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Howdy! If you've been reading my World's Largest Dungeon thread, you'll know I've been summoned to West Africa for a few weeks. I've got a little time so I figured I'd put up a journal about my exploits. Let me introduce you to the main character:
Velcro Zipper: It's me in 3D! In addition to being a magical beast, I am also a writer, photographer and all-around public relations specialist. I'm essentially a bard. I've been summoned to Africa to chronicle the adventures of the crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Legare who are working with a handful of developing African nations to protect their waters from pirates, smugglers and illegal fishing operations.
I hope to be able to post some photos from my journey, but it will have to wait until I return to a land with more powerful internet magic. Until then, enjoy this first installment of Velcro Zipper in Africa!
***
My journey began in Dakar, Senegal, where the airport terminal was about the size of a post office. A little orange cat strolled around the interior of the building while serious-looking men armed with pistols kept a keen eye on anyone entering or leaving. A gaggle of peace corps volunteers flocked behind me ready to save the world as I produced my passport to one of the customs agents. After a few moments of confusion over my residence in country, I was able to get passed the guard and meet with my embassy contact who walked me past a throng of shouting men, eager for work as porters, guides or drivers, to a beaten up white van.
Our driver sped through the deteriorating and ill-smelling airport district nearly hitting several other cars and people while the radio blasted the news of the day in French. My contact got out of the van in front of what looked like a bombed-out busstop and left me to continue the ride alone. When the driver took a detour and drove slowly through an alley where people had set up a shantytown, I half-expected to be waylaid by beggars, thieves or kidnappers that never came. Eventually, we got to the pier where we drove past more armed guards and came to stop at the brow of the Legare.
I'd barely set down my bags when I was told some members of the crew were headed to a school for a community relations project so I picked up my camera gear, some bug dope and a bottle of sun repellant and hopped on the bus.
The school was a small collection of long, one-story buildings surrounded by an eight-foot wall in an area of Dakar that looked like a typical American ghetto. Broken desks lined the courtyard or rested in piles while a pair of men did their best to repair them using power drills and handsaws. Young children played soccer between a pair of the buildings while teenagers sat at the repaired desks in the courtyard chatting. The Coasties were here to repaint a pair of the classrooms that had fallen into disuse after being covered in graffiti. I mostly just wandered around the buildings shooting snapshots of kids playing and desks being rebuilt or Coasties scraping and painting walls. A few of the kids were really excited to have their pictures taken even though they’d never get copies of the prints. At one point, I was mobbed by group of the younger children who posed or tried to look tough in front of the lens until they were chased off by one of the schoolmarms. The painting operation ended sometime a little after noon when we heard Muslim prayers being sung from loudspeakers at a nearby mosque. Along the way back to the boat, we passed a gigantic 50-meter, statue of a Senegalese family being built by North Korean workers; a statue that is causing a lot of controversy in Dakar.
I found out my workday wasn’t over when we returned to the vessel.
A bunch of bigwigs were coming by for some fancy to-do later that night; the U.S. ambassador to Senegal would be among them. I switched over to autopilot, snapped the required photos and retired to the mess deck to upload my images from the day as soon as the last pressed-shirt stumbled off the brow. With the drive to the airport and the flight from the U.S., I’d been awake for about 36 hours after my first day of work in Senegal.
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I hope you both enjoy the journal. Here comes part two:
Coming to Africa was worth it for the drugs alone.
The day after I arrived in Dakar we left for Freetown, Sierra Leone, for the next leg of the Legare's mission. I hadn’t been sleeping very well so I tried popping some Dramamine because it’s supposed to make people drowsy. It didn’t work. Nothing worked so I went about my business and ignored it the way I usually ignore my insomnia. Here’s where we get to the fun part.
Ya see, a rare side-effect of malaria medication is that it gives some people horrible nightmares and sleep deprivation has led some people to experience hallucinations. So, apparently, when you combine nightmare-inducing drugs with sleep deprivation, you sometimes get a person who experiences bizarre, sometimes violent hallucinations. Good times.
I’ve never had a dream I’d consider an actual, bona fide, wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat nightmare so I was more amused than concerned when I started seeing parts of the boat burning and bodies lying in the passageways. Sometimes, I’d hear voices or have strange visions of stranger people and creatures trying to kill me. For some reason, most of them were women, or at least, female. It was kind of sexy. I never really let it get to me but went through the next few days in a sort of bemused trance lucidly getting my work done and carrying on short conversations while enjoying the weird sensations that occasionally crept up on me.
I’m sleeping better now. I’m back to my usual four-to-five-hours-a-night routine, but I still get the occasional person-in-the-corner-of-my-eye-who-isn’t-really-there or whisper-in-my-ear and the monsters and burning passageways filled with bodies are mostly staying confined to my sleeping head.
The experience has inspired me to write a story about it.
I've heard about the malaria drugs, but I've never heard a firsthand experience with them. Pretty freaky.
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I recommend you travel to Africa just to get your hands on the sweet, sweet doxycycline. You might not experience the same side-effects I have, but I figure it's worth a go.
Here's part three of my little African adventure:
I was a few days into my stint on the Legare when the team from Sierra Leone came aboard. The strange dreams and hallucinations I’d been having were well under control so it wasn’t any trouble to get some photos of the Coast Guard boarding team working with the guys from Sierra Leone. At least a third of them were veterans of their country’s last civil war. One of them had been studying to become a doctor when the war broke out. A member of his family was killed so he left medical school to fight. If you don’t know much about Sierra Leone, it’s a country with a history of military coups and political corruption. The movie “Blood Diamond” was set there. Anyway, the men we had aboard were all nice guys and very professional. You could tell they wanted to help repair the damage that has been done to Sierra Leone over the last decade and make their country strong. By about the third day of their time aboard, they had a chance to do their part.
The Legare had chased down a rusty tub of a fishing vessel named the Yu Feng. The boat was out of Taiwan and they were fishing within Sierra Leone’s Exclusive Economic Zone so a boarding team was assembled to check them out. It was nearly sunset by the time the team got in the water, and at least an hour went by before they embarked the vessel. I hung out on the bridge or the flight deck of the Legare trying to get pictures from whatever was the best angle, but the lack of light and the distance made it impossible to get any decent shots. Eventually, I went below decks to wait out the results of the operation.
