Rwandan roads are at least as good as those in the US, so I’m starting this post from the third row of seats in our 10-passenger van as we drive the two final hours to Kigali, the Rwandan capital. We crossed the border with Uganda a few minutes ago. Writing on the Ugandan byways, which range from good (occasionally) to abysmal (far too common), is pretty much impossible, given the jouncing. Off the road, our three and a half days in Uganda were so packed I couldn’t find a spare minute to get on my iPad when the sun was up. By the time it set, I’d run out of gas.

But I can summarize what we did.

We slogged out of Kampala through mind-bending traffic…

…then moved westward across the country to finally struggle up the broken dirt roads that lead to the village of Nyakagyesi. The trip ate up ten and a half hours — pretty much all of Monday.

Wednesday we devoted to meeting with the grandmother groups and their members who are receiving micro loans funded by Women’s Empowerment, the San Diego organization for which Steve and I serve as liaisons.

Thursday we toured the first primary school built by the Nyaka Foundation, its beautiful secondary school, and its health center, then we met with yet another set of grandmothers, these specializing in making jewelry, baskets, and other handicrafts.

After that we drove a couple of hours to Buhoma, where you can catch glimpses of the mountains on the other side of the border in Congo. Buhoma is a base for gorilla trekking, but everyone in our group had already done that (Jose and Mari two weeks ago; Steve and I in 2013.) Instead we paid a quick but fun visit to the office of a non-profit organization founded and run (by a woman I know in San Diego) to help the desperately poor local Batwa community.

The setting for all these activities has been a landscape that’s among the most beautiful on earth. A dozen shades of vibrant green, the land is all rugged mountains intermixed with verdant valleys and reddish soil so rich it produces almost every crop you can think of.

This morning an unexpected treat was when our drive to the Rwandan border took us over an 8000-foot pass in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest (today in fact penetrated by a fairly smooth dirt road.) This forest, home not just to mountain gorillas but also forest elephants, is 100 million years old. Because it didn’t freeze during the last Ice Age, it harbors fantastic biological diversity. We didn’t see any forest elephants on our passage but Deus, our driver, pointed out fresh deposits of their droppings on the road.

This was our fourth visit to Uganda, and another landscape, an invisible one, has also been coming into focus over the past ten years. It’s the network of relationships we’ve acquired. Some are with people we’ve come to love, like Jennifer Nantale, head of the whole Nyaka organization in Uganda and one of the smartest, toughest women I’ve ever met.

Or Sam Mugisha, the remarkable guy who in his youth jumped at a chance to travel to Japan, became fluent in Japanese, and returned home to start a travel business catering to visitors speaking that language. (He’s also been the outfitter for all our WE trips.)

Dozens upon dozens of encounters with various individuals have been more fleeting but still vivid. Some fade quickly, but they’re still part of the tapestry composed of all the warm, kind, hard-working people we’ve gotten to know here. The impression made by others remains sharp for longer, like Norah, whom we met her early Thursday afternoon.

Norah is a 72 widow who’s currently raising four grandchildren ranging in age from 12 to 4. She greeted us with a warm smile and explained that she joined the Kyepatiko granny group four years ago. Now she’s the chairperson. Over the years she’s gotten two loans from the group, the most recent one for 500,000 shillings (about $133). She combined that money with the 3 million shillings she had saved from her coffee crop and used the money to buy a cow and calf. When the calf was a baby, Norah was getting 5 liters of milk a day that she could sell for about 37 cents a liter. But now that the calf has grown, it consumes all its mother’s milk. Still, she had bred the cow about a month before our visit, and she was hoping to have a birth in about 8 months. She would then sell one of the calves.

Norah has a warm and confident presence, and she led us to the back of her substantial house to the clean and well-organized enclosure she has built for her cow and calf.

Besides her fledgling dairy business, Norah has also built up an apiary; today it houses 50 beehives. We couldn’t visit it because the bees would sting us during the day. (Norah and her family collect their honey at night when the insects are sleeping.) It’s a good business. The grandmother can charge about $68 for 5 liters of honey. It adds up to more than $500 over the course of a year. Still Norah said she wants to develop the market further.

