Not all who wander are lost

2009-03-04T03:34:00.005+05:00

As I write this, half a dozen people are working in my house, cleaning mud and water out of the first floor. I've been in Haiti less than a week and already a flood in the house. It's not even the rainy season yet.

It's been a long time since I updated my blog, and that's mostly because I haven't felt like my life had been exotic enough to interest anyone. I continued working and living in Italy, then started working in the United Arab Emirates, which in spite of having some pretty big cultural differences, feels so much like a suburb of Los Angeles that it's hard to believe anyone would care about my impressions of it. Drinking a tall mocha in a Starbucks in Abu Dhabi (the capital), is only slightly more interesting for the fact that the guys at the next table are wearing the ubiquitous Arab dish dash (the white robe and head scarf that you can't help but imagine when I say the word 'sheikh'). Of course, if I were thinking about it more carefully there are many things I could write about life in Abu Dhabi. The honest fact is, I've grown tired enough of traveling that it is hard to get motivated enough to write about it.

But that changed last night with the flood. Or rather it didn't change, but the events of my first five days in Haiti combined with not having electricity today and being somewhat trapped upstairs with a muddy pool on the ground floor means that there is little I can do now but write something while the battery on my laptop holds out.

So, first, I'm in Haiti. My contract in Abu Dhabi finished and I've come to Haiti to stay with my girlfriend, Anne. Because of all the traveling we both have been doing for work, we managed to be together less than half of last year. We want to do better than that this year. Maybe I'll find work here, maybe not. It's a gamble, but the time seemed right to take it.

When I told people that I was moving to Haiti, they have usually mistakenly thought I said, "Tahiti", the green of envy fading fast from their faces when I corrected them. Although both are tropical islands and former french colonies, one has become synonymous with paradise and the other falls somewhat short of the mark. I've just moved my life to the latter.

Haiti is famously poor and prone to civil unrest and street crime. It's one of the few places that the Lonely Planet guidebook manages to be somewhat discouraging about. And I've used the LP for some tough places. I think the phrase "armed gangs roam the streets of the capital with impunity" was in their description.

As usual, the situation is not quite as dire as it would look from the outside, but it is dire. We have a beautiful house, full of windows and sunlight, surrounded by trees, but there are bars on every window, even the top of the garden wall is attached to house by a grillwork to prevent intruders. It's essentially a prison but also an architectural miracle that I can be inside it without feeling the weight of all those steel bars. We have two guards outside at night and one in the day. They have guns, or at least a gun, a pistol that looks like a prop from a western. It does have bullets, I checked.

Walking around the streets too much is not advised, as kidnappings for ransom have happened, though not so much lately. We have the use of a work car in the evenings and weekends, but when Anne is at work, I'm basically trapped inside the house. Again, I'm thankful for the beauty of the house and the trees around it.

Having a house in a place like this isn't easy, though. We get electricity about 3 hours per day normally. To compensate, we have a set of about 10 car batteries that charge when the electricity is on and keep the fridge, lights, and computers running the rest of the day. At the moment, even those have run dry after 3 days without power. And if this sounds strangely familiar to an earlier blog post about being on a sailboat with electrical problems in the middle of the Indian Ocean, well, it feels that way to me too.

Internet access is through a cellular modem that is rather finicky about where it is placed. Although I don't feel the presence of all those steel bars, the modem apparently does. I spent the better part of a day trying things with aluminum foil to make a reflector and boost the signal strength. And although aluminum foil can definitely block the signal, I can't seem to use it to enhance the signal.

There's no city water, we have a huge concrete cistern that refills from rain captured on the roof. That water is then pumped back up to a smaller tank on the roof which provides water pressure inside the house. Of course the pump doesn't work without electricty, so right now we are out of water except what we pull up by buckets from the underground tank. And we need a lot of water right now to clean the mud from the ground floor. Which brings me to the flood last night.

It rained hard last night. The first hard rain since this house was built. Uphill from us, another house is being constructed with a fairly barren slope in between. The rain brought mud down the slope at such a rate it jumped over the wall and ran under the door into the kitchen, through the living room and out the front door. It's an example of what is happening everywhere in this country as most of the forest has been cut for cooking fuel in the last 30 years. There are massive erosion gullies that can be seen along the slopes surrounding Port au Prince.

Not having much furniture yet, we managed to save everything, only to notice that some water was coming in around a window, dripping on the wireless router that I had so carefully placed earlier in the day. I'm still not sure it will work when the power comes back on. Part of the driveway collapsed also as the rain washed out the sand underneath. The mosquitos seemed rather happy to have an egg laying pool located so conveniently to their feeding grounds (us, that is), and acted like senior citizens at the Old Country Buffet, keeping us awake most of the night.

Of course, it's not too serious. Only a small fraction of this country's population has housing as sturdy or secure as ours. I shudder to think what happens in the shanty towns that cover the sides of the mountains when the rains get going. And although the flood made a colossal mess, I don't even have to clean it up. We have a house cleaner and a gardner who are working on it. Still, in a country where even going out to buy groceries is not easy, it feels like one more thing to deal with. Our morning coffee was somewhat more difficult to enjoy with the mud squishing between our toes while we made it.

Ok, enough whining. But it seemed a good opportunity to point just how unglamorous this expat life can be. Haiti is safer outside the capital, and we plan to explore a bit on the weekends. Hopefully I'll find some nicer things to say about it.

Update: The mud is gone and some repair works made that will hopefully stop the problem. The electricity came back on and the internet is working again. The ice cream seems none the worse for thawing and refreezing. We went shopping over the weekend and bought lots of tropical plants, which we planted in our garden, work we both enjoyed. But new things keep happening in the house, including flames shooting out of our electrical meter today. So, life goes on.

2007-09-02T13:51:00.000+05:00

So, finally an update. It's been a long time coming. Last time I updated this, it was April and I had just gotten off a sailboat and was starting to hitchike across Oman, which was fantastic. But I'll skip over that in favor of updating you on where I am and what I'm doing now.

After Oman and a few stops to see friends in Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK, I flew back to the U.S. for a few weeks before moving to Rome to take up a headquarters post with UNJLC.

I've been on deployments more than I've been in Rome at this point, but the time I've spent in Italy has been fantastic.

The city is eye-poppingly beautiful at every turn. I go for a run and come back with three or four things to look up in the guidebook so that I understand what I've seen. And the history here is thick. There are more thousand year old churches here than Starbucks in Seattle.

The street outside the building of a friend where I stayed for the first couple of weeks. It's a pretty typical scene of Rome.

The Basilica of Santa Maria Maggore. I think it is from the 13th century, but I've been in so many fantastic churches (only a handful of the 900-odd that are in Rome) that I get the dates mixed up.

The view from my bedroom. I'm sharing a flat with a former UN employee and his fiancee. I'm very happy to be sharing a flat, especially since I'm away so much. Which, I imagine, makes me an ideal flatmate. The church tower on the right belongs to a well-known church. It chimes out the quarter hours, which sounds irritating, but is really a nice way to keep track of the time. They go a bit mad with the bells on Sundays and holidays, though, trying to fill the pews (and the coffers, no doubt).

This is not in Rome, but not far away either. The mountains that run the spine of Italy peak at around 12,000 feet and offer some nice climbing and hiking.

This is also outside Rome, in Tuscany. Italy is full of these beautiful old towns.

The problem with my job inRome is that I'm never there. In fact, I started writing this blog while in Pakistan in July for a flood response. Since then, I've been back to Rome, to Sudan, back to Rome, to Denmark (for some meetings, not a disaster), back to Rome, and now to Uganda for a month to respond to flooding here. I landed in Rome on June 19 and have managed to be there for less than half the time. That's getting tiring. I was excited about the job in Rome because it was going to let me be a bit more settled but still go to the field and be involved in humanitarian emergencies. But in fact, I move around more now than when I was jumping from emergency to emergency. I have a place in Rome, but have thick dust on the furniture every time I go back. So I'm still feeling pretty rootless. Aimless even.

But there have been some highlights too. Here are a few photos from Uganda.

The fundamental problem here is large bodies of slow moving water that cut off the roads. These are not flash floods, and produce few dramatic pictures, which is probably why most people outside the humanitarian community aren't even aware that there are massive floods in Africa.

Even the roads that aren't flooded can be deceptively soft. This road is dusty when we drive it with a land rover. But this 6 wheel drive truck sank, as did the other two that were with it.

We used a field outside this school as a helipad to drop off some food for later distribution. I was along to have a look at road conditions to see what we could map from the air. These kids were studying for their exams. Copying questions about genetics and evolution from the blackboard.

I bought a bike and have been on a couple of rides outside the town where we are based. The countryside is beautiuful: very green, with scattered agricultural fields and palms. Excellent biking, though there are still some wet spots here and there. From the shocked (but friendly) looks I get when I pass people, I can safely say there haven't been too many white guys on bikes out there.

John (the bird, not the guy) lives at the airfield where the airlift operation is based.

