Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

We hit traffic as soon as the outskirts of Ougadougou were conjured up. We weren’t going to travel any further, because the car wasn’t able to last much more. I was glad that I was at least having a brief stay in Burkina. We pulled into a convent, a place where the couple had stayed previously. It was the cheapest place in Ouga, and was run by Catholic nuns. I asked Mitya if he was worried about all the Popish symbols and the threat of Arminianism but he didn’t know what I was talking about. He thought it was cool we were staying in a convent, and mused over whether the nuns would be hot and “up for it”.

 

It was mid-afternoon when we arrived, Ouagadougou looking far more advanced than I had come to expect having heard Burkina was the second poorest country in the world. The roads were paved, the people purposeful, and the monuments abstract rather than personalised. The convent was in a deep driveway, but there was no-one to talk to. The guy wanted to fix something up in his car, and Mitya offered to help. The woman and I went to another wing of the convent to get our rooms sorted, but before we could go ten metres past the gate, two men approached us. They spoke English to us, asking for us just to listen to them.

“Sure.”

“Can you lend me some money?”

“Oh, er…I’m sorry. I’m not…” I trailed off so I could walk away.

“Please. We’ve come all the way from Liberia. We tried to go to Morocco, but we were deported from Algeria.” I wasn’t sure how you end up in Burkina if you didn’t make it past Algeria.

“We want to go home. But we don’t have any money.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Please. Please help us. We can’t speak French.” I stared open-mouthed at him, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have Mitya to tell them to go away, or drag me away. The woman and I just looked at each other.

“Have you tried the nuns?”

“They can’t help us. They won’t help us.”

“We’re really sorry.” We walked away.

“Please? Money for a phone would help. Please?” was heard in the distance. We grimaced at each other. I didn’t know if they were being genuine, but I didn’t want to think that they were. I tried to trace through what they said, for signs that they had been lying, trying to steal my money.

“Shit,” was all that we could both say. I had spent nearly a day just talking to Westerners. Now talking to someone from Liberia of all places was draining.

Bamako, Mali

I organised the boy to get our beers, we would pay him once he had got us a crate. He had to go haggle over a price first. We had dinner in the same Chinese restaurant where I ate half my meal the night before. My stomach hadn’t returned to its former capacity yet. I had bok choi that dripped with a bottleful of oil. When we got back from dinner, the boy set off to get a crate. He returned an hour later, and the posh Englishman, the Japanese and us three New Zealanders sat around drinking and talking. A Dogon guide, who had wandered into the complex, joined in for a beer – I guess to make our New Year more Malian. He talked about the Dogon, and told us Dogon tales. It was riveting, if it was from a “white” man it’d have been laughable, but from a bona-fide tribesman, or so he claimed (he did have a Rastafarian vibe about him), it had that tourist-worthy level of authenticity. To add to the feel, he kept on trying to sell his services as a guide, though he and the Englishman got into an argument that lasted at least an hour.

“More-syeur, more-syeur, fifty-thousand is too much. It’s too much. It’s a joke no? A blague? More-syeur.”

“No joke. It’s a good price. It’s a fair price”

“More-syeur. That’s a joke. More-syeur.”

“Fifty-thousand is a good deal. I know the area well.”

“Oh more-syeur. More-syeur.” It soon became part of the background soundtrack to the night.

The English couple came along when the crate was nearly empty, and insisted we get another crate. They anointed themselves with the mystique of being the cool kids in the room. I asked the boy to get us another one – I felt bad, he was sitting watching TV at 8.30pm on New Year’s Eve, and we made him run errands.

The English couple disappeared briefly as they had friends, who they were on the rally with, coming here to meet them. Their two female friends bragged about their lipstick pink VW as soon as they arrived. Both had lacquered themselves in make-up in expectation of the night to come, wearing tight clothing and steering themselves with the rudder of entitlement. I saw them look around the Japanese with some dissatisfaction, and probably me, though they must have thought my observing them was simple lust.

