of people out & about (but not too many on the tracks). We managed to occupy ourselves for three hours & Louis did heroically when the seat on his borrowed bike worked the bolt loose & kept tilting up at the front. There were some nice little bits of flowing singletrack, but these were few & far between & generally the trails seemed poorly designed. I got quite excited when I saw these signs –

– warning of almost certain death, but in the end it was less challenging than the Diamondback/Dipper in the Redwoods & one small part of it was quite fun. Nonetheless, it was great being out & I more than happy to go out for some doubletrack around some woods closer to Ipswich on Sunday afternoon.

The two weeks since then have been spent organising things, brief bike rides (two hours) locally & the odd trip in to London to see sights (National Gallery & Portrait Gallery were very good – must go back to see the majority of exhibits that I didn’t have time for; back to the Imperial War Museum; really enjoyed poking around Campden Markets & wishing I had a budget that extended a bit further) & friends.

Two weekends ago was a big family get together for Trish’s (the second cousin I’m staying with) birthday. It was great to catch up with quite a few people – most of whom I had met last year. I have since seen photos of our trip in 1987 to the UK that I have not seen before – the infamous Renault 11 makes an appearance & I was a lot cuter.

Saturday last, Trish & I took a pleasant little day trip to Canterbury (a certain line from The [real] Office keeps coming to mind). After lunch, we took a look around the Cathedral (didn’t see Blackadder around or Baldrick trying to sell dubious relics). In some respects it was another great big cathedral (more of which I’m sure I will see) – but I was surprised at how it kept on going, it was a lot larger than I expected on first sight. Afterwards we took a stroll along the river in part, & then around a lot of the old walls of the city. It was warm close day & there were plenty of people out enjoying the weather & I was surprised at how many teenagers & students were around.

Yesterday was the Mayor of London’s Skyride. For six hours in the middle of the day, a loop was closed off that went from Tower Bridge, along the Embankment to Trafalgar Square & down The Mall to Buckingham Palace. Coming back the other half of the loop split off & took in St Paul’s. I biked from home in Sidcup & met up with a small group three and a half miles down the road. From there we set off for Greenwich & met up with hundreds of others. Biking from there & over Tower Bridge it started to get chaotic with so many on bikes taking over the roads. It was great joining (as it turned out) sixty-five thousand other cyclists in the city on what was a beautiful day. Of course, it was rather congested & slow going – but no one seemed to find as there were bikes everywhere, not cars, taxis & murderous buses. A great range of bikes on display – fixies, roadies, a few mountain-bikes, town/city bikes, unicycles, penny-farthings, even a pedal-powered piano, clown bikes & best of all – kids everywhere on little bikes, trailing bikes having a ball. Six hours & thirty-odd miles later, I was pleased to make it home exhausted.

friends, travel, UK

Shows & the highlands

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On the long way back to London from Edinburgh now, so here I am again. I think I last added to this the day after the tattoo (saw it on TV last night, was still a spectacular show). I started to get a bit more organised in determining which shows I was going to see about this time & since then have seen plenty of comedy, a bit of theatre, some music performances & a circus & I wasn’t disappointed by a single one of them. But more of some of them later.

Monday last week was of course the twenty-fourth & being so far from home & friends & family was a little strange. But it turned out to be a great day (it didn’t rain at all for starters) – I tagged along with Thomas as he went to visit his mother up near Inverness for the night. Thomas was great at showing me little things off the beaten track as we went through the highlands; it was particularly nice to spend a bit of time checking out the estate & village nannied for Thomas’ family quite some years ago. The heather was out in full force & it smelt divine. Managed to fit in a bit of a walk up a hill to get a cracking view of Newtonmore & the surrounds.

After dropping in on an old school friend of Thomas a little further north at Aviemore (which apparently has very good riding, I must return some time in the not too distant future) we arrived at Sally & Alan’s in time for a great venison dinner. Sally & I hadn’t seen each other for over twenty years (so that of course means I don’t remember too much from then), so it was great to catch up & share stories of our family (stories set presently or in the past) & travels.