I go back to Rome at the end of October. After that, who knows. I really hope to stay put for a while. If it keeps flooding all over the world, I'm going to quit my job and start building an ark.

2007-04-23T20:01:00.000+05:00

Out of diesel, out of wind

After some excellent and easy days sailing through the Maldives, we sadly said goodbye as we motored past the last little island and headed out into the big empty sea. Well, Diny and I were sad, Max, always ready for the next place, had been chomping at the bit for a few days. Salalah, Oman was our goal, 1250 miles of empty ocean away.

The new autopilot we installed in Thailand was on the fritz (grrr), so we had to steer the boat manually. We had initially been dreading this. Normally on watch, you just keep an eye out for traffic (1000 foot long freighters, fishing boats, debris, whatever), watch the instruments, and let the autopilot maintain the course. But now, for 8 hours each day (two 3 hour shifts, and one 2 hour shift) each of the three of us would have to watch our course (using the GPS, ship's compass, and wind indicator) and make constant corrections to keep us on course.

But it turned out not to be so bad. The seas were pretty mellow for most of the crossing, which meant the boat was not being pushed around by the waves. We spent long, lazy hours laying in the cockpit watching the wind vane on top of the mast and keeping the sails as full as possible (mostly close hauled, for you sailing geeks). We got pretty good at trimming the sails so the boat would steer itself. A few days of it were without a doubt the finest sailing I've done.

The only problem was, for quite a bit of the twelve day crossing, there wasn't much wind to sail on. And with full tanks we could only motor about 800 of the 1250 nautical miles. We spent entire days sailing on 1 - 2 kts of wind, though we were pretty proud of ourselves that we could get the boat to make about 2.5 kts on it. But 3 kts is about walking speed. Imagine going 1250 nautical miles (about 1425 miles) at a strolling pace. At times, the wind died completely for a few hours, leaving the sea glassy calm, and us calculating how many days worth of water were left in the tanks. We had plenty, so as long as we were willing to sail slowly, there should be no problem, unless the current turned against us.

One of the lulls was quite lucky. Dolphins often approach us and play in the bow wave when we are sailing or motoring, but we rarely see them when we aren't moving. Just at sunset, with the boat barely moving through the glassy sea, dolphins appeared, lots of them, at least 20. We jumped in the water and swam out to meet them. From eye level, swimming in the sea, it is somewhat unnerving to watch these fins approach you and then, 10 meters away, disappear under the water. It triggers some deep trauma from having seen Jaws as an eight year old. But they're dolphins right, our friends? Like Flipper? I sure hoped so. Not wanting to take time to put on my bathing suit when we saw them approaching, I had stripped naked and jumped in the water. I hoped they wouldn't mistake any part of my anatomy for a fish. Or a toy.

The neighbors.

While most of them stood off at a distance, some groups of 3 or 4 approached us from below, swimming on their sides to look up at us. They seemed curious, but wary, kind of like I was feeling. The water was almost purple in the late afternoon light, and watching them watch us from below in that vast blue was strange and beautiful and unforgettable. Swimming along with them, Diny and I got pretty far from the boat. Max had stayed aboard (someone has to), letting Diny and me enjoy the opportunity, as big a gift as I've ever been given. When the dolphins left us, we turned back to the boat, maybe 250 meters away, and looking very small against the empty encircling horizon. Swimming back I felt deeply fortunate to have the chance to do such things.

After about 10 days of this sometimes-sailing-sometimes-drifing, we were only about 80 nm from being able to motor the rest of the way in to Salalah, but the wind was barely a breath. That 80 nm was going to take us at least 2 days unless something changed. We came across the first small boat we had seen since leaving Maldives, a 20 meter fishing boat from the looks of it.

We approached cautiously; fishing boats occasionally take advantage of the general lawlessness of the sea to prey on "rich" yachts.

Approach with caution . . . (Diny's pic)

There were about 20 guys on deck. All of them looking pretty rough, but smiling. The vibe was good. Pointing to an empty jerry can, I yelled "diesel?". They nodded yes. "Whiskey?" they called. We said yes. We came along side, tied up, and did some trading. We got about 15 gallons of diesel (about half of what we needed to motor the remainder of our trip), and a fresh tuna. They got a bottle of rum, a bottle of whiskey, and a carton of cigarettes.

Everyone came away happy (Diny's pic).

We sailed another day, started the motor and came on in to Oman, 12 days after leaving Maldvies. After a few days working on the boat, I signed off. Running low on time, I couldn't stay with the boat through the next leg of countries that are difficult to fly out of (Yemen, Eritrea, Sudan), though it broke my heart not to go with the boat to Eritrea and see friends there.

I spent two weeks in Oman traveling by bus and hitchiking (yes, an American can hitchike quite safely across Arabia, and if that surprises you, Dick Cheney has a bridge in Brooklyn he'd like to sell you). I saw what must be one of the most beautiful spots I've ever been to, but that will have to wait for the next post.

2007-04-10T17:39:00.000+05:00

Now that's better.

The boat repair hell I mentioned last time went on and on. It took four weeks to get our old, leaky diesel tank cut out, and our shiny new tank in. The last five days of it, I spent laying in a tiny crawl space inside the hull trying get a filler pipe fitting to work. Sometimes it's not good being the skinniest one on the boat.

Me and the tank in one of our more exasperated moments. (Diny's pic)

In the evenings, we would take a little swim off the back of the boat, still at anchor in a harbor near the Maldivian captial, Male. Then dingy over to the island to get some dinner. We became regulars at the restaurants nearby. One of the great things about cruising is that being in a place with a boat (ergo, needing to fix something that is broken), we get to interact with the locals in a way that you don't normally as tourist, even a scruffy backpacker sort of tourist like I normally have been. We had to figure out (among other things), where to get a steel diesel tank manufactured to our specifications, buy lumber for mounting the tank, and get local weather reports.

Max buying lumber for the tank installation. Everyone we dealt with in Maldives was really helpful.

Finally, the tank was in, the various other jobs were finished, the pantry and fridge were stocked (halal chicken hotdogs, mmmmm), the diesel and water tanks were full, and we were ready, ready, ready to go. For the next 9 days, we sailed only in the daytime. Partly this was because there are many coral reefs that aren't marked on our charts, and it would be very, very bad to hit one in the dark. And partly it was because we wanted to enjoy these beautiful islands and rest up for the long crossing ahead to Arabia. At night we anchored at a convenient island. Sometimes these islands were inhabited by locals, sometimes by a resort, and sometimes completely uninhabited.

I won't bore you with details of each stop, but after making you glad you weren't along on this fool's errand when we were suffering on our passage from Thailand, the least you can do is let me make you a little green with envy now.

We spent two nights at our first stop, Thulusdoo. With 1200 inhabitants, the clean-as-a-pin town occupies pretty much the whole island. It has a Coka Cola factory that supplies the whole country (the only Coke plant in the world that uses desalinated water) as well as some boat building and paper recycling industries. Sounds industrial, but the impression is of a neat little town. We met some locals who showed us around, including a little park islet attached to Thulusdoo by a bridge with nice sunset views. We were told that the inhabitants spontaneously build benches and swings to make the area nicer, but I suspect they are mostly young men motivated by needing to have a nice place to court.

In the evening they took us fishing from a dark beach at one end of the island. With barely enough starlight to see each others' silhouettes, we were suddenly illuminated by a meteor turning, splitting, and crackling across the sky.

Shady and clean, the streets of Thulusdoo are laid out in a grid. You can stand in many of the intersections and see the sea in 3 or 4 directions. The longest street is probably about half a mile long.

From what I can tell there are about 2 cars, 2 motor bikes, and 5 bicycles on the island of Thuloosdoo.

Reflections at anchor in Thulusdoo.

Our second day there, we went out spearfishing with our new friends, Shaheed, Yusef, and Hassan. We (okay, they, but with our moral support) caught an octopus, a boxfish, some oysters, and a sweetlips, which is a yellow and black striped fish that to me says, "Danger, don't eat me, or you will bleed from every orifice and die." But they apparently eat it all the time. The octopus spearing was the most amazing. They spotted it in a hole about 5 feet below the surface and Hassan dug it out with the spear, a sharpened metal shaft about 3 feet long. The poor octo sent its 2 foot long tentacles out along the spear, trying to find something it could fight. Impaled, he filled the shallow water with his ink. When Hassan lifted it out of the water, it's tentacles kinked out in all directions, twisting like the fingers of someone dying in pain. It was gruesome. But delicious. I helped them clean the catch in the afternoon, and we (Max, Diny, and I) were invited over for dinner. The next morning we were sad to leave such a mellow, friendly place, but already about 5 weeks behind schedule, we couldn't linger any longer.

The town islands like Thulusdoo all seem to be places where people sit and talk to their neighbors while the sun goes down. They're not rich, but not too poor either. It seems like a good life, but they are pretty much trapped there. It's too expensive for most of them to ever have a chance to leave the islands.