I asked one of them the usual question of travellers, “where in England are you from?” She said “London”, which was narrow but broad enough to be of little use. She reluctantly reciprocated, asking where I was from, and I said “New Zealand.” My New Zealand accent requires rapid enunciation, and a muffling of the vowels, almost as if I had tissues shoved into my cheeks, but she responded as if I spat out some acrid patois. “Nusila? I haven’t heard of that. Is that near Bombay?”

“Ummm no, New Zealand.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry, my accent is quite thick.” I don’t know why I was the one apologising in hindsight.

“Oh, I just thought…” and she trailed off into asking her friend about which bar they were to go.

She and her friend were drunk, and with the English dreaded girl, they retreated to the bathroom to talk. When they came back, they didn’t want to wait for the crate, instead, they wanted to find the bars. They stood there squealing like pre-pubescent girls meeting a pop star, except they were squealing about themselves.

“Your hair looks great!”

“I love those jeans!”

“I’m so drunk!”

“Let’s go find some real fun!”

They left soon after, the English couple muttering about meeting us at the concert, like a comment thrown into the wind.

Just as they left, the crate arrived. We were already reasonably drunk, so an entire crate was superfluous. The Japanese were asleep. But we had to pay for it, only myself, the English and Ivan paid. The kid who got us the beers was heading out the room, and I knew I had to give him a tip, at least. He’d worked so hard for us. No-one else had noticed, so I paid him a 2000 CFA tip.

I then popped outside, and I saw the manager looking worried. The English girls had broken the communal toilet, and left without saying a thing. He had to fix it for the sake of the hostel at 11pm on New Years Eve. 

We got through five bottles. Mitya carefully paying exactly how much he drank, thus making it clear Ivan and I were paying the shortfall. The posh Englishman continued his price skirmish with the Dogon guide. It was nearing 11.30, so it was a good time to pawn off some beers – I gave one to the guide who told a slurred story about a rabbit and a leopard (he had been drinking beforehand and accepted our beer as if it was inevitable). We weren’t going to finish them, not even close. Mitya asked me if the Dogon was going to pay. I retorted “fuck off mate”, and my tone must have been sharpened with the alcohol that Mitya mumbled a “we’ll drink it when we get back”, rather than replying with the more belligerent tone you’d expect when someone gets in the way of a New Zealander and cheap beer.

The Japanese were woken up, hungover, and we headed into the main road. A swarm of people gathered around the Place, muted, waiting like embers about to be blown on. There was a makeshift stage in the distance, like an island off the coast. There were young people, thousands, lined on scooters clutching fireworks, cavalry preparing to charge. No-one knew whether to party, or to lurk. The actual countdown meant something, rather than being a much heralded interruption in a larger party as it was in New Zealand. There was no sign of music, but I assumed that it’d start after midnight. The posh guy complained about the lack of atmosphere, Ivan and Mitya looked disinterested at the lack of action, and the Japanese retaining the confusion of being awake for a short time, and being both drunk and hungover. Only the Dogon and I were enjoying ourselves, my French much more confident – my self-consciousness evaporating with the lack of forethought caused by inebriation.

If the crowd were impatient they didn’t show it. The bikes with a melodious hum stood idling. The countdown appeared as countdowns are meant to do – without warning, and an anti-climax. As it hit zero, I shrugged, cynicism no doubt. Perhaps the thought that last year was good and  it’s just one year closer to death that gave me my detachment. But as soon as the fireworks were let off, I thought 2008 was going to be the year of my death. Sky rockets and all sorts of contraband fire attacked the air like a swarm of locusts, whizzing past my ears and eyes, rearing up from all sorts of impossible angles, with the inhabitants whooping while also being fearful of where they’d beach. The cacophony lasted a few minutes until the fireworks had been used up, and people turned to the stage in expectation.

