Emily Burrows, Mark & Glen Cronan on the deck of The Ark.The Aberdare has always been a favorite park of mine, and today it lived up to my highest expectations.
Day 2 of the Cronan Family Safari: we left Nairobi early, around 730a, because I wanted to get to one of the waterfalls at the top of the park for lunch. The new Thika road helps, and although a long way from being completed in its 10-lanes of glory, traffic moved much more quickly than over the old road.
It was an absolutely picture perfect day! Bright, cool with few thick, white clouds and a sky so clear we could see Mt. Kenya literally from Thika! We pulled out of Nyeri onto the Nyayo tea plantation road and my long-time driver, James Ngugi, stopped to explain tea farming to everyone… He is, besides a driver/guide, a tea farmer.
We then went through the buffer forest intent on finding colobus but only saw sykes. After the electric fence and proper gate we immediately saw evidence of elephant, which we found all day long.
Most of the park’s game is down towards the periphery where Treetops and The Ark are found, but the adventuresome spirit of my family drove us further up the mountain towards the waterfalls.
The park is in spectacular condition after heavy rains. Everything was in bloom, including many orchids. Our lunch at Chania Falls was almost too wet.
On the way down we saw Jackson’s francolin and mountain reedbuck, but the colobus was still eluding us. We’d see dozens of buffalo, lots of waterbuck and warthog, and constant evidence of (but no sighting) of elephant.
Then about 4k from the lodge we came across a wonderful troop of colobus fortunately not too high in the forests and we got great views. As we pulled into The Ark I could see elephant by the waterhole, but not until we got down into the open turret was the real scene revealed.
At least 30 elephant from several families were digging salt among buffalo and bushbuck. And it grew even more dramatic when another two families stormed in from the side. A truly fantastic first day out on safari!
An absolutely beautiful crisp Sunday in Nairobi!My Cronan Family Safari began on a brilliantly beautiful Sunday in Nairobi.
Father John (Cronan) had called my wife, Kathleen, while I was on the Great Migration Safari in March, and the vagaries of my own schedules, his as a very active scientist, and his children and sigoths meant that we had to “Do It!” right now.
I’m really looking forward to a spectacular trip! For one thing we’ll once again debunk one of the Great Myths of Safari Travel that the best time to go is the dry season. East Africa has just come through a torrential rainy season, and every third of fourth day it’s still raining.
That’s good! I’ve spent 30 years of my career trying to explain this, fighting with institutionalized myths about when to go created not from facts, but to assuage client potential. That’s a fancy way of saying that “high season” and “best season” almost everywhere in the world (except for the Arctic and Antarctic) correspond not with the optimum travel opportunities at that time, but strictly when it’s convenient for people to travel. So inevitably the highest season for travel everywhere in the world is the December holiday season.
That’s true even in places like Botswana, where it’s an awful time to go! (Middle of its terribly hot, humid torrential rains.) December is absolutely NOT the time to visit Botswana.
John had been a part of a Great Migration Safari group I guided in 2007. Then we began in Kenya’s south, so this time we’ll tackle Kenya’s north, and as a perfect increment to his safari travel (which has also included Botswana), we’ll end the trip with a gorilla trek in Rwanda!
But today right after their arrival it was lovely in Nairobi! Bright, crisp, cool, and frangipani, bougainvillea and flame trees were brilliant! As we drove out of the airport beside the lush Nairobi National Park we saw giraffe in the distance! Amazing, it isn’t? Wild animals just outside an airport for a metropolis of 6 million people!
We walked through the city center learning something of the history of the area, had tea at the Thorntree Café and then went to the National Museum.
This was a real treat for me. As always, my passion for paleontology draws me like an iron filing to the incredible early man exhibit of the museum. But today was extra special, because John and both his sons are geneticists. We all marveled as I always do inside the special room where the originals of Zinj, Turkana Boy, the Black Skull and several other hominins are displayed.
The originals! What other museum in the world would put its priceless national treasures on display like that?
Early to bed for early to rise. Tomorrow, on to the Aberdare!
