Volunteering in Livingstone

Martigny, April 23rd

Terri and I arrived in Livingstone, Zambia on March 8^th, more than six weeks ago.  It’s funny to think that since I left Leysin last June, I had not spent three weeks in one place at one time until our three-week sojourn in Livingstone, and it seems unlikely that I will spend three weeks in any other place for a long time to come.  It felt as though I had given up my nomadism for a while, but since then we have restarted our peregrinations in South Africa, so it’s normal service resumed.

Terri, Angela and the 15 Kumon students at Victoria Falls

After two enjoyable weeks at my mother’s place in Ottawa and another week in Thunder Bay visiting my father, getting a flavour of the winter that I have missed by being in the southern hemisphere (although Ottawa has had a record-breaking El Nino-fuelled warm winter), I flew to London overnight on March 6^th-7th and had ten hours between flights, so I hopped on the Tube and headed into the city to visit my friend Sean and his girlfriend Shelby.  We had an outrageously good tapas lunch at a restaurant in Katherine’s Wharf, a tiny chic yacht harbour tucked away near the Tower of London.  It was good to see Sean, whom I last saw in Bali 18 months ago.  We have crossed paths all over the world, from France to Egypt to London to Japan to Bali, ever since we met as bicycle tour guides working for Butterfield and Robinson back in 1997.  Sean had to hurry back to work, but I still had a few hours, so I went to the Botticelli Reimagined exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.  The first part of the exhibit was kind of strange:  20^th century uses of Boticelli’s Birth of Venus in all sorts of post-modernist settings.  The second part showed how the Pre-Raphaelites were influenced in the late 19^th century by Botticelli, and was more interesting.  The main part of the exhibit, paintings and drawings by Botticelli himself, was fantastic, even if The Birth of Venus and the Allegory of Spring weren’t there as the Uffizi in Florence wouldn’t let them go.  I really liked the painting of La Bella Simonetta, the young mistress of one of the Medici.  Then it was time to snooze my way back to Heathrow on rhw  and the next leg of my trip, refreshed by a few hours of companionship and culture.

The flight to Johannesburg was uneventful, and once there, I met up with Terri, who had flown in from New Zealand a few hours earlier.  We had a reunion, catching up on the past three weeks, and then got on separate flights back north to Livingstone.  I was stamped into my 123^rd country and emerged to find Terri waiting with Mr. Sakala, the driver/advisor who has worked with Terri on her Zambian trips since 2007.  We drove to YCTC, a youth vocational training centre run by the local Catholic diocese, and settled in for our long stay. 

Terri has been running a humanitarian trip for students from her former school since 2007, bringing in Japanese high school students to do work at a small pre-school that she has been funding for the past 9 years.  Even though she no longer works in Switzerland, the school ran a trip this year and we were on hand to help run it.  In contrast to previous years, we arrived a good 10 days before the students to give Terri a chance to do some time-consuming bureaucratic work and keep an eye on the construction of a new classroom building.  I had never visited Zambia, and had been hearing about this project for years, so when we both left our jobs last June to travel, we decided that it was a perfect chance for me to see the pre-school in action. 

My first impressions of Zambia were of heat, rain and a strange déjà vu.  I lived in Tanzania back in 1981-2, when my father worked for 2 years at a university in Morogoro.  Morogoro is on the train line and road leading to Zambia, and we would see heavily-laden copper trucks roaring along the road whenever we drove out of town.  Looking around Libuyu, the poor neighbourhood of Livingstone in which YCTC is located, I could have been back in Tanzania 35 years ago.  There were a few differences; cell phones have arrived in a big way, and the cars are all Japanese instead of the Peugeots, Volkswagens and Land Rovers I remembered, but the shanty towns, the women walking long distances with heavy loads on their heads, the dirt roads, the huge numbers of children and the Asian-owned shops were all familiar sights.  Although Zambia is held up as an example of Rising Africa (the 15-20 sub-Saharan countries that have shown sustained economic growth since about 2000), in the outskirts it looks more like Stagnant Africa.  Long line-ups at service stations for scarce gasoline, frequent power cuts and complaints of official corruption were drearily similar to my childhood memories.

I had never done voluntary humanitarian work, and I have to confess that my two adolescent years in Tanzania left me a bit skeptical of the entire aid industry, which too often seems to degenerate into empire building and boosting home-country industries, rather than bringing about lasting improvement in the lives of people in the target country.  Terri’s ongoing project in the poor neighbourhood of Ngwenya, though, was quite different.  

Some of the output of the Ngwenya quarries

It’s run on a shoestring, using money raised by students at her former school, the Kumon Leysin Academy in Switzerland (KLAS, or Kumon).  Students, Terri and (this year) her successor Angela raise money by selling snacks at school, running bake sales and a big charity raffle.  This year Angela and some of her enterprising students took fundraising to a whole new level with enthusiasm, persistence and the clever use of online fundraising tools, and raised far more than had ever been raised in a single year before.  That money, of course, goes far further in Zambia than in overpriced Switzerland and has a huge effect on the lives of over 100 pre-school and lower elementary pupils at the newly re-named Olive Tree Learning Centre.  The money goes to pay for half of the salaries of the teachers and staff at the school, as well as for the school lunch program and for occasional capital projects, such as the construction this year of a new building which will double the available classroom space. 

Brenda, the hand-washing monitor at Olive Tree

It might well be asked why a project that has been running for 9 years still needs ongoing funding support; one of the great complaints about aid and humanitarian projects is that they never become self-funding.  I had the task of having a look at the financial books this year and essentially the school funds about half of its ongoing expenses through school fees which, at 130 kwacha (about 12 US dollars) per term, or 36 dollars a year, are very modest but still beyond the very modest means of many parents in what is a very low-income area where huge family sizes are the norm.  If the school were to charge 300 or 400 kwacha a term (some of the schools for better-off students in Livingstone charge more like 600 kwacha a term), it would cover its expenses, but would in the process price out the very students that Terri has always wanted to help the most.  