Silence. For fifteen minutes people stood there, but the crowd became restless. No-one wanted to move lest the concert started just after they left, but mutterings filled the void. Those who didn’t care about the concert did leave – Mitya, Ivan, the posh guy and the Japanese, professing a desire to go back and have a beer. I remained with the Dogon and we moved into the head of the crowd.

Musicians started performing but it looked like no one knew how to get the speakers working. There was a lot of clamour as people struggled to hear the acoustic instruments, but the thousands of people there breathed louder than the instruments. The policemen decided to push people back, with batons rather than with gentle pleading. For a moment their arms were frozen in mid-air as if from a newspaper photograph of police brutality. The night sky all that stood between the arms and justice. Then, everything exploded, the person next to me was pummelled, and he fell to the ground clutching his face. Blood was trickling onto the pavement. The crowd in their confusion moved like water in an emptying bathtub. I lost my shoe as the whirligig of frantic bodies surged backward and forwards. I was worried when I couldn’t find my shoe and the ground was strewn with sky-rockets and glass. I had only brought one pair of shoes, and somebody in the confusion might pick up a smelly, solitary running shoe.

Luckily the person who found it was the Dogon, who saw the curious disappearance of my shoe and grabbed it. We retreated back, as I scrambled my shoe back on, and the music started. The crowd settled as if nothing had happened. The man clutching his face was back up, miraculously spared from the crushing carousel of people, refusing to dwell on the tumourous lump on his skull as he went to re-find his friends. I started talking to a Ghanaian, it turned out, who recommended Kokrobite beach for when I arrived in Ghana. He talked to me about travel, about my impressions of Mali, about why I wanted to go to Ghana, and the upcoming African Football Cup. He also warned me about how crowds like this “can go crazy”.

“What do you mean?”

“Things happen. They happen to foreigners.”

“What kind of things?”

“You could be ok, you look like us. But things happen.”

He didn’t say that I had to leave, just, to be careful. So I left.

The Dogon Guide came with me, and we went back and drank. The beer was sitting there untouched, while the others were strewn asleep. The Guide and I decided to drink. I gave him as much beer as he wanted, especially as he came to the rescue of my shoe, and the worker boy came in for a while and had a beer with us too. There were still six left, while the English couple came in, grabbed two beers and left. They did pay, but we clearly weren’t trendy enough for conversation. I’m not sure if they bothered going to the concert. The Guide and I talked long into the night with no particular aim. I should have been doing this much earlier in the trip, talking to people without that magnetic charge that would draw me back to my mates – this felt easy. We just talked about anything: Mali, the Dogon, Rastafarianism, New Zealand, punctuated by nonsensical digressive flourishes. I stopped drinking but he finished all but two, which was helpful because we had to drop off the crate in the morning to the delivery boy. He left, and I noticed that my watch said that it was 4.30am. It was one of the best New Years I’d ever had.

Ile de Goree, Senegal

My stomach felt odd upon our return. It had been so for a few days since Nouakchott, but tonight it felt more clangy, white noisy. It didn’t feel like the alcohol either, growing up a lightweight in a binge drinking society had taught me how to recognise the signs of alcohol poisoning. I tried to suppress the feelings, and I fell asleep on my tiny mattress, my legs grasping at empty air but settling for the stone floor. Brief waves of nausea tantalised my sleep, but it was ignorable. It was annoying though, this constant stuttering, the dreams insolent and hallucinatory. I had continuous dreams, long nightmarish narratives that wouldn’t reach their dénouement even if I awoke, the apparitions returning to taunt me like ugly catchy songs. Eventually I tired of the discomfort. My semi-inebriated brain thought it’d be best if I tried to throw up, clear my stomach from this blockage, this inconvenience. As soon as I stood up, the food swelled up like an orchestral crescendo. And it all came out. I made the toilet luckily, but the flimsy partition immediately woke up the others. They were sympathetic, and I, trying to be staunch, convinced them that I was ok and went back to sleep with the faint taste of vomit cradling my lips. They must have thought my lightweight drinking ability couldn’t keep up with the girls.