One of the other inhabited islands was our last stop before departing for the long haul to Oman. Dhidhdhoo is similar to Thulusdhoo. I took the dingy into town to try and find diesel, water, and propane, and returned with a small local boat with a 50 gallon drum of diesel which we pumped into our tanks.

Normally working as fishermen, these guys used their little dhoni to bring us diesel. See the mobile phone? As it turns out, most of the country is covered by a mobile network, and on the islands where the towers are, you can get wireless internet as well, though there aren't too many computers around. Yet.

The pilot of our diesel boat.

Other highlights included anchoring off uninhabited islands and making a campfire for dinner. I wish I could report that we fished en route and caught a big beatiful tuna which we prepared over the coconut husk fire. But in fact, there were hot dogs going bad in the fridge, so we had hot dogs and some of Diny's excellent cole slaw.

Diny celebrates her birthday underway. She would like me to inform you that she is 26 and single. I would like to inform you that I don't know any man who could keep up with her.

We didn't see another yacht after leaving Male.

Generally, we snorkeled every day on reefs with more fish than I have ever seen, some of them so unbothered by us that they would swim within reach. One morning, after follwing a 3 foot wide manta ray around a lagoon for a while, I turned to head back to the boat only to see a school of 6 mantas swimming straight for me. They parted to go around me and let me follow for a while as they slowly glided down to the 50 foot bottom, wings motionless in the ultra clear water. I dove down to them from time to time (I've been getting to about 40 feet, not so great by skin diver standards, but I'm pretty happy with it). Another day I swam with a sea turtle who didn't see me for a long time, then suddenly started and dove down deep and watched me for a while. I thought my tattoo would get me a better reception, but I guess not.

There's really not much to say about these places. They are quiet and beautiful. The days passed in a long glow of deep water so blue it was purple, shallow water so turquoise it hurt to look at it, warm sun, cool breeze, bright stars, lapping waves. Here are some pictures that capture a tiny bit of it.

We snorkeled on this wreck. The bow sticks up about 25' out of the water and the stern rests in 100' or so. Although it looks creepy and decrepit above, below it's a wonderland of coral and fish. Just as I swam around one corner, a school of foot-long fish darted by with two tuna in hot pursit. We scared the hell out of each other.

Max and Diny exploring one of our islands. This one happened to have a new resort being built at one end. We stopped by to see the construction going on (575 Bangladeshis are building the place and live on the island, but no photos allowed). Then we took the launch over to the untouched part of the island for an afternoon of book reading, sand castle building, and crab digging (unsuccessful, so thank god for Diny's unending creativity with what was in our pantry).

After nine perfect days, we headed out across the open ocean, course 300 degrees magnetic, making for Salalah, Oman. Obviously we made it, or I wouldn't be writing you, but not without some adventures. But that will have to wait for a later post.

Some of you have been asking to see what I look like without hair. I'm letting it grow back now, but at least I know I won't look too terrible if I ever go bald.

2007-03-08T17:39:00.000+05:00

And then there were three . . .

So, the news gets sadder. Susie, Holly, and Sarah have decided to leave the boat. The reasons are a little different for each of them, I think, but the difficulties we've had with the boat are certainly a big part of it. I think those challenges sort of set the stage for some personality conflicts to come out that might not have otherwise. None of us have been at our best for a while now, due to to frustration and fatigue. Poor communication hasn't helped. It's like living in a very small house with six people: it wouldn't be easy on land. And being at sea just makes it a bit more difficult. It found our faults and split us at them. It has been, for the most part, adult. So I think everyone parts as friends. Maybe it's for the best.

I'm sad about it. There wasn't one of them that I didn't enjoy spending time with. And though I look forward to going north to India with Diny and Max, it just won't be the same. But I think we can shake it off and move on. We still plan to make stops at these beautiful atolls on the way up, which should do wonders for our mood. The old diesel tank is out. Good riddance, but we're having a tough time getting the new one in (custom built at a metal shop here in Male) . Imagine trying to get a new, 150lb couch out of your car (which never stops moving), onto your porch (which is also moving), into a very small house, and stored in a closet whose door the couch is too big to go through, so you have to start pulling out the walls (complete with plumbing and electrical wiring). That's what we're up against. But we're getting there.

I think I need a vacation from my vacation.

Oh, and Susie gave me a bad haircut for my birthday, so I had to shave my head. I'll post a pic sometime after I get it properly tanned. So far, the best think about it is how the wind feels on it and how the locals gasp when I take my hat off.

Hope you are well wherever you are and that your couches all fit.

2007-02-26T20:14:00.000+05:00

Hello from the Maldives. For those of you who haven't recently asked your rich and famous friends where they prefer to vacation, this is the place. A series of coral fringed atolls that grew up around long gone volcanoes, the Maldives are one of the lowest countries on Earth, consisting of thousands of tiny islands organized into little loops in the middle of the otherwise deep Indian Ocean.

I arrived here a few days ago aboard Reflections, the same boat I sailed on from Australia to Malaysia three years ago. It's a different crew this time, like a different season of Survivor. There are six of us, five Americans and one Dutch.

The star of the show, Reflections, at anchor in Male.

The crew. Left to right: Diny, Max (the skipper), Leigh (who was only with us in Thailand), Susie, Sarah, and Holly.

The boat had been out of the water for several months when we all came together in Phuket, Thailand to get started, and we spent two weeks getting her ready. Lots of projects, large and small. I worked on installing the propeller, installing a new autopilot and GPS system, installing a new faucet, and a dozen other projects that I probably don't remember. The worst was the autopilot: it took about 5 days to get all the cables run. When we finally put to sea, it actually worked, which was a big relief. So now we can tell the autopilot display, which is in the cockpit, what heading we want, and it talks to the computer (in the aft cabin closet) which talks to a gyroscope and sealed compass (in the same closet) and to a rudder position sensor and a rudder hydraulic (both under the aft cabin bed), and steers the desired course. It can also talk to our GPS and steer toward a waypoint. And of course all these little electronicky bits have power and data cables connecting them.

A quiet morning at anchor in Thailand. Sarah drools when she sleeps.

Our crossing from Thailand to Maldives was tough. Lots of problems with the boat. A leaky fuel tank (one of two) led to a couple of days of trying to get fuel out of the bad tank and into the good one and into any other containers. This left us with less fuel than we thought, so we calculated a schedule of sailing when the winds were strong enough and motoring when they weren’t that would get us to Maldives before we ran out of food or water. Originally, we were shooting for India, but the prevailing winds said otherwise, and advice from other boats that we were in contact with via radio said Maldives would offer any repair services we needed. It wasn’t really a close thing, we had plenty of food and water, but nonetheless, we were conserving: no showers, washing dishes in salt water; we even tried cooking noodles in sea water, but they were a bit to salty to repeat.

Diny is a great cook, even when we can barely spare a hand from holding on to the pitching boat to cook. She also serves as our nurse (which is her profession, in addition to being a professional raft guide and world tramping do-gooder). She's pretty cool, even though she's Dutch.

For the first couple of days, the winds were light, and we were moving along at a stately 3 kts, about walking pace (imagine walking from Thailand to India!!). At such low speeds and in such calm seas, we were able to swim behind the boat to bathe (with lines out to hold onto as needed), which works pretty well, but left our skin feeling pretty waxy after a couple of days.

The daily salt water bath. Good for the soul if not so great for the skin.

Dolphins visited us several times. The best was during one of my 4am to 6am night watches when a dolphin launched 10 feet out of the water, glowing green with bioluminescence. It looked like a glow in the dark toy.

Via radio, we were being promised good winds soon, but I was doubtful. The guy on the radio kept referring to the any-day-now arrival of the "Northeast Monsoon", which sounded ominous, but its hard to believe too much can happen when all of my prior experience in the Indian Ocean has been of very mellow seas. The sea was as calm as a mountain lake in the afternoon breeze: just a light chop. But one afternoon, just as I was about to recommend we start up the engine because we weren’t able to sail at the minimum speed to keep to our schedule, I noticed a line of innocuous looking clouds stretched across the sky. As they passed us, we got a couple of puffs, but the sky was clear behind them, and we thought we’d lose the wind as fast as it came. But the puffs became a breeze and the breeze became a wind, and over the next few days, the wind and the seas built and built. The wind never got over 20 kts (a nice sailing breeze), but further north the winds were stronger, and the swell they created was rolling down on us as 9-12 ft waves. Not bad, but not the most comfortable ride, either. We were making great speed towards the Maldives, and enjoying the sail. Mornings on the boat were quiet, each of us taking our two 2-hour watches (mine is from 4-6 am and pm) while others napped or did various jobs on the boat. In the afternoons we cranked up someone’s mp3 player to hear some music while dinner was prepared and served (one night on cooking, one night on dishes, 4 nights off).

Before the NE Monsoon arrived.

A view of the jibs. The round thing is the radar transceiver, mounted about halfway up the mast.

