ROY X CONE contest, 1.1.11 - 2.1.12

[Max Power]

^looking forward to the picture flood.

(Finally got to rep tg as well)

[Shorty Long]

buried in dissertation research...I'm hoping to produce some photos within the next week or so

[almostnice]

dkatz,glad that you are allright.your long absence made my worry a bit.and now keep the pics coming.

[fre-co]

Weather has been good again.

Some shit needed chopping down!

The aftermath

After that it was time to look after the boy. I realise that more often than not I am double dipped these days...

waiting for more pictures to upload

[fre-co]

.....and

We went for a little bike ride. His first on the back of my bike.

This is my neighborhood.

Back in time for a bit of ball pool crazytime before dinner

[Dr_Heech]

This is my neighborhood.

QUOTE]

Nice neighbourhood fre$co, looks just like mine! (nice stihl btw)

@TG

Great photos, they brought back memories for me (I also went paragliding in Queenstown) - loved the south Island, especially the west coast.

@Paul

Great shots of your picnic in Greenwich park (it has the most beautifull trees IIRC)

@dkatz - good to have you back, always enjoy your posts.

.

[tg76]

pan handling to pay off my amex

the ground is covered in thyme so everywhere you step makes nice smells

old township

cashing in my diggings

all that glitters is not gold, actually my sunglasses made the gold show up in the rocks... if only i had the motivation to smash a ton of them and refine it

china town... the most authentic looking part of the area was actually put here 10 years ago by hollywood for some movie

dog that lived there

[beatle]

digging the tent and the dog that lived there

[tg76]

where two rivers collide via a power making device

lunch in arrowtown

i like this town so much i got a lotto ticket so i could buy a holiday home here

the road to Chard farm, mr's favoite wine, i promised i would pick up a few bottles for him

feeling car sick so pose for tourist pic

unfortunatly there was a tour bus there full of tourists that didnt even care about the wine, i nipped in grabbed a case and left without getting to taste some of the other vintages

looking back

coming back here next year to a bike race

[fre-co]

Stunning scenery TG

[tg76]

clyde dam (thing that was built flooding old cromwell)

nz traffic jam... merino sheep fresh from bewety salon brazilian treatments

starting the rail trail at wedderburn and riding back to clyde in one day

jeans left in car wearing winter riding gear cause its f'ing cold

stopping for a snack and stripping off some layers

went through tunnels, over bridges along and along and along and fell off and smashed up my shin, wont bore you with photos of where the jeans didnt go, but lots of it was like this

now i have 2 popped ribs, a bung knee and a bashed up shin... exercise is good for you

[devilish]

Ouch! I wish you a speedy recovery. Being a fellow cyclist who has crashed on the odd occasion I feel the pain. Ribs injuries suck, makes even breathing hurt.

[tg76]

yeah ive spent alot of money trying to ease the pain of the ribs (did them a few weeks ago at cyclocross) back to the osteopath tomorrow

[aho]

^It seems I'm always out of rep for thee tg, but trust, I would if I could! Here's to a speedy recovery!

[tg76]

next day went to the easter markets in old cromwell, easter egg hunts and lots of stuff to buy, i got some pinot noir sauce and a cup of coffee

spotted this guy lurking in a shop

then we went to wanaka, the mountain to the left is ROY peak

i got a hand knitted pom pom hat, i need some sleep

[Max Power]

wow, tg, it keeps getting better and better.

[tg76]

wow, tg, it keeps getting better and better.

just like getting older

today wee headed off to a wee mountain known as aoraki

we stopped at looked at hills and lakes and clouds along the way

this is my pregnant not fat sister in law me and me mum

you may recognise these moody hills from lord of the rings, but im not sure cause i never finished watching them movies

this is me sharing with ed, he climbed stuff and did some things

looking for that wee mountain

there it is,,, its like the emperors new clothes though

back down on flat land

was probably sour anyway

[dkatz]

Thanks for the positive reinforcement, all! And I'm loving That Girl's story so far.

Right then, and off we go...

Started off the journeys with a weekend visit to Homegirl in Masaka.

