Waderlusting

Yesterday is but today's memory, tomorrow is today's dream. -Kahlil Gibran My plan was to transit through Lebanon to get to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, but as usual, my plans changed and I decided to just stay in Lebanon. I just kept my fingers crossed that the consequences of an expired visa wouldn't be too serious. Everything always seemed to work itself out, so my plan was to ride on this high tide of optimism. On Sunday, Chi and I headed over to the ancient Roman ruins of Baalbek, which is charmingly referred to as the City of the Sun. It was known in the ancient times as a place for Romans to worship their god, Jupiter, so you can imagine how massive this place used to be in its glory days of 100 BC ... read more

Coming from a country with fairly poor diplomatic relations with so many countries have had it's downs and downs. For one, individual travel is banned from several countries like Iran, Sudan and North Korea. Another is the enormous amount of anti-American conversations I've had (yawwwwwn) along my travels. So the experience at the Jordanian/Syrian border was just another friendly reminder of the world's love for America and its foreign policies. After riding a mini bus from Dahab to Nuweiba (port town of Egpt), I wandered around and met a group of travellers--most of whom were exchange students at American University in Cairo. We rode the fast ferry from Nuweiba to Aqaba in Jordan, which cost about $60-- payable only in U.S. dollars. My original plan was to go to Jordan and then later try for Syria, ... read more

While I've been here in East Africa, I've been exposed to the world of NGOs... where everyone talks in acronyms and comes together for a good cause. Well, the second part is up for debate because in the past month and a half, I've started to develop some mixed feelings about NGOs and whether some countries are better off without its help. I can't help but wonder if NGOs and aid work is actually detrimental to the development and sustainability of a 3rd world country. For one, the administrative costs that goes into these projects are ludicrous. I met a really nice Canadian engineer who was stationed in the DRC to develop a water system for a local village. The amount of administrative costs that Evelyn described absolutely stunned me. For one, they needed to remodel ... read more

I know that Rwanda as a country has more to offer than being the country where an atrocious genocide recently took place, but it's really hard to look at the country and not immediately associate the genocide with it. The Bradt guide book on Rwanda lists a UNICEF National Trauma survey of '95, which stated that: :: 99.9% of children witnessed violence :: 79.6% of children experienced death in the family :: 69.5% witnessed someone being killed or injured :: 57.7% of children witnessed killings or injuries with a machete :: 87.5% saw dead bodies or parts of bodies One of the main reasons that I wanted to go to Rwanda was b/c I wanted to see for myself how a country can move on so quickly after a genocide, and how two groups that ... read more

Off the coast of Kenya is Lamu Archipelago teeming with a vibrant Swahili ("People of the Coast" or "coastal dwellers") community--an example of what happens when two distinct cultures infuse together over centuries time without warring, land stealing, and having power struggles. The Swahili people are descendents of the Arabs and Bantu (Africans), which occurred when the Arabs started trading with Africa, and the resulting intermarriages slowly brought about a new language, society and culture of...ta-da ...Swahili! I was a little confused about Swahili being just a language or an ethnic group, as the language widely spoken all over Eastern Africa is Swahili, though not so much in Rwanda (French colonizers...self explanatory). Well, my understanding of it is that though Swahili is spoken widely here by Kenyans, Tanzanians, and Ugandans, the Swahili people are sort ... read more