May 19: No Grubby Travelers in Africa

People waiting in North American airports this holiday weekend will tend to be a pretty sloppy looking bunch. Part of that is because of the sloppy way passengers are treated, but also in the years since airplane travel became a middle-class commonplace, the idea that one should dress up to fly has gone the way of real meals on flights. In Africa I found that not to be the case. In fact, I found that any travel experience brought out the festive in people: women who road the intercity buses I took in Tanzania were as carefully dressed as those on my flights from Bujumbura to Nairobi and from Nairobi to Dar es Salaam. Whether they were wearing well-cut dresses with jackets or brilliantly coloured robes and wraps, they looked lovely.

My own travel clothes tend toward the very practical: easily washable light weight trousers and skirts, a couple of long sleeved shirts, tee shirts, a jacket that matches one of the skirts. Not dressy enough, though, I realized when I saw the looks women at the Cathedral in Bujumbura gave me on Sunday when I lingered with worshippers outside. The cotton trousers and matching cotton knit top which I thought looked pretty smart definitely were not what was considered proper. Clearly, their looks said, I should be wearing a skirt, and afterwards I wore one more frequently. Of course, I would never look like I belonged, but at least I could look like I respected the Burundais enough to conform to their standards of dress.

May 9: Travel in Troubled Times

Before I left Montreal I’d set up a number of contacts for the second part of my trip which would take me to Tanzania and the Amani Nature Reserve in the East Usambara mountains, the home of wild African violets. Louise Brossard, my novel’s major female character, has a passion for the plants, and I wanted to see where they came from originally. The internet is a terrific tool, and without too much trouble I began a correspondence with botanists working at the reserve and with innkeepers in eastern Tanzania.

When it came for my Bujumbura stay, though, I ran into a little difficulty. I picked hotels with good ratings in the Lonely Planet guide to East Africa and tried to fax for reservations, but couldn’t get a response. Both the US and Canada had travel warnings for Burundi and Rwanda at the time, saying in essence that their nationals entered either country at their peril. My sister in Seattle was alarmed by them. Her e-mails for several weeks always included a sentence in the middle: “This is a subliminal message. Don’t go.” And I must admit that, while I didn’t say anything to my husband, I was a bit concerned about making sure that I had a place to stay.

Enter our neighbor Jean-Louis Bolduc. As an executive for Hydro Quebec, he had travelled extensively in Africa, and knew just how to shake the mangos from the tree. Within a day he had a faxed confirmation of my reservation at the Novotel, probably the best hotel in town. In another bit of good luck it also was the hotel where two officials from the Canadian ministry of foreign affairs and international trade were staying. They’d been on my flight from Nairobi too—the only other white faces—and we began chatting over the breakfast buffet the morning after I arrived. That afternoon they invited me along to meet some of their local contacts, which gave me a ringside window on what might happen if trouble erupted. Among their guests was the Canadian warden, who would be the man for Canadians to contact in case foreigners had be evacuated in an emergency. A man of South Asian origin—his grandfather had come to Africa to work on the construction of the Mombasa to Nairobi railroad at the turn of the 20th century—he was just completing arrangements to bring his wife and children to Canada. “It’s for the children,” he said, “everybody wants to allow their children to grow up in peace.”