I've shown a bunch of pictures of Masaka here over the past monhts, so I'll just leave you with one, from bumming around the market

Monday morning, 4 April, hopped a bus to Hoima, out west in the Lake Albertine region (where billions of dollars worth of recently discovered oil is in the process of starting to be brought up...). Well, I say we "hopped" on a bus, but most buses here don't leave until they're full, and I had arrived just in time to hop on a bus with a couple seats left as it was prepping to pull out but had to get off when my colleague didn't arrive in time. We wound up sitting in a bus in the park for two hours waiting for it to fill. Also had the annoying (and not infrequent) experience of a random dude on the bus seeing my bottle of water and instructing me to give it to him. When I said no, he got all offended. Entitled much?

Anyway, off we went, through the belly of the beast and out of town

This dude talked for three damn hours straight. It was all in Luganda, but from the few words I picked up, it seemed like the most rambling, bizarre speech/sales pitch ever. He wound up selling some random Chinese medicinal stuff, but I can't imagine all three hours was spent just to sell those few things. Impressive endurance though.

Arrived in Hoima and checked in to a guesthouse (called "Pedro's" - hah). Innovative bathroom design.

Enables the user to poop and shower concurrently!

Hoima town looks... unremarkable.

Grabbed some local food at a restaurant. I love the presentation of the rice!

Came across a football game - not sure what teams, but probably the Hoima (district/town) team, versus another district team. Impressive crowd turnout.

But my favorite part was the bleachers

Back to the guesthouse to get some work done.

[Paul T]

Great to have you back, Daniel. Altho not too enthused by that shower.

[dkatz]

Thanks for the effusive welcome-back-rep, all! And you and me both, Paul T - imagine the smell... (didn't do much to make me feel clean).

Riff - re: not being babied in the field... you don't know the half of it. Back in the day I was staying at places that ran 11000 Shillings/night (~$5) and pretty much not sleeping from discomfort (physical and psychological). I finally decided that my well-being was worth more like 25000 per night. Hah!

The purpose of my visit to Hoima was to observe the roll-out of the baseline survey for another project. I'm going to be handing the last phase of my last project - the end-line data collection exercise - off to a colleague when I leave in a couple months, and we're planning on doing electronic data collection (PDAs for the win! I'm still dealing with ripple effects of the hell that is paper data collection from the baseline survey a year ago - managing 2810 25-page paper surveys is a BITCH), so we wanted to learn from the launch of this electronic data collection exercise. Bright and early the next morning, we met with the enumerator teams as they did some warm-ups with the PDAs

(the colleague who will be taking over my project is - shockingly - the other white guy, in the background there)

Out to the field we went. Each enumerator team is responsible for the respondents in one village each day. Funfortunately, whereas for my project we have a very organic way to physically group respondents, for this project the enumerators were visiting respondents at their households. We couldn't visit with them because of the effect we would have on responses if we were listening in, so we just posted up at the village's "trading center" and worked on our survey. My office for the first half of the day:

Later we walked to meet up with another colleague who was helping out with the roll-out (not his project, but his project is in a dormant stage so he was being a helping hand) in a neighboring village. And continued working on our survey and end-line exercise logistics. Our office for the afternoon (being a spectacle for the neighbor kids):

Wound up becoming aware of a pretty interesting dichotomy as we were sitting here for a few hours. Notice how nicely built and painted the house we're sitting in front of is (yes, we're sitting on a random dude's porch, but he gave us permission), compared to the one to the right of it - cement and paint versus mud construction. The guy whose house we were in front of went out in the morning to work his farm, came back and washed, went to pick up his little healthy-looking daughter from school on his motor-scooter, came back and went back out to his farm. The next-door neighbor came back around the time other dude got back from his farm in the morning, washed his shoes and proceeded to lounge on the grass trying to be half-involved in our conversation. His children were clearly massively malnourished and dehydrated - the 8ish year old son clearly prefered crawling as his mode of locomotion, was not wearing pants (the village alternative to expensive diapers for non-potty-trained kids) and drooling profusely. I won't draw any bold conclusions, but it was an interesting contrast, and frustrating to see and know I could (and, more importantly would) not do anything about it. [insert soap-box speech about development and dependency theory here]

Four-hour bus-ride back to Kampala early early the next morning. Hopped in my car with my colleague, picked up some materials and an enumerator, and hit the road back out Southwest toward Mbarara. On the way out of town, the police had a nice display to remind us of their authority and firepower.

