From South of France, My Tour de France

I had fun, in the last few weeks, following the Tour de France, the world's most popular bicycle race.

For the first part of the Tour I was living in a hotel and had the full privileges of the electronic world.  Every afternoon I would turn on the TV, open an internet ticker, and follow the live Boulder Report blog.

Burundi is, more or less, due south of France, and so I got to watch the race, for the first time, in its original time zone.  No need to wake at 6 a.m. for a bleary-eyed pedal over to the house of a friend who had cable.

I also got to watch in French, the language in which God intended Le Tour to be appreciated.  Of course, I understood squat.  J'etudie francais these days, I study French, since Burundi is solidly Francophone.  But the TV commentary was way beyond me.  I refreshed the live blog often to get the scoop in English.

For the crucial last week of the race, however, I was living in a temporary house: no TV, no internet.  I missed the Tour, and I didn't miss it.  There's good and bad to having most of your afternoon taken up watching a bunch of men in skin-tight shorts bob back and forth on bicycles so well-engineered you can lift them with a finger.

It got a little ironic, too, following the Tour from Burundi.  First of all, there were no black Africans in the race, never have been (though at least one guy is trying to change that).  It's a very white, Western sport.  For diversity, a couple of Japanese and Colombians rode this year.

Second, these men are riding bicycles that cost more than the average Burundian will make in half a lifetime.  Here, even buying one of the typical single-speed bikes - about all that's available in Burundi - is unaffordable for many.  Here, most people walk.

In Burundi, bikes are for work, not for racing.  They're built heavy and solid, so you can do things like install an extra seat over the back wheel.  Then your bicycle becomes a taxi.  You can make a little change, enough for some lunch.

Photo: a bicycle taxi driver in Bujumbura.

I confess I was thinking of the Tour de France, however, when on a recent ride I found myself suddenly surrounded by three of these bicycle taxis.  The drivers were all chatting with each other, grinning, pumping their pedals hard to get in front of me.

The passengers, women in colorfully patterned wraps, smiled from the back seats.  "Jambo," they hollered in Swahili, hello.  Riding sidesaddle, they swayed easily back and forth as the men pedaled.

I popped up into my big gear ring to keep up with these six companions.  We made a perfect Burundian peleton, I thought.

Then, another rider joined us.  Leaning lightly forward, he crossed his arms casually atop his handlebars, as if he were sitting on a sofa drinking tea.  He cruised to the front of our convivial pack.  Then he attacked!

He opened up a gap.  Thankfully, since I'd been watching the Tour all week, I knew what to do.  I got on his back wheel.

We'd be a breakaway, I thought, hammering hard all day for glory, hoping the women riding sidesaddle back in the pack wouldn't make their pedaling men feel too bad about being left behind and whip them up to catch us just before the finish line.

But no, I was the only one racing for glory; soon I was riding by myself.  While I dreamt of fame, my breakaway companion just wanted to get to the next town.

The Miracle of the Disappearing Wine

It was a miracle.  One minute a half-bottle of fine Spanish 'Rioja' wine nestled nicely in the back pocket of my backpack.  The next minute it was gone.

Or maybe not a miracle, but a trick of some market magician keen to earn a few Burundian francs.  He would leap suddenly in front of me, grin, and pull the missing bottle from an empty hat.

I had just stopped at the Beronia grocery shop, where, along with two packets of good, green Spanish olives, I impulse-bought the wine.  Zipping my purchases into the back pocket of my pack, I slung it on my back and marched into the teeming streets of downtown Bujumbura.  Next stop: buy some bed sheets at the marche central.

The central market is the epicenter of Bujumbura.  Under a high pavilion roof, merchants stake out a cramped space, build a rough wooden 'stall,' and set up shop.  Wander there and you can find most of the basics of life to buy, but few of the frills.

It's a fun place for a foreigner to roam, but you've got to have your wits about you.  "Watch out for pickpockets," friends had warned.  As I pushed through mid-day crowds toward the bedding area, I kept mental tabs on my wallet.

But I forgot about my bag.

Suddenly, something felt strange behind me.  I yanked the backpack off my back.  Yes, of course, the zippered pocket had been opened, the fine 'Rioja' taken.  No miracle, no magician.

I berated myself: why would I dangle steal-able items tantalizingly in an outside pocket, zippered or not?  I grew up in the 'hood, I'm supposed to have more street smarts than that.  Dumb muzungu.  Daft whiteboy.

Which is basically what two men at some hardware stalls said to me when I stopped, found my bag open, and looked up to see them eyeing me concernedly.  I pantomimed the wine bottle being lifted from my bag.

"Well, it's the market, you gotta be careful," they seemed to say in French, though they may have said, "The moon is going to be full tonight; can I sell you some nails?" for all the French I know.

I continued on with my errands.  What else could I do?

After bargaining successfully for bed sheets, I also bought a half-bottle of Drosty, a popular South African wine, as a consolation from the shock of theft.  Determined not to have all my street-smarts desert me that day, I looked closely to be sure that the seal on the bottle hadn't been tampered with.  "Not all the products in the marche are 'real,'" my friends had also warned me.

That night, at dinner, I pulled out the bottle of Drosty.  "In the interests of full disclosure," I said to my drinking companion, "I bought this bottle of wine in the central market."  She looked dubious.  "But the top looks properly sealed," I volunteered.

I cracked opened the screw cap.  I sniffed the bouquet.  "It smells like real wine," I said.

I poured two glasses, then took a sip.  "It tastes like real wine," I said.

A minor miracle.

And, for the second time that day, a bottle of wine disappeared.

It's Harder to Dance than You Think

Lately, I've been trying to moonwalk.  As is most of the rest of the world, apparently, after Michael Jackson's sudden death shocked his music and moves back to center Earth stage.

There's even a fan site featuring video of everything from humans to cats to stuffed bears trying out the signature shimmy.  I see the flashing video clips and think: "That's easy; I can do that."

Growing up an Amish-Mennonite, I had no radio, no TV, couldn't listen to music with a beat, sang hymns acapella in church.  Because of this, I wasn't really aware of popular culture until the mid-90's, around the time I turned 21.

But I wasn't the typical Amish-Mennonite child: my parents' mission move from their grassy, faith-filled community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (the heart of Amish horse-and-buggy country) put me scraping my knees on the sidewalks in a Washington DC 'hood.

From there, even I couldn't avoid the super-stardom of Michael Jackson.  Playmates and schoolmates talked incessantly about him.  I remember some hoopla about a glove.  And of course they all tried to make their feet moonwalk.

I didn't.  You see, in the black neighborhood of Kenilworth, white men couldn't, it was said, do two things: jump, and dance.  And not only was I white, I was the son of a preacher-man who thought shaking one's booty was rather more like sin than like fun.  My booty, and my feet, stayed still.

As I got older, however, and my cultural world widened, I also started to move my hips a bit.  Just a little, to and fro, just now and then.  It felt good to loose the body.  Though I mostly danced when I was alone.  Like my semester in Oxford, England, where I didn't feel at home until I had cut loose, just me and the music in my head, on an empty street at 2 in the morning.

Here in Burundi, I had a very different 2 a.m. chance to dance.  A nightclub next to my hotel was blasting live music late into the night.  Though I had gone to bed around 10, I was still awake at 2, and the music just kept pounding.  I went to see what in heck was going on over there.

With my limited French, I asked how long this music would continue.  "We will be dancing till dawn!" a spritely manager said.  Uh-oh.

I managed to communicate that, in the hotel next door, I couldn't sleep.  He looked at me.  "Well come and dance, then!" he said.

I had to laugh.

I didn't dance, though.  Sometimes, the timing just isn't right.  And, like in Kenilworth, I'm still a white man in a land that's strange to me.

I've been learning lately how, just because I've jumped to a new place and a new culture before, it doesn't mean the next jump is easier.

When I finally tried the moonwalk, soon after Jackson's demise, my feet felt awkward, alien.

It's harder to dance than you think.

Bike Shops, Bonding, Brakes, and Burundi

In 2002 I bought a bicycle.  We bonded.  I pedaled it across the US.  In DC it was my car.  In Pakistan it carried me safely through Taliban-country hills.

In 2009 I left the bike behind in Talib-land.  Heartbreaking, perhaps, but for the best.  My cousin Glen tried for comfort: "The thrill of owning a new bike, I find, quickly replaces nostalgia for the old one," he (sort of) said.

And so it is.

I bought my new bicycle at Valencia Cyclery in San Francisco's Mission District.  It's a Specialized Rockhopper, dark gray, with sporty front shocks and new-fangled disc brakes.

While the bike indeed pleased me, all shiny and spiffy, the disc brakes worried.  I knew nothing about their inner workings.  And, I was taking my purchase to Burundi, home of no bike shop to which I would trust my brand new ride.

