October 29, 2013

Gambia continues

I find it difficult to actually stop and sit down and type on my tiny scratched up phone but I spend the entire day constantly thinking about lovely things to say about this place. I imagine these perfect sentences that I can never remember by the time I get to writing, and scratch my head trying to think of all it is that I wanted to say.

It’s been nearly a week since we arrived, and we’ve had 2 different hotels and 2 couchsurf hosts. The first hotel was in the popular Senegambia area, and our it’s night left us with an impression of Gambian prostitutes and Boss ladies – the opposite (white women buying black male love). Our hotel had both electricity and water, which we started to appreciate after our first host. Our second host coincidentally lived only a few blocks away from him in the same suburb of Banjul, and we’ve run into many of our taxi drivers and even people from out flight in this crowded little area. When walking the sandy streets at night, I don’t see a thing, but the lack of street lights doesn’t bother the locals at all, so I follow closely behind them and their super-human night vision. During the day, you weave through the residential areas, split into compounds where each family (or families) lives, and think you’ll never find your way bank home or out of the maze. But then, all of a sudden you find yourself recognizing the same puddle you accidentally dipped your toe into last night, stumbling in the pitch black.

The locals can also recognize eachother a mile away, just by the way they walk, and hear eachothers whispering voices over the roaring traffic, all in a way I think I could never learn. All who know eachother greet eachother, by just quietly saying their first name “Dawda”. My local name is Binta, or those who learn it’s Katrin and can’t say it call me Kadi.

They say “thank you” for most things – yes, right, I agree, I know, thanks, whatever. We’ve been eating the same staples for breakfast, lunch and dinner – bread, potatoes, onions, and sometimes eggs or fish if you’re lucky. We escaped to a nice beach side resort for one night to have a proper shower, feel some AC, and charge the batteries (literally and figuratively), but after some time there we started to get sick of the old, fat-ish, burned tourists, overpriced drinks, and packaged culture. Once we returned to the compounds to stay with our second host, we slowly got sick of sleeping on the floor with no fan, and having only a tap of water and hole in the ground to function both as a shower and a toilet. The grass is always greener on the other side, or we just never seem to be happy with where we are, but I think the latter will stay more of a reality. It might even become the luxury we miss soon… Water seems to be a commodity in Bissau, where we’re Headed next.

October 25, 2013

Welcome to West Africa

I arrived at the international airport in Banjul with my cousin 48 hrs ago, with no plan, hotel booking or local person to greet us. Now I’m sitting under a cloudy night sky in 33 degrees C and 70% humidity watching fireflies fly over us. I’m 2 shades darker and have probably drank 4L of bottled water since I arrived, and have made many local friends and plans since then.

Our first night started late, landing at 10:30, and driving around for half an hour with our new taxi driver friend looking for a hotel to call home. We ended in at Babula’s in Senegambia, and the guard took us out to town for fried fish and local beer, Juls. The next day we walked 5 minutes to paradise, sitting on a sandy beach with straw umbrellas and snoozing in and out of our sunbathe. I found a horse to gallop on the receding tide only a few hours later, a tall skinny stallion that I rode barefoot on the sand.

We are now at our couchsurfer host, Hamza, whose idol is Barack Obama and his favorite artist is Celine Dion. He lives in a suburb area, where the dirt roads still show the tolls of a wet rainy season, and all the little kids follow us screaming ‘tubab’ (white person) when we walk through the neighborhood.

Today Hamza and his friend Youssef showed us around a few markets, including the biggest one in Gambia at Serrekunda. The smell of hot fish, rotting fruits and car exhaust didn’t make me particularly hungry, but the market made me feel happy and alive. On the way home we watched a local soccer game, on their half-sand half-turf field, and Villi paid the entrance (about 15 cents) for 20 children waiting by the gate on our way in.

Gambia is called the smiling coast of Africa, and I totally understand why now. Everyone here is incredibly friendly, greets is with ‘tabab’ of ‘hello’ or sometimes ‘how are you?’, and often offers their hand in a gentle shake. People are black as night, barely breaking a sweat in the noon sun, and walk so slowly as if they have nowhere to go. The women and children laze on little mats on the ground, cuddling and breast feeding as if they have no other place to be, and I’m starting to feel as if I have nowhere better to go either.

October 19, 2013

Goodbye Reykjavik, til 2014

I think this is the first year I’ve really appreciated Icelandic autumn, and I’m not sure if it’s because it was an exceptionally warm and beautiful one, or if it’s because I knew I was leaving before winter started. Whether or not if was because fall was good or I didn’t have to worry about dreading winter, I have been looking forward to leaving on a jet plane to West Africa ever since I booked it in midsummer. The sunny beaches and lush forests are starting to call my name.

I am going to travel with my cousin Villi, who is a strong, tall Viking man but looks a little bit more like a Colombian drug dealer with his shaved head, tattoo and dark skin (he is also half Guyanese). So I’m banking on him to protect me and pretend to be my husband when the appropriate situation calls for me to be married. The Gambia is 90% Muslim but supposedly very safe and tourist friendly, so he may be more handy in Mali or Guniea-Bissau.

