Muscat, Oman

“Do you know why we are so successful? Because we don’t fear death and you do.”

Taken from “A Captain’s Duty” by Richard Phillips; quote by a Somali pirate during the hostage taking on board of the “Maersk Alabama” in April 2009

This is a story about desperation, rage, greed, brutality and survival. It’s not pretty. It is a story with many perspectives and a lot of grey, a story without easy answers. It is also a story that has been misrepresented and misunderstood. It is the story of a failed state: Somalia

Since the end of the civil war in Somalia in the 1990s, the country has been in shambles. Poverty, hunger and starvation are the norm. Anarchy and lawlessness replaced law and order. It was a perfect opportunity for large fishing trawlers and factory ships from other countries (e.g. Spain, Japan and China) to encroach on the fish-rich territorial waters of Somalia without being penalized. There was no Somali Coast Guard to speak of and access to rich fishing was unhindered. To make money fast, ships used underwater explosives to kill fish. They also started to dump toxic waste into the local seas which destroyed coral reefs and further decimated fish stocks.

When Somali fishermen returned to their villages after the war, they found a hostile environment at sea and their livelihood threatened. Taking matters into their own hands, the fishermen went out to defend their territorial waters. Eventually, they found ways to arm themselves, board foreign vessels, hold the crews hostage and demand ransom from the ships’ owners and shipping companies. Realizing how relatively easy it was to extract money, the fishermen abandoned their profession, increased the ransom amounts from $500,000 to more than $4,000,000 per ship and widened their target group to include oil tankers and freighters.

The primary target area has always been the Gulf of Aden, a body of water surrounding the Horn of Africa between Somalia and Yemen. But all of Somalia’s coast is dangerous. Thousands of ships come through the Suez Canal and must pass through the Gulf on their way to India and East Africa. As the pirates only use skiffs with outboard motors during their attacks und were unable to travel further out to sea, the ships changed their routes, travelling hundreds of miles away from shore. That’s when the pirates also changed their tactic. They hijacked fishing trawlers (owned by their own people – Somalian fishermen!) and used them as mother ships, pulling the skiffs behind the ship. Now, when a suitable target ship is found, the pirates enter the skiffs from the mother ship and pursue the freighter or tanker until they are able to board.

The crew of an oil tanker perform a piracy drill in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia. Pirates are deterred from boarding by large volumes of water being poured over the sides of the ship.

The shipping companies are quite willing to pay. They hire security companies who drop sacks of money onto the ships via helicopter. The pirates let go of the ships and their crews, in most cases unharmed. Pirates usually turn violent and make true of their threats to kill hostages only when their backs are up against the wall. For a while, between 2007 and 2011, the practice appeared to work well. The pirates got rich, the shipping companies got their ships and crews back, the insurance companies paid for damages, the security companies made money delivering the loot and the Somali government did nothing. Insurance companies eventually more than made up for their losses by steeply increasing their policy premiums. Soon, it wasn’t just fishermen who got in on the act. Cartels formed and even a stock exchange was established allowing the average Somali to benefit from the rich ransom harvest. The most prominent groups involved in pirate activity are the National Volunteer Coast Guard, the Marka Group, The Puntland Group and the Somali Marines. Some of these are well organized with an “Admiral of the Fleet” and a “Director of Finance”.

It did not take long until terrorist organizations like al Qeada and Al-Shabaab (the group responsible for the recent attack on the shopping mall in Kenya) saw piracy as a way to fund their insurgency efforts. Some terrorists resort to extorting pirates by employing Mafia methods. Pirates who want to live, are to hand over 20% of their ransom proceeds as “protection money”. Soon, Somali fishing villages turned into boomtown communities where money is spent freely. Not surprisingly, 70% of the local population “strongly support the piracy as a form of national defence of the country’s territorial waters.”     

How do the pirates actually board the ships? A common practice is to come alongside the freighter or tanker, throw grapple hooks onto the deck and climb up the rope. Many pirates also use long ladders to board. Once on deck, hostages are taken and the bridge is occupied. Often the pirates shoot their way into the command center of the ship, stripping locks off doors by firing bullets at them.

While few hostages are harmed, they are not treated with a lot of TLC, either. Stuffed into hot engine rooms or made to kneel on deck under the broiling sun, they are abused and threatened at gun point. Ship seizures may last a long time. Hostages may have to live on board of their ships under abhorrent conditions for days, weeks or even months. The Chandlers, a British couple which was taken by pirates off their yacht, were released after 388 days and after a 500,000 GBP were paid to the pirates.

Though slowly, the international community has responded to the piracy threats around the Horn of Africa. While it is extremely difficult to monitor an ocean the size of Western Europe, now more than 20 nations have their navy vessels patrol the area. Shipping companies, reluctant to arm their ships’ crews with weapons, have hired security companies that guard the ships while travelling through the most dangerous areas. The Somali government is also stepping up its efforts to arrest the pirates in their hideouts on shore.  The ships’ crews themselves have developed a number of preventative tactics and manoeuvres to avoid capture: fire hoses are laid out on deck, ready to spray huge volumes of sea water at boarding pirates; barbed wire is strung along the deck railings; the targeted ship assumes a zigzag course a full speed, whipping up an enormous wake preventing pirates from reaching the ship’s side; throwing Molotov cocktails at approaching pirates; many merchant ships travel in convoys to avoid capture. On our Ocean Princess we had to participate in a mandatory “piracy drill” almost as soon as we came on board. In case of a pirate attack, the general alarm will be sounded and all passengers are requested to return to their stateroom. While leaving the hallway door open to be able to hear the crew’s instructions, we are to leave the balcony door locked with the curtains drawn. No ship has ever been taken travelling faster than 18 knots. Our ship's max speed is 18.5 knots.

Every year, 30,000 merchant vessels, including 20% of the world’s oil, travel through the Horn of Africa region. Even though only very few ships are attacked and even fewer hijackings are successful (e.g. in 2008 111 ships were attacked and 42 successfully hijacked), it is naïve to think the world will not defend those shipments. Of course they do; and many times with ruthless brutality. Russian ships, when capturing pirates, tie up their prisoners, put them into their skiffs with containers of fuel and set them adrift. Then, from a safe distance, they fire on them. Pirates are also attacked by helicopter gunships and navy vessels, their skiffs punctured and their occupants left to drown. However, the majority of pirates are taken into custody. Some are tried before the court of law but many of them are set free and allowed to go home.

Just as it is wrong to see the pirates purely as desperate fishermen who struggle for survival while their fishing grounds are being decimated, it is as incorrect to label them purely as ruthless bandits. Both statements are true and untrue. What was originally motivated by desperation and poverty, turned into greed that required ruthlessness, thievery and brutality to be satisfied. The more players entered the industry, the less the piracy business in Somalia became about survival.

The best way to deal with piracy is from within. Unless the coastal communities themselves stand up to the bribery, extortion, infiltration by terrorists and hijackings of their own fishing boats, the small fishing villages along the Somali coast will continue to serve as a launching pads for organized crime and a hiding place for pirates.

Somali farmers produce goats - many goats. Traditionally, the goats are sold to Saudi Arabia for the animal sacrifices 3+ million pilgrims have to perform at the Hajj in Mecca. Not long ago, Somali farmers loaded goats on a ship bound for Mecca when pirates hijacked the ship and the crew. When the farmers found out, they were furious. They pleaded with the pirates to let the ship go as the sale of the goats represented precious income for them. The pirates refused. The farmers pleaded some more, pointing out to the pirates that the goats would die within a day or two. Once again, the pirates said “no, we don’t care.” In desperation, the farmers banded together, obtained weapons and approached the ship. Once on board, they killed all the pirates and sent the goats and crew on their way. Lesson: never piss off a goat farmer.

As we pass through the Gulf of Aden and enter the Arabian Sea, I look in all directions, wondering how many naval vessels are out there keeping us safe. I can’t see them but I know they are just beyond the horizon. Their presence has led to a sharp drop in pirate activity lately, and that is good. But the root causes that have led to the acts of piracy and lawlessness (crop failures, war, criminal activity, lack of governmental intervention, overfishing and dumping of toxic waste by developed countries) still exist. 

There is a saying: “When the watering hole shrinks, the animals look at each other differently.” As fish stocks decline worldwide, we will see more competition between nations and unlawful activities on the oceans. I fear we have just seen the tip of the iceberg. As I write this, there are reports of increased pirate activity near Nigeria, Togo, Benin and even Singapore.

Haifa, Israel

It is early morning in Port Said, Egypt, where our ship is tied up at the entrance to the Suez Canal, waiting to enter. Constantly, ships of all shapes and sizes float past us, honking their horns with men on board yelling something in Arabic. In the background, if there is room for one more sound in this medley of noises, the muezzin’s call for prayer from the nearby minaret adds a haunting aspect to the sound landscape. Then, all noises stop. No more yelling, no more hammering sounds drift across from the ship yard across the Canal, no more honking. For all Allah-fearing Muslims, it’s time to lay down the tools and pray.

It is against this backdrop of sounds and sights that I want to write about my experience in Israel. We have just spent some time there and my mind is bursting with impressions and thoughts. I could write volumes about my relationship with Israel and the Jewish people and all the emotions this relationship entails. But I have no idea where and how to begin – and aside, this is not the place nor the time to elaborate on my soulful, and equally conflicting thoughts about this part of the world. This tiny country has loomed huge in my conscience all my life. Yet, I have never visited Israel – until now.

To start, you cannot be of my generation (the post WWII generation), grow up in Germany and not have feelings about Israel. As a people and as a country, Germans had to come to grips with the Holocaust and shape a new relationship with the Jewish people in the decades after the war. Reparations were made, words of apology spoken and a friendship formed between the two nations. While all of those are necessary steps towards reconciliation, nothing can and will make up for the horrifying acts of aggression against the Jewish people.

And then there is my Christian upbringing, which added a strong sense of home coming to this trip to the Holy Land. After all, this is where Jesus acted out his role as the founder of the Christian faith, my faith. Having seen so many images of the places, over the years, where Jesus walked, taught and lived, you could have blind folded me, and I could have described the scenery and landscape to you. But being able to recall the place from the pictures I have seen and experiencing it personally and in the physical are two very different modes of remembering.

For me, visiting the sites of Jesus’ life, turned into a pilgrimage - but not in the usual sense. As an “unchurched Christian”, who no longer listens to Sunday morning services nor belongs to a Christian denomination, I was seeing and experiencing the sites from the perspective of someone, who has knowledge of the historical significance of the locale and has spent much of his life in the midst of the evangelical world, but has stepped away from organized religion.

