the misadventures of Jonglei

My job sent me into the wilds of South Sudan to do research on education - I can honestly say this was the most wild and fun African bush trip I've ever taken.  We hired a Jonglei expert who turned out to be also just a great person to travel with.  Who would have guessed that a simple 5-day jaunt to ask questions about education needs in remote communities would have turned into such a trip?  Welcome to South Sudan.

Andy (our consultant) helped figure out the travel route - we were headed to Waat, then to Duk Padiet, and onward to Bor - with a few stops along the way.  It's funny to see how people pack differently for this kind of trip - Andy brought coffee and peanut butter, Pete brought whiskey and books, and Mike brought dried mangos and an iPod.  I was probably the least prepared, meaning I had granola bars, toilet paper, a headlamp, and a pocket knife.  At least we all had books to read by the dim headlamp lights.  It's funny the things that field people are impressed with - Andy was eager to compare all of our field pants - whose breathed the best, repelled water, and kept out the sun.  Mike was very concerned with the hat situation - he had an Indian Jones hat, while the rest of us went a more traditional route.  (I like the scarf & sunglasses, Pete went with a baseball cap, Andy had a light hiker hat from Patagonia)

It was the very beginning of the dry season when we were there (February), so the roads which are normally rivers in the rainy season were just drying out.  The first hurdle was our car not arriving to pick us from the airport, but thankfully our host organization loaned us a vehicle.  Our car showed up 2 days late, covered in mud from tire to roof, with the back windows busted out, mud tires bald, and extra fuel stolen out of the boot.  Oh, and the exhaust pipe was barely hanging on.  I would show you a picture, but I couldn't capture from one angle the sad story that was our car.

I love being in the field for the raw, simple life that you live there. Every meal is rice & beans, maybe add some chicken or goat, bucket showers to wash off all the dust and sweat of the day, sleep under the beautiful, beautiful stars, in bed by 10 every night, and awake with the roosters.  Of course it's easy to idealize it after you have left, but there is something beautiful about the simple life.  It's the reason when I come home from a long trip, I try to toss out the excess of my life.

Well, after a couple days in Waat, we were driving onward to Yuai - but we had to drive through a swamp to get to Padjiet and pick up the fuel that had been stolen and then recovered.  A bunch of kawajas can't just roll up to a town, though - first we got stopped by the SPLA, who wanted us to take them to town along with their giant kaleshakov, which is very much against the rules of basically everything.  We negotiated down to one commander riding with us, with his handgun.  Then we crossed through the swamp (which is where the driver had gotten stuck for 2 days earlier), and we had to go pay homage to the town commissioner.  We explained the needs, he allowed us to talk to the police and recover the fuel.  You wonder why things take longer, and you have to be more patient in Africa - these are the kinds of reasons.  Instead of a quick pickup, we strolled through town, had a couple meetings, and got on the road 2 hours later.

The next 6 hours we spent in the car headed to Yuai, even though we weren't entirely sure of the direction - the driver had never taken that route before, nor did he speak English.  Did I mention that he was about 16 years old?  yep.  Driving to Yuai was like being on a really mean roller coaster - there isn't really a road per se, more like a cow path, that sometimes is blocked - you guessed it - by cows or tiny villages.  After those six hours were finished - we had gotten so close we could see Yuai, but there was a swampy river in our path.  We decided to get out and wade through, so the vehicle would be lighter.  No sooner had we exited the car, then the driver drove it straight into a deep well, and it was stuck.  For the next 36 hours, our muddy, mud-tire-less, beat-up old SUV was stuck in that river.  For the next 36 hours, we sent more and more guys from Yuai town to try to dig it out, but nothing worked.  Finally, Andy and I were starting to wave down tiny bush planes - when we discovered the lovely organization of Tearfund (run by my friend James in Yuai), who loaned us mud plates and towed us out of the river.

That night, we continued our focus groups on education needs and had a goat roast.... fun tip:  travel with someone who is a local celebrity, and you won't have to dig into your canned corn and beans.  Finally, we got back on the road to Duk Padiet, which turned out to not have ANY space at the inn or any place whatsoever, so while the driver changed the flat tire, we decided to head onward to the next town, where Norwegian People's Aid housed us for the evening.  Pete scared up some beer, and that was our dinner.  The 'showers' were missing a roof, so it was like a luxury open air shower under the stars and full moon, haha.

The next day, we drove all the way back down to Bor - where we all got lukewarm showers and spent some quality time in the air conditioning.  It was great - we passed a few huge cattle camps, and saw the house where John Garang was born.  The next day we flew out, and of course I was amazed to consider Juba a luxurious capital city.

I'm sorry for the lack of pictures - imagine dry, arid land with lots of small brush and random rivers :)  I will try to dig some snaps up from my email archives and post.

Pura vida vacaciones

My former roomie Victoria has been bugging me to travel with her for years.  I'm kind of a bear to plan travel with, because I only want to go very specific places, and I'm hard to tack down for planning, and I don't like to make firm plans very far in advance - somewhere between yoga and Africa, I've learned everything will work out if I have a headlamp, a credit card, and a passport.