Nairobi's famous cartoonist, Gado.I have little doubt that the Gulf Oil Spill may become the most catastrophic environmental disaster of my life. I hope it will focus your attitudes towards the Third World.
Caution: I don’t expect to get oil on my hands, or for my livelihood or retirement to be profoundly changed. Nevertheless, I know it will impact me in more serious ways than any other environmental disaster in my life time.
I expect this is true of most Americans. Those who live in the Gulf region will obviously be much more greatly impacted than I will, or those who farm sheep in Montana. But no other disaster – the Oakland earthquake, the Valdez spill, Mt. St.-Helens, Katrina, the Easter Sunday twisters, the Yosemite fires – will have as serious or lasting an impact.
It will likely have an impact on how I vote. It may even have an impact on how I shave or use lights at night.
This is major. Then, why, is there so little – if any interest at all, by East Africans?
The news has been duly reported. But there’s been no local comment, and not a single blog in a blogsphere that is hypercharged and overly active.
But there has been one, very important, cartoon. See above.
I think East Africans see America’s horror at the gulf oil spill as globally hypocritical and markedly irrelevant to their way of life.
Both these views are essential for us to understand. In no way am I suggesting that we should not be horrified by the spill; or that we shouldn’t change our ways because of if. But just for a moment, let’s see what this personal horror reveals of us to the Third World.
GLOBALLY HYPOCRITICAL
There are so many estimates flowing around right now as to the economic impact of the spill that it’s too early to turn the disaster into numbers. And I know the numbers will be huge. But you don’t have to be a statistician to make valuable comparisons with numbers in East African which are already known.
The gulf oil spill disaster will be hard pressed to reach the impact on Americans that the 1991 civil war in Somalia and subsequent rape and destruction of its Red Sea coast has had on Somalians.
Remember that the 1991 civil war in Somalia was a direct result of the end of the Cold War and the abandoning of East African states as proxies by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. We as Americans are responsible for that.
(Most of the details which follow were first published by Andrew Mwangura last week in Pambazuka.)
More than 200,000 fishermen have lost their livelihoods on the Somali coast, and the biomass of the world’s fifth most diverse fishery is being destroyed by illegal fishing by First World corporations and by illegal nuclear and toxic waste dumping in Somali waters.
The 200,000 fishermen were the bulwark of more than a thousand Somali coastal villages, which have been either eliminated or transformed into pirate villages increasing allied with al-Qaeda.
UN documents quoted by Mwangura report the first evidence of people dying from toxic waste dumping was in the village of Eel-Dheer in central Somalia when dark blue long barrels of a toxic material washed ashore in April, 1992, leaking an oily liquid. That was less than a year after the U.S. abandoned Somali following Blackhawk Down. Within a few years Eel-Dheer no longer existed. Everyone was dead or had left.
The UN analysis of the “oily liquid” confirmed that it was nuclear waste. Several other incidents have happened since, the latest in 2005.
In mid 1998 a 45km long and 5-7km wide oblong of dead fish washed ashore just south of Mogadishu to Warsheekh. Less spectacular but regular dead fish “oblongs” appear across the Somali, Eritrea and northern Kenyan coasts.
Further out to sea, but still well within the 12-mile international limit that theoretically still belongs to Somalia, ECOTERRA describes how First World countries are raping with impunity the rich biodiversity of the Somali Red Sea. Constrained by their own countries’ environmental laws, and even more often breaking international laws in an area unlikely to be well monitored, these vessels are decimating the Red Sea of tuna, mackerel, swordfish, grouper, emperor, snapper, shark, shrimp, rock-lobster, dolphins, sea turtles and sea-cucumbers. They have diminished the extraordinary population of dugong to near extinction.
According to ECOTERRA, the fishing vessels which have been systematically raping the Somali waters since 1991 (in order of greatest number) are from Italy, France, Spain, Greece, Russia, Britain, Ukraine, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and India.
Except for India, these are all first world nations.
According to the High Seas Task Force (HSTF), there were over 800 such fishing vessels in Somali waters at a single time in 2005. That year, High Seas estimated that more than US$450 million in fish value was taken from Somalia.
