There are a lot of gorgeous doors in Valencia. Big doors and little doors and doors made of wood, with ridiculous knockers and door handles. It wasn’t long before Zee + I were pointing out good doors to each other, stopping for a moment to take a photo or two. Oh Valencia, you and your doors are so lovely!

Good doors, no?

Oh Spain. There was a glorious four days spent in Valencia and it was delightful. We stayed in the Old Town (Ciutat Vella), which is in the city centre, a delightful meandering maze of little cobbled streets and little plazas and gorgeous architecture. Loved it. There are a million little shops and tapas places, and where we stayed? The tables spilled out onto the footpaths right outside our apartment. Perfect for mojitos, and martinis and tapas (or, as we had twice, profiteroles + chocolate fondant!)

Old Town in general was gorgeous. We climbed the Miguelete Bell Tower, which is a super cute 14th century tower that sits above the Cathedral of Valencia. Gorgeous views, and I got such a fright when the bell rang (which it does, on the hour). It was amazing to look out over the horizon and watch the city expand. I especially liked recognising all the places we’d been. It can be confusing on foot, sometimes, but from above things made much more sense. I laughed when I realised that my Mums Plaza (we gave everything our own names, because we could never remember the spanish versions) was right along from where we’d eaten icecream that morning! Oh the ridiculousness of not realising.

We hired bikes, which I’m so glad we did. Cycling around Valencia was definitely the best way to travel. There is a park that runs down the middle of the city – the Gardens of Turia (apparently it used to be a river, the river Turia). It’s 9k of gorgeous sculptured gorgeousness that runs from past the old city out to the City of Arts and Sciences (Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències), which, woah buddy, is a feat of modern architectural amazement. It’s all big white gorgeous buildings surrounded by shallow pools of water. It’s all curves and soft arches that soar into the sky. There are a handful of buildings in the complex, an interactive science museum, a very fancy cinema, a sculpture walk, an opera house and my favourite – L’Oceanogràfic. It’s a open-air oceanographic park, in other words, a really fancy aquarium. The largest in Europe. Obviously we hit it up and oh, it was amazing.

We also spent a fair amount of time at the beach. Honestly, this city had it all. The beach was pretty gorgeous, the water cool, the sand clean and white and there was miles of it. On our last day we hired some of those beach chairs and a super cute little a parasol and spent a few hours on the beach. Loved it! I got sun burnt, but go figure. I was trying to soak in as much sun as I could before we had to go back to grey London.

So yes, Valencia. What a gorgeous city, 4 days were by no means long enough. If you get the opportunity to go, you definitely should!

Zee and I drove up to Cambridge to help celebrate Liz + Rob‘s birthdays and oh, what a fun weekend. It was lovely, with the introduction to GeoCaching (omg, the GeoCaching!) and dining at such gorgeous food places (a low key little chinese place and a gorgeous british something a rather). There was movie watching, and punting, and wandering around cambridge. Me and Zee wandered into one of the colleges, and had ostrich. Bunny came up too, and shared his toys from Taiwan. There were randoms in the beer garden and cupcakes and oh goodness. I was having a moment on the Sunday, but I was so glad we went, and so glad that these are the kind of friends I have.

Also, instead of taking many photos, I took many little videos and strung them up all together. This is what it looked like:

I guess I should introduce Zee. I’ve not introduced him thus far, and I’ve left him out of all the adventures and things, but I feel like that if I’m going to document what I’m doing it would be a terrible misrepresentation not to mention him.

So, yes, there is a Zee, and he is lovely. Ridiculous sometimes, and occasionally the things he does mortifies me, but most of things he does delights instead. He’s managed to slide himself into my life, fitting himself around ridiculous schedules, and finding time for moments, and adventures and sleepy mornings. He’s all kinds of adorable, too. Secretly he’s also a bit of a romantic, which for anyone who knows me knows that, well, his incredibly sweet gestures make me both mildly uncomfortable and tentatively happy.

It feels a bit off ‘announcing’ Zee here, because I didn’t really ‘announce’ anything in the real world. He kind of faded into my life and then there he was. And now he comes to all the things, and has met all the people. It’s all new and familiar and brilliant and I’m quite glad he’s here.

So yes. There’s a Zee.

Africa was amazing. It really was one of those life changing, perspective altering experiences. Since I’ve been back everyone has been asking mostly about Kili. How hard was it? Did you make it to the top? You did! Congratulations, high five! Smiles all round! But you know what? What got to me most was not that I went to Africa and climbed to the top of the mountain. It was the poverty I saw at the bottom.