An hour later I woke up to the same rush. This continued throughout the night, but it eventually became a dry retch. There is nothing worse than a dry retch, I need the satisfying gurgle, the emptying of a full bucket. With dry retching, it’s a lot of pain for no discernible reason. Your stomach feels like it’s trying to escape. But the dry retching was the least of my concerns by the third visit to the toilet. It had all exploded into diarrhoea. It was odd evicting your bowels just metres from your mates, and with no roof or functioning door separating you from them. As humans we try so hard to pretend shitting doesn’t happen – locked cubicles, air fresheners, toilet brushes, impassive post-dumping expressions to show that time had frozen between entry and exit of the bathroom, that we often baulk when reminded of other people’s daily necessities. Here I had no recourse to such pretence. I had no room for pride. The smell was so rancorous it actually made me vomit, and since I was already exploding one way, I had no option but to throw up on the floor. I was pushing things out both ends, like cookie dough being hit by a hammer. I couldn’t see what was going on in the dark. When I tried to clean my vomit up with my toilet paper, I had to get down on the ground and grope like a speculator, and hope I was cleaning it.

Mitya and Ivan were understanding though, immensely so. They didn’t complain about being woken up, they hunted out drugs, they gave me the sympathetic, empathetic man-grimace, which is the best thing men can do to each other short of crying on their shoulders. And the smell was the worst thing I’d ever produced. I didn’t think was humanly possible for something so rancid to be made by own body.

I woke a couple more times in the night for more frenzied assaults on the toilet, and I used up a whole roll of my limited toilet paper clearing the vomited floor and my body. I was no longer drunk, but I knew that the alcohol wasn’t going to help my dehydration.

The next morning I felt better after getting some solid sleep after popping a cornucopia of pills. I stumbled to get some lemonade by myself in the morning, returning to the restaurant which had now turned itself into a store for the day. I walked without direction or vigour, compelled forward against my body’s best wishes. My body felt like somebody had picked me up and wrung me dry. My bones were trying to hitch a ride on the other side of town, my mind wanted to collapse into the lava, my clothes drenched in sweat, and god knows what other internal workings were conspiring against me. I threw up the lemonade straightaway and at irregular intervals for a few hours afterwards. I had loose motions again too, and this lasted for a considerable time. I couldn’t bear the thought of food in me, so my chastised stomach sat in resigned hunger. I tried forcing down a banana, but that came out the wrong hole too. This was the first time in the trip that I wanted to go home. Immediately. I wanted to get out of there, back to a comfortable toilet, back to a warm, comfortable bed, back to home comforts like TV or music. Stomach bugs are as unpleasant as you can get – but this felt worse than an ordinary stomach bug – and my sole comfort was two guys who heard me creak all night.

I suppose it was put into context by being on a slave island. But context doesn’t stop the shits.

Nouadibhou, Mauritania

The next morning we tried to meet the Canadian again, in case she got confused with the am/pm distinction. Travel can do that to you. But she never came. Our driver from yesterday offered to pick up, though when I say offered, he told us he’ll pick us up at 10, so we needed ouguiya to pay a reasonable price. He also might know where the Canadian was staying, as he knew her driver, and we thought we’d ask him so she could help subsidise our trip a bit. No money changers were open and the only bank didn’t have a functioning computer. However as we gazed mournfully at a taciturn money-changing shop, a man sidled up to us, like a Faustian apparition. He asked if we wanted to change money. We couldn’t lie given our hangdog expressions in front of the closed moneychanger so we followed him to his two-bit office. “Money changer” was written in twink on his glass door, and a picture of a world map was the only other sign that he was a money-changer. He also sold biscuits. The biscuits were the primary business venture. He gave us a good rate.

