Author: zora

November 14, 2014

Mexico, Supposedly Corrupt Police, and Rental Car Insurance

Tourist police go electric in Playa del Carmen.

Last weekend, the New York Times published the essay A Maddening Bargain with a Mexican Police Officer. The writer, Jeremy Peters, recounts getting scammed on his car rental, then shaken down by a cop on the highway near Tulum.

It made me sad to read this, because a) that sucks, and b) it was preventable. Oh, and c) the snide of-course-this-happened-it’s-Mexico tone–but on that topic, I drafted a rather huffy letter, which I’ll spare you.

Everyone should know some really basic facts about the law when driving around the Yucatan (and in Mexico as a whole).

tl;dr: Skip to items #4 and #6.

1. Relax. Corruption just isn’t that prevalent.

I can speak only for the Yucatan, Chiapas and Tabasco, but since 2003, I have driven tens of thousands of miles around that area, and nothing bad has happened.

I have had a grand total of two encounters with police, both positive. In one case, they very sweetly alerted me to the fact that I was going the wrong way down a one-way street. In the other, I was in a traffic accident that was probably my fault. I didn’t even get a ticket either time, much less get hassled for a cash payout.

Granted, I’m a woman, which I think makes me less of a target in this case (chivalry lives in Mexico). Also, my first instinct is to apologize rather than get angry, and I speak Spanish, if badly.

The one firsthand bad-cop story I have heard (one! in all these years) was from a man, and he got out of it by playing dumb: not speaking Spanish and not taking the cop’s hint to pay up. And he admitted he had been speeding.

2. You don’t have to pay the cop!

If you do happen to get pulled over–whether you did something wrong or not–and the cop is suggesting you can pay the fine to him directly…you don’t have to, of course.

It’s not like he’s going to shoot you or kidnap you or beat you up! He’s a traffic cop, not a cartel boss. The Mexican system is not so bad that you’ll be tossed in jail to rot. There’s a whole, functioning system for collecting traffic fines, just like in the US.

Call the dude’s bluff. Smile and apologize, and say you’d be happy to pay the ticket as required, at the police station or through your rental-car company (see #4).

Betcha anything this cop will decide he has better things to do than write you a ticket.

3. A traffic fine costs about US$50.

That’s just not very much. And maybe you were speeding. So maybe you should just take the ticket (if the cop bothers to write it), and pipe down.

You also get a discount if you pay within the first 24 (or maybe 48?) hours, or so I’ve read.

(Can I just note that Waters forked over US$120 in bribe money? Ouch!)

4. And you probably don’t even have to pay that fine either!

Here’s the amazing thing! Cancun, Playa del Carmen and Tulum all have laws on the books granting tourists TWO “courtesy infractions”–official warnings–before being ticketed for anything. (Links go to text of the laws; search for “infracción de cortesía.”)*

Technically, car-rental companies should advise renters of the law and provide them with a leaflet that can be shown to police–though that practice fades in and out, in my experience.

If you do burn through your two warnings and receive a ticket, then you have the option of paying it through your car rental company, when you return the car, for a small extra fee. You never even have to go to the police station.

Simply mentioning the law should deter any cop who’s trying to shake you down. Insist on a written record of the infraction, thank him for his “courtesy,” and be on your way.

5. You really, really shouldn’t pay the cop.

I know, you’re still thinking about it. Why give up any of your vacation time to police stuff? And won’t that little brush with third-world corruption make a good story later? (Jeremy Waters got his published in the New York Times!)

C’mon: corruption takes two people. Every tourist who pays up is paving the way for more cops looking to make a buck. You are part of the problem.

I was about to write “end rant,” but then I remembered: Most of the stories I read about corrupt cop situations, the driver starts by saying, “I was speeding down the highway…” or “My husband was peeing on a bush…” (seriously, that was on TripAdvisor).

Dude, they have traffic laws and laws against peeing in public in Mexico too! If you break them, you get a ticket, just like at home. It’s just douchey to think you can buy your way out of trouble.

OK, really, end rant. On to more info, after the chicken-car break.

Alas, it’s not for rent.

