Kenya

Nov 2, 1977. Twiga Lodge, Kenya. 

(Dear folks, this  letter continues from a new spot, the coast south of Mombasa, where we are passing our last week in Kenya).

Skimming through the weeks, I mentioned that we visited the pretty little country of Malawi with its beautiful swimmable lake; saw Victoria Falls under the moonlight, spent a week canoeing in Botswana's Okavango Swamp, where an angry hippo chased us out of his territory, missing our canoe by just a few yards; entered South Africa after a two weeks' wait for visas, and then spent two appalling weeks getting our eyes opened by apartheid in the raw; then slowly north through Rhodesia, usually by military convoy, hearing war stories, but fortunately encountering no problems; stopping long enough to marvel at the ancient ruins of Zimbabwe, somewhat Mycenaean in flavor and scale, whose date of construction, occupants, and purpose remain unknown; hitchhiked back to Lusaka (Zambia's capital), just when president Kaunda had put the capital city under blackout and curfew regulations to stir up sympathy for his “war“ against Rhodesia.

In Lusaka I was able to purchase airline tickets for Nicole and myself at one-third the regular price. Our tickets show us going as follows: Lusaka – Nairobi – Bujumbura (Burundi's capital) – Nairobi.  (this much we’ve already used)) - Saana (capital of North Yemen) – Aden (capital of South Yemen) - Kuwait – Tehran – New Delhi – Calcutta – Rangoon – Bangkok..  Nicole's ticket includes a Tehran – Paris – Tehran loop, so she’ll be able to spend Christmas with her folks while I sniff around those parts of Iran where her female presence would be more hassle than pleasure. We fly to Addis Ababa in just a few days, and our next address, valid for about a year, is.:

Sam Edwards

c/o American Express Company 

PO Box 537

New Delhi, India

We won’t be in India until mid January, so don’t expect instant responses to your queries. We will have spent about 13 months in Africa, visiting a dozen countries, cooking virtually all of our own meals, camping about 1/2 the nights, staying with friends otherwise - I think we stayed in hotels about 30 times. It’s been the best year of my life in many ways, but we are looking forward to an even better year in the countries listed above, where the cuisines are more developed, the people more culturally, interesting, and approachable, the sites and sounds and smells more exotic. Africa for me brings first to mind the flora, fauna, mountains, and coasts, and, further down the list, it’s peoples - we think we are moving onto countries where this order will be reversed.

Between the time I wrote this portion of this letter in Bujumbura and now, Nicole and I have completed a month's circuit of a very interesting and beautiful piece of Africa comprising Lake Kivu, Lake Idi Amin Dada  (formerly Lake Edward), and Lake Mobutu Sese Seko (formerly Lake Albert).  Here, the so-called “Switzerland of Africa“, a most inappropriate name, we encountered our most difficult traveling: very few hotels, practically no restaurants, no public transportation, where bribing and corruption at all levels are standard, nothing happens according to plan or schedule. Through patience, travel experience, many good contacts, and some luck, we made it with no serious problems, except a bit of mental and physical exhaustion – hence, the rest on the beach; some highlights: we climbed Mount Karisimbi, the highest volcano in the Virunga National Park, for a magnificent view of about a half dozen other volcanic peaks, amidst tropical jungle as rich as any I’ve seen. We investigated Mount Nyiragongo, which blew up last January, and sent a lava flow at 40 km an hour straight at the town of Goma on Lake Kivu, killing over 90 people and stopping only 5 km short of the town. We went looking for mountain gorillas twice, once in the Kahuzi Biega National Park in Eastern Zaire, once in the Virunga area in Rwanda (where Diane Fossey lives and works), and we found them both times, with shrieks, chest beatings, tree shakings, the works. We went as far north as the little town of Beni, on the “Route to Beauté”, a road that twists its way among peaks and canyons, escarpments and plains, lovely villages of thatched huts and stands of eucalyptus and quinine trees. Here we found a guide to take us into the Rwenzori  Mountains, Ptolemy's “Mountains of the Moon”, which he believed to be the source of the Nile (he wasn’t far wrong).  We walked for five days in bamboo forests, carpets of yellow, green and red mosses, with fantastic groundsels, giant Lobelia and Seneca, reminiscent of Tolkien's, Lord of the Rings, and iridescent sunbirds in the high alpine meadows - amazing, strange place. We passed our last several days with a friend of Nicole‘s parents, a Belgian lady who has lived most of her life in Bujumbura, right on Lake Tanganyika. In her garden or two Crowned Cranes, Africa’s most exotic bird, as well as some tiny antelope we couldn's identify, and several bright jungle parrots. I spent one day looking through and photographing some of her collection of about 250 masks and statues, most from the Congo basin, each a museum piece - the sort of art we had not yet seen in Africa. Zaire stuff is so good compared with everything we’ve seen in East Africa, I’m almost tempted to visit that country again at some future date, except everything function so erratically.

Sounds like you’ll be having a great Christmas with the Florida gang - wish I could see you all, especially the little ones, they change so fast. Don’t send any packages to New Delhi, but letters usually make it. Love to get pictures of Len and Inger's house - where is it exactly? Have you had any rain since the drought? Sure glad I missed all that. Want anything from Iran? (carpets?) or India? (Miniatures?) Do you have any addresses for countries between Iran and Malaysia? Keep eating plenty of lotus cream ice cream, and tell all your friends to do the same.

All of my affection 

Big Sam and Nicole 

PS if you by any chance, have a great craving or desire to send us something that would really help us in our travels, something that might even count as a Christmas present, then I can tell you how to satisfy that incessant craving: send a good guide to Turkey (which covers the eastern part) to me c/o American Express Co., 130 Takht Jamshid Ave., Tehran. If it covers Syria and/or Iraq as well, so much the better. We arrive in Tehran in about three weeks, and I leave Tehran for Turkey in about six weeks, so the sooner the better. There is just no info on where we are nor where we are going. Thanks in advance, Sam.