More Textures

Textures

Though I haven’t edited many of my Africa photos since I’ve been home, I have been inspired lately by textures. These photos have been layered with various textures I’ve found online or have taken from my immediate surroundings. More to come soon!

Website Update

I have updated my website with a Senior Pictures category, and I am open to taking senior pictures throughout the summer around the Gorge. If anyone knows anybody who is graduating next year and would like their photos to be a bit different from the rest, they can contact me through this blog, through my website, or my emailing jenistembridge@gmail.com

Here are some examples of my latest senior session, the rest can be found here.

Home

Apologies for the hiatus.

I am home safe and sound, galavanting outside in the premature spring sunshine and catching up with old friends. The last few weeks of my trip were filled with snow storms in Petra, floating bodies in the Dead Sea, excrutiating sickness in Luxor, snowy passes in Switzerland, and scuba diving in the Red Sea. Perhaps I will share some stories, but first I am going to enjoy simply being in one place for a little while and start editing some photos. I will share them soon!

The White Desert

Here are some photos from our camping trip into the White Desert in western Egypt, a barren and magical landscape of stark white sandstone and calcium formations. It was like walking into the heart of psychedelia and setting up camp. Upon entering the White Desert we had to tell the guards that we were German, as Americans have to be escorted by police. When I suggested Canadian, our driver waved his hand at me erratically. When I asked why Americans have to be escorted by police, he waved it again and shrugged, indicating the conversation was over.

Some formations had human heads, some resembled cobras or camels or chickens, others looked like tables and sacrificial altars and unicorns. The ground was a hard white stone, covered mostly by sand. We slept in the open under an incredible array of stars and a sort of phallic monolith, surrounded by sleeping turtles and spindly mushrooms. Occasionally foxes would appear just at the edge of the firelight, peering cautiously at our food and yipping in a high warbling cry. Sunrise brought a pink hue to all of the white figures surrounding us, bathing everything in a rosy glow as we drank copious amounts of Bedouin tea with fresh mint and four spoonfuls of sugar.

The landscape was alive with a tremendous, cautious energy; a sort of trembling stillness. It left a lasting impression upon my mind, and I hope the photos can convey a little piece of that. Enjoy.

Of Family and Pharaohs

“It’s like fighting,” said Rami, gesturing to the oncoming traffic as he wove in and out of camels, wheelbarrows, and countless small children. He took a drag from his cigarette and ran his other hand through his crisp hair, then grabbed the wheel abruptly to dart between an old man on a donkey and a tour bus. Narrowly avoiding them both, he smiled and threw his smoldering stub onto the street. “I am a good fighter.” I laughed nervously and looked out the window. That’s when I saw it, looming in between buildings at the end of a long urban corridor – the Great Pyramid of Giza.

After spending nearly nine hours sprawled out on the cold tile floor of the Nairobi airport, I finally made it to Cairo – city of history, one of the main cradles of civilization, the end of the Nile I so enjoyed the beginning of. I shared a taxi with a few people from the plane, huffed up three damp and dingy flights of stairs, finally made it to the reception of the African Hostel, and immediately saw what I had been looking forward to the entire plane ride: the gnarly hair and gigantic beard of my brother Josh.

Yes, I will be sharing in this Great Egyptian Experience with my only sibling. A constant source of inspiration and laughter, a man as hairy as he is kind, my best friend through the ages, a guy as good as they come. We shared a couple of Pacific Northwest microbrews he brought in his bag and hit the streets.

I’m not sure if the ease in which I can walk around Cairo is directly related to the male presence at my side, but it feels great to be able to walk around a city at night again. And Cairo really awakens at night: it opens its bright and shiny eyes after a day of slumber and yawns out bleating horns and incessant chatter. The downtown area, filled with fluorescent window displays and sparkles, has an electric atmosphere and feels like a city of carnival booths. I liked to watch the women, fully covered from head to toe at the arm of their husband, gaze intently at the numerous lingerie window displays. The windows were nearly as bright as the faces of the men clutching at them.

