Angola: How to Test a Friend

2019-08-09T22:03:26+02:00

To make sure your friend is a true friend,
you have to go with him,
to travel with him night and day,
travel with him near and far.

Or you have to part with him,
to leave and leave him in your house.
If then he shows himself worthy of trust
then you can really trust
his friendship.

Bantustan: We Need Your Help

2021-05-09T11:48:22+02:00

Our book, BANTUSTAN, is now available in English, after almost a decade in the making. As a small non-profit from a small country, we have little means of spreading the word about the book to any potential readers outside the Balkans. This is why we must rely on friends, acquaintances, and basically everyone we can think of who might be willing to help. But before that, let’s talk about what exactly you would be helping us with, and why.

The Travel Club is a community of travelers, explorers and creators founded on the ideas of free sharing, free movement, and personal exploration of the world. All our projects are crowd-funded and non-profit. Any money that comes our way is reinvested into the Club (for the running costs, or community projects such as The Travel House/School), or donated to charity. The bulk of the proceeds from the sales of the Serbo-Croatian version of Bantustan were donated for the schooling of several primary and high school children in Kenya, through two organizations: Osiligi, and Hatua Likoni.

The book sold well in the Balkans because The Travel Club had already had a vibrant community there, which allowed us to spread the word. This data visualization shows that the geographic area of our readership largely corresponds to the cultural space of former Yugoslavia. However, that is where our reach ends. Without any international following to speak of, the English version of Bantustan will remain absolutely invisible, just another drop in the vast ocean of self-published books by unknown authors from obscure places; it won’t even have a fighting chance. That is the curse of small countries and small languages: whatever sprouts in them is almost destined to remain trapped there forever; the chance to break through that barrier is infinitesimally small. But that is exactly what Bantustan is about: crossing the borders, climbing the walls, breaking the barriers that surround us - against all odds.

This is why we need your help. And we really, really need it. Seriously. Or we wouldn’t be asking for it.

So, here’s what you can do:

Buy the book. As always, our goal is for the fruits of our work to be affordable to everyone. The Kindle edition costs $3.99. The printed version costs $12.99, which is a modest price for a book of that size (360 pages, 16.99 x 24.41 cm or 6.69″ x 9.61″). To fully enjoy the illustrations, we warmly recommend going with the printed version.
Leave a review on Amazon. This is crucial for the rank of the book; if we reach a certain number of sales, ratings and reviews, Amazon will start recommending the book to other people. We need to hit that critical point where that starts to happen - an almost impossible goal, but well worth trying. Each and every sale, each and every review is a step towards that goal.
Tell your friends. If you like the book, please think of anyone you know who might enjoy it too, and let them know it exists. The word of mouth is a powerful weapon - and the only one we have. When recommending the book to someone, please refer them to www.bantustanbook.com rather than to Amazon; that will give them a chance to learn more about the book and its background story.
Spread the word even more. Do you know of any organizations, groups, online or offline communities, mailing lists, forums that serve as gathering places for people who might be interested in reading this kind of book? If so, you can help us by sharing the link there.
Join our mailing list. We hope to make many more Travel Houses, publish more books, and carry out other projects in the future, creating value for ourselves and others; joining our mailing list is a way to stay up to date with our activities. (If you are from the Balkans and already a member of our Serbo-Croatian mailing list, there is no need to join the English one).
Consider becoming a regular supporter on Patreon.

Yeah, but what about the dough?

Why would I help you guys line your own pockets? - we hear those more paranoidly inclined of you ask. Since its creation in 2005, The Travel Club has always insisted on transparent finances. So here’s the book price breakdown:

Paperback list price: 12.99$
Amazon’s share: 40%
Printing cost: 5.17$
Tax: 30%
Our profit: 1.8$

As for the ebook, we get 1.1$. So - no worries there, nobody is getting rich (except Mr. Bezos and the IRS).

Having an international audience will motivate us to create more stuff in English, which is something we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. It will also enable us to publish new contents on our English website more frequently, organize more community projects for travelers, and donate more money to those in need.

We hope you enjoy our book. We guarantee it is unlike any travelogue you've ever come across.
The Travel Club

Dahomey: The Women Fetishers

2011-01-14T11:40:09+01:00

A short travel story by Geoffrey Gorer (1905-1985), an English anthropologist and writer. He visited West Africa in 1934, in order to study traditional dances of the region. This is his account of some strange rituals in Dahomey, today's Benin.