At some point during all of this, we started having power problems. Two of our four house batteries had gone bad, and in so doing, overworked and killed the other two. We had to run our small generater for most of the day to have enough power to run our systems. Then, during the biggest day of swells (about 10 days into the trip), the main sail ripped. So we put on our harnesses and went out on deck to bring it down and put up a smaller emergency sail. This was fun: climbing a few feet up the mast with the boat rolling around and waves higher than the pilot house bearing down from behind. Beautiful and engaging, and not all that dangerous (really, Mom). We were clipped onto the boat, and not once did I need that connection to stay aboard.

The end of it all was when we arrived in Male on day 11, and couldn’t get the engine started. Our power problems seemed to have spread to our starter battery. We tried to sail into the harbor, but there was a massive current, and without the mainsail, we just couldn’t quite get in. We could have sailed out of the strait and made another pass, but it would have meant for another night at sea in a low power situation, so in the end we radioed for a tow. A tug called Ox was dispatched and pulled us in. All in all, it was a tough cruise, trying to keep everything going, but we had some fun too.

Holly working on a sail change.

So, we’ve been in Maldives for about a week now, and I’ve spent most of that time inside the diesel tank underneath the floor of the boat with a grinder trying to get the damned leaky thing out. Sarah, Max and I have taken turns at it. We bundle up in coveralls, protective glasses, face mask, and earplugs, fold ourselves down into the bilge and then lay out inside the tank and then hold a grinder, all sparks and steel-ripping screams, a foot from our faces while we carefully cut the 100 gallon tank out, piece by piece. I say carefully because on top of the tank are various hoses and cables that can’t be cut, and underneath it is the fiberglass hull which, obviously, can’t be cut, and in between are our fingers and noses, which can’t be cut. After an hour or two, we switch out and go jump in the sea to cool off. We’ve made steady progress and should have it out in a day or two.

An old chestnut of cruisers is, "Cruising is going to exotic ports and working on the boat." So true. But I learn all sorts of new stuff, so I don't mind so much. However, I think I've learned enough on this trip.

Really, I think I've spent half the trip in the bilge.

Male (rhymes with volley), the capital of the Maldives, is a surprising place. Imagine an art deco-ish sort of town, populated by Muslims, and packed wall to wall on an island about 1 mile square. It's a pretty cool place, marred only by the inability to buy a beer (however on the resort islands you can get anything you want).

A few days ago, we took a break. The whole crew was picked up by a boat here in Male and taken to a tiny, one-resort island a few miles south for a day of snorkeling and napping. Saw some beautiful fish, some decent coral, and a lot of pasty Europeans on holiday. The best part was being able to shower just as long as I wanted. We all did some laundry as well and hung it out on the balcony of the room they gave us for a day. We were sort of the white trash coming to the resort with dirty finger nails and leaving rings in the bathtub.

Even lower-end resorts are pretty posh. The room they gave us for the day had a glass panel in the floor so we could see the fish swimming by underneath on the reef.

It seems like every island has a resort, this one is pretty typical, but there are some islands where locals live. I hope we get to anchor at some of both.

The crew is pretty tired. So's the skipper. It's hard to keep morale up when we've had to work so hard for over a month now, with really only a handful of days that could be called easy. But hopefully we have shaken out all the loose bits and will have a much easier cruise on the next leg. Today, Susie said she's staying here in Maldives (she's a dive instructor, so she can probably find work here), and Sarah and Holly said they're leaving in India. It makes me sad to see them go after we've been through so much together, but I can understand it. Everyone expected to work on the boat, but the effort required on this trip was definitely not in the brochure. So it goes with boats.

We’re here for a few more days. We have to finish getting the tank out, get the new tank in, provision, fix the main sail, solve our battery problems, and do a dozen other little tasks to get this boat ready to go again. Next stop will be Cochin, India, with a few anchorings along some of these beautiful atolls on the way. At least that's the plan.

2006-12-07T22:20:00.000+05:00

First sign of Christmas, and perhaps Easter, seen in Juba!

Some random bits:

This morning, on our way across town, another UNJLCer, Hugo, and I saw a local man stopping his bike along the side of the road to take whiz in the tall grass. He was an older man, very thin, wearing ragged shorts and a stained t-shirt, both more or less the color of the drying grasses that stood as high him beside the road; on his head he wore a rather dirty Santa hat. Something I can't explain.

Then later today, Hugo, who attracts mishaps and misadventures like light bulbs attract bugs, returned to his tent after dinner to find that one of the chickens that live in the compound had somehow managed to sneak into his tent to lay an egg on his bed. Apparently one of the cleaners had left the tent open.

Chickens, goats, and Dutchmen (Hugo is Dutch) aren't the only animals living in the compound. A large lizard has moved in underneath my tent. I seem him looking out at me occasionally, as his door is adjacent to mine, and I hear him scratching around underneath the heavy rubberized floor at all hours. I just hope I don't step on him.

Trading haircuts in Juba. That's Scott, the other GIS guy at UNJLC.

2006-11-26T12:04:00.000+05:00

Happy Camping in Sudan

When you tell someone on an airplane that you're on your way to work in Sudan, they look at you like you've told them that you're on your way to get chemo. They think of Darfur, where 2 million people are huddled in camps hoping vainly for protection from the raping, pillaging Janjaweed. They imagine I'm on my way to feed starving babies or something else heroic. Of all the places I've been, Sudan elicits the most dread from people who hear that I'm en route.

But like everywhere I've been, the truth is more subtle. First of all, I'm not in Darfur, which is indeed a tragedy of massive proportions that brings shame on the world for allowing it to continue. Darfur is certainly a more difficult and dangerous place to work than where I am in Southern Sudan.

Sudan is complicated. It's the largest country in Africa. Mostly Arab Muslim in the center and north, with Christian and Animist tribes in the west (Darfur) and south. The Southern Sudanese fought a 20 year civil war against the Arab-dominated government. That ended in 2005 with a power sharing deal and a planned referendum on secession in 2012. Now that the war is over, the refugees are returning, perhaps as many as 5 million of them. And that means a massive aid effort to help them get their lives restarted and a UN Peacekeeping Mission to keep an eye on the armies of the south and north. All this is happening over a huge area, 700 miles across with dozens of tribes speaking a variety of languages. Even the main routes are muddy, swampy roads.

This is a city street actually in the town of Juba, the seat of the southern government. I haven't been out on the roads in countryside yet, but they're worse, I hear. But there are lots of projects going on to improve them.

The Juba bridge, one of the few Nile crossings, partially collapsed under the weight of an overloaded truck a couple of weeks ago, hopefully it will be repaired soon.

I'm based in Juba, possibly the future capital of an independent Southern Sudan. There's not much here. A dozen or two run down two-story buildings in the center of town; mostly rough dirt streets (I have seen few 2 wheel drive cars on the streets here). The residential quarters are traditional tukles, round mud huts with thatched roofs.

Downtown Juba.

Juba's suburbs.

One of Juba's churches.

The mosque down the street from the church.

This photo was made by my colleague, Katya. UNICEF has started it's back to school program and they give the kids everything they need as well as giving books, blackboards, and such to the schools.

There's a huge influx of aid money, and things are changing steadily. Roads are being improved; hotels, residences, and ministry buildings are going up.

There are about 350 UN staff in Juba itself at any given moment, most living in camps like the one I'm in. Basically, it's like summer camp. Each resident has a tent, about as big as a small bedroom. A table, a bed, a fan, a mosquito net, and a bare florescent light bulb are provided.

Rise and shine, campers.

Showers and bathrooms are in portable containers in one corner of them camp. The mess hall is an open sided tent where the concessionaire (a Kenyan safari company) serves really great food. For Thanksgiving we even had turkey, dressing, and cranberry sauce. There are quite a few Americans working here (more than anywhere else I've worked).

The food in the camp is great, but it's good to get out occasionally. Mareng, one of our local staff, took Katya and I out to a local joint last week. The food was good, but it's difficult to enjoy it when you are worried about how many trips to the toilet you might have to make in the night. So far no problems, though. The best dish was the one in front of Katya, Salata Dakwa, a sweet peanut sauce served over vegetables and taro. The one in front of me is a sort of meaty tomato sauce served over the ubiquitous ugali, a sort of corn meal cooked to the consistency of mashed potatoes.

The landscape of Southern Sudan alternates between savannah and swamp. The worlds largest freshwater swamp is just a few miles north of us, and so there are lots of bugs of every size and shape.

Just north of here, the Nile sort of disappears into a 200 mile long swamp.

The bugs seem to come in waves. When I first arrived, there were 3 inch long grasshopper sort of things flying around everywhere. They occupied the bathrooms, covered the pathway lights in the camp, and one or three joined each table for dinner, sitting calmly on top of the ketchup, watching us eat. Then one morning I came up to get a cup of tea to find that they had all died in the night. Hundreds of them littered the mess tent floor and were being swept up by the staff.

The Preying Mantises love all the prey. The lizards are pretty fat too.