But the most intense shopping is done at the sweet shops. It is incredibly hard to find a beer at a restaurant (or bar, for that matter) but the sweet shops at night are outrageous – grandmas pushing into the small of your back to move past you, families elbowing for more room to see the goods. You would move out of their way had you anywhere else to go, but the shop is so packed you simply have to deal with the jabs and float along with the sugar-hungry locals reaching and screaming for tarts and treats, pies and pastries, nut bars vacuum-sealed with sugar and boxes of donuts tied with ribbons.

The produce market at night feels like falling into a rainbow that smells slightly rotten. Prayer alleys jutting off from the colorful fruit stands reveal men lined up behind green mats to pray, the scent of bread and pizza from the small bakery on the sidewalk wafting through the alley and distracting from the pious moment. I had rather missed the Call to Prayer that I got so used to on the Kenyan coast, but here it is much more than that. Prayers are at all hours of the day – on the TV, on the radio, in the grocery store. Many people listen to prayers in headphones while they are working, occasionally repeating parts out loud.

We ate cow brain stuffed into hot dog buns on the side of the road and sat in tiny restaurants with upstairs seating that could double as courtrooms for mice trials. There are an incredible amount of coffeehouses, all looking the same with old men out front sitting on plastic patio furniture smoking sheesha and staring blankly at passersby. They snicker to themselves when tourists try to order something.

The morning, however, feels like death; like the day wakes up strangled and dazed and doesn’t regain consciousness until afternoon hits. The few people on the streets are like ghosts wandering aimlessly through the morning haze, barely slowing down at intersections. All other hours of the day, crossing the street may be the hardest thing one can do in Cairo.

Our second day in town Josh and I set out to do what everyone does when they are in Egypt: see the Pyramids. Rami, our driver, wore designer jeans, a jacket with sparkly silver lettering, a brown checkered scarf and smelled of hair gel. We stepped outside near the gate and were immediately approached by three men and a camel. We drank sweet, thick tea and discussed prices with them for nearly twenty minutes. Finally, the question was broached: “Do you want a camel?” I looked down at my foot and thought things through.

Over a month ago in Uganda I twisted my foot walking down a hill at the Hairy Lemon. It swelled up, turned green, and seemed to be getting better. Unfortunately, by the time I was in Nairobi, it still hadn’t healed so I finally went to get an xray – broken. I refused a cast in order to guarantee my time in Egypt was what it should be: climbing pyramids, diving the Red Sea, generally having a good time. I just didn’t think that a cast would allow me such rampant fun. The female traveler in me also didn’t like the idea of not being able to run if I had to. The pyramids of Giza, however, are nearly a 12k walk to see everything, and I could feel a dull throb in my foot from wandering around Cairo all night. I took a sip of my tea. “You better give me a camel.”

So it was that I perched myself on top of an unruly camel with open sores on his hind knees and a red knit blanket on his back. Josh rode beside me on a horse because we were told that we would want to trade off. I felt ultimately superior, not only because my camel was nearly three times the height of the horse, but also because I would occasionally catch him peeing on Josh’s leg. A small child of about five led us to the edge of the desert, where we veered right toward the great pyramids looming in the distance.

Our guide allowed us to climb the second pyramid by paying off the guards that inevitably swarmed around, demanding baksheesh (a general tip for services rendered, often exploited by security guards, small children who give you toilet paper in the bathroom, and even old women who show you how to get to a market). When other guards came over to wave us down (get their share), he paid them off too, and we were able to climb up the ancient stones. By the time we reached the Sphinx (Rami called it “Sphinkas”), the masses had arrived. Giant tour buses, like robot whales of the desert, parked in droves and a never ending sea of camera-toting tourists poured out of them, dissolving into the chaos like hot milk into tea.

Sometimes the pyramids of Giza felt a bit too much like Disneyland: thousands of tourists moping around, stumbling, staring through binoculars and shielding their faces from the sun. But, just like when you peek behind the Disney gates and find that Goofy is actually a chain-smoking Latino immigrant, things change when you venture just a bit off the trail from one site to another. You find dogs chewing on the remains of a horse carcass and feel the mighty desert wind force sand into every crevice of your body.  

