(Photos disponibles ici)

(Des infos pratiques pour les cyclistes sont disponibles ici)

(Photos available here)

(Practical information for cyclists available here)

Hello from Kisumu once more, where we’re back from Mfangano a little earlier than expected.  Everything went great on the island, but the combination of torrential rains and sleeping in a tent did send us packing in the end.  Still, it was an unforgettable experience and we’re glad we went.

To get to the island, we biked south from Kisumu and around the bay to Mbita.  It was two days along the worst dirt (mud, more appropriately) roads we had seen yet, including a mistake with directions that doubled our distance on the second day and put our marriage on the line – all culminating in the confused stares from people we met in Mbita and Mfangano: “There’s a ferry from Kisumu you know, and a paved road – it’s only an hour by Matatu…”

Well thanks. Now let us never speak of the shortcut again.

But the ’shortcut’ wasn’t all bad since it gave us the chance to meet Erin and Paul, a couple working with Suba Environmental Education Kenya (SEEK), a Christian environmental organization in Mbita that took pity on us at the end of a long day and offered us a place to camp in their officially closed campsite.  They even cooked us dinner.

Sometimes if you leave things up to chance they work out pretty well.  The next day for instance, we got on the boat to Mfangano not quite knowing where we were going: through an e-mail miscommunication, we weren’t sure Richard, our host, was expecting us.

But then again fortune favored the lost – crammed next to us on the boat was a friend of Richard’s, a nurse at the health center on the island who took it upon himself to explain to the boatmen where to drop us off.  He even walked us to Richard’s house.  Ruth, Richard’s wife, seemed surprised to see us – Richard as well we think, but he didn’t show it – he’s a pretty laid-back guy.

That first day we learned more about the island and the project Richard is working on – Organic Health Response.  It’s not quite the Permaculture eco-village we had expected, but it’s a very cool project nonetheless, working to build a community response to the local HIV/AIDS epidemic.  The infection rate on Mfangano is officially over 30% (and actually may be closer to 40%), making it one of the highest rates in the world.  As someone told us later in our visit: “Here, no one cares about Malaria, it’s only AIDS that matters.”

Why such a high rate?  Well partially because the area is littered with small islands and so any sickness gets around quick.  But the social and public health catastrophe that AIDS represents is also (and for those of you who have read Edward Goldsmith, this should come as no surprise) directly related to the destruction of the local environment – in particular through the introduction of the nile perch and massive deforestation…

Now okay, I don’t want to get too historical on all y’all, but it is worth a little digression here…

The nile perch is not native to Lake Victoria – it was introduced by the British in 1954 in order to create a commercial fishing industry.  The fish though are carnivores – even cannibals – and lacking a natural non-human predator in the lake they have thrived, bringing hundreds of other species of fish to or near to extinction – while themselves growing to enormous sizes of up to 250 kg.

The nile perch are caught for export mainly since no locals can afford the larger ones, and Lake Victoria Nile Perch are a major ingredient in fish sticks and white-fish all over the world.  If you eat fish, you have probably eaten nile perch caught in Lake Victoria – it is probably even for sale labeled as such at your local supermarket.

This brought the cash economy to the region.  Fishermen are paid each day in cash – an obvious incentive over farming, where months of planning and preparation and capital are needed for an unsure result. It brought migrants to the region as well, and the migrants, in addition to putting more pressure on local forests and food supplies, brought HIV/AIDS along with them.

In the past, when fishing was small scale and local, it could be combined with small-scale farming and people could subsist.  Today though, as fishing has reached an industrial level, fish stocks are decreasing, and as fishermen spend more time in their boats to earn a living they spend less time on their land.  The economy now relies totally on fish and the cash it brings in to buy food.

The other aspect of this whole problem is deforestation.  Because there is no refrigeration in the area, fish have traditionally been preserved through drying.  Yet the nile perch is too fat to be dried and must be smoked, thus using more fuel – and thus cutting down more trees since fuel on Mfangano means charcoal.   The huge forests which once covered the island are now nearly nonexistent, only still standing in a few groves of sacred trees (another nice note for you Goldsmith fans).

Some of the islands around Mfangano are completely deforested.  They are just piles of rocks in the lake which serve as village, latrine, kitchen, garden…  All cooking fuel has to be imported and almost all food as well, with the forest on Mfangano being cut to provide fuel for smaller islands.  And then with deforestation comes soil erosion, drought, and desertification, making farming even harder than before; making fishing seem even easier.

