Insideotherplaces

Drinking at the doctors in the Ivory Coast

Booze or medicine It’s a common dilemma for the poor, hard-drinking man: spend your limited funds on medicine or get drunk to disguise the symptoms? However, in West Africa they have found a unique solution – make booze into medicine. In the Ivory Coast it all starts with the basic ingredient of palm wine or Banji as its known. Sap from certain varieties of palm is tapped off every day from the living trees to be delivered to the thirsty, although…

Toilet of the month

A celebration of Ethiopia’s most notable cultural heritage. Once in a while, a piece of toilet architecture stands out head and shoulders above the competition, sometimes enough to make a whole month of dragging yourself around UNESCO World Heritage Sites and unique geological creations somehow worthwhile. This glorious example tucked away in the back-end of Abozo in southern Ethiopia will surely soon be turning this quiet little village into a major tourist hub, as the masses flock to get a…

Nobody runs in Gonzague

A bit of everyday life in the suburbs of Abidjan, Ivory Coast There’s a wonderful lack of urgency on the sandy streets of Gonzague, this ramshackle development stretched out along the pedestrian unfriendly, coastal route to Grand Bassam. Why hurry anywhere, when you can dawdle in the sun and sea breeze, chat to neighbours or a shopkeeper, making a trip to the shop last twice as long as any westerner would? A goodbye to a parting guest might become a…

Fuck you Ethiopia!

Dear Ethiopia Actually, why am I starting with the word dear, when what I really want to say is, “fuck you”! It’s difficult to hold anything dear about a place that has institutionalised the ripping off of visitors and does so with a level of contempt that may well be unique. If it was just me that had similar thoughts, I’d keep my whining to myself and any other embittered travellers for when we’d had a few too many beers,…

The hand painted, shop art of Somaliland

It often takes time to dig up the real cultural differences when you cross borders in Africa but sometimes evidence leaps out at you immediately, such as in Somaliland: neighbouring Ethiopia and nearby Sudan are almost devoid of the brightly painted shop fronts that you see on many streets in Somaliland. Such art can be found elsewhere in Africa but each region has its own take: sometimes modern and stylish but often crude, or what some in the art world…

The Tea Ladies of Sudan

You won’t get very far on a street in Sudan before you run into a sittet shai, a tea lady providing essential hot refreshments to passersby: tea, sometimes laced with cinnamon or mint; coffee, with flavours like ginger, cloves or cardamom; karkadeyh – hibiscus tea. Whatever the choice it will come totally saturated with sugar. Crouched on little chairs behind their paraphernalia and a charcoal burner with a steaming kettle, these ladies are an essential part of everyday life. Over…

Hit me with your rhythm stick- Part 3 The deserts of Sudan

Traveling the lyrics of Ian Dury Once again the chance arrived to tick off another destination in my pointless quest to travel the lyrics in Ian Dury’s, Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick. Even without its link to the opening line of the legendary (ish) song I would have gone to Sudan anyway, precisely because it’s near the bottom of the list of places to go to for sensible people and near the top of the list of places the…

Dreams of the Empire in Sudan

Somewhere in rural England a wizened figure in the landed gentry is bemoaning the loss of the good old days of empire. His echoes reverberate to the ears of a tattooed skinhead, wistfully staring into his can of super strength lager in a grubby, urban apartment, festooned with Union Jacks, waiting for an English football team to live up to the days when we conquered the world. No doubt, both would be surprised to learn that some measure of…

The tuk tuks of Dongola

The custom, auto-rickshaw scene in Sudan In a short space of time, cheap, Asian imports have transformed many aspects of life for Africans: mobile phones are now within reach of the relatively poor, opening up communication in what has always been an oral culture that values the spoken word over the written one; Chinese motorbikes have created jobs for two-wheeled taxi drivers and increased access for individuals in more remote places that you might have had to wait a week…

Dear God

A Catholic wedding in Sudan Dear God I had expected to be writing to you with your Allah hat on, seeing that Sudan is a Muslim country, but as luck would have it I got invited to a Catholic wedding so thought I had better have a few words with you about it. Whatever religious hat you had on when you created the people of Sudan you must have been in a good mood, as they are a likeable lot…

Insideotherplaces

Drinking at the doctors in the Ivory Coast

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Toilet of the month

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Nobody runs in Gonzague

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Fuck you Ethiopia!

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The hand painted, shop art of Somaliland

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The Tea Ladies of Sudan

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Hit me with your rhythm stick- Part 3 The deserts of Sudan

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Dreams of the Empire in Sudan

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The tuk tuks of Dongola

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Dear God

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