6. The car-rental guys aren’t scamming you, although it can look like it.

Peters complained in his essay that a $20/day rental jumped to $40/day at pickup time. I’m almost certain it wasn’t a scam–just the boring old law. Primary liability insurance is required in Mexico, but unlike in the US, almost all of the rental-car companies pass that cost on to the renter, as a separate fee. It’s about $15/day extra, plus taxes.

Most of the major rental companies note this in fine print on the booking page. Go to alamo.com, for instance, and run a search for pickup and drop-off in Cancun–you’ll see “Primary Liability Insurance” is an option. But only if you click to read more will you see the explanation of the Mexican law, and the fact that the only way out of paying is with very good on-paper evidence that your home car insurance covers liability.**

If you rent through a third-party site, such as Kayak, it’s worse–you see only a blanket “additional fees, taxes and insurance may be required,” which is so vague, it’s easy to think it doesn’t apply to you.

FWIW, Hertz is an exception–it carries its own liability insurance and includes it in the total rate, so you will not be charged extra. ~~(At least last I checked.)~~ [EDITED: This is still true, as of January 2017. Hertz will of course try to sell you more insurance, as rental places always do. Note, though, that Hertz is selling you on “supplemental liability insurance,” as opposed to Alamo’s “primary” coverage.]

So yes, it feels like a scam if you’re not forewarned, but the people to blame are the honchos at Alamo/Thrifty/etc. headquarters, not the Mexican guys at the car desk in Cancun.

Why drive when you can ride a triciclo?

So, that’s it. Honestly, you barely need a car in the Yucatan, because the bus and taxi (and triciclo!) system is so good. But you shouldn’t be afraid of renting a car because you’re afraid of getting shaken down by the police or car-rental companies. If you have this info before you go, you’ll be fine–just watch the speed limit and keep an eye out for topes. Have a great trip!

—————————
*Various websites refer to this law as “Article 152,” but the numbers are different for each city, and they change whenever the traffic laws get tweaked anyway. So you can’t say to the cop, “Dude: Article 152” and expect results.

**I don’t own a car, so I don’t actually know if standard US car insurance will *ever* cover liability on rentals in a foreign country. Does anyone know?

And just to clarify, because it took me a long time to figure this out: There are two kinds of insurance:

Liability insurance: This covers the damage you might do to other vehicles/drivers. Liability insurance is required virtually everywhere in the world, and often countries or US states require the car company to provide it, included in the rate, where it’s called primary liability insurance and/or LDW. But if the rental company doesn’t bundle it into the price, then you must buy it. Supplemental liability insurance is optional, and it usually just increases the coverage amount. As I say above, it’s not required–but you have to know what risk you’re comfortable with.

Collision insurance: This covers the damage you might do to the rental car itself, and it is usually covered by your home car insurance and/or a good credit card (issued in the US or Canada only; I don’t think European credit cards play this game?). At the rental counter, you *can* opt out of collision insurance (“decline the CDW,” in the lingo). Of course, the agents may try to upsell you–just like they do in the U.S. And of course, if your credit card isn’t covering collision, you have to decide whether you’re OK with the risk of going without it. And if you decline collision, the rental agency will put a hold on your credit card for a lot of money–between $5,000 and $10,000, depending on the car–until you return the car in one piece.

I know about insurance firsthand, from that car accident a few years ago. It was a great opportunity to find out how the rental-car-insurance system works.

September 26, 2014

“Old Main” Prison Tours in New Mexico

Tip of the hat to the woman I overheard talking on her mobile in the DFW airport this summer:

“And we were, like, going to go on this rilly cool tour of the prison outside Santa Fe? But it was, like, totally sold out?”

After I got over the cognitive dissonance (prisons? tours? upspeak?), I quickly googled and found…yes, the New Mexico Corrections Department runs tours of the “Old Main” prison facility outside Santa Fe. (Go check out that link now: There are two more tour dates this season.)

Which was still a little hard for me to grasp, actually, because that prison, which is no longer in use, was the site of one of the country’s worst prison riots, in 1980. Thirty-three people were killed, many in really grisly ways, and the whole facility was taken over by the prisoners for a while.