We also went to Dahshur and Saqqara, the other, older, lesser-known pyramids. The Step Pyramid of Zoser is regarded as the oldest surviving pyramid in the world, and we were able to climb down into the lower caverns of the Red Pyramid of Dahshur. Rami also took us to the obligatory shops (“don’t have to buy, just look!”): a papyrus painting shop (“you want Arab boyfriend? Arab boyfriends are good”) and a perfume shop (“this one make you crazy like European horse! …only after midnight.”).

On our way back into downtown Rami taught us the secret language of car horns. “Two short honks” he demonstrated with his own horn, “mean ‘Hello,’ three quick high honks is a sort of alarm, and one longer, angry honk,” he lay on his horn aggressively and surveyed our expressions, “means ‘Get out of the way!’” He looked a bit sheepish. “We mean it when we honk like that – we are not slowing down.”

After a night of navigating Cairo and a day of clutching a camel between my legs, we arrived back at the hotel exhausted and dirty. Josh, still on U.S. time, was sleepy and delirious, and my foot pounded in my shoe in a show of displeasure at crawling through narrow passageways.

On to the next adventures.

Goodbye, Uganda

After a few days spent relaxing at Lake Naivasha and an amazing evening at the restaurant Carnivore in Nairobi (never ending meat? Heaven!), I am on to the next chapter of my African adventure: Egypt.  And while I am looking forward to it, I will certainly miss the little transitory home I have made and left at Bujagali Falls in Uganda.

Bujagali is a place where the air gets inside your pores and smells like exhaust and dirt and river water, where adventure and existence are one and the same. It is a word that sounds like a Halloween gag gift, a name that looks like the intestines of a scrabble addict.

The village sits haphazardly on a cliff overlooking the Nile and gives new meaning to the term “dusty”. It is the kind of place that makes your snot turn black, that makes a Q-tip look like an anthill when it emerges from your ear. At dusk the very air turns red with a mixture of dirt and the last bloody rays of sunlight, producing a glow that hovers over the village like a glistening ruby collection hidden under filthy glass. During this time hordes of teenagers congregate at the open field under the large spindly tree and play some sort of giant teamed keep-away game that involves a lot of clapping.

The locals have embraced the constant flow of muzungus. They remember everyone’s face, and if they don’t see you for a day or two they will ask what has happened. We had several dinners at Lwabaga’s, a local elder who sits behind you when you eat his food ready to engage in conversation at the slightest hint of welcome. He is genuinely interested in who you are and what you’re doing, and what we can all do to make the world a better place. When he suggests things like forcibly sterilizing everyone that is HIV+ through their food and water and we bring up the human rights implications involved, he says “We are just discussing, you know. They are just ideas.”

The plywood chapatti stands that line the dusty street had names like Bujagali Chapatti Company, or Uganda Chapatti Company, or Bujagali Chapattis. None of them have thought to sell any other snacks yet. “How about some fresh juice?” One of us might ask the chapatti boy. “No one else here has fresh juice. You could make more money than the others!” The boy would just shake his head and ask which number we want. They all have the same menu.

In the morning I would write or edit photos on a porch overlooking the Nile, relishing in the early morning sun that breaks through the haze in a shower of light and warmth and watching the fishermen throw sticks of dynamite into the river to collect the fish that inevitably rise to the surface like small fallen logs. Sometimes I would go watch the rafts flip over at The Bad Place and photograph the kayakers at Itanda Falls or Nile Special. I also learned a bit of kayaking, though one time I flipped over unexpectedly and hit my head on the bottom of my friend’s kayak trying to get back up again. He eventually had to flip me over manually, and I decided to take a little hiatus.

At the NRE bar it was always someone’s coming or going party, or just a party for the hell of it where people dressed up in shiny suits custom-made in Jinja and got their beards braided at the beauty shop next door. You could usually find a lone, awkward wiener dog asleep on the far left bar stool, and the nearly transparent geckos that lined the bathroom walls would sometimes fall unexpectedly from the ceiling and land on your head, or worse, your bare lap while you are sitting on the toilet. They scrambled away, just as terrified and embarrassed by the encounter as you.

I lived at Eden Rock, next door to NRE but much quieter. The restaurant had a pool table with a right angle in it, and there was usually either political commentary on the TV or a movie starring Brenden Frasier. Sometimes I would wake up in the morning to a giant spider stuck in between the tent and the flap, silhouetted in the sunshine. Its spindly legs seemed to hover over the thin fabric.

