Wooden Ships

We have traveled to a ton of places over the last 11 or so years. Six continents. 25 plus countries. Who knows how many cities and towns. Mountains. Rivers. Highways. Beaches. Volcanoes. Parks. Much more. Most of those places we've visited just once, and they will either stay that way or we'll say hello again once that destination gets back to the top of our list. It's a long list. Some places may need to wait a long while. Or forever. Hey, we have other things to see.

But that last part is not true of everywhere we've traveled. There are spots in this world that we've found ourselves in much more than once, compelled by some force or experience to go back and do it once again or polish off those things that we missed the second or third or fourth time. In some cases, when we've spent so much time in one place, it's started to feel like a second home. New York definitely leads the pack there. We don't do much tourist-y stuff in New York anymore. We just want to be there, spending time in our favorite haunts because we are in love with the place.

London is getting there. We are definitely running out of obvious, in the guidebook stuff to soak up in England's capital. Four visits in 10 years will do that. But we are not quite there yet. It's not New York, and I mean that on so many levels. Our time in London in September of this year found us turning over a rock or two to get one or two more drops of juice out of the place, including two experiences that built on a couple of days we'd spent elsewhere on the globe in the last 12 months. This post is about one of those.

Earlier this year, we spent some time in Southeast Asia. Part of that trip involved spending some time in Malaysia where we visited a tea plantation. It was honestly the most interesting and coolest thing we did in Malaysia. I'm not kidding. It was truly awesome. I'm not knocking Malaysia by saying the best thing we did was go to a sort of farm (although we WERE disappointed a bit in Malaysia). Visiting the tea plantation was well worth the trip. 

When we think of tea today, of course, we often think of England, and not because that's where tea is grown, because it categorically is not grown in England. But whether you grew up there or when you are visiting and just have to have a cuppa with breakfast or crave some afternoon tea or a cream tea now and then, tea is now for sure, no doubt an English thing. We did, on just this one trip, partake in all three tea experiences mentioned in this paragraph so clearly we have bought into this drink association.

So how did the English get to love tea if you can't grow tea in Great Britain? Why, by exploring and then colonizing the world, of course. They first found the stuff in China, and started importing it into the country in the 1650s. Considering the speed at which information moved back then in the middle of the seventeenth century, it seems to me that tea caught on in England pretty quickly, perhaps spurred on by a mention of the drink by Samuel Pepys in his writings or Charles II's wife Catherine of Braganza being a bit of a tea fanatic. 

The East India Company started bringing back tea from China in 1669 and Thomas Twining opened his first tea room in London in 1706. From that point on there was really no looking back. Tea would be intertwined into the national identity to this day. Eventually in the mid-1800s, the English started growing it in spots around the world that they claimed for their own whether whoever was there already wanted it or liked it or not. That's how tea plantations started in India, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), Kenya and yes...Malaysia.

But even after they started growing tea for themselves, they still needed it from China.

So how did one transport tea from the far east (or Africa) back to England between the 1650s and the 20th century? On a ship. How else? I mean this is before air travel or reasonably safe and efficient and speedy overland travel. You wanted to get somewhere on the globe from Point A to Point B a few hundred years ago relatively quickly? You boarded a boat. 

Speed counted here. Between 1861 and 1866, the first tea ship into port each season would earn its owner an extra shilling for each ton of tea on board. But beyond that, generally the faster you can move product from source to market, the faster you will turn a profit and the faster you can turn around and go get another load. In the second half of the 19th century, ship owner "Jock" Willis commissioned ship designer Hercules Linton to design the fastest tea ship in the world. 

They named the ship the Cutty Sark, after a line in Robert Burns' poem "Tam O'Shanter". The Cutty Sark is still around today. It's in Greenwich, just a 40 minute or so ride down the Thames from the center of London. This, I had to go see to add one more level to the understanding of tea, which we had started to explore in February.

The tea clipper Cutty Sark, Greenwich. No, it's not early evening; it's England.

I had been to Greenwich once before. It was a while ago (in 2007) and I know sometimes my memory is lacking but I couldn't recall seeing a full size original tea clipper hanging around the place when we went to visit the Royal Naval Museum, the Royal Observatory and the Queen's House all those years ago. It seemed to me that I should have noticed something this big just out in the open near the commuter and tourist boat dock along the Thames. 

Turns out in this case my memory wasn't wrong. The Cutty Sark was in Greenwich in the summer of 2007 but it was under restoration at that time. Even worse, the ship was the victim of a fire in May of that year which halted and delayed the restoration so it was likely (a) under wraps and (b) under heavy protection and immediate recovery beyond just being under wraps. It's no wonder I missed it in 2007. I wouldn't in 2024.

The hull of the Cutty Sark, suspended over the exhibit floor.

The Cutty Sark was custom built to transport tea. It was designed with a fast hull with sufficient cargo space to hold a lot of product but also with a low draft so that it wouldn't get snagged on the sand bars which were present at the mouths of the rivers in China which it would need to navigate to stock up on tea. And the speed thing that I mentioned earlier? The design worked. When it was built, the Cutty Sark was the fastest ship in the world. It almost seems crazy that it was custom built for tea. I mean it seems like that sort of a cargo wouldn't be that valuable to warrant the fastest ship in the world. But then again, we are a long way removed from the late 1800s.

