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Tomorrow I’m off to the Afrigraph conference. I haven’t been to a conference in quite a while, so I’m looking forward this one, especially since I’m not presenting — so all I have to do is sit around, talk to people, and eat the food. Yay! Thursday the conference has an outing to Maropeng, which I somehow managed to miss when I was at my last conference in the area. I’ve heard good things about the touristy goodness that is the Maropeng Centre, and hopefully there’ll be a tour of some of fossil localities in the area.
I’m slowly getting back in to the swing of work. Today I finished off my tax return, which was thankfully quite easy and fairly quick to do. And I cleaned up most of my flat, which I haven’t done properly for the last few weeks. Throw in a visit to campus, and suddenly most of the day is gone.
On the Yay!-side of life, Vera has kindly given me a bookshelf that she no longer wanted, so all the books that were previously sitting on my floor are now neatly packed away on the shelf. Even better, the shelf still has some free space left, so I can start bringing in some of my other books that’ve been waiting for me at my parents’ house.
Off to nap, and then to do proper work. Adieu!
The other day I was looking through all the old documents I’ve collected on my PC over the years, and came across a blog entry I wrote for my trip to Kenya. I never finished, and I’m not going to now. But it made an interesting read, so I’m posting it here for anyone that’d like to see it. The file that it’s from is dated Wednesday, 13th September, 2006.
I’ve got various other posts about Kenya dotted around on the blog, as well as pictures on flickr.
Herewith, Kenya:
“My Kenya trip began on Saturday the 15th of July with a 6:00 am flight
to Jo’burg. Needless to say I was up bright and early — in body, if
not exactly in spirit.
“Thankfully the flight itself was short: a two hour trip to Jo’burg,
followed by a four hour trip into Nairobi’s Yomo Kenyatta Airport.
We’re always carrying extra luggage with us, including the laser
scanner (all 40 kilos of it), and a tripod (another eight kilos or
so), but this time the airline gave us no hassles, making this one of
the most painless and pleasant flights I’ve been on.
“Nairobi reminds me of other capital cities I’ve visited in Africa: a
melange of modern buildings and damaged buildings, the poor and the
run down next to the rich and the snooty. Expensive buildings stand on
pot holed pavements beside rickety buildings for who it would be
polite to just understatedly say that they’ve seen better days.
“Cars crowd Nairobi’s streets and their exhaust fumes hang in the
air. You can smell it everywhere, and it fills your nose with an awful
grey gunk. Thankfully there was no wood smoke. Mixed with smog it
becomes earthy and rotten, feels like a rasp to your lungs. For me,
wood smoke has become an instant reminder of Mali; it was something I
smelled whether in Bamako or Tombouctou, and memories of Mali will
live with me a long time because of that.
“I was told not to walk around Nairobi alone. “Make sure you don’t
carry anything valuable with you,” said the hotel’s concierge, a
Muslim lady in her 60s. This led to one of my first thoughts of
Nairobi being, “Why, this sounds like Jo’burg.” Still, as a stranger
in the city I felt safe wandering the streets. But the concierge, the
one with the warning, seemed to want to clutch her heart when I
mentioned that I was going to walk to the National Museum. Her concern
made me think that my feeling of safety was illusory. I took a taxi
instead.
“One of the interesting things I noticed is the invasion by South
African companies. I found a Steers while wandering the streets; I ate
at Wimpy. Mortene Target sells itself as Mortein Doom and Vodacom
advertises themselves something along the lines of “Tanzania’s
favourite cellular network”. This rebranding as an “east African”
country is interesting, especially considering that it’s a South
African company owned by Vodafone, a company from the UK. Vodafone
isn’t, as far as I’m aware, African in even the vaguest sense.
“This east African rebranding is not completely arbitrary. Kenya seems
to place some importance in their being an east African country. For
instances, passport control have gates for east African citizens. You
can often find tiered prices for goods or services, with Kenyan
nationals paying the cheapest, east African nationals the next, and
the remaining foreigners the highest. A tourist’s first impulse might
be that they’re being cheated out of their money, but imagine being
able to use Table Mountain’s cable car at rates not targeted towards
people who earn Euros, Dollars or Pounds.
“I spent my first few days in Nairobi alone. We were air freighting
some of our equipment into the country and for various reasons it was
arriving a few days after we reached Nairobi, and I had to spend a day
or two organising it. I can’t say that being alone in Nairobi is the
rockin’ thing to do for a holiday, but it wasn’t too bad. I tried to
see the National Museum, only that turned out to be closed for
construction work. Instead I visited a snake park and ogled puff
adders and cobras, Nile crocodiles and one single, lonely looking
Mississippi Alligator.
“After three cold nights in Nairobi, flying to Lamu island was a
relief. I flew out of Nairobi’s Wilson Airport, which is much smaller
than Kenyatta. And for the first time I flew in a small plane: a Twin
Otter, which at my count seemed able to seat eighteen people. I was
surprised at how smooth the flight was. The day was overcast and had
been raining, but there was little bumping and jiggling of the plane
while flying below the clouds, and none at all while above. The plane
landed at an airstrip on Manda island, which from the sky is all
mangroves and coast line and greenness. As you step off the plane the
island greets you with pleasant heat and high humidity, which stands
in stark contrast with Nairobi’s Cape Town like weather.