Greetings to the Chief of an Akan State

2019-08-09T22:12:14+02:00

Greetings to the chief of an Akan state on the occasion of the new year

The year has come round.
I have come to greet you,
To shower blessings on you.
Live long, live long, live long,
Live to a good old age.

The drummer of the talking drums says,
He showers his blessings on you.
Live long, live long, live long,
Live to a good old age.

The God of old says,
He showers his blessings on you.
Live to a good old age, chief,

The Earth Amponyinamoa says,
She showers her blessings on you.
Live to a good old age.
Live long, live long, live long,
Live to a good old age.

May years be added to your years.

Akan people are a meta-ethnicity residing in the southern regions of the former Gold Coast region, in what is today the nation of Ghana.

The poem was first written down by Carl Einstein, (26 April 1885 – 5 July 1940), born Karl Einstein, was an influential German Jewish writer, art historian, anarchist and critic.

The Eye of the Sahara

2021-05-04T09:20:56+02:00

One day I was sitting at my laptop, getting bored at home and looking randomly at Google Maps, when something interesting caught my eye: I noticed a giant circle in the Sahara, in the middle of nowhere. It looked like a mine, but the size didn't fit: it was obviously huge, much larger than anything I'd ever seen or heard of. When I zoomed in on the map, I found out it was something called the Eye of the Sahara, or the Richat Structure.

The Eye of the Sahara on Google Maps – it really looks like an eye!

A glance at Wikipedia told me it was huge indeed: the diameter of the outermost ring is 40 km (25 mi) in diameter. Also, it is not a hole, as I first thought: it could best be described as a series of concentric rings, each one forming an almost perfect circle. It is an "eroded dome" – not a meteor impact crater, and definitely not a mine.

** We recently published our first English book: Bantustan, Atlas of an African Journey. It is an illustrated travelogue with a collection of hand-drawn maps, available on Amazon. Find out more at www.bantustanbook.com **

The Eye of the Sahara was first described in the 1930s and 1940s and was considered to be a meteor impact site, but that theory was refuted in the early 2000s. It was created by erosion.

It is the closest one can get to walking on Mars without really being on Mars.

From the moment I saw the giant circle on Google Map, I got very excited. I started wondering if it would be possible to go there. Not just to stare at it on the map, but to really, physically go there and step into the center of the circle. I invited two friends – Inesa Adamonyte and Uros Krcadinac – with whom I had traveled to crazy places before, and who I thought might be willing to go on such an adventure. First they tried to convince me it was suicidal, but finally I managed to talk them into it. That same year, 2013, we decided to go for it.

We met in southern Spain and crossed by ferry to Morocco. Then we went down through Morocco, Western Sahara and finally Mauritania, where the Eye of the Sahara is located. From Nouadhibou we took the desert train used for transporting iron ore and after that a series of "desert buses", Toyota Land Cruisers that take people between small villages in the Sahara. For the final leg of the trip, we hired a jeep with a Tuareg driver, to take us to the circle.

The daytime temperatures were above 50 degrees C (122 degrees F). After a while, our cameras and phones got overheated and stopped working. Uros and I suffered a mild heatstroke, while Inesa suffered a more severe one, and ended up in the hospital in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, where we arrived after a long, arduous trip. After she recovered, we continued on to Senegal, from where we flew back to Spain. The whole trip lasted three weeks.

During the trip, it came in handy that Uros spoke some French, and I could speak Spanish and some Arabic. French and Spanish were spoken in the cities, but when we got deeper into the Sahara we had to rely on my broken Arabic to find out where to go and how to get there.

We were planning to shoot a documentary about the trip, so we did a lot of filming along the way (until our equipment died from the heat), but sadly we never got round to editing it; it turned out that hours upon hours of desert footage don't make for a watchable story. The adventure was definitely the most challenging trip of my life (so far), and probably the most dangerous one as well.

However, I'd say it was worth it. There's no place on Earth that could be even remotely compared to the Eye of the Sahara. It is the closest one can get to walking on Mars without really being on Mars.

And there's no feeling – at least not one that I'm familiar with – that comes close to standing in the very center of the innermost ring of a 40-km wide crater, in the middle of the Sahara, knowing that it all started with an evening of sitting at home, getting bored and randomly looking through Google Maps.

