Obsessions of East (and a bit of North) Africa

In case you're new, whenever we finish traveling through a certain region of the world, we try to pick one thing that each country seemed to be "obsessed" with. This is totally subjective, of course, and not meant to offend. Well, not too much. If you've been to any of these places, feel free to let us know if you agree or disagree with our choices.

On to the countries we visited in Eastern Africa!

Tanzania: Spare tire covers. I never would have noticed this, but Andy pointed out that nearly every truck in Tanzania had a fancy spare tire cover on the back with some sort of design or corporate logo or something. It did seem to be true. Chalk that one up to boys looking at cars more closely than girls do...

Rwanda: Giving every town two names. And the names are never even close to sounding the same! Musanze = Ruhengheri. Butare = Huye. I'm sure there were more. This made finding a bus to the destination you wanted interesting.

Uganda: Bananas. Growing on the mountain slopes. Loading down bikes being cycled to market. Mashed up in the staple starch, matoke. They're everywhere!

Kenya: Butcher shops. AKA "butcheries." You know, you can see half a skinned goat carcass hanging in the window in many, many places across Africa...but somehow, not quite with the same ubiquity that we saw them in Kenya. No wonder nyama choma is so popular--there's a lotta goat out there to barbecue!

Ethiopia: Walking sticks. As soon as you get out into the countryside, you kinda can't help but notice how pretty much every male over the age of 8 carries a walking stick. Approximately half the aisle space on any bus is taken up with a tangle of sticks, which is kind of a catch-22, because it makes having a stick necessary to negotiate your way out without falling...but to have a stick available for this purpose, you'll have needed to bring it on the bus, and stash it in the aisle...

Egypt: Shisha. You may know this as hookah (the Moroccan term). You probably don't know it by its Jordanian name, and my favorite--hubbly bubbly (I'm not kidding!). But anyway, it's a big apparatus for smoking tobacco, usually fruit-flavored to make it taste sweet, and it's incredibly popular with Egyptians and tourists alike. We don't smoke and didn't try it...it smelled OK when I caught a whiff, but apparently smoking one shisha does as much damage to your lungs as an entire pack of cigarettes, so, um, not so good for you.

Financial Update: Eastern Africa

It's time once again for what may be our most boring blog entry for regular readers, our Financial Update. Boring, but very useful to anyone who is thinking about traveling for a long time. As a reminder, prices are the total for both of us for everything that we need while there. It does not include general trip expenses such as insurance. So, here we go.

Tanzania- $163 per day over 18.5 days. Visas were $100 each at the border (these are much cheaper if you are not American). This is an expensive one. Without my $1100 climb of Kilimanjaro or our $400 safari, the average is only $97 per day. Then again, why go to Tanzania if you aren't going to do anything interesting? Hotels and food are not very expensive if you go to the places that locals go (and locals often stay in rather nice hotels in Tanzania, it seems), but anything even remotely connected to tourism will cost a fortune. National Parks often charge $50 for entrance.

Rwanda- $223 per day over 6 days. No visa required for Americans, but many nationalities need a visa before entry. Entirely because we paid $500 each to see the gorillas. Of course, that is essentially all there is to do in the country other than look at the beautiful countryside or read more about the depressing genocide. Without gorillas, it was only $46 per day. Hotels are a bit more expensive in Rwanda and transport is more expensive than surrounding countries, but not bad.

Uganda- $149 per day over 6 days. Visas were $50 each at the border. Another expensive one. We took an expensive three day organized tour to Murchison Falls that accounts for most of the expense. Outside of Kampala, life is cheap. If you had more time and did everything yourself, it would be much cheaper.

Kenya- $71 per day over 5 days. Visas were $25 each at the border. This is actually made cheaper because we only visited one national park and we stayed with a family in Nairobi. We did the safari part in Tanzania. If you wanted to do a safari in Kenya, the price for Tanzania above is probably more realistic.