The driver picked us up at ten, and we drove around looking for the Canadian. We couldn’t find her, but we didn’t want to pay for the whole car. We asked if he could find one or two people to lower the cost. He said it’ll be “crowded”, but it would save us US$16 each which all three of us preferred. He found two people – they were uncommunicative twins, and they sat in the front. We thought that was it until he pulled over again and told us to move over. Two more people got in. Ivan was livid, and tried to bargain our price down four more dollars each. The driver refused. The car wasn’t big, four passengers in total would have been comfortable, five squirmy, but seven meant severe contortion and no movement.

We drove through the Sahara to Nouakchott like this. Seven hours. We couldn’t open windows because of sandstorms. I never understood it when people said time felt long, I was always too busy back home, but this was long. Ivan and Mitya complained the whole way, refusing to tone down their frustration, assuming the others didn’t speak English. I had the least amount of room, on account of being the smallest and most malleable there, but I didn’t mind much either. I kept on needling them by talking about how much I was enjoying the Berber music tape that was being repeated over and over again. This story would be repeated by all three of us, the dimensions of the car shrinking like a room designed to kill James Bond with each telling, extra passengers thrown in with little concern to plausibility, as people would scarcely believe we were in Mauritania in the first place.

I did find the lack of fresh air challenging, squashing seven people into a vehicle was going to guarantee a greenhouse effect. There were, as you’d expect in the depths of the Sahara, no people. We did go past a tyre shop, camping in the middle of nowhere, with no evidence of customers or friends. I bet he sits there every day, patient, waiting. But when someone is forced to use his shop, he could probably charge them enough to eat for a year.

Western Sahara

We stopped in a moody town about 3am. No-one on the bus stirred, except the driver and the Saharan, who wanted a cigarette. A man was sitting on the side of the road with his head in his hands, the moon casting a noirish shadow over his face. A friend, or so it seemed, was trying to comfort him. Three ghost-white, almost transparent dogs prowled a few hundred metres down the road, without even a token wag if a human passed nearby. A street light flickered an epileptic glimmer of light, shadows carved into the wall behind the sobbing man. The town felt like the wind had blown through like the Pied Piper and taken all the life out with it, the latent ashes comforting scoundrels and empty medication sachets. We didn’t leave for an hour. Someone had taken off their shoes and the smell had made the driver uncomfortable.

———-

We went through six checkpoints on the way to Dakhla, from the Western Saharan border. We were the focus because we were tourists, and we had to clamber past everyone with apologies etched on our face. Each time the guards would ask our occupations, and I wished they’d instead use walkie-talkies from one checkpoint to another to tell the other soldiers about us. It’s not as if we were going to suddenly find arms and start a rebellion in-between check-points. Apparently the Moroccan government is trying to encourage tourism here. I half-considered saying I was gainfully employed as a journalist, or a Mormon missionary, maybe mercenary, maybe a human rights lawyer, but I settled for music teacher. Essentially you could make it up because there was no way of checking, though mine is technically true in that I teach in the popular music papers at university, but when pushed by men armed with guns, I say I’m a saxophone teacher. It’s simpler. It’s not as if they’ll have a saxophone out in the desert to prove it.

Fes, Morocco

It got worse when we got to the Medina, with its claustrophobic capillaries. The faux guides were awful. They’d latch onto you for half an hour or so, making you feel guilty if you cold shoulder them – “did you come to this country to not talk to the locals” or “what are you doing here? This is my place. Do you know my place better than me?” One especially persistent guy, a lanky, fresh-faced boy with closely cropped hair, focused on Mitya as we walked around the Casbah. He was jovial, claiming not to want any money, and just wanting to talk. However, that tore at Ivan’s patience, who roared back in French with “laissez-nous”. A heated argument took place. As Ivan hadn’t said a word to this guide, preferring to have an aloof distance between him and the local, this took everyone by surprise. Ivan was moseying around, keen on seeing the sights, smelling the smells, hearing the sounds, and didn’t care about Mitya’s new friend prior to this. But he unleashed, furious French flying, and the guide was bug-eyed in his surprise. I wanted to step in and say “he’s just talking, we’re not going to do anything he tells us”, but this was exciting to see. To see the emotions really spill over. And the guide was right. He had hit a sore point for me. Why was I here if I wasn’t going to talk to the locals? Am I to not trust anybody at all and assume everybody is out to grab a buck? Even if they are out to grab a buck, I can still talk to them. I never fully convinced myself.