I was seven years old then; we lived about 45 minutes down the road. I happened to overhear the grownups talking about what went down, and happened to see photos (a family friend, unfortunately for her, was a paralegal with the state attorney general’s office and had to deal with all the materials). Let’s just say I learned a bit about man’s inhumanity to man, with a blowtorch, at an early age.

So…now it’s a tourist attraction? I was confused, but I booked tickets for Peter and me later in the summer.

Main entrance to the State Pen, opened in the 1950s.

It was a really good tour. Other sites of trauma and tragedy should be so lucky to have their stories told so well.

A lot may have hinged on our particular guide, a retired guard who started work in the facility in 1981, not too long after the riots.

Our guide in action.

His experience kept the tour from seeming morbid or voyeuristic.

The tour itself was done in interesting way, telling the hour-by-hour story of how the riot began and developed. You couldn’t really make up a worse set of unfortunate factors and bad management: recently installed but untested “bulletproof” glass; an unsecured construction site in one cell block (that’s where the blowtorches came from); prison policy that dressed “vulnerable” prisoners (pedophiles, snitches, etc) in different-color jumpsuits, and so on.

Clocks above the cell blocks were set to the times of key turning points in the riot.

Woven in were details about how the corrections department learned and changed following the incident.

These details included not just practical things, such as the more secure way they store cell-block keys now, but also “softer” stuff, all the various programs for prisoners and the like.

One goal of these tours, I realized at the end, was perhaps to explain to people why treating prisoners well is a far better idea than treating them poorly. Even my mother, who is a pretty liberal lady, said when we were talking about the tour later, “Well, prison should be terrible.”

Inside the Protestant chapel in the prison.

Actually, no, these tours seem to be saying. If prison is terrible, it makes people do terrible things–and then these brutal people will get out of prison and live right next door to you!

So, yes, please, teach the gang leaders how to decorate cakes that they can give to their kids when they visit. Yes, please, have prisoners grow vegetables and run a printing press and sew boxer shorts for the other inmates.

It seems to be working. The woman who spoke to us at the end of the tour said recidivism in New Mexico is only 48 percent–which sounds not so great, but the national rate is more like 75 percent.

The view out.

So, here’s to being soft on crime, or at least on criminals. Thanks, NMCD–I certainly never thought I’d be inside that building and hear the full story I did.

July 2, 2014

Another Book Update: Moon New Mexico

Hey kids–the new edition of Moon New Mexico is out! Check it out if you’re planning a trip around the Land of Enchantment. I covered thousands and thousands of miles last year, in a dinky rental car, to bring you all the news.

There’s a new section on the bootheel of New Mexico, way down in the southwest, and a lot of other nifty little finds. I love that, ten years in to working on this book, there are still new places to explore in the state.

That link above leads to Amazon, which is not the greatest, I realize~~, especially now that Perseus, which owns Moon, has been acquired by Hachette~~. Consider the link for info purposes only–hit up your local bookstore instead.

Speaking of local bookstores, I will be at Bookworks in Albuquerque on August 17, at 3 p.m., to talk about the goodness of the guidebook, show some pics from recent trips, and generally answer questions. Mark your calendars!

June 30, 2014

Book Update

“Can’t wait till your book comes out!”

“Let me know when your book is out!”

“Hey, when’s your book coming out?”

This post is for all my friends and acquaintances and great people I met while I was traveling, to answer their ever-optimistic questions.

First, the book (working title: The Crimson Sofa) is now scheduled for publication in fall 2015.

That seems a long way off, yes? This, alas, is the way book publishing works. And, you’re not imagining it, it has gotten further off since I started this whole thing. Thanks in part to my own failure to grasp how book publishing works. Despite having worked in the industry off and on for more than fifteen years.

Two pro-tips (which, in the spirit of all pro-tips, are screamingly obvious once you write them down and look at them):

PRO-TIP #1: In your proposal, don’t just guess what your word count might be.

It’s hard, right, that you have to say how many words a book will be, before you write it? And there’s no straightforward way to find out how many words there are in other, comparable books?