The past few weeks have been interesting - the opposition has been holding "Walk-to-Work" campaigns in which the lead opposition politicians have been walking to work from their homes each of the past few Mondays and Thursdays, in order to protest rising fuel prices (due to inflation that's risen to 11%) and subsequent rises in basic commodity prices. The government has responded with brutal police crackdown, resulting in riots in sundry spots around the country. It's interesting hearing authoritarian and police-state-ish rhetoric coming from a regime that is still patting itself on the back for the (widely regarded as massively fraudulent) "democratic elections" held a couple months ago.

Anyway, we hit the road towards Mbarara without event... and got stuck in all sorts of fun traffic-jam situations

Stopped in Masaka to pick up another enumerator and Homegirl (who came with for work- and non-work-related reasons). I was particularly amused to find these in a gas station where we met up in Masaka. The NRM (National Reistance Movement) is the ruling party, Masaka is a very opposition-dominated district, and 5000 Shillings is a lot of money (around the price of two full meals in local food restaurants).

The NRM REALLY does not need fund-raising help - they demonstrated in the elections that they have no qualms about raiding the national bank account to fund party activities.

The purpose of the ensuing couple weeks' adventures were to have pre-endline meetings with project stakeholders (local reps of partner organizations) and do survey pretesting - essentially the process by which a survey tool goes from being a good idea to actually usable. This is probably the most interesting part of my job, though definitely pretty exhausting pulling 10ish hours of pretesting and then a few hours of reviewing the survey and making changes.

Pretesting in a church at Mbarara University of Science and Technology

The morning view from our lovely guesthouse in Mbarara town

Looks like they'd planned on building this floor out further, then ran out of money.

[tg76]

we went back into queenstown to go shopping

i said it wouldnt be open as it was anzac day

they said it would be cause queenstown was allowed to do what it wanted

i said thats for easter not anzac day

i was right nothing was open till 1

except for this crap place with no gluten free food but a good view

pissed off and hungry i went for a walk through a park with frisbee golf

then the shops opened and i spent 2 seconds looking at them as im not interested in touristy crap or more outdoors/adventure clothes

so i found this place

my sister in law found it too, we had

and we ate it all

remarkable

your turn dkatz

[entertainment!]

Continuing my duties as tour guide last weekend, we took my folks to Washington's Crossing, the place where George Washington crossed the Delaware to attack the Hessian troops in Trenton fighting for the British in the Revolutionary War. Trenton is about ten miles south of the crossing point. Until that point in the war, Washington and the the Continental Army had suffered many defeats, so the battle is considered the turning point of the Revolutionary War.

The Delaware River divides the states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. These pictures were all taken on the Pennsylvania side which preserves many old buildings.

On Christmas night and into Boxing Day, about 2400 troops of the Continental Army crossed the river in the snow.

This is a reproduction of one of the boats, although a guide told us the boats used by Washington were about fifty percent longer. They were normally used to haul cargo up and down the river.

Crossing the river is a bit easier now.

[riff]

Wow, awesome updates from so many of you! TG - what an adventure! Dkatz - like I said, glad you are ok! Entertainment - great pics! Did they have any of the original boats (fragments or otherwise) still preserved? Fresco - that sure is a pretty area you live in!

Paul - I envy that idyllic Easter scene! I've been drowning under work, photography (not work ) and a host of other things. Will get an update posted when things calm down a bit. For now, just a fit pic

[ThisSunday]

@robbie Thanks for the postcard. My gf thought it was junk mail at first

The past few pages have been great. I have to spread some rep for everyone in here. I guess I have some work to do. Work has been killing me so I haven't done anything worth while. The most exciting thing has been trying to find the cheapest gas in Queens. I have at least one thing planned this weekend though.