Ethiopia- $89 per day over 16.5 days. Visas were $20 each at the airport. Ethiopia is both dirt poor and dirt cheap. We include the entire cost of our flights ($300 each) in this average because Ethiopia refuses to issue overland visas, forcing us to fly. Without that, the average would be closer to $50 per day. Food is especially cheap (and good).

Egypt- $77 per day over 13.5 days. Visas were $15 each at the airport. Everything in Egypt is cheap except entry to all the ruins. Probably a third of our budget was spent on entry fees. Hotels, food, and transport are all cheap and have a high standard.

That's it. Hope you found it helpful. Feel free to contact us with any questions.

Starch Smackdown! Foods of Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya

When it comes to cuisine, Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya have one passion in common: Starch! Be it a giant lump of cooked cornmeal (ugali--Kenya), a mass of mashed green plantain (matoke--Uganda), or a melange of every type of starch you've ever heard of (Rwanda), one thing's for certain...travels through these parts of eastern Africa will be the death of your low-carb diet.

Let's kick the pictures off with some foods of Rwanda!

Throughout east Africa, Tetra-Paks of juice or nectar are popular, and each country has its own brands. This one is Rwanda's--it's not the best, but it was the cheapest. (FYI, the best is probably Splash, Uganda's brand.)

Sticking with beverages, Rwanda offered two new flavors of Fanta we had not seen elsewhere! The pale green one is Fanta Citron, slightly limey and not bad. The purple one is Fanta Fiesta, which tasted like the Red Fanta you find in Latin America...in other words, chicle (bubblegum) flavored and pretty disgusting.

OK, lunch or dinner in Rwanda pretty much always looks like this. You sometimes get a melange plate, which for a fixed price of about $1.75 comes with several starches (for example, here we got chips, pasta, rice, beans, and stewed plantain), a green vegetable (cabbage here--sometimes salad or cooked dark greens), and a little bowl with a chewy piece of meat in a tasty sauce. Or sometimes you pay about $2 for an all-the-starch-and-veggies-you-can-fit-on-one-plate buffet, in which the choices are pretty much all the same things you'd normally see in the melange plate, and you then might pay extra for meat. It's not the world's most exciting food, but it's a great deal if you're really hungry.

In Butare, Rwanda, there is an ice cream and coffee shop called Inzozi Nziza, which means sweet dreams, and it is the NGO project of Blue Marble Ice Cream in Brooklyn, NY. Blue Marble ice cream is delicious but crazy expensive (like, $10 for a pint), so we were hoping to find a better deal at their Rwanda branch. Turns out they only have soft serve, but we were able to get large bowls of it for substantially less than the NY rates.

The shop from the outside. It's only been open a few months, but seemed popular with locals and foreigners.

Here is Andy modeling the fun tiny bottle of hot sauce that is found on every restaurant table in Rwanda.

And here is me modeling a giant cheese roll, which I found in a store in Butare. Not quite up to Colombian standards, but still, hooray for cheese bread!

While waiting out a rainstorm in Musanze, Andy allowed some local women to convince him to buy a bag of the strange-looking fruits they were selling. Here is what one of the fruits looks like from the outside...

And here it is out of its papery shell. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name or what they tasted like, but I do remember that Andy liked these a lot better than I did.

On to Uganda!

Uganda must be the banana-producing capital of Africa, if not the world. All through the west of the country, we saw people riding bicycles loaded with bananas, taking them to market.

Here's a shot of my first dinner in Kampala--masala chips and sausages. It would have been better if it was hot.

Bus snacks! The guys outside the window claimed these were both beef, but we think one of them may have been some sort of organ. Please focus on the meat on a stick in this picture and not my hair.

Always a fan of sachets of drinkable yogurt, I was excited to find the novel flavor of butterscotch in Uganda. Sadly, it wasn't as great as I'd hoped.

This might be my favorite billboard in Uganda. Those are some clever marketers who have convinced people they need a special cooking oil just for frying chapatti! (Chapatti are tasty Indian-style flat breads, which you can find all over east Africa--yay!)

