What a luxury to be able to travel for an entire month. This has never happened before in our working lives (and may never happen again, unless we remain expats). At first, we had quite exaggerated views of what we could accomplish in a month. “Let’s go to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and maybe Hong Kong too!” we thought. Continue reading
Extra-Congo Affairs
We’ve only been here a few months, yet already we’re cheating on Congo.
One of the benefits of being an expatriate is having generous vacation time and an annual travel budget. The idea is that the company wants us to be able to go home every so often to keep up on things, but it’s okay to go elsewhere, too. Since we don’t have many loose ends at home, we’d like to use the opportunity to travel to far-flung places, especially those hard to reach from the States.
Our first vacation will be to Southeast Asia. I feel guilty that we’re not exploring more of Africa instead. But my husband (who’s been here longer than I) had one request for our first Christmas abroad: it must be somewhere developed. Apart from South Africa, I don’t know if “developed” is a good description of the continent, but I hope we find out during our stay here. I want to see Ethiopia, Ghana, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, Namibia, Botswana… I want to see it all. But, to be fair, Asia has been on both our must-see lists the longest. And living in the eastern hemisphere has its advantages. So off to Asia we go…
First snake sighting
My part-time gardener, Lenge, came to the door today, all excited and definitely out of character. “Madame, madame! Le serpent!” He motioned for me to follow him. I grabbed my camera and did.
He took me down the gravel path a bit, where two other gardeners were standing around watching. He pointed to the green snake on the ground. Green mamba, I thought instinctively. Because they’re around, they’re dangerous, and this guy was definitely green.
I stepped forward to get a better look. The snake turned towards me just a bit. The three Congolese guys jumped backwards. Very helpful they would be in a pinch, I thought. But I wasn’t within striking distance, and darn it I wanted that picture. I stepped forward again and snapped this shot.
My amateur research online shows a Green Mamba that matches this description exactly. But I shipped the photo off to our resident doctor and herpetologist, who answered that it looks like the Angolan Green snake – in his words “harmless but can put up a good fight”!
So, how’s this thing work?
Before turning to WordPress for help with the your-emails-come-from-Nigeria-therefore-we-will-block-them problem, I used to send my travel stories to friends and family via email. Below is an archive of those. If you’re new to my blog, these may help give some background to who we are and why the heck we are in Congo. (And if you were a cox.net customer in my address book at the time, you may have missed some of these!)
For the record… I started working on this blog in November, and didn’t actually “publish” it until… umm, August? Such is the speed of the internet here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful we have internet at all… I’m just sayin’.
As a result, the “date published” of the stories below match the date I emailed them, but posts since then have been artificially engineered to match the actual date of the event. Well, some of them. A little confusing, maybe, if you’re watching closely…
Adventures in… umm, not Congo
ok, actually emailed on December 17, and also after a few cocktails…
Hello everybody, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and are gearing up for a fantastic Christmas! My apologies for being incommunicado lately… every waking minute with my computer has been focused on vacation planning. Lemme tell ya, when every click takes 5 minutes to respond, and mysterious “disconnection” and “quota exceeded” errors pop up each day to contend with, planning a vacation to — where? anywhere! — can be a tall order. This one took me two months.
But finally all the tickets were ordered, and all the hotels connected by train, plane, or boat, and vacation we are now on. Southeast Asia was the call… and not because we don’t want to see more of Africa, but because Asia was on our must-see list first. And living in the eastern hemisphere has its advantages. Continue reading
Likasi Visit
A few months after we moved here, Seb’s chief geologist and Congolese mentor Papa Nzita invited us to meet his family and have a look around his adopted hometown of nearby Likasi, about two hours east by dirt road. Built up by the Belgians who originally called it Jadotville, Likasi was once one of the crown jewels of this region, even considered a tourist destination in many travel books of the time. Fifty years later and you can still see the beauty of the place… if you look with Congified glasses. Ignore the potholes, the peeling paint, every third abandoned or crumbled building and you’ll discover the skeleton of a beautiful colonial capital. Wide tree-lined boulevards, grand art-deco buildings, and roundabouts with large fountains (some of them even with water!). Surprisingly, I’m taken by the place. If Seb’s job took him this direction, I’d be happy to settle in here. Continue reading
Adventures in Congo, vol. 5
Hello everybody, hope you had a fantastic Halloween! I enjoyed hearing stories about Seb’s niece Charlie-Rose dressing up as a skunk, and my nephew Ethan as Buzz Lightyear, even sharing his own loot with kids who later came to his door! Ethan might be an exception to my story later on about sharing.
But first, speaking of adorable little kids, I forgot to mention something in my earlier stories about our adventures in the Fungurume market. There are a dozen or so little boys that follow us around the market, trying to sell us plastic bags for 200 francs (that’s about 20 cents) every time we buy some produce. One little cutie who couldn’t have been much more than 4 years old quickly made change for our 500-franc note, in 100 and 50-franc bills, using one hand. We were impressed.
Oh, another story I left out, though on a less-pleasant note: While walking through the market I saw a pig-shaped hunk of carcass hanging upside down, and asked if it was indeed a pig. Our guide Jean-Pierre casually replied, “Nope, that’s a dog.” Continue reading
Adventures in Congo, vol. 4
Hello everyone and happy Monday!
Yesterday we took another walking trip into Fungurume to get fresh bread and vegetables at the local market. It’s becoming kind of our “regular” Sunday morning activity — a little exercise, sun, and cultural adventure. We went with our friend from the Canary Islands, Sergio, who has a gift for picking up languages. He’s fluent in Spanish, English, French, German, and is quite good in Swahili and even Sanga, the local local language. He was able to converse with people along the way (more than our usual “Jambo!”) which made it a little more interesting. This time we ventured into the non-food section where we bought clothespins, a funnel, and a t-shirt. Here’s Seb modeling our local fashion find!
Lukutola Visit
Fellow geologist and friend Sergio took us on a visit to Lukutola today, a Spanish Catholic mission in a small village on the concession. The mission is run by one priest and three volunteers, guys from Mexico or Spain. Sergio is from the Canary Islands, so he speaks Spanish fluently with the others. The volunteers are learning the local language quickly, and some French as well (which is less important in the villages). Hugo from Oaxaca speaks English perfectly; he said he studied in the States for a bit. I studied Spanish not very long at all, but it’s funny how it lodged itself in my brain as “the foreign language”… so every time I reach for a new word, out it comes. Since I arrived I’ve been struggling to switch from the Spanish article “el” to the French “le” and from the rolled “r” to the throaty French one. Ugh. Even though now with the guys I can say only a couple of sentences in Spanish, somehow this break from French feels like a relief. Continue reading
Adventures in Congo, vol. 3
Hello, dear family and friends!
I hope the first two editions of “Adventures in Congo” have left you craving more. If not, as always, please feel free to write me back and request an “unsubscribe.” You will then be moved from this list to my Grandpa’s email list, who never fails to forward a good joke. (Daily.)
It has been a busy two weeks since I last wrote you! We spent the past two Sundays — Sébastien’s only day off — trekking to the nearby metropolis of Fungurume, a town of nearly 100,000 people. I mentioned earlier that we live just outside it, yet getting there is quite an ordeal. To leave the gates of base camp, we have to notify company security, who both times have made a bit of a fuss. “You mean la cité — the actual town?” “Why do you want to go there?” “What do you plan to do there?” “Do you have an escort?” Once we assure them it’ll be ok, they write down our names, take our phone number, and finally let us exit through the metal turnstile. Continue reading
Adventures in Congo 