Eventually, the faux guide stepped back. Mitya mouthed sorry and we walked off. He shouted at us, like an alcoholic, though if he could, it would have struck Ivan directly between the eyes, “I’m not the first, I won’t be the last. Go wash your trousers.” I wonder if he heard us guffaw at the epithets he unleashed – Ivan’s girlish giggle and Mitya’s more tempered chuckle ringing in the guide’s ears, but the statement was so ridiculous we rubbed our arrogance in his face. He turned and walked away, muttering to himself.

“He must know you don’t wash your clothes very often, was he telling you to wash them?”

“Did he notice the mud on the cuff of the pants?”

“Maybe he’s got this weird hygiene phobia thing going on.”

However, our barb-wired walls applied only to the locals – we soon met some Germans, whom we naturally assumed to be totally trustworthy, simply because they were “white”, and wouldn’t be after our money. People who I might have nothing to do with back in New Zealand become golden in the eyes of a cynical traveller. We were in a country that was exploited by “white” people, and we instinctively trusted them more.

Excerpt Part 2: Cairo, Egypt

It ended up being expensive, but we decided to ride the camels around the Pyramids. Sure, it was clichéd. Sure, I was blowing my entire Cairo tourist budget, but it did end up being enjoyable. Even if my balls felt like they’d been jack-hammered, especially when the camels decided to run down sand-dunes. Each downhill step was a blow to my future virility. Girls would enjoy the friction though, our guide confirming this by saying that this was his chief pick-up tool. He had three wives so it must be successful, which led to Mitya demanding how he juggled the rigours of polygamy. He called himself Jimmy, when that clearly wouldn’t have been his name, probably as a way to ingratiate himself with tourists. Maybe it’s like how a lot of non-Western families give their dogs Western names like Lassie or Julie or Tim.

We went up to the three Pyramids, on the back of these camels, guided by Jimmy and a little kid who shared the camel with Mitya. Much to Mitya’s chagrin. The desert air demolished the city sounds, as if there was nothing else nearby, despite the city and its effluent being part of the Pyramids’ aura. We saw the Sphinx with its missing nose, its steely gaze only more disconcerting because of Napoleon’s supposed target practice, and clambered up a hill to get an overview of the whole field. The whole area was the only remaining Ancient Wonder of the World, one of the most iconic buildings in human history. Its coarse stones had been caressed by my fingers. It felt banal though, I’d seen all the photos of their brilliance, read the accounts of their mysterious power, seen the tourist brochures, that the Pyramids weren’t new, immense, breathtaking. It was scarcely believable sure, but it felt like I’d just ticked it off on a list of tourist attractions to see. That was it. I could have spent the time talking to somebody.

Mitya felt compelled to ask the guide if he’d seen a haka before, seeing as Jimmy knew that New Zealanders were called “Kiwis” and said phrases like “sweet as” to us, rather than ask “sweet as what?”. Before the guide could respond, Mitya said “we’ll do a haka to show you”. Ivan and I dissented. Mitya was about to rip off his shirt but realised that while he couldn’t back out after his promise, he didn’t have to display his bare chest to the desert and the tourists taking their hundreds of photos. He demonstrated an awful rendition by himself, mostly wrong, pronouncing his Maori with a clipped fury and botching the dance with puppet-like movements. His cheeks blazed at doing it alone, but his enthusiasm wasn’t dimmed, and the guide and his little helper boy looked on with polite amusement at Mitya’s ferocious, pitiful version, giving polite applause at the end. This is a man who complains about “Maoris” and “political correctness” back home.

