Travelogue day 11: Walvis Bay, Namibia

Namibia is not nearly as poor as most of its West African neighbors, but it's still not rich (measured by GDP per capita).  It's right in the middle of the rankings, about the same as Egypt and Indonesia.  So I was expecting to find yet another typical third-world country, but I was very pleasantly surprised.  It is impossible, of course, to get the full measure of a country in a day, but Walvis Bay, at least, turned out to be surprisingly civilized.  There was some low-income housing on the outskirts of town, but no shanties, no vendors selling furniture by the side of the road, no animals in the street, no fleets of broken-down taxis, no one pulling carts by hand.  The town of Walvis Bay itself was virtually indistinguishable from parts of California.



It was at once a relief and a disappointment: western suburbia is comfortable, but it's kind of boring.

Nancy and I went on different excursions that day.  She got to see flamingos:



while I went out into the famous Namib desert, to an area aptly named the "Moon landscape":



It looks barren and god-forsaken (and it is) but there's actually a lot of interesting stuff going on here. There's some really cool geology:



There's some plant life too, if you look closely.  These lichens, for example, are normally black:



but when they get wet they turn green:



These lichens got wet because we tourists were pouring water on them from our bottles, but normally they get their water from coastal fog that blows in from the ocean about ten miles away.  In fact, when we arrived it was actually raining gently at the coast!

This plant is called a Welwitschia:



It's actually a tree (closely related to evergreens like pine and spruce), and this one is probably several hundred years old!  It is found only in the Namib desert.

Of course no self-respecting desert would be complete without sand dunes.  The dunes here are so big and persistent that they have names (or at least numbers).  This is dune #7:



Climbing up was not easy.  Walking was impossible without sinking in up to your ankles.  I tried taking my shoes off, but it was much too hot to walk barefoot so I just made my peace with the fact that my shoes were going to fill up with sand and slogged my way up to the top.



Up there, whenever the sand was disturbed it would flow down the side of the dune almost like water.

Even the art work in Namibia seemed like it was of higher quality than the rest of Western Africa.  Most of the art we've seen in Africa is wood carvings, but here in Namibia we found a lot of really beautiful and intricate stone sculptures:



There must be some poverty in Namibia somewhere, but they did a really good job of hiding it from us.

Travelogue, day 10: Luanda, Angola

Luanda, Angola is the worlds' most expensive city to live in, due mainly to the effects of oil money pouring in.  We were there on a Sunday, so everything was closed.  Hotels and churches were open, but nothing else.  No restaurants.  No shops.  Nothing.  There weren't even street vendors hustling us by the dock.  That was a first.

It was a little eerie.

Despite the shiny modern facade, the smell of urine permeated the 95-degree air.  Did I mention that everything was closed?  So no public restrooms.

Oh, the military museum, built in to an old Portugese fort, was open.



From there you could see the nice spiffy new city under construction on one side:



And this shanty town on the other:



You can't really see it from this picture, and I wasn't able to get any better shots because I never got on the ground down there, but there's a high wall surrounding the slum so you can't see it from the road.  Inside there are mountains of garbage.

Then, next door, so that the slum is literally in its shadow at certain times of the day, is this multi-hundred-million-dollar memorial to Angola's first president:

I don't think I've ever been offended by a building before, but this one did.  If you were going to design a building with the intent of giving the middle finger to a bunch of poor people you could hardly do better than this.  They have the money to build this monstrosity (and don't even get me started about the new Parliament building!  And the presidential palace!), but they can't clean up the trash next door.  Yes, all this is typical of African corruption, but the Angolans have taken the brazenness of it to a whole new level here.

As ever in Arica there were the usual WNIKAM (we're-not-in-Kansas-any-more) moments, like this guy slapping the water with his oar:





Never found out what that was all about.  Nancy suggested that maybe they were trying to stun some fish, but if that's the case it wasn't working very well.

There is apparently some stunning natural beauty in Angola, but unfortunately we didn't get to see any of it.