I understand, the publishing people have to do their own math, according to some arcane formula which mere writers don’t know. So when I first started writing, I emailed my editor as soon as I realized my estimated word count was way too low. Because I had, yes, just guessed in my proposal. (“Let’s see…Peter wrote a book that was 60,000 words? It could be longer than that. But what if nothing happens on my trip? Better be conservative… Um, 70,000? Yeah, that’s the ticket. 70,000.”)

Turns out, that was a problem. Turns out I should’ve been more careful at that stage.

Anyway…

PRO-TIP #2: 150,000 words is way too many words.

OK, I know it’s too many words. I mean, obviously some needed to be cut. I just didn’t know it was omg-my-head’s-exploding-I-can’t-even-deal-with-this too many words.

Which is a totally inaccurate paraphrase of my editor’s reaction, but an accurate depiction of the fallout. In order for my editor to be able to deal with my book, I had to cut it massively. My pub date got bumped, from next spring to next fall.

I spent the last few months alternately gnashing my teeth and cutting every fourth word of every single sentence. (Reading this post, you can perhaps sense how that kind of cutting would be possible, yes? Buh-bye, “just,” “really,” “perhaps,” etc. Buh-bye, parenthetical asides. Buh-bye, rhetorical questions.)

I spent a fantastic week in southern Utah, with no internet. I rode a train. In the end, I emerged with 92,000-ish words, which I just submitted today.

Which is crazy to me, because I eat that many words for breakfast. The last Lonely Planet job I did, just the Cairo chapter of the Egypt guide, plus some front matter, was 82,950 words. (Maybe I should have considered this, at the proposal stage!)

So, long story short, the draft is on my editor’s desk. I have no idea if the short version is really tenable as a book. I’ve been stuck in the swamp of it so long, I hate nearly every word of it, and I can no longer remember what the point of writing it might have been.

I’m hoping a couple of months off, updating my Moon guide to Santa Fe (approximately 98,000 words), will restore some perspective. Time usually does that.

Which, I suppose, is the silver lining around book publishing taking so long–you need that time just to love your book again. And I hope you’ll all still be around, still asking about the book, when it does finally come out. Thanks for all the support, over this long haul.

May 22, 2014

Kigali Genocide Memorial (and the 9/11 Museum)

A couple of days ago on Facebook, I posted this essay–The Worst Day of My Life Is Now New York’s Hottest Tourist Attraction–about the new 9/11 museum (excuse me, National September 11 Memorial Museum) in New York, and it got me thinking.

First, the whole museum seems icky, doesn’t it? Just twelve years after the event. $24 admission–what, it’s like the MoMA now? And a gift shop, for God’s sake. I have no interest in going.

Yet…when I went to Rwanda, one of the “tourist” things I did was visit the Kigali Genocide Memorial. Which is also a museum.

(One of the more bizarre moments on that trip was telling our host we’d gone to the memorial, and we’d liked the museum. “Wait, did you go to the memorial, or the museum?” Because of course there’s not just one memorial, or one museum. Our conversation went around in circles, like a Pizza Hut/Taco Bell situation.)

Honestly, Peter and I were thinking we would blow it off–we’re not morbid tragedy tourists. Except the people we were visiting said it was good!

It was great. It was somber without being grossly emotional. It was very informative (Herero massacre–what?). It was well lit and professional, but with no multimedia fanciness. And it was free–though of course donations are encouraged. The “gift shop,” in a little wood hut, carried a few books about the genocide, and some crafts.

The whole thing opened in 2004, on the ten-year anniversary of the genocide. Too soon? Not if you want a genuine memorial for people who died, of course not. (Though I would be curious to know how it was discussed at the time.)

The key to the genocide memorial not seeming maudlin or exploitative or generally icky was that when we arrived, a guide greeted us and took us to one of the mass graves. He briefly explained the situation, and the efforts of the memorial center, then we stood for one minute of silence.

After that, we were free to walk around however we wanted, with our audio tour or without.

I don’t envy that guide his job, but I think this human connection made all the difference in how we saw the whole museum/memorial.