He wasn’t impressed at our reticence, and mouthed off to us when we were back on our camel train. “I can’t believe you guys didn’t join in the haka. How many New Zealanders have the opportunity to display their culture here, at the Pyramids? You guys are pussies.” We just ignored him. He knew we were both quite introverted, so he must have half-expected it, but I wanted to say “would you have done it visiting a marae?”

At the end, we knew that we had to tip our guide, but the others had little to no change, only lonely coins, so I was forced to give him a 20 Egyptian pound note, so he didn’t think that these fiercely proud New Zealand guys were also cheap bastards. I also knew that the others wouldn’t pay me back for this, given New Zealand’s lack of tipping culture, and their inherent cheapness, but I knew that our guide would probably only get paid on tips. I also threw some coins to the little kid.

The opening section of Getting Under Sail

Please comment if you’re interested. Any feedback (good/bad/unrelated/brutal) would be grand

December 10 2007

I have been told by many of my fellow New Zealanders that my upcoming trip through Africa is foolhardy, unplanned, dangerous, crazy – a whole host of frightening adjectives which seemed to connote violent death at the hands of strangers. But people telling you you’re crazy and actually feeling it are two different things. I don’t think travelling through Africa is particularly unusual, but I do have a paucity of funds, only one lock and key, and a complete absence of foresight. Not that the people who warned my travelling companions and me of our impending deaths knew that, they just thought that since I was going to Africa I was going to die. A cheery sentiment; it’d be like taking bets on a friend when he gets a motorbike as to when he’d die in a crash. I was tempted to be belligerent and ask “what’s the capital of Mauritania? Oh you don’t know? How do you know I’ll die there then?” But I wasn’t sure if I’d believe my own confidence. And my friend is still alive in spite of his motorbike. But now as middle age claws its way towards me, with my partial departure from the cloistered world of education, there seemed no better time to procrastinate facing that mysterious concept of the real world, and to explore the world for the sake of exploring.

It was my initial idea to go to Libya, to take photos of photos of Gaddafi, to travel over from Egypt, but apparently entry is limited to those with a tour guide. That required two things: money and organisation, both of which were too much effort to try and organise beforehand. I wanted to go somewhere like Ethiopia or Mali, so I booked my flights into Cairo. I didn’t want to follow the banality of a European cruise ship where rigorous day planning (often done months in advance) and queasy bellies ambush the concept of independent and improvised travel. Most of my friends, for some mysterious reason, take that option. I could go to that continent, Europe, with children, and again, with a much augmented cheque account. The idea of an organised tour group where you get driven to photo opportunities didn’t appeal either. The rest of my friends take that option. I must have some pretty boring friends. Maybe I had a romantic fixation with Kerouac, (not Sal, I was in love with the narrator), but I just wanted to do something that was totally unlike me. To no longer just talk about seeing the world, but to put down the binoculars and to pick up the microscope. But it wasn’t totally unlike me, because I couldn’t do it alone.  

I had to convince similar, or at least unwitting, individuals. I found two, and two only, whom I’ve known since I was ten. We share the type of comfortable familiarity which means most conversations involve a restatement of nostalgic nothings and the coruscations of youth. “Remember” is the most common verb in our conversations, and is usually preceded by “do you” if we weren’t being grammatically lazy.

Other friends had the problem of gainful employment – and those who didn’t, hadn’t figured how to conjure up money out of nothing yet (short of social welfare or money trading). Most, however, weren’t interested as they were saving for their OE to London in three years time where they would look for flats with New Zealanders and spend their time subsisting with other New Zealanders and talk about how great it was getting out of New Zealand. One of the foolish romantics I convinced had a similar outlook in life to me, or at least was similarly cowardly. He used his comfortable middle class position to protest the exploitation of workers, his ultimate aim in life was to become a bus driver in order to damn the Man who demanded a use of his university education. He was a self-confessed hippie, albeit one with short hair and lacking his own swarm of flies. For him the trip was him getting back in touch with his African roots he left behind with the Missing Link and Lucy.

