When driving down from Abengourou, there is this one spire that sticks up and basically serves as my indicator of where to turn in Abidjan to go down to Plateau. For those who haven't had the thrill of driving in the Art Nouveau highway offramp designs of Côte d'Ivoire, let me tell you that when you see something like this spire, you remember it. If you don't, you're going to end up in Ghana before you can turn around and come back.

Anyways, for all my time in the country, I never actually managed to get up to this spire which is the top of a Catholic church. So, on my last day in the country, I set out to go visit it. This was definitely an interesting trek to set out on because while I'm sure there are easier ways to get to this church, I don't think that any of them don't involve driving the opposite directions at various point before you finally get there. Suffice to say, I'm glad that I went. While the exterior is a bit funked up from the climate, it's actually an extremely nice church with a design like no other I've seen and that I appreciated a great deal. If you're there, I'd recommend checking it out to show that yes, places of Christian worship don't have to look like the European church layout.

But, in the shot below that shows the spire, I realized that it sums up Abidjan quite well with the church looming above, lush greenery, laundry drying on said greenery (common in this district), the twisty roads, an old Mercedes on said roads, mobile network advertisements, skin lightening cream advertisements, and some guy in the middle of the shot because there's always some guy sitting in some random place. About the only thing missing would be the lagoon, which was actually a bit off the the right. Funny how one shot can show so much. A tip of my hat to Elia for getting it.

Photo by Elia

I've unfortunately had to leave a Côte d'Ivoire a bit earlier than I had planned. After nearly six months in the country (which went by insanely fast despite délestage) you would have thought that most everything that needing doing and seeing was covered to some degree. But, it's amazing how when once back to your home country, you realized how much was missed.

For obvious starters, BarCamp Africa did not come about. This was due to many factors which will someday be part of a larger treatise to put on that site, but suffice to say, it was an ambitious project that fell prey to many limitations. The list is large, but the biggest one deals with the cost and time of travel in Africa. Highway Africa is one of the few pan-African, multilingual events that happens each year and knowing what goes in to making an event like that happen, I have to say that I am in awe. I hope that someday, the BarCamp Africa will actually happen somewhere in Africa and be a smashing success though.

I am happy to have paid one last visit to Maison de la Lagune although it's disheartening to see how it is spiraling out of control with these large, obnoxious groups including the ever idiotic French Licorne troops. I'm sure the owner is tired of the constant seven day a week schedule as well. But on the issue of travel, it's unfortunate that I never got the chance to take one of the water taxis across the lagoon. Even the most hardened and acerbic of staff at ONUCI will attest to how nice that boat ride is... if done outside of commute hours. It was a lot of fun to have visited Treichville one day though as that is a fantastic neighborhood. Although on the same token, I will never set foot in Koumassi again, even if at the wrong end of a gun. Lord I hate that neighborhood.

But probably the most frustrating thing I missed was not getting out to San Pedro. While visiting a town named the same as one near Los Angeles had mere entertainment value, it was more the fact that I've been to the North, South, East, and center of Côte d'Ivoire, but I never made it to the West. I suppose there is always a next time someday.

But more than anything, despite the malaria, heat rash, lack of power, lack of water, and any number of other troublesome problems, I've finally understood why it is that people miss Africa so much after having lived there for some time. I can't tell you why this is and it's not that I won't tell you because I want to be an ass, but there is an appeal to it that goes above and beyond simple comparisons. Taken singularly, there are a great many things to hate on their own, but taken as a whole and once away from it, there is something that seems to always beckon from the continent where we humans all came from in the beginning. I suppose that no matter what our beliefs, we know this and we work so hard to act as if we don't.

But best of luck in the World Cup, Côte d'Ivoire. And best of luck with Gbagbo and Soro. You will need it and then some...

Africa is entirely peopled by wild animals, or so the travel guides would have you believe seeing as how any guide to Africa always has a lion or cheetah or something else with four legs on the cover. Of course, if one were to follow this rational, then in Paris only exists the Eiffel Tower. I guess books are just meant to be marketed and judged by their covers.