As I stood and observed other pilgrims worship the ground they were standing on, kiss the rock where Jesus is said to have shared a meal with his disciples, pray at the spot where Jesus preached the “Sermon on the Mount” and get baptized in the Jordan River where Jesus was baptized, I was touched by the sincerity of the faithful, their heartfelt devotion and the love expressed in their actions. How much comfort billions of people around the world derive from the spiritual practices they learned in Sunday School, in their mosque or temple, or through religious teachings in their synagogue and through pilgrimages. In today’s society we tend to emphasize the negative aspects of organized religion, the wars fought in the name of faith, the twisting of spiritual truths and the abuses by religious organizations, that the benefits are lost. Fact remains, spiritual practice feeds the soul and religion has found a way to show us humans how we can have a relationship with the Divine. And while I have decided to grow my faith outside of the structures of organized religion, I respect the devotion of my fellow pilgrims at the holy sites of Israel. Yes, I do believe these things happened here and yes, I do believe they were significant events in history. After all, what happened here 2,000 years ago and believing in these events have made me into the person I am today. Perhaps forever, my evolving faith and my life as a spiritual being have taken me away from church structures but, in no way, shape or form do I judge those who find comfort in them.

After visiting the sites where Jesus lived and preached around the Sea of Galilee 2,000 years ago, I end my day at the Temple of the Baha’i faith in Haifa. Here, we are being shown a very different way of communicating with the Divine: through the creation of beauty. And while I have a long way to go before I can even touch the level of perfection we saw in the gardens of the Baha’i temple, I humbly submit that I know a thing or two about connecting with God while pulling weeds…

 

Ushuaia, Argentina

It sure ain’t New York or Paris, but it has a huge claim to fame: Ushuaia is the southernmost city in the world. When a place smells like a frontier town, feels like a frontier town and has the sophistication (or lack of it) of a frontier town, chances are: it is a frontier town. With a population of 60,000 people, Ushuaia is the jump-off point for trips to Antarctica. Adventurers, tourists, scientists, government employees and crazy people (e.g. those who sail to Antarctica in a 29 ft sailboat), all leave from here to travel the 1,000 km (600 mi) distance to a very cold and icy continent. To be accurate, Ushuaia’s claim is being disputed by the citizens of the much smaller town of Puerto Williams, which is located on an island further south.

Formerly a missionary station and then a prison for very nasty people, Ushuaia, which now is the capital city of the island province of Tierra del Fuego, suffered a major problem for a very long time: nobody wanted to live here. But hey, look what incentives can do: cut taxes to corporations and lure people to Ushuaia with salaries that are three times when compared to the rest of Argentina and voila – people show up. The oil and gas industries, sheep farming as well as fisheries and eco-tourism employ the majority of workers in this town.

The weather, even the locals admit, is pathetic: it is cloudy and cold all summer long. Very rarely does the sun come out. And the temperatures don’t look too appealing either: Average high in summer is 15o C (59o F), average high in winter is 4o C (40o F). The cold southern ocean surrounding the entire region and the close proximity of the Antarctic continent don’t let the sun’s heat do its job. Even though Ushuaia is located at a southern latitude of only 54o SL, the town does not seem to enjoy nice warm weather any time of the year.

Another claim to fame is that Ushuaia features the terminus of the Pan American Hwy. So, if you have travelled 17,848 km (11,090 mi) south on your bicycle or motorcycle from Alaska to Ushuaia (as many people do!!), you’ll be happy to know, that the mighty Pan Am Hwy shrinks to a narrow, winding dirt lane and ends with a small gravel parking lot at its end. Then, if your legs will let you, you can stroll another 200 m on a boardwalk to a view point by an ocean bay. This, ladies and gentlemen, is officially considered the END OF THE WORLD. Why didn’t I come up with that idea?! I would have opened a McDonalds or a Starbucks right there and taken money from all those people who still believe in the flat earth theory and expect a steep drop-off at the end of the board walk.

Grand Bassam, Ivory Coast

Perhaps I shouldn’t be sharing this online, but the voodoo dolls came with some really weird bugs – and I brought them with me when I returned to Canada from the Ivory Coast last December. I sprayed the dolls with insecticide and left them outside for weeks, hoping the African bugs would freeze to death in our Canadian winter (…which they did).

Frankly, I didn’t need bug infested voodoo dolls in my house, but I bought them to put money into the hands of some desperately poor souvenir vendors in Grand Bassam. This is the same Grand Bassam and even the same beach where six Al Qaeda terrorists mowed down and killed 16 tourists yesterday. With incidents like these it is very unlikely that tourists will return to Grand Bassam in the foreseeable future. The hardship caused by the attackers goes far beyond the physical and emotional pain felt by the shooting victims and their families. The attackers also destroy livelihoods of local citizens. The deaths of infidels come at a high price.

The hatred behind these attacks is fueled by the sentiment that western countries and their Christian religion want to destroy Islam. Of course, it is a misguided belief but many Muslims in the Middle East still consider modern wars launched by Christian powers into Islamic lands as extensions of the ancient crusades. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have reignited the power struggle between east vs west and Islam vs Christianity.

With his inflammatory rhetoric Donald Trump is adding fuel to the fire and justification to the hatred. It seems to me that he has no idea what forces he is about to unleash. The way Trump is conducting his campaign is stupid and irresponsible at best and fatalistic at its worst.

As a Canadian I will not have the opportunity to cast my vote against this man in November, but with this little post and my words I can still add my voice to the world-wide chorus of the millions of likeminded people who sense a profound danger in Trump’s message.

The bugs are gone and my voodoo dolls have moved inside, now. But every time I look at them, I will wonder about the fate of the young man who sold them to me at the very beach where 16 innocent people lost their lives to the same kind of hatred that permeates this year’s American presidential campaign.

~ RT

Alexandria, Egypt

Quite frankly, I was trying to avoid Egypt. Visiting the country can be as fascinating as it can be painful. Here are a few words that describe Egypt really well, and while all of these express facets of life in Egypt, none of them apply in isolation:

Chaotic – beautiful – old – cruel - young – poor – well educated – warm – friendly – dirty – loud – polluted – uncertain – hopeful – loving – savvy – embarrassed – fanatic – proud – hungry - tired

Alexandria is a Mediterranean port city in Egypt. During the Hellenistic period, it was home to a storied library and a lighthouse ranking among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Today the library is reincarnated in the disc-shaped, ultramodern Bibliotheca Alexandrina research center. The city has many Greco-Roman landmarks, old-world cafes and European-style parks. Its 15th-century Qaitbay Citadel is now a museum.

It is this mixture of attributes that can make it difficult to spend time here. You really need to have a strong stomach. I have been here before. I have seen dead cows floating in canals with children playing in the water right next to them, I have seen crippled children begging  in the streets, I have seen horses with open sores and close to starvation being used to pull tourists around town and have seen the environment being abused in ways I didn’t think possible. At the same time, the exotic nature of all that is Egypt pulls you in and invites you to digest impressions of rich and poor, old and new, apathy and enthusiasm, order and chaos, joy and despair - life here is raw and essential – humanity as its worst and its best.

Alexandria’s infrastructure crumbles and garbage is everywhere, but this city of 7 million people is still beautiful, the people are friendly and the children happy. It is a sunny late afternoon as I drive around town, mostly along the waterfront. Lovers are walking hand in hand on the promenade and people are swimming in the ocean, sitting in coffee shops or enjoying a picnic. Despite much hardship and difficult lives, people seem happy here. They know how to enjoy life.

It has been years since I took the picture of the boy riding the pony. For all I know, he could be graduating from school this year. But such is the power of photographs: every time I look at that smile, this purest expression of unmitigated joy, I find myself transported back to that Sunday afternoon in Alexandria - a moment that is frozen in time, a moment I will never forget.

~ RT

Easter Island, Chile

If you ever want to get away from it all, I’ve got just the place for you: Easter Island. Home to only 6,000 inhabitants, “Rapa Nui” as the island is known in the Polynesian language, is considered to be the most isolated inhabited island on earth. Just think, if you ever grew tired of your 5,999 fellow islanders, you could swim 3,700 km to reach Chile or 2,000 km to reach Pitcairn Island which is, with 49 inhabitants, the nearest “population center”. Of course, Easter Island is most famous for its stone statues called “moai”, not its degree of isolation. It is, however, true that isolation played an important role in the development of the Rapa Nui’s spiritual practices. Cut off from the rest of the world by thousands of miles of ocean in all directions, out of Easter Island an ancestral cult emerged – and the moai played an important role in this tradition.

Easter Island, a Chilean territory, is a remote volcanic island in Polynesia. It’s famed for its archaeological sites, including some 900 monumental statues, called moai, created by its early Rapa Nui inhabitants during the 10th-16th centuries. The moai are carved human figures with oversize heads, often resting on massive rock altars called ahus. Ahu Tongariki has the largest group of upright moai.

A quarry on the slopes of the volcano Rona Raraku was the main source and production facility for the moai. Made out of “tuff” (compressed volcanic ash) and then erected on a platform called “anu”, each moai is said to represent an ancestor, in most cases a prominent community or spiritual leader. Upon death, the person’s body was commonly cremated and buried underneath the anu. After a statue had been erected in a diseased leader’s name, the ancestor was worshipped. It appears that each tribe on the island had its own platform with erected statues. During ceremonial events, the moai’s eyes, consisting of white corals and black obsidian for pupils, were attached to the statue. It was believed, that “mana”, a divine spirit, would travel from the grave through the eyes and rest upon the people. For this reason the vast majority of moai are located along the coast, facing inland towards the tribe. It is believed that ancestor worship began approx. around 1,000 A.D. and ended some time after 1,650 A.D. Today, Easter Island is littered with toppled moai. When the first Europeans came to the island on Easter Sunday in 1722 (thus the name), they reported all of the statues standing. By 1868, however, there were no more upright moai. While some moai are believed to have fallen due to earth quakes, most statues were toppled during tribal conflicts. Yes, even in paradise humans tend to have wars.

Going back a few centuries before the island was discovered, Easter Island was a tropical paradise with millions of tall palm trees, fresh water streams and land birds. Some believe the Polynesians came to Rapa Nui around 375 A.D. The people thrived on this beautiful island where food, fuel and fertile land were plentiful. Gradually, as the island’s population grew to over 13,000 inhabitants, environmental destruction resulted in the loss of all trees, all fresh water sources and all land birds. And as the population grew more and more desperate for food, feuding began among the tribes, resulting in the destruction of many hundred moai. Until today, only 50 out of 887 Moai have been re-erected and restored.

The Rapa Nui (the people of Easter Island) had their fair share of calamities over the centuries. The loss of their pristine environment, a severe rat plague (which was partly responsible for the loss of trees and a declining bird population), raids by Peruvian slave traders, tribal wars and leprosy (among other diseases) eventually reduced the human population to 111 people. With the remaining Rapa Nui lacking leadership and identity, it was not difficult for missionaries to introduce the concept of a Christian God in the 1860s.

Researchers who study the moai, have noticed that all statues feature certain body parts, such as noses, fingers, ears etc., in an accentuated fashion. It is believed that this was done in response to the leprosy epidemic that ravaged the island. The masons shaping the moai had the idea that, at least in his stone portrayal, the leader should look free from the crippling symptoms of this terrible disease.

