Saturday, July 30, 2011

Beyond Beauty

Every haircut on this trip has been an interesting experience—the glass of wine in the fancy salon in Lima, the two-hour social visit in Mendoza, and the after-hours, back-of-the-shop $3 hack job in Madagascar. You can’t hide a bad haircut, and I’ve been nervous each time. Except in Lima, where I got good advice, I was just taking my chances with whatever salon I happened upon.

But the cut I got the other day here in Gaborone may be the most memorable. I was running around the Main Mall doing errands, and just downstairs from the cellphone place I saw the Beyond Beauty salon. It looked prosperous, it looked full. I went in.

As soon as I came through the door, everyone looked at me—the women getting their hair braided in the row of chairs down the side, the stylists standing behind them, the guy with the broom wearing a thick scarf and a tall cap covered in Rasta-colored maps of Africa. The manicurist near the door glanced at me and then looked down.

I smiled at her. “How much is a haircut, please?”

“Just a minute,” she said. Then she called to someone I couldn’t see. “Joseph. Somebody wants you.” She went off and came back with a tall, thin, dark-skinned man in a purple-flowered shirt. From the way he and the rest were grinning, I thought he might be the designated white-people hair stylist.

He told me a cut cost 60 pulas and sat me down in a chair. There were no scissors on the counter and only Dark and Lovely hair products, lots of them, most of them purple. But by then it seemed rude to ask if he’d ever cut a white person’s hair before. Everything’s different—the texture, the techniques. But I was here now and I had to assume he knew what he was doing.

“Just like it is but a little shorter, please,” I said. I’ve kept my hair short the whole trip, but it had grown a fair bit since Madagascar and I was thinking of growing it out to chin length or so. I just wanted it tidied up a bit.

“Above your eyebrows in front?” he asked.

“Yes, but not too short.” I said. “And feathery, not straight across.” This is so much easier in a place where I can speak English, I thought.

Then he picked up the razor. Hair began falling on the black bib he’d wrapped me in—lots of hair. Lots and lots of hair.

I looked at his face in the mirror. He was looking intently at my head as he swooped at it with the razor and he looked worried. He glanced at my face and I knew he saw that I was worried too.

Other people in the salon were also following our progress. A man with many long braids who was lounging in a nearby chair kept looking over and grinning. A woman waiting to get her own hair done looked into the mirror in front of me and then looked away.

I took another look myself. My bangs were now gone almost up to the hairline on one side of my forehead, but not the other. The little point of hair in front of my right ear had all but vanished. Should I say something? What could I say?

I tried to think about how lovely many African women look with super-short haircuts. I tried to distract myself by watching another stylist finish braiding a woman’s hair in concentric rings and then start sewing a hairpiece to the bottom-most ring.

Joseph tried to distract me too. He asked what my sister and I thought of Botswana, then told me George Bush had visited the Mokolodi nature reserve near Gaborone.

“Michelle Obama too, I hear,” I said. “Wasn’t she just here? What do you think of her?”

“I like her,” he said emphatically. “I like both of them. They’re a good couple. They have good hearts.” He paused and touched his own heart with his fist, still holding the razor. “Not Bush. I don’t like war.”

“Me either.” I decided to just let him do his job and see what happened. “Where are you from yourself? Are you from Gaborone?”

“No, I’m from Angola,” he said. "Where we speak Portuguese." So I told him I’m about to go to Mozambique and he helped me practice some Portuguese—good morning, good afternoon, please. Meanwhile, my hair was approaching buzz-cut length, but at least he was getting everything evened up. It was obvious he wanted it to come out well as much as I did.

Though by the time he was done, I didn’t really care that much any more. It’s just hair, after all. It will grow. I looked at my shorn reflection, not a Sinead O’Connor look exactly, but close.

“Can I see the back?” Joseph went off and rummaged around, then came back with a great big wall mirror, which he held up behind me.

“It’s shorter than I expected,” I said. “But you’ve done a good job.”

He smiled. “Come over here and I’ll wash it.”

Now? I thought. But I love getting my hair washed and the hot water felt good on my scalp. Afterward, Joseph rubbed and rubbed my head with a towel, then led me back to the chair. He put some pale-purple styling goop in what was left of my hair and combed and combed, despite the fact there was hardly anything there to comb. At last he was satisfied.

“It makes me happy to do a haircut like this,” he said. “It’s very pretty.”

He seemed so genuinely pleased that I began to think maybe it was all right after all. I gave him a five pula tip and thanked him and said goodbye in Portuguese.

“Obrigada,” I said. “Tchau.”

“You know ‘tchau’!” he said. We hadn’t covered it in our little practice session. He high-fived me, grinning widely. “Tchau! Obrigado! Tell your sister to come!”

I still can’t decide what I think of the haircut. But it doesn’t matter. This was, as advertised, beyond beauty. It was fun.


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Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Off to the Great Unknown!

