Turkey: Istanbul

by Miss Penny Black

Although I’ve got a bunch of things left to write about Africa, here’s a few first impressions of Istanbul and a little of what we’ve done so far so our parents are up to date.

We caught the red-eye from Nairobi airport, which partially, and quite spectacularly, burned down a few weeks ago.

Photo courtesy of euronews.

Unlike everything else in Africa, authorities managed to get it up and running again within days and so our flights were on time and everything ran smoothly. We did get there several hours early, but due to the wonders of technology we had plenty of entertainment watching David Attenborough Africa doco’s. If you haven’t seen ‘Savannah’ and the rest in the series I highly recommend them.

All five of us slept through pretty much the whole flight and missed the evening meal, which is almost unheard of for me. When we landed I felt almost normal. We arrived in Istanbul at 10am but couldn’t check in until 2 so we perused duty free, I drank an iced chocolate from Starbucks that was as big as my head and we used the internet until it was time to get a cab.

Everything was so quick and painless and as the scenery slid by we marvelled at how clean and modern this place is. Cities on hills always have a special charm and Istanbul, or at least the part we’re in, seems to be nothing but hills.

We found our accommodation without a hitch, and apart from the 70 steps to get to our top floor apartment, it’s pretty cool with a small kitchen and a stunning view over the Bosphorus to Asia.

We unpacked a few things then walked up the hill through little alleys lined with cafes and shops to a main road that runs to Taksim Square. It’s Istanbul’s equivalent of Trafalgar Square, I suppose. A big open paved area where tourists and birds gather, people sell food on sticks and there’s not much shade. The boys marvelled at the variety of kebabs on offer and then we walked back, stopping along the way to get bits and pieces of food to snack on later. We’ve all been looking forward to the food here – having all the food cooked for us on the tour was great but it was all the kind of food you can cook easily in large quantities. I’m so happy to be able to buy small, tasty snacks like borek, olives and cheese. We’ve also bought some fruit that isn’t bananas or pineapple – hooray!

View from our balcony.

Tomorrow I’m hoping to head to the Grand Bazaar and whatever else I can fit in. There’s also a pile of belongings to be sent home so my pack doesn’t weigh as much as a baby elephant.

24Aug2013

Uganda: Lake Bunyoni and the Little Angels Orphanage and School.

by Miss Penny Black

Lake Bunyoni is the deepest lake in Uganda at 6300 feet. Our campsite for two days was on the edge of the lake and it’s certainly the prettiest campsite we’d yet seen. The steep hills surrounding the lake are terraced with banana trees and other crops, the lake is a lovely clean greeny-blue and the air is a bit misty from cooking fires. Fishermen in dugouts ply the lake and you can hear cows mooing at the farms. Our tents sit by the water’s edge on thick green grass and even though it is very warm and humid during the day, at night it is nice and cold.

The cutest kids in Africa!

We spent half a day visiting a school that is run by a man who used to be a sponsor child himself. His name is Duncan and he told us that his sponsor parents lived in England and he wants to help the community here and give other children the same chance he’d had. He took us for a very steep walk over the hills to see the village the children come from and to meet a local lady, Frida. He warned us beforehand that Frida is ‘mad – but not crazy, just mad. I don’t tell her that!’ She is 87 years old and a tiny little lady full of life and smiles. When we arrived she came out of her house and spoke to us, giving each of us a hug, feeling our arms and, in the case of ladies with decent ..ah.. assets.. she felt those too. We all laughed with her. She always asks Duncan which of the ladies is his girlfriend and he gets her to guess. This time she guessed Nikki was. Leigh wasn’t so lucky, Frida asked whether he eats anything because he is so thin. Poor guy!

Everyone in Africa loves a beard.

Then we walked on to the school through plantations of eucalypts. It is a free school and many of the children are orphans or their families are very poor. The school gives the children two meals a day. When we arrived they were having lessons so we split up and went into the classrooms. There were about 30 children in each room and about 200 children in the whole school. Thirty is unusually small for classes in Africa but then the rooms were so small they wouldn’t have fitted many more.

Year one classroom.

The classrooms had dirt floors, no door and the walls were rough boards with huge gaps and a corrugated iron roof. Each room had a blackboard and some posters – some of which were identical to the ones we have in my school at home.

We sat in a room with the kids and they were singing songs and doing spelling. Due to a lack of resources most lessons seem to be aural, which would be hard on kids who learn better through seeing or doing.