Here's Uganda's take on the melange plate: rice, pasta, ugali (cornmeal mush), cassava, cabbage, and matoke, which is Uganda's national starch. It's the yellow stuff on the right of the plate and made of mashed, unripe plantains. Like ugali, it doesn't have a ton of taste.

On our last night in Kampala, we stumbled upon a store that was selling Bounty bars for an outrageously low price, like 30 cents each. Guess who pounced?

And finally, Kenya.

Kenya probably had the most interesting food of the three countries I'm covering here, though that doesn't necessarily say a lot. Still, we never look down our noses at countries that supply cheap fried dough things for breakfast. These are called maandazi.

Remember in the other post, when I was complaining about not being able to find a restaurant in Naivasha that served both chips and beer? Well, this is what we ended up eating that night instead. I don't remember the name, but it was a kind of mashed-potato thing that also had greens in it, and I was later told it is a Kikuyu specialty. Can anyone identify?

Andy couldn't resist buying this bag of puffy sugary snack things in Naivasha. They tasted kind of stale and we later realized that they were expired...maybe that's why they only cost 5 cents.

My favorite drink in Kenya, and all of east Africa, has to be Picana. It is basically fruit nectar that comes in a glass bottle. There are different flavors--I tried passionfruit and cocktail, and they were both great! In this picture you may also notice large plastic bottles of salt--staples on the table of any restaurant that serves chips.

In Nairobi, our couchsurfing host Jusca and her sons prepared this incredible feast for our first night in town--a meat stew made with tomatoes, onions, and delicious spices, wonderful sauteed greens, and the best ugali we've had anywhere! Even more impressively, they made this all on a single-burner charcoal stove they had set up in the hallway.

Jusca even tried to teach me and Andy how to make ugali. Andy was more skilled at it than I was. You need a lot of arm strength to stir that cornmeal when it thickens up!

Our biggest culinary splurge of our entire trip so far was our trip to Carnivore restaurant in Langata, a suburb of Nairobi. It's pretty much a total rip-off of the Brazilian barbecue (rodizio) concept, but with the African twist of a few game meats thrown in. I had hoped that warthog would be on the menu, but the day we visited, it was just ostrich and crocodile in the "exotic" section.

Anyway, here's the main roasting pit, with many types of meat on swords.

As in any rodizio, the waiters keep coming to your table with different kinds of meat until you lay down your little flag and "surrender." Here's a shot of my plate early on--clockwise starting from the baked potato we have chicken, ostrich (very tasty when not overcooked--dry when overcooked), ox testicle (yup, you read that right--it was very tender), pork sausage (yum), and lamb sausage (meat was good, but trying to eat th casing was a mistake).

Here is Andy later in the meal, contemplating a bite of crocodile meat. It turns out that the meat itself is fairly good, but the fat is really fishy-tasting and disgusting.

The last thing I'll say about Carnivore is that we kept our flag flying for so long that finally a maitre d' came over to us and asked if there was anything particular we wanted more of, since we'd already eaten everything they had. Apparently, most tourists concede meat-defeat much earlier than we did. Ha, we conquered Carnivore!

Sticking with the meat theme, on our last day in Nairobi we went out with Jusca for some nyama choma, which is Kenya's national grilled-meat dish. Usually it is goat, but can also be beef, and that's what we had. The waiter brought a board full of meat to our table and chopped it up before us, then gave us toothpicks to eat with and little piles of salt to dip the meat in. Very flavorful!

In addition to nyama choma and ugali, chips seem to be a national food obsession in Kenya. A big plate or bag of deliciously greasy chips costs about 60 cents in Nairobi. They are served with hot sauce instead of ketchup. Yum!

I think this is the only yogurt I tried in Kenya. It was tasty, and I enjoyed the slightly-more-creative-than-usual naming used by this company.