I took a side trip to Sipi Falls with Doug, Leonie, and Julian, a kayaker from Switzerland. Sipi consists of three giant waterfalls on the slopes of Mt. Elgon near the Kenyan border. We hiked around the waterfalls and watched a fabulous fiery African sun set behind a lone Acacia tree. Heading back to Bujagali we hitchhiked on the back of lorry trucks among dried maize and sleepy locals and sat on sacks of flour in matatus named Baby Snake and LisaMona (with an oversized heart dotting the “I”).

I will miss the adventure in the air, the lazy days spent at the Hairy Lemon gazing up at a blanket of stars, the friendly and inviting locals. I will miss hilarious nights at the casino in Jinja and the nightclub with the black lights and backward foosball table, little Nathan who licked my skirt the first time he met me, the lopsided ramshackle tent I’ve been living in and the friends I’ve known and loved in a very short but intense amount of time.

Goodbye, Bujagali. 

Goodbye, Uganda.

…Cue the Arabian music.

Rafting the Nile

“Paddle harder!” I eyed the immense wall of white water to our right and pushed my paddle down with all of my energy, but I just scooped air – the raft was already vertical. I looked straight into a churning mass of white and green foam and grabbed onto the rope. My body rolled sideways as water seethed into the raft, covering everyone with a slick foamy coat. I held on.

Suddenly I was up again, paddling fiercely against several angry waves. I looked behind us at Silverback, the grade five rapid we just tumbled down, and watched another raft topple sideways and flip over forcefully. The rafters waved their arms wildly trying to resurface from under the crushing water.

As we were the only raft to stay afloat the whole day, we praised ourselves for being amazing rafters and took pleasure in a long stretch of calm water. As the other rafts continued downstream to attack two more rapids we pulled in to a lodge called The Haven and enjoyed an enormous lunch, a nap in a hammock, a three course dinner, and beautiful accommodation. Doug, Leonie and I’s rafting adventure was a two day event.

Rafting and kayaking are extremely popular at the source of the Nile. With an assortment of everything from exhilarating grade threes to fearsome grade five rapids, the Nile has some of the best rafting in the world and the depth of the water makes it ideal for beginners. Kayakers also train here in the winter and the whole area has an air of excitement and adventure.

Thabani, our guide, was one of the first Africans to set foot on a raft. He guided the Zambezi for nearly ten years, did four seasons in Colorado and has since taught numerous locals to enjoy adventure sports on the river they depend on every day. The next morning, encouraged by our anything-goes attitude and our excitement of the previous day’s success, he decided to try out some runs he wouldn’t normally do. This time we were not so lucky. We flipped the raft four times that day – the first two day expedition ever to do so.

The worst was at Vengeance, a rapid we would normally power through with little more than a good drenching and an adrenaline rush. We hit a wave sideways and Doug flew out, though he was still grasping onto the rope attached to the side of the raft. “Get him in! Get him in!” yelled Thabani, but three seconds later he was yelling “Leave him! Leave him!” The look on Doug’s face said it all – eyes wide with horror and mouth wide with excitement. He let go.

Leonie and I turned simultaneously to see where we were headed, and immediately gasped a huge breath of air. A swell of undulating white rose ominously in front of us and with a sudden violent thrust we were upside down. Since I was on the opposite side where we were trying to rescue Doug, I was the first to go under and after much washing machine upside down and backwards rolling under water I grasped something – the boat! I was hoping I’d be able to find the “Cathedral”, which is the space under a flipped boat where tiny bits of sunlight filter through and you can catch your breath, but I didn’t find any air; just rubber. I scrambled in any direction I could, but the river has its own way of directing traffic – once your hand may reach the open air and then suddenly you are thrust upside down again and can’t figure out which direction is up.

Eventually my head reached the surface and I found Leonie’s wide eyes looking at me with a frantic expression. I had been under a long time. Coughing and sputtering, Thabani pulled me into the raft by my life jacket and I lay on the bottom for a minute before I realized that Doug wasn’t there. I looked up to see him in the safety raft, fist-pumping the air and yelling outrageously.