The path to the apiary passed through healthy coffee trees laden with berries. And Norah also seemed proud of her field of emerald spears of elephant grass. She harvests it to feed to the dairy animals (which can’t just wander around, munching other people’s crops.)

Later, we watched Norah direct the grandmother group meeting. She commands attention with ease. Reflecting on our meeting with her at dinner a few nights later, Jose and Mari and Steve and I agreed she was hard to forget. “If she were in the US, she’s be the CEO at some big corporation,” someone said.

But I have to confess: my attention is drifting away from all that. It’s now Saturday morning and in a few minutes Steve and I will board our flight to Harare. Compared to the cozy familiarity of Uganda, Zimbabwe is terra incognito.

The start of this trip has been pretty flawless. Our flight from Chicago to Addis Ababa (capital of Ethiopia) landed behind schedule on Sunday morning, leaving us only 20 minutes to get from one side to the other of the chaotic terminal. Yet somehow we caught our flight to Entebbe, and then were thrilled to find our duffel on the luggage carousel of Uganda’s international airport. Later that afternoon we met up with the other couple from San Diego accompanying us on our mission to visit Women Empowerment’s Uganda partner.

Monday morning, our foursome enjoyed an excellent meeting with our partners at the Nyaka Foundation in Kampala, then we checked into our hotel and ate delicious Indian food in its second-story restaurant. In the afternoon the four of us spent more than an hour at the Ugandan national museum (not dazzling, but worth the visit.)

Then… how to pass the several remaining hours until we could reasonably go to bed? Jose and Mari opted to hang out on the hotel’s rooftop terrace, but Steve and I strolled the few blocks to the Acacia Mall, considered by locals to be the fanciest in the capital. A slew of ATM machines line its perimeter, and its facade indeed promised a classy experience within.

We passed the scrutiny of gun-touting guards and metal detectors, then made a thorough tour of the interior. We found a decent complement of clean, bright shops that could have been plucked from any run-of-the-mill American mall, as well as a busy Carrefour supermarket.

The movie theater was pulling in some customers.

But the last screening of Barbie had started hours earlier.

The mall’s bookstore looked impressive, but it was closing as we arrived.

And the dearth of offerings in the food court depressed me.

We could have patronized the Colonel’s big eatery next to the front entrance.

The Indian food back at the hotel seemed a lot more enticing, however. So we made our way back in the dark over the broken, intermittent sidewalks, dodging puddles from the steady rain earlier in the day. Steve and I shared a butter chicken, vegetable pulao, and some garlic nan, washed down with a couple of Lion Special. Once again, it all tasted yummy.

That’s what Steve and I will be doing Friday morning (9/15): buckling up as we take off on perhaps our most ambitious adventure.

We’re flying off to Africa (via Chicago and Addis Ababa), disembarking in Uganda, which has become one of the few countries to which we’re happy to return. Once again we’ll be visiting the remote village of Nyaka (near where Uganda meets up with the borders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo), to take the pulse of the microfinance project there supported by the Women’s Empowerment organization in San Diego. (For almost 10 years we’ve volunteered to be the liaisons between the villagers and their American patrons.)

We will then make our way to Harare, capital of Zimbabwe (once known to the Western world as Rhodesia.) We’ll be renting a Land Rover and driving it into the country’s beautiful eastern mountains (said to be reminiscent of Scotland), then down into a big-game hunting preserve where, trust me, we will not be shooting any animals ourselves. We will move on to the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, the biggest and most impressive stone-walled city in sub-Saharan Africa. After sleeping in a tent on the Land Rover’s roof in Hwange National Park, we’ll wind up at the awesome Victoria Falls, spend a couple of nights at an upscale lodge on the Zambezi River in Zambia, then catch a South African Airlines flight to Johannesburg.