Welcome back dkatz

[robbie]

glad you received it.

I guess I forgot to mention I sent postcards to everyone. Dkatz, maybe yours will arrive before the end of the contest.

-rF

[tg76]

got up early and went for a ride along lake dunstan

it looks like a nice day but its only 2 degrees so im back in my winter ride gear

my favorite wine at the moment is a pinot noir called roaring meg, named after the place wher two rivers meet via a power making thing, so i had to go to mt difficulty where it is made for lunch and a wee tasting session

jeans are with me in spirit... they were airing out on the line

the winery is in an old sluicing area so it has quite a cool landscape

i had roast duck in a pinot noir sauce and an estate pinot noir, someone else had some curry seafood thing and a roaring meg pinot gris

dessert i had a poached pear, again pinot noir and mapple icecream

went on a tikitour round some of the back roads of the lake

[ranonranonarat]

great posts all around guys, definitely liking everything i see on this thread for sure. it has become one of the more active threads in this forum. i look forward to reading the posts every morning as soon as i get into work.

dkatz glad to see you post. was afraid this muzungu was lost and fell into a deep pothole forever to be lost. repped!

tg 2 eggs, toast, tomatoes, sausages, bacon, potatoes, you could ride your bike to the heavens on that meal.

entertainment! cant rep you for now but i will be back for you. such a beautiful place, i wished i could live in your pictures. away from big cities and all, suddenly a quiet life seems really appealing.

riff thats a great look and great shirt. 20k soon i would say. now for some running pics!

[Farhad]

tg- great posts

Dkatz- welcome back. was wondering about you

Riff- looking good amigo. I think you're going to break the rep meter soon.

Fresco- Nice hood man. are you on a farm?

[beatle]

thread is on fire !

[dkatz]

ranon - your rep made me laugh! Also you use the word "lost" in a very Ugandan way.

Beautiful stuff, entertainment!

speaking of the protests/riots, for an example of how things have been going here, have a look at this:

ZoNt_RKhIdk

from yesterday. That's Kizza Besigye - the main opposition leader - they're trying to get out of the car. He'd been arrested three times over these "Walk-to-work" demonstrations in as many weeks. They granted him bail the day before yesterday on the condition that he not engage in more demonstrations. Dude was DRIVING to work (not walking as part of the demonstration) and plain clothes security stopped him, beat the shit out of him and his aids and arrested him again. No one knows why.

Aaaaanyway.

After a couple days in Mbarara, it was time to head to Arua. I decided not to drive the 7 hour trek in my car, so back on the bus we went. This is what trying to do data- and survey-work on a cramped-ass, hot bus looks like

Also note the strangely creepy old British missionary dude who's been in Africa for decades - totally safari-kitted out and loving his adventure.

Had the stakeholder meeting straight off upon arrival (nothing like running straight into a meeting after 7 hours on a cramped hot bus), then to dinner at my favorite spot in Arua town

Homegirl shows how beasting Ethiopian grub is done. Dude in the back shows how rocking all kitenge everything is done (the shorts match...)

All this food, 5000 Shillings (~$2.25) per person for that whole platter plus the salad to the left. BOMB. I love this place.

Back at the guesthouse, my colleague doing some work after power goes out (Arua is not yet on the grid so is run off of a gigantic generator just outside of town)

Next morning, this big guy greeted us on the door frame of our room

Funfortunately, I discovered that morning that I had managed to forget to pack any shirts with me to Arua. Slick. I travel so damn much, one would think I'd be pretty automatic at packing at this point. Instead I had to ask my colleague for a spare shirt. Not my favorite fit:

Off to do more pretesting. We had actually tried to survey here in the baseline but wound up dropping it from the sample due to insufficient turnout. I had been with the baseline enumerator teams when they visited trying to survey here a couple times in the baseline, so it was funny to be back here to pretest.

The next handful of pictures will be mixed between my own and Homegirl's, who was out exploring Arua while I was pretesting.

Love the name of this place

How many buzz words can they put in one restaurant name?

The road out of Arua town

Tag, the Traveling Girl's turn

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