Surveys commissioned by the UN prior to 1991 in a larger report trying to document a peaceful Somali economy estimated there were 200,000 tons of sustainable fish per year that could be harvested from Somali waters. High Seas estimates that 300,000 tons is now being harvested annually.
(Hugh Seas, ECOTERRA and Mwangura make compelling arguments that current Somali piracy is essentially the former Somali fishing industry forced into attempts to control its rightful grounds.)
MARKEDLY IRRELEVANT
This is a lot easier to explain but harder to fully comprehend. Simply refer back to Gado’s cartoon above. Unlike us well off Americans, a person’s security in East Africa hardly exists day-to-day. Third World people are beset by so many problems that another natural disaster is simply not unusual.
They make do after earthquakes, revolutions and droughts, often in unseemly if creative ways. Kenya and Uganda have recently announced very promising oil and gas discoveries that the Chinese are developing at a speed unimaginable.
Japan has announced a $1.2 billion dollar project to build an oil pipeline from the southern Sudan to the yet-to-be built port (by the Chinese) on Kenya’s island of Lamu. (Or in place of the island, probably.) The risk for an accident or environmental catastrophe is much greater than for the more than 4000 oil rigs currently sitting in the Gulf of Mexico.
But it doesn’t matter. The cost-benefit ratio isn’t great enough to stop Third World peoples from doing anything they can to make tomorrow better than today. Cost-benefit is calculated in hours and days, not years or decades. It reflects an individual’s life, not the life of our planet.
Until the vast majority of the world, its poor peoples, see a future worth saving, the planet is doomed. And right now, their future doesn’t look very promising.
Watching the brown pelicans dying on a CNN short, I found myself viscerally effected by this spill in a way I hadn’t expected. I know that it will effect my life. So now take that feeling and try to imagine an East African who carries that feeling with him every moment of every day.
Bitter enemies now best buddies!I hadn’t expected to return to Nairobi so soon, but if I hadn’t, the radical change in the city would have gone unnoticed by me. Things are really, at long last, back to normal.
And normal is good.
There are a lot of sarcastic cliches about hindsight, but in this case it’s a perfect lense for realizing how bad Nairobi and Kenya had been. First the horrible election violence of 2007, and then the “drought” finally ended by flash floods and mud slides.
From December, 2007, through March, 2010, Kenya suffered one of its worst periods in its modern history. In hindsight, its remarkable any of us thought we could just sail through it unscathed. And to top it all of with a global depression…
Today, it’s back to June, 2007. The city is green and growing. Politics is all healthy fisticuffs but sane and masterfully Shakespearean.
The mood on the streets hasn’t been so positive for ages. People talk of going back to work; of increased harvests; of new factories and positive outlooks for their kids. The Nairobi dam is full; there aren’t electrical outages, anymore.
In fact, the cost of electricity has gone down!
The East African Community – a pipedream of the British a half century ago – made its first big play with a new Nile River agreement that has the power to force giant Egypt to the table. In extraordinary deft pan-African politics, Vice President Kilonzo attended the inauguration of southern Sudan’s primary official in Juba, an important diplomatic snub of Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir and then attended Bashir’s inauguration in Khartoum, a balancing act that will probably work and rivals the Chinese diplomacy with the Koreas.
And the once venomous rivals, President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga, were practically holding hands at several rallies and today promoting the “Yes” campaign for the constitutional referendum.
And there’s been an unexpectedly large surge in tourism! Most of it is to Kenya’s grand beaches, and never mind that’s probably in large part because of oil spills, earthquakes and drug wars on Caribbean beaches that compete head-to-head with Kenya.
Kenya’s doing everything right, right now, and everything seems to be helping Kenya.
This is how Lamu looks NOW! Get to Kenya quick!It’s serious: lots of oil and a new scramble for (east) Africa.
We’ve known for about a month that China had found serious oil and gas reserves in northern Kenya. And we’ve known for about that same amount of time China had found new oil reserves in Uganda. And we’ve presumed for wont of anything contrary, that the expected new state of Southern Sudan will have lots of oil.