I don’t think I was meant to see it. Our guides were very careful to take us where we were meant to be, and not further. There wasn’t much opportunity for random wandering (except for at Stonetown in Zanzibar). I took the time to quietly slip out and explore the little town we were in. At first I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at. It seemed that people were glad, dressed in their brightly coloured clothes selling fruit on the side of the road, wandering about on their business. Everyone seemed happy, the sky was blue and it was warm. Life seemed good!

I bought fruit from street vendors and admired all the stores. Walked past little impromptu market places set up along the dirt roads, and admired the very low key wood scaffolding. I listend to the people speak and yell at each other around me in a language I couldn’t follow. I stepped out of the way of shiny cars and admired the taxi men on their motorbikes, all lined up waiting for customers. Everything was busy, and moving, and bright and happy.

Until it wasn’t. Until I realised what I wasn’t seeing. Which was the man with no legs begging on the side of the road, hoping I’d look at him. It was the incredibly dirty, incredibly skinny street children wasting time on a back street corner, who eyed me and my camera up as I passed. It was the guide telling me that he’s not able to afford to go to university, or buy a house or do anything more to improve his life other than by living day to day. It was the tourist shop vendor who was trying so hard to convince me to part with an extra dollar or two, so he could continue to run his shop and compete with the fat well paid vendor who bribed tourist operators to bring their hordes to visit across the way. It was the too small child who took such delight at having her picture taken, who left dirty little fingerprints on my legs when her mother wanted to leave, because it was clear we weren’t going to buy her bananas. It was the crowd of people huddled around a single tv on the dirt road after the sun had gone down, as we drove past on our luxurious bus. It was the fish market with the fish on plastic on the ground. It was the man who picked through the rubbish I left on the table hoping that I’d left something he could eat. It was the children minding goat herds and working the fields with their parents when shouldn’t they have been in school? It was the old man with open sores on his legs. It was the skinny teens walking along the road mid afternoon with plastic canisters on their heads, which I really hoped contained water.

I saw all these people live in a manner which I’ve never had to, which is to say, under the poverty line. So openly under the poverty line.

I came back to London and I was in such dissonant place. I wasn’t sure of myself, of how I lived my life. I’d never once considered myself rich, or privileged. But it has never been more clear to me than right now I live in that very cushy 1%. I’ve never lacked for food, or clean water. Education was right I didn’t even know I enjoyed. I have a job, a very cushy job that pays me a pretty penny, so I can afford any kind of medical care I might want or need. Anything I want I can buy, because everything I need has already been well taken care of. I have a roof over my head, more clothes than I ever wear, and access to a shower and a washing machine.

I live an easy life well above the poverty line, and how do you align that when you can remember the faces of so many that don’t?

Poverty in Africa is a problem and it’s heartbreaking. I’m sure what I can do.

I felt that throwing money at it wasn’t a solution. One, I don’t have enough money to solve all the things that need solving, and two, where would it go? I know that most kind of aid isn’t a long term solution. I also know that some aid runs the risk of destroying local economy – (a very high level) example might be something like a charity provides food to a community. Locals stop farming their own food, because it’s easier to accept the aid. When the aid stops, the local farming community is then non-existant. If I was going to support a charity, I’d want to it to do more good than harm, but it’s hard to tell from the outset whether this is the case. It’s also not clear whether the charity is fiscally + morally responsible, or whether they’re a bit corrupt and skimming.

There’s also the problem that throwing money at a problem doesn’t make me feel like I’m contributing. It doesn’t ease the dissonance I have, but rather makes me feel like I’m paying my guilt off. The problem with this though, is if I did something that I felt like I was contributing, would I be making a huge impact for a small number of people (say, like moving to Africa and volunteering in a orphanage) or would I be making a small impact, that allows other people to make a change for a large number of people (like, say a charity that does more good than harm, and is fiscally and morally responsible).

Really I think what needs to happen is change at a political level. Which is something that I feel that I would be relatively useless at. Not to mention that I’m not African, so my chances of being successful there are relatively nill.

And then I wondered about the poverty where I’m from, or am. There is poverty in New Zealand. And in the UK. There is poverty here in London, I see it all the time, but it’s less easy to look at. The people begging outside tube stations, the smelly men who ask you if you’ve got any spare change, the old lady who has plastic bags on her feet and is looking through a rubbish bin. I did a terrible thing the other day, and oh, all the shame I feel. I was thinking about this post, wondering what I could do, and a man was begging with his dog, asking for money. I looked away, and walked past him. I LOOKED AWAY. Shame shame shame shame.

If I have coins I’ve taken to giving them, how they spend it is their business, but I hope that they spend it on food or medical care. I wonder what the UK government is doing to reduce poverty, if there’s a way to volunteer with a shelter or food kitchen, or whether I could do something a simple as make half a dozen hot meals and deliver them to hungry homeless people (assuming that I could find some, and could distribute food in a safe way). Can I do that? What can I do?