This trip will be one of the first I take with company for so long, and also the first without a computer so I’ll be blogging from my iPhone. Not sure how that will work out but whateves. I would much prefer to go old school and carry around some pen and paper to handwrite about my journey, but then I wouldn’t be able to share it online and assure my mother I’m still alive. But that got me thinking, why does no one write anymore? Will the next generation just grow up learning how to type on screens? Even so, people write and type less, I feel like. Maybe writing is more stressful because people don’t want their thoughts to be permanent or reread or personal to themselves. And then half the things we think we don’t even feel comfortable sharing in the first place, so writing it down makes us scared of everyone judging us all the time for the crazy things we think. I say screw them and think whatever you think, you’re the one deciding to read this. Now I should probably say something brilliant I’ve been thinking, but instead I’m going to go back to what I was talking about before my rant.

I’m leaving for The Gambia, we need to get to Senegal, but first I fly through Paris and Barcelona. I only have 6 hours in Barcelona, where I plan to walk down the Las Ramblas, drink Sangria, and find Villi at the airport. I have 2 nights in Paris to meet a handful of amazing people, both new and old friends, and drink a lot of good wine. I’m not sure I’ll miss Iceland too much while that is all going on, but maybe the heat, Mosquitos and water in West Africa will stir a few homesick strings in me.

September 30, 2013

Photo Highlight: Sea swimming in the fall

sunset today at Nauthólsvík, a perfect evening for seaswimming

September 29, 2013

Autumn in Iceland

fall colours and snow-topped mountains

It’s always a little bit sad when summer ends. You first start to notice the nights getting dark in the beginning of August, and by the end of August, some mountain tops will already have had their first snow fall. By the middle of September, the valleys have started to bronze and the trees have become fiery shades of red and gold. By the end of September, the leaves have blown all over the place, but bits of green still scream for sun as a few summery days still pop up here and there. It starts to rain more, and every day is literally 9 minutes shorter than the one before, so the nights come noticeably quicker and stay longer every morning. The strange thing about autumn is that it’s probably the most beautiful season, but one can hardly call it a season since its over as soon as it begins; after 4 months of summer come 8 months of looming winter and noone really knows where the fall went or remembers anything about it until next fall. You can’t really pinpoint when summer and winter meet to make the autumn, but at some point it feels like you fell asleep on a summer night and woke up on a winter morning.

herding sheep through the snow

After the horse season ended, I went back to the east to chase sheep in the annual round up ´réttir´. However, after an early snow storm and some other uncooperative weather, it became more like a hide-and-seek sheep-search instead of a chase; they were much harder to see in the melting snow, and a bunch of sheep were dug up from their soon-to-be snow-graves. We couldn’t even do the sheep round up on horse back, as is custom because Fljótsdalshérað is such a huge area, but instead of taking 3-4 riding days, we had to use snowmobiles, 6-wheelers, a bunch of dogs, our own feet and some walking sticks to cover the area. There are still some hundreds of sheep missing, so the round up goes on, weather permitting.

Mjölnir

I went east this weekend to collect a horse. Not just any horse, but my horse, my first and only Icelandic horse I can call my own. It was given to me over a drunken conversation on the last night of the sheep round up by a nice farmer named Magnus. We didn´t discuss many details, but he held true to his word and I showed up with a horse trailer and took him without any further questions. I only recently found out he´s a 6 year old, 5 gaited horse from Kollaleira, which has some very good horses and I can´t believe the luck I stumbled upon to just have him. If I had searched far and wide across Iceland for my perfect horse, and could spend a pretty penny on one, this is probably the exact horse I would have chosen.

The wedding couple and my mom

My aunty got remarried in September, and my mother came for the wedding since she´s her sister. My Aunty Myrtle has lived in Iceland for more than 30 years and blends in alot better than my mom who showed up with her dark skin and Chinese features wearing a sparkling Indian sari to the ceremony in Laugafellskirkja. It was a wonderful wedding, probably the happiest wedding I´ve ever been to, but every wedding you go to seems to be a perfect day so its hard to say if it was really the best wedding ever… but still, close.

an autumn sunset

The sunsets seem to get brighter and more beautiful as fall draws to a close, with red and purple skies flaring up earlier each evening. I´ve spotted my first northern lights already and look forward to seeing more and more in the star-studded sky I had almost forgotten about. This fall has gone by particularly quickly. The days of smelling like horse and spending more days in the mountains than civilization just ended abruptly, and I was thrown back to the life’s reality in Reykjavik where reverse culture shock and my unfinished masters thesis awaited. I escaped back to the countryside a few times in September, once to chase sheep, once to collect Mj0lnir, and the other time to ride horses and eat reindeer lasagne in Hvanneyri. There I was reminded yet again why autumn is such a beautiful time of year, since the dark skies and falling rain can create so many, spectacular rainbows and I probably saw twelve in one day that weekend.