And we knew when President Kibaki came back from the Shanghai expo, that China wanted to transform the little tropical paradise of Lamu into Africa’s biggest oil port.
Well, guess who also knows: Japan.
Japanese interests, according to Nairobi’s Business Daily, are upset at the $200 million dollar no-restriction grant that President Kibaki walked home with from Shanghai, although it’s suppose to begin planning the Lamu port.
Hello modernity, good bye remote tropical paradise.
The port is now estimated to cost $16 billion, of which China has offered to put up almost 97%. It is projected to have a total of 22 berths with a quay that will lie on 1,000 acres.
But Japan is sticking itself into the oily works. President Kibaki – bless his little crafty soul – is using the Chinese grant to hire Japanese consultants to create the feasibility study!
Home run for Kenya.
“This is likely to be the most fought after project between the two countries as they seek to enhance their economic and political dominance, ” said Dr Joseph Kieyah, a senior researcher at Kenya Institute of Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA).
Japan has always been the sweeter donor to East Africa, with often unrestricted aid for truly humanitarian projects. China has never done that. So from the perspective of who would be the better friend, Japan has a leg up.
But both countries have been awarded provincial drilling rights in the southern Sudan, pending that country’s maturation into state hood after a March, 2011, referendum.
Last month, Toyota Tsusho, the car maker’s trading arm, announced plans to build a $1.5 billion oil pipeline from South Sudan to the Kenyan coast, complete with an oil export terminal.
So China builds the port and the roads in Kenya, and Japan builds the pipeline from The Sudan. I hope they’re friends.
But what this means – with the extraordinary amounts of money that are being talked about – is that both China and Japan view the southern Sudan and Kenya as its only outlet as a new Nigeria.
The estimated cost of the port and the pipeline ($17.5 billion), represents about half of all of East Africa’s 2003 GDP. More than amazing: mind blowing.
Not unconstitutional; rather inconsequential.Here’s one for the books. Yesterday, a panel of 3 Kenyan judges said the proposed judicial system in the proposed new constitution is unconstitutional!
Wait, wait, don’t tell me. There isn’t a constitution , yet, because it’s being voted on August 4, so how can something that isn’t, not be?
This is incredibly embarrassing to Kenya, and it’s a patent retrogression to the old days of corruption and nepotism. If the new constitution passes, all judges lose their jobs and must be reappointed to the newly reconstructed judiciary.
These lameducks are trying to … what… how should I put it, be… eternalized?
The ruling is ridiculous but disturbing. The new proposed Kenyan constitution, which I consider brilliant, sets up an admittedly controversial judiciary that includes a second tier of civil courts for Muslims – restricted strictly to personal matters like marriage and only if all parties agree.
The judges called these “kadhi” courts unconstitutional.
Incredible. There is no constitution yet, so nothing yet can be unconstitutional.
Kenyan political leaders have called it for what it is, “inconsequential.”
An easy distraction.This weekend officials on Kenya’s coast warned of increasing crocodile attacks on local residents. Nonsense.
If the reports of increased lion and crocodile attacks in Kenya are true, why are they not true in neighboring Uganda and Tanzania? Do those animals not have visas?
Like the incorrectly reported increase in lion attacks made last week in the Mara, the increasing media emphasis in Kenya on wild animal attacks can be explained for two reasons: (1) the boundaries between people and wild animals are growing smaller and more stressful, and (2) because the story makes good politics.
It reminds me very much of the regular conservative attacks on vermin at home, particularly wolves. Generally when the rains are good and the stock is healthy we hear very little about wolf attacks. But the moment there’s a drought or anthrax, wolves start eating babies.
“The marauding reptiles of River Tana are killing villagers, particularly women,“ reported Mark Agutu, a reporter for Kenya’s Daily Nation, this weekend.
The Tana River just came out of an extended drought, and there are now floods and mudslides, and farmers have suffered terribly. An important, somewhat contentious, national referendum is occurring in a few months. Muslim and Christians are in the throes of trying to deal with being near an Al-Qaeda Somalia not far from them.