School lunch line:  same as anywhere in the world

About a quarter of the students who attend the Olive Tree do so free of charge, as the school management feels that their families are too poor to be able to pay any fees at all.  The others pay a low fee that helps fund the school without making it a school just for the better-off.  The additional funding brought in by Kumon students is the difference between having another school for lower-middle-class pupils and having a school that makes a huge difference in the lives of the poorest children in a tough neighbourhood.

Olive Tree students 

The big construction project this year took up a lot of time and organizational effort.  Essentially a three classroom building, with two classrooms for the expansion of the school up to grade four and one multipurpose room that could be used for adult education or for income-generating activities to increase the self-funding capacity of the school, was being built from the ground up.  We watched the building rise from the extra plot of land that had been purchased a couple of years earlier.  One builder, a few permanent staff and some casual labourers methodically moulded construction blocks from sand and cement, laid a big concrete foundation slab and then began laying courses of blocks.  It all happened remarkably quickly, in a matter of perhaps six weeks in total.  What amazed me was the cost.  A fairly sturdy construction, tons of sand and concrete, doors, gates, windows, many man-weeks of labour, and it was all done for under US$10,000.  The same building would have cost 25 times as much in Switzerland, and 10 times as much in Canada.  Of course, the fact that building labourers work for 20 or 30 kwacha a day helps keep costs down.

At any rate, we watched the building foundations being prepared for the big day of concrete laying as we waited for the Kumon students to arrive.  Justin, the contractor, worked harder than any of his labourers laying blocks, mixing mortar and shoveling sand.  He had conferences with Mr. Sakala, our driver, who had been a builder in his day and was a masterful jack of all trades; they discussed the design of the building, the height of the concrete slab, the supply of bricks and sand.  I even got in on the act, trying to estimate the number of blocks we would need to produce, and hence the quantity of sand and cement we would need.

Starting to lay the foundation of the new school building 

The pre-school itself, still called the Little Angels Pre-School (the Olive Tree re-naming would happen while the Kumon students were there) was a hive of activity whenever we visited.  The school consisted of a main building with two classrooms and a tiny office, a cookhouse that had one room being used as a classroom during the construction (which had claimed one classroom as a storeroom for construction materials), a couple of latrines for the students and a chicken coop where the school supplemented its meagre income from school fees by raising chicks to adult size and then selling them for 45 kwacha (US$ 4) each.  It was a mildly profitable business that kept the otherwise chronically underemployed security guard busy. 

It seems as though every humanitarian endeavour in Livingstone has a similar income-generating activity (IGA, in the parlance) going to supplement funds from overseas donors.  Chicken raising is a popular one, along with sewing, vegetable farming and an Italian restaurant (Olga’s) that was founded to help support YCTC, the Catholic diocese’s training centre for underprivileged youth.  It’s a worthwhile idea to help projects become self-sustaining, but these IGAs run the risk either of not making enough money, or of falling into disrepair due to lax oversight.  Olga’s was apparently not making nearly the money that had been forecast, while YCTC’s IGAs (making furniture and selling clothing) were languishing because of cutbacks, lack of motivation and quality-control issues. 

The Olive Tree is attended full-time by two classes of pre-schoolers, and two half-day classes of grades 1 and 2.  The enrolment of almost 120 is about eight times what it was in 2007 when Terri got involved in the project, and the school is thriving.  The three full-time teachers run their classes with lots of energy and enthusiasm while the school lunch program for the pre-school classes has the pupils looking well-fed and healthy.  One day, walking around the Ngwenya neighbourhood around the school, Terri and I saw a number of students with the orange hair and bulging abdomens that are tell-tale signs of protein-poor diets and malnutrition.  I was amazed that the school was able to feed 70 kids four lunches a week on a budget of about US$100 a month.  That’s basically about 10 US cents a meal.  The staple starch of Zambia, maize-flour porridge called nshima (think of polenta) is unbelievably cheap, and it is supplemented by green vegetables, dried fish and beans.  And yet, despite these low prices, many of the parents of the neighbourhood, working piecework for the rock quarries of the area, are unable to provide enough food for their extensive families.  The school lunch is vital for the pupils, almost more important than the educational opportunities that are also on offer.  It amazes me how little money it can take to make a real, tangible difference in the lives of so many children. 

A joyful, tearful reunion between Terri and Miss Bwaliya

When we weren’t visiting the Olive Tree-to-be, we went to town to do grocery shopping, to buy construction materials and paint, and to visit some of the circle of friends and acquaintances that Terri has amassed over the years of coming to Livingstone.  The no-nonsense Irish nuns of the Little Sisters of St. Francis, Sisters Frances and Fidelma, provided interesting conversation and insight into the problems of trying to run charitable programs in Zambia.  Mr. Sakala gave us stories of economic mismanagement and official corruption.  Ms. Bwaliya, a dear friend who used to work at YCTC, told stories of her family and community that were straight out of Dickens or Victor Hugo, full of poverty, disease, untimely death and horrible crime; I was amazed at her ability to keep going and keep smiling in the face of such adversity.  Zambia has a huge number of orphans whose parents have died young of AIDS, and yet seems to have almost no street kids sleeping rough at night; the extended family takes in the orphans, swelling already large families to Biblical proportions. 

Saying hello to students at Luumono Elementary School

The main complaints that Zambians have about their country and their government are those that you might expect:  shortages of running water, electricity and gasoline; official corruption; a lack of jobs for graduates; and misguided economic policies that have hollowed out the small industrial base that once existed.  While economic growth has occurred over the past 15 years, its benefits do not seem to have been very widely spread.  There is still widespread and obvious poverty, and now that copper prices have fallen off a cliff and the copper mines that were once the leading exports are mothballed, and with a drought driving up prices of corn flour, many people are struggling more than before to make ends meet.  The story of decisions made in the 1990s to allow imports of cheap used Japanese cars and cheap second-hand Asian clothing were interesting and a bit depressing.  Livingstone had a Fiat car assembly factory, a Bata shoe factory and a textile mill that made blankets.  