I haven’t figured it out yet, and it’s weighing pretty heavily on my heart and mind. I fear that if I don’t find something to do soon, I’ll forget. I’ll forget how privileged I am, and I’ll lose the empathy I had for all the people struggling away in Africa. I’ll lose my will to help, to be better person, to improve lives other than my own.

What do I do? What can I do?

What is it you do?

Moshi is the small little town at the bottom of Kilimanjaro. It’s where Amani is based, and it’s where we based ourselves between adventures. I snuck off one afternoon while we were in town. Not for long, barely fifteen/twenty minutes before I was requested back.

There was so much to see! It was hot, and there was people and colour and movement and I felt like I was caught up in one big impromptu show. There were people threading their way through the dirt pavements. Dodging cars, and pulling carts and balancing big fruit buckets on their heads.

There was also a lot of people watching. Men on their bikes lined up along side the road waiting for customers to whizz off. Ladies organising their fruit laid out on white plastic sheets, carefully stacking, carefully rearranging. The teens with their hand carts, winding their way through traffic, being careful not to get in the way. There were also many young men standing outside the stores, standing in the shade. I’m not sure what they did exactly, but they seemed polite enough. They wanted to talk, and say hi. Practice their english, I think. Where are you from? What do you do? Why are you here? Take our picture?

It was definitely a show. Crowds playing out their part as they move through. I wish I’d had more time to explore more. Ah well. Next time.

As part of climbing Kili, there was a fundraising aspect. I pimped it pretty hard – I’m pretty sure if you’ve been around the last few months you will have seen a post or two. Truth though, I didn’t climb Kili to raise funds for a charity. I climbed it because it was an adventure that I was ready to tackle. Tacking on a charity seemed like a ‘nice’ thing to do, and everyone else was doing it, so I jumped on the band wagon, determined to raise more money that anyone else.

That right there emphasises how very shallow I was about the whole thing. Sure, raising money for street kids is inherently a nice thing to do, but I didn’t pick the charity. I didn’t really check them out, other than to make sure they did more good than harm and were fiscally responsible. Mostly it was a competition to see who could raise the most. The children blurred into ‘African street kids’ without faces or names or personalities, mere stereotypes that I used to ease a donation out of someone. I could have been fundraising for anything really, and called it good.

Oh, how very silly I feel now.

We visited Amani on our last day in Africa and oh oh oh. There wasn’t enough time – I could have spent days and weeks and months with these children. These gorgeous happy children who had names, and personalities and histories. Oh their histories, which were full of hardship and abuse and just generally shit. It astounds me, positively blows my mind to hear about their pasts, their difficulties and struggles and then to see them smile, to dance, to play. To see the effects of malnourishment, to see 15 year old girls that look like they’re only 10, to see scars on the boys legs and hands and faces, and then to have them grin like I’ve given them the world because I took their photo, and they can see themselves on a little digital screen.

These children, they are precious.

And it’s pretty clear to me now, that while before I was fundraising for a charity? Now I’m raising money for children’s lives, for improved quality of life. For food, for safety and for education. For a FUTURE. Many many futures.

It’s amazing how Amani works, reaching out to street kids, letting them know that there is a place for them if they want to come. A place where they know where their next meal is coming from. An amazing, traditionally Tanzanian meal (because keeping to their culture is important). They have classes in the center, for their kids that haven’t sat their primary school exams. Taught in Swahili, in small numbers (6-10 a class), squishing two academic years into one to catch the kids up. They’re taught english too, because secondary schools in Tanzania are taught in english, and if they’re going to continue their schooling they need to have a decent understanding of it. And oh, so far they have a 100% primary school pass rate – isn’t that amazing? That’s apparently much much higher than the typical pass rate in a Tanzanian primary school.

The lady that was there to shepherd us was quite proud – most of the kids go on to secondary school outside the centre. Ones that show promise get a grant for private schooling. And recently? One of their Amani kids started studying at university. Isn’t that phenomenal?

We spent the afternoon out in the yard, in the heat with the kids. Predominantly boys, which is a reflection of what it’s like on the street. But there was a game of soccer, our guys against their guys. And woah buddy, what a game! It was a draw in the end, 4 all. But those kids definitely gave as good as they got.

There was dancing in a little pergola at the back of the yard. There was a radio, and they flicked between stations to find up beat songs to clap their hands to. Then there was all the photo taking, oh the photo taking! At first they were a bit shy, but soon they were asking me to take their pictures and of course I did. Even better was when I realised I could hand my camera off to them, and they’d take the photos for me. The delight! They were as happy to be behind the camera as they were in front of it. Those kids were amazing.