Joburg will be our launch pad for exploring a few more of the world’s microstates. This won’t match our tour of the smallest countries in Europe two years ago. But we should end up knowing more than most folks about the mountain kingdom of Lesotho and mellow little eSwatini (formerly known as Swaziland.) If all goes well, we’ll be home again Oct. 19, five weeks after taking off.

Preparing for this trip has been a challenge. We’ll have to check a duffel bag to carry sleeping bags and towels and other gear for the Land Rover. A motley zoo of electrical adaptors will be necessary to plug into power in this part of the world.

Of course the power is not always on. We know the grid often fails in Southern Africa. I’ll be writing as much as possible, but it may take me a while to post some of my reports. I’m trusting my readers will understand any such delays.

I’m embarrassed. The message that went out yesterday was a mistake, a “re-publication” of the very first travel post I ever produced, back in February of 2010, when Steve and I were starting our 41-hour transit to South Africa. It happened because I’d been fiddling with some of the blog’s design elements (something I almost never do). Among other things, I added a “category cloud” to the right-hand column. It’s a list of the categories I’ve assigned to most of my posts over the years. I liked the idea that if someone is going to a place I’ve written about, it should help them quickly and easily find what I had to say about it.

The problem, however, is that if a blog writer forgets to select a category, WordPress automatically declares it to be “Uncategorized.” Seeing that word in giant letters on the list bothered me. (I was pretty sloppy about categorization in those early years.) So I went in and changed the “uncategorized”on that very first report to “South Africa.” When I updated it, WordPress treated it like a new post — and sent all my loyal subscribers a (confusing!) email.

Sorry!

Steve and I won’t actually be setting out on our next adventure until May 11, when our destination will be Indonesia — the fourth most populous country on earth. We’ll only get to a handful of its 17,000 islands, but highlights should include tracking orangutans and komodo dragons in the wild, visiting the largest Buddhist temple in the world, and relaxing during a weeklong home exchange on Bali. Indonesia will be the 81st country I have visited.

I’m startled to reflect that South Africa was the 30th. Steve and I have covered a lot of ground since then. And this fall we’re planning to return to South Africa, along with some other places in the southern half of the continent. I promise to try to categorize everything properly.

And to refrain from sending out any emails when I screw up.

(as reported by Dilly)

My pack and I got back from the road last week, and I have to tell you: life has been pretty boring since then. So I’ve volunteered to briefly shift my attention from Sitting and lying Down and Speaking to… Reporting. My puppyraiser/Mom usually handles this task, but on our recent trip she (my p/M) didn’t find anything interesting to write about. She’d be the first to say she had a wonderful time. But really.

(Excuse me while I yawn.)

We drove 2600 miles but never had a flat tire or ran out of gas or got into any accidents. No one asked for bribes or tried to kidnap us. We visited five national parks (and a couple of lesser ones). But who doesn’t know those places are amazing? (I’ll admit I didn’t. But I’m a one-year-old aspiring service dog.) To most folks, that’s not news.

I, however, see (and smell) things from a different perspective. Here are five of my most important takeaways from our adventure:

1) Flying is much more interesting than being driven around in a kennel. And traveling out of a kennel is (slightly) better than traveling inside one.

I flew once before, when I was 8 weeks old and Canine Companions for Independence (CCI), the organization that owns me, shipped me down from Northern California to my San Diego puppyraiser/parents. But for all their travels, my p/ps never before had flown with any CCI puppy. (I’m the 9th one they’ve raised.) Despite their trepidations, our flight from San Diego to Salt Lake City went well. The nice man at the Southwest Airlines counter didn’t even ask to see the rabies-vaccine documentation my p/M had brought along. (I mean, duh, it’s pretty obvious I’m not rabid.) He gave us boarding passes that let us go first through the jetway,so we had tons of room, sitting in the first row. I Stayed in a perfect Down position when the flight attendant gave her speech, and although I got a little nervous during the take-off (and later, the landing), my p/M gave me the Lap command and let me look out the window. I found the sights out the window intriguing, if slightly creepy.