Dancing at assembly.

After the class time there was an assembly and then we helped hand out the lunches. The kids had two meals at school. We gave them a banana, juice, cup of porridge (no sugar or salt) and a slice of bread (plain). I can only imagine the look on kids’ faces at my school if you gave them food like that, but while they were eating the teachers gave a spelling quiz and if a child answered correctly they got another slice of bread.

Lunch time.

Along with the school we saw the beginnings of buildings Duncan had designed for volunteers to stay in. A lot of places charge volunteers money to stay but his plan is to offer free accommodation for people who want to come and teach. If I ever decided to do something like that, Lake Bunyoni would be the perfect place. My only regret is that Swahili is not the local language and I’d have to start all over.

I’d happily go to work every day in this fashion!

We were rowed back to camp in dugout canoes and I reflected on the roll of aid in Africa and how this kind of grass-roots organisation that grows from within a community but looks to draw on knowledge and experience of outsiders, is probably one of the most sustainable and successful we’ve seen yet.

Leigh plays with one of the kids.

24Aug2013

Uganda: Mini Golf World Championship (Round 2)

by Miss Penny Black

‘Adrift’ at Jinja in Uganda was one of our favourite campsites. They had a bar that overlooked the Nile, hot showers (usually), monkeys, and wifi that worked (usually). There was also bungee jumping and, nearby, mini golf! Luke, Kat and I had played mini golf together in Australia and the Cook Islands so we were keen to have a game in Africa. Leigh, Nikki and Joan joined us on our excursion and so we all bundled into a taxi and made our way there.

Appropriately the park was ‘Big Game’ themed, complete with large fibreglass models of African animals…. and a tiger. Which made for good photo opportunities and, unlike straight-laced Australia, the staff didn’t seem to mind at all when we climbed on top of them.

Tally ho!

Oh noes!

The only tiger in Africa!

Giddyup!

The place we went to also ran quad biking tours and the practise laps went around and between the golf holes, adding a certain degree of excitement and petrol fumes that our previous mini golf experiences had lacked.

Joan with some of the lovely local kids.

As the game went on we attracted a small crowd of local kids who were keen to talk and hold our pencils and score sheets. They also posed for photos with us at the end and I coached them in making ‘oooooh’ noises when we missed and ‘yaaaaaay!’ noises when we got the ball in the hole. Their natural inclination seemed to be to stand silently watching but by the end they were clapping and cheering… or laughing at us.

Luke accepts the crowd’s adulation.

As to the scores, Luke won with a blinding 3 holes in 1. Nikki came second (I think) and I’m pretty sure I came last. As far as courses go I would definitely recommend it – if you’re in Uganda and enjoy mini golf don’t miss it!

Proof of victory.

Group photo!

(note: the post events are jumping around a bit at the moment as we’ve had barely any internet over the past two weeks, so rather than posting in chronological order I’m just posting about events as I get the photos ready.)

20Aug2013

Rwanda: Gorillas!

by Miss Penny Black

The top of our hiking poles.

We spent three nights in Rwanda, the first two at a small town just outside Volcanoes National Park, just over the border from Uganda. The road from Lake Bunyoni to the Rwandan border is surprisingly, startlingly beautiful. Not only is it a new piece of tarmac but it winds through steeply hilly countryside that is lush and green, terraced with crops and eucalyptus trees. It made me think of my friends who like to drive their sports cars along winding roads.

Rwanda is one of those rare countries that has banned plastic bags and the second you’re over the border the difference is noticeable. Buildings are also more solidly built, everything has a slightly more prosperous air than the other countries we’ve been to. Which is surprising (at least to me) as Rwanda seems to be a byword for trouble and poverty to the rest of the world.

Although I could wax lyrical about Rwanda for pages I’ll cut straight to day 2 and our gorilla trek.

Unexpected bamboo.

We were broken up into groups and Luke and I went with Joan, John, Miriam and Adele from our tour group and we got the guide who was driving to the closest group of gorillas. The chances of seeing a group are extremely high as they are tracked constantly during daylight hours and the guides are in contact with the trackers by radio.

We took a jeep from the muster point to a farming area, were given walking poles and then headed uphill through fields of daisies, potatoes and beans. People came out to say hello, especially the ubiquitous smiling, rag-clad children. Further up we met our armed trackers and crossed the stone wall into the park. Unexpectedly, most of our half hour walk through the park was within a bamboo forest. Apparently gorillas love bamboo and actually get drunk on bamboo shoots. The guide told us that they act in a more outgoing manner when drunk and are also more likely to try to box people who come to see them.

