Visit my Adobe Portfolio page to see a set of images taken whilst staying in the Pirow Camp in the Timbavati Game Reserve which borders the Kruger National Park in South Africa.
Category: 3 Travel experiences in Africa
One day in Zimbabwe
Getting out and about
I have just spent a week in Harare – the capitol of Zimbabwe. I spent the whole week in meetings but had one day when I could take out my camera on a field trip outside the city. (One of the meetings was on the 16th floor of a building – with no working elevators! A day after I had made the climb the newspaper carried a story of a woman who had had a miscarriage climbing the stairs in the same building – a heavy price to pay.)
Climbing out of the pit
I was in Zimbabwe as a consultant to support the drafting of a new national water policy. In about 2008 the country hit the bottom. Following the economic collapse with hyper-inflation, everything ground to a halt. Wide spread unemployment meant that people could not pay their bills, local authorities had no revenue to provide basic services, infrastructure collapsed… Without electricity water and sewage pumps don’t work, raw sewage is routed directly into rivers and dams from which drinking water is drawn, massive cholera and typhoid epidemics result… And yet somehow the people continue, they have no other option. Today, although the situation has not changed much, there is hope and a sense that the corner has been turned. The resilience and energy of ordinary people on the streets and in the markets is inspiring.
Some images – Life goes on
Getting around in Kinshasa
If you travel a lot over a long period you will probably have an accumulation of currency which is very colourful but now quite useless. It will either have been devalued to the point of irrelevance or no longer be in use. I was looking through my stash the other day and came across a 50,000 Nouveau XZaires note from Zaire before it became the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997. I have traveled to DRC several times, both when it was Zaire and as DRC. I recall going to a small streetside shop to get a sandwich for lunch once and noting that the wad of notes it cost was thicker than the sandwich itself. On one memorable trip to Kinshasa I learned that it is probably better to have a driver than to drive your self …. Continue reading “Getting around in Kinshasa”
Getting a boarding pass in Lagos
In all my years of working in Africa I did not personally come across a great deal of corruption – this particular experience at Lagos International Airport is the exception rather than the rule.
Lagos is a very large city in Nigeria – it is the second largest city in Africa (Cairo is the largest) with an estimated population of 15.5 million. It is an overwhelming city which is full of life but also mostly poor and dilapidated. I first visited Lagos in the late 1990s on an assignment for UNICEF – the UN Childrens’ agency. We could only travel in convoy with an armed escort and it was not recommended that you walked around in the city. I recall very clearly arriving at the hotel I was to stay in with a colleague from the United Nations. As I checked in the clerk asked me how I was going to pay and I put my credit card on the counter. My colleague slapped his hand down on the counter covering my card and gave it back to me saying that I must not use it or let it out of my sight anywhere in Lagos – I paid in cash.
My memorable experience of catching a British Airways flight from Lagos to London happened on the same trip as my remarkable flight from Abuja (read about it here) – it was a long day. Continue reading “Getting a boarding pass in Lagos”