The next morning came and the Legare was putting over a replacement team. It turned out the first team had discovered the Yu Feng’s crew was fishing without a license and had no crew or representatives from Sierra Leone aboard so we were going to escort the boat to Freetown where they’d be taken into custody by the Sierra Leone Maritime Wing. I got the pictures I needed of the second team going over and got word I’d be taking a trip with the smallboat crew when we recovered them later that night. Things didn’t exactly go as planned.
The plan was simple. I was going to get in the boat, ride over to the Yu Feng and get pictures of the boarding team coming off and the Freetown team going on. Well, once again, our smallboat didn’t get into the water until nearly sunset. With storm clouds in the sky, light fading fast and the Yu Feng close to something like two miles out, there was no way I was getting the pictures I needed. I stowed my still camera and pulled out my video camera because it had a night vision setting. I say “had a night vision setting” because at some point during the operation, the camera got smacked and my night vision became a casualty.
We’d pulled up alongside the Yu Feng’s starboard side and the sea was ugly fierce. Up close, I was surprised at the condition of the Yu Feng. Light peeked out from the hull where small holes had opened up in the rust and it smelled heavily of dead fish. The smallboat rocked side to side and bobbed violently as we made an approach to the Jacob’s ladder hanging from the vessel. There was no way we were going to be able to safely get our crew off so word came that there was a new plan. We were taking the Yu Feng and its crew all the way up near the mouth of the Sierra Leone River where, supposedly, the crew from Freetown would have an easier time getting aboard. I was just along for the ride at this point. My video camera was still working fine so I’d be able to get some footage when something finally happened but, for what felt like two hours, I sat at the back of the smallboat trying to spot a buoy with a busted light that we’d heard we might crash into.
Just at the edge of Freetown, near a small dock, I spotted a tiny light bobbing in the water. The Sierra Leone Maritime Wing was on its way. Somewhere around seven armed men were crammed into the 20ft. johnboat that motored toward us in the dark. One man held what looked like a small electric lantern; the boat’s only light. The men followed us back to the Yu Feng and tried to get aboard, but their boat was no match for the swells. They came up alongside us and, after talking with the coxswain, six of them scrambled onto our boat. Though some of the men looked skittish about coming over, they all seemed relieved to be out of the little wooden boat with its tiny outboard motor.
We got in close to the Yu Feng and all six of the Maritime Wing members climbed or jumped onto its deck using whatever means available as quickly as they could. I think that’s when my video camera got walloped by the butt of an AK-47 or somebody’s boot because my night vision setting died after that. I filmed what I could in full color, but once we got away from the ship’s light it was no use. By then, most of our second boarding team had gotten into the smallboat and we were on our way back to the Legare.
River bars can be dangerous places for smallboats. When you’ve got the river current trying to get out to sea smashing into the incoming tide, you wind up with huge swells that can swamp a vessel or tip it over. Well that’s where we were; at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River with walls and sprays of saltwater shooting over our bow and into our boots. I shoved my video camera down my lifejacket and covered it as best as I could to keep it dry, but that left me with only one hand to hold onto the boat as we flew toward the Legare. One of our team from Sierra Leone, a representative from the Office of National Security, sat next to me laughing his ass off whenever we launched into the air. I laughed with him. Back on the Legare, I cleaned off my equipment and threw my clothes into the laundry to wash out the salt before hitting the showers.
It took three days for my boots to dry.
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Adventure is amazing, Celestial Healer. I recommend everybody go on one at least once in their life.
If you've liked what you've read so far, perhaps you'll enjoy this:
We met up with one of Sierra Leone’s only patrol craft, the PT-105, about a day before pulling into Freetown for a port call. I was told I’d be getting back into the smallboat to go out and get pictures of the two boats, the Legare and the PT-105, next to each other for some publicity shots. After my last experience, I half-expected we’d be setting into the water an hour after too late but the Maritime Wing patrol boat showed up on the horizon a little into the early afternoon.
I got into the smallboat with a few other guys who were going over for a crew exchange and huddled near the bow where I thought I might be able to get some decent pics. To avoid any saltwater getting into my camera, I’d brought it a raincoat, a clear plastic enclosure with a hole for the lens to peek through. Thing was useless. The raincoat made the camera difficult to operate and the wind from the speed of our little boat over the waves blew it off faster than a cheerleader’s panties on prom night. I shoved the worthless bag into one of my pockets hardly caring if I lost it to the sea and tucked my camera into my chest. I wasn’t going to get any good pictures with the boat bouncing off the surf the way it was anyway.
The exchange crew went over amid a cloud of black smoke pouring from an exhaust on the starboard side of the Maritime Wing patrol boat. Except for the parts where it was blackened from exhaust fumes, the PT-105 was navy gray and covered in machinegun turrets. I later found out the Maritime Wing had gotten it as a gift from the Chinese who handed it over with the stipend that Sierra Leone would never board their vessels. I also found out the thing handled rough water like a rocking horse on a trampoline so half the crew was usually seasick after a couple days underway. You had to give these guys credit. On their way out to meet us, they’d boarded and fined two vessels.
I got a short tour of the boat and met the commanding officer and his executive officer. The crew all seemed friendly enough and whatever they were cooking for dinner smelled pretty good. They had a small lounge where some of the crew was watching “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” on a 20-inch television while a few other men stood or sat around one of the machinegun turrets on the bow listening to a soccer broadcast over a small transistor radio. I didn’t think Benjamin Button was a very good movie so I went out and talked to the guys around the radio until I got called back to the smallboat for my return trip to the Legare.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I got the pictures I needed and lost the hood to my video camera over the side of the smallboat when we hit a wave. The raincoat, on the other hand, is still with me. It now lives at the back of my locker where I never have to look at the stupid thing.
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Here's another quick update for the journal:
The ocean is blue. That’s what you’re taught as a kid but, until you’ve actually sailed on it, you never really know what that means. I’ve lived in plenty of coastal towns and, lemme tell ya, the ocean ain’t hardly ever blue in close to shore. Usually, it’s more of a dark gray or almost black. You’ve got to get a good distance away from land and civilization before you can see the ocean the way it’s meant to be seen. Out in the middle of the Atlantic, tiny eruptions of salty white foam occasionally burst from its surface but, for as far as you can see, the ocean is a field of sapphire that rises and falls like a sleeping woman’s chest. It's beautiful.