“Just beyond the airstrip is the coast and a peer. Motor boats wait to
take tourists across the short stretch of water separating Manda and
Lamu islands. Across the water one can see Lamu town. It stretches
along the coastline, climbing slowly up the island’s slope. From a
distance the town appears white plastered and old, built in
layers. Boats lay docked along its seafront, helping the town look
idyllic; other boats move along the coast, helping it to look lived in
and busy. Standing on the peer you feel that there is only one place
the waiting motor boats will take you. And this is so.
“Heinz had a guide meet me at the airport and organise the boat across
to Lamu. My guide lived in Lamu Town, which he spoke of during the
short boat trip, pointing out some of the landmarks that I couldn’t
easily make out over the distance. All that remember is being told
that 18 000 people live in the town.”
I was relistening to Arcade Fire’s album, Funeral, while working today. I listened to this album almost continuously a few years ago while I was doing field work in Ethiopia. It’s odd how listening to it now can still bring back that feeling of being in another place very different from my own. Smelling wood-smoke while I’m walking around Town does the same thing as well.
Listening to Funeral reminds me of laying in my hotel room in the mornings, before getting up to start the day. You can hear the (small) town waking up around you: many roosters, and an occasional donkey, and people walking around. You can smell burning wood. Our rooms shared a balcony that overlooked the mountain-side, and the morning and evening views of the green (just after the rainy season) or dry slopes, with all the little patches of cultivated fields, and birds circling overhead, was breath taking.
Sitting on that balcony was good times. Especially with a beer.
Ethiopia and Lalibela have been really great so far. I’ve missed travelling, missed both Ethiopia and Lalibela, and so it’s good to be back.
We’ve worked continuesly since we’ve arrived. It’s mostly going well, although we’ve had a few hiccups. For instance, we can’t get inside some areas of each church, even though we were given “permission” to do so, and have a priest (who technically can enter any room of each church, even if we can’t) helping us out.
We’ve also had a bit of time in the evenings to just chill out — last night Steve and I went to a tej house (tej being a kind of mead) where we drank and danced, although tej, it seems, doesn’t agree with Steve’s stomach 
Over the next few days we’ll be finishing off our work. Hopefully we’ll have no problems getting out of Lalibela — when we reconfirmed our flights earlier in the week we found that we weren’t even on the flight! That’s now been fixed, but the Air Ethiopian flights to Lalibela seem to break down regularly, and they haven’t added extra flights to make up for the short-fall. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that no flights break down on Wednesday, when we return to Addis. Otherwise the quickest way out might be to rent cars and drive. That’d be fun, and the landscape is gorgeous, but it’s a two day trip that I hope we don’t have to make.
And now I’m off to the shower. Ciao!
It’s been a while since I’ve gone traveling. In fact, I haven’t really gone anywhere since I quite my job last year. Which is why I was happy when my ex-boss asked if I’d like to come along to help with their field work in Ethiopia.
Later today I’m off in a Jet-Plane to Addis Ababa, and then Lalibela, to continue on the field work that the group started a few years ago (while I was working for them). I’m looking forward to traveling again, and I’ve missed Ethiopia — it’s a beautiful country with friendly people.
Well, I’m back in my office, trying to get into the swing of things. We’ll see how it goes. The thesis has come along nicely, and maybe next week I’ll have a finalish version of it. Yay!
Welcome back to my life, work.
Aluka has produced a promotional flyer in the gear up of the first release of its database early next year.
I’ve started to upload my Ethiopia pictures to Flickr. It’s taken me a while to get around to doing that, and it’s going to take me even longer to finish putting them all up. But I’ll get there.
What a long flight. I left New York City on Monday night and got back home last night around 22:00. Phew. I slept like a bomb, but when my alarm went off at 6:00 this morning it felt like I was waking up in the middle of the night. 
I’ll get over it soon enough.
My weekend in New York was fun. Saturday afternoon, soon after settling in at the hotel, I went off to Times Square and stood in line at the tkts booth, which sells discount tickets for the day’s theatre shows. I managed to get a half price ticket to Phantom of the Opera. While I enjoyed the show, the thing that impressed me the most was how they managed the stage. Scene changes where over in moments, usually in the few seconds they had with the stage lights off. There was only one extended break of more than a few seconds, and that was the intermission. Too bad I didn’t get to see any other plays, but that’s probably good for my back account. Dollar prices for stage shows are expensive! Even when discounted.
Sunday I mostly spent at the American Museum of Natural History. That must be the most beautiful museum I’ve been too. But then life size models of various things always give me a warm, fuzzy feeling, whether it’s of penguins or plants. The museum has a lot of displays, and while the dioramas aren’t better than, say, those at the SA National Museum (well … I’m maybe being a bit kind), the AMNH have a larger selection of things on display, usually in better upkeep (much better upkeep), and often quite enticing and provoking. For instance, in the science section, they have this HUGE sphere (with a 23 odd meter diameter) hanging above everything. They use it to compare the sizes of various things: if the sphere is the size of the universe, then this teeny model is the size of the local cluster. If the sphere is the size of a blood corpuscle, then this little model is the size of a rhinovirus. For me, the sphere was one of the more impressive displays at the museum. My favourite, though, is a diorama of a whale taking on a giant squid, which was unfortunately too dark for a picture.
Anyway, I thought I’d mention that my favourite pic from this weekend’s post secret set is this one.
And in further news, technology (i.e., your ipod) is evil because it’s used for escapism:
http://gamepolitics.com/2006/11/18/bill-oreilly-slams-playstation-3-launch-gamers-ipods-tech-not-in-that-order/
In the past, you see, there was just alcohol and drugs. Noone ever used books, work, hobbies, relationships, music, sex, pets, relgion, politics, or children to avoid this “reality” thing.
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