Sister Bridgit, an inspirational young teacher at Luumono

Shortly after the cheaper imports were allowed, these three factories were gone, taking hundreds (perhaps thousands) of relatively well-paid steady industrial jobs with them and casting the former employees back into the more precarious world of informal employment.  It hardly seems the way to develop a modern prosperous economy, and it’s certainly not the route taken by Japan, South Korea, China, Malaysia and other Asian countries to raise the living standards of most of their populations.  With a hotly-contested election coming up later this year, Zambians fear both more economic populism and real electoral violence.

Zebras at the Royal Livingstone Hotel

At the end of the day, Terri and I often went to a couple of riverside restaurants to take in the breathtaking sunsets.  The Royal Livingstone has an air of colonial elegance and an unbeatable location, along with giraffes, zebras and impalas roaming the grounds.  One of the giraffes, a big male named Bob, took a dislike to me and would advance menacingly if he caught sight of me.  By the time we left Livingstone, Bob had been deported from the hotel back to a nearby national park for being aggressive with other hotel guests.  Terri and I would sit watching the sunset, sipping drinks and watching the passing birdlife.   It was Terri’s favourite spot to end the day.  We also went to the Riverside restaurant, just up the river, with an equally lovely view but without the genteel air of the Royal Livingstone.   Olga’s Restaurant, the Italian joint started as an IGA for YCTC (I feel like a proper NGO worker, spouting an alphabet soup of acronyms) and the Zambezi Café, a lively joint popular with the local Zambian middle class, were other frequent supper spots.  Then we would return to YCTC, often in the darkness of a power cut, and sleep under our sagging mosquito nets.

Bob the aggressive male giraffe

Then, suddenly, the day of arrival was at hand and 15 Japanese high school students and Angela, their South African-born supervising teacher, were at the airport (sadly, without their luggage).  The next 9 days passed in a blur, with work trips to the preschool, a cultural exchange with YCTC students, a class trip with one of the pre-school classes to a big cat centre and an amazing safari trip to Chobe National Park (across the Zambezi in Botswana, a trip which I will write about in a separate post).  The trip, honed over the years by Terri, was a good mixture of activities for the students.  Essentially Angela and the students had already done a lot of the hard work over the past 7 months in raising thousands of dollars to fund the project; that was their biggest practical contribution, and without that money Olive Tree wouldn’t be able to keep operating.  At the same time, though, Terri wanted the students to learn through doing and contributing, so we put the students to work making construction blocks, repairing broken windows and repainting the original school building.  They also taught lessons one day to the youngsters at Olive Tree, and escorted two or three pre-schoolers each on the trip to Mukuni Big Five, the cat sanctuary.  

Taro trying his hand at making construction blocks

I think that it was important for the Kumon teenagers to see the results of their fundraising, the smiling, irrepressible youngsters in their neat uniforms lining up for school lunches, eager to show off their poems and songs.  This sort of direct experiential learning leaves a much more lasting impression on teenagers than any number of academic lessons on the developing world.

Kumon students scraping before repainting Olive Tree

Taro discovers breaking rocks is tough

Daiki with three Japanese JICA volunteers

The impression can be so lasting, in fact, that students come back to Zambia on their own initiative to volunteer.  While we were there we spent a lot of time with Daiki, a former Kumon student who was on Terri’s first-ever Zambia trip in 2007.  He is now a graduate student in Switzerland, studying international development, and was on his second internship at YCTC.  He said that it was only a few years after the trip that he realized what a profound effect the trip had had on his conception of the world, and he was keen to try to help the students on this year’s trip get the most out of their experience.  It was great for me to have Daiki around as he was quite a good source of local information on what was going on at YCTC and in the wider community.  He also organized three local Japanese overseas volunteers who were working in the neighbourhood to come have dinner with the Kumon students one night and give insight into the life of an overseas volunteer.

YCTC dancers at the cultural exchange

The cultural exchange program with the students at YCTC got off to a slow start, with the YCTC group very late in arriving from their classes, but once it got going, it was a very worthwhile experience, with the Japanese demonstrating some typical Japanese skills like origami, calligraphy and wearing a kimono, while a group of YCTC students showed off their drumming and dancing skills.  Afterwards, there were throngs of Zambian students clustered around the tables getting their names written in Japanese characters or trying their hand at origami.  I think it was a good chance to bridge the huge gap in affluence, experience and expectation between the two groups. 

Drummers at the YCTC cultural exchange

Kumon students doing origami at the cultural exchange

Cheetah at the Mukuni Big Five centre

A caracal (African lynx) at the Mukuni Big Five

When we had finished the “service” part of the trip, on Friday morning, after six days of whirlwind activity, when we said goodbye to the pre-schoolers in the parking lot of the Big Five, it was finally a chance for the students to have a more touristy experience.  We went to Victoria Falls (my first visit after being in Livingstone for two and a half weeks) and experienced the awesome volume of water hurtling over the precipice.  At places the spray returning to the ground from the sky was like a second waterfall, drenching anything not protected by a waterproof rain poncho.  We could only really see one half of the falls, as the Zimbabwean half was completely lost in the dense clouds of spray.  

Victoria Falls, aka Mosi Oa Tunya, "The Smoke That Thunders"

Some of that Victoria Falls "smoke"

The waterfall’s spray is visible from many kilometres away on a clear day and is perhaps the most impressive part of an impressive natural sight.  That evening we had a celebratory dinner at the Royal Livingstone before heading off to the Chobe safari early the next morning.