The majority of the volume of the ship was reserved for cargo space. Everything that involved the crew sailing the ship took place on the main deck, or the top level of the ship. The enclosed living space dedicated to the captain, officers and crew of the ship are tiny. Privacy was non-existent for most all of the men on the ship that were not the captain. The two lower levels, the lower hold (below the water line) and the 'tween deck (with floor pretty much at the water line), are huge and existed strictly to make money. They would be packed as tight as possible with crate after crate of tea on the journey from the far east to England. 

How much tea could the Cutty Sark transport in a single voyage? Enough tea for an astonishing 200 million cups with a total value in today's currency of 18.5 million pounds. In one trip. Seems like the owners of the Cutty Sark which they custom built for this purpose had figured out the game pretty well. They launched the ship in 1869. 

The two cargo holds of the Cutty Sark: the lower deck (top) and the massive 'tween deck (bottom).

The Cutty Sark's life as a tea clipper lasted less than 10 years. In 1878, the ship stopped hauling tea from China to England and started transporting wool from Australia. 

In the year the Cutty Sark was launched, something else happened that would change the tea trade from China pretty quickly: the Suez Canal opened, creating a route to China that was 3,800 miles shorter. Steam ships now had a schedule advantage over sailing ships, which could not sail (but could be tugged) through the Canal. Combine a shorter route with a much less treacherous journey that avoided Africa's Cape of Good Hope and smaller insurance premiums and the tea clipper idea was dead. How fast was the Cutty Sark? Didn't matter. It wasn't 3,800 miles faster.

Today, the Cutty Sark is restored back to its early 1870s appearance, which for me was perfect because that's exactly the period in which I was interested. That restoration first occurred in the 1950s, long after the ship was transporting tea from China or wool from Australia or then ferrying cargo back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean from Portugal to South America. 

The masts, rigging and deckhouses which housed the crew on the main deck had to be entirely reconstructed, but 90% of the hull, which was made from Indian teak and American rock elm, is original as is some of the iron frame which was used as the primary structure for the decks. The original iron today is painted white in the restored ship. There is a whole lot of iron painted white in the two pictures above.

The Cutty Sark today is in permanent dry dock. Those sailing days are long over. The ship is suspended on steel columns and enclosed by a glass roof structure that pretty much mimics the level of the ocean when the vessel was afloat. The main and 'tween decks and the lower hold are all accessible to visitors and there is a below grade museum level that allows you to pass on foot directly below the hull. 

The fact that you can see the entirety of the exterior and interior of the ship is pretty special. The hull is massive, which considering it was designed with a low draft to allow passage over sandbars just indicates how much below water stuff there is on other ships out there not designed with the same feature as the Cutty Sark. The cargo spaces look as big inside as the hull looks outside. There is so much space in these interior holds. It must have been pretty impressive to see these things packed full of merch.

But the most interesting area for me was the main deck, where the captain, crew and officers lived, worked and slept, although I'm sure it was way more work than anything else, particularly for the crew. A one-way voyage on the Cutty Sark, despite being the fastest ship in the world, was almost four months long. That's four months on the open water sailing every day and working on the ocean's schedule. This is not a 9 to 5 gig that some of us enjoy in 2024. This must have been hard and demanding work with emergencies and conditions to react to at a moment's notice. 

The safety record on the ship was impressive; they only lost five crew members on the open water. But that doesn't mean it wasn't extremely hard work.

The saloon used by the ship's officers at mealtimes (top) and an officers' bunk room for three (bottom).

The only person with a private cabin on the ship was the captain. All other officers and crew quarters were shared. Each man aboard would need to have clothing for the coldest and hottest weather and would obviously need to do their work outdoors every day with no modern luxuries as simple as sunscreen. Some crew members could afford changes of clothes. Others couldn't, which must have really been inconvenient when your clothes were soaking wet in a storm. 

The majority of "free time" was spent indoors in the deckhouses with fellow crew members. According to signage on the main deck, time not working was usually spent mending gear or playing board games, if someone had managed to bring one on board. Tobacco and, in rare situations, alcohol sometimes provided a different sort of relief from what I am sure was a lot of pain, aches and abject boredom. I can't imagine how difficult this sort of work was. I get bored at home on weekends sometimes and I have a ton of things to entertain myself. This must have been excruciating. 

I love it when different trips in the same calendar year provide us opportunities to learn about different angles of a similar subject. This was completely unplanned. We had no idea when we visited a tea plantation in Malaysia that the Cutty Sark would be on this year's United Kingdom agenda. Similarly, we had no idea there was a tea clipper in dry dock in Greenwich when we planned a day trip down the Thames (we'll get to the other reason we visited Greenwich). Luck happens sometimes, although this was really a "make your own luck" situation by us continuing to explore different places in the world.

Every so often there is a little nugget of something in a place I have visited that fascinates me. That nugget on the Cutty Sark is the two suspended discs in the officers saloon in the picture above. They look like they might be there to hold candles or some other form of light, but they are not. They were installed in the saloon to hold bottles and drinks so that liquids (presumably some of it wine or liquor) would not spill when the ship tilted with the action of the water. I find these sorts of simple inventions intriguing. That's the last word on this one.

The Cutty Sark with modern London in the distance. 

Tea For The Tillerman

To answer what might be an inevitable question, there's no tillerman in this post.