So what happens on those treeless islands?  The men fish.  The women?  Those without husbands rely on the only opportunity available to earn money to buy food – prostitution.  This is the fish for sex trade, and it’s a vicious cycle: the more women are forced to turn to prostitution (without condoms of course), the more HIV/AIDS spreads, the more orphans and widows there are, the more they are forced to turn to prostitution, the more…  Combine all this with declining fish stocks, which mean that even if fish is still available for export, in order to get it locally you have to have a ’special relationship’ with a fisherman, and well, you get a perfect environmental/social/health storm yielding a 40% HIV/AIDS rate.

You can see where something has to stop, and that is where Richard’s organization comes in, working to restore the sense of community and respect for the environment and to empower island residents to take responsibility for their own futures.  It’s also pretty clear (to us at least) that permaculture can play a role in all this.  What could an island facing a lack of farmers and a huge deforestation problem need more than food forests and do-nothing agriculture?

But anyway, enough of the history lesson – in fact, I’m kind of hesitant to mention all of that.  It’s not that it’s not important or interesting, but it’s just that it gives the impression we too often have of Kenya that it’s a country torn by misery where people are crawling in the dirt and barely finding a reason to wake up in the morning and face their horrible horrible lives…  Poverty porn, if you will.

The reality is, people here are living, just like anywhere else – they are getting by with their families and their friends and there is just as much laughter here as anywhere else in the world.

Once we got settled, we spent our nights sleeping in our tent in the front yard of Richard’s temporary house – 25 square meters rented just outside the village of Sena.  Richard had just bought a new piece of land when we arrived, and was in the process of building the family’s future home there.  In the mean time, the small house was enough for Richard and Ruth, their three children, and three cousins in from out of town.

Richard’s plans for his new land included not only the house though, which was almost done when we left, but a vision of a huge organic farm similar to that of his uncle Joel, farther up the island where most WWOOFers stay.

“Trees,” Richard told us when we asked what he wanted to plant.  “I want lots of trees.”

And so with surprisingly little cajoling – Richard really is a laid-back guy – we set out to work with him to make a design for his land.  (There’s more information on that in the permaculture section, so we won’t bore you here.)

For the first week or so, work entailed waking up around 7:00 and heading out to the site to dig holes  for a perimeter line of trees.  Around 9:30, one of Richard’s cousins would bring us breakfast and tea; around 11:00 Richard would announce it was too hot to work and we would head back home.  The walks to and from the site always took far longer than the kilometer or so of distance would normally have needed – everyone we passed had to be greeted and pleasantries had to be exchanged.  In the morning though, when the air was cooler and with the birds singing in the trees along the way, it wasn’t hard to take the time for it; mornings might have been the most beautiful time of day on the island.

During lunch, we would sift through all the permaculture stuff we have on our computer to come up with ideas for the design, and then in the afternoon we would go back to the site to dig more holes, maybe plant some trees.  At around 7:00, as the sun disappeared behind the mountain and the water to the east started glowing red, we would head home for the day; evenings might have been the most beautiful time of day on the island.

When Ruth (who worked at a salon / computer cafe in town in addition to cooking, cleaning, and taking care of three children) got home, she would cook dinner with the cousins and the whole family would eat together – nine of us including Richard’s cousin Eric, who worked alongside us on the farm.  By 10:00, Anna and I would be in bed; the others would stay up late watching Kenyan music videos or Nigerian movies on the generator-powered TV.  At night, the fishermen on the lake float lanterns out with their nets to attract fish – it’s illegal, but it’s beautiful, and the water glows with the specs of light almost like a mirror of the stars above; come to think of it, night was the most beautiful time of day on the island.

And that was how it went until the rains came…

We had been under the impression  the rainy season was over, but apparently the island hadn’t got the memo.  Just before Christmas we had our first big storm, and then Christmas day even after we had slaughtered a sheep and the women had cooked for twenty to thirty guests, the rain turned the roads into soup and no one came.  The holiday was rained out. 

We were left to eat as much of the food (roast mutton, mutton stew, mutton pilau, fried nile perch, fried termites, butternut squash (Anna’s contribution), frites (a la Belge aussi),and a dozen other things I’m forgetting) as we could ourselves since with no refrigerator nothing keeps.

And the rains continued, usually pouring around 4:00 in the morning and then continuing gray and drizzly until ten or so when things would begin to dry out.

Through the second week, we had to let up on much of our work on the farm since the land was almost totally clay and clay soils shouldn’t be worked when they’re wet.  We left a swale half-dug, which was a sad sight to behold.  We worked on the design instead though, and played with Richard’s children when we needed a break.

We were pretty used to life on the island at this point.  There is no running water – all washing and bathing happens in the lake, and additional water is brought to the house in buckets by the women several times a day.  There is no electricity either, though you’ll see plenty of electric wires in the photos.  The island is wired for electricity and even has a power plant that has just never run – a little problem of vanishing funding all too common in Kenya.

Really the only hard part of life on the island for us was the reception by the locals.  Not that people weren’t nice – we met many very welcoming, curious, and friendly people, and like we said, Richard and his family are fantastic.  For most people though, we were a curiosity to be heckled (in Luo ideally), stared at, and laughed at.  Spending your day digging holes beside a road where passing pedestrians stop to shout at you can get a little tiring to say the least.  Even watching the island’s soccer tournament became impossible when we couldn’t see the field for the children surrounding us and laughing.

It’s somewhat understandable though – there aren’t many Mzungu who pass through Mfangano.  Or at least not that are visible to the locals.  There is actually a very nice resort on the island, and several times a day we would hear small propeller planes coming in to land on the airstrip, mostly flying direct from the Maasai Mara (the Kenyan side of the Serengeti).  From the airstrip though, they then walk to the shore and a speedboat takes them to the resort where they spend 500 dollars a night to visit a secluded island paradise.

The resort (with the ironic title of “Fisherman’s Camp” since no actual fisherman would ever have been granted entrance) is supposedly owned by a Mzungu, but no one on the island is sure since no one on the island works there: the employees come from Nairobi, the security guards are Maasai.  No one from the island is let in and none of the money spent there reaches the local community.  Ahh Kenyan tourism…

Mzungu who walk around are a bit rare on Mfangano then and we never quite got used to all the attention.

After Christmas, the rains kept up and upon waking up one morning with water in our tent we decided the time had come to leave.  Our actual departure was a bit rushed, but we made our boat and only left a few essentials behind (who needs a map anyway?).

On the way back, we visited our friends at SEEK in Mbita, and then took the ferry across the bay and biked to Kisumu in one afternoon.  Now back in our favorite city in Kenya (where we haven’t heard the word Mzungu in three whole days!), we’re running lots of errands and eating lots of Indian food in preparation for leaving tomorrow for Uganda.

From there, our plans are flexible as usual (we might try to visit a permaculture site southwest of Kampala at the end of the month) but you can all rest assured we’ll keep you informed with more interminable updates and incoherent rants.

Thanks as always for all the messages and e-mails of support.  We hope you all had a nice holiday – and happy new year!

(Des infos pratiques pour les cyclistes sont disponibles ici)

(Sorry guys, but the connection here is a bit of a pain and so there are no photos in the text.  If you want to check them out though, there is a slideshow available here.)

(Practical information for cyclists is available here)

Well, so much has happened since our last update that it’s hard to know where to begin.  How about with this: we are in Kisumu, Kenya now, just a bike day and a half from the canoe to Mfangano Island where we’ll be WWOOFing.  Things couldn’t be going better – we are happy and healthy and all is well.

Though actually it wasn’t always clear things would go so well – between the delicious breakfast chez Geraldine in London and our dreams of free and easy Kenyan riding, there was one little obstacle: Heathrow…

We won’t go into all the details here, I don’t think anyone wants to endure a blow-by-blow account of every day we’ve been on the road, but one bit of advice for other travelers: if you plan on bringing bikes on an Air France flight – no matter how reassuring the ‘official’ policy on bikes posted on their website might be, and no matter how reassuring the nice people you talk to on the phone might be, you’d do well to get there 4 hours before your flight – ’cause that policy, well, it’s not so much their policy…  And actually that’s not half the grief they gave us, but we did eventually make it out and after a sleepless night in Charles de Gaulle Airport we were on our way to Nairobi.

We spent three nights in the city (Nairobbery as it is affectionately known) before finally mustering up the energy to escape.  Honestly, we were kind of intimidated by the city’s reputation, though it bears note that we had only good experiences there – we saw no crimes and we only met kind, helpful people.

From Nairobi we biked up the Rift Valley to lakes Naivasha, Elementeita, Nakuru, Bogoria, and Baringo.  Out of Nairobi, and really until we got north of Nakuru, the road was packed with trucks and even though we managed to ride comfortably on the shoulder with other cyclists (there are always other cyclists here) we were left feeling like we had smoked a pack of cigarettes by the end of the day.