Travelogue day 9: São Tomé and Príncipe

I'm going to get lazy here and just quote Wikipedia:

São Tomé and Príncipe is a Portuguese-speaking island nation in the Gulf of Guinea, off the western equatorial coast of Central Africa. It consists of two archipelagos around the two main islands: São Tomé and Príncipe, located about 140 kilometres (87 mi) apart and about 250 and 225 kilometres (155 and 140 mi), respectively, off the northwestern coast of Gabon.

The largest town, Sao Tome, sits almost walking distance from the equator (0.3 degrees north).  In other words, Sao Tome has all the makings of a tropical paradise.

Alas, Sao Tome is also one of of the poorest countries in the world, not in terms of GDP per capita (it ranks around 150 by that measure).  But with a total population of less than 200,000 people, its nominal GDP is one of the lowest in the world, about $338 million per year.  To put that number in perspective, if Bill Gates were to put his net worth in a savings account at 1% interest he would make more money than the total GDP of Sao Tome.

So while the place has some nice curb appeal...



...once you get on land it's a bit of a fixer-upper.







The market is one of the most depressing I have ever seen.  It was so bad that I couldn't even bring myself to take photos of the worst of it.  Here's my best shot:



You can't really tell from here, but just about the only product on offer is mangos and limes.  Some of the merchants sitting out on the sidewalk (and I do mean sitting on the sidewalk) had a total stock of a dozen limes or so.  Even the stray dogs were starving. We tried to find something to buy that we could feed them (because Nancy can't stand to see animals suffering) but the only protein of any sort that we could find was this fellow selling squid out on the street:



At least, we think he was selling them.  He was actually a couple of blocks away from the main market, and in the half hour or so that we were hanging out in this part of town we didn't see him make a single sale.  So maybe he was just waiting for a ride.  I have no idea.

Still, there were some hints of real ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit, like the vehicle that this guy was using to get around:



And once you got out of town and into the rain forest it was quite lovely

This is an old coffee plantation



All in all though, by the time this day was over I was really starting reach the limits of my tolerance for seeing such abject poverty.

So what? They're Jewish!

One of these quotes is real.  Can you tell which one?

Adolf Hitler's spokesman, Joseph Goebbels, in an interview with the Völkischer Beobachter yesterday insisted that his candidate’s plan to bar all Jews from immigrating to the Germany is “really nothing new,” and even if it were, it wouldn’t matter because “So what? They’re Jewish!”

Donald Trump’s campaign spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, appeared on CNN’s “The Lead” yesterday to insist that her candidate’s plan to bar all Muslims from immigrating to the United States is “really nothing new,” and even if it were, it wouldn’t matter because “So what? They’re Muslim!”

The parallels between Trump's supporters and the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei in the early days are really starting to be quite disturbing.

Travelogue day 8: Lome, Togo

According to both the World Bank and the IMF, Togo is the 11th poorest country on Earth by GDP per capita.  That makes it the poorest country we have ever visited.  (We did once set foot in Mozambique, the seventh poorest country in the world: in 2008 we were on a safari in the Kruger national park in South Africa, driving along the fence that marks the border between South Africa and Mozambique.  Elephants had torn a big hole in the fence, so on a lark we walked through the hole.  But there was no one there to stamp our passports so I'm not sure that counts.)

Voodoo is a significant presence in Togoan culture.  51% of the population holds "indigenous beliefs."  This was reflected in the costumes worn by the welcoming committee:

Had a few more we're-not-in-kansas-any-more moments.  Here's a fellow walking down the middle of a major highway carrying a poster featuring anatomical drawings.



I never did find out what he was doing.

Here they are selling coffins by the side of the road:



I did not realize just how desperately poor Togo was while I was there (I'm ashamed to admit that I did not do my homework at the time).  I was just struck by how much more pushy the street merchants were than other places we've been (and that's saying something!)  I was just about ready to give up on the place and retreat back to the ship when something inside me said, no, you're giving up too soon.  So I went back out and immersed myself in the fray, and ended up meeting a gentleman who called himself Benjamin but whose real name is Kenake Kodjo.  I ended up buying a pair of figures carved out of bone from him, and he later emailed me this description of their significance:

(Click on the picture to enlarge it so you can read the text.)