Our trip to Southeast Asia earlier this year had us in Singapore for a night, on to Cambodia for three nights, back to Singapore for another seven nights and then finishing in Malaysia for four nights. Cambodia was amazing. Singapore was amazing. Malaysia was...not amazing. There was nothing necessarily regrettable about our time in Malaysia. It just wasn't amazing. 

I don't know what we did wrong in Malaysia but the place didn't capture our imagination the way the other two countries did. Maybe it was our questionable choices to visit the Kuala Lumpur Bird Park and take a trip out to the coast to see (very, very few) fireflies at night. Maybe it was the fact that we found one of KL's marquee tourists attractions, the Batu Caves, to be mostly just smelly and hot. Or maybe we just didn't get anything out of taking the elevator up to the top of the Petronas Towers (once the tallest building in the world) because there's nothing else up there to look at. Whatever it was, we didn't love Malaysia. Maybe it was just Kuala Lumpur. Maybe we should have gone to Penang.

If there's any other evidence needed of how much we didn't love Malaysia, consider this: Cambodia got five blog posts; Singapore got five blog posts; Malaysia's getting one. Yes, there's one post shared between all three countries about food but as far as Malaysia-only posts, this is it. It's about tea. And it was the best thing we did by far in Malaysia. 

To be clear, this isn't like a token post to make me or the country of Malaysia feel good about the fact that we visited. Our time with tea in Malaysia was worth writing about. So here goes.

Boh tea plantation. Cameron Highlands, Malaysia.

I grew up on tea. I spent the first 11 years of my life in England and drank tea every day pretty much for as long as I can remember. Now, I'm sure there was a time when I was really young that my mom fed me something other than tea, but as far as I can remember in my childhood, there was tea on the breakfast table and for afternoon tea on weekends every time we had breakfast or tea. It's an essential part of growing up in England and likely always will be. I don't drink tea really today like ever but when I go back to England to visit I do. Every time I have any sort of sit down meal to start off the day. It must be some kind of innate behavior kicking in.

Of course, tea doesn't grow in England. The reason why English people drink tea is that they took over about half the world centuries ago and produced goods in all their territories to make life back at home in Britain that much better. That included tea, which was produced in massive quantities in places like India and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and Kenya and Uganda and yes, even Malaysia.

As of the beginning of this year, I had never visited a tea plantation anywhere in the world. Some of that has to do with the fact that I haven't really been that many places where tea is grown. Yes, I've been to Kenya and Uganda but I was a bit more focused on something other than tea in the week long safari we spent in each of hose two countries (although we did see tea plantations in Uganda). I've visited a coffee plantation (in Hawaii), but never tea. Time to change that. In Malaysia.

Some of the seemingly endless greenhouses that coat the Cameron Highlands.

There are no tea plantations in Kuala Lumpur. Or anywhere near there really. Apparently, something about the climate or the soil or the elevation or something isn't right there. KL is barely above sea level and it's hot pretty much all the time. Particularly in February. So we had to get out of town a bit to the north.

There's a spot in Malaysia called the Cameron Highlands which is perfect for growing almost anything that needs soil and water to grow. Tomatoes, long beans, greens, lettuce, spinach, eggplant, cucumbers, you name it. The elevation and climate are ideal. It's also (as the name suggests) high enough above sea level (say 5,000 feet or so) that the nights are cooler and misty and the land doesn't get baked by the mid-day (or late day or early morning) sun. It's also a pretty good spot to grow tea. There are at least two very large tea plantations there. 

The problem? It's nowhere near Kuala Lumpur. Want to drive out there? Google Maps says three hours to get there. Train? Five hours. If we wanted to go there (and we did), we'd need a ride. 

We found one on Viator. We picked what sounded like a jam packed 12 hour (!!!) day traveling to the Cameron Highlands, exploring various things up there (including a tea plantation) and then back again to KL. We paid to make the tour private and then hoped we'd be able to talk our guide into skipping most of the stuff and just focusing on the tea plantation part of the whole thing. It sort of mostly worked. Kind of. His wife tripped us up a bit.

So what was on the tour? Ready for this? A basket weaving demonstration. A waterfall. An aborigine village. A vegetable market. A strawberry farm. A butterfly farm. A honey bee farm. A cactus shop. Lunch. A visit to a tea plantation (Boh Tea, as it turned out) and a photo stop at a second tea plantation. We didn't figure we needed all that. I mean, why do we need to go to a vegetable farm? It's not like we are picking up some garlic and some long beans or something like that. Pass on the vegetable farm. Pass on the strawberry farm. Pass on the basket weaving.

We figured we'd just stick to the things we were really interested in and if we were able to squeeze a bit more time at the tea plantations, that was good for us. Plus maybe then we'd have a day that lasted less than 12 hours and could make it back to the hotel in time for afternoon happy hour in the executive lounge at the Kuala Lumpur Hilton. Free food and booze. Always with the mooching with these two.

Three hours to Cameron Highlands is no joke by the way. It was two hours on Malaysia's super-modern North-South Expressway followed by an hour's drive up and around twisty-turny roads to the beginning of Cameron Highlands. And our driver was no slouch. He was definitely driving at a good clip. There were times that the roads definitely tested his ability to keep his Toyota Innova on the road or at the very least between the lines. It would be at least 30 minutes after the three hour mark before we got to anywhere we could stop.