So there are many photos. This is a photo heavy post, and I make no apologies for it. Every single photo was taken with joy, and gave so much delight that I can’t not share them. Also, this was a much reduced set from the original 600 shots that were taken that afternoon.

I’m still raising funds. I’ve met my goal to raise £1k, and as a group we smashed our target of £5k, but you know what? Every cent helps. It goes straight to Amani, and every pound we send is specifically allocated for the kids. To feeding them, and clothing them. Educating them. To providing moments of fun, a childhood. A worthy cause, I think, more so than I initially realised. So if you’d like to donate:

Oh Zanzibar. Zanzibar was gorgeous, and luxurious and ridiculous and just, all the things. Over the top, really. It was hot. 32°C+ every day, and ridiculously humid. Zanibar itself was insanely gorgeous. Long pretty beaches, lush forest in the middle of the island. Pretty blue waters. A topical island filled with resorts.

We hit up Stonetown right after we flew in. I wish I hadn’t. When we landed, everyone who had sunburnt immediately bubbled thanks to the heat – as we sweated the sweat pooled under our sunburn because our skin was all dried up and burnt and unable to let the sweat out. It was disgusting, and uncomfortable. My face was also still burnt and blistering from the climb, and I came down the mountain with a cold that one of the boys was sharing. I can’t even describe what it’s like to be ill and feel terrible in a place that’s so warm and so pretty and then go ahead and try play tourist. I know, call me an idiot but there you go. I wanted to see Stonetown for fear that I’d never get another chance and so I did.

Stonetown – it’s old. It was established way back in the late 1800′s and was a pretty successful trading post for spicers and slaves. SLAVES. Isn’t that insane? The buildings were old, and everything has that delicious texture about a place that’s slightly worn down. Cracked plaster and pretty wooden doors. Cobblestones and wires everywhere. Everything had character, and it was delightful to walk through the little streets.

We hit up the Slave Market, to see what it was like. When I think about how many suffered here, it’s horrific. The place itself? A little rundown, with pretty flowers and a lawn and a church. Throw in an art gallery that feels a little worn in and it’s all very ordinary from the outside. There’s a memorial where the auction block used to be – the memorial is sunken but oh, I’m glad it’s there. We were taken down to the cells which were fairly horrific. They were vertically half size rooms, but wide, and ridiculously hot. There was no air flow, and three slits in the outer wall to provide light. I cant even imagine what it was like – the amount of people they crammed in their would have meant everyone would be lying or sitting up against each other. There’s a path sunken in through the door which we all stood in – apparently that was where people could defecate, because when the tide came in it would fill up the path and wash anything it in away when it went out. It was pretty chilling. They told us that slaves were given no food or water and had to survive in the rooms for three days to prove their ‘strength’. A ‘strong’ slave is worth more, apparently. Which is ridiculous because surely a live slave is worth more than a dead one, and it’s fairly easy to see how many died being kept in this horrific cells.

I didn’t last long in the cells, I was eager to get up into cooler and fresher air. I shouldn’t have worried, really. Because we hit up the spice market next.

Oh the spice market. The spice part was fine, under a cool red tarpoleon. All the spices are in little labelled bags. Lots of people trying to get to you buy things. The Meat Market was worse. It was foul. It smelt horrific. The meat was out, either hanging from hooks, on tables or on tarpoleons on the ground. There was no ice (it’s too hot for ice) and no freezers. Nothing to keep the flies off, and oh my days there was CLOUDS of them. The smell had me gaggin, and we moved on pretty quickly after that.

The best bit of Stonetown was sitting on the beach at a bar. Iced cocktail in hand watching the sun go down, and watching all the kids play in the water. They were doing somersaults and all sorts, it was fairly entertaining, and a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

I’m not even going to talk about what happened at Africa House, which is where we went for dinner. In short, they couldn’t handle a group of 16 and instead of dealing with the problems they had they tried to cover it up. We walked out without paying for anything bar the drinks. It was fairly terrible.

After Stonetown, we didn’t leave the resort. It was gorgeous! Over the top luxurious. There was swimming everyday, and hanging out bikinis, and being warm without being too burnt. I had a kitesurfing session (still determined to master it!) and there was beach volleyball (something which I am rubbish at, but improved dramatically the more I played) and a snorkling trip. There was amazing food, with breakfast and dinner being included. Ridiculous lobster (so tasty!) and just generally it was super relaxing. There was much napping and book reading and hanging out. Even more cocktails and tasty things too.

I wasn’t ready to leave when it came time to go. I literally took one last swim minutes before I had to be on the bus, and I got on all wet for the long trip back to Moshi. Oh Zanzibar. What a trip!