Almost all of the moai came from Rona Raraku. The slopes of this volcano were the only place where the tuff was openly exposed and the incline of the mountain was perfectly suited for this type of masonry and craftsmanship. Four to five people worked roughly for one year on the creation of each new moai. When the front was finished, the statue had to be detached from the mountain and made to stand upright for the back of the statue to be crafted. For this, the natives dug a hole at the base of the half-finished statue and slowly allowed the moai to slide into the pit in a vertical position.

When the job was done, a completed statue had to be transported to the designated platform, though experts still disagree on how the moai were moved. While theories range from teleportation powered by the divine to Eric van Daniken’s idea that the statues were moved by aliens, most experts agree they were dragged on sleds, rolled on tree trunks or “walked” upright to their intended destination. One thing is clear: it was a tremendous feat of ingenuity and skill when you consider that the average moai weighed 12.5 metric tons and was 4 m tall. Some had to be transported a distance of 18 km. How difficult this task must have been is hinted by the fact that only 32 % of the 887 Moai on Easter Island actually made it to their designated anu. It is not surprising that 397 or 45 % of all moai remained at the quarry - some erect, some leaning, some horizontal, some partly finished. We know now that the production of moai was abandoned around the 1650s. Since then, the statues at the quarry have been partly covered by soil but many statues also seem to have fallen and broken during transport. Can you imagine the distress felt by the dozens of Rapa Nui transporting a moai when their giant statue fell and split in half? (Most statues broke at the neck, the weakest part.) I can still hear the swear words reverberating throughout the island!

Evidence shows that the statues became taller and heavier during the 650 years of production. There appeared to have been a competition among the tribes as to which tribe had the biggest moai. The largest statue ever erected is almost 10 m tall and weighs 75 metric tons, but the largest statue was still being chiselled out of the mountain when the Rapa Nui gave up on the ancestor idea. This moai was to be 21.6 m tall and weigh approx. 182 metric tons. Makes you wonder: did they really plan on moving that monster statue or was it to remain at the quarry for eternity?

Located not far from the quarry at Rona Raraku are the moai statues of Ahu Tongariki. These 15 statues vary greatly in height and weight. They were re-erected in the 1990s with the help of the Japanese and collected from a large geographical area.

During the 17th and 18th centuries the spiritual tradition shifted away from ancestor worship and the production of moai towards the “Birdman Cult”. Until then there had always been 1 paramount leader for the entire island. Perhaps the environmental and political dynamics changed enough for something new to emerge. A new tradition was born that allowed for the election of a new leader every year. This new concept, which had strong spiritual undertones, was promoted by the warriors of the island who had as their symbol a mystical figure of half man/half bird. The election of the new leader took the form of a competition. Every spring, the tribal leaders gathered at a steep cliff overlooking the tiny islet of Motu Nui. The competitors were asked to climb down the 300 m cliff, swim to Motu Nui, await the arrival of the birds and return with the first bird egg of the season. The successful competitor then returned to his sponsor who became the island’s venerated chief for one year. Sponsorship of athletes is definitely not a modern idea.

Almost all civilizations on earth go through extraordinary lengths to create monuments for their spiritual practice or to build structures where the divine is invited to reside. The sheer artistic, physical and logistical challenges these efforts posed to their sometimes seemingly primitive civilizations are difficult to grasp. From the Egyptian temples to the European cathedrals to the Incan spiritual sites to the monstrous statues of Easter Island, the efforts invested in creating these special places and monuments often appear to have required super-human determination and power. How did the Rapa Nui move and erect a 75-ton statue using ropes and sleds? It is estimated that several hundred men would have been required to transport a moai of that size. Any experiments done by researchers over the years have always been performed on much smaller and lighter statues. Why did the Rapa Nui do it? What is this almost unstoppable spiritual urge that drives us to accomplish such a feat? Is it possible that the Rapa Nui availed themselves of “divine help”? Standing in the quarry of Rona Raraku, taking is the energy of this place and visualizing the many workers and craftsmen who gave it their all to create and move these statues, I cannot totally dismiss this possibility.

It is said that a women lived alone near the quarry. She prepared meals for the workers and, as local legend has it, she had super-natural powers at her disposal. Simply by the power of her thought she was able to “walk” the statues to their intended destinations. It must have been a sad day for the workers when she died.

~ RT

The Soul Of Nations

Like an annoying tune stuck in my head for hours, four words keep flooding my mind: “the soul of nations”. I am puzzled by the persistence of this ethereal message, so I look up the definition of the word “soul”. There are two definitions in Mirriam-Webster that come close to the sentiment I associate with my phrase. “: a (nation’s) deeply felt moral and emotional nature” and “: the ability of a (nation) to feel kindness and sympathy for others, to appreciate beauty and art”. For both definitions I substituted the word “nation” for “person”.

During this journey through many countries I have come to accept as reality the concept of nations possessing individual souls. But far from gaining a thorough understanding of the issues each country faces and the struggles people face, I have only managed to capture glimpses of the souls of nations. If you care enough, you sense the moral and emotional nature of a country the moment you set foot outside the port and you see the ability of a nation’s government to treat its people with kindness, compassion and sympathy in the eyes of men, women and children walking the streets. In many cases, what you pick up with your eyes and your senses belies the words of the tour guide.

But for us who come from the developed world, it is so easy to point fingers. The solutions to a country’s problem appear so simple if only the will and determination were present in leadership. Move over and let me handle it! Just clean up the garbage, get rid of your corrupt leaders, take charge of your country’s resources and work towards the common good for everyone. Done – problem solved!

The souls of many nations show deep wounds. Wounds inflicted by powers from the outside through centuries (if not millennia) of various types of colonialism and slavery and most recently by the very individuals who have been entrusted with the well-being of its own people. But also consider the “false prophets”, countries like China and Japan which are currently reaching out with a helping hand only to expect access to the countries’ resources in return.

But what do we expect: that Angola should act like Norway and Brunei like New Zealand? The wounded soul of a nation takes generations to heal. I believe effective change can come from the people and through the people as soon as they start to believe in their own worth and power – something akin to a deliberate and gentle “Arab Spring”.  That is something the world community can encourage but not impose on wounded nations.  

My wife Kit asked me this morning: “Why have you been so quiet during the past few days?” I don’t know, but her question prompted me to explore my inner state. Did this journey affect me that deeply? Did I see myself in the eyes of the many adults and children I photographed? Has my soul been touched by the things I have seen and experienced? How has the journey changed my view of the world? To what a degree did I have to face my own demons as I crawled into the slave dungeon in Togo?

Of all the pictures I have taken during this journey, this simple and not so great photo has touched me the most. I took it out of a bus window on my way to Grand Bassam in Cote d’Ivoire. The seemingly forlorn woman gazing out over the Atlantic Ocean, the beauty for the landscape, the ever-present garbage – the picture speaks volumes about the contrasting faces of Africa, especially when you consider the scene across the street: a dirty, crowded market with yelling vendors, smoldering trash and stifling heat. Is the woman dreaming of a better life or is she just having a cigarette while taking a break from her shopping?

That is the challenge we all face as travelers. How can we travel and assess fairly the human condition with our own set of filters that have been shaped by our upbringing, our experiences and our beliefs?  

It will take me some time to adjust to my daily routine at home, to put into perspective everything I have experienced and to sieve through my sad, happy and angry emotions that have been triggered in the various places.

Better wait a couple of weeks before checking out the itinerary for my next journey…

~ RT

West Africa

Perhaps it was not the most politically correct way to broach the subject of slavery: “Have you ever noticed that your black people in America are much bigger and stronger than we are here in Africa?” Peter, our guide in Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) asks. Well no, I had not noticed, but I am not about to respond to the question without knowing where this conversation is going. “It is a well-known fact that European slave traders selected the biggest and strongest men and women for the transatlantic crossing on slave ships”, Peter clarifies. “Work in the cotton plantations the southern states was hard and only the strongest would survive.” The implication is that today’s African-Americans come from a genetic pool with superior physical attributes compared to average Africans.

This is our second visit to West-Africa and by now we know about one common perception: for tourists, there isn’t much else to do but to learn about voodoo and slavery. No matter where you go along the coast of West Africa - Senegal, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Togo, Ghana or Angola, the history of the transatlantic slave trade looms large in the collective conscience of the people in each of those countries; and as a visitor you have a choice: you can either “endure” the many explanations about this dark chapter of human history, or embrace the opportunity to really “get into” the subject. Why not try to envision what it must have been like as a young African man to be captured by European slave traders, ripped away from your home and family and walked in chains and with a yoke around your neck to a slave ship? Why not crawl into the 1 m (3 ft) high dungeon where captured slaves were held for days under sub-human conditions before being hauled off to the waiting slave trading vessel? Why not stand at the same shore where thousands of slaves boarded European trading vessels on a journey of no return? Just as we visit Auschwitz to honor the Jews who were murdered by Hitler’s regime, human decency demands that we pay attention to the atrocities that have occurred here. Today, we call the transatlantic slave trade the largest forced migration of humans in history and - the African Holocaust.

Most of the slave transports from West-Africa to the “New World” took place between 1580s and 1860s. It is estimated that more than 35,560 (!!) transatlantic slave trading voyages occurred during those roughly 300 years, carrying between 10 and 12 million Africans to the Americas. Surprisingly, only 7% of all slaves ended up in what is now the USA. The largest number of slaves was transported to the Caribbean and Brazil.  

The motivating force behind this enormous movement of people was the insatiable appetite for cheap labor in the colonies. The British, Spanish, French and Portuguese had brought diseases to the New World which decimated the native population, leaving the European powers without laborers to work in the mines and sugar and cotton plantations of the colonial territories; and so the lucrative triangle of commerce was complete: slaves from Africa to the Americas, raw materials (e.g. sugar, cotton, cocoa) from the Americas to Europe and manufactured goods (e.g. guns, alcohol) from Europe to Africa. It was an unimaginably huge and profitable exchange of goods and human resources.

The trip across the Atlantic, called the “Middle Passage”, was brutal. Roughly 80% of the slaves on board the trading vessels survived. Crowded between the decks of the ship with no room to stand up and only 60 cm (2 ft) of space to lie naked on the wooden planks, the holds on the ships were places of total misery. Men and women were separated by partitions and while women were unfettered, the men were chained together by twos. The movement of the ship caused the slaves’ flesh to be rubbed off their bones and without bathroom facilities available to the slaves the stench of blood, mucus and feces in the holds was unbearable. The crew and the ships’ doctors often refused to go below deck to treat the slaves. Many female slaves were kept in separate compartments and subjected to sexual exploitation by the ships’ officers and crew.