After that, we got around in a rented van. My p/ps had checked a travel kennel for me to ride in. But after a while, they started letting me ride loose, like a Regular Big Dog. Sometimes I took advantage of this, sitting on a seat and looking out the window. Just as often, I napped.

2) Weather can be more interesting than I ever imagined.

I got a big lesson in this our first afternoon in Jackson Hole (Wyoming). My p/D had taken me out for a little afternoon stroll around the compound where we were staying when suddenly the sky got dark and I was being pelted with hundreds of little pebble-sized pieces of ice! Hail, people were calling it. I never saw the like of that in San Diego!Frankly, I’m not a fan.

Several days later when we had moved just outside Yellowstone National Park, my p/M took me out for my morning constitutional, and fluffy white stuff was falling out of the sky. That was cold too, but at least it didn’t hurt! And pretty soon the sun was shining again.

3) National Parks smell amazing.

We hiked an awful lot. One day (I think we were walking along the Rim Trail at Bryce Canyon National Park), my p/M sighed and said, “Dilly, it’s really too bad this can’t appreciate these sights.” They were looking at stuff like this:

My p/D piped up, voicing what I would have said (if I could talk). “Dilly says you can’t begin to appreciate all the smells.” Man, did he get that right! Sometimes there were scary smells, like this stuff, which was HUGE and filled with berry seeds. I didn’t want to get anywhere close to whatever creature produced it.

Day after day at Yellowstone, we hiked past what surely must be some of the weirdest smells on the planet.

But even the simplest stroll in a forest made me want to close my eyes and savor the symphony of scents produced when streams and leaves and pine trees and animals come together.

4) I don’t want to go to the moon.

After Yellowstone, my p/ps and I drove to Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve (in southern Idaho). It’s not actually the moon but a vast, crater-pocked area that was created when lava flowed out of fissures in the Snake River plain between 15,000 and 2,000 years ago. It’s a stark, alien landscape that did NOT smell anywhere near as interesting as the Grand Tetons or Zion canyon. And the scrunchy black gravel kind of hurt my paws.

5) I’m thinking about a career change.

Everywhere we went, I had to wear my official cape and halter and leash (on which I pulled about 1000 times more often than I should have). But I did get one taste of paradise.

This happened when we visited my p/M’s uncle and aunt. They live on a farm in a small town in Utah. Before sunset, we went for a walk through the farm’s corn fields. I was on my leash, as usual, but then we stopped and suddenly they released me. For a moment I was so stunned I couldn’t move. Then I went berserk with joy – racing up and down the road, kicking up clouds of dirt, leaping and twisting and finding sticks and dried corn cobs and stones to chew.

My ecstasy was so obvious, my p/ps brought me back early the next morning. Again I romped and rollicked.

Everyone tells me it will be a great thing if I graduate and work in a life of service. I say….. maybe. But I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be as great as life on a farm.

I knew two bad earthquakes hit Christchurch in 2010 and 2011, but they didn’t become real for me until the night Steve and I were eating dinner in Kaikoura. Looking out the window next to our table, Steve exclaimed, “Is that a bobcat?” The animal he was staring at seemed too small to be that, but it lacked a tail. “He lost it in the earthquake,” our waitress (the wife of the owner) told us. Her house in Christchurch had also collapsed, she added, and she and her husband had lost the five restaurants they owned. They’d recently moved to Kaikoura, trying to start over. This lady was a hearty, jokey sort of person, but the way her face subtly tightened when she talked of the disaster betrayed how overwhelming it had been. Watching her face, I struggled to keep mine composed.

A few days later, on the Routeburn Track, I asked one of my fellow trekkers, a longtime Christchurch resident named Louise, how the quake had affected her. She used to work in one of the high rises that had collapsed, she told me. “Nine of my friends died in it.” Two others had lost their legs. For a while, the funerals had been incessant.