But the most interesting part of the visit was seeing an actual voodoo ceremony.  There was some disagreement about just how touristified it was.  On the one hand, they waited until four busloads of tourists were all seated before starting.  On the other hand, they didn't really play to the audience, and some of what we were seeing looked pretty real.  Not real voodoo magic, of course, but real in the sense that this is what they really do, and it's not just a show that they put on for the tourists.

There was drumming and dancing, and after a while the men started to go into trances.



They seemed to really lose control over their bodies.  They had to be restrained, and a few of them were carried off "stage" by their compatriots.  The first time it happened I thought a fight had broken out.



After a while, they dug a hole in the ground in which they buried a bag of broken glass:



Some of the men used pieces of the broken glass to cut themselves.  Real blood was shed, which was one of the things that convinced me that we were seeing the real deal and not just a theatrical performance.



This particular tribe does this even when they aren't in voodoo trances.  They consider the resulting scars attractive.





After a while they dug the bag of broken glass up and presented it to the chief.  The glass had been magically transformed into coins.



That's the chief in the middle with his wife and son on either side of him.  He looked extraordinarily bored throughout.

BTW, I didn't actually realize that what we'd seen was supposed to be a magical transformation until after it was over.  There was no explanation given (another indication that it wasn't a performance).  It just happened.  They didn't do anything to draw our attention to it or to set it up as a proper magic trick.  And people were going into trances and turning into whirling dervishes the whole time they were doing the coin trick.  It was only after the fact that our guide explained what was going on.

Apparently, magic tricks of this sort figure prominently in Togoan voodoo ceremonies.  There was another group that saw a different ceremony where there were these little hut-like things that moved around, apparently under their own power.  Of course, there was a person inside "driving", but occasionally they would lift up the little "hut" to reveal a small animal (and no human) inside, so it was clearly intended to look like magic.  I don't have many regrets in life, but not having a chance to see that with my own eyes is probably going to be one of them.  (I found this video of what seems to be what the other group saw.  And here's a better one.  It's actually a pretty good trick.)

The interesting question to me, and which I never got a chance to find out (they ushered us away while the ceremony was still going on -- we were told it would go on for hours) is whether these things were intended to look like real magic, or if it really is just supposed to be theatre all of the participants know that they are tricks.  If it's the former, that raises an interesting question: who among the participants is in on the trick?  And how do they decide who to initiate into the circle of trust?

Maybe I'll email Benjamin and ask him.

Well, at least they've got rules

ISIS leaders have issued rules on the treatment of sex slaves:

Islamic State theologians have issued an extremely detailed ruling on when "owners" of women enslaved by the extremist group can have sex with them, in an apparent bid to curb what they called violations in the treatment of captured females.

I've been staring at that passage for five minutes trying to come up with something to say about it, but I'm sorry, I've got nuthin'.

No, I take that back.  I do have something to say:

Ever since the end of WWII the Western world has recited the mantra, "Never again."  Well, here it is happening again.  If anything, ISIS is even more brutal than the Nazis were in the early days.

Neville Chamberlain must be smiling in his grave.

Travelogue day 7: Secondi-Takoradi, Ghana

Our luck with the weather ran out here.  It was raining when we arrived, but I grabbed an umbrella and went exploring.  I found the central market, which was a really fascinating place.  It consisted of a circular road (called, appropriately enough, Market Circle Road) within which was a maze of little alleyways amidst vendor stalls accessible only by foot.



There were a lot of we're-not-in-Kansas-any-more moments:



and things-we-don't-have-to-worry-about-at-home:



like falling into the sewer

That hole is actually quite a bit deeper than it looks in this photo, probably about 4-5 feet.  If you fell in, you'd probably survive, but it would hurt.

On the plus side, the people were incredibly friendly, even playful:



I thought this was poignant:



We went to the fish market, which was lively, borderline chaotic:



It was really quite remarkable how friendly everyone was, quite a contrast to some of the other places we had been.



I met a fellow on the street who tried to get me to invest in his mineral quarry outside of town.  When I asked him for his business card, he rummaged around in his wallet for about five minutes before he finally found this:



If anyone is looking to invest in Ghanaian mineral quarries please feel free to get in touch with him.