It is truly a different world in the Highlands, by the way. When you get out of the hot and sticky lowlands of tropical Malaysia and up a bit in the clouds, it's a totally different world, one which man has figured the best thing to do is cover it with greenhouses as far as the eye can see. I'm not convinced there was a single right angle used in the construction of a single one of these things. Those stick and plastic-built plant incubators covered the contours of the land and mimicked the surface of the Earth. A dip in the land meant a dip in the roof structure. 

And it is COLD. Not like freezing cold but I definitely regretted not bringing something with long sleeves with me. A 20 to 30 degree drop in temperature will do that to you.

The approach to Boh Tea's visitor center.

Somewhere between the butterfly farm and the cactus shop, we stopped at Boh Tea.

Malaysia is not a huge tea producer. China leads the world in tea production at 2.47 million metric tons per year. That number represents 40% of the world's total tea production. India is next. Then Kenya. Then Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka manages just a bit more than 10% of China's output at 349,000 metric tons per year. Malaysia isn't anywhere close in terms of volume produced. It isn't even in the top ten. How much in Malaysia? 10,000 metric tons per year. That's nothing. It doesn't look that way when you visit one of these plantations, though. I can't imagine these things in China.

A metric ton by the way is 1,000 kilograms, or 2,200 pounds. 2.47 million metric tons is a lot.

My first impression of our drive to the Boh Plantation was how incredibly beautiful these tea plant covered fields were. They are a gorgeous mix of dark and light green colors and the plants coat the Earth just the same way those greenhouses we passed on our way to the plantation do. Although instead of ugly white-ish plastic, it's verdant green. The plants create a cover for the ground, with tiny paths separating the plants for the pluckers to walk through. This is a strange analogy but the only thing I can liken the appearance to is a craquelin topping on top of a chou pastry bun. I know that's ultra obscure (yes, I do watch the British Baking Show religiously) but for me, that's exactly the look.

Every surface that can be covered with tea plants is covered with tea plants. There's no need to mess about with anything else. The walkway to the plantation visitor center is as narrow as it can reasonably be to accommodate the volume of incoming tourists. Either side of the path? Tea.

Tea plant. Up close and personal. 

It's funny what you don't know about how things that you consume are produced. We came face to face with that last year in Zanzibar when we stopped by a spice farm. We got the same kind of experience here in Malaysia. I mean, I had no idea how tea was produced. I could have guessed at the picking but after that...I don't know. Ignorant.

There are five basic steps after picking: withering, rolling, fermentation, drying and sorting. Do these five things in that order, and you end up with some tea. Withering takes about 20 hours to complete. Drying takes just 20 minutes. The object of the entire process is to get the moisture content of the tea down, down, down and concentrate the flavor so it's useful to make drinks for British people and whomever else out there loves a good cuppa. There's a display outside the 1934 factory on property that shows the various stages of leaf condition during the entire production process.

The factory, which was built about five years after the plantation was established, is still in use today. A tea plant, by the way, takes about that length of time to go from seedling to tea-producing vine.

The entire process of tea production, along with the history of Boh Tea and some ancient tea-rolling and drying equipment that replaced hand labor and time respectively, are on display for all to see in the visitor center. If you are a tea geek (and I'm not quite sure I'm completely in that category) this must be a dream come true. For someone like me just generally interested in food production, it was still pretty fascinating. I mean the lengths people used to go to just to dry some plant leaves so they could be shipped halfway around the world and steeped in hot water so people who couldn't have imagined the sight of the place where these little leaves came from could have a drink is just amazing to me.

And of course they had samples. They had to have samples, right? And I have to say...my eyes are opened.

After you get through all the history of Boh and the stats about worldwide production of tea and the process of the whole thing, there are four urns of tea (I was honestly going to use the term coffee urns but, well, you know...) each of which has a different flavor of sweetened tea. And get this...the tea is powdered. 

Now, look, I know that we can buy powdered iced tea drink here in the United States but I figured that was some kind of synthetic drink that wasn't really tea. Some sort of chemical concoction to approximate real iced tea drink. Apparently I was wrong.

Iced tea is disgusting by the way. It just is. It's one of those American things I can't get my head wrapped around.

This powdered tea stuff...incredible! They were serving this stuff in tiny cups and I must have had 12 of these things. I kept going back. I don't know what they made this stuff with, whether it was milk or water or some magic elixir but the taste was just mindblowingly good. And I'm not particularly a tea guy (except in Britain...) and no way am I a powdered tea guy. But this stuff. Just wow! The caramel and matcha flavors were just indescribably good.

I will say that we have purchased some U.S.-based version of what we had at Boh and I just can't make it the way they made it at the headquarters there in Malaysia. It was just transcendent. Maybe it was the being there. Being there often makes the difference, although if that's what this was, it was a pretty extreme example of being there making a difference.

Antique tea-rolling machine (top) and the good stuff (bottom). The matcha and caramel...I'm telling you.

This travel stuff is eye-opening sometimes. But ain't that most of the point of doing this?

So about that plan to spend more time at the tea plantation and get back early. I think it worked. We milked maybe an extra 15 to 20 minutes out of our time at Boh. We probably could have got a little bit longer stay but honestly, we were pretty much finished anyway. And yes, we did make it back for free happy hour at the hotel.

We also visited the vegetable farm. Or at least a market. I said we were skipping it. We didn't. 

Apparently, vegetables in the Cameron Highlands are significantly cheaper and presumeably better than veg available in the local supermarkets around Kuala Lumpur. And our driver had a list from his wife and (I think) an appointment at a specific stall. So we stopped. 