Another thing about the ocean you don’t really know until you get there are the animals. Aboard the Legare, people are daffy over whales.
We were on our way to Freetown when the Legare put a boarding team over onto a fishing vessel to check things out. I was on the bridge waiting to get photos of the team disembarking since the boat was facing the wrong way when they got aboard. A still picture of a guy on a ladder could mean he’s either coming or going the way I see it. Anyway, the lookout shouts, “Whale!” and everybody else on the bridge turns to look where he’s pointing. About 550 meters off the bow, this humpback shoots up out of the sea and splashes down onto its back. A chief asks if I’m getting pictures of this, so I snap a few despite the distance. Another whale breaches close to the first sending a spray of water into the air from its blowhole and a dark gray flipper rolls up into view near it. There’s something like five or six humpbacks out there, and I manage to get a few shots of one shooting up out of the ocean like a whack-a-mole. A call goes out over the ship’s intercom telling everybody about the whale show and everybody runs out onto the deck to see them.
I guess I get it. Whales are great. Most people don’t see them that often, they do the big splash thing, they’re graceful, whatever. I’m just sort of over them. I’m not much of a dolphin guy either. I’ve seen whales swim up to the sides of boats I’ve been on and pods of dolphins playing in the wake from the fantail. It’s nice, but what I really like are the flying fish.
Flying fish are like the astronauts of the fish world. Dolphins and whales are equipped for trips to the surface, but flying fish have to extract oxygen from water like all the other fish. Every time they whip their little tails and glide out of the sea it’s like breaking through the atmosphere from a fish’s point of view. And they don’t just leap out of the water like salmon or sailfish. They actually make controlled flights using wind currents and the beating of their tails on the water’s surface to stay airborne for up to 45 seconds. The Legare spooks up hundreds of the little guys as it cuts through the ocean. Sometimes, schools of twenty or more will explode from the water and shoot off, wheeling and dodging like fireworks across the waves for a dozen meters or more before returning to the sea.
Flying fish are full of win.
Velcro Zipper, I'm loving this journal, please keep us abreast of your Adventure.
Does PT stand for "Patrol Torpedo," like back in the day?
I'd have to say I'd get pretty excited seeing a whale or a dolphin out in the ocean. Flying fish seem awesome, though.
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PT does stand for Patrol Torpedo, Maikurion, but the PT-105 didn't appear to have any torpedo capabilities.I could be mistaken but it appeared to be similar (if not the same as) the Type 62C Shanghai-II Class Gun Patrol Boat which uses 37mm and 25mm guns as its primary weapons.
Taig, I've traveled all over Central America and spent several years of my life in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. I've seen orca, gray whales, humpbacks and dolphins of various sizes. I think they're neat and I like seeing them, but they're a little old hat to me now. I haven't yet seen a blue whale, but I imagine being close to one when it breaches would be like witnessing a titan.
On with the story...
Freetown looks like many other coastal cities from a mile out at sea. Multi-storied buildings line the waterfront nestled in between stands of cotton trees and other tropical plants and fishing boats bob on the water secured by their anchors. Men in small rowboats and canoes paddle through the waves under the bright sun and a lighthouse stands silently on a small peninsula near the port entry. It isn’t until you get closer that you begin to smell the burning charcoal and the ashy smoke of it rising from the sprawl and see that many of the waterfront buildings are crumbling or uninhabited. Through the “Big Eyes” (a deck-mounted, pair of binoculars the size of a standard telescope) I could see beyond the pier into a small neighborhood of shacks and stucco homes with little or no electrical power. A topless, short-haired black woman stood in the doorway of one of the darkened houses adjusting a long skirt around her waist. Unhindered and unashamed by the modest social restraints of Western civilization, she motioned and spoke to some passersby before returning into the shadows of her home.
We moored up at the pier and I met with members of the local media who all wanted copies of my photos and video. A few moments later, two security vehicles and several armed guards heralded the arrival of one of Sierra Leone’s Ministers of State and the U.S. Ambassador to Sierra Leone. The bigwigs had their press conference and photo op, and then I traveled around the city with the Legare’s captain to take pictures of him visiting various high-ranking members of Sierra Leone’s military.
We rode through the rough, crowded streets of Freetown with the Navy Commodore in charge of the mission in Africa and an Air Force liaison officer who sounded and looked a bit like Julia Child. The Air Force dame had been in Sierra Leone several years and seemed pretty sharp. It seemed she had a background in medicine and was now in charge of keeping the supply train running. She talked about how hard it was to get the things the military needed in a country that hardly has the resources to get them there in the first place and how Mercedes-Benzes don’t cope well with the country’s roads (though that didn’t seem to stop certain people from requesting the cars.) She also talked a little about the city itself.
Hundreds of thousands of people came into Freetown seeking refuge during the civil war of the early 2000’s. The infrastructure of the city had been set up to support around 200,000 people but the population swelled to greater than 1 million and, when the war was over, few people returned to their original homes. By day, people choked the streets attempting to sell packaged foods, cell phone chargers and whatever else they thought could turn a profit from baskets and bowls expertly balanced on their heads. Whenever we became stuck in traffic, men would crowd the windows of our vehicle waving stacks of DVDs, towels and flip flops. Flip flops, by the way, are pretty much the official footwear of the entire African continent. The African Union should change their flag to a field of green, gold and white with a big, gold flip flop or a pair of crossed flip flops right in the middle. I’m getting off-topic. Where was I? Oh yeah…
We met with the Sierra Leonean military guys who were all courteous and seemed to all have really cute ring tones on their cell phones. I was more than a little amused the first time I heard what sounded like some sort of chibi anime theme song coming from the phone of one of the officers. I had to hold my camera up to my face and pretend I was composing a picture to hide my smile. On the ride back to the Legare, we got stuck in another traffic jam.
