Kigali view, final night. We enjoyed a sad dinner under the stars...
There is no time to think. Last month we slid through a collection of banana tree Mountains and descended into Bujumbura where Lake Tanganyika slithered at my ankles and a crocodile threatened to bite me. Now I am back in Hanoi where all the great adventures started with a slug from a bottle of Bia Ha Noi. There is slow-dance breeze stirring through Hanoi alleys. The sky, which up until a week ago was sewn tight, is now loose and spilling sunny days that tumble out like plastic balls and hit us as we burn down the dyke road on the way to teach the kids. It is a great and honest hit of joy and worth swimming in, even if I occasionally cop a lungful of durian fruit from the basket girls on the side of the road. Durian strikes like a shot of horseradish in the nostril and leaves you floating in a wind tunnel of rotten fruit. People who tell me that it tastes better than it looks are deceptive and mean. I was served it once and it tastes like sweat.
Kigali-Nairobi-Doha-Bangkok-Hanoi-Guangzhou-Los Angles-Minneapolis-Brisbane-Minneapolis.
This plane schedule has been and will be, my next five months. Between there and here, lie a complicated raft of
Tourism students posing by the edge of the university. We have just enjoyed an enormous Rwandan buffet and we'd all rather be sleeping.
realizations, beers, good-byes and dodgy planes. I want to discuss them all but I am not sure where to start. How does it feel to take off over Kigali in the belly of dawn and watch street lights and friendships fade slowly away into Africa? Bloody strange. Leaving one life and descending on another is painful this time. Our mate Hesron accompanied me to the airport and cried as I broke customs. We had to persuade another friend not to come at all; he was waiting in a bar some one in Remira and threatened to turn the take-off into a party. We can all teach each other something and my friends in Rwanda were excellent scholars.
I am spending two months in Hanoi and I am saving again. When I am asked what I do for a living, I usually tell people that I am a professional saver. I’m not necessarily good at what I do but I take a certain scruffy pride in what is achieved at the end of the day.
Fortunately for me, I am staying with Malcolm and his girlfriend Quynh, and we regularly go on wild jaunts into the down-town rabbit holes and sidewalk restaurants where food can be found for cheap. There is a bowl of something warm at the end of every dead-end in Hanoi and it is usually served by an ancient lady who sizes us up, sits us down and presents us with a bowl of verve. Dumplings on the side and beer in a cup
Hesron teaches me how to peel a banana. I spend most of the lesson posing before realising that if I don't peel it, I can't eat it.
of ice. Malcolm’s Vietnamese is more than likely and he throws it around with glee. I hasten to add bits and pieces of my half-built dialect. Men stare at me suspiciously while the women grin and pretend to understand. We pile mouldy bank-notes around plastic tables and leave with the breeze.
I’ll be flying towards Lake Itasca by June. You’ll see me if you live in Minneapolis; I’ll be the Aussie with the grin attached to his unshaven face. Here and all around there, I’ll be getting married to a girl from the Midwest who gave me a box of Marconi and cheese when I looked after her cat. Life moves in crazy circles and then you find some honey (!).
For now I am happy and hope that you are as well. There will be more to come in Africa, much more, but first I have to read a pile of books, eat some bun cha and listen to some Angolan funk. Kiss a friend on the cheek and stay rad.
Enormous concert in Kigali. Annetta and Joss proceed to round all of the bands up and take them out for beers.
After I threatened to steal one of Rwanda's Mountain gorillas and bring it back to Vietnam, my students felt that they had to buy me a fake one that looks stoned and weighs as much as an average sized sheep.