For Nile Special, the last rapid of the day, we had the option of swimming down through the waves. Leonie opted to stay in the boat and Doug and I were going to hop out and float down solo when we were told it was safe to do so. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to the point where we were supposed to jump. We hadn’t paddled hard enough to avoid the large wave to our right, and Doug and I, vertical in the raft, got launched out before we could do it ourselves. When I resurfaced, I was already far downriver. I held onto the safety kayak and Doug floated by me, beaming. Leonie and Thabani were nowhere to be seen.

Several minutes later Doug and I were both in the safety raft, but there was still no sign of them. The raft we just fell out of was violently surfing upside down at Nile Special wave, flipping and turning and being thrust around. Suddenly Leonie and Thabani drifted toward us in the current, wide-eyed and dazed. They had held on tight and surfed the wave for several minutes, their bodies repeatedly dunked into the rushing water and popped back out again and eventually flipped over altogether. “That,” said Thabani, shaking his head as he climbed into the safety raft, “has never happened on Nile Special before.”

Once we got our wits about us and waited for our raft to be spit out of Nile Special, we pulled into the Hairy Lemon, a secluded lodge on an island where we enjoyed cold beers and made a toast to both our horrific paddling and to our survival. Certainly a highlight of my journey so far, I have successfully rafted the Nile and am in the process of de-worming myself from the many, many parasitic organisms that can be found in the water. Ah, the magic of Africa.

These are some photos I took of other rafts at the rapid called The Bad Place. I also got some great footage with a headcam I mounted onto my helmet. Once I get it edited down into something more manageable, I will share it. Not for the easily seasick.

The Mammals of Murchison

After spending a few days wandering around Kampala running errands and avoiding the abnormally large storks chewing on garbage and shitting great massive explosions onto the sidewalk, I took my first safari into Murchison Falls in northwestern Uganda.

The largest protected area in Uganda, Murchison Falls National Park is named after the 45m waterfall of the same name flowing into the Victoria Nile. In all her languid and open glory, the Nile is suddenly squeezed through a 6m gap in the rock, spraying thick mist into the air and creating shimmering rainbows from every angle.  

We did a game drive through the park and stayed at a campsite near the water where warthogs roamed free and several hippo sightings occurred in the late hours of the night. Click on a photo to read a bit about the experience.

Gorillas in the Midst of Christmas

Thunder cracked over the rainforest, and white welts rose from the irritated skin on my left wrist. “Stinging nettles,” my guide said as he rubbed the sap from a large leaf over my skin. It immediately cooled off. We were climbing Bisoke volcano, an 11,000 ft straight-up-the-mountain kind of climb with a stunning crater lake at the summit and views over the Congo. As we hiked through an incredibly dense patch of overgrowth, Lisa suddenly stopped in front of me. A hush fell over the group.

Sitting to our right, hunched and looking rather bored, was a family of mountain gorillas. They stared quietly in our direction, one of them munched on a stalk of wild celery. Our guide silently rushed us past. We were not supposed to have seen them and photos weren’t allowed, as gorilla tracking is the main source of tourist income in Rwanda and it is in their best interest to avoid seeing gorillas when the tourists have only paid for a hike.

Fortunately, I was going gorilla tracking the next day.

The morning of Christmas Eve I left my things with the girls and shared a lift up to registration with a couple from South Africa, Chris and Victoria. We sipped strong black coffee at the entrance to the Parc National Des Volcans and met the rest of our group. In addition to the three of us there were three American teachers from the International School in Nairobi and a Dutch couple that was on their honeymoon and extremely insecure about it.

We were to be climbing around the steep forested slopes of Karisimbi Volcano, the highest in the region (over 13,000 ft) to search for a family of endangered eastern mountain gorillas. We hiked through dense bamboo groves, forests of stinging nettles that slapped the side of your face when you passed, and mazes of brambles. Our guide, Francis, led the way – slowly hacking a trail through the undergrowth as we slinked behind him searching for signs of gorilla life, which wasn’t always that hard to spot. In several patches of bamboo the stalks were so mangled it looked as if an elephant had plowed through.