But getting around that whole "book thing", Offbeat Guides is doing something interesting in that they custom make guides for you on order. It's an interesting concept given how electronic all the information for travelers is these days. Curious as to how it worked, I shelled out $10 USD to get the guide for Nairobi in PDF format, although you can also order a printed version if you really want to, but it takes longer and costs a lot more.

Once compiled, I downloaded the guide and after perusing it, I have to say that it's a lump of rancid ugali. Essentially it consists of all the information from the Wikipedia article as well as the Wikitravel article. Tossed in are a couple of references to Wikipedia articles on two of the large parks as well as some culled data from weather websites and a screenshot of Google Maps.

For $10, I have to say that this is pretty weak, especially considering that Nairobi is a major tourist destination and you can buy Lonely Planet's electronic guide for $4.62. Of course you can also just open up the various wiki pages and save them to your computer locally to avoid spending anything.

I suppose that Offbeat's attitude towards Africa is to be expected to some extent given that they're based in San Francisco and well... I was going to say that it's not Paris, but again, it's a major destination and for $26 you can get a whole, proper paper guide from Rough Guides just to name one of many who publish on Kenya. I'm actually curious as to the whole legality of this since their citation page at the back looks like this:

Wikipedia, Nairobi — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nairobi

Wikitravel, Nairobi — http://wikitravel.org/en/Nairobi

Wikipedia, Nairobi National Park — http://en.wikipedia.

org/wiki/Nairobi_National_Park

Wikipedia, Lake naivasha — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Lake_naivasha

Eventful — http://eventful.com

Zvents — http://zvents.com

Upcoming — http://upcoming.yahoo.com

Accuweather — http://www.accuweather.com/

Yahoo Finance — http://fnance.yahoo.com

Google Maps — http://maps.google.com

Yelp — http://yelp.com

They're not specifically citing what text and photos come from where as is mandated by Creative Commons. Also, they are trying to put out the guide under a 1.0 agreement when the source material came from a 3.0 page. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm assuming you can't just change the agreement on something that's been released under one specific agreement.

Also, in terms of Google Maps, can you sell off their map images like that? I would venture a guess as to no since this is a commercial venture. Just my two cents on all this as I feel like I've had my $10 ripped off for stuff that not only I can get for free, but also shouldn't have been bought in the first place. And given that they feel like they can so freely use the CC license with abandon, if anyone wants this crappy guide PDF, I'll happily email it to you, although prepare to be let down.

It might be a bit hard to make out as I didn't have my wide angle lens with me, but the above shot is a public tidal pool on the eastern side of Cape Town. By itself, it doesn't seem all that impressive--a pool, yay. But what this is, is part of a series of pools that run from Muizenberg down and are constantly filled by the waves washing over the walls. Drains placed along the edges continually help the pool to then drain so that the water remains fresh. So in essence these pools were built a very long time ago, but still stand and are still heavily used by Cape Towners to go for a shark-free swim.

Again, this may not seem all that notable, but projects like this are missing the world over. They're simple, cost next to nothing to maintain and benefit the public greatly. Another example that is much more common is my most favorite of traffic control systems: the roundabout.

I saw the whole series of these pools while going on a lengthy walk along the shore (again, something else for the public) and I marveled at their simplicity and use; even as the Winter sets in to the Cape. One can only hope that somewhere down the line, the municipal powers that be will come back to projects like these.

I have no idea the number of hotels I've stayed in in various African countries, but it's been a few. The situation is usually the same in that the hotel is owned by some non-African who realized that there was a need for accommodation in Country X and so they plunk down a hotel, maintain it as much as they have to, hire five times the local staff that they actually need to hire, and don't train them at all. The theory behind all of this is that the hotel money will continue to come in regardless and since manual labor is typically cheap, they just toss a who bunch of people at the work and assume it will get done in a "good enough" fashion with the occasional condescending yelling to push them along if it doesn't. I loathe this as when it happens in Africa, it makes it come across that the staff are unintelligent clods when in reality it's a reflection on some greedy owner who doesn't give a damn and just wants a revenue stream.