Far be it from me to get in the way of a hardworking Malaysian couple and a some groceries that can save them a ringgit or two. I'm not being facetious here. I am sure both of them work harder to make ends meet than we do or ever have and I don't want to stand in the way of any of that and I'm not stuck up enough to be so self centered to be upset about this. We try to tip well on these excursions for just that reason. We had two priorities for this day: (1) spend as much time as possible at a tea plantation and (2) get back for free happy hour. We got both. I appreciate our driver pushing the schedule and his car's ability to climb those hills. I think we ended up with a 10 hour day instead of a 12 hour day. That's a heck of a long time to spend driving two tourists around. I'm happy to stop for some veg. 

We did stop at a second tea plantation (Cameron Valley Tea) for a photo opportunity. More of that gorgeous tea-coated Malaysia landscape. That's what this whole day was about and it was completely worth it. I won't forget those landscapes. It's the craquelin. I don't know how else to convey the appearance.

Top to bottom: Boh's factory; the view from Boh's visitor center; Cameron Valley Tea plantation.

Uganda

We went to Uganda to see animals. It is, after all, what we do in Africa. Safari. Lodge. Safari. Lodge. Repeat as often as possible before it's time to go home. Until next time when we will inevitably do the exact same sort of thing in a different spot on the continent. And there will be a next time. I guarantee it.

We had hopes for this trip. We had wants. Gorillas. Chimpanzees. Shoebills. Elephants. Hippos. Bee-eaters (yes...bee-eaters). Lions. Leopards. Marabou storks. Vervet monkeys. Giraffes. Fish eagles. Kingfishers. Cheetahs. Hyenas. Vultures. Buffalo. Warthogs. Crocodiles. Crowned cranes. Hornbills. There were more, I'm sure. Some were a reach. Most were seen. Some were not. No cheetahs or giraffes in Queen Elizabeth National Park apparently. Yes to leopards but not where we were. Or at least not where we looked. But that's what you get with leopards.

We had some surprises. All sorts of monkeys. Ugandan kobs, which are basically impala with slightly different markings, maybe a bit more than slightly different horns and no "M" on the butts. Bushbucks and waterbucks, large antelopes which we hadn't seen since Botswana in 2015, if I'm remembering right. Lots of ants. Safari ants. Ants that bite. And bats. Hundreds and hundreds of bats on our hotel property in Kisoro, safe on the other side of the fence in the daytime but all around in the morning before sunrise, so loud that they served as a sort of alarm clock. Difficult to sleep through all that din. 

Candelabra cactus with buffalo (top); red-billed hornbill (bottom).

We found way more than just animals. Driving between lodges takes time and patience. And passing through tiny Ugandan town after tiny Ugandan town and from the back seat of a safari van, we saw more of Uganda than just the wildlife. Pepsi. Coke. Airtel. MTN. Comfoam. Goodwill Ceramic, Ltd. Regal Paints. Monaco Coatings. Lafarge. Coldease. Plascon. Simba Cement. Nile Special. Club. Blue Magic. Black plastic Gentex water tanks. Red LeBron James Lakers jerseys (I don't understand that one). Name brands and global icons. Consumerism in all its glory.

Maybe some of the names in the previous paragraph ring bells. Others I'm sure don't. Uganda is building. And Plascon, Goodwill, Regal, Monaco, Lafarge, Simba and Gentex and others are there for Uganda. Everything is piece built by hand out of components that can be carried and lifted by hand. Construction is everywhere. Bricks are fired by the side of the road in kilns made of the bricks they are cooking. Scaffolding is stick built. Literally. Out of actual sticks of wood. Brick and concrete and sand and terra cotta tiles are mixed and sifted and lifted and placed by hand. No machinery. No equipment. One piece after another. All available at the hardware stores that appeared to be in every town, there to help it all along.

The smell of the earth cooking around those bricks reminded me of the peat in Scottish whisky distilleries. Earth burning is earth burning, I guess.

Stores and houses and hotels and offices may be springing up everywhere. They can't disguise the fact that Uganda is a farming nation. Goats and cows are tethered to patches of grass by the side of the road. Chickens are luckier; they get to roam free. As does the occasional turkey. Fresh milk is everywhere. So are Bananas. In markets, on breakfast tables, on the backs of motorcycles, served with lunch as matoke along with similarly flavorless posho or cassava. The fruit is better than matoke and posho and cassava. Pineapple. Mango. Watermelon. Passion fruit. Papaya. And just plain sweet bananas. Wash it down with coffee or tea from the massive plantations and individual plants on small farms all over the country. 

Tea plantation (top). Paint store (bottom).

Think it's odd to carry bunches of bananas on the back of a motorcycle, by the way? Don't. I'm convinced Ugandans have figured out how to carry everything and anything on a motorcycle. Bananas. Greens. Pineapples. Wood. One or two or three passengers. Six foot long lengths of pipe. Other motorcycles. You name it. Anything that needs to be taken from point A to point B can be taken on a motorcycle in Uganda. Don't think that it can't be done. In Uganda, it can be done on the back or the side or the seat of a motorcycle.