There’s a lot to bother a farmer on Tana River, and one of the easiest ways to distract him from demanding action from his social and political leaders, is to sound the crocodile attack alarm.
This hysteria is not good for Kenya. Most importantly, elephant attacks are on the increase, and they are often much more destructive than lions or crocodiles, and addressing the issue won’t be easy. Expanding this fact to all predators isn’t simply specious but could really delay the need to figure out what to do with elephants.
East Africa’s wild animals are the most numerous and dramatic on earth, and there’s no question that modern society there has a serious problem figuring out what to do with the conflict caused when the wilderness meets the city.
But brazen suggestions that the animals have risen like vampires against peace-loving villagers is not going to get us anywhere.
Maasai cow laced with poison kills entire lion pride.Richard Leakey’s excellent wildlife consortium, Wildlife Direct, said today that “Kenya’s lions are on the brink of extinction.” Exaggeration or real warning?
Probably both.
The organization’s warning followed an incident in late April where three lions were poisoned in Lemek, a private wildlife conservancy north of Kenya’s famed Maasai Mara game reserve.
Wildlife officials arrested the alleged killer, a Maasai herder, who admitted the poisoning and showed wildlife officials the powder he used. He explained that the lion had been killing his cattle.
Lion have been killing Maasai stock for aeons. And in the old days Maasai morani would spear the lion to death and that usually did the trick. Today, pesticides have replaced spears. In this case, pending chemical analysis, wildlife officials believe the poison was carbofuran – widely available in Kenya because it’s used in the cut-flower industry.
Unlike spearing the marauding lion, pesticides laid out for the intruder end up killing the whole pride, and that’s what seems to have happened in this case. In the old days, the speared (usually) male lion traumatized the pride enough that they left the area. Now, there are no lions left to leave.
Killing wildlife in Lemek is a violation of two laws: a federal law against killing lions (that allowed federal officials, the KWS, to become involved) and a business contract with tourist camps in the area.
So the alleged culprit was arrested and arraigned, but later released. Not on bail, but because “a local politician intervened on his behalf,” according to Wildlife Direct.
Don’t get too angry.
Wildlife/human conflicts are on the rise throughout Africa and I don’t believe they are being properly handled. In Kenya a number of initiatives are underway, including KWS programs to educate herders and farmers on the importance of wildlife; in Tanzania more aggressive actions are being funded by organizations like AWF to actually fence portions of farms against intruders as large as elephant.
But as human populations develop and their needs become greater, and particularly during an economic downturn and following a drought, these initiatives can actually exacerbate not solve the problem.
Lemek is an excellent example. This is too far away from the real wilderness of the Maasai Mara, an extension of a “private reserve” because of presumed tourist interests. Many of Africa’s best camps are in private reserves, but I think these private reserves have become too far out.
This is really an area that should be left to stock grazing, and what the Kenyan government and wildlife officials should realize is that trying to expand it for tourism is a bad idea. It should be developed for agriculture.
Lions should not be protected in this area. They should be confined to areas further towards and actually inside the reserve, and if motivated to move out into these areas, they should be picked up or shot by wildlife officials before such messy and uncontrollable acts of poisoning grow widespread.
Protecting them in areas like these just increases the problem.
Q. Jambo Jim!
A Tanzanian friend here in Seattle, Zainab will be visiting relatives in ar es Salaam in June. She and her husband want to take their two children to the Serengeti for just 2-3 days. The children are in elementary school. I sent her info on Ndutu Lodge. Do you have any better suggestion as well as an airline suggestion from there. They will be in Dar in the last 2 wks of June. When she lived there she never went on safari. Does Ndutu have guides of their own that you could recommend?
A. I think your friend’s ideas aren’t very good. Dar is a long, long way from the Serengeti, and the besides, this is the worst time of the year for the Serengeti, and while Ndutu Lodge is very reasonably priced at any time of the year, your friends will end up spending a mint to get there.
If they were going to dedicate a week on safari, then I think coming up north and visiting places like Tarangire (which will be at its prime, then, and which has a very reasonably priced lodge in Sopa), would be ideal. But for the short time they want to allocate, the flights, the transport — it all just makes it way too expensive for what they would achieve.
I think there are two better options for her. And in fact this would apply regardless of budget, but governed by the amount of time they want to give themselves for safari.
Go to The Selous, or to Mikumi.
The Selous will have great game at this time of the year, and it’s only 80 miles from Dar. You have to fly into it, but it still ends up being way less expensive for them than the northern circuit. Slightly less expensive, and not quite as good game, would be a road safari to the nearby (Dar) game park of Mikumi.
Nairobi demonstrators aroused by al-Faisal.The Times Square Bomber says his radical Muslim cleric “gets it.” So does Kenya.
NPR reported this morning that Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, attributed his radicalization to Abdullah Al-Faisal, a convicted felon in the UK who Kenya recently deported to Jamaica.
I wrote earlier about the Al-Faisal controversy in Kenya and how Kenya stood alone among dozens of African countries by arresting then deporting Al-Faisal, who had fled into Africa to preach radical jihad.
Apparently, Al-Faisal made the gross mistake of trying to sneak into Kenya (the only easy way to get to Somalia, his obvious destination). A score of other African countries through which Al-Faisal passed did nothing, despite warrants for the man’s arrest and requests by Interpol to question him.
In fact he had become something of a celebrity in South Africa, where he was received widespread public attention and even some support from the South African government.
But the moment al-Faisal stepped into Kenya, he was arrested.
Today the leaked investigative report that NPR aired shows not just the power of internet clerics, but the obvious side of the so-called War on Terror embraced by Kenya.
Maestro Ruto looking over the student election violence.Nairobi students riot over … elections? And the man “solving” the situation is the one who caused the last election riots?
Wait, wait! The elections aren’t until the end of 2012, right? And the national referendum for a constitution isn’t for a few more months, right? What elections are we talking about?
The election for SONU, that’s Nairobi University’s student union.
Riots?
It started Friday when students claimed the results announced for the elections of their student union were rigged by political hotshots.
iPhone fotos showed pretty rough characters, not exactly your liberal arts sophomore, entering student election booths with giant pangas (machetes) and replacing one election box with another that sort of looked similar.
Sunday students really got themselves fired up and on Monday they took to the crowded streets of Nairobi. One car was set ablaze in the city center. The university grounds were trashed pretty badly. Oil tankers were hijacked and stopped in the middle of Nairobi roundabouts virtually stopping traffic in and out of the city.
Guests at the Norfolk Hotel opposite the university had slightly longer drives as taxis went the long way round River Road to avoid the university.
It’s virtually impossible to verify the students’ claims that their student union election was rigged by political bosses in the country, but the circumstantial evidence is pretty much on their side.
It’s definitely been true in the past. Becoming a student union officer at the country’s most prestigious university was a virtual path into national politics. The opposing national parties, in fact, supported slates of candidates until that was banned just a few years ago.
But here’s the clue that it may definitely be true.
William Ruto is one of the most evil men in Kenya. Until recently he was the Agricultural Minister, a pretty high profile position in a government with nearly 70 ministries but only a few – like agriculture – that sit with the President and Prime Minister.
But it is widely known that Ruto is one of the “list of 20″ submitted the World Court in The Hague as a prime suspect for having instigated the horrible ethnic violence which followed the last election. As that formal investigation proceeded, Ruto was dumped down a few stairs from Agriculture to Education.
It’s not a big drop, but a pointed one. Ruto commands a huge following in rural Kenya where he overlords other thugs and mafia, and his clout is just too powerful.
Not until he’s officially named by The Hague will Kenya’s leaders dare dump him.
So now, as Minister of Education, he has told the Nairobi faculty to undo their suspension of the student union.
The faculty had suspended the student union and closed the university. On the first action presumably because the faculty knows the elections were rigged (though none will say so), and on the section action, because the kids were trashing the campus.
That seems reasonable to me, a former student rioter myself. And besides, it’s what the students want! They were rioting against the outcome of the elections of their union.
Ruto’s insertion in this process is by association a pointer to the fact that the student elections were rigged, and probably, by him.