We returned to Edinburgh the next day, on a different route to which travelled north – calling in at a couple more friends’ houses. This was a tiki-tour that Dad would be proud of – we stopped when we saw things of interest & we went for a couple of walks. I don’t really remember the path we took home – but I think it was east of the previous day’s roads. I do remember that we went to Balmoral, but didn’t get invited in for tea in biscuits. Also early in the day we checked out the historic battlefield of Culloden – very interesting to see it & learn a little Scottish history – this was the site of the last battle in the Jacobite Rising in 1745.

The rest of that week is a bit of a blur of a lot of shows & late nights & walking to & from the flat (my only nod to exercise for a while). Two of the theatre showing I went along to were hour long soliloquies. Both were retrospective from the end of each of the characters’ lives. The first was in the shoes of Richard Burton, a very-well known (I had never heard of him) Welsh actor – who was one on the list of “has been married to Liz Taylor”. Not being able to convey what it was like – I’ll just say it was a great performance & an hour of just one person talking flew by. The second was in a very small room with about fifteen filled seats in one of them most out-of-the-way venues I had been to yet – well out of the normal venue district, up many floors & unusually we were fed tea, coffee & biscuits while waiting. I digress, we were sitting in a small dark room with the door shut, when who should charge in ranting & raving at 10.30 but some one bearing an uncanny resemblance to Adolf Hitler (we did know this was coming, but I like a bit of build-up)? For over an hour, we had Hitler in his final moments underneath Berlin pretty much summarizing his dreams, achievements, failures & thoughts on many subjects & people – on a factual side it was a very good summary of all that he did (except for the obvious bit of it being in English – thankfully). On a dramatic side (not that I can pretend to know much about the arts) it was a moving performance & as well as the megalomanical tyrant, we could see at times that Hitler, somewhat disturbingly wasn’t completely different from the rest of us – a time to consider how it all happened & could it happen again. Talking about the rest of the comedy & the Moscow State Circus (no animals – but I was impressed by the show & acrobatics) that I saw seems a little bit frivolous after that – but I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the festival.

However, I was all show-ed out by the weekend – so doing a little family history research for Mum was a welcome change. I was looking for anything on one of my fore-fathers (I’m not even going to guess how many “greats” are involved) – on Mum’s maternal side – who was originally from Italy but was in Edinburgh for a decade or two or three at the beginning of the nineteenth century. I went to four different archives, enjoyed the hunt & looking at documents that looked as though they hadn’t seen the light of day for a hundred years. I had moments of discovery (I am waiting the report of how much worth they had), walked around quite a bit of central Edinburgh where my ancestors lived, worked & hopefully had a bit of time for play (I don’t think they had mountain-bikes back then, poor souls) & managed to find the church where some of them were baptised & married. It was nice to be doing something different & putting my brain to work for the first time in a while).

The break for the archives was on Sunday, when Thomas & a mate of his, Brinky (who had recently spent the best part of a year in NZ – good stories), were going kayaking. I was happy to tag along & get out in the wilderness & be shuttle-driver (good karma, do unto others & all that) for them. We drove north to the Linn of Tummel (Thomas & I had stopped here on the way north the previous week). The guys put their kayaks in just below a hydro dam & just before about fifteen whitewater rafts went in & I had about an hour to kill before they would go over the falls of the Linn. On the drive down, I saw another group of rafts & kayaks just before I got to the Linn, so I enjoyed going down & seeing them go over the falls. The rafts went over the ~two-metre falls OK – except when the guide standing on the rocks before the falls twisted them around; then they all fell out & capsized & was most amusing & made for some decent photos.

While I was waiting for Thomas & Brinky, I wandered down the road a little & picked some more delicious chanterelles (Thomas & I picked a lot of these delicious yellow mushrooms on Monday). Eventually, the rafters, an earlier group of kayaks & Thomas & Brinky came down the river. I enjoyed being warm & dry as I watched many go over the falls & quite a few end up in the drink. I had my camera on multishot & ended up with way too many photos – here are some of the better ones.