Mucking About, Getting Out

Last Wednesday I was thinking about something I learned from a singing Swiss man in Pakistan (my previous 'strange place').  We were holed up in the 'warm hut' at Fairy Meadows, that stupendous retreat at the foot of Nanga Parbat, Earth's 8th highest peak.

Outside, snow and clouds lingered, so he sat and sang - as all Swiss mountain men must on bad-weather days.  He'd been living in Pakistan all of three weeks and was already in the high Karakoram for a weekend.  He taught me this: on moving to a new country go direct to adventure - don't muck about!

I'd been mucking about.  I grabbed my bike and went.

Bujumbura lives on a narrow strip between lake and mountains.  Its highest habitations dig into hillsides; its lowest kiss water.  I picked a paved road that, running south of town, cut diagonally toward the hills.  Soon the road turned up, and up, and up.

But I didn't mind - I like to climb.  With a lakeside panorama opening below and mountain highlands above, I had plenty to keep me entertained.

And then, of course, there were the kids.  They waited at every roadside village; soon the slap-slap of small feet running became a familiar sound beside me.

And everywhere cries of "Muzungu!" the local word for 'whiteboy.'

But what entertained, or rather astonished, me the most were the other bicyclists.  These were young men who earn their living biking sacks of charcoal from the forested heights to city markets.

They careened down the hill at twenty miles an hour and more, two heavy and oversized burlap bags piled crosswise on the rack over their back wheel.  Often, one plastic-flip-flopped foot dragged on the pavement, an extra brake.

Already, they're my heroes.

For awhile, one of them joined me as I climbed.  He pushed his one-speeder uncomplainingly up as I pedaled my fancy cycle, outfitted with 21 luxurious gears.  On the steep sections, he could walk his bike faster than me; other times he jogged to keep up.

Both of us were sweating in the mid-day heat and sun.  I was getting tired and ready to turn around.  I pulled one of my water bottles out to share with him.  He drank gratefully.

I had to think again of Pakistan, and a day hike I took in the Kashmir mountains.  Out too long on a path more difficult than expected, I descended from on high toward Muzaffarabad city, exhausted and with little water.  A woman tending goats saw my nearly-empty bottle and called out, "Panni, panni!" wanting water.  I knew I barely had enough for myself.  I kept walking.

This time, though, I learned what I should have learned then - sharing is refreshment enough.  Watching my fellow-biker drink, suddenly my feet - and I know this is sappy, but it's true - my tired feet were light again.

My companion soon stopped at a roadside shack, but I continued, newly invigorated, up the mountain for 30 minutes more.

To Inside or Outside the World, and How

As an expatriate living in strange places, I have to find new ways to perceive, and take part in, the life around me.

Of course, these places are not strange to the people who live there; to them, I am the stranger.  I walk about in my obvious outsider skin and look like a freak.  Sometimes, this difference makes me stay inside instead of go out - I'm tired of being odd.

My "inside" at the moment is the Ubuntu Hotel in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi and my new 'strange place.'  The other day I was feeling freak-ish and closed in, so I pulled back the curtains and looked out.

Glancing left, I saw the walled compounds of Bujumbura rise to meet the hills, still lush and green despite a month of dry.  I looked for, but could not see, the source of the deep drumming pounding into my room.  Even nearby palm trees swayed to the energy of those beats.

Well, actually, the palm trees moved to the breeze from the lake.  Glancing to my right, I saw Lake Tanganyika, a glossy blue surface rippled dark with waves.  I had to stop myself from smelling salty air - it's only a freshwater lake, though it looks like an ocean.

I rolled both windows open to let the breeze into my room.  Though I didn't want to go outside, at least I could let the outside in.

This blog intends to be a record of what I find when I do go beyond the window, beyond the door, beyond the compound wall and exchange the world inside for that big, crazy out-of-doors.

These days I often make the inside-to-outside leap on the bicycle I brought from the US.  Though the bike makes me stick out even more - look Mom, there's a white man in an outlandish helmet pedaling up our road! - it also gets me out.

When I don't want to engage with the newness around me, or don't know how to, I get on my bike and go somewhere. Anywhere.  Then the bicycle becomes my way of seeing the world, and by "seeing" I mean more than just looking.  I mean - I don't know quite how to put it - a deeper way of seeing, a biting into, a true and symbiotic experience-ing of the place that my difference sometimes isolates me from.

So I'm calling this blog "Biking Bujumbura" not because it will be all about bike riding (it won't), but because my bicycle is, at present, often my actual and metaphorical way of seeing this new place where I've landed.  In the midst of the unfamiliar, the familiar exercise of riding becomes my interpretive lens.

I pedal myself into the world, and the world takes me for a tour.