Cars were already lined up for several blocks on a hill going down toward the pier when the Legare’s captain and I got stuck on a narrow road with street merchants and pedestrians lining either side and walking between the vehicles. Every now and then, men on motorbikes would brave the busy oncoming traffic lane to try to get ahead of the stopped cars. It seemed any sort of headgear served as a protection in Freetown. I saw everything from football helmets to Santa Claus hats on the heads of motorcycle riders. I imagined that somewhere out there, there were five guys riding side-by-side in a cowboy hat, policeman’s helmet, fireman’s helmet, construction helmet and Native American headdress while The Village People’s "Macho Man" blared out of a handlebar-suspended boom box on the front of one of their bikes. When one of the riders was nearly crushed between two cars in our lane, I asked our driver how often he’d seen traffic accidents here. “Very many times,” he replied. I wasn’t surprised.
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Time for part two of my first night in Sierra Leone!
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I often find politicians and military bosses are often out of touch with the people whose interests they are supposed to serve and I generally prefer the company of the average Joe (but not Joe the Plumber) so, after spending all day as a fly on the wall among the political and military elite, I decided I wanted to go check out the “real” Freetown.
I hooked up with a few guys from the boat who were heading to a bar called “The Office.” A couple of armed Sierra Leonean security officers were required to join us in case we got into trouble or got hassled by the local gendarme. Both were female (very progressive I thought,) and one was kind of cute. I almost felt sorry for them because I knew a few hours later they’d likely be babysitting a rowdy, babbling, nitty-pissed busload of randy, young sailors. Beyond the van’s dirty windows, I noticed the streets were considerably less crowded at night.
Our van bumped down the road passed billboards that would seem odd in the States but seemed wholly appropriate here. Scrawled above a painting of a family of confused and innocent-looking apes were the words, “Chimps Are Like Us, Eating Chimps is Like Eating People.” That was one of my favorites. A couple other good ones were the “Smart Military Uses Condom” sign featuring a smiling soldier holding up a prophylactic and the “I’m living positively with HIV” sign whose happy, soccer ball-kicking protagonist seemed to be reminding the afflicted to hang in there and take their medicine. There also seemed to be an awful lot of signs denouncing violence against women including the message that “Rape is not okay.” I was still thinking about eating chimps when we pulled up to the bar.
The Office was typical for a party bar. Neon lights framed the ceiling, and loud, fast-paced, popular music screamed from speakers that drowned out the audio from the large-screen TVs that hung from the walls like animated canvases. The only difference, I suppose, were the several dozen maimed beggars and shifty street merchants gathered outside. Several of the ship’s crew were already there, well into their cups and carousing with the pros (or CSWs (commercial sex workers) as they are referred to on the boat.) I took a seat at an empty table where some of their bottles and glasses were arranged.
I’d gone into the bar without more than two dimes in my pocket. I don’t drink alcohol and only wanted to take a break from my work as far from the boat as I could get. The adventure of seeing a local bar also sounded like it would make a good story, and it seems I wasn’t disappointed. A few minutes after I’d begun scribbling some notes about the bar into my Moleskine, a beautiful native woman approached me.
The ebony-skinned woman before me stood about 5’8” and couldn’t have weighed more than 115lb. Her shining, black-as-onyx hair was straight and fell stiffly about her shoulders (I suspected some sort of product at work,) and her large, dark, expressive eyes reflected the blue of the bar’s neon lights like an electric arc. She wore a black lace top over a sheer, white shirt and tight, light brown jeans that hugged the curves of her ass like shrink wrap. In Krio-accented English, she asked me why I sat alone at the table. We back-and-forthed a bit and I fed her a line about being a writer traveling Africa in hopes of drafting a novel. I told her I was jotting down notes about the bar for possible inclusion in the story and how, now that she was here, I might have to include her in the story as well. She told me her name was Vivian. She also claimed she was a hairdresser (product!) and, of all things, that she wanted to watch me write something. I obliged her and penned a flattering description of her into my notes while dictating to her what it was I was writing. We were dancing in between periods of snogging and groping one another a few minutes later. After that, I had her buying me drinks (non-alcoholic, of course.)
Now I’m not saying the girl was scheming but I’ve been around enough shady characters, hustlers, tramps and vagabonds to get a sense for certain things. When Vivian tried to lead me onto a darkened patio behind the bar under the pretense of getting lost looking for the ladies room, I let her walk out the door alone under the pretense of believing she had found it. Some goon in a cheap suit just inside the door of the bar gave me a sideways glance as if to suggest I should follow her but I played dumb and sipped from a bottle of water until she returned. I figured if the girl was a pro, well, two dimes wasn’t gonna buy me a rub-and-tug and, if this was a setup, I’d rather be within earshot of the cute, little security officer with the semi-automatic pistol on her belt. Either way, we found the real ladies room and then got back to the bar where Vivian and I danced and made out a little more before I heard one of the vans was leaving for the boat. I took it as an opportunity to leave the stage while the audience was still begging for more, and headed for the door with Vivian on my arm.
Vivian pressed up close to me as we approached the van and asked (for maybe the tenth time) if she would see me again the next night. Keeping to my previous story, I told her I had more research to do for my book but that I’d try to make it. We kissed one last time amid a crowd of beggars, amputees and rowdy, babbling, nitty-pissed sailors before I heard one of the security officers tell me it was time to go. Then, Vivian told me she loved me and waved to me as I went to help throw a one-armed man off our van.
Try and tell me that isn’t romance.
Wow! You paint a picture of an almost alien world. I feel so very sheltered in my suburban existence.
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The 'burbs aren't without their share of adventures, taig, but you should definitely take a road trip across the country at the very least when you have a chance. Sometimes, college campuses will have bulletin boards up for students looking for people to help them drive cross-country. It's a cheap way to see alot of the U.S. That's my low-cost travel tip for today.
In other news, Velcro Zipper is no longer in Africa! My mission in Africa has ended and I am making my way back the U.S. I still have plenty of stories to tell so I will continue to update this thread until I'm caught up and can get some pictures in here. Now, on to my second day in Sierra Leone. It's another two-parter:
It isn’t a big secret that Africans love Barack Obama. The news was rife with stories about African support for him during the elections and ABC reported the turnout for his speech in Kenya was estimated at 1.5 million people. During my second day in Freetown, on my way out to a place called Bureh Beach, I found out just how popular the man has become.