One final coat of paint for the classroom.

When we came back from astounding Chobe, we had one final trip out to the Olive Tree, distributing some of the suitcases of donated clothing and sports equipment that the Kumon students had brought.  We talked through the figures:  the amazing amounts of money raised, and where that money was going to be spent.  We talked about what their efforts meant in giving youngsters in the poorest part of a poor country a bit of a head start through providing them with a safe space to learn and enough food to eat to be able to learn.  It was a bit heartbreaking seeing the crowds of youngsters from that neighbourhood who don’t go to school running wild in the streets, with little prospect of ever getting an education or a decent opportunity in life.  The educational needs of the community are far greater than one small school can provide for, but it’s better to do what we can than to do nothing. 

Mr. Sakala, his family and the Kumon students

As we waved goodbye to the Kumon group at Livingstone airport, it was a bit of a relief after 9 very intense days involving a lot of organizing and oversight, but it was also satisfying to have been part of providing both a possibly transformative educational experience to the Japanese students and a much-needed leg up to a worthy cause that is making a difference in the lives of a hundred families in Ngwenya township.  My long-held skepticism of a lot of large-scale aid projects is still there, but a small, focused effort like Olive Tree really does seem to be an incredibly efficient use of resources to do the maximum good.  There is still a ton of basic needs unmet in the townships around Livingstone (running water, sewage, electricity, health care, education) and it would be nice if the Zambian government did a better job of meeting these, but until (and if) that happens, projects like the Olive Tree will continue to play a vital role in trying to make a difference.  I am immensely proud of Terri and the program she has built up over the years, and I was glad to play a small part in this year’s trip.

Reunion with Natalie at the Royal Livingstone

And then, once it was all over, it was time for us to handle the last bureaucratic paperwork and have some fun.  On Monday, March 28^th we met up with a former colleague of mine, Nathalie, who is now working at an international school in Lusaka.  It was great to catch up with her and with the group of colleagues with whom we were travelling.  Then on Tuesday Terri and I treated ourselves to a microlight flight over the falls.  It was eye-wateringly expensive at US$ 165 for a 15-minute joyride, but it was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thrill, and provided by far the best overall view of the falls, as well as glimpses of giraffes, buffalo and hippos in the surrounding national parks. 

Terri going for a microlight flight

On Wednesday, March 30^th we packed our bags, said goodbye to YCTC and to Mr. Sakala and caught a flight to Cape Town to start the next phase of our journey:  our overland trip around Africa.  More on that (and on the trip to Chobe) later!

Moe, Terri and Angela and the impressive fund-raising figures

Late afternoon light on the Zambezi

That smile says it all; it's why people volunteer

Relaxing on the River Plate--February 2016

Livingstone, Zambia, March 21^st

Before I get stuck into writing about the various stages of our African overland adventure, I want to finish up describing the last stage of our South American journey, eleven days spent in Buenos Aires and Uruguay.  It was a different style of travelling than we had done up until that point:  no bicycles, a largely urban setting, hotels instead of our tent, and culture and history rather than nature as the main focus.

We left Asuncion at 1 pm on Wednesday, February 3^rd in a biblical downpour.  At the bus station, the TVs were showing scenes of flooding in some neighbourhoods of the capital, reminiscent of the devastating floods a month earlier.  Our bus left late, with my bicycle packed in the luggage hold after the usual last-minute negotiating and bribing with the luggage guys.  It’s amazing how the easiest, most elegant way to get around becomes so tedious, difficult and fraught with hassle as soon as you pack the bike in a box and try to get it on public transportation.  I had to pretend that I had spent most of my Paraguayan currency in order to get a discount.  And no sooner were we underway than we went through the Argentinian border and had to unload the bike and luggage for customs:  more negotiating, half-truths and bribes to the luggage guys there.  I think Argentinian luggage handlers at the borders must make an absolute killing out of the obligatory tips which they extort from passengers.

Buenos Aires Art Nouveau architecture

After that, the bus trip was quiet and very long.  We retraced our previous bus trip south along the flat floodplain of the Parana (the Argentinian side of the Chaco), then continued along the river towards the metropolis.  We were in comfy seats and slept most of the way.  The next morning I woke up in the Buenos Aires suburbs, dozed off again and woke up definitively as we drove past the huge soccer stadium of River Plate, one of the two biggest clubs in the country.  We raced past one of the two airports, Aeroparque, and the port, and quite suddenly we were in Retiro bus station, the nerve centre of transport for the entire country.  It was very early in the morning, and we sat in an overpriced café slowly waking up and making plans. 

I ended up leaving Terri with wi-fi and a second cup of coffee and lugging my bike the (considerable) length of the station to a left-luggage place, then heading out into the city to find a place to exchange dollars for pesos.  As I walked out into the early morning commuter rush, across a small park towards the tall buildings of the Microcentro, I felt as though I was in New York City.  On Calle Florida, the pedestrian heart of this business district, I passed dozens of dubious characters shouting “Dollars?  Cambio!” before finding a slightly less shady guy who led me to a Chinese shop where I got 14 pesos to the dollar.  I was unsurprised to find that the new president, Macri, had not gotten rid of the cambio guys when he got rid of the artificially low official exchange rate back in December.  I retreated to Retiro to pick up Terri and we set off on foot towards the apartment we had rented for the first two nights.  We walked back along Florida and its Belle Epoque buildings, then turned right up Hipolito Yrigoyen to find the Loft Argentino serviced apartments.

