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Africa Travel Tips 1
2003-03-04 12:02 p.m.

So most tips for travelers to Africa will tell you to bring mosquito netting, take your malaria medication, avoid street demonstrations, and so forth. All well and good, but kind of boring if you've got an ounce of common sense. So after two trips to the continent, traveling through various countries, here are some of mine – by request, no less: hi diane!

1. Chiefs like Schnapps , or any kind of hard alcohol that is hard to come by in their country. It's customary, and "strongly suggested", to greet the chief of the village you're trying to visit or must pass through in order to get to whatever waterfall/bushbuck watering hole/monkey sanctuary you're interested in seeing. This, do understand, is more than just a friendly handshake. This is an "offering" from your native land, in the form of good old American Cash or western-label alcohol. If you're a little low on cash, and aren't we all, this is a cheaper solution: picking up a bottle of schnapps at the airport before your flight in to present at that key moment. Do I seriously suggest lugging a glass bottle of Stoli around in your pack? How bad do you want to see that waterfall/bushbuck watering hole/monkey sanctuary anyway?

Don't misunderstand, you never just drop of the bottle and go. This is not the ticket counter at Disneyworld. You are asked to partake, if even for show, in a sort of "one for me, one for my dead homies" passing around of the cup (yes, pouring some out after you drink for the spirits of the ancestors is customary. Is that where we got that from?). This makes it a sort of social event -- your coming in and presenting the offering suddenly does, in a twisted way, become more than just your Western dollars. Don't let this opportunity pass you by, even though you just saw the goat drinking out of the same cup that you're about to drink from. How can you think about dysentery at a time like this? You're being awarded a high honor, now pour some out for your dead homies and like it.

2. Chiefs dress and act like chiefs . Therefore, the tattered-clothes man with the scraggly beard who is obviously drunk is probably not the chief, though he earnestly claims to be. He might insist that he needs your money to save the coconut trees and therefore the village, but don’t buy in. Chiefs, whether in Jeans or Ceremonial/Traditional robes, have been elected or raised as noble and regal representative members of the community. It’s probably a pretty good chance, then, that if people in the village seem to shoo away mr. scraggly-beard chief, and even seem slightly amused by your interaction with him, he’s bogus but harmless. Since I don’t advocate handouts of any kind, because it impedes the construction of an equal partnership in globalization (hey leave me and my idealism alone), the best thing you can give mr. bogus chief is conversation and warmth.

3. Forget everything you’ve ever learned about the rules of safe public transport . Hey, is that a hole in the floor? Should the back seat be making that grinding noise? Can I hold this goat/child/television set/old woman on my lap as we go? You bet! This “licensed though private” form of “Lorry” travel, often in the form of beat-up vans (in Ghana, called tro-tros, in Cameroon and Togo, called bush-taxis), might literally be your only way out to that waterfall/bushbuck watering hole/monkey sanctuary. Besides, when is the last time you got to ride in a 16 seater Mitsubishi microbus with three smelly animals and 19 strangers? Riding backwards? Hoping the doors that are tied together with twine don’t fly open? Enjoy! Or, wait the four hours for the government bus that never comes, so that you can do it all over again the next day. What day was that flight back to Amsterdam, anyway?

4. Dairy is out . So we know what the CDC web-site says about “peel it, boil it, or forget it”, blah blah blah. One thing they don’t tell you to watch for, though they should, is dairy. Unless it’s that laughing cow cheese that comes from Holland IN WAX, PRESEALED, ONLY OPENED BY YOU, you run the risk of eating something un-pasturized, which you’re probably not used to. This won’t kill you, but it will hurt for a while. Then you might have to cancel the trip to the waterfall/bushbuck watering hole/monkey sanctuary.

More to come! WHO AM I, ANYWAY?