Poor Ruto. As he loses support among matriculated Kenyan politicians, he’s forced to succor among the kids. Good for Kenya. But temporarily not so good for Nairobi University.
All (12-lane) roads lead to Nairobi.Three years ago China started building roads all over Kenya, including an 8-line highway between Thika and Nairobi. It’s now 30 miles of 12 lanes!
(Stop! Yes, the Kenyan wilderness away from Nairobi is still beautiful and healthy. You still will find lions in the Kenyan wilderness. Not to worry, there.)
In the few short years since the Chinese road building boom started throughout Kenya, the growth of the satellite suburbs has exploded. People saw roads finally being built (rather than the money for cement bloating the pockets of politicians) and began to realize they really could live cheaply outside the city and still work there.
It’s the same dynamic China has been grappling with for nearly two decades of incredible growth. I, for one, can’t understand how on earth it’s going to work, but I’ve heard that China is doing pretty well.
Once all these cars get to the city, what will they do?
Kenya’s main newspaper, The Daily Nation, reports 1000 new cars are being purchased to be used in the city EVERY MONTH.
I’ve written elsewhere how you have to avoid arriving Nairobi’s international airport on any weekday morning, because the traffic is so congested that it takes up to two hours to move a mere 11 miles from the airport to the city center.
That’s not going to change. The great roads that China is building simply feed into the city. There are plans for a ring road to circle away those cars not intending to come into the city, but most of them are trying to get into the city, not around it.
The city center isn’t big enough!
This seems like a massive failure of urban planning. I’ve questioned the Chinese motives, because they are combing Kenya for oil and other business opportunities. But then, again, did anyone see Shanghai recently?
Q. What do you know about south africa? worth seeing? I’m interested in Port Elizabeth up the coast to Durban. I heard there are quaint towns up the coast and that the area has the best of both worlds of Africa… coast, beautiful beaches on one side, and huge game reserves and animals on the other side. Obviously it looks like a huge area and distance between the two. but worth going? cheap? expensive? How’s the crime? Just wondering. a friend of mine wants to go to the area to swim with great whites. and then also to see the big 5. When you have time, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
A. I just watched a news report yesterday evening that said your city, Ryan, is now the murder capital of the world, with more than one homicide per day (468/month). That exceeds any rate in any South African city. Crime is very relative. I’m sure you know how to avoid getting bumped off in Chicago…
The coast east of Port Elizabeth to Durban is nicknamed the Wild Coast and has some of the most spectacular beach and country on the continent, and it reminds me very, very much of the coastline just north of San Francisco from Tomales Bay up to Mendocino. Mostly these are not good beaches for swimming, and the great whites are generally west, not east of Port Elizabeth. Much of the beach is rocky and cliff rock, so spectacular scenery but not good sand beaching. As for game, I know of only one game reserve, Kwando, that has any reputation in this area, and it pales in comparison to some of the other reserves much further east of Durban (Phinda, Hluhluwe and Umfolozi). It’s also very windy and in the hottest of times, cold. Just like San Fran. For more swimmable and sandy beaches you need to go further, east of Durban. Remember as for game, there is nothing you’re going to find anywhere in southern Africa that achieves a tenth of what we just saw in East Africa. And another rejoinder about “big game” in the south. Much of it is on private reserves that are hard to distinguish as such, but what that means is that all the animals have been trucked in, many are fed as in zoos and to some extent many are just like San Diego’s Wild Animal park. The way to tell in South Africa is to use the official South African site: http://www.sanparks.org/
After the kiss, she throws a grenade to the bridesmaids.A large midweek wedding celebration dominated the eastern Congo town of Goma, this week, for the first time in decades. Is the war over, or just getting ready to start, again?
We’ll have to go to our PlayStation3 to find out.
I have a mixture of distant nostalgia and abject fear when I remember my own adventures in Goma. Before Mobutu was gone the Congo (then Zaire) was a secretive and scary place, but once inside the forests were filled with beauty and magic. And that was the problem, you had to be a wizard to get out.
