Stay in Madrid

The Aika moved to the vacation rentals Hawaii, and Peruano went to live with them in 1959. There were three families at Brazil-nut Creek, our destination. Another 30 or so In­dians were on a Chicago vacation six hours away, and a few more families on the Rio Pacu, a tributary of the Cat­rimani, five days from Peruano’s house. They all got together for fes­tivals. They were a light-hearted people who would lie in their ham­mocks and tell jokes all night long. Maybe one of them would get upand do a dance or tell a story, and everyone would listen. “They will like you,” Peruano said. “It will be the first time they hear a guitar.”

On the tenth day we reached Brazil-nut Creekm where we stayed a few days at a room we rented from http://www.apartmentsapart.com/all_apartments_sitemap. Peruano let out a whoop as his homestead came into view, and three Indian men came running to the bank. As we stepped ashore 1 shook Peruano’s hand heartily, as I would that of a moun­tain guide who had brought me to the top of an alpine peak. Already I was looking forward to the easy return trip downstream. In fact, my adventures had only just begun.

“You know,” Peruano was say­ing, “I don’t think I’ll be going down to Catrimani right away, after all. I don’t think I’ll be going any­where for a while. My back hurts, and I want to plant some cassava.”

We were swinging in hammocks in the main room of Peruano’s ele­vated hut. He had distributed pres­ents—shorts, cachaça rum and a handful of shot-gun cartridges—to three Indian friends, and we were all chewing on slivers of dried wild pork. The friends’ names—the ones Peruano had given them—were Ruby, Manoel and Pedrinho. I knew better than to ask their Aika names.

I tried to stay calm. “When do you think you might be returning?”

“Oh, amanha,” he said. Amanha literally means tomorrow, but it could be anywhere between tomor­row and next year.

“Do you think you could be a little more specific? When do you really think you might be heading for Catrimani ?”

“Oh, two, three months.”

I was still in control. “You know, if I don’t get back pretty soon, the people in America are going to start worrying about me.” Peruano re­marked that he didn’t see how, if America was four years away by canoe, as I had been telling him, two or three months were going to make that much difference. The point was so well made that I did not attempt further explanation. But I was in no position to drop everything and hang around Brazil-nut Creek for several months. I still had a lot of ground to cover. Fur­thermore, I found the place depres­sing. The house and yard were in­fested with enormous cockroaches and reeked of putrid meat.

“Well, how am I ever going to get out of here?” I blurted out.

“By river, it’s about a week to the Catrimani mission,” Peruano told me. “But there are 22 waterfalls be­tween here and there, and I don’t feel like carrying the canoe past them. By land, over the mountains, it’s about the same time.”

“Won’t you come with me?”

“No, it’s too far for me to walk,” Peruano said. “But maybe the boys will take you. Give them something and they will be happy to go.”

Every year I plan out to go to some nice city far away from home to celebrate New Year with family and friends and have a nice blasting time exploring and enjoying New Year. I always get some vacations on this occasion and I utilize this time to compensate all the important days I missed while earning bread and butter by spending and providing a grate celebrative time on New Year. This year I planned to visit some African cities to witness and enjoy their vibrant lifestyle and took a trip to Cape Town.

It was not too hard finding cheap flights to Cape Town as I contacted some of the great travel agencies in London and got my whole trip arranged by them including travel tickets, hotel reservation and rented car at a very affordable price. I took my flights to Cape Town and landed at Cape Town International Airport a couple days before New Year’s Eve. From there I took a rented car arranged by that agency and head off to the luxurious and cheap hotel of Cape Town.

On New Year, Cape Town was decorated like Christmas tree with loads of light and sparkling ribbons. I really like the hospitality of locals as they recognized me and my family from our luggage and attire. They greeted us with lots of respect and attended us like a child with lots of pamper and love. I really enjoyed my hotel as it had the perfect sea view and great room service. They also provided us cabs to go out for shopping, sightseeing and hang around.

The very first place I visited was Table Mountain which is the most famous and major landmark as well as tourist hotspot of the city. I enjoyed a lot here as there were tons of attractions including cable car, National Park, place for bushwalking and much more. The scenic view of surroundings from the cliff was indescribable. After all this beautiful view all we wanted just a great place to grab a delightful bite which was again quite easy.

We stopped by at V&A Waterfront to enjoy the spectacular light view and enjoy the most delicious food here. It was a great experience after so much fun and adventure. Though this place was quite crowded by tourists and locals but still it was very enjoyable in terms of food and light shopping. Then we went back to the hotel to get prepared for the big day.