I don’t often rhapsodize about places that I stay, but I loved the Loft.  It wasn’t that expensive (about US$32 a night in the most expensive city in the most expensive country in South America), and gave us a big space to spread out our stuff.  We had a bathroom and a king-sized bed in an air-conditioned bedroom upstairs and a kitchen and living room downstairs.  The rooms faced inwards onto a courtyard and were remarkably insulated from any noise from the street outside.  Best of all, every morning we went across to the breakfast room and enjoyed a sumptuous spread while leafing through copies of the morning’s newspapers.  I couldn’t believe how good a deal it was.  We only had two nights booked, and they were booked solid over the weekend, but we decided to go to Uruguay for a few days and then return.  We made reservations for our return, and then set off to explore Buenos Aires. 

Evita on the Avenida

After a filling and inexpensive Asian buffet lunch, we caught the Subte, Buenos Aires’ excellent and inexpensive (5 pesos, or 35 US cents) subway out to a shopping mall to buy tennis tickets.  I had noticed that there was an ATP tennis tournament the next week in Buenos Aires, with Rafael Nadal, David Ferrer and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga among the featured players, and I was keen to spend a day watching pro tennis for the first time in 16 years.  I used to go to a lot of tournaments; between 1990 and 2000 I probably averaged a tournament a year, including trips to Wimbledon, the Australian Open and the US Open (twice), along with smaller tournaments in Toronto, Sydney, Santiago and Madras.  We also knew that the Rolling Stones were arriving in Buenos Aires to give three concerts and, although tickets were probably sold out, we wouldn’t mind seeing them live either.  As it turned out, tennis tickets were inexpensive and plentiful, while Stones tickets were rare and almost US$300 a person, so tennis was on but the Rolling Stones were not.  We then retreated back into town to Calle Florida to get our boots professionally shined and for Terri to do some window-shopping.  While I was having my boots done, Terri wandered off to have a look at shoes in a nearby shop and, presumably on the way there, somebody opened the top compartment of her daypack and stole the wallet inside.  Welcome to the big, bad city!  BA has a well-deserved reputation for pickpockets and for more violent crime as well, and Terri got off lightly; perhaps $50 in cash and her NZ bank card.  She decided that we would regard it as a “city tax” paid by the unwary.  We finished the shoe shining, then walked back to the apartment so that Terri could make the tedious call to her bank to cancel the card.  We nipped out to Carrefour, bought a small fortune in groceries and cooked up some excellent steaks, washed down by some equally excellent Argentinian wine.

Protest outside the Casa Rosada

Friday, February 5^th was a great day of exploring the bustling metropolis of Buenos Aires.  After filling ourselves up at the breakfast buffet, we strolled towards the centre along the Avenida de Mayo, crossing the Avenida de 9 Julio, the broad Champs Elysee-style boulevard that features a huge obelisk in one direction and an immense mural of Evita Peron on the side of a building on the other.  Portenos (the Argentinian term for a native of central Buenos Aires) strolled by looking elegant, and the city looked at its best under cloudless blue skies.  Public transport buses rolled by along 9 de Julio, and at the end of Avenida de Mayo we detoured into the beautiful Cathedral, once Pope Francis’ church, before coming out into the Plaza de Mayo and its elegant buildings.  Here, during the dark years of the military dictatorship, the mothers of the people who disappeared during the Dirty War (mostly tortured and murdered by the army and then buried secretly, or else thrown out of helicopters into the ocean) held weekly protest meetings.  They were the only people who dared stand up to the junta publicly, and they were an immensely important force of moral suasion in convincing the army to hand over power after the Falklands fiasco.  The day we went there, the Plaza was a buzzing hive of protest again, this time over the arrest of a left-wing activist in the province of Jujuy.  Peronists, labour activists, Falklands veterans, students and citizens of all sorts, from all over the country, had come to establish a protest camp in the square, right in front of the presidential palace, the Casa Rosada.  Riot police had established a line of barricades to dissuade the crowd from storming the palace gates, but otherwise it was a peaceful scene, with marquee tents set up for lectures and folk dances, and vendors selling hats and handicrafts.  We admired the grandiose architecture of the Casa Rosada, then headed out behind the palace towards the harbour of Puerto Madero.

Aboard the Uruguay in Puerto Madero

It was a blisteringly hot day, just as we had experienced for the previous few weeks in Paraguay, and it made for a long sweaty walk to the Costanera Sur.  Along the way we detoured to visit the SS Uruguay, an Argentinian naval ship which had played a key role in the drama of the Nordenskjold Antarctic expedition in 1902-04.  We had had a lecture during our cruise on the MV Ushuaia about this expedition, and had visited one of the key sites, Esperanza, where some members of the team had waited out a very long winter and summer waiting for rescue after their ship was crushed in ice and sank.  It was the Uruguay which came to the rescue, and walking around the ship and peering at the old black and white photos, it was though we were suddenly back on the Antarctic Peninsula where we had spent such memorable days back in November.  The views from the ship along the waters of Puerto Madero to the yachts and condominium skyscrapers of the new developments beyond were sweeping, and reminded us that for all that Argentina has had a lot of miserable economic news over the past few decades, there are still a lot of Argentinians who are living a comfortable, or even gilded, existence.

Fancy yachts and buildings, Puerto Madero

After all the urban bustle and architecture, culture and history of the first part of the walk, the Costanera Sur was a welcome change.  It’s a nature reserve, tucked between Puerto Madero and the waters of the River Plate estuary, and it’s a surprisingly good place to go birdwatching.  There were dozens of species of birds to be seen, particularly waders and waterbirds bobbing around in the long ponds along the road.

Me with the Bull of the Pampas

Office workers from the tall buildings nearby came out for lunch at the various food trucks parked along the road, and we joined them, eating delicious churrasco sandwiches for an unbeatable price (about 35 pesos, or under US$ 3) and watching the birds.  After a while, we decided to penetrate further into the reserve itself (so far we had just been wandering along the perimeter), but we found that there was a Formula E electric car race in town, and their racecourse blocked access to the park, which was closed for the day.  We watched a bit of the practice session (those electric cars can accelerate amazingly well, and make very little noise) and admired the statues of Argentinian sporting greats that lined the walkway:  Fangio, Vilas, Pascual Perez, Sabatini, Ginobili and others.  I had my picture taken with Vilas and my teenage idol Sabatini.