I'm sure any number of people can cite specific examples of this if they'd like and I could go on at length in a post that would serve only to rant. But, it was when I was in Mali last month that I saw that this pattern can indeed be broken; it merely takes owners that care and understand where they are creating their business. It might happen again in the future, but I think this is one of the extremely few times that I will plug a hotel, which is Comme Chez Soi in Bamako, Mali. The owners are a younger couple who have traveled around Africa and then decided to open up a small (currently six room) hotel in the Hippodrome Quarter of the town.

At this point, I'm sure most people are moving this to their, "Big Deal" list, but there are important things to note. For starters, they don't yell at the local staff that they'd hired. In fact, their staff is exceptionally good and there are very few of them as they do their work wonderfully. I have to give credit to the owners who actually took the time to a) train them well b) find people in Bamako who already had the skills needed to work in hospitality and/or c) I assume pay them a living wage. This may seem like a no-brainer type of thing, but it's not and this doesn't just apply to running a hotel in Africa, but also operating as an NGO. Finding or training qualified, reliable staff takes time and few people are willing to do it as it slows down the revenue of a hotel or growing statistics in NGO reports. Although the truth is that in the long term, it doesn't and sustainable development whether economic or aid will always outpace short term solutions.

But above and beyond the staff, there's also the fact that the owners of Comme Chez Soi are working within their neighborhood to make it better. Sure, the focus will probably make their business flourish more, but again, they're actually making the effort of doing things like paving the approach to the hotel (all side roads are dirt in this area) and giving out garbage cans that lock and can't be stolen to the residents in the neighborhood to dispose of their trash, which usually piles up in the street until some kind of torrential rain washes it away.

On top of this, they're working with a fellow at Mali Health who is working on ways to recycle plastic in town as yes, Bamako, just like many large African towns has a problem with piles and piles of plastic building up. I have no idea if they'll make any headway in this as it's a massive problem, but we'll see.

But there, in the end, this spot has become an oasis off the main drag of Rue Bla Bla that visitors to Bamako can enjoy and the reason for that exists in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the environment that they are operating in and reacting accordingly. It seems so simple, but so many completely miss how this works.

The Basilica.

Unlike like other trips during this stay in West Africa, we set the bar a good deal lower and made a day trip out of visiting Yamoussoukro, which is technically the capital of Côte d'Ivoire. You wouldn't really know it given that the "six lane highway" everyone talks about is really a boulevard with two very large lanes given where the divider paint wore off a long time ago. The roads are just as potholed, if not more than other towns, and overall, it's a pretty dinky little wide spot in the road, which is understandable given that it's a village that originally had 500 inhabitants and was then dragged in to the city of 200,000 or so that it is today.

Essentially, it echoes Gbadolite in DR Congo in many ways. It was like Houphouët-Boigny and Mobutu were comparing notes during development of these towns:

Former home village being turned in to large city? Check

Presidential Palace? Check

"International" airport that can accommodate the Concorde jet? Check

There are a few differences to take in to account such as the fact that Yamoussoukro sits on the main road to the north of the country, whereas Gbadolite is way, way out of the way in the far north of Congo on the border with CAR. Also, Gbadolite is defunct as far as a town goes. Yamoussoukro is not only a functioning city, but is also the capital, although that's almost a cruel joke given that Abidjan is, for just about any Ivorian you talk to, the actual capital with its 2.5 million+ population and thriving scenes on just about any front. Oh yeah, there are also crocodiles in what is essentially a moat in front of the presidential palace (feeding time with live chickens at 17:00 daily) in Yamoussoukro and there is the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro.

It's really this last item that most people come to visit in Yamoussoukro because as soon as you're within 5km of the town, you seem the dome looming above anything else in town. That seems pretty impressive at first, but then you get closer, it just seems freakin' weird and out of place. As many critics have noted, this massive structure (158m tall) sticks up out of what is essentially the West African bush where the homes that border the basilica are without running water. There is nothing organic about its placement. It looks like a plunked down piece of a movie set that got left behind once the filming was over.

