Eggs

I peel a hard boiled egg on the terrace of Cassia Lodge my last morning here. The egg has a minor role in a vast breakfast that also includes a fruit and yogurt course, some vegetables they steamed specially for me, some sweet little pancakes with passable syrup, fried potatoes. I gave the yogurt to…

Nicholas’ Village

We stop at the petrol station at the junction of Nicholas’ village, so he can show me his shop. I get out of the car and Brenda Nsiimenta points out that they are butchering meat right there, for Christmas. She thinks I will find it interesting. Without thinking, I snap a quick photo of the…

Manoti Rebecca

Smith and I take twin bodas to a residential street on the edge of Mbarara, looking for the place Manoti Rebecca works. We shoot forward and back, stopping at a T junction of two red dusty roads, a small sign that says Buhumuriro Counseling Centre. “They have shifted since I was here last.” “Should we…

A Covid accent on everything

Ugandan accents are home to me now, the different regional languages fusing into a shared rhythm in English, alternately soothing and pocked with loud inflection, soft and punctuated with low growls that demonstrate that you are indeed listening to the person.  The upended, rhetorical question.  “We thought the pandemic was coming to an end, but…

My boys brought me flowers

The lift off from Toronto is bumpy, windy and suspended, bouncy enough that I genuinely wonder, for the first time in my life, if the plane might crash on takeoff.  It is a thing that happens.  As I ponder my forethought at revising my will, my seatmate takes a photo of Toronto by dark.  We don’t crash.  We bounce…

5 days in Burgas: be here now

This time in Bulgaria — like all times since March, 2020 — hasn’t actually followed the plan. After the first two incredibly intense days of riding, I abandoned the whole carefully-crafted intention to traverse the country by bike and cobbled together a whole new trip of time with my friends, time by the sea, shorter…

“It’s not every day you go on a boat”: 3 days in Sozopol

Sozopol has been an actual holiday type sojourn, a beach-and-trashy-novel day, a restaurant-with-cultural-dancing evening, lots of ice creams eaten while looking at the sea. A 70 km loop bike ride that took me to ancient Thracian standing stones, a ride that was so much more easeful in 29C and without a loaded bike. Susan says…

Sliven to Burgas: the train

I’ve abandoned my project to slowly murder myself through dehydration and hills, and rerouting to the sea for mostly unladen day rides, except a 50 km two way jaunt with all my things. There will still be riding, but less of it. Like a train to the coast instead of a 93 km single ride,…

Rest day: Veliko Tărnovo. Time travel.

My bike is called Kivrin, I’ve realized. After the character in Connie Willis’ Doomsday book, the historian who time travels to the Middle Ages and ends up in the middle of the plague by mistake. While there is an influenza pandemic occurring in her own time. Only here, it’s the opposite. There is no plague,…

Kormyansko to Veliko Tărnovo: 70 km, 800 m. Persistence.

My second day of riding was an exercise in persistence. But not persistence like, grit, pushing it hard, more like persistence when the journey owns me, giving myself over to it and accepting what it was. The nutshell is that day 2 was more of day 1, but slightly less terrible. With Deyan’s advice, I…