What if the rotor got mangled in transit? I wondered.  What if the caliper housing broke open on a Burundian rock?  I'd be stuck in a strange and hilly land, brake-less.  The world would turn, and I'd have no way to stop myself while careening through it.

The brakes, happily, survived airline handling.  The rear derailleur (that gear-shifty thingy by the back wheel) didn't.  Some unkind luggage lout piled too much weight on top of my boxed-up baby, and the derailleur bent.

The need to buy an Allen wrench to unbend this part occasioned my first real wrestle with cross-cultural communication in Bujumbura.  For how am I, speaking only English, to tell my need to shop attendants speaking French, Kirundi, and Swahili, but no English?  Options: 1) "Um, um, um..."; 2) increasingly vague hand gestures; 3) doodling incomprehensible shapes on a scrap receipt...

We figured it out, eventually.  Then with helpful email advice from the folks at Valencia Cyclery, I made the crooked straight.

The Cyclery folks were helpful in general, actually, facilitating my purchase during a quick visit to their city in between Pakistan and Burundi.  I'd buy a bike from them any day.

On the day that I did, I had to work quick - I was flying out tomorrow.  So after a little bike-and-owner bonding in some nearby mud, I spread my tools out on a gritty Mission District sidewalk and fit my new cycle back into its shipping box.

"I'm taking this bike to Burundi!" I wanted to yell to random passersby as I worked.  Yes, the thrill of the new was quickly replacing nostalgia for the old.

What I didn't realize was that, once in Bujumbura, sometimes I'd want nothing more than to feel again those gritty American sidewalks beneath my feet.

But I love the orange dirt here, I really do, and I go out now and then to tear it up on my new Specialized.  The disc brakes are great, the bent gear-shifty-thingy shifts its gears as if it never had to be straightened, and when I'm on the bike, I feel a little more at home with every pedal stroke.

Brightening the Corner Where They Were

I've read two books recently that shed light on oft-untravelled parts of the globe.  One is fiction that feels like autobiography, and the other is autobiography that's crazy enough to be fiction.

I had the good fortune to chat with Nicholas Schmidle a couple times while we both lived in Pakistan.  His tales of adventure as an independent writer and inquiring American there made me shake my head in disbelief.

Now he's put his stories in a brand new book - To Live or To Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan - and it's a ride.

Nostalgic for the scent of tear gas (because he knew then he was close to the action)?  Check.  Interviewing a policeman while protester's rocks (and bullets) pinged around in rioting urban slums?  Check.  Making friends with a jihadi who raised an armed rebellion in Pakistan's capital?  Yup, did that too.

Unfettered by formal ties to news outlets, Nicholas wandered Pakistan at will, taking his freelance reporter's notebook into the unlikeliest of places.  His ability to speak Urdu (the national language) and willingness to travel in 'unsafe' areas gave him unparalleled access to Pakistan's life and politics.

The result?  A taut and penetrating look into an endlessly fascinating and deeply complicated country, with stories and insights you'll find nowhere else.

And it ain't fiction.

The next book, though, is: Whiteman, by Tony D'Souza.  Yet in its illumination of real-life experience, it reads like more than a novel.

The autobiographical feel is no accident.  About an aid worker (Jack) from the US who lives in a remote Ivory Coast village for three years, Whiteman is written by a former Peace Corps volunteer to, of course, Ivory Coast.

Since I live on the periphery of the international development culture myself, I've heard plenty of Peace Corps stories.  Yet, as so often, it was in this fictional setting that I began to really understand the plopped-in-a-village life that I've heard so much about.

But that's what good literatures does, right?  It gives us a way to imagine - and so comprehend - the lives of others.  And the book is pretty decent literature, I'd say; I wanted to read it all day, and did.

Structured as free-flowing chapters on Jack's integration into local life, Whiteman lays bare the realities of international 'development,' and not always in complimentary fashion.  There's corruption, misunderstandings and mismanagement, sex aplenty (that'll keep you reading), and of course a little redemption - but never too much.

In the end, D'Souza's character bribes his way past armed checkpoints to fly home as Ivory Coast devolves into civil war.  As for Nicholas Schmidle, he gets booted out of Pakistan (twice) for his push-the-limits reportage.

Unfortunately there's too much conflict in the world, and too much world to visit to comprehend it all.  But thankfully we have writers like D'Souza and Schmidle to help us travel, and understand, without having to brave the tear gas and the checkpoints ourselves.