It was he who came up with the idea of some sort of directional plan, a two month trip from Morocco to Ghana on the road. We’d have to travel through Western Sahara, Mauritania, Senegal, the Gambia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin and Togo to get there. I was concerned as to whether we’d get there in time, and whether we were actually going to see anything with such a claustrophobic time-frame. But it appealed to my sense of repressed adventure.

Conveniently, and dangerously, the other person was the complete opposite, a much more conservative chap whose life had reached its stasis with a car, a career and a house. He was evidence of the weird friend groupings of high school, of the veers in outward directions friends go following the rigours of adolescence, and the choices you make with your educational paths. I wonder if I’d have been friends with him if I’d met him now, without that trail of bread crumbs. He was invited on the assumption that he wouldn’t come. More for politeness. But he decided to embark on our adventure, and we didn’t have the heart to tell him ‘actually we don’t want you here’. I half-heartedly thought that it’d open his eyes, but in secret, I was concerned about the personality clash that ensues from the stress and vagaries of travel. The two lived together anyway (though also with a landlord/tenant hierarchy), so there must be some sort of mutual tolerance. But I still don’t know what the other with his ideological edifices was feeling travelling with someone who didn’t know what ideology was. But since he was coming we didn’t want to scare him off either, so we didn’t tell him the plan. We simply told him to book a flight from Cairo to Morocco, which he refused to do because he thought we could get something cheaper on standby than our $400 tickets, but agreed to do so once we had already bought ours. I should also say that the other two are disgracefully cheap. I don’t usually trust cheap people as they value money too much. But in this case it was probably a good thing. I didn’t have much money, and the last thing I wanted to be doing while travelling is to look for comfortable lodging. I might as well have stayed in Wellington.

I wanted to name the two after some symbolic Papua New Guinean city, but the only city I knew after Port Moresby was Rabaul. They had boring names, James and John, so boring that I have decided to invent names to go with them: “Ivan”, the intransigent Das Kapital sewing, soy milk drinking one (though he’s neither lactose intolerant, nor vegan) and Mitya, the mortgage paying one whose idea of a worldview is spouting off his recently deceased lawyer father’s opinions. I’m being facetious with the naming – lazy, unimaginative even – nor is there any sort of allegorical reason to do so, simply I was reading The Brothers Karamazov at the start of the trip, and those names seemed like they’d do (I am not the godly Alyosha). At least I had more imagination than their parents.

Hello world!

Hello, my name is Brannavan Gnanalingam.  I’m a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand.  I do a lot of film and music reviewing for a website called the Lumiere Reader, and I write occasionally for Werewolf Magazine and the Dominion Post. I also have a 9-5 which I like very much. But I also like writing. And have finished a novel “Getting Under Sail”. Yes, that’s a Rimbaud title. And like Rimbaud I went to Africa. Unlike Rimbaud I don’t have cancer. Or a body of critical opinion. So let me know what you think. I like feedback.

A blog seemed like a good way to get excerpts of the book in the public domain, and hopefully be a calling card/motivation for it to be published. Also, the whole purpose of artistic endeavours is to share something with others – so opinions, criticisms, or queries on the work would be really, really appreciated.

The book is called Getting Under Sail. It’s an account of a road-trip I did with two friends from Morocco to Ghana. The characters are fictionalised, but many of the events are true (arrested for mass murder, being dropped off in the middle of the desert, sickness etc.) I also try to critically analyse the purpose of travelling, and reveal myself and my characters to be nothing more than conservative, racist hypocrites. Kerouac be damned.

I also try to attack the idea that “Africa” exists. And attack how language lumps diversity and difference under single terms: Muslims, Africans, blacks or whatever, and how when we use that language to describe others, we can’t help but stereotype and simplify them. But enough of some of my thematic ideas, the next post will have the opening of the book.