I rode near the front of the van talking to our security officer, Dean, and a police officer we picked up as an escort, Mansou. The two of them were very proud to talk about their city and filled me in on the local history. As we got further from Freetown, the humanity-choked, bullet-riddled and crumbling city gave way to a peaceful rural village dotted with roadside stands and finally, beyond that, green, jungle-covered mountains and fields of calabash, rice and African laburnum. Dean told me this was Obama Junction, a rural town in Obama County. That’s right. A town and a county had been renamed for the President of the United States. Not only that, but there was an Obama school, a number of Obama businesses and at least two Obama nightclubs in Freetown. I’d seen one of them while I was there, along with a few boats and cars with the President’s name painted across them. Obama t-shirts and murals were also on display throughout the city. These people were froot loops for the guy.
We left Obama county behind and passed by two or three waterfalls as we drove deeper into the peninsula toward our destination. Before reaching the village, we passed two tax-collection roadblocks. I mention these because the idea struck me as particularly medieval. Tax collection agents armed with AK-47s build a makeshift roadblock out of barrels and tree branches across one lane of traffic. In the other lane, they lay a thick plank with nails protruding from it (basically, a poor man’s version of the stop sticks used by police in the U.S.) Anybody driving or walking through the roadblock is detained until they either pay their taxes or produce a receipt proving they’ve already paid somewhere else. Once a driver has paid their taxes, the nail board is dragged out of the way allowing them to pass. Our van was stopped at both of these roadblocks, but Mansou saved the day by yelling at the tax collectors until they opened the barrier. With that out of the way, we were free to reach Bureh Beach.
Bureh Beach is a tiny village at the very end of Peninsula Road. One or two brick houses and a couple dozen mud huts with thatched roofs provide shelter to the residents who seem to spend their days fishing, climbing trees for coconuts and hocking their wares to tourists. Our first stop in the village was, appropriately, the beach. Soft, white sand stretched across the beach like a tiny sea of powdered sugar while jade waves rolled slowly onto the shore. Out across the water, maybe about a half mile from the beach, was a small forested island just off the end of a natural sea wall of partly submerged stone. I wandered the beach a little while until I heard a loud thump behind me. A coconut had been dropped from a tree by a local child who was retrieving them for our group.
The child and his brother carried the coconuts to a man on the beach wielding a curved machete who expertly chopped away at them until they resembled crude tumblers. Coconut water is basically a nutritious, electrolyte-balancing, natural sports drink but, as I witnessed in Costa Rica, it can also sometimes act as a laxative so I didn’t have any. I didn’t come out to this beach to spend the day squatting behind a bush. I opted to swim to the small island instead.
The water was only deep enough for me to wade through until I got out about a hundred yards and, for a moment, I thought I might be able to simply walk to the island. Then, a huge wave surged toward me and lifted me off the seafloor. I spit out the salt water that dripped into my mouth from my lips and started to swim, timing my strokes to coincide with the waves so that my head was above the swells. It had been awhile since I’d swam this distance against the waves so I had to change up my stroke pattern whenever I got tired, but I kept looking ahead at my destination and pressed on. About three-fourths of the way there, I came upon a couple of the Coasties who were swimming back from the island. They asked if I wanted to go back with them, but I figured I’d come all this way and I wasn’t going to turn back now (where’s the adventure in saying I gave up?)
I got within about 50 yards of the island and decided to finish big with a full-speed trudgen-style sprint toward the shore. Within a minute, I was climbing onto the rocks at the edge of the beach and peeling off my goggles.
I sat on the shore of the island, staring out across the water at the distance I’d swum while four of the local kids cleaned their fishing nets nearby. I wanted to get a victory picture so I pulled out my small “waterproof” digital camera and held down the shutter release. Nothing. Sometime during the last couple of weeks, the camera’s hood had broken off. Apparently, it had left a pinhole in the camera body allowing salt water to get inside; just enough to ruin the camera. I didn’t let it get me down. Photos are great but, usually, it’s just as good to fully experience the moment and tuck the memory away in your head for someday when you might need it.
The kids on the shore of the island were just about done with their work when one of them came over to talk to me. He asked the kind of questions kids ask when they meet any other strange foreigner, and he introduced himself as Bob. I didn’t laugh, but I’ll admit that I was a little amused to come out to a fishing village on the edge of the African jungle and meet a kid named Bob. Bob offered me a ride back to the beach in the wooden canoe he and his brother, Francis, had brought over to the island, and I went down to where Francis was beating the nets out in the shallow water. There, I found a dead seahorse washed up on the island shore.
I’d never seen an actual seahorse before so I picked the small, dead creature up from the sand and felt the ridges of its body. I imagined the thing must have been washed up onto the beach by the waves and then died in the open air so I waded out into the water and set the seahorse
back into the sea. The ocean took the seahorse back into its care, and I helped Bob and Francis get their boat back into the water.
Getting the canoe back to the beach didn’t work so well the first time we tried it. The thin vessel rolled over sending the three of us into the water only 20 feet from shore. We all laughed, righted the canoe and baled the water out using plastic buckets. After that, we had no trouble getting back to the beach where I learned how to haul an 800lb. hardwood canoe out of the sea. It takes some effort.
Bob and I sat on one end of the canoe while Francis pulled his end on a pivot. When he couldn’t pull any further, we traded off, slowly inch-worming our way up the beach. At last, we got the canoe into the shade of the trees and I thanked the brothers for the ride.
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And now for the rest of the story...
I got a photo of Bob and Francis (using my only non-damaged camera) while getting shouted at by the resident crazy old man of the village and then headed back up the beach where a local merchant had laid out wood carvings and jewelry for sale on a blanket. Among the items for sale were a collection of coins and bills from before the civil war. I would have liked to buy a few, but I only had about 3000 Leones in my wallet and my priority was to buy a gift for a friend. I selected a brass and steel bracelet carved with butterflies from the pile, haggling the price down to 1500 Leones before getting a few pictures of Coasties playing soccer with the local kids.
I had just finished getting a few pictures of the soccer game when I met The Coconut Man.
The Coconut Man is 67-years-old, about 5’6” and built like a lightweight boxer. If Bureh Beach ever establishes itself as a premier tourist destination, this cat should be its mascot. All he does is climb coconut trees all day and sell them for a dollar apiece to tourists. I had to turn him down because of my position on fresh coconuts, but he came back and asked again only a few minutes later. I liked his persistence and his attitude, but I declined the offer and went on a tour of the village.
