the beach at Lake Tanganyika in Burundi

No Leave Travel Blog

I know I shouldn’t complain about business travel to Africa. It’s always a rewarding experience. But it’s also an exhausting one. For nearly three weeks I had been waking up at 6, cleaning out my work emails, and leaving the hotel by 7. We would be on the road all day seeing projects. With the sun long set, I would return to my hotel room, eat an overpriced and usually mediocre hotel meal, and crash. So when I suddenly found myself with a free afternoon in Burundi, I was thrilled.

To say that post-conflict Burundi doesn’t see many tourists would be a gross understatement. Travel on the highways is banned after 6 pm when the military pulls back to their garrisons. I attended a security briefing at the embassy a few days into my visit where I learned I had been violating protocol for at least three days by such rash measures as taking local taxis and traveling without a radio link to the security station.

The threat to life and limb and the nearly complete lack of tourism infrastructure were obstacles to enjoying my rare bit of leisure time, but the Lonely Planet guide raved about the beaches of Lake Tanganyika where “the waves are strong enough to keep away the parasitic snails that infest most of East African bodies of water.” What had really gotten me excited was the brochure from the swanky hotel, “Club du Lac”, that had quietly been inserted into my passport when it returned from the Burundian Embassy’s visa desk. I guessed the Ambassador’s brother must be an owner. Either way, the lake, the hotel, and its beach sounded great. Even better, the US security officer had actually signed off on the safety of the place. But really, I needed a little downtime.

I was not totally sure that I could just walk into the hotel and onto their stretch of beach, but I have always been a big believer in begging for forgiveness rather than asking for permission. I changed in the hotel bar restroom, slipped on my cheap Chinese mirrored sunglasses, and walked out to the sand as if I knew what I was doing.

Lake Tanganyika

It was a Saturday and one of the rare beautiful days in the middle of the rainy season. Dark green mountains rose up on the Congolese side of the lake crested by white clouds. A pristine beach with ocean-worthy sand lay in front of me. A bored guard with his AK-47 was throwing rocks at a can for want of people to watch. I had the beach almost entirely to myself. A European diplomat and his wife were playing in the shade. Figuring them not to be the bag-snatching type, I asked them to watch my things while I went into the waves. They pleasantly agreed.

The water was cool and fresh with the wind blowing just hard enough to stir up some surf. It was fantastic. The view was pristine, and I was alone in the water, the only soul taking advantage of the natural peace and tranquility of floating in the lake. It was a Saturday and people in this poor country could only afford to take their Sundays off. I had the water all to myself. Floating on my back, looking at Congo bobbing in and out of my line of sight, I had to admit that while it was not quite adventuring like I used to do, the government-sponsored travel had its moments.

Half an hour later, I strolled out of the waves, glowing with the realization that I was in the heart of Africa, that it was beautiful, that I was loving my job, and that I would get to come back to all this in the near future. I walked back to get my bag from the European couple.

“How was the water?” the man asked.

“Oh fantastic,” I replied. “It really was just the right temperature and so fresh. Like the ocean but without all the salt.”

They nodded politely in agreement. “So you don’t worry about the hippos?”

I looked at them, looked down, then at the mountains as I collected my thoughts.

“Thanks again.” I grabbed my bag, slipped on the sunglasses, and walked over to the bar for a drink.

Posted by Jett Thomason, 20 Jan 2010

Blog of a Modern Nomad

Like Tangier for Twain, Aleppo is the spot we have been longing for all the time:

–The Innocents Abroad

click photo for slide show

I am a bit uncomfortable in my interactions, but it’s the uncomfortable I’ve desired. The vegetable vendors at the outdoor market are not used to selling their produce to foreigners, nor am I used to their Arabic, local prices, or bartering techniques.

I am uncomfortable most everywhere, in fact, and am probably naïve too. Maybe I’m being overcharged for my freshly-squeezed mango juice at the fruit stand, but I am too absorbed to give it a second thought.

My travel partner and I are so enthralled with this complete foreignness, the foreignness that Twain describes, and we haven’t even entered the old city and souks for which Aleppo is famous. Here, the new city is a novelty to us.

The first morning in Aleppo I awoke to the call to prayer. It echoed throughout the narrow streets and radiated up from the roof tops just as it had in all the other cities we had traveled through for the past two months. But this morning, it was a real person singing. In Turkey we were used to recorded prayers that sounded harsher than a worn-out 8-track tape from the 70’s. In Northern Cyprus I buried my head under the pillow at 4am. Even though my sleep was interrupted in Aleppo, I had still appreciated its beauty.

A few hours later, at about 9am, I heard church bells. At first I didn’t think it was possible. I hadn’t heard clanking bells since Bulgaria. But later I read that ten percent of the Syrian population is Christian and the secular government is tolerant of these different faiths.

Coming from modern and westernized Turkey, Syria seems so vastly different. It is both visually shocking and stimulating to the senses. To begin, everything is in Arabic. The first thing we had to do was learn how to read the numbers. (Arabs don’t use what we call “Arabic numerals”) Adding to this, Aleppean society is very conservative. Almost no women are seen on the streets without a headscarf and many are wearing the chador.

You won’t find international chains in Aleppo and there aren’t even supermarkets here. People still do their shopping in the souqs. The souqs are covered and still preserved from medieval times. In Aleppo you will come closer to experiencing a medieval city center better than anywhere else in the Middle East.

I am often in search of places that are “thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign” but with our shrinking and globalized world, these places are increasingly uncommon.

But in Syria, on the streets of Aleppo, I found Twain’s Tangier.

Stephen Bugno, August 2007

Vasya offers some homemade wine

I am in Moldova. Now a former republic of the Soviet Union, the region has previously been known as Bessarabia and has changed hands between Russian, Austria-Hungarian, Ottoman, and home-grown empires a number of times. The population is largely Romanian in culture and language. The elected Communist government has tried to avoid the forces of “Greater Romania” by insisting on the separation between Moldovan and Romanian. This has even led to a Moldovan-Romanian dictionary. Widely mocked, it’s about the same as writing a dictionary for Californian-New Yorkian.

I came here a bit more than a month ago at the invitation of an old friend. Overall, it’s been a great place to wait out the winter, study Russian, and see a relatively unknown but fascinating corner of Eastern Europe.

I’ve been staying mostly in the capital of Chisinau (pronounced Kishinow). You would have trouble believing it to be the capital of one of Europe’s poorest countries. The nightlife is booming and the cafes are packed with people. New BMWs and Mercedes race the streets and stores are packed with shoppers. Most of the economy is funded by the tremendous quantity of remittances from young Moldovans overseas. While the country’s official population is about four million, a huge portion of the young workforce has left to find work in Russia, Italy, and Spain.

The difference between the small towns and the capital is stark. Essentially the only people left in the villages are the very old and the very young. Once school is completed, people leave for the capital or an overseas job – usually illegally. One result of this mass migration is that Moldovans have a distinct appreciation of the difference between European and their own standard of living. I’ve repeatedly had to assure locals that I wasn’t offended by their less-than-ideal living conditions. Many of the young women have seen how modern Western women enjoy more privileges and balanced roles in the house. These experiences are rapidly changing the traditional culture and gender relations in the country.

a babushka sweeps the snow

A few weeks ago I went to a small village about an hour outside of Chisinau and had a chance to see the rural life first-hand. After a long night of shish kebabs and beer, I was woken up early, given another large meal and strong tea, and led down to the basement for a “quick tour” with the same pride an American might show off their new home theater.

The signature product of Moldova is their wine. The larger wineries have imported modern production techniques and are producing excellent wine at very inexpensive prices. Still, any Moldovan worth their salt has a large store of homemade wine from the massive barrel or two in their basement.

The basement belongs to the Moldovan men just as the kitchen is the preserve of their wives. A single glass is all that they needed to begin showing off the wares. Several pairs of eyes waiting for you to finish the drink inevitably mean the wine is drunk quickly and with vigor. After a few draughts I stopped wondering why they had complained that the two-and-a-half tons of wine they make in the autumn barely lasts the year.

We sampled the open barrel of red wine, the older barrel of red wine, a little bit of the white, a couple drinks from last year’s reserve, a few shots of the grape moonshine steeped in walnut husks (to help settle the stomach), and again a small glass of the red just to round out the visit. I emerged from the basement before noon a little less steady and with my arms full of bottles of the local reserve as well as a hefty jar of salted pig fat known as “sala” – an especially proud local delicacy. (I made a personal note to avoid complimenting the quality of any other local’s sala.)

Posted by Jett Thomason

By Jason Gilpin

Odessa, Ukraine

Odessa has a severely Victorian character about it; the lampposts, sidewalks and infrastructure are something out of 1812 Hyde Park. The train station and opera house are Crimean War-era. The parks are green and manicured. This place is fancy, European, cosmopolitan and cultivated. Fantastic restaurants abound. Foreigners abound, and yet the locals do not stop to gawk at their odd tongue. Still, Odessa does have much more than a hint of Slavic culture, as the suburbs are populated with colorful Cossack cottages, the outskirts are disjointed and unplanned, and the outer skyline is guarded by wall-like concrete Soviet block apartments.

Odessa is a romantic city. Women in expensive fur coats are accompanied by well-dressed men out for a formal walk in a place that oozes a need to see and be seen. Signs advertising “marriage agencies” promised to match attractive young women with wealthy foreigners. Fashionable young couples embrace on the waterfront. They saunter across an unassuming pedestrian overpass festooned with thousands of padlocks professing love, past, present and future.

Although some might call it an industrial eyesore, I found the port area to be a vibrantly colorful picture screen displaying Ukraine’s relationship with the rest of the world; a maritime commercial traffic jam seemed to crowd the waters immediate the port, probably from Turkey, Russia, Georgia, Bulgaria, Crimea. Cargo was hurriedly off-and-on loaded from far flung places all over the world via the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles.

Many Americans are familiar with the word Odessa (although probably can’t tell you where it is), because of New York’s Brighton Beach’s Little Odessa, a district of New York founded by Ukrainian and Russian expats. In fact, America and Odessa have a lot in common. In both lands settlement was founded by diverse gigantic refugee populations.

Odessa’s early 19th century hay day was exactly that; it was founded as a free trade settlement bolstered by grain exports from the Russian Empire. German, Greek, Moldavian, Jewish, Swiss, and Polish mingled comfortably with the Ukrainian and Russian peasants, and the Nogay Tatars from the steppes. It was a city founded and managed by foreigners, existing with some autonomy in the Russian Empire. There seemed to be a very real sense of freedom here at that time.

The forefathers of the United States would have much in common with Odessa’s founder, a Frenchman by the name of Lycee Richelieu. After establishing the city and being credited with its economic success, Richelieu was appointed France’s first Prime Minister after the fall of Napoleon.

Like the Independence Hall crew, Richelieu was a man of the Enlightenment. I rather like the way Neal Ascherson, (author of the Black Sea where much of the historical info for this post comes from), put Richelieu’s character: “…energetic, austere, universal, lonely.”

The city evidently found much in common with her founder.

In my long afternoon stroll in this especially quixotic place, I felt like I did as well.

Jason Gilpin has just returned from being an NGO Facilitator in the US Peace Corps in Sevastopol, Ukraine and is currently an MA candidate (Int’l Administration) at the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies (formerly GSIS). He blogs at Gilpin on the Globe: http://jasongilpin.blogspot.com/