After that was a few days plague of small gnat sort of things. These were a bit more irritating as they tended to get in the food, but it was manageable. The mosquitos are always around, but not too many. Everyone takes precautions to avoid getting mosquito bites, as malaria is endemic. There's the particularly nasty Nairobi Fly that looks harmless, but if you brush him off, he squirts out some sort of acid that causes ugly chemical burns. Fortunately we seem to be past the season where they are most numerous.

Because of the large humanitarian community here, there are quite a few social venues. Rugby, volleyball, yoga, and the Hash (a sort of alcoholic running club) can all be found here. Unlike in the north where alcohol is illegal, there are bars here, including some down on the Nile at the eastern edge of town. I even had a bottle of California Merlot at dinner one night. In Cali it would have been an $8 bottle, here it was $22, and we were happy to pay it.

Rugby is really, fun, but really exhausting.

After the skin-phobic culture of Pakistan, it's taken a bit of getting used to seeing people on the way to the showers wrapped in a towel or a sarong, both men and women. But this part of Sudan belongs much more to the culture of central and eastern Africa than to the Muslim cultures of the north, though about 30 percent of Juba's population is Muslim. People are much more relaxed here.

I wish I had more pictures of people to show you. The different tribes are marked by rather dramatic scarring done as an initiation. Some have nested triangles on their foreheads, some vertical hashes on their cheeks. It's striking. Hopefully once I get out on the roads in the bush, I'll be able to get some more pictures. The people here in Juba are a bit overwhelmed by the big influx of foreigners and are a bit wary of having their picture made.

That's all for now.

One last photo. One that I didn't make. This is in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, which is in the North where the surrounding landscape is desert. During the spring and summer, they get massive sandstorms, called habubs, that shut everything down for a few hours. Pretty impressive. I'd love to see one, but I won't be in Khartoum at the right time of year.

2006-09-16T05:06:00.000+05:00

And Now for Something Completely Different

I'm back from Pakistan to Tennessee for a few weeks before leaving for South Sudan on another UN contract. There's so much more to tell about Pakistan. What a complicated country! Constantly surprising. There just isn't enough time to write about it all (and you wouldn't want to read the book that would result). But I must tell you something about Shimshal, the place where Jasper, Susan, Dave and I (friends from our time in Eritrea) went trekking for three weeks in August just before leaving the country.

I know that I'm prone to superlatives, labeling this or that place as the most beautiful or most remote or most friendly. For a long time now, though, Wadi Rum, a mountain-studded desert in Jordan, has been the place I called most beautiful. But not any longer. Not too far from the true Shangri La in the mountains of Pakistan lies a place more deserving of the title. Shimshal Valley has won a few superlatives and a piece of my heart too: the most peaceful village, the most beautiful landscape, the highest place I've ever been.

Susan, Jasper, and Dave were cycling friends in Eritrea, and we had many good adventures there together. After 3 of us ended up in Pakistan working on the earthquake, we began planning a trip to go trekking in the mountains of northern Pakistan, a place that has been on my list since I was a kid and read an article in National Geographic about K2, the second highest mountain in the world that straddles the border between Pakistan and China.

Dave flew in from the UK and we started our journey from Islamabad, where I've been living since January. Normally a two day drive up the Karakoram Highway (they use the term ‘highway’ loosely), our trip took 4 days because strong monsoon rains had washed out a bridge. Eventually though, we found ourselves crammed into the back of an extended cab truck, on our way up the Shimshal Road, which was only completed in 2003. Before that, the only way to Shimshal was a strenuous 3 or 4 day walk.

This is the road, believe it or not. Most of it is a bit better than that.

Shimshal village was beautiful beyond all of our expecations. It sits perched on a bench above a raging river that drains down from a dozen glaciers further back in the mountains. The Shishalis have built small canals that divert water from high in the side canyons that come down to meet the river. This water snakes through a maze of channels to irrigate the fields where they grow potatoes, wheat, apricots, and a few vegetables. It's a communal effort, managed by committee. In general, the Shimshalis seem very community-oriented, having even organized the Shimshal Nature Trust to make decisions regarding land use management and the promotion of trekking there.

Shimshal Village sits about 10,000 ft above sea level.

The Shimshalis are part of the Ismaeli sect of Islam. They are quite moderate, with few restrictions on women and a tolerant world view. After the much more conservative Islam that you see in the rest of Pakistan, Shimshal was an incredible breath of fresh air. The people too seem quite happy and contented, which is not true in the more conservative parts of Pakistan.

Mavish and Sima led us to a stream where we could wash clothes, then stood away a bit and giggled at us.

We spent a few days based in the village, doing day hikes up to glaciers another 3,000 or 4,000 ft higher.

One of our acclimatization hikes took us across the Yazghil Glacier, which flows for miles out of the higher peaks and terminates near Shimshal Village. It took us about two hours to cross it.

In the evenings we stayed at the little four room (but growing) hotel. Our guide, Muqueem, invited us to his house for dinner one night where we had chowpindok: flatbread layered with yak cheese and yak butter. We had this a few more times in herder’s huts that we came across on the trek. It’s tasty and filling mountain food, but I don't think I could eat it as often as the Shimshalis do.

The main event was a 10 day trek from Shimshal Village to Shimshal Pamir, the high summer pasture for the Shimshali’s yaks, goats, and sheep. The shortest route up there is a three day walk (three days for us mortals, the Shimshalis can walk it in a day if they need to), but passes through a narrow gorge about 3000 feet deep. Over generations, the Shimshalis have built and blasted a trail along the gorge walls. It’s not for anyone afraid of heights.

We traveled with our guide (no longer Muqeem, who had been called away, but one of his relatives, an experienced guide named Yahya), four porters, and two yaks. We each carried pretty full packs, but with 13 days worth of food, we couldn’t carry it all, not at these altitudes, anyway. Our porters turned out to be a delight, stopping and singing in the local Wakhi language at every significant milestone on the trail. They provided encouragement, company, and entertainment along the way.

Our camps were at well-established waystations used by the Shimshalis when they travel between the village and the high pasture. The guide and porters slept in the stone huts at these places, we slept in our tents.

We did much of our cooking in the huts because we had rainy weather several days.

On the third day we approached our base camp and would have seen our target peak, Mungalig Sar, but clouds obscured it. At 19,850 ft, it would be the highest any of us had ever climbed.

A picture of Mungalig Sar made on the return trip. It’s the white peak just to the right of center.

After a steep final climb, we finally reached the high pasture. Snowy peaks surround the green, mostly flat valley. A small river gathers the snowmelt and carries it down and back the way we came. Other Shimshalis, no more than specks on the other side of the broad valley, spot us coming over the lip and sing out, asking the news. Our porters and guide sing back that all is well, then we all dance to a song just for this place.

The high pasture is clearly the heart of Shimshal country. As children, the Shimshalis all come here with their mothers in the summer to tend the herds. In winter, eight men from the village are chosen to keep an eye on the yaks. The green grass, the tumbling stream, the singing herders, a horizon full of glittering peaks: it is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.

But my first day and night up there weren’t so good. I became ill with altitude sickness; a danger that we were well aware of, but thought we had avoided by spending so much time in Shimshal Village letting our bodies adjust to the elevation. Apparently it wasn’t enough for my body. I woke with a headache, nausea, and an unsettling apathy about being in such a beautiful place. It only got worse during the day when we walked the extra hour over to the herders' village.

This is Shewert, the tiny village at one end of the high pasture where Shimshalis stay when they are with the herds. The white piles are cakes of yak cheese, a main staple of their diet, drying on the roofs.

Ultimately we decided that I had to go down. My symptoms were not severe, but altitude sickness only gets worse until you descend. The weather, which had been rainy, appeared to be entering a clearing phase, so the next day promised to be a good summit attempt day. While I lay curled in the corner of a hut, wanting only to sleep, my friends had to make a hard choice about whether or not to go down with me. If they followed me down, they might miss the good weather window. I woke to find they had decided to go down with me rather than split the group. Even with the apathy that came with the altitude sickness, their decision made me emotional. I felt horrible that I might cause them to miss their summit attempt, but also buoyed up by the strength of their friendship. We dropped over the other side of the pass and descended 3000 ft. I was able to walk and even carry much of my kit, but one of the porters had to carry me across a stream on his back. I just felt too weak to negotiate the rocky bottom and fast moving water.

The next morning I awoke feeling much better, and we ascended back up to the base camp. I had decided to not attempt to summit with the others the following day, but I felt so good on the way back up to the base camp that I asked our guide, Yahya, if we could bring an extra guide along with us to bring me back down if I had any problems. He agreed, so the next morning at 4:30, the four of us and two guides left our camp under stars that don't twinkle because there isn't enough atmosphere to distort their light.

Dave and Jasper found their climbing stride pretty quickly, but Susan and I were pretty slow. She had some stomach troubles that morning, and I was just suffering from the altitude. The first few hours were on small talus, small slabs of rock that tended to slide down a bit with each step, making each foot of gain that much harder. I started out counting steps, 50 or 70 slow, careful steps, then stop and rest for 10 breaths. As our altitude increased, the number of steps between rests decreased.