This past year, my bff and travel buddy got married to a wonderful man, and is settling down in our hometown.  With Becky all domesticated, I needed to travel with someone new - but it's really hard to break in a travel buddy on both sides.  Do you have similar sleep habits?  Want the same things from your vacation?  Get stressed out over little things?  Pack too much?  Have different hotel standards?  Anyone who has traveled will tell you this is not an easy person to find!  Because Victoria and I have lived together and are both somewhat laid back, we figured we'd give it a shot.  Victoria is a wedding photographer, a total foodie, and one of the friendliest people you'll ever meet.  She can strike up a conversation with a brick wall :)  And she's patient and determined enough to make sure we bought plane tickets and made some sort of hotel reservations.

We stayed the first night in San Jose with Victoria's friend's mom's house-sitters, who were the most delightful family!  Immediately when we walked in the door, they had fresh Costa Rican coffee for us, along with an afternoon snack.  Jeanette and Giovanni took us out for dinner at this amaaaaazing restaurant that served all the fried queso, nachos mixtos, and chilles rellenos we could possibly want.  My mouth is watering just thinking about it.  It was so fun to speak Spanish again - to remember that I can speak Spanish, and to try to translate for Victoria.  Early the next morning we hopped on a bus headed all the way west to a tiny surfer town called Santa Teresa.  I love taking buses around different countries, because you really get to see what the country looks like.

When we finally arrived in ST, we were pretty tired and hungry - so we headed directly to a local restaurant and had fresh fish tacos and batidos (milkshakes!).  Then of course I wanted to get to the beach as fast as humanly possible - I may have even skipped there.  The beach in ST is almost indescribable.  It's warm sand, crystal blue water, and open skies.  Rocky outcroppings surround either side of our beach and separate us from the other towns.  We were there a little before high season, so there were always a few people about - but never too many.  I loved watching the surfers catch waves, fall, try again, and there are always lots of town dogs running around the beach.  People are relaxedly friendly - it's pura vida, man.

Adventures were waiting for us, and we didn't disappoint!  The first evening, I made a friend nameed Melanie who let me tag along with her to sunset yoga class in a raised open-air pavilion.  Victoria lined up surf instructors for the next day, and made several new friends at the bar while she was waiting for me.  The next day's highlight's were banana pancakes served by the chef named Nacho (you can't make these things up) and our hilarious awkwardness on surfboards.  Our instructors were Marcello and Leo, and their surfer abs made it a little hard to concentrate on technique, but at some point I think we both got up onto the waves.  That night we found an incredible Argentinian grill and feasted.

The next day, our new friend Jack took me to rent ATVs or 'quads' as we now call them very coolly, and we raced over to the next town called Montezuma.  The roads are dusty since it's dry season, so we wore makeshift masks of bandanas, helmets, and sunglasses.  Of all the cool, fun things to make your heart race, this one was at the top.  Once we got to Montezuma, we jumped in the ocean, grabbed some sort of fresh lunch (including batidos), and then hiked to the Montezuma waterfall.  At some point on the trip, Jack took us to the highest lookout point over the ocean, and we all yelled off a cliff, Garden State-style.

I think the next day we took the quads to a fishing village and Victoria bargained her way into buying giant red snappers and sea bass - which we were going to cook at the communal kitchen that night.  One of the guys working at the hostel, Martin, used to work as a professional chef - so he promised to help.  Then in the afternoon Victoria wandered the town taking pictures, while I laid on the beach reading.  Looking back at this post, I realize it's written day-by-day, which is consistent with the feeling of our vacation - we slept as long as we wished, decided each step one meal, one surfing lesson, one swim in the water at a time - the best way to have a vacation!

We had decided ahead of time to do both beach and mountains, and to build in enough time for travel in between. So we rode a bus up to the tiny touristy town of La Fortuna, which sits at the bottom of the (mostly dormant) volcano Arenal.  The drive took about 8 hours, but again - we got to see so much of Costa Rican countryside. We packed the next couple of days with activities - went ziplining, hiked the volcano base, swam in the hot springs, hiked to a waterfall, and got mud massages.

We also took a coffee tour for this organic, cooperative farm called Arenal Campesino.  Their mission is so interesting, 70 families living entirely off the land - including growing natural pesticides and medicines. They taught us how to make real tortillas ticas, and served us proper coffee in a pourover style - wow!  We had a really interesting conversation about the way tourism is taking over the country, and people are no longer doing the work that they grew up with - farming. Arenal Campesino is working to preserve this life, along with several strains of coffee that have become rare.  It was hard to think about the tourism industry taking over the whole country and creating a class system while we were there as tourists, but I hope it will help me think about responsible tourism for future trips.

We headed back to San Jose, had dinner with our friends Jeanette and Giovanni, and headed back to DC.  I officially love Costa Rica - that is unquestionable.  In the future, I would spend the whole time at the beach, just because beaches are my favorite places in the world - but the mountains are also beautiful and wild.  Photo credits in this blog post all go to Victoria (have I mentioned how fun it is to travel with a photographer? I recommend it!) - you may see the real versions on her blog at some point.

The thing I love about grown-up vacations is that you just do only what you want, and you skip anything that doesn't interest you.  This vacation was no different, and we had the most relaxing time - full of adventures, sleep, reading, sunshine, and more adventures.  Vic, where should we go next?