The Dutch couple, hiking in front of me, would stop every three or four minutes to take a short video of themselves. He wore a classic tan safari vest and khaki pants, sported the obligatory black fanny pack and had patches of white sunscreen on his nose. She was heavyset, wore bright pink and carried a video camera mounted on a tripod that constantly knocked into things and caused a ruckus.

More than once we came across fresh dung, shaped into a sort of long chain. The Dutch couple roved the video camera over the mass of wet feces. “Does anyone ever take this home?” I asked. I imagined the hysterical look of pure joy on my father’s face if I were to pull out a plastic bag of endangered gorilla dung upon my return home, and I laughed out loud. Francis just glared at me with a look of utter disdain for the bizarre eccentricities of westerners.

Suddenly he stiffened, and began grunting in short heavy bursts, a lilting sort of grunt that sounded remarkably inviting. He told us to drop our bags and take only our cameras out – we were close. I could hear other grunts in the forest, deeper throatier grunts issued from a chest much bigger than our own. Branches of the forest canopy started rustling and shaking. Then I saw him.

Strutting out from under the foliage emerged the leader: the silverback. He made his presence known by knocking over surrounding trees with his hands, though he didn’t need to – everyone knew who was in charge. I was in awe. The feeling of coming face to face with the world’s largest primate is at first shock and then a sense of familiarity; their presence feels undeniably human. Sharing 97% of our biological makeup, they basically are human. But the feeling of awe reaches its height when it comes to their size. Francis said that the silverback standing in front of us, who nearly matched my height while on all fours, weighed around 200 kg (over 400 lbs.).

Mr. Big grunted a few times, almost a bit lazily and stalked off up the side of the mountain. We followed him. Francis pointed out three babies playing to our right – they wrestled together, one beat his chest importantly and then finally collapsed on top of the others in an exhausted heap, only to be picked up by a female and slung upon her back as she climbed a tree. There were younger males, nearly as big but without the saddle of silver on their backs, who would eventually be cast out to live on their own. They tended to sit in one place and chew on bark, hardly giving us a second glance. The smaller adult females were the most curious about us; one meandered up to our group and sat about six feet from me gazing around until she got bored and sauntered off into the undergrowth.

We were allowed one hour with the gorillas. Not nearly enough time to develop an accurate sense of their behavior, but it proved to be a fascinating look into their lives and a rare and humbling glimpse into our own past.

When I got back to town I caught a bus to Gisenyi to meet up with Megan, Lisa and Marloes. Gisenyi is on the shores of Lake Kivu, which also borders the Congo, and was extremely dismal and uninviting. The rain poured all night, and we spent Christmas Eve drinking enormous beers and playing cards in our room.

Since Christmas day ended up being one of those days where everything goes wrong, I have officially decided that my time at Lake Bunyonyi counts as my Christmas. Lake Bunyonyi (“Lake of Little Birds”) is a flooded river valley in southern Uganda, a serpentine water channel dotted with over twenty islands and more dugout canoes than one can count. It is a place where you can hear drumming and singing from nearly every direction no matter where you are.

I spent most of my time with Leonie and Doug, an English couple I met in Kenya and have run into many times since. We paddled around the lake drinking gin and tonics and listening to music, spotting otters and taking swigs of cheap banana liquor I had bought in Rwanda. More than once we got caught in the middle of the lake during a lightning storm, climbing back up to our hostel drenched and bursting with adrenaline.

We partied with the locals on New Years Eve. It was a night of drumming and dancing and singing, then 2010 began by setting off Chinese lanterns over the water and taking a pleasant midnight swim under bright moonlight.

Bunyonyi is popular because of its lack of crocodiles, hippos, and bilharzia, a parasite that lives in nearly all freshwater lakes in East Africa. But mostly is it because it has an incredible atmosphere – it gives you a sense of being in a fantastical land, like hobbits and gnomes will pop out of the perfect green hillsides and invisible festivals of spirits are taking place all around. It appears dreamy and often looks unreal, like a backdrop painted onto the air. It is pure magic.

In the week I’ve spent at this enchanting lake, I have had a chance to edit a few of my gorilla photos. Here are some of my favorites: