It’s not snowy in Edinburgh yet, but there is still time. Hope everyone had a good Christmas. As on most days, I reflected over Christmas on how lucky I am with family and friends, not to mention being able to live in a safe and warm home and not to have to worry about where my next week’s food money is coming from. #blessings
Category: 2018
Ethiopian Birr
Going into Ethiopia for my couple of days holiday I searched the web for information about changing money. I found all sorts of useful information but not the vital fact that you can’t change your Birr back at the airport. It seems that foreign currency is in short supply across Ethiopia and everyone would love to be paid in dollars. So, just bring dollars!
Foolishly I withdrew quite a lot of Birr from an ATM on arrival at the airport. What I had not factored in, because I was ill, is that because I was ill I would not be going anywhere. However, I had a lovely stay in the comfortable and friendly Jupiter Bole hotel – mostly sleeping and sipping bottled water.
It was when I was leaving that I realised that I could not exchange my Birr. It is not an internationally traded currency so it’s no use to anyone outside the country. I took the only sensible course of action left to me – I shopped up a storm in one of the few shops in this terminal. You might remember that the other terminal has no shops at all – or any other way to offload money. Small troubles.
An improving situation – buses in Malawi
I have had some horrendous bus trips between Malawian cities but there is a new dawn. A new company, Sososo, came into the market a year or so ago. They offer road-worthy buses which leave on time. That is not half as amazing as being allocated a seat, which really is a seat and which no-one can take off you, no matter how much bigger than you they are. These buses book up early so you need to get your ticket a few days ahead, especially for a morning bus. As well as all the luxury of a real seat, passengers are given a snack and drink. The drink (hurrah for sparking pineapple Fanta) is in a can, which is astonishingly difficult to drink from on a bouncy bus. A road-block or three give me a chance to enjoy it.
The other bus companies are reported to have sharpened up their act considerably in the face of this hugely popular new service. The older bus companies are still a little more expensive (yes, really) and that difference of approx. £1.00 is significant for most Malawians.
Another major change on this new bus is the content of the music videos. On the Axa bus, the ‘old’ ones, the videos are religious people singing hymns – unrelentingly. The bus journeys can be as long as 12 hours. On the Sososo buses the videos are mostly of young people singing and performing modern music. You still needed to wait for several hours before seeing a woman in trousers on those videos. But it did happen, eventually. Wearing trousers, for Malawian women, is a cultural issue here. Msungus (white people) can, and do, wear whatever they like. Musing for another post.
Pillowcases (again)
My regular readers, all three of you, will remember my distress about the lack of pillowcases in a place I stayed last year. Well, you should be careful what you wish for because these pillowcases are my fate for tonight. I had taken the precaution of taking a chitenjie (a cloth) with me and I’ll take off these pink, nylon ones and wrap a pillow in my nice cotton cloth. It’s about 35 degrees outside at 6 pm and that is cool for here so I can’t see me sleeping on a nylon pillowcase.
I am in Karonga, North Malawi, at the lovely Kapata Lodge, which really is lovely, though with a few shortcomings. Just now we have electricity and water at the same time – a real bonus. I am charging my devices and cooling the room down with the aircon while the electricity lasts. When it stops, I’ll go out and admire the stars. I’ve had a nice shower. Hot showers are much over-rated – a trickle of cool water is all that I needed. Off to have chambo (fish) and rice now – a treat of this area, which is so close to the lake.
Tomorrow I drive back the 220 kms that I drove today. Mostly horrendous roads. Part of the road tries to deceive you into thinking you are on a good road and then you hit the caverns at speed. In a borrowed car. Sigh. At one bend I had the option of driven over a deep hole with pointy rocks or reversing towards a precipice. I chose the latter and survived.
Addicted to spending money
On this trip we transited through Addis Ababa. I have previously found this airport to be a challenging one in terms of there’s nothing there, the toilets are awful and there’s nowhere nice to wait. On this trip we muddled our way through the huge, colourful, crowds towards our gate. The gate is in the new building which is recently opened, or so it looks. Huge numbers people transit through Addis every day and the new terminal has lots of seating. It also has modern, western toilets which work. What is does not have is a single shop. There are a few vending machines for drinks and snacks and a water dispenser (yay for having keep-cup to get some of this water!).
My travelling companions and I agreed that our western, consumer minds were blown by the lack of opportunity to spend money. This terminal has focused on getting people on and off flights, not on taking their money. Shock. Horror. In the West the shops would be a priority and would probably be trading long before the departure gates were operational. Our sense of consumer starvation (not the best choice of word when thinking about Ethiopia, sorry) was startling to us all. We hadn’t realised how conditioned we are. So, I have no souvenirs of that short visit! I will be back for a couple of days, though, and hope to make up for it then.
Africa – huge continent, huge differences
Setting off on a trip to Malawi and stopping in Ethiopia for a few days on the way back, I am startled at the differences in how each country is able to deal with visitors. Ethiopia has a slick on-one visa application system. Malawi’s is cumbersome, both in terms of what I need to do in advance and in the four-queue system I’ll meet on arrival – check form, pay, get receipt, get visa. These were the people whose website said that Irish citizens didn’t need a visa but they explained to me that this was not updated and ‘all the other Irish people’ knew they needed a visa, so why didn’t I?