But the end of Mobutu – as horrible as he was – heralded an unprecedented era of barbarism. Mineral-rich Kivu province, the eastern slice of the Congo that lies astride Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, became a lawless bastion of mercenaries and thugs.
Supported by the west’s desperate need for such absolutely essential things as weapons of mass destruction, Kivu went on the auction block, and the bidders were Sony, Intel, the U.S. Defense Department and a bevy of other moral-less capitalists. They all need Coltan.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, 80% of the world’s Coltan reserves are in Kivu.
Coltan is a wizard’s brew. When refined it becomes tantalum, and shortly thereafter it becomes camera lenses, cell phones, detailed instruments for surgical implants, wires and filaments in light bulbs that last 100 times longer than tungsten and its alloys are used for jet engines, missiles and all sorts of secret, wizardry things.
I find it so heartening that PlayStation3 now uses more Coltan than the Defense Department.
According to the monitoring group, Towards Freedom, there are 1300 people that die every day in Kivu from bullets or perverse rape. The massacre is a part of the Coltan War. Whoever controls Coltan gets very, very rich.
Those who mine Coltan are abused, mostly children. Those who finally collect for the sales of Coltan often shun dollars for weapon – did you hear that? “Shun Dollars”? What do they want instead?
Guns.
It’s so remarkably convenient. The most sophisticated guns use Coltan. Is this what they call sustainable development?
Eleven years ago the world got antsy with this unusual war for PlayStations, and the UN Security Council sent in 20,000 troops to Kivu to regulate the slaughter and rape. Forget about child labor in the mines, that was beyond their mission.
It has worked a little bit. Enough that there are now weddings in Goma. Enough that the very distant President of the Congo, Joseph Kabila, has asked the UN soldiers to leave. Kabila rules from Kinshasa, more than a thousand miles away over impenetrable jungles and in a world as distant from Kivu as .. Well, as from Leaf Valley, Agar or the other supposedly mythical republics of the PlayStation worlds.
If they go, the modicum of stability in Goma will, well I think the term used in the “Modern Warfare 2 Stimulus Package” for PlayStation is , evaporize.
No pension and biodegradable.An important electricity line has just been laid in western Mozambique, crucial to the development of Mozambique’s big new Limpopo National Park.
Thanks to. Rats.
Yes that’s right. Installation had been stalled because of the huge numbers of land mines that remained in the area from the civil war. Land mines are a problem throughout much of troubled Africa, but nowhere as severely as in Mozambique.
An area of about 5000 sq. meters (100m x 50m, roughly the size of three American football fields placed end to end), was known to be full of mines, and there was no other way for the huge electricity grid to go.
The mines were known to be there, because of the skeletal remains found by the pylon diggers in the rectangular area they were to enter. The bones were from years of innocent people irregularly traveling through the remote area.
A pack of rats was let loose, identified the 32 mines in the area which were then dismantled, and the lights are on!
The giant African pouched rat is the work horse. It’s the genius work of a Belgium aid group, Apopo, with the cooperation of several organizations in Tanzania, including the army and Morogoro university where the rats undergo training.
The rat has an especially keen sense of smell. Like white rats, it’s affectionate and not aggressive, more like a bunny than vermin. Apparently it’s also quite intelligent, responding to Pavlovian training as if it were a dog. And, of course, it digs nicely.
What I find especially interesting about Apopo is that its founder and original collaborators were all engineers, those guys who look at a problem through its pieces. Traditional detection mechanisms went for the metal that the exploding powder turned into deadly shrapnel. But land mines are mostly composed of very aromatic powders (gun powder), and it was onto this principal ingredient that the geeks turned their attention.
Rats are cheap, friendly, responsive and biodegradable. AND when they step on a mine, it doesn’t go off!
Now consider this. The chief engineer, Bart Weetjens, is a practicing Zen Buddhist Monk in Belgium. It would take someone as out-of-the-box as this to create this genius scheme.
And guess what. Mines is just the first. The rats have just been trained to detect tuberculosis! Yes, and they will do so with greater success than the difficult X-Rays and chemical tests otherwise used.