All of that was over after Nakuru though, when we branched off onto smaller dirt roads and to areas less visited by tourists.  We knew we were getting off the beaten path because the calls of ‘Hello, how are you?’ from every child we passed were replaced by, ‘Wazungu!’ screamed at the top of their lungs as if they had just seen Santa Claus and Mickey Mouse riding down their street on an ice cream truck handing out free candy.

‘Wazungu’ is Swahili for something between ‘Whities’ and ‘Crackers’ depending on the context and the speaker and well, we get that a lot – from kids mostly; they scream it the moment we come into sight, and then they run with us if we’re not going too fast (or sometimes if we are), even pushing Anna ’s bike for a kilometer or so in the mountains.  We can see why Kenyans are such good runners!

At Baringo we camped in a grove of fig trees where Anna spent a sleepless night defending the tent from ‘leopards’ and ‘hyenas’ and ‘boogeymen’ while Dave slept peacefully by her side.  And then it was up through the geyser fields to lake Bogoria and hippos and crocs before pedaling west up into the mountains.

The Rift Valley in Kenya is in the midst of a several year long drought, and water weighed on every conversation we had through this part of the trip.  It’s the rainy season in Kenya now actually – the season of the short rains – and it should be raining every night, though we have only had very small storms every few days; the shores of all the lakes we passed were far receded from past levels, and though droughts in this area are common, it is clear that much of the current problems stem from logging and deviation of rivers for irrigation.

None of this is any secret: the government has been trying recently to reclaim lands in important watersheds and replant forests before the drought worsens, but in Kenya nothing is so simple: the land to be reforested was given as gifts and rewards to politicians in past administrations as well as being sold to impoverished landless groups, and so the evictions touch on difficult issues of corruption, ethnicity, poverty, and cronyism that no one can easily disentangle.

Still, around Naivasha you wouldn’t have known about the drought even if the lake had receded a kilometer from its past shoreline: business is booming there for the flower industry.  The birthplace of most of Europe’s cut flowers is here, and the area was bustling with activity from the many Kenyans who have migrated to the area for the ‘good jobs’ on offer (yes, working with pesticides in closed greenhouses does qualify for a good job nowadays).

The scale and scope of the greenhouses was really surprising, we biked for almost half a day passing them, each with its own company logo out front, each with its own set of employee housing, each with no problem that we could see getting its hands on water.

Once we got out of the Rift Valley, biking two killer hills into Kabarnet and Iten and then to the western province and Eldoret, even if land questions remained on the headlines of all the newspapers the idea of drought was hard to imagine.  The landscape here was green and fertile, and when we couchsurfed in Eldoret with a Kenyan runner named Hillary, we even had to break out the sweaters the air was so cool.

From Hillary’s, we biked west and then south down to the Kakmega forest, the last Kenyan stand of a once enormous equatorial rain forest, and then down to Kisumu along the shores of lake Victoria.  By this time we had got our routine running smoothly, waking up at 5:30 am (yes, Anna has been waking up at 5:30 am, and not only does she do it easily, she does it with pleasure!) to be on the road with breakfast in our bellies by 7:30.  We then try to take a morning break either to eat some fruit we’ve bought along the way (mangoes, pineapples, avocados, bananas…) or to have a tea and pastry in a small cafe along the road.  Lunch comes around 1:00 or so, when it is really getting hot.  We can usually get some veggies here, balanced of course with either rice or a chapati (flat bread) or the Kenyan staple of Ugali – a mixture of water and corn flour with the consistency of week-old mashed potatoes (mmmm!).  And then it is biking on through the afternoon to our destination, wherever that may be, usually getting there between three and five depending on the total distance for the day.  We’ve been trying to ease our way into things, but we’ve still made a couple 100 plus kilometer days when we’ve been lucky with tailwinds or downhills.

And so yes, things are going well – really since Heathrow things have been even – dare I say – easy.  Dave has had his continuing share of flat tires of course (5 to Anna’s 1 at last count, though we have stopped counting) but otherwise the drivers are not so bad, the dogs haven’t been a problem at all, and the food is actually not so bad as we had feared.

A testament to how nice Kenyan biking is would be the fact that we have already met two other touring cyclists over the past two weeks.  One, Marcus, Swiss, was biking from southern Ethiopia (where, yes, he had stones thrown at him) through Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania on a four month tour; the other, Winnie, German, was biking for three months in Kenya and northern Tanzania.  Both of them have far more experience than us (more than a hundred thousand more kilometers in fact) and it was reassuring to hear their stories and get some of their advice – particularly that of Winnie, who had had six flat tires already on his trip (Marcus had not had one in 15,000 km) – including one in the first two kilometers – finally Dave wasn’t alone!