The most common causes of death among the slaves included malaria, yellow fever, measles, smallpox, scurvy and dysentery. Often, slaves died from a shortage of water and food towards the end of the journey. Dead bodies were unshackled from the living by the crew and thrown overboard. It is said that sharks changed their migratory patterns to follow the slave trading vessels. Weather permitting, the slaves were allowed to spend time on deck in the fresh air. However, the crew was especially alert during those times as the captive slaves were at risk of committing suicide by jumping overboard into the ocean. Another danger was the possibility of an uprising by the slaves. It is estimated that 1% of all transported slaves died in rebellions or mutinies during the Middle Passage. Many slaves committed suicide by starving themselves to death.

A common perception is that the European colonial powers (Portugal, England, Denmark, and Spain to name a few) were solely to blame for the shameful acts committed under the label of “slavery”.  This is not true. The Africans themselves repeatedly played an important role in the sale of slaves. Tribal wars in Africa often resulted in prisoners of war, who were then readily sold to Europeans in exchange for manufactured goods, but it is also true that kidnapping raids as far inland as 300 miles from the coast were popular among the European slave traders.

While the Danish were the first nation to ban the slave trade, the British rejection of slavery was the most influential because of their many overseas holdings. During the 1850s, England had legislated an end to the slave trade and subsequently engaged in an unprecedented foreign policy effort to persuade other colonial powers to do the same. The British wanted to make sure that Portugal and Spain did not benefit from the advantages of the slave trade while England was weaning itself off the practice. In fact, they paid Portugal and Spain millions as an incentive to end the slave trade.

At this time in history there are no countries on earth where slavery is permitted by law. Still, slavery is very much alive in many parts around the globe. The primary victims of slavery in the 21st century are children sold into various forms of servitude and women lured into the sex trade. Children who have been sold by their families in destitute African countries like Burkina Faso are still used extensively in cocoa production especially in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana. The advocacy group “Free the Slaves”, which is linked to Anti-Slavery International, believes the number of people in slavery to be around 27 million world-wide. While this is the largest number of enslaved people at any point in world history, it also is the smallest percentage of the total human population ever to be enslaved at any time.

In terms of slave trade economics, today’s going rate for a young, HIV-free female slave for use in Thai brothels is equivalent to only 1/1,000th of the price for a slave in the U.S. in 1850. The relatively low price reflects the high risk of losing the slave through theft or escape. Also, sex slaves are often used intensively for short periods of time before they have to be discarded after contracting HIV. The profit margin for those controlling slaves and participating in the slave trade currently stands at 800%. This is an astronomical rate of return compared to the meagre 6% profit earned by the colonial slave traders.

Shocking? Today’s slaves no longer rot in the cargo holds of wooden ships but the callous treatment of fellow human beings has not changed by much. To me, paying attention to slavery is important. I owe it to the millions of slaves who lost their lives during the Middle Passage and to the millions of kids and young women who are, at this very moment, held against their will in many parts of the world. They are not forgotten.

As we are entering the slave master’s house in Pedakondji Village in Togo, I am determined that this time I will find the courage to enter the slave dungeon. When I was here 5 years ago I couldn’t bring myself to crawl into the dark space below the floor boards where the slaves were held. I turn on the torch on my cellphone and lower myself into, what must have felt like the abyss of despair to the slaves 200 years ago. I am the only one down here. Taking in the stench and the dark energy of this place, I wonder how many slaves have passed through the dungeon, how many have died down here and how many were unaware of the dangers ahead. Surely, by the time they reached this place the slaves must have had their first taste of abuse. Did they have hope? Were they resigned to their fate? How can people treat their fellow human beings with such cruelty?

The 14th century Arab historiographer Ibn Khaldun, who is regarded by many to be one of the founding fathers of modern sociology and economics, writes: “The Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because (Negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals.”

That’s how you justify cruelty.

~ RT

Juffureh, The Gambia

Sometimes, it’s tough to be a tourist. "Ha!" you say, "what’s so tough about travelling the world and seeing amazing sights?" I can tell you what’s tough: fighting off the creeping advance of cynicism.

My approach to travel is unusual, perhaps, as I don’t read up on the places I am about to visit before hand.  Instead, I let the ship take me to countries and cities around the world without first checking on TripAdvisor (c) what other travelers think. That way, my impressions remain free of pre-conceived ideas and notions about the people I am going to meet and the places I am about to see. I want to form my own opinions.

Jufureh, Juffureh or Juffure is a town in the Gambia, located 30 kilometers inland on the north bank of the River Gambia in the North Bank Division near James Island. The town is home to a museum and Fort Jillifree.

To me, cynicism is bad. I can see why people turn cynical over time, but so far I have managed to avoid (for the most part) falling into this trap. Cynicism can ruin your experience, it invites a judgmental mindset and it taints any form of genuine interaction you might otherwise have with people of other cultures and traditions. I associate cynicism with a closed mind – the very last thing I want to have while exploring the world.

Sometimes however, I come across situations that make cynicism look like an inevitable outcome. Our visit to the small and remote village of Juffureh in The Gambia is a good example of such a situation.

It is said that the village of Juffureh was home to a man called Kunta Kinteh, who was captured by slave traders in 1767, taken from his Mandinka tribe and transported to America. In 1976, Pulitzer Prize winning author Alex Haley, a descendant of Kunta Kinteh, published the story of his family. His narrative formed the basis for the best-selling novel and TV miniseries “Roots”.

Our trip to Juffureh started in Gambia’s capital city of Banjul at the mouth of the Gambia River. We traveled upriver by boat for two hours until we reached the twin villages of Albreda and Juffureh, the former is a fishing village while the latter a farming community. Here you encounter the harsh reality of subsistence living in the African countryside: hot dusty dirt roads, chicken and goats everywhere, fishing boats by the river’s shoreline, curious children watching us from a distance and mud shacks with metal roofs for homes. We are in the middle of nowhere and these people are dirt-poor.

Just over eight weeks ago, before Kit and I left home on our journey from Hong Kong to Miami, I went shopping. Anticipating what we were going to encounter in the African hinterlands, I bought things that might be useful to eager students in places like Togo, Zanzibar and The Gambia. Laden with pencils, erasers and pencil sharpeners, I was prepared for places like Juffureh. 

But something odd happened as we disembarked our boat and came upon the village: a man approached us and offered for sale packages of pencils and note books. It took me a moment to appreciate this odd reversal of roles as here, in the African hinterlands, he offers for sale to us the same school supplies we brought in our backpacks. We are to pay for them and then place the purchased supplies into the nearby donation box for the local school. I decline, and the thought occurs to me: what if he, instead of passing the supplies on to the school, takes them out of the donation box and re-sells them to subsequent groups of tourists?

Passing through the villages we are greeted by children who bang on pots and pans while chanting and begging for money.  Elsewhere, we are invited to visit an activity center for children. There, too, we are asked to leave money. Then we are off to meet the chief of the village. In Juffureh, the chief (alkalo) is a 76-year old woman by the name of "Aja Tako Taal". She wants money for photocopied certificates which state that we have, in fact, visited the home village of Kunta Kinteh. Then there is more posing for pictures for money, a visit with descendants of Kunta Kinteh, more children begging for money and, of course, a crafts market which we ignored - thankfully.

I did feel conned by the man trying to sell me pencils and harassed by the constant pressure to give money. The negative experience distracts from the important lessons that can be learned in Juffureh. Whatever is going on in the community of Juffereh, it is neither healthy for its people nor beneficial for the village’s touristic appeal in the long term.

Back on the ship, I decide to do some research on chief Taal and the village. As it turns out, the village of Juffereh has been inundated with tourists ever since the Roots saga took off in the USA in the late 1970s. Local tours to Juffureh are promoted as homecoming pilgrimages to African-Americans, but many Caucasian tourists make their way to The Gambia, too. Most visitors buy “Roots Excursions” in order to learn about the horrors of slavery and re-trace the footsteps of Kunta Kinteh. Approximately 10,000 tourists visit this tiny village of 1,500 people, annually. I also read many travel blogs by past visitors to Juffureh, each with experiences identical to ours and pictures of a (then younger) chief Taal holding the photocopied certificates in her lap. Most writers express disappointment with the barrage of begging children and adults.

The naïve me thinks: How fortunate for this poor village to be able to welcome visitors from all over the world! Certainly, Juffureh is the envy of all neighboring villages. What a great way to support the community, improve the children’s education and offer an alternative to growing potatoes and catching fish for survival. In my research I learn that an activity center for children was built specifically to keep the kids from harassing tourists. Also, the local guides and the chief are being paid salaries which are funded by an admission fee that is included in the “Roots Excursion” tour price. But, given the large number of visitors who make the trip to Juffureh and knowing that anybody with half a heart will leave at least some money for these presumably poor people, I must ask: where does the money go?

The cynical me thinks: Is poor Juffureh a storefront façade (as we witnessed in the Amazon) with a modern village featuring computer terminals and air conditioning units just down the road, hidden from view? Is it possible that people in the village keep the salaries and donations for themselves while pretending to be poor? Why were the children not in school but begging on the road instead? Are the villagers raising a generation of beggars?  I saw no evidence of actual farming or fishing. Has the community shifted to handouts for survival? Is there a sense of entitlement among the population, an angry attitude that all that fame should have resulted in better living conditions long ago?

In my opinion, Juffureh represents the worst in African tourism. Salaries or no salaries, donations or no donations – the disparity in income between visitor and host will always be large. But if the population of Juffureh is ever to reap the benefits of the village’s prominence and have an opportunity to improve its infrastructure and services, the villagers will have to move beyond selfishness and victimhood and accept a code of conduct that is acceptable to the multitudes of tourists walking through the village.

The Travel Foundation, a British organization dedicated to “caring for places we love to visit”, carried out a 3-year project in the twin villages between 2008 and 2011. The project’s objectives aimed to reduce the begging and help the population of Albreda and Juffureh maximize the benefits it receives from the influx of tourists. In its final project report the authors state: “Getting individuals to work for ‘the greater good’ (of the community) is perhaps the biggest challenge.” Until that happens, tourists will continue to feel harassed and violated when visiting Juffureh, be more reluctant to give … and leave just a bit more cynical than before they came.

~ RT

Banjul, The Gambia

A sliver of land here, a blob of earth there – at first look the shapes of African countries don’t make a lot of sense. But when you know the history of events that led to the formation of modern Africa, you’ll understand why Togo and Benin are such long and narrow nations, why The Gambia follows the length of the navigable Gambia River and why the borders of Algeria and Egypt mostly consist of straight lines.

Banjul, officially the City of Banjul and formerly known as Bathurst, is the capital of the Gambia and is in a division of the same name.