Would I do it again? Absolutely. I'd do it tomorrow.

––
Photos by Inesa Adamonyte and Lazar Pascanovic.

The Khoisan Once Were Kings Of The Planet. What Happened?

2015-01-11T17:52:00+01:00

Some 22,000 years ago, they were the largest group of humans on earth: the Khoisan, a tribe of hunter-gatherers in southern Africa.

Today, only about 100,000 Khoisan, who are also known as Bushmen, remain. Stephan C. Schuster, professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, has published new research about the tribe, many of whom now live in poverty, their cultural traditions endangered. Diane Cole from npr.org spoke to Schuster about his study and the lives of the Khoisan.

How did it happen that a group that was once in the majority is now so small?

First of all, the fact that 7 billion people now live on earth makes it almost impossible for us to understand how few people lived in the past. About 10,000 years ago, there were not more than 1 million on the planet. And 100,000 years ago, only a few 10,000s. The whole genome sequences we analyzed show that there was a time when the non-Khoisan peoples were not doing as well as the Khoisans.

What happened to tip the balance?

Changes in the climate. Before 22,000 years ago, the southern part of Africa where the Khoisan lived was wetter, with more precipitation, compared to the dryer western and central parts of the continent where other groups lived. A dryer climate meant fewer wild game and less food, which translates into fewer children. So other populations dropped significantly while the Khosian's population stayed about the same. But after the last ice age ended, the climate changed, and for reasons we don't understand the other African populations expanded, and the exponential growth of humans across the earth began.

How do the Khoisan maintain their way of living today?

The answer is they don't. We are seeing the end of their culture and their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, which is being replaced by herding and agriculture.

In Botswana, there is a law that the hunter-gatherers cannot hunt anymore. There are land disputes and in many cases they are being pushed off the land they used to hunt or consider sacred. They are considered lowlifes in society and have very little political representation. In many ways this replicates what happened to the indigenous people of North America, who by the way were also hunter gatherers.

Can you describe the Bushmen culture and what is being lost?

The most important thing is the language. This is a "click language" in which clicks are like consonants. Linguists believe that the more clicks you have the older the language is, and this one has five, the most of any. There is also beautiful traditional music and singing that will be lost.

What about other skills and types of knowledge particular to the Khoisan?

They have incredible knowledge about animal behavior and about the environment. Where you and I would only see plants and scrub and thorn and dry wood, they see a lot of things you can eat. If you walk with a Bushman in the bush, he is constantly eating because he always finds something to nibble or chew on, and of course this is precious knowledge that we don't have. This is also their pharmacy, the herbs or the natural substances within the plants that will help them when they have ailments. Even the elders have absolutely pristine hearing and clear vision. And I think it is understandable if your life depends on your hunting skills.

Can you talk about how they hunt?

They use a very small bow and very short arrow, which they make, and on the tip of the arrow they place a poison that they produce from caterpillars. They are also amazing masters of trapping. They make the traps not with metal or rope but only with natural materials like branches and grass and leaves. All this knowledge will be lost if the younger generation does not get the chance to live this lifestyle. It might already be too late.

What lesson should we take from the population patterns you've traced?

The most important factor for changes in the population is the climate. The key thing we want people to know is that there were times when there were so few humans, we got close to being wiped out. This is also the pattern we see in endangered species today. We look at ourselves as invulnerable, but we should not take for granted that the climate won't change in the future in ways that will endanger us. We need to take climate seriously.

—

The article originally published on www.npr.org.

The article was adapted by The Travel Club editorial staff.

Zanzibar: A Poor Man's Poem

2019-08-09T21:54:42+02:00

Give me a chair
and let me sit among you
as I celebrate poverty
and scarcity.

The face of the poor
remains wrinkled
because of hunger and thirst
in his stomach.

The poor man cannot eat
with the rich man
when eating fish
he eats his head.

Go and call the one
who has no bread
to come and eat crumbs
and thorns from bowls.

The poor is a nobody
since he owns nothing.
Although of noble birth
no honor is shown to him.

The poor is a snake -
his brothers avoid him
because of the misery that poverty
brings with it.

But still, when the poor gets sick,
his relatives are prompted
to do him some good;

But when the rich man gets sick,
if he wants to light a lamp,
he must ask a slave.

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