The modern hotel into which I’ve booked in Addis Ababa, in spite of urgent and kind invitations to friends’ homes, operates a shuttle service from the airport and responds to my email about that within a couple of hours. That is helpful as even locals don’t think it’s safe for me to travel by taxi on my own from the airport there.
This is not the place for an analysis of why these two countries are so different, just noting it with regret because Malawi, like Ethiopia, needs visitors and tourists and needs to make it easier all round.
Location, location and a banana
Hiring a car from Edinburgh city centre, it seemed like a good idea to do it from a city location rather than go to the airport, where car rental is cheaper but would take longer to pick up. Wrong. My first mistake was hiring through a website other than the car rental company. The second was not reading all of the tiny small print right to the end and back.
For the information of those who think they are picking up a car at ‘Waverley Station’, an easily-found city-centre location, maybe you are not. There are only two car rental companies operating from ‘Waverley Station’, which I knew meant New Street car park. The others advertise as the station but are actually at ‘the Omni Centre’, which the folk at New Street helpfully told me. Well, that is a cinema and restaurant complex but I went there anyway. I would have been at the airport by now.
Of course there is no car rental in the cinema so I phoned the company (always a good idea to have a printed copy of the paperwork). They gave me the location address, saying that they thought that Waverley Station was ‘quite near’. Never mind my response to that. So I looked at Greenside Row for number 29. Nothing. But Baillie Gifford have an office at that corner and the man on duty at the desk there gave me directions – ‘go down that hill and carry on around the corner’. So I did and there was a car park with a sign for another car rental company. Wandering into and around the car park, I saw a vehicle with ‘Green Motion’ on the side – that was the name of the company I had booked with. Sure enough there was a little unmarked office with two young men who are not paid enough to deal with the anger of customers like me. Not having my passport (what?) we got over but I had forgotten that I needed a credit card. I had given the card details at booking but let’s not be nit-picky here.
Back home, ate a banana and got a taxi back to the hidden car rental office. I would have been to the airport and back twice in the time that it took me to pick up a car which was located a mile from my home.
Motto: eat bananas, deal only with a car rental company that you know and whose location is known to you or very very clear. The day improved thereafter.
To see ourselves as others see us
The arrival in my home of a colleague from Malawi has caused me to reflect on my life and surroundings. This is her first time out of Malawi and she is astonished by my washing machine, my dishwasher, the amount of food I eat and the size of my flat. That is all reasonably predictable. What surprised me more was her astonishment at the lateness of the start of our working day. That her lost luggage had no chance of being delivered before 9 am (when they promised ‘morning’) left her speechless. That lost luggage is very common was a surprise to her.
Time-keeping, is predictably, an issue. While Malawians start their day at 5 or 6 am, they don’t rush around very much thereafter. How we can get up so late but we are breakfasted, ready and heading to a meeting within an hour seems odd to them. But we don’t have to make a fire before we make tea, nor collect water, nor wash dishes. It’s easy for us to be on time!
Long hot summers
Now that the ‘long hot summer’ is in recess, I have time to share my time travel feelings that it brought on. The last time we had such a long spell of hot and dry weather, 1976, I lived outside Dublin and went swimming every day. I wanted to swim off the ‘Forty Foot‘ but it was men-only at that time. As a keen swimmer I resented the exclusion of women at the best swimming spot on the East Coast of Ireland. I would go into the water at Sandycove Beach nearby and swim around to the Forty Foot, to the displeasure of the naked male swimmers there.
Sometimes I would be brave enough to try to go into the sea at the Forty Foot but was always challenged and prevented from doing so by men who were big enough and angry enough for me to leave, having made my personal protest. Protests, individual and group, continued until the men-only restriction was lifted but that was many years later. Have a men-only swimming spot if you wish, but not in the very best place on the coast. My days of swimming in the sea are not over but I’ve not been back to the Forty Foot since then. Must put it on my travel agenda!
Image from http://outdoorswimming.ie/Co/Dublin/40_foot.html
A day in the life of my Brompton
My trusty Brompton started the day in Oxford with the local Freedom from Torture group and enjoyed travelling from Oxford Parkway station, with its easy access, café (for me, the Brompton doesn’t drink coffee) and lifts. After a trouble-free trip to London, I used my new Garmin to get me to Kings Cross. That was a bit traumatic but is all part of the learning with this not-user-friendly Garmin. Then we both (Brompton and I) had a lovely trip to Edinburgh, where our adventures began. Having safely ridden from Bletchley to Oxford the previous day and across London earlier, I had three near-death experiences in the 10 minutes it took me to ride home from Edinburgh Waverley. Welcome home!
I needed to get my PC to the repair shop and had the ‘good’ idea of taking it on the Brompton. It did fit, as you can see, but it’s not really a good idea to clatter a PC over the Edinburgh cobbles. It arrived safely but I took it home in a taxi, going back to the lovely PC Repairman (who fixed it on the spot) for the Brompton. An exciting day, even by my standards!