Motorcycles are everywhere in Uganda. And they are ridden solo or by two, three or four people and accompanied by anything they can hold or strap onto the bike. But if there's anything more everywhere than motorcycles in Uganda, it's people. There are tons and tons of people out on the streets at all hours doing anything anyone could possibly do in Uganda. Building. Selling. Making metal doors that are sold as storefronts and gates in every town. Sweeping streets with brooms made of twigs. Sitting at gas stations waiting for customers (no self serve in Uganda!). Sitting at the equator waiting for customers to see some equator themed tricks for the equivalent of almost $3 US a time. Making a living. Scraping out a living. Moving from one place to another from homes to markets to roadside grills hawking meat to pork joints, often with gigantic sacks of rice or shopping bags or bundles of twigs balanced on their heads in ways that us mzungus can't possibly imagine doing ourselves. It's chaos and it works. 

Most people seem to be moving from nowhere to nowhere else. Walking across roads they have no business crossing to get to nothing. Absolutely nothing. But the fact that there's nothing in the immediate vicinity doesn't mean that's where they are going. The distances people walk are incomprehensible to us, those of us who are used to hopping in a car or in a taxi for any sort of distance more than a five minute trip on foot.

Visit to the equator (top) and vervet monkeys peeking out of a candelabra cactus (bottom).

If you need any proof of the patience and perseverance of Ugandans walking from home to somewhere else, look no further than the youth of the country. Dressed in uniforms, they are up before dawn walking in ones and twos and packs and lines along dusty roads passed by vans holding tourists to see elephants or gorillas or chimpanzees or whatever else we are en route to see. They are up early because their journey is miles long. No bus. No parents dropping them off in front of the school. Just walking in the dark.

And if you didn't get it the first time, after a day of sightseeing you will see the same kids on the same road going the other way. Walking again. Far from home. Far from school. The length of time they walk each day is not a distance felt by visitors. We can't relate. It's not part of our experience. But it is part of the Ugandan experience. Seven in the morning. Half past five in the afternoon. That's 10.5 hours of the day and that's not the start or the end.

All this from the back seat of a safari van. Kibale National Park. Queen Elizabeth National Park. Kazinga Channel. Mgahinga National Park. Those places didn't teach me about Uganda. Watching people and their lives from that seat in the back of the van showed me the real Uganda. 

I took a lot of photographs while traveling in Uganda. I have amazing and detailed pictures of some incredible wildlife, a lot of which I am sure I will share on this blog. But nothing sums up our experience in Uganda more succinctly than the photograph below. It's a perfect representation of what we went to see juxtaposed against what we found driving between parks. Truth be told, these people photobombed my elephant pic. But they did it just right.

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How We Did It

We booked our time and activities in Uganda as part of a tour package through Uganda and into Rwanda with G Adventures, who have become our favorite tour company to take us to places where the logistics are just a bit more than we want to try to tackle ourselves. Other than the first day, which we coordinated ourselves and which I am sure will be detailed on this blog, we let them handle all the arrangements. The exact tour we took was the Gorilla Treks & Safari Drives tour.

We almost didn't make it into Uganda, although that statement may be a little bit dramatic.

Before we arrived in Uganda, we applied for an East African Tourist Visa through the Uganda E-Visa application webpage. The on line approval was quick and efficient and we printed out the approval document with barcodes that could be scanned on entry to the country and exchanged for a visa sticker that would be applied to one of our passport pages.

That all worked great until...we were told that the immigration staff didn't have any visa stickers at the airport that day. No stickers? At the airport? When they knew we were coming into the country that day AND people come into the country on the East African Tourist Visa all the time? Yep. No stickers. The immigration officer emerged from his office with two receipts for our passports and told us to come back Tuesday (we arrived on a Friday). 

Just one problem with that: we'd be eight hours away or so by car on Tuesday and would never be any closer to the airport than that after that date since we were ending our trip in Rwanda which is a whole other country. And we would definitely need our passports in hand to enter Rwanda.

The solution: wait. For about three and a half hours for someone to go to Kampala (about a 45 to 60 minute drive one way) to pick up some stickers so we could have our visas that day like the system is supposed to work. We arrived in Uganda at about 2:30 in the afternoon. We left the airport at about 6:30 with our visas and passports in hand.

When we got inside the airport after getting off the plane, there was a woman from the Uganda tourist office who had been sent by G Adventures to meet us off the plane and guide us through the immigration process. I don't want to say we couldn't have gotten through the no visa sticker experience without her, but I can say that it would have been a lot less smooth without her help. I appreciate the fact that she was there for us as soon as we got off the plane and guided us through the entire experience, right up to the point when we got in the car for the transfer to our hotel. Sometimes it helps to have people looking out for you. 

I'm saving the receipt that the immigration officer gave us for our passports as a souvenir.

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The Air Up There

I knew that some kind of elevation sickness was a risk in traveling to Machu Picchu. Not so much at the site itself; after all, it sits just a bit less than 8,000 feet above sea level and that's not much higher than somewhere like Santa Fe, NM. But I knew we'd have to go through Cusco to get to the old Incan citadel and Cusco is a little bit higher up in the Andes. Like 3,200 feet higher. I just didn't think it would happen to me as badly as it did on that first night in Cusco.

People are generally susceptible to altitude sickness when they travel above 8,000 feet. I'd been there a few times before. Most recently, I'd spent four nights in the Ecuadorian capital of Quito at 9,350 feet above sea level in 2016 and earlier that same year I'd driven straight up two volcanoes in Hawaii, topping out at 10,023 feet at the summit of Haleakala which was the highest I'd ever been with my two feet planted firmly on the surface of the Earth. 

