hey, i was having breakfast this morning, while everyone else was having lunch, and i was eating my rice with a fork. an old woman in a suit sat down at my table because there are no personal boundaries in Africa, and she ate her whole fried fish with her fingers and scooped up rice and put her hands in her soup and picked at the fish spine and licked it and slurped. she ate every possible bit of that fish, she sucked the little fried eyes out of there sockets and crunched the finer bones in her molars. another man, [View Full Entry]

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the head nun of the YMCA told me never to trust a man from the street, i'm not sure because i met hassan on the street. i have decided to continue on continuing on the way i have been, trusting good men as they seem and hoping the best of them. if they turn out to be crooks then it is much more there own loss than it is mine. another interesting turn has taken place. i have been searching for film for my leica camera, before i depart south on my motorcycle. i am down to only a few rolls, [View Full Entry]

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i am a sucker, yesterday was may day, here in dar es salaam, whatever that means and it meant that the internet shop here at the YMCA was closed along with just about every business in town. the entire town was deserted, the usual horns and bells and yelling of the morning were gone. i sat and did nothing and ate eggs and then i went out the front door and across the street and beyond in search of an open internet. a plump middle aged fellow hollered at me from over by the gas station and came hopping over, i [View Full Entry]

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now i am back in dar es salaam and by no reasonable means. everything happened all at once yesterday in one long wild second. the time came to go and i went with solid water coming from the sky, no gaps between the droplets of rain, turning the dirt road into a mud river and i ran in a crouch through the night, late night, until i arrived soaked in all of the individual elements of africa: hard water, cattle patty, ash, garbage, spit of ancient ladies, the spit of infant babies who spit like grown men, the spit of [View Full Entry]

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hey! i have the motorcycle now, it is an old chinese knock-off bike, a 125cc, the brakes are good. everything seems good, it has been inspected by a mechanic, and even though the mechanic had no shop, just a tin roof and a screw driver, no shirt, grey beard, sitting in a squat, things are done here more by instinct that certified knowledge, he could tell what was in order and what was not by tapping the screwdriver against the engine casing. down at the registry three old woman squatting on the dirt in an unlit cave beside an ancient typewriter [View Full Entry]

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hey, i was going to head back to dar es salaam and go up and check out mt kilimanjaro and do a safari, but i feel like it would be chickening out, also it is recomended to visit mozambique in may to july which is when i would be going through, so i am going to get the bike. in this way i will get a good taste of things and skip out on things that have already been tasted! no other real news... reading books and sitting around and being a bum, jasper [View Full Entry]

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hello, i have been socked in out on the east coast these past day by heavy rain and foul weather generally. jambiani is a small village where once grand european hotels stood along the coast and the powder white sand but now have been reduced to crumbling wrecks. when it rains, which it has done every day, the sand turns to mud and the locals get wet and i run for cover. in the morning a spooky blanket of mist makes walking through ancient village ruins of goats and weather beaten women like something from a dream and every morning i [View Full Entry]

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hey, i have no big plans, just bumming around on zanzibar. yesterday i took a long ride out to the east coast, which is where i am now. jambiani. i arrived in the evening and walked down the beach in very fine powder white sand and a man with the sand on his face took me to a house that he rents out. it is a luxury apartment ashram style four big rooms of weird old painted cement and a thatched roof and a stove. it is very nice and very cheap because of the season, right on the beach with [View Full Entry]

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hey, i will look into a safari and the mountain climb. last night hassan took me out on the town with his school friend and his girlfriend. we sat in the park as the sun went down in the middle of town, this is where all of the young kids come on the weekend to hang out. everyone eats ice cream and fish and drinks soda and laughs and runs around from group to group shaking hands. muslim cool kids, muslim milk not beer on the weekend and still bigger smiles then beered up youth of home. very straight forward love [View Full Entry]

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hey, yesterday when i woke up i went to meet hassan, my friend from the ferry, early at 8am down in stone town by the marketplace. he was there when i got there wearing a fez already ready to go so we took off on a dala-dala mini bus across the island east to his village of makunduchi. he was eager for me to see where he lives and what he does in the day, and to meet his family and friends. we jumped crammed into the back of a sawed off van with twenty barefoot men and twenty masked woman [View Full Entry]

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