Children played on the beach and a man weaved a fishing-net as we walked into the village of Bureh Beach which smelled heavily of burning charcoal. Sierra Leone is one of the most diamond-rich countries in the world so, naturally, coal is abundant here. In addition to using it for heating, I learned the villagers here also use the coal to create white paint from crushed seashells. As I mentioned before, most of the villagers lived in mud-walled huts with thatched roofs. These huts were large, one-roomed structures with no power or running water but none of the people here seemed to mind. I thought of how the people of this village could probably live completely content lives if they’d never encountered the outside world, absolutely happy in their ignorance of modern science, customs and religious beliefs…
…and then I traded them my broken digital camera for a fish dinner and a necklace with a tiny flip flop hanging from it.
Fish, straight from the ocean, and fresh rice awaited us back on the beach. I was nearly out of money, and I couldn’t afford the price of the dinner so I offered a trade; my broken digital camera and a pair of sandals that were falling apart in exchange for my meal and a flip flop necklace. I figured the sandals were still serviceable and the villager I was bargaining with was convinced he could get the camera fixed (I admit I didn’t do much to assure him the saltwater had completely ruined the device, but I did tell him it was broken and probably couldn’t be fixed.) I think I got the better half of the deal, and I enjoyed my meal in the shade of a coconut tree while I talked with Dean and Mansou.
Then The Coconut Man returned.
I still didn’t buy his coconuts.
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What can I say? Even I fail my Knowledge checks sometimes.
You're right, Charles. I have a lot of interests, but I'm only a layman in most of them. However, I wasn't relying on Superman III alone for my information ^_^ Based on what I know about carbon and the connection between coal, graphite and diamond, it seemed natural enough to me to assume the prevalence of both coal and diamonds in Sierra Leone was more than coincedence.
I ascribe Superman's ability to turn coal into diamond to the fact that he is Superman and, therefore, super. He can fly fast enough to travel back in time by reversing the rotation of the earth without destroying nearly all life on the planet in the process so why shouldn't he also be able to create enough heat from his laser eyes and pressure from his mighty fist to rearrange the molecular bonds of coal and transform it into low-quality diamond? Also, Russian scientists say it could happen under the correct circumstances. Russian scientists, man.
There are at least two or three people I've met I intend to stay in contact with but, I'm usually happy to simply bamf into and out of people's lives. Afterall, unicorns, like dragons, lose something of their mystery if you see them all the time.
Well, my definition of romance may be different, and I want PT boats with no torpedoes to simply be patrol boats, but I love your travel stories, so I hope you continue. I, for one, got my diamond knowledge from Ferris Buehler's Day Off... ;)
BTW, did ZZ Top have anything to do with your choice of online name?
Looking forward to the pictures, VZ!
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As much as I enjoy ZZ Top, "Velcro Fly" had nothing to do with my name, Mairkurion. I cooked up my handle back when I was a young stallion trying to think up a name for a Shadowrun character. I'm picky about the way words sound together and I really liked the combination of sounds in Velcro Zipper. I also liked that it sounded punk and a little bit naughty.
On with the story!
My trip to Sierra Leone ended with another one of those big parties where a bunch of pressed-shirts show up and schmooze for a few hours before eating a cake shaped like Africa. It would have been location: Dullsville but, this time, I had a little entertainment: One of the officers was feeling toasty and making a bit of an ass of himself and the commander of the PT-109 showed up wearing blue jeans, boots and a jean jacket like he was on his way to a Def Leppard concert. That alone made it worth the three hours I snaked through the crowd, my flash popping like a strobe light, making everybody feel important by taking pictures none of them will ever see. From Sierra Leone it was off to Cape Verde but, first, we made a slight detour.
We crossed the Equator at sometime around 4 a.m. Aug. 27. I was disappointed to find there wasn’t a great big glowing line through the water to tell us we’d arrived. There wasn’t even a sign or a mermaid waiting to welcome us with a big hug. It was just a whole bunch of water and, since the sun wasn’t yet up, it was really dark too. I wasn’t impressed.
Everybody else on the Legare was psyched because crossing the Equator meant they’d get to take part in a line-crossing ceremony, a maritime tradition that goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. There are numerous ceremonies for crossing different bodies of water. Crossing the Equator gets a sailor into the Order of the Shellback.
It’s believed the tradition started back when men still paid homage to the gods of surf and storm. So much of the world was unexplored that going into new waters was like trespassing into the realm of the gods. Many crews wouldn’t sail into these regions for fear they’d be destroyed or eaten by sea monsters so a bunch of rituals were developed to serve as protection from the gods’ wrath. Many of the rituals were pure farce, something the captains and boatswains would cook up in order to allay the fears of their crew, but some were pure religion and a few cultures resorted to human sacrifice. As sailors lost their fear of the sea and the gods of the ocean were forgotten, the rituals simply became a traditional initiation rite similar to joining a fraternity.
The Order of the Shellback initiation is run sort of like a play. The night before a ship crosses the Equator, the Night of the Pollywog Uprising, is the first act. Traditionally, this is the night the initiates (the pollywogs) take over the ship and play pranks on the initiated (the shellbacks) before trespassing across the Equator and into Neptune’s domain. Pollywogs can even kidnap and interrogate shellbacks to learn things they’re going to need to know during the upcoming ceremony. Due to time constraints the crew of the Legare didn’t get to have a proper pollywog uprising. Only a few pranks were pulled and nobody was kidnapped (As a journalist and neutral observer, I didn’t get involved in the ceremony.)
The second act begins once a ship crosses the Equator and Davy Jones comes aboard to inform the captain of the vessel the pollywogs have gone too far and earned the wrath of King Neptune. The pollywogs are rounded up by the shellbacks and then made to perform humiliating tasks while they wait for the arrival of Neptune and his court. Aboard the Legare, this involved being auctioned off to pirates and being assigned buttons that, when pressed, would make the pollywog do something ridiculous. The evening ended with a “No-Talent” show where the pollywogs performed routines and skits, often in drag, the worst of them taking the prize. Throughout the second day, I followed the shellbacks around as they herded up the pollywogs and made them do things like robot dance and sing “I’m a little teapot.”