Next morning was the most awaited time of my life as I was eagerly ready to Join New Year celebration. We saved some extra cash, thanks to Cheap Cape Town flights and got reservation at Rezonance NYE Festival which is the most reputed and legendary NYE party in Cape Town and every time they show something new. This year they had many International and local artist ready to rock the stage and welcome New Year with maximum Zeal. They invited debauchery one of the most famous rock band in that region and many other art and cultural performers and made that night memorable.

Cape Town is one of the most spectacular cities and is the second largest metropolitan in South Africa. This city is blessed with tons of natural beauties and great attractive places. Cape Town is very well known tourist destination and is perfect for New Year celebration. Every year this city sparkles like a star on African land and entertain tourists and locals with great pomp and show. Though New Year has gone but this city is still a great place to spend quality vacations with family and friends. To witness all these fun all by yourself then quickly book your tickets in last minute flights with Crystal Travel to get great facilities and comfort.

The most prolific animals on the island are the tortoises, sometimes eighteen inches to two feet long; and in the reeds around the shore lurk crocodiles up to six yards long. These we found most unfriendly. On three occasions they attacked our dinghy (presumably disturbed by the out­board), one getting its jaws right over the boat and piercing an ugly hole in the metal bottom. In return we shot several, one of them fifteen feet long which contained the remains of four goats and one tortoise.

Life for the islanders somewhat naturally revolves around the hobolo. In it they travel all over the lake; but in particular between the markets atGidicho Point and Dudeni, a small village some way inland on the Gamu-Gofa shore. Local trade between Dilla and Gamu­Gofa still depends entirely on the people of Gidicho. From Sidamo they carry bundles of ensat (the ‘false banana’ from the stem of which is made a sour, doughy cake); and from Gamu-Gofa they bring woven •cloth. (Parts of Gamu­Gofa are excellent for cotton, and on the south-west shore of the lake there is a pilot scheme for large cotton plantations being run by Italians.)

Oddly enough, though the lake is teeming with good eating fish, none of the islanders eat them. They say that they make their teeth fall out! Certainly I have seldom seen better teeth than theirs. The people of Harura village have another curious occupation, for which they are looked down upon by their neighbours in the other two villages. They hunt the hippopotamus, relishing its raw flesh as a meal when it is indescribably high.

Their village is littered with hippo bones, which they sometimes put to use in making their looms; and Harura is, as a result, a vultures’ heaven. We met a delightful hunter named Dama and went out with him once. It was a fairly hap­hazard affair. We threw a few cakes of ensat into a hobolo and pushed off into a rough ‘sea’ that we would never have dared go out into in our own small boat. We headed north-east for a swampy delta area, where we prowled through the reeds, listening for the puffing and blowing of our prey. Nakedness was the order of the day, once the hunters were away from the island; and they seemed to enjoy the whole outing with schoolboy relish. Every now and then we would stop for a ‘meal’, pulling a few reeds from the lake bed and eating the crisp white shoots near the roots. They called it arafu, and it tasted vaguely like coeur de coco. In the evening we spotted a hippo, and lay in wait for it. However, it passed some way away from us and we never got it. In the old days they might have gone after it with their ten-foot harpoon spears (with a long line and float attached); but these days they seem to prefer using their Italian rifles and bullets at 6s. each: little wonder that they did not waste any ammunition on a shot at this one; besides, with a bullet, the hippo has to be either in shallow water or on dry land, otherwise they would lose it. Night came, and still no luck. We slept on the boat as we were told there were lions on the shore. It was not a comfortable night, for it began to drizzle; and when the hobolo is in the water too long it quickly becomes waterlogged: we were attacked by water from above and below. In the morning we hauled the hobolo onto a bed of reeds to dry off, and we ourselves lazed in the sun, Micawber fashion, waiting for something to turn up. It did turn up. Two little Galla girls came along with gourds of sour milk, of which we took long draughts. We tried to take pictures of the girls but they became frightened and ran away. Finally Dama got up, and out of the blue declared the hunt over. So we `gopashied’ home to the island, thus ending our charming but unsuccessful outing.

We stayed on the island for several weeks and got to know its people quite well. They are delightful, never missing an opportunity to smile or laugh, or, so it seemed, to sit around our tent for hours, silently watching everything we did. They were amused by my tape-recorder, but preferred listening to their own voices and music to that of Faure, Hummel, or even Rodgers and Hammerstein! The balabat was one of our most frequent visitors; and before we left he presented us with a small white goat. Then, at a feast at which we all got thoroughly intoxicated on a local brew of araq, it was solemnly agreed by all that we should look upon ourselves as `Brothers of Gidicho’, and that we would be welcome to return at any time.