so many rainbows

September 15, 2013

Rendezvous in Germany & London

disembarking in DUS

I haven’t left the country since May, which is a really long time by my standards, so I was itching to go somewhere but only had a week off between horse guiding and chasing sheep. Its hard to get very far from Keflavik if you dont have a lot of time or money, but London, Germany and somewhere in Scandinavia is always worth a brief visit. Air Berlin and German Wings are now flying direct from Keflavik to Germany, finally offering some competition to Wow Air or changing it up from always flying Icelandair. I booked to Dusseldorf for some €180, which I happily paid just to avoid going through London, and arrived to an airport full of beer-drinking Germans. It was just before midnight and I was still in Iceland, but I would have never been able to tell the difference when I was boarding or on the plane. The sound of duty-free beer cans snapping open all around me and that incomprehensible German language made me feel like I had already arrived.

sitting beside the Rhine

I landed at 6am in Dusseldorf, and saw the sun rise on the runway behind jets taxing to and fro. The sun continued to rise as I made my way to the train station and into Dusseldorf city center. It was much smaller than I expected, so without any time stress, I managed to sit in a sunny, green park and nap off the red-eye flight jetlag. That afternoon I met my beautiful friend Stefan, who walked me through the old center and sheltered me from a pouring, thundering rain storm.

Ritter Sport chocolate steps

I was going to Cologne to meet one of my best friends from UBC and California days, Mr. Mike Reiter who always inspires me to take pictures. We spent 3 days in Cologne drinking 2cl beers, eating Ritter Sport chocolate, cruising the Rhine (on foot and boat) and finally taking photographs of the Koln Hauptbahnhof and the empty streets on Sunday night.

I tried (and failed) to fly from Cologne to London with Mike as planned. At some point between checking out of the hotel and checking into my flight I lost my passport, or maybe it was stolen, who´s to blame, but didnt realize til my bag had been ripped apart infront of the immigration police who wouldn´t let me board my flight. Eventually the Easyjet flight left without me, and I left the airport lost and lonely at 10pm. Luckily Stefan could shelter me again, and I figured out there was an Icelandic consulate in Koln (!!!!) which was only open 9-12 on Tues – Thurs, so some 12 hours later I had an emergency passport and flew to London (for another €180).

me and mike

London was lovely, yet grey and rainy as expected. Me and Mike stayed near Oxford Circus, which was miraculously always less than 4 metro stops on one line from anywhere I needed to go. I met my Guyanese cousins for dinner, an old school mate from Iceland for coffee, and even a guy I met in Egypt 6 years ago who I hadn´t seen since but it was his first day off work in months and we could hang out all day. It was so inspiring to see him again, now speaking fluent English and boasting about how much he loved his life in Europe, and he didn´t look a day older or like any other Londoner who seems to have the life sucked slowly out of them as the days go on.

My last order of business in London was to finally get my Guyanese passport, which seemed hopeless after having not enough passport photos, or the wrong size, or losing a day to the Icelandic consulate. But, after one lost passport in Germany, the weights of Karma balanced everything out and I came home with a new passport from London, and I can finally call myself a Guyanese citizen now 🙂

September 12, 2013

Photo Highlight: Fish-eye view of the Dom

inside by day

outside by night

September 8, 2013

Photo Highlight: Dusseldorf

musical notes on the Rhine

August 31, 2013

Reindeer Hunting in Lón

reindeer

After a summer of catching no fish and forgetting how to use my own two feet (I somehow feel I´ve become welded on my horse and haven´t had to walk myself anywhere since June), a reindeer hunting trip sounded like a perfect idea. In Iceland, there is a short reindeer hunting season at the end every summer, split into nine regions around East Iceland, where permits for around 1000 deers are given out to hungry hunters. Four of my friends had a permit this year, so we made a group of 9 to hike around svæði 7 and look for some unsuspecting herds.

how to cross a river in a car

The first day went terribly – we planned to wake up at 4, but slept in til 8, because of low-lying fog and thick rain clouds. After sitting around with our 5th cup of coffee by noon time, we decided to try and start hiking into the valley so that by the time we were up in reindeer country, the clouds would be gone. That also didn´t turn out so well, since the rivers were swollen to large from all the rain fall and we couldn´t drive in as far as we wanted. Intsead we had to walk, and cross quite a few more smaller rivers with soaked feet, some 12 km and up 800m, only to face worse weather, with steady rain and wind so strong it was blowing me over.

how to cross a river on a man

We found no reindeer that day, just a tuft of hair, some old poo, and footprints that could have just been from the guy walking ahead of you. So, the next day the hunters set out again, this time at 8 am, and by 3 pm, still not a single reindeer in sight, but the same rain and freezing cold instead. It looked hopeless by that point, with only a few hours left before nightfall to shoot 4 deer. But then, a herd was finally found, and two hunters claimed their lives then. The last two weren´t shot til nearly 8 pm, with sunset already on the horizon, and the next few hours involved alot of tired, sweaty, men, taking turns carrying half a bloody deer back down to their jeeps. They finally managed, only to find a flat tire on one car, and after a few more delays trying to tetris the deer on laps and under carseats, we finally had a celebration dinner at 2 am.

Now the meat is hanging somewhere to be processed, and in the next few months, reaping the benefits of reindeer steak will never get tiring. I most look forward to the reindeer skin I get to cuddle with this winter, to keep me from getting cold on the long, dark, winter nights.