Because, honestly, tourists can suck. I’ve yawned or daydreamed at some very serious places, maybe in full view of people who had been affected by the given event. It’s easy to fall out of the moment, if you’re hungry or your traveling companion has raced ahead, or whatever.

But one real, live person, talking directly to you–that’s the key to helping you focus on the place, why it exists, and what you might get out of it.

There’s plenty to learn from Rwanda, but that’s one concrete, small thing, and I’m glad I saw their model. It makes me at least not hate the idea of the 9/11 museum.

Doing the tourist thing, posing for a group photo at the genocide memorial, with Rod and our Rwandese friend Eric

May 12, 2014

Kitchen PSA: Cast Iron Care

We deviate slightly from this blog’s travel mission to deliver an essential message for home:

Cast-iron pans are cheap, sturdy, non-stick, and incredibly easy to care for.

I have to say it, because people seem to have the wrong idea about cast iron–that it’s somehow a finicky, fragile thing that needs special care. And this idea was broadcast nationwide last night in an episode of “Selected Shorts,” when someone read Marc Maron’s essay about his cast-iron pan.

In the essay, which was first published in Lucky Peach, Maron talks about buying a cast-iron pan at a yard sale and becoming obsessed with preserving the seasoning. He barely cooks in it (there’s your problem right there, bub), and instead spends all his time coating it with lard and so on. He eventually has a bit of a breakdown, strips the seasoning with oven cleaner, and starts fresh, and has more of a breakdown, and then I couldn’t really hear because I was shouting too much.

I know–the cast-iron pan is a metaphor for Maron’s psyche. It’s not really about how to care for a skillet; it’s about how to care for yourself. And it didn’t even bother me much when I first read it in Lucky Peach, because I figured LP readers knew the practicalities of cast-iron pan care already.

But now, here’s Marc Maron on a nationally syndicated radio show, essentially giving the whole country a quickie lesson in how to care for your cast-iron skillet.

Or HOW NOT TO. With all his fretting, he set back the cause of cast iron 20 years!

Dude, first: the whole thing about no soap? It’s no big deal. Cast iron that’s well seasoned–like the pan you bought from the hipster at the yard sale–can handle a little soap. The seasoning is not going to evaporate when touched with soap. (That’s why you needed to resort to oven cleaner–insanely toxic oven cleaner, on a thing you’ll eat out of?!–to strip it off.) When I’m doing the dishes, I usually wash our skillets last, with the regular kitchen sponge–sometimes it still has some soap in it, sometimes it doesn’t.

Actually, it’s water that’s not great for the skillet. Sometimes I let the skillet soak a little, if there is something crusty on it, but this, in the long run, will do in the seasoning and dull the pan. But once, for an hour, to loosen up some scrambled eggs, will not hurt the pan noticeably.

Post-washing: dry the pan immediately. Shake the excess water off, and then set the pan on a low burner to dry. (You could of course dry it with a towel, but then your towel would get a bit greasy.)

Next up, Marc Maron: the thing about coating the pan with oil and letting the oil bake on. Yes, that’s lovely, but you only have to season the pan when it’s messed up–like, when you get one from a yard sale, and it’s all dull and maybe a little rusty. Do the oil-coating treatment once or twice, cook a couple things, and then you’re good to go.

The best thing to do for your cast-iron skillet is to cook bacon in it. When you’re done cooking the bacon, wipe out the grease with a paper towel, with a little extra friction on the stuck-on bits, and your pan will look great. Next time you pre-heat it, the last bit of bacon fat will cook in to even more seasoning. If you don’t do bacon, do something else fatty. Eventually, the seasoning will naturally build up.

Peter and I own four cast-iron skillets and one Dutch oven. We have so many because they’re like puppies–you see a cute one at a store, and you just want to give it a loving home. Plus, hey, they’re useful–you can fry things, you can deep-fry things, and you can bake pies and biscuits in them. You can fry eggs in them. Truly they’re wondrous.

And I do love cast iron for the same reason Marc Maron says he does: this object has lasted potentially a hundred or more years. It’s a connection to tradition, the past, etc. The beauty of that is that these mothers are tough.