The final act of the ceremony comes the next day when King Neptune arrives with his court to put the pollywogs on trial for trespassing into his kingdom. The pollywogs are given a meal of fish scales and seaweed (hash browns and rice with food coloring) and then locked up in jail to await their turn in front of the king. Of course, the pollywogs have to be made presentable before they meet the king so they are blindfolded and sent, one-by-one, to the royal barber whose job is to give the pollywog a terrible haircut. On some boats, the pollywogs actually get their heads shaved in various places but on the Legare, the blindfold was meant to fool the pollywog into believing their hair was being cut while, in actuality, the barber slowly dropped shredded paper onto their head as he ran bladeless clippers through their hair. After their trip to the barber, the pollywogs are put through The Gauntlet.
The Gauntlet is where pollywogs are tested by members of the royal court. In the past, when rules against hazing weren’t as severe, this might involve being covered in oil, being beaten or dragged from the ship or having to kiss the royal baby (typically a fat, half-naked man covered in grease and wearing a large diaper) on the belly. Nothing like that happened aboard the Legare. Instead, the pollywogs were asked questions about Coast Guard history and the traditions of the ceremony while being run through a short obstacle course while blindfolded. If they got an answer wrong, they were fed “truth serum” (a mixture of hot sauce, kool-aid, vinegar, etc.) and asked again until they answered correctly. Along the course, the pollywogs were spattered with seagull droppings (apple sauce,) made to walk a plank (really just a long wooden beam lying across the deck) and put through the belly of a whale. The whale’s belly was, in fact, a ship’s gangway, covered in tarps and padding and then filled with water, vinegar and leftover food (including the remains of the morning meal of fish scales and rice.) It pretty much smells horrible. Lemons and tomatoes were also thrown into the belly and the pollywogs were instructed to bring an “Apple of Truth” (a lemon) out of the whale in their teeth. Once through the whale’s belly, the pollywogs were deloused with flour and sent to meet King Neptune.
King Neptune (usually the oldest shellback aboard) and Davy Jones (the second oldest) wait to question the pollywogs at the end of their trial. Usually, Jones will produce a list of charges that can include any of the pranks the pollywog pulled during the uprising but will also sometimes include things like “impersonating an Irishman” or “being from New Jersey.” The Legare skipped this part and just had Neptune and Jones tell the pollywogs to sing songs and answer more questions until they were happy with the answers. If they didn’t like the answers they were getting or weren't entertained, it usually meant the pollywog was sent back to the whale’s belly. Once pardoned by King Neptune, the pollywog was allowed to remove their blindfold and join the ranks of the shellbacks.
This sort of thing really isn’t my bag so I was content to stand back and take pictures the whole time. I figure I don’t need to crawl through garbage to know I crossed the Equator, but I asked a lot of the pollywogs why they went through with it. Many of them said it was for the tradition, but nobody could really tell me why this particular tradition was important to maintain.
It’s true that the rituals have become less severe over the years (it’s no longer mandatory to participate and deaths and injuries are way down,) but I proposed the idea that line-crossing ceremonies (and many other such initiations) are now carried on more out of a subconscious desire to humiliate the pollywogs the way the shellbacks were once humiliated (kind of like an abused child growing up to be an abusive parent.) Afterall, many of the rituals were a farce to begin with and none of them today serve any real purpose outside of being a perversely entertaining diversion (not that I have anything against perversion.) I don’t suspect my idea is very popular or easy to rationalize for those who champion the tradition, but I imagine I’d get the same initial reaction from an abusive parent who was confronted with the same idea.
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Well, I'm about a week from the east coast of the U.S. as I write this, and I'm just about done with my stories from Africa. There's just one more country to tell you about so I'll get started on that now...
Several dolphins and scores of flying fish leaped from the water as we approached the city of Praia, the capitol of Cape Verde, on Santiago Island. It looked like a desert town with its yellow-brown earth and dark, rocky hills covered in sparse, twisted bushes and small, sun-bleached buildings, but I could tell from the deck of the ship this was no Freetown and certainly no Dakar.
Cape Verde is an archipelago off the northwest coast of Africa. A former colony of Portugal, the people of Cape Verde successfully won their independence during the 1970’s and the island nation is now regarded as a developing country after many years of having the status of one of the least developed countries in the world. The Legare was there to pick up a team of Cape Verde Coast Guard and Judiciary Police members as part of their mission. The week they were aboard was relatively tame compared to what I went through with the team from Sierra Leone. We didn’t have very many boardings and I wasn’t even asked to go on any boat rides for photos. However, I did get to speak for awhile with a lieutenant from the Cape Verde Coast Guard about his home and the development of his country.
It seems that while Cape Verde is slowly being transformed into a tourist magnet, most of the money brought in from the hotels and resorts is going straight back to European interests. The native population is paid very little for their work in the tourism and hospitality trades and much of the construction is handled by workers from other countries. Independence from Portugal also made constant water and power a problem for some of the newer cities where the skills necessary to lay down a dependable infrastructure are lacking. On the plus side, Cape Verde is in the perfect place in its development to be an example of environment-friendly engineering and the islands are drawing attention from scientific circles due to a few endemic species and an active volcano on Fogo Island (where I was told they make some boffo wine.)
Probably the coolest thing I learned about the Cape Verde Judiciary Police is that their logo was taken from The Thundercats. Apparently one of the members we had aboard used to watch the show when he was a kid and, when his division decided they wanted a logo, he drew a replica of the Thundercats emblem for them. Everybody loved it so their uniforms are now decorated with a black and yellow Thundercats logo.
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The guys from Cape Verde were pretty cool but, by the end of the week, not much had happened and I didn’t have any interesting stories to tell. I hoped things would change during our port call to the city of Praia where we intended to stay three days.
My first day in Praia went like all of my other first days in African countries; meetings with top brass and ambassadors, the usual. With that out of the way, I was free to explore the city. The downtown area of Praia is called The Plateau because, well, it’s on a plateau. After riding up the hill in a sparkling green van with a green shag dashboard cover and Akon playing on the stereo, I hopped out at Café Sofia, a nice little restaurant that served quesadilla-esque pizza and sold 20oz. bottles of Coke for 80 escudos (about $1.03.) Praia seemed much cleaner than either Freetown or Dakar. It was also less crowded (fun fact: there are more people from Cape Verde living in other countries around the world than there are in the country itself.) Since there wasn’t much going on, I decided my Cape Verde adventure would be to find and purchase a djembe (a type of African drum carved from wood with a thin leather drum head.)