The sun finally came up and gave us some encouragement. Already the views were outstanding. Our tents were almost invisible in the huge valley far below. I had really expected frigid winds, and it was certainly around or below freezing, but with the effort of climing, the temperature was nice. Whenever we stopped for a longer rest, I had to put on my down jacket to keep from getting chilled, but I've had to do that on lower climbs.

The last 1000 feet or so of the climb was on steep snow, so we had to put on waterproof pants, crampons, and rope up. Just the effort of putting on my waterproof pants was huge. Without the encouragement of the others, there was no way I would have had the will to go further. Susan and I followed the two guides, who kicked steps in the snow for us. Dave and Jasper came behind. It was like climbing a staircase slowly, but it felt like running at full speed.

It's steeper and further than it looks. That's the summit on the left, but we're something like 1000 vertical feet (and a couple of very hard hours) below it.

The guides wanted to hurry us as much as possible because the sun was warming the snow, making the travel more difficult and avalanche more likely (there had been fresh snow about 36 hours before), but Susan and I could only go so fast. We had to stop for 10 breaths every 15 steps or so. Physically, it was the hardest thing I've ever done. We kept reminding ourselves that it doesn't have to be fun to be fun, but this was really not fun. Slowly, slowly we ascended, finally reaching the little rounded, snow covered summit six hours and 4400 feet after leaving our camp. We collapsed in hugs and congratulations. It was made all the sweeter because we had all made it together, even though it had so often looked like one or the other of us (usually me) wouldn't make the climb. Impossibly, from the valley below we heard the faintest wisps of singing, the herders below could see that we had reached the summit. Our guides responded by singing the "all is well" song.

The views from the top were outstanding. No photo could ever capture the grandeur of the endless sea of peaks and glaciers that surrounded us. Several higher peaks were visible in the distance, but K2, second only to Everest, was obscured by clouds.

The descent was punishing, and seemed to take longer than the climb, though it didn't. Finally reaching camp in the early afternoon, we found our porters waiting for us, with garlands of meadow flowers to celebrate our successful climb. Tired beyond all memory, I took a nap in the sun, which I think was my favorite part of the whole trip, though a curious yak kept waking me up snuffling at my feet and our gear.

Over the next four days, we made our way back to Shimshal on a different route that took us up over the 17,400 ft. Shpodeen Pass. Already tired from 9 days on the trail, and with full packs, the pass was exhausting. I had to let Yahya carry my pack the last hour or so to get over it. But it was all downhill from there, including a beautiful walk through Zardgarben, a beautiful meadow surrounded by rocky peaks. One of our porter's sons was traveling back with us. Eight-year-old Mullah Korban walked every step of the way, including the pass where I couldn't even carry my pack. These Shimshalis are made of very tough stuff.

Zardgarben

As we arrived back in Shimshal the next day, we passed a beautiful little stone walled apricot orchard and the owner invited us in. He shook a branch and the sun-warmed apricots fell to the ground for a feast. After so many days of the pasta and oatmeal we brought for the trip, fresh fruit was a delight. It captured perfectly the richness of life in Shimshal and the hospitality of its people.

2006-07-10T16:33:00.000+05:00

It's like Disneyworld, Just Dustier

Sorry there's been no update in a while. We've been working hard to finalize all the information products that UNJLC produces before our operation shuts down at the end of July. Our field staff have been struggling up ever more remote roads to try and get as many of them as possible into the Quake Zone Road Atlas that we are publishing just before we go. I've been spending my days doing cartography and design work on the atlas and meeting with the printing company to make sure everything ends up looking like I planned. Making the transition from computer files for small volume print runs on office inkjets to large volume four-color offset printing is never easy. There's always a font that doesn't transfer or a graphics conversion that makes smooth lines jagged. I expected the same task here to be doubly hard with language and technology barriers, but it hasn't been so far.

The printing company is in light industrial area of Islamabad and looks pretty much like any other commercial printing plant I've ever been in. The pre-press guys there run the same software as any other graphic design shop, although here I think all of them are illegal copies which you can buy in shops for about $4 instead of $500 for a typical graphics package (or $8000 for the GIS software that we use).

There was a bit of a lull a few weeks ago, and I was able to make a couple of weekend trips: one to the Afghan border and one to the Indian Border. Very, very different places. The first was a trip by steam train up to the famous Khyber Pass. You wouldn't think a train ride to the border of Afghanistan would be a big tourist draw. And in comparison with Disneyworld, I guess it isn't, but there's enough interest for some local train enthusiasts to make the trip from Peshawar to the Khyber Pass every two months or so.

The train is maintained by an enthusiast who started the tourist trips as a way of funding the maintenance of the trains.

Peshawar is a colonial town, with lots of crumbling old British buildings to prove it. It's where lots of goods smuggled from Afghanistan (cars, cloth, opium, guns) end up. It has a wild west feel to it, but still is basically a part of Pakistan that the federal government controls. Heading west from there along the railway, though, we find another world. The dusty plain is dotted with little settlements made up of family compounds with high, featureless adobe walls. From the narrow streets that zig and zag between the compounds children come running to see the train and wave at us. Occasionally a burka-clad woman peeks out from a gate.

I felt a little weird making photos of people as I sped by on a train full of very privileged white people, but then I saw a local guy who was making a picture of us with his mobile phone.

The mountains approach, and the train passes through a narrow gorge to begin climbing up to the pass. We have a steam engine at each end and two passenger cars in between, full of mostly humanitarian workers and diplomats. There are two engines because the train has to reverse itself twice to make it up the steep valley. Rather than build a long looping railway grade, the engineers put in two switchbacks that form the points of a letter "N". At each point, the train stops and reverses direction to continue on.

It's easy to imagine any one of a dozen conquerors (some successful, some not) who used the Khyber pass as a gateway into the subcontinent marching down these valleys with their armies. In many spots, it looks like not much has changed.

This part of Pakistan is fully under control of the Pakistani government. We are told their control extends at least 100m (that's meters, not miles for you Americans) on either side of the railway. The railway right-of-way was formally ceded to the British by the local tribes when the railway was built in the 1920s. Off this right of way, tribal law prevails. It's a system somewhat like the Native American Reservations in the US, except the tribes here retained a lot more power.

The further up the mountains we climb, the higher the walls of the compounds. We stop for tea at an old fort and later, standing on the Khyber Pass itself, we get a briefing from the commander of the Khyber Rifles, the Pakistani force that monitors the border. The border is far below us in the valley, but this is as close as we are going to get.

The briefing. The actual border is down the valley out of the left of the frame.

There is a tarmacked highway here, which is busy with commerce and the return of refugees of Afghanistan's long abuse at the hands communist, capitalist, and religious zealots. At the peak, there were over 4 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan, some of them here for decades. That number is decreasing now as some tentatively head home in hopes that Afghanistan will hold itself together.

One of our stops involved a marching band. I don't really know the full tale of how this little bit of colonial color survived, but like the train itself, the British influence in Pakistan pops up in surprising ways.

We are treated to lunch and tribal dancing performances at the Khyber Rifles Officers' Mess, another bit of colonial architecture complete with dark wood halls covered with photos of past commanders and visiting dignitaries. There are peacocks in the garden. The tribal dancing is interesting, each tribe having its own dance form. Only men dance; the women are kept mostly shielded behind those high compound walls. The dancing involves a lot of very athletic spinning, which is impressive, and a lot of surprisingly feminine scarf waving, which is a little creepy.

Swords and scarves are a weird mix.

Ok, I'm going to be a bit impolitic here. This male dancing business is another example of how the culture here seems to have painted itself into a corner with its restrictions on women. The women can't dance as it would violate all sorts of cultural taboos. A Pakistani man in these tribal areas could be killed for even looking at a woman (dancing or otherwise) to whom he is not related, she might get killed too for having been defiled by his gaze. So the men do the dancing, and you end up with mustachioed men in pantaloons waving scarves around. It doesn't really do much for anyone.

Now you could argue that I'm judging Pakistani sexual politics by my own very post-sexual-revolution standards, which of course I am. But no matter what standard you use, the outcome here isn't a happy one. I've talked to enough men here to know that they are all pretty sexually frustrated, their attitudes toward women seem pretty hypocritical. Their ideas about how sexuality works in the west are quite distorted from reality, which means that western women here get a steady stream of weird inquiries from Pakistani men. My friends in the field tell me that rape of girls in the rural areas is common. All in all, it feels pretty unhealthy, which is what you get when you let religious people tell you what you can and can't do with your private bits. Americans, don't say I didn't warn you.

Ok. Done. Rant over. It gets to you after a while, you know. And thanks to the internet, I can vent to the whole world.

That's enough for now. I'll write about the Indian border visit another time. For those of you who are wondering what my plans are, I'm here working in Islamabad until the end of July. Then Jasper, Susan, Dave (friends from Eritrea), and I are going trekking in the mountains here in August. We're going to try to summit a 6000m peak. After that I go home for a week, then it's off to a new post with UNJLC in South Sudan for a few months. Similar work there: trying to map infrastructure to support the ramped up relief effort that is underway. Did you know that the largest human migration in decades is underway as millions of people displaced by the civil war in Sudan return home now that the war is over? There's not much for them to return to, so lots of humanitarian aid is flowing to help them get their lives restarted.