And, just as important, they can change. Sometimes your skillet looks beautiful and shiny, and your eggs practically flip themselves. Sometimes you cooked with too much wine (acid eats away at the seasoning), and your skillet gets dull. Sometimes you forget to turn the burner off after it’s dry, and your skillet gets smoking mad. But–and listen here, Marc Maron–the skillet is resilient. It can handle bad stuff, and eventually be fine again–even better. It doesn’t need babying–it just needs to keep going, to be cooked in, to be loved.

May 5, 2014

Addis Ababa Food Tour with Addis Eats

Did I mention they eat Ethiopian food in Ethiopia? I mean, of all the crazy things!

This only struck me as remarkable, I suppose, because the Ethiopian restaurants I’ve been to all have very much the same aesthetic and presentation and menu. So I assumed they were presenting a semifictional version of Ethiopia, the way a certain type of red-lacquer-and-moon-doors Chinese restaurant does of Chinese food.

But there it all was, injera rolled out on platters, dotted with different stews, and men sitting there, eating with their hands, like it was utterly normal. (Which it was, yes. It slowly sunk in…)

The grocery store was even stocked with all the ingredients for these dishes. Berbere, shiro, etc, etc. (Also lots of pasta. And, the one real surprise, loads of different kinds of peanut butter.)

So nice to see such huge bags of red chile…

After the initial surprise wore off a tiny bit, we went on a food walking tour (now officially my favorite-ever kind of tour to take, anywhere) with the excellent ADDIS EATS

I can’t recommend this tour enough! Our fantastic guide, Xavier, was up for any question, and the neighborhood we walked around was also an interesting mix of business and residence and income. We went everywhere from a really basic lunch joint to a weekend-splurge restaurant that specialized in raw beef.

In the end, the tour didn’t reveal a wildly different cuisine from what Peter and I knew (not the way, say, just walking down the street in Bangkok did the first time we went there). But it did fill in a lot of detail in the big picture we already had. It also gave me fresh respect for the Ethiopian restaurants I know, and how true to the cuisine they actually are.

Ethiopian coffee–it’s real! (Secret ingredient: rue.) These cafes are all over Addis, complete with frankincense. Note businessman in navy blazer in background–he’d just stopped in for a quick sip.

Chat, aka qat, is legal in Ethiopia, and sold all over the place. Alas, no photo of the neat little to-go bundles. In this pic, I like how it’s next door to a liquor store. One-stop mind-altering shopping!

Standard lunch place, with our guide and another tour member. Please note water served in old Stoli bottles. And platter of shiro wat on injera. Just like you expect.

Fried fish! This is something we wouldn’t have found on our own, and didn’t know about from Ethiopian restaurants already. Note the scoring into bite-size chunks–easy for eating with hands. And that was a great hot-fruity chile sauce.

Ethiopia has excellent beers–which I didn’t know. Xavier made sure we tried them all, including a freakish non-alcoholic version of Guinness (not pictured). Ambo, the water in the middle, is some of the best fizzy water I’ve had in the world.

At the splurgy raw-beef place, you get served a huge hunk of raw meat, and a knife. How bad-ass is that? These men were happy to show off their bad-ass meal.

These guys are in the restaurant, in view of everyone. They’re also sort of hammy, and loved having their picture taken. It’s their job to cut all the fat off the beef, so when it arrives at your table, it’s just a glistening ruby of flesh.

We got the pre-cut version for our table. Comes with red chile sauce and mustard, for dipping. (We also got cooked beef cubes, which were easier to compare in flavor to American beef. Guess what–Ethiopian is much better.)

Just for context, here’s the in-house butcher in a different restaurant. Right?! (Both Rod and the butcher are watching the football game on TV.)

“Special tea”: tea, ginger, lemon and pineapple juices, honey, optional ouzo. Filing with some of the best international drinks ever.

April 28, 2014

Addis Ababa, Roughly

When Peter and I got on the plane to Addis Ababa, we were giddy about every little thing. They were playing Ethiopian music! And the safety cards were in Ethiopian letters!

OK, technically Amharic, but you know what I mean.

We truly had no idea what to expect when we arrived.