On the way through the forest we got to see a giant earthworm, although apparently it was just a baby.

Urgh!

Not long after this we were told to put down our backpacks (if the gorillas see them they will try to get into them and look for food), picked up our cameras and headed down a little muddy slope. As I negotiated the tricky turn, crouched down and surrounded by bushes, I looked to the side and there, within a metre, was a gorilla. It was sitting down just watching me. I’m not an emotional person but I felt my eyes fill with tears and I can’t even really say precisely why. I couldn’t even take a photo, I was so close. We had to move on quite quickly as we were on a slope and everyone had to get down.

At the bottom was a clearing full of ferns and stinging nettles and – gorillas! We worked our way around to a group that included a silverback, several females and juveniles. The little ewok-like youths were rolling around, wrestling. It was as though a couple of rambunctious toddlers had been dressed up in gorilla suits and given a litre of red cordial.

So close!

We watched them for about half an hour (we’re limited to an hour of viewing a day so as not to disturb them too much) then moved around the corner. There were two little ones and then, not far away, a mother with a 5 day old baby. Unfortunately (but understandably) she didn’t want us to see the baby so we only saw the top of its head. We spent a little over an hour in the clearing, taking photos, sitting almost within touching distance of the animals. It was magic.

All-over-afro! At this point I almost died from too much cute.

The money we paid to see the gorillas goes in part to the parks and guides but also to the local villages to pay for infrastructure and education. Apparently this has reduced poaching to almost zero, in fact now locals will direct animals back into the park rather than killing them if they find them eating crops.

If you ever get a chance to see these amazing, gentle animals I highly recommend doing so. The more people who do these treks, the greater their chance of survival. It is definitely something to add to your bucket list – plus Rwanda is a beautiful country full of ridiculously friendly, welcoming people.

The great explorer.

8Aug2013

Nakuru National Park

by Miss Penny Black

Who’s studying who?

The alternative title for this post could’ve been ‘Not Our Best Game Drive Ever’. We woke up early and got into the vans (not jeeps this time – the vans are 4 wheel drive but don’t have the clearance of jeeps. This turned out to be rather unfortunate) in groups of 7. I was with Luke, Kat, Lucas, Pam, Ross and Joan.

After very heavy rains even getting out of the property was a challenge but we made it to the park which is set around Lake Nakuru, home of many black rhinos and many more birds than the previous parks I’ve been to. We were hoping to see flamingoes, although the rising water levels meant that most had left to find shallower lakes where the algae was easier to reach.

After a long wait to get into the park we got in and drove around, spotting rhinos almost immediately. Although I’m happy to see them, I don’t find rhinos all that interesting an I’ve seen them plenty of times in the past anyhow. The first one we saw did do something I’ve never seen before – it urinated. Now, this might not sound like something worth mentioning, but it was like someone had snuck underneath the rhino with a firehose, directed it horizontally out between the rhino’s hind legs and intermittently let it off. Quite an eye-opening sight and something you wouldn’t want to see too close up. It went on for ages.

We were part of a group of 3 vans as we drove around and, as I’ve said, there’d been heavy rains. Along one road there were some decent sized puddles and the first van got bogged.

Uh oh.

Fortunately a jeep came by and towed them out. Then the second van in our convoy (we were last) drove into exactly the same pothole, much to everyone’s surprise. There was plenty of room on the other side of the road so what, exactly, the driver was thinking, we had no idea. When that van was extricated, thanks to another jeep, our champion driver, Charles, managed to get across without getting bogged. There was much clapping and cheering within our van.

‘Adventure!’ say the drivers, every time something goes wrong.

Once we were all across we turned back to see that the helpful jeep had also become bogged but much, much worse than our vans had been – on one side the back corner was in up to its window. Of course we all piled out to have a good look and take photos and video. Even Charles got out his camera and had a photo with me in front of the stranded vehicle.

Eventually we all gave up on helping the jeep and headed off. The only noteworthy thing (in my books) that happened on the way out was seeing two young male giraffes play-fighting.

Whiplash!

They were bashing their necks and heads together. Despite this being quite far away I could’ve sat there and watched for hours. I didn’t think I’d get to see that in our travels so I was extremely happy. Oh, we also saw some very cute monkeys along the road, quite close up too.