Over the two days we spent in Christchurch (our last bit of time in New Zealand), the quakes got more and more real. The first thing we did Thursday morning was to head to Quake City, a facility dedicated to explaining what happened on those two fateful days. One of the things that shocked me most was learning that the two earthquakes which all but destroyed the central city were far from the worst that’s expected for this region. The huge fault, the one capable of moving with a force of more than magnitude 8, runs up the east side of the southern Alps, just an hour or two outside Christchurch.

What I also didn’t know is that most Christchurch residents never thought they were vulnerable to earthquakes; they had never felt any jolts for most of their lives. The 7.1-magnitude temblor that ripped the Canterbury plain in 2010 was thus a shock both physically and psychologically. But it struck at 4:35 in the morning, and while many buildings were damaged, no one was killed. The February 2011 event was an aftershock, only a magnitude 6.3. But its epicenter was within the city’s limits and only a few miles below the surface. The peak ground acceleration packed a force of almost 2 Gs, a motion more violent than that ever experienced in any urban center (or so they told us.)

Only two tall buildings pancaked, but the violence delivered in those 24 seconds smashed the tidy, conservative center city and turned into a place that looked freshly carpet-bombed. In large sections, solid ground also turned into a sticky goo that sank cars, trees, buildings. It resolidified into something that gripped with the strength of concrete what it had ingested. Quake City documents these changes well. Most mesmerizing were the filmed first-hand stories recounted by a cross-section of citizens. Watching their faces, listening to their words, the quake felt as real to me as anything apart from living memory.

But the funny thing is, if Steve and I hadn’t read and heard what we did, we wouldn’t have suspected what had happened less than 9 years ago. We walked miles and miles through a city that’s tidy again. We noted many empty lots and many buildings that are fenced off, or braced, in obvious need of repairs.

The stone cathedral that was Christchurch’s great landmark still bears gaping holes where the bell tower and some of the walls fell.But there are urban centers in America’s rust belt that look worse. And few cities anywhere have mounted the kind of makeover that’s underway here.

Christchurch is now an urban planner’s paradise. The planners have made sweeping godlike decisions. They’ve decreed that the new city center should be low-rise and surrounded by a belt of green space; that it will be divided into a few discrete “districts” — one for retail, one for entertainment, others for government and safety services, residences, and a few other designations. Tens of billions of dollars have been spent or budgeted to make this a reality. The Kiwis have repaired a vast array of unseen infrastructure (underground water pipes, etc.) and they’ve built some stunning public facilities:

They’ve re-engineered the river that winds through the center or town, landscaping it and creating lovely pathways.There’s much more to come, including rebuilding the cathedral, finishing the zoomy convention center that’s supposed to start operating next year… …and building a deluxe sports complex…

As this has gone on, intriguing temporary creations have sprung up to fill the voids. A temporary Anglican cathedral was built from cardboard tubes…Artists have been commissioned to paint murals on the sides of newly revealed building sides…… and create other works to fill the civic gaps.

This all makes central Christchurch a fascinating place to stroll through — at least during the day. At night, Steve and I found most streets in and adjoining the central city to be eerily empty. Our Airbnb flat was just a few blocks outside the center, but the nearest supermarket was well over a mile away (in the CBD’s “Retail District”). I love packed, jumbled, textured cities like Tokyo and Rome and New York; the hyper-orderliness of Christchurch made me uneasy.

Over time will it be balanced, somehow, mellowed out by the other changes that have occurred here? More than one resident testified to a profound transformation in the residents. They used to dress drably, one woman recounted. “It was almost as if they couldn’t be bothered to look nice,” she said. But in the aftermath of the destruction, people grew noticeably more stylish. The artsy vibe today is unmistakable. Another guy commented that before the quakes, the city was a bastion of white complacency. But the quakes vaporized social barriers; made outsiders welcome. “Then we had the murders at the mosque last spring,” he said. “Before, I think a lot of people would have said, ‘That’s too bad, but it’s the Muslim’s problem.’ Instead, when it happened, within hours people from every strata of society were streaming there to help out. It was an attack on all of us.”

There’s so much of the world we haven’t seen, Steve and rarely return to many places. But I’d love to pop into Christchurch in 20 years to see what becomes of it.