During the late 19th century the European powers engaged in [what is now known as] the Scramble for Africa, statesmen and diplomats of countries like France, Germany, Belgium, Great Britain and Portugal met in Berlin, Paris, London and other capitals to divide and distribute the African land mass and resources among themselves. Territories were traded (e.g. Britain gave Germany the North Sea island of Helgoland in return for Zanzibar), land was swapped for fishing rights (e.g. Britain gave parts of northern Nigeria to France in return for fishing rights off Newfoundland) and compromises were reached to keep the peace (e.g. the French gave parts of Cameroon to Germany in return for their recognition of French rule over Morocco).

Tragically, the European powers had no idea (…or didn’t care) about the consequences of the invasion, annexation and colonization of African territory. Not only did they work with inaccurate maps, they also had no idea what Africa’s interior looked like. As a result, very little attention was paid to thousands of established kingdoms, chiefdoms and tribes that existed throughout Africa. Many were split apart by the newly agreed upon borders, many were joined into countries despite long-standing antagonisms between the tribes, not to mention the latent hostilities that existed between Muslims and non-Muslims. By the time the Scramble for Africa was over, roughly 10,000 societal entities in Africa (e.g. states, tribes, ethnic groups) were amalgamated into 40 European protectorates and colonies.

What followed were many battles of resistance between the local population and their colonial rulers. Some were settled with little bloodshed but others resulted in brutal repression. The Germans, for example, conducted a major genocide in German East Africa and German South West Africa by wiping out three quarters of the Herero people and half of the Nama people between 1904 and 1908, only to lose Germany’s entire African holdings during WWI. It all made very little sense and was based upon much naivety, greed and an insatiable appetite for power on part of the Europeans. (Since then, Germany has apologized for the atrocities it committed within its African protectorates.)

Of course, many factors were considered when the Europeans divided up land and drew lines across their African map (e.g. rivers, mountain ranges, known resources), but one important reason why many countries now feature strange shapes and forms is this: the colonial powers wanted ocean access as well as land mass or navigable rivers that reached into the continent’s interior. So, next time you look at a map of Africa and you wonder why The Gambia is surrounded by Senegal and its greatest width is a mere 48 km (30 mi) across the Gambia River, just envision a few old men drawing lines across an African map while bargaining over resources they don’t own and dividing up territory without having a clue about the suffering and injustice they are just about to cause.  

~ RT

Dakar, Senegal

No matter how much or how little you enjoy your work life, you will love your job more after reading my story below.

The shores of Lake Retba, also known as Lac Rose, used to be the legendary finishing point for the infamous Dakar Rally before the event was re-located to South America. Pink Lake, as it is called in English, is located approximately 30 km (20 mi) north-east of Dakar, Senegal. Separated from the Atlantic Ocean by only a narrow strip of sand dunes and with a surface area of 3 sqkm (1 sqmi) and a maximum depth of 3 m (9.8 ft), it is small, very salty (the salt content of Pink Lake is greater than that of the Dead Sea) …and, of course, pink. Best known for its pink glow, which mostly occurs during the dry season from November to June, the lake is truly an unusual sight. The pinkish hue of the water is caused by the Dunaliella salina algea, which produces a pink pigment to assist in light absorption, and high magnesium chloride content.

Dakar is the capital of Senegal, in West Africa. It’s an Atlantic port on the Cap-Vert peninsula. Its traditional Médina quarter is home to the Grande Mosquée, marked by a towering minaret. The Musée Théodore Monod displays cultural artifacts including clothing, drums, carvings and tools. The city’s vibrant nightlife is inspired by the local mbalax music.

Pink Lake is officially recognized and classified as a mine by the state of Senegal. It is used extensively for the harvesting of salt. Local salt diggers wade into the water up to their chests equipped with poles to loosen the salt from the bottom of the lake and shovels to lift the salt into their boat. They can spend up to 7 hours in the pink water, protected against tissues damage only by a coat of shea butter which is derived from the African shea nut and used as a skin lotion. When the boats are full, the men return to land where the salt is unloaded by women, piled high along the shoreline and eventually filled into bags by hand. The most common use for the salt is the preservation of fish. Seventy percent of the salt is exported to the Ivory Coast with the rest sold to other African countries and Europe, where the salt is used in winter on icy roads.

Interestingly, the workers have organized themselves to avoid conflict among the salt diggers and to preserve the environmental integrity of the lake. In 1994 they formed a Management Committee which oversees the salt harvest, the commercialization of their product and the replenishment of the salt resources. Among other strategies, the salt diggers have agreed to leave parts of the lake dormant for 6 months on a rotation basis and to allow the salt to regenerate. They also have agreed to prohibit engine use for the harvesting of the salt.

Collecting salt from the bottom of Pink Lake is hard labour. It is hazardous work but also lucrative - salt diggers can earn about US $ 20.- per day. Normally, workers do not do this work for long. As soon as the salt diggers have earned enough, they migrate either to Dakar, to other West African countries to set up a business or even to Europe for a better life.

But despite their environmental efforts, Pink Lake is threatened. There is clear evidence of environmental degradation, detrimental effects of climate change and negative consequences from housing developments around the lake. Since 1990, the size of the lake has shrunk by 25%, from 4 sqkm to 3 sqkm. Because of its pink color and uniqueness in the natural world, it has been added to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List. Hopefully, full protection of Lake Retba under UNESCO will be upcoming in the not so distant future.  

Remember, next time you drive on an icy road that has been salted, think with gratitude of the salt diggers of Pink Lake in Senegal.

~ RT

Lome, Togo

I am in the remote farming village of Hlande in south Togo, home of the Ewe tribe.  This is the second time that I am witnessing the spectacular Vodun (“spirit”) dance ceremony involving the so-called Zangbetos, but this time I am more present to the moment and notice things I didn’t catch the first time, when I was here five years ago. Looking around the scene before me, I notice how the children of the village take in the scene with absolute awe written on their faces and bewilderment in their minds. Zangbetos must be enormously powerful creatures, very wise and capable of tremendous feats of magic.

Lomé, with a population of 837,437, is the capital and largest city of Togo. Located on the Gulf of Guinea, Lomé is the country's administrative and industrial center and its chief port. The city exports coffee, cocoa, copra, and palm kernels.

Zangbetos are also called the “guardians of the night.” Traditionally, before the existence of modern law enforcement, Zangbetos wandered through African villages, scaring away evil, catching thieves, delivering them to the villagers for punishment and keeping law and order. To demonstrate their power and infallibility, while in trance, Zangbetos perform acts of magic for everybody to see - and all that while remaining invisible to the audience.

Zangbetos are cone-shaped haystacks about 1.80 m (6 ft) in height. During the ceremony, they turn like dervishes, spinning faster and faster across the village square while being prevented by their “handlers” from crashing into villagers and by-standers. Eventually they come to a standstill. The “handlers” then hit the sides of the haystack with their hands before lifting it off the ground. This is to show that no person is underneath the haystack costume. Rather than a person, something else is revealed: a (very much alive and fast-moving) young crocodile, a figurine with moving arms, a banana-eating animal skull or an alcoholic drink. The Zangbeto has used its magical powers to transform itself!

Vodun, a similar version of the voodoo religion practiced in the Caribbean islands and in parts of Brazil, is not as evil and dark as many westerners believe (the Vodun religion evolved into Voodoo when slaves trade brought the religion to the New World). Local practitioners claim that it has nothing to do with black magic and sorcery. It promotes the idea that we are all one with nature, that there is one Creator, that we are all connected, that one event affects changes elsewhere, that our dead ancestors watch over us and can be called upon for help and that various divinities can act as intermediaries and help us create the reality we desire: a healthy child, being cured from a disease, a good job or delivery from poverty.

Surprisingly, the 10,000 year-old spiritual practices upon which the Vodun religion is based contain similar elements as Catholicism. That may be the reason why, not only in Togo but in many other parts of the world, the spiritual practices of the Ewe people in southern Togo form a complex mixture of ancient cultural traditions and Christianity. The villagers of Hlande see no conflict in attending mass first and then participating in a Vodun ceremony right after church.

Perhaps to underline this relationship and in recognition of the long-established amalgamation of Catholic and Vodun spiritual practices in this part of the world, Pope John Paul II visited neighboring Benin in 1992 to meet and dialogue with Vodun priests and elders. Adherents of Vodun saw this event as proof of legitimacy, a clear sign that the Vodunists have their place alongside the Christian faith. Following the Pope’s visit, the Vodun movement gained strength and religious practices based on this ancient cult became more popular. At this time, approximately half of Togo’s population practices indigenous religions with Vodunists occupying the vast majority.

Back in the village square of Hlande, I am still puzzled by the Zangbetos and their magic tricks. Surely, there must be a person inside that cone, spinning the haystack around and around at an ever-increasing speed. If I could just catch a glimpse and see the underside of a cone! No sooner did I finish that thought when a haystack costume “parked” right in front of me. To my surprise, four adult men approached the Zangbeto and overturned the cone in my full view: the cone was completely empty! Did I miss something? Perhaps there was a time lapse and I entered an altered reality. How did that happen? I have no idea but one thing I know for sure - this is going to cause me some sleepless nights.

~ RT

Luanda, Angola

The Mirriam-Webster Dictionary defines “struggle” as “a long effort to do, achieve, or deal with something that is difficult.”

There is a certain mood and feeling associated with places that have endured (or are enduring) hardship – Auschwitz, Syria, North Korea and Cambodia are some examples. The truths, cruel realities and memories linger long after the atrocities have ended, there may be a sense of denial or simply the proverbial elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about. You see it in the facial expressions of children, the way the land is cared for and how people spend their time or treat each other. After a war, a country has to heal – and that takes time – sometimes many generations. Angola is such a place.

First it was the slave trade that blanketed the land with sorrow, then a long struggle for independence from Portugal, then a brutal 27-year long civil war that killed over 1 million and displaced 2.5 million of Angola’s citizens (the numbers vary). Peace came in 2002 after the guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi was killed in a gun battle. But while the fighting has stopped, the struggle for the people of Angola continues. Democracy in the country is only a reality on paper; free elections are still an illusion for Angola. President dos Santos and his FNLA party have had a stranglehold on power since 1979, and there is no end in sight.

Luanda, formerly named São Paulo da Assunção de Loanda, is the capital city of Angola, and the country's most populous and important city, primary port and major industrial, cultural and urban centre.

But Angola is rich in oil, diamonds, fish, gold and forests, you say. It should be a country with great wealth, offering its population a high standard of living. After all, Angola passed Nigeria as Africa’s #1 oil producer, recently. Even looking at the skyline and the amount of new construction taking place in the capital city of Luanda, one could be forgiven for thinking that the industry is booming and the country’s population is benefitting from the economic success. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. In Luanda, a city of 4 million people, 50% of the population lives in shanty towns, yet it is considered one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Angola, which is twice the size of France, is the poster child for rampant corruption and poor management. According to worldaudit.org, the country’s rankings for Democracy, Press Freedom and Corruption are 125, 116 and 137 out of 150, respectively (0 is best, 150 is worst). Most of the profits the economy generates go to the privileged few at the top and the dos Santos family. As a result, the majority of Angola’s 19.6 million people live off US $2.00 per day, they have no running water, no sanitation and poor education and health services. The life expectancy of Angolans is still around 50 years. China, which increasingly looks like the new colonial power on the African continent, invests billions in infrastructure projects but brings its own construction laborers, leaving the local workforce without jobs. The unemployment rate in Angola is close to 25%. What does China want in return for its generosity? Access to Africa’s natural resources, of course.