I wandered all over The Plateau looking for a djembe to no avail. Most of the souvenir stores were closed, and the girl in the one store that was open only spoke Portuguese so my first night in Praia turned up nothing. However, I did find a terrific view of the valley behind the plateau and a park with an amphitheatre that looked like a terrible place to be after dark. Naturally (and with only about an hour until sundown,) I descended the stairs into the valley so I could run around in the park.
I had to walk pretty far to find an entrance to the park because it turned out the thing had a moat. Seriously. The park was walled off on every side and a 16ft. deep by 30ft. wide trench filled with water and plants surrounded the thing. I had to cross a bridge and go through an iron gate to get inside. It was pretty cool. Once inside, the park turned out to be huge. I got the impression it was originally intended to be a fort or some other defense point for the city. The wall even had what looked like guard shacks built into it. Near the entrance to the park, a young girl played on half a rusty swing set (the “A” frame of the set somehow defied gravity and stood strong on only two legs as the girl swung from its single seat.) The amphitheatre needed a little upkeep but was impressive and looked like a good place to stage a show or concert and a small complex of apartment-sized structures sat in general disrepair a short distance from a longhouse near the center of the park. All-in-all I thought it would make a good location in one of my D&D campaigns. After about half an hour in the park, I left to check out an alley lined with merchants.
I walked back up to The Plateau through a wide alley where people had set up makeshift shops under tents and in the shadows of the walls and buildings. One of the merchants sold DVDs from a kiosk built from what looked like a billboard for that terrible “The Day the Earth Stood Still” remake while another sat on a flight of stairs trying to sell a case of Snickers bars that had been in the sun all day. There were shirts and baskets and fruit and plastic dishes for sale up and down the alley but no drums so I walked back to Café Sofia and had dinner before heading back to the boat for the night.
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Here it is, folks: the end of my adventure in Africa. Considering I'll be back in my woodland home in only a few days, I suppose this is a good time to finish up the tale. Once there, I'll be able to upload all my photos so you can see Bob and Francis and The Coconut Man and the cities of Freetown and Praia and a little bit of Dakar. Until then, enjoy the final entry to Velcro Zipper in Africa!
A storm was coming into Praia and the Legare rocked violently against the pier. Not very far away, a small fishing boat was nearly thrown onto the dock as the waves rose higher by the minute. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep very much that night. Worse yet, I got word the boat would probably be leaving Cape Verde a day early which meant I was running out of time to find my drum.
I got up early the next morning and waited three hours for some Navy admiral so I could follow him around to a couple of meetings and an orphanage the Coasties were painting as a community relations project.
I finished with the political stuff around 1300 and hit the streets looking for a djembe. I was able to check out a few more souvenir stores, but the only help I got was a crude map made up of interlocking circles drawn on a wet piece of paper and some directions in Portuguese. The situation looked especially grim as the storm clouds rolled in and rain began to pelt The Plateau. I knew I’d only have two or three hours to find a drum before the command on the Legare decided whether to leave Cape Verde early so I hunted through the back alleys and near the public market until I ran into one of the guys from the boat. He told me he’d seen some guys selling drums near a hotel on the other side of the city.
The rain was falling fast and hard and quickly filling the streets as we pulled up to the hotel. I jumped out and looked out across the street and there, covered by several plastic tarps at the edge of a nearly empty parking lot, was a collection of jewelry and woodcarvings. I trudged through the water that was now up past my ankles and found a few drums under one of the tarps. One of the merchants spotted me from a porch across the beach and came running out to meet me. When he got there, we quickly grabbed two drums from under the tarp and carried them back to the porch where I could have a look at them.
A group of men waited for us at the porch. I got the impression they worked together, but only one of them seemed to handle the money and bargaining. That man, maybe the only one who spoke fluent English, told me they wanted 11000 escudos (about $140) for the drum. The drum was about 25 inches tall, covered in multi-colored, braided cords and carved with animals. It was nice, but it had been in the rain, they seemed too eager to sell and I didn’t have the escudos to pay that much so I offered him 7000 (about $90.) He agreed to the price (I probably could have gotten it for 6000 but whatever,) and I took my new drum. Cue victory music! Gain XP! Yay!
It turns out I found my drum just in time since I got word the Legare was pulling out of Cape Verde in less than two hours; just enough time for me to find a Western Union and convert my remaining escudos to dollars before heading back to the boat. Once there I learned the Legare had one last mission in Cape Verde.
Three fishermen had gone missing off the coast of Praia when their boat overturned and the Cape Verde government was asking for help in finding them. The men had already been out there a couple hours, but the Legare quickly put over a smallboat crew to search for the men. I couldn’t go due to lack of both space in the boat and importance to the mission. It’s okay. I get it. I’m just the guy with the camera and they might need room for some drowning guy. All I could do was take photos of the boat pulling away and then hope they’d return with the missing men. I wish I could say that’s what happened but it didn’t.
One of the missing fishermen managed to swim to shore and another was found dead on the beach. The third man was never found.
I learned from that lieutenant from Cape Verde that his country is known for a style of music called Morna. Morna songs, he said, are often about the sea and leaving home and, sometimes, they are about returning there. Over the last four weeks, I'd left my home and I'd seen the sea; hell, I'd even swallowed some of it. Now I was on my way home.
Somebody should write a song about me.
That pretty much wraps up my adventures in Africa. We headed north to Spain and Madeira after that. I longboarded through the cities of Rota and Cadiz, met a pretty cool Jewish dame and explored Funchal with a stray dog I named Ronaldo. I was also kindly asked not to skate through a mall and watched a terrible American movie with Portuguese subtitles. Somewhere halfway across the Atlantic I threw two bottles into the ocean containing messages with a friendly howdy and my email address. I hope I can travel to meet whoever finds them someday.
Yay adventure.
Cool! Thanks for the pictures.
Dotting as this is full of win (like flying fish)