I remember arriving in Santiago de Compostela, the great Spanish pilgrimage city, on a cool, misty, Galician morning. It was that blue pre-dawn hour when anyone with a bit of common sense is curled up beside a pretty Spanish girl, not tramping around with an oversized backpack, looking for their hostel. I had arrived by train, from Madrid - hardly the arduous, soul-sapping slog across 800 miles of French and Spanish countryside that constitute the famous camino del Santiago. In the plazas, already bracing for the day’s traffic, they were setting up their souvenir stalls: th [View Full Entry]

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In the cool, blue, pre-dawn hours, I say my goodbyes to Dar es Salaam. I’ve arranged for a taxi to pick me up at the Econo Lodge at a quarter-past four, and after a short, restless, fitful night in bed, I’m hauling my bags onto the curb outside the Mohammed Coach Lines ticket office - a grubby storefront, a concrete box, with three barefoot guys sleeping on mattresses on the floor. The warning from the ticket agent was to arrive by 4:30; he stressed the urgency of my punctuality with a sort of fervor that made me wonder how long he’s [View Full Entry]

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There’s a steady rain falling over Stone Town in the morning, and I’m dodging rank-smelling puddles on my way to Mercury’s, where a taxi driver waits to whisk me away to The Palms. With my Zanzibar goodbye just days away, I suspect these next three days will be my last - and, in effect, only - bit of beach time on the island. About that fact I have few regrets. While hardly immune to the charms of palm-fringed coasts and Italians in skimpy swimsuits, the essential elements of the Zanzibari beach retreat - swimming, boozing, basking in the sun - hold [View Full Entry]

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For two weeks I’ve shopped at the market and diced tomatoes in the kitchen and sat on the couch watching ESPN over a plate of lukewarm leftovers; in most ways, it’s been as unexotic a fortnight as you could possibly imagine in Zanzibar. It’s also been a huge relief. Homeless for close to two years, having my own place, my own household routine, has been about as foreign and thrilling to me as spotting lions and leopards on the plains of the Serengeti would be to a bunch of tourists on safari. I’ve traded Grevy’s zebra for grocery lists and cheetahs [View Full Entry]

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Ali Baba will find a place for me. He makes this promise, sweat shining on his fat Buddha’s cheeks, eyes pinched and squinting into the sunlight. In the week I’ve spent in Dar, hanging around Chef’s Pride while Ali Baba works the crowd, it’s grown obvious that this is a man with a chubby hand in many pots. He gives me the number of his nephew, Ibrahim - the owner of a popular budget guest house in Stone Town, the Pyramid Hotel - and suggests I look him up as soon as I arrive. On my day of departure, hauling my [View Full Entry]

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It’s a gray, dreary, rain-soaked evening when we roll into Dar es Salaam. The commotion at the bus station - the porters grabbing at our bags, the hopeful cab drivers jangling their keys in our faces - is more, after six cramped hours, than me and Joost can stand. We overpay for a taxi, winding through the darkening streets while the city’s homeless - adjusting their blankets and boxes, propping against weathered storefronts - settle in for the night. It’s no sooner than I’ve noted that I’d “hate to be staying in this part of town” that we slow to a [View Full Entry]

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Leaving Arusha behind, driving through market towns and fields of maize and bright, sunflower-filled pastures, I arrive in Moshi upbeat, ready to square myself for the journey south. Surprised to see two weeks pass in Arusha, having glimpsed not a single lion or leopard or loping giraffe, I don’t want to linger long; memories of a month spent worrying over finances in Nairobi are, after all, still fresh. But the fortnight in Arusha was intense: the pile-up of impressions after arriving in a new country, the whirling circus of the Sullivan Summit, the commercial frenzy around the clocktow [View Full Entry]

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It’s winter in Arusha, a colorful tourist town sprawled against the slopes of Mt. Meru, just sixty miles from the Kenyan border. Since arriving from Nairobi, I’ve spent a few days ducking touts, ogling tourists, and huddling on my hotel’s rooftop terrace through the cool, windy nights. It’s a busy week, full of fresh impressions and the excitable energies of my first days in a new country. Things are dizzy, swirling, swimming into focus. And already I’ve balanced the thrill of arriving in Tanzania against a laundry list of writer’s worries: the hopes of snif [View Full Entry]

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I’ve left Nairobi for a few days in Nakuru, where I’m meeting up with my footballer friend, Peter. When I last saw him in November, Peter was upbeat: he’d spent the months since leaving Naivasha in talks with Mathare FC - a team that, at the time, was in a heated race for the Kenyan Premier League crown. (They would eventually finish second to champions Tusker.) Peter had been invited to try out for the squad in January, but he was at home in Kitale when violence broke out following the disputed presidential election. For Peter, the timing couldn’t have been [View Full Entry]

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I’m sitting in the lounge of Kigali International Airport, drinking a coffee and surfing the free WiFi (murakoze, Rwanda!) and waiting for my flight to board. World news is scrolling across the TV screen, images from the slums of Nairobi, where violent clashes between armed demonstrators and the police have left seven dead. Kibera, again, is in flames, and Nairobi’s nerves are frayed. I’ve picked, it seems, a bad time to go back to Kenya. But then, why go back to Kenya at all? Admittedly, the idea’s been brewing for weeks. Having spent a good chunk of ’ [View Full Entry]

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