To be fair, the situation is improving, but given the steady income from oil and diamond exports, progress should be much more rapid. In the countryside, tens of thousands of Angolans that fled during the civil war are gradually returning to their homes only to discover, that their fields around the villages are heavily contaminated with landmines, making agricultural production a hazardous business. Of the 35 million landmines in Africa, 10 million are in Angola. Cleanup is slow, leaving the country dependent on food imports.

Personally, aside from the sight of malnourished children in the countryside, I find the trash on the sidewalks, the streets, private properties and in the waterways, most disturbing. I have visited many third world countries before and know the standard of care for the environment in poor nations is different from that in the developed world. However, what I saw in Angola is taking filth to another level. Aside from the health issues the unsanitary conditions cause, for a country that wishes to attract tourists to its shores, the implementation of a public trash disposal and recycling infrastructure along with a public awareness campaign would make the city of Luanda and its surrounding areas a lot more safe and attractive. But all of that takes political will and money. Both would be available to the deserving people of Angola under a different leadership. I must admit: driving through Angola, seeing how people live and noticing how the country is crying out for structure and good management, made me angry. How insensitive and greedy do you have to be to accumulate unimaginable wealth at the cost of your own people’s wellbeing?

On that note, let me introduce you to Isabel dos Santos, the eldest daughter of the president.  At age 42 and with a net worth of US $3.6 billion, Isabel is the richest woman and the 8th richest person in Africa. Isabel’s investment portfolio includes stakes in several of Angola’s state-owned companies including mobile phone networks and banks. In Portugal, she owns chunks of oil and gas companies, more banks and part of a telecom firm. In October 2015, four members of the European Parliament publically called for an investigation into the investment dealings of the Angolan president in Portugal.  According to their claim, “the Angolan State is indirectly and illegally financing private investments of the president’s daughter Isabel dos Santos."

The Mirriam-Webster Dictionary defines "hope" as "the feeling of wanting something to happen and thinking that it could happen : a feeling that something good will happen or be true." For people who have nothing, hope can be everything. 

~ RT

Luederitz, Namibia

Imagine you are an acacia tree in the Namib Desert – gnarly, thorny and old and you don’t want antelopes and giraffes to eat your fresh, green leaves. What do you do? First of all, as soon as an antelope starts munching on your foliage, you produce bitter leaf tannins. Within 15 minutes your leaves will be non-edible and toxic. Then, being a good citizen of the Namib, you may want to alert your neighboring acacia trees. You do that by releasing ethylene into the air. Carried by the wind, it warns the trees downwind to step up their tannin production in advance of the antelope attack. Good plan, but it won’t work! The antelopes already know this trick and start eating the acacias upwind from you!    

Lüderitz is a harbour town in southwest Namibia, lying on one of the least hospitable coasts in Africa. It is a port developed around Robert Harbour and Shark Island.

However, tannins and ethylene are not the only tools in your tree species’ toolbox. After all, you still have your trusty biting ants using your swollen thorns as nesting sites and collecting sweet nectar from the base of your leaves. In return for your generosity, the ants act as your body guards. They bite and hurt any large herbivore trying to eat your precious leaves. But what happens when the herbivores die out or become greatly reduced in numbers? Since you no longer need the body guard ants for protection, you stop making sweet nectar and cause the “good” ants to leave. Subsequently, “bad” ants invade your branches! They are not interested in your sweet nectar or your swollen thorns but they help wood-boring beetles create tunnels which the ants use as nesting sites. This is your death sentence. Within 5 to 10 years, you are fire wood.  

And so, the morale of the story is this: don’t hunt acacia-eating herbivores if you want acacia trees to survive in Africa!

The above is a great example of the perplexing interconnectedness of ecosystems. The Namib Desert is the third driest place on earth and at 55 to 80 million years of age it is the oldest desert in the world. Evolution must have had fun in this place! From lichen that grow 1 mm per year and get only nourished by the fog rolling in from the ocean, to 2,500 year-old Welwitschia plants that get pollinated by a red beetle running back and forth between the male and the female plants, the Namib is (aside from the Galapagos, perhaps) THE place to study ecosystems and evolution.

“One hundred years ago this desert was full of lions, elephants and giraffes” said Erwin as he steered our four-wheel drive along a dried-up washboard riverbed. “Now, the desert belongs to the Oryx, antelopes, reptiles and the wild horses.” “What happened?” I inquired. “Hunting and climate change”, Erwin responded. “One hundred years ago, the desert wasn’t as dry as it is now.” I close my eyes and try to envision this moonscape filled with animals. It’s tough to do after the area has only seen 14 mm of rain during this last year. Everything is gnarly, brown and harsh looking. How can anything survive in this environment? I wonder how many acacia trees have died during the past hundred years.

The landscape of the Namib is breathtaking; this desert is a wild place. It stretches along the west coast of Namibia for 1,900 km (1,200 mi), reaching 50 to 160 km (30 mi to 100 mi) inland. Aside from the moonscapes and the grass steppes you can also find the world’s highest sand dune in the Namib. With over 350 m (1,150 ft) in height, Dune 7 (the dune is 7 km from the town of Walvis Bay) used to be the military’s favorite exercise “facility”. During training exercises, the soldiers had to carry their heavy backpacks up and down the dune’s steep incline.

True to my German heritage and in honor of Namibia’s German past (Namibia used to be called “German West Africa”), I decide to climb Dune 7. After taking the easy route to the top, I am awe-struck by the sight before me: sand as far as the eye can see! A number of people are watching me from below. I am the only one up here on top. Should I return the same way or charge down the steep incline back to the parking lot? Standing on the top ridge of Dune 7, I feel like a child in a giant sandbox and plunge forward into the deep and sandy abyss. With a doubt, it’s hard to look dignified while having so much fun! When I reach our car at the bottom of the hill, huffing and puffing from exertion, I have a huge smile on my face. I doubt the Namibian soldiers had as much fun on Dune 7 as I did!

~ RT

Cape Town, South Africa

Rather than blessed with this gift from birth, he had to work at it. In the privacy of his cell, he had enough time for introspection – 27 years to be exact. He practiced the craft of self-control and over time had become a master of measured responses. Responses that were lacking the tone of hatred, that refused to reveal his disappointment and denied his enemies the satisfaction of witnessing any type of emotional impact.  

Cape Town is a port city on South Africa’s southwest coast, on a peninsula beneath the imposing Table Mountain. Slowly rotating cable cars climb to the mountain’s flat top, from which there are sweeping views of the city, the busy harbor and boats heading for Robben Island in Table Bay. The notorious prison that once held Nelson Mandela is now a living museum.

Nelson Mandela was a very private person. He didn’t like to talk about himself. He never put himself in the foreground but didn’t shy away from the limelight. He preferred to talk about hope, reconciliation and nation building when he was released from prison in 1990. Five decades of oppression during the era of “grand apartheid” in South Africa, had ended. He never laid blame against his ruthless captors, nor did he complain about the poor treatment he had received for all these years. He never hated his enemies. He was merely angry at them, but he hated the system they were imposing on his people. When asked how he had changed during his many years in prison, he answered in characteristic brevity: “I came out mature.”

Nelson Mandela has gone down in the history books as one of the greatest leaders the world has seen in recent memory, and I consider myself fortunate to have lived during the latter part of his lifetime, to have witnessed his struggle for freedom from oppression and to have seen his triumphant election as president of South Africa in 1994. And now I am here on Robben Island, the very place where Mandela had spent 18 of his 27 years of incarceration. For me, this is a pilgrimage of sorts; an opportunity to put myself, even if only for a brief time, into the very location where Mandela had suffered.  Here he wrote his autobiography, contemplated strategies that would lead to the defeat of the apartheid system, appealed for unity among the fractured opposition and struggled to keep faith. But let me take you back a few years, refresh your memory about the suffering of black people in South Africa and the opposition movements that arose during the 1960s and 70s.

Throughout the 1960s South Africa was a successful nation; the economy grew, foreign investment poured into the country, immigration of white Europeans was on the rise and trade with Western nations rose in leaps and bounds. There was only one problem: the black majority was excluded from the success. In fact, the government tried very hard to push blacks out of urban environments. According to the government, black urbanization had to be prevented at all cost. Cities were reserved for the white population. Policies and laws were introduced that were designed to move the black population to so-called townships, which were located outside of the cities. They made sure that every skilled trade and craft was reserved for white workers and education for blacks was limited to the level of proficiency required for manual labour only. The government spent 16 times more on education for white children (per pupil) than for black children. Eventually, homelands were created, pieces and parts of South Africa that were useless to the government but could be used as ghettos for black communities. For the most part these homelands had no infrastructure, no sanitation, no schools and no natural resources that could be traded and no economy. To survive blacks had to become migrant workers; they rode trains into the cities in the morning, worked long hours during the day and returned to their families late in the evening. They were not allowed to form trade unions and their movements were restricted. In addition, blacks living in homelands lost their South African citizenship. The dreaded “Pass Law” required all blacks to wear a passport which was to be carried by all blacks entering white urban areas. Blacks were only permitted to stay for a maximum of 72 hours at any one time.

The ANC (African National Congress) was founded in 1912 and grew to become the ruling party in South Africa under the leadership of Mandela in 1994. While the ANC was only one of many freedom movements in the country in the 1960s and 1970s, it always played a leading role in the struggle against the apartheid regime. First a peaceful movement, it developed a militant approach to their cause after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 during which 69 blacks were gunned down by police during a peaceful protest. To the South African government, opposing apartheid was worse than murder. The ANC was persecuted because the organization was supposedly endangering the nation by refusing to conform.

The government was relentless in its crackdown of black activism. In the famous Rivonia trial of 1963, almost the entire ANC leadership was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. At that time, Mandela was already serving a five-year sentence. On June 13th of 1963 Mandela was transported to Robben Island, less than 10 km off the coast of Cape Town here in South Africa. At 518 ha in size, the island has a long history as a place of banishment for murderers, lepers and uncooperative tribal chiefs under colonialism. During the early 1960s it was to become the home for political prisoners, especially the ANC leadership and the leaders of PAC (Pan-Africanist Congress) and SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organization) which fought for Namibia’s independence from South African rule.

Upon their arrival, the political prisoners were forced to work in stone quarries, shape the stones they cut and build their own maximum security prison. Mandela and the other ANC leaders were placed in solitary confinement, forced to sleep on mats on the floor, their cells no larger than 1.8 m x 2.1 m. They communicated in secret by leaving messages for each other in matchboxes with false bottoms and by drawing messages in the sand. An enormous feat in clandestine activity was Mandela’s writing of his autobiography in 1976 and the subsequent smuggling of the transcript to the outside world by a released fellow prisoner.