2006-05-17T18:52:00.000+05:00

Just a post to reactivate the blog.

2006-04-12T19:18:00.000+05:00

The Road to Sherekot

It seems simultaneously unsurprising and amazing that a mill stone in Sherekot, a village high in the mountains of Pakistan, should remind me of my great grandfather, a mountain man of the remote valleys of southern Appalachia. I went to Sherekot to assess the road so that we might use trucks instead of helicopters to deliver supplies in the ongoing earthquake relief efforts there. Driving up the narrow, winding track, Ali, the UNJLC driver, and I kept noticing timber buildings built over the mountain streams.

The single lane switchbacked up the valley slopes, making hairpin turns so tight that the little Landrover we were in required 3 point turns to get around. We found a few cleared landslides and rockfalls on the way up, which implied that there is some traffic on the road and made us feel a bit more confident. The road was often only a bit wider than the car and we would stop to check that the slope looked solid before crossing. We kept our seatbelts unfastened in case we had to make a hasty exit. Or at least that was the idea. Frankly, I can't imagine that a collapsing road would give that much warning.

Watch that edge!

In the end, we made it to Sherekot, a flat spot hung high in the valley, just beneath the snow line. Terraces trace the contours which are dotted with houses made of hand-hewn timber with earthen roofs. About a third of the homes here collapsed during the earthquake back in October.

Ali, who speaks the Pakistani national language, Urdu, asked two local men we passed what the buildings over the streams were for. They seemed pleased that we were interested and showed us one. Inside it was very dark, with only a couple of small, high windows letting in shafts of dusty light. The floor vibrated with a growling sort of thrum, like large engines far below decks on a ship. Driven by the stream hidden below the floorboards, a huge cylindrical stone rapidly and steadily spun on another base stone. It was probably 2 and a half feet tall and just as wide. Above, a wooden hopper held grains of corn that dropped, by twos and threes, into a hole at the center of the stone to emerge around the base as flour.

The dusting of white is corn meal that has settled over everything.

It was the cleverly designed wooden chute controlling the flow of corn into the mill stone that made me think of my great-grandfather, Smith Sluder. He was a carpenter of some local fame in western North Carolina, having built many barns and houses, and if my memory is correct, some mills. Someone in my family once told me that he could build an entire house out of nothing but wood. Doors, hinges, and locks all made without a nail or a screw. I don't know how much of that is true, but I do know that when I was a kid, he carved a chain for me out of a single branch. The last link formed a little cage in which a wooden ball was trapped. I still have it. And much like this Pakistani mill half way around the world, his work shed sat in a high valley, straddling a mountain stream.

That my great-grandfather should share with these Pakistanis the knowledge of how to build something as practical as a mill or a house or a barn out of local materials seems unsurprising. It makes sense that people living so close to the land would share such skills. But still it comes as a pleasant surprise to see the connection between them. It was one of those moments that made me very happy to be out exploring the hard-to-reach corners of the world. It made me a little homesick at the same time.

We learned that the residents of Sherekot make a living growing corn in the summer, storing it through the winter, then using the spring runoff to turn these ingenious millstones that grind the corn to flour which they sell in the markets below. Many of the people have blond or reddish hair, fair skin, and blue or green eyes. People say that it's the genetic remains of Alexander the Great's army, some of whom remained in these mountains when Alexander moved on. After so many weeks of seeing the brown-skinned and dark-eyed Pakistanis from the plains to the South. It is surprising to see a pair of blue eyes staring at you from behind a young girl's veil.

We spent a while longer in Sherekot, discussing the condition of the road and the kind of aid that had been received since the quake. The place feels a little wild. Everyone seemed to have a rifle, some of them decorated in the same manner as the jingle trucks that ply the Karakoram Highway far below.

Having tea in a local man's house, sitting by a pot-bellied stove, I was glad to see some UN-issue fortified biscuits. It probably wouldn't be such a great idea to go to a place like Sherekot in a flashy UN vehicle, full of sat phones, laptops, and GPS units, if the people didn't feel like they had gotten their share of the aid. But my visit was all smiles and the dutiful serving of tea to visitors. Our host even coaxed one of his shy children out so I could make her picture.

2006-02-16T19:16:00.000+05:00

Blog from Bagh

I won't get the whole blog written from here, but at the moment I'm in a tent in the UN camp in the town of Bagh. The town is about 15 km from the Line of Control that separates India from Pakistan in the disputed territory of Kashmir. It's a pretty big town. I'm guessing something like 20,000 people live here. It mainly consists of two narrow streets lined with densely packed two and three story buildings. It's strung along a hillside above a wide floodplain which at the moment only has a small river braiding it's way among the huge boulders brought down by past floods.

The town of Bagh suffered heavy damage from the magnitude 7.6 quake on October 8.

The town of Dhulli, near Bagh, is typical of small towns in Kashmir.

I came up here to do more GPS training with UN staff who will use the GPS kits we supply to collect data on the roads (for you GIS geeks out there - we are using Garmin GPS Vs to collect a combination of tracks and waypoints to define and attribute the road; clumsy, but it works and is cheap). Thankfully for me, that means getting out into the field and driving some roads. Bagh sits at 1100m (3600 ft) and traveled up and over a 2750m (9000 ft) pass into the adjacent valley. The windy road was a paved single lane most of the way, in pretty good condition. Although the winter has been mild, there is still a couple of feet of snow in the pass.

The road to Bandi Abbaspur. The roads are kept clear by a combination of Pakistani military and civil authorities, but UN Ops has a team that tries to fill in the gaps. Funny how, when you get high enough, all mountains look the same. This could be California.

A view of the mountains through a ruined building. The roof behind is sitting on the ground.

These are just the small peaks. This one is no more than 12,000 feet high. The huge Karakorum range to the north has several peaks over 26,000 feet.

A view of the Kharakorum. The large one ascending into the weird pink haze on the right is Nanga Parbat (I think), supposedly the most difficult mountain climb in the world, or so they say. The houses are sprinkled on the foothills like salt. It's a remote place, but densely populated.

On the way up, we passed a UN Operations team with snow clearing equipment. A couple of French Canadians fresh from Afghanistan, they were planning to camp up there for a few days and work to clear an important road of the snow that is blocking it. They have snowmobiles for getting around and surveying the route. Where do I sign up? The road they are clearing is one for which our data is poor, so I gave them a quick training and a GPS unit.

Unfortunately, they only got one night up there. For the next couple of days there were significant protests in other parts of Pakistan over the Mohammed cartoons. Although Bagh is pretty mellow and there haven't been any protests so far, the camp is run by Norwegians, so they pulled all the foreigners back to the base camp for a couple of days. In Bagh, most foreign aid workers who are women don't cover their hair. It doesn't seem to cause any problems. Although driving around with Susie, a spiky-haired fireball of a woman from Australia, I did see the absolute amazement on the faces of people we passed. She could have had tentacles coming out of her ears for the looks she got. They just didn't quite know what to make of her, though it never seemed angry or reproachful.

UNJLC field officer, Susie Busch, has been working in Bagh for several months.

The UN camp in Bagh. About 15 people sleep in each tent, inside little canvas enclosures that give a bit of privacy. You can hear everything anyone does, though, from opening a candy bar in the middle of the night to (of course) snoring. I swear at one point it sounded like a chorus of frogs on a summer's evening. Earplugs help. There's wireless internet throughout the camp, which is good for posting blogs.

The camp latrine. I'm not kidding. Just for guys pissing, though. There's a proper latrine for when you need to sit down. When it's really cold, you have to be careful that your bits don't touch the metal pipe or you might end up in a tongue-on-the-flagpole situation.

The next day brought rain (and some more snow up high). Another training drive took us up a canyon near Bagh on a road that doesn't appear on our maps at all. The road came to an abrupt halt at an area of massive landslides.

Whole mountain sides have come down, not just covering the road, but obliterating it. This picture doesn't even begin to capture the scale of the thing. It wouldn't fit in the frame. It was one of the most impressive things I've ever seen.

A small bridge barely hangs on to the side of the canyon. The American Rescue Council, an NGO, works in this valley. The head of the operation here told me that all the aid that had gone to towns above the slide had gone on foot, one person at a time, across this bridge and across the very precarious trails stamped into the mud of the slide on the other side.

Damage from the earthquake is evident everywhere. In town, some buildings collapsed leaving rubble filled holes between their neighbors. Outside of town, collapsed houses are everywhere.

Many buildings came down, but many more were left standing but damaged. The next quake won't have to be so big to cause major damage to the already weakened buildings. Some NGOs are bringing in earthquake engineers to assist in mitigating this threat, but that's a task that will take many years.

Even the mosque was not spared.