For me it was a thrilling sight to see this extraordinary boat at last. To say that I had never seen anything like it before is neither extravagant nor surprising, for they only exist on this one lake and are, in fact, only used by the islanders. They are called hobolos, and there are probably not more than fifty of them in existence altogether. In design and method of propulsion they are unique.

They are best imagined, perhaps, if you first think of a Venetian gondola, a Maltese dghajsa, or a reed boat of the Shatt al Arab. If you now slice one end of your gondola away, cutting diagonally downwards through the boat from the prow to a point just below the waterline at the stern, you finish up, roughly speaking, with a hobolo.

In size, all these hobolos are twenty-four feet long, four feet in beam, with a stem-post rising just over seven feet above the lowest point of the keel. There is such uniformity in their construc­tion, down to the positioning of the end-to-end

male and female joints of their timbers, that they might almost have been made by the same man. They are made of adzed baulks of ambatch timber, a balsa-like tree that grows in the water around the lake. They are uncaulked, so that the water flows freely through them, and they rely on the lightness of the wood for their buoyancy. The timbers are pegged together, with binding used only at the prow and the stern.

When loading, the boat is first half filled with bundles of sticks to form a dry platform for the cargo. When fully laden, it is hull-down in the water with the flat platform at the stern just below the surface. Thus the ‘oarsman’, who stands at the stern, has his feet in the lake.

When we had loaded all our goods into the hobolo we pushed off into the lake. For the first thirty or forty yards, where the lake was shallow, we were propelled by means of a punt-pole. But I wondered what would happen when the lake became too deep for the pole. I had noticed on board a curious object like a curved punt-pole, on the end of which was a two-foot chunk of wood which reminded me of an ant-eater’s head, with two long ‘tusks’ bound to its sides. I soon discovered that this was the gopashi, used for deep-water propulsion.

It is quite simple. If you try to force a very light block of wood under the water, it will bob to the surface with considerable force. If you force it downwards and backwards from a boat, with a punting action, it will cause the boat to move through the water at a fair speed. I tried to use it myself, but it wasn’t easy; and I could immediately see why the wooden block was shaped as it was. It was so light that it needed all one’s strength to get it into the water, and in so doing it tended to twist in all directions; but its curved bulk, the two tusks and the curve of the pole very definitely stabilized it and helped one keep it on a straight path.

The Ethnographic Survey of Africa describes the hobolo as being propelled like a Venetian. gondola. Personally I could see very little simi­larity, and as far as I know it is propelled like nothing so much as another hobolo. My boat­man, hissing between his teeth in rhythm to the swings of the gopashi, made light work of the task, and in an hour or so we were approaching the apparently impenetrable bank of reeds behind which lay Gidicho Island.

Gidicho Island is about four-and-a-half miles long and one-and-a-half miles wide. In anthropo­logical books they call its people the Harura. This is definitely a misnomer, though there is an un­usual village of that name that I shall mention later. There are just three villages on the island, Bysore on the southern tip, Shigima on the nor­thern tip, and Harura (the smallest) halfway down the east coast. There is another very small settle­ment at a village called Wallega on a near-by island. There are probably not more than 750 of these people altogether, and they call themselves the people of Gidicho. Ethnologically they are still something of an enigma, and their language is obscure in origin. They worship the sun. They do not mix much with the people of Gamu-Gofa to the west, or the Galla and Sidamo people to the east. Their island was once extensively culti­vated, as can be seen from the shallow terracing all round the coast, but in recent years goats have played havoc with what vegetation there was and the place is suffering badly from erosion. Most of the islanders now have plantations in the low-lying country on the Gamu-Gofa shore, where they produce astonishingly rich crops of maize and millet and herd their cattle. There are still quite a lot of cattle on the island, too; but the pink-and-white alluvial clay is beginning to show through the green grass, and one wonders how much longer the soil will be able to support life on Gidicho.

AFTER dipping down to the shores of Lake Rudolf, and before it finally cuts away past the northern Ethiopian mountains to the Red Sea, the Great Rift Valley has one final flirt with the fresh waters of Africa: that series of beautiful southern Ethiopian lakes with Lake Chamo in the south and Lake Zwai to the north. It is of the largest of this chain of lakes that I am writing, Lake Abaya, or, as it is printed on some maps, Lake Margherita.

On July 24, 1960, I set off from Addis Ababa with a companion to go filming on the island of Gidicho in Lake Abaya. So far as we knew, no films had ever previously been made around this area; indeed very few foreigners had visited it. This in itself was hardly sufficient reason for us to go there; but we had seen some tantalizing photographs of the lake people and their remark­able boats and we felt, rightly as it turned out, that the area might prove to be of unusual interest.