We headed back towards town via the ferry terminals for Uruguay.  The prices that Buquebus were asking for the following day’s departures were astonishing:  just to Colonia (the port on the other side of the estuary), they wanted 1800 pesos (US$130) each!  Cursing their prices, we walked to Retiro and bought night bus tickets instead for 590 pesos (US$42) instead.  Finally wilting under the heat, we walked back to our apartment and had a luxurious apero dinner of cheeses, meats, bread, salad and more good wine, happy with our day at large in the big city.

Horned screamer, Costanera Sur

The next day, February 6^th, we left our luggage in storage at the apartment and headed out for another full day of exploring on foot.  This time we headed towards the upmarket neighbourhoods of Recoleta and Palermo, past luxurious apartment buildings and chic cafes.  Unlike Santiago de Chile, the wealthy have not abandoned the downtown core of the city, and it felt very vibrantly urban and chic, like New York or London or Milan.  Our destination was Recoleta Cemetery, where the great and good of BA society were buried for a century and a half.

Raul Alfonsin's grave, Recoleta

There are dozens of graves of well-known figures—presidents, generals, scientists, writers, sportsmen—but the one tomb that everyone heads for is that of Evita Peron, wife of President Juan Peron, subject of Andrew Lloyd Webber musical immortality, icon of the populist left and the most famous Argentinian (aside, perhaps, from the Pope, Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona).  She is still a potent symbol for the aspirations of the poor, and her image and name are everywhere, including all over the protest camp in front of the Casa Rosada.  The cemetery breathes Italianate luxury, with gorgeously carved funeral monuments and mausolea.  Evita’s grave still boasts lots of fresh flowers, but some of the lesser-known graves from the past were overgrown with weeds and had broken windows.  My favourite graves were those of Raul Alfonsin, the first post-military president in the 1980s, and Luis Federico Leloir, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry in 1970.

The tomb of Evita Peron

Funerary monument, Recoleta

We lunched in a little pub just outside the cemetery, and then set off on foot through the succession of wooded parks that lead through the neighbourhood of Palermo, making for a great place for cycling, running and walking.  We later heard that Mick Jagger had been out alone on foot along the same path that morning, tweeting photos along the way; the local press were devoting pages and pages of coverage to the Stones, more than you would expect for a visiting head of state.  We eventually turned off the tree-lined avenues, past the rather dumpy-looking zoo and went up the Botanical Gardens, where we spent a happy hour wandering in the shade of the trees and watching the colourful butterflies in the butterfly garden.  A quick supper in a Lebanese restaurant, then a Subte ride back to the apartment to pick up our bags and another Subte ride to catch the bus to Montevideo. 

The bus ride was easy and uneventful, although when we got off the bus at 1 am, we didn’t realize that we hadn’t been stamped out of Argentina, only into Uruguay, and spent the next three days worrying that Argentinian immigration officials would give us a hard time on the way back.  (They didn’t.)  We woke up at 6 am as we pulled into Montevideo bus terminal, and once again spent a couple of hours relaxing and enjoying good, fast, free public wifi (a rarity in Argentina, but common in Uruguay) as we searched for a place to stay and for affordable ferry tickets back to BA.  Seacat Colonia offered us tickets for Wednesday afternoon at a much more reasonable US$ 22 per person, so we snapped them up quickly.  The bus station was the cleanest, safest, best-organized bus station we saw in South America, a far cry from the menace of Santiago or the chaos of Retiro.  No hotels online seemed very cheap, so we decided to walk into town and find a place on our own.  It was a pleasant 40-minute stroll through Saturday morning streets, past big apartment buildings that had seen better days, into the centre of town.  Half an hour of searching turned up an acceptable hotel at an acceptable price, as well as explaining the dearth of rooms:  it was Carnival season in Montevideo, and tourists from Argentina and Brazil were flooding into the city for the party. 

Palacio Salvo, Montevideo

Showers, a quick lunch and a wander through the old town followed.  I liked the Ciudad Vieja, although many of the buildings were in a state of advanced disrepair.  My favorite building was the hyperbolically grandiose Palacio Salvo, like something out of a 1930s futuristic movie.  We rented bicycles and rode along La Rambla, the coastal road, for 15 km, past the flashier suburbs where the upper middle classes live in beachside apartment buildings.  It was good to be riding a bicycle again and to get around to interesting neighbourhoods.  Montevideo sprawls a long way along the coast, and we were nowhere near the edge when we turned back.  We stopped at a lighthouse and gazed out to sea.  It was noticeably cooler than in BA, and there was a hint of rain in the air.  Uruguay is most visited by Argentinian tourists for its beaches, and we had thought of going further east to explore them, but had been put off by weather forecasts of rain.  We rode back to town, had a disappointing pizza for dinner and were in bed early, wiped out by the night bus.

Montevideo coastline by bike

Monday, February 8^th was a fairly lazy day, as we slept in, then made a late start on exploring the old town, via a stop in the fashionable Facal café (Terri was surprised and somewhat horrified that Montevideo does not boast a single Starbucks outlet).  We had an afternoon snooze that somehow lasted until 4, then went out to the wonderful Andes 1972 museum which commemorates the survival story of the Uruguayan rugby team that crashed high in the Andes in 1972, and which provided the story for the movie Alive.  It was done very tastefully and thoroughly, and the proprietor’s enthusiasm was infectious.  We wandered out into the streets, had a steak sandwich in a little café, then watched a crowd of mostly older Montevideans dancing the tango in a main square.  It looked very elegant and fitting for the country that produced Carlos Gardel, the greatest figure in the history of tango.