As to the details in the structure, it's lacking. It tries too hard to copy structures in Europe without really having any kind of a life of its own (windows, marble, and just about all the raw materials are from Europe.) This shouldn't be too much of a shock given that it was designed by a Lebanese architect named, Pierre Fakhoury and was constructed by a Korean company. And that's really the thing that's the most offensive about it in that all of its opulence, it just serves as one of the first signs of what was to come in Africa with Asian companies building everything with no African hands touching the project. From the third bridge being built across the Niger by the Chinese, to the roads being constructed by Chinese and Koreans in Ghana, to just about everything in DR Congo, to the fiber optics for internet being installed by the Chinese in Uganda, and most importantly the Statue to African Renaissance which is sad in its ironic glory of being built by a North Korean firm. The list is endless and I'm curious how many others think this when looking at such salutes to "econolizaton"* like this basilica or it is just a shrug along with TIA/C'est comme ça ici?

* Econolizaton - Colonization solely through economic/debt means. Different from neocolonialism in that it isn't being carried out by former colonialists and works in a development first/tax later model.

For the first half of this year, I'll be based in Côte d'Ivoire. I'm really quite excited and am looking forward to working with the local tech and blogger scene in the country, which is quite strong and with some really talented people.

While I've been to Congo and Ghana before, this will allow me a longer time to dig in to the local scene and hopefully be able to promote the projects that others are working on such as those in the Akendewa organization. Also, I'll be able to attend some really great events like the upcoming BarCamp Abidjan. This is also going to give me the chance to break out of the chicken-scratch mode of French that I don't really speak and to properly learn the language once and for all as it's pretty imperative that if you want to work on pan-African projects, you really need to be bilingual in English and French. Plus, it will make me seem far fancier than I actually am.

While there, I'll still be toiling away on Maneno and working with others to expand the architecture. There are a lot of great elements in the Alloco release, but the next one, Fufu is going to allow a great deal of external customization and more URL hosting options. Plus, we should be working to promote more BlogCamps in the region to get more people online and writing.

Most importantly, it will be great to get out of the cold, dreary days that California has had recently and dig in to a plate of Alloco (loved the Ghanaian version), as well as hopefully some of those beans in a red red, which I simply can't eat enough of, although I'm as to a loss of what it's called in Côte d'Ivoire or if it even exists.

So, while I'll be spending most of my time up in Abengourou, if you pass through there or Abidjan, let me know. I'd be happy to meet up for a bière.

Two suitcases with 23kgs apiece to last me until the middle of the year. That's pretty much what I have to plan for right now. When one isn't as much of a geek, this is an easier thing to plan. When one is me, there is all kinds of electronic crap and other tool crap that needs to be tossed in to the allowed 46kgs. As seen above, that is the bulk of my non-essential items, although, despite not being clothes or a toothbrush, I find everything in there to be essential.

I'll write more about this in a later post, but I'm heading off to Côte d'Ivoire for the next five months. For those unfamiliar with Sub-Saharan Africa, it may seem like I'm actually bringing too little. But really, it's not so much that these things don't exist there (they do) but more that I prefer mine, I have them, and I don't want to buy them again. That and I'm no fashionista, so I don't need 46kgs for clothing. Some people do and they scare me to no end.

In there are pretty regular things like: screwdrivers, set of metric socket wrenches (I own nothing in the American system), tape measure, hammer, network patch cables, a DSL modem, a wired router (wireless is already there ahead of me), surge protectors, multiple power adapters, power converter, and spare laptop batteries. No, I'm not planning to do any construction while there, but you only find out how useful some tool is once you don't have it. Honestly, if I had to choose only one, it would be my ridiculously-colored, purple Leatherman Juice XE 6. It's compact and has a variety of extremely useful tools; the Swiss Army Knife of the 21st century. My wife has the smaller C2 and finds it to have no end of value. Of course, as the dents will testify, the Leatherman makes for an incredibly poor hammer.