Finally, as I was preparing to spend our very last few Kenyan shillings at a supermarket before heading to the airport, what caught my eye at the checkout but my old friends from Argentina, Peanut Rocklets?? We've sometimes seen other Arcor products randomly around Africa, but I had not encountered my favorite Peanut M&M knockoffs since Chile. I did a happy dance and added them to my basket. (Sadly, they were kind of old and crumbly when I finally opened the bag, but heck, they had journeyed a long way.)

Our bellies' next destination was Ethiopia, which was a whole new bag of (deliciously spiced, delicately pureed and served atop piles of injera) beans. Stay tuned!

Anda #1: Rw

Crossing from Tanzania into Rwanda, you get a bit of a "we're not in Kansas anymore" feeling. After hours bouncing across dirt roads on an overcrowded bus that smells of dried fish (that's the Tanzania side)...all of a sudden you're on a smoothly paved road, winding through beautiful hilly scenery, in a new minibus with plenty of leg room and only one adult butt per seat. Bliss! Welcome to Rwanda.

Two other nice things about the Rwanda border at Rusumu: There's an impressive waterfall as you walk over the bridge between Tanzania and Rwanda (Rusumu Falls)...and, if you're American, you don't need a visa for Rwanda. It had been a few countries since we were able to get stamped in without forking over a bunch of cash, and it was a nice welcome.

Rwanda is a very small country, and its main tourist draw is the opportunity to track mountain gorillas in the north, where the country borders Uganda and DRC (the other two countries where you can track them). Permits to do this are expensive ($500 US apiece) and difficult to come by on short notice, so we were prepared to spend some time in the country waiting. Luckily, a friend of ours who is working in gorilla conservation put us in touch with a tour operator who is very good at getting short-notice permits (Amahoro Tours, whom we recommend), and we were able to go track six days after our arrival in the country. So that gave us six days (duh) to get to know Rwanda.

Out first destination was Kigali, Rwanda's capital. It's an attractive, very clean city set on several hills (Rwanda is the land of 1,000 hills), so almost anywhere you are, you have a great view of some other part of the city.

This is not where we stayed, but here I am in the lobby of the Hotel des Mille Collines--Hotel of 1,000 Hills, but better known as the Hotel Rwanda. This is where the hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina, saved scores of people from the genocide in 1994. It's right in the center of downtown and looked like a comfortable place to stay.
This cinema was around the corner from the much less fancy hotel where we did stay. And guess what it was showing? "Eclipse," the third movie in the Twilight series! Andy and I hadn't been to a movie yet in our seven months in Africa, and since we happened to see both of the first movies last year ("Twilight" on a bus in Peru and "New Moon" at half-price movie night in El Salvador) and it only cost $2 for a ticket, we decided to go. We turned out to be the only ones there, and the movie was played off a computer and was almost certainly pirated, given the frequent warnings that scrolled across the bottom about piracy. Pretty hilarious. As was the movie, but it was a fun night out.

Since we never seem to remember to take street-scene pictures anymore, I snapped this one down the street from the movie theater. You can see how there's no trash in the streets, and the motorcycle-taxi drivers and their passengers all wear helmets. Amazing!! Another fun tidbit--apparently, plastic bags are illegal in Rwanda. You get offered paper ones at the grocery store, etc. The rest of the world could learn a bit from Rwanda in this department...

The one thing you can't miss if you visit Kigali is the Genocide Memorial museum. It's a really well-set-up, and as you can imagine, incredibly sad commemoration of the horrific Rwandan genocide that took place in 1994. I don't have photos from it, but some features are a history of ethnic conflict as fomented by the Beligan colonisers, clothes and shoes of victims, video testimonials from survivors, pictures and profiles of murdered children (favorite foods, favorite toy, manner in which they were slaughtered)...unbelievably awful, but really necessary viewing. There are other memorials set up around the country, and the sheer number of people who were killed is staggering.