Very nice Uruguayan wine, Colonia

The next day we had some time before our afternoon bus to Colonia, and we spent it wandering through the old city again.  We tried several museums, but they were all closed for Mardi Gras, so we ended up just walking, ending up in the lovely atmosphere of the Mercado Central, a tourist mecca full of seafood restaurants.  We sat and drank a glass of quite quaffable Uruguayan wine (we never even knew Uruguay produced wine) before heading back to pick up our luggage, catch a city bus to the bus station and then take an intercity bus to Colonia.  Once again we snoozed away the afternoon, lulled by the rocking of the bus.  I think our bodies were finally recovering from the exertions of our months of cycling and hiking. 

Sunset meal, Colonia

Colonia proved to be a very pretty colonial gem.  It was founded by the Portuguese back in the late 1600s to keep an eye on the Spanish just across the River Plate estuary in Buenos Aires.  After decades of conflict, the Spanish took over the city in the 1780s.  In the confusion of post-colonial South America, Uruguay changed hands a few times between Argentina, Brazil and independence before finally settling into a role as a buffer state between its two giant neighbours.  Colonia had a number of colonial-era buildings and ruins, but most of the buildings are slightly more recent, with a flavour of an early 20^th century retreat for the rich.  The little cobbled streets of the old town make for lovely walking, and the views from the lighthouse, all the way to the skyscrapers of downtown BA on the horizon, are wonderful.  We ended up eating a tasty steak dinner in a waterfront restaurant, watching a spectacular sunset light show on the horizon, a memorable ending to our too-brief visit to Uruguay.

Back streets of Colonia

The next morning we strolled around the old town in greater earnest, visiting the ruins of the old governor’s mansion and the old city defensive walls.  I sat and sketched the lighthouse, and then, after a lunch that consumed our leftover Uruguayan pesos almost exactly, we headed to the ferry dock for the long and tedious process of going through Uruguayan and Argentinian immigration procedures. Despite our worry, the Argentinians didn't mind that we had no exit stamp from Argentina from a few days previously.  Once again we snoozed most of the way (it was actually a bit of a rough crossing, and sleeping probably prevented seasickness).  We stumbled off the ferry, stood in another long line to put our luggage through Argentinian customs and came out at cka place we couldn’t identify.  It certainly wasn’t the ferry terminal we had visited before, and we were completely disoriented, underneath a huge expressway.  A bit of random walking and we finally figured out that we were just beyond the edge of Puerto Madero.  We tried unsuccessfully to find a cab (there was stiff competition from the hundreds of fellow passengers) and ended up walking the familiar streets back to Loft Argentino.  We were tired, but looking at our schedule, we realized that it was our only chance to go see a tango show.  Many were quite expensive, but they involved an entire evening of a fancy meal, all-you-can-drink alcohol, a tango lesson and finally the show.  There was a more reasonably priced show without any of the add-ons just ten minutes’ walk from our apartment that we had checked out previously, so we quickly showered and headed over, arriving around 9:30 for a 10:15 show.  We had the bad luck to hit the one evening of the year that they had a special early schedule for a special group, so we hopped on the Subte and headed to another show, the Gardel.  There we found tickets for the show only (no food, no booze, no tango lesson) were still US$ 96, which seemed far too high, so we returned tango-less to the apartment and turned in for the night.  Buenos Aires seemed to be a study in contrasts in terms of prices:  either really quite reasonable, or incredibly expensive, depending on how far in advance you bought tickets.

Pablo Cuevas unleashes a backhand

Thursday, February 11^th was Terri’s last full day in the city, and the day for which we had bought tennis tickets.  After breakfast we tried to register online for the EcoBici free bicycle rental service run by the city, but failed.  We walked into town and spent a long time finding an EcoBici office, filling out forms and then going to a municipal office to get the magnetic cards.  It took forever, and we were late arriving at the tennis.  The first match was still going on, and we sat, baking in the furnace-like heat, high in the stands watching Pablo Cuevas dispatch Santiago Giraldo.  Next up was the tenacious clay court terrier David Ferrer who handled local hope Renzo Olivo.  After a break for supper, we trooped back in for the night session.  First of all the Italian veteran Paolo Lorenzi beat another Argentine, Diego Schwartzmann, in a highly entertaining three-setter, before the main event of the evening.  Rafael Nadal, cheered on by a suddenly full stadium, had little difficulty beating the Argentine veteran Juan Monaco, although his once-fearsome clay court game didn’t look up to his usual impeccable standards, with lots of forehands sailing long.  There was a murmur in the crowd at one point as Guillermo Vilas and Gabriela Sabatini wandered in to take their seats, Argentinian tennis royalty.  We came out at 10:30 to find the trains finished for the day, so we ended up catching a cab.  Again, for a long (10 km) ride, the fare was a reasonable US$ 9.

Pleased to be back at a pro tennis tournament

Friday, February 12^th we set off after breakfast to use our hard-won EcoBici cards, only to find that the system has a few flaws, like a complete absence of bicycles anywhere in the city centre.  We eventually gave up and walked to the Costanera Sur, where this time the park was open and we were able to walk the interior pathways looking for birds.  There were plenty to be seen, and it was good to get some exercise, although the heat was like a hammer.  We emerged after a couple of hours, had another tasty churrasco sandwich and then headed back to the apartment, via some last-minute shopping on Calle Florida for leather belts for Terri.  I escorted her to Retiro, saw her onto her bus, and suddenly was alone in the big city.

