Itinerary

Like I said you’d said, there have been certain urgings afoot, certain requests relayed by you to me toward the end of me letting you know what the fuck is going on. Where am I? Where have I been? Lost in space, above all drifting…

Seriously though, and more importantly, where am I going? Whence and whither? Hence and how far forth? Bah! You know damn well, all of you, that I have been in Livingstone, Zambia, Africa, squarely in the southern hemisphere of this a-here planet for the past week and change. I am relaxing a bit, working off the surplus lactic acid don’t you know. What you don’t know is that I have run the wild rapids of the Zambezi*; that I have beheld the mighty cataracts from the sky courtesy of a microlite flight captained by a venturesome German**; that I have boozed on tamer sections of the river***. I have also, as you know, jaunted over to Botswana on a safari whose sights seen I esteem a privilege. But fuck all that. That’s for footnotes.

I should esteem it a privilege, dear readers, if you were now to forbear as a grab a toehold in the next day and claw us an anticipated future. Ah yes, the future. What will the next few days bring? I will tell you, if you’d just bloody well calm down. It will bring, for one, my first ever jump from an airborne aircraft. That’s right, ladies and wildebeest, skydiving! But anon, anon, and fuck that shit. That’s right! Now what I’m talking about is the hog peanut! Gonna root around, gonna snuffle and get me my hands on some! No—what I’m talking about, friendies, is an itinerary. You may have seen this word printed on a piece of documentation issued you by your airline. But I’m trying to use it, use the word that is, use it in a way whose complexity and malleability cannot be encompassed by a page of printed times and airport codes. I am talking about a kind of cloud itinerary, and one that may change with the position of the sun, the tendings of the wind, even with the tidal effects of the moon’s pull. It is not insignificant that the word has a cousin in itinerant.

Now here’s what’s good, ye e-foregathered, and here’s my favorite part of maintaining this a-here blog for your benefit. I’m talking about the outlining (nebulous, mind) of a possible future, the fleshing out of a trajectory, the self-posting to a possible destiny, the—damn it people, I’m talking about making my bid on the Congo.

Here’s what I have in mind: I stay here for a few days—I have friends and the unmet friend of another friend rolling into town this weekend to make the end of the stay socially more interesting—I keep writing—I am working right now on something like a taxonomy of the melancholy of mining, something vaguely inspired by Melville’s punchy cetology—can you tell I’m feeling jouncy myself?—then I roll back up to Lusaka and Ndola. There is a certain temptation that I’ll not deny to stop by Mazabuco for a potshot at an impala or two on a game farm. But regardless, regardless. Likväl. I apply in Ndola for this—how do you call it—this document monikered “visa.” But I do not get my knickers in a twist over the process this time, for according to a miner I met, they’ll allow me 7 days iffen I so much as show up on the border. Izzit. Then I go to Lubumbashi and get in touch with a certain cryptic contact introduced vicariously to me by the met miner, a certain Mr. Something working for a certain mining company, which executive at what company is tight with the governor. If my contact met down here is right about the welcome I’ll stand to receive, I may be able to fly between the mine sites on their charter craft. Which stands to be a relatively secure sort of setup. This company mines ore out of the river slag in Kolwezi. Just fucking perfect if it comes together that way. Incidentally I met another fellow who works up in Copperbelt, a black Zambian, who operates drill rigs and had this to say about Kolwezi, that it’s total shit and that whereas you may be able to pick up a mobile phone signal, it is a town in which you ‘cannot buy a fucking bottle of water.’

I’ll say little more about my designs on Congo other than that I foresee a brief sojourn hard followed by some further venturings that I do feel at liberty to discuss at greater length. Quite. So check it, this imagined trajectory: A visit to Lake Tanganyika. Beginning at Mpulungu, which is Zambia’s only true port and home to some nice lodges on a bay; then onward on a ferry up to some port in Tanzania, maybe even on, anon, to the end of the line in Burundi. A place I know nothing about, this Tanganyika region. Isn’t this where Che Guevara was trying to turn Kabila père into a proper fighter?