Although maybe not so firmly; walking around at that elevation when having been at sea level less than an hour earlier was disconcerting. I was dizzy and needed to step slowly. Holding hands helped. My experience in Quito was better, although the first night I was there I woke up halfway through the night gasping for breath. My lungs just weren't getting enough oxygen I guess. I figured I'd be OK in Peru but there was admittedly a little concern to be had.

My first night in Cusco was worse than either Quito or Haleakala. I was curled up in bed like a baby with a severely upset stomach and a crushing headache right at the base on my skull. It came on all of a sudden after being fine most of the day. We'd been warned that altitude sickness would feel like the worst hangover you've ever had. I've had some pretty bad hangovers in my life and thankfully this wasn't like those. But a headache this bad and an upset stomach would make the rest of the week awfully inconvenient.

There are mountains all around in Cusco and everywhere else you go around there.

The traditional Andean cure for altitude sickness is to stuff a few leaves of the coca plant in your cheek and chew away a little bit. The leaves are rich in chemicals (calcium, potassium and phosphorus) and vitamins (B1, B2, C and E) which I suppose helps in staving off the effects of the high elevation when it gets into your saliva and absorbed into the body. The guides who showed Hiram Bingham the "undiscovered" ruins of Machu Picchu way back in 1911 apparently had cheeksful of coca leaves during that trek for just general well being and we saw an estimate that 360,000 kilograms of the stuff were consumed during the building of that site all those centuries ago, although I have no idea how anyone surmised that with any degree of accuracy.

If you want to study up on all the benefits of the coca leaf while you are in Cusco, there's a whole museum dedicated to this plant. The Andean people used this stuff for way more than just countering the effects of being way way above sea level. Headache? Yep. Nosebleeds and cuts? Sure (the chemicals in the leaf do actually constrict the blood vessels). Malaria? No problem. Ulcers? That too. Digestion issues? Apparently handles that easily. Painkiller during skull surgery? Got that covered but yikes! I don't necessarily believe you are covered completely here for all these ailments with a single leaf but it has been proven to have beneficial effects.

Of course, it's also the source of cocaine which makes its production banned in certain areas. The Museo De La Coca covers all this stuff, including its use in Coca-Cola, the known first case of sniffing cocaine in 1919 (it was in the United States! surprise!) and a little something about famous cocaine users. This section includes Diego Maradona, Amy Winehouse and Freddie Mercury along with a little narrative about their use of the drug. There's also a diagram about how to make cocaine from the raw coca leaf. I took a bunch of pictures in the Museum but declined to snap one of that display. No way was I coming back from South America with a diagram of how to make cocaine on my phone.

The Museo De La Coca, Cusco.

So I can imagine what you are wondering: why didn't I just stuff a wad of coca leaves into my mouth and have done with it and get rid of that nasty headache and upset stomach? Well, I did. Sort of. Our hotel lobby had a pile of remedies for altitude sickness just sitting around waiting for folks to use, including a big dish of dried coca leaves, an always full canteen of coca leaf tea and even an oxygen tank on standby complete with (perhaps less than sanitary) mask for sucking some extra air into your lungs. And earlier that day I'd crunched on a coca leaf (kind of bitter and eating a dried leaf isn't pleasant) and had three or four cups of coca tea (sort of like green tea). 

It didn't work.

I'm sort of willing to admit that the upset stomach was caused by our meal that night of Peruvian junk food, including Inca Corn (Carolina BBQ flavor, if you must know), Chitzos and Tor-Tees but I don't know that for sure. And my private theory is I overdid it on the coca leaf tea entirely. I'd just have to wait until the morning to see if it was still there. So I slept it off, like I would any good hangover.

Pick your altitude sickness cure: coca leaves, coca leaf tea or oxygen. Taypikala Hotel, Cusco.

Miraculously, sleeping it off worked. We'd descend out of Cusco that next morning into the Sacred Valley of the Incas and then to Machu Picchu. The headache and stomachache never came back, despite our return to Cusco later that same week and a day trip to the town of Chinchero, which at 12,360 some feet above sea level is my new high point for having my feet on solid ground.

I'm assuming it was just acclimatization and I just needed a day or so to really get used to the higher elevation. I certainly didn't have any issue in Quito three years ago after the first night and that pattern held for our time in Peru. But it is difficult to breathe there. Despite the lack of noticeable effects after night number one, every so often I'd need to take a deep breath of air into my lungs to make up for the shortfall of oxygen available in my however many prior regular length breaths. This sort of thing went on all week. It's unnerving and the deep breath solution comes with its own concerns because taking a deep breath in the Andes is not like taking a deep breath somewhere lower down. There's just not enough air. Remembering to breathe is a funny concept. 

And running or climbing stairs? Do it slowly. I got winded easily. I know I'm not the fittest individual but the lack of oxygen was noticeable here. As it was when bending over and standing back up. Head rushes were never so painful.

I am supremely grateful that I was fortunate enough or healthy enough to not have breathing issues at altitude last week, particularly because the best thing we did while in Peru was to hike for a day in the Andes. I saw a woman in our hotel lobby who had to go for the oxygen tank and she seemed to be sucking down that air forever, at least as long as we were waiting for whatever we were waiting for. I stayed off the oxygen tank entirely and after that first day, I refused all coca based altitude treatments as well. I did just fine after that first night.