Kigali, and Rwanda in general, look so shiny on the surface these days, that it's really hard to imagine the streets filled with corpses and murder-crazed, machete-wielding gangs going door-to-door with death lists. But it happened, only 16 years ago, and if you visit a memorial or even just talk to a Rwandan, there is no avoiding how it affected every single person in the country. The people who are our age now were teenagers then, and it's incredible to think about how they all lived through members of their family either being killed...or being killers.

But Rwanda today is a different place, and is totally worth visiting. Our next destination was Butare, home of the National Museum and University.

A quirk that we've found not just in Rwanda, but all over East Africa, is that every hotel room, no matter how cheap, gives you a pair of flip flops. Ostensibly, these are to wear into the bathroom so you won't slip, since most of the time the shower isn't separated from the rest of the bathroom and just sprays all over the floor. I think it's kind of icky to wear these communal flip flops and usually don't...I mean, I doubt they're getting disinfected between users. Anyway, in Butare we got a particularly colorful pair.

Here's a view of some terraced farming on the outskirts of Butare. Because of the hilliness, most farming in Rwanda looks like this.

Here's the National Museum. It has mostly ethnographic displays. It was a little dry for my taste, but very comprehensive if you'd like to learn about traditional life in Rwanda.

We walked around the University campus. It looked pretty much like an American state university, with one important difference: The basketball court was crawling with vervet monkeys.

The University has an arboretum where we saw many, many varieties of eucalyptus tree. We assume they were planted to test how well they'd do in a Rwandan environment.

My favorite trees in Rwanda are these purple-flowered ones, which we think are jacarandas. They are everywhere and are so beautiful--one day, I will plant some alongside my aviary. Here are a few students studying under one on the college campus.

From Butare--also known as Huye--in the south of the country, we traveled to Musanze--also known as Ruhengheri (for some reason every town in Rwanda has two completely dissimilar names)--in the far north of the country, a trip that took only four hours. This was so we could finally go track gorillas!

Our day began at 6AM with a ride to the national park headquarters, where all of the permit-holders were divided into different groups to visit the different families of gorillas up the mountain. A maximum of eight people can visit each gorilla family, and you can only spend one hour with them.

Rwanda is known for having easier-to-reach gorillas than Uganda...except for the Susa group, which requires a three-hour climb through dense brush to reach. Guess which group we got assigned to? Andy was excited ("If we paid $500, we may as well get to do the most hiking possible!" he said), but if you know how I feel about hiking, you may guess that I felt a little differently.

The only nice thing I can say about our hike was that it went through many different interesting landscapes, and always with impressive volcanoes in the background. We started by trekking through farmers' fields outside of a small village.

Next we went through my favorite part, a bamboo forest. We felt like we were tiny people lost in a giant front lawn, a la "Honey I Shrunk the Kids."

Adding to the giant-stuff-around-us theme, we found the biggest earthworm we'd ever seen hanging out in the bamboo.

The longest and most painful (literally) part of the hike involved climbing (ugh!) through rainforesty brush filled with stinging plants (ugh!!) that attacked any exposed skin you might have.

But, of course, it was all worth it when we came upon the gorillas.

Our group had more than 20 gorillas, including three silverbacks (mature males), which are huge and scary as they patrol the group, and several babies and juveniles, which are adorable as they tumble around, playing together.

One of the silverbacks:

The gorillas were feeding and moving farther and farther uphill during our hour with them, so we scurried to follow.

Fresh gorilla poop! (That picture is for Matt.)

Who is hairier, Andy or a silverback? Tough question.

Little gorillas are cute.

We got quite close to the gorillas, sometimes only a couple of meters away, but it was still really hard to get a good picture of us and them in the same shot. This is the best we could do.

And that appears to wrap up Rwanda--we returned to Musanze in the afternoon and caught a bus to the Uganda border after a late lunch. Rwanda may not be overloaded with exciting attractions, but the cleanliness, beautiful countryside, ease of getting around, and lack of harassment from tourist touts was enough to make it one of my favorites in the region--a great place to relax a little between more hectic places like Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya. Plus, those gorillas are pretty terrific. High marks!