louiseinlimbo

  Whilst still wishing I had more time in Lagos, I took my flight from there to Port Harcourt, to join a ten-day tour of what the agency naughtily called Biafra – a term you should not use in front of most Nigerians.  Yes, a lot of time has passed since the Biafra War (1967-70), but it resulted in the deaths of more than a million people, and the country is still battling to maintain its unity.  Our tour included a visit to the Biafra War Museum in Umuahia (which was for a time the capital of Biafra), and I did hear a few rants from people in the region who still resent being a part of Nigeria (given that most of the wealth of the nation consists of the oil in their region), but it is generally not something you should talk about today. What we tried to talk about was the cultural history of that part of the country, but I have to say that we met so many kings and chiefs, and saw so many different masquerades, that my head is still reeling, and I think I just have to acce...

  So I finally made it to Lagos.   Somewhere I’ve felt for many years that I should visit, but never found the courage to do so, as I’d bought into the view that it was a dangerous city.   Then I read a report by a female traveller who’d spent a month there, who said it was nowhere near as scary as people assumed, so I decided to spend a few days there. & I wish I’d spent longer.   I took advice not to follow my usual cheapest-available-accommodation approach, but booked myself into a nice little boutique hotel in a safe neighbourhood, and also booked their airport transfer.   As I researched what to see, I realised that I should have given myself two more days, but anyway, I had a half day and three full days to do what I could. I started with the National Museum, which I enjoyed – some great masks and other traditional artifacts, one of the Benin bronzes (so they’re not all in the British Museum!) and a rather unexpected exhibition of photographs docum...

Just completing three weeks of 'down time' in this up-and-down life I lead!  That is, time to edit and back-up the photos from my last trip, to catch up with emails, as well as some serious admin related to the next few months.  So now I have my visas for Nigeria and for Equatorial Guinea (with accommodation and airport transfers) and a one-year multi-entry visa for India.  All of these things take quite a lot of work - filling in forms, uploading photos and screenshots of flights and accommodation bookings, visiting cyber cafes to print copies of visas and flight tickets (needed for Nigeria) ... but that also helps me to 'balance the budget', spending very little following my expensive trip around the Indian Ocean.  My bed in the hostel dorm here in Nairobi is not as cheap as in some countries (around US$10 a night), but that does include a  fairly good breakfast, and of course there are no other bills to pay as there would be if I were at home living a regular...

  Without understanding how much money would be added on for inter-island flights (and for a single supplement as no-one else wanted to share), I booked a slot onto a birdwatching tour of some of the Indian Ocean islands: the Seychelles (Mahe, Praslin, La Digue and Cousin), Mauritius and Rodriques, Reunion and Mayotte, and the Comoros.   As seems to have become the norm on birding trips these days, the other tour participants were not only older than me, but also hard-core birders, holding endless conversations about different bird guides, bird books and their authors, and getting very concerned as to whether or not we might see various endemic sub-species of bird species we’d already seen on a different island. But I still enjoyed the trip, getting to see the beautiful scenery of the islands and the wildlife – giant tortoises, blue-tailed geckos, enormous palm spiders, and flying foxes (bats) as well as the birds – and learning snippets of information about the history and cu...

Well it would have been nice to go ‘on to Kazakhstan’, but actually I had to fly all the way back to Istanbul, transit for 14 hours in the airport (and despite what they advertise, Turkish Airlines did not provide hotel accommodation, merely two vouchers for the cheapest dishes on the menu at the cheapest eating establishments in the airport), and then fly back over Turkmenistan to get to Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city and former capital.  There my friend and I met our tour group, were given a tour of the city’s highlights, and finally were able to get some much-needed sleep. The next few days mostly focused on what for me were the highlights of this country – the spectacular mountains and canyons of its natural scenery.  We visited several different sites within the 4,600 km2 Altyn-Emel National Park, walking for several hours in both the stunning Charyn Canyon and the almost-as-stunning Katutau Coloured Mountains, and also visited the Black Canyon, a couple of lakes, and ...

Turkmenistan wasn’t all that high on my wish list of countries to visit, but I’m glad that I accepted the suggestion of a friend that we visit last month.  All that came to mind was the famous gas crater burning methane for the last 50 years (the so-called Gateway to Hell), but it turns out to not only have some great ruins (Old Nisa, Konya Urgench and Merv all being UNESCO-listed sites) but also a fairly interesting modern culture. One of the most sparsely populated nations on the Asian continent, mostly desert, It became independent after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 (having also been under the Oghuz, the Seljuks, the Mongols … but with a largely nomadic population who never really kow-towed to anyone).).  I suppose you could call it a benign dictatorship; no-one except the president is allowed to stand in its rare elections, but a good share of the country’s very great wealth (from its oil and gas deposits) is shared with the population in its pretty centrali...