But I know, I know, ye e-foregathered. You want a map. But whatever map I could provide would be put to shame by the schematics of the earth put out by the Nystrom Map Company; much less Google. Isn’t it? Do me a favor. Google-Earth Mpulungu, Zambia, and tell me what you get.

Of course, the northern reaches of Lake Tanganyika are where the beckoning bells of gorilla country do toll. It costs five hundred snaps just for the permit to track Mr. and Mrs. Silverback and their wee ones, but it is difficult to substantiate a logic saying that it wouldn’t be worth it. And while I’m in the neighborhood, it seems like a visit to Goma DRC might be in order. Goma is near the Rwandan border I believe, and I have an invitation of sorts to check out the good work done by the foreign-staffed clinics of there on behalf of the victims of the terrible conflict in that region. Vaginal reconstruction and similar instances of mop-up in the wake of the horrific. It seems that as far as the Congo is concerned, I will only consider border towns, as if anything more than simple frottage would impel me too close to some “pith of obscurity.”

I’ll say no more on that head, but will say that I am more than interested in Zanzibar, Kilimanjaro, and Mozambique.

~

Now. Ye e-foregathered. Ah, fuck it. I remember a time not too long ago—two years gone—when I was doing this same thing, shifting gaze from map to screen, from screen to map, and typing out this same sort of possible trajectory. It was at the end of the time in the Yemen, when I’d caught the pan-Arab bug well and proper. I was sitting with my computer in our mafraaj, the belvedere where we slept and studied, and planning out how I would skirt from Muscat to Hurgeisa to Mombasa to the Comoros islands, in so doing describing the historical arc of Arab trade. Of course, it never happened, but what of it? The plan was brilliant, and the memory of the joy of sitting there and planning it out makes me think that it—I mean the original Arab Swahili plan—may come together this time. Is there a great book to be written about such or a similar voyage, or am I wrong?

* The rainy season not being very far gone, the waters are very high this time of year. This meant we could only run about half of the rapids that can be done later in the dry season. I had never seen such currents: At one point I jumped from a rock into a section of water that looked calm from above, only to be sucked down much farther than mere gravity would have pulled me. Had it not been for my lifejacket, you may have been befallen by the sorry (negative) circumstance of not being able to read this post, as it would not exist. What will the next days bring? I shall tell you, if you’d just bloody well calm down. It will bring, for one, my first ever jump from an airborne aircraft.

** If you ever travel to Victoria Falls, the microlite flight must not be missed. My pilot, day and claw us into an anticipated Heiko Held—I believe he has some travel books out in German, so any Teutonophiles out there go ahead and google him—seemed a classic German-adventurer-in-Africa. He reported having lived in Congo some years back, and spoke with a true fear about the atmosphere brewing up around the time he had to leave because of the growing instability in the mid-nineties. Nasty guys, he said. The flight was a great way to see the entire sweep of the falls and to see the big geological history of the cataracts in display in the form of the great gorges where the water used to fall in the cataract’s various earlier incarnations before the power of the water sheared off the sections one after the other. Another interesting thing was that whereas the air near the surface was very cold that morning, about a thousand feet up we entered a warm current and stayed there. A bit away from the falls we could see giraffes and elephants and warthogs doing a bit of morning grazing.

*** On this sunset river cruise the thing of note is just that there was a Zambian woman staffing the cruise by the name of Vanessa had a weird schtick going on. After introducing herself she said something like ‘you don’t have to remember my name, just as long as you say something that starts with a ‘v’ that’s fine. There is only one thing that starts with a ‘v’ that I won’t let you call me.’ I don’t know how I knew, but I had a feeling about what that word was. She would have me guess, but I stopped the little game from going to far. I believe I got as far as ‘Vicious.’ My suspicion about the one word that could not be used, but whose forbidden mention she somehow seemed to desire, was later confirmed by a fellow booze cruiser from another day.