I can't imagine I'm heading anywhere higher than Peru any time soon. I'm certainly not heading to Everest base camp or anything silly like that. But if I do head back there, I'll at least know I can breathe on my own. And I guess that's comforting.

Chinchero, Peru. My new highest point above sea level. After a few days at altitude, I felt no ill effects.

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How We Did It
There's not much to doing what we did in this post. Go climb up a mountain and see what happens. But if you do find yourself in Peru, there's plenty of help available. We saw altitude sickness remedies all over the place in Lima, Cusco and elsewhere.

If your hotel doesn't offer coca leaves or coca leaf tea (I think there was coca leaf tea available in every hotel we stayed at including in Lima although the bowl of leaves was unique to Cusco if I'm remembering right), you will find a couple of alternate cures. We did buy altitude sickness pills in Lima just in case we needed them when we traveled to Cusco. We bought them at a pharmacy over the counter after some pointing and writing of numbers on pieces of paper (we needed help with the dosage) but ended up not using them. They are not super expensive.

There are also coca based candies, including chocolate and gum. We did buy some gum but I can't speak to its efficacy because (a) I didn't use it and (b) other than a little shortness of breath there was nothing I needed curing. I certainly wouldn't rely on anything I've written in here to help you through your own altitude sickness issues. Talk to someone more qualified than me if you really want to know what to do to make sure you are healthy in the mountains.

The Museo De La Coca is located at 618, Cuesta de San Blas on a small square in the San Blas area of Cusco. It's not going to take you long to get through the place and it's not going to cost you much either (10 soles or about $3.00 US as of this writing). I found it worthwhile I guess and it got us to a part of town that we wouldn't have gone to anyway which I guess is always good to do. Skipping it is not going to hurt you much either.

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Berber Whiskey

Before I travel somewhere new, I generally like to research the history, culture, sights and customs of wherever I happen to be heading. I say generally because despite making 15 trips to Las Vegas in the last 14 years, I still don't understand the history of that place; just never looked into it.

Vegas is my mulligan, if you will. 

So when I decided to spend three days in Marrakech this past spring, I turned to my trusty Lonely Planet guide and the whole entire internet to make sure I was prepared. Well prepared. Visiting Morocco, in all honesty, could have kind of freaked me out so I made doubly sure before I left Madrid to fly south to Marrakech that I had swotted up properly on the place so there would be absolutely no missteps.

Of all the Moroccan customs I was dreading, one of the scariest for me was drinking mint tea. Not the language, not getting lost in the souks, not being in the ethnic and religious minority or the lack of available sanitary public toilet facilities. Mint tea. Call me crazy here and you'd be completely and totally within your rights because there's nothing especially scary about it at all. It doesn't have mysterious hallucinogens or some other sort of drug like super powerful caffeine in it. It's just tea brewed with mint in it. Like a whole ton of mint.

Don't get it yet? I'm not surprised. Let me explain. Every guide book I read, be it on the internet or in good old fashioned paper form, described mint tea as the symbol of Moroccan hospitality. I guess it's sort of like pineapple in the United States, although I rarely get offered actual pineapples when visiting someone, which is regrettable. I was afraid I would encounter this stuff everywhere and that I just wouldn't like it and I would be faced with the choice between offending a host in a country which I didn't fully understand and drinking a liquid that I didn't particularly care for.

What's wrong with mint tea, you ask? Well as it turned out, nothing. But if there are two things that don't exist in my life, it's mint and hot drinks. Crazy, right? I know. But almost every drink I take in life is cold. I'm usually naturally hot (think insulating layer of blubber here) and I just never drink heated beverages. I make an exception sometimes for Irish coffee (hot) and red wine and bourbon (room temperature) but come on, all those drinks have alcohol in them, something I was confident I wasn't getting in my mint tea in muslim Morocco. I just can't stand mint and Americans seem to be obsessed with the stuff. For me, mint is good for dental products and gum. That's it. Nothing else.

So it's about an hour after I arrive in country and I'm faced with my first glass of mint tea (shown above) and I'm not looking forward to it. The tea is definitely hot and the teapot is jam packed full of mint leaves (believe me, I checked). The cookies look great (they were) but the tea, maybe not so much. The manager of our hotel, Ishmael, described the tea as "Berber whiskey" and poured the drink in what seems to be the traditional style, raising the pot as the glass is filled, causing an herb-y head on the tea. OK, so that's pretty cool. I can get behind a drink cheekily referred to as whiskey which has a beer like head on it served in what looks like an oversized shot glass.

And as it turned out, the tea was pretty darned good. I actually had it for breakfast every morning in our hotel by request. Mint tea, thankfully, is really not that minty or tea-y. It's sort of nicely in the middle of the two. It doesn't taste like gum or dental products and with a lot (and I do mean a lot) of sugar, it's nicely palatable. And to my relief, I guess, I didn't get offered it everywhere I went. I didn't find too much beer (best drink ever!) in Morocco but I'd still rather be offered water than tea if a cold brew isn't available. 

I will forever after refer to mint tea as Berber whiskey. I'll never get that phrase out of my head. And I like that, much like I'll every so often refer to donkeys as "Berber taxis". Mint tea was part of my Moroccan experience. If you ever go, have a glass of Berber whiskey for me.