We travelled by car to Dilla, a journey that can normally be undertaken in one day. The road was good the whole way, with tarmac for the first hour or two south of Addis Ababa, and a good gravel surface from then onwards. Dilla, however, marked the southernmost point of interest on the part of the Highways Department; and when later we tried to travel a mere five or six miles further south we spent most of our time digging ourselves out of mud.

At Dilla, a small town in the coffee-producing hills of Sidamo, we stayed with friends we had met previously in the Sudan Interior Mission. From their house we could see, some twenty or twenty-five miles below us, the long silvery streak of Lake Abaya, reminiscent of a morning mist, gathering beneath the towering dark peaks of the mountains of Gamu-Gofa on the other side.

Having paid our respects to the governor of the district, a helpful English-speaking Ethiopian called Colonel Selashie, we then set off for the lake. Only a few years ago one would have been compelled to travel by mule; but today there is a rough track, at times petering out in the bush, that leads down to a small sansevieria factory overlooking the lake. Sansevieria, a sisal-like plant, grows wild around the lake, and apart from its uses in rope- and sack-making, it forms an effective hedge. Its stiletto-sharp points present a considerable hazard to straying cattle, marauding crocodiles, or wandering strangers such as ourselves.

By good fortune the sansevieria factory was sited near Gidicho Point, a promontory in the lake resulting from the eruption of a small flat-topped volcano. At the factory we found an Italian, one of those outlandish people you frequently come across in Africa, living a depressed and solitary sort of existence with few comforts but for those he could obtain locally. This fellow was delighted to see us, and having helped us pitch our camp, he found us a local guide who could speak a smattering of Italian, and promised to help arrange for a boat to collect us and take us across to the island. Later, when we were on the island, he periodically sent us ‘luxurious’ gifts of wild tomatoes, chives and potatoes, and that rarity, a loaf of very soggy bread.

So far as water transport was concerned, we had brought with us an eleven-foot aluminium dinghy with an outboard motor, but as this was too small to get us and all our gear across in one trip, or indeed in two, we felt it best to hire a boat to take the heavier articles.

Slight difficulty arose over getting a boat, as they generally came over from the island only once a week for the market on Gidicho Point. But fortunately market-day was just coming up, and our Italian friend found a boatman. Before he finally agreed to take us he had to go back to the island to ask the chief (balabat) if he minded us going; but permission was readily given. My companion took the dinghy on ahead; and I waited down by the water’s edge behind the tall reeds that surround the lake. At last I could hear a rustling and gurgling of water on the far side of the reeds. My ferry had arrived. Slowly the craft edged its way through the wall of greenery, finally emerging into a small lagoon.

There are plenty of people all over the world who are keen on cycling. This is one of my favorite hobbies as well. Every time I have a chance and visit a city that I have never been before I want to explore it, and most often I do it on bike. Judging by the plenty of organizations all over the world I assume that many people like this type of sightseeing. Okay let’s say that you are already in Spain’s capital. There are a few things that you need to know before finding a decent bike organization. First of all I would recommend you to avoid the hotels. I don’t know how long are you going to stay but I know that you will not be happy when you hear about the prices of an average room in a normal hotel. This is why personally I always prefer to rent Madrid apartments. It really doesn’t matter where they are situated because I usually don’t stay there for a long time. Apartments Barcelona are the other good choice which you can pick while in Spain but I think that you’d prefer Madrid. It is really easy to find this type of accommodation plus the prices are OK. You can compare them with the prices of Budapest apartments or Kiev apartments for example and you will see the difference.

Now let’s say a few words about the bike tours. I’ve been in Madrid only once in my life but I remember that I was satisfied with the bike tour. I used Bravo Bikes. For more additional information I think you can visit their official web page – http://madrid.angloinfo.com/af/269/madrid-bike-hire-scooter-and-cycle-rental.html – here you will find interesting information and basically everything you need. Madrid is big city and sometimes the traffic jams are huge. This is why these guys from Bravo bikes are the best for me. We cycled through narrow streets where there was almost no traffic. Plus make sure you tip the guider well because they are doing their job pretty good.

Madrid has definitely lots to offer to the common tourist and it doesn’t matter what type of things you want to see – whether is something considered to be modern art or architectural monument – the tour will take you through all of those things. Other advantage is that if you are with a group they are making discounts so you will save some money. Plus they are not cycling fast or something, everything is just perfect.

Of course there are several more organizations which are dealing with bike tours but I can’t give you feedback on them because I haven’t used them. I’m telling you about Bravo bikes because it is a first hand experience and the things were that way few years ago when I went to Madrid. Everything was great and I’m sure you will have a great time too. Just avoid small organizations that haven’t proven the quality of their services. You can sort them out by making research on internet.