i'm exhausted. i spent the last two days learning to roll a trick kayak. those are the short, wide ones that are especially hard to roll. i got it consistently before lunch yesterday, but after lunch, i think i was too tired to do it right anymore. i'd dig the paddle into the water, get the kayak halfway up (enough for a new breath of air), flop back down and try again. sometimes it'd take me 3 or 4 times before i got fully upright. trying to position the paddle flat against the water while half-drowning takes a special kind of zen: death, poo-poo to you; is my paddle parallel yet?
two safety kayakers from our rafting trip were teaching us on the sly. their friend actually set up a kayaking company that charges USD125 a day (they sometimes teach for this company), but they agreed to take only USD75 for 3 days. every day, we had to leave separately from the hostel and sneak down to a secret beach on the nile. all very hush hush...they kept emphasizing how we couldn't tell any of the "boys" or they'd get into trouble.
the beach was gorgeous. you walk past some fields, turn off onto a path thru flowering trees, and eventually end up on this half finished mosaic-tile portico where locals would swim or do laundry. very secret garden. i think the someone started building it but ran out of money. now it's crumbling, covered in vines and trails of ants, half finished columns reaching to nowhere. in the water with us, crested cranes, thin-necked cormorants, and kingfishers that drop like stones.
in town, maribu storks pick thru the rubbish heaps. these birds are seriously huge--the size of a large flamingo. i think they'd come up to my shoulder. when they take off, they need to have a running start and a hop b/c they're so big. one of the mikas here (there are two) got pooped on by a stork. he said it landed on his shoulder and covered his entire torso. he thinks that anything that poops so much has no business living in a tree. the other mika married morgan after dating for 1.5 weeks. they're throwing a big party on thursday, which is why we're not leaving till friday.
roberto and paul, our kayak teachers, took us to a local place for lunch yesterday. we sat in the shade of a jackfruit tree, and smacked on pork baked in a clay oven, on a dish with cabbage cooked in g-nut sauce (g-nuts=p-nuts). paul picked us a sprig of small red chilis to squeeze over the pork. we ate with our fingers, trapping the meat against pieces of motoke (mashed plaintains) or posho (ugali/cornbread). large black crows with white chests hopped all around us. when i made a motion as to shoot a crow with a bow and arrow, roberto said that ppl don't kill these crows b/c they're poisonous. every bit of them is poisonous. their blood, their bones, their feathers (whereas hyenas and snakes only have a poisonous organ that you can remove and eat the rest of them safely). i tried to convince them that the crows aren't poisonous, but it was an uphill battle. they said that even flies won't eat a dead crow. also, they are convinced that sunblock will burn a black person's skin (they said that mzungu skin is tougher than black skin--"we may be black, but our skin is tender like a baby's"), that the color red attracts lightening (b/c it looks so bright from the sky), and that a man from the bujagali tribe may ride through the waterfall on a piece of goatskin if he keeps the old ways (i.e., doesn't wear any western clothes). turns out, the traditional tribal clothes are all made of wood. no wonder he's buoyant.
also, after paying off a local to let us store the kayaks by the river, roberto pointed out a round woven mat to erika. erika was a bit confused, so she asked what it was. "a mat." what's it for? "sitting". it was kind of a weird funny moment. i think he wanted to impress us with its roundness...
the kayakers here are badass. geoffrey, our raft guide on the second day, is the top kayaker in uganda. he took #23 in the last olympics. i think paul was #2 in uganda (behind geoffrey) until he got injured and lost his competitive drive. while we were paddling the rafts thru still water, they'd casually float up and do some loops (flips--they'd bounce on the kayak with the nose in the water, so the person is facing the water, and after 3 or 4 bounces, jump the kayak completely into the air). no wonder they're all so ripped.
the rafting trip itself was pretty good. we did a two day, camping in between. the group we went on had about 30 18yr old kids who are volunteering in africa for their gap year. they were ridiculous. it was like watching a soap opera. for example, on the busride back, they had a huge debate about whether tactical booting counted as booting at all. and then later that night, i heard three of them in the same toilet stall. two of them were coaching a girl on how to stick her finger down her throat. ah, the lifeskills you learn in africa! apparently, around 3am, one of the girls slept with someone on the sofa at the bar (i was long in bed by then), and another one of them went home with one of the local raft guides (she was crying about it the morning after--"oh, i'm so stupid" etc etc).
but enough about the company. the rafting itself was amazing. we started out with 8 ppl on our boat, one of whom was a reporter from the NYT, doing a travel piece. he had lots of cool stories about getting kidnapped in the middle east (he managed to convince them that he was greek, not american), sneaking up kilimanjaro without guides, porters, or permits, getting caught on the way down, escaping to the US embassy in dar es salaam, cooking up some story about tanzania corruption, being found out and told to leave the country in the next 24 hrs, and staying for 2 more weeks anyways. the other girls on the raft were all volunteers from that program. a couple of them couldn't paddle to save their lives. we flipped our raft on the last rapid of the day (a class 4), and everyone got trapped under the boat. i think we were only under for 3 seconds, but it felt like forever. that's when 1 of the bad paddlers lost her nerve and rode safety boat for the rest of the trip. the next day, the entire left side of the boat got bounced out on a rapid, and i was the only 1 to come up scotchfree. 1 girl dislocated her ankle, and another fractured her wrist. we stopped for lunch early to take them to the hospital, while erika and i had our first taste of the kayaks.
the last rapid of the second day was a class 4 called malalu (crazy). it formed an eddy so rafts could surf in the same spot forever. ollo's raft got stuck there for like 5 minutes, and he had to make everyone jump out of the boat before he could navigate out. we also broke out some body boards to surf the eddy. really good fun.
and did i mention that i rafted the first day naked? josh, our raft guide, promised me USD50 if i did it...and i got a bit screwed on the exchange rate at the border (never change money at the border), so i wanted to make up the cash. it wasn't that big of a deal. i had a life jacket on the entire time, and i think half the time you can't see the bottom anyways what with the water and the getting down, and the swimming. the kids were pretty shocked tho. i got some stares, and during lunch (which i didn't have to do naked), some polish guys (i think) came up to me and said, "looking good" or something weird like that. i think a lot of the other rafts thought my shorts had fallen off in a rapid. i hope i don't end up in any of the nyt photographer's pics :-).
this girl fell out in the first rapid, right on top of some rocks. props to her for getting back into the boat and bouncing around the rapids on bruises and scrapes. i cringe just looking at her. even without hitting rocks, i ended the rafting trip battered and fried (like a chicken?).
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