There a few non-geek-guy things on there that are probably noteworthy. The pillow (that rolled up white thing in the left) is essential. While I can stand a foam or hard pillow for a few weeks, on an extended basis, my neck gets really messed up as it gets no love from all the computer work I do either. That is a half kilo bag of tea with my tea infuser. You really can't leave home without that either or you're going to be drinking Lipton and anyone who likes tea won't like that. Lastly, at the bottom, there is a toilet seat. Yeah, that seems rather random to bring, but once I'm there, I'll write more about that on my other, personal blog. And no, I have no plans to host any bachelor parties. That is what it is.

Coffee drinkers the world over are well-known for needing their coffee fix wherever they might be. This can lead to rather burdensome life requirements of course as was shown by a friend of a friend who took an entire espresso machine with him when he went to DR Congo. He was Italian of course, so I have a great deal of respect for the attention to detail.

I never really got in to coffee. It's not to say that I don't like it, as I do enjoy a dark, straight cup as they make it in Spain, Bosnia, or Turkey, but at the same time, I just really don't need it. And I really don't need that whipped cream, cinnamon sprinkled joke they pass off as coffee at places like Starbucks.

Snicker as you may (or if British, nod in approval) but I happen to be much more of a tea fan. This is fine when in Eastern Congo, Rwanda, Kenya, or a number of other African countries that have vast, wonderful tea fields, but when traveling at large, you often have to BYOT (Bring Your Own Tea.) For instance, when in Ghana, I found that there was indeed Lipton and it was better than the bagged version you get in the US, but it still just wasn't quite "there". If you lob the phrase "tea snob" at me, I probably won't duck it at this point as I've just had so many crappy cups of tea while traveling that I generally pass if it doesn't seem up to snuff. I'll try not to sneer if in your company, but I make no promises.

The travel woes changed a great deal with the discovery of this bad boy, which is a very portable tea leaf infuser that's rather affordable. It's large enough to let the tea steep properly, unlike the ball, but small enough to fit anywhere. Naturally one might be looking at this and thinking, "Um, buddy, why don't you just travel bag-enabled?" I did this for awhile, but I have to be honest with you in that once you go loose, you can't go bag; thank you very much, Fortnum & Mason Assam. I assume it's something along the same lines as grinding your own coffee beans prior to brewing.

But that's about it. I can take this little fellow with me anywhere and it will span just about any cup. I can bring my own leaves or just try what is locally grown. Boil up some water, send it my way, and you've got a happy tea drinker. Bill, I'm hoping to get over your way soon to try some Cameroonian tea as well and I will be there, infuser in hand.

I have to admit that this was all inspired by this article on Twiga which shows that you absolutely don't need to go the fancy infuser route and may very easily find a local metal smith that can construct one out of recycled materials. But, just a bit of travel tea-lore for some of my fellow drinkers out there who might be staying in the shadows because it seems that few folks write about tea and travel as if one excludes the other, to which I say, "Hardly!"

My traveling buddy.

According to this article on the BBC, word has come down that Air Austral has purchased not one, but two of the superjumbo Airbus A380 planes. While other airlines are outfitting them to carry more passengers in multiple classes, Austral is opting for the "budget" route and outfitting the planes to carry a whopping 840 passengers all at the economy level from their Paris-Saint-Denis route.

Given that there are only about 827,000 people in total living on the island of Réunion, it is obvious that they are planning to ply towards the holiday makers. Of course, at 11 hours in flight time and a cost of 800€ or so, it makes for a strange terminology to call this a "budget" flight as I'm much more used to seeing this applied to stag parties on Ryanair in Europe. Of course, they must obviously believe that there will be a good deal of profit in this or they would have paid the 1 billion (thousand million) USD for the two jets. And maybe there is something to be said for this approach. If it does indeed work, it might prove to be a decent model to drop the cost of flights to Africa and allow for an increase of connectedness which is most definitely needed.

A 'budget' ticket to paradise?