We certainly didn’t expect to arrive in what was, to my eyes, Cairo twenty years ago. The airport lighting was that old-fluorescent dim. The springs in the seat of our taxi were sprung just exactly like all the taxi seats I’d known in Cairo in 1992, so that they felt a bit molest-y, but also sad. The air even smelled the same: dusty, smoggy, desert-like, even in the cold.

After we arrived at our hotel, we took a quick spin through the surrounding blocks. It was Christmas day (Ethiopian Calendar), and while that had meant near silence at the airport, around our hotel, it meant the streets thronged with drunken party people.

Mere steps outside of the hotel gate, we were accosted by a gang of four dudes who claimed to be students, and who at various points claimed not to know one another, and then yes, know some of the other guys, and then that they just wanted to have a drink and talk because it was Christmas.

This too reminded me of Cairo twenty years ago–not because Cairo no longer has charming street hustlers who want to chat you up, but because I haven’t been particularly bothered by them in twenty years.

When I wrote the Cairo chapter of the Lonely Planet Egypt guide in 2007, I took it as my chance to pour out all my love for Cairo onto the page. To help the first-time visitor take a short-cut to loving the place the way I did, maybe in a few days, instead of a few months (or never, as happens with the majority of tourists). Don’t worry, I said, basically–just relax and enjoy the chaos. People are basically nice–don’t lose sight of that.

But going to Addis was a good reminder–some might say, ah, a reality check for the blithe travel writer–of just how overwhelming a whole new rough-and-tumble city can be, one where you are very, very obviously a tourist.

I couldn’t read the signs. I couldn’t understand the language. I didn’t yet know where I was on a map, and it was dark, and half-dressed street people were sleeping in the shadows, and I didn’t know how much a beer cost, and hadn’t had time to inspect the money (only enough to notice that the bills all smell like Ethiopian food, from being passed from spicy-buttered hand to spicy-buttered hand). I was out of my depth in a way I had not been in a very, very long time. I couldn’t even blame jet lag, because we’d just flown a few hours, from Kigali.

I knew these faux-students were probably no more than a nuisance, but I could not see past my own discomfort to see how it might be informative and interesting to talk to them anyway–as I had cheerfully advised people to do in the Egypt guide. We bought the guys one round of beers (in a bar strewn with hay, to mark the festive Christmas day), and stomped back to the hotel in a mild, exhausted huff.

Daylight was better. Then I could get my bearings a bit. The corner where we’d gotten press-ganged the night before was now the site of different traffic.

In 1992, camels were often driven straight through the center of Cairo and over the bridge to the west bank of the Nile.

I could walk slowly, and look at architectural details–Greek- and Armenian-style architecture in the blocks around our hotel.

Hundred-year-old balconies, roughly.

And soon I was noticing even smaller, stranger details. Like the propensity for all the male mannequins to be so…bulging.

Is that a rolled-up sock in your pocket or…? Oh, yeah. I guess it is.

In a few more hours, I felt my equilibrium somewhat restored. It wasn’t that the sketchy aspects of Addis had gone. Plenty of people stared, and followed, and a street kid yoinked Rod’s cell phone (but he got it back).

Behind the rock wall was someone’s sleeping nest.

I found myself wondering about Cairo. When I was there in 2011, it seemed cleaner than I remembered, not so filled with beggars, and the hassle is somewhat less. But how much of that was due just to my perception? To my learned ability to screen out the worst, while also seeing (and knowing) the best in Cairenes? That’s what getting comfortable in any new place requires.

We were only in Addis a few days, but even in that short time, I was able to agree with what our guidebook (Bradt) said about the city: “Its bark is worse than its bite,” the author assured us. Which is a gracious way of saying, “Just relax and enjoy the chaos.”

Thus endeth the lesson. A few more photos:

Crossing the bridge by the ex-railway station.

Italians were here.

Where the Chinese are building a metro. For now, a pleasant (but dusty, and full of holes and rubble) pedestrian boulevard.

Italians again? Who can say.

Spare chairs stacked up in a stairwell at Addis Ababa U., like some kind of art installation.

More chairs.

I have no idea either.

Taking the long view.