Knowing the power of Mandela’s influence and charisma, the government, for more than a decade wanted to make sure he was forgotten by his supporters and that his name was erased from the public’s mind. His speeches were banned and it was forbidden to publish his photograph. However, all of this changed in 1980 when, in the wake of a major anti-apartheid revolt, the Soweto newspaper The Post started a campaign, demanding Mandela’s release with a banner headline FREE MANDELA. The campaign caught the public’s imagination. By now, a different generation had replaced the freedom fighters of the 1950s and 60s. White university students and liberal politicians made their voices heard. Mandela, a mythical figure held captive on this mythical island, once again became a symbol for the rights and freedoms of black people in South Africa. In 1982, the government decided to move Mandela to a different prison on the mainland near Cape Town.

The apartheid system in South Africa entered its final years of terror amid secret negotiations between Mandela and P.W. Botha, the country’s prime minister. While mostly symbolic in nature, the talks were a recognition and acknowledgement of Mandela’s importance in finding a solution to South Africa’s isolation from the world community, international sanctions and racial turmoil in the townships. However, it was not until Botha’s successor F.W. de Klerk took office in 1989 that negotiations moved along in earnest. Eventually, after 27 years of incarceration Mandela was freed from prison in 1990 and the end of apartheid was proclaimed to the world.  Democratic elections were held and in 1994 Nelson Mandela elected president. The miracle was complete.

I have long thought about the forces that were at play during those last years of apartheid. What finally gave the impetus to freedom for all blacks in South Africa? Mandela was definitely a key component and de Klerk acted as a catalyst as the different anti-apartheid organizations relentlessly pressed for change. But unlike the disintegration of the Soviet Union which was based on the failure of communism and the collapse of the economies behind the Iron Curtain, the apartheid system in South Africa had not failed. Despite sanctions and strong opposition from the rest of the world, South Africa’s government was strong and its military force mighty. It could have suppressed the blacks’ freedom movement for much longer. It was the shift in public understanding that led to South Africa’s miracle.  In my opinion, what really moved the ball along was the arrival and political influence of a new generation of South Africans. The mood had changed, the country was tired of conflict and the public’s consciousness was raised to greater awareness of fairness.

When taking his oath of office after winning the elections in 1994, Mandela spoke to his people: “We enter into a covenant that we shall build a society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity – a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.”

As I am standing at the door to his cell, the place where Nelson Mandela was held captive for 18 years, where his dignity was denied him, where the possibility of failure must have crossed his mind more than once, where his plans for the future were formed in his mind, where he perfected his formidable self-control and where he dreamed of a brighter future for his country, I try to put myself into his shoes. But I can’t. His life, his struggles and his eventual political success are too far removed from my life experiences. Nevertheless, I can still have admiration and respect for a man who, through his unassailable conviction, took on a formidable system and military might - and won.

~ RT

Durban, South Africa

Simon presses his hands together and makes a squeezing motion.  He is showing us how to survive in the dry Savannah, “You place fresh rhino manure into your hands, press hard and capture the water – then you drink it” Simon says with a straight face. He then proceeds to describe the taste and aroma of the precious liquid. I will spare you the details but will tell you that just about anything tastes delicious if you are thirsty enough.

Durban, a coastal city in eastern South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, is known for its African, Indian and colonial influences. The Golden Mile beachfront is a popular destination for surfers, joggers, sunbathers and water-sports enthusiasts. Refurbished for soccer’s 2010 World Cup, the seafront promenade starts at uShaka Marine World, a huge theme park with an aquarium, and ends by the futuristic Moses Mabhida stadium.

I don’t think Simon, in his mid-twenties, has ever had to drink manure juice, but he sure knew his stuff when it comes to rhinos. Having been brought up as the son of a ranger on a South African game reserve, Simon, now a ranger himself at the Tala Private Game Reserve near Durban in South Africa, is on the front lines of the fight for the rhino’s survival in Africa. With their numbers decimated by poachers all over Africa an ever-increasing number of white and black rhinos are slaughtered for their horns every year. The horns, which consist of the same protein keratin substance as our human fingernails, are sought after by Asian (mostly Vietnamese) customers for medicinal purposes. A ground up rhino horn, poured into a drink, supposedly cures cancers, soothes hangovers and detoxifies the body after excessive consumption of food and alcohol. Of course there is no scientific basis for those claims. If there were some truth to these miracle healing properties, all we'd have to do is chew on our fingernails to be cured from cancer. Rhino horns are also cherished by rich Vietnamese for the purpose of displaying their newly attained wealth. With horns being sold at a going rate of US $300,000 a piece, a businessman’s wealth is easily demonstrated with a rhino horn sitting on a shelf in the foyer.

When I detected Simon’s intimate knowledge of the rhino poaching problem in Africa, I was all over him with questions. As a good liberal, I always want the government to help first. “Why doesn’t the South African government send in the troops?” I ask Simon. “Understand that the rhino horn trade is monopolized by crime syndicates” Simon says. “The criminals bribe politicians to prevent laws and government action that will be detrimental to the poaching trade. There is an entire supply chain at work and everybody takes their cut.” Simon points out a good example of government interference: rangers on private game reserves are prohibited from carrying guns. Obtaining gun permits is almost impossible. “Try to take out a bunch of poachers with a Taser gun!” he explains in frustration. After having located a rhino with a GPS, poachers swoop in with their helicopter, tranquilize the animal, and with a battery powered chain saw cut off the horn and lift off before anybody can catch them. The poachers carry guns, rangers on private reserves do not (…or are not supposed to). “Because of its enormous value, poachers take off as much horn as they possibly can, thereby injuring the rhino. On average, the rhino dies within 12 minutes of the attack” Simon explains. Only 8% of rhinos survive attacks by poachers.

Protecting the rhinos from poachers is a logistical and financial challenge. After having lost 2 rhinos a month earlier, Simon and the owners of this game reserve are taking no more chances. Every rhino is now equipped with a collar on one hind leg. The collar monitors the rhino’s pulse rate and notifies Simon of any sudden changes in the animal’s vital signs via cell phone. In addition, wires have been installed inside the horn. The severing of the wire with a chain saw will set off an alarm and immediately notify the rangers of an attack. The reserve has also hired 12 full time rhino patrols. The patrols are on duty 24 hours a day, 7 days per week. Their job is to keep eye contact with the Rhinos at all times. Will this be enough to deter the criminals? “The poachers are brazen and equipped with the latest technology and equipment. In case of an attack, we might be able to chase them away before they do harm” Simon explains. He continues: “The other day a helicopter approached the reserve and despite our issuing several warnings, the helicopter continued on its course. It was pretty clear that an attack by poachers was imminent. We shot at the helicopter with our guns (Simon obviously decided to ignore the prohibition of guns on private reserves) and while we didn’t down the copter, we persuaded the pilot to turn away.” A shoot-to-kill policy for rangers is a hotly debated issue at this time. It shows the desperation of the men and women whose task it is to protect the precious rhinos.

This definitely sounds like war to me or at least a long, drawn-out battle. With the large majority of the remaining African rhinos living in South Africa, this country plays an enormously important role in the fight against poaching. And there is no shortage of suggestions and ideas on how to curb an ever-increasing threat to this endangered species. Some believe that it will be possible to educate Asians on the ineffectiveness of rhino horns, but to change superstition and cultural practices has always been very difficult. Others believe that a de-criminalization of the horn trade will lower the price and make poaching uninteresting. People have called for “horn farming” whereby rhinos’ horns would be harvested at regular intervals (the horns grow back at a rate of 5 cm per year) and sold on an open market. Some are in favour of poisoning or tainting the horns. Lately, the relocation of endangered rhinos to areas less prone to poaching has been suggested, but the logistics of such an undertaking and the cost of transport can be staggering. A serious plan and negotiations are currently under way to move 1,000 rhinos to the south of Texas, where they can live on private ranches in a climate and on terrain that is similar to that of their homeland. The idea is to allow the rhinos to live freely, to reproduce and hopefully, once the poaching craze has subsided, to reintroduce them back to their native habitat.

The idea receiving the most traction is that of removing the horns of thousands of rhinos in the areas most affected by poaching. While this would not guarantee the end of poaching (poachers might still kill the rhino in order to “harvest” the base of the horn), it would definitely lower the incentive to attack the animals. Apparently, the horn is not essential to a rhino’s survival. It is mostly used by males to scare off other males during mating season. But the de-horning of rhinos is not without challenges. The procedure itself requires tranquilization of the animal, which is dangerous and can lead to the rhino’s death. Also, mothers cannot be de-horned as long as their young are nursing. The cost of de-horning ranges from US $ 650 to US $ 1,000 per animal, a staggering expense considering the large number of rhinos still roaming the African Savannahs. And then there is the question about what to do with the horns. While some suggest that the horns should be sold on the black market and the money be used for rhino conservation, others would argue that burning and destroying the stock piles of horns is the only ethical solution.

Whatever the solution might be, it very well could be a combination of several ideas and approaches. One thing is clear, as long as African countries struggle with corruption, the nations’ governments will be seen as driving with one foot on the gas and one on the brakes. They will say all the right things in the news but will do nothing to curb the poaching problem. It is left to non-profits, conservation organizations and private individuals to fight this evil trade.

Simon does not hold out much hope for a happy ending. “At the current rate of killing, I believe we have a decade before all the rhinos are gone” he says. To me, this sounds like a very pessimistic outlook. Having seen the passion, the determination and the number of people who care about the future of rhinos, I hold out hope that a combination of relocation, de-horning and increased security at the reserves will stem the poaching tide and reverse a very dangerous trend.

Before leaving, I have one final question: “Where do you live, Simon?” He responds while pointing towards a lone house with a red roof high above the plains of the reserve. “See that house up on the hill? That is my place. The owner wants me to live there so I can look across the reserve and immediately notice suspicious activities. I never leave the game farm. It makes for a lonely existence. At this rate, I will never find a wife!”

I quietly wonder how much longer Simon can keep fighting this war, live with the stress and keep up his enormous level of commitment toward the cause.

As I am writing this, I recall another question I asked of Simon: “What is behind the poachers’ willingness to risk their lives for a rhino horn – poverty or greed?” Simon’s response came quickly; he didn’t have to search very long for the right answer. “Greed, of course! You don’t need 300,000 dollars to feed your family.” But as we drive through the poverty stricken regions of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, I can see similarities to the problems the marine trade has had with pirating issues during the past decade. What started out as desperate acts by disenfranchised fishermen in Somalia, got quickly overtaken by crime syndicates and brutal organizations. It is quite possible that the pirates, and in this case the poachers, are the guys who take all the risks and do their overlords’ dirty work. The only long term solution is to educate the end consumer and to go after the corrupt officials and syndicate bosses. They are the greedy individuals who seem to have no conscience or care about the future survival of an endangered species. My suggestion: lock them up with a pile of fresh rhino manure in the jail cell – and then withhold water. Having to drink manure juice for survival seems like a fitting punishment to me.  