But of course most memorable through this part of the trip have been the people we have met.

There was Moses for one, who we met in an office while we were having business cards made (yes, permacyclists are now ready to be entered into all your TGI Friday’s business-card lotteries).  Moses works in the energy sector, hoping to use efficiency and innovation to bring electricity to the tens of millions of Kenyans who still live without it.  He told us a good deal about his country – both its problems (‘corruption’) and its strengths (‘the people’).  If all Kenyans are as hard-working as he (working around the clock to support himself and his siblings and parents and to try to remain independent – ‘a free man’ as he put it), then the country is rich indeed.

One particular idea he mentioned that stuck with us was about corruption: ‘Most Kenyans come from a background of poverty,’ he told us, ‘and so when they have the chance to sit at the table, they are going to eat until they are full, it’s human nature.’

And then there was Freddy, quite possibly the nicest human being on the face of the Earth, who we met when an ill-advised ’shortcut’ was leading us farther and farther from where we wanted to go.  Freddy came running after us through a good 3 kilometers of scrubland when he saw we’d made a wrong turn, and then he even walked with us for an hour to escort us through private land and make sure we made it back to the right route.

Freddy is a ranger at Mt. Longonot National Park and when he saw our bikes and how much stuff we had he laughed at us – ‘Why is it that Americans and Europeans always have so much stuff?’ he wanted to know.  A good question – and if he only knew how much stuff we threw out over the past few months!

We met Harun at Lake Baringo, where he grew up and now works as a guide.  Tours on the lake there are pushed pretty forcefully, with a mass of salesmen surrounding you when you enter town – but Harun won our business when he started speaking flawless French, and then even, upon learning Anna is from Belgium, throwing in a few words of Dutch (and of course all of this comes in addition to being fluent in Hebrew, English, Swahili, and Turkana).

Harun is a professional guide who works all over Kenya, but then comes back to his hometown when he is between contracts.  In the town they have now organized a type of co-op, where local restaurants, boat guides, and fishermen work together to share the money they make from tourists and ensure that it is all reinvested into the community.  Rather than competing to everyone’s detriment, they cooperate.

The co-op has dozens of members, and all of the money we paid for our tour on the lake was handed directly over to them, to then be divided up by need.  Gilbert, who worked in a restaurant we ate at, gets help from the co-op to cover the expenses of his education for instance, and then when he is off from school he works in town and contributes his earnings to the community.

And of course Harun is also a snake-hunter (you know, just catching black mambas and spitting cobras and then milking them for their venom to make anti-venom – your typical superhero stuff) and an ornithologist and just about everything else you could think of – an impressive person through and through.

Patrick is a school teacher in Iten, a small town up in the mountains on the edge of the Rift Valley.  We shared a Coke together (the first time he had ever had a conversation with wazungu) while looking out from our campsite on the valley.  Patrick also shook his head at the state of corruption in Kenya – everyone we talked to did – and he was most impressed that we managed to save money for our trip during several years.  ‘We Africans are too pessimistic to save money I think,’ he told us.

The last person we feel like we should mention was Hillary, our couchsurfing host around Eldoret.  Hillary is a runner who lives and trains in just about the most beautiful place on Earth.  He welcomed us to his home in the mountains like kings and we spent the day working to harvest maize with his friends (none of whom could understand why we would want to do something like that on a rest day) and then even slaughtered a chicken for dinner.

Hillary’s dream is to make it to the US to work or study (ideally to run of course), and like many people we visit was full of questions about visas and work permits and border crossings.  These questions can be hard to answer sometimes – Anna for one knows well the difficulties of immigrants trying to get into Europe, and the US isn’t any better.  And to hear such a desperate desire to escape this country from someone who really seems to have everything that we dream of having – a little land, cows, chickens, rabbits, and a community of friends and family within walking distance.  To give that up to spend your life trying to stay out of closed centers and working for pennies a day…  It’s hard to fathom sometimes.

But if we have learned anything lately it’s that you can’t tell people what to dream, you can only hope that they achieve it.

And that’s that for us I guess.  Feel free to check out the photos and leave us a comment, and we’ll update again in a month or so when we’re back in touch from Mfangano Island.  As always, our Google Group is the best way to know when we update the site, so feel free to sign up!

Thanks for reading this far, and happy holidays!