April 21, 2014

The Sugar King of Rwanda

Before we leave Rwanda, and while we’re still on the subject of material culture, let me just mention how nice it is that you can get intensely gingery tea with milk pretty much anywhere there.

For instance, at the edge of a national park:

Please note Heineken umbrella, and waiter in Heineken shirt. On the edge of Nyungwe Forest, about a thousand square kilometers of wilderness. Just the drive up to this entrance gate, and the grassy lawn, was a couple of hours of winding-through-nothing.

This bridge was why we went. But I was too terrified to take a photo from the middle of it.

To give you an idea of the scope of things:

(Yes, that’s an earthworm.)

Anyway, after you’ve hiked out to the wobbly cable bridge, and you’ve survived crossing it, by breathing deep, clutching the wires and chanting “science, science, science” all the way across (because it constantly feels as if it’s going to flip over, but of course, physically, it cannot), well, then you want some restorative “African tea,” as that ginger-milk-tea mix is called.

Everywhere in Rwanda, when you order tea, you get your own giant thermos of it, which is very nice. You also get a large bowl of sugar. And, here on the edge of the forest, we got…the Sugar King!

When our Heineken-shirted waiter brought him over on a tray, Peter and I both started pointing and laughing and taking a million pictures. Which no one really understood.

Regular readers of this blog may know, but this is because we have a particularly characterful sugar dispenser, Sugar Duck.

The Sugar King of Rwanda is flanked at all times by his loyal bodyguards. They are especially good at silencing the crowds when the Sugar King issues his royal proclamations.

Peter was a most loyal subject, obeying (under the enforcing glare of a bodyguard) the ruler’s decree that every cup of African tea should have not one scoop of sugar, and not two scoops…but three!

I doubt Sugar Duck even knows that his true overlord holds court on the edge of the Nyungwe Forest. He may be hurt at first by Peter’s defection, but I think he’ll understand in the end. If he wants to make a pilgrimage there, to pay his respects, we’ll take him. We might even go hiking again.

(The cable bridge is very cool! We saw tiny little sunbirds and great blue turacos. There are several other, longer day hikes you can take from this entrance gate, where you might see some other wildlife–aside from earthworms and anthropomorphized sugar bowls. If you go, you have to leave Butare at dawn, as the hikes leave at scheduled times in the mid-morning.)

April 14, 2014

Nyamirambo Women’s Centre Tour

There’s a great little organization in Kigali, the Nyamirambo Women’s Centre. It’s a work co-op and educational group, teaching women job skills. They run a fun walking tour around their neighborhood, which ends with lunch–which happened to be some of the best food we had in Rwanda.

I highly recommend this! To tantalize you, here are some pics.

Nyamirambo is known as the Muslim part of town, though it’s really quite mixed.

It’s also known as the place to get your car detailed, and, if you’re a moto-taxi driver, where to get your regulation green helmets.

First we visited the market. Men pounding things that women should be pounding: always funny.

Also in the market, a crew of ladies was ready for all our sewing needs. If only I’d brought my other pants! They are still held together with a safety pin.

Nyamirambo is also known for its hair salons. I got a big long braid put in.

We stopped in an herbal medicine shop. Like pretty much everything in Rwanda, it was very organized and licensed by the government.

A great deal of Kigali is still dirt roads.

One of our guides helped us pick out passion fruit and avocadoes, because we needed one last fix before we left town.

Our delicious lunch in process–just mixing up the ukali, the corn-flour pudding, in the outdoor “kitchen.”

Our wonderfully satisfying meal, clockwise from upper left: plantains stewed with onion, tomato and celery; sumptuous potatoes with green peppers; red beans I wish I’d asked more about; the ukali, the corn-flour pudding, that is cut into wedges; and dodo, callaloo with, in this case, peanuts, dried sardines, green eggplants and celery.

Passion fruit are on prominent display in this pic because our guide Marie Aimee (who runs the organization) taught us how to eat them without a knife and spoon–a life-changing skill.

(FYI on the passion fruit: You just bite off the end of it, and suck the insides out! Of course, you should wash the fruit first. It’s all so obvious now–and to think how many years I wasted fussing with them…)

Thanks for everything, ladies!