(Nkwichi Lodge)
 
The wilderness conservation organization where I will volunteer next month is pretty remote. That’s a big part of its appeal, both for me and for the people who stay at the associated eco-lodge, but making arrangements to get there turned out to be a little more complicated than I expected.

Nkwichi Lodge and the Manda Wilderness are in northern Mozambique, on the eastern shore of Lake Malawi (or Lago Niassa, as people in Mozambique call it). The folks I’ll work with told me the easiest way to get to Nkwichi is to fly to Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital, and then take either a charter flight or a battered old steam ship up the lake to the lodge. So I did my usual cheapskate search for the lowest fare, went on Air Malawi’s website and reserved a flight from Johannesburg to Lilongwe.

I reserved it, but then I couldn’t pay for it. The site wouldn’t let me uncheck the “Pay Later” button, and I couldn’t find any way to actually buy the ticket. I emailed their reservations department. I called. Then I called the two other numbers they gave me, both of which were out of service. Finally I got an email that said I could pay at the Johannesburg airport. I emailed back asking if that meant I could pay on the day of departure. I’m in Gaborone now and won’t be in Jo’burg until the day I’m flying. No answer.

I asked my landlord if he knew how Air Malawi’s procedures worked and he said, “Oh, Air Malawi!” in a worrisome way. I asked a travel agent for help—no luck.

But then it turned out to be a good thing I hadn’t paid for my ticket. Right at this juncture a friend in Mozambique emailed me to make sure I’d heard about the upheaval in Lilongwe. I hadn’t, but the news was grim—demonstrations over food and fuel shortages, violent conflicts, multiple deaths. That poor country.

I began my travel planning again. I thought about going overland from Maputo, Mozambique’s capital, but reading online accounts of shaky buses and breakdowns and missing bridges quickly cured me of that idea. I wasn’t eager to find myself stranded in the boonies with my inadequate Portuguese, and I’d had enough shaky buses in Madagascar.

Flying sounded good. But though I could tell from my Mozambique map that Lichinga is the closest airport to Manda Wilderness, I couldn’t for the life of me find any airlines that fly there. Kayak turned up nothing. Expedia, zilch. Travelocity wasn’t even sure the place exists. LAM, the national airline of Mozambique, showed Lichinga on its route map but its booking engine couldn’t come up with a flight, even a sold out flight. It started to seem like the place wasn’t really there.

Finally I went by the local office of South African Airlines, a partner of LAM’s and a really good airline. A helpful man there connected me with a knowledgeable travel agent, and she shortly emailed me. She'd actually found flights and she quoted me a fare.

Still, there was a bit more comedy to go through. I asked the agent if she wanted my credit card number and she emailed back, “I’m sorry, we don’t take credit cards.”

More emails.

“How can I pay?”

“Cash or cheque.”

"Where are you located?"

She told me. I trundled down to the office with a wad of pulas and am now the proud possessor of a ticket to Lichinga.

At least I hope that’s what it is. After all my attempts to find flights, I know Lichinga’s airport code is VXC and that’s what’s on my ticket. But where the travel agent’s computer was supposed to fill in the airport and the town, the ticket says instead “Unknown, Unknown.”

(KK)


Thursday, July 21, 2011

Bells and Whistles

Just letting you know about a few new features on the blog:
  • Our trip diary in photographs was getting unwieldy, so now it's in two parts, Picture of the Day for the most recent pictures and Pic of the Day--South America for pictures from the first stage of the trip. [Update, 24 October: Picture of the Day is now in three parts. Photos from mid-May to mid-September are now on the Pic of the Day--Africa page.]
  • If you'd like to get an email when a new blog post goes up, you can sign up using the "Follow by Email" box on the upper right of the page.
  • We've started tracking our miles (and kilometers) to date down on the very bottom of the page, on the left.
Let us know if there's anything else you'd like to see on the blog, or if we can make it easier to use. We're working on getting Flowers by Rie-Rie back up soon. We know you miss it! We do too!
 

Monday, July 18, 2011

The Baobab Forest and Nearby--Pictures from Mangily, Madagascar

[17 June 2011]
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De L'Isalo National Park in Pictures

[12 June 2011] We expected baobab trees. We expected lemurs--though we didn't expect them to try to eat our lunch! But we didn't know Madagascar had scenery like that we found in De L'Isalo national park. We'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

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Roxy, our guide. (KK)

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Caves where local people bury their dead. (MK)
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The fabulous swimming hole--unfortunately, it was too cold to do more than wade. (MK)
Brown lemur hanging around the camping area. (MK)
Ring-tailed lemurs (KK)

The brown lemurs really did try to steal our lunch! (KK)

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The ring-tails were far better behaved. (KK)

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More sundews! (MK)

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These tiny white critters grow into little pink moths, Roxy told us. But meanwhile they can creep you out crawling along a twig. (MK)

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