the Adventure Lifestyle magazine

have been there. In Africa there is violence, crime, fear and pestilence. But there is also beauty, friendship and deep understanding of how people survive. Africa is a deadly hot place where rain squalls can drop the temperature so quickly that grown men throw up. Where massive walls of blowing sand can choke and blast everything to a light brown softness. Where camels walk, ghostlike, through the desert carrying dirty white slabs of salt. Where massive mud buildings create a look that is as alien as one can get on this planet. A place where paddle wheelers chug down brown rivers, faded yellow earth movers sit dead and picked like dinosaur carcasses. A heavy place where the necessity of doing nothing creates unusual incidents and fast friends. Africa can be your paradise or your worst nightmare. To those who have been there, Africa is shades and nuances, complex conundrums and bizarre events. But, ultimately, Africa is unexplainable. You have to go and experience it for yourself. The country can be divided into five dissimilar parts, separated by great empty forests and deserts. THE HORN: A heat-blasted hell of dried animal carcasses and bucktoothed mooryans; a land of blood feuds and heartless thievery (Includes Ethiopia, Erit rea, Somalia + Djibouti). THE MAHGREB: The western-most realm of Islam. A dry hot mountainous land with a lush Mediterranean rim. A safe place, except for Algeria where a government wars on its own people. The shores of North Africa are a rich indolent place where people once fed and inebriated the ent ire Roman Empire with their wheat and grapes. A land of empty ruins, great hospita lity and sparse elegance. THE WEST: A land of color, cultural clashes and forced stability, criminal and colonial. This area contains nations set up as free homelands for the slaves, one American, one British-both disasters. Liberia and Sierra Leone seem to have no future, no hope, only the constant nihil istic f riction of dissonant cultures. THE SOUTH: The lands of safaris, superficial civilization, scenery, careening economies and Western influence. A land unraveling into chaos at its east and west extremit ies and, increasingly, at its center. THE GREAT LAKES: The countries that border the Great Rift Valley, in Cent ral eastern Africa, the cradle of humankind and the wellspring of the Apocalypse. Colonial influence still flutters , ripped and bloodstained, in the wind. Mildewed, looted and burned architecture, border guards with bloodshot eyes, glue-sniffing kids wielding AKs with the stocks sawed off. This is a land where there has been a great war between the Nilotics and Bantus but no one dares to intervene. A place so devolved that there is no law, no hope, no money-only warfare and survival. on me, like a wiidebeest that didn't see the lIone.ss out of the corner of it's eye. Yet Atnca lets mfillve-for now. -·Kobert Young Pelton Atrica cauQht me unprepared. It pouncea But geography is sefiOndary to the emotional a.nd sensory adventure t at ~waits you in Afnca. It's hard to describe the eellngs th~country evokes. The crysl;;ll clarity of a sl,mrise. he awe-inspiring storms. The brut;;lI.lty of death. T e soft slng-SQng of women speaking In the thatched huts. I he warfare that does not seem to alter the routine of the people. because I h9ve alwi:;lYs taken Africa seriously,

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