Working and traveling in the very different cultures that I have in the last couple of years, I've noticed that in many ways they aren't that different. People still want the same basic things, a comfortable and secure life, to feel productive, to feel some sense of self-worth. But sometimes you see something that makes you realize just how wide the span of human experience really is. I've seen women here, fully covered but for their eyes, turn their backs to the road and squat down as we pass in the car, so strong is the taboo on being seen by a male stranger. Another example is the profusion of homemade helipads. Noting that helicopters tend to land on white H's marked on the ground, locals have started making their own in hopes that a heli will plop down and disgorge lots of stuff.

This homemade helipad is on someone's house and I don't think they would be very happy if a big white MI-8 tried to land on it.

2006-02-07T21:23:00.000+05:00

A random and slowly growing selection of photos from past travels . . .

Some kids in a small village in Nicaragua were fascinated with my digital camera and kept bringing me things to photograph.

Church, Carthage, Tunisia

Guilty pleasure, Sierra Nevada, California, USA

Sinai Peninsula, Egypt

Mpala Research Preserve, Kenya

Steep Ravine Canyon, California, USA

Beach Rocks, Point Reyes, California, USA

Kathmandu, Nepal.

Petra, Jordan. Traveling here just after Sept 11, 2001, I pretty much had these fantastic tombs to myself.

Asmara Plateau, Eritrea. Abandoned tanks are not uncommon in a country with almost more years of war than peace in the last century.

Wat Tham Suea, Thailand. This is the monastery I lived at for a month or so. This craggy mountain top is said to have a footprint of the Buddha, discovered by the founder of the monastery.

On board SV Reflections, Indian Ocean. You can see the reflection of the bow in the water. We were fortunate to have dolphins swimming off our bow every couple of days, sometimes 20 or 30. Ocassionally I could lay on the deck, reach down, and touch them.

Catching up in Pakistan

2006-02-06T05:15:00.000+05:00

I usually make lots of photos anywhere I go. Even when I was visiting home in Tennessee a few months ago, I was snapping pictures like a Japanese tourist at the baggage claim of SFO. On arriving in a new place my hand starts twitching towards the pocket where my camera lives. But I was in Pakistan for more than two weeks before making my first photo. Partly that was because I've been working a lot and had seen nothing more than the route from the house where I am staying to the office. But it's also because Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan and my home base here, is rather dull.

You'd expect dusty streets full of carpet touts, dhal vendors, one-armed beggars, women with their faces covered, and AK-47 toting bandits. But instead you get tree lined streets in a perfect grid with large, vaguely Brady Bunch-ish houses. The place was planned and built from whole cloth in the 60s, and although very pleasant and safe, it's lacking in soul. It's about as western a city as I've seen outside the west; KFC, Dunkin Donuts, and funky cafes give it a familiar feel. In Islamabad, women dress however they like. Many cover their hair, but not their face. Most would not look out of place walking down any street in any city in the U.S.

Still though, it has some oddities that mark it clearly as part of the world where 'family values' still dominate in the public arena. There's a club in the basement of the Marriot hotel complete with dj and dancing, but if a couple gets touchy-feely, there's a bouncer/chaperone who comes around and separates them. And to buy any sort of booze in Pakistan, you have to have a license which you can only get if you are a "Christian". Because the assumption is that all white people are Christians, it works ok for westerners, but there are lots of Pakistani Christians. I'm not sure what they have to do to prove they are Christian and get some hooch.

Even in Islamabad, which is more than a hundred miles from the heavily affected areas of the earthquake, the scale of this massive geologic event can be felt. Everyone seems to know someone or have a family member who died. More than once when riding in a taxi, the driver has asked me about what I am doing here. When I mention that I am working in the earthquake response, he will tell me about his nephew or daughter or wife who was hurt or killed when the quake hit in early October. Around 75,000 people were killed, mostly by collapsing houses and shoddily built schools. Even here in Islmabad, a hotel collapsed, killing 40 people.

I've been to the field once, and will probably be going up again this week. Although there are some large towns, it is mostly rural and rugged, but by no means empty. These foothills of the Kharakoram range are covered in narrow, precipitous roads leading up the terraced slopes to quiet villages of stone-walled or concrete houses.

Villages strung like garland on the hillsides cover most of the affected area.

The town of Mansehra was damaged by the quake, but is mostly still standing.

Damage in Mansehra.

Houses with tin roofs are generally still standing (at least in the area where I visited; in other areas whole towns have been reduced to rubble). The traditionally constructed houses didn't fare so well. Roofs made from a layer of timber covered in earth (remarkably similar to traditional homes in Eritrea) make for good insulation, but are incredibly heavy and attached only by gravity to stone walls with no foundation. During the quake the earth shifted, the walls tipped, and roofs came down on their dwellers. My first site of a massive earthen roof flat on the ground, timbers sticking out from the edges like crayons from the box, was a shock. In other houses, the walls held, but the heavy roof caved in. And on the fringes of the disaster, where most homes withstood the shaking, schools, full of children, collapsed. Relief workers here in the first days after the quake talk about being able to identify the schools by the large numbers of people grieving by a pile of rubble.

This used to be a town.

Flying into and out of the area by helicopter, I looked down on thousands of tents. Some are white canvas tents in the familiar shape of something from the set of M.A.S.H. Others are blue or red plastic half-cylinders that look more like part of a moon colony. In some places they are scattered among the ruins of the towns, each tent adjacent to the pile of rubble for which it stands in. In other places camps have sprung up for those displaced by the disaster. Facing a winter without shelter in the high valleys of the Kharakoram (home to many of world's highest mountains), hundreds of thousands have descended, destitute, seeking help. Others stayed put for fear of losing their land if they left it. Predictions were that many would die in the winter, but the winter storms were late this year, allowing the relief effort to deploy lots of shelters, and so far it has been mild for a Himalayan winter. It seems odd to me, though not surprising, that people here are quick to thank God for this meteorological blessing when they won't blame him for the geological curse of the quake.

The relief effort is simply amazing. More than 80 agencies are directly involved. Government agencies from around the world, UN agencies, and NGOs (Muslim, Christian, and Secular) have swarmed the place. Around 40 helicopters spend all day carrying loads of relief goods into the remote valleys and god-knows-how-many of the fabulously decorated jingle trucks shuttle goods on the roads. These efforts are constantly hampered by landslides as the mountains shake off the dust of the earthquake and settle themselves back to sleep (we hope). And when the winter storms roll through, pretty much nothing moves until the road clearance teams (mostly Pakistani military) can get to work.

My favorite things in Pakistan are the jingle trucks. Every one is a unique work of art and they are the workhorses of the relief effort.

Another jingle truck.

And when the terrain is too rough for jingle trucks, jingle tractors take over.

Many villages are only reachable by foot, so the shelter materials, including the heavy corrugated iron sheets you see here, have to go up on foot.

Most relief workers live in camps run by different agencies. They sleep in large, crowded tents, some camps have good showers and food, some don't.

The Abbotabad base camp is run by the Norwegians. Quite comfy with heated tents and hot showers. No privacy, though. And because this is where the helicopters live, it's pretty loud when they all depart in the morning.

Like I said, not much privacy.

Rise and shine at the heli base. It's impressive when half a dozen big helicopters are preparing to take off.

Such was the scale of this disaster than only now are people beginnig to think about reconstruction and recovery. Until now, the effort has been 100 percent focussed on delivering food and shelter to people to keep them alive through the winter. Many thousands of tons of corrugated iron sheets, foam insulation, bed mats, stoves, cook kits, hygiene kits, clothing, and food have been delivered. Those efforts continue.

My friend Jasper, who I met in Eritrea, is now here working with an NGO to distribute shelters. Here he's assessing a village to determine how many shelters will need to be built. The areas below the snowline are just now getting help because the early focus was to help the people up high before winter arrived.

Trying to manage the chaos of 80 plus agencies delivering all this stuff to thousands of villages is daunting, but it's the role of the agency that I work for, the UN Joint Logistics Center. The team of 3 GIS guys that I am part of is charged with mapping the locations of warehouses, roads, helicopter landing zones, landslides, road closures, bridge conditions and anything else that affects the ability of all these agencies to deliver all their stuff. We collect, collate, and disseminate daily maps of road conditions. We are working to create analytical maps showing what stuff has gone where, though as you might imagine it is difficult to get that information back from the field. My main job at the moment is training teams in the field to collect GPS road data while they go about their usual tasks and then to get that data onto our maps. A team from the Univeristy of Georgia is helping with all the data editing required to do that.

A main road. This one is in good shape.

Many bridges survived, but they're still a bit scary to drive across.

Me, preaching the gospel of GPS.

The work hours are long. We work seven days a week, usually between 10 and 12 hours per day. Often more. I share a house with the other two GIS guys, so it's pretty much work from the breakfast table to the dinner table. We each have laptops so we can work anywhere. It's intense, but when you enjoy the work, feel like the outputs of your effort are valuable, and enjoy the people that you work with, it's not so bad. And barring another bit of geological nastiness somewhere in the world, I should get a few months off after this is over in April or May.

Be well,
cj