~ RT

Stone Town, Zanzibar Archipelago, Tanzania

Just close your eyes for a moment and think about the word “Zanzibar”. What does the term conjure up in your mind? Can you smell the scents of exotic spices? Do you envision a Sultan with his many slaves? How about hearing vendors’ loud voices in a busy market? You are definitely on the right track if those are the things you perceive and associate with Zanzibar.  (You can open your eyes now.)

Zanzibar City is the capital and largest city of Zanzibar, in Tanzania. It is located on the west coast of Unguja, the main island of the Zanzibar Archipelago, roughly due north of Dar es Salaam across the Zanzibar Channel.

Zanzibar: exotic, beautiful and far away. During the Middle Ages this island archipelago (just off the East-African coast near modern-day Tanzania and Kenya) became a popular stop-over point for Arabian, Persian, Indonesian, Indian and Chinese merchant vessels. The interaction with all these different ethnicities eventually led to the creation of the Swahili culture and language. Unique, tolerant and colourful in its culture, traditions and religions, the people of Zanzibar survived occupation by the Portuguese, several generations of hereditary Omani Sultanate rule and existence as a British Protectorate during the centuries that followed. In April 1964, the country of Zanzibar merged with the United Republic of Tanganyika to form a new nation called The United Republic of Tanzania. Since then, Zanzibar, as a semi-autonomous region of Tanzania, has had a rocky relationship with its multi-party system and still struggles to feed its people and maintain its infrastructure.

Zanzibar’s glory days arrived with the Arabian Sultans. At one point, the Sultan of Oman even moved his capital from Muscat to Stone Town in Zanzibar. Now a World Heritage Site, the capital’s aging waterfront palaces, deteriorating grand houses with their intricately carved wooden doorways, labyrinths of narrow lanes and busy markets still hint of those times when ivory, spices, tortoiseshells and slaves were traded here.

Up to 50,000 slaves passed through Zanzibar annually from the interior of Africa to the Mediterranean. Tippu Tip, the most notorious and feared slave trader of the 19th century, frequently directed large caravans into the African interior. There, he bought slaves and ivory for next to nothing, transported both back to Zanzibar and sold them for large profits at local auctions. The demand for slaves was strong and the business lucrative. Muslims were more than happy to buy slaves as long as they were non-Muslim, Hindus liked slaves as their religion permitted the trade in human flesh and European Christians had a need for slaves to work in their far-flung plantations. Africans were not shy in their extensive use of slaves, either. Eventually Tip, who came from an Omani ruling class, became a very wealthy man who owned many plantations and 10,000 slaves in Zanzibar. Yielding to British pressure, the slave trade in Zanzibar ended in 1873. Tip died of Malaria in 1905.

Today, with an average income of US $250 annually and 50% of the population living below the line of poverty, Zanzibar is looking to tourism and possible off-shore oil reserves for relief from its dire economic situation. The will of the people of Zanzibar to re-build their island paradise is strong. In 1866, the famous European explorer David Livingston called Zanzibar “the finest place in all of Africa”. Perhaps, with a stable government and new economic drivers in place, this beautiful island nation in the Indian Ocean can recover some of its past glory.  

~ RT

Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania

The first thing you notice is the deafening quiet, as if a blanket had been placed upon the land and every sound is absorbed by the vastness of the terrain. My senses are piqued and I intuitively know that my presence in this vast wilderness is inconsequential - I have entered a sacred space.

Dar es Salaam, a major city and commercial port on Tanzania’s Indian Ocean coast, grew from a fishing village. The open-air Village Museum has re-created the traditional homes of local and other Tanzanian tribes and hosts tribal dancing. It’s part of the National Museum, which offers Tanzanian history exhibits, including the fossils of human ancestors found by anthropologist Louis Leakey.

The landscape before me is exactly how I envisioned it: acacia trees dispersed throughout the topography, vervet monkeys curiously checking us out from above, hippos up to their eye balls in muddy waters, majestic giraffes nibbling on whistling thorn bushes and lions resting in the shade, protected from the merciless mid-day equatorial sun. But the peace I perceive is haunting, misleading and temporary. The skulls and bones strewn across the landscape speak of a different reality. Here the weak are eaten first, the darkness treacherous and lions -not humans- occupy the top of the food chain.

We are in the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania, close to the east coast of Africa. In a small plane it takes 45 minutes to fly here from Dar Es Salaam. This 50,000 sqkm (19,300 sqmi) park is less known than the Serengeti or Kruger National Parks, but with a land area greater than Switzerland or Denmark and twice the size of Massachusetts, Selous is the largest game reserve in the world. It is part of a 155,000 sqkm (60,000 sqmi) large ecosystem, an area almost totally void of villages, cattle, roads, farmed land and people. It is described as “the real thing” when it comes to African wilderness.

Selous is the second of six natural game reserves my wife Kit and I plan to visit over a two week period (the first was Amboseli in Kenya). The other four are Lokobe, Hluhluwe, Tala and Inkwenkwezi. Equipped with two cameras, three lenses, my laptop and four eyes that constantly scan the landscape for iconic African wild life (Kit is helping me identify the next perfect shot), I plan to digitally capture as many animal and bird species as I can. Also, I want to learn about the state of the different reserves, the threats to their wildlife stocks and the political landscape that will define and determine the fate of these precious territories.

As we have noticed already, reaching the reserves in a timely manner and returning before the ship sails is always a challenge. The African concept of time is fluid and traffic unpredictable. In Africa, when the car in front of you stops, you might have enough time to read a 500 page novel before traffic moves on.  Like a gazelle grazing too close to a sleeping lion, Africa appears to be too close to always-looming chaos.

I have created a new Gallery page just for Game Reserve images and posted the first set of photographs taken in the Amboseli Game Reserve in Kenya and the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania. Of course, there are more to follow. Stay tuned for my story about the state of the game reserves in eastern and southern Africa in early December.

~ RT

Aride Island, Seychelles Islands Archipelago, Indian Ocean

“This is probably the rarest bird you will ever photograph”, Sarah said as I point my camera towards the Seychelles Magpie-Robin. Sarah should know. As a volunteer, she has spent the last 6 months on this remote island that many of us would consider to be paradise. Aride, one of the granite islands in the Seychelles archipelago, located 1,600 km east of Kenya in the Indian Ocean, is a jewel in the crown of spectacular granite and coral islands that make up the tiny country of Seychelles. But for Sarah, her return home to England can’t come soon enough. “Spending 6 months with the same 8 people on a remote island can be very trying”, she says.

Aride Island is the northernmost granitic island in the Seychelles and is part of the district of Grand'Anse, located 10 km north of Praslin island and is 68 hectares in area.

To me, as a first time visitor to Aride, the island is a wildlife spectacle. Walking on rudimentary trails along the shoreline, I don’t know where to look first. There are giant frigate birds soaring over my head, tiny lizards whizz past my feet and sea turtles lay their eggs at the lower reaches of the beach vegetation while white-tailed tropicbirds roost right beside the trail, totally unperturbed by our presence. As in the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean, here, birds and animals do not fear humans. If you are not careful while walking along the trail, you’ll trip over hermit crabs and baby birds. To most of us, who commonly have to search for wildlife and consider ourselves lucky if we catch a glimpse of a deer, eagle or moose, this is a surreal and uncommon experience.

Aride Island was colonized after 1851. Until then, pirates used the island of 68 ha (168 acres) as a base from where to launch their unsavory activities. The pirates were followed by entrepreneurs who logged the forest, etsablished coconut plantations, made meat pies from sea birds and traded their eggs by the thousands. Fortunately, unlike so many other islands with precious wildlife, Aride’s bird colonies and turtle nests were not devastated and did not suffer damage from cat and rat infestations. Eventually, the natural flora and fauna recovered on the island, which now resembles a nearly undisturbed habitat. In 1973, the chocolate maker and British nature conservationist Christopher Cadbury, purchased Aride for the Royal Society of Nature Conservation in the UK. Recognized under Seychelles law, Aride is now a Special Nature Reserve managed by the Island Conservation Society of Seychelles. The island is permanently staffed with research scientists, an island manager and volunteers who help in the monitoring of bird, fish and turtle populations.

While walking along the shore line under the canopy of trees, I notice the strong smell of rotting fish. Apparently, shortly before our arrival on the island, an abundant and powerful algal bloom caused the ocean to turn blood-red and many fish to suffocate and die. With the exception of the casualties it left in its wake, all evidence of the algal bloom is gone. “We can’t be certain what caused the algal bloom”, says Sarah “but we believe it has something to do with the unusually strong El Nino we are experiencing this year.” Research has shown that there has been a proliferation of toxic algal blooms all over the world’s oceans during the past 30 years. While I try to process the information and the inevitable implications on the fishing industry, Sarah goes on to explain that some seabird species on Aride have been devastated by high chick mortality this year. Again, the causes are uncertain, but a logical explanation is that the chicks simply starved to death due to the sharply reduced fish stocks. The number of turtles returning to the beaches of Aride has also been affected: usually, between 50 and 60 turtles make their trek through the sand to lay their eggs. This year, only 6 turtles have returned. “We hope everything will be back to normal next year”, Sarah comments, but I do sense resignation in her voice. As environmental calamities pile up, finding the strength to get up in the morning can be challenging.

As my first impressions of Aride as a paradise on earth quickly give way to an all-too-familiar despondency about the state of our ecosystems, I notice a plain looking bird in the tree above me. “This is the Seychelles Warbler”, Sarah points out. “During the 1960s this song bird was nearly extinct with only 26 of the species left in the world, but conservation efforts have brought the Seychelles Warbler back from extinction. The species, which is endemic to the Seychelles, is now 2,500 strong.”

I leave Aride Island with a sense of gratitude and admiration for the work Sarah and her colleagues are doing. You have to be a special kind of person to drudge through tropical forests in any kind of weather, to count thousands of birds on a lonely rock in the open ocean or to collect hundreds of dead fish and bury them in deep pits. It is important work in which success is measured in very small increments and patience is directly linked to one’s hope for a better future.

~ RT

Sinai Peninsula, Egypt

I have looked at this picture a thousand times while trying to put myself into the boots of this soldier. With a plastic water bottle in his hand, a gun on his back and holding his helmet, he pauses before entering his concrete booth at the edge of the desert. What may be going through his head? Not long before this picture was taken, terrorists fired upon a freighter as it passed through the canal. Now, the Suez is lined with hundreds of soldiers like him. It is a dangerous post and definitely not too pleasant when mid-day temperatures soar above 40 degr C (104 degr. F).

~ RT