David Ferrer, the Energizer Bunny of tennis

I spent the last three days in BA cocooned in the air conditioned comfort of the hotel, writing blog posts, sorting through photos, napping and watching the rest of the tennis tournament on TV.  Nadal and Ferrer lost, surprisingly, in the semifinals and the young Austrian Domenic Thiem looked impressive winning.  I did venture out one day to the Bellas Artes museum, where an impressive collection of Old Masters and Argentinian paintings provided a couple of hours of aesthetic enjoyment.  And then, all too soon, on Monday, February 15^th, I was on a flight back to Ottawa on my bike after three and a half months in South America and Antarctica.  It was a wonderful adventure, and I look forward to exploring more of the northern half of the continent on my next visit! 

Waiting for Rafa

Terri at her first-ever tennis tournament

Rafael Nadal, showing off the forehand that ruled tennis for a decade

As for my final take on Buenos Aires and Uruguay, I really, really enjoyed Buenos Aires, despite its crime and obvious social problems.  It has a confident urban feel and provides culturally rich city living to its huge population and feels unlike any other South American city I have encountered, an island of cosmopolitan sophistication.   Uruguay is an interesting country, very socially progressive (legalized marijuana, a very early welfare state) but a bit non-descript compared to Argentina.  If I went back, I would concentrate on the eastern beaches before heading off to Brazil. 

Africa Awaits! A Preview of Upcoming Travel Plans

Livingstone, Zambia, March 18

This will be a slightly atypical blog post from me:  much briefer than usual, and looking forward instead of backward.  I want to fill you in, gentle readers, on the upcoming travel plans.

Terri and I are in Zambia now, doing some work for a humanitarian project that Terri started almost a decade ago.  She and the Social Service Club of her former school raise money and donate it to help support a community-based pre-school and primary school in the impoverished Livingstone suburb of Ngwenya, and they have visited during their school’s March vacation almost every year since 2007.  I have heard lots of stories and seen lots of pictures and videos from previous visits, but this is my first time to see the project first-hand.  It’s been very interesting so far, seeing the pre-school and its new project:  the construction of a new classroom building, doubling the available classroom area of the school.  The students arrive from Switzerland tomorrow morning, and for the next 9 days it will be a blur of activity:  helping build the new structure, painting and repairing broken windows in the older building, teaching lessons and doing cultural exchanges with the pre-school students and with older students here at a youth training centre where we are staying.  I am looking forward to it.

However, it would be a long way to come to Africa just for a 9-day visit.  After Terri’s former students leave, we are flying south to Cape Town to start a much longer trip.  The plan is to buy a second-hand 4WD camper and use it to explore large chunks of the African continent over the coming months.  We haven’t made firm plans in terms of dates and routes, but the basic plan is threefold.  We will first pick the low-hanging fruit in terms of ease of travel by exploring the landscapes of Southern Africa (as far north as Namibia, Zambia and Mozambique), taking advantage of the lack of irritating visa rules and the network of largely decent roads.  I am particularly excited to visit Namibia, Botswana and Mozambique, but we plan to visit all of the countries in the south over the next few months.  We also want to try to dive and snorkel in the awe-inspiring Sardine Run that passes the South African coast, having seen amazing footage on BBC’s Blue Planet documentary series.  Having a vehicle should greatly simplify matters in terms of having access to the remote wild places that we most want to see, and in terms of camping rather than staying in the overpriced accommodation on offer in much of Africa, as well as being able to cook for ourselves.

Once the south has been thoroughly explored, then it will be time to head further afield into slightly more difficult territory.  East Africa is the likely next stage, with the familiar trio of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda being joined by Rwanda and Burundi (the latter depending on the current state of civil unrest).  Then it will be time to go further north:  South Sudan seems unlikely, given its current civil war (although things might change), but Ethiopia and Sudan are definites, with perhaps Djibouti and Somaliland.  Sadly Somalia itself is probably completely out of the question, as is paranoid Eritrea with its closed land borders and hard-to-get visas.

Then, having gotten as far as Sudan, it would be nice if we could turn west and drive into Chad to get into West Africa.  This seems sadly unlikely, given that the route would lead straight through troubled Darfur, which the Sudanese government would like to keep nosy foreigners out of.  If (and it’s a big if) we could get through, we could make a huge loop to get back to South Africa.  If not, we might have to backtrack south as far as Zambia to get to the next stage:  West Africa.

West and Central Africa are almost terra incognito for me.  I spent two days in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), back when it was still called Zaire, visiting mountain gorillas back in 1995.  I also spent three weeks cycling in Togo and Benin a few years ago.  For the rest, it’s all new territory for me.  I would like to visit every country possible, since once we’re there, it doesn’t cost much more to keep going to another country, while having to come back on another trip to get to a country that I missed would be much more expensive.  The countries that seem least likely to get visited are Equatorial Guinea (expensive and hard to get a visa), Central African Republic (civil war) and Nigeria (unpleasant, expensive and with serious unrest in the northeast).  Angola, DRC and Mauretania seem to have tricky visas as well, while much of Mali, Niger and Chad (the most interesting bits, up in the Sahara) seem to be no-go areas as well.  Sao Tome and Principe, along with the Cape Verde islands, both will require a flight out from the mainland, but are both said to be well worth it.  Much of West Africa has the reputation of being overpriced and underwhelming, but with our own vehicle, we should at least be able to travel in some comfort and seek out areas of greater interest.  Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea and Mauretania sound as though they’re more interesting than some of their neighbours, and I’m looking forward to visiting them. 

Then, if we’ve managed somehow to do a complete loop and ended up back in South Africa, we would sell the vehicle and fly off for a glorious finale in Madagascar, a country that’s high on my bucket list for its (sadly fast-vanishing) natural beauty and wildlife.  If, instead, we end up in Mauretania at the end, we might drive up through Western Sahara and Morocco into Europe and try to ship the vehicle back to South Africa to sell it. 

It’s not clear how long it will take to do all of this, or even if we will accomplish it all in one long monster trip, but it’s exciting planning a big trip, reading up on things to see and contemplating seeing a new part of the world for both of us.  Stay tuned here or on Facebook to follow our ongoing progress!